Chromium Ungoogled repo [1] made it to the `top30` some days ago. I too have switched back to Firefox with the release of Quantum and have been very pleased.
Frankly, I am amazed every day that Ungoogled Chromium, Firefox, & DDG.co are as good as they are. (aka: slightly inferior to Google regarding product polish, but truly "good enough" 98% of the time - without selling my future data down the drain)
I tried using Firefox Quantum since Safari 12 closed off most extensions. Firefox Quantum is laggy in comparison, particularly the UI (web page rendering is fine). For example, dragging tabs to other windows is jittery. Launching preferences page is a bit delayed.
I don't understand why people keep saying Safari closed some extensions. It simply disabled them and they're ready to be enabled again in the preferences panel, simple as that.
From what I understand, now you cannot install unsigned extensions. You might have some “grandfathered” if they were already installed, but anything new (on new machines etc) won’t get in. So, effectively, if the developer was unable or unwilling to pay the Apple tax, the extension was killed.
is there some option i'm missing? i'm trying to switch over on tablet, but ff touch detection or 'guessing where they meant to touch' is just horrible. i have to zoom in like crazy to hit the upvote button on hn while on chrome it just works, or i might be trying to click on an article on the front page but end up hitting the comments section.
i usually prefer the desktop version of websites since mobile often times looks more awkward on tablet. but with ff i almost have no choice.
There's some potential for the new WebRender stack to improve battery life a lot - part of the reason why Edge is so good at saving battery is that it makes good use of modern GPUs to save power, and Firefox's new graphics stack is another modern one that attempts to avoid wasting CPU/GPU to do old-style rendering of web pages
It's really that we should be using the OS compositor more than we are, particularly on macOS. I think I'm probably going to be working on this, or at least finding someone to work on it, soon. WebRender should make this easier, because we should be able to get away with using a smaller subset of the OS composition functionality than other browsers do.
Anyway, for now, if you're on macOS, set gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque to true in about:config for a large increase in energy efficiency at the cost of some visual effects.
Last time I played around with comparing, Chrome and Firefox were comparable in terms of battery drain on my MBP. However they were both significantly worse than Safari, which barely ever turns on the discrete GPU while I'm browsing.
Or fortunately for those of us who use desktop computers. Usually battery performance enhancements decrease actual performance. It's a real shame so much good software is gimped just so people can run it on mobile.
This hasn't been true for a long time. The same enhancements that conserve battery also tend to ensure that plenty of processing and thermal capacity is available for whatever does want the CPU. (For instance, your top CPU "turbo" speed depends on how many of the other CPU cores are sleeping.)
Given that Chrome on Android doesn’t support extensions and thus no ad/privacy blockers, it might as well not exist and Firefox is for me the only game in town due to supporting uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger.
Brave browser has been my default browser on Android.
It's as fast as Chrome (if not faster) as it uses the same rendering engine Blink; has all the features you mention; has builtin Ad and privacy controls; is developed by Brendan Eich's company (Mozilla's co-founder); but is fully open source and a fork away, if the company starts pulling odd moves.
>(Though frankly, if you're using a Mac, Safari should be your browser of choice, if only for privacy reasons.)
What privacy protections does Safari have that Firefox doesn't? (Keeping in mind the vast extension store - I include extensions like NoScript within the umbrella of "Firefox")
Moreover, does Safari provide something similar to Firefox's tab containers? Blocking Facebook, Amazon et al. from tracking me across the web is a big deal in my book.
Good point. Safari is not a bad browser, but it's all or nothing - I prefer Firefox since I can find add ons if there's a feature I want that isn't included.
Just read the FAQ and it seems that extension installation in this "spin-off" is pain in the ass; which makes protecting one's browsing experience in terms of privacy and ads even more annoying...
I wonder, how much it differs from SRWare Iron or Iridium
No, I was asking to figure out if I should switch! When I look up their differences this is what I see, which makes me hesitant, so I'm wondering if it's an actual problem or not.
I have used that Gentoo Chromium on a bunch of different video sites.
Here are some examples I can think of:
- to stream live webcast and prerecorded webcasts through a Continuing Legal Ed provider, using their (proprietary?) web app.
