With the number of people concerned about privacy, it is a wonder why chrome is even popular.
The best time to switch to Firefox was 5 years ago. The second best is today.
Oops, I switched 15 years ago,
I switch when it was Phoenix, then switch again when it was Firebird, and finally switch when it become Firefox
you win Firefox!
I went straight from Mozilla Navigator to Firefox 1.0.
Tabs were such a crazy new thing back then. You would show tabbed browsing to someone (rather than opening new windows) and they thought you were a wizard. IE5 didn’t have tabs, so nerds moved to Mozilla/Firefox. Then IE6 came out but still didn’t have tabs. By the time IE7 came out, I’d had tabbed browsing for 5+ years.
Hat trick!
deleted by creator
Noob. I switched in 2006 - 17 years ago.
What took you so long?!?
I had to pee!
I cannot be 100% certain but I’m confident I was using it not long after the 1.0 release. That’d put me at 2004. 19 years!
Although I did briefly switch over to Chrome when it was new and fast. Then switched back when Firefox had a major optimization pass.
The early Chrome was crazy fast when it had none of the bloat.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/nCgQDjiotG0
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Google has a web-browser?
10 to 15 years ago, myself. Don’t remember exactly.
Sorry, that’s 3rd best at most, according to the data above. Sorry, I don’t make the rules!
Funnily enough - this article is 3 years old
I use Firefox since it’s release. It was never bad. I don’t get all the Chrome users.
I had the crappiest of PCs in 2006 or 2007 with 768MBs of RAM running Windows XP. Funnily enough the reason I switched to Chrome back then was the immense RAM usage of Firefox compared to Chrome back then. With the big rebranding an rerelease of Firefox in 2017? 2018? I came back and haven’t looked back since.
It has a pretty severe memory leak issue during the period where Chrome siphoned off most of its users.
I used it since netscape navigator XD
Does it have native dark pages. Why I use brave. Would use Firefox but it’s glaring white
Firefox has dark mode.
Most people aren’t concerned about privacy outside of places like here and Reddit.
With Chrome killing ad blocking, they’ll quickly care
Hmmm, on the bright side, with lemmy going mainstream maybe some of this culture (including privacy and FOSS) becomes more and more openly discussed.
As much as I love Lemmy I don’t see it going mainstream :/
It’s too weird for the general userI mean I love Lemmy but I don’t see it going mainstream :/
It’s too weird for the general userThe irony of this comment duplicating 😅 but yeah you’re right, there needs to be a lot of streamlining first
I dunno. Lemmy isn’t all that weird outside the first little bit of choosing an instance and signing up for communities. Everything since that has felt extremely normal to me. Some more thought about that and a good instance onboarding workflow can be implemented, that seems like a solvable problem.
Not sure why it’s weird, it’s just reddit but open source?
Lemmy isn’t weird at all. Now P2P platforms like secure scuttlebutt and aether, that’s some weird stuff. I couldn’t get them working at all (or maybe nobody is using these anymore). P2P is very confusing for me. I assume that a federated network is as confusing for many people as p2p social networks are confusing for me. I guess there will be someone out there who reads my comment and be like: “What? P2P networks are so simple, what don’t you understand?” I guess people just have different amount of tolorance to being confused by complexity of something before they just give up. I couldn’t figure out those P2P systems so I just give up.
I wish that was the case. Privacy is barely a thing in the general public’s eye. FOSS is a spec in the wind in comparison.
WHAAT? I CANT HEAR YOU OVER THE MEEEEEMEES!!. SPEAK LOUDEERRR!
I think lots of boomers and gen-x do care. (At least the ones I know). They just aren’t tech literate enough to do anything about it.
I think we need more privacy oriented devices and software with simple ux, and advertising that isn’t targetted at the tech community.
Run some TV ads for a privacy enabled smartphone, and play up how it works just the same as your current phone but doesn’t spy on you. Shit like that.
Firefox + Ublock Origin blows Google Chrome out of water.
Firefox is a weird buggy mess that constantly freezes.
This is definitely not normal, Firefox never freezes for me. May be worth checking that out, especially your extensions.
The whole Reddit debacle has really made me rethink all my services. I recently installed duck duck go and still getting used to it, so not quite sure if I’m ready to make another drastic change.
I used to love Firefox in 2006 or so, but got Chrome when it was released and forgot about Firefox. I think I’ll open a tab in my chrome browser for the Firefox page now…this is how I remind myself to delve deeper into stuff later. Thanks for the inspiration, everyone. Google has irked me ever since removing the Don’t Be Evil mantra.
