I switched to Firefox and using DDG as my search engine about 2m ago and I'll be honest I really don't care for it. I'm trying my best but I use my phone for 100% of my browsing and not being able to set a home page sucks and with DDG searching for stuff takes significantly longer to get answers with. I search for a ton of stuff that I just need a quick answer to that when searching for Google would just show the answer instead of needing to open links and such. I'm giving it a bit more time but I'll probably end up back with chrome.
Firefox on Android allows you to install uBlock Origin. That alone is a major improvement over Chrome.
You can also try out Vivaldi, which is based on Chrome and also has a built in ad blocker. I don't think you can install uBlock Origin on Android tho...
IMHO, people in corporations should acknowledge that there is a growing user base for Firefox and give it as much priority as chrome. That way people in an organization can at least explore a different browser than chrome (especially the non-tech folks).
The reality is that companies test all their websites in Chrome. Any automation testing will also be focused on Chrome and Safari. Also majority of the developers use Chrome dev tools for debugging. I don't see that changing anytime soon. I feel that Firefox is like a second class citizen in their book.
But hey, that might be a good thing too. All the tracking B.S will be developed for chrome and We can continue to enjoy privacy with good old firefox.
Our automation tests run on Firefox on odd days and on Chrome on even days. I don't think it ever made a difference, tho. It's getting harder to create bugs that are specific to Firefox or Chrome. Safari, on the other hand, is a fucking mess.
I have switched to Firefox but I'm having a hard time. Firefox feels sluggish compared to Chrome and uses an insane amount of memory. And I really miss tab groups as Chrome had them. There are some add-ons for Firefox that try to imitate this feature but none of them has everything I want (e.g. the ability to collapse a group in the top tab bar). And most of them build on top of Firefox tab groups which come with an isolation feature I don't want (and haven't found a way to disable for tab groups).
All you said plus Firefox's rendering looks like total crap. Maybe you would like ungoogled-chromium?
And... for what's worth Firefox is a privacy nightmare as well, just start Wireshark and launch the browser to see what it does. LibreWolf or ungoogled-chromium always.
My experience has been the opposite. I will have far too many tabs and windows open and with Chrome I would often see memory usage over 10gb. And on more than one occasion I'd have to end task on chrome as it was locking or already locked up.
Switched [back] to Firefox in the last year or two, same plugins, no change in behavior, and it never locks up. Memory usage is fine. Right now with just as many windows and tabs open it's using 5gb ram.
Chrome has been uninstalled from my PC.
And the tab containers plugin from Mozilla is really incredible.
I like the idea of tab isolation, but I don't want to be forced to use it for every tab group. I want to use tab groups to organize my tabs because I have way too many of them open at the same time. I often create tab groups on the fly just to keep things organized. I don't want to login into every account once I decide I need a new tab group.
I agree the tab containers are pretty specific use cases. It's invaluable for AWS. If I still used Facebook it would be great to keep that isolated from all the other sites that share data with it. I like to use it for banking which is done very specifically. Otherwise yeah everything remains in the non-container tab.
And I was not saying the containers relate to memory usage.
So my gut instinct is to go to Firefox (again), but how can it compete? It’s down to like 2% market share, there’s a serious portion of the web that Firefox just can’t render anymore, and there’s all this press about the CEO getting this monsterous golden parachute.
So realistically what can anyone do but continue to use the only browser people ever really test sites for anymore, or swear allegiance to either Microsoft or Apple?
I've been using Firefox exclusively for close to twenty years now and non-compatible websites are extremely rare. I'm sure there are industry-specific shortcomings but for general usage it's always been acceptable at worst. And its market share is close to 7%.
I've only encountered 2 websites that didn't work properly in Firefox and it was only intermittently
Those 2 were Google Play Music and YouTube Music, and both were fixed within a few days. Basically it worked fine, then something broke, then Firefox patched and it worked again.
It was also right around the time Google Play Music was set to die.
Firefox can always compete, because if it ever stopped existing Google would have an antitrust case on their hands. For the same reason, Google cannot violate web standards, like what has happened in previous browser wars.
I don't agree that Firefox is unable to render a portion of the web, I've been using it for years and have never once run into a website that had a problem with my browser. I thought once that studentaid.gov did, but that turned out to be a problem with extensions. I've seen more websites that have issues with me using Linux than with Firefox.