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Chances are more and more of what you do when you use your computer is done through a browser (keeping in contact with friends, jobs, and even organizing).
So the importance of browsers cannot be understated. And having one piece of software do all of this means you have to be able to trust it.
Which brings us to Google & Chrome. Google Chrome has come to dominate the browser usage share, but even that is an understatement. Every single browser you have heard of, with the exception of Firefox, uses a version of Chrome (Chromium) in the background. Opera, Edge, Brave, you name it, they're all based off of Chrome.
Most people know Google is shitty already; if we're just talking about the web, they are regularly caught sabotaging Firefox to boost Chrome usage and, as any corporation would, continue to strengthen their monopoly by making it harder for alternative browsers to rise up (hence why Firefox is the only alternative right now). This is of course without mentioning the crimes they commit outside the web, e.g. how they help build the US's drones, or how they work closely with the NSA.
It goes without saying then that the authors of this post all urge you to switch from Chrome, or other Chrome-based browsers, to Firefox. This article shows you how quick & easy it is to switch, and transfer all your bookmarks, passwords, and other browser data to Firefox too!
Firefox isn't just the only viable alternative to Chrome, though. It also has a bunch of cool tricks and features up its sleeve.
Extensions
Firefox is very easy to customize to your liking via the settings or extensions, you can have vertical/tree style tabs via one of these extensions, there's also Gesturefy which lets you navigate the browser with mouse gestures.
There's also the Containers feature which "lets you carve out a separate box for each of your online lives", it basically provides you with separate profiles/browsers... and extensions like Facebook Container use it to isolate facebook related tabs and trackers into a facebook container seperate from everything else, or Temporary Containers which provides you with disposable containers, or Google Container among others. There's a lot more but that's what I can think of off the top of my head.
Firefox also comes with built-in tracking protection and anti-fingerprinting features plus tweaks you can apply.
Extensions on Chrome are actually much weaker than on Firefox because of Manifest v3 and other things, check this post for more on this.
If you want more screen space
Try the Compact mode in Firefox by going to Customize from the main menu and picking Compact from the Density menu at the bottom.
Build Beautiful Firefox Themes
check https://color.firefox.com/
Custom CSS styles that can change the whole look of the browser
Firefox also has a thing called userChrome (nothing to do with Chrome) which lets you basically change the whole look of the browser, you can see some examples here. Those are a few examples but if you want more you can check out /r/firefoxcss.
Firefox for Android
Unlike most browsers, Firefox supports extensions on Android so you can use uBlock Origin (adblocker), Dark Reader and other extensions.
It also comes with built-in tracking protection and an option to have the toolbar at the bottom of the screen.
Plus you get syncing between your browsers and firefox has a feature to show tabs from other devices in the customization settings.
You should get Firefox from F-Droid instead of Google Play. It's called Fennec on F-Droid
Firefox for iOS
Firefox ship both the standard browser, as well as Firefox Focus with extra tracking protections (you can use it as a content block in Safari, too).
More detailed technical info about Firefox
Firefox is a unique browser in a lot of ways. Firefox runs on an engine called Gecko, as opposed to Apple's web engine called WebKit or Google's fork of WebKit called Blink.
Firefox was originally a spinoff of mozilla internet suite, which itself was a continuation of the netscape communicator project. Firefox then underwent the quantum update which made it much faster and made it easier to develop for while also dumping the XUL extension system. This means that the Gecko engine is entirely independent from chrome/safari. It is also a lot more tightly integrated into the firefox browser, which is one of the reasons why most browsers are based off of blink/webkit.
There are firefox based browsers though, the most notable of which is the TOR browser, which protects users by routing all traffic through the TOR network and it's also designed to be as difficult to fingerprint as possible.
We hope this post has convinced you to make the switch! Here's the switching guide again, in case you missed the first link. Feel free to ask questions in the comments, or alternatively check out the !libre weekly megathread, which is sticked :)
Check this post out if you want more open source apps on your Android.
This post was brought to you by @Windows97 @kitten @Pirate @ImSoOCD
Good effort post! Unfortunately, Firefox is often framed as an "alternative" to Chrome, which is strange to me, because, privacy issues aside, it's a much better browser for those who like to have more control over their software.