- Vimeo.
- NFL.com but not live streamed any games.
- some of the 2018 Winter Olympics, including live stream.
- videos but no live stream on the Premier League and Bundesliga websites.
- Twitch, both live and recorded
However, I have never tried Netflix or Hulu or any other pay provider.
I'm sure I've watched videos on other sites that I'm not thinking of right now, like BBC, etc.
I have never had any other issues, but I only use Chromium for a few things, like expressly watching videos, and using a few specific websites. Otherwise, I use Firefox and FF Nightly as my main browsers, for almost everything except watching videos and streams and also anything with audio. For all that stuff, I have had nothing but great experiences with Chromium.
> I have never tried Netflix or Hulu or any other pay provider.
... except YouTube Red/subscription and Amazon Prime Video, which are obviously both pay-fors, but I mentioned those in the previous comment so I neglected to include them in the list above.
Both of those have worked perfectly well in Chromium on my Gentoo install.
This update really broke a lot of things. There are a lot of services that rely on the first logged in google account. I used to log into chrome with a personal account, and log into gmail/etc first with my business account. That way, my bookmarks and history would stay with me personally, but things that I use a lot, work email/google cloud etc would open as default under the work account.
One common issue is some sites (google’s gallery.io even), only really associate based with the first account logged into chrome, or the OAuth flow breaks.
Now if you log out of google, to set the base login to your work email for example, it logs you out of chrome also, so there goes your password manager/bookmarks/cookies etc.
I’m still figuring the best strategy, currently I just made a second chrome profile to separate but it’s super time consuming/annoying.
I feel like it was a major change without any heads up.
I'm not sure how attached you are to your browser, but if you're open to switching: you can use Firefox Accounts for syncing in Firefox, and use Multi-Account Containers [1] to stay logged in with different Google accounts.
Also meaning you need to manage two piles of bookmarks, on new devices, add the second profile, go through 2factor login processes twice during setup etc. There doesn’t seem to be a central, personal identity any longer, separate from google services, which they didn’t really think through.
The thought of switching between two windows just to copy a bookmark or a note from another browser add on, seems crazy in 2018. You can’t have tabs from different chrome profiles in one window, which is understandable, but wasn’t really a concern before this change.
FWIW I've used the dual profile strategy (one for work, one for personal) for a long time and I really like it, so perhaps it just takes some getting used to.
For example, I most definitely prefer my bookmarks and browser history to be separate. Let's just say I might blush if the location bar autocompleted some sites from my personal history if I was entering a URL in front of someone at work...
Many years ago I shared that I browse across several browsers, separating usage depending on the site I am visiting.
+ Gmail, Drive, Google Calendar = Chrome
+ Sites I trust = Firefox
+ Sites I do not know or trust = Firefox Private browsing (or Firefox Focus on Android)
This involves cautiously copying links from browser to browser, and if I make a mistake I have a scorched Earth policy of the history and cookies.
The only thing that is consistent is that they all have Pinboard so I can bookmark as I go along.
Over the years this feels more and more like the safest thing to do, to compartmentalise according to trust, and trust Google only with whatever you want tracked.
I used to this do exactly, but switching to Firefox containers made Chrome redundant. Chrome uses too much memory to leave it running just for few websites, and Google including analytics script as builtin library was the last straw.
I feel the same way, but unfortunately I have some things tied Chrome-only extensions or apps. They really need to work on any WebExtension-capable platform...
- Firefox incognito and Bing for sites I dont trust and/or wanting to watch any videos I want (tv shows, movies, porn, etc). Bing is miles better anyhow for this because of googles DMCA takedowns. Theres no risk of XSS because firefox is sandboxed and I have nothing important there.
- Firefox I occasionally use for devdocs.io and some documentation resources.
- Google for everything else. I have too many plugins though here though.
I am debating on using a 3rd browser bc I do occasionally scrape things and keeping track what I am being tracked on is hard to remember. Id rather not run the risk of getting banned anywhere. At the sametime, getting tracked through cookies is convenient to me so I dont have to relogin etc.
