Why you SHOULD be using Firefox

I think I'll give Brave a wide berth.
Way back in 2016, Brave promised to remove banner ads from websites and replace them with their own, basically trying to extract money directly from websites without the consent of their owners

In the same year, CEO Brendan Eich unilaterally added a fringe, pay-to-win Wikipedia clone into the default search engine list.

In 2018, Tom Scott and other creators noticed Brave was soliciting donations in their names without their knowledge or consent.

In 2020, Brave got caught injecting URLs with affiliate codes when users tried browsing to various websites.

Also in 2020, they silently started injecting ads into their home page backgrounds, pocketing the revenue. There was a lot of pushback: "the sponsored backgrounds give a bad first impression."

In 2021, Brave's TOR window was found leaking DNS queries, and a patch was only widely deployed after articles called them out. (h/t schklom for pointing this out!)

In 2022, Brave floated the idea of further discouraging users from disabling sponsored messages.

In 2023, Brave got caught installing a paid VPN service on users' computers without their consent.

Also in 2023, Brave got caught scraping and reselling people's data with their custom web crawler, which was designed specifically not to announce itself to website owners.

In 2024, Brave gave up on providing advanced fingerprint protection, citing flawed statistics (people who would enable the protection would likely disable Brave telemetry).

In 2025, Brave staff publish an article endorsing PrivacyTests and say they "work with legitimate testing sites" like them. This article fails to disclose PrivacyTests is run by a Brave Senior Architect.

Other notes​

They partnered with NewEgg to ship ads in boxes.

Brave purchased and then, in 2017, terminated the alternative browser Link Bubble.

In 2019, Brave taunted Firefox users who visited their homepage.

In 2025, Brave taunted people searching for Firefox on the Google Play Store. (The VP denied this occurred, but also demonstrated ignorance of multiple different screenshots.)
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List of Brave browser CONTROVERSIES - Reddit

What worries me is people blowing things out of proportion, possibly leading to the demise of Firefox. I hope not. :(
 
v136 has annoyed me slightly. Each time I launch Firefox, I am taken to my homepage which is google.co.uk. I don't care to use Firefox Home and I've done this for as long as I can remember - Google is a simple homepage, even if it is probably seen as old school these days. :o

Ever since v136 installed today, when I launch Firefox I am asked for my master password for Firefox. I can only think this is because I'm not signed into Google, again another one of my stubborn choices I wish to maintain - for all Google probably tracks us all anyway, I'd rather not link my data to a Google account where possible.
 
darael said:
v136 has annoyed me slightly. Each time I launch Firefox, I am taken to my homepage which is google.co.uk. I don't care to use Firefox Home and I've done this for as long as I can remember - Google is a simple homepage, even if it is probably seen as old school these days. :o

Ever since v136 installed today, when I launch Firefox I am asked for my master password for Firefox. I can only think this is because I'm not signed into Google, again another one of my stubborn choices I wish to maintain - for all Google probably tracks us all anyway, I'd rather not link my data to a Google account where possible.
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Have you saved any passwords in Firefox?
 
darael said:
Yes and I use a master password to help keep them secure. I suppose I can just hit escape for each dialogue, but it's not something I've ever had to do before.
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You could always use a password manager like Bitwarden (free or £10 a year) and then you could easily use your passwords on multiple devices at once. The Firefox extension is pretty nice. In terms of stopping the prompt I'm not sure.
 
I saw this earlier, I couldn't help posting it here:
funny-meme-about-mozilla-firefox-the-godfather.png
 
www.theregister.com

Cloudflare blocking Pale Moon and other browsers

: Not on Firefox or a Chrome derivative? You shall not pass
www.theregister.com www.theregister.com

Cloudflare's bot bouncer blocks weirdo browsers

Not on Firefox or a Chrome derivative? You shall not pass

Users of some of the less well-known web browsers are getting blocked from accessing multiple sites by Cloudflare's flaky browser-detection routines.

Aside from reporting it on Cloudflare's forum, there appears to be little users can do, and the company doesn't seem to be paying attention.
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mrk said:
Worth the watch for those grinding an axe all of a sudden.

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The part i don't get with the umbrage taken with these new privacy polices is that this data has been getting collected by Mozilla for ages it's simply that they didn't (afaik) have a policy to say what they collected and how they used it, now they've put one in place and that's what seems to have ticked people off.

That and if you know, and care, about Mozilla collecting this data you can, as I've done, turn off or opt-out of the features that sends data back to them.
 
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Have switched it off any data collecting in the options of FF, but I still end up going back to chrome due to its speed overall.

Has anyone bounced back and forth and found chrome to still be faster and smoother browsing experience compared to FF? (recent versions)
 
When you say speed do you mean loading the app or rendering pages? When I tried last both were just as fast as each other, Firefox loads the moment I lift off the mouse button at boot for example as well.

The fact that Chrome now disables uBlock Origin and addons like it is a sign to never touch Chrome again even if to just try a new version release.
 
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FWIW, uBO Lite does a good job at blocking ads at an identical level as Origin imo. It just lacks features that Origin has such as being able to run scripts, add custom filters etc. But there are other MV3 compatible extensions that can do this.

I've tested multiple browsers and with regards to Chrome specifically, I've managed to get it an identical ad blocking/anti tracking level as before. Same with Edge. Brave (love or hate it) does this well out the box with the ability add custom scripts/filters etc all within the browser without the need for extensions.

FF gives me intermittent playback problems unfortunately which I cannot tolerate.

From testing, when it comes to speed, Edge (pardon the pun) edges out the win. But pretty much on par with Chrome/Brave. Chromium based browsers have always been speedy for me. FF isn't slow but isn't consistent for me personally.
 
Dons flame proof jacket... Well, I've been trying Edge for a few days on both PC and Android mobile. And, it's pretty darn snappy. Seems to have a good amount of security features/tracking prevention as well as defender SmartScreen and a new scareware blocker, and I've not come across any sites that don't like it. It seems to just work. Being able to use the integrated CoPilot AI as well has been handy along with the split screen option. I'll give it a few more days and see how I feel.
 
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