Tell HN: Firefox Is an awesome browser right now | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Firefox Is an awesome browser right now

1,310 pointsrrishi598 comments

I was having trouble loading GMail in Chrome. I wasn't sure if it was my spotty internet or the browser acting up so I gave Firefox a shot. And behold! Firefox opened it in a jiffy.

What impressed me most was that it was able to import saved passwords, bookmarks and websites history from Chrome pretty quickly. Previously, I had imported these to Chromium based web browsers (Brave & Edge) but was afraid that it might be an issue for non-Chromium browser like Firefox, but to my pleasant surprise, it wasn't.

Some really cool observations in first 30 mins of using it :

1. It opens websites really quickly, much faster than Chrome

2. All parts feel really customizable. I was able to get rid of the Firefox View tab really easily (I may explore it in the future because it seemed quite interesting to send links from phone to desktop). It was also easy enough to customize bookmarks bar to only show up in new tab.

3. Extensions ecosystem is thriving . I was glad to find my old favorite: Dark Reader. But I have also found a new favorite - Tab Stash. I also found an extension to download Youtube videos - Video Downloader, something I didn't find in Chrome

4. Clean look that gets out of your way.

I had given Firefox a shot in the past and had found Chrome to be a better performing browser at the time. But this time, Firefox seems to really have clicked with me.

I'd be glad to learn of any other cool features and extensions that y'all might want to share.

View on HN

I love Firefox too but this is a really weird post.

The OP is clearly having performance issues with Chrome presumably due to extensions interfering or something else. I can guarantee you that Google makes sure Gmail loads at least as fast in Chrome as in Firefox.

Chrome is customizable too (panes you can open/close), Chrome extensions are also thriving, and Chrome was the one who invented the "clean look", same as Firefox invented tabs.

This post just feels like weird marketing. There's nothing actually substantive about it. It doesn't feel like it belongs on HN.

I think it’s just some uncritical excitement. Given the typical discourse on our browser options, I thought it was nice :) perhaps not academic or technical, but relatable.

> Chrome extensions are also thriving

Yeah, especially with Manifest v3 :) https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/chrome-users-beware-ma...

This post is over a year old. Requiring Manifest v3 has been indefinitely postponed. There are arguments for using Firefox, but if people keep crying wolf about Manifest v3 before it hits and has a negative impact, especially over such a long timespan, it loses its impact.

"Mandatory beatings have been indefinitely postponed"

I have seen this phrase in several places, but cannot find the origin of the phrase. Where is it from?

It could well be a riff on the more famous, "The beatings will continue until morale improves"

I thought it was an upside down version of "the beatings will continue until morale improves."

Oh that's it.. no wonder why I couldn't find it. I didn't have enough coffee this morning.

Yeah, there was some blowback to make the big G reconsider, but don't you worry. I'm sure they're cooking up something similarly nefarious to accomplish their goal.

Google is the world's biggest ad company. Sufficiently few people use ad blocking that I don't think it's an existential threat, but as long as the shareholders demand infinite growth, getting rid of ad blocking will be seductive to Google.

    The goals of the advertising business model
    do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.
    - Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page
    - The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine

Ditto for extensible browsers.

I feel like they lost me when they got rid of "Don't be Evil" as their motto. I realized their slide down the slippery slope was well underway.

> Requiring Manifest v3 has been indefinitely postponed.

From docs [1]: "As of January 17, 2022 the Chrome Web Store has stopped accepting new Manifest V2 extensions."

[1]: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/mv3/intro/

Mv3 blocking has some advantages, and may be enough for most people, currently, at least until things escalate. Mv3's blocking capabilities are similar with Safari's, and have the advantage of performance and security.

You can see it for yourself by trying uBO Lite:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin-lite...

This extension is Mv3 compliant and decent enough. It blocks Google's trackers and ads, it blocks YouTube ads.

Also, keep in mind that other Chromium browsers have ad-blocking built-in, e.g., Brave and Vivaldi.

And Google's problem will be that all of Chrome's competition will have better adblocking as a selling point (except for Edge). So they can't keep Mv3 functionality too ineffective.

Which ironically could have solved the network performance problems that the OP is experiencing.

Chrome also has objectively better performance (https://www.phoronix.com/news/Firefox-Chrome-109-Benchmarks), especially for 3D performance. I'm sure on modern machines both browsers are more than fast enough, but I'm not quite sure why everyone seems to think firefox is faster.

On the other hand, I feel like the nyxt browser (https://nyxt.atlas.engineer) has a spot on HN, its very much like emacs in the sense everything is just Common Lisp you can redefine. Its definitely still considerably slower than chrome and firefox, webkit doesn't perform all too well.

"objectively better performance" What are yon talking about? How many people browse the web on an i9 13900K with 32GB RAM? Try a 5 year old laptop with 4GB RAM and you'll see a completely different picture - Firefox is far better at managing limited memory.

Also on Android (probably on iPhones as well) Chrome doesn't allow installation of ad-blockers - making it 10x slower than FF with uBlock Origin.

>Chrome doesn't allow installation of ad-blockers

That is not accurate. The Android version of Chrome does not support web extensions at all. It's not like Google has a switch somewhere that they can flip and make web extententions work. Supporting web extensions on Android would be a brand new feature and would need significant development time.

Not even Firefox properly supports web extensions on Android. They tried, but then seemingly gave up and just whitelisted a select few extensions from developers they could trust not to abuse the security of it.

If I say your chevy doesn't allow you to travel the friendly skies in your car this covers both lacking wings and a lock on the throttle keeping you from achieving sufficient lift. They chose not to port that pre-existing feature from desktop chrome when they built mobile chrome and I think arguably for an ad company not supporting ad blockers is a feature.

I use 8 extensions on firefox nightly on Android. They work quite well.

You have to jump through a bunch of hoops to use them, to the point that only a handful of people do it, which decreases the motivation for anyone to put effort into supporting Firefox for Android in their extensions.

It really seems to me like Firefox wanted to prevent a healthy extension ecosystem on Android, but they have not been transparent about their reasoning.

What hoops do I have to jump through to get some extensions on Chrome on Android?

Whataboutism isn't a particularly useful response. Firefox used to have thousands of supported extensions and allow users to install unsupported extensions. Now it doesn't, deliberately, and I would like them to reverse that decision. The fact that a more popular browser has a worse situation is irrelevant.

You can run a fork of Chromium that supports most desktop Chrome extensions: Kiwi Browser. That's not so different from having to run an unstable build (nightly) or fork (Iceraven) of Firefox.

> Supporting web extensions on Android would be a brand new feature and would need significant development time.

Kiwi Browser, a Chromium fork for Android with a small development team manages to have extensions, and successfully runs almost all extensions for desktop Chrome.

Google doesn't have extensions in Android Chrome because it doesn't want them. I'm not surprised; many popular extensions make Google's business model less profitable. Firefox also significantly crippled extensions in its Android version, and I'm more puzzled as to their motivations.

Did Google reject an effort to upstream this support? The priorities of a small browser trying to have unique features to offer people to use it are different from a large existing browser which isn't trying to attract new users, but are more focused on more impactful changes.

It appears they accepted changes to make it easier for third-party projects based on Chromium to enable extensions, implying they are actively choosing not to enable it on Chromium or Chrome.

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=107471...

Firefox did win in the small JavaScript benchmark they had, which covers 99% of the use case “websites that I’d willingly return to.”

In these discussions, I am always mindful that the two browsers have shared developer DNA (not to say code) from the inception of Google's offering: "Messrs. Brin and Page hired some Firefox developers who built a demonstration of Chrome. “It was so good that it essentially forced me to change my mind,” Mr. Schmidt said..." [0]

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20200805000248/https://blogs.wsj...

You can add Safari to the mix: Dave Hyatt (ex-Netscape/Mozilla) was part of the team at Apple that created Safari.

> Firefox invented tabs

Wow, that's false. Firefox was NOT the first browser with tabs. From the top of my head, Opera had tabs before Firefox, confirmed by a quick Google search. And apparently Opera wasn't the first browser with tabs either, although it was probably the first browser with a significant market share with tabs.

Also tabs were not invented by any browser, other programs used to have tabs before it was integrated into browsers.

simplebrowser had them before opera

dont know what kind of googling prodigies you are, but I googled 'first browser with tabs' and it says the InternetWorks Browser was the first

They’re not googling. Google is useful but sometimes has incorrect answers. The truth is we probably won’t know the true first browser with tabs. It could have been before the one you found.

These people are saying “I personally used browser Z with tabs before your example Browser A was even released”. If enough people continue the chain, we’ll get to “the oldest tabbed browser that anyone on HN remembers using”.

The nice thing about these anecdotes is that they can generally be validated quickly and easily. But your google result cannot be validated easily.

you know, you're alright with me

Related to this, the first browser I experienced with tabs was a custom VB3 wrapper around shdocvw.dll (IE) somewhere around early Windows 9x that I wrote myself. I'm not suggesting I invented tabbed browsing and certainly that VB project never influenced anyone else, I just find it a fun anecdote.

The easiest way to track it down isn't looking for the oldest memory. It's looking for reviews of Firefox when tabs were added and looking for the ones that complain about that earlier browser doing it better.

Way to jump in with a quick retort, when GP already conceded that Opera wasn't the first browser with tabs. But it was arguably the first browser that popularized tabs.

Besides, their point was refuting the "Firefox invented tabs" statement, which is valid.

listen here poindexter if you're feelin froggy you can @ me in the parking lot about it and we can nerd out

It’s only a “retort” if you read it uncharitably, and there’s no reason to do that.

I have a feeling it was either omniweb or icab. But I’m probably wrong. And anyway, tabs existed in other applications before browsers adopted, rather than invented, them. Right?

There's also the antecedent called the Mozilla Suite, that Firefox branched off from. It still lives on, somewhat zombie-like, as the Seamonkey Suite.

I think tabs are a terrible ideas (and I have probably more than 200 opened right now).

I think the browser should just make windows and it should be the window manager responsibility to group them in tabs or show them side to side or do whatever it's needed.

Same for code editors.

I often times need to group together tabs from different applications and that's obviously impossible.

I ran virtually the same extensions and set of open tabs when I tried Firefox and I have to say my (yes, anecdotal) experience was that FF loaded Gmail quicker than Chrome as well...

I'm pretty sure that Opera invented tabs, not Firefox.

> There's nothing actually substantive about it. It doesn't feel like it belongs on HN.

Most of the comments on every new Firefox release post are just as bad and have nothing to do with the actual release (folks whining about how their incredibly-niche use-case isn't supported anymore which breaks their workflow etc.), so in some ways it's nice to see something positive (which I would wager is more representative of the average user).

https://xkcd.com/1172/

Wow there really is an xkcd for everything.

You didn't know that one?

You must be one of today's lucky 10000 [1].

  [1] https://xkcd.com/1053/

It's xkcd's, all the way down.

> It's xkcd's, all the way down.

Forgot your link [1]

[1] https://xkcd.com/1416/

BRUH

It really is

https://xkcd.com/1416/

Incredible

By coincidence, just this morning I had a panic because I tried to close FF by closing the only window (which is something I need to do periodically because memory usage will build up over time), and I thought I had lost the tabs because when I opened it back up, they were gone with no way to restore. Apparently the behavior had changed so that closing the last window no longer closes FF, but just that window a la Skype.

(Fortunately I was able to figure out what was going on and restored the previous window.)

Also, the automatic "check before exiting FF" got turned off somehow.

So, yeah, lots of fun surprises to deal with.

Firefox normal collection, automatic or triggered in about:memory, will reduce memory used by Firefox about the same as restarting firefox. The latter only SEEMS to reduce usage because it also unloads all tabs which are only reloaded when accessed. If you want to prove that to yourself compare a restart preserving tabs and manually trigger tab unloading in about:unloads

If you are dealing with normal amounts of memory usage and you have less than 16GB you may consider upgrading RAM considering this is as little as $40-60 at this point and well worth the look.

The check before closing multiple tabs didn't get turned off somehow the default changed in 2021 to default unchecked.

Lastly the behavior regarding closing the last window closing Firefox remains unchanged. It does in fact still work that way. If it didn't properly close I would suggest that is a bug or a second window on another workspace. If all you desire is to restart as opposed to actually closing firefox you can trigger a restart in about:profiles this has the benefit of working no matter how many windows you have open.

>Firefox normal collection, automatic or triggered in about:memory, will reduce memory used by Firefox about the same as restarting firefox.

Obviously not, since the memory usage is increasing without bound despite no corresponding increase in memory-intensive tabs. Thanks for suggesting an alternate workaround for the collection failures though.

>If you are dealing with normal amounts of memory usage and you have less than 16GB you may consider upgrading RAM considering this is as little as $40-60 at this point and well worth the look.

I have 32 GB, which it (thankfully) hasn't come close to, but would, if I weren't periodically restarting. Kinda funny how we automatically don't expect 16 GB to be enough memory for text/image web pages though.

>The check before closing multiple tabs didn't get turned off somehow the default changed in 2021 to default unchecked.

Makes sense, I think it was a while since I was shocked to see that behavior.

>Lastly the behavior regarding closing the last window closing Firefox remains unchanged. It does in fact still work that way. If it didn't properly close I would suggest that is a bug or a second window on another workspace.

No other workspaces, so probably a bug. I found this report of something very similar, though on Mac rather than Windows:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1772056

>If all you desire is to restart as opposed to actually closing firefox you can trigger a restart in about:profiles this has the benefit of working no matter how many windows you have open.

Thanks, but I'd prefer the option that can be done with a few quick key commands, and Firefox isn't customizable in that way anymore.

The quit behavior does seem to be a Mac specific behavior not a bug. You'll note the request to change it is labeled an enhancement as opposed to a bug. I agree it seems a sub-optimal choice.

Your memory usage growing without bounds on the other hand is obviously a bug. I would create a fresh profile and see if you can reproduce this behavior without extensions and report it.

I also suggest using Tab Session Manager. Sometimes I save a session and close everything and start working on a different project, but I know I can go back to my previous session and continue the previous project. I'm not afraid of losing any tabs because it also has an autosave.

Does it save each tab's back/forward history? AFAIK, the WebExtension API doesn't provide any robust mechanism to obtain it directly.

> and I thought I had lost the tabs because when I opened it back up, they were gone with no way to restor

You know ```Ctrl+shift+t``` this opens the last closed tab and - at least in chrome - restores the previous environment after restart

Yeah. The votes are just the normal FF fanclub, which I'm a card holding member of. This post seems a bit like karma farming to me.

> (folks whining about how their incredibly-niche use-case isn't supported anymore which breaks their workflow etc.)

If these complaints come up every release, then perhaps they aren't "incredibly-niche" after all. At least not what they represent in aggregate.

Browsers remind me a lot of superstores and why successful ones go out of their way to stock low-volume specialty items despite them having low profit margins, costing more to handle and stock, and having a very small subset of their customers care enough to buy them:

1. Customers will usually go to a store that's further away from them if it has 100% of the items they want even when your store is much closer but only has 95%.

2. Cut enough of those low-volume items and you'll become that 95% store for most of you customers.

What the team steering firefox need to understand is that the average user is a myth. The average user does not exist. Every user is unique and has their own set of peculiarities. If you remove enough functionality based on telemetry or your own limited perception of what "niche" is (hello, gnome!), everyone will eventually be affected.

I think most of Firefox's hemorrhaging of users today is because Firefox became a 95% browser for most developers and users.

Yes, I also felt similarly. I guess OP has this overwhelmingly positive opinion and is so easily impressed because his bar of acceptance is so low.

It might be the excitement from the novelty:

> Some really cool observations in first 30 mins of using it

>It doesn't feel like it belongs on HN.

A discussion about the state of two modern web browsers doesn't belong on HN? Why not? There are 300 comments in a couple hours.

>This post just feels like weird marketing.

Come on. Direct links to Apples new product announcements aren't?

No need to police the articles, just skip over them.

Good think with firefox is if an extension slow down a page, it'll tell you which extension to blame. I was having an issue with a page with a huge form loading super slow (10 minutes!) in chrome until I tried loading it on firefox and it told me that lastpass was the culprit.

I hope you've dumped Lastpass and changed all your passwords [0]

[0] https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/lastpass-cus...

There is also "about:performance" which will tell you resource use by page.

> Same as Firefox invented tabs

I think opera did https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_(web_browser)

> Chrome was the one who invented the "clean look"

Ironic naming given their aim was to get rid of as much chrome as possible.

> I can guarantee you that Google makes sure Gmail loads at least as fast in Chrome as in Firefox.

