Been meaning to bring this up for awhile. I've pretty much settled on Chrome for mobile and desktop with Edge as a backup for the rare site that doesn't work right. Pretty much done with Firefox. For now.

Meh. To many privacy concerns with both chrome and edge. I used to love firefox. Now I tolerate it and enjoy it as long as I have all my settings and extensions installed. I hate that they don't sync all your settings, only certain ones. I hate that they keep changing crap around and adding crappy integrations like hello and pocket. I hate that they keep taking away features and making the browser slower. A couple of versions ago the freaking url dropdown became animated and sloooowwwww. But with extensions I can reverse ~95% of the crap they do and not worry about my privacy. I don't get constantly nagged to "log in" to my browser. I don't need to have an account and login to get free extensions. I don't get tracked and my information sent to google. I am not forced to use auto-update. They are transparent about each release and what goes into it as well.

On my iphone I'm using safari with some content blockers. Not happy about apple not allowing real 3rd party browsers. They know safari sucks and nobody would use it if they had a real choice.

I have an android phone I barely use and it has firefox on it. The extensions work on the mobile version, too, which is sweet.

I wouldn't use edge even if I could because of the whole windows 10 debacle around telemetry, lack of privacy, ads in desktop applications provided with the operating system, and forced auto-updates that break things. They can kiss my ass.

Also I'm sure you know this but browsing without an ad blocker is like having sex with a stranger with no protection. You're going to get malware. You're going to get infected and it's going to be from ads that are running on major web sites that everyone "trusts." The only real way to keep yourself safe is to not let that **** onto your computer in the first place. That means you should never use edge for anything no matter what because as far as I know, that browser doesn't support extensions at all. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

yeah, it's not even a matter of convenience anymore. Things have gotten so bad I have no regrets leaving uBlock Origin on at all times.

Too bad for our Recon Gamer site sponsor.

But thanks for keeping the site ad-free Brian (need to confirm this tho... not taking uBlock off)

For those users not using any sort of ad blocking for their browser, I'm guessing they are just getting eye-raped over and over and over. Especially in this age of self-starting videos and adverts that take huge swathes of the screen, those folks must getting hit hard yet somehow learning to endure.

I am partial to uMatrix. The UI is like a dream come true for control freaks: it starts out by blocking most things, except for 1st party resources, as well as static, non-tracking resources like images and css from domains that aren't on a blacklist. These defaults take care of banner ads and also tracking cookies, while still letting static sites load no matter what. However, a lot of fancy sites will be broken if you stop here, and if you need scripts to run from 3rd party domains, you can gradually whitelist them using a nifty 2D red/green color-coded matrix (rows=subdomain, colums=(cookie|css|image|script|XHR|frame)), and apply / save the whitelist additions at any level of generality, from the current subdomain to *.

One nice side effect of going through this whole affair is getting to see just which sites are bloated with tracking, since their matrix will be 20+ columns long, with cookies from Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google Analytics, etc. (Massassi.net comes out totally clean!)

It also appears not to slow down the browser, which is more than I can say for some others (I think it was µBlock Origin on Firefox, but TBH I can't remember for sure).

I've been using Firefox since 2004. I don't care whether chrome is better technically. Mozilla is more pro-user.

Firefox for most things, Chrome for porn and as a backup.

I'm never going to stop using an adblocker, no matter what any site says with their "boo-hoo-hoo, we need money" messages. If they actually try to force me to stop using one, I'll just avoid the site completely from that moment on (e.g. Forbes.com).

So if you want to get rid of me, Brian, you know what to do. ;O

I've been hit by malware ads too often even on technically minded pages to even consider turning my adblocker off. They've brought this onto themselves. Whatever happened to Google's plain text-only ads? They were all right.

Chrome everywhere using the HTTP Switchboard plugin.
I still use Firefox for testing, but only for testing. Just "oh, good, this works," then I move on.

People actually use "Edge?"

Chrome with ublock and latex addons? I suppose i should add those security ones

I'm sure a lot of people do. I only use it as a last resort for incompatible websites which is hardly ever. I liked Firefox and used it religiously for years until I notice far more frequent high memory usage even when the browser had been closed.

I use Vivaldi, because I'm a Power User :smug:

But actually just Chrome with an ad blocker and a hover-zoom extension to blow up thumbnails into full images when I hover over them. I had a series of other extensions that I just removed because I realized I never used them, like Vimium (keyboard navigation, kinda neat but ultimately not too useful unless your mouse **** outs) and the Google Calendar app, which I never used in favor of just always going to Google Calendar proper.

Note that the author of HTTP Switchboard has reworked this project into a fork, called µMatrix.

