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Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

• yonrg 4y ago
  Firefox plugin ftw: tridactyl I love this so much. Perfect vim key binds. I also removed menu, address and tab bars, which subjectively occupy 25% of vertical space. And the infamous ublock, but that's also available on Chrome(ium).
  • gurjeet 4y ago
    I'm a fan of Vimium [1]. Do you know of any advantages Tridactyl may have over Vimium? [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimium-ff/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimium-ff/
• ncann 4y ago
  A very nice feature that is only available in FF and not Chrome is the ability to display subtitles/closed captions in Picture-in-picture (PIP) mode. It's a game changer for me, who uses PIP heavily on my ultrawide monitor to watch Youtube videos.
• blackhaz 4y ago
  Here's one more: It's not Google.
  • mrweasel 4y ago
    It was my primary reason to drop Chrome twelve years ago. Every so often I try Chrome again, but other than a minor speed boost, I see no reason to switch back. The UI isn’t great, nor is resource usage. These days I don’t bother installing an alternative browser and just use Safari.
  • timerol 4y ago
    > Ask current Firefox users why they switched, and you’ll often hear “It’s not Chrome.” Pretty sure they covered that in the last reason of TFA
  • stackbutterflow 4y ago
    Same reason for me. Firefox would have to be utterly broken for me to switch to chrome.
  • account42 4y ago
    > It's not Google. It's still almost exclusively funded by Google though.
    • ajyotirmay 4y ago
      However Google does it to avoid anticompetitive lawsuit,and not for helping snoop on users for Google
      • account42 4y ago
        We can only speculate about Google's true motivations and there is no reason to believe that it is only that. You can't deny that a privacy focused browser having their funding depend on one of the primary privacy violators on the web is a conflict of interest. Even if Google is not directly pressuring Mozilla to implement/not implement things, Mozilla is still going to be hesitant to piss off Google too much.
• vi2837 4y ago
  Firefox is the best
• ur-whale 4y ago
  One more reason: firefox will work on older Macs. Case in point: Chrome started to misbehave on my fathers rather old Macbook (missing root certs, refuses to render google drive, etc...) When I open Google drive, after being a completely cryptic (to a non-tech person) set of error messages, I realized I needed to upgrade Chrome. I tried to upgrade Chrome and was told I'm on an unsupported version of OSX. I tried to upgrade OSX and was told, no such thing exists on this older hardware. Lo and behold, firefox has none of these issues. Ditch Google as soon as you can, and Apple as well.
  • wlindley 4y ago
    Ditch 'em all — Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Amazon (the "evil MAGA"). It's like when folks complain about CNN or Fox News but keep feeding the beast by paying for subscription television: Stop hurting yourself, folks!
    • mark_l_watson 4y ago
      I totally agree, but I wish you had included MSNBC news with CNN and Fox. They all push a pro-war and corporate agenda, just in different flavors.
  • windowsrookie 4y ago
    That's strange. Chrome says it requires MacOS 10.11, Firefox says it requires MacOS 10.12. Based on that it would appear that Chrome is supporting older versions of MacOS than Firefox. MacOS 10.11 supports every 2008 and newer Apple computer. There are also patches to get newer versions of MacOS on old hardware. I'm using one patch to get 10.13 running on a 2008 MacBook Pro and it runs great. http://dosdude1.com/software.html http://dosdude1.com/software.html
• baisq 4y ago
  Mozilla? Thanks but no thanks.
  • happymellon 4y ago
    You sound like someone who would then suggest Brave.
    • skinnymuch 4y ago
      Haha usually this sort of comment is silly and random, but in this case this does seem most likely
  • andyjohnson0 4y ago
    Care to expand on your aversion to Mozilla?
    • mrweasel 4y ago
      While I don’t share the aversion toward Mozilla, I do think it a strange company. For some reason their focus seems directed towards everything that’s specifically not Firefox or browser related. Sort of if Microsoft forgot that they own Windows.
      • MacsHeadroom 4y ago
        Mozilla is a non-profit with a mission focused on encouraging open source and open web technology. FireFox is a relatively small part of that mission.
• below43 4y ago
  I find Edge is a nice alternative
  • b112 4y ago
    I tried Edge on mobile. Before, I had thought chrome, and to a lesser extend firefox, phoned home a lot. But oh boy, does edge on android phone home. You'd think a phone home party was going on, as the tcpdump flies off your screen... No thanks.
  • SaulJLH 4y ago
    Edge is better than Chrome, & better than FF in many respects, too. Don't let the "M$ teh hacking my dataz!" tin-foilers dissuade... Performant, good mix of features, stable, solid compatibility, & flexible.
    • formerly_proven 4y ago
      Something Edge has going for it is that it's the only browser on Windows where hardware acceleration seems to consistently work.
      • juki 4y ago
        I haven't really tried using Edge for general use, but I do use it whenever I want text-to-speech. That's a lot better in Edge than other options I've tried.
      • croes 4y ago
        The browser of the OS producer works best with the OS, honi soit qui mal y pense
    • boudin 4y ago
      I wouldn't touch Edge because I still remember the days when IE was dominating the market. As much as I despise Google being the one now, I do not miss those days and do not trust Microsoft to do anything good if they were in this position again. So you can make fun of people concerned about privacy, but history proved there's a lot more concerns to have regarding Microsoft
• sieabahlpark 4y ago
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• amanzi 4y ago
  I'm still using Firefox as my primary browser on desktop and mobile. I have minor complaints, but nothing to make me consider switching to something else.
  • Synaesthesia 4y ago
    It's really nice on Android to have extensions like YouTube background player and uBlock origin.
    • abyssin 4y ago
      That’s the only thing I really miss from Android (F-Droid was precious to me but I don’t miss it as much).
    • andrepd 4y ago
      Any YouTube I watch on android I watch on NewPipe. It's amazing.
      • HKH2 4y ago
        Yes, it's amazing, until the API changes and you have to wait for an update for it to work. Also, you only get to see top level comments. (Maybe that's a feature for some people.)
