36 ms·

Give Firefox a chance

• vehemenz 7y ago
  I've given Firefox multiple chances, but we've had no progress with the MacOS performance issues for years. Also, no pinch-to-zoom? 2007 called, and it wants its browser back.
  • BozeWolf 7y ago
    Energy usage on MacOS is another problem, especially compared to safari. I am using safari for a while now, but every now and then you just have to admit chrome does some things much better, like tab management and the dev tools are more user friendly. Which, i realize, is the case for firefox btw. Ff tab management and dev tools are quite nice.
    • philjohn 7y ago
      Yes - but it's miles ahead of Chrome IMHO. I had to move from Chrome to Safari because it just pegged the fans on constantly once I had a few tabs open. Then I got tired with some sites not working well in Safari and moved back to FF which is much improved.
    • n1000 7y ago
      Yes, all those Macbook Pros that operate at the limits of their thermal system start venting like crazy when using Firefox. I prefer it so much more over all other browsers, but this drove me to using Safari almost all the time.
  • vardump 7y ago
    Lack of pinch-to-zoom has also ended all my attempts to move back to Firefox. Just too used to that. It's equally useful both on Windows and macOS.
  • jfroma 7y ago
    I used it for 6 months and gave up few weeks ago for this reason.
  • xvf22 7y ago
    Firefox will still often call for the dedicated GFX card (boosting battery usage) and then refuse to let it go even if you close the tab. I generally switch to Safari when I'm trying to maximize battery life.
  • bonsai80 7y ago
    If you haven't already, please fill out the feedback form here: https://qsurvey.mozilla.com/s3/FirefoxInput/ https://qsurvey.mozilla.com/s3/FirefoxInput/
    • bgdnyxbjx 7y ago
      Why?
  • criddell 7y ago
    My big Firefox problem is the lack of media key support. I like to hit play or pause on my keyboard and have my streaming music start or top. It's probably the one big thing that makes me run Chrome all the time.
    • Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
      This sounds like a pretty easy feature to implement and send upstream, you should give it a shot. In my everyone has their niche "one big thing", and it's different for every user and impossible for upstream to accommodate for. But scratching your own itches always works!
      • criddell 7y ago
        It's blocked by this issue: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1411795 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1411795 You used to be able to work around the problem with an extension (MediaKeys) but that stopped working with Quantum. That's basically when I went back to Chrome. I keep checking on Firefox to see how they are doing though.
• wtmt 7y ago
  Not a lot of details compared to what many others have said before. The developer tools enhancements in Firefox are interesting. > Safari is on the second place just because of macOS popularity. Shouldn’t this be “iOS” instead of “masOS”?
  • tsjq 7y ago
    yes. macOS, iOS, tabOS (or is it padOS now?) , etc everything.
    • saagarjha 7y ago
      iPadOS.
      • eddieh 7y ago
        Personally I think it is time for Apple to drop the "i". For lots of stuff they already have stopped naming with the "i", Apple TV, Apple Watch, Apple Music. Maybe they should also just start capitalizing properly too. PhoneOS, TVOS, PadOS, WatchOS, MacOS, etc. For some products it just makes no sense anyway iMac Pro?! That basically reads as "consumer model for professionals" given what the original "i" and "Pro" modifiers were used for.
        • saagarjha 7y ago
          I think iMac Pro is pretty aptly named if that’s what it makes you think of.
• stanislavb 7y ago
  If only it was a bit faster.
• needle0 7y ago
  Vertical. Tabs. For my usecase, nuff said. Chrome developers WONTFIXed requests for this a long time ago, so keep using Firefox I will (that and doing my part to preserve web engine diversity). Additionally, I've begun trying out Brave/Vivaldi/Opera to see if I can uninstall Chrome from my system entirely; They all run Blink, so I assume I can open the occasional compatibility-issue pages on those.
  • ramraj07 7y ago
    What plugin allows this feature in Firefox now?
    • amake 7y ago
      Tab Center Redux https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/tab-center-redux/ https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/tab-center-redux/
      • Aelius 7y ago
        This is the most stable option for sure. The more popular Tree Style Tab is still rather buggy, even after its complete rewrite.
    • paulryanrogers 7y ago
      Tree Style Tabs is a popular one. Though none can take away the Tabs in title bar without manually installed CSS hacks.
      • mruts 7y ago
        It’s only a few lines of code, though.
        • darkpuma 7y ago
          Not a big problem for technical users, but it's enough to dissuade many non-technical users. With vertical tabs being such a second class feature in this and other ways, consumers have not been given a fair opportunity to try both schemes and decide for themselves which they prefer. Thus the tyranny of horizontal tabs is perpetuated.
• ctvo 7y ago
  These constant pleas to get me to use Firefox for some other motivation than features and performance won't work. I'll switch back in a day. - Battery life on both iOS and macOS is poor compared to alternative (Safari) - Dev tooling is poor compared to alternative (Chromium)
  • floatboth 7y ago
    > Dev tooling is poor compared to alternative Really? Other than the websocket thing everyone keeps bringing up, I find Firefox devtools ahead of everything else. Especially for CSS layout.
    • deviantfero 7y ago
      I need a websocket inspector, what do you suggest?
• glenrivard 7y ago
  Why? Chrome works great and is the better browser, IMO.
• petepete 7y ago
  I switched back to Firefox from Chrome earlier this year, and the experience has been very positive. It performs well, feels snappy, the dev tools are on par with Chrome's and everything feels right. The only negatives are that container tabs are still taking a bit of getting used to (why can't I have a 'Work' window in which all the new tabs are 'Work' tabs by default?) and the initial migration of passwords was a bit of a pain. However, I'm glad to be back.
  • bad_user 7y ago
    For passwords the browser's built in management is inferior to password managers. I use 1Password (most polished) and there's also Bitwarden (hosted, but open source) and others. And I use my password manager every day, so if there's a cost associated, it's worth it.
    • nkozyra 7y ago
      > For passwords the browser's built in management is inferior to password managers. Can you expound? After years of using various pw managers I found it being embedded in the browser very useful.
      • nashashmi 7y ago
        One type of incident I came across repeatedly was the browser would not recognize new password setup after password reset. Also found that 2fa systems were being confused for new password accounts. I agree password managers like last pass fill this void quite nicely. But are not serviced to run on mobile without payment.
      • Majestic121 7y ago
        Not the parent, but for my own use case, I use password managers for things outside of the browser (office door code, steam, this kind of thing). It might be possible to enter those in the password manager of the browser, I never actually checked, but in any case that's why I use an out of browser password manager
• igetspam 7y ago
  I use FF as my daily driver. I am forcing myself to do it because I value privacy. Unfortunately FF doesn't make it easy. Chrome may be a memory hog but FF gets OOM killed multiple times a day and every night. I'm not a light user but I'm also not a tab junky. The big consumers are the 3-5 gmail tabs and the 3+ slack tabs. Other than that, it's normal browsing. Chrome ate all my memory but FF just dies.
  • fiblye 7y ago
    Oh man, I've having the opposite problem. I recently switched and no crashes yet (Chrome would freeze and die fairly frequently), but good god is FF a memory hog. I've got 5 tabs open, only text (some short programming docs and HN), and it's eating 3.5GB. Chrome would reach about 150 MB a tab, in my experience. I have plenty of memory to spare, but still.
  • syockit 7y ago
    Is the OOM problem still there even after Quantum release? This was the main turn off factor for me with FF long ago, and when the OOM fails to even trigger, the famous swap thrashing occurs. I tried again with Quantum, but then there were still stability problems causing the whole browser to lock up (just like Edge. But same problem existed in FF since long ago too), so I've never tried it anymore since then. Twice bitten, thrice shy.
    • igetspam 7y ago
      Yes. My laptop is a Xeon with 32GB RAM and I can't keep FF alive for more than 4-6 hours. I let upstream (ubuntu) keep packages updated so I'm current.
      • Yetanfou 7y ago
        That is... puzzling. I use Firefox on a 2GB Thinkpad T42p, regularly have 100+ tabs 'open' (as in 'opened in the background' which means it'll start rendering when I actually open the tab) over 2 or 3 active windows and I have never seen it being killed by the OOM killer. It can crawl due to paging but it does not get killed. To me this sounds like you should either add a bit of swap space or tune the OOM killer to be less trigger-happy.
• ElKoji 7y ago
  I left Chrome for personal usage a long time ago, however I am forced to use it at work. I use Safari all around for my personal usage, I find Safari with content blockers and DuckDuckGo as search engine to be a very good alternative.
