this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2024
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I can't remember a time when I didn't use Firefox. Actually back in highschool I used IE around 2002ish but only because I didn't know any better back then.
At some point 15-20 years ago Firefox was becoming a resource hog and I switched to chrome. I switched back a number of years ago and regret not switching back earlier.
Are you me? Firefox was always an option, but it definitely became slow maybe around 2010? I switched to chrome but came back to Firefox a few years ago also when chroms was first getting enshitified
Yeah, all my bad experiences with Firefox from back in the day were completely gone when I switched back to it a couple of years ago.
Back when Chrome was the shiny new thing, Firefox was taking a downturn, I think it was around version 50 or something, as they wanted to update something that would break compatibility with a considerable number of existing themes and plugins, including my then favorite, NoScript.
For some reason, the UI of Chrome was never my cup of tea, all those round edges and auto-hiding buttons (maybe these were later additions?) annoyed me to no end.
I went from IE to Firefox back in that same timeframe, then by the time Chrome came out, my Firefox just had too much clutter and Chrome was way faster.
Within the past year, Chrome managed to enshittify itself enough that I've gone back to Firefox on PC (still using chrome on mobile) and it's the same sort of "lighter, faster" feel that I got years ago when I left it for Chrome.
There's also the whole ad blocker bullshit too, of course. YouTube ads were the last straw for me.
if you use Firefox on mobile, you can add plugins like ublock origin.
I can't use the Internet on Mobile without an adblocker. The user experience is totally unbearable
When Chrome launched Firefox was in pretty rough shape, and Google wasn't what they are today.
Lots of us switched to Chrome then because it simply ran better.
Honestly, IE was the best browser around the time IE6 was released (2000/2001). Way better than Netscape. Opera was the other good browser back then. The initial release of Firefox wasn't quite there yet.
Better for MS non-standard things? Or better how? Performance-wise - yes.
IMHO a web browser has to support HTML 4.* , JS, Netscape plugins (Java, Flash, whatever else) and that's it.
That's what I came to when I started using the Web, but I'm confident it's not just bias - that was the best combination. I'm not sure on CSS - I hated it, but people have good arguments in favor of it. But hypertext with limited appearance tuning and scripts for the web itself, plus plugins for various content, including applications, - that's definitely a better idea than the modern approach.
All browsers had non-standard things back then, to the point where many sites had two versions: An IE version and a Netscape version.
Believe it or not, back then Internet Explorer was the most standards-compliant browser. It was the first browser to implement the DOM and CSS based on relevant W3C specs (Netscape was backing JSSS instead).
Many features we take for granted these days came from IE. Drag and drop, the JS events system, iframes, rich text editing, clipboard access, AJAX (dynamically loading content on the page without a full page reload), visual effects like transparency and gradients, all originally came from Internet Explorer.
The CSS box-model in IE6 (including margin, padding and border in the width of elements) was wrong because the CSS spec hadn't been finalized by the time of its release so Microsoft used a draft, and it changed from publication of the draft to publication of the final version. Many years later, people realised that IE6's model was actually the better model, which is why every browser supports it now via
box-sizing: border-box.Sigh. OK, since I didn't use Netscape (started around 2002), didn't know about some of these.
I admit I didn't always use Firefox. I used netscape navigator.
I am still using Mosaic because it supports Gopher.
there was a point between 3x and quantum (47 or 48 I think) that the performance was pretty poor and I briefly switched to chrome. when quantum got released, I switched back instantly
When Firefox was just starting to get good I still used Opera with their party engine
For a time in the early 2000s I used IE via AvantBrowser. It had some cool features at the time! 😅