14 ms·

Firefox Sync actually works

515 points by Vinnl 3y ago

rldjbpin 3y ago
i gave it a try last month with some bad results. for context, i was using firefox containers before using sync, and i lost all my containers after trying this! the bookmarks did not get synced to a new device after logging in there either. i am sure there might be a good explanation for this or someplace i went wrong, but it is not idiot-proof yet to say the least. for most privacy-centric guys, just a bookmark sync solution is better suited imo, and some of them also work across different browsers fwiw.
Vinnl 3y ago
(Sorry for title editing; HN cuts of "The Best" if a title starts with that, which would make for a rather nonsensical title...)
- amelius 3y ago
  This makes me wonder how much of moderation (and thus headline editing) could be done by an LLM, and if that would be an overall improvement.
mempko 3y ago
This! I set up everyone in my family with Firefox because of sync that just works. I prefer reading content, especially PDFs, on my computer over my phone. One useful feature Firefox has is the ability to just send a tab to a device. When I am out and about, I would queue up reading papers by sending them from my phone to my computer. When I get home, my browser would have the tabs right there, ready for me to read.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- hiatus 3y ago
  I would add that chrome has a "send tab to device" feature that does as you describe.
saberworks 3y ago
I'm not convinced. Recently moved to a new computer and firefox didn't sync my settings in about:config and didn't sync my container assignments (had to go in and enable it manually in both the source and target computers, buried deep in the settings for the containers extension). It doesn't sync addons or addon settings. I don't think it synced all the interface customization (like removing pocket icon from the url bar, separate urlbar/search box), only some of it. I got my bookmarks, so that was helpful. To sync a lot of other stuff I was able to copy my prefs.js from the old to the new, and most of those settings worked.
- LtWorf 3y ago
  You have to login and enable sync separately in the containers plugin for that to work.
ugjka 3y ago
It can be a pain when you do large random deletes from browsing history, then sync can hang up for 20 minutes with lot of IO/Cpu. You can trigger this by doing "Forget this website" and if that website is a lot in your history
- xnzakg 3y ago
  I suppose it probably has to rewrite your entire history in that case? Deleting lines in log-like files isn't exactly easy. Actually, I wonder how that's stored in order for the search to stay responsive, some kind of bloom filter? Or just a normal database?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - ugjka 3y ago
    i think they use sqlite for everything
  - salil999 3y ago
    Most browsers use a SQL database for storing data like this.
baby 3y ago
Heh. Sync works on chrome too. IMO tree style tabs was the best thing firefox had and they killed it.
- neogodless 3y ago
  Does it only count if it's native rather than an extension? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
- temp0826 3y ago
  What do you mean killed it? I use a different addon for vertical tabs (there are many now) but isn't it still available?
- ropeladder 3y ago
  Tree style tabs works as well as it did before, except that it's more difficult to get rid of the top tabs.
  - yoavm 3y ago
    Check out my userChrome changes if you're into vertical tabs and a minimal UI: https://github.com/bjesus/fireside https://github.com/bjesus/fireside
bluelightning2k 3y ago
Firefox has grown on me since Google's war on ad blockers made me feel like it's "their" browser not mine. (Which is true ofc. But still.)
- briffle 3y ago
  tab containers are a huge bonus once you start using them that makes it very hard to look at other browsers again.
  - Vinnl 3y ago
    For the uninitiated: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/multi-account-conta...
    - mdaniel 3y ago
      and its companion, open in container https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/open-url-in-container/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/open-url-in-c... which allows forming links that open in the container of choice without having to pre-define rules for the container I use it every single day for spawning AWS SSO urls into their dedicated containers, since each url is always of the form console.aws.amazon.com which makes writing rules for it stupid hard
- hoherd 3y ago
  Same. I've tried to switch from a chromium based browser to FF several times over the last several years, and I always found something that was a deal breaker. A few months ago when the Google war on adblockers really started gaining steam, I tried the switch again, and it's been flawless, and I haven't found any good reasons not to use FF. It's been my default browser for at least two months now, and if it weren't for wanting web-usb for a few devices, I wouldn't even have a chromium based browser installed.
herdcall 3y ago
Yes, it just works; but a few days back all my devices suddenly lost almost all of the passwords. Not all but most of them, couldn't make out any pattern or reason. Luckily a Linux laptop that I don't usually use had the full set and I had to export them, sync, and import them back to restore everywhere. Very scary, any ideas why this could've happened? I immediately backed up for the future, but this kind of loss should not be happening.
- sherr 3y ago
  No idea. I've been using Firefox and Sync for years, currently on 5 devices (one android). Never had a problem. Firefox 121.0 (64-bit). This is the "release" channel. Maybe you're beta testing?
  - xrd 3y ago
    Me too. It is so flawless that I had forgotten how good it works until seeing this article pointing that fact out.
    - stavros 3y ago
      Same, I've been using Firefox for years and it's always just worked. Recently it got faster, too, now sending tabs between devices is instant.
  - herdcall 3y ago
    You know what, you could be onto something. I'm using the Firefox Developer version (122.0b3 64 bit). In any case, how are the differences resolved? E.g., in my recent case, all the devices ended up with only a handful of passwords (17), whereas the Linux laptop had 858. When I brought that laptop online (after exporting them), it synced and also ended up with the 17. I wonder what the logic was to deduce that the 17 are the ones to keep and the 858 should be deleted (there are some common ones of course). Because after sync when I imported the 858 back, it kept them all and synced them to all other devices, so it considered them as additions that should be kept.
- 3y ago
thecopy 3y ago
I love Firefox. It is a mystery to me why it is not more popular.
- dfgfek 3y ago
  [flagged]
- cuddlyogre 3y ago
  They're not an multi-billion dollar ad company that can pay to make their browser the de facto default.
- leosanchez 3y ago
  IMO. It's mostly due to not being default browser for major platforms.
- spinningarrow 3y ago
  For me the deal breaker is that it doesn’t use native UI elements on macOS which means patterns such as invoking menu items using the keyboard behave differently.
  - sensanaty 3y ago
    Does Chrome? Can't say I notice too much of a difference here on my macbook, other than slight color choices and paddings and whatever the 2 UIs are basically indistinguishable to me
- wharvle 3y ago
  I used it from when it was Phoenix until 2011 or so. I left because it was a lot worse than my main two other options on MacOS at the time, and they’d not followed through on the things that made me like it when I adopted it, so I hadn’t really loved it since late 1.x or early 2.x. I haven’t gone back because there’s no compelling reason to switch back from Safari. It is still my mod-downloading browser on my Windows gaming PC.
- latexr 3y ago
  In all HN Firefox threads with a sufficient number of comments you’ll see a variation of this comment, and people answering how Firefox fails as a daily driver for them. Firefox is missing a ton of very useful stuff for some people, such as some audio API or AppleScript¹. The latter absolutely kills it for any kind of automation on macOS. It’s the sole major browser on macOS without support for AppleScript but Mozilla people think that’s just a power user feature. I know because I talked with devs at various points, in person and online, and was given the same answer. Thing is, power users create automations for non-power users. When the latter want to use a tool from the former and the answer is “you can’t, Firefox doesn’t support it”, there’s another user lost. On a personal anecdotal level, I also don’t find it that stable. Just recently I wanted to try an extension and decided to do so on Firefox. After a while it just removed the extension from the list and it was seemingly impossible to get back, even after reinstalling. Every time I give Firefox a try, I am disappointed. I’m glad it works for you and many other people, but the answer as to why it isn’t more popular is that your experience is far from universal. ¹ Whose bug report has been open for 22 years: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=125419 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=125419
ilayn 3y ago
Why would anyone need a reason? I mean it seriously. Chrome users on this platform really baffling for me. They know what the consequences are, they know quite well what the icon with their picture on the corner does. Still being OK with this is super interesting. Most products are often get grilled here for having closed code parts or similar concerns but when it comes to giving complete audit of their online existence, "meh...". Same folks who criticize canonical (which I disagree strongly with their late practices) only to install chrome as their browser on their systems. Insert "statistically speaking" wherever needed.
- Filligree 3y ago
  Firefox stutters. Every couple of seconds, if I'm doing anything active on the page, it freezes up for a fraction of a second. I have no idea if that's a garbage collection issue or what, but it makes it painful to use. That being said, I'm on Safari instead. Chrome doesn't make me happy.
  - ilayn 3y ago
    When does it do that? I mean during doing what?
    - Filligree 3y ago
      When scrolling, for example. Though it’s a lot more obvious while running an animation, e.g. http://server.kimbruning.nl:8081/~kim/baughn/snowmageddon/dist/ http://server.kimbruning.nl:8081/~kim/baughn/snowmageddon/di...
  - askiiart 3y ago
    I've never seen this, and I've used FF (well, LibreWolf) on everything from a 2003-ish laptop to a 12th gen i5. I assume you've filed a bug report?
- zamadatix 3y ago
  I think the big difference is stated purpose vs execution, especially combined with who/when that elicits a response vs passive agreement/disagreement. An extremely small proportion of even the super techno-nerd crowd are really about the principles of open source, all other considerations be damned, when selecting software to use. That said, when something claiming supposed to be the bastion for that use case and antithesis of what the closed for profits do does something they'd expect from the latter it elicits an extremely strong response from nearly all of those that are as well as a good portion of those who have other considerations just because of the hypocrisy. Windows/macOS adding a new Bing or Siri integration somewhere, while getting some mumblings, isn't going to illicit nearly the same kind of reaction from the crowd though as everyone already knows and expects that of them. The majority of even highly technical users tend to use software based on what they find most productive, not necessarily the software with the best policies and licensing. So, statistically speaking, you tend to get complaints about open source software not being up to snuff or principle followed by most people choosing non-open software much of the time anyways because they feel it works better for them. For Firefox specifically, it's long failed at holding the web back from Chrome and the choice isn't about that anymore. That title has firmly been with Safari for a long time now. Because Safari isn't available on all platforms it leaves not much of a concern to choose a Chromium based browser outside that group who operate solely on principle not 100% of the browser is open source. I think for a long time Firefox languished a bit too far behind Chromium in many architectural aspects (I remember waiting fooooreeever for Electrolysis then when it came out the browser was significantly slower than Chrom* at the time). This comparison is leaps and bounds better today but it's a bit of a day late, dollar short situation in that it's not better enough to get droves of people to switch over again like the IE vs Firefox era. The other thing I'll mention is when the topic of browsers comes up people's goto is the last issue they personally had with each. Given the size and complexity of browsers combined with the amount of hardware, OS, and use case variance this tends to feel more akin to people arguing whether lottery numbers skew odd vs even based on their last experience than anything about the actual browsers. Even when the discussion steers towards talk of a specific feature a lot of the time that feature didn't even originate in the browser it's being brought up for.
gausswho 3y ago
I've avoided FF sync because I don't want my browser history on the cloud. I only really want my profile configuration, such as my addons and userjs flags. Unfortunately the FF directory in my .config is intermixed enough between config and content that I don't try to back it up. Am I missing something?
- threePointFive 3y ago
  FF Sync doesnt work by backing up your config directory to some cloud storage. That would be a recipe for disaster since your profile has certain machine specific settings configured automatically by the browser. When you enable Sync you get to explicitly decide which things you want to include in the sync. I have mine set to just addons, configs, and bookmarks.
- stavros 3y ago
