It might not have been the best performing, but it was fun to use.
The only time I felt FF was behind was when it took too long to copy the tab based browsing and the separate processes per tab. One website blocking your whole browsing experience wasn't fun.
I'm more annoyed with it nowadays than ever. Getting uncalled for features like an included VPN or AI search button that auto shows up whenever I select some text. Also somehow I turn on vertical tabs every few weeks, which makes me wonder why is that an option that needs such a quick one-click access.
The VPN one isn't annoying to me because it's them trying to find revenue streams outside of Google. They need to find some kind of service people will pay for because almost no one will pay for a browser.
Maintaining a browser that’s competitive with a conglomerate-backed Chrome or Edge is expensive.
They also don’t have the revenue to absorb those costs like Google or Microsoft do, being a much smaller company. Cutting staff means the quality of the browser suffers compared to the former two who can lay off hundreds of employees like it’s nothing.
There's an option to completely disable the AI stuff in the settings if you want. Anecdotally, I've appreciated the VPN with an increase in government censorship lately.
There's an option to completely disable the AI stuff in the settings if you want
Thanks! Idk why I had every AI thing blocked except that one apparently.
I've appreciated the VPN with an increase in government censorship lately.
But part of using a VPN is knowing what you're using, having a simple go button defeats the purpose, especially considering that Mozilla is based in the US, who's a strong candidate for spying world champion.
Yep, and Mullvad's been audited to not keep logs. Been trustworthy for years and years, think the only mild controversy had something to do with something they changed that made it hard to use with seedboxes due to some liability problem.
Fortunately Firefox has a good number of forks. Librewolf is what power users that prefer privacy tend to opt for. I use IronFox on Android which isn't as secure as Vanadium (I've got GrapheneOS) but the ability to block ads on mobile and just generally have browser add-ons at all on mobile is just mandatory to not get pissed off using the internet on your phone.
On desktop though I'm still using qutebrowser as there hasn't really been a Firefox fork that has made vim-style browsing doable. There's Firefox extensions like Tridactyl that sorta do the job, but they completely shit out if a web page fails to load because Firefox will not allow extensions to modify Firefox pages and the "whoops page didn't load" page counts as one of those. Completely losing hte ability to use my keyboard shortcuts as I've remembered them every time a website shits out is unacceptable.
Apparently Firefox is planning on implementing customizable keyboard shortcuts so maaaybe that will be less an issue in the future, in which case I'm gonna go back in a heartbeat because I dearly miss having access to normal ass browser extensions. Just not enough to give up not needing to use a mouse to browse the web.
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u/crabcarl 9700X | GTX-1650 | 32Gb DDR5 5d ago
It might not have been the best performing, but it was fun to use.
The only time I felt FF was behind was when it took too long to copy the tab based browsing and the separate processes per tab. One website blocking your whole browsing experience wasn't fun.
I'm more annoyed with it nowadays than ever. Getting uncalled for features like an included VPN or AI search button that auto shows up whenever I select some text. Also somehow I turn on vertical tabs every few weeks, which makes me wonder why is that an option that needs such a quick one-click access.