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> I think modern Firefox is a much better browser than Chrome though, but Mozilla certainly lost the PR war and to no fault but their own, because Firefox sure

> I think modern Firefox is a much better browser than Chrome though, but Mozilla certainly lost the PR war and to no fault but their own, because Firefox sure sucked for a long while. This gets said often, but I've been using Firefox continually since 2003 and I've never noticed it sucking.

bryanrasmussen 8y ago
I use FF too, and I notice it sucking periodically, often after a big update - as things will - there have been periods of a month maybe two times in the last 10 years where I had to switch to another browser because it sucked too bad.
- baldfat 8y ago
  Sadly this is my story also. I use Vivaldi as my main browser now, which is Chromium based. Firefox does work awesome and is normally what I program my scripts through headlessly but in personal use FF just gets bad periodically.
watt 8y ago
When you log out, Firefox will block it and warn you that you are about to close number of tabs. When you select "OK", your tabs are gone. But Chrome will quietly exit, and when you start it next time, will offer to restore the tabs that were open last time. Chrome approach wins, hands down.
- bryanrasmussen 8y ago
  Isn't this google applications will track what you do all the time, and even after you close the application and restart it knows who you are and what you did?
- sveme 8y ago
  That's a setting in both browsers. Default is "Start with Startpage or empty page" in both browsers as well. You can always select "Restore last session" in both browsers.
  - watt 8y ago
    The problem is that if Firefox is getting this default wrong, what else are they getting wrong? And it should realize user state is sacred, I would even expect if I quit browser with something written in the address bar (or search bar, etc), when it starts up again, it should be able to preserve this half-entered user input!
    - askmike 8y ago
      I'm very happy that when I close my browser it kills all my tabs. If I really want something back I just view it from the history. > I would even expect if I quit browser with something written in the address bar (or search bar, etc), when it starts up again, it should be able to preserve this half-entered user input! I'm pretty sure no one expects nor wants this. You're definitely in a minority here. The problem you describe isn't very technical, it's simply that you want something else than most people else and you don't want to take the time to configure your browser to how you want it to behave.
      - QasimK 8y ago
        I’m pretty sure watt is right...
      - vvillena 8y ago
        Lots of people actually expect that. It's how phone apps work. There's no concept of "closing an app" in the iOS and Android guidelines. You just get the app out of the way. I think the lack of improvements in desktop UX in the last 10 years is making every desktop OS to slowly adopt mobile UX conventions. Some of those new conventions are a step back.
    - mathw 8y ago
      I'm sure I remember Chrome not preserving session state as its default setting either. It's been so long since I configured either of them though...
    - Silhouette 8y ago
      But this isn't wrong, it's just your entirely subjective personal preference being different to someone else's. Personally, I don't like it when browsers implicitly keep tracking things when I close the application and then fire up some half-baked version of the same stuff when I come back later. If I want to remember where I am, I can easily bookmark some or all of my tabs. Firefox has had a particular problem in recent versions where it seems to think it crashed on the previous shutdown, even though there was no user-visible evidence of this, and then tries to restore the previous session even when it otherwise wouldn't. That's not helpful if your previous session involved shopping for surprise Christmas presents for the SO who is now standing behind you as you open the browser again several hours later for some entirely unrelated purpose, in a totally hypothetical example.
- blauditore 8y ago
  Both browsers have this configurable in settings. So they just use different defaults, which depends on personal preference.
  - sdenton4 8y ago
    But which is the natural default? The one where you lose a lot of state seems like a far worse choice.
    - blauditore 8y ago
      It warns you. And there are people who do browsing in a one-off fashion: Open many thing, then close everything and forget.
- distant_hat 8y ago
  Except for tabs in incognito mode. I wish there was an 'OK' for Chrome too. Especially since it is so easy to hit Cmd-Q instead of Cmd-W.
- donatzsky 8y ago
  Unless they removed it recently, Firefox will also let you restore the last session. You may have to use the default startpage, though.
cm2187 8y ago
I switched from Chrome to Firefox after the google login controversy, and have been happy with the transition too. The only only thing that really annoys me is that when you snap a tab out of a window into a new window, the gesture is similar with snapping a tab into the favorite bar, and I end up with lots of "New Tab" or other unwanted favorites. Also a small personal annoyance. I got into the habit of always launching the browser by clicking the shift key on the windows task bar icon, so that I always get a new window, irrespective of whether some session is already running or not. But in firefox, when no session is running, launching with the shift key pressed results in the "safe mode" prompt. I wish there was a way to disable that.