  • bad_user 7y ago
    Safari is a good browser due to it being the most battery efficient on MacOS. However its content blockers are inferior to what's available on Firefox. It's also not portable, so if you use various devices (Android, iOS, Windows, Linux, MacOS) it's pretty cool having your history synchronized. Firefox is really good for privacy. For example you can sandbox Facebook with Firefox's containers extension such that they can't follow you around the web. Firefox is probably the best for power users. I usually use it with more than 100 tabs opened. Its tree-style tab extension and the Awesome Bar makes it painless. Firefox is also good as a development browser. It lags behind Chrome in some areas but is ahead in others. At work I only use Chrome for testing our web interface, but I use Firefox most of the time, even on my iPhone (nice UI plus the sync).
    • lloeki 7y ago
      Safari has blocked third party cookies, as well as the largely unknown segregated cache and localstorage, and now some form of tracking protection. That should make it equivalent to Firefox containers, although it’s just automatic and kind of invisible to the user. As for blockers, I use 1blocker to great effect. I’d use uBlock Origin but the transition to MAS seemed to be rocky last time I checked. I do give it a spin regularly but the two things that make Firefox a non starter is battery usage and inability to use Keychain (before quantum there was an extension but even then it was hit and miss)
• ggurgone 7y ago
  I switched to Brave, it was a painless migration
• crispinb 7y ago
  I keep giving it a chance, and will continue to do so, for the reasons stated in this article, along with the goodness that is multi-account containers. I wish it wouldn't keep driving me away with its reliability problems.
• lovetocode 7y ago
  I left Firefox because of its memory consumption on MacOS. Have they fixed it?
  • timothevs 7y ago
    Memory, and CPU on a retina MBP in my case. The bug is still open, with no signs of being fixed anytime soon. I really do want to switch back, but this is a deal breaker.
• andai 7y ago
  Is there any way to select multiple tabs and drag them around in FF like you can in Chrome? Edit: Holy smokes, it works now! How long has that been a thing? Shift will select the tabs between current and clicked, while Ctrl will select / deselect clicked tab.
  • kenniskrag 7y ago
    use the shift key while selecting the tabs.
  • lewiscollard 7y ago
    Ctrl + click the tabs you want to move and drag em around to your heart's content :)
• idoubtit 7y ago
  Not much content in this article. A single benchmark which shows nothing of real-life cases. Two minor technical features, one of them already in Chrome beta. Lastly, an appeal to fight Chrome's monopole. Surprisingly, not a word about privacy. I do give Firefox a chance, but it gets tiring. Many years ago, I dropped Firefox's ancestor for Opera 6. The UI and the features were miles ahead (e.g. Mozilla had no tabs). Yet I wanted to support free software so, once in a while, I tried to use Mozilla/Firefox again, but so many features where lacking, and the reactivity was really bad. When Opera dropped their engine and UI to become a new Chromium derivative, I switched to Firefox. I tried to get used to it, but for the past year my main desktop browser has been Vivaldi, a Chromium derivative. I still use Firefox, but I'm getting more and more irritated against it. I had to search the web in order to change the tile of empty tabs (no buttons, no context menu, only drag-n-drop from bookmarks). Who designed such an unguessable interface? I can't stand horizontal tabs in my brower. The Tree Style Tab extension was a strong point of pre-quantum FF, though its CPU usage was noticeable. Unfortunately, it's been a pain since I upgraded to Quantum, with many bugs and slowness. Another example: my last FF ESR upgrade introduced a calamitous rewrite of the download interface. It's inconsistent, error-prone and ridden with several bugs. For weeks, I duplicated many downloads because the notification is absurdly small and quick. Now I've learned to click on the FF icon to check if the download started. A last example: this morning, I selected 5 finished downloads and removed them. No reaction for 2 seconds, so I pressed the key again, just as the suppression begin, in slow motion. It took FF 3 seconds to remove 6 entries from the log. With uBlock against tracking, DDG+Qwant for search, and a custom cookie handler (no third-party, white-list for those that persist after a tab closes), I don't think FF has anything to offer me on privacy. So the only reasons that keep me interested in Firefox are Free Software and Web diversity. I'm afraid these moral incentives don't weight much against many practical reasons.
  • juststeve 7y ago
    try FF nightly. I'm on debian as my daily driver, but nightly works well for me.
    • vinay_ys 7y ago
      I've been trying nightly as well. But it seems to sporadically reset all my settings whenever it upgrades. For example the DoH was turned off again. And there are some weird settings like this: $$$apz.fling_curve_function_x1$$$ and it isn't editable nor deletable.
• synthmeat 7y ago
  From developer point of view, isn't this a bit of a false dilemma? I have open, at the moment: - Safari (general browsing) - Safari Technology Preview (studying, reference) - Chrome Canary (development, debugging) - Chrome (main QA) - Firefox (work account related stuff) - Brave (consuming video content) This is all on MacBook Air from 2013, so performance concern is also a moot point really.
• grecht 7y ago
  I recently tried Firefox on a Windows machine, and noticed that the font rendering was much, much worse than in Chrome or Opera, it looked almost bold and was hard to read. I guess it’s got something to do with subpixel hinting. Has anybody else noticed that?
  • yoasif_ 7y ago
    Firefox uses your Windows font settings (Chrome does not). Have you tried playing with Cleartype tuner?
  • bgdnyxbjx 7y ago
    Yes. Font weights are all messed up, and colors too. I’ve seen fonts that are barely readable on FF because the contrast ratio between the font color and background color is tiny, however it looks correct on all other browsers.
• ZuLuuuuuu 7y ago
  99% of "you should switch to Firefox" articles focus on the speed of the browser. I used Firefox since it was beta till Edge came out when everyone around me was asking "why are you not using Chrome?", and the thing is, I never had much problem with the speed or the crashes, so I never felt the need to switch to Chrome. Until WP died and I bought an Android phone. Then I switched to Chrome so that I get perfect synchronization of my passwords, contacts, locations etc. I think the reason why majority of people are using Chrome and Safari is not because of speed, it is because of synchronization, because of integration of ecosystem. IMO, if Mozilla provided a suit of paid services with built-in privacy like mail, contacts, maps, they might have a better chance that people would also use Firefox as their browser. Nowadays, Microsoft follows that approach; they provide Android launcher, Edge browser, mail, and pretty much every other service you need. I am actually considering to give Microsoft ecosystem on Android a try, at least their main income is not selling your data. But it would be even better if Mozilla launched a similar suite of services.
  • hcal 7y ago
    Firefox Lockwise and firefox sync are really good synchronizing tools. Between the two services, they do a good job of keeping my desktop, laptop, iPad and Android phone in sync. Since lockwise integrates with Android and ios' built in password manager systems it works everywhere including in apps. I don't feel like I am missing anything over the first party options. I've been a Firefox desktop user for years, but I just switched to the Firefox mobile apps. On the iPad it's fine. It's basically safari with Firefox sync. On Android it feels like someone finally made a full powerful browser for mobile. You can run standard browser extensions and that is a big win for me.
  • tstrimple 7y ago
    > and Safari is not because of speed The main reason I stick to Safari on my Macbook is that I still get significantly better battery life from it than either Chrome or Firefox. Chrome has also switched to a UX breaking requirement to hold cmd+q to quit instead of just tapping it. I'm sure I could configure it back to what literally every single other app on my Mac uses, but it's incredibly annoying that they think they are special enough to deviate from the OS design.
• dallen33 7y ago
  If you’re on a Mac, just use Safari. Feels better than any other browser on the Mac.
  • iamdamian 7y ago
    How does Safari's third-party cookie blocking compare with Firefox containers from a privacy standpoint?
  • Scarbutt 7y ago
    No decent adblockers.
    • yinyang_in 7y ago
      It has unblock origin. It works well for me.
      • saagarjha 7y ago
        uBlock Origin will not work in Safari 13, just FYI.
• ancientgallery 7y ago
  The adblock-related thing pushed me to Firefox, and I've been using it for about a month. The only problems I have are regarding PDF files: 1) Dark mode (via dark reader) won't work on PDFs. 2) The Print-to-file (Ctrl + P) save location defaults to "~/mozilla.pdf" and there seems to be no option in preferences to change this default (titles often are multi-word long and copy pasting is a huge pain. Chrome just picks up the title of the webpage and the default downloads directory as the location, which IMO is the sensible thing to do.) In my experience, Chrome is really better at handling PDFs (even better than the native reader, Okular, in terms of fine-grained zooming, dark theming(again via the Dark Reader extension.)) and I'm mulling over switching back, because I use pdfs a lot. (As for other stuff though, like lagginess, I don't find any noticeable difference.)
