14 ms·

I keep encouraging people to use Firefox over the others. My efforts keep failing. Mozilla’s focus on privacy is important and should be to others. People have

by tdhz77 6y ago

I keep encouraging people to use Firefox over the others. My efforts keep failing. Mozilla’s focus on privacy is important and should be to others. People have been burned in the past and are willing to give up privacy for something that just works. The irony.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
mitchdoogle 6y ago
Do people think Firefox doesn't work? I've noticed zero difference between using Firefox and Chrome and I've used both daily for five years or so.
- Widow 6y ago
  Google has an incredible walled garden of apps and things that 'just' work together seamlessly. I remember switching from FF to Chrome years ago as Chrome was measurably faster. The staying power was using Google's entire suite of apps with Chrome. Things like copying and pasting without formatting or searching for strings all contribute to stickiness.
  - infinityplus1 6y ago
    I have to frequently open Google Meet in Chrome because other users can't see my screen while screen sharing using Firefox.
    - kiwijamo 6y ago
      Interestingly, when we had lockdown in my country I tried using Google Meets in Chrome and it just shat itself. Switched to Firefox and Meets worked so much better in Firefox. Very strange...
    - BuckRogers 6y ago
      It works fine in Edge as well if you don't want to support that sort of neglectful behavior by Google.
  - wolco 6y ago
    Chrome opens up files and slows everything down windows 7. Using chrome once it loads with everything else shutdown seems fast. Firefox is overall faster because of those issues. But firefox will use too much memory and kill itself in time. But has gotten better at killing itself without killing everything else.
  - Chirael 6y ago
    I use Google apps in Edge, and nothing else in Edge. I use Firefox for all other web browsing, and avoid doing anything Google related in Firefox. I won't install Chrome on my machine at all and don't need to - Edge is good enough, now that it's Chromium-based.
    - BuckRogers 6y ago
      I use Edge similarly. I'm glad it's here and it's good because Firefox keeps losing share and I'm glad I have a second browser now from a major vendor that I could live with if developers stop testing with FF or if too many sites are broken using it for any reason.
- gen220 6y ago
  For me, there are only subtle differences. I use Chrome for work (golden browser for our web apps) and FF personally. Google maps has never worked well for me on FF. The "old"/basic interface for Gmail works fine, but the new one was noticeably slower. It doesn't seem exclusive to Google, however. Many PWA sites (including bank websites!) have, from time to time, inexplicably failed to load certain elements on FF, while loading them without fail on GC. I don't really fault FF for this, but it is what it is. The good news is it seems to be getting better. Every month or so, I try these trouble sites in FF, and every month I have fewer "trouble sites".
  - jackson1442 6y ago
    I’ve personally found that the new gmail interface is simply awful on every browser, just a little less awful on Chrome.
    - dwighttk 6y ago
      Gmail IMAP interface is fine
- megous 6y ago
  They didn't manage to fix developer tools for like last 5-7 releases (despite multiple reports of it being broken). Network tab still messes up/merges unrelated requests together, and style editor shows completely garbage content every other reload, like this (probably related issue to the request confusion): https://megous.com/dl/tmp/33d9622c7e53e3bc.png https://megous.com/dl/tmp/33d9622c7e53e3bc.png https://megous.com/dl/tmp/8b3e50856a913236.png https://megous.com/dl/tmp/8b3e50856a913236.png I still use it as a primary browser even for development, but with issues like this being unresolved for almost a year, it's really hard. Ever since the rewrite in React, it's really bad. First a massive performance regression (which improved over time, thankfully), but it still has major issues like the above.
  - megous 6y ago
    One wonders if it's just devtools or if the whole browser is leaking random data everywhere. It certainly doesn't inspire confidence.
- seventh-chord 6y ago
  Im unable to book flights with local airlines via firefox because the payment popup gets blocked with no warning. Sure, I can figure out whats going on and use a different browser, but it's terrible UX.
  - indigochill 6y ago
    Not even the tiny little box in the right side of the address bar that says a popup was blocked? I've seen blocked pop-ups there before, but never heard of or seen Firefox block a pop-up with absolutely no feedback.
    - prox 6y ago
      Might be a dhtml (Div) popup, dynamically generated. Those are harder to block.
- cgs 6y ago
  I've had issues with audio on Apple TV glitching out on Firefox. Only thing I use Chrome for
- typon 6y ago
  NetflixParty is the only extension that I actually use that isn't on Firefox. I wish someone made a clone. I wonder if there's something technical preventing that from happening.
  - ffpip 6y ago
    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/netflix-party-for-firefox/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/netflix-party...
    - typon 6y ago
      how the hell didnt i find this before...
  - l3s2d 6y ago
    There is Metastream (https://getmetastream.com/ https://getmetastream.com/), but it doesn't seem as easy to use.
- evolve2k 6y ago
