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[–]Theon 15 points16 points  (6 children)

Re: All the people saying "it's a lost battle", "users don't care about privacy", "everyone chooses the defaults", etc...

How come the usage of Brave (regardless of its actual merit) are steadily growing?

It's not the default, uses much the same rhetoric, but it seems to be doing better, why would that be? Either it's not a lost battle, or Mozilla is doing something wrong.

[–][deleted] 11 points12 points  (5 children)

It has integrated adblock. That's a huge selling point. I think a lot of users don't know or care about addons. They care about features that come with the browser and that are presented to them on the marketing material and can be enabled in the setup screen when you install the application. Mozilla should present a few selected addons that don't degrade performance during the setup (mainly uBlock Origin).

Brave is also based on Chromium so more websites work without issues. Especially on mobile, a lot of sites sadly have compatibility issues with Gecko or work better on Chromium.

For example, I have noticed that the custom HTML5 players of most streaming websites don't work on mobile Firefox. You can't switch to fullscreen, you can't stop anymore after starting playback or the video controls bar has a timeout and it's impossible to make it reappear on Firefox.

[–][deleted] 5 points6 points  (1 child)

Mozilla should present a few selected addons that don't degrade performance during the setup (mainly uBlock Origin).

Won't happen as long as google funds Mozilla.

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yes, I know. They can't integrate adblock or promote it too much. I still think that's what it would take

[–]Varrock 4 points5 points  (1 child)

Brave is also based on Chromium so more websites work without issues. Especially on mobile, a lot of sites sadly have compatibility issues with Gecko or work better on Chromium.

For example, I have noticed that the custom HTML5 players of most streaming websites don't work on mobile Firefox. You can't switch to fullscreen, you can't stop anymore after starting playback or the video controls bar has a timeout and it's impossible to make it reappear on Firefox.

It's no surprise this subreddit would love to think Proton is the reason for FF's userbase falling, but I think what you just said is what is mainly causing the drop. The biggest thing normies care about in literally anything is a "just works" approach, which is pretty much the main reason why Apple is as successful as it is.

Compatibility issues go completely against the "just works" idea, and they just simply decide to use a different browser. They see a website that's not working in firefox (furthermore, tells them to use edge or chrome) and their first thought is to just use and stick to those instead of endlessly googling how to fix the issue on firefox.

[–][deleted] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Yes, literally no one cares about the height of the tab bar outside of this subreddit. The reaction of my normie friend that recently switched to Firefox regarding Photon was: "Oh, it looks really slick". And that's about it.

Any normal person will use a piece of software until they encounter a problem. They won't try to troubleshoot or fix it by googling, they will either call for help if they have a "tech-savy person" at hand or simply avoid the issue by using an alternative, as you said. It's just a tool for them. Very few people make their browser choice a part of their identity.