5 ms·

Testing the Firefox Alternatives

lolinder 2y ago
> You can totally still stick with Firefox… but remember to download userChrome.css from GitHub. And if you want vertical tabs, be sure to install Sidebery until Mozilla get around to implementing native vertical tabs. I'm a constant critic of most things Mozilla (as well as an avid Firefox user... there's a lot of overlap in that venn diagram) and most of what this intro rails against resonates, but I'll never understand why they get hammered for not implementing vertical tabs. This is a feature that a small but passionate subset of their users use, but it's also a feature that already has an extension that said subset of their users uses. Further, said subset has a strong overlap with the never-Chromium crowd, so they're not going to lose them any time soon. Out of the thousand and one things that Mozilla could be doing to make Firefox more competitive, vertical tabs is solidly in the second half of the list.
- bloopernova 2y ago
  In my experience, once people see how sidebar/vertical tabs work, they're a lot more interested. Most folks I've talked about this with have not even known there was an alternative. After someone has been shown how to change between tab layouts, they mostly stick to sidebar/vertical tabs.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    Maybe I should have tried plain vertical tabs—I tried out tree-style tabs and kind of hated it, so I went back to horizontal. Regardless, the question isn't really whether vertical tabs would be a useful feature, it's whether it would be the most useful thing Mozilla could be working on. I'd much rather see them pour resources into making Firefox's devtools the best again. I'm pretty much the lone pure-Firefox holdout among my coworkers, with everyone else at least switching into Chrome for serious devtools work, and most now run it all the time. Make Firefox the best for devtools and you ensure it has reliable support across all browsers and put it back in the hands of the biggest browser-evangelists.
    - bloopernova 2y ago
      Purely out of curiosity, what did you prefer about horizontal tabs, and what did you dislike about vertical tabs?
  - Dwedit 2y ago
    I use two side-by-side browser windows, so there's no room for a sidebar.
- wtcactus 2y ago
  Well, the entry barrier is higher than simply installing an extension. You also need to change the userChrome.ccs (if I remember the file correctly), to get rid of the horizontal tabs. For a base/intermediate user, that's not a simple thing to do.
- jrajav 2y ago
  I think it's fair to count at least a subset of Arc users in the "wants vertical tabs" camp. I have several friends and co-workers who use it now, and most of them mentioned vertical tabs at least once. I agree that it's probably still an 'enthusiast' feature, but it's one that I think is starting to catch the road and has a pretty solid future trajectory.
- callahad 2y ago
  Edge and Safari have had vertical tabs for years; when the default browsers on Windows and macOS offer that affordance, it becomes more of a mainstream parity issue. Which is thankfully, finally, being addressed.
- thayne 2y ago
  I'd be fine with letting an extension take over that niche ... if they made an API that let it replace the horizontal tabs instead of only being able to duplicate the tabs in the sidebar. Or even a way to configure that as a user. That is how tree style tabs worked before Firefox switched to webextensions. And when Firefox switched to the we extensions API, a ticket was immediately opened requesting an API allowing hiding the horizontal tab bar. But despite some initial interest, nothing really ever happened with that.
  - larntz 2y ago
    It's not an api, but just in case people don't know... It is possible to hide the horizontal tabs via userChrome. https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-for-custom-style-rules#for-userchromecss https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-fo...
    - wkat4242 2y ago
      Hmm but I don't want to use vertical tabs in every window. Only some of them, in the others (with few tabs and narrower 4:3 displays) i want horizontal. If I hide it in userchrome I end up with no tab bar in those cases.
  - jwells89 2y ago
    Yep. While Sidebery, TST, etc have done about as well as they can given the limitations of extensions, the resulting vertical tab experience is half-baked without userChrome mods. It's also still kinda janky even with the mods unless one spends time polishing out all the edge cases, but then there's a high chance the mods will randomly break in weird ways after an update one day. There's real value in having the feature be native.
- mikae1 2y ago
  Native vertical tabs are already in nightly and it's about as neutered as its Edge and Vivaldi counterparts. What Edge and Vivaldi does not have is APIs for implementing something as impressive as the nested style Sidebery or Tree Style Tabs. Making it sound like Edge and Vivaldi has the upper hand, when it comes to vertical tabs, is not fair.
- heraldgeezer 2y ago
  Because Edge, Brave and Vivaldi has GOOD vertical tabs and they made it native somehow so much be a very small userbase right??? :) ALSO it is now native in Nightly anyway, so we won and it is good. :)
- wkat4242 2y ago
  Not a big fan of having such core functionality in extensions. Firefox translations work better now that they're in the core and it keeps the number of extensions down (and thus the messages of "Firefox is.. starting.. slowly") The same with the AI stuff, i don't mind that in the browser. It does an okay job though it needs a lot of work. And I can already use it with my local AI server. Unlike the copilot crap in edge and whatever AI Google has in Chrome (I've not used chrome in years, only chromium)
