I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back
howtogeek.com
howtogeek.com
It’s crazy to think that some software engineers might actually intentionally degrade user experience on non-Google browsers or for people using adblockers. The mentality here is pretty disturbing: it’s almost like punishing users for making the choice to browse the web without ads, or without the surveillance mechanisms that come with them. Instead of building a better experience, these engineers seem to be focused on sabotaging alternatives in the name of profit or control. The kind of mindset behind this reeks of the same tactics we see in some ad networks or big tech companies - if we can’t convince you to opt in, we’ll make sure you’re inconvenienced or frustrated until you do.
It’s a dangerous precedent because it introduces a toxic game of cat-and-mouse, where the user is constantly playing defense, trying to protect themselves from deliberate misdirection. It’s not just an ethical concern, but also an issue of how we value user autonomy in the digital space.
For the hackers out there, this is a opportunity to dig into the JavaScript code responsible for this. There’s almost certainly some interesting obfuscation or odd behavior hiding in the code, and by pulling it apart, we can both understand how these tactics work and build tools or methods to counteract them. Let’s make sure the only thing that slows down the web is bad design or slow servers, not malicious code aimed at punishing the user for making their own choices.
I would add to the list the Linux Foundation too.
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/linux-foundation-annou...
As recently as yesterday I ran into an e-commerce site that didn’t work in Firefox (CPC Farnell, I’m looking at you), giving some obscure security error in multiple languages. I thought it might be caused by an extension at first (e.g., uBlock Origin) but, after trying various workarounds, I realised the site would only work in Chrome. It’s not OK.
Developers like myself are the thread that Firefox keeps hanging on by.
Yep. A majority of HN crowd claim to like open source and all that, but then they use Chrome instead of Firefox due to some small perceived convenience. Nobody makes decisions based on principles these days, only their immediate wants. Hoe_math is right, we're on the edge of civilization collapse because to that.
My guess is that the developers didn't actively try to do that, but used some framework that's all well an good for a SPA or something that needs to be more like a "real" application and applied that to something that just needs to be a bloody website. People need to stop doing that.
I've heard this before...
Oh yeah, replace Chrome with IE and you've got the same thing happening again.
sometimes im glad im a technical person that can get away with a somewhat "healthy digital life" im basically immune to all the crap going on. i don't need to work too hard to meet my digital needs because im also a simple person. but i really feel bad for the normies who have to deal with all the shit the tech industry throws at them. they don't even know what's wrong, they can't pinpoint what's giving them that extra stress, building up day by day when they use their devices, handle their info, or consume entertainment. like account exhaustion, confusing UI changes every day, or why they have to navigate a sea of crap just to unsubscribe. and why do they need a new computer for software that worked fine 15 years ago? and don't even get me started on what they're doing to older people. cable companies for example are ripping them off with terrible TV boxes and nonsense plans. all their appliances need subscriptions or apps and have cryptic buttons. stores now feel like border control, straight out of a black mirror episode. i can't imagine the frustration they must feel. it just feels backwards.
I'm not saying this to complain, but to suggest a risk of what might come next.
So far, they've run wild, and taken over computers, the Internet, AI, and information technology in general.
What happens when there's a disruptive breakthrough in medical care, and the exploiters rush in with the same thinking?
Right now, one of the few firewalls against that might be that doctors generally have traditions of ethics, and some stature to hold their ground and influence things.
Earlier Internet didn't have the same formalized ethical traditions, but had a lot of very smart people people who had altruistic intentions, as well as suspicion of those who'd attempt to twist online potential. All those ethical people were pretty much swept away in a funding gold rush, suddenly with little to no influence over it.
(Google did grab some of those people, because Google said the right words, so the altruistic techies thought it was their people, but look what eventually happened even there.)
Just like virtually every IoT product and Web site violates every user, what happens if a medical gold rush (say, some kind of implant, or transformative process) means that what we thought was a bulwark of ethical practitioners, is easily bulldozed over, by investment money and culture. And then everyone's body is violated by the newly unchecked industry-wide socipathy, with no alternatives to even live?
Allow me to simultaneously assuage and stoke your fears. There is little chance of big tech disrupting the medical field; Because every aspect of the medical field has already been seized by the insurance companies. See United Health / Optum.
(I would actually extend this to all large businesses in general, but we can start with tech.)
Rinse and repeat forever...
