Something's happening. It seem everywhere you go, it's Linux this and Linux that.

I think Microsoft has given Linux a huge boost, in the past year or so, since otherwise so many otherwise perfectly functional and hardware capable desktops and laptops would be forced to either stick with an 'unsafe' version of Windows, or just be consigned to the dustbin. I have two desktops and two laptops, and only one of them (a desktop) will run Windows 11. Not that I want to run Windows 11, of course - I'm no fan of Windows 10, but I'm used to it now. I'm one of the many "Windows peaked with Windows 7, I wish Microsoft had stuck with that OS" people.

You say that yet you use 10.... while I never stopped dailying 7, typing from 7 right now :V Never felt the need to downgrade to 10 as 7 still works very well today

Kerr Avon wrote on 2025-11-01, 16:05:

I think Microsoft has given Linux a huge boost, in the past year or so, since otherwise so many otherwise perfectly functional and hardware capable desktops and laptops would be forced to either stick with an 'unsafe' version of Windows, or just be consigned to the dustbin. I have two desktops and two laptops, and only one of them (a desktop) will run Windows 11. Not that I want to run Windows 11, of course - I'm no fan of Windows 10, but I'm used to it now. I'm one of the many "Windows peaked with Windows 7, I wish Microsoft had stuck with that OS" people.

I don't think it's the much mocked "year of the Linux desktop" or anything but I think you are on to something, like Linux being a "lifehack" to keep older hardware going for somewhat-technical but not command line-oriented users who had no reason to try it out before. For those of us in the US at least, perhaps like using an MVNO instead of Verizon or AT&T, or knowing that TurboTax web isn't the only income tax software and that there alternatives available that are cheaper and dispense with the dark pattern upsells. Using Firefox instead of IE in the 2000s had a quite similar feel, until it was steamrolled by the release of Chrome which quickly became the normie browser.

I can get by with an alternative web browser (mostly), but Linux is a bit too much for me at this point. I might re-evaluate when everyday things no longer launch on Win10 (if I'm still alive at that point).

Kerr Avon wrote on 2025-11-01, 16:05:

I think Microsoft has given Linux a huge boost, in the past year or so, since otherwise so many otherwise perfectly functional and hardware capable desktops and laptops would be forced to either stick with an 'unsafe' version of Windows, or just be consigned to the dustbin. I have two desktops and two laptops, and only one of them (a desktop) will run Windows 11. Not that I want to run Windows 11, of course - I'm no fan of Windows 10, but I'm used to it now. I'm one of the many "Windows peaked with Windows 7, I wish Microsoft had stuck with that OS" people.

I've been daily driving Linux for the past 6 or 7 years and dual booted it since Windows 8. As I look at the desktop OS market share every now and then Linux usage does grow, but it's Apple that really benefits from MS dropping the ball. I find it ironic that the main complaint I hear from people at every new Windows release since 8 is that each version is more of a walled garden than the last with more privacy intrusion... and then they migrate to Apple.

jakethompson1 wrote on 2025-11-01, 19:47:

Using Firefox instead of IE in the 2000s had a quite similar feel, until it was steamrolled by the release of Chrome which quickly became the normie browser.

I still don't understand how Chrome became so popular almost overnight. It was absolute shit when it first launched, and that was before the current era of corporate shill social media bots. I still remember that it would simply refuse to load pages periodically, and the only thing you could do was wait for the timeout period with the CPU pegged and either no network activity at all or spamming the same request without waiting for a response (back then, Windows itself didn't have such heavy constant network activity that it made searching through Wireshark logs impossible). It took several years to fix that bug, and it happened so often that I found Chrome unusable. There was another bug later that I don't remember now. It wasn't any faster or more compatible than Firefox, either.

Today, Firefox is such a major RAM hog that Chromium-based browsers really are faster and more stable (although the instability with Firefox is the result of your computer running out of RAM and virtual memory).

UCyborg wrote on 2025-11-01, 20:22:

I can get by with an alternative web browser (mostly), but Linux is a bit too much for me at this point. I might re-evaluate when everyday things no longer launch on Win10 (if I'm still alive at that point).

I keep saying it, but Linux is never going to be easy to use. There will never be a "year of the Linux desktop." When the favorite easy-to-use distro (Mint) performs so poorly (strangely, VLC in Arch gives me the same bad video performance as Mint Cinnamon, but MPV-based video players work fine), the household name (Ubuntu) has a strange GUI that turns some people away from Linux entirely, and anything that works requires lots of manual configuration to get to that stage, it's hard to recommend. I'm using Linux as my main OS now, and I still have that opinion. I'm at the technical skill level to make it work, but I'm more of the exception. At this point, I'm curious about MacOS, but I don't want to spend the money for a Mac Studio (the Mini probably won't have enough RAM for me).