An interesting thing to note is that Electron apps are also Chromium in disguise, so if you're using Discord, Slack, or even something as simple as Etcher, you are running one or more instances of Chromium on your machine. Then there's CEF apps that also embed Chromium, and a common example is Steam. So if you want to get rid of Chromium completely, you might want to find free and/or native alternatives for those.
Also keep in mind that many companies, not just Google, do questionable things. rms has written a lot about this, in particular (yes, his website is not just bad takes).
Firefox containers are awesome! There's also Multi-Account Containers that you can use to assign any website to always open in a designated container. Alternatively, there's Containerise that's like MAC, but you can use globs and regexes to match domains. Also note that currently syncing MAC containers through Firefox Sync doesn't work very well with Temporary Containers and is a known issue. And lastly, Temporary Containers are not really "mini incognito tabs", because containers don't isolate browsing history, yet.
If you decide to switch to Firefox for it's superior tracking protection, PrivacyTools has a list of tweaks that you can apply to further enhance it.
All these features and extensions we mentioned should really get chapos to use Firefox and make it easy for them to recommend it.
Chromium is just the browser engine from what I understand. Isn't most of the Google stuff removed?
Oof. Not a huge problem if it's just an electron program though since they're probably only contacting the program's own servers anyways. It's still ridiculous. Maybe someone could make a new protocol to replace HTTP and all web standards with something a little less fingerprintable for certain use cases (would obviously never become widespread though).
Someone did make such a protocol! It's called Gemini and it's great. Although, it might be too minimalist for some.
Honestly, who knows? Not me. :)
But I do know that even though Chromium is an open-source project, Google still makes most of the decisions. There's the engine part and there's an actual browser also referred to as Chromium. The Chromium browser is Chrome sans branding and proprietary parts of Chrome. However, it still makes use of Google services and will call home depending on which features you have turned on.
Vendors can decide to skip on some of Google's stuff when building on top of Chromium components. Electron seems to not use any of it by default, even though it can, if an app vendor decides to do so.
@margaretsnatcher2020 @boooo thought you might find the post interesting.
Sending this comment from Fennec :elephant-pog:
Thanks to the Libre Gang @Pirate @kitten @Windows97 @ImSoOCD for making the change to FOSS seem doable for my ADHD brain, atleast on android. Now my main app screen looks like this.
Awesome! Soon you will be a part of the gang and you'll go around bullying people into using libre lol :big-cool:
@Wmill there are a couple of cool extensions and features you might wanna check out :)
Thank you for this! I remember getting fennec for my phone but gonna see about switching my computer over to firefox now. One's a chrome book that's on it's last legs but my thinkpad should easily have this. Just need to save my passwords and I'm never going back.
The guide in the post should show you how to easily import your passwords into Firefox. Now you can sync tabs between your phone and laptop.
Did it, am in using firefox! Noob question but is there a way to still use my old gmail or should I make a new one?
You can but take this chance to use Protonmail or Tutanota instead! Both provide free accounts and they are very privacy friendly. This way you won't have Google reading your emails and shit.
Made a new one and now feel freer than ever. Thanks a bunch @Pirate @kitten @Windows97 @ImSoOCD y'all are great people for getting this info to us less tech savvy comrades :heart-sickle:
Really glad to hear it and appreciate how receptive to new ideas you are comrade! Let me know if you wanna get rid of any other proprietary stuff. The dominant business model of the internet as you know is surveillance capitalism but there are libre alternatives and ways to limit the scope of that shit. Just don't get yourself overwhelmed and try to tackle it one by one.
It'd be a huge win though if you could ditch Windows for Linux cause Windows 10 is basically spyware. I know Linux might seem intimidating but it really isn't and you don't need to rush into it, you can take your time to learn more about it and all that :) Oh and consider getting yourself a password manager instead of storing them in the browser.
One day I do wanna try linux and yeah password managers are a must. Been using browser and a old notebook to be honest. Might try on saturday to ditch windows gotta cook in a bit and hang with family, thanks again!
Both, so it told me no more updates past september but also the battery is failing on me. If I could find a replacement battery that would be great but big reason why I finally got something other than a chromebook. Last chromebook did the same thing.
Firefox is definitely a bit nicer and has the built-in tracker removal like the Chromium-based Microsoft Edge. Mozilla is still basically dependent on Google and 'donations' from organization for its funding. So it's not like it's some kind of completely neutral platform, nor does it really 'compete' with Chrome. But Firefox or edge are both better (Firefox probably more so in terms of privacy and customization)