  The sync contents are encrypted between devices. EDIT: After writing this, I realized I should investigate the claim, because new devices are added just by logging in, not by giving them any sort of password.
  - amelius 3y ago
    Yes, E2EE.
    - unshavedyak 3y ago
      The parent raised a good point tho. If you can add devices without entering encryption info, how can it be properly E2E?
      - caminante 3y ago
        I don't know what criteria is required to meet an E2EE (End to end encryption?) standard. In general though, the info is stored on Mozilla's (or an affiliate's) cloud.[0] 1. If you lose your password and didn't setup a separate password recovery code (one time codes), then your data is toast. You can't reset your password via email without wiping your cloud data because mozilla uses your password in a hashing algorithm to store your data. 2. If I recall, you have to setup a 2FA to login on new devices. [0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/features/sync/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/features/sync/ *EDIT: revised above to clarify mozilla password reset wipes data unless you have recovery key.
rrdharan 3y ago
Firefox on iOS randomly changes the order of new bookmarks, adding new ones to either the top or the bottom of the list. I assume they're assuming ordering in some underlying platform data structure that doesn't support it? EDIT: I guess it was this, though I think it's been broken again more recently? https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-ios/pull/11895 https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-ios/pull/11895 At any rate I've found Firefox on iOS/iPadOS to be surprisingly buggy.. tabs hang and need to be closed, not all bookmarks are synced and/or the ordering changing per above, showing sponsored ads in the new tab shortcuts list and needing a force-close until they go away after being disabled, etc. etc.
- gloryjulio 3y ago
  Firefox on ios is just a reskin of Safari. They would need extra effort to make the account system work on that
_lqaf 3y ago
Configuring browsers to mirror each other across machines makes a big soupy mess. I understand why surveillance capitalists like the idea, makes their lives a little easier. But I really don't get why I'm supposed to want it. I use different machines differently. The laptop I'm typing this on is my "main" browser, I have lots of bookmarks set up in a specific structure. I only use my phone browser when I have to, and it is rarely the same thing I've done before. It has a couple stale bookmarks, I don't care. I use the browser on my iPad even less. My big desktop is where I play with recreational software development, it has lots of bookmarks, but a very different set than my laptop. And my work phone/work laptop are their own things. It just seems like making every closet door in your house open the same closet, if that where physically possible. There are reasons different things go in different buckets.
- the_sleaze9 3y ago
  Shoutout to the time I was looking at job listings on my cellphone, which then immediately popped up on my work computer in front of my coworkers. I didn't even know there _was_ a sync feature, it got turned on automatically after an update. Fun. No sync please.
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    Don't use your personal account on your work browser. Or, actually, on anything in your work. (And the other way around too.) Nobody implements proper context switching and privacy from yourself. The only kind of privacy anybody even acknowledges the existence is from 3rd parties.
    - nottorp 3y ago
      Personal account? Account? When I switch from my desktop to my laptop and back, I sometimes get an extra Firefox icon in my dock. I once hovered over it and I think it was the sync feature. I don't have a Firefox account and I'm not signed in into any browser on any account. Why does it try to sync things without my permission?
pzmarzly 3y ago
Can some long-standing user of iOS Firefox say if the sync issues there have been fixed? Halfway-broken sync on iOS version of Firefox (as well as a general lack of love for it and the UI that kept getting redesigned every other month) was the reason why I switched to Safari 4 years ago.
- rrdharan 3y ago
  Still kinda broken and buggy.
- D13Fd 3y ago
  It's not fixed. It's still better than nothing, but it's weird to see an article singing its praises. I still use Firefox though, it's the best cross-platform browser overall.
- kobiguru 3y ago
  I have used Firefox sync in my new Mac M3 and it flawlessly synced everything from my older mac, my Android phone, my Linux workhorse, and Windows machine. Really love firefox.
ddxv 3y ago
This is the exact reason I've started using Firefox for the past few years and never looked back. My passwords are synced across devices and I just let FF autogenerate them. I memorize a couple important ones like email and banking, rest is handled by Firefox. Best is that it also works for apps on my Android.
nidnogg 3y ago
I have nothing but praise for Firefox's Sync. It has saved me countless times. Back when I had more than 4 active machines it would sometimes trip up here and there with a bookmark or another, but it was always really solid overall.
SloopJon 3y ago
See "Chrome Sync privacy is still very bad"[1] and its predecessor article[2] about Chrome and Firefox for an evaluation of the privacy and security of browser syncing. [1] https://palant.info/2023/08/29/chrome-sync-privacy-is-still-very-bad/ https://palant.info/2023/08/29/chrome-sync-privacy-is-still-... [2] https://palant.info/2018/03/13/can-chrome-sync-or-firefox-sync-be-trusted-with-sensitive-data/ https://palant.info/2018/03/13/can-chrome-sync-or-firefox-sy...
PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
It does work very well, but personally I'd appreciate a mechanism that I could implement manually and without the cloud. Something like "copy files Foo, Bar and Baz on the source device to folder DooDad on the target device". I appreciate that this doesn't work for mobile devices with their filesystem-free presentation, but even there I'd rather explicitly import data from a file I downloaded than have it move through the cloud.
- ijustlovemath 3y ago
  You should check out SyncThing. It's a privacy-respecting p2p file sharing application that you can use like Dropbox. A little fiddly to set up but works like a charm once you get it going
- abound 3y ago
  Firefox's sync service is open source [1], so you can self-host it and update your about:config to point to it. I do this and it works great. (I believe you can even self-host the accounts service if you really want to) Caveat is that I've linked to the old Python one, and they've got a new Rust one, but it didn't support SQLite the last time I had checked. [1] https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncserver https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncserver
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  You can copy around profiles, which are just directories, or if you only want bookmarks you can export/import them to HTML or JSON easily enough from in Firefox.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
    Generally, I only want passwords, and I want a workflow that can be scripted 100%.
Timber-6539 3y ago
No need for bookmarks. My smooth brain doubles up as a zero-latency information resolver.
salil999 3y ago
If you're in the Apple ecosystem then Safari has had this for a while.
- pivo 3y ago
  Something that's frustrating to me wrt Safari is my, admittedly edge case, in which the company I work for won't allow using personal Apple IDs on company supplied macs. Apple only allow Safari sync to work between computers with the same Apple ID, which I sort of get, but still that makes it useless to me. This same-Apple-ID restriction causes other issues too, like not being able to use my iPhone as a webcam on my work mac even though I can use my AirPods on that same mac because reasons. Luckily for me, I'm super happy with Firefox.
yesimahuman 3y ago
It’s too bad that Firefox has such a great UX and privacy-focused cloud features like this, yet is being held back by its engine. As a heavy FF user for the last few years it’s become more and more clear that the world just doesn’t care about making sites work on FF and I’m more frequently having to switch to Chrome. My dream is that FF would switch to Chromium while keeping all the great features around the browser engine. But suggesting such a thing is blasphemy in the FF world so we’re stuck with an engine that no one targets any more and isn’t keeping up with modern web APIs more web devs are using.
- GeekyBear 3y ago
  In a decade of use, I have yet to run into sites that don't work just fine with Firefox.
- intrasight 3y ago
  It's too bad that I can't read the article - because I'm using Firefox and an ad blocker. I get "Something went wrong. Please disable your blocker on How-To Geek"
  - lagniappe 3y ago
    Works fine on my Firefox with several blockers.
  - tetris11 3y ago
    works fine for me with uBO
  - MrDrMcCoy 3y ago
    I'm using Mull, an Android Mobile browser based on Firefox with some privacy tweaks, with uBlock origin enabled, Android set to use NextDNS with even more adblocking, and a VPN. The page loads just fine for me. Maybe you're missing one of the lists that helps with anti-adblocking?
  - GeekyBear 3y ago
    Works fine on Firefox with uBlock Origin.
entropie 3y ago
Braves syncing is also top notch. I can watch the bookmark bar dissapear almost in real time on other machines (eg. notebook) when I use it. I do not sync passwords, though.
url00 3y ago
Obviously this is only one anecdote so take it with a grain of salt but my experience with Firefox Sync was abysmal. I had it corrupt my bookmarks db twice in a year of using it. Fixing it required digging into my profile folder on Windows and manually deleting the db file while also disabling sync. Otherwise it would just redownload the corrupted db. It was bad to the point where I couldn’t even make new bookmarks with the corrupted file. Anyway, it really burned me on FF since. It’s probably fixed now (or at least I hope it is) and I want to go back but given the lack of priority put on FF by Mozilla I’m just nervous to make the change again.
barkerja 3y ago
For all its issues, I wouldn’t say iCloud syncing is one of them for Safari. I’ve had nothing but a good experience over the past couple years when it comes to syncing tabs, bookmarks and passwords.
- spinningarrow 3y ago
  I have the opposite experience. Sometimes I see tabs from some of my devices, sometimes all of them, sometimes a few of the tabs and sometimes all of them. If I want to “hand off” browsing to another device I pretty much always have to use AirDrop.
- latexr 3y ago
  > I’ve had nothing but a good experience over the past couple years when it comes to syncing tabs There was a period where it sucked at syncing tabs for me, as it repeatedly showed tabs from other devices that no longer existed. Quitting them from that interface would not work as they would soon be back. I found many reports of the same problem online. Fortunately it’s been working consistently well for long enough that I can rely on it again.
the_common_man 3y ago
The most compelling reason is it is not chrome
deleted 3y ago
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nonbirithm 3y ago
Last time I tried sync with Firefox it saved all the extensions I installed but not the customized layout I used, so every time I installed Firefox I had to redo my toolbar again so it didn't get swamped in dozens of addon icons. It was always a mild pain point that disincentivized me from using sync. (But I haven't used Firefox in a while, so it may have been fixed.) It was also pretty annoying how all the extension install pages opened in several dozen new tabs whenever sync was set up and I had to sit there letting it do its thing for a minute or two before trying to interact with anything. It didn't seem like the hallmark of a sync system that "just worked", in my opinion.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  You could disable syncing extensions?
  - nonbirithm 3y ago
    Yes, but I did want to sync my installed extensions, just in a way that the extension layout was preserved without further intervention, and not interrupting the initial flow with all the "extension installed" tabs. I will always want to install uBlock and my password manager in every Firefox instance, for example, so that seems like a perfect use case for sync. Plus, some extensions have a lot of config that would be a hassle to copy over every time (like Redirector). Now that I think about it, I don't remember Sync handling syncing extension settings on top of install state.
thyrox 3y ago
As an avid OSS supporter, I used to be a Firefox user until I got frustrated by its restrictive policies. For example, the addon store would block certain addons from being installed, or some settings were hidden or disabled by default. On Android, they only allow a handful of whitelisted addons and prevent you from installing anything else. This goes against the spirit of OSS, which is supposed to be highly customizable and user-friendly. I really hope they stop treating us as children.
- gregstoll 3y ago
  Many more addons are now available on Android, and any extension can make itself available there (as of this month): https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/new-extensions-youll-love-now-available-on-firefox-for-android/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/new-extensions-youll-lov...
- aftbit 3y ago
  What do you use instead? Most other browsers, especially the big blue and yellow one, provide even less control. I am always annoyed that Firefox won't let me skip an invalid cert warning though, while Chrome always will by typing "thisisunsafe" into the error page.
Rapzid 3y ago
I've never noticed a problem with Chrome sync.. It's funny though that the issue the author has, address bar history sync, is something I explicitly turn off.. Because it does work, and I don't like all my browser histories showing up in screen shares..