I've been hearing people say that Linux is improving, but I don't see it. I've been using it to some extent (not daily until about a year ago) since Ubuntu 7.04, and it doesn't look any more refined or easier to use to me.

I remember Google kept advertising Chrome on its search page. Some may have fallen for its Google account integration.

Then it pushed "standards" for theirs and allies' benefits. EME (DRM) should have never been a thing.

It's a current day Internet Explorer. While Chromium is open source, it's a huge monstrosity that keeps changing rapidly, is difficult to produce something unique based on it (even Ungoogled Chromium's project of removing "phoning home" is rather hacky because they don't have resources to do it properly), needs a huge amount of resources to compile from source...

Manifest V2 was phased out because content blockers are bad for their profits. Sites tend to rely on huge frameworks that tend to work best with Blink.

Mozilla lost their way a long time ago, they're just a pretense at this point that there's an actual alternative IMO.

lti wrote on 2025-11-02, 16:35:

I still don't understand how Chrome became so popular almost overnight. It was absolute shit when it first launched, and that wa […]
Show full quote

jakethompson1 wrote on 2025-11-01, 19:47:

Using Firefox instead of IE in the 2000s had a quite similar feel, until it was steamrolled by the release of Chrome which quickly became the normie browser.

I still don't understand how Chrome became so popular almost overnight. It was absolute shit when it first launched, and that was before the current era of corporate shill social media bots. I still remember that it would simply refuse to load pages periodically, and the only thing you could do was wait for the timeout period with the CPU pegged and either no network activity at all or spamming the same request without waiting for a response (back then, Windows itself didn't have such heavy constant network activity that it made searching through Wireshark logs impossible). It took several years to fix that bug, and it happened so often that I found Chrome unusable. There was another bug later that I don't remember now. It wasn't any faster or more compatible than Firefox, either.

Today, Firefox is such a major RAM hog that Chromium-based browsers really are faster and more stable (although the instability with Firefox is the result of your computer running out of RAM and virtual memory).

UCyborg wrote on 2025-11-01, 20:22:

I can get by with an alternative web browser (mostly), but Linux is a bit too much for me at this point. I might re-evaluate when everyday things no longer launch on Win10 (if I'm still alive at that point).

I keep saying it, but Linux is never going to be easy to use. There will never be a "year of the Linux desktop." When the favorite easy-to-use distro (Mint) performs so poorly (strangely, VLC in Arch gives me the same bad video performance as Mint Cinnamon, but MPV-based video players work fine), the household name (Ubuntu) has a strange GUI that turns some people away from Linux entirely, and anything that works requires lots of manual configuration to get to that stage, it's hard to recommend. I'm using Linux as my main OS now, and I still have that opinion. I'm at the technical skill level to make it work, but I'm more of the exception. At this point, I'm curious about MacOS, but I don't want to spend the money for a Mac Studio (the Mini probably won't have enough RAM for me).

I've been hearing people say that Linux is improving, but I don't see it. I've been using it to some extent (not daily until about a year ago) since Ubuntu 7.04, and it doesn't look any more refined or easier to use to me.

i was using Firefox 3 when Chrome came out at the end of 2008, and the main reason i switched in 2010 was that Firefox, AT THAT TIME, didnt separate the tabs in different processes, so when a website decide to froze, it took all the web browser with it. That was supper annoying and happened all the time with Firefox

Chrome solved this, and not only that, was way faster and stable. It took Mozilla 10 years to solve all this things and get nearly all the features that Chrome kept adding

Today i use Firefox since 2023 again, but for my clients i still install Chrome, its less of a headache and the privacy part is on them, not me (i only help with an Adblocker)

I've been using firefox since 2005, never switched to chrome, used it as a secondary browser at most. Recently I just switched from vanilla firefox to a fork (librewolf) and for the secondary from chrome to brave, because Im pretty sick of telemetry being pushed without asking.... and never really had any issues with how firefox worked, works fine for me ™️

God Of Gaming wrote on Yesterday, 06:23:

I've been using firefox since 2005, never switched to chrome, used it as a secondary browser at most. Recently I just switched from vanilla firefox to a fork (librewolf) and for the secondary from chrome to brave, because Im pretty sick of telemetry being pushed without asking.... and never really had any issues with how firefox worked, works fine for me ™️

same here, since version 1 really. I just got used to it quickly and used it everywhere, then when i started using linux more it was often the rbowser of choice, in Mint its there and i use it.

