21 ms·

Seriously, switch to Firefox. It's good again, and prioritizes privacy.[0] After Chrome's forced-sign-in debacle [1] I switched away from Chrome on all my platf

by davidp 8y ago

Seriously, switch to Firefox. It's good again, and prioritizes privacy.[0] After Chrome's forced-sign-in debacle [1] I switched away from Chrome on all my platforms (Windows, Linux, Android) and haven't missed a thing. [0]: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/11/firefox-sync-privacy/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/11/firefox-sync-privacy/ [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18055161 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18055161

kanon 8y ago
What about Chromium?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- firethief 8y ago
  Using Google's browser engine still gives them a lot of control, even if you aren't using their trimmings.
  - kanon 8y ago
    True that. I wish they removed all Google stuff from Chromium and only use it in Chrome. Seems like the only fair thing to do imo.
    - ziftface 8y ago
      That kind of exists, but it's still giving Google power because it relies on their software. It basically makes it really difficult for anyone to shape how the web works besides Google, since no one has any browser market share. For example, WebAssembly started out as a Mozilla project. What if Mozilla didn't exist, or Firefox didn't have any market share? It would never have been created. Think of all the accumulated features/innovations that could exist over the next few years that might not if the only browser engine being used is controlled by a single company.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- bunderbunder 8y ago
  The whole subtext here, as described in TFA, is that the near-complete dominance of Google's browser engine is worrying.
toddsiegel 8y ago
Same here. I have been been back on FF for a few months and have been very happy. It's fast and works great in every respect. I did experience a glitch the other day in dev tools where a pane blanked out on me. I may have had a crash too, but that's it.
- tehbeard 8y ago
  From my experience it's not a glitch, ff Dev tools are slow and second class compared to chrome. Quantum made it viable to use ff on my old laptop, but a daily driver for a web dev it still is not.
  - selrond 8y ago
    This, and especially perf profiler is lacking in every way compared with Chrome
  - _xoo 8y ago
    If you are a web dev you will either way have both browser installed for testing. The question is what will you use as your main browser apart from developing.
selrond 8y ago
I want to love FF, I really do! But the fact that it causes my CPU usage to go through the roof every couple of minutes for no apparent reason makes me want to pull my hair out...
- gronne 8y ago
  funny, I could say the same about chromium (except the wanting to love it part)
  - iscrewyou 8y ago
    Seriously, I don’t understand why there are always complaints of Firefox over using CPU when chrome has same issues.
    - selrond 8y ago
      I haven’t had a single perf problem with Chrome. It seems to be related to the platform - I’m on a Mac
      - iscrewyou 8y ago
        I have a MacBook Pro. The fan spins up sometimes. So what? It also spins up when I’m doing other tasks. I’m always plugged in. So I have no opinion to share about battery performance.
        txcwpalpha 8y ago
        Different commenter here, but same issue as the parent. I'm on a 2016 MBP. When I use Chrome, my fans stay off or at around 1200rpm at all times unless I open a video or a Twitch stream, at which point they jump up to around 1400rpm and the highest the CPU temp gets is around 50c. On Firefox, my fans will randomly jump up to 3000rpm when doing only normal web browsing, even on simple sites like HN. I'm using FF right now to post this comment, and as soon as I opened HN, my CPU temp went from 40 to 50c. And this is the only tab I have open. If I open a video, or heaven forbid a Twitch stream or Google Maps, my fans instantly go to 7000rpm and my CPU temp goes to 70-80c. Even just opening Gmail makes FF go haywire. And it isn't just "my fans spin up, big deal". Browsing the internet on FF turns my MBP into a slag of near-molten metal that is too hot to even touch, and I can only imagine what it's doing to my battery life. I want to like FF, I really do, but this is simply a dealbreaker for me, and even though it's a known issue, Mozilla seems uninterested in fixing it (I have previously seen a response from Mozilla that essentially amounted to "it's hard for us to optimize FF for certain sites, so we aren't going to even try"). It's clearly not an issue for everyone, but I definitely have noticed that I'm not the only one who has these issues, either.
rehemiau 8y ago
Many people won't switch because either Firefox is slow on their platform (MacOS) or stuff they use are slow on Firefox (Google ecosystem, many other webapps optimized for Chrome)
- irrational 8y ago
  I use Firefox on MacOS. It is easily as fast as Chrome for me (and I have tons of tabs open in multiple windows). And I use Google Docs/Sheets/etc. all day long with zero slowdowns.
  - k__ 8y ago
    I use Firefox on MacOS. It is much slower than Chrome for me (and I don't tend to hold open many tabs or windows). I use Google Mail/Groups/Calendar all day long which became unusable in the last months.
    - yesimahuman 8y ago
      Yea the new gmail on firefox was the reason I switched back to Chrome. I blame google for it but I just couldn't bare the performance in FF
      - androidgirl 8y ago
        I've been using the plain html gmail for the past year on Firefox. Works amazingly! Haven't noticed speed issues in Drive either.
      - baroffoos 8y ago
        Open your email in thunderbird or move your email somewhere else. This is all part of googles game. They slow down youtube in every other browser as well.
        Manishearth 8y ago
        IIRC this isn't intentional, but it's not due to benevolence either: The whole custom elements fiasco (which is largely Google jumping the gun and shipping an unstandardized API that they eventually had to deprecate) means that some Google properties are still written on custom elements v0, and use a polyfill on non-Chrome.
MrHorsetoast 8y ago
What about developer tools? As a front-end dev I'm very pleased with the tools Chrome offers. I only tried Firefox's dev tools briefly but can they compare?
- p49k 8y ago
  Their dev tools are comprehensive and have a very similar UI to Chrome. Personally, it wasn't hard to pick it up and I haven't (yet) run into any limitations.
- st3fan 8y ago
  Yes they are first class. Give them a try.
- leppr 8y ago
  Yes, they're mostly the same. On some points Firefox is better (e.g. DOM Inspector, Network tab, animations, dark theme), on others Chromium is (e.g. Profiler, sources). I use both.
- llampx 8y ago
  If you are a developer I'd think that you would use both, along with Safari on Mac if that's available to you.
tomphoolery 8y ago
Firefox is a way better experience than Chrome these days. Google, you constantly add new features that nobody wants, and furthermore, make it WAY more difficult for those of us who care about privacy to turn your tracking BS off. Google Chrome can die in a fire as far as I'm concerned.
- adontz 8y ago
  Firefox added Pocket, and kind of nobody wanted it. So it happens in FF too.
  - ghostly_s 8y ago
    Plenty of people don't want it, but Pocket is actually quite popular. It's an essential part of my browsing experience.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - vrazj 8y ago
    And I don't think anybody wants the ads they have added to the home page.
    - sha666sum 8y ago
      Eh, at least it only takes a few clicks to remove them.
      - yarrel 8y ago
        Then it only taking a few clicks to install them would be just as good.
      - sazfedjhrgnukc 8y ago
        Eh, what does that say about Mozilla wanting to be the "good guy"? If they want to be good then they have to constantly be held accountable to the high standard they like people to think that they are at. They don't get their cake and eat it too.
Someone1234 8y ago
The best thing about Firefox is Mozilla's Multi-Account Container tabs[0]. Essentially it allows you to put different tabs into different light-weight profiles, with their own session, cookies, and state. That means if you want to log into Facebook but don't want Facebook following you online, just give Facebook its own container. Mozilla has anti-tracking already baked in, but Multi-Account Containers are a whole other level of isolation, but without sacrificing usability (like traditional multi-profile/multi-user browsing). [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
- tptacek 8y ago
  This has been a first-class Chrome feature for years, for whatever it's worth.
  - wutbrodo 8y ago
    Multiple profiles in Chrome is super useful, but it doesn't work at the tab level, does it? Just at the window level? Not that that's a fundamental change, but it's a nice usability bump
    - tptacek 8y ago