Pretty sure that was happening back in a days when Opera was using own engine (Presto). They shipped browser with scripts to fix some popular sites. Actually Firefox also has some fixes for particular sites about:compat
While I agree; between an up-to-date uBlock Origin and https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/chrome-mask YT is quite usable.
Long term I'm more worried by Mozilla leadership than Google shenanigans.
> Please don't use Chrome Mask on YouTube. It won't resolve any issues, and it will make your experience worse over time. If some issue got fixed after toggling Chrome Mask on, it most likely got fixed by the addon clearing the cache. But you can do that yourself, too, without the need for this addon.
Might be a placebo but YT appear more responsive with it on than off after a ctrl+f5.
Edit: appears to be in the reviews: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-mask/r...
YT is quite usable
Supposedly it's just been fixed?
https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1i182q7/firefox_13...
I've used Pocket Cast for a little over a year and a half. Just manually skipping through ads when I have my phone handy and they come on, the app reports I've apparently saved 14 hours of wasted time.
I've been blocking ads in Firefox for nearly 20 years and have been helping friends and family do it for nearly as long. I'm not going back because I should feel bad for some company with billions of dollars in profits that doesn't care about me or any of my privacy. I go the extra step further and use the banned from Chrome store extension, Ad Nauseum, to click on nearly every single blocked ad.
The engineers implement all of the "features" that these management types decide on. I understand there are infinite engineers so eventually the features will get implemented, but I do not blame the managers alone for tasks done by unethical engineers who do not consider the effect of their work in the long run.
Mozilla is an advertising company now, and by many accounts Mozilla has been the main attack on Firefox for the many years even before they explicitly shifted to advertising.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/advertising/
https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/1e0p62h/mozilla_i...
Why would I, as a developer whose income stream is based on advertising, intentionally cater to users who are costing me money? There is a web based on hobbyist platforms like PeerTube and Mastodon, and you can clearly see why they haven't captured the masses.
You have your right to develop things your way, I have a right to say no thank you. Google, though, is so big it is basically saying "you don't have a choice." That's the problem and one that Google spends billions to enforce. They use the weight of the uninformed to apply pressure to the rest of us.
It was no better when Microsoft did it with IE, nor is it any way proper, now.
Why would I, as a doctor whose income stream is based on people getting sick, intentionally support policies that make people healthier
Thank goodness you're not a doctor.
Because you are working for a corporation that joins in World Wide Web Consortium, who literally says this in the Ethical Web Principles?
> People must be able to change web pages according to their needs. For example, people should be able to install style sheets, assistive browser extensions, and blockers of unwanted content or scripts. We will build features and write specifications that respect people's agency, and will create user agents to represent those preferences on the web user's behalf.
https://www.w3.org/TR/ethical-web-principles/#render
If you cannot maintain your service, paywall your features, not forcing malwares and trackers to users. No one forced you to serve 1080p, 1440p or 4K videos to everyone for free. You were the one literally "advertised" yourself as a "free" service at beginning, in order to hoard how many users you could. And now when you cannot control your own costs, you push malwares and trackers to users? The mentality of hoarding users with "baits" like "free" are the real poisons for the internet, for both of you and your users, NOT users who are doing exactly what World Wide Web Consortium tells them.
Where are all your MBAs in your corporations? The ones bragging about themselves on LinkedIn and now the only resolutions you can think of is pushing malwares and trackers to users? All of the finance classes in your college should be simplified to advertisement classes I guess? That would save a lot of resources for everyone.
Asked as on mobile I run as few apps as possible, so use the web version. Haven't seen any issues.
The performance is way worse (which Google engineers will explain by some browser API being slower in Firefox and they haven't yet had time to optimize it, N years later [they did the same with Inbox + Firefox before]) and you'll also see more ads if you're not a paying user and using Firefox compared to if you used Google Chrome.
I think what's actually happening is that they are targeting uBlock + Firefox on desktop for punishment.
On Android, Firefox has much more extensions, such adblockers.
FUD
I am happy to do all that, because I like my videos uninterrupted and my web experience lean.
I don't think its "almost like", I think it "actually is", and that its intentional.
There is a perspective that is now prevalent in tech and business that users are good only as far as you can monetize them. Any concepts of respect or value outside of that have been discarded.
There used to be a sense that you needed to continue improving a product to keep charging the same or more for it. Now companies expect you to pay more every year while products are stagnating or being enshittified to extract higher profit margins on top of the increased prices they are charging.
Tech is now run by Business/Sales people, and every user is a statistic in a spreadsheet they are trying to extract the most money from for the least amount of investment.