Why? I can imagine them working hard to make sure that Gmail loads fast in Chrome. The Gmail team probably suggests changes to the Chrome team and vice versa.

So long as Gmail is fast in Chrome, I can't imagine Google would be all that upset about Firefox or any other browser loading it faster. At most it would be an indicator that they need to make changes to stay competitive.

> Chrome is customizable too

Not really. Got a link to a Tree Style Tab that properly renders itself in a chrome sidebar? Because that's still not possible.

Agree; and in general I think people underestimate how heavy and potentially dangerous extensions are. Adding an extension is like loading an additional webpage on each primary page load, and it can make as many requests and consume as many resources as it wants. It can also interfere with or alter the behavior and performance of the primary page in any manner that the DOM allows. As a web dev who has investigated a lot of performance complaints, disabling extensions is one of my first debugging steps.

> I'd be glad to learn of any other cool features and extensions that y'all might want to share.

I'm sure others will be sharing it as I type this comment as well, but for many HN readers, Multi-Account Containers [1] are bound to be a godsend. Easily log in to different accounts for any website, in different tabs. Great feature that's not available in other browsers.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/multi-account-conta...

And some more tips:

- Translate web pages locally, without sending any data to remote servers: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/firefox-translation...

- Vertical/tree-style tabs: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/sidebery/

- If you're in the EU: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/consent-o-matic/

- If you use RSS: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/feed-preview/

And I assume you've already got uBlock Origin. And as others mentioned, try also using Firefox as your mobile browser, so you can send tabs from one to the other, which is pretty neat.

In addition:

- SponsorBlock - Automatically tag and skip portions of youtube videos, such as sponsors, intros, recaps, and others. - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sponsorblock/

- Firefox Relay - Automatically create up to 5 (for free, more if paying for it) email addresses that redirect to your actual address, to avoid giving your private address to everyone. - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/private-relay...

Ha, thanks for sharing Firefox Relay - I actually work on that, so I was a bit hesitant about sharing it. I'll add that "paying for it" is €1 a month for unlimited email addresses.

Not a paying customer but if there was a way to sign up and pay anonymously (crypto and/or cash via mail), I'd be banging on the door even at a significant markup.

Is something like privacy dot com (virtual card numbers) not anonymous enough? I kinda don’t wanna know what you’re doing with these email addresses

There are a lot of people who just want privacy wherever they can get it. It's not necessarily something nefarious, but the result of the question "Does this person need to know who I am? No. Therefore there is nothing to gain and only something to lose by telling them."

For me it's more like "Do I want to waste time dredging this info back up in case they ever get breached", to which the answer is almost always "No".

Those are some really interesting extensions you've suggested.

I'll be sure to keep Relay in the back of my mind, I haven't had need of it yet.

Though I do have requirement for SponsorBlock avid watcher of YT that I am, I am a little hesitant to add SponsorBlock as I am not quite sure how it would work flawlessly without some really complicated algorithms potentially involving ML work. I am curious to know if in your experience it has ever erred and automatically skipped portions it wasn't supposed to ? Or any other type of errors ?

It's crowdsourced. The downside to that is that less popular videos may not have the sponsor information skipped, although you do have the ability to post start and end timestamps for videos that don't have it in place yet.

From my understanding SponsorBlock doesn't use any ML stuff, but is simply a database that allows other users to submit what they think is a sponsor (or other annoyance). I've found it to sometimes not get all sponsors (especially for more niche videos), and the self-promotion sections are usually too agressive (but they can be disabled). I'd say give it a go honestly

Yeah, the word "automatically" does a lot of heavy lifting there. But like others said, it's crowsourced. You watch a video, tag it, done. There's some anti abuse tools, like tags done by new users being served not all the time and tested by other users before it's trusted.

I have never seen bad section tagging over the past two years.

> Translate web pages locally

This is a good start for a but what I'm looking for is Local Full Text Search of every page in my history. It shouldn't be hard to automatically maintain a text index of the pages I've browsed so that I can search them by keyword without bookmarking everything. Maybe it's just me but chronological history is useless beyond a few days.

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/falcon_extension/

Why don't you just search the add-ons? This would have taken less time than to formulate your post.

I did, and never found this. Thanks.

You could have just pasted the URL. When someone here asks a well-formulated question I assume they've done their research first.

This is one of those moments where I realize other folks on HN have almost exactly the same Firefox setup as me. Nice list of add-on recommendations!

I would add in a couple more, for anyone tempted to switch away from Chrome or Safari:

- Redirector: https://www.einaregilsson.com/redirector/ Very helpful for redirecting "new" reddit to old.reddit.com, AMP links to normal links, Twitter to Nitter, etc.

- RES (Reddit Enhancement Suite): https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/reddit-enhanc... Provides built-in image preview and lots of other subtle goodies for old.reddit.com. I have a very hard time browsing reddit without it!

- Sponsorblock for Youtube: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sponsorblock/ If you watch any amount of YouTube on channels with lots of sponsors, this is a great way to keep your sanity. Works just like sponsor skipping in the Overcast podcast client.

Would you share your redirector redirections list?

(Sorry for the lazyness :P)

Use libredirect instead, it comes with a prodigious amount of configured redirections. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34641069

nice, also these

- https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clea... - https://addons.mozilla.org/pl/android/addon/onetab/ - stylish - kill sticky

I love tree style tabs and I really want to encourage people to set it up and really customize their user stylesheet to make the best use of it. I have removed all traces of the original tab bar at the top and the three primary window buttons (close, restore, minimize) giving me back lots of that precious vertical space. Their GitHub has a ton of CSS snippets to help you with customization. I'd also be happy to share my user CSS file.

Please do.

@DangitBobby please share your user CSS file

>- Vertical/tree-style tabs: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/sidebery/

This is the biggest reason why Chrome sucks - they have no workable version of vertical tabs.

Reasons why horizontal tabs are clearly inferior:

1. Screens (generally) have way more horizontal space than vertical and you read webpages vertically. I already have an OS top bar and a browser top bar taking some of this valuable vertical space.

2. Most webpages have predefined right and left margins, so vertical tabs don't take away from the visible space of the page.

3. The size of the tab header is critical for being able to read the name of the tab. I have my vertical tabs set to 30 characters. If I had horizontal tabs with 30 characters, I could fit maybe 6 tabs on the screen at once.

4. Ease of having many more concurrently open tabs. I easily have 38 tabs open and visible without scrolling. 8 of those are pinned tabs which take up the space of one tab. I use 6 different windows (which are category titled using the Titler extension). That is 228 tabs open at once and very easily accessible and readable. (of course I use Total Suspender to keep them from taking too many resources)

All this said, Firefox still sucks because vertical should be the default or at least a simple toggle. As it is, you have to trust some extension and then you have to jump through obnoxious hoops just to get the damn horizontal tabs turned off. And yes, there are some other browsers that have vertical tabs built in, but I am not touching Edge or Opera as they are from dubious companies. I also think that Brave is working on it, but they seem dubious as well.

Now to my complaints about Sidebery (which is superior to Tree Style Tabs). Sidebery has tree style as well, but I turn it off as it undermines the value of #3 above. It has panels, which are goofy and, while you don't have to use them, you still lose a tab worth of space for it. You also lose an even larger tab space to the Sidebery title (which is a menu and an X that aren't necessary. Sidebery doesn't work well with the Titler extension - when you want to move a tab to another window, it doesn't show you the title.

I used to work on the Opera browser. I quit when it got sold to China. Also wanted to do that, since most people as well as main Oslo HQ was fired from Poland a year earlier.

Opera was very much a not-dubious company. But that is what it has turned in to.

-- I use Firefox as my main work-browser, and have for a long time, and the last few years I've used Vivaldi as my main personal browser.

I find it easier to just have separate browsers rather than do anything more advanced for context. :)

Feed-preview is so helpful, thank you!

feed preview seemed to break my browser since I have a ton of tabs open all the time. Not sure why the extension causes this, but just a head's up

Firefox has a really great json viewer that I prefer even over my IDE, but it's one weakness is it's lack of XML support which Chrome does have :/

Consent-o-matic does not work on most websites; you still have to click the consent banners manually. Try https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/

I'd love to be able to enable DRM for a single container. Until then, I have to continue with profiles.

You're right, but for a counter-point versus Chromium, multi-account containers are worse for security compared with profiles…

This matters when you can't 100% trust your browser session, or the installed extensions. Did you ever load https://my.1password.com in your browser? How do you feel about it? Do you trust your installed extensions to not take a peak? I don't.

Chrome solves this elegantly via profiles. Even more, you can install websites as “apps”, with a shortcut that gets indexed by the OS, and Chrome remembers the profile. I simply type “1Password Online” or “Banking” and my Chromium opens a new window in my “Private” profile that has no extensions installed. Firefox dropped the ball on both PWA shortcuts, and on profiles.

Even for using multiple accounts, I feel like Chromium profiles are a better solution.

For example, my workplace has very strict security requirements, and when looking at company documents it's not cool to provide access to extensions like LanguageTool or Grammarly. I'd be in trouble. And Chromium always had finer grained permissions for extensions, like activating or deactivating them per website.

Wouldn't Firefox's profiles accomplish the same thing? (Yes, I understand they are difficult to access but they are still there.)

That said, containers are a handy tool for people who want to access multiple accounts without the trouble of setting up individual profiles. Keep in mind, if you're only trying to access a personal and work Google account you probably don't want to spend time setting up a separate profile for each then keeping the settings synchronized.

Yes, but Firefox's profiles are very hard to use (apart from keeping multiple Firefox channels installed, e.g., stable, beta), I tried, and I couldn't.

Starting a profile is difficult, and also switching between windows, since the OS sees profiles as different apps. It's probably not hard to fix, but Mozilla has had other priorities.

Just open about:profiles. You can create new ones, remove old ones, set which one is the default and can open them in a new browser. I use this all the time to open a browser as a new SSO functional user without having to log out.

I don't know why they don't add this somewhere in the menus and I don't know why you can't bookmark about:profiles, but this works well for me as it is.

The -ProfileManager command line flag opens it up as a startup window.

Try Profile Switcher for Firefox, which provides a Chrome-like interface for managing and switching between profiles in Firefox.

Add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profile-switc...

Source: https://github.com/null-dev/firefox-profile-switcher

My problem is opening links from apps. Sometimes I want a link in Slack (or other desktop apps) to open in my personal profile and sometimes I want it to use my work profile. With Brave/Chrome, the link will open in whatever profile window is active. I can't find a way to make this work with Firefox.

Have you tried making a different desktop entry/shortcut for each Firefox profile and then setting a browser picker as your default browser?

- Junction (Linux browser picker): https://github.com/sonnyp/Junction

- Finicky (macOS browser rule setter): https://github.com/johnste/finicky and Browserosaurus (macOS browser picker): https://github.com/will-stone/browserosaurus

- Hurl (Windows browser picker): https://github.com/U-C-S/Hurl

The -ProfileManager flag to Firefox gives a startup window to manage, create, and select profiles (and has existed forever).

You can create shortcuts (or shell scripts) by hand with --no-remote -p ProfileName to auto-open specific sites in specific profiles. It's certainly less convenient than PWA installs, but is an old tool with all sorts of old ways to automate it.

Multi-account Container is far easier than all that though and does reduce the number of windows to manage in your OS taskbars. Obviously you need to be careful with which extensions you install that they are safe for every container you want to use, but that's a given and a good idea in general no matter how many profiles you use: keep extensions to the bare minimum you are comfortable with. Vet their permissions manifests and keep additional permissions you grant them to a minimum.

Holy crap thank you!

I have to log into multiple Microsoft365 tenants and it drove me crazy with the amount of signing OUT I needed to do when switching accounts, to the point where my crappy workaround was to use different browsers for each account (Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Opera, Brave, etc) but I started to run out of different browsers.

This multi-account container extension is a godsend

Chrome supports multiple user profiles. I assume Edge and Brave do too.

Or you can start them pointing to a completely different user-profile-directory.

I do that, no chance for one to leak into the others.

Or you can just use FF containers - which is 99% less work.

Yea, but those came about after I'd built the wrapper for quickly launching different profiles of either Chrome or FF.

FF containers are more work than the 2 clicks I do now, powered by some Python I wrote like 15 years ago (with minor maintenance).

you still have to switch through browser windows right? with containers it is just a tab click and you can put related tabs for a particular topic in a single window

that works to some of the same things firefox can do, but you can also tell firefox to "Always open this site in my banking container" and the next time you load it up, from any container, it will switch it the one you prefer. Also, I really love having amazon and facebook on their own containers, to cut down on all the weird advertising stuff I see..

Chrome's support is way more invasive on google sites. Once you "go multi-profile" you are forced on every google site to do the same thing, because of the borderline-illegal tight integration of Chrome with google sites.

For instance, I can't have Youtube Music playing something on one profile while doing a Google Meet on another profile in a different tab (has to be the other profile window). In Firefox it's site-based (and tab-based) but Chrome locks down on any Google site.

Finally it's actually really hard to undo multi-profile in Chrome once you switch to it, I had to throw out all my Chrome profiles to get back to the old, preferred behavior.

Use profiles to separate work for each tenant, whether you use firefox or chrome. Firefox supports multiple profiles too! Chrome supports multiple profiles. And launching chrome/firefox with certain profiles requires setting up shortcuts with --flags. So you can have one browser shortcut for one tenant and another shortcut for another tenant.

simple tab groups + Firefox counters are far superior that using different profiles

Not sure how containers can be superior than profiles for separating sessions between work clients. Auto switch container feature is not applicable. And reloading tabs in another container should not ever be required. Plus, logins and passwords of different work clients do not get merged into one profile.

You can also make new profiles on about:profiles and open a browser as another user without destroying SSO for your current user. I'm assuming Chrome has something similar, but I've never installed it so I don't know.

Caveat: there is still no first-party support for resetting the cache or the cookies in a per-container fashion. https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers/issues/3...

Cookie AutoDelete is my go-to for deleting cookies.

I can't imagine browsing the web without MAC and Temporary Containers. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...

It's sort of like everything opens in a private browsing window, except the stuff I've whitelisted.

One more extension related to container management - https://github.com/kintesh/containerise

This lets you set regex/wildcard to contain subdomain or redirect happy sites into a single container

Oh that's definitely a use case that had arisen in my workflow. I'll be sure to check it out. Thanks!

Multi account containers + Temporary Containers [1] + I don't care about cookies [2] are an awesome combination I use, I have ~10 fixed containers and for almost everything it's a new container that lives as long as the tab is open.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con... [2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/i-dont-care-a...

Why do you need a container for almost everything? It's it for privacy reasons? If yes, what do containers offer which is not already provided by the total cookie protection feature?

Would love to know this too! It's a bit confusing the amount of options available.

Hate to be a black cloud, but as much as I love containers, my containers and their settings often disappeared. I can no longer remember exactly why. it may be if i disabled containers and then re-enabled them. (Containers may be a source of glitches so disabling is to help with troubleshooting.)

getpocket.com needs to be logged in via container 0. if you put getpocket to a personal container, and don't login to getpocket from container 0, then firefox's save to pocket feature does not work.

i cannot save bookmarks to automatically open in set containers (personal gmail to open in one container, work gmail to open in another container, etc.).

Otherwise, containers is something i miss and i have used workarounds to implement the same with MS Edge.

Why not start firefox with the -P flag for troubleshooting? And keep your default Profile using containers.

Not sure what the flag does but your context tells me another profile without my extensions is established. The problem is I am trying to figure out which extension is causing the problem. So enabling and disabling each one is supposed to be a procedure.

Regardless, enabling/disabling should not cause losing settings.

instead of bookmarking if are fine using another extension, then use "Session Boss" to save and restore sessions

> i cannot save bookmarks to automatically open in set containers (personal gmail to open in one container, work gmail to open in another container, etc.).

Sure you can: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/container-boo...

I wrote about my favorites here [1]. I make an active effort to sculpt my online experience into something useful rather than intellectually draining; every time I fire up an unconfigured browser instance on a new machine I'm taken aback at how much I lean on various extensions and configurations to make the web usable.

[1] https://alexplant.org/post/my-favorite-firefox-plugins-produ...

One thing I haven't figured out with container tabs: say I'm currently in one of the container tabs and I want cmd + T to open a new container tab. This doesn't work by default, AFAICT...instead it opens a regular non-container tab. How can I make it so that I get a new tab for the same container I'm currently on. Right now, I have to either go to File > new container tab or right-click the tab and click "new tab"..but I don't like using the mouse.

Control + Shift + a number key should open a tab in a specific container. You can map containers to specific number keys in the addon settings.