      True, but that for me is a feature (I almost always want new tabs to open in the same container; for instance, when reviewing a Github PR and clicking through to see context). But from a privacy UX perspective, both Chrome and Firefox accommodate this use case gracefully.
      - Nullabillity 8y ago
        It sounds like you already know this, but for anyone else reading, tabs inherit the container of the tab that opened them (aside from special cases like Facebook Container, which trigger based on the domain).
  - Someone1234 8y ago
fixermark 8y ago
I keep them both installed, for the rare occasion when some web app or other only works performantly on one of them.
FooHentai 8y ago
I just had to switch back to Chrome because firefox couldn't handle multiple (4+) 1080p x264 streams in the same window. Chrome managed to handle 18 of them, across two windows, without a hitch.
- baroffoos 8y ago
  How often are you streaming 18 1080p streams at once?
  - FooHentai 8y ago
    Fair bit at the moment, am grinding marbles on stream. But it's not the particular use-case that's the problem, it's the drastic difference in performance characteristics which is more of a sliding scale than a one-time issue. Firefox is pound-for-pound slower in general browsing activities for me, and chokes on javascript-heavy pages much quicker than Chrome. It's still an order of magnitude better than IE in that regard, but on a sliding scale, Chrome's out in the lead with FF somewhere in the middle. I'm hanging on to FF for idealogical reasons, but that's it. If the browsing experience was my only measure, it'd be Chrome all the way.
pureliquidhw 8y ago
I moved away due to the battery drain issues on OSX, has that been addressed? Based on this bug and some of the related ones, the answer seems to be no. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042 Until then I'm stuck with Opera/Safari/Chrome, mostly in that order.
- wonthegame 8y ago
  Try viewing Imgur.com on Safari. Just scroll a bit until you get a couple gifs displayed and check the CPU usage on the imgur.com tab. Just insane that a few gifs destroy an i7. Is it bad video compression? I notice imgur attempts to make gifs from mp4 files and vice versa but damn. A 5 year old iPhone has no problem with this task. It'd be nice if you could throttle processor usage. I'd rather have a choppy experience on the occasionally website than constant fans and having my Mac turn into a heater.
  - muxator 8y ago
    I do not know about macos, but in Linux you could achieve this by running your process in a cgroup.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    http://www.willnolan.com/cputhrottle/cputhrottle.html http://www.willnolan.com/cputhrottle/cputhrottle.html
    - wonthegame 8y ago
      That’s awesome. Thanks for the link
- itchynosedev 8y ago
  It was unusable for me too, afaik it had to do with scaling more than anything else, so if you toy around with scaling factors it might help.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
tptacek 8y ago
Does it prioritize privacy? I haven't used Firefox in a long time, so my impressions of it are based on news stories, like them launching a partnership with sketchy VPN services or building in "easter egg" advertisements for television shows.
- berbec 8y ago
  I'm not a customer so I dont have skin in the game, but is ProtonVPN really considered sketchy? [1] 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18608041 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18608041
  - SEJeff 8y ago
    No. There was some FUD which was spread that was eventually outed to be written by PIA, one of their competitors. The entire thing mostly just elicits an eyeroll.
- vrazj 8y ago
  Don't forget when they sent your data to Cliqz.
  - rcw4256 8y ago
    Or when they silently installed an extension in order to send telemetry from Firefox installations that had explicitly opted out of telemetry. https://www.ghacks.net/2018/09/21/mozilla-wants-to-estimate-firefoxs-telemetry-off-population/ https://www.ghacks.net/2018/09/21/mozilla-wants-to-estimate-...
    - taneq 8y ago
      That looks pretty harmless but the way they went around it is concerning.
    - pluma 8y ago
      The reason this is outrageous is because they weren't doing this kind of thing before. The reason this isn't outrageous when Chrome does it is that Chrome always does this. Using this as a reason to distrust Firefox and instead trust Chrome is insane. It's valid criticism but seeing this presented in arguments about why Firefox is bad (and you should be using Chrome instead) is absurd.
natex 8y ago
I've been trying to use Firefox at work for years. It doesn't work well in my company's intranet (lots of Sharepoint). Random pieces of the the company website do not show up and I get way too many certificate warnings. Chrome, Edge, and IE work fine. Firefox hasn't worked through 2 iterations of our intranet over the course of 10+ years.
- unsignedint 8y ago
  I think the reason is probably network.negotiate-auth.delegation-uris and network.negotiate-auth.trusted-uris in about:config, and your authentication is failing. Since Chrome, Edge, and IE uses Windows certificate infrastructure and Firefox uses its own, it won't understand directive perhaps pushed through your company's group policy. You can specify address of your intranet site, in style of https://.example.com https://.example.com (where subdomain of example.com is covered in this case) and it should work. As for certificate, is it using internal certificate of some sort? If that's the case, you will have to load it to Firefox's NSS.
eightysixfour 8y ago
Except for the battery life on laptops. Edge and Chrime are way ahead here and it is very frustrating.
atombender 8y ago
Adapting a comment I posted in a different Firefox thread: I'd like to use Firefox. I prefer its ideals to everything else. I've tried it out several times the last year. It's okay. Unfortunately, I always end up going back to Safari. Despite the performance improvements, Safari still feels like a faster, sleeker, smoother, and more user-focused browser. Firefox is still pretty ugly. On macOS, it feels chunkier and less natively integrated. It does not feel like a first-class citizen of macOS, but rather like a gtk+ or Qt app ported to the Mac. Safari's "omnibar" is superior to Firefox's. Safari actually suggests web sites (see https://imgur.com/a/dY2SWKB https://imgur.com/a/dY2SWKB), which I use all the time. Wikipedia is a major one. Start typing "Richard Fey", for example, and the first hit will be the Wikipedia page for Richard Feynman, complete with a short summary and photo. Firefox forces me through a Google search. I use DuckDuckGo and its shortcuts, but Safari's suggestions are more helpful. I also tried out Firefox on iOS some time ago, and it wasn't as nice as Safari. For there to be a point to this, I'd need the same browser in both places, with perfect syncing of bookmarks, cookies, tabs, etc., just like Safari. I'm not tied to iCloud for this, though it'd be nice to use iCloud and not yet another cloud syncing mechanism. Lastly, migrating is a pain. There's apparently no way to import my current Safari session (I have probably 60-70 tabs) or history (I keep everything I visit, going back years), which means I'd lose stuff by migrating and would have to migrate tabs over incrementally. Hard to try out a browser in any meaningful way this way. Here's a few things Firefox could do to interest me: - Make super-sleek platform-specific UIs that feel native. Do you really need a platform-agnostic GUI toolkit for the chrome? The renderer is the portable part. I don't care about theming myself, and wouldn't miss it if my browser didn't have it (Safari doesn't). I prefer an opinionated browser that knows what it should look and feel like. - Innovate by addressing actual user pain points. Containers are an innovation, but they target techies and fail the grandmother test. I'd like true containers, where every 2nd-level domain is contained. This means having to be innovative about how to address cross-origin things (Google spreads itself over many domains, and then you have things like OAuth). Another huge innovation you could bring to the table is to fix the user identity and authentication problem. I use a password manager, but why are we still logging in with user names and passwords these days? Why is the password manager using brittle form fills rather than APIs, for God's sake? Here's my solution: When I go to Reddit or whatever, and I'm logged out, what if my browser showed a little bar at the top that said: "This web site would like to use your profile 'Atombender'. [Accept] [Ignore]". On accept, browser and web site would negotiate through some kind of opaque, cryptographically secure token (via some plugin API so that providers like 1Password and Apple can store your state) so that the browser can prove that I am me, and the web site can prove that it is itself. No more phishing, no more remembering passwords. Web sites can only identify users that you've granted access to your identity to, and like ApplePay your true identity should be hidden behind an opaque identifier. Standard protocols could be defined for things such as email addresses and phone