Firefox Sync actually works | Hacker News Reader

Firefox Sync actually works

howtogeek.com

515 pointsVinnl328 comments

The most compelling reason to use Firefox Sync is that it is client-side encrypted. Mozilla stores opaque encrypted blobs that it is entirely unable to decrypt.

Law enforcement agencies request that data from time to time, hoping to obtain browsing history, only to be turned down thanks to the encryption.

(disclaimer: former Mozilla security)

Even better, you can host the sync server yourself: https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncstorage-rs

Only downside to using your own sync server for your devices' Firefox Sync is that the Firefox/iOS cannot accept custom Sync server URL; with Firefox/iOS, you are stuck with Mozilla Sync server.

That sounds equally like a downside to using Apple devices as a lot of open source self-hosted applications are limited in their respective iOS version.

A local server that uses sentry and spanner?

What?

You have an incredulous tone, but you can host Sentry (it's open source) and it's very common to host databases in the cloud.

This is a big reason to avoid Edge: They have entire categories that aren't e2ee, browsing history being one of them. Chrome, IIRC, can have e2ee but the user has to turn it on.

Brave, Vivaldi and Firefox offer complete, e2ee sync solutions.

Is this encrypted with a KDF from your password?

The encryption method is detailed here, that might potentially (not sure, as I don't know what KDF is) answer your question: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/11/firefox-sync-privacy/

But encryption does depend on your password:

> The crux of the difference in how we designed Firefox Accounts, and Firefox Sync (our underlying syncing service), is that you never send us your passphrase. We transform your passphrase on your computer into two different, unrelated values. With one value, you cannot derive the other. We send an authentication token, derived from your passphrase, to the server as the password-equivalent. And the encryption key derived from your passphrase never leaves your computer.

Chrome Sync is also client-side encrypted, you just need to set the sync password.

Settings -> You and Google -> Sync and Google Services -> Encryption options

Somewhat relevant: https://palant.info/2023/08/29/chrome-sync-privacy-is-still-...

Google uses some dark patterns in the UX, yes. It's still weird to me that GP says "The most compelling reason to use Firefox Sync is that it is client-side encrypted" when that's table stakes for any browser sync engine I know of.

Isn't this the same with Safari?

One of my biggest gripes with Firefox sync is the way they have divided the mobile bookmarks from the pc ones. It makes the ux kinda weird as a lot of the bookmarks I use on my desktop I also use on my phone and vice verca. But when I add a bookmark on my phone it ends in a separate mobile bookmark folder.

Can only mirror this, I just want my bookmarks not different sets of them.

For the life of me, I don't understand why they do this.

It's not 2003. I don't have a separate bunch of WAP bookmarks for my phone.

I like Firefox. I've been using Developer Release path for years. Yet, the memory usage is such a hog.

I almost cannot run VS 2022 or Android Studio while also running Firefox to check for questions on code. [1]

I have two tabs open responding to this post (HN and HN comment), and Firefox has 13 processes running in Task Manager with ~1 GB of memory used. And in there, is a -42 MB process. I'm not even sure what a -42 MB process even means in Task Manager. No wait, now its -77 MB.

[1] Note: this is also a serious issue with VS 2022 and Android Studio. Every release, Android Studio somehow gets slower. A couple years ago, I used to be able to build, test on emulator, and deploy while having a browser open. Now I can barely open the emulator. VS is kind of a joke. To build a couple 100 line WinRT file it loads the entire device library from all of history (following MS' examples)

It's somewhat nice that the bookmarks added from mobile is marked in some way as such. Makes organizing them on a computer later easy and/or can make it easier to recall (I remember seeing this page on my phone -> I'll look for it in the mobile bookmarks folder). But depends on how you use bookmarks of course.

Chromium browsers do a similar thing IME, and while I don't mind it, I don't like that the "mobile bookmarks" folder is only really accessible from the bookmark manager proper, not the bookmarks sidebar or the desktop bookmarks bar's UI.

Oh and you can't use the bookmark tag thing on mobile either.

And you can't delete a URL (or domain) from the results of a search of browsing history. So the URL will continue to come up until you sync your history and get rid of the URL/domain on desktop.

This is the number one reason why I can't use Firefox

Yes, it just works; but a few days back all my devices suddenly lost almost all of the passwords. Not all but most of them, couldn't make out any pattern or reason. Luckily a Linux laptop that I don't usually use had the full set and I had to export them, sync, and import them back to restore everywhere. Very scary, any ideas why this could've happened? I immediately backed up for the future, but this kind of loss should not be happening.

No idea. I've been using Firefox and Sync for years, currently on 5 devices (one android). Never had a problem. Firefox 121.0 (64-bit). This is the "release" channel. Maybe you're beta testing?

You know what, you could be onto something. I'm using the Firefox Developer version (122.0b3 64 bit). In any case, how are the differences resolved? E.g., in my recent case, all the devices ended up with only a handful of passwords (17), whereas the Linux laptop had 858. When I brought that laptop online (after exporting them), it synced and also ended up with the 17. I wonder what the logic was to deduce that the 17 are the ones to keep and the 858 should be deleted (there are some common ones of course). Because after sync when I imported the 858 back, it kept them all and synced them to all other devices, so it considered them as additions that should be kept.

Me too. It is so flawless that I had forgotten how good it works until seeing this article pointing that fact out.

Same, I've been using Firefox for years and it's always just worked. Recently it got faster, too, now sending tabs between devices is instant.

Weird, I'm using Firefox across 6 different devices, different OSes (Android, MacOS, various Linux distros) and different versions (current or LTS) and it just works.

Unfortunately my company blocks the sync password feature :-(

A reasonable policy given the lack of control. What do they provide you with as an approved password manager?

is it a good idea to use password managers built into web browsers? (vs using a password manager from some third party? bw/1p)

I used Firefox's password manager for a long time but eventually switched to KeePass which is FOSS and not cloud based. It's much better than the browser builtin password managers.

I store the .kdbx file in Syncthing (== Dropbox) so it automagically syncs between all my computers and phones. Use the KeepassXC app on computers along with their browser plugins, and the KeepassDX app on Android (idk about iOS).

One advantage of this is that the passwords work across all browsers. If you use FF's password manager, you only get passwords available in Firefox; but with Keepass they work in FF & Chrome & for native android apps & etc. And with the browser plugins it works about as well as the browser's native password managers. It also has support for TOTP 2 factor authentication.

Also I can easily make a copy of the .kdbx file (literally just ctrl-c ctrl-v the file) to save archives of my password db. (That said, over years of having the database open across multiple devices and editing it while open on multiple devices, it's never gotten corrupted)

Similar workflow here. On iOS I use Keepassium, which can access files on Dropbox, so it can read and write to the master password file there, which then propagates to the other machines with Dropbox installed.

Whatever password manager you use I would consider browser integration critical. This is because it will check the domain for you and prevent phishing attacks that may work if you need to copy+paste your password. The fact that the password doesn't auto-fill is a huge red flag that interrupts your regular workflow and requires an unusual manual action to be phished.

But whether that is an in-browser password manager or a third-party manager with browser-integration (usually via an extension) probably doesn't matter much.

I don't know, but I use an admittedly clunky setup using Password Safe and my own NextCloud server just to be sure I have complete control.

I don't think so, but since browsers offer this option it should be extremely stable.

I use BitWarden pretty good

They recently updated the Firefox extension with very good UX improvements!

It's definitely suboptimal.

Sure, why not?

> this kind of loss should not be happening

It should not, but you probably should also not be keeping your passwords (only) there, encrypted or no.

This just happened to me too. Checked my linux machine and they were there. Backed em up.

