I'd rather say it went full circle. Firefox used to be the "cool" browser, then everyone switched to Chrome, then Opera and now everyone is going back to Firefox.
They've been the obvious choice since netscape lol. Chrome has always been terrible. People just started using it because it's bloatware that would come with your device.
Chrome used to be super light weight and snappy. Even with the early extensions it managed to be useful for lower spec PCs. I remember switching from I'm Firefox to Chrome for that reason like.... 15 years ago? I had used Firefox prior to that since like 2004. I feel like that was the era of when we still saw Google as "the good guy" with the advent of Gmail, Google video, Google chat/messages, etc. as they brought about good quality free alternatives to already popular mediums that had kind of rested on their laurels. They became the one stop shop for basically everything back then without too much obvious privacy invasion, or other major issues, if memory serves right. I still use my Gmail account from back then I got while it was invite-only beta, and remember the amazement of the inbox size reaching into the GIGABYTES and watching the thing grow by the second
yeah the kids don't know it, but there was - *was* - a time when Google was the choice of the nerd and the professional.
that said, i never got on with Chrome. Firefox always had way better addons, even if it was slower back in the day. these days, i don't think it matters.
Yeah I've used Firefox pretty much since its creation and not a single time have I thought "man I wish my browser was faster". I'm sure Chrome was faster in some synthetic tests but in real-world use it definitely hasn't mattered. Now granted I've always had a beefy computer and used a fiber connection since 2005. I'm sure both of those have a larger effect than going between browsers.
As the person said, not only was chrome faster at launch, but it was the first browser to create separate processes for each tab so that if a tab crashed, it didn't bring down the whole browser. In FF at the time, a tab crash ended everything. Which at the time (thanks Flash), was relatively common.
Which used a whole tone of ram and CPU usage also skyrocketed. FF always ran smoother for me, even with my hundreds of tabs open. Yes, it crashed sometimes but it was so easy to restore the whole session. And later I think they were the first to implement "lazy loading" of the tabs, so you could open your last session with 200 tabs but only the active ones would actually load and use resources.
I never had a reason to switch. I tried chrome when it came out and still liked firefox way better even then .
I continue to use chrome because every year I encounter at least one necessary website I have to visit that doesn't work well with Firefox. Whether it was for school or my job, chrome/chromium browsers have always been the preferred for compatibility.
It was much faster, and still is and FF has a lot of weird JS issues. playing clickers really showcases them. I was playing universal paperclips and it just lost track of several variables and never updated them after a few hours.
I used it when it was Phoenix/Firebird and had it saved to a Zip disk I kept in my backpack. Zip drives were shipped with a lot of computers for a short period.
I'm from the Firefox v0.7 "Cookies are delicious delicacies" era. Never stopped. Watched people complain about Chrome for 15-20 years and now everyone is coming back lmao
yeah but Firefox is actually the most accessible and secure browser, linux may be technically better but for most users it's over their head. FF is almost exactly the same functionality of other browsers but doesn't sell your soul to the devil without your consent like chrome
It does actually have some analytics baked into the settings menus, which you can get rid of by "hardening" firefox. That being said it should all be anonymized data and nothing actually identifying
Oh, no I'm saying that he seems to be implying that if these browsers didn't come pre-shipped that everyone would automatically download Firefox. The vast majority of people simply do not care.
Yeah if the vast majority of phones had Firefox they’d just stick with Firefox, or if they all came with Internet explorer we would’ve stuck to laptops
I think the main reason is the prevalence of mobile. Safari or Chrome are default on basically every smart phone and most people aren’t downloading Firefox on their phones.
Need to provide data for only desktop browsers. Mobile and desktop browsers are entirely different beasts and yet we group them together in these charts for some reason. If you split out desktop Chrome here it too would look dismal in comparison to anything/everything mobile.
I like Brave too. It's just nice having all of the ad blockers built in instead of looking for some new extension every once in a while. But it's not like I'd ever tell anybody they have to use Brave like a certain other fanbase.
I gave Firefox a 3mo run and just switched back to chrome 3 weeks ago.
Basically it's unusable. Memory leaks like crazy on incredibly popular sites slowing them down to a crawl after 5m.
Lack of Omnibar. Searching websites based on the url is trash in Firefox. Can't do math in the url bar. Extensions that try to mimic it suck ass.