the4anoni 3y ago
Unpopular opinion: did OP tried Vivaldi?
- jw_cook 3y ago
  Vivaldi is great, but its sync is basically the same as Chrome's. I often see a sync delay of several minutes when switching devices. Do you know if there's a setting for sync frequency? Aside: my favorite parts of Vivaldi are its workspaces, tabs stacks, and other tab management features. I really wish these features were integrated into its sync!
deleted 3y ago
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PontifexMinimus 3y ago
My favourite feature of Firefox is multi-account containers -- great if you have multiple online identities.
- rc_mob 3y ago
  I use firefox profiles for this. Its an old old feature but the command line options for it still work.
- leetcrew 3y ago
  this is absolutely a killer feature if you follow the one account per stage per region guidance with AWS accounts (which you really should).
  - dv35z 3y ago
    Can you say more about this?
    - pmw 3y ago
      I am not the OP, but I believe he's referring to the ability to be logged in to different AWS accounts simultaneously. Without containers, logging in to AWS account B would invalidate the tabs where you're already logged in to account A.
    - leetcrew 3y ago
      basically what the sibling said. it's a good idea to isolate dev stages from prod by putting their respective resources in different accounts. it's also good to have separate accounts for different prod regions. people often don't do this because it sounds burdensome to have 2-3 dev accounts and 3+ prod accounts for each service. it is pretty painful using the out-of-the-box AWS web UI, since it forces you to log in and out of each account. but the containers extension associates each account's SSO token with the respective container, so you can switch between them freely. you can also color-code and label the tabs from each container, which makes it harder to forget whether you're looking at dev or prod.
dekatron 3y ago
One of the things that I like about Firefox is that it lets you right click on websites that disable right clicking by holding down shift. Reminds you that the browser should be the user's agent and not the website's.
- gigglesupstairs 3y ago
  Wow i didn’t know that. So much thanks.
- jdewerd 3y ago
  Ooh, that's a killer feature and this is the first I'm hearing about it! Thanks!
- rc_mob 3y ago
  Did not know! Thatnks you!
- Pikamander2 3y ago
  This one's niche, but Firefox's dev tools also let web developers see which font is actually being used. Chrome's dev tools only show you what font is supposed to be in use, but doesn't tell you if it had to resort to a fallback font.
  - lieuwex 3y ago
    Are you sure? I think the computed tab in Chrome devtools shows the actual used font.
    - hrldcpr 3y ago
      Yup if you scroll to the bottom of the Computed tab, it shows the "Rendered Fonts".
- globular-toast 3y ago
  I wish you could stop websites hijacking the quick find key (/) too.
graycat 3y ago
Ah, looks like I'm different!! Sync???? Thanks for the explanation: "As a refresher, Chrome Sync is capable of syncing, and settings across devices signed into with the same Google account. That's the idea, at least." I'm a heavy user of Firefox, 1+ hours a day. Never used "sync". Heard about it, but never knew what it was. Now, nope: Don't want it! For more: "bookmarks, passwords, browsing history, tabs, payment info, personal info" I don't know what a "bookmark" is. For the rest, I don't want Firefox involved with remembering any of those. Generally I want Firefox to do less, and less, and less, a lot less. For all those issues, I have perfectly good, simple, old solutions. I just want my Web browser doing little more than the minimum a Web browser needs to do and do not want it cooking my lunch or generally doing me favors. And I deeply resent Firefox, ..., my car trying to anticipate what I "want". E.g., when I need to pound in a nail and swing my hammer, I don't want the hammer stopping, reminding me that a hammer could hurt one of my fingers, and requiring that I push a special button for the hammer to go ahead and hit the nail. Generally, when I give an order, I want the intended purpose accomplished and do not want warnings, advice, popups, refusals, requirements to repeat my order, etc. Why? I'm trying to get my work done, ASAP, and the special help makes the work take 2-3 times longer. Back talk: Tools that refuse my command and give me back talk seem to believe that they know more about my work than I do, and that is not just hurting my work but also patronizing and insulting. Tool developer: Don't do that; else, as soon as I have an alternative I will take it. Yup, looks like I'm different. Maybe lots of people actually like popups, e.g., ones that try to do me favors but cover up what I need to see.
abhinavstarts 3y ago
I have tried firefox, Vivaldi. But in terms of speed, when different sites load chrome fares better than them. I'm back to using chrome. I like customisation feature of Vivaldi but it lags in terms of speed. I still use Vivaldi on case basis (to read some sites' articles which have by default ads enabled)
- nottorp 3y ago
  If you install uBlock Origin all sites will load faster :) And next year you'll only be able to do that in Firefox.
- ryanjshaw 3y ago
  When was the last time you tried? I reached the same conclusion a few years back, but I've been back to FF on all my devices for about 6 months now and haven't looked back.
GeekyBear 3y ago
One of the headline features for me is the Firefox recommended extensions program, where the extension code (and updated code) is manually vetted for malware and privacy violations. > Recommended extensions are expected to: Function extremely well. All Recommended extensions should not only perform as they promise, but do so at an exceptional level. For instance, there may be many ad blockers out there, but not all ad blockers are equally effective. Be safe and secure. Recommended extensions undergo full code review by staff security experts to provide a strong additional security check. Provide a delightful experience. Recommended extensions should embody great design and user experience standards. https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-recommended-extensions/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-recomme...
- Forgeties79 3y ago
  It’s honestly things like this that make me respect (more than I already do) and stick with Firefox. They do not need to do that and in a lot of ways it’s just sticking their neck out for other developers/their users for very little gain on their part. Obviously, there are some benefits for them, but I think most people would agree that it’s mainly a risk at the end of the day.
  - hackernewds 3y ago
    with enough market share, if Google did this they would be cursed with numerous lawsuits for preferential selection and sued successfully
    - GeekyBear 3y ago
      > with enough market share, if Google did this they would be cursed with numerous lawsuits for preferential selection and sued successfully Google already has featured products on the Play Store, so preferential selection doesn't appear to be an issue. However, the likelihood of Google paying human beings to go over the code of a free extension looking for security and privacy violations is about zero.
byyll 3y ago
Chromium crashes for me after running for a while with 10+ tabs. I had more than 500 open in Firefox and it ran well. Also the ability to add proxies to multi account containers is great when I am trying to access the 3-4 websites that are only available in 1 country or are blocked in the EU. I can even force a certain domain to open in that container so I don't think about it.
vehemenz 3y ago
I'm surprised one can write an entire article on browser sync and not mention Safari, Chrome's main competitor.
- zeta0134 3y ago
  Safari works great if you run 100% Apple devices, and breaks the moment you want to mix and match with even one non-blessed device. Firefox will happily sync to everything, and so will Chrome.
  - latexr 3y ago
    Doesn’t that just mean “every browser syncs great between different versions of itself”? It just so happens that Safari is not available on as many operating systems as Firefox and Chrome. “Breaks” doesn’t seem like the right characterisation.
  - vehemenz 3y ago
    These are reasonable caveats, but I don’t think this disqualifies Safari as not worth writing about if you’re a so-called tech journalist. There are way more Apple-only users than Firefox users.
    - ta8903 3y ago
      But we're talking about anyone who ones at least one non-Apple main device being excluded, I don't think their number would be as high. But you're right that Apple devices and services are not even considered in a certain type of tech journalism.
pshirshov 3y ago
It's not possible to sync extensions/setting on mobiles, so it works but only partially.
okasaki 3y ago
I don't use Firefox because I find the way Mozilla communicates to be creepy. I don't like that word but I'm not sure how else to describe it.
- nottorp 3y ago
  It's pretty sad. I wanted to do a one time donation to mozilla last month and they kept and kept pushing for a recurring one instead. Aggressive marketing tends to trigger in me an equal and opposite reaction, so they didn't even get the one time donation. Also, they should get rid of the 'what's new in firefox after an upgrade' and just give me my pages back. 99.99% of the time I don't care what's new. Also, the popup that tells you there's a new version available that randomly shows up over what you were trying to read. Just let me get on with my stuff, will you?
jcalvinowens 3y ago
I switched back to firefox last year and haven't looked back. I still use chrome on another laptop sometimes, the performance difference from my human perspective is literally zero. These days, it's much more common for me to encounter a website that works in firefox but not chrome than the other way around. I actually switched for good when I had to use firefox to file my taxes, because the IRS free self-file site was hopelessly broken on chrome.
- rc_mob 3y ago
  Ad blockers break the websites far more often than any browser compat issues.
  - jcalvinowens 3y ago
    One of many reasons I don't use ad blockers :)
Waterluvian 3y ago
For me, a fatal flaw with Firefox is that canvas getImageData doesn’t work like any other browser. Instead of returning the pixel values for the image loaded into the canvas, it gives the pixel values after they’ve been modified by the current screen/OS color profile. Other browsers seem to maintain the actual pixel values even if the OS later modifies the visual output of the application. This means that any user trying to do any data work with my GIS software will regularly get wrong outputs if they use Firefox.
3ln00b 3y ago
I never had the urge to switch from Firefox to any other browser, it's the first application that gets installed on any personal device after setup.
hbn 3y ago
Chrome history is confusing and bad. They broke history out into 2 things at some point, where you have "history" and something that I see now is called "groups" and of course I was able to look it up and see, yes, Google is once again gaslighting with random name changes and it was called "journeys" until a few months ago. It's some vague grouping of history as a list of pages you visited in sequence from an initial search, or perhaps starting from a new tab? And for some reason this tends to contain pages that the regular history doesn't. I wonder how much money was spent on designing and implementing this stupid unnecessary reimagining of browser history that only serves to make things more confusing.
__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
Passwords belong in a dedicated password manager. Besides those, I don't understand what I'd want to sync. I've even disabled syncing tabs between sessions on the same machine. The last thing I need is for what I was doing yesterday to distract me from what I'm trying to do today. What I want in a browser is a dumb box that starts up as a blank slate every time, renders HTML and JavaScript, and is indistinguishable from all of the other dumb boxes that do so.
- iudqnolq 3y ago
  You might want all the configuration you did to make your browser a dumb box to be synced. For example, disabling showing recently viewed pages on the new tab page.
- nickdandakis 3y ago
  I actually wish Mozilla put out a dedicated password manager. They have Sync, and they have SoPS (or well, used to?). I'd gladly pay extra for it
  - billyzs 3y ago
    There used to a standalone Firefox Password app for mobile but it got the axe.
    - OJFord 3y ago
      Lockwise. And it had way better UX when auto-fill didn't work, because for some reason about:logins doesn't work on mobile, so you have to hunt through a menu mess to copy the password manually from Firefox. I continued to use it (because they didn't stop it syncing) until I switched phone and so couldn't easily install it.
  - bloopernova 3y ago
    I think that I'd prefer Firefox allow Bitwarden and other password tools to replace Firefox's password implementation. That way you'd get the UI/UX of integrated password management, but the single-source-authoritative backend too. (before someone points out that Bitwarden has an extension: I do know that, but I'd like to see more modular features in browsers rather than our-way-is-best)
PhilippGille 3y ago
Many years ago, I wanted to use Firefox sync to migrate profile and bookmarks from one OS to another. I don't know if it's still the case, but at the time there was an automatic periodic and a manually triggered sync, with a button and sync icon (like ). I triggered the manual sync by clicking on the button. The icon spinned for a few seconds and then stopped. I interpreted this as the sync being finished, formatted the drive, installed the new OS, installed Firefox, set up sync, and waited for the profile/bookmarks to arrive. Nothing happened. Apparently (as per their issue report response) at the time, the spinning of the sync icon was only showing that the data had been written somewhere on disc and registered for the next periodic sync. The button did NOT trigger the sync itself. This was very frustrating and a good reminder to never rely on a single sync/backup. Also an interesting example of bad UX. Dropbox was already around at the time IIRC, and its stopping rotating sync icon indicated the actual sync to be finished, as one would expect. Again, this was many years ago, and I think I remember reading that they reimplemented sync from scratch some time later. I'm still using Firefox, but not their sync. Maybe time to give it another chance.