numbers, so that I can edit the email for my profile locally, and it would automatically make an API call to the web site to update the email address on that end. Things like deleting an account, setting up 2FA etc. would be part of this API. Of course, to accomplish this you have to design a standard and make web sites use it. Mozilla used to have enough clout to do this, anything is possible. Another area where innovation is needed: Fix the tab problem. Bookmarks, tabs, windows -- we can do better. Why isn't a tab and a bookmark sort of the same thing? Why is bookmark editing so bad? Why do bookmarks get broken when the web site disappears or changes? A bookmark should save a complete copy of that page! And why can't I search my history of visited web pages? I remember reading an article a few weeks ago. It mentioned Charlemagne's reign but the title was about something completely different. I don't remember anything else. How do I find it? Browsers only record the title and URL and visit time. Why can't I search for "Charlemagne" in the browser and get a hit? - Firefox can interest me with great performance, but Quantum has been disappointing on macOS. I remember the standalone WebRender (?) demo app a few years ago, and it was insanely fast. Maybe because it had less legacy baggage. Firefox could charm me by using significantly less RAM and less idle CPU. - Why don't browsers have adblocking built in? I use 1Blocker, and it has a clunky UI where you can point the cursor at a page element to block that specific element. This could be made so smooth. - To catch more developers' mindshare, Firefox could develop a super-modern, low-resource-usage Electron competitor with some kind of easy (gRPC?) glue for interfacing with languages. Join forces with Slack to make it happen. Just some ideas. I don't pretend I know better than the Firefox team, and I'm just one data point, of course. But like many people I see Firefox as being increasingly less relevant. I don't see this as being caused only by the ascendancy of Chrome, either.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
hacknat 8y ago
I’ve been contemplating this for a while, and I just took the jump today. You’re right it’s just as good. Especially since google s-canned inbox, I’m feeling pretty vindictive (switched to paid proton mail as well).
mixedCase 8y ago
> It's good again No it's not. It's frequently hanging certain tabs which I'm forced to close and reopen because I get the grey spinner and my 8 core machine grinds down to a halt. On Android when opening the embedded webview powered by Firefox, whether the page will load without being forced to open it in the full browser is a coin toss. It doesn't help that Mozilla has lost most of my goodwill by being such a mixed bag when it comes to politics and decision making the past few years. I still use it, because I like that a part of the company is trying to move the needle forward in browser tech, I find container tabs better than Chromium profiles and up until recently I could get bypass paywalls without workarounds, but unless things improve by the time Brave moves the Chromium fork out of beta, I'm moving to Brave.
thiagowfx 8y ago
Firefox 3 was much better. No Pocket. No article/news recommendations. Panorama view. Firefox used to be my favorite until it started to get bloated. Prioritizes privacy? Then let me turn recommendations and Pocket permanently off.
- kayamon 8y ago
  The weird thing about Pocket is it was actually better _before_ they integrated it, when you installed the separate Pocket extension.
- c0nducktr 8y ago
  Funny using Panorama as an example of when Firefox was better, and then criticizing it for Pocket, in context of bloat. I'd bet Pocket is more useful to more people than Panorama was.
baby 8y ago
This, and get Tree Style Tabs. It's literally the best thing about Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
OhSoHumble 8y ago
Right now I have this bug in Firefox where the results from the drop down menu are incorrect. As in, if I get an autocomplete result that is several lines down - say, foobar.com - and I click on it then I'll be taken to barbar.com. If I click on the result that is several lines above foobar.com then I get foobar.com. I don't know how to explain this correctly.
chadAnon69 8y ago
Brave browser is solid as well, built in ad blocking and Tor support. CEO is brandon eich and it's built on Chromium
- bjz_ 8y ago
  > and it's built on Chromium That's a negative to me - again, too much browser engine consolidation. :/
  - bartread 8y ago
    Inclined to agree. I see the fact that Microsoft is abandoning Edge in favour of a Chromium-based browser as a fundamentally bad thing for the web due to the loss of competition amongst browser engines (me of 10 - 15 years ago would probably be appalled by this sentiment, but times change). Brave, as yet another Chromium based-browser doesn't feel like it's helping. That, and the name "Brave" absolutely grates on me. It's a web browser: what exactly is brave about it? Too pretentious for my taste.
    - BrendanEich 8y ago
      The name is not about the company, rather the user who takes control of their own Web economics. This requires facing down some anti-ad/tracker-blocking, and supporting favorite sites and creators (easily done from grants, no need to pay; but still requires courage compared to false security of taking ads and tracking). I always thought "Opera" was pretentious, personally! But I'm friends with long-time CTO, who does go to Bayreuth every year for Wagner, so I mean this is best possible way ;-).
  - BrendanEich 8y ago
    As only big companies can underwrite development and then support ongoing/backlog compatibility quirks-mode work for a new engine, you are effectively saying "no" to other, higher-order values offered by new browsers than the engine. Yes, I include Mozilla in "big companies" (2017 big revenue, which won't recur from what I can tell; big pay to chair too). Nevertheless, Mozilla has mismanaged Servo into an AR/XR only position where it won't go big, and Mozilla (for same reasons as MS) faces pressure to bail on Gecko. Blaming little browsers for using chromium/Blink is blaming them for surviving. Successful genes (e.g. for adaptive auto-immunity) tend to sweep. Think of WebKit and now (on desktop) chromium/Blink as such alleles. We may not like it but it happens whatever we may wish. I've chosen to fight for user rights at a higher domain of discourse: private ads, anonymous donations, ad and tracking protection by default. The time for a more radical new engine will come; it isn't now.
MarcysVonEylau 8y ago
One gripe I have with FF is that their DevTools are crap... Chrome is a really unprecedented WebDev platform for me.
chrischen 8y ago
A good chunk of people who actually care about their computer/work on a computer a lot use a Macbook, and use it while on battery power. So battery efficiency is a major issue for me and because my browser is basically constantly open and full of tabs, I have no choice but to use Safari.
AnaniasAnanas 8y ago
> and prioritizes privacy.[0] It actually prioritizes calling home, stopping ad-blockers from working on Mozilla owned sites, etc. Don't get me wrong, I am a Firefox user myself, and I do think that Firefox is the most privacy oriented browser when compared to the other popular ones, but nowadays it is a pain in the butt to disable all of their spyware on about:config.
- Steltek 8y ago
  > stopping ad-blockers from working on Mozilla owned sites Err, do you mean preventing extensions from modifying critical sites like addons.mozilla.org? Because that's seems like common sense to me.
  - AnaniasAnanas 8y ago
    It does not seem like common sense at all when said sites also load tracking scripts such as google analytics.
  - anoncake 8y ago
    A mouse gestures add-on not working on some pages, which are no more critical than my bank's, is just bad UX.
esistgut 8y ago
After quantum I did my best to switch but I had the following problems: no scrollbar search highlights, terrible Linux/gnome dark theme integration, angular source maps not working. After a couple of weeks I got back to Chrome.
- mixmastamyk 8y ago
  Looks great on my Linux/mate dark theme. Wonder what the difference is?
Draiken 8y ago
I tried and simply couldn't do it. Although I know in my case it's a very specific issue with multiple profiles. I have a work and personal profile for Chrome and even tho I could make that work on Firefox, one very simple thing makes it completely unusable to me: clicking a link always opens on one particular window/profile. On Chrome whatever window you last used will be the one opening the url, which is extremely necessary when using multiple profiles. Perhaps one day that's going to be implemented and I can go back to the good old FF.
- dewiz 8y ago
  If understand your scenario, you can do that with FF, if you don't force a url to be always opened in one profile. For instance you can have sites hard-linked to specific profiles (e.g. social networks) and others that are not, so they stay in the current session (e.g. paypal, which otherwise is broken by the multi account feature).
  - Draiken 8y ago
    Oh I don't force anything. Chrome obeys the "last window" rule while Firefox always opens things on the first profile (or last? can't recall). If you use multiple accounts on the same service (eg. Gmail for work/personal use) you're screwed. The whole point is that it shouldn't need configuration, it should be smart like Chrome is.
wetpaws 8y ago
I'm trying to use Firefox both on my home and work machines, but until Mozilla fix their horrendous developer tools I have to keep both browsers open side by side
barrongineer 8y ago
I tried to switch to firefox a few months ago, but it had no way to view websocket frames in the dev tools. This was kind of a deal breaker for me at the time as I was doing a lot of ws work. Have they remedied this?
microcolonel 8y ago
Firefox has had its fair share of debacles this year too. Chrome works better on Linux for me, and Firefox is full of strange and unusual bugs which Mozilla shows little or no interest in fixing. If Mozilla forked Chromium this year, Firefox would be a better browser (even with the very interesting developments coming from the Servo camp, E10S, etc. etc. etc.). Firefox has accumulated bugs, particularly around their implementation of SVG, since about 4.x, and it doesn't seem to be getting any better on that front.
blitmap 8y ago
I think Servo is going to be a massive Good Thing (tm) for Mozilla, but they have messed up a few times with UI anti-patterns and sneaking extensions into updates that users didn't opt for. They have seriously breached our trust like Google and it will take years to earn back that trust. I switched to Firefox away from Chrome recently. I am happy with this but I wish they had a friendly UI you could bring up to expose cookies to be shared between tabs on an opt-in basis. Cookies should be isolated per-tab by default. Cookies and other persistent data should be forgotten as soon as the tab is closed. I don't like container tabs, I think it gets confusing to manage tab groups by profile. I want to quickly mouse over and say "expose this tab's cookies to this other tab". I'm still sad I can't get perfect "tree tabs" going. I have a plugin I use to show parent and child tabs in a tree arrangement but nothing looks sexy about it: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-tabs/?src=search https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-tabs/?sr... I want an actual tree of lines shown to each row/tab to quickly visualize how the tabs were created from parent-to-child. How it currently looks is too busy with borders everywhere. It's functional but not what I envisioned. I can't hide the tab bar at the top as far as I know. I'm just frustrated that I remember trying to make this work in like 2002 and it's soon to be 2019. I feel like browsers aren't made for workstations, but casual consumption. They should enable so much productivity. I also wish they focused on minimizing and isolating references to various Web APIs, so it would be easier to unreference and orphan them - unreachable from advertisers. (Unrelated rant?)
- chmln 8y ago
  I'm afraid our hopes of Servo resurrecting Mozilla were short lived. From what I understand, work on Servo for Desktop has been phased out considerably. See https://blog.servo.org/2018/03/09/servo-and-mixed-reality/ https://blog.servo.org/2018/03/09/servo-and-mixed-reality/
  - Teknoman117 8y ago
    Ah crap. I totally missed that this happens. It's a damn shame really, what exists of Servo at this point was rather amazing in terms of speed.
kossTKR 8y ago
Too bad it completely kills your CPU on a Mac. I tried switching completely a month ago for the third time. Sadly absolutely nothing has happened in a 5 year time-span. The performance on my high-spec i7 Macbook Pro is abysmal. ( same across several company Macbooks ) The fans speed up constantly like they have done it for years. It's completely unusable for "professional" work or just regular multi tab browsing and drains the battery in no time. Safari, Chrome, Opera, whatever, doesn't have these problems. I actually haven't experienced an application that feels so sluggish and unoptimised in OSX as Firefox. Something is seriously wrong and the dev group must not be prioritising it? I checked their subreddit and loads of people are fleeing the Mac version, even on the newest nightly builds of quantum - seriously what the hell is going on? Why hasn't "the bug" or whatever been found or defined in clear termes in over 5 years? The day the app works without serious CPU issues i will uninstall Chrome and go to Firefox, but the handling of this problem makes me worried about the dev groups competence. When i talked to devs in the subreddit many of them were like "Hey, that sounds weird, should be better in the new nightly, are you sure it's not ..." - an absurd answer in the light of the constant stream of people saying this for years and years - even in this thread i see multiple people saying it's useless on OSX. To the dev group: Get a Macbook (many devs use them), open Firefox, identify the problem - should have happened 5+ years ago.
- inferiorhuman 8y ago
  I use the nightly builds and I definitely do not have that problem with around 750 tabs open on my non-retina MacBook Pro. It does suck down memory though.
  - kossTKR 8y ago
    Which doesn't change anything since the Macbook Pro has been sold with Retina displays for what, the last 6 years? The fact that Firefox works exclusively on ancient laptops or edge cases doesn't make anything better. All Apple devices today are sold with Retina screens and the Pro Lineup, and therefore most devs has had Retina screens for 6+ years.
    - 8y ago
ilrwbwrkhv 8y ago
I would switch in a heartbeat if the audio issue for sped up videos is solved...
- sobani 8y ago
  Which audio issues do you experience? I regularly watch videos sped up on YouTube and InfoQ and never noticed any problems.
  - ilrwbwrkhv 8y ago
    This one: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1383363 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1383363
andai 8y ago
You may have missed a spot: using a privacy conscious browser on an OS designed to spy on you.
sAbakumoff 8y ago
Brave
ospider 8y ago
I have switched to Firefox two month ago. The only feature I missed about "show initiator in devtools network panel"[1] 1. https://github.com/jingjingke/crontab.git https://github.com/jingjingke/crontab.git
Smithalicious 8y ago
Mozilla has a political stance that I do not support, and they openly use Firefox to push it. This doesn't get brought up enough on places that lean liberal such as HN, but it is a reason why I, and several other people I know, cannot use it in good faith. It's also a fair bit slower than Chrome, which doesn't help.
- mprev 8y ago
  Can you be more specific about what you perceive to be their political stance, how that impacts your browser usage, and how it differs from that of the other browser vendors?
- gyaru 8y ago
  And this political stance is?
- llampx 8y ago
  Google also has the same political stance and they push it very hard.
speedplane 8y ago
Sadly, Google Chrome has moved beyond just providing good performance. They now nicely manage all of your google accounts, which is really nice when you have a work account, personal account, etc. These nice small but nice features can really lock you in, especially if you use Chrome on your phone as well as your computer. It's clear that the current round of browser wars isn't just about speed and standards compliance, but also feature lock-in too.
speedplane 8y ago
Also, scrolling on firefox is awkward and imprecise. They seem to prefer bouncy accelerated/decelerated scrolling where Google Chrome is as sharp as a knife. When I take my finger off the scroll wheel, I want scrolling to stop immediately, I don't want it to keep moving for a handful of pixels to artificially slow down.
- i_live_there 8y ago
  Check your settings. My scroll works equally on both browsers
macspoofing 8y ago
Performance. Firefox still lags in performance. Granted you may only see the difference in edge cases, but I work for a company that creates a performance-sensitive web-app and the difference is big. I do agree however that the entire industry standardizing on Chrome is not great for anyone (including Google). I'm surprised that Microsoft isn't continuing Edge development, even only as a hedge and to have a sensible default for Windows - especially if you're building Windows Apps and you need a browser control. Why give that up to Chrome? And it isn't like Microsoft can't afford it - they are almost a trillion dollar company.
mathiasrw 8y ago
Try Brave from brave.com - so much innovation in one browser.
sneakernets 8y ago
Firefox 57 is why I switched to Chrome in the first place. If I'm going to use a butchered UI, I might as well use the original from whom everyone copied. And on top of that accessibility was a nightmare. My grandmother had glaucoma and could not use Firefox 57 in any capacity because the feature to have large chunky Netscape/Mosaic buttons was removed completely. I had to switch all her stuff over to SeaMonkey, which still had the ability to have large buttons, so she could use a web browser.

