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Let's Talk: What browser are you using?
Most of my internet browsing is done on mobile and I've used predominantly Firefox and Firefox Focus in the past. I just switched over to Brave now that they've finally implemented their own crypto currency.
What browser are you using?
Is there a reason for this browser specifically? If so why?
What do you use your browser for?
Firefox. Not only because it's wonderful and Mozilla is a force for good on the internet, but also because after living through the IE6 era, I don't want to see a single entity strong arming their way through all technology decisions. Especially not an advertising company hellbent on siphoning every ounce of personal info from its users.
Chrome, Brave, The new Edge are all gigantic NOPEs for me.
That's basically exactly why I use Firefox as well. In addition, I appreciate how they have continued to stand up for open standards for such a long time. I feel Google tends to strongarm web standards to go their way, and though they have also largely used their weight to help everyone (Just look how they made web video possible without dealing with patents by purchasing On2), they quite simply have too much power over standards generally.
Why is Brave a nope for you?
Can't speak for them but what bothers me is that browsers like Edge or Brave (Opera, too, I think?) are basically Chrome with a different coat of paint. It seems like it shouldn't be a problem but there was some news, recently (I don't know if it's implemented yet or just rumors) that Chrome might drop support for a lot of functionality necessary to run a proper adblocker addon.
So is it more of a functionality issue than an aesthetic one?
For me the ad network and cryptocoin just sounds shady as hell. There was also some things they did with the BAT without users consent. I did try the Brave browser and the vibes I got from it was that it just felt somehow "off". Like it was so hard shoving at my face that "Look how many bad things we blocked in the last minute!" That just makes it less trustworthy in my eyes. I also inherently trust anything that comes from chrome-based less.
Kind of. The way new internet technologies are born is from various committees which are generally comprised of the people who make web browsers.
Ideally it's a democratic process with good intentions. But sometimes, when one browser has too much power, they just start implanting features into their browser and the other browsers either have to follow along, or be seen as "broken" to users when things don't work.
So google makes Chromium, and those browsers are just chromium with some paint slapped on top which gives google even more market share and more power to do whatever they want with the internet.
Imagine a standard technology shared across all browsers that prevents advertising fingerprinting and tracking. Not gonna happen with google at the helm.
Right, there were also a couple of concrete examples of this popping up in recent months. There was a "bug" in youtube's rendering that basically caused it to be much slower on Firefox than on Chrome because it was optimized for Chrome-specific quirks. Google, of course, says this is unintentional but it doesn't even require an evil plan or anything. Just the existence (and market share) of Chrome makes it the most "obvious" thing to optimize towards for a front end engineer. It's a cycle that ends with Chrome becoming the "standard" for web rendering and they're already showing signs of abusing that position for their own profit.
Firefox's ethos is exactly why I've used them for so long. Definitely a company I trust my data with
Firefox. I used Chrome for a while from ~2011 to 2015, but I've since switched to Firefox because I appreciate having an open source browser I can use everywhere, and I don't want to see return to a browser monopoly like we had in the 2000's.
On mobile I switch between an old version of the Android stock browser and Opera, the former for performance and the latter for modern compatibility. I would use Firefox too if it weren't such a massive resource hog...
Interesting. I'd assume newer browsers would have higher performance, and that Firefox would use less resources than a Chromium browser.
I admittedly use a very old smartphone, and most modern browsers really don't take well to the limited about of RAM available. I personally haven't felt like browsers have gotten faster, I think they've actually been getting slower as they include support for more standards and technologies, but the hardware (especially in the smartphone segment) has been getting more powerful at a ridiculously fast rate. Just as a very simple example, using the Antutu benchmark, the Galaxy S10 scores about ~415,000 apparently (from a random quick google search), while my Epic 4G scores about 5500. That's about a 75x increase in processing power, which is really quite phenomenal. I also have a Galaxy Tab S2 that I use Samsung Internet on, and while the tablet is way more powerful than my phone, it sometimes chokes on webpages (especially those with a lot of content, like Wikipedia articles) that even my Epic has no problems with.
And as for Opera being faster, I chalk it up to hyper optimization on their part. They've traditionally done a really good job getting their browser working on low end hardware, and it's really pretty good once it gets going. The long initial load time is why I sometimes use the stock browser, for quick google searches. That, and it has the all-important dark mode!
You might be interested in trying Firefox Preview
(Disclaimer: I work on GeckoView, Mozilla's new Android tech for embedding Gecko into browsers and apps)
I use Chrome simply because all of my workflow is centered around Google and its products. Being able to switch accounts so effortlessly and being automatically logged in to so many services is just too convenient for me to switch. I tried switching to Firefox briefly, but it just didn't suit my needs as well as I wished it did. If I ever switch to Linux for anything, I will probably switch to Firefox everywhere just to have the ease of synced bookmarks and extensions and all that. I love that Firefox is open-source, and I hate being dependant on Google, but Chrome simply works the best for me right now.
Firefox my whole life and I refuse to ever change to Chrome, because Google has too much power already. Also there's no reason to. I am still surprised that everyone switched to Chrome when Google first came out with it, just because they put ads for it everywhere.
When Chrome first came out, it was 1) light and fast as hell, 2) ran tabs in separate processes, and 3) had developer tools that were a lot better than Firebug <the state of the art at the time>. Since then, Firefox has slimmed down a lot and implemented tabs-in-their-own-process, and Chrome isn't the lightweight little speedster it once was. Google has also gone from "Don't be Evil" to whatever it is these days, making me more leery of Chrome.
All of this is to say that - yeah, we all collectively should've known better and stayed faithful to Mozilla, but I can totally see why people thought it was worth making the leap at the time.