  Chrome offers this quiet magical feature called ‘tab to search’, Firefox allows you to make custom search key shortcuts but you need to make each of them. It’s just not as easy to use and is a killer feature that’s very fast/useful and missed for anyone who uses it and tries to switch away to Firefox. It’s the only thing that keeps pulling me back to Chrome, as well as many others I’ve seen discuss it in forums over the years. There’s no Firefox extension to add it and as Firefox users don’t have it they don’t miss it. Really, sort this, you’ll quietly unlock a bunch more switches. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1177556 https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1177556
  - ric2b 6y ago
    I just have duckduckgo as my default search engine, that way I can use the bangs to search almost any site that's even remotely mainstream by starting my search with !w (wikipedia), !y (youtube) !hn (hacker news), !g (google), etc.
    - WorldMaker 6y ago
      There is related functionality built-in to Firefox (since basically forever) you can assign keywords to any installed search provider and then search that specific search engine by prefixing your search with the keyword you assigned. So you could assign !g directly in Firefox options and Firefox will take you directly to Google for that search (no need for the intermediate duckduckgo). You can add things like YouTube etc as well so long as they have "OpenSearch" metadata. (Presumably what Chrome is using for "tab to search"?) [1] [1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-or-remove-search-engine-firefox https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-or-remove-search-en...
      - heavyset_go 6y ago
        Firefox is getting rid of, or has already got rid off, OpenSearch integrations[1]. What you're describing is a bookmark substitution search feature that's independent of OpenSearch, and Mozilla calls the feature keyword searches[2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSearch#Support https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSearch#Support [2] http://kb.mozillazine.org/Using_keyword_searches http://kb.mozillazine.org/Using_keyword_searches
- ImaCake 6y ago
  I suspect the problem is that firefox sometimes performs poorly. But most power users don't see this problem because they either have firefox when it performs well or because they have a powerful computer. For reasons I cannot understand, firefox on my 8GB RAM windows surface eats up huge amounts of memory. But it uses very little RAM with the same profile on my much more powerful desktop.
  - heavyset_go 6y ago
    Some extensions have memory leaks. There might be a discrepancy between the extensions you have installed or their versions.
- heavyset_go 6y ago
  Last year, I was on a Zoom call where I shared my screen, and several web developers asked if I "seriously still use Firefox" as if I was stuck in 2005.
chrisjc 6y ago
Maybe it's just a coincidence, but since we're doing more and more things over screenshare these days, I've noticed that all my peers are starting to use Firefox. I like to think it's because they've seen me use it when I'm sharing my screen.
bishalb 6y ago
I would use it regularly if it weren't noticably slower than Chrome and in many cases unresponsive (I get the yellow bar at the top that says site isn't responding or something like that, when the same site opens fine on chrome). I have the developer edition installed and am logged in via alternate profiles on some sites there. Often times, it displays a blank for a few seconds on heavy sites(with just 2 tabs open) before loading the content. The developer console is also slower than Chrome's.
- shock 6y ago
  If you are a developer, I encourage you to create a test case that reproduces the issue reliably and then profile Firefox in that test case. If you feel a bit apprehensive about doing so, it is worth mentioning that profiling Firefox is not terribly hard and you can share the profile with Firefox developers.
- kiwijamo 6y ago
  That is really strange. I run Firefox on two different machines (plus my phone). One is my PC which is several years old and the other is my work's Mac which is also showing its age. Yet Firefox runs pretty fast on both (while other apps struggle, especially on my work Mac). I rarely see that yellow bar during typical usage...
m463 6y ago
I use umatrix to block stuff and a side effect is that EVERYTHING is much faster. Some sites routinely load hundreds of items from dozens of third-party servers, so this shouldn't be surprising.
- DavideNL 6y ago
  Agreed, also I was surprised to see how much website still work while blocking all the third party scripts.
- ragnese 6y ago
  Everyone who is quasi-technical should be using uMatrix. I'm a privacy nut, but I don't think you even have to be much of one to appreciate the value that something like uMatrix provides. On the other hand, everyone keeps saying that it speeds up their browsing experience, but anecdotally, I'm not sure I experience the same thing. I do have a couple of other addons that are likely clouding this judgment. Not to mention my specific machine, network connection, sites I typically browse, etc, etc. But is it possible that processing the requests for things to strip, and then updating uMatrix's UI elements is causing more overhead than just letting the assets load (which may even be cached)? Not to mention that if I do encounter a broken site and I decide to try to make it work, I end up refreshing it 5 or so times before getting it minimally functional. The time spent doing that surely outweighs the time of just letting it load. But I'm not saying to abandon uMatrix. Just that I use it for privacy, not performance or convenience.
noahtallen 6y ago