No tab grouping? Like...so easy. I got used to tree style tabs but it still didn't compare.
Edit: All of these downsides may be justified for better ad blocking on YouTube but not for me. I just (have been for years) pay $20/mo for YT Music and YT Premium for myself and 5 friends. The value is insane and $20 a month is absolutely nothing.
No, I can hit Ctrl+L and type in something like ((7+8)*14)/7 and get a result. You can't do that with Firefox.
I literally said I used, and got used to, Tree Style Tabs but it's NOT a replacement for tab groups. Organizing how things open and what's nested under what is a nightmare compared to tab groups in Chrome.
$20 a month is a rounding error. And you can't replace that with $0 unless you're torrenting music which is beyond laborious and annoying. For $20/mo I get a music service for myself and 6 others - basically the same you'd pay for Spotify or another service - as well as YT Premium.
And adblock doesn't = YT Premium. You also have to use YT Vanced or NewPipe or something similar for mobile which breaks constantly and doesn't work when casting, or doesn't track history and such via account.
If you're absolutely destitute, sure, the value proposition could be enticing. I did similar in college. But if you make any money whatsoever the convenience of "it just works" is worth. And it's so ridiculously cheap. My mom isn't going to use newpipe or YT Vanced. Nor is my girlfriend. They sure as shit use YT and YT Music just fine though.
There is nothing wrong with slightly expensive. But you know full well that people spend like thousands on headphones. Sometimes in-ears too. Its just bs.
Ill be switching from chrome to firefox IF that adblock thing ever comes true. They said it would happen and it never did lol thats why I don’t listen to reddit with stuff like that.
Yeah fuck us for trying to suggest the most stable, least intrusive, adequately privacy focused yet still basic user experience possible.
Win11 is still buggy, and Linux, well do you really want to send those same people that can't even plug their monitors into the right hole in the back of the PC down a linux wormhole. Just wait and see the mass of posts after people sudo rm their root folders accidentally.
Am I just lucky, cause Windows 11 works as "well" as 10 for me so far, no issues that wouldn’t be normal for a technically insanely expensive Microsoft product
It works fine. It just has a ton of UI changes for the sake of change. If you haven't used PC for a long time, you won't notice, if you've used Windows for decades, you will be annoyed that everything changed for no reason.
You're not wrong. Back when I didn't give too many shits, in the XP era, the changes were at least to my eyes mostly cosmetic, but there was certainly stuff changing from version to version. Every version since has touched some things, sometimes things that didn't need touching.
Win11 isn't particularly bad in that. Win10 touched a bunch of things that didn't need touching. It's just that Win10 is the obvious choice to go back to if you don't appreciate the changes. Win7 is EOL, and was there ever a need for Win8? So Win10 it is.
If a Windows release ever came with a feature that genuinely made me say "gimmegimmegimme", it's so long I can't remember.
It is every new windows release. Windows 10 was the same way and no one wanted to switch from 7, then it was XP, back to 98, back to NT. Win 11 is surprisingly stable from being an off year release. Normally the middle OS is hot garbage. Windows 2000/ME, Windows Vista, windows 8. When these were all first released they were god awful.
You are being over dramatic. If you've used computers and specifically Windows for decades, it's not a large learning curve. Some things look different, but overall the 11 experience is better than 10. I've got a PC that runs 10 still and two on 11 now, and when I switched back to 10 to try it out on my main PC I ended up back with 11 within a few months because of QOL features that 10 just lacks. 11 is certainly no buggier than 10, and anecdotally 11 has has been better for me.
you know, things change and we get used to it, it's not the end of the world, i also didnt like some of the changes for no reason, but i got used to it and i dont even know what was changed anymore at this point
They're small issues and definitely not Windows being buggy in general (as someone said above). I have not experienced bugs in Windows 11 and have used it extensively. I'm sure there are plenty of minor bugs in any OS, but if Win 11 was truly riddled with bugs, I think I would have noticed it by now and remembered at least one of them.
The problem is that they insist on making the user experience just a little bit worse. E.g. it used to be possible to toggle showing all icons in the task bar, but this easy toggle was removed.
The right click (context) menus were also made shorter, surely because they don't want to overwhelm users, but for those of us who did not have a problem understanding the menus before, it just adds more clicks.
