It always astonishes me how many people who are ostensibly against the webkit derivative hegemony won't even consider recommending Firefox. It's certainly a competitive browser, and personally my favourite, and Mozilla does fantastically important work balancing out an otherwise entirely corporate, ulterior-motive laden browser market.
My experience has been that Firefox was unusably slow on OS X and Linux for a long time and they lost a lot of users because of it. Now it is faster but it is difficult to woo people back.
And even if it is faster, there track record shows that they found doing a release that slows down a large portion of users was acceptable. Granted I doubt they still have that attitude, and i think they are more performance based now, but a lot of us left for Chrome and never looked back.
> and i think they are more performance based now, but a lot of us left for Chrome and never looked back.
And you don't have the same problem with Chrome? I've found Chrome to be a terrible resource hog lately, and sometimes I have to kill it to get my computer back to a usable state. And of course, I have to dig through all of the Chrome process and try to figure out which is the one that will take down the rest of them.
> And you don't have the same problem with Chrome? I've found Chrome to be a terrible resource hog lately
I'm OS X and I've had some CPU issues lately if I have a lot of tabs open but overall not nearly as many issues as when I finally decided to give up Firefox.
I actually downloaded Firefox lately and it seems pretty nice. If Chrome gets works I may consider it.
I usually have a few hundred tabs open in Firefox without issue; it seems to do a good job of putting unused/old tabs to 'sleep' until you come back to them.
I tried using Firefox for a while recently (over the last month) and still found it unbearably slow as well as downright buggy in the way it handled and displayed certain pages. Was very disappointed by this since I really want to start using it again.
My work doesn't allow the latest version of FireFox, so after months of crashes and general unbearably slowness on MacOS I switched to UnGoogled Chromium. I wish I could go back to FF because I like Mozilla as an org, but it's not in the cards for my day to day.
Firefox is OK these days. As a user I couldn't care less about Google offering, specifically because of google. That company is creepy and its core mission is to be even more creepy.
On android, Firefox mobile is by far the best browser, since it allows (some) extensions, and you definitely need one - microBlock origin. No effin' way I am going to use their official browser, web is beyond useless with all the ads.
I think trying to fight a browser engine monoculture is a lost cause.
There is no money in building browser engines and it costs a lot of time and money to create one from scratch.
The only reason Mozilla and Microsoft still use their own engine is for historical and technical reasons.
The fact that we are down to just three implementations should tell you were things are headed.
Sure that's how it is today but what if Mozilla runs out of funds? Say they fail to get a lucrative search deal after the current one ends while Pocket fails to pick up the slack.
What if Microsoft doesn't ever get a significant number of users on Edge? Say websites and users alike treat it like Windows Phone.
I think Mozilla is already cutting projects because they know their next search deal won't be as lucrative as their previous ones. Software development costs money.
Edge came out in 2015 if it doesn't have inertia yet then you have to at least wonder if it's another Windows Phone.
If Microsoft plans on using it to get users on to their services then they'll need way more users than they are getting. Otherwise why invest the money in building one?
I wouldn't go by the negative tone of that article. The whole point of the cliqz experiment is to try out a possible alternative to one part of today's privacy-destroying web. You are not going to tracked through an indirection through cliqz anyway, but if i understand correctly, even that is only a way to make prototyping feasible to see whether it's worth proceeding with a fuller, architecturally privacy preserving implementation.
