31 ms·

Tell HN: Firefox Is an awesome browser right now

• kurtprp 4y ago
  I only use firefox, because people don't use it. I always choose the 3rd
• haunter 4y ago
  [flagged]
  • moffkalast 4y ago
    Maybe, but I've been noticing the same in the late week or so. Github was actually unbearably lagging the other day and some pages perform really terribly on occasion. It's probably some of the new haphazardly implemented garbage from manifest v3, after all it's all about Google shooting the browser in the foot to save their adsense business. I haven't really checked if it's better on FF because it can't screenshare specific tabs so it's dead to me.
  • ohgodplsno 4y ago
    >Also FF shits itself over +100 tabs 10 years ago, sure. I currently have 235 tabs open, plus another window with 172. Firefox is at 5.3G of RAM, 0% CPU. Most of these tabs have gone to sleep and get restored in less than a second. Tabs have not been a problem with firefox in years.
  • pivo 4y ago
    Huh, I regularly have 300+ tabs open in Firefox and have never had a problem (macOS).
  • dang 4y ago
    "Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=true&page=0&query=by:dang%20astroturf https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
• seren 4y ago
  Firefox on Mobile supports uBlock origin, and is very nice as well. edit: on Android
  • simlan 4y ago
    Yep. Firefox on Android is really awesome. If I only could replace the android WebView with it...
    • ap916 4y ago
      If all you need is for apps to open browser window on firefox instead of chrome, you can just disable chrome. That's what I have done and it works fine for me.
  • rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 4y ago
    Do note this is Firefox on Android.
    • kragen 4y ago
      What is?
      • 1maginary 4y ago
        Support for ublock is only available on Android's Firefox
        • kragen 4y ago
          i'm using ublock origin in chromium for desktop linux and firefox for desktop linux
          • celsoazevedo 4y ago
            They're talking about mobile. Since Apple doesn't let browsers use their own engine, uBlock Origin doesn't work on Firefox for iOS, only on Firefox for Android. On the desktop, it works everywhere.
• wsgeorge 4y ago
  Firefox was my go-to 3 years ago because it was just lighter than Chrome (and easier on my battery). I still hate the fact that different browser profiles and profile switching aren't surfaced like they are in Chrome. I think it's such a major use case for modern web browsing, I find it hard to believe they aren't prioritizing it. (FWIW this isn't even supported in Safari, which I would have preferred using) I still keep it around because I love it's download manager, but I tend to use a lot of Google services, and out of habit, I stick to Chrome. (ps. I was an early Chrome adopter, so it's quite sticky with me)
  • chaosite 4y ago
    Multi-Account Containers are like profiles, but in tabs instead of other windows. They're pretty great. It's an official Mozilla Firefox extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
    • ttctciyf 4y ago
      If I understand correctly, these only compartmentalise cookies and browsing history, whereas full profiles (via the -ProfileManager switch in Firefox) compartmentalise the whole browser config (add-ons, permissions, etc.) as well, which I think is much more useful.
      • matsemann 4y ago
        To me it's the opposite. I'd like the same browser config, use the same window, keep my bookmarks, history etc., just want different logins and website contexts. I love Firefox's implementation of containers, and find Chrome's way of doing profiles useless. But Firefox supports profiles as well if that's what you want, as you say. So best of both worlds.
      • doubled112 4y ago
        If you want to open 5 of the same website but with different accounts, containers are the way to go. The AWS console comes to mind. I don't want separate configs, just separate accounts. I have also used it as a proxy manager. Different proxy config in a different container.
• eptcyka 4y ago
  I prefer Firefox, even though I don't experience the benefits you seem to be experiencing. I find Firefox to be more sluggish than Chrome, and it's less compatible with websites than chrome. I love it for tab containers - a game changer in web browsing. And ublock origin, and the fact that it isn't chrome.
• nend 4y ago
  I just switched back to chrome for the same reason. Every page in Firefox was taking 60+second to load. Tried it on chrome and pages were loading instantly. I had originally switched to Firefox for privacy concerns but that and the memory usage/occasional crashing were too much for me. edit: not sure what the downvotes are for. I'm glad there's a second option out there. It didn't work for me but figured it was worth sharing my anecdote along with OPS. I just wish there was a third option, or more.
  • drita 4y ago
    60+ seconds seems really odd. It sounds like less of a rendering issue and more like some more fundamental technical problem. Have you tried all the usual things, e.g. reinstalling, previous versions, etc.?
  • catfishx 4y ago
    I think you got confused here, OP had the exact opposite experience
  • patates 4y ago
    > Every page in Firefox was taking 60+second to load That really sounds like a broken installation. Out of curiosity, would you care to share what add-ons you have/had installed?
    • nend 4y ago
      Yeah good point, could be that. Just keeper and ublock, on windows
  • RandomWorker 4y ago
    Snappyness is really a feeling. It could be cache or something else. Sometimes you want to use something else. Like cpu doing some work on something else while it put the browser on pause. All browsers should be able to render all sites really fast. I don’t have a dedicated browser, I use edge chrome safari and Firefox interchangeably. However, I work on websites for a living. Using different browsers is part of the job and if I don’t I might miss something breaking somewhere. Generally my thinking has been get passwords into 1P, store bookmarks and interesting sites in zotero. Now, all I use the browsers for its pure rendering capabilities.
• xattt 4y ago
  Portability of saved passwords is a hassle that might get regulated in the next decade or two. I have 15 years of saved Keychain credentials that I’ve been very slowly porting over to Firefox Sync since switching to Windows. The fact that I let Apple generate complex passwords makes entry by hand even more slower. Apple’s Chrome iCloud plug-in for Windows is just paying lip service.
  • Someone 4y ago
    > I have 15 years of saved Keychain credentials that I’ve been very slowly porting over to Firefox Sync since switching to Windows. The fact that I let Apple generate complex passwords makes entry by hand even more slower. Do you know you can export all Safari passwords to an unencrypted .csv from the Safari Preferences page? (Preferences Passwords, click the “circle with 3 dots” pop-up, choose “Export All Passwords”)
    • xattt 4y ago
      I had no idea! My faith in technology companies is restored! I tried to export from Keychain Access before without success.
• loa_in_ 4y ago
  I love Firefox but some JS heavy demos etc. just don't work fast enough. I hate that I know exactly why. It's because they were only ever tested on Chrome during development.
  • onion2k 4y ago
    It's interesting that you put the blame for the slowness on Firefox. I blame web developers for failing to build things for browsers rather than just Chrome.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • rideontime 4y ago
      This isn't blaming Firefox any more than one would blame other web browsers for a bad enterprise app requiring Internet Explorer, it's just the sad reality that users have to deal with.
    • zeendo 4y ago
      Which part of their comment reads as blaming Firefox?
      • onion2k 4y ago
        I love Firefox but some JS heavy demos etc. just don't work fast enough.
        • The_Colonel 4y ago
          Have you read the last sentence as well? > It's because they were only ever tested on Chrome during development.
          • onion2k 4y ago
            That only means the developers didn't care if it was fast, or even works, in other browsers. It says nothing about Firefox. The first sentence, where the author complains that JS heavy apps are too slow in Firefox, is the part that's about Firefox.
• aldanor 4y ago
  Been on Firefox for many years for one reason only - TreeStyle Tab. Once other browsers implement it, if ever, would consider jumping ship. Orion has something similar, but it's a baby version of that, really...
  • throwaway290 4y ago
    I had to switch to Sidebery after some bugs with TST (broken hierarchy, etc.).
    • quietbritishjim 4y ago
      I don't know when you had those problems but I had similar problems in the past (>1 year ago) but they all seem to have been fixed.
    • cassianoleal 4y ago
      I had to uninstall Sidebery as it would put my CPU on a high spin and hurt battery life.
• nicoburns 4y ago
  I've also recently switched back to Firefox. The Simple Tab Groups is the killer feature for me. It allows me to group tabs by task which is a godsend if I ever need to work on multiple unrelated tasks concurrently.
• hankmander 4y ago
  The suggestions you get when typing in the address bar are miles better than the chrome counterpart imo. Otherwise I think these browsers are more equal now than ever.
• low_tech_love 4y ago
  Just tangentially related, but on Windows I find that Edge is way faster than Chrome nowadays. No idea why, and it feels stupid to even consider it, but the difference is staggering.
  • rrishi 4y ago
    I did try Edge a couple of years ago and I would agree with your observation too. I just didn't stick with Edge and came back to for some reason that is escaping me right now.
  • Tomte 4y ago
    I'm even happily using Edge on Linux. I know, sacrilege.
• therealmarv 4y ago
  Not on Android (it stutters on scrolling even on newest Pixel). And I also think it's not the most safest browser on Android because Chromium is much more hardened there. Source: https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing
  • feanaro 4y ago
    Firefox for Android does not stutter when scrolling for me on a phone much weaker than a Pixel. That suggests it's not a universal issue but something more specific to your setup.
  • neogodless 4y ago
    FWIW we don't have that issue on a Pixel 5a, OnePlus 7 Pro or Galaxy S21 Ultra.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • Semaphor 4y ago
    I’ll pile on and say that it doesn’t stutter on my old and slow OnePlus Nord. Only on one weird page that was recently on the frontpage, but I guess they were simply also doing some fuckery with the scrollbar.
• drita 4y ago
  I love Firefox and use it as my main browser. I do sometimes see issues with JavaScript on some sites which I assume are the result of developers mainly testing on Chrome these days.
• tomrod 4y ago
  Feels a bit PG submarine-ish, but I'll bite. Firefox took away a lot of accessibility options in a large August 2021 and broke my trust in them. Good that they brought back extension options in Android, as I read other comments, but taking away the text size render option killed me.
  • wolfium3 4y ago
    Wow... after some searching I eventually found out what PG is... Paul Graham (PG) wrote an essay titled "The Submarine". http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
  • BeefWellington 4y ago
    but taking away the text size render option killed me. Maybe you're talking about something different but zooming text only is still there on the View -> Zoom menu for me in current Firefox.
