I'm so tired of seeing people recommend Brave. Firefox is what the web needs. Organizational shenanigans aside, Firefox is the best browser on the market right now.
yeah, except it doesn't work half the time (I have issues with it on MS Teams, Outlooks, even Gmail sometimes) the Mozilla boss thinks the solution is raise her own pay and fire devs.
EDIT:
and I should mention that I am a die-hard Firefox fanboy, that I've been using it since like Firefox 2 or something, and that seeing it fail to properly render certain web apps and having to use chromium, which I consider to be uglier from a UI point of view as a fallback pains me dearly.
What extensions are you using? I (anecdotally) never have any of the issues you describe. And I'm on my computer 12+ hours per day, most of which is spent galivanting across the web in Firefox. Are you using a forked version of Firefox?
Same here... I read comments all the time in browser threads about these issues in Firefox and I must be lucky or my basic install with just uBO is the difference (I also don't use any Google websites outside of search and Youtube). I have been daily FF user on both desktop and laptop for 4+ hours a day since I left Opera when it changed to a Chromium base and I can probably count on one hand the issues I've had with FF working with sites properly. One was a repeatable memory leak that would crash FF like 4 years ago that I submitted as a bug report and it was fixed in next release.
To me FF is just as fast in general browsing than anything else. I routinely try other browsers and I just feel "wrong" using any of the Chromium based others of Edge/Brave/Vivaldi when FF needs us right now. It needs the us to stand against non-open source web browsers and as an alternative engine to the web. I really like Vivaldi and would be my 2nd choice (then Edge then Brave, refuse to use Chrome) but it isn't open-source nor does it do anything to protect privacy.
If FF is giving crashes, issues at sites etc please try at least refreshing your install in the options and don't install so many extensions. Even better backup your bookmarks and uninstall it while making sure to also delete all users\$username\Appdata folders as well then reinstall.
ah, good point about the extensions, I do have uBlock Origin and NoScript, so it could actually be those, even if the latter is basically off 90% of the time... thank you for pointing that out ^_^
I use Vivaldi because about a year ago I realized Firefox Android had an issue with smooth scrolling. It would stutter a lot. Also, it would reload tabs every time I left and came back to one, which is awful.
So I'm using Vivaldi in mobile, and decided to try it on desktop too. I like the reading list feature, basically a twist on bookmarks.
Brave works, Firefox don't, simple as. I tried Firefox numerous times and I always stumble upon glitches, and it still measurable slower. Chromium won, deal with it.
Brave is super shady by default due to their cryptocurrency associations, and also has made several questionable decisions in the past (see: hijacking your URL bar and replacing it with an affiliate link).
Firefox is the superior browser, but if you must use Chromium I strongly suggest ungoogled-chromium over Brave.
I don't touch crypto with a 10-foot pole, but it baffles me why anyone would care about Brave's "cryptocurrency associations". It takes a few clicks, one-time at initial install, to completely disable the "BAT" advertiser network and all of the crypto ads on the New Tab.
Everything in tech is shady. I think advertising is super shady. So I use an ad-blocker and move on with my life.
The bottom line is that your choice today is between Firefox, and something that is Chromium-based. Mozilla is a wreck of an organization, and their browser has compatibility issues all over the place because it's just not large enough to be relevant anymore (I'm sorry, it's true).
So people choose Chromium-based. If you don't want to go with Google or Microsoft, then this means you can use "ungoogled-chromium" or Brave. Brave is available on all devices (Vivaldi doesn't support iOS), and syncs bookmarks and passwords across all your devices.
So yeah. It makes a ton of sense for a lot of people to gravitate toward Brave. Why do I care whether their business model is showing NFT ads to people who don't turn that off? Just turn it off.
It isn't slower. Not measurably, nor in feeling. Where do you get this?
It's also not faster, if that is what you read in my comment: Chrome/ium and Firefox keep improving. And depending on what month and what benchmark, one will outperform the other. Slightly.
It could be anecdotal? For any of both browsers, though. E.g. some plugins/addons will slow down the browser significant. Or usage specific? Maybe one handles having 2000 tabs open better than the other? Or page-specific?