jmclnx 2y ago
Nice little article, posted via eww on emacs :) Edit: via Firefox. The odd thing about eww and ycombinator, the line size is limited on eww and you are limited to 1 line in eww. It is a eww thing, but surprisingly eww renders pages rather well.
pndy 2y ago
Waterfox is nearly same as Librewolf; it comes with own set of additional settings and tweaks. From what I saw around some users weren't fond of the arrangements the author of the project went into (startpage, fastly) and bundling of tree tabs extension that had to be disabled by about:config entry change. Pale Moon: IIRC initially it was a fork of Firefox ESR then project switched to own Goanna engine, which in turn is a fork of Gecko; it also tries to keep alive XUL extensions platform. There were some dramas happening in the past around the project, esp. regarding porting browser to OpenBSD. It's kinda a niche project I'd say - surely it has some community but it's not that big. As for IceCat - I'm surprised it's still around; seems it runs own extensions database (https://gnuzilla.gnu.org/mozzarella/ https://gnuzilla.gnu.org/mozzarella/) but these aren't keeping up with official releases, at least on the page. Perhaps autoupdate bumps these to the current versions; still, uBlock Origin is stuck at 1.51.0 from last December, while the current version is 1.59.0. I tried Zen recently - it's kinda hard to get used to tabs sidebar. For some people this might be useful but not for me - I prefer tabs on top.
- lazyeye 2y ago
  Also try the Mullvad browser which I believe is based on the TOR browser with the TOR bit removed https://mullvad.net/en/browser https://mullvad.net/en/browser
bloopernova 2y ago
One minor nitpick: Firefox has vertical tabs, they were recently added in version 131 nightly builds. (Blog was probably written before it was added) Also Edge/Vivaldi have sidebar/vertical tabs, but they don't nest which reduces their utility in my opinion. The Miller Columns view implemented in a recent HN post[1] would be great way to view history. Each column could be linked visually with its sidebar tab. I use my sidebar tab tree structure to give additional context on what I've viewed, I can see that page G is a child of B, etc. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41263203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41263203
- gmueckl 2y ago
  Vivaldi tabs do nest one level deep via tab groups. Drag one tab over another to group them. That's at least something.
- bad_user 2y ago
  I'm using Brave. Vertical tabs don't nest; however, you can group them using Chromium's native groups. In Brave, I can also assign custom keyboard shortcuts, so I have Ctrl+G for starting a new group, and Ctrl+T for opening a new tab in the same group. I've also been a user of Firefox for years, and the tree-style tabs extension are all slightly broken, enough to make me disable them. I also never found much value in nesting.
seba_dos1 2y ago
> And if you want vertical tabs, be sure to install Sidebery until Mozilla get around to implementing native vertical tabs. (You know, like Chromium-based browsers including Edge and Vivaldi already have.) I've been using vertical tabs in Firefox ever since Mozilla implemented it back in 2016 as "Tab Center" long before any Chromium-based browser decided to do so too. Of course the official feature has been discontinued long time ago, but I've been a happy user of its webext-based replacement ever since. Just a bit of CSS goes a long way in making it compact and well-integrated, unlike stuff like Sidebery or Tree Style Tabs that always felt big, clunky and filled with stuff I never use. For the past 8 years, my Firefox looked like this: https://dosowisko.net/firefox-tabcenter.gif https://dosowisko.net/firefox-tabcenter.gif and I never stumbled upon a reasonable alternative, including the native implementation Mozilla recently added back into Firefox (though it's a step in the right direction).
- pasc1878 2y ago
  I have been using vertical tabs since the mid 90s - OmniWeb on NeXT then OSX. Unfortunately that stopped being usable in the late 200s then I used Firefox extension TreeStyleTabs - I did not know that Mozilla did vertical tabs. Chrome also had vertical tabs then but the bug tracker is hilarious in that the authors really did not understand its use and eventually removed it. After 2016 then Vivaldi and in the last couple of years Safari (there was a horrible admin 10 years ago)
- seba_dos1 2y ago
  For the record, the CSS used to achieve that result can be found at https://gitlab.com/-/snippets/3715038 https://gitlab.com/-/snippets/3715038
- codethief 2y ago
  For the lazy here's the link to the extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabcenter-reborn/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabcenter-reb...
freitzkriesler2 2y ago
[dead]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
drdaeman 2y ago