Oh awesome, thank you!

cmd + shift + <number>

You can configure 10 different tabs in extensions settings

I never understood the concept of Multi-Account Containers. I would guess it makes sense when one hardly closes the browser (and clears the cache) and has dozens of tabs open? What is a standard use case (home/work)?

I simply use Temporary Containers to isolate tabs (or different domains) and login to websites either by hand or via KeepassXC's browser integration. No per-container setup needed, every tab just lives briefly in its own little container.

There are lots of different use cases.

1. Further defense in depth against common XSS attacks: if you only ever log into banking sites in a Banking container, then some random ad-sprung malware trying to access your bank in any other container will never find a logged in banking session to hijack (no matter how good your bank thinks they are at XSS protection and auto-timeouts).

2. Isolating tracking cookies from major ad companies. This reduces cross-correlation between/among them. I have separate containers at this point for all of: Google account usage, Twitter account usage, Facebook account usage, and Amazon account usage. The amount of targeted advertising I see decreases every time I sequester one of these major accounts into its own container. The trade-off is the increase in ReCaptchas needed and the increase in advertising companies complaining I must be using an "ad blocker". (I don't have any ad blocker extension installed, just this strategy of isolating major cookies to specific containers and Firefox built-in Enhanced Tracking Protection.)

I use Firefox sort of begrudgingly. It's marginally less bad than the other options, but it's still an awful browser.

I vehemently disagree with almost all of its design decisions, and with every new release they seem to stray even farther from sane UX.

It has hamburger menus on desktop and a lot of weird space-saving design that makes no sense on a modern high resolution display. Buttons are small, have cryptic flat Linear B icons with no labels, and the menus are hard to navigate.

It's also nearly impossible to disable all the tracking they do. Even if you do, they'll sometimes remotely change your settings, so there's no guarantee settings will stay the way you configured them. They love to talk about how privacy is important and keep building tools to disable other people's tracking, but their own data gathering is sacrosanct and must be retained at all costs.

Overall Mozilla seems to wage an all-out war on user agency, constantly trying to take away configuration options, while pushing shit nobody wants like Pocket or their themes.

This also sounds like Chrome and Edge.

Yeah.

I think part of the problem is that if all they're doing with their browser is to emulate Chrome, they'll never be more than a Chrome clone.

> Buttons are small...

I don't understand this criticism. How often do you actually have to use those buttons? At best, once in a long while. So given that, why not make the buttons unobtrusive.

If the buttons are small, they are harder to click. It's also harder to understand what they do, which is important when they have icons that are just cryptic monochrome squiggles.

What's the merit in making the buttons unobtrusive? What are you going to do with all those saved pixels? There is no pixel shortage on desktop! That's a mobile design consideration.

When the browser is covering a sixth of my screen it's already uncomfortably large. There is no reason to save hundreds of pixels when there are literally millions to spare.

Given this line of thought, why doesn't Firefox put every single icon from the menu on the toolbar. Since there is so much space. My argument is that since those buttons are rarely used, they should be unobtrusive.

Looking at my toolbar now, I really don't think they are that small. Just the right size. https://i.imgur.com/wyM9c2k.png

Well if you make something hard to access, of course it won't be used very often.

The buttons are pretty tiny within the context of the entire screen: https://imgur.com/BGKsaeD

Your toolbar is a nightmare for people that may have some eyesight problems or are not expert FPS shooters in the latest triple A game and miss some mouse dexterity.

What I'm trying to say is that a large surface is good for muscle memory. And I have a lot of pixels to play with, 4k screens are cheap. Of-course programs have to scale between small and (very) big screens, but making everything very small by default is not the way to go.

Curious to know the set of extensions you've got there

In order of buttons:

Downloads (not an extension)

Firefox Account (not an extension - I really should hide it) uBlockOrigin

Honey (basically coupons)

PushBullet (I use this occasionally to move links or images between the PC and iPhone. Should probably get rid of it since Firefox now supports functionality natively).

Multi-Account containers

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>My argument is that since those buttons are rarely used, they should be unobtrusive.

Why the half measure? If they are rarely used remove them. If they are used enough to leave them on the UI make them big enough and labeled well enough that I don't need a decoder ring and magnifying glass. Making them small and unintelligible is probably the best way to make them rarely used.

> There is no pixel shortage on desktop! That's a mobile design consideration.

I'm using Firefox on half of my laptop's screen, so I'm glad the menus don't take up that much space.

Some of those things are sorted out easily with Librewolf (patched Firefox) and Arkenfox (drop-in user.js configuration).

Both are easy and encouraged to customize but also work fine out of the box.

It’s trivial to increase the UI button size in Firefox, though.

Really? How do you do that?

I can't open it right now but I'm pretty sure you right click anywhere around the bookmarks bar (NOT a bookmark) you get an option to customize the UI/bars and there's a checkbox for icon size

Unless I'm completely mixing this up with Chrome but I don't see that here.

Nope, not getting any of that. If it ever existed, it's another casualty in the war on configurability. There's an option to add more space between the icons, but they're still as tiny as they ever were.

It still exists. Customize Toolbar -> Density (bottom left). There are only 2 or 3 presets, but it is possible to slightly adjust the icon size. Just confirmed on 109.0.1.

Huh, I get two presets. And the density only changes the spacing between the buttons. They're still the same size.

You may be right. I checked before replying, but I may have just been tricked by an optical illusion with the extra padding shifting everything.

By default there are only 2 densities, but there used to also be a "Compact" option which was removed. I believe it is possible to still enable this, though it is officially unsupported at this point.

You can change every aspect of the chrome yourself if you want.

I appreciate the space saving. Not everyone has a 4K 30 inch display

Why can't a browser exist that makes use of such a display though? Seems like every browser is targeting 12½" monitors to the detriment of proper desktops.

I would not be shocked if 13” was, in fact, the modal display size.

A lot of people work off of laptops or even tablets.

Why is not possible to cater to the needs of more than one group of users?

Windows 95 had the ability to change the size of its icons. Clearly it can be done.

You can scale the whole UI

https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/7wnf7y/is_there_an...

I agree with your sentiment. To address privacy concerns I decided to use a privacy-oriented fork: LibreWolf - https://librewolf.net/. I use it as a daily driver for all my use cases and it works like a charm (inc extensions).

It is frustrating that Mozilla/firefox position themselves as user friendly and privacy-focused but they don't walk the talk. It's all marketing lies so my sympathy for the org is on an all-time low.

Telemetry is not synonymous with tracking. You can implement telemetry while not tracking users. You can track users without telemetry.

There is a lot of telemetry, but there doesn’t seem to be any tracking.

I don't want my applications to dial home and tell Mozilla what I'm doing with them. Doesn't matter what you call it.

It does. “I don’t want telemetry” and “I don’t want tracking” are two overlapping sets of people. Whether or not you care about the distinction, others do.

It doesn't. You're replying to marginalia_nu, who has just clarified their position after you made a point. You're not replying to all those hypothetical people who haven't made a peep.

What's the difference here? There's a unique client ID included in the report, so that means statistics can be tracked at the individual level.

In theory you can have telemetry without tracking but I'm pretty sure nobody does it anymore.

Telemetry analysis doesn’t care who you are, and makes no effort to find out, even if it’s plausible that one could find out of effort was taken to do so.

Tracking analysis does care who you are, and makes every effort to find out, whether to sell marketing to you or to sell your data to others.

It isn’t necessary to deanonymize telemetry to make use of it, and it’s quite costly to do so (both in PII storage duties to GDPR et al. and in enrichment terms), so tracking isn’t knowingly done by default by lots of telemetry implementers (for example, Homebrew).

Note that telemetry implemented using Facebook clearly does end up with Facebook trying to track you in order to sell you ads and sell your data; implementation decisions are critically relevant when it comes to collecting telemetry, in order to not accidentally cause tracking.

"Telemetry is not synonymous with tracking. You can implement telemetry while not tracking users. You can track users without telemetry."

Yes, it is. If you have the ability to track, then tracking is done. It is the nature of risk management.

As a long time FF user my opinion of it took quite a hit recently. I wanted to hack together a small personal extension, likely outside the scope of what Tampermonkey can do easily. I was really shocked by the mandatory signature enforcement. You need to get your extension signed by Mozilla with no way to disable it in the standard FF, the about:config setting does nothing (see [1]). Your temporary extension will also be deleted on browser restart. Sure, I can use the developer edition, but why? I am not a web developer. I get Mozilla's arguments about user security, but isn't an about:config tweak obscure enough? It already shows you plenty warning when you open it.

Looking at the mentioned LibreWolf, the changes reminded me of my time using ungoogled Chromium. I left that path, because it seemed like an uphill battle to keep up with upstream changes in the long term. Also you potentially risk using a somewhat outdated browser until all changes are ported to the new version. I was also not a fan of giving Chromium browsers additional market share.

For me switching to FF was primarily about using a browser supporting user choice and privacy, not for its UX or anything else. However Mozilla is losing my trust in this regard. Opt-out telemetry/tracking/whatever you want to call it and user experiments as well as reducing user choice with forced signatures by a central party, this sounds counter to why I switched in the first place. I hate that I have to go into settings after installing it to disable "features", it is not Windows...

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-on-signing-in-firef... (I am also a bit surprised I had to strip an utm key from this URL...)

Usually you find that the reason these barriers exist is because people were abusing the previous system.

There are (sadly) plenty of people out there who will install a browser extension & tweak an about:config setting if you set up the right incentives to get them to look past the warnings.

The price of protecting these people from those that would take advantage of them is developers having to download a different version of the browser in order to develop their extensions.

When you dig deeper, you will indeed find that the public reason for these kind of restrictions is "to keep the user safe".

They claim to be worried about malware installing their own extensions, so they lock everything down. As if that same malware wouldn't just patch the firefox binary to allow loading unsigned extensions.

It's ridiculous and obviously meant as a first step towards a walled garden. It's very unfortunate that firefox followed google in this.

> It's ridiculous and obviously meant as a first step towards a walled garden. It's very unfortunate that firefox followed google in this.

Check out Firefox for Android. It has a Walled Garden of extensions. There is a list of about 20 whitelisted extensions. All others are (falsely) claimed to be "incompatible".

> Usually you find that the reason these barriers exist is because people were abusing the previous system.

I absolutely get this argument and this is also what I got from the Mozilla docs. For me the decision for user safety moved too far away from user freedom. I get that this is a tradeoff, I am not happy with the outcome personally. I have no perfect solution to this problem either, I just find the current state runs counter to what I personally would expect.

I see a sliding scale from Apple walled garden to Windows XP wild west. I think I am more on the XP side than the Apple side, so my view likely clashes with what Mozilla has in mind.

> The price of protecting these people from those that would take advantage of them is developers having to download a different version of the browser in order to develop their extensions.

So what stops these people from downloading a developer version of the browser themselves?

You cannot protect people from themselves. The only cure for idiocy is death after all.

> Usually you find that the reason these barriers exist is because people were abusing the previous system.

Why be vague? Point out some people who were abusing the previous system who couldn't abuse it now.

Why doesn't google do the same then? They have the same issue and have a much larger market share.

They don't do it because it doesn't stop those plenty of people from doing what they want to do. This misguided decision from Mozilla only serves to drive developers and tinkerers away from their browser. (No, I will not download the nightly/beta browser just to run my own addons)

The signature process for extensions not offered to the public (on addons.mozilla.org) is automated and pretty much instantaneous, and they only verify there is no obvious malware in the extension. I’ve built a handful of extensions for myself and getting them signed is just a small nuisance.

> I am not a web developer.

Maybe not, but you seem to be a browser extension developer.

I've used FF for a decade and have literally never noticed a UI change that I gave any thought to whatsoever.

If you want a menu, and you're not on Mac where Firefox supplies a full set of menus by default like any other well-behaved Mac application, hit the "Alt" key on your keyboard. Or right click on the toolbar and show it. Honestly, I wish I could turn it off because I only ever activate it by accident when switching from Mac to Linux and forgetting to switch from Cmd to Ctrl.

> I vehemently disagree with almost all of its design decisions, and with every new release they seem to stray even farther from sane UX.

You're entitled to your opinion, certainly, but please do be aware that not everyone agrees with you? I quite like Alpenglow, I'm happy with the combined onmibar, I trust them to not to abuse their telemetry. My understanding is that the data suggests that more people use themes than use "regular" add-ons.

It's by no means perfect, but it's a whole lot better than one might expect from reading all the negative comments on pretty much any Firefox thread.

Recommend:

1. Sign up to Firefox sync

2. Install the Multi-Account Containers extension. Create containers to partition your identities. Eg: Banking, Shopping different Gmail accounts, different AWS console accounts etc

3. Install the "containerise" extension so you can create URL rules that automatically open sites in the correct container. (It can match URL regexes, allowing you to identify different accounts on each platform. Eg: on gmail, 'mail.google.com/mail/u/?authuser=hunter12@gmail.com', which you can bookmark as "Hunter12 Gmail")

4. Kagi search

5. uBlock Origin extension

6. Simple Tab Groups extension

7. Don't use any add-ons for sensitive identities like the Banking one.

You can't (as far as I can tell, and I'd love to be wrong!) set add-ons to only activate on certain containers in Firefox. You have to setup separate profiles, which are fully isolated browser contexts and only install extensions you want into each profile.

It's the biggest thing that I like better about Chrome - the profiles are seamless and easy to switch and I can set up different profiles with different extensions.

Containers work "ok" for Firefox for me, but for my biggest use-cases, like splitting work, personal, banking, shopping (e.g. where "Honey" or "Rakuten" are allowed to live) into different contexts with different extensions - Chrome is so much more seamless/effortless.

I think that private tabs are the ones where you can set extensions to not run

In the wake of Lastpass there were some criticism of Firefox's password storage security IIRC, might look into that before using sync for passwords.

I disable all password storage in the browser and use a password manager. It's just used to sync extensions, bookmarks and open tabs

Why is your email address my password? Wtf?

Thank you for the suggestions. I have got uBlock origin and will look into Multi-Account Container pretty soon too!

Would love to actually be able to use Firefox Sync. But I refuse when I cannot self host it. It seems it is not actually possible to self host it.

Looks like you can with some extra steps https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncstorage-rs

Yes, I am aware of the project. However, it seems from this issue that self-hosting Firefox Sync is not actually documented or supported: https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncstorage-rs/issues/68...

What's the advantage of using multi-account containers and partitioned identities?

If you have multiple awa accounts it's a godsend.

Typo in my text, can't correct it now. But you can simultaneously log into multiple Google accounts by putting each into a different container. These containers are mapped onto tabs. So in one tab, one Gmail account, in another tab, another Gmail account. And it's not just Gmail it's anything that you might want multiple accounts in (eg: AWS)

The containerise extension is the cherry on top. Once you've set up your containers, it can recognise URL patterns so you can set up bookmarks for each Gmail account and they'll automatically open in the correct container, already logged in.

Interesting. I don't have multiple accounts.

Firefox on Mobile supports uBlock origin, and is very nice as well.

edit: on Android

Do note this is Firefox on Android.

What is?

Support for ublock is only available on Android's Firefox

i'm using ublock origin in chromium for desktop linux and firefox for desktop linux

They're talking about mobile. Since Apple doesn't let browsers use their own engine, uBlock Origin doesn't work on Firefox for iOS, only on Firefox for Android. On the desktop, it works everywhere.

Not just on Android, I'm using it with uBlock Origin on a GNU/Linux phone as well. Only iOS is an exception.

Assuming it's not available on iPhone is what you're getting at. In that instance Apple is the one to blame.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-ons-firefox-ios

Yep. Firefox on Android is really awesome. If I only could replace the android WebView with it...

If all you need is for apps to open browser window on firefox instead of chrome, you can just disable chrome. That's what I have done and it works fine for me.

Unfortunately Firefox on Android is noticeably slower than Chrome / Kiwi browser. But on desktop it is great!

It's a mixed bag. Ad blocking speeds up some websites substantially. IMO that makes Firefox mobile faster overall.

Vivaldi puts Firefox Mobile to shame when it comes to speed.

Unfortunately, Vivaldi is not FOSS which makes it a non-starter for many.

Brave is FOSS and fills the gap (if you can find all the crypto ads toggles hidden as hamburgers).

I find Brave slower than Chrome on my phone even on sites filled with ads.

Enable JavaScript JIT (disabled by default on Brave for something like a year) to trade some safety for performance.

Kiwi browser also has ublock (and supports adding any desktop add-on) and still does not crash or slow down like firefox does. I'd really like to use firefox in mobile too but with Kiwi being an option, there's almost 0 reason to use firefox.

I frequently have to close all my tabs because the browser has become unresponsive.