        • lolinder 4y ago
          I disable comments altogether in Newpipe, which for me is a great feature.
      • was_a_dev 4y ago
        I've always stuggled with NewPipe, not because of NewPipe itself, but because YouTube and it's algorthim. People act as if the algorthim is some sort of evil entity, but my viewing habbits follow recommended videos and content aware search. I find sticking to subscriptions and trending videos to be very trapping.
• Heckopi 4y ago
  Where's opera at
  • b112 4y ago
    In China?
    • Heckopi 4y ago
      I thought most use opera leo since Mozilla is heavy and buggy as frak
  • BlueTemplar 4y ago
    Basically called Vivaldi now. (But not really, since both are Chromium based now ..)
  • ksrm 4y ago
    Right here: https://imgur.com/a/COXJUwb https://imgur.com/a/COXJUwb
• aspaviento 4y ago
  I wonder why there are sites in which the reader mode is not even available. I can't think of any right now but it happens with relative frequency to be annoying.
  • d3nj4l 4y ago
    Because Reader Mode is using heuristics to fetch the content of the article, and that can fail if the article is weirdly formatted in HTML. You can read more about this on the repo for Mozilla's Readability, which is what Firefox uses under the hood: https://github.com/mozilla/readability https://github.com/mozilla/readability
• pelagicAustral 4y ago
  Been using FF for about a year now. Absolutely no complains. Before that I used Chrome for many years and really there is nothing I used to do con Chrome that I cannot do on FF. I did not change because of privacy concerns or whatever, I just wanted to try something else, and FF has been quite alright.
• haunter 4y ago
  >Automatic blocking of autoplay videos And then this very site has an automatic playing video in the article lmao Also a lot of these claims are so-so imo. "Lighter on system resources" "Speedier website browsing" I usually have 60-70 tabs open across 5-6 windows. Firefox absolutely shits itself all the time but Chromium doesn't. Anyways I use ungoogled-chromium https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
  • formerly_proven 4y ago
    > I usually have 60-70 tabs open across 5-6 windows. Firefox absolutely shits itself all the time but Chromium doesn't. Last time I checked I had a few thousand tabs open with Firefox and it doesn't do anything except use memory.
    • barbs 4y ago
      A few thousand tabs?!?! Come on mate!
      • zelphirkalt 4y ago
        And why not? Since it works so well on Firefox, it seems like a valid thing to do. You can quickly jump to any opened tab using the % thing in the URL or, if you have tagged bookmarks open, you can search by tag. Basically opened tabs are like a huge brain cache layer of things you want to look at.
    • 8organicbits 4y ago
      I'm always curious about the use case of having so many open tabs. Is there some context you work in where so many tabs are needed? Are you able to find already open tabs, or do you just end up with 50 hacker news tabs because you just open new ones? Do you actually look at each tab, or do you open in the background and never load them? Are you using extensions to make tabs management easier, like tree style tabs? Once I get past 40 or so I purge old tabs because it makes it hard to find others I'm actively using. Besides, opening a tab again isn't a huge burden.
• anotherhue 4y ago
  Firefox: Yes. Mozilla: No
• impetus1 4y ago
  I have this nice toolbar I made which customizes firefox. I would also suggest reviewing security on firefox. https://gitlab.com/coolcoder/fractal-toolbar/-/tree/fractal https://gitlab.com/coolcoder/fractal-toolbar/-/tree/fractal
• frankzander 4y ago
  Using Firefox all the time ... Brave seems also to be a reasonable alternative. But I just don't like the Dev tools in Chrome ... The FF ones are way better (IMHO). At the end it seems so that FF isn't blocking a lot of tracking by default while Brave do so. But FF with uBlockOrigin is a good match for privacy.
  • toastal 4y ago
    uBlock Origin can do a lot more than people think too... easy opt-in to JavaScript, cleaning tracking tokens from the URL, and allowing me to block features from websites trying to be a bit too 'social' or 'recommendy'. Fx will be skipping the part of the latest WebManifest that cripples uBlock's ability to block as well.
• sph 4y ago
  I honestly want to ditch Firefox and try a Chromium browser for a minute [1], but I'm stuck on Firefox because it's the only one with a killer feature: send a tab to/from iOS and my Linux desktop. I skip Chrome and Edge for privacy reasons, Brave have a crappy and buggy sync feature that I don't know what OSes it supports, but not my combination. Can't send tabs with them. Vivaldi doesn't have an iOS port. Impossible to do with Chromium. Firefox can send tabs to all my machines, and I use that feature multiple times daily, such as finding a cool article while I'm sitting on the couch and sending it to my desktop so I can read it later. Mr. Eich, if you're around here, please please fix syncing tabs in your browser, it's the only thing stopping me from switching honestly. -- 1: I quite like Firefox, but it's in a dying spiral, and I'm starting to see broken sites. The Web is such a complicated nightmare "protesting" won't change anything, and forking neither, because it's too bloody complex. Chromium has won. Our only hope is Mozilla takes their head out of their arse and start working on their browser instead of faffing about and making small, meaningless changes every release, but I don't see that happening any time soon.
  • rusk 4y ago
    > send a tab to/from iOS and my Linux desktop This was actually the killer feature for me on chrome about 5 years ago and then Google did what Google did, and killed it.
  • stragies 4y ago
    The super-annoying thing about that, is that you need a Sync-Server, and an "Identity" server to run this all without having sign in to "Firefox Sync". The sync-server is trivial to run via docker, but (last time i checked) running the other essential part yourself is (intentionally?) not easy at all.
    • andrepd 4y ago
      Is this serious? Your criciticism is that... they offer their service and the possibility to self-host?
      • 4y ago
• lordnacho 4y ago
  Tree style tabs is what brought me over. I have dozens of tabs I want to keep an eye on, without necessarily having them actually open and loaded. Kinda like bookmarks but quickly available. There's no way to arrange that many tabs across the top, so a bit of CSS magic removes the top tabs. With modern screens being so wide it makes sense to just have them vertically, in a tree.