• Mizza 4y ago
  "BypassPaywallsClean" is a must-have extension for the modern internet. Does anybody else use multiple browsers? Maybe it's just because I'm doing web-dev right now, but I think using as many browsers as possible is necessary as I find inconsistencies that could become bugs all the time. I use Firefox as my "main" and Chrome as my "alt".
  • catfishx 4y ago
    I have to use Chromium for MS teams unfortunately (calls and screen sharing are not allowed on FF)
  • contravariant 4y ago
    I use chrome as a backup. Though initially I only did this to support some legacy software that only worked through Flash (don't ask), so if I'm forced to use Chrome I get the distinct impression that I'm looking at a buggy/legacy/badly written webpage.
  • veganjay 4y ago
    What's the difference between "BypassPaywallsClean" and "BypassPaywalls"? - Related HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22482329 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22482329 - Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/pwtafe/bypass_paywalls_vs_bypass_paywalls_clean/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/pwtafe/bypass_payw...
  • jodrellblank 4y ago
    > "Does anybody else use multiple browsers?" Yes, now everything is in a browser there aren't different programs visible on the taskbar so I make do with different browsers for different tasks. It's not because I love browsers, it's a bodge for the decline of good dedicated desktop GUI programs.
• gbil 4y ago
  Time for my rant as a Firefox user since the beta Phoenix versions, stating that I'm a daily MacOS and Android tablet user * Firefox uses much more battery on MacOS than any chromium based browser. Bugzilla ticket exists since ages, few things have change * Firefox on Android tablet after the change to Fenix is a stretched phone browser, with no tabs support, no default desktop support. Firefox developers treat this as a ER instead of bug totally ignoring that it was there before and they dropped it, no development whatsoever At the same time, Firefox history sync is like no other but balancing what I care for the most, I had to drop firefox after literally decades and every now and then I look if at least there is something on the tablet support, hoping that I'll be able to change back at some point
  • dahfizz 4y ago
    You consider it a bug that you don't like the UI?
    • gbil 4y ago
      It is not if I like the UI or not, the UI after fenix on a tablet is just the phone UI and is a waste of space and functionality. Before Fenix you had a proper tablet UI with visible tabs like a desktop browser, utilizing the extra space properly, so this is a downgrade regardless of the “like” factor you mention. And missing a desktop mode is a huge omission.
  • cassianoleal 4y ago
    > Firefox uses much more battery on MacOS than any chromium based browser. I really don't see that. Firefox with certain extensions is a battery hog but the browser itself is pretty lightweight on CPU for me.
  • debug-desperado 4y ago
    Not sure on MacOS memory usage (I stick with Safari and Edge on respective laptops for battery life reasons), but agreed 100% about Firefox on Android tablet. It's just awkward. They need to make the Android UI in general a closer match for the desktop and iOS (skinned Safari) browsers. For instance, note how buried things like "passwords" are in the Android menus compared to iOS and desktop browsers: Desktop: Menu->Passwords iOS: Menu->Passwords Android: Menu->Settings->Logins & Passwords->Saved logins It's almost like the Android team doesn't even use their own browser on other platforms, or there's no product lead to make things consistent.
• qbasic_forever 4y ago
  Your Gmail/Google cookies are probably in a weird state with chrome. Clear the cache and all saved cookies (will log you out of every site fyi) and I bet it will load right up again. But all that said, yes, Firefox is very good. I wish it was a little more bleeding edge with stuff like experimental web standards (native filesystem access, USB, etc.) but I still use it for most of my browsing.
  • rrishi 4y ago
    > Your Gmail/Google cookies are probably in a weird state with chrome. Clear the cache and all saved cookies (will log you out of every site fyi) and I bet it will load right up again. That's definitely a likely candidate. I'll try that, thanks!
• jmartrican 4y ago
  It doesn't support the webkit scrollbar variables. -webkit-scrollbar -webkit-scrollbar-track -webkit-scrollbar-thumb
  • vehemenz 4y ago
    So? Chrome doesn't support hyphenation yet.
  • mejutoco 4y ago
    To be fair, vendor prefixes are there while standards are adopted. I do not expect Chrome to support the -moz prefix either. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Vendor_Prefix https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Vendor_Pre...
  • jonathanstrange 4y ago
    That's because Firefox is not based on webkit. Of course, nonstandard webkit extensions only work on webkit browsers.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • matsemann 4y ago
    Why would it..?
  • Aldipower 4y ago
    Yeah, because they are -webkit variables.
• mnky9800n 4y ago
  I love firefox but it's kind of annoying that it doesn't have the chromecast option in the android version for most videos. so i have to open chrome only to do that.
  • naavis 4y ago
    It is the same on desktop. But that is probably because of Chromecast being proprietary to Google, so sadly nothing Mozilla could do.
• jarbus 4y ago
  Switched from FF to Brave, just because FF spins up my fans and uses far more battery than Brave on arch linux. Wish I could switch back.
• kanapala 4y ago
  Can't use it on a Mac as it won't play ball with Keychain. Not going to reenter all my passwords.
  • tecleandor 4y ago
    I don't use Keychain as I have BitWarden but, AFAIK, the only browser able to connect to Keychain is Safari, isn't it ?
  • pornel 4y ago
    Sadly, Apple has just completely cut off 3rd parties from Keychain for website passwords (they can use the Keychain for their own isolated items, but can't touch any shared password data). All non-Safari browsers are affected. Firefox on iOS a loophole for this, because it's forced to use Safari's WebView, so it gets Safari's keychain, but it can also then prompt to save in its own password sync. Far from ideal, but at least a way to escape Apple lock-in.
  • vehemenz 4y ago
    I agree it's annoying, but it's also not that big of a deal. I have 200 or so passwords duplicated in both Keychain and Keepass.
• Vinnl 4y ago
  > I'd be glad to learn of any other cool features and extensions that y'all might want to share. I'm sure others will be sharing it as I type this comment as well, but for many HN readers, Multi-Account Containers [1] are bound to be a godsend. Easily log in to different accounts for any website, in different tabs. Great feature that's not available in other browsers. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/multi-account-conta...
  • Vinnl 4y ago
    And some more tips: - Translate web pages locally, without sending any data to remote servers: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/firefox-translations/ https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/firefox-translation... - Vertical/tree-style tabs: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/sidebery/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/sidebery/ - If you're in the EU: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/consent-o-matic/ https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/consent-o-matic/ - If you use RSS: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/feed-preview/ https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/feed-preview/ And I assume you've already got uBlock Origin. And as others mentioned, try also using Firefox as your mobile browser, so you can send tabs from one to the other, which is pretty neat.
    • ohgodplsno 4y ago
      In addition: - SponsorBlock - Automatically tag and skip portions of youtube videos, such as sponsors, intros, recaps, and others. - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sponsorblock/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sponsorblock/ - Firefox Relay - Automatically create up to 5 (for free, more if paying for it) email addresses that redirect to your actual address, to avoid giving your private address to everyone. - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/private-relay/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/private-relay...
      • Vinnl 4y ago
        Ha, thanks for sharing Firefox Relay - I actually work on that, so I was a bit hesitant about sharing it. I'll add that "paying for it" is €1 a month for unlimited email addresses.
• adenozine 4y ago
  This is very obviously an ad… at the top of the front page… Y’all crack me up sometimes.
  • Aldipower 4y ago
    It is opinionated, but is it en vougue nowadays to call everything an ad? Come one.
    • adenozine 4y ago
      It’s literally a product name drop and elevator pitch of user features. I mean, I can appreciate your trying to take a nuanced approach, but it is quite literally and quite clearly an advertisement.
  • vehemenz 4y ago
    This level of cynicism would make more sense if you spent any time on the Internet, where normal people regularly evangelize for their browser of choice simply because they feel strongly about it. It's a very common thing. Check out Reddit.
• pontifier 4y ago
  I switched to Firefox several years ago out of principal, but it's been a struggle to stay with it. 2 big issues I have are the tendency to freeze, and then say "restart to keep using Firefox" because it updated in the background and can't continue. The other was almost a deal breaker, and still could be. When using a barcode scanner, Firefox can't keep up with the characters coming from the scanner. It will randomly drop characters. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why some scans weren't working, and the scanner works perfectly in Chrome, works perfectly in a text editor and intermittently drops characters randomly in Firefox. If it were just the start character, or the end character it wouldn't matter so much, but it drops characters in the middle of a barcode. It has for years, it's a known issue, I don't see it ever being fixed.
  • kapep 4y ago
    > the tendency to freeze, and then say "restart to keep using Firefox" because it updated in the background and can't continue. I never encountered that, neither freezing nor being forced to restart. By default Firefox will only download updates in the background and inform you that the update will be installed if you restart.
    • cassianoleal 4y ago
      That is incorrect. By default, it installs in the background and then displays the behaviour reported by GP. You probably have it set to not install before prompting you.
      • kapep 4y ago
        No, I'm using the default settings of Firefox for Windows. I just installed Firefox in a new Windows VM to confirm this. Automatic installation of updates in the background is enabled by default there. There's also a checkbox to use use a background service for installing updates which is enabled by default, though that's likely a Windows specific feature.
        • 4y ago
• bspammer 4y ago
  It's not firefox exclusive but SponsorBlock is an incredible extension if you watch a decent amount of Youtube. It's not just about skipping sponsorships (which it does well of course), but having a bunch of crowdsourced metadata about every video is so useful if you just want to skip to the point of the video. You can also skip non-music portions of music videos, filler content, etc.
• eps 4y ago
  If you are on Firefox and you run into an overall system slowdown, check how many subprocesses it has spawn. With the release of Fission (their website isolation tech) this number becomes unbound. In my case it was close to 100, each eating up at least 50MB with some well into hundreds megs. It was a swap fest. Not sure what they were thinking, but a simple post-update warning would'be been nice... or perhaps it was there, behind all that "aww, let's select your mood color" nonsense that now refularly surfaces after every second update. In any case Fission is easy to disable once you know it exists.
