Goodbye, EdgeHTML
<i>Firefox once again holds its own when it comes to speed and performance. Try Firefox as your default browser for a week and then decide.</i><p>Challenge accepted.<p>A week later, after having set Firefox to default on my systems and working with it, I decided that:<p>* There&#x27;s still no good replacement for DownThemAll or Tree Style Tabs (the gimped, non-feature-complete alternatives to those are not acceptable alternatives),<p>* That the unfixed dupe SSL cert problem that makes Firefox unusable at work is going on a decade old and has no movement on it,<p>* That Mozilla deciding what I can install in the browser is an infringement on my freedoms as a user in a much more real way than philosophical concerns about licensing (no, running a fork of the browser is not an acceptable alternative)<p>* That they keep making extremely questionable decisions regarding privacy, telemetry, and overall user control over those things,<p>And overall:<p>* That Mozilla&#x27;s stated commitment to empowering the user cannot be trusted inasmuch as it applies to people with strong computer literacy.<p>--<p>So for now, I stay on Chrome. Your choice of web browser comes to to functional concerns, not the kind of political wankery that this blog post represents. With that in mind, why would I choose something that&#x27;s basically Chrome that offers maybe one or two useful additional features, but is basically worse in every other way?<p>Speaking of which:<p>&gt;<i>That’s what happened when Microsoft had a monopoly on browsers in the early 2000s before Firefox was released. And it could happen again.</i><p>This is bald faced fearmongering, edging dangerously close to maliciously lying. The main problem with IE6 of the day is that it is closed source and very difficult to interoperate with, given its rather special take on web standards.<p>Chromium is open source and can be forked given the will to do so - which <i>will</i> happen should this doomsday scenario they&#x27;re predicting come about. Hell, Firefox was responsible for ultimately unseating IE as the browser of choice a long while ago, and they did not have this advantage.<p>Say what you want about Google&#x2F;Chrome(ium)&#x27;s motivations, but I see very little in the way of things they do that go out of their way to make my life miserable. They&#x27;re hardly perfect or blameless, but at the end of the day, I&#x27;ve spent a lot more time cursing at Firefox than Chrome.<p>What it boils down to is that firefox is dead to me until they are cured of the dread GNOME disease of deciding they know better than the people who use their software what the people who use their software want and need. You know, <i>priorities</i>. Like making the actual browser better, rather than shoveling in crapware like <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;testpilot.firefox.com&#x2F;experiments&#x2F;price-wise" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;testpilot.firefox.com&#x2F;experiments&#x2F;price-wise</a> and ancillary, niche garbage like WebVR. There are a hell of a lot of questionable resource allocation decisions being made here.<p>I&#x27;m looking at Vivaldi with a great amount of hope:<p>&gt;<i>Your browser matters.</i>
<i>Take control with Vivaldi.</i>
<i>We live in our browsers. Choose one that has the features you need, a style that fits and values you can stand by.</i><p>This is a philosophy that is a breath of fresh air to me.