FF’s UX around things not related to browsing is slightly worse on all platforms. It’s most obvious on iOS where some of the styles for your “library” just don’t work correctly on iPhone 10’s. I also think their model for managing non-browsing stuff is too complex comparatively. To access many things like history and bookmarks, you need to use the dropdown menu on the right, which has like 30 different options in it, some of which seem similar but are actually different. Those options are sometimes also available from different locations, so it can be confusing how to access what you’re looking for. Other browsers are a lot more polished in this area, like Brave, Chrome, and even the new MS Edge. None are perfect, but I find their UX and UK slightly easier to use and generally less clunky. If FF fixed that, I’d be completely sold on it. But as is, I keep going back to the drawing board.
- sedatk 6y ago
  Firefox is especially bad in download UX. The “something is downloading” animation isn’t noticeable enough, causing me to click on download links multiple times and wondering why it didn’t work.
  - fireattack 6y ago
    At least they recently added the animation back. It was nearly invisible for quite a long period.
  - prox 6y ago
    Haha, and I find the mega bar on the bottom in Chrome super annoying. Get out of my face! ;)
- atombender 6y ago
  I long assumed the slightly-wonky UX in Firefox was due to a mountain of legacy tech debt around XUL and so on that they were still struggling to remove. Firefox doesn't really feel all that native on macOS, for example, though it's not terrible. Chrome/Brave doesn't always feel native, for that matter, but it's not nearly as clunky. But then I installed the Firefox iOS app, which must surely have an UI written from scratch, and it's just as weird. I'm starting to think that they just don't put enough effort into UX, or perhaps don't hire the right people.
twblalock 6y ago
I have several reasons for not using Firefox: Font rendering looks non-native on most platforms. Scrolling behavior seems non-native on most platforms. The combined location/search bar seems slower, and gives less useful results, than the same feature in other browsers. Inferior developer tools. Mozilla's marketing portraying itself as the white knight of the open web is tiresome and contradicted by past behavior. Pocket is still installed by default, and remember the Mr. Robot scandal? Tracking is easily defeated in other browsers. Besides, if you use Gmail and Google search, and watch videos on Youtube, you've already decided to give your data to Google and you might as well use Chrome too.
- wolco 6y ago
  What platform are you using?
- Semaphor 6y ago
  > Inferior developer tools. Very much an opinion, I prefer the Firefox dev tools, especially with the recent changes. And while I can’t speak for other OS, scrolling and font rendering looks native on Windows and has for years.
  - WorldMaker 6y ago
    I find most people that complain about Firefox dev tools other than just not knowing where the cheese is stored often just need slight tweaks to their sourcemaps. That problem is self-reinforcing because so many developers only test in Chrome that some of the biggest tools in the ecosystem (webpack, for a big for instance) default to sourcemaps that only work in Chrome, when they could just easily produce sourcemaps that work in both.
- kiwijamo 6y ago
  Your font rendering remark stands out as a odd remark. I use Firefox as a daily driver across my own PC (Windows), my work laptop (Mac) and on my phone (Android). Font rendering looks fine across all three platforms. Perhaps it seems better to me because Firefox renders things the same way across all platforms (even if it differs from native)? I think I quite like how Firefox renders things the same way regardless of which device I am using. Makes it easier for me to context switch between my devices.
muststopmyths 6y ago
I recently gave up on firefox after trying for years to use it for my more sensitive browsing (email, bank, investments, etc.) where I could not run javascript blockers. 3 big problems (and many minor little things that i hit every day but haven't bothered to record) - composing email in gmail is horrible. unexplained bursts of lag where it hangs for several seconds and may or may not lose anything I typed in that interval. This one is recent as of the past couple of months. - outlook email just not updating or refreshing until I restart the browser. - lagginess in most if not all input boxes (could be related to the first problem above). - every few updates it will lose all my containers and I have to make them from scratch. It may be something these sites are doing wrong, but I don't have the patience any more. Chrome works, Edgemium works, so I switched. still use firefox for facebook container, but that's about it.
- BadassFractal 6y ago
  Firefox is my daily driver as well, and I experience a bunch of lag with it too. Overall it's stable and reliable, but it feels slow. I usually fail over to Chromium if Firefox is misbehaving.
jm4 6y ago
I've been using Firefox since it was called Phoenix and I used Mozilla before that. I'm pretty annoyed with Firefox lately. There's the pocket junk, the significantly worse battery life, the DOH stuff really pisses me off. How can they pitch themselves as the privacy browser when they siphon off my DNS traffic by default? Why does anyone give them a free pass on that? About the only thing they have going for them is they're not Chrome and that's not saying much. Lately, I find myself spending much more time in other browsers to see if one of them can become my daily driver. I fear that Firefox is becoming irrelevant.