Given that this whole "AI" integration shtick is minimal effort thing with negligibly small value (if any), I suspect it was either an attempt to just ride on "AI" hype (certainly didn't work, feedback comments are virtually univocally "AI" hate), or attempt to find new monetization source (e.g. for a default provider). My own thoughts on the AI feature: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/share-your-feedback-on-the-ai-services-experiment-in-nightly/m-p/70100#M26342 https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/share-your-feedba... - LLM integrations can be useful and actually supporting end-users, but it must be based on entirely different paradigm (all about user agent automation, not a website in a sidebar) and it's probably best left out of the core application itself and rather be a external co-program. As for the alternatives - to be honest, I don't really see much difference beyond various cosmetics. Both Zen and Floorp are basically the same Firefox for me, containing all the things I hate about Firefox ("sponsored" stuff everywhere, Firefox Account and Sync overengineering abomination, all the "safety" features that "protect" browser from its users, hardcoded built-in things that should be pluggable rather than fixed), while bringing nothing I actually care about and want to see (such as decluttering websites aggressively minimizing all the noise I don't care about - kinda like improved reader mode for everything by default, flexible automatic workflows for personal routine things, advanced history with optional content indexing for finding back things I vaguely remember seeing somewhere, automatic tab management to solve 100 open tabs problem, removal of tightly integrated bits like password or download management in favor of replaceable classic UNIX-way style external programs so I can use any tool I want while feeling those tools are properly truly and fully integrated and aren't some hacks like those password manager extensions messing with HTML). Honestly, I'm sad that niche stuff like surf and Uzbl had essentially died, instead of evolving towards a pre-packaged "batteries included out of the box, but you can replace everything with your own" suites. I wished for a non-monolithic browser for technical/power users, with replaceable components for about a decade now - don't think I'll ever see it happening.
- SlackingOff123 2y ago
  There are sooo many AI chat options to choose from[1] that I don't need my browser to provide one too. I just want my browser to be a good browser. [1] I've been enjoying my self-hosted instance of LibreChat a lot, but I also started using Kagi's assistant lately. Besides those two I'm also using 'aichat' cli tool for quick queries, particularly for helping with cli commands since the context is already there.
prmoustache 2y ago
aren't all "antifeatures" disabled by default on most linux distro packaged firefox?
- sumuyuda 2y ago
  Not the telemetry
politelemon 2y ago
This part is misleading. It is possible to make the same point without having to make it sounds the feature has been introduced nefariously: > Yes, I get that some people want it, and you can turn it off. It is already off. You have to opt in to the 'experiments' area.
causality0 2y ago
I wish someone would release a good mobile fork. Firefox Mobile probably has the worst UX of any mobile browser I've used since 2009 and I'm convinced whatever intern they have locked in a closet coding it doesn't use it themselves. It's as if they used a supercomputer to predict user behavior for the sole purpose of making sure their obnoxious purple toast messages cover the exact button you need to use and that they last exactly one second short of the time required to make you uninstall it in fury.
- cuu508 2y ago
  What are your main gripes?
  - causality0 2y ago
    If I dismiss a tab the "you dismissed a tab" popup blocks the view of the next tab. If I full-screen a video, the "you fullscreened a video!" message blocks the entire video progress bar so I can't move forward or back. I don't need the damn browser to tell me what I just did. I was there. Adjusting the volume while watching a full screen video drops the whole browser into a 4mmx4mm picture-in-picture window on my home screen. Oh, and the bug where using the back button sometimes completely breaks the "view desktop site" button until I manually kill the app is still there.
    - jorams 2y ago
      > If I dismiss a tab the "you dismissed a tab" popup blocks the view of the next tab. This only happens if you close a tab just above the bottom of your screen. You can scroll the entire list up past the point where any tabs will be obscured by the toast (which has an undo button), and it even does so by default when you open the list with one of the lower tabs active. To reproduce your complaint I have to either explicitly scroll the tab I want to close into the area that will be obscured, or I have to have a tab higher in the list active, then open the list, and then close one of the tabs at the bottom of the screen. > If I full-screen a video, the "you fullscreened a video!" message blocks the entire video progress bar so I can't move forward or back. This is/was indeed annoying. It's been resolved in a recent update for me on Beta. I've never seen the other two things you mention and I can't reproduce them, but they don't seem like UX issues, just bugs.
Dwedit 2y ago
Librewolf ships with uBlock Origin preinstalled, however the default installation of uBlock Origin enables EasyPrivacy by default. EasyPrivacy blocks legitimate websites, and there is no recourse to try to have a false positive become unblocked. Because of this, I do not recommend enabling EasyPrivacy if you are installing the browser for another person, unless they are comfortable with changing extension settings to disable the filter.
WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
I use ~10 desktops across the day (physical, remote and virtual). They all have Firefox (rel, ESR, nightly) as their primary browser. I also use of Ffx alts every day (presently Waterfox). I co-use Ffx alts to segment browsing - and as a quick fix for when sites develop Broken Control Syndrome. Outside of the Ffx ecosystem, I'm using Brave (today) to test Google products and deal with Google's passive-aggressive hostility to Firefox. I had tried Opera before Brave but it felt like being trolled. Something is very wrong in that house.