This doesn't happen to me. I currently have 60 tabs open, and that's only because I have 'auto close after 1 month' turned on.

thanks for the tip

Yes, Firefox on Android is really fantastic now.

I've been impressed to find literally zero compatibility issues in the last year with it being my primary browser on mobile. Works perfectly with my bank, works with heavy WebRTC apps, etc. It's quite a feat, especially given its market share is so low, and so there are relatively so few users to report feedback.

I've found that <input> with <datalist> doesn't work on Firefox Android — and the issue has been reported for years.

Does Firefox on Android still reload idle tabs when returning to them?

If I open a page, navigate away from it for a few days, and come back, I do not want the page to reload automatically, ever. Firefox was doing that, Vivaldi does not. I moved to Vivaldi.

I love that browser menus and address bar are at the bottom instead at of top.

I found having the address bar at the bottom of the screen odd, but within a few minutes I realised it was the right way and now having it anywhere else feels wrong on mobile.

Meanwhile Apple fanatics .....Muhahahah

Wonder what’s preventing this on iOS. iirc Orion manages to do it.

Update: Just tried it in Orion. I could install the extension but it seems to be broken. This is what I remember reading though:

## Wait, are you saying I can run uBlock Origin and other Chrome/Firefox extensions in Orion?!

Yes, Orion makes it possible!

## Wait, are you sure? No browser on iOS can use Chrome/Firefox extensions!

Orion makes it possible!

https://web.archive.org/web/20220329163943im_/https://browse...

Apple has a very strict browser policy on iOS: you must use either Safari or an Apple approved skin over the same underlying rendering engine.

Apple policy is preventing Mozilla/Gecko from being built/distributed for the app store.

It's so notorious that there has been legislation considered to address that practice: https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/26/apple_ios_browser/

But only a handful of other extensions, a deliberate restriction that strikes me as almost malicious.

God I wish they would let me pull-down to refresh a page though...

If you use Android, Firefox on Android is also really nice because it can sync with your desktop and also has about a dozen extensions (ublock origin, dark reader, etc.)[1].

And then Iceraven[2] is even better, because it's just Firefox for Android, but with several hundred extensions enabled and a few other annoyances fixed.

(A few years ago all extensions were enabled on Firefox on Android, but a few didn't work so they decided to limit it to a very short list of allowed ones. And then they let that list stagnate for years. Kind of a dick move IMO.)

If you use iOS, then "Firefox" is really just a skin on Safari, so no extensions (this is entirely Apple's fault), but the sync features work, so that's something if you use Windows or Linux.

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/search/?promoted=re...

[2]: https://github.com/fork-maintainers/iceraven-browser

fyi you can create a custom list of addons and tell iceraven to use that custom list, so all extensions can be installed (but are not guaranteed to work) on iceraven now.

> (A few years ago all extensions were enabled on Firefox on Android, but a few didn't work so they decided to limit it to a very short list of allowed ones. And then they let that list stagnate for years. Kind of a dick move IMO.)

After years of negative user feedback, Mozilla finally enabled custom add-on collections in Firefox Beta for Android last October, which allows any add-on from addons.mozilla.org to be installed again. (Firefox Nightly for Android recieved this option in 2020, but the nightly channel was not stable enough for my daily use.)

https://www.ghacks.net/2022/10/20/firefox-beta-for-android-n...

Last December, Mozilla announced their intent to fully support WebExtensions on Android with work starting this year.

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2022/12/15/new-extensions-av...

Yeah, I almost wish there weren't workarounds, because then I feel like there'd be more pressure on Mozilla to reverse course and re-enable addons in the normal release.

I love Firefox but some JS heavy demos etc. just don't work fast enough. I hate that I know exactly why. It's because they were only ever tested on Chrome during development.

It's interesting that you put the blame for the slowness on Firefox. I blame web developers for failing to build things for browsers rather than just Chrome.

This isn't blaming Firefox any more than one would blame other web browsers for a bad enterprise app requiring Internet Explorer, it's just the sad reality that users have to deal with.

Which part of their comment reads as blaming Firefox?

I love Firefox but some JS heavy demos etc. just don't work fast enough.

Have you read the last sentence as well?

> It's because they were only ever tested on Chrome during development.

That only means the developers didn't care if it was fast, or even works, in other browsers. It says nothing about Firefox. The first sentence, where the author complains that JS heavy apps are too slow in Firefox, is the part that's about Firefox.

What the OG commenter meant (as I read it) was that the page was slow in FF solely because the developer didn’t test the page in FF.

It does in no way imply that FF is worse than Chrome, but it does imply that (some) web developers are lazy.

That sentence is a simple statement of fact - that some apps are too slow in Firefox. It places no blame for the slowness. The blame comes later, and is put on lazy developers.

If developers are writing in a vanilla style based on open standards, then why should there be performance idiosyncrasy among browsers?

> why should there be performance idiosyncrasy among browsers?

Because the engines work differently, some are better at some parts and worse at others. That's just the name of the game when you have different implementations of something.

Not saying that work shouldn't be done do make them on-par with each other, just providing a reasoning why things are like they are. I remember at one point some Google product was using some JavaScript API for lots of things and obviously only tested things in Chrome, when testing it in Firefox the performance was a lot worse, as Gecko performed worse than V8 using the data structure/API. They ended up disabling Firefox access to it because of this.

Eventually, Firefox got the bug fixed I think, so the product enabled support for Firefox.

I guess the point is, the standards around the web platform say how the user should be able to use some API/format/structure, not much about how said API/format/structure is internally implemented.

Interesting, I haven't run into it as upto now and I was checking some pretty cool and intense CodePens earlier.

I'll look into some threeJS demos to see how it goes (ex. https://bruno-simon.com/ ). Are there any other specific JS demos you've had a bad experience with?

That 3D website ( https://bruno-simon.com/) ran well enough though it did cause my laptop's fans to run but I believe that happens in Chrome too.

So far, I haven't found much of a difference in performance of websites but it's still early times for me.

I tested this on FF/Chrome/Safari on an M1 Max, couldn't see any difference at all between FF and Chrome but on Safari it was incredibly slow (which actually let me drive the car, that thing turns fast). I also wasn't aware prior to clicking that it was even possible to create web apps like this.

That person (Bruno Simon) is fantastic at creating 3D experiences on the web. He has a course on three.js too that I hope to buy and go through hopefully within this year.

For me a good example have always been https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/ which rendered very poorly on Firefox. I see it's better now, but still, try to hover over the table (do couple of mouse movement, some circles or something) and see that it's not as responsive as Chrome is.

Another example is iD[0] Editor on https://www.openstreetmap.org/. But there, to be fair, it's also slow on Chrome but I feel it's a bit slower on Firefox.

[0] https://github.com/openstreetmap/iD

> https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/

Oh man this was a rough one both for FF and Chrome but Chrome did perform better slightly on cursory glance.

Thanks for providing these links, they're definitely a good rule of thumb benchmarks to test new browsers

Doppio (JVM implemented in JS) is absurdly slower for running java programs in Firefox compared to Chrome.

Lets be clear here. They were only tested on some developer's fast machine on Chrome. All the users are going to be using it on some bag of shit $300 laptop running crapware infested Edge so they will be suffering like your Firefox users are.

The problem is the left hand side of the chain. Stop pulling in thousand layer garbage abstractions and making the user pay the penalty for it.

All web developers should be required by law to work on 4gb 3ghz laptops with a 3G mobile connection.

No, Firefox just flat out has some worse JavaScript performance and bugs/incompatibility with other browsers.

I’ve been/am currently burned by Firefox’s pretty poor IndexedDB support and performance. IDBObjectStore.getAll() fails with a cryptic exception if you store too much in IndexedDB (iirc 256mb is the limit), whereas Chrome and Safari have no problem with it. It also has terrible performance - about 4x slower than Chrome, with Safari having the best performance.

That's a microscopic problem in a macroscopic ocean of shit.

I recently wrote a small JS page, the core of it is a table of tens of thousands of items and a for(let i=0; i<len(array); i++) loop with DOM CSS changes to hide/show rows matching a filter in the inner loop.

In Edge the page loads quickly and the loop is typically under 20ms.

In FireFox the page lags many seconds while loading and rendering, and several seconds when the loop involves a lot of hide/show of the table.

It's not that I haven't tested, it's that FireFox just isn't as fast as Edge. This simple approach relies on the browser handling a lot of items because I can't write a complex indexer in JavaScript and don't want to spend more effort on a low-use page and I refuse to put up with 'paging'.

> It's not that I haven't tested, it's that FireFox just isn't as fast as Edge.

Only in this one specific case. You don't know the other cases. What you do is write code and check if it's fast enough in Chrome. If it's not you change your code. You never check if it's fast in Firefox instead and then go on with your day, saying "well chrome's just slow".

> "You don't know the other cases."

Why would I care about the other cases? It's no use to me if FireFox is really fast at caching if I'm not using caching.

> "What you do is write code and check if it's fast enough in Chrome. If it's not you change your code."

I can't change my code, it's at the limit of (my understanding of JavaScript/web performance) crossed with (how much work time I can spend developing this page). I've already got rid of function calls in the inner loops, trimmed the data set aggressively, pushed more into SQL than in client side, have an out-of-band dataset generator so querying the DB isn't part of page load it's a static page served with static compression, it's taken days longer than I wanted to get even this functionality fast enough to be as fast as I want, if it needs double the time and SpiderMonkey performance expertise to cater for FireFox then the result is tell people to use Edge for it.

> "You never check if it's fast in Firefox instead and then go on with your day, saying "well chrome's just slow""

I did check if it was fast in FireFox and it wasn't. I carried on trying to make it faster until I ran out of ability and it went from 'okay I guess' on Edge to 'great that's what I hoped for' on Edge. And sluggish on FireFox. The reason I don't go on saying "Chrome's just slow" is because Chrome isn't.

> Why would I care about the other cases?

Because you talk about the other cases when you make general statements like:

> it's that FireFox just isn't as fast as Edge.

> I can't change my code,

I wasn't suggesting you change anything about your code. Remember, the context of this conversation is this Statement by GP:

> I hate that I know exactly why. It's because they were only ever tested on Chrome during development.

The reality is that Firefox has a tiny market share at this point, so it is questionable how much time should be invested into optimizing pages to make them fast on Firefox. But that is a problem with Firefox's market position, not technology.

My point was that when code is slow in Chrome, you change it and never notice whether Firefox would have been faster in those cases. You only test code that is sufficiently fast in Chrome in Firefox. Thus, you don't usually see the cases where Firefox is faster than Chrome.

The context from the GP is relevant, my reply was to say no don't accuse laziness and ignorance, I do use FireFox as my daily browser, I did test with FireFox, I wanted my page to be equally good and I couldn't achieve that. The effort of rewriting to get 'great' responsiveness in Edge got 'sub-par' in FireFox - and it's not because I didn't bother trying.

Your last paragraph is probably true in general, and true specifically for me because the Windows server I was using had Edge and didn't have Chrome or FireFox.

I wouldn't make dom changes in a tight loop like that. Better would be to accumulate the changes that need to be made and then do a batch change operation instead of one at a time like it sounds like you're doing. That code would be slow in any browser.

You say "it would be slow in any browser" but that's not true. It's fast in Edge and Chrome and slow in FireFox.

> "then do a batch change operation"

What would the 'batch change' be if not a loop over all the changes, making the changes one by one?

One possibility would be to create all the matching rows of the table in text (<tr><td>...</td></tr>), and then replace the contents of the table in one assignment. That's pretty fast, although I'm not sure about OP's case.

It shouldn't matter honestly, I didn't notice any performance difference in benchmarks for react.

When that happens I just fire up a vanilla chrome and look at the js thingy there. It doesn't happen more than once per week.

Can you give an example of something JS heavy that is slow in Firefox? I haven't encountered something like that in a very long while.

This might be a bit niche, and not specifically JS, but drawing anything in a HTML <canvas> element which involves a CanvaAPI ShadowBlur[1] is guaranteed to make Firefox weep.

The issue was mentioned on Bugzilla (at least) 11 years ago[2], performance remains abysmal.

[1] - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/CanvasRende...

[2] - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=763120

SAP Concur

Idk if being JS heavy was the issue here, but Twitch had terrible performance on Firefox for years. I installed Brave specifically for Twitch (and Twitch alone), and could finally use the site without everything feeling sluggish and super laggy.

I don't use Twitch much anymore, but the one time I opened it recently (for NeoVimConf), it seemed much better.

To me it's not only a speed problem. Some pages directly won't work on Firefox because of some JS issue, but they do work in Chrome.

On the contrary, colossal GitHub diffs routinely crashed Chrome for me [in the past], while Firefox dealt with them effortlessly. Different browsers have different strengths.

No it is not. In the past months/years they removed:

    - ability to zoom out images. Firefox has two different zooms, but none of them can zoom out images. If an image doesn't fit your screen, you can't see it period. 
    - ability to open an image in the same window 
    - ability to use different search engine in the search bar and URL bar 
    - ability to quickly change search engine clicking the magnifier icon top right
    - custom search engine URLs
    - showing download speed

I bump these into like every day, and they cause me minutes of annoyances. (and probably some others I can't recall now)

Firefox 2 years ago was a way better browser than it is now. And a lot of things still missing, like proper profiles.

In Firefox Developer Edition Desktop, I was able to

  - Quickly change search engine clicking magnifier icon top right
  - Set a custom search engine keyword ("wiki" + search term in the URL) via right-clicking a search bar
  - View download speed of an ISO file
  - Zoom images in and out, both as part of a page and as a standalone file

I was not able to right-click > open image in same tab, or have different default engines in URL vs search bar. That last use case is really edge, considering they have a search bar with multiple search engines and one can set search keywords and for most people, having different engines per bar would be unexpected and confusing.

Zoom is my wrong, I've set away browser.zoom.full option to text only.

They removed RSS, removed compact mode, removed bookmark descriptions... I'm scared that at their current pace by 2030 they'll remove the last remaining feature and it will disappear.

Sometimes I wonder if Mitchell Baker and the product team are paid by Google to destroy their own browser.

Mozilla gets about 90% of their money from Google, 9% from advertising and 1% from privacy services like the VPN, which doesn't paint a good picture for their incentives, unfortunately. (The numbers are approximate because I can't look up the source right now, but they're public numbers and easy to search.)

zoom: not experienced here. I just visited a page with an image that doesn't (naturally) fit; Ctrl-scroll zooms it to fit (and back)

image in same window: seems true, but i can't imagine why you'd want this

search engines: I use single letter keywords to drive this. "g foobar" searches on google for foobar. "d foobar" searches duckduckgo. "o foobar" searches on google maps. Never had any desire to "quickly change the search engine" or have custom search engine URLs given keywords.

download speed: shows in the download dialog for me

Zoom is my wrong, I've set away browser.zoom.full option to text only.

Proper profiles are there what they need is a proper profiles UI. Just a switcher button in the normal browser window like Chrome and they’d be all set.

The Tree Style Tab extension[1] is wonderful for "keeping tabs" on our modern "to forget" lists (unclosed tabs). Putting tabs on the left is also a good screen real estate trade for wide aspect ratio screens.

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

Tree Style Tabs is absolutely vital to me, I don't understand how people can live without that extension.

The other thing I use a lot is firefox's readability builtin (it's not an extension), which removes all the cruft and *walls from websites and makes them... readable in one click.

These two together are killer apps for me. I might consider switching to another browser (firefox isn't exactly the paragon of virtue it used to be either anymore), but the new browser would need to have these two features.

I used to use it, until I wrote my own vertical tabs extension, which acceptably handles thousands of tabs...

Is there a link to this extension for your own vertical tabs

Safari has vertical tabs natively now. The interesting part is hierarchical tabs

Where does Safari have vertical tabs? I've been using Orion for a while now mainly for that feature, a WebKit browser with well working vertical tabs.

View > Sidebar

On the left, it should show the number of tabs in the current window. If you click on that, it lists the tabs.

That's cool, thanks! But there's no way to hide the normal tab bar, is there?

Not yet but I hope Apple brings it back. It used to be possible

It's the hierarchical tabs that I need. If you are traversing large hypertexts you need to keep track of where you are and where you were.

Middle-clicking to open-in-new-tab together with Tree-Style-Tabs is incredibly useful in this scenario.

You can rapidly open a large number of potentially-interesting links in tabs, and then weed out the ones you don't need just as rapidly. Then wash, rinse, repeat. It's an assembly line approach.

Thankful for the readability builtin.

I use Sidebery, which is similar, but adds features like 'panels' (essentially switch between sets of tree-style tabs in the sidebar) that integrates with Firefox 'containers', so you can have a 'work' vs. 'personal' panel&container for example.