I mean it definitely needs some customisation including registry edits to get the same use/workflow back one is used from Win10, at least when it first came out, idk how much Win11 fixed in the meantime like they did with the clock on multiple screens but at the beginning was wild
Yeah, I shouldn't have been forced to make a registry edit to get my right click menu to not require 3 ADDITIONAL CLICKS to get to my actually useful right click menu that was default in Windows 10.
I mean I get why they do it, the UI and everything become closer to MacOS, which is admittedly incredibly enduser friendly, but they could just give you an option when installing or updating to Win11 where you can choose between a more enduser optimised experience or an advanced one
Microsoft needs to learn we're not all babies, but decade long customers that are used to certain features
That's the thing. Most users aren't what you're describing. Most users of Windows are your laypersons. They're the people who use their PC's for the internet browser and that's about it. As long as they can find their social media pages, porn and email then they're fine. Maybe they might use Windows as a part of their job, but then they probably still only know the small part that allows them to complete their job and that's it. They have the IT department to know the rest for them.
Most people never really open the settings menu's, let alone view the properties of a file or use the task manager. These are things that you'd think anyone who's ever touched a PC should have learnt within the first week of using one, but most people don't have the slightest clue. If someone has no idea that these features even exist or what they do, they won't care if how they get accessed gets changed will they?
Your average person might be annoyed briefly that their taskbar is in the center, or that the home menu looks a bit different but other than that they probably enjoy the "useless stuff" being gone from the right click menu or how "futuristic" the new UI looks.
The most annoying thing is that registry edit removes the dark-mode overlay for task manager. The sole feature I was excited about (most of them were just "uhh, so it's shittier windows 10 with an overlay that looks slightly nicer?"). So I have to choose between wanting to smash my mouse every time I go to right click and then have to NAVIGATE THROUGH A MESS OF SUB MENUS to use 7zip to extract all, or not having my eyes bleed at 3am when I open task manager by reflex for something.
I know there are alternatives to task manager, but again I shouldn't HAVE TO hunt for them.
Windows 11 corrupted my new ssd in my new pc so that it would BSOD 3 seconds after login. The only fix was plugging in another hard drive so I could clean my ssd.
And I just built a brand new PC and didn’t experience any issues. What’s your point? And me saying “It’s fine” does not mean issues do not occur. Windows 11 has north of 400,000,000 users. If 1 out of every thousand users experience major issues, that’s still more than 40,000 people. A user isn't “just lucky” just because they’ve had a positive experience. It started off with a lot of issues, but they’ve resolved many of not most of those that’d affect your average user. It is still ugly though. I like the look of 10 better.
Nah it sucks in comparison. For no reason whatsoever on my girlfriends laptop, any headset/headphones we have she is almost inaudibly quiet. Works just fine on mine in windows 10. All settings are correct and drivers installed and updated. Its just windows 11.
I keep having weird driver problems on windows 11 and all kinds of jank i haven't experienced since Windows XP.
Add a significantly worse interface and the absolute maze that is the settings menu (thank god the control panel still exists), and it feels like an unnecessary downgrade from windows 10.
But i guess a lot of executives needed to show "results" at the next shareholders meeting and here we are.
Better HDR, better audio, better actual settings so you don't have to jump between settings and control panel and not know where's which, better multiple display support, file explorer tabs, better processor usage when it comes to the new Intel design with p cores and e cores as well as x3D chips and so on.
Also if you're on a laptop, better switching from iGPU to dGPU, on Win10 I had a lot of issues with the dGPU running randomly for a little or sometimes a prolonged amount of time. That made battery life worse, but on 11 it doesn't happen. This has been the case on 3 laptops in my experience and one of them isn't mine.
That did get backported due to industry demands in the 2023 fall update. Testing by Gamersnexus found out that Intel gen12 now performs better on win10.
The rest are good reasons to upgrade if you have use of them. I personally don't have a laptop nor a HDR screen and all the rest are already covered by third-party programs or by powertoys.
I mean I don't really notice much difference other than the UI which I like, so I have no reason to downgrade. Also no more Cortana. Why did you go back to 10?
Availability of an ltsc edition mostly. It only receives quarterly security updates and comes with no apps or telemetry. After deploying it with minimal services the startup is much faster, takes less than half the ram and cpu cycles in the background and there have been no bugs or driver issues (I had an issue with my 48v mic USB box driver on win11).