• andyjohnson0 4y ago
  Firefox user for about five years and very satisfied with it. Firefox's multi account containers are very useful - when I started using them a few years ago I very quickly noticed that my Web searches stopped showing up in Amazon or as FB ads, and vice versa. And just generally not using a browser that is aligned with the interests of a global advertising company seems like a good thing.
• hn_user145 4y ago
  The only thing missing on Firefox for me is the ability to translate websites inline. Otherwise Firefox+ multi-account containers + proxy per container is a really nice feature
  • lionkor 4y ago
    there is an addon which integrates very cleanly, they should just merge that into the browser
    • kevincox 4y ago
      For me it is rare enough that I just paste the URL into Google translate manually.
  • kwanbix 4y ago
    That is exactly why I no longer use Firefox. I moved to germany and I don't speak german, so you can imagine browsing without this functionality is impossible.
• hosteur 4y ago
  I would really love to use Firefox Sync. But I don't want all my browsing history at Mozilla. Is it possible to run self-hosted Sync?
  • robin_reala 4y ago
    Sync is E2E encrypted, so while Mozilla host an encrypted file they don’t have access to your data. (yes, it’s also possible to run your own sync service.)
    • hosteur 4y ago
      Is it though? I have not been able to find any official up-to-date docs on it. The Github README says that it is no longer maintained: https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncserver https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncserver
      • hosteur 4y ago
        It seems that self-hosted Firefox Sync is NOT currently supported: https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncstorage-rs/issues/550 https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncstorage-rs/issues/55... https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncstorage-rs/issues/681 https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncstorage-rs/issues/68... It seems they are migrating the solution without having any instructions on how to self host it.
• blahbon 4y ago
  Firefox is lacking many major enterprise controls making it unsuitable for many large companies. An example of this is the lack of ability for administrators to apply additional restrictions on the domains specific extensions can access. Other basic enterprise features that are missing are the inability to force restarts when updates are available.
• lawgimenez 4y ago
  Funny, I've done the opposite. Firefox has always been my default as far as I can remember but for the past several releases it has been heavy in terms of macOS memory. The author is obviously using Windows, but on macOS it is the opposite. Every startup, Firefox seems to throttle my MBP fans and will get sluggish as I keep on using it.
  • cyber_kinetist 4y ago
    Same for me too (I'm using Windows), I've moved on to Chrome because of annoying performance issues with Firefox. Much better in that area after switching , although I still miss Tree Style Tabs sometimes... (you can't find a replacement for that in Chrome)
    • rg111 4y ago
      I have done some benchmarking, and Edge seems to be the most battery-efficient and the most RAM friendly laptop. When I am away from a power outlet, Edge is what I use to work in GCP, AWS and Jupyter Notebook (via SSH or local). I don't use Edge otherwise.
• hnlmorg 4y ago
  FireFox Containers are a killer feature for me. It allows you to run sandboxed sessions. So you can ostensibly make every site a private tab by default but have a small few sites persistent. Eg I’ll have a work group with GitHub, Okta, etc in it so I only need to log in once a day. But random websites cannot track me between sites. Couple that with DNS blocking of trackers and ads, and the web is actually a lot more pleasant to use. Unfortunately you cannot fix everything locally though.
  • dools 4y ago
    The ability to have separate sessions was actually the reason I switched to chrome many years ago, looks like it’s time to give Firefox another look
    • zelphirkalt 4y ago
      Although Firefox had profiles for ages and you could start Firefox with the profile manager and "new instance allowed" to choose a profile at the start of each new instance. More hidden then in Chromium, but definitely possible. EDIT: Just for completeness sake, here is the command to open Firefox with profile manager and new instances: firefox --new-instance --ProfileManager %u
      • kevincox 4y ago
        Yes, but with this UX it may as well not exist for 99% of users. Container tabs while still a little power-user is something that can be explained to the average user.
        • anonymousab 4y ago
          One of the major problems with container tabs is that they share a lot of persistent state between them, such as browsing history. Profiles are mostly isolated by comparison.
      • commoner 4y ago
        The Firefox Profile Switcher add-on provides an easy-to-use interface that looks just like Chrome's: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profile-switcher/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profile-switc... You'll need to install a connector for it to work. (The add-on gives instructions during the onboarding process.) Both the add-on and the connector are free and open source (GPLv3). I use profiles and containers together on Firefox. Each profile has its own set of add-ons, browser settings, and containers. Containers in the same profile share the same add-ons and browser settings. For example, you could have separate personal and work profiles, with containers for different online accounts in each profile. On Firefox, you have the option of using only profiles, only containers, both profiles and containers, or none of the above.
• zahma 4y ago
  Among all the other extensions that help guard my privacy and improve QoL, Containers is another great feature that integrates well with FF. I like maintaining profiles for privacy and security, and it helps me navigate certain sites where I have different accounts. I honestly don’t get the lean toward Chrome — or Safari for that matter. I don’t detect such a big jump in performance that I’d ever consider sacrificing privacy to Google’s or Apple’s end. Brave is a nice browser but in the end I don’t see how I’m better off with it. Maybe I’m too much of a layman and don’t understand benchmarks or just don’t pay attention to latency, but purely from a daily driver perspective, I’ve never been happier with Firefox.
  • TingPing 4y ago
    Safari is fairly pro privacy and blocks or deletes data more aggressively than others sometimes.
    • MBCook 4y ago
      It also integrates extremely tightly into the Apple ecosystem and has always had fantastic performance with very little resource usage. Unlike chrome (although that’s gotten much better).
• Existenceblinks 4y ago
  For many years, Firefox is my development browsers because I thought I would run into perf issue, problematic/weird behaviour more often. But recently I develop on app on Firefox for many months, then test it on Chrome, dang! It's almost 3x slower (rendering lots of dom nodes). So now I've switched to Chrome for development because if it's fast on Chrome it's going to be very fast on Firefox.
• IMSAI8080 4y ago
  Long time Firefox user. Using it now. Used it in the early days for features liked tabbed browsing, good performance and Linux support. These days I really mainly use it to be contrarian to avoid using Google for everything. I just want to support a competitor.