dark-star 3y ago
Chrome's sync also "just works" for me shrug
- tempaccount420 3y ago
  Firefox needs to celebrate the small wins I guess.
  - xbar 3y ago
    I feel like Firefox already wins on all the privacy dimensions, so what's left but small stuff?
- jklinger410 3y ago
  Yeah the whole premise here is that Chrome sync is broken. I'm not sure many people share that belief. Love FF though. Maybe I'll go through another testing cycle with it and see if I just end up on Chrome again lol.
  - rcMgD2BwE72F 3y ago
    >see if I just end up on Chrome again lol. One must love advertising and tracking to put up with Chrome on mobile.
- mdaniel 3y ago
  Or rather it will until you step on some mysterious Google ToS violation and they nuke your Google account, without any recourse. I'm cognizant that's always a risk with cloud hosted things, but I can't recall seeing any amount of front-page posts of "Mozilla nuked my account and won't respond to my emails halp!1" FWIW, I think Brave(?) has an implementation of the Google sync server that they use, so it's not totally ludicrous to self-host, but I don't suspect it would be easy or that Chrome would make any such thing easy to pull off
Tomte 3y ago
FF sync reliably fails for me. No matter how often I disconnect/reconnect devices. It's not worth the hassle for me.
redder23 3y ago
I wish there was an extension that would make it work in Chromium based browsers. I use Firefox in windows while gaming ... but for dev work on Linux I use Brave. I use Xbookmarksync to sync bookmarks and Bitwarden for passwords. It basically works but I have a Firefox account anyway and history could be sync across browsers and maybe some setting that exist in both the same way.
jw_cook 3y ago
Since the main topic of this article is sync, does any browser or extension out there support syncing active tabs withing the browsing window, rather than putting them in a separate "recent tabs" menu? In other words, mirroring the entire browsing session across devices (ideally preserving tab order).
- cvburgess 3y ago
  Arc[0] does this really well for me - across computers and even my phone. Its chromium under the hood but the UX and sync story is impeccable. [0] https://arc.net/ https://arc.net/
  - jw_cook 3y ago
    Good to know! I'm on the waitlist to try the Windows beta. Do you know if they're planning to port it to Linux at some point?
andrew_ 3y ago
FWIW Brave's sync works extremely well.
bloopernova 3y ago
Firefox has multiple compelling reasons to use it: Sync Containers Tree Style Tabs uBlock Origin on Android Open Source since 1998! Not based on Chromium Be wary of sync on a fresh Linux install, it might sync the default bookmarks and merge them with your own. Not a huge deal but definitely an annoyance.
- avg_dev 3y ago
  I’ll have to look into containers and tree style tabs. I have never knowingly used those.
  - avtolik 3y ago
    Containers are the best. I use them every day. Also I switched from Tree Style Tab to Sidebery. I like it better for some reason.
    - zavertnik 3y ago
      I found a config that worked for me using TST so I haven’t explored other methods for vertical tabs. What eventually convinced you to try Sidebery and what convinced you not to switch back to TST? I’m curious what I’m missing out on!
      - avtolik 3y ago
        Nothing major. It just feels sleek. I don't require much from these plugins.
  - bloopernova 3y ago
    Tree style tabs enables vertical tabs, which are listed at the side of the window rather than the top. It means you can still read tab titles when you have more than a dozen tabs open. Plus you can nest and rearrange your tabs to fit your work or study. For some, like me, it's a game changer and I dislike using chrome now because it doesn't support vertical tabs. Caveat: to disable top-of-window tabs you have to use a user chrome CSS file, so it's not just "install extension, enable checkbox" easy.
scruple 3y ago
Personally I find mobile browser plugins to be the most compelling reason, it's certainly the reason that FF is my main browser in conjunction with working browser sync across devices.
loloquwowndueo 3y ago
Dunno, I’ve been using Firefox since before it was Firefox as my primary browser and I’ve never used sync. I don’t think that’s the most compelling feature.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  Sync is not a feature useful to me, either (along with most of the other newer features). Lots of people do find it very useful, though, and despite it not being for me, it sounds plausible that it could be the most compelling feature for the majority.
- Toorkit 3y ago
  It's not the most compelling feature for me, but I spend 2 hours on the bus every day and love being able to send a bunch of tabs that pop up on my desktop when I get home.
  - mxmilkiib 3y ago
    It can be neat, though my problem is I've several hundred tabs "archived" (discarded/hibernated/whatever) on the phone and and I want to open them all on the desktop at the same time to go through (I'd be very happy for the 10 minute wait, and/or if they were all discarded/hibernated, as doing them one by one would be an absolute chore), but trying to kills the desktop FF by making it hang then fall over!
ReptileMan 3y ago
>On the surface, Firefox Sync seems to be basically the same as Chrome Sync. To set it up, you just need to sign into your devices with the same Mozilla account and choose what you'd like to sync. And this is why I use brave - the sync there is accountless, you just get random id and create a random phrase - that's it.
katella 3y ago
I really like Firefox containers, not sure if chrome has something similar.
zero0529 3y ago
One of my biggest gripes with Firefox sync is the way they have divided the mobile bookmarks from the pc ones. It makes the ux kinda weird as a lot of the bookmarks I use on my desktop I also use on my phone and vice verca. But when I add a bookmark on my phone it ends in a separate mobile bookmark folder.
- araes 3y ago
  I like Firefox. I've been using Developer Release path for years. Yet, the memory usage is such a hog. I almost cannot run VS 2022 or Android Studio while also running Firefox to check for questions on code. [1] I have two tabs open responding to this post (HN and HN comment), and Firefox has 13 processes running in Task Manager with ~1 GB of memory used. And in there, is a -42 MB process. I'm not even sure what a -42 MB process even means in Task Manager. No wait, now its -77 MB. [1] Note: this is also a serious issue with VS 2022 and Android Studio. Every release, Android Studio somehow gets slower. A couple years ago, I used to be able to build, test on emulator, and deploy while having a browser open. Now I can barely open the emulator. VS is kind of a joke. To build a couple 100 line WinRT file it loads the entire device library from all of history (following MS' examples)
- vorticalbox 3y ago
  Can only mirror this, I just want my bookmarks not different sets of them.
- soundnote 3y ago
  Chromium browsers do a similar thing IME, and while I don't mind it, I don't like that the "mobile bookmarks" folder is only really accessible from the bookmark manager proper, not the bookmarks sidebar or the desktop bookmarks bar's UI.
- deanishe 3y ago
  For the life of me, I don't understand why they do this. It's not 2003. I don't have a separate bunch of WAP bookmarks for my phone.
  - deleted 3y ago
bananaflag 3y ago
I use Firefox because of the Awesome Bar. I can easily find whatever page I visited ever since it was introduced in 2008. Chrome's omnibox has always felt like a discount version of it.
trulyrandom 3y ago
Really? Is the new implementation of the sync server finally stable? For years we've been stuck between the old Python 2 implementation and the new incomplete Rust implementation.
jaylittle 3y ago
I mean that's great... but I've been using Brave sync across a wide variety of devices (Linux, iOS, Windows and MacOS) and it has worked without a hitch for quite awhile.
SergeAx 3y ago
For a while, two things kept me from switching to Firefox entirely: instant translation and Google product compatibility. The first one was solved in Firefox 118 several weeks ago. The second one keeps nagging me: Google Maps are somehow jittery in Firefox, and I think there's something with YouTube, too. So, I am waiting for an inevitable manifest v3 transition of Chrome to ditch it for good.
jvehent 3y ago
The most compelling reason to use Firefox Sync is that it is client-side encrypted. Mozilla stores opaque encrypted blobs that it is entirely unable to decrypt. Law enforcement agencies request that data from time to time, hoping to obtain browsing history, only to be turned down thanks to the encryption. (disclaimer: former Mozilla security)
- soundnote 3y ago
  This is a big reason to avoid Edge: They have entire categories that aren't e2ee, browsing history being one of them. Chrome, IIRC, can have e2ee but the user has to turn it on. Brave, Vivaldi and Firefox offer complete, e2ee sync solutions.
- GeoAtreides 3y ago
  Even better, you can host the sync server yourself: https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncstorage-rs https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncstorage-rs
  - ranguna 3y ago
    A local server that uses sentry and spanner? What?
    - camgunz 3y ago
      You have an incredulous tone, but you can host Sentry (it's open source) and it's very common to host databases in the cloud.
      - ranguna 3y ago
        I just hoped that everything on that server could run locally and not depend on any cloud based tech.
        kuschkufan 3y ago
        I strongly suggest to read the requirements fully before commenting what amounts to misinformation at best. You can run everything locally. You don't need spanner and can use mysql instead as a database. Also, as the previous commenter already told you, you can can run sentry locally. Let's see whether you're willing and able to walk back your comments. I'm in the same boat as you - I'd want to run everything locally and I'm very happy to see it's entirely possible.
WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
I run Firefox as a remote app. Every night, my main Firefox copies it's profile to a local virtual machine; that VM hosts Firefox as a virtual/remote app. I'm posting this from it. This way I have all my containers and logins but my data stays at home. And browsing from my home IP has advantages.
roshansingh 3y ago
It's Firefox containers for me. It is extremely useful to manage different environments - dev, production etc., and I can use the colors to identify the tabs.
javier_e06 3y ago
Firefox falls flat on its foxy face when it comes to chromebook tablet support. I am so ready to ween myself from Chrome but when I open my chromebook, they pull me back in. Arrrgh.
- mort96 3y ago
  Uh... if you wanted to get off of Chrome, getting a Chromebook might not have been the best choice.
mort96 3y ago
This article is terrible, there's an animated ad between almost every paragraph and a floating animated banner ad and a floating auto-playing video ad. Completely unreadable.
butz 3y ago
I wish Firefox took RSS more seriously. Imagine, if Firefox Sync not only supported RSS feed synchronization between devices, but also would keep updating them in the cloud, so one wouldn't miss any news from busy websites.
- pieter_mj 3y ago
  Will never work the way firefox sync is set up : it's client side encrypted, in the "cloud" it's just a blob.
soundnote 3y ago
Firefox's actual, non-replicable killer feature is somewhat questionable, but: Chromium has a lower limit on how much RAM a page can consume. Now, YouTube comments sections get huge, and huge web pages are huge. Turns out, Firefox can give the page more RAM and keep it nice and functional for longer. The questionable part is spending your limited lifetime on reading huge YouTube comment sections.
danShumway 3y ago
Minor trick, if you use separate Firefox profiles, Firefox sync can be enabled between separate profiles, which means you can use it to do things like sync addons between profiles when you're quickly setting things up. It's not perfect, I do still wish there were better ways to fork profiles in Firefox, but it can cut down on a lot of repeat configuration. And you can set it up, sync your addons over, and then turn it off and diverge from there.
kornhole 3y ago
I love Firefox and this feature, but I need to hop between several devices and browsers for different purposes. I keep all my passwords, tabs, and bookmarks synced to my Nextcloud server with some extensions. If a particular browser goes to sh.., I can switch to another with low friction.
bandyaboot 3y ago
One thing I find annoying about all the sync implementations I’ve run across is the inability to exclude certain extensions. I want most of them to sync, but not all.
pferrel 3y ago
I have three google accounts, one personal, one for my business, one for garbage web sites where I need an email but do not trust with my everyday address. Chrome sucks at dealing with these since sync is tied to the account you have logged into and you have to switch login every time you access another account. This switch affects every new tab. Firefox does not touch the FF login when you access some Google account info or email so FF sync works sooo much better than Chromes. Chrome needs to scrap and rethink how it uses Google accounts IMHO.
anjel 3y ago
I use the FF "send tab to other sync'd device" constantly.
raingros 3y ago
Recently switched from Chrome to Firefox and was disappointed to learn that syncing custom search engines still doesn‘t work in Firefox. Hope that will be fixed soon.