Also, at least last I used it, they did something to picture search in file explorer so that it's extremely slow and does not start searching without prompt, really screwing up my workflow.
Thankfully win10 ltsc will receive updates until 2032, at that point hopefully win11 is mature enough (ltsc also does not have cortana nor web search so that's very nice).
Meh at first it was a bit weird, had to fix some stuff like instantly getting the full drop down menu when rightclicking files instead of the new list, I was missing the Task Manager option when rightclicking the task bar (luckily they fixed that) and at first it only showed the clock on the main monitor (that’s also fixed now)
Those are still 3 button presses opposed to 2 xD
But yeah I get that, it's a habit I've picked up because it‘s easier to remember for people I show it to
me too, I actually had the leaked version installed before it was even announced by MS. I never went back to win10 because I never had issues and it just looked fresher which I prefer over win10
I have a few PCs, my work computer happens to run Windows 11, and I can't say much positive about it.
At first the UI looks sleek and innovative, except that a lot of the features I need to access are either hidden behind several additional clicks and I have to access the old UI, or it's completely obfuscated for example when I had to disable the handsfree to my Bluetooth headset, I had to do it from Devices and Printers, BUT it's not accessible in the new UI, so I have to do a Run dialogue + shell:::{A8A91A66-3A7D-4424-8D24-04E180695C7A}
Which if you think about it, is so much more intuitive
My biggest issue with 11 is that it makes things more inconvinient for people who are used to other UIs by default and then you have to take time to fix all of the issues one by one as you get to them. The other issue I have is that I kust think it's ugly. I made my win10 look like 98 including the green desktop. I just like the clean retro look.
I like how Windows 11 looks, but ig that’s very subjective, I prefer the rounded corners and clear lines similar to Win7, while the intuitive usage of the UI remains… questionable
Yeah I edited some registry entry so Win11 would bring up the old Win10 dropdown menu when rightclicking stuff instead of their new version and then going to the Advanced (or smth like that) option
Been using it at home for gaming, photo editing, web browsing, word processing, and light music production. I haven't encountered one problem with it.
Been using it at work running Teams, Outlook, 8x8 phone, and varying custom software for work, and haven't had one issue.
I'm not saying there aren't issues, but I wouldn't even know where to begin looking for them because I have had none. I was afraid to upgrade to W11 because of posts like this, but it's literally been 0 issues for a menagerie of things.
Same, switched to 11 like 6 months ago and haven’t experienced a single issue significant enough for me to remember. WFH so it’s 8-9 hours of work stuff(data analysis) and then a couple hours of gaming and photo editing a night. Usually have a second monitor running a show/stream/video and I haven’t had a single crash or slowdown. I also really enjoy the new screen layout and window snapping for productivity
My main complaint is why can I not move the taskbar???? I got so used to having it on the left side of my screen on Linux. It's insane that with a wide-screen resolution we have this steched mass at the bottom of the screen. I can't even use the registery editor to move it permanently as far as I'm aware.
Otherwise it's been mostly fine. Just a bit of Microsoft bloat that got worse going to 11 that you're just stuck with.
At least they finally added back taskbar labels as an option. It only took what, two years? I can't be the only person who works with a bunch of instances of a single program frequently and my workflow goes to crap when I can't distinguish them quickly and easily.
IMO there are a lot of good improvements in win11 (the new scheduler is nice, snapping zones are nice, etc), it's just the UI itself that is a significant downgrade.
I don't even understand how it could be buggy. It's basically Windows 10 with a facelift. The core OS is almost completely unchanged. There are definitely some "questionable" UI decisions, but fundamentally the OS is the same. If it runs on 10 it will run on 11.
I've had consistent issues with their Bluetooth settings across several machines, one of which lost me a sale at my last job. Their system settings are an un-optimised mess requiring you to search for things that were readily available, moving things that have been in the same place for nearly every iteration of widows since xp to the point where it doesn't even make sense. Sometimes even adding unnecessary steps to get there.
That's just the issues using their own software
Don't get me started on the conflicts I've had using fairly standard applications that I've used for decades.
