NYT: 'Firefox Is Back. It's Time to Give It a Try.' (nytimes.com)

Another high-profile endorsement for Firefox -- this time from the lead consumer technology writer for The New York Times. (Alternate link here). The web has reached a new low. It has become an annoying, often toxic and occasionally unsafe place to hang out. More important, it has become an unfair trade: You give up your privacy online, and what you get in return are somewhat convenient services and hyper-targeted ads. That's why it may be time to try a different browser.

Remember Firefox...? About two years ago, six Mozilla employees were huddled around a bonfire one night in Santa Cruz, Calif., when they began discussing the state of web browsers. Eventually, they concluded there was a "crisis of confidence" in the web. "If they don't trust the web, they won't use the web," Mark Mayo, Mozilla's chief product officer, said in an interview.... After testing Firefox for the last three months, I found it to be on a par with Chrome in most categories. In the end, Firefox's thoughtful privacy features persuaded me to make the switch and make it my primary browser.
The Times cites privacy features like Firefox's "Facebook Container," which prevents Facebook from tracking you after you've left their site.

While both Chrome and Firefox have tough security (including sandboxing), Cooper Quintin, a security researcher for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, tells the Times that Google "is fundamentally an advertising company, so it's unlikely that they will ever have a business interest in making Chrome more privacy friendly."

Comments

Re: Strong Maybe?

[theweatherelectric]

It's hard to filter out Facebook

The Facebook Container makes it easy.

Of course they can still see that you come from the same IP address, but if all Facebook traffic is passed through a proxy then it won't do them any good.

Tor is being integrated into Firefox. So once that happens Firefox can offer this out of the box and the Tor project will no longer have to maintain Tor Browser.

Re:Firefox? Never left it.

[TheRaven64]

Why does chrome need 4 processes before it displays a home/start page?

It's been a few years since I looked, but as I recall:

• One is the parent process which manages the rest and holds all the rights that the program is started with.
• One is the credential store. It manages passwords and hands them out only to the correct renderers.
• One is the zygote for renderer processes. This does all of its initialisation and then fork()s clones so that each new tab can have a pristine renderer.
• One is the owner for plugins (or possibly the zygote for plugins). NAPI plugins run in a separate process with reduced privileges, so that they can't compromise the rest of the tab's state.

For something that deals with as much untrusted data and code as a web browser, I'd want it to be compartmentalised as much as possible.

Re: manually disable pocket?

[OtisSnerd]

So is mine. It still shoves "pages recommended by pocket" in my face when I start typing in an address.

Try setting these about:config values to stop Pocket:

browser.pocket.api = ""
browser.pocket.enabled = false
browser.pocket.oAuthConsumerKey = ""
browser.pocket.site = ""
extensions.pocket.api = ""
extensions.pocket.enabled = false
extensions.pocket.oAuthConsumerKey = ""
extensions.pocket.site = ""

In Cyberfox, it kills it dead here.
--
If this is paradise, I wish I had a shovel.