Firefox performance has been trash for years, for many reasons. I still stick with it because it was included in my Ubuntu 8.04, which was the first OS I installed by myself, and more recently because of its stand regarding privacy. Now I might as well bite the bullet and move to Chrome or Edge, performance is much much better.
That's simply not true. I regularly find Firefox to be faster than Chromium. And the opposite is also true, but the difference isn't big. None of the two browsers has a clear advantage, and neither gets in the way of normal usage, nor in the way of heavier usage (I do some light data crunching and 2D convolution in the browser).
There's chromium, and then, for those who take their privacy more seriously than the average VPN customer that just wants to do piracy, there's ungoogled-chromium.
It's like chromium, just without feeding heaps of your personally-identifying metadata directly to Google, who give it directly to the NSA, who give it directly to Elon Musk and DOGE.
Remember, ALL mass surveillance by ALL intelligence agencies is ALWAYS a threat to your freedom, because you don't get to revoke it. You weren't consenting to sharing your information with the Obama administration, you were consenting to sharing your information with all future administrations, no matter how far removed from your own worldview those future administrations may be.
There is one solution. We the people demand an end to ALL government surveillance as well as severe legal consequences for all US government employees who ever helped build such systems, even if they were "just following orders", because neither following orders nor ignorance of the larger picture is an excuse for facilitating moral atrocities.
A few years ago Google came under fire for sending extra identifiers to Google's websites in a header named X-Client-Data[0]. I don't remember how many identifying bits that includes or whether they still do it, but it was the tipping point for me.
- Extensive evidence provided by brave national heroes and civil rights legends like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, including training materials for specific named NSA programs like PRISM that offer explicit lists of cooperating partners, including Google, Microsoft, Apple - basically every big tech company, but also smaller but popular ones, such as Skype (pre-Microsoft acquisition); this is well known among technology's civil rights advocates, and isn't hard to find discussion of by credible technologists, including the folks behind Protonmail¹
- Elon & DOGE: see literally every major American news network besides Fox pretty much since the inauguration, large swathes of the internet, several prominent discussions on HN. It's not just illegally mass-surveilled stuff either, they're going through all sorts of classified stuff right now!