515 points by Vinnl 3y ago

i gave it a try last month with some bad results. for context, i was using firefox containers before using sync, and i lost all my containers after trying this! the bookmarks did not get synced to a new device after logging in there either. i am sure there might be a good explanation for this or someplace i went wrong, but it is not idiot-proof yet to say the least. for most privacy-centric guys, just a bookmark sync solution is better suited imo, and some of them also work across different browsers fwiw.

Vinnl 3y ago

(Sorry for title editing; HN cuts of "The Best" if a title starts with that, which would make for a rather nonsensical title...)

amelius 3y ago
This makes me wonder how much of moderation (and thus headline editing) could be done by an LLM, and if that would be an overall improvement.

mempko 3y ago

This! I set up everyone in my family with Firefox because of sync that just works. I prefer reading content, especially PDFs, on my computer over my phone. One useful feature Firefox has is the ability to just send a tab to a device. When I am out and about, I would queue up reading papers by sending them from my phone to my computer. When I get home, my browser would have the tabs right there, ready for me to read.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
hiatus 3y ago
I would add that chrome has a "send tab to device" feature that does as you describe.

saberworks 3y ago

I'm not convinced. Recently moved to a new computer and firefox didn't sync my settings in about:config and didn't sync my container assignments (had to go in and enable it manually in both the source and target computers, buried deep in the settings for the containers extension). It doesn't sync addons or addon settings. I don't think it synced all the interface customization (like removing pocket icon from the url bar, separate urlbar/search box), only some of it. I got my bookmarks, so that was helpful. To sync a lot of other stuff I was able to copy my prefs.js from the old to the new, and most of those settings worked.

LtWorf 3y ago
You have to login and enable sync separately in the containers plugin for that to work.

ugjka 3y ago

It can be a pain when you do large random deletes from browsing history, then sync can hang up for 20 minutes with lot of IO/Cpu. You can trigger this by doing "Forget this website" and if that website is a lot in your history

xnzakg 3y ago
I suppose it probably has to rewrite your entire history in that case? Deleting lines in log-like files isn't exactly easy. Actually, I wonder how that's stored in order for the search to stay responsive, some kind of bloom filter? Or just a normal database?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- ugjka 3y ago
  i think they use sqlite for everything
- salil999 3y ago
  Most browsers use a SQL database for storing data like this.

baby 3y ago

Heh. Sync works on chrome too. IMO tree style tabs was the best thing firefox had and they killed it.

neogodless 3y ago
Does it only count if it's native rather than an extension? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
temp0826 3y ago
What do you mean killed it? I use a different addon for vertical tabs (there are many now) but isn't it still available?
ropeladder 3y ago
Tree style tabs works as well as it did before, except that it's more difficult to get rid of the top tabs.
- yoavm 3y ago
  Check out my userChrome changes if you're into vertical tabs and a minimal UI: https://github.com/bjesus/fireside https://github.com/bjesus/fireside

bluelightning2k 3y ago

Firefox has grown on me since Google's war on ad blockers made me feel like it's "their" browser not mine. (Which is true ofc. But still.)

briffle 3y ago
tab containers are a huge bonus once you start using them that makes it very hard to look at other browsers again.
- Vinnl 3y ago
  For the uninitiated: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/multi-account-conta...
  - mdaniel 3y ago
    and its companion, open in container https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/open-url-in-container/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/open-url-in-c... which allows forming links that open in the container of choice without having to pre-define rules for the container I use it every single day for spawning AWS SSO urls into their dedicated containers, since each url is always of the form console.aws.amazon.com which makes writing rules for it stupid hard
hoherd 3y ago
Same. I've tried to switch from a chromium based browser to FF several times over the last several years, and I always found something that was a deal breaker. A few months ago when the Google war on adblockers really started gaining steam, I tried the switch again, and it's been flawless, and I haven't found any good reasons not to use FF. It's been my default browser for at least two months now, and if it weren't for wanting web-usb for a few devices, I wouldn't even have a chromium based browser installed.

herdcall 3y ago

Yes, it just works; but a few days back all my devices suddenly lost almost all of the passwords. Not all but most of them, couldn't make out any pattern or reason. Luckily a Linux laptop that I don't usually use had the full set and I had to export them, sync, and import them back to restore everywhere. Very scary, any ideas why this could've happened? I immediately backed up for the future, but this kind of loss should not be happening.

sherr 3y ago
No idea. I've been using Firefox and Sync for years, currently on 5 devices (one android). Never had a problem. Firefox 121.0 (64-bit). This is the "release" channel. Maybe you're beta testing?
- xrd 3y ago
  Me too. It is so flawless that I had forgotten how good it works until seeing this article pointing that fact out.
  - stavros 3y ago
    Same, I've been using Firefox for years and it's always just worked. Recently it got faster, too, now sending tabs between devices is instant.
- herdcall 3y ago
  You know what, you could be onto something. I'm using the Firefox Developer version (122.0b3 64 bit). In any case, how are the differences resolved? E.g., in my recent case, all the devices ended up with only a handful of passwords (17), whereas the Linux laptop had 858. When I brought that laptop online (after exporting them), it synced and also ended up with the 17. I wonder what the logic was to deduce that the 17 are the ones to keep and the 858 should be deleted (there are some common ones of course). Because after sync when I imported the 858 back, it kept them all and synced them to all other devices, so it considered them as additions that should be kept.
3y ago

thecopy 3y ago

I love Firefox. It is a mystery to me why it is not more popular.

dfgfek 3y ago
[flagged]
cuddlyogre 3y ago
They're not an multi-billion dollar ad company that can pay to make their browser the de facto default.
leosanchez 3y ago
IMO. It's mostly due to not being default browser for major platforms.
spinningarrow 3y ago
For me the deal breaker is that it doesn’t use native UI elements on macOS which means patterns such as invoking menu items using the keyboard behave differently.
- sensanaty 3y ago
  Does Chrome? Can't say I notice too much of a difference here on my macbook, other than slight color choices and paddings and whatever the 2 UIs are basically indistinguishable to me
wharvle 3y ago
I used it from when it was Phoenix until 2011 or so. I left because it was a lot worse than my main two other options on MacOS at the time, and they’d not followed through on the things that made me like it when I adopted it, so I hadn’t really loved it since late 1.x or early 2.x. I haven’t gone back because there’s no compelling reason to switch back from Safari. It is still my mod-downloading browser on my Windows gaming PC.
latexr 3y ago
In all HN Firefox threads with a sufficient number of comments you’ll see a variation of this comment, and people answering how Firefox fails as a daily driver for them. Firefox is missing a ton of very useful stuff for some people, such as some audio API or AppleScript¹. The latter absolutely kills it for any kind of automation on macOS. It’s the sole major browser on macOS without support for AppleScript but Mozilla people think that’s just a power user feature. I know because I talked with devs at various points, in person and online, and was given the same answer. Thing is, power users create automations for non-power users. When the latter want to use a tool from the former and the answer is “you can’t, Firefox doesn’t support it”, there’s another user lost. On a personal anecdotal level, I also don’t find it that stable. Just recently I wanted to try an extension and decided to do so on Firefox. After a while it just removed the extension from the list and it was seemingly impossible to get back, even after reinstalling. Every time I give Firefox a try, I am disappointed. I’m glad it works for you and many other people, but the answer as to why it isn’t more popular is that your experience is far from universal. ¹ Whose bug report has been open for 22 years: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=125419 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=125419

ilayn 3y ago

Why would anyone need a reason? I mean it seriously. Chrome users on this platform really baffling for me. They know what the consequences are, they know quite well what the icon with their picture on the corner does. Still being OK with this is super interesting. Most products are often get grilled here for having closed code parts or similar concerns but when it comes to giving complete audit of their online existence, "meh...". Same folks who criticize canonical (which I disagree strongly with their late practices) only to install chrome as their browser on their systems. Insert "statistically speaking" wherever needed.

Filligree 3y ago
Firefox stutters. Every couple of seconds, if I'm doing anything active on the page, it freezes up for a fraction of a second. I have no idea if that's a garbage collection issue or what, but it makes it painful to use. That being said, I'm on Safari instead. Chrome doesn't make me happy.
- ilayn 3y ago
  When does it do that? I mean during doing what?
  - Filligree 3y ago
    When scrolling, for example. Though it’s a lot more obvious while running an animation, e.g. http://server.kimbruning.nl:8081/~kim/baughn/snowmageddon/dist/ http://server.kimbruning.nl:8081/~kim/baughn/snowmageddon/di...
- askiiart 3y ago
  I've never seen this, and I've used FF (well, LibreWolf) on everything from a 2003-ish laptop to a 12th gen i5. I assume you've filed a bug report?
zamadatix 3y ago
I think the big difference is stated purpose vs execution, especially combined with who/when that elicits a response vs passive agreement/disagreement. An extremely small proportion of even the super techno-nerd crowd are really about the principles of open source, all other considerations be damned, when selecting software to use. That said, when something claiming supposed to be the bastion for that use case and antithesis of what the closed for profits do does something they'd expect from the latter it elicits an extremely strong response from nearly all of those that are as well as a good portion of those who have other considerations just because of the hypocrisy. Windows/macOS adding a new Bing or Siri integration somewhere, while getting some mumblings, isn't going to illicit nearly the same kind of reaction from the crowd though as everyone already knows and expects that of them. The majority of even highly technical users tend to use software based on what they find most productive, not necessarily the software with the best policies and licensing. So, statistically speaking, you tend to get complaints about open source software not being up to snuff or principle followed by most people choosing non-open software much of the time anyways because they feel it works better for them. For Firefox specifically, it's long failed at holding the web back from Chrome and the choice isn't about that anymore. That title has firmly been with Safari for a long time now. Because Safari isn't available on all platforms it leaves not much of a concern to choose a Chromium based browser outside that group who operate solely on principle not 100% of the browser is open source. I think for a long time Firefox languished a bit too far behind Chromium in many architectural aspects (I remember waiting fooooreeever for Electrolysis then when it came out the browser was significantly slower than Chrom* at the time). This comparison is leaps and bounds better today but it's a bit of a day late, dollar short situation in that it's not better enough to get droves of people to switch over again like the IE vs Firefox era. The other thing I'll mention is when the topic of browsers comes up people's goto is the last issue they personally had with each. Given the size and complexity of browsers combined with the amount of hardware, OS, and use case variance this tends to feel more akin to people arguing whether lottery numbers skew odd vs even based on their last experience than anything about the actual browsers. Even when the discussion steers towards talk of a specific feature a lot of the time that feature didn't even originate in the browser it's being brought up for.

gausswho 3y ago

I've avoided FF sync because I don't want my browser history on the cloud. I only really want my profile configuration, such as my addons and userjs flags. Unfortunately the FF directory in my .config is intermixed enough between config and content that I don't try to back it up. Am I missing something?

threePointFive 3y ago
FF Sync doesnt work by backing up your config directory to some cloud storage. That would be a recipe for disaster since your profile has certain machine specific settings configured automatically by the browser. When you enable Sync you get to explicitly decide which things you want to include in the sync. I have mine set to just addons, configs, and bookmarks.
stavros 3y ago
The sync contents are encrypted between devices. EDIT: After writing this, I realized I should investigate the claim, because new devices are added just by logging in, not by giving them any sort of password.
- amelius 3y ago
  Yes, E2EE.
  - unshavedyak 3y ago
    The parent raised a good point tho. If you can add devices without entering encryption info, how can it be properly E2E?
    - caminante 3y ago
      I don't know what criteria is required to meet an E2EE (End to end encryption?) standard. In general though, the info is stored on Mozilla's (or an affiliate's) cloud.[0] 1. If you lose your password and didn't setup a separate password recovery code (one time codes), then your data is toast. You can't reset your password via email without wiping your cloud data because mozilla uses your password in a hashing algorithm to store your data. 2. If I recall, you have to setup a 2FA to login on new devices. [0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/features/sync/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/features/sync/ *EDIT: revised above to clarify mozilla password reset wipes data unless you have recovery key.