- bornfreddy 2y ago
  > Outside of the Ffx ecosystem, I'm using Brave (today) to test Google products and deal with Google's passive-aggressive hostility to Firefox. Well said! I do the same.
hk1337 2y ago
I may get some naysayers for this, maybe because I'm on macOS and not Linux or Windows but... Two features I love about Safari is: - Pinch/Zoom to view all my tabs as windows to switch between tabs - What at least appears to be total isolation between tabs when in private browsing mode. If I login to Facebook in one tab, then open up a new tab and go to Facebook, it will not see me as logged in. Chrome nor Firefox have either of those features.
- mediumsmart 2y ago
  I did not know that thanks, been using Orion for a while now as my main browser and, oh wait, yes same thing. very nice. I only used firefox to test local webdev projects and still switched to librewolf which is fine. And I have a chrome browser so it can pull up the results of a local lighthouse test but that is it.
- curt15 2y ago
  Do Firefox [temporary container tabs](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...) fit the bill?
  - hk1337 2y ago
    Maybe but I never could figure out how to do it and safari did it out of the box with little to no configuration
- xemdetia 2y ago
  That is an interesting Safari feature for private tabs, when I start needing to have more than two levels of isolation past the non-private universe and the private universe I start using profiles. My intuition that my private tabs are logged in and I can open more tabs with the same credentials is a big part of my workflow so I never thought of needing that further isolation.
- strunz 2y ago
  Safari is just not usable without a Ublock or similar extension support. No, a desktop app ad blocker isn't a good alternative.
Dwedit 2y ago
There is a fork of Pale Moon that is compatible with Windows XP called "New Moon". It's based on Palemoon 28.10.7a1. While an old version of the browser, it is still compatible with modern websites, such as Github. It is available at http://o.rthost.win/palemoon/ http://o.rthost.win/palemoon/ , but make sure you don't download a 64-bit version by mistake. (Providing a non-secure http link because the MSIE version that ships with Windows XP is not compatible with modern https websites)
d0mine 2y ago
https://zen-browser.app/ https://zen-browser.app/ killer features for me: - web panel: to show/hide messenger/mail quickly. I don’t see it — no distractions — but it is instantly there when I need it - hor/vert. grid/tiling on keyboard shortcut: pair some web pages together so that they are visible/hidden at the same time - Firefox addons work (that I use) e.g., Vimium C - vertical tabs combined with compact mode that show/hides them on keyboard shortcut
slowmovintarget 2y ago
I'm hoping Ladybird makes it across the finish line. https://ladybird.org/ https://ladybird.org/
- wkat4242 2y ago
  It's years away according to the most optimistic planning so I'm not holding my breath.
cdrini 2y ago
Man, Firefox users are something else. So many of these complaints are kind of annoying or have internal contradictions. "That’s rather disconcerting if you’d like Mozilla to focus on making a good browser instead of chasing the new and shiny because it is new and shiny." - contradiction, you just conceded that there are Firefox users that want these new AI features, so no it's not just a shiny because it's shiny. Just because you don't want it doesn't mean it's "shiny for shiny". "I’ll note that some of the AI stuff Mozilla is pursing is reasonable. The translation feature uses a local model for translation, which is a great idea. It doesn’t support all the languages that Google Translate does, but it’s good." Great, it's not as good as one of the largest, richest companies on the planet, that has had translation as a feature for what like 20 years now. Firefox introduced translation like this year! Can't we just celebrate the successes when they happen and recognize it as an important step? "the rollout of the ghastly Proton UI, which necessitated (and still necessitates) setting up Lepton aka Firefox-UI-Fix" I'm so tired of this view, why can't people recognize when a UI preference is just a preference? The UI is fine. This is why browsers are configurable, so you can shape it to your preferences. Don't get me wrong, there are lots of problems with Mozilla and things they could be doing better, but when these are being touted as the primary problems at the top of the article, it just seems petty and overly negative.
butz 2y ago
I remember the times when I had three or more different browsers installed, just because each had their own unique and useful features. Had some workflows for each too. Now, I ended up using the least worst browser, and that must tell something about current situation in "browser market".
butz 2y ago
I just don't get all the hate for Firefox "AI" integration. Probably I am out of the loop, but to get access to all chatbots that are actually collecting user data and using questions for more training, are "locked" behind some API and requires for user to enter login credentials? Please correct me if I am wrong. Sure, I hate Pocket as any other Firefox user, and always disable it on new install, and I assume I will be able to disable all those chatbot integrations too? Oh, and I forgot about the new weather widget... Yes, situation is dire.