What the heck

See "Chrome Sync privacy is still very bad"[1] and its predecessor article[2] about Chrome and Firefox for an evaluation of the privacy and security of browser syncing.

[1] https://palant.info/2023/08/29/chrome-sync-privacy-is-still-...

[2] https://palant.info/2018/03/13/can-chrome-sync-or-firefox-sy...

I've avoided FF sync because I don't want my browser history on the cloud. I only really want my profile configuration, such as my addons and userjs flags. Unfortunately the FF directory in my .config is intermixed enough between config and content that I don't try to back it up. Am I missing something?

FF Sync doesnt work by backing up your config directory to some cloud storage. That would be a recipe for disaster since your profile has certain machine specific settings configured automatically by the browser. When you enable Sync you get to explicitly decide which things you want to include in the sync. I have mine set to just addons, configs, and bookmarks.

You can choose to sync or not sync bookmarks, history, open tabs, logins and passwords, credit cards, add-ons and settings individually. So, yeah, you're missing that you can just not sync history!

The sync contents are encrypted between devices.

EDIT: After writing this, I realized I should investigate the claim, because new devices are added just by logging in, not by giving them any sort of password.

Logging in includes giving the device a password.

There's no off-channel key synchronization. What means that the encryption is only as good as your password. But AFAIK no browser has it anyway, and nearly no sync service.

Brave uses a QR code to exchange the key.

They posted an article a while ago with a high level overview of how FF Sync encryption works, but the TL;DR is that the key for E2EE is derived from your account password.

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/11/firefox-sync-privacy/

Yes, E2EE.

The parent raised a good point tho. If you can add devices without entering encryption info, how can it be properly E2E?

You can selfhost the sync server

How is this working nowadays? A few years back it wasn't exactly easy to self host. Ideally there would be a docker image and a docker compose config.

It works pretty well actually! I love FF sync and I started self hosting it earlier this year. You can find the full details (also changes needed in the browser settings) here: https://thesmarthomejourney.com/2023/03/18/self-hosting-fire... I only wish they would make their new rust based server available via docker(-compose) too. I have not found a working version of that yet

I was looking at this recently and still couldn’t make it work smoothly. The server itself is fine but I couldn’t get Firefox to pick up the new sync server url from about:config.

Possibly my fault and I need to poke at it a little more but in general I can start a docker container just fine so I feel like its maybe not quite there yet.

You can turn history sync off. It’s like, one of the first main toggle options shown to the user.

It does work very well, but personally I'd appreciate a mechanism that I could implement manually and without the cloud. Something like "copy files Foo, Bar and Baz on the source device to folder DooDad on the target device". I appreciate that this doesn't work for mobile devices with their filesystem-free presentation, but even there I'd rather explicitly import data from a file I downloaded than have it move through the cloud.

Firefox's sync service is open source [1], so you can self-host it and update your about:config to point to it. I do this and it works great. (I believe you can even self-host the accounts service if you really want to)

Caveat is that I've linked to the old Python one, and they've got a new Rust one, but it didn't support SQLite the last time I had checked.

[1] https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncserver

You should check out SyncThing. It's a privacy-respecting p2p file sharing application that you can use like Dropbox. A little fiddly to set up but works like a charm once you get it going

You can copy around profiles, which are just directories, or if you only want bookmarks you can export/import them to HTML or JSON easily enough from in Firefox.

Generally, I only want passwords, and I want a workflow that can be scripted 100%.

Obviously this is only one anecdote so take it with a grain of salt but my experience with Firefox Sync was abysmal. I had it corrupt my bookmarks db twice in a year of using it. Fixing it required digging into my profile folder on Windows and manually deleting the db file while also disabling sync. Otherwise it would just redownload the corrupted db. It was bad to the point where I couldn’t even make new bookmarks with the corrupted file.

Anyway, it really burned me on FF since. It’s probably fixed now (or at least I hope it is) and I want to go back but given the lack of priority put on FF by Mozilla I’m just nervous to make the change again.

Can some long-standing user of iOS Firefox say if the sync issues there have been fixed? Halfway-broken sync on iOS version of Firefox (as well as a general lack of love for it and the UI that kept getting redesigned every other month) was the reason why I switched to Safari 4 years ago.

I have used Firefox sync in my new Mac M3 and it flawlessly synced everything from my older mac, my Android phone, my Linux workhorse, and Windows machine. Really love firefox.

It's not fixed. It's still better than nothing, but it's weird to see an article singing its praises.

I still use Firefox though, it's the best cross-platform browser overall.

Still kinda broken and buggy.

Passwords belong in a dedicated password manager. Besides those, I don't understand what I'd want to sync. I've even disabled syncing tabs between sessions on the same machine.

The last thing I need is for what I was doing yesterday to distract me from what I'm trying to do today.

What I want in a browser is a dumb box that starts up as a blank slate every time, renders HTML and JavaScript, and is indistinguishable from all of the other dumb boxes that do so.

The FF address bar is an extremely unappreciated and under-praised search apparatus. I use it wholesale, dozens of times a day, and it can almost completely replace bookmarks (if you have a memory for titles and keywords), so it has for me, but the whole conceit only works if you sync history.

Syncing bookmarks is similar in reasoning and just as valuable. Syncing history and bookmarks both and abusing the address bar's search feature means I can have a two-tiered sync system where things that get bookmarked become "read later, forget now" and things like a documentation page for an ORM's conventions don't need to be bookmarked and can still be near-instantly and directly visited.

Syncing browser settings and extensions makes setting up a new machine or reinstalling or whatever trivially easy. Firefox felt right on my new work machine in a couple minutes.

There's autocomplete for credit cards, personal details, and address information that you can manually curate and sync as well. I don't trust it with my CC info, but having Firefox (on all devices) know who I am and where I live has saved me three minutes here and there dozens of times.

My experience with using Firefox as my only password manager has been great. Aside from functioning as intended on my computer, it makes it easy to access them on Android (shortcut to passwords if you long-press the app, systemwide password provider integration)

You might want all the configuration you did to make your browser a dumb box to be synced. For example, disabling showing recently viewed pages on the new tab page.

Completely agree. But speaking to end users, syncing between devices is an extremely high importance feature to many of them, although rarely can they explain why.

> What I want in a browser is a dumb box that starts up as a blank slate every time

This is what I want from a TV too, and yet most people seem content buying ad-riddled, ACR enabled, streaming app pre-install, 20 second boot rubbish. I'm not sure you and I are the standard consumer market.

> Besides those, I don't understand what I'd want to sync.

I think it's useful to sync extensions, and personal configurations.

For example, I have a userchrome.css (or something like that) file that, for the news.ycombinator.com domain enforces a maximum width on paragraphs, so that on my really really wide screen I don't get 900 characters per line, I get 78 or so.

Without sync, I simply copy the files to the correct profile whenever I buy a new machine. With sync, I wouldn't have to.

I don't think Firefox Sync manages userChrome though. I currently manage those files together with the rest of my dotfiles with Chezmoi:

https://github.com/flexagoon/dotfiles/blob/main/.chezmoiexte...

https://github.com/flexagoon/dotfiles/tree/main/dot_config/f...

> I don't think Firefox Sync manages userChrome though.

Sadly, no. This is one of the bigger QoL features of a modern browser - automatically lock the important CSS declarations for specific domains to make things readable and usable for sites you visit the most.

I use it to make sites readable (like HN), but there's some other things I think you can do.

I mean, if you had a list of ad-serving domains (typically ads are served from a different domain to the content), you could set the ad divs to be invisible in some way (`width: 1px`, for example) and the anti-adblocking javascript wouldn't detect any adblocking going on.