rrdharan 3y ago

Firefox on iOS randomly changes the order of new bookmarks, adding new ones to either the top or the bottom of the list. I assume they're assuming ordering in some underlying platform data structure that doesn't support it? EDIT: I guess it was this, though I think it's been broken again more recently? https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-ios/pull/11895 https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-ios/pull/11895 At any rate I've found Firefox on iOS/iPadOS to be surprisingly buggy.. tabs hang and need to be closed, not all bookmarks are synced and/or the ordering changing per above, showing sponsored ads in the new tab shortcuts list and needing a force-close until they go away after being disabled, etc. etc.

gloryjulio 3y ago
Firefox on ios is just a reskin of Safari. They would need extra effort to make the account system work on that

_lqaf 3y ago

Configuring browsers to mirror each other across machines makes a big soupy mess. I understand why surveillance capitalists like the idea, makes their lives a little easier. But I really don't get why I'm supposed to want it. I use different machines differently. The laptop I'm typing this on is my "main" browser, I have lots of bookmarks set up in a specific structure. I only use my phone browser when I have to, and it is rarely the same thing I've done before. It has a couple stale bookmarks, I don't care. I use the browser on my iPad even less. My big desktop is where I play with recreational software development, it has lots of bookmarks, but a very different set than my laptop. And my work phone/work laptop are their own things. It just seems like making every closet door in your house open the same closet, if that where physically possible. There are reasons different things go in different buckets.

the_sleaze9 3y ago
Shoutout to the time I was looking at job listings on my cellphone, which then immediately popped up on my work computer in front of my coworkers. I didn't even know there _was_ a sync feature, it got turned on automatically after an update. Fun. No sync please.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  Don't use your personal account on your work browser. Or, actually, on anything in your work. (And the other way around too.) Nobody implements proper context switching and privacy from yourself. The only kind of privacy anybody even acknowledges the existence is from 3rd parties.
  - nottorp 3y ago
    Personal account? Account? When I switch from my desktop to my laptop and back, I sometimes get an extra Firefox icon in my dock. I once hovered over it and I think it was the sync feature. I don't have a Firefox account and I'm not signed in into any browser on any account. Why does it try to sync things without my permission?

pzmarzly 3y ago

Can some long-standing user of iOS Firefox say if the sync issues there have been fixed? Halfway-broken sync on iOS version of Firefox (as well as a general lack of love for it and the UI that kept getting redesigned every other month) was the reason why I switched to Safari 4 years ago.

rrdharan 3y ago
Still kinda broken and buggy.
D13Fd 3y ago
It's not fixed. It's still better than nothing, but it's weird to see an article singing its praises. I still use Firefox though, it's the best cross-platform browser overall.
kobiguru 3y ago
I have used Firefox sync in my new Mac M3 and it flawlessly synced everything from my older mac, my Android phone, my Linux workhorse, and Windows machine. Really love firefox.

ddxv 3y ago

This is the exact reason I've started using Firefox for the past few years and never looked back. My passwords are synced across devices and I just let FF autogenerate them. I memorize a couple important ones like email and banking, rest is handled by Firefox. Best is that it also works for apps on my Android.

nidnogg 3y ago

I have nothing but praise for Firefox's Sync. It has saved me countless times. Back when I had more than 4 active machines it would sometimes trip up here and there with a bookmark or another, but it was always really solid overall.

SloopJon 3y ago

See "Chrome Sync privacy is still very bad"[1] and its predecessor article[2] about Chrome and Firefox for an evaluation of the privacy and security of browser syncing. [1] https://palant.info/2023/08/29/chrome-sync-privacy-is-still-very-bad/ https://palant.info/2023/08/29/chrome-sync-privacy-is-still-... [2] https://palant.info/2018/03/13/can-chrome-sync-or-firefox-sync-be-trusted-with-sensitive-data/ https://palant.info/2018/03/13/can-chrome-sync-or-firefox-sy...

PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago

It does work very well, but personally I'd appreciate a mechanism that I could implement manually and without the cloud. Something like "copy files Foo, Bar and Baz on the source device to folder DooDad on the target device". I appreciate that this doesn't work for mobile devices with their filesystem-free presentation, but even there I'd rather explicitly import data from a file I downloaded than have it move through the cloud.

ijustlovemath 3y ago
You should check out SyncThing. It's a privacy-respecting p2p file sharing application that you can use like Dropbox. A little fiddly to set up but works like a charm once you get it going
abound 3y ago
Firefox's sync service is open source [1], so you can self-host it and update your about:config to point to it. I do this and it works great. (I believe you can even self-host the accounts service if you really want to) Caveat is that I've linked to the old Python one, and they've got a new Rust one, but it didn't support SQLite the last time I had checked. [1] https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncserver https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncserver
yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
You can copy around profiles, which are just directories, or if you only want bookmarks you can export/import them to HTML or JSON easily enough from in Firefox.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  Generally, I only want passwords, and I want a workflow that can be scripted 100%.

Timber-6539 3y ago

No need for bookmarks. My smooth brain doubles up as a zero-latency information resolver.

salil999 3y ago

If you're in the Apple ecosystem then Safari has had this for a while.

pivo 3y ago
Something that's frustrating to me wrt Safari is my, admittedly edge case, in which the company I work for won't allow using personal Apple IDs on company supplied macs. Apple only allow Safari sync to work between computers with the same Apple ID, which I sort of get, but still that makes it useless to me. This same-Apple-ID restriction causes other issues too, like not being able to use my iPhone as a webcam on my work mac even though I can use my AirPods on that same mac because reasons. Luckily for me, I'm super happy with Firefox.

yesimahuman 3y ago

It’s too bad that Firefox has such a great UX and privacy-focused cloud features like this, yet is being held back by its engine. As a heavy FF user for the last few years it’s become more and more clear that the world just doesn’t care about making sites work on FF and I’m more frequently having to switch to Chrome. My dream is that FF would switch to Chromium while keeping all the great features around the browser engine. But suggesting such a thing is blasphemy in the FF world so we’re stuck with an engine that no one targets any more and isn’t keeping up with modern web APIs more web devs are using.

GeekyBear 3y ago
In a decade of use, I have yet to run into sites that don't work just fine with Firefox.
intrasight 3y ago
It's too bad that I can't read the article - because I'm using Firefox and an ad blocker. I get "Something went wrong. Please disable your blocker on How-To Geek"
- lagniappe 3y ago
  Works fine on my Firefox with several blockers.
- tetris11 3y ago
  works fine for me with uBO
- MrDrMcCoy 3y ago
  I'm using Mull, an Android Mobile browser based on Firefox with some privacy tweaks, with uBlock origin enabled, Android set to use NextDNS with even more adblocking, and a VPN. The page loads just fine for me. Maybe you're missing one of the lists that helps with anti-adblocking?
- GeekyBear 3y ago
  Works fine on Firefox with uBlock Origin.

entropie 3y ago

Braves syncing is also top notch. I can watch the bookmark bar dissapear almost in real time on other machines (eg. notebook) when I use it. I do not sync passwords, though.

url00 3y ago

Obviously this is only one anecdote so take it with a grain of salt but my experience with Firefox Sync was abysmal. I had it corrupt my bookmarks db twice in a year of using it. Fixing it required digging into my profile folder on Windows and manually deleting the db file while also disabling sync. Otherwise it would just redownload the corrupted db. It was bad to the point where I couldn’t even make new bookmarks with the corrupted file. Anyway, it really burned me on FF since. It’s probably fixed now (or at least I hope it is) and I want to go back but given the lack of priority put on FF by Mozilla I’m just nervous to make the change again.

barkerja 3y ago

For all its issues, I wouldn’t say iCloud syncing is one of them for Safari. I’ve had nothing but a good experience over the past couple years when it comes to syncing tabs, bookmarks and passwords.

spinningarrow 3y ago
I have the opposite experience. Sometimes I see tabs from some of my devices, sometimes all of them, sometimes a few of the tabs and sometimes all of them. If I want to “hand off” browsing to another device I pretty much always have to use AirDrop.
latexr 3y ago
> I’ve had nothing but a good experience over the past couple years when it comes to syncing tabs There was a period where it sucked at syncing tabs for me, as it repeatedly showed tabs from other devices that no longer existed. Quitting them from that interface would not work as they would soon be back. I found many reports of the same problem online. Fortunately it’s been working consistently well for long enough that I can rely on it again.

the_common_man 3y ago

The most compelling reason is it is not chrome

deleted 3y ago

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nonbirithm 3y ago

Last time I tried sync with Firefox it saved all the extensions I installed but not the customized layout I used, so every time I installed Firefox I had to redo my toolbar again so it didn't get swamped in dozens of addon icons. It was always a mild pain point that disincentivized me from using sync. (But I haven't used Firefox in a while, so it may have been fixed.) It was also pretty annoying how all the extension install pages opened in several dozen new tabs whenever sync was set up and I had to sit there letting it do its thing for a minute or two before trying to interact with anything. It didn't seem like the hallmark of a sync system that "just worked", in my opinion.

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
You could disable syncing extensions?
- nonbirithm 3y ago
  Yes, but I did want to sync my installed extensions, just in a way that the extension layout was preserved without further intervention, and not interrupting the initial flow with all the "extension installed" tabs. I will always want to install uBlock and my password manager in every Firefox instance, for example, so that seems like a perfect use case for sync. Plus, some extensions have a lot of config that would be a hassle to copy over every time (like Redirector). Now that I think about it, I don't remember Sync handling syncing extension settings on top of install state.

thyrox 3y ago

As an avid OSS supporter, I used to be a Firefox user until I got frustrated by its restrictive policies. For example, the addon store would block certain addons from being installed, or some settings were hidden or disabled by default. On Android, they only allow a handful of whitelisted addons and prevent you from installing anything else. This goes against the spirit of OSS, which is supposed to be highly customizable and user-friendly. I really hope they stop treating us as children.

gregstoll 3y ago
Many more addons are now available on Android, and any extension can make itself available there (as of this month): https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/new-extensions-youll-love-now-available-on-firefox-for-android/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/new-extensions-youll-lov...
aftbit 3y ago
What do you use instead? Most other browsers, especially the big blue and yellow one, provide even less control. I am always annoyed that Firefox won't let me skip an invalid cert warning though, while Chrome always will by typing "thisisunsafe" into the error page.