• Comevius 4y ago
  I have been using Firefox since 1.5 or so, and will keep using it because I value customizability. I keep Chromium around for web development, but it has a lot of issues with Wayland (not to be confused with XWayland) currently.
  • kevincox 4y ago
    Although with the removal of old extensions Firefox has lost most of its customizability. I really wish they kept those around. Even if they came with scary warnings and would break frequently because only a few APIs were kept stable.
    • Comevius 4y ago
      Those old XUL/XPCOM extensions weren't really safe, and the only big loss was UI manipulation, which was kind of stupid anyway, and not at all portable. When I say customizability I mean user.js.
      • kevincox 4y ago
        Hence the "scary warnings". I don't think UI manipulation is stupid, I don't believe that Mozilla makes the best UI and extensions can definitely improve on it for many more specific use cases. Portability is also nice but not everything needs to be widely portable, I would rather have a nice feature in Firefox than not having it because it wasn't portable across browsers. To be clear I am hugely in favour of WebExtensions. I am glad that they were implemented and I think that they should be the recommended API. But I would love to still have the full-power backdoor for the extensions that are no loner possible. For example I maintained VimFx for about a year after they stopped officially supporting these extensions and it was fine. The biggest pain wasn't actually keeping up with the internal API changes, it was the fact that it wasn't allowed in addons.mozilla.org anymore and there is no good way to distribute self-signed or third-part signed extensions.
      • iggldiggl 4y ago
        > the only big loss was UI manipulation Well, for a start e.g. mass downloaders have become relatively useless because they can't download to outside of the OS downloads directory without resorting to weird hacks, can no longer intelligently handle already existing files, etc. Then user scripts no longer being able to live normally on the file system (and therefore being editable outside of whatever limited UI the extension can provide, being easily searchable) are another victim of webextensions.
• bananamerica 4y ago
  You know, I did that. Firefox is great, but it's using 600mb of RAM on my meager 2012 MacBook Air. I'm regretably looking for alternatives. Probably Safari if I manage to get adblock. I think it's better on Linux.
• swfsql 4y ago
  I use Libre Wolf, which is a pre-configured Firefox with enhanced privacy. They still support the FF Sync stuff. Similarly for vscode, there is vscodium.
  • toastal 4y ago
    I recently switched to LibreWolf too where the privacy setting involve opting in to keeping instead of destroying cookies, WebGL support, etc. I know that when upstream Fx pushes a new feature, the LibreWolf team will choose the strict privacy option as the default.
  • nyanpasu64 4y ago
    I wish LibreWolf supported Firefox Sync. I appreciate how they removed Firefox's sell-out advertising, promotions for Mozilla Corporation products, and telemetry by default. But I couldn't get sync to work; it's my main blocker from using it as my daily driver. (Some smaller annoyances as a developer are not having about:crashes to examine, debug, and upload coredumps on an opt-in basis, and Firefox Profiler not having LibreWolf's C++ symbols.)
    • swfsql 4y ago
      My sync worked normally, except for the password autofill (but the passwords are still saved on the Settings)
      • nyanpasu64 4y ago
        Running LibreWolf on Windows 7 on an older machine, with ublock0 set to default-deny JS for performance reasons. I tried enabling Firefox Sync in about:preferences#librewolf, visiting the settings, and logging in again. This time I got further, when I logged in I got asked for 2FA, but it logged into accounts.firefox.com but not the browser. When I restarted LibreWolf, a Tools -> Sign In option appeared, but https://accounts.firefox.com/signin?action=email&service=sync https://accounts.firefox.com/signin?action=email&service=syn... asked for the password of a now-removed email (which is now neither a primary nor secondary email, why is it still in Firefox's servers?!) under the same account. Entering my password said that I should use my primary email again, and selecting "Use a different account", entering my email and password, and another 2FA did not sign into sync (Tools still says "Sign in", as did about:preferences#sync). Logging in a third time emailed me instead of asking for a 2FA code, but yet again did not sign into my browser. This accounts.firefox.com bug scares me; it reminds me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30169435 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30169435. At this point, I think I'm going to delete and recreate my Firefox account to remove all traces of my old email. EDIT: I tried deleting my Firefox account, but realized it would remove my Fenix addon collections too. I tried signing into addons.mozilla.org... and again saw my removed email on the login screen.
• kriro 4y ago
  I need exactly one reason. Mozilla Foundation > Google for my browsing needs.
• d_sc 4y ago
  I really like Firefox but have recently started using Edge a lot more because Firefox is unable to do virtual backgrounds in Google Meet. At first I tried to run 2 browsers, Edge for meetings and Firefox for everything else but that got cumbersome and frustrating. Clicking into a meeting invite would open in the wrong browser (if FF was the default browser) or constantly copying & pasting links to open them in FF. I was hoping Camo would eventually add in virtual backgrounds to their app but it hasn’t happened yet. Would love to ditch Edge/Chromium.
  • mark_l_watson 4y ago
    Question: how good is Edge privacy wise? Microsoft doesn’t make their big money selling advertising targeting services, right? I noticed that Edge is even available on iOS.
    • MacsHeadroom 4y ago
      Edge is worse for privacy than Chrome. Even edge "private" browsing mode is significantly less private than Chrome's private browsing. It's one of the worst browsers for privacy. Edge makes lots of calls to Bing for advertising purposes.
      • mark_l_watson 4y ago
        Thanks.
    • dopa42365 4y ago
      Assuming you use ublock origin, does it really matter? For all intents and purposes, whatever data is collected is absolutely worthless.
• trinovantes 4y ago
  Why I originally switched to Firefox: I can use dividers in my bookmarks
  • pvinis 4y ago
    Haha very similarly, at some point I tried switching to chrome, and went back to ff because I could remove the x button on tabs. for ff there was tabmixplus back then.
• slurpmaker 4y ago
  Anything has more privacy than a google product. Firefox/mozilla at least have products adjacent to their browser so its believable they aren't only sustaining by selling peoples personal information to the nearest data broker.