  • nashashmi 7y ago
    I did the same. Pdfs are probably the easiest thing to switch. If you download a pdf reader, you can switch PDF renderer easily. Firefox supports browser plug in viewers where Chrome does not. And Firefox was the first browser to use js to render PDF. A complete miracle really.
    • tapland 7y ago
      We generated a few PDFs at work last week which break in Firefox default viewwe, but that we can't reproduce anywhere else =/
      • rebelwebmaster 7y ago
        If it's not something sensitive, try filing a bug and attaching the PDF to it? https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Firefox&component=PDF%20Viewer https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Firefox&c...
        • phonon 7y ago
          Better to go upstream https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/issues https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/issues
• mgkimsal 7y ago
  I do give it a chance, regularly, but it's never enough to be 'default'. Pins. Loved the idea. Unfortunately, they often go missing. Loading the browser, about 15% of the time, I get the "oh this is embarrassing" screen, with "restore your session". If I don't restore right then, all pins are gone. For good. Forever. I've lost way too much time recreating those over the last couple of years. Have never had this happen ever in Chrome. I can't say it never happens in Chrome ever - maybe for someone it has - but not for me. However, I don't even know how to report this. "My pins get lost". If they're just special tabs, and tabs are known to get lost, is this even a 'bug'? Or just... "I'm doing it wrong" (as in, expecting pins to be more useful than they are?)
  • TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
    The “restore your session” shouldn't be regularly appearing when you start the browser and indicates it's crashing on shutdown or otherwise failing to save state. That is a bug.
    • mgkimsal 7y ago
      this has happened to me fairly regularly, for years, on multiple different pieces of hardware/cpu/drives, under different user profiles, ISPs, and operating systems. 15% may have been a high estimate - probably under 8-10% of the time starting up. But it's enough to mean I just can't trust it as much as I can trust other platforms.
  • WaltPurvis 7y ago
    In Chrome, a pinned tab will close when you hit Cmd-W, which is never what I want to happen. E.g., I have Gmail pinned, I open several more tabs, then at some point type Cmd-W several times to close those tabs, but if I type one extra Cmd-W my Gmail tab goes away (and the window closes). Again, I never want pinned tabs to be closed that way. The whole idea of pinning something is to make sure it stays in place. That's what pinning means. It's really irritating (as you can probably tell).
    • 7y ago
• ReptileMan 7y ago
  The moment they allow mouse gestures addons to work on ALL pages. New and system included.
• signal11 7y ago
  If anyone from the Firefox team is reading this: containers are a great idea (I love them), it’s just that currently they’re too much work. Even on AMO, there’s now a bunch of site-specific container addons (Facebook container, Twitter container, Google container, etc) which clearly isn’t scalable. A little bit of UX work is clearly needed to make them more mainstream and a first-class feature in Firefox.
  • nextos 7y ago
    I agree they need a bit more polish. But to be fair, they are also more powerful than in Chrome. You can e.g. request that every subdomain opens in a new temporary container. That's really good isolation.
  • edraferi 7y ago
    Have you tried the Temporary Containers[0] add-on? It has an “Automatic Mode” that makes links open into fresh containers by default. Then you can create rules to dial that back as needed for usability. I use this in concert with the Multi-Account Containers[1] Add-on. I create names containers for things where I need persistence (“work” “personal” “LinkedIn”) and then everything else is isolated by default. The main challenges are: 1) I have complex rules defining a whitelist on Temporary Containers. I have to sync this manually with setting import/export because Firefox Sync doesn’t handle this for you 2) Multi-Account Containers doesn’t expose its settings AT ALL, so I’m constantly hitting unnecessary “always open site.com in Personal container?” modals. [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con... [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
    • signal11 7y ago
      I was using "Containers on the Go" until recently, I'll try this out, thank you!
    • darkpuma 7y ago
      Temporary Containers is almost perfect, except when you create a new tab it takes a split second for that tab to be assigned a new temporary container. For that split moment, if you're typing in an address whatever you've typed in so far will be erased when the new tab is switched to the temporary container. On my underpowered machine, this usually means one or two keys are dropped, such that if i was typing in "google" immediately after creating a new tab, the effect is as if I typed "ogle". Perhaps on faster hardware, the switch to the temporary container happens faster than you can begin typing.
• jmull 7y ago
  If you’re on MacOS, also consider Safari.
  • ur--whale 7y ago
    The reason I walked away from Chrome a couple of years ago is because of the amount of information it sends to Google. I'm curious to know where Safari stands in that regard: how much and how often does it "call home"? Oh, and also : how much of it is Open Source? In my experience, Apple is particularly good at OpenSourcing lots of pieces while keeping the juicy bits proprietary. Can Safari be 100% rebuilt from source?
    • latexr 7y ago
      Don’t hold me to this, but I think you may be able to build Webkit from source, giving you a functional browser. I think Chromium is to Chrome as Webkit is to Safari. The latter have proprietary code on top of the open-source former.
      • bbernoulli 7y ago
        Blink is to Chromium/Chrome as Webkit is to Safari Webkit and blink are browser engines and Chromium/Chrome are both browsers, but Chromium doesn't include the closed source pieces that Chrome does.
        • latexr 7y ago
          > Webkit and blink are browser engines Petty sure Webkit is also a browser you can build and run, like Chromium.
          • floatboth 7y ago
            No, WebKit is an engine. It ships with small demo browsers for some platforms (minibrowser for gtk, at least) but that's it. You might be confused by Apple calling its nightly Safari builds "WebKit technical preview" or whatever. It (used to) show up as "WebKit.app", but it's literally Apple Safari.
• CryptoBanker 7y ago
  I switched back to Chrome from Firefox. FF was slow, bloated, used all my RAM,no add on support (even for those add-ons who had an an FF product) Mobile sites, especially HN just don't work properly on HF. The simple act of collapsing posts often seems to overwhelm the browser on my Pixel. Not to mention there's this bug where videos create notifications on FF Android, and these notifications keep your phone alive from the background, burning through an entire battery in 30 minutes. OH, there's also the issue where mobile videos don't play in window, instead opening a new window to play... Highly annoying Oh, and that thing where FF videos often don't show a bar for your time if the video is playing vertically And maybe this is just my brain, but FF doesn't seem to detect the back button too well, necessitating many double clicks Oh and the fact that it can't open Google maps links straight from the browser, yuu have to right click So yeah, I've tried it and it's just not as good, not even close TBH
  • p2detar 7y ago
    I tried using FF for a while on my MBP. I could hear the fans turning on after I open a 4th tab. What's up with that? I don't want to use Chrome, but FF seems so slow.
    • yladiz 7y ago
      How about Safari?
  • have_faith 7y ago
    I use Firefox at home and Chrome at work daily and I barely notice a difference apart from UI. It's rare I have to complain about something with either. I also use Firefox on my phone (iOS) and it works ok but I don't recommend it as quickly. I can't remember the last time any modern browser felt 'slow'. I don't even know what that means any more with regards to browsers, on a fast internet speed they all seem pretty fast.
  • snazz 7y ago
    I can see most of your points as anecdotal (of course someone will come around with a contrasting anecdote, but neither means anything), except for > no add on support (even for those add-ons who had an an FF product) Assuming we’re talking about Android here, what do you mean by this? Mobile Chrome has no extensions, whereas Firefox supports the full suite of desktop addons. I can use uMatrix and even developer extensions on my phone with Firefox. Also, I think the point of the “videos creating notifications” thing is so that you can continue listening to the audio after turning off your phone, like on iOS and iPadOS. Apple got the battery thing better in general. Maybe Firefox should stop playing videos in the background after a certain period without user intervention? Some of the other things can be chalked up to bugs (it would be nice of you to submit something to their Bugzilla!), while some I have never seen myself (especially the videos thing... for me they’ve always played in window, with the bottom UI, correctly; it could be a problem with your favorite video site?)
• Lazare 7y ago
  I switched to Chrome from Firefox years ago because Chrome has a better UX (faster, snappier, cleaner UI). A couple years ago I tried to switch back to Firefox (right after the Quantum project landed, and Firefox was meant to be a lot faster), but found FF to still be bloated, slow, and painful to use. A couple weeks ago I made another try to switch back to FF, and I have found the experience to be very pleasant this time; desktop FF on both Windows and MacOS are, for me, better than Chrome. I recommend others give Firefox a try. (There are a few reasons why you might want to: Privacy, fighting mono-culture, recent decisions by Google to neuter ad blocking addons, a general aversion to the power of the largest tech companies, just chasing the latest and fastest browser, a fondness for novelty or contrarianism. Some of those reasons may resonate; others may not, but if any of them do, give it a shot!)