  • rrishi 4y ago
    Thanks for the heads up. I'll keep an eye out.
• BirAdam 4y ago
  I now use Brave on everything: Linux, Mac, iOS, iPadOS. Mozilla has some really weird stuff going on in their financials that bother me, and as a result, I just can’t use their products anymore. This is similar to my feelings about Google, Microsoft, and so on. I prefer tech companies to just be tech companies and not branch into other fields. I understand that Brave’s stance on certain things bleeds into politics with things like thwarting censorship and encouraging encryption, but those are also still technical problems. Tossing money at social issues isn’t what I want out of a tech company. Full disclosure: philosophically, I am an anarchist. You should look for yourself at Mozilla’s financials if you don’t agree with my politics. https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-2021-fs-final-1010.pdf https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-202... https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/ https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/ https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-990-ty21-public-disclosure.pdf https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-990... Also, just search up some of the organizations and stuff that get mentioned here. It’s weird. ————- Edit: so, of their 1.1billion dollars in assets (the foundation, and two wholly owned for profit subsidiaries) Mozilla cut 100 million from software development expenses, while at the same time spending large sums of money on groups with no tie to software at all. It also seems that the vast majority of their revenue comes from Google search inclusion as default in Firefox… so why cut the software development funding? Regarding Brave, it’s funded by Founders Fund, Pantera Capital, Digital Currency Group, Pathfinder, Foundation Capital, Rising Tide, Hone Capital, Propel Venture Partners and through their BAT tokens. I find the crypto side annoying, but that doesn’t feel as morally “icky” as some of things Mozilla appears to do (calling themselves a non-profit without mentioning for-profit subsidiaries, spending money on things that have nothing to do with software, reducing funding to the development of their core product). In short, I kind of hate all major browsers, but there aren’t good ones to choose from so I try to pick one that feels least-evil. When LadyBird browser gets to some kind of truly usable level, I will certainly switch to it for daily use. https://awesomekling.github.io/Ladybird-a-new-cross-platform-browser-project/ https://awesomekling.github.io/Ladybird-a-new-cross-platform...
  • notafraudster 4y ago
    I clicked on your links but I don't really understand what it is I'm meant to be seeing. I haven't read a balance sheet since college, but things look pretty normal to me? Is the objection that about 2% of their expenses are on Grants and donations? Is it that they make revenue through a VPN subscription they offer? Is it that their taxes show spending about $14 million (a drop on the bucket) on policy programming (mostly it seems about building the Common Voice dataset and funding external data scientists to work on data stewardship policy stuff; these feel, I think, like what you're suggesting that it's fine for Brave to do because they're "technical problems"?) I read -- skimmed, but I think that's fair -- through a dozen pages to try to understand your point and nothing jumped out at me. There's a part where they talk about how they made a few thousand dollars from credit card rewards points. I did a ctrl+f for "woke" and "transgender" and "critical race theory" and "covid vaccination" and "cico versus macro-based dieting strategies" and didn't find anything. It's a little frustrating because I spent more time trying to figure out your point than you spent to make it.
• mattbrewsbytes 4y ago
  You should checkout the ability to use containers (no not docker) in the browser for certain sites like social media, keeps their tracking nonsense contained.
• countrymile 4y ago
  I love firefox and have been using it for nearly 20 years now, but my latest employer doesn't support it so they recommended I switch to Edge on my work machine... Don't get a job in academia
  • Swinx43 4y ago
    I just came to offer my sympathies. That sucks in ways few will understand. Please tell me you have been spared from using Microsoft Teams...
  • rrishi 4y ago
    Hahaha ... that's a pretty odd thing to not support. I don't understand the rationale.
• acdha 4y ago
  It’s been that way since the mid-2010s, especially if you don’t have at least 16GB of RAM. I switched from Chrome circa 2015 but use both extensively. As a developer what I found worked best was to develop sites in Firefox and then test them in other browsers - it avoided relying on Chrome-only features but since the developer tools both have things they do better you’ll naturally find certain tasks are easier in one.
• shafyy 4y ago
  I also use Firefox as my main daily driver and have been for 5 years or so. Recently I started trialing Arc (https://arc.net/ https://arc.net/) and it's interesting. They try to be quirky and have a bit of a different approach. What I like is that they also have the idea of different profiles (like Firefox Multi-account Containers) built in. I'm not 100% convinced of Arc yet, but it's good enough for my secondary browser (also for stuff that required Chrome, since it's based on Chromium).
  • qbit42 4y ago
    I've really loved using Arc recently, it's a very fresh take on web browsing. I've found that its spaces feature handles my uses of (most) bookmarks and tab groups in a more coherent way. My main annoyance is that there isn't any sort of backup standard bookmark system built-in.
    • shafyy 4y ago
      I also like Spaces a lot. I think my main issue is that I don't like the vertical sidebar, and doing cmd+s to hide and show it all the time is not that great (also because some web apps hijack cmd+s).
  • rrishi 4y ago
    I am definitely interested in giving Arc a try after reading about it in different parts of the interwebz. However, I haven't received an invite despite being on the list for close to a month.
    • shafyy 4y ago
      I can send you one if you email me at canolcer@hey.com
      • rrishi 4y ago
        Thank you for the offer. I just shot you an email.
• vladvasiliu 4y ago
  > 1. It opens websites really quickly, much faster than Chrome I wonder if it's a question of accumulated cruft. My main browser is Firefox, but there is this one site that's broken on it, so I use Chrome for that. It's the only thing I use Chrome for. But I find that it's much faster (even when testing other sites) than Firefox.
  • rrishi 4y ago
    > I wonder if it's a question of accumulated cruft. Definitely a possibility. Another user suggested deleting cookies and re-trying. I might give that a shot at some point.
• jvnnmfjvfjvflkj 4y ago
  Firefox's best engineers left after they fired Brendan Eich. That was the worst decision they ever made.
• cm2187 4y ago
  Also it feels "more on the side of the user". Like for instance if you do shift right click it bypasses the website's attempt to hijack your contextual menu. I think Chrome disabled that.
  • rrishi 4y ago
    Yea the feeling I get from them is they are more on the side of the user too. > Like for instance if you do shift right click it bypasses the website's attempt to hijack your contextual menu. I think Chrome disabled that. Interesting, didn't know that.
• lucky_cloud 4y ago
  I'd like to use FF but I've never been able to figure out how to replicate something Safari does that's ingrained in my fingers at this point. In Safari, I can use command+1-9 to open bookmarks. So command+1 is my PRs, command+2 is the JIRA board for the current sprint, etc.
  • bmn__ 4y ago
    You can give bookmarks nicknames, e.g. "PR". You can activate those from the location bar by typing the nickname. Then set up a keyboard macro that maps <command>+<1> to <control>+<l>, <p>, <r>, <Enter> etc.
• thrdbndndn 4y ago
  I honestly don't think there is much difference between each major browsers nowadays, so just pick whatever you like. I personally go full utilitarianism about the tools/software I use, so I can't care less about the companies behind them. I was an avid Firefox user since version 1.5, simply because it was objectively superior than competitors and way more polished (at the time, other browsers like IE didn't even have tabs). Then Chrome came out, which was indeed blazingly fast but the feature set just wasn't there (in both basic features and the extension scene. It didn't even have a proper multi-language font setting which was a deal breaker for me). A few years past, XUL-based Firefox became unbearably slow (it didn't help that I have 50+ addons), and Chrome was steadily catching up in every aspect. Right before Firefox's transition to Quantum, I couldn't take it any more and started to use Chrome primarily. After 57, Firefox Quantum was obviously great, but at that point I just didn't have any reason to switch back. All the heavy lifting parts (webext) are the same, so it's down to some minor details, which TBH, I'm getting used to the "Chrome way". The final nail in the coffin of Firefox for me, is its development. I'm not a professional software developer, and lack the ability to contribute code to large open source projects like browsers. So instead, I tried my best to help by reporting bugs. I've filed at least 50~100 tickets on both Mozilla's bugzilla and chromium's trackers. I hate to say it, but I can see the sheer difference between the maintenance effort of the two projects, even in basic triage. I understand the two companies are not really comparable in their sizes, but Firebox's is declining hard. It was much better several years ago. More and more bug tickets are not touched by anyone. Legit problems got closed for no reason. Sometimes you can even spot management-level interference despite clear objection from users and even internal developers, which I would think I should see more on Chrome's end. Filing bugs about Firefox no longer feel fulfilling or even fun, because I KNEW if it's a minor issue, it won't get fixed in years, if at all (hell, it took them 5+ years to fix something major like full-range video playback). I just don't have faith in its future.
• Semaphor 4y ago
  For extensions: [0] Better History NG (my fork of the unmaintained non-NG version, so far I only fixed bugs, so it works again, same performance issues as before), apparently inspired by the Vivaldi history. [1] uMatrix, which has the superior interface for blocking/unblocking of domains compared to uBlock (which you obviously have as main adblocker ;) ) [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/better-history-ng/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/better-histor... [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/umatrix/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/umatrix/
• innerbits 4y ago
  Firefox is my primary browser at present but definitely has annoyances: - unable to close pinned tabs without custom extensions - unable to undo close open tabs after closing last window (also solved with extension) - pins itself to taskbar and install desktop icon on every install - I prefer how downloads' progress is handled in Chrome better - Not all settings are synchronized (esp. around privacy), making it very hard to configure computers the same consistently Favorite extensions: - Vimium - Undo Close Tab - Shortkeys (using it specifically to move tabs around) - Aardvark Duex
  • ectopod 4y ago
    On your second point the History menu has a Restore Last Session option (or something like that) when you reopen the browser after inadvertently closing a bunch of tabs.