by tdhz77 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

mitchdoogle 6y ago

Do people think Firefox doesn't work? I've noticed zero difference between using Firefox and Chrome and I've used both daily for five years or so.

Widow 6y ago
Google has an incredible walled garden of apps and things that 'just' work together seamlessly. I remember switching from FF to Chrome years ago as Chrome was measurably faster. The staying power was using Google's entire suite of apps with Chrome. Things like copying and pasting without formatting or searching for strings all contribute to stickiness.
- infinityplus1 6y ago
  I have to frequently open Google Meet in Chrome because other users can't see my screen while screen sharing using Firefox.
  - kiwijamo 6y ago
    Interestingly, when we had lockdown in my country I tried using Google Meets in Chrome and it just shat itself. Switched to Firefox and Meets worked so much better in Firefox. Very strange...
  - BuckRogers 6y ago
    It works fine in Edge as well if you don't want to support that sort of neglectful behavior by Google.
- wolco 6y ago
  Chrome opens up files and slows everything down windows 7. Using chrome once it loads with everything else shutdown seems fast. Firefox is overall faster because of those issues. But firefox will use too much memory and kill itself in time. But has gotten better at killing itself without killing everything else.
- Chirael 6y ago
  I use Google apps in Edge, and nothing else in Edge. I use Firefox for all other web browsing, and avoid doing anything Google related in Firefox. I won't install Chrome on my machine at all and don't need to - Edge is good enough, now that it's Chromium-based.
  - BuckRogers 6y ago
    I use Edge similarly. I'm glad it's here and it's good because Firefox keeps losing share and I'm glad I have a second browser now from a major vendor that I could live with if developers stop testing with FF or if too many sites are broken using it for any reason.
gen220 6y ago
For me, there are only subtle differences. I use Chrome for work (golden browser for our web apps) and FF personally. Google maps has never worked well for me on FF. The "old"/basic interface for Gmail works fine, but the new one was noticeably slower. It doesn't seem exclusive to Google, however. Many PWA sites (including bank websites!) have, from time to time, inexplicably failed to load certain elements on FF, while loading them without fail on GC. I don't really fault FF for this, but it is what it is. The good news is it seems to be getting better. Every month or so, I try these trouble sites in FF, and every month I have fewer "trouble sites".
- jackson1442 6y ago
  I’ve personally found that the new gmail interface is simply awful on every browser, just a little less awful on Chrome.
  - dwighttk 6y ago
    Gmail IMAP interface is fine
megous 6y ago
They didn't manage to fix developer tools for like last 5-7 releases (despite multiple reports of it being broken). Network tab still messes up/merges unrelated requests together, and style editor shows completely garbage content every other reload, like this (probably related issue to the request confusion): https://megous.com/dl/tmp/33d9622c7e53e3bc.png https://megous.com/dl/tmp/33d9622c7e53e3bc.png https://megous.com/dl/tmp/8b3e50856a913236.png https://megous.com/dl/tmp/8b3e50856a913236.png I still use it as a primary browser even for development, but with issues like this being unresolved for almost a year, it's really hard. Ever since the rewrite in React, it's really bad. First a massive performance regression (which improved over time, thankfully), but it still has major issues like the above.
- megous 6y ago
  One wonders if it's just devtools or if the whole browser is leaking random data everywhere. It certainly doesn't inspire confidence.
seventh-chord 6y ago
Im unable to book flights with local airlines via firefox because the payment popup gets blocked with no warning. Sure, I can figure out whats going on and use a different browser, but it's terrible UX.