  • edraferi 7y ago
    I had the same experience. Switched to Chrome from Firefox years ago, tried and was disappointed by the initial Quantum release, tried Firefox again with the “Chrome is killing uBlock Origin” announcement, very pleased this time. My main gripe with Firefox at the moment is Sync. It just doesn’t sync everything you need. My Firefox profile is highly customized, with a lot of extensions that all have their own complex config. Sync will keep the actual extensions synced, but not their settings. You have to rely on manual import/export features provided by the extensions themselves. Some first party extensions (eg Containers) don’t even give you that option. You can get some of that by syncing your profile folder directly, but it’s very fragile. It hasn’t played nice with the generic folder syncing tools I’ve tried. I think this is painful because Firefox really encourages customization, and it’s really useful! I just don’t want to have to keep track of that customization on every device. I trust Firefox Sync’s security model and want to do more with it.
    • auscompgeek 7y ago
      I believe extensions have to explicitly add support for synchronising settings. For example, uBlock Origin supports Firefox Sync: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Cloud-storage https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Cloud-storage
• k__ 7y ago
  They iron out their macOS and Android story.
• nashashmi 7y ago
  I switched to Firefox after the adblock debacle. My biggest problem is with cookie management on desktop. Chrome allows me to block certain cookies or keep them just for sessions. In Firefox cookie management is hard. If I want to list up all the cookies I can't do it.
  • xf86alsa 7y ago
    Perhaps Cookie AutoDelete could help? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autodelete/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autode... I use it to set which site I'd like to keep cookies for multiple sessions for, and which I'd like cookies to be forgotten for as soon as I've left. It doesn't have per-cookie granularity however, if that's what you're looking for.
    • nashashmi 7y ago
      Thank you. That works somewhat.
• dsego 7y ago
  I miss being able to zoom in (coming from Safari). Ctrl + wheel causes a layout reflow and while it makes the text bigger, images often get even smaller. Oh right, it's annoying when it auto updates in the background and shows some generic error message that looks like a network error and it takes me a few minutes to realize I need to restart it.
• allenleein 7y ago
  You need to give Brave a chance. I switched to Brave from Chrome and Firefox months ago. No regret. https://brave.com/ https://brave.com/
  • rb666 7y ago
    Splitting up the market more won't do us any good, better support Firefox (even if you somehow prefer Brave) so there can be true competition, if there's just Chrome and 10 tiny others, there will only be Chrome.
  • CondensedBrain 7y ago
    I'm going to pass on the browser part owned by the chairman and cofounder of Palantir. I don't trust it for that and other reasons. I don't have the skills or interest to audit and compile every release myself. I don't do it with the browser I do use, but the threat model is different for its maintainers.
    • jonathankoren 7y ago
      Brave’s founder is Brenden Eichman, formerly a long time exec at Mozilla, so it’s at least “complicated”
• mrkeen 7y ago
  Every time the Firefox v Chrome debate comes up I feel a little crazy when speed gets discussed. They're the same speed, right? Web pages on the other hand... 2 seconds to bring in the bulk of the content. Another second spent firing ajax requests to all the trackers. 2 seconds for me to click through all the Cookie notifications, GDPR violations, and bald-faced lies that the site values my privacy. What's a ballpark figure for the actual render bit? 10-50 ms? What sites are you guys using which are fast enough to notice slowdown in the browser?
  • weystrom 7y ago
    Just opening a new tab, when you have a lot of tabs open, is slow on Firefox. Chrome is also much better for web video. Sites like Youtube and twitch.tv perform better on Chrome. I don't have any benchmarks on hand, but that's how I feel after switch between two browsers for a while. I think I'm sticking to Chromium.
    • krzyk 7y ago
      Youtube slows down on non-Chromium browsers on purpose (Shadow DOM v0 and see also problems Edge devs had with it). Try non-Google websites to compare speed.
      • floatboth 7y ago
        YouTube feels very fast for me in Firefox. The v0 polyfill is not slow, you shouldn't notice any slowdown from it unless your hardware is really really bad.
• mrtweetyhack 7y ago
  still slow, 2 zero day exploits in a two weeks. no thanks.
• bin0 7y ago
  Proud firefox convert. I used chrome for quite a number of years, but their quantum update convinced me to move (though I've seen other posts mentioning it was seriously buggy at first, I didn't switch right away). As others have mentioned, containers are a bit of a killer app. Plus, firefox is going to keep ad-blocker support. It's not perfect, and chrome is probably more stable. I've gotten memory leaks, crashes (mostly on mobile), and one weird resize issue on i3. However, none of them are critical, and I'm willing to put up with them to avoid google's cancerous garbage. Also, I never thought I'd say this, but good on Apple for maintaining webkit. It's a darn good engine, and I'm happy to have a third player. Plus, it's easier to wrap it with your own custom browser (see surf). There's one piece of feedback; I wish people could do with firefox what they do with chrome. Maybe then the next cool browser could be based on firefox.
  • godelski 7y ago
    I'm in that boat. I use FF but I do face weird bugs. I also realize I'm on Linux. Weird bugs: things that use Google fonts sometimes make the text white on a white search or form box. Anytime I get a Google survey this happens or like when using tends. But not in the Google search bar. Send tabs I love but for some reason I can't send to my Pixel 2. Though I can send from it. Another is that I work in graphics and if I hit my GPU hard then FF will crash. It also won't recovery after the program releases GPU allocation. These are super minor problems though. I don't need to see what I'm typing so I don't need it and it happens only a few times a month. I would like to send stuff to my phone but more often I'm sending the other direction. Battery life? Who isn't almost always plugged into their charger.
• microtheo 7y ago
  In the end, it seems that Microsoft adopting Chromium is pushing more and more tech people toward Firefox, fearing a monopoly of the former. Isn't that ironic?
• weystrom 7y ago
  It doesn't perform well on my Mac. No hw accelerated video (and still kinda slow) when I run Linux. I've tried multiple times, and as much as I like what Mozilla is doing for privacy on the web, I keep coming back to Chromium.
  • floatboth 7y ago
    It's not like upstream Chromium has accelerated video on Linux..
• blunderkid 7y ago
  I am a web dev and react debug console matters a lot to me but on FF it does this weird scroll to the top thing every time I switch file tabs. And it’s in general buggy. Now it may have to do with the plugin dev but if you want to be a viable platform, dudes need to be writing good software on top. I love the promise of FF and would want to make it my dev browser but using Chrome out of sheer necessity.
  • mch82 7y ago
    Could be worth documenting this issue in Bugzilla so the Firefox project team can work in improving react debug support. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/home https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/home
• iamdamian 7y ago
  I want to move on from Chrome, and Firefox's Containers have made Firefox an easy decision for me. But I am a huge fan of Chrome's aesthetic and don't want to give that up for the sake of privacy. I am not one to do extensive tweaking to my machine, but this is important to me, so I spent an hour experimenting. And I have to say, I am pretty satisfied. Even though it isn't straightforward, Firefox actually can look nice and uncluttered. If you're like me and want both privacy and aesthetics, here are some pointers: - Switch to the light theme. - Hide everything you can in the address/nav bar by clicking through the UI. Some settings are obscure, but you can get rid of a lot. - Hide even more using userChrome.css [0], including the outdated blue bar at the top of an active tab. My userChrome.css looks like this and works like a charm: https://gist.github.com/iamdamian/9efc271208bfb5ca52dc51572b57ec4f https://gist.github.com/iamdamian/9efc271208bfb5ca52dc51572b... Now we just need Mozilla to come up with a more modern-looking logo. [0]: https://www.userchrome.org/ https://www.userchrome.org/
  • TheArcane 7y ago
    Your css also hides the container colour bars. I need the container colour bars!
    • iamdamian 7y ago
      I've commented out that part of the CSS for people who want those bars. Thanks for sending this.
      • TheArcane 7y ago
        Thanks, it looks great now. Any more recommendations to make it cleaner?