  • account42 4y ago
    > unable to close pinned tabs without custom extensions Middle click works and there is also a context menu option to close the tab.
    • innerbits 4y ago
      I should've clarified that I meant closing using keyboard shortcuts
• marginalia_nu 4y ago
  I use Firefox sort of begrudgingly. It's marginally less bad than the other options, but it's still an awful browser. I vehemently disagree with almost all of its design decisions, and with every new release they seem to stray even farther from sane UX. It has hamburger menus on desktop and a lot of weird space-saving design that makes no sense on a modern high resolution display. Buttons are small, have cryptic flat Linear B icons with no labels, and the menus are hard to navigate. It's also nearly impossible to disable all the tracking they do. Even if you do, they'll sometimes remotely change your settings, so there's no guarantee settings will stay the way you configured them. They love to talk about how privacy is important and keep building tools to disable other people's tracking, but their own data gathering is sacrosanct and must be retained at all costs. Overall Mozilla seems to wage an all-out war on user agency, constantly trying to take away configuration options, while pushing shit nobody wants like Pocket or their themes.
  • micahdeath 4y ago
    This also sounds like Chrome and Edge.
    • marginalia_nu 4y ago
      Yeah. I think part of the problem is that if all they're doing with their browser is to emulate Chrome, they'll never be more than a Chrome clone.
  • 3np 4y ago
    Some of those things are sorted out easily with Librewolf (patched Firefox) and Arkenfox (drop-in user.js configuration). Both are easy and encouraged to customize but also work fine out of the box.
  • starik36 4y ago
    > Buttons are small... I don't understand this criticism. How often do you actually have to use those buttons? At best, once in a long while. So given that, why not make the buttons unobtrusive.
• LoganDark 4y ago
  And if you use it longer than 30 mins the memory leak will crash your computer. /s (this is my own experience, FWIW, but I understand not everyone has this.) -Emily
  • reportgunner 4y ago
    Works well on my machine(s), even the 2010 TP x201 that has a whopping 4GB RAM.
    • LoganDark 4y ago
      yes, our comment indeed said that not everyone has this problem -Emily
  • timbit42 4y ago
    Are you on macOS? FF has some issues on macOS.
    • LoganDark 4y ago
      I wish we were on macOS, but unfortunately we only have access to Windows now. So it was on Windows 10 Home 2004. -Emily
      • timbit42 4y ago
        I know a number of people using FF on Windows and they all find it works fine. Hmm.
        • LoganDark 4y ago
          Yes, we're aware that most people don't have this issue. -Emily
• bartimus 4y ago
  I wasn't happy when they moved the "Close tabs to the right" menu option into a submenu and then not have that configurable. It's an important feature for me. I now need to install an add-on to get the desired behavior. Which just seems a bit silly to me. For the rest it's wonderful.
• crazygringo 4y ago
  I love Firefox too but this is a really weird post. The OP is clearly having performance issues with Chrome presumably due to extensions interfering or something else. I can guarantee you that Google makes sure Gmail loads at least as fast in Chrome as in Firefox. Chrome is customizable too (panes you can open/close), Chrome extensions are also thriving, and Chrome was the one who invented the "clean look", same as Firefox invented tabs. This post just feels like weird marketing. There's nothing actually substantive about it. It doesn't feel like it belongs on HN.
  • bbor 4y ago
    I think it’s just some uncritical excitement. Given the typical discourse on our browser options, I thought it was nice :) perhaps not academic or technical, but relatable.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • shaunsingh0207 4y ago
    Chrome also has objectively better performance (https://www.phoronix.com/news/Firefox-Chrome-109-Benchmarks https://www.phoronix.com/news/Firefox-Chrome-109-Benchmarks), especially for 3D performance. I'm sure on modern machines both browsers are more than fast enough, but I'm not quite sure why everyone seems to think firefox is faster. On the other hand, I feel like the nyxt browser (https://nyxt.atlas.engineer https://nyxt.atlas.engineer) has a spot on HN, its very much like emacs in the sense everything is just Common Lisp you can redefine. Its definitely still considerably slower than chrome and firefox, webkit doesn't perform all too well.
    • Idiot_in_Vain 4y ago
      "objectively better performance" What are yon talking about? How many people browse the web on an i9 13900K with 32GB RAM? Try a 5 year old laptop with 4GB RAM and you'll see a completely different picture - Firefox is far better at managing limited memory. Also on Android (probably on iPhones as well) Chrome doesn't allow installation of ad-blockers - making it 10x slower than FF with uBlock Origin.
• nmstoker 4y ago
  I considered switching a while back, but it only got compelling when I took the leap and switched on Android and my various desktops. Sync'ing is great, general use is pretty good. I keep Chrome in backup for a handful of sites that just don't work on Firefox. Not sure if it has changed recently but for ages the regular version of Firefox on Android lacked several things that were in Firefox Nightly (eg pull down to refresh, which might seem trivial but it's annoying as anything when it's not there!)
• throwaway2056 4y ago
  > Some really cool observations in first 30 mins of using it : > 1. It opens websites really quickly, much faster than Chrome This is the same thing everyone says whatever new browser they move to. Once some one hoards 100 tabs it becomes slow. (Again,I am not against firefox or chrome - just meaning that everything is quick initially - somehow becomes slow in a few weeks)
  • rrishi 4y ago
    Yea I put that in as a disclaimer that these are my first impressions after a quick 30 min session. I'll see how it feels after month or two
• Zurrrrr 4y ago
  I use Waterfox personally, but it's a minor difference. Some lesser known extensions: LocalCDN Tab Session Manager Feedbro Enhancer for YouTube Request Control Trace There is a lot of configuration you can do with a user.js file as well. I took a lot of options from the tor browser config since I value privacy.
  • morjom 4y ago
    I recommend checking out some of the guidelines of the arkenfox.js for extensions. https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/wiki/4.1-Extensions#-dont-bother https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/wiki/4.1-Extensions#-don...
  • isleyaardvark 4y ago
    Is the fact that it’s owned by an analytics/ad company a concern for you? https://avoidthehack.com/review-waterfox-browser#thebad https://avoidthehack.com/review-waterfox-browser#thebad
    • Zurrrrr 4y ago
      No, but I'm choosing to trust the developer for the moment. https://www.waterfox.net/docs/faq https://www.waterfox.net/docs/faq
• pornel 4y ago
  I'm a tab hoarder, and I love the scrolling tab bar. No matter how many tabs I keep open, they remain readable, instead of squishing into ||||||||||||||.
  • mcv 4y ago
    Definitely. I wouldn't mind a feature that makes it easy to locate a particular tab, though. Often I know I've got it open somewhere but I just can't find it, causing yet another duplicate tab.
    • glandium 4y ago
      type % in the url bar, and keywords will search in your open tabs.
  • rrishi 4y ago
    Yes the scrolling tab bar is another good design choice.
• alhirzel 4y ago
  The Tree Style Tab extension[1] is wonderful for "keeping tabs" on our modern "to forget" lists (unclosed tabs). Putting tabs on the left is also a good screen real estate trade for wide aspect ratio screens. [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
  • Kim_Bruning 4y ago
    Tree Style Tabs is absolutely vital to me, I don't understand how people can live without that extension. The other thing I use a lot is firefox's readability builtin (it's not an extension), which removes all the cruft and *walls from websites and makes them... readable in one click. These two together are killer apps for me. I might consider switching to another browser (firefox isn't exactly the paragon of virtue it used to be either anymore), but the new browser would need to have these two features.
    • silon42 4y ago
      I used to use it, until I wrote my own vertical tabs extension, which acceptably handles thousands of tabs...
      • noloblo 4y ago
        Is there a link to this extension for your own vertical tabs
      • throwaway290 4y ago
        Safari has vertical tabs natively now. The interesting part is hierarchical tabs
        • kiliankoe 4y ago
          Where does Safari have vertical tabs? I've been using Orion for a while now mainly for that feature, a WebKit browser with well working vertical tabs.
• qwerty456127 4y ago
  Indeed. It's the best. Unless you have a veeeery old PC (if you do then Chrome feels faster).
• dom96 4y ago
  > I'd be glad to learn of any other cool features and extensions that y'all might want to share. I built an extension to inject your Mastodon timeline into Twitter[0], recently added Firefox support as well. Especially useful as a stop gap in light of Twitter getting rid of their API access and hopefully will be a first step for many to transitioning to Mastodon. [0] - https://chirper.picheta.me https://chirper.picheta.me
• PaulHoule 4y ago
  Firefox has been my main browser for a long time. At work we have one screen an an interface that has an extreme number of items in a grid control. Chrome is noticeably faster in that screen but otherwise I find Firefox performance to be great.
• branon 4y ago
  Firefox View is decent, I don't often wish to transfer tabs between devices, but Colorways has a home now which makes much more sense.
• synergy20 4y ago
  I use firefox more and more these days on my android phone as it does ads-blocking _much_ better than chrome, like 100x better, after many years I somehow feel it might be time to retry firefox on desktops.
• mancerayder 4y ago
  My browser preference is almost 100% tied to how well it blocks ads and auto play/scripts and other enemies of attention. The rest is mostly irrelevant to me personally.
• AndroidKitKat 4y ago
  For my new job, I've switched to using the Orion Browser [1] from Kagi since I was noticing some weird typing lag on my MacBook in Firefox. I still use Firefox at home on Windows, but native vertical tabs in Orion are enough for me to use it full time. It's also handy that it supports both Firefox and Chrome extensions, albeit some features don't fully work (e.g. "Block element" of uBlock Origin doesn't let me choose anything). I'm not a fan of Mozilla currently, but they do have the least bad non-chromium, multiplatform browser out there. [1]: https://browser.kagi.com https://browser.kagi.com
  • shaunsingh0207 4y ago
    I've found Orion wonderful as well. It fixes all my extension gripes with safari while still keeping the performance and battery life.