• k__ 4y ago
  I used Firefox for some years after being a Chrome user since it was released. Firefox had some kind of glow up years ago, with Quantum, but that didn't hold for long. A few years ago I switched to Brave and am pretty happy with it. It has a Chromium base, but without Google's shenanigans. The integrated adblocker even makes it feel a bit more responsive. Also, it comes with IPFS, Onion, and crypto wallet out of the box. Which isn't for everyone, but in my case it was a pretty nice cherry on top.
• zelphirkalt 4y ago
  I always use Firefox, but there is one annoying thing they do not seem able to fix: The debugger. It often happens to me, that I can step through code, but I simply cannot see the value of variables at all, not by hovering, not by adding them to watched variables. This often happens when working on JupyterLab. And some days it works suddenly. Maybe JupyterLab has become so overheady, that the debugger gives up or something. No idea. When it does not work, I just use GNU Guix as follows: guix shell ungoogled-chromium -- chromium (a double minus there) That runs an instance of ungoogled Chromium without me having to install it in the system packages or so. After the first time the build should be cached until you update your Guix packages and start up quite quickly.
  • MaurizioPz 4y ago
    Something similar happens to me working in angular. I can see the value referencing it as _this.variableName instead of this.variableName
• tjpnz 4y ago
  Firefox on Android with uBlock Origin was a game changer for me. It makes the mobile web usable again.
  • rg111 4y ago
    You already get ad blocking with DDG, Bromite, and Brave.
• 01acheru 4y ago
  I don't know how long I'm using FF, a couple years of Opera ages ago, some time with the early Chrome when FF was a hog but now I'm on FF only on Mac, iOS and Linux. It is perfect for every use case of mine, also it is fantastic on iOS. There is only one reason why I'm using Chrome: at work we use Google Workshit for Business or whatever it is called now and every Google service has issues anywhere besides Chrome and it is getting worse as the time goes by. Meet is terribly unreliable and since some months simply won't open the calls because of some unknown error, Docs and Sheets cannot be edited, Drive is slow as fuck and sometimes doesn't finish loading the page, Gmail has low res icons and is significantly slower, etc... Don't be evil... go fuck yourself!
• Eriks 4y ago
  I have only one issue with Firefox - Google Streetview is sluggish for GeoGuessr use. Otherwise it is my default browser on my Linux box. On Macbook Safari is still the best.
• kkfx 4y ago
  I mainly use Firefox, because of vertical tabs (Tab Center Reborn), Reader, TPRB/NoScript etc BUT sometimes I fall back on Chromium simply because I want to access a webcrapplication that does not work and I do not want to dig how many js and co I have to allow to make it works... Yes, I can use still FF with different profiles, but I'm simply a bit too lazy for that...
  • wintermutestwin 4y ago
    I recently switched to vertical tabs in FF (Sidebery) and it is an incredibly better approach. Why the hell is this not built in to the browser??? It is lame that Mozilla isn't baking this kind of core functionality in. On top of that, they make it a PITA to kill the stupid horizontal tabs. Supposedly Edge has a vertical tabs option. Chrome doesn't seem to even have a plug in for it.
    • kkfx 4y ago
      Perhaps because they are still on very small monitor where horizontal space is precious, Mozilla is FLOSS but definitively not a free project, they act as a corporate one so maybe they have some guidelines written in the era of 1024x760 CRT monitor, I can't tell... However I'm glad I can have them (hiding the tab-bar also to avoid clutter) since with them I can have many tabs open, seeing a sufficient amount of text to identify any and sparing precious vertical space on my modern normal 19:9 monitor... I do not use Windows, thankfully, so I do not know Edge, I've looked for something similar for Chromium but finding nothing like you... Honestly I see modern WebVM improperly named browsers for legacy reasons as a necessary evil since unfortunately the modern world is web2.0-centric and I have not much choice for that, but I have not much expectations from both nor not much interests beside the minimum protection and ergonomic of my daily digital life...
• irajdeep 4y ago
  The only chrome feature that is preventing me from moving to firefox is the "tab grouping" feature in chrome.
• XorNot 4y ago
  I've been using Firefox on all my devices for years now, and I am never stopping. Google sells you ads: Chrome is how Google shows you ads and gets your data. If you believe in a privacy respecting, open web where users own their own devices then you have choices other then Firefox - but nobody should be using Chrome.
• bachmeier 4y ago
  I've used Firefox as my main browser since it was called Phoenix. Never had a reason to change. When I have to use Chrome (as right now on this Chromebook) I'm not a fan because of the lack of a built-in reader view button. That's a critical part of my web usage due to the small fonts used on many sites. The extensions providing this functionality for Chrome just aren't as good IMO. There is a recent development that might get me to switch to Chrome after this long. Chrome-based browsers will give apps access to the local filesystem. The Firefox team has said you can't do that safely because users don't understand the concept of a file. Using Chrome, I can for instance go to the Logseq website, click the button to give access to that directory, and start writing. No signing in, no need to store my data in the cloud. It's so nice to be able to avoid the cloud - but only using Chrome.
• BlueTemplar 4y ago
  I'm using Mozilla Firefox, but it annoys me how it has no support for what is probably the least bad digital document format : MHTML = EML... even though Mozilla Thunderbird does support it !
• butz 4y ago
  Ability to customize browser UI should not be overlooked either, especially in the day when application rarely allow user to rearrange controls in toolbar. And if you want to go deeper there still is "userChrome.css" file, where you can change how Firefox UI looks by editing simple CSS file.
• bambax 4y ago
  I switched to Firefox a little over two years ago because of the whole Manifest V3 snafu (and wild and unfounded invocations of "security" to justify it), and never looked back. It works perfectly well for everything -- and I couldn't live without reader mode. (TBH, I still use Chrome for developing, as I find the dev tools on Chrome easier to use than on FF, and much better looking. But I could also let go of that if needed be.)