So I also run a scorched earth policy. Possibly using a 4th browser for seperating bank logins, social media etc on a different browser entirely. Granted I 2FA everything
VPN for everything, I turn it off only during gaming. Rather not deal with my ISP and net neutrality implications.
I dont care what google or microsoft knows about me in all honesty. There are so many ways to fingerprint users on the web that its almost impossible not to get tracked, unless you took extraorindary measures against it.
Anything I do on my phone I assume is compromised, managing app permissions is too much work. I dont take photos with potential blackmail material. Same with anything I use chrome with, I use a lot of extensions. They always get compromised.
I also used to do exactly this. Except with Safari as my untrusted 3rd. Eventually, I just got tired of the trouble and found that having a complete, searchable web history was actually so much a useful feature for me. So I stopped pretending and sold out to Google completely.
I had an instinctual gut reaction against this, because it really does feel like it crosses a line between browser and content that shouldn't be crossed.
BUT -- I know a lot of regular (non-technical) users who are terrified of logging into shared/public computers with their Google accounts, because they can't tell the difference between logging in/out of Gmail and logging in/out of Chrome, and they've experienced/heard horror stories of people leaving one logged in when they log out of the other.
I just tried it, and logging out of my Gmail also clearly logs me out of my Chrome (with a big message), which feels like a big win for peace of mind for most users.
So as much as it bothers me as a "power user"... I actually think this is a big improvement in conceptual simplicity for the average user. (And power users can figure out how to use multiple profiles for multiple Google accounts.)
There was a story [1] here just a few days ago where the culprit seemed to be that Chrome Sync had been set up with the daughter's EDU account and it was saving passwords for the parent's banking account, and presumably this will help avoid that kind of mix-up.
It will cost you around $5 each month that you actually need to use it (mostly because of the Microsoft RDP license), but with AWS AppStream with an image with a browser, you are not leaving any traces of your browsing on the local computer.
Exactly. Idea of public computer is crazy. If it is university/institution computer with your presonal account hen you are probably fine it is most likely some VM. But othervise lol.
Google calls the feature "Identity consistency between browser and cookie jar" and a Chrome representative on the official Google Chrome Help Forum confirmed that this is the intended behavior.
I don't like that different Google services are linked together. It would be fine if Youtube would remember what videos I prefer, but I don't want Google to save my search phrases to the same account, don't want Google to know what sites I visit (using Google Adsense and Google Analytics that are present on most sites). That would be too much information and I don't want to share it with Google.
So when I need Gmail or Google Maps, I have to open it in a private window. Not very convenient, so I don't use them often.
By the way, if you use Chrome and haven't changed the default search engine from Google, then your browser pings Google every time you open a new tab. You can check it yourself with Developer Tools: a new tab page is loaded from Internet and it sends cookies. It can be fixed by creating and choosing as default a new search engine with Google's URL, but using other name (for example, Gogol instead of Google). Then Chrome will load its start page from disk, not from Internet.
The new Google Chrome design with version 69 marked the beginning of a new era – Google wants to portray Chrome as something that is way more than a browser. They want you to see it as the primary interface of the web.
This is what the average user wants. All complex functionality has been put in the background. Cross-platform integration has been perfected.
Give it a year and users around the world will no longer think of Chrome as a browser, but simply as the interface to the (Google-)Web.
With Chrome Google has succesfully defeated Apple, MS and Mozilla.
And Google will continue to do everything to make people stop thinking of Chrome as a browser. They want you to think of it like a window into your online life, a window that is the same no matter where you are or what device you use.
> They want you to think of it like a window into your online life, a window that is the same no matter where you are or what device you use.
And that's a terrible loss for human civilization. They are going to destroy the open, decentralized Web to build a walled garden for Google to cater to some hypothetical "average user". It's truly absurd.
That might all accurately describe what they'd like to achieve, but fortunately we still live in a free market society where there's room for competition (and if there isn't, regulators often step in).
I don't find Google to be the best search experience anymore. It gives me too many ads and partnership deals. I use searx.me and it gives me good old fashioned organic web search with results that are just as good.
Plenty of alternatives exist to their other services as well which only get better every year. I'm now convinced Google has a hard fight ahead of them just to keep what they've already got.