  • rrishi 4y ago
    Interesting, definitely going in my list of browsers to try at some point in the future.
• Mathildebuxton 4y ago
  [dead]
• kls0e 4y ago
  LibRedirect by ManeraKai redirects YouTube, Twitter, TikTok... requests to alternative privacy friendly frontends and backends. https://libredirect.github.io/ https://libredirect.github.io/
• tgv 4y ago
  Right now? It's been like this for years.
• t0bia_s 4y ago
  I prefer a fork of Firefox, focused on privacy: https://librewolf.net/ https://librewolf.net/ Highly recommended.
• tommica 4y ago
  Yep, its the best!
• znpy 4y ago
  Firefox used to be even better. I’m still bitter they dropped that workspaces feature where you could group tabs together and switch to a completely different group of tabs witha few keystrokes. And no, the replacement feature is not equivalent nor better in anyway. Still better than that bag of spyware trash that google chrome is.
• yashg 4y ago
  Firefox is my default browser across devices. The killer feature of FF for me is primary password. One main password which protects all my other passwords and I have to enter it once after I start the browser.
  • josefresco 4y ago
    Yeah I love the primary password feature. Chrome now prompts to login which is nice (to protect your saved passwords), but I like Firefox's "local control" model better.
• lazerl0rd 4y ago
  Still waiting for FIDO2 support on macOS, unfortunately.
• fellerts 4y ago
  I recently switched from Chrome to Firefox and have not looked back. What eventually threw me over the edge is a recent "fix" [0] in Chromium after which Chrome will scroll an enormous distance per click of the scroll wheel from my MX Anywhere mouse. Of course, there's no way to get the old behavior back (see: https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/). In Firefox, the scroll multiplier can be tuned to perfection. [0] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1270089#c27 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=127008...
• tzs 4y ago
  Firefox was my main browser on Mac for years, but a year or two ago it got demoted to secondary primarily because of one issue: spelling. I just found myself spending too much time when writing anything in Firefox dealing with false positives in its spell checker [1]. I still have no idea why it has so many false positives. They use the same open source spell checker that LibreOffice, Chrome, and MacOS use, and none of those have trouble with the words that Firefox does. (I don't know what Microsoft uses, but Office on Mac and Windows and Edge on Windows also are fine with the words Firefox can't handle). That suggests they just need a better English dictionary, which they could get from LibreOffice. [1] Here are some words it incorrectly flags as misspelled: manticore survivorship misclassified ferrite massless rotator dominator untraceably synchronizer. Those were reported on their Bugzilla bug for reporting spell check problems 25 months ago. Here are some more, reported 19 months ago: ad hominem backlight coaxially hatchling impaction intercellular irrevocability licensor measurer meerkats mischaracterization misclassification misclassified partygoers passthrough plough retransmission seatbelt sensationalistic trichotomy underspecified untyped. All the words in batches I submitted 30 months or more ago have been fixed.
  • bmn__ 4y ago
    Weird, the English (UK) dictionary knows most of these words. https://files.catbox.moe/wfbedm.webp https://files.catbox.moe/wfbedm.webp
  • rrishi 4y ago
    Interesting, I'll keep an eye out if I encounter this issue
• myfonj 4y ago
  > All parts feel really customizable. This is one of the selling points for me as well. Literally just before opening HN I've looked at my overflowing bookmarks toolbar and thought "Those folder icons and default favicons feels quite unnecessary any only occupies precious space. Let's get rid of them." and then did exactly that in few lines in the userChrome CSS [1] and voilà, toolbar no longer overflows. I don't think any other major browser lets you do that. [1]: https://gist.github.com/myfonj/f5415dd0580663a82ea18407ef2ee5de#file-_userchrome-css-L420-L446 https://gist.github.com/myfonj/f5415dd0580663a82ea18407ef2ee...
• INGSOCIALITE 4y ago
  I used Firefox exclusively for years, but I switched away when they bundled “pocket” and kept trying to force it down my throat.
• rchaud 4y ago
  Tab Stash is amazing. This is how bookmarking should work in the modern age, where it's normal to have > 50 tabs open, and not want to close any of them. Click one button, and all your open tabs are saved in a nice, tabular view. If you saved tabs from yesterday as well, those will be visible in another grid on the same screen, so you can drag and drop tabs into categories, which you can then rename. Brilliantly simple. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/tab-stash/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/tab-stash/
  • rrishi 4y ago
    Yes I like it too.
• einpoklum 4y ago
  > I was having trouble loading GMail in Chrome You should avoid using GMail. Messages sent from and to GMail addresses are occasionally copied to the US government, and analyzed and possibly copied by various commercial companies who pay Google/Alphabet for the privilege. (You should also encourage your friends to stop using GMail). Also, regardless of whether it's GMail or not - use an email client. GMail and all other email providers suppose access using the IMAP and/or POP3 protocols. That (mostly) guarantees no ads, and is much faster. As for Firefox - Mozilla has decided to block extensions' access to most APIs and limit them only to a "WebExtensions" API (even though Mozilla's internal UI code is basically just like an extension, i.e. they don't _have_ to do this.) So, FF is only partially customizable and manipulable, and the extension ecosystem is somewhat stunted. I use FF, but let's not go overboard with the praise.
• propogandist 4y ago
  Firefox gets all their operating funding from Google’s Search agreement. This prevents FF from protecting user privacy as it’d jeopardize their primary source of income. Firefox also has a lot of telemetry and experiments enabled, even if users opt out in the GUI. These have to be disabled in the about:config setting. It is the slow and uses a lot of RAM, but despite all these thing it’s the second most popular for a reason (kept alive as an easy way for Google Chrome to avoid anti-trust)
  • ggrelet 4y ago
    Could you kindly provide a reliable guide about how to completely disable telemetry in FF?
    • propogandist 4y ago
      There are many such guides out there with each covering slightly different things, this may be a good starting point https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Firefox/Privacy https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Firefox/Privacy
  • Parae 4y ago
    > Firefox also has a lot of telemetry and experiments enabled, even if users opt out in the GUI. These have to be disabled in the about:config setting. Have you heard of LibreWolf ? It is basically FF without the telemetry and with a lot of privacy and security features [1]. I've been using it for 2+ years and I'm very happy with it. The transition from FF to LibreWolf was seamless. [1]: https://librewolf.net/docs/features/ https://librewolf.net/docs/features/
    • propogandist 4y ago
      It’s been a while since I’ve looked for alternatives, and I remember coming across Ice Weasel and similar forks in the past, but they had slow security updates. I will take a look at Librewolf.
• readingnews 4y ago
  I use firefox a lot. When I have to build a PC / workstation for grad-students or labs, I install linux, and the distro I use has Firefox by default and no chrome installed. The number one complaint / request I receive when I build a PC / workstation for the grad-students after they get it? Can you please install Chrome? When I ask them... they have not even tried Firefox. Chrome is all they know, and therefore they do not want to even look at Firefox. As a longtime user of Firefox, I find it odd. I suppose if you put me on a new box, with Chrome as the only browser that came up, I guess I would ask you to install Firefox :)
  • pwg 4y ago
    > The number one complaint / request I receive when I build a PC / workstation for the grad-students after they get it? Can you please install Chrome? Have you tried changing the desktop Firefox icon to be chrome's icon and naming it Chrome? This complaint sounds like the old meme from years back of not so internet savy folks who thought "the internet" was inside "the blue ball" (the old IE icon). I.e., these students only know "Chrome" and only look for the chrome icon. It would be interesting if they would complain if the icon matched their possible expectations.
    • readingnews 4y ago
      Ah, the old social behaviour experiment. I like it. I might change my image to reflect that.
      • pwg 4y ago
        If you give it a try, it would be interesting to learn the results.
  • rrishi 4y ago
    Reminds me of the meme that the only thing people search on Internet Explorer is "download Chrome". I hope some of them give FF a fair chance.
• AltruisticGapHN 4y ago
  Putting aside all politics, end of the day, despite all of Google's shortcomings - they actually got the UX of Google Chrome REALLY RIGHT. The tabs are awesome. The unified search bar is awesome. The top panel UX is really tight and compact and looks good at the same time. The ability to sweitch between profiles which I now use a lot (work/leisure) works great. ps: did I mention the smaller details like the immediate visual feedback you get when you use a search keyword? It's frigging awesome and one of the main reasons I abandoned Firefox and never looked back. I mean even if you disliked Google you can just use Chromium or some un-Googled version. Chrome is literally the BEST browser UX as far as mainstream is concerned. Obviously power users are always going to find issues with it. But as an attempt to provide a user friendly browser for the largest audience possible, it's simply excellent.
  • deafpolygon 4y ago
    > The tabs are awesome. Not that special anymore. > The unified search bar is awesome. No, they're not. By design they're very leaky, they send your typed queries to the search engine that your browser is set to PLUS a few to Google for analytics. That includes every website you type the address into.
• lycopodiopsida 4y ago
  I feel it is the awesome browser since some years, already. With UBO, TSTabs and containers every other browser out there feels broken.
• sshine 4y ago
  I love Firefox, too. It is more customizable than Chrome. But it isn't fast. Especially not on iOS.
  • cassianoleal 4y ago
    Firefox, as well as every other browser on iOS, is as fast as Safari since they are all required to use the same WebKit rendering engine. That is, at least with regards to website rendering.
• k_ 4y ago
  Funny timing for me to see this on HN today After some years of love/hate relationship with Vivaldi, I'm currently trying (once again...) to go back to Firefox after one too many chrome-based browsers fuck-up: opening Edge in a windows VM suddenly got my RAM usage up by 32GB, which were shared with my non-VM chrome-based browsers (chromium, vivaldi). First time just crashed my whole computer, second time I had to kill it all (the memory usage moved to chromium and then vivaldi when I closed the VM). Vivaldi performance issues (and some bugs) was already putting me on the edge very often, but I really like the features so switching is very hard and will take a lot of time getting used to. Mouse gestures, panels, integrated mail (took way too long to come), tab stacking/tiling, command palette, etc. Sure some of these have firefox extensions doing something similar but it's still far from being the same.