The tabs being listed vertically is by far the most important aspect to me though, I previously used something (that stopped being maintained) that did that without being 'tree-style'. Nesting is probably not what I wanted as often as it is.

Interesting integration of panels and containers. Definitely going to try it.

As someone who uses wide screens to hold multiple page-shaped windows, sidebars are a no-go. I really like Chrome's recent addition of what they call tab groups; anyone know of equivalent functionality for Firefox?

Dunno how similar it is, but there is Simple Tab Groups: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-gr...

Also there's a bunch of userChrome css people have shared for Tree Style Tabs that makes the sidebar collapse and auto-expand on mouseover so it doesn't take much space. It's not part of the extension itself because they lost access back with the Firefox Quantum release and I guess no new API was ever made.

Thanks for the suggestion !

I'm giving Sidebery a shot first. If I'm not a fan, I'll give Tree Style a try.

Firefox was my go-to 3 years ago because it was just lighter than Chrome (and easier on my battery).

I still hate the fact that different browser profiles and profile switching aren't surfaced like they are in Chrome. I think it's such a major use case for modern web browsing, I find it hard to believe they aren't prioritizing it. (FWIW this isn't even supported in Safari, which I would have preferred using)

I still keep it around because I love it's download manager, but I tend to use a lot of Google services, and out of habit, I stick to Chrome.

(ps. I was an early Chrome adopter, so it's quite sticky with me)

Out of curiosity, what do you need different profiles for? Kids/SO?

I have separate profiles for personal/work.

Work. I count 5 profiles on my current laptop. I like to compartmentalize my work/external projects, so I don't mix things like search histories, multiple Google accounts, etc.

These are the profiles I currently have:

1. Default, personal. My personal Gmail and other sites.

2. Non-profit that I run, signed in to its Gmail and other email account, etc

3. 3 profiles for different volunteer/contract roles, each signed in to their Gmail and other accounts.

I use it when I need to log into multiple AWS accounts.

The official Container Tabs extension on Firefox seems to be perfect for that. You can login to different accounts on the same profile.

One example - my shopping profile runs the extensions Rakuten/Honey to find coupon codes. I don't want those running on every single page I load outside of the shopping intent, so I use a separate profile.

Firefox's containers don't allow for limiting extensions, so you have to use profiles. Chrome only has profiles.

Multi-Account Containers are like profiles, but in tabs instead of other windows. They're pretty great.

It's an official Mozilla Firefox extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

If I understand correctly, these only compartmentalise cookies and browsing history, whereas full profiles (via the -ProfileManager switch in Firefox) compartmentalise the whole browser config (add-ons, permissions, etc.) as well, which I think is much more useful.

To me it's the opposite. I'd like the same browser config, use the same window, keep my bookmarks, history etc., just want different logins and website contexts. I love Firefox's implementation of containers, and find Chrome's way of doing profiles useless.

But Firefox supports profiles as well if that's what you want, as you say. So best of both worlds.

If you want to open 5 of the same website but with different accounts, containers are the way to go.

The AWS console comes to mind.

I don't want separate configs, just separate accounts.

I have also used it as a proxy manager. Different proxy config in a different container.

Both have their merits, in my opinion.

Given that Firefox already has multi-profile support internally, it would only be a matter of adding a GUI similar to Chrome's to make it the best of both worlds.

Yes, containers compartmentalise the web-facing side of the browser, not the user-facing side.

This fits with my use case for profiles.

Depends on usage.

I use distinct profiles for testing, but during the day, I open versions of the site for personal and work for example. Or at work for different clients.

It depends on workflow IMO. There are uses for both.

Yes, perhaps I should have said 'more powerful'. Utility is definitely relative to usage.

I've been using a multi-profile setup in firefox for years, just by launching it with

    firefox --new-instance -ProfileManager %u

which lets me pick a profile at startup, each with its own settings, cookies, history, and add-ons, etc.. This works fine for me, I don't really feel the need to launch into a different profile from the browser's own menu, if that's what you're referring to?

Can you run multiple profiles at the same time using this approach?

Firefox doesn’t restrict how many profiles you run at the same time. You can start them either via -ProfileManager, or by going to about:profiles.

The --new-instance flag lets you run multiple copies of even the same profile.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/CommandLineOptions#-new-ins...

IME, starting Firefox with this flag, then (from the profile manager) picking an already-running profile, I get the fatal error:

> Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To use Firefox, you must first close the existing Firefox process, restart your device, or use a different profile.

So I guess it allows multiple instances but only with different profiles, at least on my system.

If that's true (I haven't tested), then --no-remote is what you're looking for.

I think Container Tabs are a better fit for the way most people use multiple accounts online.

Plus it enables the Facebook Container extension, which sandboxes all facebook-directed network requests so they can't track you across the web.

And the third party Container Proxy extension lets you set different proxy setting for different containers. So your work tabs can use a different network route.

Container Tabs are not a replacement for profiles though. It doesn't let you have different bookmarks, extensions, theme, etc, which doesn't work when you want to have a separation between work and personal stuff.

Firefox already supports profiles, all it needs it's a simple UI to switch between them. Profiles + Containers (and everything that comes with them) would be perfect.

I use Firefox as my daily driver but I really miss user profiles and tab groups from Chrome. None of the tab related extensions for Firefox give quite the same ease of use as the built in tab groups do in Chrome.

As noted by others in this thread, you want the -ProfileManager flag when you start it. You should be able to either have it remember you always want the profile manager on startup, or change the application shortcut to always use the flag.

It would be great if they made this more easily available though. It was the default once upon a time.

I hear you on profiles. My go-to for this is to use firejail or podman to keep truly separate browsers on all my alternate profiles.

What's wrong with using about:profiles?

Edit: you even can set it as bookmark into the toolbar.

Nothing really, it just feels like I'm "breaking glass" whenever I do it, so I end up using Chrome for the multi-profile use case.

If Firefox was to add a similar GUI, I'd probably get by completely without Chrome.

2 clicks instead of one. There’s an extension to make it one click, but it requires a helper app installed, which is not great.

Open new tab, type: "about:profiles" create as many profiles as you want. Or as others have said you can use tab containers or the profile manager switch.

This addon[1] is very, very close to the way chrome handles having different profiles. That is what I'm using to separate my work vs personal browsing.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profile-switc...

I don't think profiles are that important when most users have their own account these days.

I honestly don't think there is much difference between each major browsers nowadays, so just pick whatever you like.

I personally go full utilitarianism about the tools/software I use, so I can't care less about the companies behind them.

I was an avid Firefox user since version 1.5, simply because it was objectively superior than competitors and way more polished (at the time, other browsers like IE didn't even have tabs).

Then Chrome came out, which was indeed blazingly fast but the feature set just wasn't there (in both basic features and the extension scene. It didn't even have a proper multi-language font setting which was a deal breaker for me).

A few years past, XUL-based Firefox became unbearably slow (it didn't help that I have 50+ addons), and Chrome was steadily catching up in every aspect. Right before Firefox's transition to Quantum, I couldn't take it any more and started to use Chrome primarily.

After 57, Firefox Quantum was obviously great, but at that point I just didn't have any reason to switch back. All the heavy lifting parts (webext) are the same, so it's down to some minor details, which TBH, I'm getting used to the "Chrome way".

The final nail in the coffin of Firefox for me, is its development. I'm not a professional software developer, and lack the ability to contribute code to large open source projects like browsers. So instead, I tried my best to help by reporting bugs. I've filed at least 50~100 tickets on both Mozilla's bugzilla and chromium's trackers.

I hate to say it, but I can see the sheer difference between the maintenance effort of the two projects, even in basic triage. I understand the two companies are not really comparable in their sizes, but Firebox's is declining hard. It was much better several years ago. More and more bug tickets are not touched by anyone. Legit problems got closed for no reason. Sometimes you can even spot management-level interference despite clear objection from users and even internal developers, which I would think I should see more on Chrome's end. Filing bugs about Firefox no longer feel fulfilling or even fun, because I KNEW if it's a minor issue, it won't get fixed in years, if at all (hell, it took them 5+ years to fix something major like full-range video playback). I just don't have faith in its future.

Feels a bit PG submarine-ish, but I'll bite.

Firefox took away a lot of accessibility options in a large August 2021 and broke my trust in them. Good that they brought back extension options in Android, as I read other comments, but taking away the text size render option killed me.

Wow... after some searching I eventually found out what PG is... Paul Graham (PG) wrote an essay titled "The Submarine". http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

    but taking away the text size render option killed me.

Maybe you're talking about something different but zooming text only is still there on the View -> Zoom menu for me in current Firefox.

Always has been

I used Firefox when it came out, then I moved to Chrome when Chrome came out because Firefox was terribly slow (and it was because of the addons). When Chrome became slow because of the addons, I jumped back to Firefox, and I haven't looked back.

It is specially important to use Firefox now given that there are very few non-Chromium alternatives for web browsers. Keep the web open!

I use both Chrome and Firefox daily and I must say that over the years, from personal experience, Firefox has improved to the point of being about as fast and stable as Chrome. The downside is that Firefox lost most of its identity, the big one being XUL, which made for more powerful plugins and customization.

So yeah, Chrome and Firefox are more of less interchangeable now and the choice is essentially about how much you like Google, and specific details. Details include the presence or absence of a plugin you particularly like, support for video codecs and DRM (for streaming platforms), and specific features and bugs. Generally, I find Chrome better on the "specific details", one of it ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=791429 ) actually was the trigger that made me switch to Chrome some years ago.

About extensions, I think all the extensions I use are available on both platforms or have equivalents. Now using

- uBlock Origin (of course)

- SponsorBlock for YouTube (autoskips sponsors in YouTube videos, user-contributed)

- Behind the overlay (remove most overlays, have many equivalents)

- URL to QR code (shows the current URL as a QR code, so you can scan it to open it on your phone, have many equivalents too)

I disagree on the two browsers being interchangeable. Chrome supports quite a few Web APIs that Firefox doesn't. For example the lack of support for platform authenticators in WebAuthn.

For my new job, I've switched to using the Orion Browser [1] from Kagi since I was noticing some weird typing lag on my MacBook in Firefox. I still use Firefox at home on Windows, but native vertical tabs in Orion are enough for me to use it full time. It's also handy that it supports both Firefox and Chrome extensions, albeit some features don't fully work (e.g. "Block element" of uBlock Origin doesn't let me choose anything).

I'm not a fan of Mozilla currently, but they do have the least bad non-chromium, multiplatform browser out there.

[1]: https://browser.kagi.com

I've found Orion wonderful as well. It fixes all my extension gripes with safari while still keeping the performance and battery life.

Interesting, definitely going in my list of browsers to try at some point in the future.

Proud to say I never left. I used Mozilla, and as soon as Phoenix was released I jumped on it. Stuck with it through thick, thin and name changes. Just had a short period when Firefox became too bloated for my 256M FreeBSD laptop so I had to use Opera temporarily. But as soon as I upgraded my laptop I was back with Firefox.

For a long time, maybe still, noscript was unchallenged on FF. Something about Chrome API not allowing the deep JS blocking required. I consider JS to be the number one threat online, so I must block it by default to feel safe(r).

But really it's a no brainer to me that my web browser, my most used graphical program, should be FLOSS.

So there are others!

I've also ever used Chrome and I never will. Also never used IE either. Netscape was way better.

I actually found a copy of the Firefox 1.0.14 (I think) installer when going through an old hard drive a few months ago. That was a cool little discovery.

Your Gmail/Google cookies are probably in a weird state with chrome. Clear the cache and all saved cookies (will log you out of every site fyi) and I bet it will load right up again.

But all that said, yes, Firefox is very good. I wish it was a little more bleeding edge with stuff like experimental web standards (native filesystem access, USB, etc.) but I still use it for most of my browsing.

> Your Gmail/Google cookies are probably in a weird state with chrome. Clear the cache and all saved cookies (will log you out of every site fyi) and I bet it will load right up again.

That's definitely a likely candidate. I'll try that, thanks!

Funny timing for me to see this on HN today

After some years of love/hate relationship with Vivaldi, I'm currently trying (once again...) to go back to Firefox after one too many chrome-based browsers fuck-up: opening Edge in a windows VM suddenly got my RAM usage up by 32GB, which were shared with my non-VM chrome-based browsers (chromium, vivaldi). First time just crashed my whole computer, second time I had to kill it all (the memory usage moved to chromium and then vivaldi when I closed the VM).

Vivaldi performance issues (and some bugs) was already putting me on the edge very often, but I really like the features so switching is very hard and will take a lot of time getting used to. Mouse gestures, panels, integrated mail (took way too long to come), tab stacking/tiling, command palette, etc. Sure some of these have firefox extensions doing something similar but it's still far from being the same.

Recently started Vivaldi and it's pretty nice! I switched because it's the only decent browser that I can remove the address bar and use it only with a hot key. So far it seems fast enough and haven't run into bugs.

It does have a ton of features that I'll never use that I wish were extensions or something

I'm experimenting with that right now on firefox with userChrome.css changes, and it's starting to work:

/* Kinda unrelated, but I'm using this to go with Sidebery / Tree Style Tab */

#TabsToolbar { visibility: collapse; }

/* Hide the whole top bar */

#nav-bar {

  position: fixed;
  top: -10vh;
  width: 100%;
  z-index: 1;
  height: 0;
  min-height: 0 !important;

}

#urlbar-container:focus-within, #search-container:focus-within {

  position: fixed;
  top: 15vh;
  left: 50%;
  background: #111;
  outline: 4px solid #f8b218;
  box-sizing: border-box;
  padding: 1em;
  transform: translateX(-50%);
  width: 40vw;
  border-radius: 4px;

}

Top bar stays hidden, but url bar / search bar appear when I press ctrl+l / ctrl+k. Likely need to tweak css to your likings, and you need to set toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets to true in about:config to enable userChrome.css (you can find various guides on that if needed)

Time for my rant as a Firefox user since the beta Phoenix versions, stating that I'm a daily MacOS and Android tablet user

* Firefox uses much more battery on MacOS than any chromium based browser. Bugzilla ticket exists since ages, few things have change

* Firefox on Android tablet after the change to Fenix is a stretched phone browser, with no tabs support, no default desktop support. Firefox developers treat this as a ER instead of bug totally ignoring that it was there before and they dropped it, no development whatsoever

At the same time, Firefox history sync is like no other but balancing what I care for the most, I had to drop firefox after literally decades and every now and then I look if at least there is something on the tablet support, hoping that I'll be able to change back at some point

You consider it a bug that you don't like the UI?

It is not if I like the UI or not, the UI after fenix on a tablet is just the phone UI and is a waste of space and functionality. Before Fenix you had a proper tablet UI with visible tabs like a desktop browser, utilizing the extra space properly, so this is a downgrade regardless of the “like” factor you mention. And missing a desktop mode is a huge omission.

> Firefox uses much more battery on MacOS than any chromium based browser.

I really don't see that. Firefox with certain extensions is a battery hog but the browser itself is pretty lightweight on CPU for me.

Not sure on MacOS memory usage (I stick with Safari and Edge on respective laptops for battery life reasons), but agreed 100% about Firefox on Android tablet. It's just awkward.

They need to make the Android UI in general a closer match for the desktop and iOS (skinned Safari) browsers. For instance, note how buried things like "passwords" are in the Android menus compared to iOS and desktop browsers:

Desktop: Menu->Passwords iOS: Menu->Passwords Android: Menu->Settings->Logins & Passwords->Saved logins

It's almost like the Android team doesn't even use their own browser on other platforms, or there's no product lead to make things consistent.

If you are on Firefox and you run into an overall system slowdown, check how many subprocesses it has spawn.

With the release of Fission (their website isolation tech) this number becomes unbound. In my case it was close to 100, each eating up at least 50MB with some well into hundreds megs. It was a swap fest. Not sure what they were thinking, but a simple post-update warning would'be been nice... or perhaps it was there, behind all that "aww, let's select your mood color" nonsense that now refularly surfaces after every second update. In any case Fission is easy to disable once you know it exists.

Thanks for the heads up. I'll keep an eye out.

I use FF as my daily driver (but I'm also a Linux desktop user so take my views with a grain of salt lol) and I can't say the experience is any better than Chrome. But honestly I think that is probably the best thing that can be said about it. It works just as well as Chrome for all of my use cases and it isn't run by Google.

I also use Firefox as my main daily driver and have been for 5 years or so. Recently I started trialing Arc (https://arc.net/) and it's interesting. They try to be quirky and have a bit of a different approach. What I like is that they also have the idea of different profiles (like Firefox Multi-account Containers) built in. I'm not 100% convinced of Arc yet, but it's good enough for my secondary browser (also for stuff that required Chrome, since it's based on Chromium).

