:stallman-shining:
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.
Chrome also scans your entire hard drive. I don't know what information it sends back to Google about what's on it. If you're running chrome you'll sometimes notice something called "software_reporter_tool.exe" running in the background. Google claims it's just to scan for malware but they don't respect your privacy anywhere else so why would they do it here?
I couldn't figure out why chrome caused my HDD to go crazy sometimes, I had to check my running processes until I found this.
I literally just made the switch on everything, it was so easy and I have a little bit more piece of mind :stalin-feels-good:
I'm all-in on the fuck Google train at this point. I'm a web developer and I'm doing everything I can to not use any Google products/APIs for any sites I build or work on.
Awesome! Here is a libre Google Analytics alternative if you are looking for one.
Haha, I actually just implemented Plausible on my own personal site - but thanks!
Chrome has also opted a bajillion Chrome users into a third-party cookie trial (read: you're helping Google with a new tracking/marketing feature under the guise of privacy): https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/google-testing-its-controversial-new-ad-targeting-tech-millions-browsers-heres
A good a time as any to switch!
PS Firefox Focus on Android is pretty great. It's like a temporary session browser that forgets everything after it closes (and it has multiple paths to closing itself). It's a great default browser for when you open links in other applications.
Alright I switched, you wore me down. Any cool add-ons I should try?
okay, i just installed firefox for the first time in nearly a decade.
it’s much faster than chrome by comparison, and the particular extensions i just for dnd actually work.
just gotta get my bookmarks over, and see if the twitch adblocks work at all too
Chrome is the only browser that supports honorlock, which is a whole other privacy nightmare. I need it about 2-3 times a semester. Any other time, I'm using firefox.
Never heard of custom css for FF and now I'm missing two hours of my life @_@
lookin sweet tho
ayyy I'm happy to have gotten another person into it! I love firefox css so much and I feel like not enough people know about it.
It's like a whole new world of unknown possibilities and needless obsession over minute details
and I love it :sicko-yes:
You can still perfectly use them via Firefox. Even better you get to use the Containers extension that is linked in the post or Google Container to separate that from your other stuff and have a bit more privacy.
The only thing that doesn't seem to work for me on firefox is using my right click to paste in Google docs. I wonder if google container will solve that. I do everything on firefox except work since I have to use Google Drive. Plus chrome's auto-fill seems to work better, but that's probably because they save so much of my info lol.
Consider that to allow that feature, Google Docs must have access to your clipboard at all times.
The browser cannot tell that the custom context menu that Docs shows says "paste"; when you click the paste button the browser gets a request from the site to read your clipboard and grants it. The website could ask for this at any time and send everything you copy, including passwords and things you'd rather keep away from Google. If Mozilla ported that feature over to Firefox you'd have to take care every time you copy anything to the clipboard.
When you paste with Ctrl-V or with the browser's standard context menu, on the other hand, the browser sends the website "hey there's this thing on the clipboard". The website cannot request your clipboard, only receives it when you give the order.
Ah that does make sense. Still, I need that feature. I write for a living.
What is wrong with ctrl-v?
Or simple markdown-based collaborative editors like https://pad.snopyta.org/
ctrl-v doesn't give me the option to remove formatting when I paste and I tend to move a lot of passages from docs with different design elements. Sure it's only a couple extra clicks, but it adds up and often breaks my flow a little bit. Most of the organizations I work with are on Google Docs organization-wide, so it's easier to contain my work in there, unfortunately.
Chrome also runs my battery down so fast. Firefox is in all ways just objectively better
Nice post! I use chrome for my phone, downloading Firefox now. Should I change my search engine? I tried duckduckgo but i wasn't impressed
I've used DuckDuckGo since the Snowden disclosures, and I would say give it another chance! The feature that made me stick with it wasn't the lack of tracking and privacy features but the "bangs" as they call them which allow you to pass your search into another webpage. If you've used pipes on a unix-like system, it's a bit similar to that, where if you type "mozilla firefox" into the search bar on DuckDuckGo, or in the address bar if you've set it as your default search, you can append
!aor!wto pass that search over to Amazon or Wikipedia for example. There's a whole list of bangs that are useful for day to day stuff, but it's made my browsing habits so much quicker since I don't have to move my hands from the keyboard as much. Check it out again, it's fun! https://duckduckgo.com/bangYep, once you pass it over from DuckDuckGo with
!g, it's in Google's hands. It's more of a pass-through from DuckDuckGo to other search engines or services than an anonymizer. You can pipe it to startpage though with!sif you want to search Google anonymously but you won't be anonymous to StartPage's operators (unless you're using Tor).Do they still do a captcha? I haven't used their search in years outside of some testing at work.
Do you want the short answer or the long answer? :)
Short answer is it's fine, depending on what you're after. Long answer is StartPage's operators can still see what you're searching, where you're coming from, what time you're checking it, along with logging it. Like DuckDuckGo they're a private company as well as also not being open source so you can't validate their claims (at least at the software level) for what they do and don't do with your data.
Nice! That feature sold me on DDG several years ago and haven't looked back since 😎
It's good but DDG is better and has more features plus it doesn't rely on Google's search engine. Try using DDG as your default and use !s when you don't get the results you want.