  • frebord 4y ago
    Recently started Vivaldi and it's pretty nice! I switched because it's the only decent browser that I can remove the address bar and use it only with a hot key. So far it seems fast enough and haven't run into bugs. It does have a ton of features that I'll never use that I wish were extensions or something
    • k_ 4y ago
      I'm experimenting with that right now on firefox with userChrome.css changes, and it's starting to work: /* Kinda unrelated, but I'm using this to go with Sidebery / Tree Style Tab */ #TabsToolbar { visibility: collapse; } /* Hide the whole top bar */ #nav-bar { position: fixed; top: -10vh; width: 100%; z-index: 1; height: 0; min-height: 0 !important; } #urlbar-container:focus-within, #search-container:focus-within { position: fixed; top: 15vh; left: 50%; background: #111; outline: 4px solid #f8b218; box-sizing: border-box; padding: 1em; transform: translateX(-50%); width: 40vw; border-radius: 4px; } Top bar stays hidden, but url bar / search bar appear when I press ctrl+l / ctrl+k. Likely need to tweak css to your likings, and you need to set toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets to true in about:config to enable userChrome.css (you can find various guides on that if needed)
• gabereiser 4y ago
  Front page of HN for what clearly is opinion and user error. Nice. Enjoy.
  • pictur 4y ago
    so much irrelevant stuff is on the front page now that i'm pretty sure they did it on purpose. and they are right, such things cause more comments and more discussion.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• raffraffraff 4y ago
  Recommend: 1. Sign up to Firefox sync 2. Install the Multi-Account Containers extension. Create containers to partition your identities. Eg: Banking, Shopping different Gmail accounts, different AWS console accounts etc 3. Install the "containerise" extension so you can create URL rules that automatically open sites in the correct container. (It can match URL regexes, allowing you to identify different accounts on each platform. Eg: on gmail, 'mail.google.com/mail/u/?authuser=hunter12@gmail.com', which you can bookmark as "Hunter12 Gmail") 4. Kagi search 5. uBlock Origin extension 6. Simple Tab Groups extension
  • clircle 4y ago
    What's the advantage of using multi-account containers and partitioned identities?
    • phaedrix 4y ago
      If you have multiple awa accounts it's a godsend.
    • raffraffraff 4y ago
      Typo in my text, can't correct it now. But you can simultaneously log into multiple Google accounts by putting each into a different container. These containers are mapped onto tabs. So in one tab, one Gmail account, in another tab, another Gmail account. And it's not just Gmail it's anything that you might want multiple accounts in (eg: AWS) The containerise extension is the cherry on top. Once you've set up your containers, it can recognise URL patterns so you can set up bookmarks for each Gmail account and they'll automatically open in the correct container, already logged in.
      • clircle 4y ago
        Interesting. I don't have multiple accounts.
  • trompetenaccoun 4y ago
    7. Don't use any add-ons for sensitive identities like the Banking one.
• revskill 4y ago
  It's not about Chrome, it's more about Google itself i think. Basically, Google services are mostly dead eventually, given enough time.
• laborman 4y ago
  Awsome, yeah, sure… what are the most interesring speed or usability improvements were in ff during past 2 years? How many core devs are working on changing things to make ff secure, faster and (not-so-dumb-)user-friendly? Telemetry opt out? Sure, but… you need to patch and build your own version of firefox to make it really privacy-friendly. And do not forget about re-branding. For me, OP looks overly excited and hallucinogenically optitimistic.
• mcv 4y ago
  Biggest difference compared to Chrome, of course, is privacy. Of course Chrome cares about performance and all that other stuff, but significantly less about privacy. The downside of that is that ReCaptcha sucks more than usual. Because Google knows less about me, I sometimes have to do a ReCaptcha two or three times before it will grudgingly acknowledge my humanity. Usually I see ReCaptcha as a sign not to use that site.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• throwaway1492 4y ago
  Shout out to all the peeps who never left firefox, and recognized Chrome for what it was. A cynical grab for influence and surveillance dominance it was from the beginning. Chrome always offered technical and ui excellence in exchange for your soul. Personally googles motto "don't be evil" always made me sick because corporations are by their very nature psychopathic. Now their motto is "do the right thing", yes, right by the company. Let's all be clear about what going on here.
• archontes 4y ago
  I want to begin typing a website's name, have firefox recognize it and indicate it to me, and press 'tab' to begin searching. The lack of that single feature makes firefox unpleasant to use for me.
  • radiojasper 4y ago
    that literally works in Firefox. It didn't in earlier versions, but it does now.
  • bmn__ 4y ago
    What does begin searching mean? I just tested, the tab key cycles through the list of results for the input typed into the location bar. What should happen instead?
    • archontes 4y ago
      If I type 'goog', and the history result is google.com, then pressing tab should result in calling the search function in the tab with google as the search engine, and with the cursor in the box for the query. It should not cycle through the drop down menu.
      • bmn__ 4y ago
        I can offer you search engine bookmarks as an alternative way to achieve this. For example, I have bookmarked https://www.npmjs.com/search?q=%s https://www.npmjs.com/search?q=%s with the keyword `n`, and https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/search?q=%s https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/search?q=%s with the keyword `mdn`. In the location bar, I type `mdn font-family` and submit, and this kicks off the search.
  • rrishi 4y ago
    This feature is present in my install. You should try updating perhaps.
    • archontes 4y ago
• chrismonsanto 4y ago
  At least for me (Linux, Wayland) it is literally unusable, due to this bug[1] and related issues in the comments. I finally stopped putting up with it and switched to Chrome this year, after being a loyal user since the browser was called Firebird. In retrospect I should have jumped after Mozilla ruined Firefox on Android. [1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1789602 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1789602
  • rrishi 4y ago
    Oh sad to hear that. I am on Windows though.
• nathias 4y ago
  Firefox nightly has become nearly impossible to use, everyone is blocking, falsly assuming your version is too low, trying to get you to use chrome or assuming you're a bot and forcing you into CAPTCHa hell.
• cloudking 4y ago
  We had a case where Chrome was choking on really large Google Sheets when you tried to use filter views, it would freeze for 10-20 seconds. With Firefox there was no freezing, which is strange considering Sheets should be optimized for Chrome.
• UltraViolence 4y ago
  I've been using Firefox for twenty odd years now. It's performance is comparable to that of other browsers. But the pilfering of Mozilla by its management (giving themselves million dollar bonuses and pretending they're managing a billion dollar corporation) and their illogical and fickle decisions has reduced IMHO the need for an independent open-source browser. The only rationale for having a browser like Firefox now is to push back against megacorps like Google adding extensions to prop up their agenda (like preventing ad-blockers from working). Mozilla had its day in the sun. I still use it but if it were to go away I wouldn't lose too much sleep over it.
• wolongong942 4y ago
  Opposite experience here. Long time Firefox user and in the past 3 years it's gotten incredibly bad for me as sites have gone more JS heavy, and video in particular has become a huge problem for my Firefox install it seems. Major sites like Youtube (~25% of videos get an error, forcing me to open in chrome), Reddit (yeah this one sucks for everyone, but at least loads on chrome if you have a high end pc+connection, which i do) and Instagram can't be reliably used for watching video. For years i used Firefox with a bunch of privacy/security-hardening settings but I've had to undo a lot of it to even use the web as of recent as the number of broken websites was getting too ridiculous.
  • DangitBobby 4y ago
    This doesn't really sound like a FireFox problem. Not sure how it could be their fault that installing extensions which intentionally disable parts of the browser required to run the websites you use breaks things. Literally none of those websites ever have any problems on any of the computers my family uses FF on, running UBlock Origin.
    • wolongong942 4y ago
      Ublock origin is my only extension and this is a fresh install with no about:config changes.
  • aembleton 4y ago
    I've never seen a YouTube video not play on Firefox. What does the error say? Can you give an example URL?
• beaconfield 4y ago
  Yay. I'm glad to hear more and more folks are moving back to Firefox. It really is the best browser IMO. Like you said, it's fast, stable, has all my extensions and gets out of my way. Love it.
• brailsafe 4y ago
  I've been using it on desktop for a while, but on Android it's pretty rough, at least with the address bar on the bottom. I think there's a bug with touch locations being mapped to the correct place on a website.
  • YoshiRulz 4y ago
    I can't fathom why you prefer it at the top, but it's in Settings > Customise.
    • brailsafe 4y ago
      I meant the opposite. I prefer it at the bottom, but it seems the app doesn't handle it well. I'm often unable to precisely hit targets on the screen like a link or giant button.
• shp0ngle 4y ago
  I’m using Edge because it’s like Chrome but has the vertical tabs which is a killer feature for me Does Firefox have vertical tabs? If yes, I am switching
• kevincox 4y ago
  > it seemed quite interesting to send links from phone to desktop This is a killer feature for me. Last time I used chrome it supported "pulling" tabs between devices but not "pushing". It seems like a minor difference but it really improves the UX for me. Often I am reading something on my phone but get interrupted so just fire it to my desktop. This is much better for me than remembering that I wanted to finish something and then find it in my list of tabs.
  • rrishi 4y ago
    Yea definitely a use case a lot of people would run into.
• 8bitme 4y ago
  It also supports a subset of extensions on the Android app vs most other browser apps that support no mobile extensions
• RektBoy 4y ago
  > "import saved passwords" Yikes
• bmacho 4y ago
  No it is not. In the past months/years they removed: - ability to zoom out images. Firefox has two different zooms, but none of them can zoom out images. If an image doesn't fit your screen, you can't see it period. - ability to open an image in the same window - ability to use different search engine in the search bar and URL bar - ability to quickly change search engine clicking the magnifier icon top right - custom search engine URLs - showing download speed I bump these into like every day, and they cause me minutes of annoyances. (and probably some others I can't recall now) Firefox 2 years ago was a way better browser than it is now. And a lot of things still missing, like proper profiles.