> You can totally still stick with Firefox… but remember to download userChrome.css from GitHub. And if you want vertical tabs, be sure to install Sidebery until Mozilla get around to implementing native vertical tabs. I'm a constant critic of most things Mozilla (as well as an avid Firefox user... there's a lot of overlap in that venn diagram) and most of what this intro rails against resonates, but I'll never understand why they get hammered for not implementing vertical tabs. This is a feature that a small but passionate subset of their users use, but it's also a feature that already has an extension that said subset of their users uses. Further, said subset has a strong overlap with the never-Chromium crowd, so they're not going to lose them any time soon. Out of the thousand and one things that Mozilla could be doing to make Firefox more competitive, vertical tabs is solidly in the second half of the list.

bloopernova 2y ago
In my experience, once people see how sidebar/vertical tabs work, they're a lot more interested. Most folks I've talked about this with have not even known there was an alternative. After someone has been shown how to change between tab layouts, they mostly stick to sidebar/vertical tabs.
- lolinder 2y ago
  Maybe I should have tried plain vertical tabs—I tried out tree-style tabs and kind of hated it, so I went back to horizontal. Regardless, the question isn't really whether vertical tabs would be a useful feature, it's whether it would be the most useful thing Mozilla could be working on. I'd much rather see them pour resources into making Firefox's devtools the best again. I'm pretty much the lone pure-Firefox holdout among my coworkers, with everyone else at least switching into Chrome for serious devtools work, and most now run it all the time. Make Firefox the best for devtools and you ensure it has reliable support across all browsers and put it back in the hands of the biggest browser-evangelists.
  - bloopernova 2y ago
    Purely out of curiosity, what did you prefer about horizontal tabs, and what did you dislike about vertical tabs?
- Dwedit 2y ago
  I use two side-by-side browser windows, so there's no room for a sidebar.
wtcactus 2y ago
Well, the entry barrier is higher than simply installing an extension. You also need to change the userChrome.ccs (if I remember the file correctly), to get rid of the horizontal tabs. For a base/intermediate user, that's not a simple thing to do.
jrajav 2y ago
I think it's fair to count at least a subset of Arc users in the "wants vertical tabs" camp. I have several friends and co-workers who use it now, and most of them mentioned vertical tabs at least once. I agree that it's probably still an 'enthusiast' feature, but it's one that I think is starting to catch the road and has a pretty solid future trajectory.
callahad 2y ago
Edge and Safari have had vertical tabs for years; when the default browsers on Windows and macOS offer that affordance, it becomes more of a mainstream parity issue. Which is thankfully, finally, being addressed.
thayne 2y ago
I'd be fine with letting an extension take over that niche ... if they made an API that let it replace the horizontal tabs instead of only being able to duplicate the tabs in the sidebar. Or even a way to configure that as a user. That is how tree style tabs worked before Firefox switched to webextensions. And when Firefox switched to the we extensions API, a ticket was immediately opened requesting an API allowing hiding the horizontal tab bar. But despite some initial interest, nothing really ever happened with that.
- larntz 2y ago
  It's not an api, but just in case people don't know... It is possible to hide the horizontal tabs via userChrome. https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-for-custom-style-rules#for-userchromecss https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-fo...
  - wkat4242 2y ago
    Hmm but I don't want to use vertical tabs in every window. Only some of them, in the others (with few tabs and narrower 4:3 displays) i want horizontal. If I hide it in userchrome I end up with no tab bar in those cases.
- jwells89 2y ago
  Yep. While Sidebery, TST, etc have done about as well as they can given the limitations of extensions, the resulting vertical tab experience is half-baked without userChrome mods. It's also still kinda janky even with the mods unless one spends time polishing out all the edge cases, but then there's a high chance the mods will randomly break in weird ways after an update one day. There's real value in having the feature be native.
mikae1 2y ago
Native vertical tabs are already in nightly and it's about as neutered as its Edge and Vivaldi counterparts. What Edge and Vivaldi does not have is APIs for implementing something as impressive as the nested style Sidebery or Tree Style Tabs. Making it sound like Edge and Vivaldi has the upper hand, when it comes to vertical tabs, is not fair.
heraldgeezer 2y ago
Because Edge, Brave and Vivaldi has GOOD vertical tabs and they made it native somehow so much be a very small userbase right??? :) ALSO it is now native in Nightly anyway, so we won and it is good. :)
wkat4242 2y ago
Not a big fan of having such core functionality in extensions. Firefox translations work better now that they're in the core and it keeps the number of extensions down (and thus the messages of "Firefox is.. starting.. slowly") The same with the AI stuff, i don't mind that in the browser. It does an okay job though it needs a lot of work. And I can already use it with my local AI server. Unlike the copilot crap in edge and whatever AI Google has in Chrome (I've not used chrome in years, only chromium)

jmclnx 2y ago

Nice little article, posted via eww on emacs :) Edit: via Firefox. The odd thing about eww and ycombinator, the line size is limited on eww and you are limited to 1 line in eww. It is a eww thing, but surprisingly eww renders pages rather well.