- indigochill 6y ago
  Not even the tiny little box in the right side of the address bar that says a popup was blocked? I've seen blocked pop-ups there before, but never heard of or seen Firefox block a pop-up with absolutely no feedback.
  - prox 6y ago
    Might be a dhtml (Div) popup, dynamically generated. Those are harder to block.
cgs 6y ago
I've had issues with audio on Apple TV glitching out on Firefox. Only thing I use Chrome for
typon 6y ago
NetflixParty is the only extension that I actually use that isn't on Firefox. I wish someone made a clone. I wonder if there's something technical preventing that from happening.
- ffpip 6y ago
  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/netflix-party-for-firefox/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/netflix-party...
  - typon 6y ago
    how the hell didnt i find this before...
- l3s2d 6y ago
  There is Metastream (https://getmetastream.com/ https://getmetastream.com/), but it doesn't seem as easy to use.
evolve2k 6y ago
Chrome offers this quiet magical feature called ‘tab to search’, Firefox allows you to make custom search key shortcuts but you need to make each of them. It’s just not as easy to use and is a killer feature that’s very fast/useful and missed for anyone who uses it and tries to switch away to Firefox. It’s the only thing that keeps pulling me back to Chrome, as well as many others I’ve seen discuss it in forums over the years. There’s no Firefox extension to add it and as Firefox users don’t have it they don’t miss it. Really, sort this, you’ll quietly unlock a bunch more switches. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1177556 https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1177556
- ric2b 6y ago
  I just have duckduckgo as my default search engine, that way I can use the bangs to search almost any site that's even remotely mainstream by starting my search with !w (wikipedia), !y (youtube) !hn (hacker news), !g (google), etc.
  - WorldMaker 6y ago
    There is related functionality built-in to Firefox (since basically forever) you can assign keywords to any installed search provider and then search that specific search engine by prefixing your search with the keyword you assigned. So you could assign !g directly in Firefox options and Firefox will take you directly to Google for that search (no need for the intermediate duckduckgo). You can add things like YouTube etc as well so long as they have "OpenSearch" metadata. (Presumably what Chrome is using for "tab to search"?) [1] [1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-or-remove-search-engine-firefox https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-or-remove-search-en...
    - heavyset_go 6y ago
      Firefox is getting rid of, or has already got rid off, OpenSearch integrations[1]. What you're describing is a bookmark substitution search feature that's independent of OpenSearch, and Mozilla calls the feature keyword searches[2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSearch#Support https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSearch#Support [2] http://kb.mozillazine.org/Using_keyword_searches http://kb.mozillazine.org/Using_keyword_searches
ImaCake 6y ago
I suspect the problem is that firefox sometimes performs poorly. But most power users don't see this problem because they either have firefox when it performs well or because they have a powerful computer. For reasons I cannot understand, firefox on my 8GB RAM windows surface eats up huge amounts of memory. But it uses very little RAM with the same profile on my much more powerful desktop.
- heavyset_go 6y ago
  Some extensions have memory leaks. There might be a discrepancy between the extensions you have installed or their versions.
heavyset_go 6y ago
Last year, I was on a Zoom call where I shared my screen, and several web developers asked if I "seriously still use Firefox" as if I was stuck in 2005.