Autoplaying videos bothering you? Set the width and height for all video tags on specific domains to 1px.

With CSS getting every more powerful, it opens up a range of opprtunities.

- Sync installed extensions - Sync configuration and settings

Even with your quite unusual requirements, sync could still be beneficial if you use multiple machines.

That's what nix is for.

On the phone as well? Impressive.

Firefox sync may then only be for us regular mortals.

I actually wish Mozilla put out a dedicated password manager.

They have Sync, and they have SoPS (or well, used to?).

I'd gladly pay extra for it

I think that I'd prefer Firefox allow Bitwarden and other password tools to replace Firefox's password implementation. That way you'd get the UI/UX of integrated password management, but the single-source-authoritative backend too.

(before someone points out that Bitwarden has an extension: I do know that, but I'd like to see more modular features in browsers rather than our-way-is-best)

There used to a standalone Firefox Password app for mobile but it got the axe.

Lockwise.

And it had way better UX when auto-fill didn't work, because for some reason about:logins doesn't work on mobile, so you have to hunt through a menu mess to copy the password manually from Firefox.

I continued to use it (because they didn't stop it syncing) until I switched phone and so couldn't easily install it.

For all its issues, I wouldn’t say iCloud syncing is one of them for Safari. I’ve had nothing but a good experience over the past couple years when it comes to syncing tabs, bookmarks and passwords.

I have the opposite experience. Sometimes I see tabs from some of my devices, sometimes all of them, sometimes a few of the tabs and sometimes all of them. If I want to “hand off” browsing to another device I pretty much always have to use AirDrop.

> I’ve had nothing but a good experience over the past couple years when it comes to syncing tabs

There was a period where it sucked at syncing tabs for me, as it repeatedly showed tabs from other devices that no longer existed. Quitting them from that interface would not work as they would soon be back. I found many reports of the same problem online.

Fortunately it’s been working consistently well for long enough that I can rely on it again.

>On the surface, Firefox Sync seems to be basically the same as Chrome Sync. To set it up, you just need to sign into your devices with the same Mozilla account and choose what you'd like to sync.

And this is why I use brave - the sync there is accountless, you just get random id and create a random phrase - that's it.

I never had the urge to switch from Firefox to any other browser, it's the first application that gets installed on any personal device after setup.

I'm not convinced. Recently moved to a new computer and firefox didn't sync my settings in about:config and didn't sync my container assignments (had to go in and enable it manually in both the source and target computers, buried deep in the settings for the containers extension). It doesn't sync addons or addon settings. I don't think it synced all the interface customization (like removing pocket icon from the url bar, separate urlbar/search box), only some of it. I got my bookmarks, so that was helpful. To sync a lot of other stuff I was able to copy my prefs.js from the old to the new, and most of those settings worked.

You have to login and enable sync separately in the containers plugin for that to work.

(Sorry for title editing; HN cuts of "The Best" if a title starts with that, which would make for a rather nonsensical title...)

This makes me wonder how much of moderation (and thus headline editing) could be done by an LLM, and if that would be an overall improvement.

Chrome's sync also "just works" for me shrug

Yeah the whole premise here is that Chrome sync is broken. I'm not sure many people share that belief.

Love FF though. Maybe I'll go through another testing cycle with it and see if I just end up on Chrome again lol.

>see if I just end up on Chrome again lol.

One must love advertising and tracking to put up with Chrome on mobile.

Or rather it will until you step on some mysterious Google ToS violation and they nuke your Google account, without any recourse. I'm cognizant that's always a risk with cloud hosted things, but I can't recall seeing any amount of front-page posts of "Mozilla nuked my account and won't respond to my emails halp!1"

FWIW, I think Brave(?) has an implementation of the Google sync server that they use, so it's not totally ludicrous to self-host, but I don't suspect it would be easy or that Chrome would make any such thing easy to pull off

Firefox needs to celebrate the small wins I guess.

I feel like Firefox already wins on all the privacy dimensions, so what's left but small stuff?

It’s too bad that Firefox has such a great UX and privacy-focused cloud features like this, yet is being held back by its engine. As a heavy FF user for the last few years it’s become more and more clear that the world just doesn’t care about making sites work on FF and I’m more frequently having to switch to Chrome. My dream is that FF would switch to Chromium while keeping all the great features around the browser engine. But suggesting such a thing is blasphemy in the FF world so we’re stuck with an engine that no one targets any more and isn’t keeping up with modern web APIs more web devs are using.

It's too bad this is always one of the most upvoted comments on every FF thread when it just doesn't reflect reality.. been using Firefox for basically it's entire existence and it just works. It's always worked. Never been significantly slower than Chrome, at least to an extent that it matters, and now it's not slower at all. I don't have Chrome installed on my computer since everything works. What parallel reality do others live in?

My experience also. Whenever a site doesn't work I try it in chrome and bing -- and it doesn't work there also.

I have also been using Firefox since its early days. The only issue I have is trying to share my screen with Google Meet it just does not work. While, not surprising it is a slight annoyance as my company uses Google meet for all of our meetings.

Some smaller sites (for example local restaurants) will recommend chrome, but Firefox still works just fine for me.

I have the exact opposite experience. I've been using FF for a very, very long time, and I have yet to encounter a site that doesn't work on it.

Also, what modern web APIs Firefox doesn't support?

The only roadblock I’ve found has been the webserial API, which enables users to flash ESP32/8266 or other devices from webpages. It’s super handy for flashing WLED or ESPHome to devices because you don’t have to install any extra software. As far as I know, it has been marked as a “wontfix” in the Firefox bugtracker as they consider it a harmful feature [0]

[0]: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/336

Big blocker for me too. Would love to see support, perhaps behind some buried flag.

I mean, I understand the attractiveness, but it's a super-niche feature that wouldn't really move the needle.

The real problem, imho, is the constant glitching on Google properties like Gmail and YouTube. Even if they were really "accidental" (big if), they impact massive amounts of users in their everyday lives, and it takes very little to lose a user forever.

Maybe FF should launch a GMail competitor, and/or promote alternatives to any Google property.

I have issues, but rarely. (but I'm tech savvy... wouldn't want to tell my mom to try a different browser...)

My sense of what sites don't work properly (not necessarily 100% of the time, joy) are some big corporate, non-tech company websites, like Kaiser Permanente's and ADP's sites. My sense of recollection says these cases are frequently experienced as the combination of, "Ugh, gotta log into that stupid bloated benefits/work related site, oh and it's not working... time to try Chrome."

It’s a lot of little things. Just yesterday I was on vanguard and a select box wouldn’t display at all on FF. You start to notice these rendering differences all over the place. Gone are the days a site just flat out won’t work unless it’s specifically using an API FF doesn’t support, but it’s all the small stuff like wondering if a form is working correctly because something seems broken for FF

It's missing webnfc support which means it's not an option for our web based inventory tracking system.

I took a glance at Can I Use what the difference between the last public release of Firefox and Chrome is [1] and they don't really have that big of a difference in the eyes of normal use-cases? Some of these aren't implemented purely because of privacy reasons, the proposals aren't finished yet or complexity [2].

Why would Firefox need to change to Chromium engine? The only websites I notice that don't work with Firefox is because of user-agent targetting or just putting 5-second time-outs in Youtube code on non-chrome webbrowsers [3].

Can you give some examples of websites not working on Firefox?

[1] https://caniuse.com/?compare=chrome+120%2Cfirefox+121&compar...

[2] https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/

[3] https://www.neowin.net/news/youtube-seemingly-intentionally-...

Why should Firefox move to an engine that is completely controlled by Google? Firefox's independence is exactly why uBlock Origin will continue to work just as well as it always has, and Chromium-based browser will flounder with MV3.