        • iamdamian 7y ago
          I'm glad to hear it :) A few other things that made the experience better for me: - Disable "one-click search engines" (which is where the cruft in the address bar dropdown comes from) - Move as many extensions as you can into the overflow menu (I don't interact with them much, with the exceptions of Multi-Account Containers and maybe uBlock) - Right click on the Bookmark star in the address bar to remove it
• swixm 7y ago
  I switched to Vivaldi a few months ago. It's not as polished as Chrome or Firefox but it was made by the people who made Opera, and it shows. Just having tabs laid out vertically makes it worth it.
  • onetom 7y ago
    I don't think that's an excuse. As mentioned in other posts, there is an Add-on for vertical tabs: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta... It can't hide the horizontal tabs though because of the strict rules imposed on FF extensions, so you have to hack around it yourself as described here: https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-for-custom-style-rules#for-userchromecss https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-fo...
    • swixm 7y ago
      An excuse? I don't need an excuse to use a browser I like. Also userChrome.css doesn't sync does it?
• UglyToad 7y ago
  I've long regarded the calls to switch to Firefox as tinfoil-hatted crankery but Chrome's behaviour with respect to ad-blocking caused me to finally make the switch. At the time I didn't use ad-blocking at all and didn't have any plans on it but I think this represented unacceptable overreach by Google so I switched to Firefox (and DDG for search). I still miss bits of Chrome, the Chrome UX is still better, especially suggestions for sites you've already visited in the omni-bar and FF's 'Top Sites' logic seems a bit screwy, it includes pages I've visited once and leaves out pages I use every couple of hours but I think it's incumbent upon people to send a message to Google that their behaviour as a virtual monopoly is unacceptable by switching to a non-Chrome browser. (I also started using an ad-blocker once I switched to Firefox, wow the web is a lot better without adverts!)
  • tssva 7y ago
    What Chrome behaviour regarding ad-blocking caused you to make the switch? Installing an ad-blocker with Chrome is just as easy as installing one with FF.
    • UglyToad 7y ago
      I believe they've u-turned on it now but I was thinking of this https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2019/01/22/google_chrome_browser_ad_content_block_change/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2019/... (from Google AMP because I'm on mobile and haven't made the switch on mobile yet) As I say I'm not particularly concerned personally about not being able to use ad-blocking but it points to an abuse of monopoly power.
      • tssva 7y ago
        It points to news sources trying to get clicks using inflammatory headlines. Google has never blocked ad-blockers or announced that they were going to. They announced API changes which will require ad-blockers to change the manner in which they are implemented. What they recently announced is an increase in the number of blocking rules allowed under the new api which some want to call a u-turn by Google. Except Google announced earlier that the preliminary limits were likely to be increased later after performance testing, so what Google has actually recently announced is just in line with their earlier announcement. Of course that take on it doesn't follow the pitchfork mentality on HN regarding Google nor make for clickbait headlines.
• epr 7y ago
  Chromium by itself is really great. I miss nothing. I see lots of browsers mentioned here that are chromium derived, but add extra features. I switched several years ago from chrome to chromium and have never missed any features from chrome ever. If you have concerns about privacy, you can read the source code. https://chromium.woolyss.com https://chromium.woolyss.com I use the builds edited by "Nik", which include video codecs, widevine, and auto-updating. If you are considering switching from chrome but aren't sure you will like the added features of another chromium-derived browser, I would suggest trying this first to see if you would really miss anything.
• AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  You know what? I did, and it sucks. I have a few Lubuntu laptops I use when streaming on twitch to monitor the dashboard and they consistently become unresponsive when performing this task. Sometimes it is "just" the browser and I can still watch the mouse cursor jerk across the screen when I move it, other times everything is frozen doing god-knows-what and I just have to hard boot the thing. For my stream yesterday, I switched to Chromium and everything went fine. If you want me to use your product, make it actually work. Edit: This is an article that literally says I should give FF a chance, and I respond that I did and still don't like it, and you downvote me in your fanboyism. Welcome to /r/svwebdev I guess.
• tellme_throwa 7y ago
  Also on android phone, FF allows addons like uBlock, noscript & greasemonkey. GM scripting is pain w/o external editor, but it's worth it...
• aduitsis 7y ago
  Even as we are headed for a monoculture where the only existing browser will be for all intents and purposes controlled by one or more very big companies, one can read various complaints on HN regarding Firefox battery usage, font rendering, development facilities, etc. That's not necessarily a bad thing, and of course people have the right to complain about whatever they wish. But, can we please all of us stop pretending that we care about freedom, privacy, etc? Because if we did care, we'd put our proverbial money where our mouths are and try to cope with these defects, just to make sure that a higher purpose is served. (Genuinely don't want to offend anyone nor do I dismiss anyone's problems with Firefox, especially on macosx)
  • iamdamian 7y ago
    I wish HN did a better job of celebrating when companies ship something that we've been asking for (e.g., Apple's new privacy features, companies that are embracing more end-to-end encryption) rather than focusing on the negatives (e.g., how they fall short of being a perfect solution).
  • ben509 7y ago
    I think a person pursuing a privacy agenda would still want to raise those other complaints, though. The reason is that while a technically inclined person probably has the means to cope with them, the point of a privacy agenda is broader: it wants to make privacy something everyone does and expects, to hit a critical mass. And technical barriers to adoption of privacy-enhancing technology are the obvious obstacles. > Genuinely don't want to offend anyone I think you worded it just fine. Since there's always room for improvement, the "let's stop pretending we care" might be recast as, "what we're saying doesn't line up with what we're doing," which is a bit more factual and avoids claims on anyone's inner motivations.
    • aduitsis 7y ago
      That's what I mean, thank you. Phrasing it like "what we're saying doesn't line up with what we're doing" is a better way to express it.
• orpheline 7y ago
  I'm apparently one of those rare people who never switched off Firefox - it's been my default browser on Mac and Linux for years. Open source, good plugin ecosystem, and does everything I need (not a web developer, so the dev tools were never a strong selling point for me). I've used Chrome here and there through the years, but the more invasive Google became about data collection, the less inclined I've been to use their tools. The latest moves to block ad blockers, coupled with nearly every other browser using their engine, had only reinforced my decision to stay with Firefox. Diversity makes for a healthier ecosystem.
  • dontbenebby 7y ago
    I'm the same way. I tried Chrome when it was new but at the time it didn't have a NoScript equivalent so I went back to FF.
    • vntok 7y ago
      Chrome has had NoScript equivalents for a while, you should try it again!
      • frenchy 7y ago
        I suspect for most people who hadn't switched already, that ship has already sailed. Chrome had something of an edge over Firefox for a while with a more responsive UI, but since Firefox Quantum it hasn't really had anything besides some creepy Google integrations. Edit: Chromium is also easier to embed, but that doesn't really matter for the purposes of chosing a browser.
        • Qub3d 7y ago
          Its strange, for me. I remember getting super pumped about Chromium when it went live in '09. Then, somewhere along the line, I felt like a boiled frog. Honestly, a big change for me was symbolically realized by The logo change: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome#/media/File:Chrome_Logo.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome#/media/File:Chro... It went from this space-age, nerdy little project to a cleaned up design that signified its shift to a position as a core Google product.
• tclover 7y ago
  I'm using Firefox, it's great.
• JansjoFromIkea 7y ago
  Chrome on iPhone is so restricted by Apple's rules that I found switching from it to be extremely easy. Working on moving to Firefox on desktop, it's my default browser and whathaveyou, but I must admit any time I get confused by something I instinctively flip back to chrome. With that level of a struggle, I can only imagine how hard it'd be to get more casual users to switch over. Anyone able to tell me how much of a difference there is between Chrome and Firefox on Android? Is it a swap I could get friends to do without it being much of an adjustment?
  • Jonnax 7y ago
    Currently there's a rewrite in development for Firefox Android: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix The difference between the nightlies of this and the current Firefox Android is night and day. Perhaps wait until it's out?
• latexr 7y ago
  I’m tired of seeing “change to Firefox” arguments that never address its faults. Particularly on macOS, Firefox is unusable for many users — read this thread and any others on HN where Firefox is the topic, and you’ll find the same complaints: * Lack of AppleScript support (my main complaint, every other was lifted from other comments). * Lack of other basic features such as pinch-to-zoom. * Poor Keychain support. * Slow. * Resource-hungry. And this article comes out just after reports of a 0-day exploit of Firefox on macOS[1]. If you want people to give Firefox a chance, make it good. For many of us it isn’t, and shouting over and over that it’s good doesn’t make it so. Fine if it works for you, but it doesn’t for many. [1]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/06/potent-firefox-0day-used-to-install-undetected-backdoors-on-macs/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/06/poten...