• chiefalchemist 4y ago
  One of the reasons I've been reluctant to go back to FF is the lack of support for users (that Chrome). I like to set up a Chrome user (effectively a new instance of the browser) for each project / client. Each gets ends up with its own password manager, history, bookmarks, etc. Having users helps me silo things abd stay organized. I can also have multiple users' browsers open at the same time. How can I replicate this with FF?
  • timbit42 4y ago
    Does Firefox's Profiles do what you are describing?
• gandalfff 4y ago
  I fired up Firefox and Chrome on Kubuntu on a 2008 iMac and was surprised to find that Firefox could play 1080p video on YouTube but Chrome kept dropping frames at 480p. It's definitely worth trying both to see which is faster.
  • coayer 4y ago
    Sounds like HW acceleration wasn't working on Chrome, no?
• pebble 4y ago
  I keep trying to switch to Firefox but I use canvas a lot in my work and canvas is so much slower compared to Chrome it keeps being a dealbreaker.
• elcapitan 4y ago
  I've been using FF as my main browser again since (I think) Quantum, and kept it at version 91 to avoid the constant breaking UI changes. Performance since Quantum is generally good, but for more intense things like video or apps I am going back to Chrome now. FF keeps my CPU 20C higher than Chrome for some simple Youtube videos, which is just ridiculous (Macbook 12, 2017). For daily non-performance relevant use, I still like the Container feature a lot though, doesn't look like Chrome will get it anytime soon.
  • computerfriend 4y ago
    Every version bump includes patches for serious security vulnerabilities. You should reconsider your decision to pin to version 91.
• dbg31415 4y ago
  Firefox is my default browser. That said... I now use Chrome for all video calls. Firefox just isn't battery efficient for those. Blame Google, blame Zoom, blame whoever. On EVERY service I've tested (check my post history, complained about this to nauseam)... I can call one browser from the other, and no matter what Firefox on Mac uses at minimum 50% more power according to Apple's power use tool. Also, any time I take or receive a streaming call on Firefox, my MBP gets very hot. Much hotter than Chrome. Wish someone at Mozilla would take battery usage / CPU usage on Mac more seriously. It's been a problem for years.
• sidjor 4y ago
  My reasons for switching to Firefox were IT related. IT security divisions in some orgs are so paranoid that they won’t allow saving form data or passwords. Or even let sessions persist and will make work hell. They do this for corp standard browser - Google Chrome it is. Firefox saves the day.
• brokenkebab2 4y ago
  "Lighter on system resources" contradicts to my experience: at least on js-heavy websites FF made my laptop notably hotter than Chrome, so on CPU side it didn't feel light at all
• SMAAART 4y ago
  Google Workspace user here, and Firefox and Google Docs/Sheets don't play well together, I've tried. Of course I'd like to find a Google Workspace replacement but I can't seem to find any so, I am married to Google.
  • mark_l_watson 4y ago
    Well, Google Workspace is the best for work environments. Every company I have worked for in the last decade uses GSuite, then Workspace. I am happy running Google’s stuff on my corporate/job laptops, and more privacy preserving options on my own systems.
  • computerfriend 4y ago
    Also a Google Workspace user, using Firefox for everything with no issues.
• debacle 4y ago
  The timing on this article is interesting. My Firefox just "refreshed" itself, turned Pocket back on, turned DNS over HTTPS back on, removed all of my plugins, and then somehow leaked itself up to 10gb of RAM (I'll blame Discord for that I guess). The browser ecosystem under Google's benevolent dictatorship is languishing.
  • fuckcensorship 4y ago
    I recommend checking out LibreWolf as a possible alternative: https://librewolf.net/ https://librewolf.net/.
    • mark_l_watson 4y ago
      Thanks for the link! I have been using Safari on macOS and it is not so bad on privacy (please correct me on this if I am wrong) but I will try LibreWolf on my System76 Linux laptop.
  • jrootabega 4y ago
    I had two similar experiences recently. DOH turned itself on a few weeks ago for everyone, I think, out of band from a new release. And when they released v100, the Ubuntu snap just updated itself automatically and killed a firefox process that I was actively using. (Not sure exactly whose fault that was, but I think we can give Mozilla some of it.) After restarting, I was greeted with that bullshit-purple-neon-themed "100 Thank You's" modal dialog, with no useful information, that had to be acknowledged before continuing.
• bittercynic 4y ago
  I regularly use Chromium and Firefox on an older/slower laptop, and Firefox seems much more restrained in memory usage. Chromium frequently consumes all available memory and swap, and brings the whole system to a crawl, and I never really see that behavior with Firefox.
• jokoon 4y ago
  I recently tried to enable resist fingerprinting, I ended disabling it because it broke all dark themes on websites...
  • Tmpod 4y ago
    It is doing its job. The media query for your theme is a point of data for fingerprinting, so disabling it is a good thing. However, it would be nice to have a way to select which measures should be applied, so you can costumise it to your preference.
• Cyder 4y ago
  I was using Firefox for a kiosk project and netstat/wireshark kept showing connections to Google. I tried to de-Google firefox and it wouldn't run. I was amazed Firefox is so tied to Google. It was disheartening. Ive left Firefox for Brave after being a Firefox evangelist for 15 years. Brave isn't perfect, but it doesn't hide what it really is.
• tzs 4y ago
  I switched to Chrome a while back after years on Firefox because of Firefox's terrible spell checking. It is quite puzzling because Firefox uses the same open source spell checker that Chrome uses and that is also used by LibreOffice and is the OS provided spell checker on Mac. Here are some examples of words that it botched that nearly everything else (Chrome, Edge, Safari, LibreOffice, anything on Apple that uses the OS provided spell check) got right: 1. all-nighter auditable automata blacksmithing bubonic cantina commenter conferenced epicycle ethicist fineable initializer lifecycle micropayments mosquitos pre-programmed preprogrammed prosecutable responder solvability spectrogram splitter subparagraphs subtractive surveil tradable transactional tunable verifiability verifier 2. ballistically chewable counterintuitive exonerations mistyped "per se" phosphine programmability recertification shapeshifting tradeoffs webmail 3. manticore survivorship misclassified ferrite massless rotator dominator untraceably synchronizer 4. "ad hominem" algorithmically another's backlight ballistically coaxially hatchling impaction implementer inductor intercellular irrevocability licensor measurer meerkats mischaracterization misclassification misclassified partygoers passthrough plough retransmission seatbelt sensationalistic trichotomy underspecified untyped All of those were reported to their bug tracker item for spell check errors. They do eventually fix those, but the lag was in the one to two year range. As of now they have fixed all of #1 except for initializer, all of #2, none of #3, and none of #4 except for algorithmically, ballistically, implementer, and inductor.