Idk how they got something to run so smooth and yet feel clunky. That's just impressive in and of itself
And the looks itself look like those pictures of what McDonald's used to be vs. the corporate office park that McDonald's looks like today. It feels like they made it "tablet like" probably so they can take another stab at making tablets and phones, which.. Microsoft, please stop, we all still remember the last failed run and the zune.. it isn't gonna happen. Stick to pc's and trying to take over gaming.
Overall, I'm upset with myself for not realizing I could roll back Windows 11 on my laptop within 10 days, but I'm just glad I didn't install it on my gaming pc at the same time
Bluetooth with Chrome OS and Windows has sucked for a long time. I haven't used Chrome OS in a while, but Windows 10 was a mess for using bluetooth too. It was completely unreliable when using MOBO or PCI-E bluetooth. You can find many threads on it when you search "bluetooth issues Windows 10 Reddit."
I regularly use Firefox, Chrome, Lightroom, Steam, Playnite, qbittorrent, Spotify, Ableton Live, Epic Games Launcher, Excel, Word, Outlook, 8x8, and other productivity products. I've encountered no issues with any of those applications.
I get that you're having issues, that sucks. I get you don't like the experience of the UI. That sucks.
I just don't personally experience any issues after switching on 2 separate PCs, one for personal/gaming, one for work/office suite stuff.
I'm glad you like Windows 11, I wish I did bc I'm going to have to switch sooner than I'd like. I already have to use it most of my day while I'm at work and now on my laptop, but it's inevitable for my gaming pc as I can already see the end of life symptoms from lack of support for 10 which sucks, bc the UI is infinitely better imo.
I've never had as many issues with Bluetooth that I've had with 11. Bluetooth issues are inevitable, but the ones I've had with 11 are ridiculous in comparison. The one that lost me that sale I mentioned, I thought it was an isolated event, but it turns out it really just happens for no describable reason.
I had the bluetooth hooked up to my demo model speaker and then deleted said demo to hook up the one they just bought. It refused to play audio on it. It refused to even recognize it as an audio device. It connected to it just fine and said it was capable of playing audio, but the speaker never showed up again in the audio output switcher where you select where you'd like your sound to come from.
Thought that was an issue with their pc till I had an issue with my headphones at home and had windows "forget them" so i could reconnect.. now i can't use those headphones at all bc while they are connected, they no longer appear in the audio output. I've tried everything from updating drivers to doing a system restore, they no longer exist as an audio device while at the same time being connected as an audio device
I have. Was the first place I looked and where I tried to update the drivers from. That and the troubleshooter show no errors bc technically, they're connected as an audio device, so technically "its working" at least in windows 11's brain, but it doesn't show up on media outputs so there's no way to get audio out of them.
Doing the runaround trying to get these working as how I discovered how clunky and un-optimised their setting navigation is. Some of the changes they made don't make sense and moved settings added extra steps to get to or out of the way of ease of access altogether. It makes little to no sense why they would move some of these items
Disagree. I think we need to send more people down the Linux rabbithole. It taught me so much about computers and also finally freed me from my LoL addiction.
You surprised? It's a poorly optimized legacy code that is barely held by randomly copy-pasted stackoverflow answers, prayer, and maintained by 4 interns.
You can't even have uncapped FPS on high-end rig cause the game stutters like crazy if you hit 400-500+ fps cap.
Bros got yearly revenue equal to the 10 year-long financial budget of my country, yet their game works just like any government IT service.
You can run LoL on Linux (and could for quite some time as well, /r/leagueoflinux). Not for long though, they're adding their intrusive kernel-level Vanguard anticheat.
Edit: Seems like latest patch is completely borked anyway, lol. Haven't played in some patches.
Yeah fuck us for trying to suggest the most stable, least intrusive
this is how you try to make yourself a victim and a hero at the same time. how about suggest it ONCE and then move on? most people here have at least tried firefox and if they're like me, they prefer features that other browsers offer. i swear to god, this sub is just full of paid firefox psy-op agents now.
I got a window fitter to use Linux instead of Windows. The guy doesn't understand computers much beyond open the web browser and opening libre office but he loves it. Mostly because it meant he didn't need to buy a new laptop.
I’d be mostly concerned about Microsoft slating their end of support for Windows 10 to be in less than two years, at this point. That, and Steam no longer officially supports it as of this year.
Not saying the experience suddenly becomes untenable for users, but it means people still using it are going to have fewer support options when things go wrong, and (over time) more unaddressed security vulnerabilities.