Rapzid 3y ago

I've never noticed a problem with Chrome sync.. It's funny though that the issue the author has, address bar history sync, is something I explicitly turn off.. Because it does work, and I don't like all my browser histories showing up in screen shares..

the4anoni 3y ago

Unpopular opinion: did OP tried Vivaldi?

jw_cook 3y ago
Vivaldi is great, but its sync is basically the same as Chrome's. I often see a sync delay of several minutes when switching devices. Do you know if there's a setting for sync frequency? Aside: my favorite parts of Vivaldi are its workspaces, tabs stacks, and other tab management features. I really wish these features were integrated into its sync!

deleted 3y ago

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PontifexMinimus 3y ago

My favourite feature of Firefox is multi-account containers -- great if you have multiple online identities.

rc_mob 3y ago
I use firefox profiles for this. Its an old old feature but the command line options for it still work.
leetcrew 3y ago
this is absolutely a killer feature if you follow the one account per stage per region guidance with AWS accounts (which you really should).
- dv35z 3y ago
  Can you say more about this?
  - pmw 3y ago
    I am not the OP, but I believe he's referring to the ability to be logged in to different AWS accounts simultaneously. Without containers, logging in to AWS account B would invalidate the tabs where you're already logged in to account A.
  - leetcrew 3y ago
    basically what the sibling said. it's a good idea to isolate dev stages from prod by putting their respective resources in different accounts. it's also good to have separate accounts for different prod regions. people often don't do this because it sounds burdensome to have 2-3 dev accounts and 3+ prod accounts for each service. it is pretty painful using the out-of-the-box AWS web UI, since it forces you to log in and out of each account. but the containers extension associates each account's SSO token with the respective container, so you can switch between them freely. you can also color-code and label the tabs from each container, which makes it harder to forget whether you're looking at dev or prod.

dekatron 3y ago

One of the things that I like about Firefox is that it lets you right click on websites that disable right clicking by holding down shift. Reminds you that the browser should be the user's agent and not the website's.

gigglesupstairs 3y ago
Wow i didn’t know that. So much thanks.
jdewerd 3y ago
Ooh, that's a killer feature and this is the first I'm hearing about it! Thanks!
rc_mob 3y ago
Did not know! Thatnks you!
Pikamander2 3y ago
This one's niche, but Firefox's dev tools also let web developers see which font is actually being used. Chrome's dev tools only show you what font is supposed to be in use, but doesn't tell you if it had to resort to a fallback font.
- lieuwex 3y ago
  Are you sure? I think the computed tab in Chrome devtools shows the actual used font.
  - hrldcpr 3y ago
    Yup if you scroll to the bottom of the Computed tab, it shows the "Rendered Fonts".
globular-toast 3y ago
I wish you could stop websites hijacking the quick find key (/) too.

graycat 3y ago

Ah, looks like I'm different!! Sync???? Thanks for the explanation: "As a refresher, Chrome Sync is capable of syncing, and settings across devices signed into with the same Google account. That's the idea, at least." I'm a heavy user of Firefox, 1+ hours a day. Never used "sync". Heard about it, but never knew what it was. Now, nope: Don't want it! For more: "bookmarks, passwords, browsing history, tabs, payment info, personal info" I don't know what a "bookmark" is. For the rest, I don't want Firefox involved with remembering any of those. Generally I want Firefox to do less, and less, and less, a lot less. For all those issues, I have perfectly good, simple, old solutions. I just want my Web browser doing little more than the minimum a Web browser needs to do and do not want it cooking my lunch or generally doing me favors. And I deeply resent Firefox, ..., my car trying to anticipate what I "want". E.g., when I need to pound in a nail and swing my hammer, I don't want the hammer stopping, reminding me that a hammer could hurt one of my fingers, and requiring that I push a special button for the hammer to go ahead and hit the nail. Generally, when I give an order, I want the intended purpose accomplished and do not want warnings, advice, popups, refusals, requirements to repeat my order, etc. Why? I'm trying to get my work done, ASAP, and the special help makes the work take 2-3 times longer. Back talk: Tools that refuse my command and give me back talk seem to believe that they know more about my work than I do, and that is not just hurting my work but also patronizing and insulting. Tool developer: Don't do that; else, as soon as I have an alternative I will take it. Yup, looks like I'm different. Maybe lots of people actually like popups, e.g., ones that try to do me favors but cover up what I need to see.

abhinavstarts 3y ago

I have tried firefox, Vivaldi. But in terms of speed, when different sites load chrome fares better than them. I'm back to using chrome. I like customisation feature of Vivaldi but it lags in terms of speed. I still use Vivaldi on case basis (to read some sites' articles which have by default ads enabled)

nottorp 3y ago
If you install uBlock Origin all sites will load faster :) And next year you'll only be able to do that in Firefox.
ryanjshaw 3y ago
When was the last time you tried? I reached the same conclusion a few years back, but I've been back to FF on all my devices for about 6 months now and haven't looked back.

GeekyBear 3y ago

One of the headline features for me is the Firefox recommended extensions program, where the extension code (and updated code) is manually vetted for malware and privacy violations. > Recommended extensions are expected to: Function extremely well. All Recommended extensions should not only perform as they promise, but do so at an exceptional level. For instance, there may be many ad blockers out there, but not all ad blockers are equally effective. Be safe and secure. Recommended extensions undergo full code review by staff security experts to provide a strong additional security check. Provide a delightful experience. Recommended extensions should embody great design and user experience standards. https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-recommended-extensions/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-recomme...

Forgeties79 3y ago
It’s honestly things like this that make me respect (more than I already do) and stick with Firefox. They do not need to do that and in a lot of ways it’s just sticking their neck out for other developers/their users for very little gain on their part. Obviously, there are some benefits for them, but I think most people would agree that it’s mainly a risk at the end of the day.
- hackernewds 3y ago
  with enough market share, if Google did this they would be cursed with numerous lawsuits for preferential selection and sued successfully
  - GeekyBear 3y ago
    > with enough market share, if Google did this they would be cursed with numerous lawsuits for preferential selection and sued successfully Google already has featured products on the Play Store, so preferential selection doesn't appear to be an issue. However, the likelihood of Google paying human beings to go over the code of a free extension looking for security and privacy violations is about zero.

byyll 3y ago

Chromium crashes for me after running for a while with 10+ tabs. I had more than 500 open in Firefox and it ran well. Also the ability to add proxies to multi account containers is great when I am trying to access the 3-4 websites that are only available in 1 country or are blocked in the EU. I can even force a certain domain to open in that container so I don't think about it.

vehemenz 3y ago

I'm surprised one can write an entire article on browser sync and not mention Safari, Chrome's main competitor.

zeta0134 3y ago
Safari works great if you run 100% Apple devices, and breaks the moment you want to mix and match with even one non-blessed device. Firefox will happily sync to everything, and so will Chrome.
- latexr 3y ago
  Doesn’t that just mean “every browser syncs great between different versions of itself”? It just so happens that Safari is not available on as many operating systems as Firefox and Chrome. “Breaks” doesn’t seem like the right characterisation.
- vehemenz 3y ago
  These are reasonable caveats, but I don’t think this disqualifies Safari as not worth writing about if you’re a so-called tech journalist. There are way more Apple-only users than Firefox users.
  - ta8903 3y ago
    But we're talking about anyone who ones at least one non-Apple main device being excluded, I don't think their number would be as high. But you're right that Apple devices and services are not even considered in a certain type of tech journalism.

pshirshov 3y ago

It's not possible to sync extensions/setting on mobiles, so it works but only partially.

okasaki 3y ago

I don't use Firefox because I find the way Mozilla communicates to be creepy. I don't like that word but I'm not sure how else to describe it.

nottorp 3y ago
It's pretty sad. I wanted to do a one time donation to mozilla last month and they kept and kept pushing for a recurring one instead. Aggressive marketing tends to trigger in me an equal and opposite reaction, so they didn't even get the one time donation. Also, they should get rid of the 'what's new in firefox after an upgrade' and just give me my pages back. 99.99% of the time I don't care what's new. Also, the popup that tells you there's a new version available that randomly shows up over what you were trying to read. Just let me get on with my stuff, will you?

jcalvinowens 3y ago

I switched back to firefox last year and haven't looked back. I still use chrome on another laptop sometimes, the performance difference from my human perspective is literally zero. These days, it's much more common for me to encounter a website that works in firefox but not chrome than the other way around. I actually switched for good when I had to use firefox to file my taxes, because the IRS free self-file site was hopelessly broken on chrome.

rc_mob 3y ago
Ad blockers break the websites far more often than any browser compat issues.
- jcalvinowens 3y ago
  One of many reasons I don't use ad blockers :)

Waterluvian 3y ago

For me, a fatal flaw with Firefox is that canvas getImageData doesn’t work like any other browser. Instead of returning the pixel values for the image loaded into the canvas, it gives the pixel values after they’ve been modified by the current screen/OS color profile. Other browsers seem to maintain the actual pixel values even if the OS later modifies the visual output of the application. This means that any user trying to do any data work with my GIS software will regularly get wrong outputs if they use Firefox.

3ln00b 3y ago

I never had the urge to switch from Firefox to any other browser, it's the first application that gets installed on any personal device after setup.

hbn 3y ago

Chrome history is confusing and bad. They broke history out into 2 things at some point, where you have "history" and something that I see now is called "groups" and of course I was able to look it up and see, yes, Google is once again gaslighting with random name changes and it was called "journeys" until a few months ago. It's some vague grouping of history as a list of pages you visited in sequence from an initial search, or perhaps starting from a new tab? And for some reason this tends to contain pages that the regular history doesn't. I wonder how much money was spent on designing and implementing this stupid unnecessary reimagining of browser history that only serves to make things more confusing.

__MatrixMan__ 3y ago

Passwords belong in a dedicated password manager. Besides those, I don't understand what I'd want to sync. I've even disabled syncing tabs between sessions on the same machine. The last thing I need is for what I was doing yesterday to distract me from what I'm trying to do today. What I want in a browser is a dumb box that starts up as a blank slate every time, renders HTML and JavaScript, and is indistinguishable from all of the other dumb boxes that do so.

iudqnolq 3y ago
You might want all the configuration you did to make your browser a dumb box to be synced. For example, disabling showing recently viewed pages on the new tab page.
nickdandakis 3y ago
I actually wish Mozilla put out a dedicated password manager. They have Sync, and they have SoPS (or well, used to?). I'd gladly pay extra for it
- billyzs 3y ago
  There used to a standalone Firefox Password app for mobile but it got the axe.
  - OJFord 3y ago
    Lockwise. And it had way better UX when auto-fill didn't work, because for some reason about:logins doesn't work on mobile, so you have to hunt through a menu mess to copy the password manually from Firefox. I continued to use it (because they didn't stop it syncing) until I switched phone and so couldn't easily install it.
- bloopernova 3y ago
  I think that I'd prefer Firefox allow Bitwarden and other password tools to replace Firefox's password implementation. That way you'd get the UI/UX of integrated password management, but the single-source-authoritative backend too. (before someone points out that Bitwarden has an extension: I do know that, but I'd like to see more modular features in browsers rather than our-way-is-best)

PhilippGille 3y ago

Many years ago, I wanted to use Firefox sync to migrate profile and bookmarks from one OS to another. I don't know if it's still the case, but at the time there was an automatic periodic and a manually triggered sync, with a button and sync icon (like ). I triggered the manual sync by clicking on the button. The icon spinned for a few seconds and then stopped. I interpreted this as the sync being finished, formatted the drive, installed the new OS, installed Firefox, set up sync, and waited for the profile/bookmarks to arrive. Nothing happened. Apparently (as per their issue report response) at the time, the spinning of the sync icon was only showing that the data had been written somewhere on disc and registered for the next periodic sync. The button did NOT trigger the sync itself. This was very frustrating and a good reminder to never rely on a single sync/backup. Also an interesting example of bad UX. Dropbox was already around at the time IIRC, and its stopping rotating sync icon indicated the actual sync to be finished, as one would expect. Again, this was many years ago, and I think I remember reading that they reimplemented sync from scratch some time later. I'm still using Firefox, but not their sync. Maybe time to give it another chance.