pndy 2y ago

Waterfox is nearly same as Librewolf; it comes with own set of additional settings and tweaks. From what I saw around some users weren't fond of the arrangements the author of the project went into (startpage, fastly) and bundling of tree tabs extension that had to be disabled by about:config entry change. Pale Moon: IIRC initially it was a fork of Firefox ESR then project switched to own Goanna engine, which in turn is a fork of Gecko; it also tries to keep alive XUL extensions platform. There were some dramas happening in the past around the project, esp. regarding porting browser to OpenBSD. It's kinda a niche project I'd say - surely it has some community but it's not that big. As for IceCat - I'm surprised it's still around; seems it runs own extensions database (https://gnuzilla.gnu.org/mozzarella/ https://gnuzilla.gnu.org/mozzarella/) but these aren't keeping up with official releases, at least on the page. Perhaps autoupdate bumps these to the current versions; still, uBlock Origin is stuck at 1.51.0 from last December, while the current version is 1.59.0. I tried Zen recently - it's kinda hard to get used to tabs sidebar. For some people this might be useful but not for me - I prefer tabs on top.

lazyeye 2y ago
Also try the Mullvad browser which I believe is based on the TOR browser with the TOR bit removed https://mullvad.net/en/browser https://mullvad.net/en/browser

bloopernova 2y ago

One minor nitpick: Firefox has vertical tabs, they were recently added in version 131 nightly builds. (Blog was probably written before it was added) Also Edge/Vivaldi have sidebar/vertical tabs, but they don't nest which reduces their utility in my opinion. The Miller Columns view implemented in a recent HN post[1] would be great way to view history. Each column could be linked visually with its sidebar tab. I use my sidebar tab tree structure to give additional context on what I've viewed, I can see that page G is a child of B, etc. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41263203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41263203

gmueckl 2y ago
Vivaldi tabs do nest one level deep via tab groups. Drag one tab over another to group them. That's at least something.
bad_user 2y ago
I'm using Brave. Vertical tabs don't nest; however, you can group them using Chromium's native groups. In Brave, I can also assign custom keyboard shortcuts, so I have Ctrl+G for starting a new group, and Ctrl+T for opening a new tab in the same group. I've also been a user of Firefox for years, and the tree-style tabs extension are all slightly broken, enough to make me disable them. I also never found much value in nesting.

seba_dos1 2y ago

> And if you want vertical tabs, be sure to install Sidebery until Mozilla get around to implementing native vertical tabs. (You know, like Chromium-based browsers including Edge and Vivaldi already have.) I've been using vertical tabs in Firefox ever since Mozilla implemented it back in 2016 as "Tab Center" long before any Chromium-based browser decided to do so too. Of course the official feature has been discontinued long time ago, but I've been a happy user of its webext-based replacement ever since. Just a bit of CSS goes a long way in making it compact and well-integrated, unlike stuff like Sidebery or Tree Style Tabs that always felt big, clunky and filled with stuff I never use. For the past 8 years, my Firefox looked like this: https://dosowisko.net/firefox-tabcenter.gif https://dosowisko.net/firefox-tabcenter.gif and I never stumbled upon a reasonable alternative, including the native implementation Mozilla recently added back into Firefox (though it's a step in the right direction).

pasc1878 2y ago
I have been using vertical tabs since the mid 90s - OmniWeb on NeXT then OSX. Unfortunately that stopped being usable in the late 200s then I used Firefox extension TreeStyleTabs - I did not know that Mozilla did vertical tabs. Chrome also had vertical tabs then but the bug tracker is hilarious in that the authors really did not understand its use and eventually removed it. After 2016 then Vivaldi and in the last couple of years Safari (there was a horrible admin 10 years ago)
seba_dos1 2y ago
For the record, the CSS used to achieve that result can be found at https://gitlab.com/-/snippets/3715038 https://gitlab.com/-/snippets/3715038
codethief 2y ago
For the lazy here's the link to the extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabcenter-reborn/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabcenter-reb...

