this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2025
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[–] pH3ra@lemmy.ml 6 points 6 days ago (3 children)

Because vanilla Firefox has to be tinkered with to get the best out of it and the average user is not able to do it

[–] BlackVenom@lemmy.world 12 points 5 days ago (1 children)

As a user of Firefox from 1-3 and quantum to current.... What exactly are you tinkering with? Install ublock and be done.

[–] pH3ra@lemmy.ml 1 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Dude I use firefox as main browser too, I'm not saying that brave is better, read my comment again.

What I'm saying is that you and I are not the average user. Our moms are the average user, our brother that got a DUI last friday is the average user, our anti-vax aunt is the average user...

[–] BlackVenom@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

As pointed out, I didn't say anything about brave.

But your later reply also doesn't really explain why people choose nonstandard browser A over B...

Regardless... That tinkering is all you.

[–] PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 2 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Read their comment again.

They didn't say that you said brave was better.
They said that folks barely need to tinker with anything, and was asking what you need to tinker with to make it suitable for you.

[–] pH3ra@lemmy.ml 1 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

and was asking what you need to tinker with to make it suitable for you.

For myself I like to add a couple addons, like u-Block origins with automatic cookie reject and containers for when I have to browse IG or Google stuff, plus some tweaks in the about:config for disabling telemetry and such.

My point is that many people either don't feel like going through this process, even if it takes just a few minutes, or don't care about privacy at all, they just fancy an ad blocker. So they may end up installing Brave.
I'll give you one of many examples I have: I've taken guitar lessons for the last year and a half and every time my teacher put a background track on youtube we had to sit through 30 seconds of ads, while he complained about it every single time. For the first month I tried to persuade him to install FF + u-Block, but he kept saying things like "I'm not a computer guy". Even after I offered to do it myself, he was afraid that "there may be some sort of virus" so at one point I just stopped suggesting it. A couple months ago he installed Brave because a frend of his told him to and that was it.

And that's because what me and you see as "barely tinkering", as you put it, other people see it as this herculean labor they cannot even imagine to approach. Of course this is because of a lack of culture on the matter, but most of people don't care about making a culture at all, they just want to be spoon fed with stuff that works, no matter what happens under the hood.

[–] PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 1 points 4 days ago

Does Firefox have an app (plug-in/extension) store where you get it from? Are they even able to use an iPhone?

If not, than installing any browser is probably gonna be too complicated for them. Otherwise it's not a hurdal of technical expertise, but rather they just don't care

[–] tiramichu@sh.itjust.works 10 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

In what way?

I switched recently to Librewolf, but as a long time Firefox user (of which Librewolf is a fork anyway) it didn't seem unusable out of the box. There are some settings for privacy and studies etc you mght want to change, but they are all very obvious in the GUI preferences.

I did personally go into about:config to set a few things, like not allowing searches from the address bar because I'm weird, but what makes Firefox no good for the average user?

[–] pH3ra@lemmy.ml 3 points 6 days ago (1 children)

The typical conversation I have is:

  • Hey, how don't you have ads on Youtube?
  • Well, its easy: you install Firefox and then...

and that's where I loose most of the people, that extra step.

Me and you can go down on the about:config all day long to dissect every aspect of privacy we care about. For the other 90% of people, even just going to Mozilla extensions manager and downloading u-Block Origin is too much.

Bear-proof trash can theorem...

[–] Taleya@aussie.zone 3 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Don't extra step

" how come you don't have YouTube ads??"

"Firefox"

Later they come to you "but i still have ads!" THEN ya hit them with config

[–] 13igTyme@lemmy.world 2 points 5 days ago

Config is just to add ublock. I'd hardly call that config.

[–] moopet@sh.itjust.works 4 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Any more so than vanilla Chrome?

[–] pH3ra@lemmy.ml 4 points 5 days ago

No, in fact the average user doesn't tinker with Chrome either