I've really loved using Arc recently, it's a very fresh take on web browsing. I've found that its spaces feature handles my uses of (most) bookmarks and tab groups in a more coherent way. My main annoyance is that there isn't any sort of backup standard bookmark system built-in.

I also like Spaces a lot. I think my main issue is that I don't like the vertical sidebar, and doing cmd+s to hide and show it all the time is not that great (also because some web apps hijack cmd+s).

I am definitely interested in giving Arc a try after reading about it in different parts of the interwebz.

However, I haven't received an invite despite being on the list for close to a month.

I can send you one if you email me at canolcer@hey.com

Thank you for the offer. I just shot you an email.

> 1. It opens websites really quickly, much faster than Chrome

I wonder if it's a question of accumulated cruft.

My main browser is Firefox, but there is this one site that's broken on it, so I use Chrome for that. It's the only thing I use Chrome for. But I find that it's much faster (even when testing other sites) than Firefox.

> I wonder if it's a question of accumulated cruft.

Definitely a possibility. Another user suggested deleting cookies and re-trying. I might give that a shot at some point.

Also it feels "more on the side of the user". Like for instance if you do shift right click it bypasses the website's attempt to hijack your contextual menu. I think Chrome disabled that.

Yea the feeling I get from them is they are more on the side of the user too.

> Like for instance if you do shift right click it bypasses the website's attempt to hijack your contextual menu. I think Chrome disabled that.

Interesting, didn't know that.

Been on Firefox for many years for one reason only - TreeStyle Tab. Once other browsers implement it, if ever, would consider jumping ship.

Orion has something similar, but it's a baby version of that, really...

I had to switch to Sidebery after some bugs with TST (broken hierarchy, etc.).

I don't know when you had those problems but I had similar problems in the past (>1 year ago) but they all seem to have been fixed.

I had to uninstall Sidebery as it would put my CPU on a high spin and hurt battery life.

I love firefox except for a fairly recent feature adopted by chrome, which is the ability to update usb device firmware through a web browser via the Web Serial API. I do a lot of ESP32 stuff and it's so much nicer to be able to go to a webpage and just install the firmware directly rather than having to actually configure and compile it from scratch in vscode/platformio.

For instance, if you want to install WLED, just go to https://install.wled.me, select the version, select the usb port your device is connected to and "install." Bam, done.

Firefox team views it as insecure: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/336

I prefer Firefox, even though I don't experience the benefits you seem to be experiencing. I find Firefox to be more sluggish than Chrome, and it's less compatible with websites than chrome.

I love it for tab containers - a game changer in web browsing. And ublock origin, and the fact that it isn't chrome.

Opposite experience here. Long time Firefox user and in the past 3 years it's gotten incredibly bad for me as sites have gone more JS heavy, and video in particular has become a huge problem for my Firefox install it seems. Major sites like Youtube (~25% of videos get an error, forcing me to open in chrome), Reddit (yeah this one sucks for everyone, but at least loads on chrome if you have a high end pc+connection, which i do) and Instagram can't be reliably used for watching video. For years i used Firefox with a bunch of privacy/security-hardening settings but I've had to undo a lot of it to even use the web as of recent as the number of broken websites was getting too ridiculous.

This doesn't really sound like a FireFox problem. Not sure how it could be their fault that installing extensions which intentionally disable parts of the browser required to run the websites you use breaks things. Literally none of those websites ever have any problems on any of the computers my family uses FF on, running UBlock Origin.

Ublock origin is my only extension and this is a fresh install with no about:config changes.

I've never seen a YouTube video not play on Firefox. What does the error say? Can you give an example URL?

> All parts feel really customizable.

This is one of the selling points for me as well. Literally just before opening HN I've looked at my overflowing bookmarks toolbar and thought "Those folder icons and default favicons feels quite unnecessary any only occupies precious space. Let's get rid of them." and then did exactly that in few lines in the userChrome CSS [1] and voilà, toolbar no longer overflows.

I don't think any other major browser lets you do that.

[1]: https://gist.github.com/myfonj/f5415dd0580663a82ea18407ef2ee...

Firefox is my primary browser at present but definitely has annoyances:

  - unable to close pinned tabs without custom extensions
  - unable to undo close open tabs after closing last window (also solved with extension)
  - pins itself to taskbar and install desktop icon on every install
  - I prefer how downloads' progress is handled in Chrome better
  - Not all settings are synchronized (esp. around privacy), making it very hard to configure computers the same consistently

Favorite extensions:

  - Vimium
  - Undo Close Tab
  - Shortkeys (using it specifically to move tabs around)
  - Aardvark Duex

On your second point the History menu has a Restore Last Session option (or something like that) when you reopen the browser after inadvertently closing a bunch of tabs.

> unable to close pinned tabs without custom extensions

Middle click works and there is also a context menu option to close the tab.

I should've clarified that I meant closing using keyboard shortcuts

Tab Stash is amazing. This is how bookmarking should work in the modern age, where it's normal to have > 50 tabs open, and not want to close any of them.

Click one button, and all your open tabs are saved in a nice, tabular view. If you saved tabs from yesterday as well, those will be visible in another grid on the same screen, so you can drag and drop tabs into categories, which you can then rename. Brilliantly simple.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/tab-stash/

Yes I like it too.

I've also recently switched back to Firefox. The Simple Tab Groups is the killer feature for me. It allows me to group tabs by task which is a godsend if I ever need to work on multiple unrelated tasks concurrently.

IIRC the thing that turned me away from Firefox most recently was the "Pocket" spam on the front page. I vaguely recall that you couldn't customize it, and the content that was pushed had a strong ideological bent that I just didn't want to have to deal with every time I opened my browser. I might be misremembering some of the details; it's been a few years.

I tried Safari, Brave, etc as well but they all had usability issues in one form or another. I didn't really want to settle with Chrome, but it has been the least grating for me personally.

Firefox feels really visually noisy, almost to the point of spaminess on a fresh intall. Out of the box you have a gazillion ads everywhere on the new tab page, below that some "firefox tips" advertising sync, pocket shoved into the toolbar, when you go to the url bar it flies outward, inside the url bar there are buttons for various search engines, and there's a persitent "tab pickup" option that fools you into thinking you have a tab open when you're not. (Not to mention recently they removed tab distinction entirely).

And to top it off it's a nightmare to even figure out how to do something basic like install your own extensions straight from a folder. Apparently if you download developer mode you can at least load unsigned packed extensions, but I don't want to do that, I just want to load it from a folder like the "load temporary development add-on" mode except permanent.

Not to mention they don't even support something basic like reconfiguring keybindings without editing some obscure omni.ja file.

Firefox forks might be better, but right now Firefox doesn't feel like it's really targeting anyone. I bet the average person would look at chrome compared to firefox and say the former feels "cleaner" and easier to use because it quite frankly is. On the flipside Firefox feels quite hostile to the power-user, and every update makes it feel like you're fighting the browser. At that point it's far less effort to use an ungogled chromium fork. At least despite their terrible decisions regarding manifest v3 they still allow you to load your own extensions with a simple checkbox.

I love firefox and have been using it for nearly 20 years now, but my latest employer doesn't support it so they recommended I switch to Edge on my work machine... Don't get a job in academia

I just came to offer my sympathies. That sucks in ways few will understand. Please tell me you have been spared from using Microsoft Teams...

Hahaha ... that's a pretty odd thing to not support. I don't understand the rationale.

Firefox was my main browser on Mac for years, but a year or two ago it got demoted to secondary primarily because of one issue: spelling. I just found myself spending too much time when writing anything in Firefox dealing with false positives in its spell checker [1].

I still have no idea why it has so many false positives. They use the same open source spell checker that LibreOffice, Chrome, and MacOS use, and none of those have trouble with the words that Firefox does. (I don't know what Microsoft uses, but Office on Mac and Windows and Edge on Windows also are fine with the words Firefox can't handle).

That suggests they just need a better English dictionary, which they could get from LibreOffice.

[1] Here are some words it incorrectly flags as misspelled: manticore survivorship misclassified ferrite massless rotator dominator untraceably synchronizer. Those were reported on their Bugzilla bug for reporting spell check problems 25 months ago.

Here are some more, reported 19 months ago: ad hominem backlight coaxially hatchling impaction intercellular irrevocability licensor measurer meerkats mischaracterization misclassification misclassified partygoers passthrough plough retransmission seatbelt sensationalistic trichotomy underspecified untyped.

All the words in batches I submitted 30 months or more ago have been fixed.

Weird, the English (UK) dictionary knows most of these words. https://files.catbox.moe/wfbedm.webp

Interesting, I'll keep an eye out if I encounter this issue

At least for me (Linux, Wayland) it is literally unusable, due to this bug[1] and related issues in the comments. I finally stopped putting up with it and switched to Chrome this year, after being a loyal user since the browser was called Firebird.

In retrospect I should have jumped after Mozilla ruined Firefox on Android.

[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1789602

Oh sad to hear that. I am on Windows though.

I'm a tab hoarder, and I love the scrolling tab bar. No matter how many tabs I keep open, they remain readable, instead of squishing into ||||||||||||||.

Definitely. I wouldn't mind a feature that makes it easy to locate a particular tab, though. Often I know I've got it open somewhere but I just can't find it, causing yet another duplicate tab.

type % in the url bar, and keywords will search in your open tabs.

Yes the scrolling tab bar is another good design choice.

The reasons why I continue to use Safari right now despite wanting to use Firefox really badly:

1. Apple Pay integration only works in Safari. 2. Firefox on iOS uses MobileWebKit underneath, which is basically just Safari with a mustache 3. Firefox on iOS is (was?) also buggy in weird ways, like tabs would close unexpectedly or pages would fail to load. 4. (Biggest reason) Firefox on iOS does not support extensions. Safari does.

Don't use it on macOS. It has no protections at all for cookie theft. Unencrypted SQLite DB sitting in a user-readable directory. Chrome and (I think) Safari both use encryption keys in the secure enclave. That's still not perfect (Chrome remote debugging and Safari code injection can get around those), but better than nothing at all.

> I was having trouble loading GMail in Chrome

You should avoid using GMail. Messages sent from and to GMail addresses are occasionally copied to the US government, and analyzed and possibly copied by various commercial companies who pay Google/Alphabet for the privilege. (You should also encourage your friends to stop using GMail).

Also, regardless of whether it's GMail or not - use an email client. GMail and all other email providers suppose access using the IMAP and/or POP3 protocols. That (mostly) guarantees no ads, and is much faster.

As for Firefox - Mozilla has decided to block extensions' access to most APIs and limit them only to a "WebExtensions" API (even though Mozilla's internal UI code is basically just like an extension, i.e. they don't _have_ to do this.) So, FF is only partially customizable and manipulable, and the extension ecosystem is somewhat stunted. I use FF, but let's not go overboard with the praise.

I'm a daily Firefox user for many years, because they have the best devtools, in my opinion. But Firefox and Mozilla have weird priorities that are not focused on their users. I just don't understand them. Firefox added a "temporary feature" called Colorways that let's you, I guess, change the browser's color theme to one out of, like, five colors? Wasn't this a thing that you could already do twenty years ago, and it wasn't temporary?

They also moved "Close tabs on the right" from the bottom of the menu and moved it to a submenu next to "Close tabs on the left". So now it's a multi-step process to close tabs on the right with a higher chance of misclicking on the action opposite of what I want, that I also will never use in my life.

Just seems like they're fond of making many odd, small UI decisions to create the appearance of progress without really moving forward.

This post feels a bit like fanboy without much data backing, but I think the OP could have mentioned a big win of FF over Chromium-based browsers: support for Manifest V2.

As an extension developer who makes heavy use of HTTP requests and header sniffing, I feel like V3 literally put me in a cage carefully crafted by Google (and their explicit hatred for ad-blockers, no matter if making life difficult to uBlock developers eventually makes life hard for all other developers too).

I feel like V3 is a grave mistake that eventually will make Chromium-based browsers less flexible. No matter if Brave announced that they'll keep supporting V2 extensions: they don't have their own store, they still rely on the Chrome store, and the Chrome store now only accepts V3 extensions.

So FF announcing their continuous support for V2 is really a breeze of fresh air, and eventually it'll be (at least for me) their biggest selling point over Chromium.

> Some really cool observations in first 30 mins of using it :

> 1. It opens websites really quickly, much faster than Chrome

This is the same thing everyone says whatever new browser they move to. Once some one hoards 100 tabs it becomes slow.

(Again,I am not against firefox or chrome - just meaning that everything is quick initially - somehow becomes slow in a few weeks)

Yea I put that in as a disclaimer that these are my first impressions after a quick 30 min session. I'll see how it feels after month or two

> 3. Extensions ecosystem is thriving . I was glad to find my old favorite: Dark Reader. But I have also found a new favorite - Tab Stash. I also found an extension to download Youtube videos - Video Downloader, something I didn't find in Chrome

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...

About 2.5 years ago, extensions came back in Firefox mobile Nightly and it is still a hidden feature in mainstream Firefox?

I just had to reinstall Firefox Mobile, and tried to re-add my addon collection and I get the following error messages "No addons here", "Failed to query addons" ... Why are cumbersome collections required to access the addons that you love?

I switched to Firefox several years ago out of principal, but it's been a struggle to stay with it.

2 big issues I have are the tendency to freeze, and then say "restart to keep using Firefox" because it updated in the background and can't continue.

The other was almost a deal breaker, and still could be. When using a barcode scanner, Firefox can't keep up with the characters coming from the scanner. It will randomly drop characters. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why some scans weren't working, and the scanner works perfectly in Chrome, works perfectly in a text editor and intermittently drops characters randomly in Firefox.

If it were just the start character, or the end character it wouldn't matter so much, but it drops characters in the middle of a barcode. It has for years, it's a known issue, I don't see it ever being fixed.

> the tendency to freeze, and then say "restart to keep using Firefox" because it updated in the background and can't continue.

I never encountered that, neither freezing nor being forced to restart. By default Firefox will only download updates in the background and inform you that the update will be installed if you restart.

That is incorrect. By default, it installs in the background and then displays the behaviour reported by GP. You probably have it set to not install before prompting you.

No, I'm using the default settings of Firefox for Windows. I just installed Firefox in a new Windows VM to confirm this. Automatic installation of updates in the background is enabled by default there. There's also a checkbox to use use a background service for installing updates which is enabled by default, though that's likely a Windows specific feature.

> Automatic installation of updates in the background is enabled by default there.

I'm confused. That's what I said is the default, and you said it isn't. Now you start by saying "no" to me, and confirming what I had said. Sorry if I've missed something though, I'm really tired right now.

You're right to be confused, sorry. I meant to day "Automatic installation of updates when Firefox is not running is enabled by default there."

I said "no" to "have it set to not install before prompting you" because I use the default settings. Now I'm actually also a bit confused whether you meant "it installs in background [while browsing]" or "it installs in background [while Firefox is not running, using the background update server]"

With the default "when Firefox is not running" setting, the updates should _download_ in the background and then inform you that it will be installed next time you restart.

The freezing and forced restart as reported by pontifier does not sound like default behaviour, it sounds like "when Firefox is not running" is unchecked.

Assuming you're talking about an actual barcode scanner device: barcode scanners commonly present as USB keyboards to the OS. The thing about USB keyboards is that events aren't pushed to the computer but are polled at a set rate (commonly 125Hz). It could be that the scanner produces the numbers quick enough to approach the USB polling rate, and maybe Chrome has some additional smarts to handle it, or maybe Firefox just adds a bit of overhead that's enough to lose some of the characters. You could try increasing the computer's polling rate and see if that helps.

The scanner works perfectly in everything except Firefox. I've tried multiple scanners, I've tried different settings. I think I even tried setting an inter-character delay. Firefox is the only thing that seems to drop characters. I basically had to write the back end of my web app to do error checking after the fact and reject barcodes that didn't have the right number of characters. Which doesn't help at all when some barcodes are different lengths. I had to add an extra step for the user to tell the back end how many characters were in the barcode before they can scan one.

Just a guess but you could avoid the step with length input (if the only purpose is to check for errors) if you checked the CRC checksum of the barcode. But that's just an uneducated guess, I have no idea how your app works.

I wasn't happy when they moved the "Close tabs to the right" menu option into a submenu and then not have that configurable. It's an important feature for me. I now need to install an add-on to get the desired behavior. Which just seems a bit silly to me. For the rest it's wonderful.