Oh, cool, I didn't know that.

i absolutely can't stand the way chrome handles tabs... so i use firefox... i keep chrome around for the odd thing that absolutely refuses to work in firefox and for easier switching to my alternate reddit account

This, though I don't keep Chrome around at all. Each tab opens a new instance of Chrome. I keep 15-20 tabs open at all times on all of my computers (both at work and at home) and firefox handles them perfectly. Memory wise, it usually only consumes about 135MB, but I've seen it as high as ~256MB. But, with today's computers of 8GB+ memory standard, this shouldn't be an issue at all.

That's interesting, I did not know that. However, even with multiple tabs open I have not noticed the performance degradation that I see with Firefox. Of course since I haven't been using Firefox significantly lately I'm sure I'm some number of updates behind. Firefox also seems to stay open as an active process at times that must be manually closed and I also seem to remember this issue seems to be connected to Flash as I may have had to close a Flash process as well. I've just not had any problems with Chrome in that regard.

I'm also not particularly worried about privacy or malware anymore. Virtually everyone you do business with is collecting and sharing your data. Of course I'm not going to be happy if some malicious programmer manages to steal my passwords but I guess I'll deal with it if it happens. I don't mind logging into Gooogle through Chrome, either. I like to be able to quickly access Google Docs and such but you can certainly log into Google on any browser so I'm not certain what Brian's complaint is in that regard.

Indeed, the Zeitgeist of the times.

Of course, the right to privacy was never about you. It (was) about solidarity against the levers of power which, left unattended, all too readily yield to malicious actors (or more generally, to any mechanism controlled by economic forces, which will probably include "A.I." soon enough) who would out those who do have something to lose by being harassed, defrauded, or blackmailed.

Logging into a browser is different than using a browser to log into a web page.

Sure but I'm not aware of a requirement to log into Chrome.

I use Edge on Windows 10 & Firefox/Tor on Debian. I no longer run OSX because my '09 iMac is no longer supported by macOS & since I've ditched my iPhone in favor of a Nexus 5X, I no longer have a need for it anyhow. While Edge is still lacking a few features that interest me, the recent addition of extensions has made it more tolerable. Aesthetically, I prefer it over any of the major players.

I said it's annoying that chrome keeps nagging me to log into chrome. I didn't say it forces you.

Sorry, I've just never noticed it. I'm not even sure if I'm logged into the browser or Google as I would be in any browser.

And that's my point. The browser tricked you into logging into the "browser" and now it tracks everything you do, not just the google pages you visit (which are tracked when you're logged into google). It uses all your "chrome activity" to target you. The information is available here but obviously it's written to make it sound completely harmless. Which is ok as long as you're happy knowing google tracks every site you visit now.

https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/185277?co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop&hl=en

Which, to be clear, is mostly possible anyway (if you don't sign into chrome) because a huge percentage of sites use google analytics, which allows google to track you everywhere. But if you use an ad blocker that also blocks analytics plus you log only into google sites (and not into chrome) you are much more protected from this type of stuff.

Personally I couldn't give two craps about privacy on the internet. I assume nothing is private. Even with adblocking, etc., you're still leaking information, because every server you access keeps a log. I am personally "all in" on Google and I like what it offers in return. Besides, all my truly private stuff is in an encrypted drive, off of the internet.

Chrome does that because it's more secure that way, and more stable. Every time Firefox crashes and takes all your tabs with it, you can thank that issue. Because of this, Firefox is also moving to Chrome's multi-process model.

Also, I couldn't give a **** about memory usage. Chrome often uses up to a gig of my RAM, but why do I care, I still have a crapton anyway. On low-spec systems, Chrome acts much more conservatively anyway. It only uses the RAM if it's there to use.

I looked into memory usage after being informed of this issue earlier in the thread and found that yes, Chrome was using a lot of memory. I was surprised because Chrome never really seems to drag my system down. Firefox grinds to a halt at times and after closing it won't reopen. I'll find a process still running in the task manager and kill it. Firefox will then run fine until the next issue. I'm pretty much in agreement with all that CM posted above and informed as well as to why my experience is so different between the two browsers.

Firefox grinds to a halt often because of one stupid page with crappy javascript. Firefox is trying to move to the multi-process stuff like Chrome so this doesn't happen anymore but they're not fully there yet.

I just saw an article that firefox is down to 11% share, much lower than even internet explorer and edge at this point

It's difficult for Firefox to compete in the mobile market where Chrome & Safari are built in to their respective OSs (Android & iOS). Unless Firefox OS miraculously takes off, they can only hope to gain on Edge/IE, & with Edge being built in to Windows 10 & getting better daily, that's unlikely. There's a lot to like about Firefox, but it's difficult to see a path where they re-gain significant ground, primarily because they're all practically the same, & it's more convenient to use what you already have.

Ah I didn't even consider that they'd be counting mobile browsers. You can get "real" firefox on android through the app store but the one on ios is just a ui on top of safari (because apple sucks and won't allow competing browser engines). I think they killed firefox OS.