Data collection and behaviour tracking is one side of the coin, but we really don't talk about why companies are willing to pay so much for that data or what they do with it... that's a conversation I think needs to be focused on.
FF has been my dailer driver for a long time. But google blocking ublock origin was a deal breaker. I now only use chrome when a site is otherwise unusable.
Is this actually a thing? As far as I'm aware all degradations in non-Chromium browsers have been unintentional bugs, either caused by a YouTube bug or a non-YouTube bug (i.e. in the browser or an extension) (note I'm specifically not commenting on the last portion of your comment regarding "for people using adblockers").
Can you explain this more? I don't understand what this means.
There's a pretty famous example of Google deploying a specific variations of Youtube to Microsoft Edge browsers (back when Edge had it's own engine) and that specific variation would cause Edge's hardware acceleration to break. If you overrode the user agent to present as google chrome, the problematic invisible parts of the page disappeared and everything worked as intended. And what the specific problem HTML was would change just as fast as the MS team could roll out fixes. In effect they were playing a game of "break the browser" against their competitors to force them to apply temporary fixes that would then later have to be removed resulting in unnecessary code churn in their competitors' code bases.
1. Every video defaults to the absolute lowest resolution (240 or 320) until I manually switch it to a higher setting.
2. Occasional (but fairly frequent) 30-second delay before a page loads (loads enough to show a black page, then just freezes for a while. During this delay, refreshing the page gives the same result.
3. Rarely, interstitial notice pages threatening vague consequences if I continue to use an ad blocker.So let them be arrogant and loose their YouTube customers over time too.
https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/wo...
Edit:Wrong year - that was 2020 this is 2024
https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/wo...
It's such an unprecedented amount of money that it corrupts everything else and distorts the market.
that said, firefox has been my browser of choice as a web dev for most of my career. (im old enough to have used netscape before that).
i remember having super powers compared to other devs with the help of firebug :-)
The only problem I really remember is at one point Firefox having issues under linux when NVIDIA was swapping their main driver over to the "open-sourced" version, there was some performance issues with decoding, not unusable - but it was resolved within a week.
But, this is just my experience.
"Precedent", yeah.
Eventually competitors caught up.
Managers.
It's also crazy that we've let ad companies tell us that using a non-Google browser is the same thing as using an adblocker. It is not the same and it never was.
I use Firefox with no adblocker installed. I don't mind ads to an extent. I do mind tracking and find micro-targeting disgusting and creepy and evil, so I use Firefox, and I use its Enhanced Tracking Protection, and I only log in to the major Ad Companies like Google/YouTube, Amazon, Meta, others in dedicated containers that only are for their sites themselves. It's sad and annoying how many ad networks accuse me of having an adblocker just for using Firefox (or Safari) with relatively cleaner than average cookies.
Show me the old school of ads, the "Superbowl" broadest audience ads, the stuff that advertising companies "knew" for centuries of their existence as "common sense" that was the most useful way to make and sell ads before tech companies got involved and decided that user privacy was up for auction to the highest bidder. The way I see it: If an ad network can't do that and sees this as "adblocking", it deserves to die and something better needs to step up and eat their lunch. That includes Google and Meta's ad networks. That includes "Admiral" and any other network that buys ads from creepy "Temu".
If a creator puts up ads or a paywall, it's because they want to be compensated. You should either respect their wish or simply not view their content.
If someone wants to use a public space (i.e., the Internet), then they have accept that technological solutions to annoyances are also part of that.
Block it with a subscription if you don't accept this reality. But getting the benefits of a free, global audience doesn't entitle the artist to any means of revenue they choose, including what annoys and harms people.
It's like saying you have to walk the long way around to your exhibit through the concessions hall before seeing my display, when someone can just take a shortcut and skip that, and blaming them for doing so.
Banksy said it better:
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs.
YT might want me to do something else, but I am not bound by their wishes.
AKA depriving content creators of their revenue. If you're saying their content isn't good enough to pay for directly, and isn't good enough to endure ads in order to engage, then why are you trying to consume it? Look elsewhere.
> or without the surveillance mechanisms that come with them
I agree with this depending on what you mean by "surveillance." There's a minimum amount of "surveillance" required to measure ad penetration and effectiveness and essentially provide assurance to advertisers that they aren't getting scammed. There's a whole other level of "surveillance" where the ad network (usually Google) is building a dossier on all your interests and every site you've ever visited. Some of that information enables targeted advertising, but you should always retain the right to opt-out, and see all the data that's been collected on you and edit it. You should also be able to opt-in to that data being sold and getting a cut of the proceeds, should you so desire. I wouldn't, but I could imagine some people would.