For extensions:

[0] Better History NG (my fork of the unmaintained non-NG version, so far I only fixed bugs, so it works again, same performance issues as before), apparently inspired by the Vivaldi history.

[1] uMatrix, which has the superior interface for blocking/unblocking of domains compared to uBlock (which you obviously have as main adblocker ;) )

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/better-histor...

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/umatrix/

I use firefox a lot. When I have to build a PC / workstation for grad-students or labs, I install linux, and the distro I use has Firefox by default and no chrome installed. The number one complaint / request I receive when I build a PC / workstation for the grad-students after they get it? Can you please install Chrome?

When I ask them... they have not even tried Firefox. Chrome is all they know, and therefore they do not want to even look at Firefox. As a longtime user of Firefox, I find it odd. I suppose if you put me on a new box, with Chrome as the only browser that came up, I guess I would ask you to install Firefox :)

> The number one complaint / request I receive when I build a PC / workstation for the grad-students after they get it? Can you please install Chrome?

Have you tried changing the desktop Firefox icon to be chrome's icon and naming it Chrome?

This complaint sounds like the old meme from years back of not so internet savy folks who thought "the internet" was inside "the blue ball" (the old IE icon). I.e., these students only know "Chrome" and only look for the chrome icon. It would be interesting if they would complain if the icon matched their possible expectations.

Ah, the old social behaviour experiment. I like it. I might change my image to reflect that.

If you give it a try, it would be interesting to learn the results.

Reminds me of the meme that the only thing people search on Internet Explorer is "download Chrome".

I hope some of them give FF a fair chance.

Nice coincidence: I've been using Teams in Chromium for a few months because audio just wouldn't work in Firefox. The Chromium experience then kept degrading until I couldn't reliably receive video or audio. Usually it would "fix" itself with a reload or two, but when even a reboot didn't help I tried Firefox again. Lo and behold, everything worked immediately! I swear MS must be on their old "let's make sure the customers have to spend XX% of their time trying dumb shit to keep our products working, and the sunk cost fallacy will keep them using our software" shtick.

LibRedirect by ManeraKai redirects YouTube, Twitter, TikTok... requests to alternative privacy friendly frontends and backends.

https://libredirect.github.io/

I agree. Maybe not for the same reasons:

FF has awesome privacy tools and extensions. I use it because I can configure it to be extremely pendantic about a lot of stuff.

For example, my setup requires me to whitelist each and every JS external script I ran to. The NoScript extension provides me granularity to choose whether fetch requests are allowed, fonts are loaded, etc. It remembers my choices and provides a quick UI for making these decisions.

For normal, non-paranoid users, I would recommend Chrome though. Not exactly because it is better, but because some pages will only work properly on it (due to lack of testing by the page authors, this is not FF fault)

I run Firefox in its own network namespace with Firejail so I can more easily observe traffic from Firefox with Wireshark. Unexpected traffic gets added to nftables to be dropped and logged. I almost feel like automating this process, but then I consider that I'd probably be better off running a fork of Firefox under different stewardship in the first place. https://librewolf.net/ looks very interesting for this reason. The health of the Librewolf project is interesting to look into.

People use a browser, overload it with extensions, then try a new one and are impressed by how fast it is lol

On benchmarks, both Firefox and Chrome have their advantages and disadvantages. One thing about Firefox is it has a richer extension ecosystem so you're probably even more likely to fall into the trap of overloading your browser with extensions

However since real adblocking is threatened in Chrome's future and adblockers can significantly improve performance on some sites, I wouldn't be surprised if eventually this works to Firefox's benefit

Yay. I'm glad to hear more and more folks are moving back to Firefox. It really is the best browser IMO. Like you said, it's fast, stable, has all my extensions and gets out of my way. Love it.

I love Firefox, it's my daily driver except for two things:

- printing (to a pdf or a printer). - copy paste

In both cases chromium is much better at keeping the styling.

Bugs have been reported for the later, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1772785 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1646515 but no progress is happening.

I want to begin typing a website's name, have firefox recognize it and indicate it to me, and press 'tab' to begin searching.

The lack of that single feature makes firefox unpleasant to use for me.

that literally works in Firefox. It didn't in earlier versions, but it does now.

What does begin searching mean?

I just tested, the tab key cycles through the list of results for the input typed into the location bar. What should happen instead?

If I type 'goog', and the history result is google.com, then pressing tab should result in calling the search function in the tab with google as the search engine, and with the cursor in the box for the query.

It should not cycle through the drop down menu.

I can offer you search engine bookmarks as an alternative way to achieve this. For example, I have bookmarked https://www.npmjs.com/search?q=%s with the keyword `n`, and https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/search?q=%s with the keyword `mdn`. In the location bar, I type `mdn font-family` and submit, and this kicks off the search.

This feature is present in my install. You should try updating perhaps.

Will try.

I considered switching a while back, but it only got compelling when I took the leap and switched on Android and my various desktops.

Sync'ing is great, general use is pretty good. I keep Chrome in backup for a handful of sites that just don't work on Firefox.

Not sure if it has changed recently but for ages the regular version of Firefox on Android lacked several things that were in Firefox Nightly (eg pull down to refresh, which might seem trivial but it's annoying as anything when it's not there!)

> it seemed quite interesting to send links from phone to desktop

This is a killer feature for me. Last time I used chrome it supported "pulling" tabs between devices but not "pushing". It seems like a minor difference but it really improves the UX for me. Often I am reading something on my phone but get interrupted so just fire it to my desktop. This is much better for me than remembering that I wanted to finish something and then find it in my list of tabs.

Yea definitely a use case a lot of people would run into.

I use Waterfox personally, but it's a minor difference.

Some lesser known extensions:

LocalCDN

Tab Session Manager

Feedbro

Enhancer for YouTube

Request Control

Trace

There is a lot of configuration you can do with a user.js file as well. I took a lot of options from the tor browser config since I value privacy.

I recommend checking out some of the guidelines of the arkenfox.js for extensions.

https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/wiki/4.1-Extensions#-don...

Is the fact that it’s owned by an analytics/ad company a concern for you?

https://avoidthehack.com/review-waterfox-browser#thebad

No, but I'm choosing to trust the developer for the moment.

https://www.waterfox.net/docs/faq

Couldn't disagree more. Between ~October and ~December of last year, Firefox mobile on iPhone was essentially broken. The main menu would take 30 seconds or more to pop up. Switching to another app and coming back (or bringing up the control center) would result in Firefox hanging for 20 seconds if not outright crashing.

Before last October, I would have recommended Firefox to anyone who asked. Now, I would recommend Chrome for their ability to fix bugs in a timely manner.

> I'd be glad to learn of any other cool features and extensions that y'all might want to share.

I built an extension to inject your Mastodon timeline into Twitter[0], recently added Firefox support as well. Especially useful as a stop gap in light of Twitter getting rid of their API access and hopefully will be a first step for many to transitioning to Mastodon.

[0] - https://chirper.picheta.me

The FF JS engine is too slow. I like to check my Screeps account every now and then and even Chrome on my phone is faster than FF on my 2700x desktop.

I just tried it last week. :/

You should checkout the ability to use containers (no not docker) in the browser for certain sites like social media, keeps their tracking nonsense contained.

It’s been that way since the mid-2010s, especially if you don’t have at least 16GB of RAM. I switched from Chrome circa 2015 but use both extensively. As a developer what I found worked best was to develop sites in Firefox and then test them in other browsers - it avoided relying on Chrome-only features but since the developer tools both have things they do better you’ll naturally find certain tasks are easier in one.

I prefer a fork of Firefox, focused on privacy: https://librewolf.net/

Highly recommended.

It's not firefox exclusive but SponsorBlock is an incredible extension if you watch a decent amount of Youtube. It's not just about skipping sponsorships (which it does well of course), but having a bunch of crowdsourced metadata about every video is so useful if you just want to skip to the point of the video. You can also skip non-music portions of music videos, filler content, etc.

Biggest difference compared to Chrome, of course, is privacy. Of course Chrome cares about performance and all that other stuff, but significantly less about privacy.

The downside of that is that ReCaptcha sucks more than usual. Because Google knows less about me, I sometimes have to do a ReCaptcha two or three times before it will grudgingly acknowledge my humanity.

Usually I see ReCaptcha as a sign not to use that site.

Portability of saved passwords is a hassle that might get regulated in the next decade or two.

I have 15 years of saved Keychain credentials that I’ve been very slowly porting over to Firefox Sync since switching to Windows. The fact that I let Apple generate complex passwords makes entry by hand even more slower.

Apple’s Chrome iCloud plug-in for Windows is just paying lip service.

> I have 15 years of saved Keychain credentials that I’ve been very slowly porting over to Firefox Sync since switching to Windows. The fact that I let Apple generate complex passwords makes entry by hand even more slower.

Do you know you can export all Safari passwords to an unencrypted .csv from the Safari Preferences page? (Preferences Passwords, click the “circle with 3 dots” pop-up, choose “Export All Passwords”)

I had no idea! My faith in technology companies is restored!

I tried to export from Keychain Access before without success.

I'm not sure how it compares or works with Tab Stash, but I have used Tree Style Tabs[0] for years and couldn't live without it.

[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

For months my Chrome (on Windows) just stopped showing new tabs when there are so many that they are supposed to scroll.

Bug is known, but I haven't seen a solution even though it's not recent.

Reinstalling doesn't help. Disabling extensions doesn't help. Same thing on another computer with same google account logged in.

I've been using firefox for years... Firefox is cool. Slack huddle in my Firefox never works, I don't know why. But that's cool. If someone in the team needs a "huddle" I can give a reason and ask them to describe their problem instead. That works 99% and saves me a lot of time.

I love firefox.

I wish it had better permissions around extensions. So I could only allow them for certain pages like in chrome.

I can't use Firefox in my work environment. It doesn't have some Chrome extensions that make it impossible for me to use, such as ones for Google services. It sucks because I dearly miss container tabs. If Firefox could support Chrome extensions, that would be game changer.

I mainly use firefox as well, but as lots of the people I have other browsers installed just in case. I like it, it’s fast and reliable for me, and I don’t want only-chrome future.

I’ve kinda browser wrapper thing with a chrome based browser for few google apps, like Keep, Gmail and Calendar on Windows.

Oh Firefox, the best of the worst browsers, as there are no new and exciting browsers any more. Added new unremovable extensions button, video conferencing support is still flaky, but I use it daily, no matter what. Maybe one day Andreas Kling's browser Ladybird will replace it...

I switched to Vivaldi for most of my browsing. I was a Firefox users for over a decade, but had to quit after they kept rearranging the UI every six months.

Vivaldi isn't perfect. It takes a lot of searching around the internet to find out how to enable or disable certain options (and there are a lot of them), but right now I consider it the best of the worst for 2023. It's the most customizable, and the browser sync feature works pretty well.

Thanks for reminding about Vivaldi. I loved Opera back in the day, when they had their own browser engine and kept on innovating browser UI.

Firefox used to be even better.

I’m still bitter they dropped that workspaces feature where you could group tabs together and switch to a completely different group of tabs witha few keystrokes.

And no, the replacement feature is not equivalent nor better in anyway.

Still better than that bag of spyware trash that google chrome is.

I'd like to use FF but I've never been able to figure out how to replicate something Safari does that's ingrained in my fingers at this point.

In Safari, I can use command+1-9 to open bookmarks. So command+1 is my PRs, command+2 is the JIRA board for the current sprint, etc.

You can give bookmarks nicknames, e.g. "PR". You can activate those from the location bar by typing the nickname. Then set up a keyboard macro that maps <command>+<1> to <control>+<l>, <p>, <r>, <Enter> etc.

I now use Brave on everything: Linux, Mac, iOS, iPadOS.

Mozilla has some really weird stuff going on in their financials that bother me, and as a result, I just can’t use their products anymore. This is similar to my feelings about Google, Microsoft, and so on. I prefer tech companies to just be tech companies and not branch into other fields. I understand that Brave’s stance on certain things bleeds into politics with things like thwarting censorship and encouraging encryption, but those are also still technical problems. Tossing money at social issues isn’t what I want out of a tech company.

Full disclosure: philosophically, I am an anarchist. You should look for yourself at Mozilla’s financials if you don’t agree with my politics.

https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-202...

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/

https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-990...

Also, just search up some of the organizations and stuff that get mentioned here. It’s weird.

————-

Edit: so, of their 1.1billion dollars in assets (the foundation, and two wholly owned for profit subsidiaries) Mozilla cut 100 million from software development expenses, while at the same time spending large sums of money on groups with no tie to software at all. It also seems that the vast majority of their revenue comes from Google search inclusion as default in Firefox… so why cut the software development funding?

Regarding Brave, it’s funded by Founders Fund, Pantera Capital, Digital Currency Group, Pathfinder, Foundation Capital, Rising Tide, Hone Capital, Propel Venture Partners and through their BAT tokens. I find the crypto side annoying, but that doesn’t feel as morally “icky” as some of things Mozilla appears to do (calling themselves a non-profit without mentioning for-profit subsidiaries, spending money on things that have nothing to do with software, reducing funding to the development of their core product).

In short, I kind of hate all major browsers, but there aren’t good ones to choose from so I try to pick one that feels least-evil. When LadyBird browser gets to some kind of truly usable level, I will certainly switch to it for daily use.

https://awesomekling.github.io/Ladybird-a-new-cross-platform...

I'm not an anarchist, but I did the same thing for the same reasons.

Sure, Mozilla seems to have quite severe organizational issues, but to me, the deep integration of a crypto wallet into Brave is what's keeping me away from it.

A Crypto pivot didn't end well for Opera, it ruined one of my favorite OSM apps for iOS (maps.me; fortunately there's an open source spin-off available now, i.e. Organic Maps), it left a bad taste in my mouth when Signal did it...

I use Firefox as my main browser, and more or less consider my relationship with Mozilla to be not different from any other corporation – as long as the product itself works for me and doesn't seem to be heading into a predatory direction (e.g. heavily pushing a subscription model, needlessly collecting data server-side etc.), I'm fine with its creators spending their money however they see fit.

That said, I'll also definitely not donate to Mozilla in its current state.

Opera was ruined by many other things. The new owners (since 2016) have been running it into the ground basically.

The ads, tracking, dark UX patterns, performance regression, and social media integrations are things that together made it for me, even before I heard how even OG ex-Opera employees won't touch it out of mistrust anymore...

The crypto wallet you can take or leave, it's not like they shove it in your face.

It’s possible to be completely bearish on the crypto ponzi, and use Brave with all the crypto features completely disabled.

Their crypto play is a novel revenue generation scheme which doubles as a “web3” marketing campaign to acquire a niche userbase. Good for them, but it’s not for me so I opt out all of it, and it’s trivial to do so.

Brave is more aggressive on protecting user privacy than all the other browsers also, including Mozilla who is completely dependent on Google to pay their bills.

I clicked on your links but I don't really understand what it is I'm meant to be seeing. I haven't read a balance sheet since college, but things look pretty normal to me? Is the objection that about 2% of their expenses are on Grants and donations? Is it that they make revenue through a VPN subscription they offer? Is it that their taxes show spending about $14 million (a drop on the bucket) on policy programming (mostly it seems about building the Common Voice dataset and funding external data scientists to work on data stewardship policy stuff; these feel, I think, like what you're suggesting that it's fine for Brave to do because they're "technical problems"?)

I read -- skimmed, but I think that's fair -- through a dozen pages to try to understand your point and nothing jumped out at me. There's a part where they talk about how they made a few thousand dollars from credit card rewards points. I did a ctrl+f for "woke" and "transgender" and "critical race theory" and "covid vaccination" and "cico versus macro-based dieting strategies" and didn't find anything. It's a little frustrating because I spent more time trying to figure out your point than you spent to make it.

> You should look for yourself at Mozilla’s financials if you don’t agree with my politics.

It has nothing to do with your politics, but I shall continue to not care about Mozilla's financials.

Can you show us how did you inspect Brave's financials ?

I'm not seeing what's troubling here. Going strictly off of the examples you provided, I see that they largely hold their donations as bonds, while re-donating the rest to either purchase open source software or, at the government level, prevent tech companies from selling privacy or participating in censorship. As an anarchist, wouldn't that be something you'd approve of?

I don't use Firefox. I find the UI to be clunky. But after reading your examples I'm persuaded to switch.

> As an anarchist, wouldn’t that be something you’d approve of?

I suspect GP considers themself an anarchist in the pop culture sense, which has little in common with the political practice.

Firefox is alright, and I use it for some things, but the killer feature preventing me from transitioning over is the inability to cast to my TV. Even with the janky plugins, the friction is too great to allow me to commit to a full switch of my browsing experience.

