Joined the revolution 20 years ago and never looked back!
BTW, Firefox still has over 10% market share in German speaking countries, compared to 3% worldwide. To the rest of the world: stop being lazy and try other browsers!
It really is amazing how things have come full circle from the point where chrome positioned itself as a "Libre" alternative to the IE near-monopoly
There was a point between IE and chrome when Mozilla was always in the near-foreground offering alternatives to every internet hegemony, right around web 2.0, kinda makes me optimistic for the internet to see a resurgence of recommendations
From how I remember it, we started with Netscape, IE outcompeted that by adding new features until they had enough share to strangle the competition. By that time IE became mandatory because of their extensions. Windows systems couldn't get updates without opening IE.
Eventually it (IE) fossilized and Firefox became the better browser with more features (remember that debugging extension?) but was still pretty slow.
Then came chrome. Way way faster, sleek and modern UI, removing the search and tool-bars. Hiding bookmarks by default and putting everything into the Omni bar.
Really, that was what everyone I know of cared about: responsiveness/speed and that sleek UI.
Finally Firefox improved its resource usage/speed and adjusted it's UI, taking inspiration from chrome... But by that time, it's popularity had already dropped massively.
> IE outcompeted that by adding new features until they had enough share to strangle the competition.
ie won because it wasn't an utter piece of shit. Netscape 3 crashed if you looked at it crosseyed, and ie3 was significantly more stable and performant. I worked at one of the first companies to ship a serious app targeting a browser and, at one point, 1/3 of our front-end code was fingerprinting various netscape versions and working around their browser bugs. The world rushed to ie3/4 because it wasn't garbage.
I'm not saying Microsoft didn't abuse their monopoly position or compete in underhanded and illegal ways, but they originally won purely on quality. People shipping serious web apps begged their users to get off netscape.
It took a while to get used to vertical tabs but once that took, I have moved completely to Zen. It was good to see it move from alpha to beta recently.
Too bad they removed the ability to open the vertical tabs side bar on hover, that was a critical feature that caused me to go back to Firefox proper. I'll go back to Zen once they add it but to be honest, I'm not too sure what extra value Zen would bring me.
I am talking about this feature [0], it should have the option to show all the tab icons and expand on hover, not hide the side bar entirely. The creator said this was being dropped due to maintenance concerns, and I haven't seen a community solution like they said yet.
If you want vertical tabs, built-in adblocker, and more generally are looking for a lightweight and free (as in free speech and as in free beer) browser, you may look at https://www.falkon.org/ (made with QTwebengine i.e. Blink)
> Support for Event pages, along with support for blocking webRequest, is a divergence from Chrome that enables use cases that are not covered by Chrome’s MV3 implementation.
> Firefox, however, has no plans to deprecate MV2 and will continue to support MV2 extensions for the foreseeable future.
Uh, YT on FF is unusable now. They'll show the "adblockers not allowed" message if you have Ghostery enabled. Even if you disable that, they will add tons of artificial lag on things like key input, clicks and screen draw speed. I know it's artificial because it worked fine for years and then one day....
I’ve had zero issues or ads lately using Firefox + uBlock origin. For a while I had to update the Adblock lists manually sometimes, but for months now it’s been flawless for me.
Just wait a day and uBlock will update its filters. That's what happened to me initially. In the meantime I had a yt-dlp script for videos I wanted to watch. Tubular on mobile also works fine.
Disable ublock origin on Youtube, or pay for Youtube.
As for artificial lag, I suspect it is because it using the web standard version of Youtube. Had this issue with Google Sheets where paste did not work correctly (forget exactly what it is) and it did work on Chrome. Google uses non-standard things to optimize the experience.
It is not acceptable, but it is also an issue that will go away once more people go back to the fox.