chrisjc 6y ago

Maybe it's just a coincidence, but since we're doing more and more things over screenshare these days, I've noticed that all my peers are starting to use Firefox. I like to think it's because they've seen me use it when I'm sharing my screen.

bishalb 6y ago

I would use it regularly if it weren't noticably slower than Chrome and in many cases unresponsive (I get the yellow bar at the top that says site isn't responding or something like that, when the same site opens fine on chrome). I have the developer edition installed and am logged in via alternate profiles on some sites there. Often times, it displays a blank for a few seconds on heavy sites(with just 2 tabs open) before loading the content. The developer console is also slower than Chrome's.

shock 6y ago
If you are a developer, I encourage you to create a test case that reproduces the issue reliably and then profile Firefox in that test case. If you feel a bit apprehensive about doing so, it is worth mentioning that profiling Firefox is not terribly hard and you can share the profile with Firefox developers.
kiwijamo 6y ago
That is really strange. I run Firefox on two different machines (plus my phone). One is my PC which is several years old and the other is my work's Mac which is also showing its age. Yet Firefox runs pretty fast on both (while other apps struggle, especially on my work Mac). I rarely see that yellow bar during typical usage...

m463 6y ago

I use umatrix to block stuff and a side effect is that EVERYTHING is much faster. Some sites routinely load hundreds of items from dozens of third-party servers, so this shouldn't be surprising.

DavideNL 6y ago
Agreed, also I was surprised to see how much website still work while blocking all the third party scripts.
ragnese 6y ago
Everyone who is quasi-technical should be using uMatrix. I'm a privacy nut, but I don't think you even have to be much of one to appreciate the value that something like uMatrix provides. On the other hand, everyone keeps saying that it speeds up their browsing experience, but anecdotally, I'm not sure I experience the same thing. I do have a couple of other addons that are likely clouding this judgment. Not to mention my specific machine, network connection, sites I typically browse, etc, etc. But is it possible that processing the requests for things to strip, and then updating uMatrix's UI elements is causing more overhead than just letting the assets load (which may even be cached)? Not to mention that if I do encounter a broken site and I decide to try to make it work, I end up refreshing it 5 or so times before getting it minimally functional. The time spent doing that surely outweighs the time of just letting it load. But I'm not saying to abandon uMatrix. Just that I use it for privacy, not performance or convenience.

noahtallen 6y ago

FF’s UX around things not related to browsing is slightly worse on all platforms. It’s most obvious on iOS where some of the styles for your “library” just don’t work correctly on iPhone 10’s. I also think their model for managing non-browsing stuff is too complex comparatively. To access many things like history and bookmarks, you need to use the dropdown menu on the right, which has like 30 different options in it, some of which seem similar but are actually different. Those options are sometimes also available from different locations, so it can be confusing how to access what you’re looking for. Other browsers are a lot more polished in this area, like Brave, Chrome, and even the new MS Edge. None are perfect, but I find their UX and UK slightly easier to use and generally less clunky. If FF fixed that, I’d be completely sold on it. But as is, I keep going back to the drawing board.