I was going to buy a Pixelbook Go since it's a well-made laptop and I like the simplicity of ChromeOS. Then I realized that the first app I'd install is Firefox since it's vastly superior when it comes to ad-blocking especially on Android.

We had a case where Chrome was choking on really large Google Sheets when you tried to use filter views, it would freeze for 10-20 seconds. With Firefox there was no freezing, which is strange considering Sheets should be optimized for Chrome.

Putting aside all politics, end of the day, despite all of Google's shortcomings - they actually got the UX of Google Chrome REALLY RIGHT.

The tabs are awesome. The unified search bar is awesome. The top panel UX is really tight and compact and looks good at the same time. The ability to sweitch between profiles which I now use a lot (work/leisure) works great.

ps: did I mention the smaller details like the immediate visual feedback you get when you use a search keyword? It's frigging awesome and one of the main reasons I abandoned Firefox and never looked back.

I mean even if you disliked Google you can just use Chromium or some un-Googled version.

Chrome is literally the BEST browser UX as far as mainstream is concerned. Obviously power users are always going to find issues with it. But as an attempt to provide a user friendly browser for the largest audience possible, it's simply excellent.

> The tabs are awesome.

Not that special anymore.

> The unified search bar is awesome.

No, they're not. By design they're very leaky, they send your typed queries to the search engine that your browser is set to PLUS a few to Google for analytics. That includes every website you type the address into.

I've been using it on desktop for a while, but on Android it's pretty rough, at least with the address bar on the bottom. I think there's a bug with touch locations being mapped to the correct place on a website.

I can't fathom why you prefer it at the top, but it's in Settings > Customise.

I meant the opposite. I prefer it at the bottom, but it seems the app doesn't handle it well. I'm often unable to precisely hit targets on the screen like a link or giant button.

Firefox has been my main browser for a long time.

At work we have one screen an an interface that has an extreme number of items in a grid control. Chrome is noticeably faster in that screen but otherwise I find Firefox performance to be great.

Firefox nightly has become nearly impossible to use, everyone is blocking, falsly assuming your version is too low, trying to get you to use chrome or assuming you're a bot and forcing you into CAPTCHa hell.

Firefox's default theme is just...bad.

I use ideaweb's Safari theme https://github.com/ideaweb/firefox-safari-style

Firefox is my default browser across devices. The killer feature of FF for me is primary password. One main password which protects all my other passwords and I have to enter it once after I start the browser.

Yeah I love the primary password feature. Chrome now prompts to login which is nice (to protect your saved passwords), but I like Firefox's "local control" model better.

I use firefox more and more these days on my android phone as it does ads-blocking _much_ better than chrome, like 100x better, after many years I somehow feel it might be time to retry firefox on desktops.

Multi-Account Containers made by Mozilla is the reason I can't stop using Firefox. Chrome doesn't have any similar extension that can display multiple profiles in one window like it does.

Front page of HN for what clearly is opinion and user error. Nice. Enjoy.

so much irrelevant stuff is on the front page now that i'm pretty sure they did it on purpose. and they are right, such things cause more comments and more discussion.

Just tangentially related, but on Windows I find that Edge is way faster than Chrome nowadays. No idea why, and it feels stupid to even consider it, but the difference is staggering.

I did try Edge a couple of years ago and I would agree with your observation too. I just didn't stick with Edge and came back to for some reason that is escaping me right now.

I'm even happily using Edge on Linux. I know, sacrilege.

Right now, I have had to move off of Firefox on my iOS iPhone because Google persistent ad is punching thru some websites.

Temporarily, Brave/iOS is filling in that void of much needed ad blocker.

I love Firefox and use it as my main browser. I do sometimes see issues with JavaScript on some sites which I assume are the result of developers mainly testing on Chrome these days.

My favorite is Library Extension which watches pages you surf for media titles and gives you a link to your library to check them out instead of buying them. Works well for me.

My browser preference is almost 100% tied to how well it blocks ads and auto play/scripts and other enemies of attention. The rest is mostly irrelevant to me personally.

I love firefox but it's kind of annoying that it doesn't have the chromecast option in the android version for most videos. so i have to open chrome only to do that.

It is the same on desktop. But that is probably because of Chromecast being proprietary to Google, so sadly nothing Mozilla could do.

Pro tip: use Nightly on Firefox, it’s a much better experience

The suggestions you get when typing in the address bar are miles better than the chrome counterpart imo. Otherwise I think these browsers are more equal now than ever.

There was a recently-resolved issue between macOS 13 + Chrome + Microsoft MDE that caused dragging tabs from one window to the other to either beachball or crash.

What always sucks me back into chrome.

* seamless japanese page translation

* Firefox always seem to be applying an update at that critical moment where you just need the browser to start RIGHT NOW

FF with Sidebery is nearly perfect, except that it seems that persisting pinned tabs across sessions is an alien technology that nobody has quite figured out.

Personally I find the most useful part of FF to be the events inspector in the console. More often than not I use it solely for that purpose.

Firefox View is decent, I don't often wish to transfer tabs between devices, but Colorways has a home now which makes much more sense.

Last time I benchmarked, Firefox was using way more RAM than Chrome. Microsoft Edge has been using most less RAM so I went ahead with it.

Switched from FF to Brave, just because FF spins up my fans and uses far more battery than Brave on arch linux. Wish I could switch back.

I’m using Edge because it’s like Chrome but has the vertical tabs which is a killer feature for me

Does Firefox have vertical tabs? If yes, I am switching

I feel it is the awesome browser since some years, already. With UBO, TSTabs and containers every other browser out there feels broken.

And if you use it longer than 30 mins the memory leak will crash your computer. /s

(this is my own experience, FWIW, but I understand not everyone has this.)

-Emily

Works well on my machine(s), even the 2010 TP x201 that has a whopping 4GB RAM.

yes, our comment indeed said that not everyone has this problem

-Emily

Are you on macOS? FF has some issues on macOS.

I wish we were on macOS, but unfortunately we only have access to Windows now. So it was on Windows 10 Home 2004.

-Emily

I know a number of people using FF on Windows and they all find it works fine. Hmm.

Yes, we're aware that most people don't have this issue.

-Emily

I used Firefox exclusively for years, but I switched away when they bundled “pocket” and kept trying to force it down my throat.

It's not about Chrome, it's more about Google itself i think.

Basically, Google services are mostly dead eventually, given enough time.

It also supports a subset of extensions on the Android app vs most other browser apps that support no mobile extensions

Firefox is cool and would be great if it wasn't overly uptight about 2FA. Vivaldi is the best browser by far.

Awsome, yeah, sure… what are the most interesring speed or usability improvements were in ff during past 2 years?

How many core devs are working on changing things to make ff secure, faster and (not-so-dumb-)user-friendly? Telemetry opt out? Sure, but… you need to patch and build your own version of firefox to make it really privacy-friendly. And do not forget about re-branding.

For me, OP looks overly excited and hallucinogenically optitimistic.

Firefox's best engineers left after they fired Brendan Eich. That was the worst decision they ever made.

Can't use it on a Mac as it won't play ball with Keychain. Not going to reenter all my passwords.

I don't use Keychain as I have BitWarden but, AFAIK, the only browser able to connect to Keychain is Safari, isn't it ?

Sadly, Apple has just completely cut off 3rd parties from Keychain for website passwords (they can use the Keychain for their own isolated items, but can't touch any shared password data). All non-Safari browsers are affected.

Firefox on iOS a loophole for this, because it's forced to use Safari's WebView, so it gets Safari's keychain, but it can also then prompt to save in its own password sync. Far from ideal, but at least a way to escape Apple lock-in.

I agree it's annoying, but it's also not that big of a deal. I have 200 or so passwords duplicated in both Keychain and Keepass.

Shout out to all the peeps who never left firefox, and recognized Chrome for what it was. A cynical grab for influence and surveillance dominance it was from the beginning. Chrome always offered technical and ui excellence in exchange for your soul. Personally googles motto "don't be evil" always made me sick because corporations are by their very nature psychopathic. Now their motto is "do the right thing", yes, right by the company. Let's all be clear about what going on here.

Firefox's killer feature is isolated Containers.

Dealing with multiple AWS accounts would be awful without them.

Indeed. It's the best. Unless you have a veeeery old PC (if you do then Chrome feels faster).

I just use firefox bc its opensource. I use it with the duckduckgo extension as my search engine

The real reason to use Firefox is to prove Netscape won the browser war and Microsoft sucks.

Wait till you discover container tabs.. you're gonna love the way you browse!!!!

Container tabs feel so "good old internet": a power-user feature that changes the game but will never be very popular.

Not on Android (it stutters on scrolling even on newest Pixel). And I also think it's not the most safest browser on Android because Chromium is much more hardened there.

Source: https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing

Firefox for Android does not stutter when scrolling for me on a phone much weaker than a Pixel. That suggests it's not a universal issue but something more specific to your setup.

FWIW we don't have that issue on a Pixel 5a, OnePlus 7 Pro or Galaxy S21 Ultra.

I’ll pile on and say that it doesn’t stutter on my old and slow OnePlus Nord. Only on one weird page that was recently on the frontpage, but I guess they were simply also doing some fuckery with the scrollbar.

I only use firefox, because people don't use it. I always choose the 3rd

"BypassPaywallsClean" is a must-have extension for the modern internet.

Does anybody else use multiple browsers? Maybe it's just because I'm doing web-dev right now, but I think using as many browsers as possible is necessary as I find inconsistencies that could become bugs all the time. I use Firefox as my "main" and Chrome as my "alt".

I have to use Chromium for MS teams unfortunately (calls and screen sharing are not allowed on FF)

I use chrome as a backup. Though initially I only did this to support some legacy software that only worked through Flash (don't ask), so if I'm forced to use Chrome I get the distinct impression that I'm looking at a buggy/legacy/badly written webpage.

What's the difference between "BypassPaywallsClean" and "BypassPaywalls"?

- Related HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22482329

- Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/pwtafe/bypass_payw...

> "Does anybody else use multiple browsers?"

Yes, now everything is in a browser there aren't different programs visible on the taskbar so I make do with different browsers for different tasks. It's not because I love browsers, it's a bodge for the decline of good dedicated desktop GUI programs.

I love Firefox, too.

It is more customizable than Chrome.

But it isn't fast. Especially not on iOS.

Firefox, as well as every other browser on iOS, is as fast as Safari since they are all required to use the same WebKit rendering engine. That is, at least with regards to website rendering.

Firefox's "Take Screenshot" feature is too good.

It always has been. No real reason to use any other browser.

best for desktop for me, too, but absolutely very very bad for mobile, since

* I cannot automatically clean cookies when I close it * I even have to close tabs manually

Still waiting for FIDO2 support on macOS, unfortunately.

I recently switched from Chrome to Firefox and have not looked back. What eventually threw me over the edge is a recent "fix" [0] in Chromium after which Chrome will scroll an enormous distance per click of the scroll wheel from my MX Anywhere mouse. Of course, there's no way to get the old behavior back (see: https://xkcd.com/1172/).

In Firefox, the scroll multiplier can be tuned to perfection.

[0] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=127008...

i started using firefox for spotify since i dont want to install the app and it would stop playing during potcasts after about ~1hour on chrome

Right now? It's been like this for years.

Still, firefox drains battries on MacOS.

Firefox enjoyer since 2008 over here :)

Obvious shill post is obvious

> "import saved passwords"

Yikes

Any must have extensions?

chrome still has some slick and instantaneous-ness over firefox

Hsolo8553@gmail.com

It doesn't support the webkit scrollbar variables.

-webkit-scrollbar

-webkit-scrollbar-track

-webkit-scrollbar-thumb

To be fair, vendor prefixes are there while standards are adopted. I do not expect Chrome to support the -moz prefix either.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Vendor_Pre...

That's because Firefox is not based on webkit. Of course, nonstandard webkit extensions only work on webkit browsers.

Why would it..?

Yeah, because they are -webkit variables.

So? Chrome doesn't support hyphenation yet.

Yep, its the best!

I've been using Firefox for twenty odd years now. It's performance is comparable to that of other browsers.

But the pilfering of Mozilla by its management (giving themselves million dollar bonuses and pretending they're managing a billion dollar corporation) and their illogical and fickle decisions has reduced IMHO the need for an independent open-source browser.

The only rationale for having a browser like Firefox now is to push back against megacorps like Google adding extensions to prop up their agenda (like preventing ad-blockers from working).

Mozilla had its day in the sun. I still use it but if it were to go away I wouldn't lose too much sleep over it.

This is very obviously an ad… at the top of the front page…

Y’all crack me up sometimes.

It is opinionated, but is it en vougue nowadays to call everything an ad? Come one.

It’s literally a product name drop and elevator pitch of user features.

I mean, I can appreciate your trying to take a nuanced approach, but it is quite literally and quite clearly an advertisement.

This level of cynicism would make more sense if you spent any time on the Internet, where normal people regularly evangelize for their browser of choice simply because they feel strongly about it. It's a very common thing. Check out Reddit.

Firefox gets all their operating funding from Google’s Search agreement. This prevents FF from protecting user privacy as it’d jeopardize their primary source of income.

Firefox also has a lot of telemetry and experiments enabled, even if users opt out in the GUI. These have to be disabled in the about:config setting.

It is the slow and uses a lot of RAM, but despite all these thing it’s the second most popular for a reason (kept alive as an easy way for Google Chrome to avoid anti-trust)

Could you kindly provide a reliable guide about how to completely disable telemetry in FF?

There are many such guides out there with each covering slightly different things, this may be a good starting point https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Firefox/Privacy

> Firefox also has a lot of telemetry and experiments enabled, even if users opt out in the GUI. These have to be disabled in the about:config setting.

Have you heard of LibreWolf ? It is basically FF without the telemetry and with a lot of privacy and security features [1]. I've been using it for 2+ years and I'm very happy with it. The transition from FF to LibreWolf was seamless.

[1]: https://librewolf.net/docs/features/

It’s been a while since I’ve looked for alternatives, and I remember coming across Ice Weasel and similar forks in the past, but they had slow security updates. I will take a look at Librewolf.

Firefox WAS a good browser.

Firefox has been a failure since their values shifted from developing an extensible browser for advanced users to protecting lgbtq+$^! rights.

I just switched back to chrome for the same reason. Every page in Firefox was taking 60+second to load. Tried it on chrome and pages were loading instantly.

I had originally switched to Firefox for privacy concerns but that and the memory usage/occasional crashing were too much for me.

edit: not sure what the downvotes are for. I'm glad there's a second option out there. It didn't work for me but figured it was worth sharing my anecdote along with OPS. I just wish there was a third option, or more.

60+ seconds seems really odd. It sounds like less of a rendering issue and more like some more fundamental technical problem. Have you tried all the usual things, e.g. reinstalling, previous versions, etc.?

I think you got confused here, OP had the exact opposite experience

> Every page in Firefox was taking 60+second to load

That really sounds like a broken installation. Out of curiosity, would you care to share what add-ons you have/had installed?

Yeah good point, could be that. Just keeper and ublock, on windows

Snappyness is really a feeling. It could be cache or something else. Sometimes you want to use something else. Like cpu doing some work on something else while it put the browser on pause. All browsers should be able to render all sites really fast.

I don’t have a dedicated browser, I use edge chrome safari and Firefox interchangeably. However, I work on websites for a living. Using different browsers is part of the job and if I don’t I might miss something breaking somewhere.

Generally my thinking has been get passwords into 1P, store bookmarks and interesting sites in zotero. Now, all I use the browsers for its pure rendering capabilities.

It wasn't a rendering issue, it was a network connectivity issue. I probably sound like I don't know what I'm talking about, but it is what it is. Switched to chrome and the network issue resolved immediately.

Did you try to clean up Firefox (i.e. remove the whole Firefox profile on the disk)?

No, but at the same time I don't really want to diagnose my browser. I just want something that works.

Occasionally, the first page takes 30+ second to load. I am on Lubuntu 20.04 and only have ublock extension active.

Usually to "fix it" (bringing time to below 10s), Hamburger Menu -> Help -> More troubleshooting information -> Clear Startup Cache. Also making sure my dns/network is up by pinging successfully a external website before launching Firefox.

But sooner or later startup time will creep-up again. I'm not quite sure what's happening. Maybe it's trying to load various file from disk (and not the SSD), or waiting for some blocking network request. I guess maybe I'll get luckier when I'll migrate to 22.04. My chrome is completely broken and cannot be installed at all since I've inactivated Snap forever for botching the migration process from 18.04 to 20.04.

This sounds like it might be the same issue tbh, although I'm on windows. I'll give it a shot if I feel like switching back, thanks.

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