by davidp 8y ago

kanon 8y ago

What about Chromium?

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
firethief 8y ago
Using Google's browser engine still gives them a lot of control, even if you aren't using their trimmings.
- kanon 8y ago
  True that. I wish they removed all Google stuff from Chromium and only use it in Chrome. Seems like the only fair thing to do imo.
  - ziftface 8y ago
    That kind of exists, but it's still giving Google power because it relies on their software. It basically makes it really difficult for anyone to shape how the web works besides Google, since no one has any browser market share. For example, WebAssembly started out as a Mozilla project. What if Mozilla didn't exist, or Firefox didn't have any market share? It would never have been created. Think of all the accumulated features/innovations that could exist over the next few years that might not if the only browser engine being used is controlled by a single company.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
bunderbunder 8y ago
The whole subtext here, as described in TFA, is that the near-complete dominance of Google's browser engine is worrying.

toddsiegel 8y ago

Same here. I have been been back on FF for a few months and have been very happy. It's fast and works great in every respect. I did experience a glitch the other day in dev tools where a pane blanked out on me. I may have had a crash too, but that's it.

tehbeard 8y ago
From my experience it's not a glitch, ff Dev tools are slow and second class compared to chrome. Quantum made it viable to use ff on my old laptop, but a daily driver for a web dev it still is not.
- selrond 8y ago
  This, and especially perf profiler is lacking in every way compared with Chrome
- _xoo 8y ago
  If you are a web dev you will either way have both browser installed for testing. The question is what will you use as your main browser apart from developing.

selrond 8y ago

I want to love FF, I really do! But the fact that it causes my CPU usage to go through the roof every couple of minutes for no apparent reason makes me want to pull my hair out...

gronne 8y ago
funny, I could say the same about chromium (except the wanting to love it part)
- iscrewyou 8y ago
  Seriously, I don’t understand why there are always complaints of Firefox over using CPU when chrome has same issues.
  - selrond 8y ago
    I haven’t had a single perf problem with Chrome. It seems to be related to the platform - I’m on a Mac
    - iscrewyou 8y ago
      I have a MacBook Pro. The fan spins up sometimes. So what? It also spins up when I’m doing other tasks. I’m always plugged in. So I have no opinion to share about battery performance.
      - txcwpalpha 8y ago
        Different commenter here, but same issue as the parent. I'm on a 2016 MBP. When I use Chrome, my fans stay off or at around 1200rpm at all times unless I open a video or a Twitch stream, at which point they jump up to around 1400rpm and the highest the CPU temp gets is around 50c. On Firefox, my fans will randomly jump up to 3000rpm when doing only normal web browsing, even on simple sites like HN. I'm using FF right now to post this comment, and as soon as I opened HN, my CPU temp went from 40 to 50c. And this is the only tab I have open. If I open a video, or heaven forbid a Twitch stream or Google Maps, my fans instantly go to 7000rpm and my CPU temp goes to 70-80c. Even just opening Gmail makes FF go haywire. And it isn't just "my fans spin up, big deal". Browsing the internet on FF turns my MBP into a slag of near-molten metal that is too hot to even touch, and I can only imagine what it's doing to my battery life. I want to like FF, I really do, but this is simply a dealbreaker for me, and even though it's a known issue, Mozilla seems uninterested in fixing it (I have previously seen a response from Mozilla that essentially amounted to "it's hard for us to optimize FF for certain sites, so we aren't going to even try"). It's clearly not an issue for everyone, but I definitely have noticed that I'm not the only one who has these issues, either.

rehemiau 8y ago

Many people won't switch because either Firefox is slow on their platform (MacOS) or stuff they use are slow on Firefox (Google ecosystem, many other webapps optimized for Chrome)

irrational 8y ago
I use Firefox on MacOS. It is easily as fast as Chrome for me (and I have tons of tabs open in multiple windows). And I use Google Docs/Sheets/etc. all day long with zero slowdowns.
- k__ 8y ago
  I use Firefox on MacOS. It is much slower than Chrome for me (and I don't tend to hold open many tabs or windows). I use Google Mail/Groups/Calendar all day long which became unusable in the last months.
  - yesimahuman 8y ago
    Yea the new gmail on firefox was the reason I switched back to Chrome. I blame google for it but I just couldn't bare the performance in FF
    - androidgirl 8y ago
      I've been using the plain html gmail for the past year on Firefox. Works amazingly! Haven't noticed speed issues in Drive either.
    - baroffoos 8y ago
      Open your email in thunderbird or move your email somewhere else. This is all part of googles game. They slow down youtube in every other browser as well.
      - Manishearth 8y ago
        IIRC this isn't intentional, but it's not due to benevolence either: The whole custom elements fiasco (which is largely Google jumping the gun and shipping an unstandardized API that they eventually had to deprecate) means that some Google properties are still written on custom elements v0, and use a polyfill on non-Chrome.

MrHorsetoast 8y ago

What about developer tools? As a front-end dev I'm very pleased with the tools Chrome offers. I only tried Firefox's dev tools briefly but can they compare?

p49k 8y ago
Their dev tools are comprehensive and have a very similar UI to Chrome. Personally, it wasn't hard to pick it up and I haven't (yet) run into any limitations.
st3fan 8y ago
Yes they are first class. Give them a try.
leppr 8y ago
Yes, they're mostly the same. On some points Firefox is better (e.g. DOM Inspector, Network tab, animations, dark theme), on others Chromium is (e.g. Profiler, sources). I use both.
llampx 8y ago
If you are a developer I'd think that you would use both, along with Safari on Mac if that's available to you.

tomphoolery 8y ago

Firefox is a way better experience than Chrome these days. Google, you constantly add new features that nobody wants, and furthermore, make it WAY more difficult for those of us who care about privacy to turn your tracking BS off. Google Chrome can die in a fire as far as I'm concerned.

adontz 8y ago
Firefox added Pocket, and kind of nobody wanted it. So it happens in FF too.
- ghostly_s 8y ago
  Plenty of people don't want it, but Pocket is actually quite popular. It's an essential part of my browsing experience.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- vrazj 8y ago
  And I don't think anybody wants the ads they have added to the home page.
  - sha666sum 8y ago
    Eh, at least it only takes a few clicks to remove them.
    - yarrel 8y ago
      Then it only taking a few clicks to install them would be just as good.
    - sazfedjhrgnukc 8y ago
      Eh, what does that say about Mozilla wanting to be the "good guy"? If they want to be good then they have to constantly be held accountable to the high standard they like people to think that they are at. They don't get their cake and eat it too.

Someone1234 8y ago

The best thing about Firefox is Mozilla's Multi-Account Container tabs[0]. Essentially it allows you to put different tabs into different light-weight profiles, with their own session, cookies, and state. That means if you want to log into Facebook but don't want Facebook following you online, just give Facebook its own container. Mozilla has anti-tracking already baked in, but Multi-Account Containers are a whole other level of isolation, but without sacrificing usability (like traditional multi-profile/multi-user browsing). [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

tptacek 8y ago
This has been a first-class Chrome feature for years, for whatever it's worth.
- wutbrodo 8y ago
  Multiple profiles in Chrome is super useful, but it doesn't work at the tab level, does it? Just at the window level? Not that that's a fundamental change, but it's a nice usability bump
  - tptacek 8y ago
    True, but that for me is a feature (I almost always want new tabs to open in the same container; for instance, when reviewing a Github PR and clicking through to see context). But from a privacy UX perspective, both Chrome and Firefox accommodate this use case gracefully.
    - Nullabillity 8y ago
      It sounds like you already know this, but for anyone else reading, tabs inherit the container of the tab that opened them (aside from special cases like Facebook Container, which trigger based on the domain).
- Someone1234 8y ago

fixermark 8y ago

I keep them both installed, for the rare occasion when some web app or other only works performantly on one of them.