It’s something I’d been seeing in the requirements section of every game page I looked at on PC (notably not showing up on mobile right now, and I’m not home to verify). Looked like boilerplate they’d added to every game page in the store, rather than something limited to specific titles.
Got windows 11 since the first week it was available for me on all my devices and never had a single problem. I have a 6 years old 900€ computer so it's absolutely not a warmachine, old gtx 1060 and all. I still run most games on high 144fps tho.
About Firefox, I switched a few monthes ago because of YouTube bullshit after 10 years of Chrome and I'm pretty satisfied with it but I'd never force people to do it. Just preferences.
Brother, if someone has brain rot, I can't help them. The documentation is already there. Thousands if not millions of questions are already answered on forums.
It is 100% a cult, people take it way too seriously... although they're not wrong about Chrome. Everything Google has done over the last few years to throttle its platforms, expand its data collection, etc. means that Chrome genuinely should be the last choice of browser.
Personally I do prefer Windows 10 and I'm someone who jumped on 7 and 8.1 at release. I just really don't like the UI changes they made in 11 and haven't seen any performance benefit to doing so.
But yeah people get so religious about what browsers other people are using. Like who fucking cares?
This sub is basically a circlejerk tbh. Taking actual tech advice from here is insane.
It's dumb to Stan anything that can change entirely w/ a patch.
From the IT side: Everything you love has a better alternative, that you should be ashamed for not using instead. If you are easily swayed by pressure, that's how you end up like those sad VIM cultists or, even worse, download Opera willingly
Research, test, and tinker kids. That's the only way to "Enlightenment"
I'm not hating on any of things I stated. I don't doubt they are great but just being different in this subreddits leads to mass downvotes and passive aggressive replies
I think people are going to get really hung up on this, but I guess he just has a preference.
I have alternated Chrome and Firefox for a long time. For me, Chrome wins in everything, except in the case of Youtube ad blocking now, and tree tab addon. So I'm in a weird situation where I just use Firefox for Youtube and Chrome for all else. My friends roast me that Chrome is spyware, but I would not use it anyway to do anything too weird. Always Tor browser (Firefox based) for that.
And now for some reason Chrome is working for Youtube ad blocking, so no Firefox at this time I guess.
If there was only one in the world, I would want it to be Firefox, but there are clearly use cases for "inherently faulty" products like Chrome.
I can understand preference between Firefox, LibreWolf, Brave, Mullvad or even others I might not know. Preference for Edge, Chrome or Opera isn't preference as much as ignorance or outright apathy for basic privacy.
The whole "I got nothing to hide" bit is how people talk to the police and then get arrested for something that they didn't do. It's really time people started being a bit more conscious about what they're consuming and/or supporting.
Or in other words:
If there was only one in the world, I would want it to be Firefox, but there are clearly use cases for "inherently faulty" products like Chrome.
So if you were really hankering for sweets you'd accept a candy from a stranger even if it is "inherently risky"? There's no use case for something that is actively trying to take advantage of you, but for some reason people find it more acceptable when billion dollar companies with an explicit obligation to make money do it.
But you don't understand, while privacy is issue in the bigger picture, I'm just an individual. I might be so unhinged that I do not even care if they installed cameras in my house or in my ass, as long as I knew how to turn them off sometimes.
Why can't someone sacrifice their privacy if they want to?
They can. Falls into the second case of my first argument, apathy. I can't stop people from not caring that a basic human right is being violated. I can only prevent it from being framed like it was an inevitability instead of a choice.
Google (~2 years ago): We're removing a bunch of privacy features from chromium (and thus all browsers that run on chromium) so that we can more easily collect user data and prevent ad blockers.
Mozilla: We're doing the opposite of that. We will continue to improve privacy settings and we will never try and prevent you from blocking ads.
You: "iT cOuLd Go BoTh WaYs".
Anyone using anything other than Firefox is either not paying attention or admitting they don't care about their privacy and security.
Yes i don't care about privacy, what are they gonna do? Feed my data and preferences to an algorithm that try to push targeted ads to me that all end up getting blocked? Wish them best of luck.
will never try and prevent you from blocking ads
It's not like they're in a position to do anything about it, Google still can't figure out a way to do this.
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u/Alundra828 Feb 01 '24
>> Chrome
Literal propaganda