I'd say it's what the average user was tricked into. In first years of existence Chrome was smuggled as "additional software offer" along with default browser setting in many software installers - that's how it mainly became popular. The typical computer user wouldn't notice the difference of new web browser presence (tho, the initial panic - "where are my bookmarks/passwords" could and did happen) and thus, as you're saying will accept that Chrome is the Web interface.
> With Chrome Google has succesfully defeated Apple, MS and Mozilla.
I'd say they managed to accomplish what MS couldn't with IE years ago - they had dominant position but not the quality and that's what Google with Chrome has achieved. I'm still "crying" after Opera decision of moving from Presto to Webkit/Blink - without it there's little to no competition at all between two remaining meaningful players. Nowadays it's Firefox with Gecko/Quantum vs Chrome along with all its's copies using Blink; an artificial homogenization of browsers market has happened - stimulated by shady marketing actions (mentioned bundling within installers).
People make the decision between different ecosystems, and Apple and Google are the biggest. Apple has a tight control over Safari on iOS. Safari has been defeated on Desktop though.
Not only is it missing a lot of features, many of the features it has implemented are buggy to the point of being unusable. Try speeding up an HTML5 video for a quick example of something people often do that is not implemented correctly in Safari.
I work with many not very technical mac users who mostly use apple provided apps like mail, notes, reminders and icloud. Only thing everyone installs is Chrome.
I do use Safari on the Mac (and Firefox for some things). Safari uses resources far more efficiently, it has a reader view, and its layouting doesn't make the page jump around quite as much as other browsers do.
Many websites are barely usuable in Chrome but acceptable in Safari.
"With a smarter Chrome, you will be able to do more than just look at a webpage. Imagine searching on Chrome for a singer you just heard, and having Chrome show you not just their bio, but also their upcoming concert near you and where to purchase tickets. With AI, Chrome will also better understand what you’re trying to get done, and help you do so faster. Vacation planning typically requires juggling multiple tabs and open documents. But as Chrome evolves to better understand what tasks you’re trying to get done, it can help manage all this complexity for you as you switch back and forth between hotel research and booking flights.
When we first launched Chrome, Sundar said: “We think of the browser as the window to the web.” A decade later, it’s still the tool people use to access all of the websites and applications that help them do what they want to do. As Chrome heads into the next 10 years, we want to expand that window—so you can see more and do more."
Which is all great until it gets it wrong, and you have to fight against it. Just this morning I was trying to google a specific car problem, and it decided I was actually looking for a different problem. Had to rephrase my search many times for it to give me what I wanted. I wish there was a search modifier that turned off all the cleverness.
Nice, this is actually exactly the sort of thing I’ve been wishing for. Except for the part where Google gets to collect all of our data. But that is a temporary problem I think. Eventually these sorts of things will be available to us as completely open source and self-hosted software.
Well the more some for-profit company wants me to push around to their vision of the future and milk me for more and more data from my private life, the more I will resist. It comes naturally, doesn't it for you?
It is a good browser, it may be even the best for some things, but it ain't so good compared to rest I will stop using Firefox, especially on mobile.
The more they push, the less I use their services (openstreet|opentopo, duck).
I daresay this comment might apply more to us than to Google. To 99% of people, these features are useful and helpful, with the downsides being mostly philosophical or theoretical.
> To 99% of people, these features are useful and helpful, with the downsides being mostly philosophical or theoretical.
There is something there that makes it comparable to the early nature conservation movements. Fast forward a couple generations and nearly 99% of the population is pretty convinced on climate change and that we've messed up quite severely - but not enough to stop messing up.
"Not immediately apparent" is neither theoretical nor philosophical.
It's sufficiently reliable a behaviour, however, that it's eminently bankable. Most especially in Silicon Valley's surveillance capitalism world.
Data are liability. They're long-term toxic waste. But as with earlier forms of toxic waste, they return profits to those who ignore, conceal, or confuse as to the true deferred costs.
Chrome is a platform for client-side Google services.
As the article says, the web browser is the most obvious component, but it also includes Google Cloud Print [0], Google Talk/Hangouts [1], Google Earth [2], Google Music [3], Gmail Offline [4], etc.