My experience has been quite different in that I don’t even have Chrome installed on my Windows machine just yet, because FF has been working fine for me for a long time. I like to use uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger. I don’t use the cloud sync feature myself, because I mostly switch between FF and Mobile Safari and I don’t know if there is a good sync solution, and I’d prefer not to send my usage history and stuff out anyway. I’m sure someone out there - many someones, probably - has painted a number of more or less accurate pictures of who I am using my browsing data anyway.

In most cases FF is blocked by useragent sniffing, so you just need an useragent changer addon

This assertion doesn't match my experiences. I can't recall the last time a site gave a clear complaint about "we don't support firefox". I remember doing useragent modification 10-15 years ago, but more recently, when I tried to do it (I forget why), it seemed like changing the useragent has gotten less convenient, too (installing an addon feels worse than whatever I used to do). I also have the impression from podcasts maybe, that useragent filtering just isn't the near-source-of-truth it used to be.

I very rarely have issues with FF and I've been using it for 10 years or so. If a site doesn't work I'll try agan in a chromium based browser I use as needed but that's it. It's easy to keep one installed for such a use case.

In a decade of use, I have yet to run into sites that don't work just fine with Firefox.

> As a heavy FF user for the last few years it’s become more and more clear that the world just doesn’t care about making sites work on FF

Wouldn't it be better to build according to standards - rather than browsers? Do that and any site will work in Firefox.

It's too bad that I can't read the article - because I'm using Firefox and an ad blocker. I get "Something went wrong. Please disable your blocker on How-To Geek"

I'm using Mull, an Android Mobile browser based on Firefox with some privacy tweaks, with uBlock origin enabled, Android set to use NextDNS with even more adblocking, and a VPN. The page loads just fine for me. Maybe you're missing one of the lists that helps with anti-adblocking?

Works fine on Firefox with uBlock Origin.

It shows nothing of the sorts for me. Try uBO if you are not using it.

I am using uBO. When I disable it, the article renders.

How-To Geek is one of those spam sites that is full of basic tutorials that don't really help with your problem and pollutes your search results for ... anything.

Don't think you lost much, I didn't even try to open the original article.

Works fine on my Firefox with several blockers.

works fine for me with uBO

I've run into one site having oversized svg icons in Firefox only over the past few years.

Aside from that, no "chrome only" issues you describe.

Try Brave, it also has privacy-focused sync, but uses the Chromium engine.

One of the headline features for me is the Firefox recommended extensions program, where the extension code (and updated code) is manually vetted for malware and privacy violations.

> Recommended extensions are expected to:

    Function extremely well. All Recommended extensions should not only perform as they promise, but do so at an exceptional level. For instance, there may be many ad blockers out there, but not all ad blockers are equally effective.
    Be safe and secure. Recommended extensions undergo full code review by staff security experts to provide a strong additional security check.
    Provide a delightful experience. Recommended extensions should embody great design and user experience standards.

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-recomme...

I wish they'd only permit manually vetted FOSS extensions, separating developers (who might secretly sell out) from the ability to push updates directly to users. I want something like F-Droid or Debian but for browser extensions.

In fact it's really disappointing that Mozilla goes out of their way to make it difficult for another organization to do this for Firefox. If you want to install extensions from a source other than Mozilla you need to jump through more hoops than doing the same on android...

> I wish they'd only permit manually vetted FOSS extensions, separating developers (who might secretly sell out) from the ability to push updates directly to users.

The developer does have to supply access to the code and updates do have to be vetted before being pushed to users for an extension to be included in the recommended extensions program.

This is a big advantage over Chromium based browsers, since we know that extension authors have sold their extension to less that scrupulous persons in the past who slip in malware without the user even knowing that a formerly well regarded extension has changed hands.

I've seen more than one post on HN with extension developers revealing how common it is to get offers to buy out an extension with a large user base.

My point is that they shouldn't be publishing any extensions except those vetted extensions, or they should make it easier for another organization to publish extensions.

Both Google and Mozilla publish unvetted extensions and consequently their extension "stores" are on the whole very sleazy.

Some Firefox extensions are provided in the Debian repositories, maybe that's a start? I haven't tried much to use them, but maybe I should (though I'm not using Debian on the desktop right now).

It’s honestly things like this that make me respect (more than I already do) and stick with Firefox. They do not need to do that and in a lot of ways it’s just sticking their neck out for other developers/their users for very little gain on their part. Obviously, there are some benefits for them, but I think most people would agree that it’s mainly a risk at the end of the day.

with enough market share, if Google did this they would be cursed with numerous lawsuits for preferential selection and sued successfully

> with enough market share, if Google did this they would be cursed with numerous lawsuits for preferential selection and sued successfully

Google already has featured products on the Play Store, so preferential selection doesn't appear to be an issue.

However, the likelihood of Google paying human beings to go over the code of a free extension looking for security and privacy violations is about zero.

If Google did this there would be no more extensions on Chrome store because they'd have to remove them all.

The most compelling reason is it is not chrome

Braves syncing is also top notch.

I can watch the bookmark bar dissapear almost in real time on other machines (eg. notebook) when I use it. I do not sync passwords, though.

My favourite feature of Firefox is multi-account containers -- great if you have multiple online identities.

I use firefox profiles for this. Its an old old feature but the command line options for it still work.

this is absolutely a killer feature if you follow the one account per stage per region guidance with AWS accounts (which you really should).

Can you say more about this?

basically what the sibling said. it's a good idea to isolate dev stages from prod by putting their respective resources in different accounts. it's also good to have separate accounts for different prod regions. people often don't do this because it sounds burdensome to have 2-3 dev accounts and 3+ prod accounts for each service. it is pretty painful using the out-of-the-box AWS web UI, since it forces you to log in and out of each account.

but the containers extension associates each account's SSO token with the respective container, so you can switch between them freely. you can also color-code and label the tabs from each container, which makes it harder to forget whether you're looking at dev or prod.

I am not the OP, but I believe he's referring to the ability to be logged in to different AWS accounts simultaneously. Without containers, logging in to AWS account B would invalidate the tabs where you're already logged in to account A.

This! I set up everyone in my family with Firefox because of sync that just works.

I prefer reading content, especially PDFs, on my computer over my phone. One useful feature Firefox has is the ability to just send a tab to a device. When I am out and about, I would queue up reading papers by sending them from my phone to my computer. When I get home, my browser would have the tabs right there, ready for me to read.

I would add that chrome has a "send tab to device" feature that does as you describe.

Firefox on iOS randomly changes the order of new bookmarks, adding new ones to either the top or the bottom of the list. I assume they're assuming ordering in some underlying platform data structure that doesn't support it?

EDIT: I guess it was this, though I think it's been broken again more recently? https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-ios/pull/11895

At any rate I've found Firefox on iOS/iPadOS to be surprisingly buggy.. tabs hang and need to be closed, not all bookmarks are synced and/or the ordering changing per above, showing sponsored ads in the new tab shortcuts list and needing a force-close until they go away after being disabled, etc. etc.

Firefox on ios is just a reskin of Safari. They would need extra effort to make the account system work on that

I run Firefox as a remote app.

Every night, my main Firefox copies it's profile to a local virtual machine; that VM hosts Firefox as a virtual/remote app. I'm posting this from it.

This way I have all my containers and logins but my data stays at home. And browsing from my home IP has advantages.

Ah, looks like I'm different!!

Sync????

Thanks for the explanation:

"As a refresher, Chrome Sync is capable of syncing, and settings across devices signed into with the same Google account. That's the idea, at least."