freitzkriesler2 2y ago

[dead]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

drdaeman 2y ago

Given that this whole "AI" integration shtick is minimal effort thing with negligibly small value (if any), I suspect it was either an attempt to just ride on "AI" hype (certainly didn't work, feedback comments are virtually univocally "AI" hate), or attempt to find new monetization source (e.g. for a default provider). My own thoughts on the AI feature: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/share-your-feedback-on-the-ai-services-experiment-in-nightly/m-p/70100#M26342 https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/share-your-feedba... - LLM integrations can be useful and actually supporting end-users, but it must be based on entirely different paradigm (all about user agent automation, not a website in a sidebar) and it's probably best left out of the core application itself and rather be a external co-program. As for the alternatives - to be honest, I don't really see much difference beyond various cosmetics. Both Zen and Floorp are basically the same Firefox for me, containing all the things I hate about Firefox ("sponsored" stuff everywhere, Firefox Account and Sync overengineering abomination, all the "safety" features that "protect" browser from its users, hardcoded built-in things that should be pluggable rather than fixed), while bringing nothing I actually care about and want to see (such as decluttering websites aggressively minimizing all the noise I don't care about - kinda like improved reader mode for everything by default, flexible automatic workflows for personal routine things, advanced history with optional content indexing for finding back things I vaguely remember seeing somewhere, automatic tab management to solve 100 open tabs problem, removal of tightly integrated bits like password or download management in favor of replaceable classic UNIX-way style external programs so I can use any tool I want while feeling those tools are properly truly and fully integrated and aren't some hacks like those password manager extensions messing with HTML). Honestly, I'm sad that niche stuff like surf and Uzbl had essentially died, instead of evolving towards a pre-packaged "batteries included out of the box, but you can replace everything with your own" suites. I wished for a non-monolithic browser for technical/power users, with replaceable components for about a decade now - don't think I'll ever see it happening.

SlackingOff123 2y ago
There are sooo many AI chat options to choose from[1] that I don't need my browser to provide one too. I just want my browser to be a good browser. [1] I've been enjoying my self-hosted instance of LibreChat a lot, but I also started using Kagi's assistant lately. Besides those two I'm also using 'aichat' cli tool for quick queries, particularly for helping with cli commands since the context is already there.

prmoustache 2y ago

aren't all "antifeatures" disabled by default on most linux distro packaged firefox?

sumuyuda 2y ago
Not the telemetry

politelemon 2y ago

This part is misleading. It is possible to make the same point without having to make it sounds the feature has been introduced nefariously: > Yes, I get that some people want it, and you can turn it off. It is already off. You have to opt in to the 'experiments' area.

causality0 2y ago

I wish someone would release a good mobile fork. Firefox Mobile probably has the worst UX of any mobile browser I've used since 2009 and I'm convinced whatever intern they have locked in a closet coding it doesn't use it themselves. It's as if they used a supercomputer to predict user behavior for the sole purpose of making sure their obnoxious purple toast messages cover the exact button you need to use and that they last exactly one second short of the time required to make you uninstall it in fury.

cuu508 2y ago
What are your main gripes?
- causality0 2y ago
  If I dismiss a tab the "you dismissed a tab" popup blocks the view of the next tab. If I full-screen a video, the "you fullscreened a video!" message blocks the entire video progress bar so I can't move forward or back. I don't need the damn browser to tell me what I just did. I was there. Adjusting the volume while watching a full screen video drops the whole browser into a 4mmx4mm picture-in-picture window on my home screen. Oh, and the bug where using the back button sometimes completely breaks the "view desktop site" button until I manually kill the app is still there.
  - jorams 2y ago
    > If I dismiss a tab the "you dismissed a tab" popup blocks the view of the next tab. This only happens if you close a tab just above the bottom of your screen. You can scroll the entire list up past the point where any tabs will be obscured by the toast (which has an undo button), and it even does so by default when you open the list with one of the lower tabs active. To reproduce your complaint I have to either explicitly scroll the tab I want to close into the area that will be obscured, or I have to have a tab higher in the list active, then open the list, and then close one of the tabs at the bottom of the screen. > If I full-screen a video, the "you fullscreened a video!" message blocks the entire video progress bar so I can't move forward or back. This is/was indeed annoying. It's been resolved in a recent update for me on Beta. I've never seen the other two things you mention and I can't reproduce them, but they don't seem like UX issues, just bugs.

Dwedit 2y ago

Librewolf ships with uBlock Origin preinstalled, however the default installation of uBlock Origin enables EasyPrivacy by default. EasyPrivacy blocks legitimate websites, and there is no recourse to try to have a false positive become unblocked. Because of this, I do not recommend enabling EasyPrivacy if you are installing the browser for another person, unless they are comfortable with changing extension settings to disable the filter.