  • unethical_ban 4y ago
    In Firefox Developer Edition Desktop, I was able to - Quickly change search engine clicking magnifier icon top right - Set a custom search engine keyword ("wiki" + search term in the URL) via right-clicking a search bar - View download speed of an ISO file - Zoom images in and out, both as part of a page and as a standalone file I was not able to right-click > open image in same tab, or have different default engines in URL vs search bar. That last use case is really edge, considering they have a search bar with multiple search engines and one can set search keywords and for most people, having different engines per bar would be unexpected and confusing.
    • bmacho 4y ago
      Zoom is my wrong, I've set away browser.zoom.full option to text only.
  • dandellion 4y ago
    They removed RSS, removed compact mode, removed bookmark descriptions... I'm scared that at their current pace by 2030 they'll remove the last remaining feature and it will disappear.
    • codalan 4y ago
      Sometimes I wonder if Mitchell Baker and the product team are paid by Google to destroy their own browser.
• nunez 4y ago
  The reasons why I continue to use Safari right now despite wanting to use Firefox really badly: 1. Apple Pay integration only works in Safari. 2. Firefox on iOS uses MobileWebKit underneath, which is basically just Safari with a mustache 3. Firefox on iOS is (was?) also buggy in weird ways, like tabs would close unexpectedly or pages would fail to load. 4. (Biggest reason) Firefox on iOS does not support extensions. Safari does.
• makingstuffs 4y ago
  Personally I find the most useful part of FF to be the events inspector in the console. More often than not I use it solely for that purpose.
• bzmrgonz 4y ago
  Wait till you discover container tabs.. you're gonna love the way you browse!!!!
  • toyg 4y ago
    Container tabs feel so "good old internet": a power-user feature that changes the game but will never be very popular.
• wellthisisgreat 4y ago
  Pro tip: use Nightly on Firefox, it’s a much better experience
• jimbob45 4y ago
  Couldn't disagree more. Between ~October and ~December of last year, Firefox mobile on iPhone was essentially broken. The main menu would take 30 seconds or more to pop up. Switching to another app and coming back (or bringing up the control center) would result in Firefox hanging for 20 seconds if not outright crashing. Before last October, I would have recommended Firefox to anyone who asked. Now, I would recommend Chrome for their ability to fix bugs in a timely manner.
• dinkleberg 4y ago
  I use FF as my daily driver (but I'm also a Linux desktop user so take my views with a grain of salt lol) and I can't say the experience is any better than Chrome. But honestly I think that is probably the best thing that can be said about it. It works just as well as Chrome for all of my use cases and it isn't run by Google.
• egberts1 4y ago
  Right now, I have had to move off of Firefox on my iOS iPhone because Google persistent ad is punching thru some websites. Temporarily, Brave/iOS is filling in that void of much needed ad blocker.
• throwaway378037 4y ago
  Firefox enjoyer since 2008 over here :)
• ciroduran 4y ago
  Always has been I used Firefox when it came out, then I moved to Chrome when Chrome came out because Firefox was terribly slow (and it was because of the addons). When Chrome became slow because of the addons, I jumped back to Firefox, and I haven't looked back. It is specially important to use Firefox now given that there are very few non-Chromium alternatives for web browsers. Keep the web open!
• GuB-42 4y ago
  I use both Chrome and Firefox daily and I must say that over the years, from personal experience, Firefox has improved to the point of being about as fast and stable as Chrome. The downside is that Firefox lost most of its identity, the big one being XUL, which made for more powerful plugins and customization. So yeah, Chrome and Firefox are more of less interchangeable now and the choice is essentially about how much you like Google, and specific details. Details include the presence or absence of a plugin you particularly like, support for video codecs and DRM (for streaming platforms), and specific features and bugs. Generally, I find Chrome better on the "specific details", one of it ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=791429 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=791429 ) actually was the trigger that made me switch to Chrome some years ago. About extensions, I think all the extensions I use are available on both platforms or have equivalents. Now using - uBlock Origin (of course) - SponsorBlock for YouTube (autoskips sponsors in YouTube videos, user-contributed) - Behind the overlay (remove most overlays, have many equivalents) - URL to QR code (shows the current URL as a QR code, so you can scan it to open it on your phone, have many equivalents too)
  • JLCarveth 4y ago
    I disagree on the two browsers being interchangeable. Chrome supports quite a few Web APIs that Firefox doesn't. For example the lack of support for platform authenticators in WebAuthn.
• EchoReflection 4y ago
  Firefox is cool and would be great if it wasn't overly uptight about 2FA. Vivaldi is the best browser by far.
• rnmkr 4y ago
  [dead]
• rnmkr 4y ago
  Last time I benchmarked, Firefox was using way more RAM than Chrome. Microsoft Edge has been using most less RAM so I went ahead with it.
• Teamteam16 4y ago
  Hsolo8553@gmail.com
• nfriedly 4y ago
  If you use Android, Firefox on Android is also really nice because it can sync with your desktop and also has about a dozen extensions (ublock origin, dark reader, etc.)[1]. And then Iceraven[2] is even better, because it's just Firefox for Android, but with several hundred extensions enabled and a few other annoyances fixed. (A few years ago all extensions were enabled on Firefox on Android, but a few didn't work so they decided to limit it to a very short list of allowed ones. And then they let that list stagnate for years. Kind of a dick move IMO.) If you use iOS, then "Firefox" is really just a skin on Safari, so no extensions (this is entirely Apple's fault), but the sync features work, so that's something if you use Windows or Linux. [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/search/?promoted=recommended&sort=random&type=extension https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/search/?promoted=re... [2]: https://github.com/fork-maintainers/iceraven-browser https://github.com/fork-maintainers/iceraven-browser
  • Snuupy 4y ago
    fyi you can create a custom list of addons and tell iceraven to use that custom list, so all extensions can be installed (but are not guaranteed to work) on iceraven now.
  • commoner 4y ago
    > (A few years ago all extensions were enabled on Firefox on Android, but a few didn't work so they decided to limit it to a very short list of allowed ones. And then they let that list stagnate for years. Kind of a dick move IMO.) After years of negative user feedback, Mozilla finally enabled custom add-on collections in Firefox Beta for Android last October, which allows any add-on from addons.mozilla.org to be installed again. (Firefox Nightly for Android recieved this option in 2020, but the nightly channel was not stable enough for my daily use.) https://www.ghacks.net/2022/10/20/firefox-beta-for-android-now-supports-custom-add-on-collections/ https://www.ghacks.net/2022/10/20/firefox-beta-for-android-n... Last December, Mozilla announced their intent to fully support WebExtensions on Android with work starting this year. https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2022/12/15/new-extensions-available-now-on-firefox-for-android-nightly/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2022/12/15/new-extensions-av...
    • 4y ago
• OOPMan 4y ago
  Obvious shill post is obvious
• butz 4y ago
  Oh Firefox, the best of the worst browsers, as there are no new and exciting browsers any more. Added new unremovable extensions button, video conferencing support is still flaky, but I use it daily, no matter what. Maybe one day Andreas Kling's browser Ladybird will replace it...
  • codalan 4y ago
    I switched to Vivaldi for most of my browsing. I was a Firefox users for over a decade, but had to quit after they kept rearranging the UI every six months. Vivaldi isn't perfect. It takes a lot of searching around the internet to find out how to enable or disable certain options (and there are a lot of them), but right now I consider it the best of the worst for 2023. It's the most customizable, and the browser sync feature works pretty well.
    • butz 4y ago
      Thanks for reminding about Vivaldi. I loved Opera back in the day, when they had their own browser engine and kept on innovating browser UI.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• echobear 4y ago
  I just use firefox bc its opensource. I use it with the duckduckgo extension as my search engine
• throwaway894345 4y ago
  IIRC the thing that turned me away from Firefox most recently was the "Pocket" spam on the front page. I vaguely recall that you couldn't customize it, and the content that was pushed had a strong ideological bent that I just didn't want to have to deal with every time I opened my browser. I might be misremembering some of the details; it's been a few years. I tried Safari, Brave, etc as well but they all had usability issues in one form or another. I didn't really want to settle with Chrome, but it has been the least grating for me personally.
  • krackers 4y ago
    Firefox feels really visually noisy, almost to the point of spaminess on a fresh intall. Out of the box you have a gazillion ads everywhere on the new tab page, below that some "firefox tips" advertising sync, pocket shoved into the toolbar, when you go to the url bar it flies outward, inside the url bar there are buttons for various search engines, and there's a persitent "tab pickup" option that fools you into thinking you have a tab open when you're not. (Not to mention recently they removed tab distinction entirely). And to top it off it's a nightmare to even figure out how to do something basic like install your own extensions straight from a folder. Apparently if you download developer mode you can at least load unsigned packed extensions, but I don't want to do that, I just want to load it from a folder like the "load temporary development add-on" mode except permanent. Not to mention they don't even support something basic like reconfiguring keybindings without editing some obscure omni.ja file. Firefox forks might be better, but right now Firefox doesn't feel like it's really targeting anyone. I bet the average person would look at chrome compared to firefox and say the former feels "cleaner" and easier to use because it quite frankly is. On the flipside Firefox feels quite hostile to the power-user, and every update makes it feel like you're fighting the browser. At that point it's far less effort to use an ungogled chromium fork. At least despite their terrible decisions regarding manifest v3 they still allow you to load your own extensions with a simple checkbox.