Firefox under Linux on desktop only. With uBlock Origin, aggressively configured uMatrix and HTTPS:// Everywhere. Also with a Pi-Hole for DNS with all of the checked block lists from https://firebog.net/. Anything less is uncivilized.
Firefox on Windows for its multi account contains and the reasons @tildez stated. Safari on macOS, because I don't like Firefox on macOS
What's wrong with Firefox on macOS? I'm currently using firefox on a mac and I'm not really noticing any difference compared to Firefox on windows.
They recently offloaded a lot of rendering to CoreAnimation or Metal or whatever and saw something like a 20+% increase in efficiency and power savings.
It gets better every release, but even me as a FF fanperson, gets annoyed that they haven't figured out proper gesture animations or elastic scrolling that makes it feel like a native mac app. So I can understand.
A couple weeks ago it was also both slow, drained my battery like crazy, and kept my fans spinning while idling. They fixed that though.
All in all, it just doesn't feel like a good native mac app, it feels like a cross platform one
Have you tried the temporary container add-on? It's exactly what I hoped for with containers. If you enable automatic mode, it will create a new temporary container for every tab.
Nope, but that's a bit much for me. I usually keep the big ones in their own containers (Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc), but everything else can stay in the main one
Firefox exclusively.
Extensions: uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, Tree Style Tab, PassFF.
I used Opera for many years, until they decided to drop Presto and become just another Chrome reskin. I've despised Chrome forever—first because the UI was heavily nonstandard and full of antipatterns, and eventually because Google keeps leveraging it to make the web worse.
I currently use Firefox for mobile, because it supports all the same extensions as the full desktop version and because I use Firefox as my primary browser on my computer. On my computer, beyond firefox, I use Safari Developer Preview for work, regular Safari for testing webpages (the adblock on my Safari Dev Preview breaks some pages), and Chrome to watch Hulu and foreign language sites (hulu ad-skipping is only possible via Chrome extension as far as I know, and the built-in webpage translation on chrome is just a lot more convenient).
Firefox on Windows 10, and Android Firefox on mobile. I also use edge on Windows 10. I use the mobile Twitter app which is chrome.
I use Firefox because I want an alternative to chrome.
I use edge because I take part in Microsoft rewards and there's a small bonus for searching Bing using Edge, and I like using alternatives to Google when searching. (Although I prefer DDG to Bing).
I'm using Firefox on PC and Firefox Preview on Android. Firefox Preview has some annoying issues but the interface has really grown on me to the point where I reinstalled Brave and then uninstalled it again.
Cent Browser, which is a fork of Chromium with features.
Firefox. On desktop, the tree style tab extension is just too good.
On mobile, I use the new Firefox preview and liking it a lot.
I use firefox on PC mostly to support the company and what they stand for. I never had any problem with browser, but the Google's assholish CAPTCHA design is testing my patience :(
I use bromite browser on my phone(Android). Just because both firefox mobile and firefox preview are still very buggy. Chromium browsers are way ahead when it comes to android
I used Firefox from the time when it was known as Phoenix until about 2010, when I switched to Safari on the Mac, Windows and iPhone so that I could keep my history and bookmarks in sync.
About a month ago, when Catalina came out, a whole bunch of extensions just stopped working. So I started using Firefox again and it's fantastic.
There are many more extensions for Firefox than there are for Safari and they've gotten syncing working extremely well. Everything is synced between my phone, laptop and desktop seamlessly (Firefox didn't sync at all last time I used it).
It's been extremely helpful in decoupling myself from Apple's ecosystem.
Mobile: Ecosia - plant 'em trees || Safari - it comes preinstalled
Laptop: Firefox - it works well with linux and is less power-hungry than chrome or chromium || qutebrowser - keyboard focused, minimal, one downside is that it's based on python and PyQt5, making it really slow when it comes to startup times
Firefox Quantum on Linux w/ uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, and Https Everywhere.
I use Firefox on mobile and Vivaldi on my raspi
Firefox Developer Edition on desktop, and Firefox Nightly on mobile.
For personal stuff I use Safari because it's very handy to have everything synced between laptop, desktop, iPhone, and iPad (one of the benefits of being deep in the Apple ecosystem). If not for the continuity features I'd probably use Opera or Firefox on my computers.
For work I use Chrome because my company uses GSuite and I get the sync benefits through that. (Deep in the Google ecosystem). It is a total battery hog though, which I find annoying. It also breaks a lot of Mac OS HIG and interface norms, which really peeves me. But a separation between work and personal browsing is really nice and helps me click into "work mode" when it's time to get stuff done. It also keeps my personal browsing sites from popping up in the auto-complete when people are shoulder surfing.
I currently use Chrome on desktop. I used to use Firefox. I usually flip between them every so often.
On mobile I use kiwi browser. I definitely recommend checking it out. I also have used Samsung browser in the past and it is also really good. You can use it on non Samsung phones too.
I pretty much have only used Firefox ever since it was available. Feels like the only major browser I can really trust.
Standard Chrome mobile for Samsung phones. Oh well.
Firefox for pretty much everything. Pretty much the only time I open Chrome is when I'm working on an Angular project.
I always feel ashamed to answer that question because I use Google Chrome. I just have a near perfect setup that is hard to reproduce, and Firefocs (they keyboard I'm writing right now doesn't have the "ecs" keys, but you know what I mean!) doesn't work right with my "ecs"modmap and "ecs"cape customizations on i3wm.
Vivaldi and Vivaldi mobile. Works great.
Pretty much exclusively Safari because I'm quite embedded in the Apple ecosystem and the cross-device sync, and password management just makes things easy.
I have Chrome available because a few things seem to demand it (and I basically don't trust google), and I have FF available because sometimes I like to play around with different plugins.