I'm a heavy user of Firefox, 1+ hours a day. Never used "sync". Heard about it, but never knew what it was.

Now, nope: Don't want it!

For more:

"bookmarks, passwords, browsing history, tabs, payment info, personal info"

I don't know what a "bookmark" is. For the rest, I don't want Firefox involved with remembering any of those. Generally I want Firefox to do less, and less, and less, a lot less.

For all those issues, I have perfectly good, simple, old solutions.

I just want my Web browser doing little more than the minimum a Web browser needs to do and do not want it cooking my lunch or generally doing me favors. And I deeply resent Firefox, ..., my car trying to anticipate what I "want".

E.g., when I need to pound in a nail and swing my hammer, I don't want the hammer stopping, reminding me that a hammer could hurt one of my fingers, and requiring that I push a special button for the hammer to go ahead and hit the nail.

Generally, when I give an order, I want the intended purpose accomplished and do not want warnings, advice, popups, refusals, requirements to repeat my order, etc. Why? I'm trying to get my work done, ASAP, and the special help makes the work take 2-3 times longer.

Back talk: Tools that refuse my command and give me back talk seem to believe that they know more about my work than I do, and that is not just hurting my work but also patronizing and insulting. Tool developer: Don't do that; else, as soon as I have an alternative I will take it.

Yup, looks like I'm different. Maybe lots of people actually like popups, e.g., ones that try to do me favors but cover up what I need to see.

I've never noticed a problem with Chrome sync.. It's funny though that the issue the author has, address bar history sync, is something I explicitly turn off.. Because it does work, and I don't like all my browser histories showing up in screen shares..

Last time I tried sync with Firefox it saved all the extensions I installed but not the customized layout I used, so every time I installed Firefox I had to redo my toolbar again so it didn't get swamped in dozens of addon icons. It was always a mild pain point that disincentivized me from using sync. (But I haven't used Firefox in a while, so it may have been fixed.)

It was also pretty annoying how all the extension install pages opened in several dozen new tabs whenever sync was set up and I had to sit there letting it do its thing for a minute or two before trying to interact with anything. It didn't seem like the hallmark of a sync system that "just worked", in my opinion.

You could disable syncing extensions?

Yes, but I did want to sync my installed extensions, just in a way that the extension layout was preserved without further intervention, and not interrupting the initial flow with all the "extension installed" tabs. I will always want to install uBlock and my password manager in every Firefox instance, for example, so that seems like a perfect use case for sync. Plus, some extensions have a lot of config that would be a hassle to copy over every time (like Redirector).

Now that I think about it, I don't remember Sync handling syncing extension settings on top of install state.

Personally I find mobile browser plugins to be the most compelling reason, it's certainly the reason that FF is my main browser in conjunction with working browser sync across devices.

If you're in the Apple ecosystem then Safari has had this for a while.

Something that's frustrating to me wrt Safari is my, admittedly edge case, in which the company I work for won't allow using personal Apple IDs on company supplied macs. Apple only allow Safari sync to work between computers with the same Apple ID, which I sort of get, but still that makes it useless to me.

This same-Apple-ID restriction causes other issues too, like not being able to use my iPhone as a webcam on my work mac even though I can use my AirPods on that same mac because reasons.

Luckily for me, I'm super happy with Firefox.

I have three google accounts, one personal, one for my business, one for garbage web sites where I need an email but do not trust with my everyday address.

Chrome sucks at dealing with these since sync is tied to the account you have logged into and you have to switch login every time you access another account. This switch affects every new tab.

Firefox does not touch the FF login when you access some Google account info or email so FF sync works sooo much better than Chromes. Chrome needs to scrap and rethink how it uses Google accounts IMHO.

For me, a fatal flaw with Firefox is that canvas getImageData doesn’t work like any other browser. Instead of returning the pixel values for the image loaded into the canvas, it gives the pixel values after they’ve been modified by the current screen/OS color profile. Other browsers seem to maintain the actual pixel values even if the OS later modifies the visual output of the application.

This means that any user trying to do any data work with my GIS software will regularly get wrong outputs if they use Firefox.

Really? Is the new implementation of the sync server finally stable? For years we've been stuck between the old Python 2 implementation and the new incomplete Rust implementation.

Why would anyone need a reason? I mean it seriously. Chrome users on this platform really baffling for me. They know what the consequences are, they know quite well what the icon with their picture on the corner does. Still being OK with this is super interesting.

Most products are often get grilled here for having closed code parts or similar concerns but when it comes to giving complete audit of their online existence, "meh...". Same folks who criticize canonical (which I disagree strongly with their late practices) only to install chrome as their browser on their systems.

Insert "statistically speaking" wherever needed.

I think the big difference is stated purpose vs execution, especially combined with who/when that elicits a response vs passive agreement/disagreement. An extremely small proportion of even the super techno-nerd crowd are really about the principles of open source, all other considerations be damned, when selecting software to use. That said, when something claiming supposed to be the bastion for that use case and antithesis of what the closed for profits do does something they'd expect from the latter it elicits an extremely strong response from nearly all of those that are as well as a good portion of those who have other considerations just because of the hypocrisy. Windows/macOS adding a new Bing or Siri integration somewhere, while getting some mumblings, isn't going to illicit nearly the same kind of reaction from the crowd though as everyone already knows and expects that of them. The majority of even highly technical users tend to use software based on what they find most productive, not necessarily the software with the best policies and licensing. So, statistically speaking, you tend to get complaints about open source software not being up to snuff or principle followed by most people choosing non-open software much of the time anyways because they feel it works better for them.

For Firefox specifically, it's long failed at holding the web back from Chrome and the choice isn't about that anymore. That title has firmly been with Safari for a long time now. Because Safari isn't available on all platforms it leaves not much of a concern to choose a Chromium based browser outside that group who operate solely on principle not 100% of the browser is open source.

I think for a long time Firefox languished a bit too far behind Chromium in many architectural aspects (I remember waiting fooooreeever for Electrolysis then when it came out the browser was significantly slower than Chrom* at the time). This comparison is leaps and bounds better today but it's a bit of a day late, dollar short situation in that it's not better enough to get droves of people to switch over again like the IE vs Firefox era.

The other thing I'll mention is when the topic of browsers comes up people's goto is the last issue they personally had with each. Given the size and complexity of browsers combined with the amount of hardware, OS, and use case variance this tends to feel more akin to people arguing whether lottery numbers skew odd vs even based on their last experience than anything about the actual browsers. Even when the discussion steers towards talk of a specific feature a lot of the time that feature didn't even originate in the browser it's being brought up for.

Firefox stutters. Every couple of seconds, if I'm doing anything active on the page, it freezes up for a fraction of a second. I have no idea if that's a garbage collection issue or what, but it makes it painful to use.

That being said, I'm on Safari instead. Chrome doesn't make me happy.

I've never seen this, and I've used FF (well, LibreWolf) on everything from a 2003-ish laptop to a 12th gen i5. I assume you've filed a bug report?

When does it do that? I mean during doing what?

When scrolling, for example. Though it’s a lot more obvious while running an animation, e.g. http://server.kimbruning.nl:8081/~kim/baughn/snowmageddon/di...

Firefox falls flat on its foxy face when it comes to chromebook tablet support. I am so ready to ween myself from Chrome but when I open my chromebook, they pull me back in. Arrrgh.

Uh... if you wanted to get off of Chrome, getting a Chromebook might not have been the best choice.

This article is terrible, there's an animated ad between almost every paragraph and a floating animated banner ad and a floating auto-playing video ad. Completely unreadable.

Minor trick, if you use separate Firefox profiles, Firefox sync can be enabled between separate profiles, which means you can use it to do things like sync addons between profiles when you're quickly setting things up.