I don't dislike other browsers, in fact i can't often see a reason to become partisan about them - but if a browser cannot be quickly made light and have readily edited privacy settings then i'm not keen

I like Opera too, seems to have lots of features but for the most part firefox does it all

God Of Gaming wrote on Yesterday, 06:23:

I've been using firefox since 2005, never switched to chrome, used it as a secondary browser at most. Recently I just switched from vanilla firefox to a fork (librewolf) and for the secondary from chrome to brave, because Im pretty sick of telemetry being pushed without asking.... and never really had any issues with how firefox worked, works fine for me ™️

Same here, though I do remember a short stint maybe 10 years ago where Firefox had some kind of severe performance or compatibility issue that caused me to use Chrome for a little while. Other than that, I've been using Firefox since 2004-2005. I had used Netscape Navigator and IE for a while and I remember IE6 being very unstable compared to IE5, so Firefox was a welcome change.

gerry wrote on Yesterday, 16:39:

same here, since version 1 really. I just got used to it quickly and used it everywhere, then when i started using linux more it was often the rbowser of choice, in Mint its there and i use it.

I don't dislike other browsers, in fact i can't often see a reason to become partisan about them - but if a browser cannot be quickly made light and have readily edited privacy settings then i'm not keen

I like Opera too, seems to have lots of features but for the most part firefox does it all

There is no Opera, though. It's just another Chrome fork now.

Opera isn't even a good fork of Chrome.

The Serpent Rider wrote on Yesterday, 18:55:

Opera isn't even a good fork of Chrome.

Yeah, I miss the time when Opera was its own thing. And so was every browser, in fact. Much as I never liked IE, everything being Chromium-based isn't any better.

At the moment, the only Chromium browser worth using is Brave (ex-Firefox CEO), because it has compatibility for AdGuard, uBO, uMatrix and NoScript after Manifest V2 was nuked. Maybe Vivaldi (ex-Opera employees), because it has pretty customizable adblock, but no Manifest V2, if I understand correctly.

What specifically is wrong with Chrome browser?

I switched to Basilisk when Firefox 51 wasn't usable anymore, then few years later to Pale Moon. There's been few hurdles along the way, mostly related to JavaScript monstrosities dominating post-Chromeopalyptic web. Need backup for few specific sites, mostly work related.

But otherwise, my web life is still like as if Firefox never dropped its extensions, NPAPI (Flash Player, ability to use professional application for PDF viewing inside browser tab...), no tricks needed for tabs below address bar, have working ColorfulTabs extension, GlassMyFox (Aero Glass is dead on Firefox, on Pale Moon, it still lives, even on Win10+ with DWMBlurGlass), no need to deal with CSS for UI customizations that breaks all the time on Firefox (or userchrome scripts), navigational sounds just like in Windows Explorer or Internet Explorer (Navigational Sounds extension), font rendering that still obliges Windows ClearType settings and probably some other things I forgot.

Still daily driving 16,5 years old AMD based PC, I notice other browsers, despite being snappier at first glance, put notable stress on the machine. Firefox does take a good long while before it's ready after the window opens, Edge seems to cause occasional audio dropouts. TBH, I haven't messed with other Chromium browsers in a while, Edge is the only Chromium browser with tweaks to font rendering to consider ClearType settings and Firefox is usually good enough as a backup, haven't come across anything that would only work in Chromium. Plus Edge is from Microsoft and we don't want to deal with Microsoft more than we have to, right. 😜 Though Chromium is still interesting to play with when it comes to specific demanding applications.

It'd be nice if we could cover certain aspects with extensions in Pale Moon, but the wizards who can program them are few and far in between. There's a notable gap with things that are still doable in web extensions.

UCyborg wrote on Yesterday, 20:47:

Still daily driving 16,5 years old AMD based PC, I notice other browsers, despite being snappier at first glance, put notable stress on the machine. Firefox does take a good long while before it's ready after the window opens, Edge seems to cause occasional audio dropouts. TBH, I haven't messed with other Chromium browsers in a while, Edge is the only Chromium browser with tweaks to font rendering to consider ClearType settings and Firefox is usually good enough as a backup, haven't come across anything that would only work in Chromium. Plus Edge is from Microsoft and we don't want to deal with Microsoft more than we have to, right. 😜 Though Chromium is still interesting to play with when it comes to specific demanding applications.

So I'm guessing your 16.5 year old AMD machine is running Windows 10?

I am running my own ~1 year newer than your AMD machine with Linux daily driver and it doesn't seem slow in any browser opening or loading most pages. I have noscript or ublock on my browsers. It only really slows down some if I have many demanding tabs. Certain sites are just badly written, IMO, and it's likely a problem on any machine. And since I've run this same machine for about 15 years, I've seen all the browser changes on it. Firefox performance tanked after around version 58, such that Chromium is actually faster. Certain sites don't work well on Firefox (sluggish), work fine on Chromium. So when this started happening on Firefox, I finally loaded up Chromium and kept it around just in case, probably in 2018. Seamonkey when they switched to the updated engine, it's performance tanked. I loaded up Basilisk, and it seems like a decent browser, but I don't use it much.

I've never had issues with video playback. Actually, firefox seems to now have working hardware video decoding on linux for the first time for AMD open source drivers, after all these years. So in that respect, an improvement for once. Not a biggie, because software-only video decoding on the CPU is sufficient on the PC.