  • hrktb 7y ago
    I think the rethoric is targeting Chrome users. Users fully satisfied with Safari won’t find that much to bite by going to firefox.
    • latexr 7y ago
      I’m also not fully satisfied with Safari (poor control over privacy — content blocking is weaker than uBlock Origin, and you can’t disable cookies and javascript on a per-site basis).
  • gavinpc 7y ago
    > make it good Are you arguing that Firefox is not even "good," or just not perfect? (I use Firefox on a Mac all day and the only kind of "resource hunger" I've observed can be pinned to the web pages that it's running.)
    • latexr 7y ago
      > Are you arguing that Firefox is not even "good," or just not perfect? I’ll extend the quote a bit more: > make it good. For many of us it isn’t I’m saying Firefox isn’t good enough for many of us (mostly various subsets of macOS users). As for resource hunger, in my case I see it in headless mode (it always turns the fans on), but every point in that list apart from (lack of) AppleScript support was lifted from other complaints I’ve seen in similar HN threads, not my experience. Most of those problems I could live with in the name of supporting Firefox, but not the lack of AppleScript support. That seems to be the case for many of the aforementioned macOS users: we want to like Firefox, but theres a detail it screws up so bad for our needs, it becomes unusable as a daily browser.
• m463 7y ago
  I should mention the uMatrix add-on - it will speed up firefox more than anything while blocking third-party nonsense. I change the default rules to allow only first-party by default, then the first time I load a page turn stuff on and save: * * * block * * frame block * 1st-party * allow * 1st-party frame allow
• archey1 7y ago
  Firefox is absolute garbage on any OS that isn't Windows. I think that's probably the biggest thing for the power user crowd...but as a someone that finds dual booting too inconvenient, so I virtualize instead, and will never touch an Apple product..works great for me and most family members and friends I set up with it are pretty satisfied. The new built-in tracking protection is pretty great, and the only extension most people really need is uBlock Origin.
  • JaggedJax 7y ago
    I recently switched to Firefox as my default on both Linux and Android. Things work great and I have not noticed issues. On Linux it's working perfectly. On Android it's also very nice, but I subjectively feel it may be slightly slower than Chrome.
    • archey1 7y ago
      Every time I used FF on Linux, it had serious issues with hardware acceleration.
  • floatboth 7y ago
    Firefox is excellent on FreeBSD :P
    • archey1 7y ago
      I'll take your word for it, I've never used it.
• nottorp 7y ago
  Interesting that the adblock thing is finally nudging people away from Chrome. I've found it disrespectful of its users long ago. The last straw for me was when it started to prevent my computer from sleeping because some unspecified page had active WebRTC connections. There is no option to disable WebRTC in Chrome. I don't understand: why do they dare prevent my system from sleeping just because some page is doing some p2p stuff in the background? Why would a page even be allowed to do p2p stuff in the background? Anyway, these days i use Safari (with its nice battery related optimizations) as my main browser with Firefox as a backup. Not missing Chrome in the least. Edit: I just noticed i had a Chrome instance (with no pages) open and pressed cmd+Q to close it... and it told me "hold cmd q to quit. What the hell Google? Why do you think you're so special?
  • hombre_fatal 7y ago
    Safari is so good performance-wise on OSX that Firefox/Chrome feel like a mess. One way to perceive this is if you use something like iStat Menus to show your CPU usage in the global status bar. Safari barely affects the meter yet Firefox/Chrome put up some impressive numbers just idling.
    • nottorp 7y ago
      Not to mention "This page was unloaded because it was using significant energy". The only sane way to keep an infrequently used google docs tab open all the time ;)
    • tssva 7y ago
      I noticed that my password vault app now has a Safari plugin available, so I conducted my annual attempt to switch from Safari to Chrome. It lasted 3 days. I switched back an hour ago. The major reason was poor performance. Specifically my browsing habits have me moving forward and back between pages often. Whenever I went back to a previous page Safari would pause for a few seconds before allowing me to interact with the page. Don't know if this was caused by Safari itself, the ad blocker plugin I installed or the password vault plugin but it was there and annoying.
  • 7y ago
• darkhorn 7y ago
  In 2005 I have switched from Internet Explorer 6 to Firefox. At that time unlike Firefox IE6 did not have tabs and could not prevent pop up windows. Since then I'm on Firefox, and I have never been disappointed.
• sakopov 7y ago
  I'm on XPS/Windows and switched to Firefox a month ago and so far it's been enjoyable. I think it is noticeably slower than Chrome but no more memory usage issues with just a handful of tabs open and adblock running over a period of several days. XPS also has a weird scrolling bug in Chrome when the trackpad just stops scrolling until the window is resized. That's not an issue anymore. I've not been disappointed in general.
• katsura 7y ago
  When all the adblocking news came out I switched to Firefox. Used it for two weeks exclusively, then I switched back. There are a lot of things that just don't work, or work in a weird way. For example, I use Linux with the Arc Dark theme, and Firefox shows the inputs, textareas and buttons dark background and dark text, which results in an almost unusable experience on a lot of websites. Of course, this can be fixed, if you add an extra config (so not editing an existing one), and you set the "inner" styles to use the light Arc style. Next, my laptop has a touch screen, and I cannot use it to scroll. When I'm listening to music on YouTube, even if it is in the background, it uses so much CPU that my whole laptop becomes extremely hot. Also, I'm developing a website where there is an element that has overflow:auto on it, and has some inner paddings, Firefox doesn't render the bottom one. The buttons are rendered with the text off center on all Bootstrap 3 websites, and for example on Github a bunch of buttons, badges, labels, and pagination elements have their text vertically off center too. I know that all of these could be happenning, because we (developers) optimize things for Chrome now, but when the CSS styling works as expected in Chrome, and not in Firefox, then it certainly feels like Firefox has the bugs, because Chrome does what I expect it to do. Lastly, on my iPhone, the browsing experience was really bad. Frequent freezes, slow page loads, when I closed a tab, the whole tab screen scrolled to unexpected positions. All in all, the small things are the ones that ruin the experience for me, and Firefox has a lot of them (at least for me).
• trpc 7y ago
  The thing is Google is punishing me for using Firefox with recaptchas everywhere. Recaptchas with Firefox needs like 5 or even more attempts (the slow ones) while Chrome is resolved automatically or just one attempt at maximum.
• bradleyjg 7y ago
  I switched several months ago from Chrome to Firefox (don't remember exactly when, think it was when the articles about logging into gmail would turn on sync came out). Unlike many here I'm not a browser power user--few to no plugins, no sync, and no customization. I'm not a web developer, so I rarely use the dev tools. It's fine. The only annoying thing is that there are a few webpages here and there that just don't work. Reminds me of when IE was dominant and sometimes you had to use it to got to a bank's website.
  • derefr 7y ago
    I wonder if Firefox (or a living fork thereof) could be built with a “Chromium compatibility mode” where it boots up a Chromium-based renderer for a known blacklist of pages. Sort of like Edge with its IE compatibility mode. There’s no technical problem with the idea; but I would worry that smoothing over the problems some pages have when rendered with anything other than the Chromium renderer, would just cement Chrome’s hegemony, since nobody would have any incentive to fix Chromium-renderer-only pages any more. Perhaps it would still make sense specifically for enterprise use-cases: if the whitelisting (blacklisting?) of sites to trigger the compatibility mode on was only ever manual, or due to GPOs/MDM profiles, but never by predefined compatibility lists or extensions or auto-detected, then it would only get used in practice by enterprises who needed it for their legacy Intranet sites. Corporate Intranets are certainly where most IE-only websites reside these days—but is the same true of Chromium-renderer-only websites?
    • bradleyjg 7y ago
      At least for me, I'd rather the other way around. When I'm on my work machine and using one of my company's assets I want to know if it breaks on firefox so I can go file a bug report. If my bank's website breaks on firefox I both have less interest in filing a bug report and less confidence it will do any good. I suppose it would be different if my employer officially disavowed compatibility.
• chadlavi 7y ago
  I use FF as my daily driver, and have for years. But at work, I use Chrome. I bet most of you do, too. There's kind of just not another option. For one thing, if you work on a product that has to meet accessibility standards (and if you don't: consider advocating for doing so anyway, it's good for users), FF's accessibility testing tools are frustratingly hard to use. Google's lighthouse is just way way more advanced. And, my company (like most, if not all) _targets Chrome_, so I need to be doing most of my work in the target browser. Personal browser choice is one thing, but products actually being built with non-Chrome browsers in mind is another. If people leave Chrome then discover that websites don't work as well (probably because those sites were built with Chrome in mind, and only ever tested in Chrome), they'll go back to Chrome.