• alganet 4y ago
  I agree. Maybe not for the same reasons: FF has awesome privacy tools and extensions. I use it because I can configure it to be extremely pendantic about a lot of stuff. For example, my setup requires me to whitelist each and every JS external script I ran to. The NoScript extension provides me granularity to choose whether fetch requests are allowed, fonts are loaded, etc. It remembers my choices and provides a quick UI for making these decisions. For normal, non-paranoid users, I would recommend Chrome though. Not exactly because it is better, but because some pages will only work properly on it (due to lack of testing by the page authors, this is not FF fault)
• bryan0 4y ago
  I'm not sure how it compares or works with Tab Stash, but I have used Tree Style Tabs[0] for years and couldn't live without it. [0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
• moneywoes 4y ago
  Any must have extensions?
• cronix 4y ago
  I love firefox except for a fairly recent feature adopted by chrome, which is the ability to update usb device firmware through a web browser via the Web Serial API. I do a lot of ESP32 stuff and it's so much nicer to be able to go to a webpage and just install the firmware directly rather than having to actually configure and compile it from scratch in vscode/platformio. For instance, if you want to install WLED, just go to https://install.wled.me https://install.wled.me, select the version, select the usb port your device is connected to and "install." Bam, done. Firefox team views it as insecure: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/336 https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/336
• hello2023 4y ago
  I've been using firefox for years... Firefox is cool. Slack huddle in my Firefox never works, I don't know why. But that's cool. If someone in the team needs a "huddle" I can give a reason and ask them to describe their problem instead. That works 99% and saves me a lot of time. I love firefox.
  • fersarr 4y ago
    I wish it had better permissions around extensions. So I could only allow them for certain pages like in chrome.
• amflare 4y ago
  Firefox is alright, and I use it for some things, but the killer feature preventing me from transitioning over is the inability to cast to my TV. Even with the janky plugins, the friction is too great to allow me to commit to a full switch of my browsing experience.
• frontierkodiak 4y ago
  FF with Sidebery is nearly perfect, except that it seems that persisting pinned tabs across sessions is an alien technology that nobody has quite figured out.
• jonaustin 4y ago
  Firefox's killer feature is isolated Containers. Dealing with multiple AWS accounts would be awful without them.
• soliton4 4y ago
  i started using firefox for spotify since i dont want to install the app and it would stop playing during potcasts after about ~1hour on chrome
• winrid 4y ago
  The FF JS engine is too slow. I like to check my Screeps account every now and then and even Chrome on my phone is faster than FF on my 2700x desktop. I just tried it last week. :/
• fIREpOK 4y ago
  > 3. Extensions ecosystem is thriving . I was glad to find my old favorite: Dark Reader. But I have also found a new favorite - Tab Stash. I also found an extension to download Youtube videos - Video Downloader, something I didn't find in Chrome https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extension-support-in-firefox-for-android-nightly/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio... About 2.5 years ago, extensions came back in Firefox mobile Nightly and it is still a hidden feature in mainstream Firefox? I just had to reinstall Firefox Mobile, and tried to re-add my addon collection and I get the following error messages "No addons here", "Failed to query addons" ... Why are cumbersome collections required to access the addons that you love?
• culi 4y ago
  People use a browser, overload it with extensions, then try a new one and are impressed by how fast it is lol On benchmarks, both Firefox and Chrome have their advantages and disadvantages. One thing about Firefox is it has a richer extension ecosystem so you're probably even more likely to fall into the trap of overloading your browser with extensions However since real adblocking is threatened in Chrome's future and adblockers can significantly improve performance on some sites, I wouldn't be surprised if eventually this works to Firefox's benefit
• fnordpiglet 4y ago
  The real reason to use Firefox is to prove Netscape won the browser war and Microsoft sucks.
• damnesian 4y ago
  My favorite is Library Extension which watches pages you surf for media titles and gives you a link to your library to check them out instead of buying them. Works well for me.
• mathfailure 4y ago
  Firefox WAS a good browser. Firefox has been a failure since their values shifted from developing an extensible browser for advanced users to protecting lgbtq+$^! rights.
• blacklight 4y ago
  This post feels a bit like fanboy without much data backing, but I think the OP could have mentioned a big win of FF over Chromium-based browsers: support for Manifest V2. As an extension developer who makes heavy use of HTTP requests and header sniffing, I feel like V3 literally put me in a cage carefully crafted by Google (and their explicit hatred for ad-blockers, no matter if making life difficult to uBlock developers eventually makes life hard for all other developers too). I feel like V3 is a grave mistake that eventually will make Chromium-based browsers less flexible. No matter if Brave announced that they'll keep supporting V2 extensions: they don't have their own store, they still rely on the Chrome store, and the Chrome store now only accepts V3 extensions. So FF announcing their continuous support for V2 is really a breeze of fresh air, and eventually it'll be (at least for me) their biggest selling point over Chromium.
• berry_sortoro 4y ago
  [dead]
• cod1r 4y ago
  Firefox's "Take Screenshot" feature is too good.
• mac-chaffee 4y ago
  Don't use it on macOS. It has no protections at all for cookie theft. Unencrypted SQLite DB sitting in a user-readable directory. Chrome and (I think) Safari both use encryption keys in the secure enclave. That's still not perfect (Chrome remote debugging and Safari code injection can get around those), but better than nothing at all.
• perfecthjrjth 4y ago
  Still, firefox drains battries on MacOS.
• INTPenis 4y ago
  Proud to say I never left. I used Mozilla, and as soon as Phoenix was released I jumped on it. Stuck with it through thick, thin and name changes. Just had a short period when Firefox became too bloated for my 256M FreeBSD laptop so I had to use Opera temporarily. But as soon as I upgraded my laptop I was back with Firefox. For a long time, maybe still, noscript was unchallenged on FF. Something about Chrome API not allowing the deep JS blocking required. I consider JS to be the number one threat online, so I must block it by default to feel safe(r). But really it's a no brainer to me that my web browser, my most used graphical program, should be FLOSS.
  • negative_zero 4y ago
    So there are others! I've also ever used Chrome and I never will. Also never used IE either. Netscape was way better. I actually found a copy of the Firefox 1.0.14 (I think) installer when going through an old hard drive a few months ago. That was a cool little discovery.
• scotty79 4y ago
  For months my Chrome (on Windows) just stopped showing new tabs when there are so many that they are supposed to scroll. Bug is known, but I haven't seen a solution even though it's not recent. Reinstalling doesn't help. Disabling extensions doesn't help. Same thing on another computer with same google account logged in.
• NetOpWibby 4y ago
  Firefox's default theme is just...bad. I use ideaweb's Safari theme https://github.com/ideaweb/firefox-safari-style https://github.com/ideaweb/firefox-safari-style
• parasti 4y ago
  I'm a daily Firefox user for many years, because they have the best devtools, in my opinion. But Firefox and Mozilla have weird priorities that are not focused on their users. I just don't understand them. Firefox added a "temporary feature" called Colorways that let's you, I guess, change the browser's color theme to one out of, like, five colors? Wasn't this a thing that you could already do twenty years ago, and it wasn't temporary? They also moved "Close tabs on the right" from the bottom of the menu and moved it to a submenu next to "Close tabs on the left". So now it's a multi-step process to close tabs on the right with a higher chance of misclicking on the action opposite of what I want, that I also will never use in my life. Just seems like they're fond of making many odd, small UI decisions to create the appearance of progress without really moving forward.
• agumonkey 4y ago
  chrome still has some slick and instantaneous-ness over firefox
• l0b0 4y ago
  Nice coincidence: I've been using Teams in Chromium for a few months because audio just wouldn't work in Firefox. The Chromium experience then kept degrading until I couldn't reliably receive video or audio. Usually it would "fix" itself with a reload or two, but when even a reboot didn't help I tried Firefox again. Lo and behold, everything worked immediately! I swear MS must be on their old "let's make sure the customers have to spend XX% of their time trying dumb shit to keep our products working, and the sunk cost fallacy will keep them using our software" shtick.
• voxelghost 4y ago
  What always sucks me back into chrome. * seamless japanese page translation * Firefox always seem to be applying an update at that critical moment where you just need the browser to start RIGHT NOW
• dorfsmay 4y ago
  I love Firefox, it's my daily driver except for two things: - printing (to a pdf or a printer). - copy paste In both cases chromium is much better at keeping the styling. Bugs have been reported for the later, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1772785 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1772785 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1646515 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1646515 but no progress is happening.
• ethcat 4y ago
  Multi-Account Containers made by Mozilla is the reason I can't stop using Firefox. Chrome doesn't have any similar extension that can display multiple profiles in one window like it does.
• chocolatera1n 4y ago
  I run Firefox in its own network namespace with Firejail so I can more easily observe traffic from Firefox with Wireshark. Unexpected traffic gets added to nftables to be dropped and logged. I almost feel like automating this process, but then I consider that I'd probably be better off running a fork of Firefox under different stewardship in the first place. https://librewolf.net/ https://librewolf.net/ looks very interesting for this reason. The health of the Librewolf project is interesting to look into.
• jdalgetty 4y ago
  It always has been. No real reason to use any other browser.
• sacnoradhq 4y ago
  There was a recently-resolved issue between macOS 13 + Chrome + Microsoft MDE that caused dragging tabs from one window to the other to either beachball or crash.
• hotcoffeebear 4y ago
  I mainly use firefox as well, but as lots of the people I have other browsers installed just in case. I like it, it’s fast and reliable for me, and I don’t want only-chrome future. I’ve kinda browser wrapper thing with a chrome based browser for few google apps, like Keep, Gmail and Calendar on Windows.
• oriettaxx 4y ago
  best for desktop for me, too, but absolutely very very bad for mobile, since * I cannot automatically clean cookies when I close it * I even have to close tabs manually
• fillipvt 4y ago
  I can't use Firefox in my work environment. It doesn't have some Chrome extensions that make it impossible for me to use, such as ones for Google services. It sucks because I dearly miss container tabs. If Firefox could support Chrome extensions, that would be game changer.
• octygen 4y ago
  I was going to buy a Pixelbook Go since it's a well-made laptop and I like the simplicity of ChromeOS. Then I realized that the first app I'd install is Firefox since it's vastly superior when it comes to ad-blocking especially on Android.