Invasive Species - Lemmy.World

Firefox FTW!

Yes, but only begrudgingly.

(edit) oh no, I’ve said something bad about the lesser evil, and the people who have made it their identity to violently cum all over the first thing that isn’t owned by Google are after me. I hope the pipe bomb hitman is at least polite.

Same… I know it’s better and worth supporting, I just don’t like using it for some reason.
Back in the day, Firefox was literally not as good as Chrome. I personally think that has reversed and it’s now much better than Chrome. Leagues better, now that Chrome is banning UBlock Origin. I do wish we had more competition than just Chrome, Safari, and Firefox though…
Yeah any other alternatives? There’s arc, but I think that’s just chromium underneath (see above, meme)
There’s ladybird and servo, but neither are near a release and ladybird won’t even have an alpha til 2026.

And to make things even more difficult,

  • Servo, as far I know, has no intention to be an actual browser. Instead, they want to offer an alternative to Blink (the Chromium engine), so that other software (such as browsers) can be made using it.
  • Ladybird’s project lead and main developer, Andreas Kling, may or may not hold controversial views that many would prefer to avoid supporting.

I really want there to be more options in the browser market that aren’t Blink based (or WebKit, sorry Apple), but the situation’s tough.

I’m an advocate for Firefox, but it is slowly, slowly entering enshittification.

The addition of AI, dark patterns to enable “sponsored bookmarks” upon reinstall, ads (albeit subtle) when using the address bar for search…

All of these can be disabled, some easily, some with feature flags.

Sure the enshittification isn’t anywhere near the pace as Chrome but it’s happening. And again, this is coming from a maybe 10 year financial donor to Mozilla.

Firefox is better than Chrome, no question but there is an opportunity for a new browser to challenge the field.

You make good points but some people are knew jerking on Firefox’s AI. One of them is client side translation which is really neat as I don’t need to send the content to some Google ad data vacuum.

Another AI model helps differently abled people to have websites described to them using, again, a local model.

There is also Libtefox which uses the same rendering engine without the other stuff if you don’t want it.

I consider it an important act to use non Chromium browsers as not to completely hand over the power of rendering web content to Google.