• what i don’t get is all the people complaining about google and at the same time using their browser…

    i believe that trying to steer masses away from chrome would be more useful in the long run than trying to make it work

    • Unfortunately chromebooks have been one of the cheapest options for a whole now and have been being introduced all over school systems in the US so kids are used to them and uninformed parents will continue to buy what they know meete school requirements.

      Everyone that can definitely should switch to Firefox.

    • You can fork it and basically freeze it at manifest-v2.

      The problem is, all the big tech sumbitches, their buddies and all the companies who want a corporate website that Just Works [tm] will support Google’s new shit, and your privacy-respecting fork will slowly deprecate and stop working right, because you don’t have the resources to mirror new features in Google’s official browser. And of course, ordinary internet users with stick to Google’s version because they need a browser that works.

      Chicken and egg… In fact, that’s exactly what’s happening to Firefox and why it’s sliding into irrelevance: Google is simply too massive and too monopolistic to resist for very long. Mozilla has had hundreds of millions to throw at trying and even they are on the verge of losing the battle completely.

    •  Eugenia   ( @eugenia@lemmy.ml ) 
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      3 months ago

      Look, I’m a Linux user, and I prefer to use Free apps. However, the truth must be told: Firefox is not as optimized as Chrome. On older devices, Chrome is twice as fast in youtube playback, and it uses way less RAM overall. Chrome is the better browser in terms of architecture, at least for older PCs (and I have a whole bunch of them). On my main PC, running Debian-Testing, which is a newer PC, I do use Firefox, because it can handle stuff ok with enough CPU power. But for all my older PCs (anywhere from 5 to 15 years old), I have to use Chrome.

      Now, if you find me a de-googled, Free, WELL-MAINTANED Chromium browser, I rather use that than Chrome. No, Brave, etc don’t cut it. I want a community-driven, well maintained Chromium browser. Currently, all de-googled versions are not well maintained, or not available as native packages on Debian.

      EDIT: So, downvoted, huh? By fellow open source users who don’t want to hear the truth?

      • I can’t downvote you from my instance, but you do realise it’s been pretty well-known, for at least a decade in certain circles, that YouTube specifically slows down on Firefox? I’m pretty sure you can test this yourself by changing user agents. So that hardly seems like a fair test of a browser’s speed.

      • Google has a history of sabotaging Firefox in YouTube, because they can. This is a YouTube problem more than a Firefox problem. I know that’s not really helpful for you as an end user, but I want to mention it because really, Google deserves the blame.

          • Yes, Vivaldi isn’t fullFOSS, because 5% of the script of the unique UI is proprietary of Vivaldi, but it’s 100% auditable and even moddeable by the user, they even show how to do it in its community. Edge and Chrome would fork it in the same moment when Vivaldi make it OpenSource, killing all other Chromium and Vivaldi itself. Maybe in the future it will go full OpenSource, there are still intern debates about it. The sense of OpenSource is to be capable to collaborate in new products, but with almost 100 browsers and forks in the market, this value is pretty debatable. For the user is more important the ethics of the company respect the user, in this case a european, employee-owned cooperative, which is given with a full transparency in all it’s services included in the account (mail, calendar, feed, blog, the Vivaldi Mastodon instance, e2ee sync in own server, etc.).

        • Does Vivaldi play nice with Wayland? I have it installed (can’t remember if was an rpm or flatpak) but seems to crash kinda often. Sometimes to the point of gnome session restarting. I used to have the opposite problem with my previous PC. All AMD cpu/GPU. Stock fedora 40 gnome.

      • the truth must be told: Firefox is not as optimized as Chrome

        what are you talking about? my desktop pc is amd fx4300. definition of old and subpar - https://i.imgur.com/WBm5Ub1.png - and i have 313 open tabs right now.

        granted, that is slightly more affected by memory, before i updated from 8 to 32 gb recently, it was admittedly slightly more sluggish.

        but at the same time normal people don’t really have 300 open tabs at once and also you have to ask what is the threshold where you are willing to sacrifice your privacy for slight speed increase.

        do you have some numbers to support that speed difference, or is it just your feeling, or anecdote that is being passed around and everyone repeats it and everyone believes it, because everyone says so?