Bottom line - people gotta make money to eat and oftentimes they're not giving away content for free. If you don't want to pay for it - that's your choice as a user: pay and consume or don't pay and move on. Calling on hackers to figure out a way to steal it may not have a future that works out to your liking.
> How much do they pay the CEO? Why aren't they exploring other funding options? At the same time, why are they "wasting resoures" working on other things!? They should exclusively work on Firefox!
> ...and that's why I stick to this Chromium fork with its own digital advertising service and its own cryptocurrency, but you can easily switch it off!
[0] https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/18/mozilla_buys_anonym_b...
[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/advertising/formats/
[2] https://www.privacyguides.org/articles/2024/07/14/mozilla-di...
"Talking points" is from the same land as "gotcha questions." "Talking points" are the points that people are talking about that you'd prefer not to talk about because you don't have good answers for. So you pretend like repeating an unanswered question is an dirty underhanded plot.
> How much do they pay the CEO? Why aren't they exploring other funding options? At the same time, why are they "wasting resoures" working on other things!? They should exclusively work on Firefox!
This isn't a quote. Don't make up quotes. This is you putting words in people's mouths, and choosing the ones that allow you to reply with something about Brave. At the same time, you're excusing Firefox for doing things because Brave does similar things. The people switching to for-profit Brave from Firefox would have prefer a non-profit, user-focused Firefox, but have been pushed to the point where they don't see any moral difference between the two, so they might as well experiment. When Firefox was innovating, it was the founder of Brave that was running it.
Most Firefox haters use Firefox. They just wish that it wasn't so bad, that it wasn't so much torture to put it into a usable state, and that the developers weren't actively fighting the users to keep them from putting it in that state, rather than centering on the users. They largely blame this on the company, Google, who subsidizes Firefox while competing with it. And on the company, Mozilla, that sucks all of that subsidy up in salaries, while seemingly neglecting the browser.
For the record, I used a Firefox phone for many years (and yes it did cause me a lot of problems), and remember vividly when they announced a luxury Firefox phone about one week before killing the project.
> With Microsoft and Google, we just expect them to Do More Evil, with Mozilla we expect Good
And with Safari, a loathsome browser that's intent on recreating the IE6 conditions of yore, we give it a free pass.
Plus the incompatibility with various sites... Just sticking with FF. I can certainly appreciate an OS-integrated browser, though. It makes life simpler for users and if you have the full Apple ecosystem, the tab sync is useful.
Good job. Smart tactics.
Sometimes? They tend to hit the mark of bad decisions more often than not
Most good decisions don't get a full press cycle (because they are boring).
The thing I _Love_ is container tabs. I can isolate empires by using container tabs to sandbox cookies and other web state. This means that ebay doesn't change my adverts to the last thing I searched on every site, and autoplay embedded youtube doesn't fuck up my video recommendations.
It means I can hide my work gmail from my home, and separate search histories (although thats less relevant now with AI.)
lastly, being able to scroll left and right on my tabs, rather than new ones being unaccesable is great.
But yes, people should learn about Multi-Account Containers if they haven't, yet. It's a killer feature that no other browser has. This is the extension to enable the UI for it: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/multi-account-conta...
Oh wow! I totally missed this. Thank for sharing!
I've been using multiple browsers for as long as I can remember. But always liked Firefox ocer the others. Especially now with container tabs.
And the only thing I keep wishing for, has been a better experience with profile management, but also running the browser in different profiles.
I'm really looking forward for these updates
For tab containers, maybe there's a "good reason" that no other browser has that feature, cause it is confusing both as a concept and in use, and doesn't separate the rest of the stuff (or even the stuff in intends to separate when it's cumbersome and peculiar to use). Like, shared history, or inability to have separate extensions, defeats many of the purposes people use profiles for - which is an actual complete separation of things.
OTOH Vivaldi guys said that much as they'd like to implement this, they're unable to due to some architectural issues with Blink. So basically no Blink browser will have that unless and until Google decides to do it in Chrome - which seems unlikely given their incentives.
It is so convenient to have container tabs. All my extensions are available in new containers, unlike multiple Chromium profiles (or Firefox profiles).
Container tabs also pair very well with Simple Tab Groups, which allow you to pin a container to a group, so that everything for one account ends up in one place.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/aws-sso-conta...