In some sense it's the spiritual successor to Google Desktop [5], which used to fill a similar role.
I am seriously considering rolling my own browser by embedding the Chromium Embedded Framework into my own GUI (or WebKit, or Gecko).
A browser should just render pages (incl. JavaScript), and save cookies if you need it to. Beyond that, there's nothing else it needs to do. Round about Netscape 4 and IE6, browsers were functionally complete. Since then they've just been gilding the lily and creating an artificial 'features race' between the browser vendors.
I liked the idea of those minimal vim like browsers, but webkit2 lib they all used was always hopelessly out of date, insecure and slow.
I've been keeping an eye on qutebrowser[1] though which offers either up to date [2]qtwebengine or webkit (qtwebengine is the browser engine of chromium minus all the google services and other garbage).
The obvious problems and conflicts here are multiple.
1. People may wish to not have activity on multiple services connected or associated. This was certainly true for me when I found that G+ and YouTube accounts, independently created, though sharing a common email address, were conjoined.
2. Google is put in a position of advantage as regards online identity. This persists across several dimensions:
a). Google apps and services share an authenticator with the browser itself. Other parties must implement their own authentication schemes, unless ...
b). Third-party applications utilise the Google Chrome authenticator, in which case
i). Those third parties leak user identity, activity, and all but certainly fraud and abuse detection, including both false negative and false positive determinations, to Google.
ii). Other browser venders, including Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Opea, and others, are rendered as second-class citizens from an authentication standpoint.
iii). Consequences of a loss or freeze of an account now extend to multiple third-party services.
c). Loss or freeze of an account locks people out of their own web browser and all that entails; cookies, bookmarks, history, extensions, configurations, extensions-related data (say; Zotero).
3. The centralisation, stakes, and attractiveness of attacking people's Google identities rises yet higher. Data exfiltration, access to browser and local system state, denial-of-access attacks, and more.
The privacy, anti-trust, security, conflict-of-interest, general risk, and other implications simple boggle the mind. That this was quietly rolled out with no apparent announcement or consideration tremendously reduces my already greatly-diminished trust in Google, its leadership, and its stewardship of critical Web infrastructure and protocols.
This is very bad. There are so many reasons why I want to be able to use Gmail without having google track all of my activity across search and maps.
I have been a loyal Chrome user since pretty much launch, because it was the fastest browser and mostly seemed to stay that way over the years. I understand why Google is doing this from a monopolistic “control all the things” perspective, and this will probably increase engagement in the near term, but I think this is a very poor strategic decision given the rising tide of trust issues surrounding Big Tech these days. Privacy is such a hot button issue now. Facebook is rightly getting raked over the coals in front of Congress for its rampant neglect/abuse of privacy issues. Apple is crushing it with its privacy-first positioning and hammering FB and Google publicly on their tracking-based revenue models. I understand that Google can’t change its underlying business model overnight, but why double down on more enforced tracking? It makes them an even bigger target just in time for an oncoming storm.
Time to start shopping for a new browser. Thanks for everything, Chrome.
> This is very bad. There are so many reasons why I want to be able to use Gmail without having google track all of my activity across search and maps.
But I don't think this Chrome release changed anything with regards to that? It's been the case for more than a decade that if you're logged into gmail you're also logged into search, maps, apps, etc. And if you log out of one, you log out of all of them.
Whatever workflow you've been using to keep logged into gmail while avoiding being logged in to the other Google sites would still work exactly the same way. (E.g. I'm always logged into gmail and chrome, but do 99% of my searches and Youtube watching from incognito windows, so they don't get associated with my account).
The problem is that even most devs (I’m just gonna assume and pull this assumption outta my ass) don’t have the time or energy to put into such jailed browser windows. I think I used to a bit, but sometimes I’d forget and log into a service in my non google windows, etc. It got to be too much work. There has to be a better way to manage this.
Thanks for clarifying. I'm going to step slightly down from my high horse now. So, I just tested and I can still have separate "People" in Chrome browser-level settings, + incognito windows as you mentioned. I guess now I'm confused as to what actually changed then.