FooHentai 8y ago

I just had to switch back to Chrome because firefox couldn't handle multiple (4+) 1080p x264 streams in the same window. Chrome managed to handle 18 of them, across two windows, without a hitch.

baroffoos 8y ago
How often are you streaming 18 1080p streams at once?
- FooHentai 8y ago
  Fair bit at the moment, am grinding marbles on stream. But it's not the particular use-case that's the problem, it's the drastic difference in performance characteristics which is more of a sliding scale than a one-time issue. Firefox is pound-for-pound slower in general browsing activities for me, and chokes on javascript-heavy pages much quicker than Chrome. It's still an order of magnitude better than IE in that regard, but on a sliding scale, Chrome's out in the lead with FF somewhere in the middle. I'm hanging on to FF for idealogical reasons, but that's it. If the browsing experience was my only measure, it'd be Chrome all the way.

pureliquidhw 8y ago

I moved away due to the battery drain issues on OSX, has that been addressed? Based on this bug and some of the related ones, the answer seems to be no. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042 Until then I'm stuck with Opera/Safari/Chrome, mostly in that order.

wonthegame 8y ago
Try viewing Imgur.com on Safari. Just scroll a bit until you get a couple gifs displayed and check the CPU usage on the imgur.com tab. Just insane that a few gifs destroy an i7. Is it bad video compression? I notice imgur attempts to make gifs from mp4 files and vice versa but damn. A 5 year old iPhone has no problem with this task. It'd be nice if you could throttle processor usage. I'd rather have a choppy experience on the occasionally website than constant fans and having my Mac turn into a heater.
- muxator 8y ago
  I do not know about macos, but in Linux you could achieve this by running your process in a cgroup.
- icebraining 8y ago
  http://www.willnolan.com/cputhrottle/cputhrottle.html http://www.willnolan.com/cputhrottle/cputhrottle.html
  - wonthegame 8y ago
    That’s awesome. Thanks for the link
itchynosedev 8y ago
It was unusable for me too, afaik it had to do with scaling more than anything else, so if you toy around with scaling factors it might help.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

tptacek 8y ago

Does it prioritize privacy? I haven't used Firefox in a long time, so my impressions of it are based on news stories, like them launching a partnership with sketchy VPN services or building in "easter egg" advertisements for television shows.

berbec 8y ago
I'm not a customer so I dont have skin in the game, but is ProtonVPN really considered sketchy? [1] 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18608041 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18608041
- SEJeff 8y ago
  No. There was some FUD which was spread that was eventually outed to be written by PIA, one of their competitors. The entire thing mostly just elicits an eyeroll.
vrazj 8y ago
Don't forget when they sent your data to Cliqz.
- rcw4256 8y ago
  Or when they silently installed an extension in order to send telemetry from Firefox installations that had explicitly opted out of telemetry. https://www.ghacks.net/2018/09/21/mozilla-wants-to-estimate-firefoxs-telemetry-off-population/ https://www.ghacks.net/2018/09/21/mozilla-wants-to-estimate-...
  - taneq 8y ago
    That looks pretty harmless but the way they went around it is concerning.
  - pluma 8y ago
    The reason this is outrageous is because they weren't doing this kind of thing before. The reason this isn't outrageous when Chrome does it is that Chrome always does this. Using this as a reason to distrust Firefox and instead trust Chrome is insane. It's valid criticism but seeing this presented in arguments about why Firefox is bad (and you should be using Chrome instead) is absurd.

natex 8y ago

I've been trying to use Firefox at work for years. It doesn't work well in my company's intranet (lots of Sharepoint). Random pieces of the the company website do not show up and I get way too many certificate warnings. Chrome, Edge, and IE work fine. Firefox hasn't worked through 2 iterations of our intranet over the course of 10+ years.

unsignedint 8y ago
I think the reason is probably network.negotiate-auth.delegation-uris and network.negotiate-auth.trusted-uris in about:config, and your authentication is failing. Since Chrome, Edge, and IE uses Windows certificate infrastructure and Firefox uses its own, it won't understand directive perhaps pushed through your company's group policy. You can specify address of your intranet site, in style of https://.example.com https://.example.com (where subdomain of example.com is covered in this case) and it should work. As for certificate, is it using internal certificate of some sort? If that's the case, you will have to load it to Firefox's NSS.

eightysixfour 8y ago

Except for the battery life on laptops. Edge and Chrime are way ahead here and it is very frustrating.

atombender 8y ago

Adapting a comment I posted in a different Firefox thread: I'd like to use Firefox. I prefer its ideals to everything else. I've tried it out several times the last year. It's okay. Unfortunately, I always end up going back to Safari. Despite the performance improvements, Safari still feels like a faster, sleeker, smoother, and more user-focused browser. Firefox is still pretty ugly. On macOS, it feels chunkier and less natively integrated. It does not feel like a first-class citizen of macOS, but rather like a gtk+ or Qt app ported to the Mac. Safari's "omnibar" is superior to Firefox's. Safari actually suggests web sites (see https://imgur.com/a/dY2SWKB https://imgur.com/a/dY2SWKB), which I use all the time. Wikipedia is a major one. Start typing "Richard Fey", for example, and the first hit will be the Wikipedia page for Richard Feynman, complete with a short summary and photo. Firefox forces me through a Google search. I use DuckDuckGo and its shortcuts, but Safari's suggestions are more helpful. I also tried out Firefox on iOS some time ago, and it wasn't as nice as Safari. For there to be a point to this, I'd need the same browser in both places, with perfect syncing of bookmarks, cookies, tabs, etc., just like Safari. I'm not tied to iCloud for this, though it'd be nice to use iCloud and not yet another cloud syncing mechanism. Lastly, migrating is a pain. There's apparently no way to import my current Safari session (I have probably 60-70 tabs) or history (I keep everything I visit, going back years), which means I'd lose stuff by migrating and would have to migrate tabs over incrementally. Hard to try out a browser in any meaningful way this way. Here's a few things Firefox could do to interest me: - Make super-sleek platform-specific UIs that feel native. Do you really need a platform-agnostic GUI toolkit for the chrome? The renderer is the portable part. I don't care about theming myself, and wouldn't miss it if my browser didn't have it (Safari doesn't). I prefer an opinionated browser that knows what it should look and feel like. - Innovate by addressing actual user pain points. Containers are an innovation, but they target techies and fail the grandmother test. I'd like true containers, where every 2nd-level domain is contained. This means having to be innovative about how to address cross-origin things (Google spreads itself over many domains, and then you have things like OAuth). Another huge innovation you could bring to the table is to fix the user identity and authentication problem. I use a password manager, but why are we still logging in with user names and passwords these days? Why is the password manager using brittle form fills rather than APIs, for God's sake? Here's my solution: When I go to Reddit or whatever, and I'm logged out, what if my browser showed a little bar at the top that said: "This web site would like to use your profile 'Atombender'. [Accept] [Ignore]". On accept, browser and web site would negotiate through some kind of opaque, cryptographically secure token (via some plugin API so that providers like 1Password and Apple can store your state) so that the browser can prove that I am me, and the web site can prove that it is itself. No more phishing, no more remembering passwords. Web sites can only identify users that you've granted access to your identity to, and like ApplePay your true identity should be hidden behind an opaque identifier. Standard protocols could be defined for things such as email addresses and phone numbers, so that I can edit the email for my profile locally, and it would automatically make an API call to the web site to update the email address on that end. Things like deleting an account, setting up 2FA etc. would be part of this API. Of course, to accomplish this you have to design a standard and make web sites use it. Mozilla used to have enough clout to do this, anything is possible. Another area where innovation is needed: Fix the tab problem. Bookmarks, tabs, windows -- we can do better. Why isn't a tab and a bookmark sort of the same thing? Why is bookmark editing so bad? Why do bookmarks get broken when the web site disappears or changes? A bookmark should save a complete copy of that page! And why can't I search my history of visited web pages? I remember reading an article a few weeks ago. It mentioned Charlemagne's reign but the title was about something completely different. I don't remember anything else. How do I find it? Browsers only record the title and URL and visit time. Why can't I search for "Charlemagne" in the browser and get a hit? - Firefox can interest me with great performance, but Quantum has been disappointing on macOS. I remember the standalone WebRender (?) demo app a few years ago, and it was insanely fast. Maybe because it had less legacy baggage. Firefox could charm me by using significantly less RAM and less idle CPU. - Why don't browsers have adblocking built in? I use 1Blocker, and it has a clunky UI where you can point the cursor at a page element to block that specific element. This could be made so smooth. - To catch more developers' mindshare, Firefox could develop a super-modern, low-resource-usage Electron competitor with some kind of easy (gRPC?) glue for interfacing with languages. Join forces with Slack to make it happen. Just some ideas. I don't pretend I know better than the Firefox team, and I'm just one data point, of course. But like many people I see Firefox as being increasingly less relevant. I don't see this as being caused only by the ascendancy of Chrome, either.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