Recently, many sites won't fix the viewport horizontally. Why such a major bug happens is baffling
That said, it's telling that it's so difficult to disable auto-playing video entirely in Firefox. I'm not convinced that a profit motive is NOT the reason behind that (it is possible but requires a bunch of about:config changes; it's not exposed in the settings UI and that smells sinister)
Unfortunately at work I must use Chrome without an adblocker. It's pretty terrible.
- Embedded telemetry can be disabled via about:config - Running ublock origin in advanced mode blocks all third party domains, websites are often broken but easily fixable - Cookie Autodelete deletes a website cookie after the tab closes - Decentraleyes as a local CDN to avoid external requests for common libraries - Redirector to change request to alternative no tracking frontends for famous websites - Simple tab groups keep tabs organized by "job" - Bitwarden to manage passwords
I rarely encounter websites that are not working and I just switch to another website, and I use Vivaldi for things like meet where I want things to "just work".
I seriously don't see any disadvantage in picking Firefox over Chrome. I still have Chrome around if any website requires it specifically, but I haven't launched it in ages.
There were a few Chrome extensions that weren't there on Firefox [1] [2] but I fixed that _easily_ by getting the crx file, unpacking it, then adding the https://github.com/mozilla/webextension-polyfill to the extension to make it cross-browser.
It's easy enough to make an extension work on both Firefox and Chrome, I've done it myself with SideHN (https://github.com/alin23/sidehn), but I guess Firefox is not really in the mind of Chrome extension devs.
[1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/anchor-headings/lgg...
[2] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/xpath-helper/hgimno...
Is that actually true?
I’ve used Chrome for many years before Firefox and it was always prioritizing JS responsiveness even when the app was in the background and not needed, so it consumed CPU cycles and battery power needlessly. I see now that Chrome enables a Low Power mode by default on battery and it’s unusable as scrolling gets janky. I don’t know if the overall experience has gotten better in the last year on Chrome.
Not sure what’s different about memory though, but Chrome always appeared like a memory hog when I tested both browser side by side on the same set of websites and same few extensions. Could be that it just caches more and that’s benefitting responsiveness
Some days ago I was wondering how it works and was kinda surprised just now that this is from mozilla itself. Reading the project Readme makes this even straight up sound like a privacy addon. I wonder why this is not natively supported.
I'll have to try out that extension.
My bookmarks bar is filled with bookmarks without names that I can recognize by the icons. I refuse to re-visit every bookmark when I login from a new PC, which is often.
This has been requested for 17 years: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=428378
Every other browser sync solution has this feature. Firefox insists on not implementing it because what, it's too much data to sync? I'd pay for it if it was a premium feature.
If anyone has a browser agnostic bookmark syncing solution that can sync the favicons, let me know.
When you login to Firefox. Just right click your bookmarks and hit open all in new tabs. It will open all 500+ tabs. Leave it for a few minutes all all the favicons will be loaded.
Firefox badly needs someone who gives a shit about user experience.
Personally I keep it at the bottom, as it's much closer to my thumbs and also the keyboard, so I don't have to adjust my hands to type in a url or search query.
Why not? How often?
This should take literally 5s using the bookmark manager, right click on "Bookmarks Toolbar", "Open All Bookmarks". Then some more to load the websites I guess.
I have thousands of bookmarks that also have names but I would still like to see the icons before clicking the link. Sometimes the name doesn't hint at what kind of resource the bookmark was at a glance. Is it a youtube video, is it an article?
I already have access to that information at the time of bookmarking. I don't want to lose it and then have to get it again.
I rely on sync a lot, so that was a dealbreaker for me.
It just opens every bookmark to load the favicon. Brute force, but it works!
I don't know how people use phones with ublock or leechblock. I guess "with less battery life" and "more".
I am always stunned when I have to use anything else at how unusable some pages are without my extensions.
* The omnibar: I have a couple IPs I connect to frequently. One ends in 36, the other in 243. In Firefox I can just type 36 (or 243) + Tab + Enter. In Chrome I have to type the whole address. And why can't I search for the title of a page I know is in my history or even just a tab I already have opened directly from the search bar? I do that all the time in Firefox
* Ctrl+Tab to switch back and forth between tabs instead of cycling them in order (not the default in Firefox either, but at least it can be configured without having to install an extension and a native executable as I had to do in Chrome)
I recently started using Firefox, after giving up on Windows, and recently found out about this feature. It's a godsend for productivity, especially in a world where a lot of things are done in a browser.