• icare_1er 4y ago
  Avoiding a Google monopoly is a good-enough reason.
• amazd 4y ago
  This extension right here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
  • nashashmi 4y ago
    Or this one https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-sidebar-we/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-sidebar-w...
• Vladimof 4y ago
  The worst part about Firefox for me is that they removed most add-ons on Firefox Mobile (unless you use cumbersome collections).
• cdrini 4y ago
  One unique Firefox feature I love that I don't see talked about often is how awesome Firefox's address bar suggestions are. I can type just a snippet of a URL or a web page title and it'll instantly show me all matching URLs I've visited, whether on my desktop or on my phone. It's become my primary second brain for finding Google docs, or articles I've read, or GitHub issues. It's usually only a few characters before it finds exactly what I want. Eg I type in "Ed"? It shows the URL to my "editions in solr" GitHub issues I've been working on recently. I vaguely recall an article I read months ago on CSS grid? I type "grid guide" and bam it's the first suggestion. The spreadsheet I made about user languages? "sheets lang". That vague API I can never remember the parameters to? Just type "/query.json?" And I get all my previous requests as examples! I find Chrome's address bar has been way less reliable and much more frequently just gives me Google autocomplete suggestions -- even when I know that I visited a URL recently that should match!
  • dandanua 4y ago
    You can also add tags to bookmarks and let it search only through bookmarks. Now I just bookmark everything, so I don't need to use google's search a second time and filter again all that SEO and other crap. Moreover, I even bookmark some of my local files, since adequate tagging capabilities in file systems are still technologies from future, apparently.
  • throw10920 4y ago
    To add to this, my experience has been that Chrome's address bar does only matching on whole "fragments" of URLs - that is, if I visited a URL with /foobarbaz/ in the name, Firefox will match that with "bar" while Chrome won't - which is pretty terrible behavior. And then there's the bookmarks mess, lack of tree-style tabs, and crippled ad-blocker API. As an information management tool, Firefox is light-years ahead of Chrome.
    • sp332 4y ago
      I've only been using Chrome for about a year, but if I want the find something in my history, I have to open the history window (ctrl-h). The address bar is very inconsistent about returning pages that I've been to recently or often.
• Shadonototra 4y ago
  Mozilla sells its users to Google, so no thanks I'll stick with Chromium
  • cyber_kinetist 4y ago
    Ironically the reason why Google supports Firefox financially (mainly with web search deals) might be to make a competitor float (barely) alive so they don't need to get sued by antitrust/monopoly issues in the future.
• rvz 4y ago
  Mozilla is a joke when it comes to privacy and being dependent of Google's money and it is quite a funny sight to see that after 14 years [0] of trying to figure a way to make money after 'promising' to not rely on Google, they still can't and continue to aid their surveillance capitalism With that, I have heard all the (very weak) reasons listed in this article and at this point, you might as well use Brave browser since everything listed here is already implemented by them. Firefox (really) has no killer features and the chronic decrease in users shows that it is only going down as Edge has already over taken it. [1][2][3] [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9044160/Mozilla_can_live_without_Google_s_money_Baker_says_ https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.compu... [1] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share [2] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worldwide https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl... [3] https://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php https://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php
• loudthing 4y ago
  How did Chrome become so popular instead of Firefox in the first place? Was it purely Google's advertising of their browser? Brand recognition is so important to typical consumers.
  • gurjeet 4y ago
    IMHO, performance. Chrome's V8 engine (for running JavaScript) was way ahead of competition when it was released. It took Firefox many years to come close to it. Disclosure: Happy Firefox user since v1. Sometimes I was jealous of Chrome's speed, sometimes I was weary of Firefox's memory leaks, but never enough to leave the flexibility and customizability the Firefox provided. EDIT: ... and now Firefox is fast enough, and isn't a memory hog anymore, so I continue to be a very happy Firefox user.
    • loudthing 4y ago
      Good point. V8 gave us Node.js, right? Also I've been out of the loop for a while now about Firefox. My understanding was Firefox had a pretty bad memory leak for a long time. Was that ever resolved? Edit: Saw your edit. Glad the firefox memory problem was resolved.
    • MBCook 4y ago
      This matches my memory as well. Safari was dramatically faster but it was limited to the Mac (let’s just ignore the Windows version). Chrome was based on Safari and was far far faster than anything else available on Windows at the time. Not only that but they moved fast and kept improving. Firefox is great now but it took a long time to catch up.
  • wussboy 4y ago
    I think it was because it was widely advertised on Google.com, a luxury Firefox never had.
    • loudthing 4y ago
      Crazy thing is Mozilla was heavily funded by Google for years before Chrome came out.
• narag 4y ago
  I've always used "Firefox", since it was called Netscape 2.4. I use Chrome to watch streaming and a few sites that don't work with Firefox. That said, I might start using Chromium because I want to make some improvements to the browser (to use it as a tool) that would need me to compile the browser myself. As far as I know, Firefox is no longer just C/C++ but it's migrating, at least partially, to Rust, so it's a moving target.
• zerop 4y ago
  I ditched chrome and switched to MS Edge (Not sure if many would have done that). Chrome would heat up my Mac a lot and slows eventually, it always shows up eating lots of power. MS Edge seems lighter so far. Main reason to choose MS Edge (and not firefox) was the outlook web. I don't use outlook client and I use outlook web. Outlook web is slow on chrome, I found it lighter on Edge. I also switched to Bing from Google and found not much difference in day to day searches. However if I need to search address/people/places I go to Google.