sedatk 6y ago
Firefox is especially bad in download UX. The “something is downloading” animation isn’t noticeable enough, causing me to click on download links multiple times and wondering why it didn’t work.
- fireattack 6y ago
  At least they recently added the animation back. It was nearly invisible for quite a long period.
- prox 6y ago
  Haha, and I find the mega bar on the bottom in Chrome super annoying. Get out of my face! ;)
atombender 6y ago
I long assumed the slightly-wonky UX in Firefox was due to a mountain of legacy tech debt around XUL and so on that they were still struggling to remove. Firefox doesn't really feel all that native on macOS, for example, though it's not terrible. Chrome/Brave doesn't always feel native, for that matter, but it's not nearly as clunky. But then I installed the Firefox iOS app, which must surely have an UI written from scratch, and it's just as weird. I'm starting to think that they just don't put enough effort into UX, or perhaps don't hire the right people.

twblalock 6y ago

I have several reasons for not using Firefox: Font rendering looks non-native on most platforms. Scrolling behavior seems non-native on most platforms. The combined location/search bar seems slower, and gives less useful results, than the same feature in other browsers. Inferior developer tools. Mozilla's marketing portraying itself as the white knight of the open web is tiresome and contradicted by past behavior. Pocket is still installed by default, and remember the Mr. Robot scandal? Tracking is easily defeated in other browsers. Besides, if you use Gmail and Google search, and watch videos on Youtube, you've already decided to give your data to Google and you might as well use Chrome too.

wolco 6y ago
What platform are you using?
Semaphor 6y ago
> Inferior developer tools. Very much an opinion, I prefer the Firefox dev tools, especially with the recent changes. And while I can’t speak for other OS, scrolling and font rendering looks native on Windows and has for years.
- WorldMaker 6y ago
  I find most people that complain about Firefox dev tools other than just not knowing where the cheese is stored often just need slight tweaks to their sourcemaps. That problem is self-reinforcing because so many developers only test in Chrome that some of the biggest tools in the ecosystem (webpack, for a big for instance) default to sourcemaps that only work in Chrome, when they could just easily produce sourcemaps that work in both.
kiwijamo 6y ago
Your font rendering remark stands out as a odd remark. I use Firefox as a daily driver across my own PC (Windows), my work laptop (Mac) and on my phone (Android). Font rendering looks fine across all three platforms. Perhaps it seems better to me because Firefox renders things the same way across all platforms (even if it differs from native)? I think I quite like how Firefox renders things the same way regardless of which device I am using. Makes it easier for me to context switch between my devices.

muststopmyths 6y ago

I recently gave up on firefox after trying for years to use it for my more sensitive browsing (email, bank, investments, etc.) where I could not run javascript blockers. 3 big problems (and many minor little things that i hit every day but haven't bothered to record) - composing email in gmail is horrible. unexplained bursts of lag where it hangs for several seconds and may or may not lose anything I typed in that interval. This one is recent as of the past couple of months. - outlook email just not updating or refreshing until I restart the browser. - lagginess in most if not all input boxes (could be related to the first problem above). - every few updates it will lose all my containers and I have to make them from scratch. It may be something these sites are doing wrong, but I don't have the patience any more. Chrome works, Edgemium works, so I switched. still use firefox for facebook container, but that's about it.

BadassFractal 6y ago
Firefox is my daily driver as well, and I experience a bunch of lag with it too. Overall it's stable and reliable, but it feels slow. I usually fail over to Chromium if Firefox is misbehaving.

jm4 6y ago

I've been using Firefox since it was called Phoenix and I used Mozilla before that. I'm pretty annoyed with Firefox lately. There's the pocket junk, the significantly worse battery life, the DOH stuff really pisses me off. How can they pitch themselves as the privacy browser when they siphon off my DNS traffic by default? Why does anyone give them a free pass on that? About the only thing they have going for them is they're not Chrome and that's not saying much. Lately, I find myself spending much more time in other browsers to see if one of them can become my daily driver. I fear that Firefox is becoming irrelevant.