You can't do that because that would lead to less people seeing the Google Search page, and therefore less ad impressions.
People been complaining about that for decades at this point, and Google just refuses to fix it, pretty clear why.
I sometimes use Edge as a fallback browser, and it suffers from this problem, too, and yeah, it is sooo annoying – much as I'm unhappy about various Firefox changes in the last years, I wouldn't switch to a different browser for that alone.
Interestingly, Edge (and probably Chrome, too, unless it's a strange Microsoft customisation) simultaneously suffers from the problem that on the rare occasion where an addressbar search actually delivers a locally history result, the autocomplete is often too precise, because it prefills the whole URL, not just the domain.
FF handles this perfectly, no other browser I've tried comes close.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/aws-sso-conta...
Gestures, "search with" context menu, "add active tab" in a bookmarks bar folder, autorenaming downloads, custom keybindings, tab squeezing (it keeps them wide and shows scroll buttons), last tab standing, proper double-click-drag selection and text editing in general. Probably a dozen more things that I cannot remember now. Also "sync" just doesn't work, something went wrong, try again.
For gestures I used Gesturefy - isn't a mess and has "rocker". For "search with" I just had to write my own extension with hardcoded searches. I'm autorenaming through AHK - external tool, non-general use case. Tab squeezing and last tab solved through about:config.
"Add active tab", custom keys, text editing still unsolved.
In general I'm sort of satisfied with the results, but it took quite a while to migrate. Firefox is sort of extensible but not hacker-ish. Extension store is not generic-developer-hacker spirited either. FF is almost as dumb as Chrome, with a few settings that can make it better if you know where to look and have time for that.
Sadly Vivaldi also slowly breaks things, although I guess I’ll remember my words at the next Firefox “refresh”.
I used to get teased (all in good fun) at my last company for being the only dev that used Firefox. Then I'd be the only one to ever catch the Firefox only bugs in PRs.
I get it - it's got way less market share, and for a small company, you may be able to argue the value of the time vs the probability of a bug, but not having your website work on all browsers in the 2020s (aside from new browser features like WebGPU and file system access) is a let down.
I used it for a few years, but sometime around the end of 2021 I switched to Chrome because I got tired of the Firefox spell checker marking correctly spelled words as incorrectly spelled.
Here's a list of words I reported in 2020 and 2021 on the open issue they keep in their bug tracker for this problem:
ad hominem, algorithmically, all-nighter, another's, auditable, automata, backlight, ballistically, blacksmithing, bubonic, cantina, chewable, coaxially, commenter, conferenced, counterintuitive, dominator, epicycle, ethicist, exonerations, ferrite, fineable, hatchling, impaction, implementer, implementor, inductor, initializer, intercellular, irrevocability, licensor, lifecycle, manticore, massless, measurer, meerkats, micropayments, mischaracterization, misclassification, misclassified, mistyped, mosquitos, partygoers, passthrough, per se, phosphine, plough, pre-programmed, preprogrammed, programmability, prosecutable, recertification, responder, retransmission, rotator, seatbelt, sensationalistic, shapeshifting, solvability, spectrogram, splitter, subparagraphs, subtractive, surveil, survivorship, synchronizer, tradable, tradeoffs, transactional, trichotomy, tunable, underspecified, untraceably, untyped, verifiability, verifier, webmail
It was kind of puzzling because Firefox actually uses the same open source spell check engine that Google, Apple, LibreOffice, and many others use, and all those others had no trouble with any of the words that Firefox got wrong. This suggests that it might just be a dictionary problem and Firefox could simply grab the dictionary that say LibreOffice uses.
I mentioned that on one of my comments in the bug tracker and a developer said they were going to look into it but I don't know if anything ever came from that. All the words I reported now work but I don't know if they just added those to their dictionary or switched to a better dictionary.
Maybe I'll try doing my HN commenting from Firefox for a while and see if is fixed.
There is some subtle tab / link click behavior that takes a bit to get used to, but after a while it just doesn't bother you any more because you're used to the behavior.
The good of Firefox:
* the extensions ecosystem (KeepassXc, TamperMonkey, AdBlock, Disable Javascript, Youtube Audio, etc)
* the defaults in privacy and performance are good enough for me
The bad of Firefox:
* it is a minority web client engine so a few technologies and sites have problems with it. E.g: it is easy to debug WASM in Chrome, it isn't in Firefox
Unfortunately, companies treat chrome like they treated IE. Hard to get rid of.