• illumin8 7y ago
  Firefox has way better privacy controls than Chrome, however, their track record on security is abysmal. In fact, a 0-day was just found last week targeting Coinbase employees. I wish I could switch to Firefox for privacy reasons, but good security is table stakes and Firefox just doesn't have nearly the security credentials that Chrome does at the moment. This definitely could change in the future, and I hope it does, but for now, I'm stuck in privacy hell because I can't compromise on security.
  • spappal 7y ago
    > Firefox just doesn't have nearly the security credentials that Chrome does at the moment I think this claim deserves a justification. Not saying you're wrong but I'm interested in how to compare browser security. (Counteranecdote: the HN-popular article [0] which explained the Firefox zero-day, mentioned in it's last paragraph a Chrome zero-day from March 2019.) [0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-patches-firefox-zero-day-abused-in-the-wild/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-patches-firefox-zero-d...
    • mda 7y ago
      Firefox added proper sandboxing and process / site isolation a lot later than Chrome. There are many examples in vulnerability database that is marked as critical for Firefox but similar ones are ended up as only high for Chrome. My take, Chrome security was much better in past, but Firefox is decent nowadays (but not better than Chrome). Check last 6-7 years pwn2own records.
  • K0nserv 7y ago
    > Firefox has way better privacy controls than Chrome, however, their track record on security is abysmal. In fact, a 0-day was just found last week targeting Coinbase employees. All complex codebases, especially web browsers, will suffer from 0-days and other critical bugs. You cannot use the occurrence of 0-days as a measure of security maturity. what matters is how such occurrences are handled, incidentally Mozilla handled the last 0-day well. In between Google crippling Chrome users ability to control the code that runs on their machines and Mozilla’s investment in security innovation at the lowest levels(Rust) I am pretty happy as a Firefox user.
• Vektorweg 7y ago
  Most argue to switch, because of Google's webRequest API changes in Chromium. Would like to remind you, that its not set in stone yet, especially whether Opera, Vivaldi and Microsoft will follow Google's plan.
• Anecdotal 7y ago
  I will switch to Firefox as soon as Workona creates an addon for it, similar to the one that they have for Chrome.For whoever doesn’t know it yet, this is an awesome productivity tool, which changes the way you use the browser.
• cityzen 7y ago
  Pro Tip: You can use most chrome extensions in Firefox. This is what got me to switch. I don't recall if I used this but I am running all of the chrome extensions I had in firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-store-foxified/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-store-... Not to mention, their new side view feature is great to have reference and code on a single window.
• hailhash 7y ago
  I am one of those developers who never switched from Firefox. Early days IE was the market leader and now it’s Chrome. Firefox seems to always the underdog. If you haven’t tried Firefox in the last year, give it a try and see for yourself. To me Chrome is IE+Flash+PC Bloatware+Spyware. Just check your Task Scheduler on windows and see for yourself.
• ilrwbwrkhv 7y ago
  i will switch once firefox can pitch correct sped up html 5 videos properly.. it is a crucial skill for me to learn fast and firefox's pitch correction is garbage.
• bredren 7y ago
  I've tried twice to switch back to Firefox since this chrome add-on code change issue, including setting it my default browser. I had it beach ball on me a few times and crash twice in just 8 days. Chrome almost never beach balls, and very very rarely crashes. I painfully gave up on firefox again for now. Its gotta be stable and fast and it just wasn't for me.
  • mevile 7y ago
    Curious, I haven't had this experience. Firefox has been very stable and fast for me. I'm on an older Macbook Pro (mid 2015).
    • Consultant32452 7y ago
      You probably saw this already, but your MbP might be in a recent recall. https://metro.co.uk/2019/06/21/apple-issues-recall-faulty-macbooks-may-catch-fire-10022965/ https://metro.co.uk/2019/06/21/apple-issues-recall-faulty-ma...
  • lscotte 7y ago
    Beach ball? What does that mean?
    • dave7 7y ago
      It's the Mac equivalent of Windows' old-style "hourglass" or more modern "spinning blue circle". Basically means "become unresponsive, perhaps eventually needs process killed"
    • bosie 7y ago
      On macosx that means your OS or at least the process is unresponsive. The mouse cursor then becomes a 'beach ball': https://cdn.macpaw.com/uploads/images/spinning-wheel.png https://cdn.macpaw.com/uploads/images/spinning-wheel.png
    • teddyh 7y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_pinwheel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_pinwheel
• thrower123 7y ago
  Firefox needs to make the choice compelling. That is why I switched from Firefox to Chrome almost a decade ago; Chrome was so much faster and better. It's still faster and better.
• deviantfero 7y ago
  I did, but I get beach balls of death now and then, I also need a websocket frame inspector
• tssva 7y ago
  I've given FF several chances and each has been awful. Performance on my Macbook Pro is horrible. It will often peg the cpu so badly that the laptop appears to be locked up. This is a known issue which Mozilla has chosen not to address and instead seems to hope the switch to webrender will fix. I say "seems to hope" because the bug for the issue doesn't give confidence that the full cause is truly understood and specify exactly how a switch to webrender will fix it. Maybe Mozilla knows and has done testing but it certainly isn't reflected in the bug report. Firefox on Android is bloated, slow and is a terrible UX experience. Mozilla obviously recognizes this because they have already announced an effort to completely replace it. There are other Mozilla provided browsers for Android which do perform better but they have a limited feature set compared to Firefox and don't meet my needs.
• iamleppert 7y ago
  The firefox devtools are painfully slow and clunky in the latest release. Until those are fixed I won’t be switching.
  • hrktb 7y ago
    I always wondered how many devs don’t use multiple browsers, even just to split work and personal accounts. I guess it’s a pain for people who hate switching context, or don’t have a hard line between the two. Chrome dev tools are definitely great, I keep Chrome basically for that for sites I dev. Everything else is in firefox, and anythting private in Safari for synching. The only issue is battery life, but as long as there’s Chrome there’s no way out anyway.
• blue_devil 7y ago
  It's not about giving a chance - it's about making a considered choice. Give Mozilla feedback about Firefox, if you want to give them anything: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/new/desktop https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/new/desktop
• app4soft 7y ago
  why you need != we need BTW, I will never give a chance for Firefox. I could recommend only links2[0] and Pale Moon[1] [0] http://links.twibright.com http://links.twibright.com [1] https://linux.palemoon.org https://linux.palemoon.org
• coffekaesque 7y ago
  If only they could help us, Firefox supporters, by stopping with the stupid market campaigns that only damages the brand. And the amount of nagging features are becoming too much. Even with my huge user.js it's like every couple of updates I have to disable something. Last week was the extensions recommendations inside about:addons, and I already had disabled "Recommend extensions when I'm browsing". The other was an icon (Firefox Sync?) added to every single browser install I manage and a tab asking me to login. How about a do-not-nag-me flag?
• kbudaj 7y ago
  I want to use Firefox, but the performance on MacBook with retina is terrible. The scrolling is just pure pain in comparison to Chrome/Safari.
• super_mario 7y ago
  When they killed pentadactyl, they killed Firefox for me. I will never look back. I don’t use and never will use Chrome either.
• onetom 7y ago
  I switched about a year ago and I was also pleasantly surprised, UNITL I've realized that it's eating up several GIGABYTES!!! of memory, even when I just have a handful of tabs open. What's worst, it doesn't releases all the memory when I just close the tabs! When I restart FF and cycle thru the tabs to make sure they are loaded, it uses a lot less but still in the GB range. I compared the same set of tabs in Chrome and it consumes about half or 2/3rd of the memory. (Tested under macOS only) While I work on machines with 16GB & 32GB, I find it unreasonable to waste so much memory usage on the browser windows. I'm looking into alternatives. I think most pages would be better viewed by just extracting the text content and the links, like Reader View mode... I've checked out pretty much all active projects on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_lightweight_web_browsers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_lightweight_web_... and https://qutebrowser.org/ https://qutebrowser.org/ seems to be the most usable one which consumes even less memory than Chrome, while still supporting JavaScript and video playback. Or maybe I shall switch back to Opera/Brave/Chromium? I've tried so many... I'm already used to keep closing tabs manually which I don't need, like web.whatsapp or gmail and the like. I even came across the Tab Wrangler extension, which automatically cleans my tabs up. I can highly recommend it to conserve memory! So other than the memory usage issue, I'm satisfied with the current FF. It's web developer console is almost as good as Chrome's. It supports Ctrl-Tab jumping to the MRU (Most Recently Used) tab. Has built-in reader view. The Multi-touch Zoom add-on even brings "zooming by 2 finger pinching" capability to FF, which is almost as good as the auto-zoom by 2 finger tap.
