this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2023
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I made the switch to waterfox (Firefox fork) that strips out much of the problematic mozilla stuff.
I started to switch because of the tab containers, as I work across a dozen or so accounts in our MSP business.
Now I realised how good Firefox can be if you get rid of the bloat.
I've never once used Firefox and thought "man, is there bloat here". Whatwas bugging you?
I was mainly referring to how sluggish it was. For my web apps, it was always slower and the UI would bog down. Maybe not the correct definition of you refer to unnecessary features.
I am more referring to how lean or streamline the software is. Both in front end design and backend.
A lot of browser performance has to do with how you use it, so my experience is not universal.
Still, even full fat Firefox is skinny compared to the morbidly obese Chrome and edge browsers.
So weird to me how when Chrome first came out, it was the opposite: Firefox was getting sluggish and poorly optimized with too much going on, and Chrome was sleek and fast and seemed to just have what was needed to work.
These things go in cycles. But I think the writing is on the wall. Google will never make the investment to unbloat Chrome.
They have no incentive to, at least not as long as they're the dominant web browser
There isn't much, Waterfox removes Pocket and disables most of the telemetry, tweaks some of the settings to be more privacy and performance minded, swaps google from default search engine and iirc it has more aggressive compiler optimization settings in exchange for having slightly more modern hardware requirements. And the default theme is more compact and less chrome-esque.
It originally was just about providing 64-bit builds of Firefox back when Mozilla didn't yet, today it's mostly "Firefox, but slightly better."
Around the time Chrome first hit the scene, Firefox was getting pretty bloated and inefficient... They've come a long way since then but they still do a bunch of unnecessary stuff that should probably be off by default but isn't
Like what should be off by default