Why? I am surprised as I use 3 browsers for different contexts: - ungoogled chromium for everything behind my company's SSO - firefox with an AWS theme with containers setup for each AWS account under another firefox account. - librewolf for everything else with containers syncronized under a personal firefox account
I could probably run everything under the same firefox or librewolf browser and different profiles but that way I didn't even had to setup separate launchers for the profiles. I also like that they are all visually different so I can spot them easily when switching windows.
[1]: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/
[2]: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2016/12/firebug-lives-on-in-firefo...
1. "Pause breakpoints" gets unchecked after app rebuilds and/or restarts.
2. The Ctrl+P hotkey only works on the sources tab, unlike Chrome. I just can't bear to always keep in mind what tab I'm on when using a hotkey.
Overall it's a pretty similar experience. Most difficult part is the habit changing of getting used to a different UI.
Then it turned out that because Firefox was installed using Snap, and the file was apparently on a mount point that was out of reach of Snap, the file could not be read.
I think Mozilla should refuse package managers that are clearly broken.
* It includes advertisements in the New Tab page without user consent https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/sponsor-privacy
* It shared browsing history without user consent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliqz#Integration_with_Firefox
* It enabled a new tracking protocol for advertisers without user consent https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2024/08/22/ppa-update/
* It blocked uBlock Lite from their store without notice https://www.pcworld.com/article/2474353/popular-ad-blocker-r...
* It's ~80% funded by Google https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-05-05/why-go...
* Their main focus lately has been white-labelling dubious products https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/03/mozilla-drops-onerep-aft...
Mozilla is a tech company that stopped caring about tech and loves to portray itself as a victim.
Since they fired the entire Servo (& Rust) team, the project joined the Linux Foundation. Servo is now my best hope for a truly independent browser.
If you misrepresent what Chrome is "accused" of, sure. I have 0 attachment to Firefox as a permanent solution, but it's WAY better than Chrome on every issue, and the only thing Servo has over Firefox is it hasn't existed in a usable form long enough to push the same kind of updates.
If you disabled updating in Firefox today, you would have a more complete version of Servo that is just as private and secure. You may not like Mozilla as a company, but Firefox is the best tech option for open source web browsing and it's not even close. That's why browsers like Librewolf that just barely tweak Firefox are possible.
I have to address these issues, though, because your descriptions of them really bury the lede.
> It includes advertisements in the New Tab page without user consent
> It shared browsing history without user consent
> It enabled a new tracking protocol for advertisers without user consent
While the ad tracking is not great, everything you posted is opt-out. I know you take specific issue with being automatically included as "opt-in" on update, but you don't even have the option to opt-out of everything in Chrome.
> It blocked uBlock Lite from their store without notice
That was a mistake remedied very quickly. Contrast that with Chrome where Ublock is now broken. Raymond Hill is the person speaking in your link, and he still explicitly recommends Firefox in his releases.
> It's ~80% funded by Google
And? That Google has money to throw around (and most privacy zealots specifically won't fund anything) is not a mark against Firefox. There's nothing to indicate Firefox is controlled by Google, and you may be surprised to know a lot of these competitors fund each others OSS because some of the tech is critical infrastructure.
> Their main focus lately has been white-labelling dubious products
I have to ask, are you reading these links or getting them from a friend? This was also opt-out, and as soon as this information was discovered, Mozilla immediately dropped them. You make it sound like they knew about this and powered through. Should they drop their partnership with haveibeenpwned on the off-chance they might secretly own an ad company?
Then I switched to Firefox for iOS. It is SO MUCH FASTER. It's like getting a new phone. Idk what the Chrome team is doing but it's slow.
And about other stuff. The UX is also becoming more and more confusing recently. You now have 3 places to look for browser history. The menu, the standalone history window. the firefox view. And except for the menu. Thye all miss certain stuffs. The standalone window miss tabs from other devices and recent closed window. The firefox view don't have bookmark and recent closed window.
Last week I switched to Edge. I know some people will turn up their nose at such a choice, but it turns out to actually be a very nice browser. I'm even using it on my phone now too.
I just get a white screen that says "Hello world. I'm a bubble" and flickers.
When I change to desktop site, I'm not getting any ads.
I guess I have resigned being like a ping-pong ball bouncing between these two browsers.
Even with issues I have using firefox and switching with brave/chrome.