  • phaer 7y ago
    Do you have actual memory usage issues? Is a lack of memory causing problems for other applications? I am asking because RAM is meant to be used, high allocations to Firefox on a (mostly) idle system isn't too interesting as a metric on its own and should automatically decrease if others need it.
    • onetom 7y ago
      I had ~1GB swapped out on 32GB 3.4GHz quad i7 machine. 5GB was taken up by ~8 tabs in FF. I noticed it because IntelliJ and Android Studio started to be suspiciously laggy. I mean laggier than usual :) After stopping FF, the IDEs went back to normal. Processor usage was negligible when I was not touching the system, so it wasn't caused by some runaway js code on some webpage.
• boyadjian 7y ago
  I will never use Chrome, because I don't want to strengthen Google's monopoly, it is as simple as that, even if Chrome is better. It is a matter of common sense.
• Waterluvian 7y ago
  I switched to Firefox a few weeks ago after becoming totally sick of mobile Chrome lagging out and sometimes crashing any time I tried to load a sufficiently complex website. Like if I scroll liquipedia on chrome it just dies. If I try to comment on a hacker news page with a ton of comments it takes 3 seconds for each letter I type to appear. Yet somehow mobile Firefox works just completely fine on these pages and more. I have a Motorola G5 so yes a budget phone. But still. It shouldn't be this terrible on chrome. I don't get what's failing so badly.
• Causality1 7y ago
  >better extensions support Better support for modern crippled extensions you mean. It's still impossible to really theme or customize Firefox Quantum. Most of the good theme developers just gave up and left. If I can't make Firefox work the way I want why should I use it instead of other browsers I also can't customize and who don't make kindergarten-level mistakes like forgetting to renew key security certificates and disabling extensions for everyone on the planet for tens of hours?
• ansgri 7y ago
  Well, since I've had some strange graphics issues with Chromium on my Linux Mint that wouldn't fix with chromium reinstall, I've tried Firefox and it was consistently more reliable, no reason to use anything Chrome. But I'm feeling old and don't like complex things, so on Apple devices Safari it stays.
• AlchemistCamp 7y ago
  I came back to Firefox in 2016 and have been happy with it. I just don't understand why so many devs are happily running spyware and feeding it their most personal information.
• Improvotter 7y ago
  I've switched to Firefox over the last few weeks. It definitely feels faster on my desktop PC which runs Linux, also no problem in Windows when dual-booted. Though there are two big issues imo: - When running Firefox on my late 2013 Macbook Pro, it doesn't feel as fast as Chrome or Safari, it feels very sluggish. I am forced to use h264ify to force YouTube to use h264 instead of VP8/9 as it makes my Macbook Pro turn into a steam engine. Besides the fact that this is Google's fault and its "monopoly?", it all around just feels slower elsewhere as well and it takes more power compared to even Chrome it seems to me. - Lastly it does not sync all of my settings that I want. Why does it not do that? I run Firefox on Linux, MacOS, and Windows and I have to change my settings everywhere every time I make a change and it's a pita. Google Chrome just syncs all of my settings across all of my devices except for extension settings (which is a bummer).
  • stevenjohns 7y ago
    I just moved to a new OS and was somewhat surprised my Firefox configuration didn’t come along with my extensions. Out of all the data they can collect about me, what I’d be least worried about is how wide I’d like the width of the address bar to be.
• techntoke 7y ago
  TLDR: We need to give Firefox 0days more chances to be exploited and let them forget to renew certificates which disables all addons; and help run anti-Chrome campaigns every day on HN.
• eb0la 7y ago
  I can't trust chrome. For me Firefox is not a choice but a necessity. I have to login into too many systems with different credentials and I need NOT to be remembered by the browser even if I happen to forget to put it into private mode. The only time I had to use chrome recently was because I had to login into google cloud and my company just don't support Firefox as a browser option and cannot install firefox.
  • mkl 7y ago
    You can turn off remembering of credentials in Chrome - I always have. It's called "Offer to save passwords" in settings.
• Slashbot 7y ago
  Firefox ... Mozilla turned its back on what even made Firefox not shit in the first place and that were the powerful addons that were able to be made by third party developers..... now its nothing more than crappy chrome clone in all but the backend, the frontend ux etc is just shit.... because the extensibility you could do with that browser is just the same as using the same shitty garbage web extensions that chrome supports. really just pathetic.. especially when you consider Vivaldi have actually bothered to make the effort in replicating a lot of the power functionality found in extensions firefox used to have working great before the quantum garbage releases.. and they've just build that on the chromium engine, it remains today the best browser you can use bar none, I've tried dozens including various chinese ones.. they are all fucking shit. So have mozillidiots done what Vivaldi did and just build in the power extensions, supported enhanced tab functionality they used to get from tabmixplus, mouse gestures etc the list goes I used to have a core of about 20must have addons for firefox, they are all broken and can no longer be made to work on shitting firefox now.. So no those fucking morons at mozzila spend more time ignoring bugzilla reports from the third party developers who made firefox not shit in the first place, they don't even bother implementing the addons they broke...and they think people give a crap about privacy, we all know whatever efforts they say think on that mean shit these days... just fucking pathetic.. firefox just fuck off you conceded the web to shitting google and the assholes that work there.
• stockkid 7y ago
  It is indeed sad to see the market share of Firefox declining. At the same time, I understand why; even though I use Firefox, I constantly notice that there are many useful areas in which Chrome works far better than Firefox. Those areas include profiling, debugging service worker, etc. Although I want to support Firefox by switching to it 100%, it is simply impossible when I want to get jobs done.
  • st3fan 7y ago
    Regular users don’t use any of those features. Chrome is eating everyone’s market share because they are literally spending billions of dollars on it.
• torstenvl 7y ago
  Every once in a while, I decide to give Firefox a try, but I always find it wanting. - UI responsiveness is poor. Scrolling through the about:config window feels like I'm drunk. If they can't get the row highlighting to keep up with the mouse cursor, they should just turn it off. - Setting up keyword search is tedious. Import from Chrome should allow importing all the search engines, either into the Firefox search engine functionality or into a bookmark folder with keywords. - Setting up security is tedious. The previous functionality of importing certificates via "Open with..." leads to this: https://imgur.com/H2V2bUn https://imgur.com/H2V2bUn - The UI is ugly. Look at the drop-shadow in that same screenshot at https://imgur.com/H2V2bUn https://imgur.com/H2V2bUn EDIT: Went through the tedious process of installing DoD certificates into Firefox, and it hangs about half the time on Marine Corps websites... and 100% of the time on OWA. It's completely unusable for me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
• sys_64738 7y ago
  I am using Vivaldi nowadays. Used to use FF and always avoided Chrome as you knew Google was stalking you.
• baggy_trough 7y ago
  Firefox needs native support for Chrome's persona/people menu. A game changer for home/business users. Also, the Firefox UI for the main window / tabs looks terrible on macOS compared to Chrome or Safari. Really non-native and ugly.
  • hiroshi3110 7y ago
    Agreed. Only reason why I’m using Chrome is the People menu.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• y2kenny 7y ago
  Does anyone know of a way to migrate an active chrome session (with all the tabs and windows) to firefox? (so kind of like restoring a session but restoring a session from chrome.)
• ImGunter 7y ago
  I love firefox it's the best open source web browser out there along with brave google just uses chrome for tracking and serving ads.
• aabbcc1241 7y ago
  I remmeber last time I ran a custom javascript benchmark on both desktop, laptop and mobile. Firefox ran much faster than chrome. My custom benchmark: https://speedtest.surge.sh/ https://speedtest.surge.sh/ More benchmarks: https://jsperf.com/ https://jsperf.com/
• funkjunky 7y ago
  It's a nitpick, but also a deal killer for me. The way Firefox behaves when you click the address bar on Android absolutely infuriates me. The way chrome immediately clears the address, and gives you buttons to either copy the current address to clipboard, share, or edit, is brilliant and makes it a joy to use. Therefore I use chrome.
• lenkite 7y ago
  I wish firefox could use the locally installed certificate store of the OS. This doesn't seem to be possible. You have to manually export and import certificates into Firefox's store. And on IT controlled Windows and MacOS desktop's, certificate+priv key export is disabled. So, one needs to stick to Chrome.