It's not perfect, I do still wish there were better ways to fork profiles in Firefox, but it can cut down on a lot of repeat configuration. And you can set it up, sync your addons over, and then turn it off and diverge from there.

As an avid OSS supporter, I used to be a Firefox user until I got frustrated by its restrictive policies.

For example, the addon store would block certain addons from being installed, or some settings were hidden or disabled by default.

On Android, they only allow a handful of whitelisted addons and prevent you from installing anything else.

This goes against the spirit of OSS, which is supposed to be highly customizable and user-friendly. I really hope they stop treating us as children.

Many more addons are now available on Android, and any extension can make itself available there (as of this month): https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/new-extensions-youll-lov...

What do you use instead? Most other browsers, especially the big blue and yellow one, provide even less control. I am always annoyed that Firefox won't let me skip an invalid cert warning though, while Chrome always will by typing "thisisunsafe" into the error page.

I don't use Firefox because I find the way Mozilla communicates to be creepy. I don't like that word but I'm not sure how else to describe it.

It's pretty sad. I wanted to do a one time donation to mozilla last month and they kept and kept pushing for a recurring one instead.

Aggressive marketing tends to trigger in me an equal and opposite reaction, so they didn't even get the one time donation.

Also, they should get rid of the 'what's new in firefox after an upgrade' and just give me my pages back. 99.99% of the time I don't care what's new. Also, the popup that tells you there's a new version available that randomly shows up over what you were trying to read. Just let me get on with my stuff, will you?

Dunno, I’ve been using Firefox since before it was Firefox as my primary browser and I’ve never used sync. I don’t think that’s the most compelling feature.

It's not the most compelling feature for me, but I spend 2 hours on the bus every day and love being able to send a bunch of tabs that pop up on my desktop when I get home.

It can be neat, though my problem is I've several hundred tabs "archived" (discarded/hibernated/whatever) on the phone and and I want to open them all on the desktop at the same time to go through (I'd be very happy for the 10 minute wait, and/or if they were all discarded/hibernated, as doing them one by one would be an absolute chore), but trying to kills the desktop FF by making it hang then fall over!

Sync is not a feature useful to me, either (along with most of the other newer features). Lots of people do find it very useful, though, and despite it not being for me, it sounds plausible that it could be the most compelling feature for the majority.

For a while, two things kept me from switching to Firefox entirely: instant translation and Google product compatibility. The first one was solved in Firefox 118 several weeks ago. The second one keeps nagging me: Google Maps are somehow jittery in Firefox, and I think there's something with YouTube, too. So, I am waiting for an inevitable manifest v3 transition of Chrome to ditch it for good.

Firefox's actual, non-replicable killer feature is somewhat questionable, but: Chromium has a lower limit on how much RAM a page can consume. Now, YouTube comments sections get huge, and huge web pages are huge. Turns out, Firefox can give the page more RAM and keep it nice and functional for longer.

The questionable part is spending your limited lifetime on reading huge YouTube comment sections.

I wish there was an extension that would make it work in Chromium based browsers. I use Firefox in windows while gaming ... but for dev work on Linux I use Brave. I use Xbookmarksync to sync bookmarks and Bitwarden for passwords. It basically works but I have a Firefox account anyway and history could be sync across browsers and maybe some setting that exist in both the same way.

Chromium crashes for me after running for a while with 10+ tabs. I had more than 500 open in Firefox and it ran well.

Also the ability to add proxies to multi account containers is great when I am trying to access the 3-4 websites that are only available in 1 country or are blocked in the EU. I can even force a certain domain to open in that container so I don't think about it.

Chrome history is confusing and bad. They broke history out into 2 things at some point, where you have "history" and something that I see now is called "groups" and of course I was able to look it up and see, yes, Google is once again gaslighting with random name changes and it was called "journeys" until a few months ago. It's some vague grouping of history as a list of pages you visited in sequence from an initial search, or perhaps starting from a new tab? And for some reason this tends to contain pages that the regular history doesn't.

I wonder how much money was spent on designing and implementing this stupid unnecessary reimagining of browser history that only serves to make things more confusing.

Since the main topic of this article is sync, does any browser or extension out there support syncing active tabs withing the browsing window, rather than putting them in a separate "recent tabs" menu? In other words, mirroring the entire browsing session across devices (ideally preserving tab order).

Arc[0] does this really well for me - across computers and even my phone.

Its chromium under the hood but the UX and sync story is impeccable.

[0] https://arc.net/

Good to know! I'm on the waitlist to try the Windows beta. Do you know if they're planning to port it to Linux at some point?

Many years ago, I wanted to use Firefox sync to migrate profile and bookmarks from one OS to another.

I don't know if it's still the case, but at the time there was an automatic periodic and a manually triggered sync, with a button and sync icon (like ). I triggered the manual sync by clicking on the button. The icon spinned for a few seconds and then stopped.

I interpreted this as the sync being finished, formatted the drive, installed the new OS, installed Firefox, set up sync, and waited for the profile/bookmarks to arrive.

Nothing happened.

Apparently (as per their issue report response) at the time, the spinning of the sync icon was only showing that the data had been written somewhere on disc and registered for the next periodic sync. The button did NOT trigger the sync itself.

This was very frustrating and a good reminder to never rely on a single sync/backup. Also an interesting example of bad UX. Dropbox was already around at the time IIRC, and its stopping rotating sync icon indicated the actual sync to be finished, as one would expect.

Again, this was many years ago, and I think I remember reading that they reimplemented sync from scratch some time later.

I'm still using Firefox, but not their sync. Maybe time to give it another chance.

This is the exact reason I've started using Firefox for the past few years and never looked back. My passwords are synced across devices and I just let FF autogenerate them. I memorize a couple important ones like email and banking, rest is handled by Firefox. Best is that it also works for apps on my Android.

i gave it a try last month with some bad results. for context, i was using firefox containers before using sync, and i lost all my containers after trying this!

the bookmarks did not get synced to a new device after logging in there either.

i am sure there might be a good explanation for this or someplace i went wrong, but it is not idiot-proof yet to say the least.

for most privacy-centric guys, just a bookmark sync solution is better suited imo, and some of them also work across different browsers fwiw.

I love Firefox and this feature, but I need to hop between several devices and browsers for different purposes. I keep all my passwords, tabs, and bookmarks synced to my Nextcloud server with some extensions. If a particular browser goes to sh.., I can switch to another with low friction.

Heh. Sync works on chrome too. IMO tree style tabs was the best thing firefox had and they killed it.

Does it only count if it's native rather than an extension?

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

What do you mean killed it? I use a different addon for vertical tabs (there are many now) but isn't it still available?

Tree style tabs works as well as it did before, except that it's more difficult to get rid of the top tabs.

Check out my userChrome changes if you're into vertical tabs and a minimal UI: https://github.com/bjesus/fireside

It can be a pain when you do large random deletes from browsing history, then sync can hang up for 20 minutes with lot of IO/Cpu. You can trigger this by doing "Forget this website" and if that website is a lot in your history

I suppose it probably has to rewrite your entire history in that case? Deleting lines in log-like files isn't exactly easy. Actually, I wonder how that's stored in order for the search to stay responsive, some kind of bloom filter? Or just a normal database?

Most browsers use a SQL database for storing data like this.

i think they use sqlite for everything

I have nothing but praise for Firefox's Sync. It has saved me countless times. Back when I had more than 4 active machines it would sometimes trip up here and there with a bookmark or another, but it was always really solid overall.

Recently switched from Chrome to Firefox and was disappointed to learn that syncing custom search engines still doesn‘t work in Firefox. Hope that will be fixed soon.