hacknat 8y ago

I’ve been contemplating this for a while, and I just took the jump today. You’re right it’s just as good. Especially since google s-canned inbox, I’m feeling pretty vindictive (switched to paid proton mail as well).

mixedCase 8y ago

> It's good again No it's not. It's frequently hanging certain tabs which I'm forced to close and reopen because I get the grey spinner and my 8 core machine grinds down to a halt. On Android when opening the embedded webview powered by Firefox, whether the page will load without being forced to open it in the full browser is a coin toss. It doesn't help that Mozilla has lost most of my goodwill by being such a mixed bag when it comes to politics and decision making the past few years. I still use it, because I like that a part of the company is trying to move the needle forward in browser tech, I find container tabs better than Chromium profiles and up until recently I could get bypass paywalls without workarounds, but unless things improve by the time Brave moves the Chromium fork out of beta, I'm moving to Brave.

thiagowfx 8y ago

Firefox 3 was much better. No Pocket. No article/news recommendations. Panorama view. Firefox used to be my favorite until it started to get bloated. Prioritizes privacy? Then let me turn recommendations and Pocket permanently off.

kayamon 8y ago
The weird thing about Pocket is it was actually better _before_ they integrated it, when you installed the separate Pocket extension.
c0nducktr 8y ago
Funny using Panorama as an example of when Firefox was better, and then criticizing it for Pocket, in context of bloat. I'd bet Pocket is more useful to more people than Panorama was.

baby 8y ago

This, and get Tree Style Tabs. It's literally the best thing about Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

OhSoHumble 8y ago

Right now I have this bug in Firefox where the results from the drop down menu are incorrect. As in, if I get an autocomplete result that is several lines down - say, foobar.com - and I click on it then I'll be taken to barbar.com. If I click on the result that is several lines above foobar.com then I get foobar.com. I don't know how to explain this correctly.

chadAnon69 8y ago

Brave browser is solid as well, built in ad blocking and Tor support. CEO is brandon eich and it's built on Chromium

bjz_ 8y ago
> and it's built on Chromium That's a negative to me - again, too much browser engine consolidation. :/
- bartread 8y ago
  Inclined to agree. I see the fact that Microsoft is abandoning Edge in favour of a Chromium-based browser as a fundamentally bad thing for the web due to the loss of competition amongst browser engines (me of 10 - 15 years ago would probably be appalled by this sentiment, but times change). Brave, as yet another Chromium based-browser doesn't feel like it's helping. That, and the name "Brave" absolutely grates on me. It's a web browser: what exactly is brave about it? Too pretentious for my taste.
  - BrendanEich 8y ago
    The name is not about the company, rather the user who takes control of their own Web economics. This requires facing down some anti-ad/tracker-blocking, and supporting favorite sites and creators (easily done from grants, no need to pay; but still requires courage compared to false security of taking ads and tracking). I always thought "Opera" was pretentious, personally! But I'm friends with long-time CTO, who does go to Bayreuth every year for Wagner, so I mean this is best possible way ;-).
- BrendanEich 8y ago
  As only big companies can underwrite development and then support ongoing/backlog compatibility quirks-mode work for a new engine, you are effectively saying "no" to other, higher-order values offered by new browsers than the engine. Yes, I include Mozilla in "big companies" (2017 big revenue, which won't recur from what I can tell; big pay to chair too). Nevertheless, Mozilla has mismanaged Servo into an AR/XR only position where it won't go big, and Mozilla (for same reasons as MS) faces pressure to bail on Gecko. Blaming little browsers for using chromium/Blink is blaming them for surviving. Successful genes (e.g. for adaptive auto-immunity) tend to sweep. Think of WebKit and now (on desktop) chromium/Blink as such alleles. We may not like it but it happens whatever we may wish. I've chosen to fight for user rights at a higher domain of discourse: private ads, anonymous donations, ad and tracking protection by default. The time for a more radical new engine will come; it isn't now.

MarcysVonEylau 8y ago

One gripe I have with FF is that their DevTools are crap... Chrome is a really unprecedented WebDev platform for me.

chrischen 8y ago

A good chunk of people who actually care about their computer/work on a computer a lot use a Macbook, and use it while on battery power. So battery efficiency is a major issue for me and because my browser is basically constantly open and full of tabs, I have no choice but to use Safari.

AnaniasAnanas 8y ago

> and prioritizes privacy.[0] It actually prioritizes calling home, stopping ad-blockers from working on Mozilla owned sites, etc. Don't get me wrong, I am a Firefox user myself, and I do think that Firefox is the most privacy oriented browser when compared to the other popular ones, but nowadays it is a pain in the butt to disable all of their spyware on about:config.

Steltek 8y ago
> stopping ad-blockers from working on Mozilla owned sites Err, do you mean preventing extensions from modifying critical sites like addons.mozilla.org? Because that's seems like common sense to me.
- AnaniasAnanas 8y ago
  It does not seem like common sense at all when said sites also load tracking scripts such as google analytics.
- anoncake 8y ago
  A mouse gestures add-on not working on some pages, which are no more critical than my bank's, is just bad UX.

esistgut 8y ago

After quantum I did my best to switch but I had the following problems: no scrollbar search highlights, terrible Linux/gnome dark theme integration, angular source maps not working. After a couple of weeks I got back to Chrome.

mixmastamyk 8y ago
Looks great on my Linux/mate dark theme. Wonder what the difference is?