By visiting sites I visit often/everyday in both Brave and Firefox and comparing DomContentLoaded/Load/Finish timings in Developer Tools. Brave (but also Chromium in the past when I used it) is consistently faster.
Not much, but I noticed even before I measured, I did it to check if my feeling is wrong, and it isn't.
To be clear: I'm not saying your feeling is wrong.
But this is the definition of "anecdotal". I can see all sorts of biases luring in your methodology. And the body is way too small to have any statistic meaning.
Again: performance, measured or perceived, may be bad for you. But that is completely different from "Firefox is slower than Chrome".
You cannot make such a statement based on measurements on a few websites where Firefox appeared slow to you.
It sometimes failed to load reaction icons on Linkedin. This was happening for a long time, but seems that either Firefox or Linkedin fixed it. I didn't stumble upon it recently.
Firefox don't play MKV videos, I use some site that has embed MKVs.
Slack calls didn't work on it (they workaround it). But I had trouble with other sites that use WebRTC in Firefox.
This is things I recall at this moment, but I don't want to have to use backup browser when something like this happens, so I use Chromium based browser and get on with my life.
How do you separate which of these are bugs in Firefox and which ones are bugs in the sites that don't test against more than one browser engine? Reminds me of back in the day with the "works best in Internet Explorer" banners.
The MKV thing sounds like a Firefox or codec issue, but I couldn't say. I haven't had issues with MKV or WebM, which is effectively a MKV profile, in many years.
These days I find more glitches in Chrome than Firefox. Last one I found was that a certain fetch request showed an empty response in the devtools network monitor. Spoiler: it was not actually empty.
Not sure if this is what the GP was referring to, but I constantly find Google and Amazon (two sites I almost never use) pinned to my frequently accessed sites in Firefox. I unpin them, then check all settings for any kind of advertising opt, and yet, some month later, they're back.
Are you installing Firefox and signing into them on new machines? I don't have hard evidence but I feel like when I install FF on a new box and sign in, the pinned sites sometimes show up on other machines when everything is synced.
I just wanted to nit-pick and state that this includes mobile (ie. Android) but on Desktop it is not better (67.33%) as Safari is not that strong there. And Firefox still loses on Desktop (0.5% compared to last year).
Wow.
Safari isn't available for Windows or Linux. So that is one important reason for its low desktop usage.
(And which also shows that this "Apple is protecting Browser Diversity by not allowing another browser on iOS" narrative is wrong: Without even improving Safari, by "just" supporting it on Windows and Linux, they would move the needle for browser diversity)
I heard that ad blocking will not work after January. I am going to wait until ads actually start appearing in my browser again to switch because the internet is full of bad information but assuming it actually happens I, and all the non tech dependents I influence, will be giving Brave a try. I am attracted to it because it says it blocks ads by default, however I am concerned because it doesn't appear to have even 1% of browser share. I don't know where else to go though because Edge...just I can't believe myself ever using a Microsoft browser again after the IE drama and Firefox is a zombie from a by gone era that only exists on the fumes of massive payments from Google to prevent anti trust so not worth investing in either. Slim options and no clear path forward.
If you are on Windows or Linux I'd give Chromium a try. While still bloaty as its the basis of Chrome, it's essentially de-Googlified without anything extra that Brave might bring.
If there is one thing good about Chrome dominance, its that at the end of the day its core Chromium is open source so we can have a non-Google version of it while still being supported.
I have no choice but to use Firefox because I have switched to vertical tabs (with Sidebery) and it seems that every other browser besides Edge(?!) is stuck with horizontal tabs.
Horizontal tabs are objectively inferior - why are vertical tabs so rare???
Vivaldi has the best vertical tabs implementation I've used. Edge would be 2nd. Sideberry would be great if it was easier to rid of the horizontal tabs in FF when Sideberry is active. Horrible having the horizontal tabs still while also having vertical tabs and only some CSS hacks fixes it.
Brave has vertical tabs coming soon as they are in nightly I believe.
I have never seen a 'product ad' anywhere on my brave.
Crypto got turned off (and i also have an extensive hostsfile for that, too).
Never seen an affiliate code being injected anywhere.