IMO the thing is that people don’t care about their privacy. Sure, some people around here do, but your average person owns an Alexa, has a FB/Instagram account and constantly posts their location, uses the same password on many sites, uses TikTok, doesn’t block cookies, etc etc etc.
Most people don’t actually care. Some claim they do, but then can’t even be bothered to stop using Instagram etc because of the “inconvenience”… So do they really care?
Some companies (Apple, etc) push their products under a narrative around safety and security, and people will repeat that point as a way to justify a decision they already made, but if they actually cared, they would be doing other things too. But they don’t.
The number of us who do actually care about privacy and security is actually very small.
With the number of people concerned about privacy, it is a wonder how privacy is still a word in the dictionary
With the number of people concerned about privacy, it is a wonder why chrome is even popular.
It’s no wonder. It’s because people aren’t actually concerned about privacy.
If you ask someone if they’re “concerned about privacy” many people will of course say yes. If you follow up that question with “what are you willing to do about it”, you’ll find that the answer is a resounding “not a God damn thing”. If they were they would spend 3 minutes on Google looking for an alternative browser that works even better than Chrome but without the privacy invasions.
A browser is the low-hanging fruit on the “do-you-care-about-privacy meter”. It’s the one step with no sacrifices and the highest increase in privacy.
With the number of people concerned about privacy
That number appears to be very small, all things considered. Out of everyone I know, literally one person cares about privacy. My mother. She will even go as far as to only use her first initial online instead of her name if she can get away with it. However, she uses Chrome all the time because she doesn’t understand that your browser also tracks you.
I think that’s what it comes down to. A mixture of lack of public interest, and lack of public awareness about tracking/privacy in general. If people can’t immediately see how having their data harvested will inconvenience/hurt them, they simply don’t care.
The biggest issue for a lot of people is going to be Microsoft forcing all Office 365 users to use Edge all the time. Our sysadmin recently forced me to uninstall Firefox and Chrome from all workstations unless they had an approved use for it. Everything must be through Edge.
Why? “Security” of course. It’s always “security”. Curious
Edit: the point is Microsoft could have worked to provide enterprise customers with ways to manage third party browsers going forward. They could have worked with Google and Mozilla to make that happen. They didn’t. Not really.
It’s that Microsoft continues to make decisions that create rationale for only using them, because that’s their business. “Security” gives them an extremely convenient cover for anticompetitive behavior. Anyone that thinks their C-Suite hasn’t pulled the defender/365 team into a meeting or two to discuss business strategy has far too much faith in a corporation that deserves very little.
With the number of people concerned about privacy
Generous estimate there. “People” don’t care. Who cares if your browser tracks your online presence when everything is connected back to your facebook profile or whatever is trending.
Most individuals embrace convenience above all; literally putting all their private stuff on any online service that tout “shiny feature that you won’t even use”. Even some privacy-focused people don’t see putting all your emails/photo/video/agenda/chat/text messages in one third party opaque service as an issue.
Tons of business do the same, outsourcing the most basic stuff like private discussions and storage to anything “convenient” to not pay for two sysadmin to manage it (leading to most major leaks). I have direct experience of business coming to us, asking “yeah, privacy is good, data ownership and control is mandatory, so we won’t host anything and you’ll keep all our data, deal?”. They prefer have us, a third party, bill them for hosting rather than have some control over it.
My take on this is that while pointing that browsers can be an issue is not a bad thing, the first step would be to get people and business interested in their privacy. Without that, it remains a niche. Sadly.
Google has a vested interest in showing you ads and selling your data.
Firefox does not.
Seems like a pretty clear choice to me.
Using firefox exclusively on all my devices since the last major revamp of the Firefox Android.
Gotta love the uBlock Origin extension on Firefox Android!
Yes. And it makes many sites more browsable in phone.
Wish I could get cookie auto delete on Android too
There’s no reason you should be using Chrome. Using Chrome:
- Means you consent to spyware (along with everyone else you interact with)
- Allows Google to continue dictating web standards
- Is a resource hog
If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading this comic about the dangers of Chrome: https://contrachrome.com/
If you need to absolutely use a Chromium-based browser, at least use Brave (just for that site).
Not-so-fun fact from the comic Contra Chrome: Google Chrome’s URL bar is called the “omnibox.” The name is derived from the Latin word “omnis,” meaning “everything.”
When you type into the omnibox, it’s sent to Google’s servers and added to your profile forever.
Even if you deleted it or didn’t hit enter.
This is the problem! :( Monopoly is never good, in this case in particular since it’s in the hand of a corporation they make money on people data.