  • tomComb 4y ago
    These points about edge vs. chrome seem questionable to me given that Microsoft just takes Google’s browser engine for edge . I guess they each do their own optimization, but it’s not like Google is inexperienced in this area.
• nerder92 4y ago
  I tried to switch to Firefox, is almost one year that I've tried but it just does not work for me. I can't express what it might be in words, but the experience is just worse than Chrome.
  • copperx 4y ago
    What OS, if I may ask? I find browser choice heavily depends on the OS you're using. For instance, I can't stand anything but Safari on macOS. There's nothing better than Firefox on Linux. But on Windows, Chrome is king.
• arun6582 4y ago
  I have tried doing the several times in past because of chromes arrogant and monopoly like attitude on forcing feature addition or removal But browsing works better and faster in chrome and most consumer base blindly use chrome If you want to build a extension with a user base you will have to use chrome If you want your website to work properly it must satisfy chrome first
• xony 4y ago
• Sloppy 4y ago
  Add VPN, TOR support, private search, IPFS, etc. and maybe Brave is a better choice.
• garfieldnate 4y ago
  I actively tried to switch to Firefox this year, but couldn't due to issues with saving tabs on sudden shutdown. Due to a separate issue, my apple laptop was crashing and restarting a couple times a week. Several times Firefox was not able to restore the browsing session, and I lost all of my tabs :(
  • glowingly 4y ago
    All of the browsers (including all of the Trident based ones) have had this issue for me. Most of my browser hopping in the past was driven by losing a session, being unable to recover it, and moving on to the next browser hoping it is more stable now. Nowadays I aggressively save to bookmarks. Still a lot of tabs open, though.
• cptskippy 4y ago
  The feature I use most is Firefox Sync and the ability to not only send browser tabs to instances of Firefox running on other machines but also to look at and load tabs from another machine, even when it is offline. Routinely I'll be reading something on my laptop in the evening and want to reference it from my Dev VM the next day. With Sync I can just pull up the list of open tabs on my laptop that's asleep and retrieve the URL.
• freebuju 4y ago
  Most chromium hit pieces come across as evangelical and this one is no exception. From my personal perspective, Firefox gets the job done but Chromium is undoubtedly the better browser. On desktop and mobile, the difference is felt even more on mobile. Every time I found an obvious bug or got an unpolished experience on Firefox, I hated it even more. Whatever data the author thinks they are hiding away from Google, they are (un)knowingly giving it to Mozilla. Even worse if they are using Google to search.
• rkk3 4y ago
  I wanted to switch to Firefox, but gave up because it kept hanging on me with only a couple of tabs open.
• Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
  Even without all great features Firefox has, it is the last bastion of open internet, and this reason alone makes it worth using instead of Chrome and its derivatives.
• spurgu 4y ago
  Does anyone here know how to change the keyboard shortcut to focus the URL bar on Firefox? I'd like to map it to Cmd+D instead of Cmd+L since it's (Alt+D) been in my muscle memory since forever. It's the main reason that keeps me from switching. With Chrome I simply assign it to the menu entry File -> Open Location ... but Firefox doesn't have a menu entry for focusing the URL bar (or at least didn't have last time I checked[0]). [0] Checked again, v100 still doesn't have a menu entry
• pipeline_peak 4y ago
  As Mozilla loses core dev resources, just like IE, Firefox will go extinct. It will no longer be able to render modern pages as the web continues to grow increasingly complex. Hopefully someday there will be a major backed FOSS project that forks web kit and can compete. But there are far too many more important problems out there for something as complex as a modern browser.
• shaman1 4y ago
  I tried using Firefox on Android for a while but had to switch back to Chrome mainly because Firefox reloads the page if you put it in the background even for a few seconds. This caused real issues when I had to approve a payment on a banking app I'm using - after aproval going back to Firefox the page got refreshed and I had to do it again. Chrome somehow manages to keep the page loaded even with tens of open tabs. Another thing missing in the Android version is the Print function. Such a basic feature! I've been using it on the desktop too and there it works ok, no major issues - just the print dialog was much poorer then Chrome's and I had to print from Chrome. Firefox has a many people rooting for it but not enough people contributing. Brave strangely decided to go with Chromium rather than Firefox as a base even though Brendan knew Firefox much better. And many other browsers have decided the same Vivaldi, Edge, etc. At this stage I'm afraid Firefox has too many unpolished edges, especially on mobile to match the competition.
  • rg111 4y ago
    I use Firefox in android even though it has too many rough edges. But I primarily use Bromite and Brave. I have disabled Chrome altogether. Bromite has some rough edges, but Brave is ready to be used as a primary browser. DDG android is nice, too. > had to switch back to Chrome Give Brave a try?
• pvinis 4y ago
  I know it's blasphemy, but! what would a firefox with WebKit/blink look and feel like? would we want that? in a future that we are officially a monoculture, would we prefer no firefox, or a traitor firefox?
• mr_woozy 4y ago
• neop1x 4y ago
  I have been using FF on desktop as my primary browser for many years and continue doing so but I switched to Kiwi Browser on mobile since FF Mobile made a "major update" and removed about:config and reduced the amount of extensions available for mobile. Kiwi Browser is a Chromium fork with full extension support. It is not perfect but it is currently the best mobile option for me.
• sh4un 4y ago
• ajyotirmay 4y ago
  Firefox is here to stay. Or so I hope. It's my daily driver, and I definitely prefer it over Chromium's uncertain future of curbing ad blockers. I work in web development, and all our products are built with 100% compatibility with Firefox and it being the priority browser. The rest are secondary including Chromium based ones. If it works on FF, it works elsewhere (except that steaming pile of crap that Safari is)
• Karolis_K 4y ago
  Killer feature for me, why I migrated to FF recently - add blocking in mobile. When I migrated to FF on mobile there was no choice but to migrate to FF on desktop. And I don't regret anything after doing that.
• bihapyam4 4y ago