This makes it impossible to offer remote sensing processing tools that care about radiometric values to Firefox users. I specifically have to tell them to use a different browser if they want to use that toolset.
Mind you I haven’t checked this issue in almost a year so maybe they finally offer a way to make it behave like every other browser.
After building a fairly involved browser extension this last year, I’ve become way more paranoid knowing just how insecure browser extensions can be; especially manifest v2 extensions. It’s not just about ad blockers unfortunately.
Although to be fair, as long as it's done properly, it's fine, but I don't know if Mozilla communicates on those products.
I remember one security employee mentioning that monitoring chrome with wire shark showed an insane amount of unnecessary traffic that went to google and others.
Never used Chrome on desktop. Never had one installed.
Ok, as Windows user I have "Edge" installed inevitably, but never used it more than 1 time to download FireFox installer.
Using FireFox on Android from early betas, no problem.
Is it something worth to write article about?
Edit: grammar (maybe, not enough).
Add to that the non-macOS text handling, macOS-unlike font rendering, its insistence to not use the system-wide spell checker provided by the OS etc. It feels a bit rude at times.
I think it's a super-solid browser that unfortunately doesn't give a shit about the platform it's running on. Irritatingly, it's fine with being a black box, so much more than the Chromiums are (for all their various faults).
Type in skinflint (price comparison) page I often use, tab toward "search on this site". Then I press enter.
All non-Chromeengine browsers have - type website, enter - wait to load, use search bar on site
as a workflow.
Made me stay with Chrome way too long. Now, I use Firefox, but miss this.
I have 2 of those hockey puck's audio dongles Google used to make to connect to your stereo. They only work with Chrome, SiriusXM, VLC, CalmRadio and Youtube, Chrombooks.
They don't work with Firefox.
Sad.
Maybe Mozilla should start IoT devices for Firefox.
It's usually sync that was too broken for me to use. Chrome's sync works nearly immediately. Firefox on Android would stop syncing open tabs so frequently that I barely remember it working at all. I had to log out and log back in from my Firefox account to get it to sync. But an hour or so later it wouldn't work anymore.
Vivaldi has better sync, but it seems to just randomly break a LOT. It would recover itself after a while, so in that sense it was superior to Firefox. (I liked Vivaldi's amazing configurability, but it's lack of bookmarklet support was breaking some of my workflows too, so in the end I abandoned it.)
I tried Opera too, but I think it had similar issues and I abandoned it quickly.
Syncing extension settings (the settings of an extension, e.g. custom filters in uBlock Origin) seems to only be supported on Chrome. Firefox doesn't have it.
I use Firefox on all my devices. Actually, I am now experimenting with Zen Browser (FF-based fork prettier than Firefox, and even more privacy-focused). My wife and my kids get no say in it: it's Firefox in the whole household.
How did we get to a point where the dominant browser is designed to be hostile to user choice?
Unfortunately it seems that the powers that be at Firefox have no plans to support it on account of privacy and security - which I half get, but, it appears to be an established standard in Chrome. The discussion surrounding it kinda sucked and well.
Well, I guess it was still Phoenix then.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/
[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/import-bookmarks-google...
It's 90% of my personal browsing, and effectively the only option considering UBO is a requirement for the modern web. I've always loved the `user.js` configurability, extensions for actual tree-style tabs, etc.
Moving to laptop it then makes sense to continue using it instead of installing Firefox over and above Edge anyway there plus Chrome.
So it gets crowded out.
Ironically, Safari would render this cleanly with 1 click.
Chrome feels too shallow.
Every morning I open a bookmarks folder with my dailies (news/blogs/Wordle/XKCD etc) that includes https://mrotherguy.github.io/fx-nightly-changelog/, and CTRL+F hoping for Fission on Fenix :(
bg3 foo => searches on the baldurs gate 3 wiki
r tragedeigh => goes to the reddit.com/r/tragedeigh subreddit ...
It can be done, but it's far too difficult. Containers are the absolute bomb though.
Today? Not at all.
Built-in screenshot tool? "You don't need to install extensions"! Really? Dude just press Print Screen, it even works outside a browser, if one day you have to be put through the unspeakable torture of using a native application! Single-use burner emails are also nice and all, but why exactly does this have to be linked to my browser?
Of course switching browsers it's gonna be a big deal, when you actively walk out of your way to lock yourself to your browser's "ecosystem", but better Mozilla than Google I guess.
There are situations where it’s really useful to be able to capture the entire web page and not just the visible viewport.
[0]: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/how-to-capture-...