Draiken 8y ago

I tried and simply couldn't do it. Although I know in my case it's a very specific issue with multiple profiles. I have a work and personal profile for Chrome and even tho I could make that work on Firefox, one very simple thing makes it completely unusable to me: clicking a link always opens on one particular window/profile. On Chrome whatever window you last used will be the one opening the url, which is extremely necessary when using multiple profiles. Perhaps one day that's going to be implemented and I can go back to the good old FF.

dewiz 8y ago
If understand your scenario, you can do that with FF, if you don't force a url to be always opened in one profile. For instance you can have sites hard-linked to specific profiles (e.g. social networks) and others that are not, so they stay in the current session (e.g. paypal, which otherwise is broken by the multi account feature).
- Draiken 8y ago
  Oh I don't force anything. Chrome obeys the "last window" rule while Firefox always opens things on the first profile (or last? can't recall). If you use multiple accounts on the same service (eg. Gmail for work/personal use) you're screwed. The whole point is that it shouldn't need configuration, it should be smart like Chrome is.

wetpaws 8y ago

I'm trying to use Firefox both on my home and work machines, but until Mozilla fix their horrendous developer tools I have to keep both browsers open side by side

barrongineer 8y ago

I tried to switch to firefox a few months ago, but it had no way to view websocket frames in the dev tools. This was kind of a deal breaker for me at the time as I was doing a lot of ws work. Have they remedied this?

microcolonel 8y ago

Firefox has had its fair share of debacles this year too. Chrome works better on Linux for me, and Firefox is full of strange and unusual bugs which Mozilla shows little or no interest in fixing. If Mozilla forked Chromium this year, Firefox would be a better browser (even with the very interesting developments coming from the Servo camp, E10S, etc. etc. etc.). Firefox has accumulated bugs, particularly around their implementation of SVG, since about 4.x, and it doesn't seem to be getting any better on that front.

blitmap 8y ago

I think Servo is going to be a massive Good Thing (tm) for Mozilla, but they have messed up a few times with UI anti-patterns and sneaking extensions into updates that users didn't opt for. They have seriously breached our trust like Google and it will take years to earn back that trust. I switched to Firefox away from Chrome recently. I am happy with this but I wish they had a friendly UI you could bring up to expose cookies to be shared between tabs on an opt-in basis. Cookies should be isolated per-tab by default. Cookies and other persistent data should be forgotten as soon as the tab is closed. I don't like container tabs, I think it gets confusing to manage tab groups by profile. I want to quickly mouse over and say "expose this tab's cookies to this other tab". I'm still sad I can't get perfect "tree tabs" going. I have a plugin I use to show parent and child tabs in a tree arrangement but nothing looks sexy about it: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-tabs/?src=search https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-tabs/?sr... I want an actual tree of lines shown to each row/tab to quickly visualize how the tabs were created from parent-to-child. How it currently looks is too busy with borders everywhere. It's functional but not what I envisioned. I can't hide the tab bar at the top as far as I know. I'm just frustrated that I remember trying to make this work in like 2002 and it's soon to be 2019. I feel like browsers aren't made for workstations, but casual consumption. They should enable so much productivity. I also wish they focused on minimizing and isolating references to various Web APIs, so it would be easier to unreference and orphan them - unreachable from advertisers. (Unrelated rant?)

chmln 8y ago
I'm afraid our hopes of Servo resurrecting Mozilla were short lived. From what I understand, work on Servo for Desktop has been phased out considerably. See https://blog.servo.org/2018/03/09/servo-and-mixed-reality/ https://blog.servo.org/2018/03/09/servo-and-mixed-reality/
- Teknoman117 8y ago
  Ah crap. I totally missed that this happens. It's a damn shame really, what exists of Servo at this point was rather amazing in terms of speed.

kossTKR 8y ago

Too bad it completely kills your CPU on a Mac. I tried switching completely a month ago for the third time. Sadly absolutely nothing has happened in a 5 year time-span. The performance on my high-spec i7 Macbook Pro is abysmal. ( same across several company Macbooks ) The fans speed up constantly like they have done it for years. It's completely unusable for "professional" work or just regular multi tab browsing and drains the battery in no time. Safari, Chrome, Opera, whatever, doesn't have these problems. I actually haven't experienced an application that feels so sluggish and unoptimised in OSX as Firefox. Something is seriously wrong and the dev group must not be prioritising it? I checked their subreddit and loads of people are fleeing the Mac version, even on the newest nightly builds of quantum - seriously what the hell is going on? Why hasn't "the bug" or whatever been found or defined in clear termes in over 5 years? The day the app works without serious CPU issues i will uninstall Chrome and go to Firefox, but the handling of this problem makes me worried about the dev groups competence. When i talked to devs in the subreddit many of them were like "Hey, that sounds weird, should be better in the new nightly, are you sure it's not ..." - an absurd answer in the light of the constant stream of people saying this for years and years - even in this thread i see multiple people saying it's useless on OSX. To the dev group: Get a Macbook (many devs use them), open Firefox, identify the problem - should have happened 5+ years ago.

inferiorhuman 8y ago
I use the nightly builds and I definitely do not have that problem with around 750 tabs open on my non-retina MacBook Pro. It does suck down memory though.
- kossTKR 8y ago
  Which doesn't change anything since the Macbook Pro has been sold with Retina displays for what, the last 6 years? The fact that Firefox works exclusively on ancient laptops or edge cases doesn't make anything better. All Apple devices today are sold with Retina screens and the Pro Lineup, and therefore most devs has had Retina screens for 6+ years.
  - 8y ago

ilrwbwrkhv 8y ago

I would switch in a heartbeat if the audio issue for sped up videos is solved...

sobani 8y ago
Which audio issues do you experience? I regularly watch videos sped up on YouTube and InfoQ and never noticed any problems.
- ilrwbwrkhv 8y ago
  This one: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1383363 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1383363

andai 8y ago

You may have missed a spot: using a privacy conscious browser on an OS designed to spy on you.

sAbakumoff 8y ago

Brave

ospider 8y ago

I have switched to Firefox two month ago. The only feature I missed about "show initiator in devtools network panel"[1] 1. https://github.com/jingjingke/crontab.git https://github.com/jingjingke/crontab.git

Smithalicious 8y ago

Mozilla has a political stance that I do not support, and they openly use Firefox to push it. This doesn't get brought up enough on places that lean liberal such as HN, but it is a reason why I, and several other people I know, cannot use it in good faith. It's also a fair bit slower than Chrome, which doesn't help.

mprev 8y ago
Can you be more specific about what you perceive to be their political stance, how that impacts your browser usage, and how it differs from that of the other browser vendors?
gyaru 8y ago
And this political stance is?
llampx 8y ago
Google also has the same political stance and they push it very hard.

speedplane 8y ago

Sadly, Google Chrome has moved beyond just providing good performance. They now nicely manage all of your google accounts, which is really nice when you have a work account, personal account, etc. These nice small but nice features can really lock you in, especially if you use Chrome on your phone as well as your computer. It's clear that the current round of browser wars isn't just about speed and standards compliance, but also feature lock-in too.

speedplane 8y ago

Also, scrolling on firefox is awkward and imprecise. They seem to prefer bouncy accelerated/decelerated scrolling where Google Chrome is as sharp as a knife. When I take my finger off the scroll wheel, I want scrolling to stop immediately, I don't want it to keep moving for a handful of pixels to artificially slow down.

i_live_there 8y ago
Check your settings. My scroll works equally on both browsers

macspoofing 8y ago

Performance. Firefox still lags in performance. Granted you may only see the difference in edge cases, but I work for a company that creates a performance-sensitive web-app and the difference is big. I do agree however that the entire industry standardizing on Chrome is not great for anyone (including Google). I'm surprised that Microsoft isn't continuing Edge development, even only as a hedge and to have a sensible default for Windows - especially if you're building Windows Apps and you need a browser control. Why give that up to Chrome? And it isn't like Microsoft can't afford it - they are almost a trillion dollar company.

mathiasrw 8y ago

Try Brave from brave.com - so much innovation in one browser.

sneakernets 8y ago

Firefox 57 is why I switched to Chrome in the first place. If I'm going to use a butchered UI, I might as well use the original from whom everyone copied. And on top of that accessibility was a nightmare. My grandmother had glaucoma and could not use Firefox 57 in any capacity because the feature to have large chunky Netscape/Mosaic buttons was removed completely. I had to switch all her stuff over to SeaMonkey, which still had the ability to have large buttons, so she could use a web browser.