I really like Firefox containers, not sure if chrome has something similar.

I use Firefox because of the Awesome Bar. I can easily find whatever page I visited ever since it was introduced in 2008.

Chrome's omnibox has always felt like a discount version of it.

One thing I find annoying about all the sync implementations I’ve run across is the inability to exclude certain extensions. I want most of them to sync, but not all.

It's Firefox containers for me. It is extremely useful to manage different environments - dev, production etc., and I can use the colors to identify the tabs.

FF sync reliably fails for me. No matter how often I disconnect/reconnect devices. It's not worth the hassle for me.

I'm surprised one can write an entire article on browser sync and not mention Safari, Chrome's main competitor.

Safari works great if you run 100% Apple devices, and breaks the moment you want to mix and match with even one non-blessed device. Firefox will happily sync to everything, and so will Chrome.

Doesn’t that just mean “every browser syncs great between different versions of itself”? It just so happens that Safari is not available on as many operating systems as Firefox and Chrome. “Breaks” doesn’t seem like the right characterisation.

These are reasonable caveats, but I don’t think this disqualifies Safari as not worth writing about if you’re a so-called tech journalist. There are way more Apple-only users than Firefox users.

But we're talking about anyone who ones at least one non-Apple main device being excluded, I don't think their number would be as high.

But you're right that Apple devices and services are not even considered in a certain type of tech journalism.

It's not possible to sync extensions/setting on mobiles, so it works but only partially.

I use the FF "send tab to other sync'd device" constantly.

I have tried firefox, Vivaldi. But in terms of speed, when different sites load chrome fares better than them.

I'm back to using chrome.

I like customisation feature of Vivaldi but it lags in terms of speed. I still use Vivaldi on case basis (to read some sites' articles which have by default ads enabled)

If you install uBlock Origin all sites will load faster :)

And next year you'll only be able to do that in Firefox.

When was the last time you tried? I reached the same conclusion a few years back, but I've been back to FF on all my devices for about 6 months now and haven't looked back.

Configuring browsers to mirror each other across machines makes a big soupy mess. I understand why surveillance capitalists like the idea, makes their lives a little easier. But I really don't get why I'm supposed to want it.

I use different machines differently. The laptop I'm typing this on is my "main" browser, I have lots of bookmarks set up in a specific structure. I only use my phone browser when I have to, and it is rarely the same thing I've done before. It has a couple stale bookmarks, I don't care. I use the browser on my iPad even less. My big desktop is where I play with recreational software development, it has lots of bookmarks, but a very different set than my laptop. And my work phone/work laptop are their own things.

It just seems like making every closet door in your house open the same closet, if that where physically possible. There are reasons different things go in different buckets.

> I understand why surveillance capitalists like the idea, makes their lives a little easier.

FWIW, Firefox Sync is end-to-end encrypted, and Mozilla doesn't broker in your data.

surprise revelation: some people work differently from you

Shoutout to the time I was looking at job listings on my cellphone, which then immediately popped up on my work computer in front of my coworkers. I didn't even know there _was_ a sync feature, it got turned on automatically after an update. Fun.

No sync please.

Don't use your personal account on your work browser. Or, actually, on anything in your work. (And the other way around too.)

Nobody implements proper context switching and privacy from yourself. The only kind of privacy anybody even acknowledges the existence is from 3rd parties.

Personal account? Account? When I switch from my desktop to my laptop and back, I sometimes get an extra Firefox icon in my dock. I once hovered over it and I think it was the sync feature.

I don't have a Firefox account and I'm not signed in into any browser on any account. Why does it try to sync things without my permission?

I wish Firefox took RSS more seriously. Imagine, if Firefox Sync not only supported RSS feed synchronization between devices, but also would keep updating them in the cloud, so one wouldn't miss any news from busy websites.

Will never work the way firefox sync is set up : it's client side encrypted, in the "cloud" it's just a blob.

FWIW Brave's sync works extremely well.

Unpopular opinion: did OP tried Vivaldi?

Vivaldi is great, but its sync is basically the same as Chrome's. I often see a sync delay of several minutes when switching devices. Do you know if there's a setting for sync frequency?

Aside: my favorite parts of Vivaldi are its workspaces, tabs stacks, and other tab management features. I really wish these features were integrated into its sync!

I mean that's great... but I've been using Brave sync across a wide variety of devices (Linux, iOS, Windows and MacOS) and it has worked without a hitch for quite awhile.

One of the things that I like about Firefox is that it lets you right click on websites that disable right clicking by holding down shift. Reminds you that the browser should be the user's agent and not the website's.

This is great, but... As the meme goes, "why do we even have that lever" to disable a mouse click? More evidence that browsers are out of control, and have given over way too much agency to web developers. If a user doesn't want to right click on a page, they can just... not right click. Why does the developer even have a say?

> As the meme goes, "why do we even have that lever" to disable a mouse click?

So that web pages can implement their own behaviors for right-click, e.g. web applications which have their own contextual menus, games which use right click as an input, remote desktops which pass right click to the remote host, etc.

This.

We actually need the override right-click functionality in some cases. Most of the abused functionality had some normal use case at some point. It's a shame that bad actors make everyone's life harder.

It's about allowing a custom right click action more than just disabling it. There are plenty of use cases for making a custom action happen on right click. Google Docs adds a custom menu on right click. Games often have a use case for right clicking.

Usually it is done for one of three main reasons:

- to make it hard for the user to copy/save stuff

- to offer context menu in a web app

- in a web app game for whatever

The first reason is clearly hostile to the user. The rest is arguably reasonable.

Hijacking the right click is useful for web apps like word processors, text editors, spreadsheets, image editors.

This one's niche, but Firefox's dev tools also let web developers see which font is actually being used. Chrome's dev tools only show you what font is supposed to be in use, but doesn't tell you if it had to resort to a fallback font.

Are you sure? I think the computed tab in Chrome devtools shows the actual used font.

Yup if you scroll to the bottom of the Computed tab, it shows the "Rendered Fonts".

Ooh, that's a killer feature and this is the first I'm hearing about it! Thanks!

I wish you could stop websites hijacking the quick find key (/) too.

Or Ctrl+h for history. I'm looking at you Google Docs. I really don't understand why websites are allowed to override browser shortcuts and there is no way to block it.

Wow i didn’t know that. So much thanks.

The current meta for disabling right click seems to be invisible but tangible divs on top of the thing you don't want people to right-click.

... maybe they could add something like ctrl-shift-rightclick to get the context menu on the topmost visible element, and then we can get into more stupid arms races about opacity levels or something...

Convenience + simplicity > complexity

Did not know! Thatnks you!

It would be great if they allowed that for Ctrl+F as well. Jupyter Lab infuriates me with that.

(If I understand you correctly, a workaround is to switch focus to the address bar first so the ctrl-f goes to the browser chrome and not the page.)

(I'm not actually familiar with the issue but I imagine if they're "clever" enough to block CTRL+F, they probably also block CTRL+L which is supposed to change the focus to the URL bar. So in the end you have to resolve to using the mouse after all...)

Yeah, it's a pain. One workaround is to go to the menu and select Find

Firefox has multiple compelling reasons to use it:

  Sync
  Containers
  Tree Style Tabs
  uBlock Origin on Android
  Open Source since 1998!
  Not based on Chromium

Be wary of sync on a fresh Linux install, it might sync the default bookmarks and merge them with your own. Not a huge deal but definitely an annoyance.

Most important is that Firefox is the only barrier that protects us from Google locking up internet behind a DRM.

Firefox has compromised on DRM before and there's no reason to expect they won't cave again next time.