dark-star 3y ago

Chrome's sync also "just works" for me shrug

tempaccount420 3y ago
Firefox needs to celebrate the small wins I guess.
- xbar 3y ago
  I feel like Firefox already wins on all the privacy dimensions, so what's left but small stuff?
jklinger410 3y ago
Yeah the whole premise here is that Chrome sync is broken. I'm not sure many people share that belief. Love FF though. Maybe I'll go through another testing cycle with it and see if I just end up on Chrome again lol.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 3y ago
  >see if I just end up on Chrome again lol. One must love advertising and tracking to put up with Chrome on mobile.
mdaniel 3y ago
Or rather it will until you step on some mysterious Google ToS violation and they nuke your Google account, without any recourse. I'm cognizant that's always a risk with cloud hosted things, but I can't recall seeing any amount of front-page posts of "Mozilla nuked my account and won't respond to my emails halp!1" FWIW, I think Brave(?) has an implementation of the Google sync server that they use, so it's not totally ludicrous to self-host, but I don't suspect it would be easy or that Chrome would make any such thing easy to pull off

Tomte 3y ago

FF sync reliably fails for me. No matter how often I disconnect/reconnect devices. It's not worth the hassle for me.

redder23 3y ago

I wish there was an extension that would make it work in Chromium based browsers. I use Firefox in windows while gaming ... but for dev work on Linux I use Brave. I use Xbookmarksync to sync bookmarks and Bitwarden for passwords. It basically works but I have a Firefox account anyway and history could be sync across browsers and maybe some setting that exist in both the same way.

jw_cook 3y ago

Since the main topic of this article is sync, does any browser or extension out there support syncing active tabs withing the browsing window, rather than putting them in a separate "recent tabs" menu? In other words, mirroring the entire browsing session across devices (ideally preserving tab order).

cvburgess 3y ago
Arc[0] does this really well for me - across computers and even my phone. Its chromium under the hood but the UX and sync story is impeccable. [0] https://arc.net/ https://arc.net/
- jw_cook 3y ago
  Good to know! I'm on the waitlist to try the Windows beta. Do you know if they're planning to port it to Linux at some point?

andrew_ 3y ago

FWIW Brave's sync works extremely well.

bloopernova 3y ago

Firefox has multiple compelling reasons to use it: Sync Containers Tree Style Tabs uBlock Origin on Android Open Source since 1998! Not based on Chromium Be wary of sync on a fresh Linux install, it might sync the default bookmarks and merge them with your own. Not a huge deal but definitely an annoyance.

avg_dev 3y ago
I’ll have to look into containers and tree style tabs. I have never knowingly used those.
- avtolik 3y ago
  Containers are the best. I use them every day. Also I switched from Tree Style Tab to Sidebery. I like it better for some reason.
  - zavertnik 3y ago
    I found a config that worked for me using TST so I haven’t explored other methods for vertical tabs. What eventually convinced you to try Sidebery and what convinced you not to switch back to TST? I’m curious what I’m missing out on!
    - avtolik 3y ago
      Nothing major. It just feels sleek. I don't require much from these plugins.
- bloopernova 3y ago
  Tree style tabs enables vertical tabs, which are listed at the side of the window rather than the top. It means you can still read tab titles when you have more than a dozen tabs open. Plus you can nest and rearrange your tabs to fit your work or study. For some, like me, it's a game changer and I dislike using chrome now because it doesn't support vertical tabs. Caveat: to disable top-of-window tabs you have to use a user chrome CSS file, so it's not just "install extension, enable checkbox" easy.

scruple 3y ago

Personally I find mobile browser plugins to be the most compelling reason, it's certainly the reason that FF is my main browser in conjunction with working browser sync across devices.

loloquwowndueo 3y ago

Dunno, I’ve been using Firefox since before it was Firefox as my primary browser and I’ve never used sync. I don’t think that’s the most compelling feature.

JohnFen 3y ago
Sync is not a feature useful to me, either (along with most of the other newer features). Lots of people do find it very useful, though, and despite it not being for me, it sounds plausible that it could be the most compelling feature for the majority.
Toorkit 3y ago
It's not the most compelling feature for me, but I spend 2 hours on the bus every day and love being able to send a bunch of tabs that pop up on my desktop when I get home.
- mxmilkiib 3y ago
  It can be neat, though my problem is I've several hundred tabs "archived" (discarded/hibernated/whatever) on the phone and and I want to open them all on the desktop at the same time to go through (I'd be very happy for the 10 minute wait, and/or if they were all discarded/hibernated, as doing them one by one would be an absolute chore), but trying to kills the desktop FF by making it hang then fall over!

ReptileMan 3y ago

>On the surface, Firefox Sync seems to be basically the same as Chrome Sync. To set it up, you just need to sign into your devices with the same Mozilla account and choose what you'd like to sync. And this is why I use brave - the sync there is accountless, you just get random id and create a random phrase - that's it.

katella 3y ago

I really like Firefox containers, not sure if chrome has something similar.

zero0529 3y ago

One of my biggest gripes with Firefox sync is the way they have divided the mobile bookmarks from the pc ones. It makes the ux kinda weird as a lot of the bookmarks I use on my desktop I also use on my phone and vice verca. But when I add a bookmark on my phone it ends in a separate mobile bookmark folder.

araes 3y ago
I like Firefox. I've been using Developer Release path for years. Yet, the memory usage is such a hog. I almost cannot run VS 2022 or Android Studio while also running Firefox to check for questions on code. [1] I have two tabs open responding to this post (HN and HN comment), and Firefox has 13 processes running in Task Manager with ~1 GB of memory used. And in there, is a -42 MB process. I'm not even sure what a -42 MB process even means in Task Manager. No wait, now its -77 MB. [1] Note: this is also a serious issue with VS 2022 and Android Studio. Every release, Android Studio somehow gets slower. A couple years ago, I used to be able to build, test on emulator, and deploy while having a browser open. Now I can barely open the emulator. VS is kind of a joke. To build a couple 100 line WinRT file it loads the entire device library from all of history (following MS' examples)
vorticalbox 3y ago
Can only mirror this, I just want my bookmarks not different sets of them.
soundnote 3y ago
Chromium browsers do a similar thing IME, and while I don't mind it, I don't like that the "mobile bookmarks" folder is only really accessible from the bookmark manager proper, not the bookmarks sidebar or the desktop bookmarks bar's UI.
deanishe 3y ago
For the life of me, I don't understand why they do this. It's not 2003. I don't have a separate bunch of WAP bookmarks for my phone.
- deleted 3y ago

bananaflag 3y ago

I use Firefox because of the Awesome Bar. I can easily find whatever page I visited ever since it was introduced in 2008. Chrome's omnibox has always felt like a discount version of it.

trulyrandom 3y ago

Really? Is the new implementation of the sync server finally stable? For years we've been stuck between the old Python 2 implementation and the new incomplete Rust implementation.

jaylittle 3y ago

I mean that's great... but I've been using Brave sync across a wide variety of devices (Linux, iOS, Windows and MacOS) and it has worked without a hitch for quite awhile.

SergeAx 3y ago

For a while, two things kept me from switching to Firefox entirely: instant translation and Google product compatibility. The first one was solved in Firefox 118 several weeks ago. The second one keeps nagging me: Google Maps are somehow jittery in Firefox, and I think there's something with YouTube, too. So, I am waiting for an inevitable manifest v3 transition of Chrome to ditch it for good.

jvehent 3y ago

The most compelling reason to use Firefox Sync is that it is client-side encrypted. Mozilla stores opaque encrypted blobs that it is entirely unable to decrypt. Law enforcement agencies request that data from time to time, hoping to obtain browsing history, only to be turned down thanks to the encryption. (disclaimer: former Mozilla security)

soundnote 3y ago
This is a big reason to avoid Edge: They have entire categories that aren't e2ee, browsing history being one of them. Chrome, IIRC, can have e2ee but the user has to turn it on. Brave, Vivaldi and Firefox offer complete, e2ee sync solutions.
GeoAtreides 3y ago
Even better, you can host the sync server yourself: https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncstorage-rs https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncstorage-rs
- ranguna 3y ago
  A local server that uses sentry and spanner? What?
  - camgunz 3y ago
    You have an incredulous tone, but you can host Sentry (it's open source) and it's very common to host databases in the cloud.
    - ranguna 3y ago
      I just hoped that everything on that server could run locally and not depend on any cloud based tech.
      - kuschkufan 3y ago
        I strongly suggest to read the requirements fully before commenting what amounts to misinformation at best. You can run everything locally. You don't need spanner and can use mysql instead as a database. Also, as the previous commenter already told you, you can can run sentry locally. Let's see whether you're willing and able to walk back your comments. I'm in the same boat as you - I'd want to run everything locally and I'm very happy to see it's entirely possible.

WarOnPrivacy 3y ago

I run Firefox as a remote app. Every night, my main Firefox copies it's profile to a local virtual machine; that VM hosts Firefox as a virtual/remote app. I'm posting this from it. This way I have all my containers and logins but my data stays at home. And browsing from my home IP has advantages.

roshansingh 3y ago

It's Firefox containers for me. It is extremely useful to manage different environments - dev, production etc., and I can use the colors to identify the tabs.

javier_e06 3y ago

Firefox falls flat on its foxy face when it comes to chromebook tablet support. I am so ready to ween myself from Chrome but when I open my chromebook, they pull me back in. Arrrgh.

mort96 3y ago
Uh... if you wanted to get off of Chrome, getting a Chromebook might not have been the best choice.

mort96 3y ago

This article is terrible, there's an animated ad between almost every paragraph and a floating animated banner ad and a floating auto-playing video ad. Completely unreadable.

butz 3y ago

I wish Firefox took RSS more seriously. Imagine, if Firefox Sync not only supported RSS feed synchronization between devices, but also would keep updating them in the cloud, so one wouldn't miss any news from busy websites.

pieter_mj 3y ago
Will never work the way firefox sync is set up : it's client side encrypted, in the "cloud" it's just a blob.

soundnote 3y ago

Firefox's actual, non-replicable killer feature is somewhat questionable, but: Chromium has a lower limit on how much RAM a page can consume. Now, YouTube comments sections get huge, and huge web pages are huge. Turns out, Firefox can give the page more RAM and keep it nice and functional for longer. The questionable part is spending your limited lifetime on reading huge YouTube comment sections.

danShumway 3y ago

Minor trick, if you use separate Firefox profiles, Firefox sync can be enabled between separate profiles, which means you can use it to do things like sync addons between profiles when you're quickly setting things up. It's not perfect, I do still wish there were better ways to fork profiles in Firefox, but it can cut down on a lot of repeat configuration. And you can set it up, sync your addons over, and then turn it off and diverge from there.

kornhole 3y ago

I love Firefox and this feature, but I need to hop between several devices and browsers for different purposes. I keep all my passwords, tabs, and bookmarks synced to my Nextcloud server with some extensions. If a particular browser goes to sh.., I can switch to another with low friction.

bandyaboot 3y ago

One thing I find annoying about all the sync implementations I’ve run across is the inability to exclude certain extensions. I want most of them to sync, but not all.

pferrel 3y ago

I have three google accounts, one personal, one for my business, one for garbage web sites where I need an email but do not trust with my everyday address. Chrome sucks at dealing with these since sync is tied to the account you have logged into and you have to switch login every time you access another account. This switch affects every new tab. Firefox does not touch the FF login when you access some Google account info or email so FF sync works sooo much better than Chromes. Chrome needs to scrap and rethink how it uses Google accounts IMHO.

anjel 3y ago

I use the FF "send tab to other sync'd device" constantly.

raingros 3y ago

Recently switched from Chrome to Firefox and was disappointed to learn that syncing custom search engines still doesn‘t work in Firefox. Hope that will be fixed soon.