- randkyp 8y ago
  You can middle-click on the taskbar icon to do that -- and it works for other apps, too.
totfz 8y ago
If you haven't used Chrome, no wonder you haven't noticed Firefox sucking. But a side-to-side speed and responsiveness comparison of Chrome and Firefox is unfair even today.
- gronne 8y ago
  I use both and could never feel the speed difference. On the contrary the lack of control over browser behavior in chrome is a constant annoyance.
- downer56 8y ago
  I have used Chrome and Firefox side-by-side, consistently since Chrome's original release. I have used Netscape and Internet Explorer since before both existed. I have performance gaming rigs of all generations, and I develop software. I have multiple generations of Apple machines as well. I run Windows and Linux. Firefox doesn't suck, and matches Chrome. But there's no accounting for user behavior. I have seen user behavior that is mind-blowingly stupid, and subcultures of user activity and tendencies trace well with product loyalty trends. Some user subcultures are retardedly dependent on browser extensions, never clear their cache, retain cookies for the lifetime of their laptop battery, and seemingly need hundreds of tabs open. And none of this shit makes sense to me. These are likely the same people who carry around phones on the brink of overheating while locked, and in their pocket, because they have to have a thousand apps installed, in order to feel like they're getting the $1,000 phone they paid for, I guess. Their emails are constantly peppered with "sent from [app|device|service]" signatures, and they claim microphone permissions are why ads target them. Honestly, if you've been blaming the browser, it's more likely that you're the one being your own worst enemy.
  - ksec 8y ago
    All the users I forced to use Firefox, decided that Chrome was faster, and they were more than 100s of them. ( And as a user I knew that too. I just wanted to support Firefox. ) So saying Firefox Doesn't suck may be partially right. As we will have to define "suck" first. But saying it is as fast as Chrome during Firefox 4 and early Chrome era is just the same as saying earth is flat.
Silhouette 8y ago
This gets said often, but I've been using Firefox continually since 2003 and I've never noticed it sucking. To this day, my browsing experience is still worse with Firefox than it was before 57, because so many useful little add-ons have never been replaced or have been replaced only with inferior versions. In some of those cases, that useful functionality can't be provided in the new environment, because the APIs to support it aren't there. I was unpleasantly reminded of this just a few days ago, when the same problem infected the latest Thunderbird update. More seriously, I am running into increasing numbers of sites that simply don't work properly with Firefox. Sometimes this is because of the privacy/blocker extensions I use, but often the problem persists even if I disable those. Whether it's due to bad web developers doing Chrome-only things or bugs in recent versions of Firefox, the unfortunate result is still the same from the user's point of view.
- feanaro 8y ago
  This I can relate with, but I would like to note that Firefox seems to be continually expanding its APIs and regaining functionality that was lost. In particular, [Tridactyl](https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl) (which tries to reimplement Pentadactyl, a kitchen-sink extension API consumer) works rather well. There are still some pain points, like the keyboard shortcut API which still hasn't been merged, but I am hopeful they eventually will be. I too experience privacy extensions breaking websites frequently, since I'm a heavy user of those, but so far I have never encountered a case of a website that was truly broken under Firefox. It was always one of my settings and worked under a clean profile.
  - cf498 8y ago
    They rushed it and I find it hard to not see it as a giant "screw you". They didnt release the specifications early enough for people to rewrite their addons and at the end of ESR52 there where still multiple bugs open which prevented people from porting their addons. We didnt even get a normal 1 year ESR support frame for gods sake. All that ignoring the fact that there was no warning for the end users that all their security addons were disabled after the automatic update. I am still furious about the absolute arrogance and carelessness Mozilla showed here.
mda 8y ago
I used Chrome since its early alpha versions on Linux, and I have to disagree. Even in its first days Chrome was a far superior browser speed, responsiveness and security wise. Firefo caught on some of these nowadays, but not nearly e ough for me to switch back.
- xte 8y ago
  The same for me until few time ago when Chrome weight and features start to be more nice for Alphabet then me. I ditch all Alphabet services, I do not like to waste my system and network resources for it's sake.
Bartweiss 8y ago
For several years, Firefox was punishingly slow and had awful tab control compared to Chrome. It may not have 'sucked', in the sense that I still vastly preferred it to IE or even Safari, but switching was an immediate and dramatic improvement. There have been major speedups since, and container tabs help fix the other issue. At this point, I still find Firefox worse than Chrome in a large number of ways, but they're small and often preference-based - but lots of people seem to agree that were a lot of users lost (or not gained) during a stretch where Firefox was pretty much objectively behind.

