Now, I encourage people to use anything but Chrome. Firefox is really great these days.
Firefox took a long time to catch up and their CEO was utterly incompetent, which seriously harmed Mozilla.
Switch to Firefox if you haven't already really.
They do offer some integrated services (which some would denote as bloat), though unlike Chrome, they do let you actually turn things off, which I'm very appreciative of -- they don't seem to be nearly as forceful as Google, who recently added a 4GB download to every Chrome install[0].
As I grow older, I find myself becoming more and more appreciative of platforms which don't try to redefine the problem scope, and instead just provide a platform for other things. GrapheneOS does this perfectly too.
[0]: https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/ [1]: https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2026/05/google-chrome...
We really need independence from Google in the browser landscape if we want the open web to survive.
Zen is my favorite browser experience by far, and I've been using the web since Netscape in 1994. But the slowdowns do put a damper on things. Also some of the streaming platforms don't seem to play nice with it.
Most devs I know are on Mac. Why not just use Safari? Works in most cases, helps you catch issues earlier on, looks beautiful and is super customizable, still supports UBlock, has vertical tabs, syncs profiles to your focus, is way more memory efficient, etc.
I've daily driven Safari for ~3y after Arc got sunset and the only site that gives me issues is Hulu (but not Disney+ weirdly). Similarly drive Edge on Windows, I can't think why I'd ever reach for Chrome.
I use Firefox when I want disposable tabs / containers.
then majority of stuff - Safari. private window work stuff set to chrome - since I can resume the session unlike safari.
However, this paper[1] suggests that uBO Lite (MV3) which is still supported in the latest Chrome/chromium browsers, works at least as well for almost all users as the original (MV2) uBO, and, in some cases even better than before... so it's really no cause for alarm IMO.
But I will keep using it until they pry it from my hands. And if they do, I'll use forks until those break down too. I can't stand Google, or what Chrome has become. No single company should have such unilateral control over the internet and its information.
They dont have the advantage of owning the OS (android/chrome and iOS / Safari) nor the advantage of advertising on the google home page like chrome.
The "customers" they are courting are security/privacy zealots who constantly want them "just work on the browser" but never seem to have an answer on how to pay for that.
I am hoping the advent of LLMs allows more entrants into the space at a faster speed. Time will tell. Maybe as FF dies ladybird will take over.
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
This is basically whole history of Mozilla and to be honest most of open source projects that dont have BDFL type of leadership.
Back when Chrome was new, you could run Firefox with a decent selection of add-ons to get security benefits of similar magnitude through different mechanisms. The NoScript extension was at the forefront, providing a lot of functionality way beyond just blocking JavaScript per domain. And Firefox with extensions always had better privacy controls.
Google has consistently sad they want to stop exposing url's. That's 100% them wanting to prevent people from bypassing them when accessing the web.
I prefer Firefox on mobile for supporting ublock personally and I don't see why I would use a different browser on my desktop.
I've worked at some places where they restrict to Chrome because they have a corporate extension
I don't know why using the default browser a OS comes with or not would be better? Who cares? All that matters for me is what features it has and that performance isn't horrible, and if I cannot have vertical tree-style tabs in it and hide the tab-bar, then I personally have no use for it. So stuck with Firefox I am, and been for decades.
Besides, if my OS is Arch Linux, what browser is my "OS-browser" anyway?
Another point: I’m not sure if Safari’s dev tools are worse but I feel friction any time I have to use them. It’s probably partly just that I don’t want to learn the quirks of both sets. Firefox’s is much closer to Chrome’s. I bet they’re both inspired by Firebug.
Using Mac is a no-go. For me, they became insufferably power-user hostile over the years.
Second,
God the safari rendering was so horrible for so many years. As a web developer, you have to target your greatest demographic, and Safari just broke everything more often than not.
Finally, even using Mac on enterprise, Chrome use is required because of the profile controls that can be exerted. And items #1/2 don’t help
Firefox allows me to share stuff across devices, block anything I want to and does not get in my way.
I think safari is largely fine but there are a lot of web APIs that it doesn’t support, rightly or not. A lot of devices are configurable through serial connections using the Web Serial APO thats only available in chromium browsers.
As a primary browser it really comes down to ergonomics. Things on top of the engine that make someone prefer one browser over the other.
I would not mind to pay for the browser, but they will not let me.
Firefox on Android lags during scrolling on multiple sites that do not lag on Chrome. The only extension I have is UBO, and I don't know if that is the cause of it or not - I haven't tested thoroughly. One way or another there is a performance issue there by default.
Second, GrapheneOS has this to say about Firefox on mobile:
>Worst of all, Firefox does not have internal sandboxing on Android. This is despite the fact that Chromium semantic sandbox layer on Android is implemented via the OS isolatedProcess feature, which is a very easy to use boolean property for app service processes to provide strong isolation with only the ability to communicate with the app running them via the standard service API. Even in the desktop version, Firefox's sandbox is still substantially weaker (especially on Linux) and lacks full support for isolating sites from each other rather than only containing content as a whole. The sandbox has been gradually improving on the desktop but it isn't happening for their Android browser yet.
I'd love for both of these issues to be resolved at some point. But I stand by it because I like UBO and because I'm a bit contrarian.
malfist•36m ago
abroszka33•28m ago
Henchman21•27m ago
abroszka33•25m ago
tentacleuno•24m ago
gonzalohm•20m ago
tentacleuno•14m ago
I really do think pen and paper will slowly regain prominence; I personally find that it can be much more liberating than digital media.
It's great to be able to use the page as a canvas, writing wherever you want, without having to meet the constraints of a text editor or the likes. Doodles help to visualize and understand problems, too.
Tangent for macOS is my current go-to for note-taking, and it works quite well: it's mostly just a Markdown editor, a tree structure of folders (which is really just a normal folder), and the ability to cross-reference and embed images.
I suppose the primary problem of note-taking apps is that they sort of have to be opinionated in some way to be useful (that's been my experience, anyway.) Markdown files are also guilty of this: they constrain you to a certain layout, which can either be a negative or a positive. Anything too complicated can be off-putting, whilst anything too simplistic can also be limiting.
It's a surprisingly complex field, and it could explain why there's so many different apps for it.
unclad5968•13m ago
markvdb•16m ago