In fairness, they did compromise in such a way that you can still keep it disabled. If/when they do it again, they'll likely also keep a safety switch involved as before.

They caved because they were afraid that without Netflix they would lose market share but then they lost market share anyways. In the alternate universe where they didn't cave users mounted a pressure campaign against Netflix for blocking Firefox and that got the FTC's attention and Netflix was the one that caved .

Can you really say that when Firefox makes most of its money funneling users to Google?

If Containers is a sufficient alternative to Chromium's profiles, I'm switching, that was the only thing holding me back.

Firefox has its own profiles, which are separate from containers.

`about:profiles` shows you a window for creating and switching to a different one. I add that as a bookmark on the bookmarks toolbar of the two profiles I use

I believe there is a `-P` option to open a new window with a specific profile. I do not use it. I usually just open the browser and then go to the aforementioned bookmark and open the other profile.

I use different colorways to differentiate the windows between the two profiles.

There may be addons that alleviate a few of the pain-points with Firefox profiles. I have not tried to find any.

IMO containers are easier to use than profiles. The main issue is that history seems to be shared across containers, but being able to mix tabs from multiple containers in the same window is very practical. Though I guess it increases the risk of accidentally opening some website in the wrong container if this is one concern. (though there is a feature to make some website always open in a given container)

Containers is what every browser should be or have. Only Firefox as far as I know has containers as thoroughly.

Chrome doesn’t. Safari has something similar.

I’ll have to look into containers and tree style tabs. I have never knowingly used those.

Especially if you do any web development or IT, containers is great for testing different cookies. You can easily be logged in under multiple different accounts in the same browser window, which can be super useful for debugging certain issues tied to user accounts on a site. It's honestly such a useful feature that I'm shocked there isn't an alternative available in chrome, but it does also thwart tracking so I can see why Google won't implement it.

Yup I use it to be logged into various azure accounts

Tree style tabs enables vertical tabs, which are listed at the side of the window rather than the top.

It means you can still read tab titles when you have more than a dozen tabs open. Plus you can nest and rearrange your tabs to fit your work or study.

For some, like me, it's a game changer and I dislike using chrome now because it doesn't support vertical tabs.

Caveat: to disable top-of-window tabs you have to use a user chrome CSS file, so it's not just "install extension, enable checkbox" easy.

> Tree style tabs enables vertical tabs

It's not just vertical tabs (which MS Edge has an option for), it's tree-structured vertical tabs. If you open a link in a new tab, the new tab will become a child of the original tab, making it easy to identify related groups of tabs. The subtrees can be expanded/collapsed. There are a lot of configurable options (e.g., to automatically collapse a subtree when you open a new one).

More info on the extension's page: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

As someone pointed out in a sibling comment, Sidebery gives you a similar UI. I haven't used it as much, but it seems to work OK too.

https://github.com/mbnuqw/sidebery is also good for this, different approach than TST

Minor addition: you have to create a user chrome file AND you have to go into about:config and set "toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets" to true.

I don’t use containers all that much (I just auto clear cookies and history when Firefox is relaunched) but I can’t overstate the workflow upgrade that was my switching to TST a few years ago. That combined with a plethora of mouse macros for moving between tabs, changing their position in the tree hierarchy, and other basic functionality really made the experience of using a web browser more enjoyable and interesting. Lots of customization to be had with userChrome.css + TST css theming. Thankfully there’s a lot of prebuilt configs shared on GitHub to help get you started.

Containers are the best. I use them every day.

Also I switched from Tree Style Tab to Sidebery. I like it better for some reason.

I found a config that worked for me using TST so I haven’t explored other methods for vertical tabs. What eventually convinced you to try Sidebery and what convinced you not to switch back to TST? I’m curious what I’m missing out on!

Not entirely owned by google.

But treestyle tabs (and sidebery) require editing the chrome.css to remove the tabs at the top. It just feels janky.

I love Firefox. It is a mystery to me why it is not more popular.

They're not an multi-billion dollar ad company that can pay to make their browser the de facto default.

In all HN Firefox threads with a sufficient number of comments you’ll see a variation of this comment, and people answering how Firefox fails as a daily driver for them.

Firefox is missing a ton of very useful stuff for some people, such as some audio API or AppleScript¹. The latter absolutely kills it for any kind of automation on macOS. It’s the sole major browser on macOS without support for AppleScript but Mozilla people think that’s just a power user feature. I know because I talked with devs at various points, in person and online, and was given the same answer. Thing is, power users create automations for non-power users. When the latter want to use a tool from the former and the answer is “you can’t, Firefox doesn’t support it”, there’s another user lost.

On a personal anecdotal level, I also don’t find it that stable. Just recently I wanted to try an extension and decided to do so on Firefox. After a while it just removed the extension from the list and it was seemingly impossible to get back, even after reinstalling. Every time I give Firefox a try, I am disappointed.

I’m glad it works for you and many other people, but the answer as to why it isn’t more popular is that your experience is far from universal.

¹ Whose bug report has been open for 22 years: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=125419

For me the deal breaker is that it doesn’t use native UI elements on macOS which means patterns such as invoking menu items using the keyboard behave differently.

Does Chrome? Can't say I notice too much of a difference here on my macbook, other than slight color choices and paddings and whatever the 2 UIs are basically indistinguishable to me

They lost a lot of their userbase back in the day when they started getting slower and Chrome was way faster. Now, Chrome is default on Android devices and people are used to it on desktop. Edge is default on Windows, Safari on Mac and iDevices. The only place Firefox is the default is desktop Linux.

Nowadays they've caught up on speed pretty well on desktop, but are still behind on security, and years behind on security on Android.

Personally, I just like features like tab groups, and hate the Foundation's politics, so it was easy to drop it back when they said we need more than deplatforming. The competition has better features, is actually developing new features, and is focused on toolmaking instead of activism. Funnily enough, it shows up in the products.

I used it from when it was Phoenix until 2011 or so.

I left because it was a lot worse than my main two other options on MacOS at the time, and they’d not followed through on the things that made me like it when I adopted it, so I hadn’t really loved it since late 1.x or early 2.x.

I haven’t gone back because there’s no compelling reason to switch back from Safari.

It is still my mod-downloading browser on my Windows gaming PC.

IMO. It's mostly due to not being default browser for major platforms.

Firefox has grown on me since Google's war on ad blockers made me feel like it's "their" browser not mine.

(Which is true ofc. But still.)

Same. I've tried to switch from a chromium based browser to FF several times over the last several years, and I always found something that was a deal breaker. A few months ago when the Google war on adblockers really started gaining steam, I tried the switch again, and it's been flawless, and I haven't found any good reasons not to use FF. It's been my default browser for at least two months now, and if it weren't for wanting web-usb for a few devices, I wouldn't even have a chromium based browser installed.

tab containers are a huge bonus once you start using them that makes it very hard to look at other browsers again.

For the uninitiated: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/multi-account-conta...

and its companion, open in container https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/open-url-in-c... which allows forming links that open in the container of choice without having to pre-define rules for the container

I use it every single day for spawning AWS SSO urls into their dedicated containers, since each url is always of the form console.aws.amazon.com which makes writing rules for it stupid hard

I switched back to firefox last year and haven't looked back. I still use chrome on another laptop sometimes, the performance difference from my human perspective is literally zero.

These days, it's much more common for me to encounter a website that works in firefox but not chrome than the other way around. I actually switched for good when I had to use firefox to file my taxes, because the IRS free self-file site was hopelessly broken on chrome.

Ad blockers break the websites far more often than any browser compat issues.

One of many reasons I don't use ad blockers :)

No need for bookmarks. My smooth brain doubles up as a zero-latency information resolver.

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