What were they thinking? That most people wouldn't know or understand the implications over centralizing all things to better collect information. For Google, they turned an old adage into becoming one of the wealthiest companies in the world with the full understanding that besides government regulations, nothing's stopping them.
"Knowledge is power. Information is power. The secreting or hoarding of knowledge or information may be an act of tyranny camouflaged as humility."
--Robin Morgan
Agreed. Mozilla has a special container just for Facebook and I use that. Other people have made similar special containers for Google, etc. but I don't trust them as much as Mozilla.
So I use one container for Google properties (gmail, YouTube, etc.), a different one for social networks other than Facebook (Twitter, Reddit, etc.), and a third for shopping (eBay, Amazon, etc.)
You can teach Firefox to always open certain URLs in a particular container so smile.amazon.com brings up the shopping container, twitter.com brings up the social one, and so on.
I've been a little sad about losing some of the old Firefox extensions but Quantum has been great.
For MAC you are responsible for curating the decisions about what's inside each container.
That's a bunch of work. The more complicated or fast changing the sites in a container, the more work.
Facebook Container comes with the curation done by its maintainers. This is probably less trouble than it might be because it's not as though developers who use Facebook are unheard of.
Is there a way to open subtabs within each container? Ie in the google container I’d like subtabs for YouTube, Gmail, calendar, drive, etc
Opening up every google service in its own google container seems like a recipe to forget once and leave google cookies in your shopping container, for example
Even worse: did they surreptitiously capture the browsing history of everyone that has intentionally avoided signing into chrome over the last few years? I'm glad I switched to firefox a year ago and have auto update on chrome disabled.
Not totally true, you can pretty easily have a logged-in Chrome profile that you use for Gmail, and an unauthenticated Chrome profile you use for everything else.
This is speculation on my part, however given the sophistication of their tracking capabilities I would imagine they could correlate the source to (at a minimum) a grouping of related users, if not the primary user.
Increasing complexity in the browser and a number of other projects has put it out of reach of small open source teams, it can now only be done by a well funded corporates. This is a huge loss because now we can't have viable alternatives put together by open source teams who don't need millions of dollars to exist.
Without competition ultimately the user does not have choice and you get invasive and arbitrary behavior like this, all pushed under the guise of 'helping' some mythical average user and it will keep getting worse.
There are professional security fud mongers always pushing 'no alternative' solutions that somehow always end up benefiting centralized corporate interests. The simple fact is the tech community have lost control of the web, standards, privacy, user interests either by naivete or collusion to adware and spyware companies masquerading as tech companies.
Seeing its provenance, I have never considered Chrome or Chromium an option for daily use. The same way I have never been tempted to create a Gmail - or indeed any kind of Google - account.
Still mystified why such huge numbers of people - also among the well informed - find it a worthwhile trade handing over the generality of their life to this monolith in return for some perceived marginal gains in speed og useability or whatever.
No, I don't use the search either, and I block their Analytics snooper, whichever guise it appears in (font, tagmanager, gstatic etc. etc.).
My setup and workflow are unremarkable and will bore you to tears.
Linux & Firefox on all my desktops. Firefox uMatrix'ed to within an inch of its life, and with one of those extensions that kill all cookies from a given tab as soon as you close it.. Every now and again I have to temporarily allow one access or another - some sites break if not allowed use of Google TagManager, for example.
I keep a seperate profile for a few known sites which I occasionally must use, and which absolutely refuse to function without live access to all the evil empires of the world.
My searches go through DuckDuckGo, with a detour to Startpage whenever things don't work out.
Oh, and Youtube videos. I never stream. I go there, often via proxy, and I download the thing before watching.
For mail, I run all the boring stuff via FastMail, and some personal correspondance through my own server, running on an old discarded thin client with a usb stick for storage.
It's a good thing I don't really like the Go language, or I should find myself in a dilemma.
No, it wasn’t that boring. Highlights were the email server running on a thin client with usb stick for storage LOL. Proxyign YouTube manually rather than vpn seems a little hasslesome though. Interesting setup, thanks!
I'd strongly suggest people create separate users in the browser, one for daily, one for Google, one for Facebook.
This way in my regular browsing there's no Facebook or Google cookies reporting on what websites I visit.