bryanrasmussen 8y ago

I use FF too, and I notice it sucking periodically, often after a big update - as things will - there have been periods of a month maybe two times in the last 10 years where I had to switch to another browser because it sucked too bad.

baldfat 8y ago
Sadly this is my story also. I use Vivaldi as my main browser now, which is Chromium based. Firefox does work awesome and is normally what I program my scripts through headlessly but in personal use FF just gets bad periodically.

watt 8y ago

When you log out, Firefox will block it and warn you that you are about to close number of tabs. When you select "OK", your tabs are gone. But Chrome will quietly exit, and when you start it next time, will offer to restore the tabs that were open last time. Chrome approach wins, hands down.

bryanrasmussen 8y ago
Isn't this google applications will track what you do all the time, and even after you close the application and restart it knows who you are and what you did?
sveme 8y ago
That's a setting in both browsers. Default is "Start with Startpage or empty page" in both browsers as well. You can always select "Restore last session" in both browsers.
- watt 8y ago
  The problem is that if Firefox is getting this default wrong, what else are they getting wrong? And it should realize user state is sacred, I would even expect if I quit browser with something written in the address bar (or search bar, etc), when it starts up again, it should be able to preserve this half-entered user input!
  - askmike 8y ago
    I'm very happy that when I close my browser it kills all my tabs. If I really want something back I just view it from the history. > I would even expect if I quit browser with something written in the address bar (or search bar, etc), when it starts up again, it should be able to preserve this half-entered user input! I'm pretty sure no one expects nor wants this. You're definitely in a minority here. The problem you describe isn't very technical, it's simply that you want something else than most people else and you don't want to take the time to configure your browser to how you want it to behave.
    - QasimK 8y ago
      I’m pretty sure watt is right...
    - vvillena 8y ago
      Lots of people actually expect that. It's how phone apps work. There's no concept of "closing an app" in the iOS and Android guidelines. You just get the app out of the way. I think the lack of improvements in desktop UX in the last 10 years is making every desktop OS to slowly adopt mobile UX conventions. Some of those new conventions are a step back.
  - mathw 8y ago
    I'm sure I remember Chrome not preserving session state as its default setting either. It's been so long since I configured either of them though...
  - Silhouette 8y ago
    But this isn't wrong, it's just your entirely subjective personal preference being different to someone else's. Personally, I don't like it when browsers implicitly keep tracking things when I close the application and then fire up some half-baked version of the same stuff when I come back later. If I want to remember where I am, I can easily bookmark some or all of my tabs. Firefox has had a particular problem in recent versions where it seems to think it crashed on the previous shutdown, even though there was no user-visible evidence of this, and then tries to restore the previous session even when it otherwise wouldn't. That's not helpful if your previous session involved shopping for surprise Christmas presents for the SO who is now standing behind you as you open the browser again several hours later for some entirely unrelated purpose, in a totally hypothetical example.
blauditore 8y ago
Both browsers have this configurable in settings. So they just use different defaults, which depends on personal preference.
- sdenton4 8y ago
  But which is the natural default? The one where you lose a lot of state seems like a far worse choice.
  - blauditore 8y ago
    It warns you. And there are people who do browsing in a one-off fashion: Open many thing, then close everything and forget.
distant_hat 8y ago
Except for tabs in incognito mode. I wish there was an 'OK' for Chrome too. Especially since it is so easy to hit Cmd-Q instead of Cmd-W.
donatzsky 8y ago
Unless they removed it recently, Firefox will also let you restore the last session. You may have to use the default startpage, though.

cm2187 8y ago

I switched from Chrome to Firefox after the google login controversy, and have been happy with the transition too. The only only thing that really annoys me is that when you snap a tab out of a window into a new window, the gesture is similar with snapping a tab into the favorite bar, and I end up with lots of "New Tab" or other unwanted favorites. Also a small personal annoyance. I got into the habit of always launching the browser by clicking the shift key on the windows task bar icon, so that I always get a new window, irrespective of whether some session is already running or not. But in firefox, when no session is running, launching with the shift key pressed results in the "safe mode" prompt. I wish there was a way to disable that.

randkyp 8y ago
You can middle-click on the taskbar icon to do that -- and it works for other apps, too.

totfz 8y ago

If you haven't used Chrome, no wonder you haven't noticed Firefox sucking. But a side-to-side speed and responsiveness comparison of Chrome and Firefox is unfair even today.

gronne 8y ago
I use both and could never feel the speed difference. On the contrary the lack of control over browser behavior in chrome is a constant annoyance.
downer56 8y ago
I have used Chrome and Firefox side-by-side, consistently since Chrome's original release. I have used Netscape and Internet Explorer since before both existed. I have performance gaming rigs of all generations, and I develop software. I have multiple generations of Apple machines as well. I run Windows and Linux. Firefox doesn't suck, and matches Chrome. But there's no accounting for user behavior. I have seen user behavior that is mind-blowingly stupid, and subcultures of user activity and tendencies trace well with product loyalty trends. Some user subcultures are retardedly dependent on browser extensions, never clear their cache, retain cookies for the lifetime of their laptop battery, and seemingly need hundreds of tabs open. And none of this shit makes sense to me. These are likely the same people who carry around phones on the brink of overheating while locked, and in their pocket, because they have to have a thousand apps installed, in order to feel like they're getting the $1,000 phone they paid for, I guess. Their emails are constantly peppered with "sent from [app|device|service]" signatures, and they claim microphone permissions are why ads target them. Honestly, if you've been blaming the browser, it's more likely that you're the one being your own worst enemy.
- ksec 8y ago
  All the users I forced to use Firefox, decided that Chrome was faster, and they were more than 100s of them. ( And as a user I knew that too. I just wanted to support Firefox. ) So saying Firefox Doesn't suck may be partially right. As we will have to define "suck" first. But saying it is as fast as Chrome during Firefox 4 and early Chrome era is just the same as saying earth is flat.

Silhouette 8y ago

This gets said often, but I've been using Firefox continually since 2003 and I've never noticed it sucking. To this day, my browsing experience is still worse with Firefox than it was before 57, because so many useful little add-ons have never been replaced or have been replaced only with inferior versions. In some of those cases, that useful functionality can't be provided in the new environment, because the APIs to support it aren't there. I was unpleasantly reminded of this just a few days ago, when the same problem infected the latest Thunderbird update. More seriously, I am running into increasing numbers of sites that simply don't work properly with Firefox. Sometimes this is because of the privacy/blocker extensions I use, but often the problem persists even if I disable those. Whether it's due to bad web developers doing Chrome-only things or bugs in recent versions of Firefox, the unfortunate result is still the same from the user's point of view.

feanaro 8y ago
This I can relate with, but I would like to note that Firefox seems to be continually expanding its APIs and regaining functionality that was lost. In particular, [Tridactyl](https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl) (which tries to reimplement Pentadactyl, a kitchen-sink extension API consumer) works rather well. There are still some pain points, like the keyboard shortcut API which still hasn't been merged, but I am hopeful they eventually will be. I too experience privacy extensions breaking websites frequently, since I'm a heavy user of those, but so far I have never encountered a case of a website that was truly broken under Firefox. It was always one of my settings and worked under a clean profile.
- cf498 8y ago
  They rushed it and I find it hard to not see it as a giant "screw you". They didnt release the specifications early enough for people to rewrite their addons and at the end of ESR52 there where still multiple bugs open which prevented people from porting their addons. We didnt even get a normal 1 year ESR support frame for gods sake. All that ignoring the fact that there was no warning for the end users that all their security addons were disabled after the automatic update. I am still furious about the absolute arrogance and carelessness Mozilla showed here.

mda 8y ago

I used Chrome since its early alpha versions on Linux, and I have to disagree. Even in its first days Chrome was a far superior browser speed, responsiveness and security wise. Firefo caught on some of these nowadays, but not nearly e ough for me to switch back.

xte 8y ago
The same for me until few time ago when Chrome weight and features start to be more nice for Alphabet then me. I ditch all Alphabet services, I do not like to waste my system and network resources for it's sake.

Bartweiss 8y ago

For several years, Firefox was punishingly slow and had awful tab control compared to Chrome. It may not have 'sucked', in the sense that I still vastly preferred it to IE or even Safari, but switching was an immediate and dramatic improvement. There have been major speedups since, and container tabs help fix the other issue. At this point, I still find Firefox worse than Chrome in a large number of ways, but they're small and often preference-based - but lots of people seem to agree that were a lot of users lost (or not gained) during a stretch where Firefox was pretty much objectively behind.