WarOnPrivacy 2y ago

I use ~10 desktops across the day (physical, remote and virtual). They all have Firefox (rel, ESR, nightly) as their primary browser. I also use of Ffx alts every day (presently Waterfox). I co-use Ffx alts to segment browsing - and as a quick fix for when sites develop Broken Control Syndrome. Outside of the Ffx ecosystem, I'm using Brave (today) to test Google products and deal with Google's passive-aggressive hostility to Firefox. I had tried Opera before Brave but it felt like being trolled. Something is very wrong in that house.

bornfreddy 2y ago
> Outside of the Ffx ecosystem, I'm using Brave (today) to test Google products and deal with Google's passive-aggressive hostility to Firefox. Well said! I do the same.

hk1337 2y ago

I may get some naysayers for this, maybe because I'm on macOS and not Linux or Windows but... Two features I love about Safari is: - Pinch/Zoom to view all my tabs as windows to switch between tabs - What at least appears to be total isolation between tabs when in private browsing mode. If I login to Facebook in one tab, then open up a new tab and go to Facebook, it will not see me as logged in. Chrome nor Firefox have either of those features.

mediumsmart 2y ago
I did not know that thanks, been using Orion for a while now as my main browser and, oh wait, yes same thing. very nice. I only used firefox to test local webdev projects and still switched to librewolf which is fine. And I have a chrome browser so it can pull up the results of a local lighthouse test but that is it.
curt15 2y ago
Do Firefox [temporary container tabs](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...) fit the bill?
- hk1337 2y ago
  Maybe but I never could figure out how to do it and safari did it out of the box with little to no configuration
xemdetia 2y ago
That is an interesting Safari feature for private tabs, when I start needing to have more than two levels of isolation past the non-private universe and the private universe I start using profiles. My intuition that my private tabs are logged in and I can open more tabs with the same credentials is a big part of my workflow so I never thought of needing that further isolation.
strunz 2y ago
Safari is just not usable without a Ublock or similar extension support. No, a desktop app ad blocker isn't a good alternative.

Dwedit 2y ago

There is a fork of Pale Moon that is compatible with Windows XP called "New Moon". It's based on Palemoon 28.10.7a1. While an old version of the browser, it is still compatible with modern websites, such as Github. It is available at http://o.rthost.win/palemoon/ http://o.rthost.win/palemoon/ , but make sure you don't download a 64-bit version by mistake. (Providing a non-secure http link because the MSIE version that ships with Windows XP is not compatible with modern https websites)

d0mine 2y ago

https://zen-browser.app/ https://zen-browser.app/ killer features for me: - web panel: to show/hide messenger/mail quickly. I don’t see it — no distractions — but it is instantly there when I need it - hor/vert. grid/tiling on keyboard shortcut: pair some web pages together so that they are visible/hidden at the same time - Firefox addons work (that I use) e.g., Vimium C - vertical tabs combined with compact mode that show/hides them on keyboard shortcut

slowmovintarget 2y ago

I'm hoping Ladybird makes it across the finish line. https://ladybird.org/ https://ladybird.org/

wkat4242 2y ago
It's years away according to the most optimistic planning so I'm not holding my breath.

cdrini 2y ago

Man, Firefox users are something else. So many of these complaints are kind of annoying or have internal contradictions. "That’s rather disconcerting if you’d like Mozilla to focus on making a good browser instead of chasing the new and shiny because it is new and shiny." - contradiction, you just conceded that there are Firefox users that want these new AI features, so no it's not just a shiny because it's shiny. Just because you don't want it doesn't mean it's "shiny for shiny". "I’ll note that some of the AI stuff Mozilla is pursing is reasonable. The translation feature uses a local model for translation, which is a great idea. It doesn’t support all the languages that Google Translate does, but it’s good." Great, it's not as good as one of the largest, richest companies on the planet, that has had translation as a feature for what like 20 years now. Firefox introduced translation like this year! Can't we just celebrate the successes when they happen and recognize it as an important step? "the rollout of the ghastly Proton UI, which necessitated (and still necessitates) setting up Lepton aka Firefox-UI-Fix" I'm so tired of this view, why can't people recognize when a UI preference is just a preference? The UI is fine. This is why browsers are configurable, so you can shape it to your preferences. Don't get me wrong, there are lots of problems with Mozilla and things they could be doing better, but when these are being touted as the primary problems at the top of the article, it just seems petty and overly negative.

butz 2y ago

I remember the times when I had three or more different browsers installed, just because each had their own unique and useful features. Had some workflows for each too. Now, I ended up using the least worst browser, and that must tell something about current situation in "browser market".

butz 2y ago

I just don't get all the hate for Firefox "AI" integration. Probably I am out of the loop, but to get access to all chatbots that are actually collecting user data and using questions for more training, are "locked" behind some API and requires for user to enter login credentials? Please correct me if I am wrong. Sure, I hate Pocket as any other Firefox user, and always disable it on new install, and I assume I will be able to disable all those chatbot integrations too? Oh, and I forgot about the new weather widget... Yes, situation is dire.