It's really easy and doesn't impact at all on workflow, if you want your Gmail you just click the user button, and click Google. You could even set that user's homepage to Gmail.
I feel like there's some implied assumption here that this change lets Google do something evil that they couldn't do before, but I don't really see what.
If you're logged into Google properties (independent of browser), Google can already track you across most of the internet, via their Ads and Analytics embedded in a rather large percentage of web sites. If you don't want Google to track you on non-Google web sites, then you really need to use separate browser profiles (or separate browsers). Have one profile for Google properties and a separate one for other things.
Ironically, Chrome has really good multi-profile support. It's easy to have different Chrome windows running different profiles, each of which has all its own settings, storage, login state, etc. Give each one a different theme to make it easy to tell which profile you're using.
Firefox has a concept of profiles but AFAICT you can only run one profile at a time. :(
> Firefox has a concept of profiles but AFAICT you can only run one profile at a time. :(
You can have one primary firefox instance, and any number of instances that have the "--no-remote" flag set, each running different profiles. Any links you click outside of firefox (e.g. xdg-open) will use the primary firefox.
The 'firefox --no-remote -P' trick has worked for longer than chrome has existed and I've been using it to juggle about 15 profiles since firefox 3, usually having 4 different firefox instances open with 4 different profiles.
The more user-friendly way to do this is with firefox containers though.
What is the memory hit though. Do the separate profile processes share some of the library memory or do they each reuse a lot of memory. I’d assume chrome profiles being natively supported via a easy GUI means the separate profile processes are able to share memory??
Chrome lost all my browser history, bookmarks, settings and extensions when I let someone else log into chrome and log out again. I now try to use Firefox for non Google services but still use multiple gmail/docs accounts in chrome for performance.
Even if I hadn't already had a terrible experience with their login feature, it is a privacy violation. I haven't agreed to have my browser history and other private data uploaded to an advertising company. The argument that most users want this is flawed: many would object to giving Google access to this without permission. Maybe the EU will step in?
Years ago I sniffed packets sent by Chrome and found that it sent loads of data to Google servers when it was completely unnecessary for it to serve its function (as a browser). Haven't used it ever since.
Actually, you don't need to believe that to have incentives to move to Firefox. Read more about some of Firefox benefits here (besides, obviously, the ungoogle side of it): https://fiatjaf.alhur.es/entulho/firefox-vs-chrome.txt
I'm going to need to check whether this behavior is overriding the group policy we put in for a client to not log into the browser. We previously hadn't bothered with that until someone almost got fired after signing into Chrome with their shared family account. Someone else at down at the shared desk and saw a porn video in the bookmarks.
Is it possible to run Chrome in a sandbox on Linux? I no longer trust Google enough to run with regular permissions. I'm only using Chrome for testing web apps anyway, and haven't been using it for web surfing for almost three years now.
Chrome can run in Docker, I have tried it with Browserless which is the headless version -- but I see no reason why you can't run it with an X11 connection just the same.
You can login to the Chrome browser (think profile) using a Google Account. Doing so allows you to sync bookmarks, settings, passwords, etc. as well as remain always logged in to Google sites even after deleting all cookies (which would normally log you out obviously).
Syncing Chrome across devices has long rendered the point moot. If you wanted syncing you were already logged in to the browser. If you didn't want syncing, there was no reason to use Chrome.
I'm actually kinda upset at firefox, because I wanted to switch, but when I tried the syncing (from one firefox instance to another) it didn't seem to work for like 90% of my bookmarks, history, passwords so I kinda gave up.
Firefox and Firefox focus come with the anonymous stats tracking enabled. That kinda pissed me off, but as long as that’s the only thing they are doing to track, I’ll move back to Firefox over chrome happily.
You may like to know that it is encrypted on their servers, and if you lost your password, resetting your password nukes all your data. So I don't mind letting Mozilla host the contents.
Frankly, I am amazed every day that Ungoogled Chromium, Firefox, & DDG.co are as good as they are. (aka: slightly inferior to Google regarding product polish, but truly "good enough" 98% of the time - without selling my future data down the drain)
(edited: to fix typos)
- [1]: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium