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How to Firefox
- thoroughburro 1y ago> Here’s something the iPhone isn’t getting anytime soon: honest-to-god browser extensions that you use on your desktop, also on your phone. This convinces me the author is not knowledgeable about current browser capabilities. They probably haven’t tried anything but Firefox in a long time. Orion runs desktop (Firefox) extensions on iOS, and is in many ways a breath of fresh air. Instead of parroting “all iOS browsers are Safari” and throwing their hands in the air, they actually got hacking on it. https://kagi.com/orion/ https://kagi.com/orion/ Edit: > With adopting the Web Extensions API, we show our support for creating a unified browser extensions experience across all three major web rendering engines. We ended up porting hundreds of APIs, one by one, that were never meant to work with WebKit. Took us a few years, but here we are! > Orion currently supports about 70% of Web Extensions APIs, and we add more every day. On top of that, we built advanced security features that give our users granular control over extensions, beyond what Chrome and Firefox offer. For example, you can choose to allow an extension to run only on certain websites.
- inopinatus 1y agoby family tree, almost all current browsers are descendants of '90s-era Konqueror.
- elashri 1y agoWhile orion is good option, it is not there yet in terms of comparison with Firefox on Android. Many of the extensions will install but will not actually work. Even uBlock origin will have problems. Also it is common that an update will make the browser crash very often (happened with few updates). Also they don't provide a list of APIs they support and it is not open source (although they said they will but at this point I don't think they will any time soon).
- thoroughburro 1y agoBut you agree the quote I responded to was incorrect, right?
- elashri 1y agoOrion is based on WebKit, that's usually what people mean when they say it is all safari. So it is technically correct but orion approach ia to try to implement web extensions API in WebKit. Otherwise, apple wouldn't have allowed orion on App Store because the requirement is not to use any other engines (holding off to see what EU DMA effect would have).
- cwillu 1y agoYou agree that your statement that it runs firefox extensions is misleading, right? If I said “linux runs windows software and games” without further remarks, people would be correct to call me out on it.
- thoroughburro 1y agoNo, I don’t agree. And Linux does run Windows software and games; I use this ability all the time. Are there really people who read that and think “ALL Windows software and games” is implied? Bizarre to me.
- rwc 1y agoYes. If you say you’re compatible with Windows software and games, my expectation as a user is that everything “just works”.
- thoroughburro 1y agoYou changed the phrase from “runs Windows software and games” to “compatible with Windows software and games”. I’m talking about the former phrase. The latter does imply more, but I didn’t say it; you did.
- jeroenhd 1y agoI tried Orion after reading this, but other than uBlock Origin I haven't had much luck with getting extensions to work. I guess the extensions I use don't really overlap with the 70% they do support. If they've been working hard on this for years, I have to wonder what will happen first, actual mobile extension support on iOS through Kagi or a Firefox release for iOS. The entire Orion browser feels like a beta product to me. But at least I've got uBlock on my work phone now, so that's cool I guess.
- freeAgent 1y agoIt is literally in beta, so it feeling like a beta product isn’t surprising. It does work with the extensions I need and it’s my primary browser on iOS, but I still find it too buggy and crash-prone on the desktop. That seems to be improving, but it’s not convinced me that it’s reliable enough yet.
- navigate8310 1y agoThe author definitely is not being very knowledgeable. In the comments, they didn't try Zen because they assumed, it can't sync bookmarks and extensions, which in fact it can and has Mozilla account baked into it.
- sorcercode 1y agoyep that's something I learned later. fwiw though: Zen does have other challenges at the moment with the Widevine licence. so you effectively can't use it to watch most video services today. But point taken, from a technical accuracy perspective.
- lol768 1y ago[flagged]
- cosmic_cheese 1y agoIt’s still something of an exaggeration. If you take a look at the source for iOS browsers, the amount of unique code is non-trivial. At minimum, it’s a sliding scale rather than binary and iOS browsers are less Safari reskins than Chromium-based browsers (most of which share a much higher percentage of code) are Chrome reskins. There’s exceptions like Arc which uses a bespoke AppKit/SwiftUI/WinUI UI instead of the standard Chromium stuff but that’s pretty rare.
- fsflover 1y ago> the amount of unique code is non-trivial This doesn't matter as long as essential features of Firefox aren't allowed by Apple.
- cosmic_cheese 1y agoOrion has proven that web extensions are allowed, even if its implementation isn’t complete. There’s no guideline preventing a browser with a user-hackable UI (like Firefox userChrome) but nobody’s tried that yet. What’s left? As far as I’m aware, it’s just the small handful of manifest v2 request interceptor APIs that uBlock Origin depends on that can’t be supported fully.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- fsflover 1y ago> small handful of manifest v2 request interceptor APIs that uBlock Origin depends on that can’t be supported fully ... which is the most important Firefox extension.
- thesuitonym 1y agoThe author is very clearly an Android user, so I'll give them some leeway on this. It's not like it's the crux of their opinion, it's just one extra layer. Also, until Orion is available on Windows and Linux, it's a no-go for a lot of people.
- abyssin 1y agoThank you so much for this comment that made me learn about Orion on iOS. It seems to be filling a gap that had been open for years.
- DavideNL 1y ago> "Orion runs desktop (Firefox) extensions on iOS" Most extensions can be installed, but they do not actually function properly. Or, maybe only for 50%. The most annoying part is, you do not know which extensions don't work (like content blockers, etc.)
- esskay 1y agoI really struggled going back to Firefox after being a Chrome user for so long, it just feels so incredibly slow in comparison - I know it's probably just perception but I couldn't shake that feeling. I ended up going with Brave. Once you turn off their crummy VPN and crypto advert it's effectively just google chrome with a built in ad blocker. I know there were arguments/concerns about the crypto thing, but I did a bit of research before picking a new browser (as should you) and once I realised it was a simple thing to turn off and never see again I was fine with it, it's all opensource as well so you can see how things work. Of course it's just a chrome fork, so is still somewhat influenced by Googles decisions but that really wasn't the issue here, I just wanted to keep ublock origin and that's been the outcome. I still have syncing and such all running between my desktop and mobile, I still have all the same extensions I've used for over a decade, so it's been relatively pain free to switch.
- eclecticfrank 1y agoGive us an example where Chrome is faster than Firefox, so we can see if it is more important than having uBlock Origin. I use both Firefox and Chrome for work and haven't noticed any speed differences (without measuring).
- esskay 1y agoAs I said I think it's more of a perception thing than an actual slowness. I don't think Firefox is actually any slower in a practical test of loading a site for example, I just perceived it as being slower, perhaps more likely its something like the transitions between tabs and other actions being different enough to feel slower.
- homebrewer 1y agoIf your life has been as unfair to you as it has been to some of us, and forced you to work on SPAs as the result, try opening any large frontend project that uses Vite (or any other dev server that serves each file separately instead of bundling them). If you're unfamiliar with this stuff, it results in your browser fetching thousands of JavaScript files from the local dev server. Any Chromium-based browser handles that just fine in about 1-2 seconds. Firefox takes at least ten, including full page reloads. No adblocking on either, and yes I've tried all combinations of about:config knobs, fresh/empty profiles, etc. That's the only reason I use Chromium for development work.
- akazantsev 1y agoFirefox has no profiles. It has a bunch of hacks, such as containers, which are cumbersome to use. Chromium provides separate windows with different profiles, and Firefox should follow Chromium here. Firefox's "solution" forces you to switch Github tabs between personal and work containers constantly.
- uallo 1y ago> Firefox has no profiles. It does now, it is being rolled out gradually: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-management https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-management
- jraph 1y agoI didn't know about this new feature, that looks nice. One can force-enable it with the browser.profiles.enabled config. Firefox havs always had profiles (about:profiles, firefox -P). I do hope this new feature will be able to manage profiles created with the current method.
- lmz 1y agoIt definitely has "profiles" as in the entire set of settings/ preferences/history[1]. Whether or not they are usable as a replacement for Chrome's however... [1]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-remove-switch-firefox-profiles https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...
- VerdisQuo5678 1y agofirefox has had profiles for years, maybe decades its hidden in about:profiles i guess they're just adding a proper ui now
- paavope 1y agoI use profiles on Firefox daily and they work fine https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-remove-switch-firefox-profiles https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...
- stby 1y agoThe article implies that tabs, bookmarks, passwords can only be synchronised between Firefox installations and not with Zen or Libre (I assume this refers to LibreWolf?), but at least Zen can be connected to the Mozilla account and synchronises everything with the other connected Firefox, Firefox for Android, ... installations.
- thoroughburro 1y agoLibreWolf also connects and syncs seamlessly to Firefox Accounts.
- Propelloni 1y agoSame for Waterfox.
- silvanocerza 1y ago> Zen can be connected to the Mozilla account and synchronises everything with the other connected Firefox, Firefox for Android, ... installations. They made this work? I remember testing it out some months ago and it didn't work because of some reason.
- krige 1y agoYeah, it works as of ~3 months ago until now. t. user
- Geezus_42 1y agoI'm eagerly awaiting Zen to enable tab groups/folders. I've been watching feat:9355, but its gotten bogged down in a debate about the whether tab folders in the tab bar should be the same as bookmarks, ala Arc. I personally did not like that Arc considered tabs and bookmarks to be the same because it made management and syncing a pita. Having to use a third script to export your bookmarks is not a good look.
- godshatter 1y ago
- ketanmaheshwari 1y agoDoes anyone know how to reliably use Firefox from command line to take screenshots? It used to work well a few years ago but now it does not. For one, it asks that Firefox is already running and I need to kill it. This is surprising -- why can't two Firefox processes run at the same time?
- jdalt 1y agoUse playwright?
- moltar 1y agoScript with Playwright?
- mdaniel 1y agoIt is whining about the shared use of your main profile directory. You can give it a temporary profile directory to more clearly express your intentions via "--profile=/tmp/$(uuidgen)" or similar. I'd guess you could even just straight up point <<env HOME=$(tmpdir) firefox --screenshot...>> for even stronger isolation
- yjftsjthsd-h 1y agoPROFILEDIR="$(mktemp -d)" firefox --no-remote --profile "$PROFILEDIR" --screenshot $PWD/output.png https://xkcd.com rm -r "$PROFILEDIR" (You don't have to create and destroy a profile directory every time, but it's cleaner to do that way and you need one per instance you're going to run anyways)
- WorldMaker 1y agoThe CLI has long had `-noremote` for a long time to tell it you want a second Firefox. It's useful with `-ProfileManager` or `-P $profileName` for multi-profile workflows, which are out of fashion this decade, especially with Multi-Account Containers being able to do most of those workflows in the same browser window now with different tags. But some of us still have ancient profiles for ancient reasons and ingrained habits regarding them. Ancient documentation: https://www-archive.mozilla.org/docs/command-line-args.html https://www-archive.mozilla.org/docs/command-line-args.html
- iamkonstantin 1y agoI tried Firefox just a few days ago, but it didn't work out. I just missed too many things out of the box. My main browser is Vivaldi (so all the chromium goodies + privacy + made in EU). Safari comes in as a close second, I tend to use it on the go because it syncs well with my Mac and Apple throttles any other browser on iOS.
- fsflover 1y ago> I just missed too many things out of the box. Another very vague comment bashing Firefox without any real explanation.
- iamkonstantin 1y agoI'm not sure making a list that's been done time and time again here would make a difference. But if you're truly interested, here are my top 3: - Firefox comes packed with all kinds of telemetry and analytics turned on. - No workspaces/profiles. I know there are extensions that can enable various flavours of this functionality, but it's just too much overhead to experiment and test every-single-one. - Widgets! I love Vivaldi's Dashboard for when one needs more than just a homepage.
- WorldMaker 1y ago> No workspaces/profiles. I know there are extensions that can enable various flavours of this functionality, but it's just too much overhead to experiment and test every-single-one. Most of it is built-in and these days there is generally only one recommended extension: Multi-Account Container. Containers (tabs in the same window with different cookie jars/etc) are built-in, the UI for working with them is not, and MAC is the generally agreed best UI. It lets you create as many named Containers as you want and assign them a color to gently stripe your tabs. You can right-click the new tab button and get a list of Containers to open the next tab in. You can right-click an existing tab and reopen it in a new Container. (TIL from this article there's an option to have left click on the new tab button always open the Container menu. I don't think I'd use that, but it's nice to know.) If you want to go older school, Profiles (browser windows with different extensions/cookie jars/everything) have been around since the beginning of Firefox (and it shows in how old and ugly some of the UI still is, hah). `about:profiles` is a profile manager when you are already inside a Firefox browser. The `-ProfileManager` command line switch is the ancient startup option to manage profiles before opening a browser window at all. If you like to use side-by-side profiles often you want `-noremote -ProfileManager` and/or `-noremote -P $profileName` shortcuts. (`-noremote` says not to send it to any currently open Firefox window.)
- cwillu 1y agoI prefer stylebot to stylus, as it doesn't require an unnecessary dance to make a specific theme and then mark it as only for the current site, before you can plop some css into the sidebar for that specific site.
- midnitewarrior 1y agoJust use Brave Browser. https://brave.com/ https://brave.com/ It's like de-Googled Chrome, as it's based on the same Open Source Chromium browser, has all of the ad-blocking and anti-fingerprint tools built in, and all of the Google taken out. You can also run popular browser extensions published for Chrome, but you don't need to worry about ad blocking, as Brave has you covered by default. It also blocks YouTube ads effectively, by default. There's nothing you have to do to make this work.
- eclecticfrank 1y agoBrave wants to replace "bad" ads from third parties with their own "good" ads.[1] They have also in the past been caught adding their own referral codes to crypto transaction URLs pasted into their browser. [2] [1] https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/how-to-earn-and-use-cryptocurrency-with-the-brave-browser https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/how-to-earn-and-use-cryptocurre... [2] https://www.pcmag.com/news/brave-browser-caught-redirecting-users-through-affiliate-links https://www.pcmag.com/news/brave-browser-caught-redirecting-...
- dartharva 1y agoYou can disable Brave Shields and just use classic uBO (which Brave supports) instead.
- esskay 1y agoI'm not sure trying to bad mouth it by bringing up a 5+ year old long fixed thing is the right way to go about making a point. Heck if we're doing that theres vastly more "wrong" over at Mozilla and Google to complain about in that timeframe. Aa of right now Brave has two "features" that you can disable - the crypto thing and a vpn advert. Once those are off, they are off. You don't see them anymore, they aren't sitting in the background running, and they aren't calling home. It's no different to Mozilla's constant and blatant attempts to reactivate telemetry data in Firefox updates despite opting out - I'd argue that's a bigger offence.
- midnitewarrior 1y agoYeah, this seems a bit disingenuous given the nature of, and the time since that issue existed. I did their ads, I made hundreds of dollars leaving them on in the early days. I value my attention more so I've shut them off.
- JLemay 1y ago[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Ecko123 1y ago[dead]
- javier_e06 1y agoFirefox is all that. Except on my arm-based crhomebook. There it gets confused and do not resize properly thinking is in phone format. Also cast to chromecast is a no-go. If it wasn't by those 2 issues I would have ditched chrome long time ago.
- skrebbel 1y agoI would just like to add that in my experience, "How to Firefox" is just: - Download Firefox - Install uBlock Origin - Use Firebox Somehow this blog post makes it seem like adopting Firefox is hard, or overwhelming, or some multi step process, and if you don't do those steps you're effectively downgrading. But really it isn't. It's a browser. Its UX is great. It just... works. The suggestion that to use it properly you need to customize it to the max is simply flat out wrong.
- boobsbr 1y agoYou forgot - Disable all telemetry in your list.
- skrebbel 1y agoIn the context of switching from Chrome? No, I very much did not. On the privacy front, I'm absolutely convinced that switching from Chrome to Firefox is an upgrade even if you don't do stuff like this. This is my entire point. Yes, you can tweak Firefox to the max and yes you can complain about the more questionable stuff Mozilla has done, but compared to the privacy/goodness you get just from ditching Chrome (or Edge for that matter), all that is pretty marginal.
- ReadCarlBarks 1y agoDisabling anonymous telemetry just harms the project. It doesn't give you any "privacy" benefit.
- voidUpdate 1y ago- Work out how to transfer everything across from whatever you were using before
- sfink 1y agoWhich is actually not bad these days. Firefox imports a lot of stuff from a bunch of different browsers. (Or so I've heard; I haven't used a bunch of different browsers and built up enough stuff to know for myself.)
- adithyassekhar 1y agoThis is really hard to read. I can't get the tone of the article or how I'm supposed to feel about it. Or is it a generation gap, I was born in 2000.
- skotobaza 1y ago>I can't get the tone of the article or how I'm supposed to feel about it It's a tech article. What do you expect to feel while reading it?
- adithyassekhar 1y agoThe author uses a really excited tone and frequent questions like You know what? Guess what? Wow! Boom! Exaggeration obviously, but I like to connect emotionally with the author of whatever I am reading. You can understand a lot more that way than words can convey. I was not able to keep up with such an enthusiastic post that's all.
- skotobaza 1y agoI suppose the author was expecting that people who read the article already knew what it's all about (i.e. the context) - switching browsers because of manifest version changes made by Google, and some "concerns" that people have about Firefox compared to Chrome. But that part is conveyed in the first two sentences of the article. In the end, he is just "excited" to help people switch to Firefox, that's all.
- alt227 1y ago> This is really hard to read. I am old and I agree. It is full of things that break the flow of reading like asking a hypothetical question to the reader and following it up with a plosive like 'BOOM!', or inserting useless conversational stops like like 'sure,' 'But...', and '...Nope!'. Makes it sound/feel like an excited toddler is desperate to tell you something, but cant really get to the point.
- 1y ago
- sto11z 1y agoI tried transitioning to FF from Chrome several times, but it just feels so unresonsive and slow in comparison. I really wanted to, but ultimately couldn't. On a side note: You can manually install uBlock and just continue using it: - Enter chrome://flags in chrome’s URL input - Search for ‘Allow legacy extension manifest versions’ - Enable it and relaunch browser - Download the latest zip file of uBlock version from github: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/releases https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/releases - Under Assets, download the chromium zip and extract it - Open the extension page in chrome, click the Load Unpacked button on top left side load (enable Developer Mode in the top right if it doesn't appear), then select the extracted folder.
- Ygg2 1y agoUnderstandable. I tried moving from Firefox to Chrome but I couldn't. Pages are so slow to load and there are adds everywhere.
- TechDebtDevin 1y agoI'm curious what would make you even want to try with all the shenanigans Google has been up to. It seems obvious that its a bad idea.
- Ygg2 1y agoI wanted to see just how bad is raw Chrome experience on Android. I've learned my lesson.
- phoronixrly 1y agoRight there with you. I cannot understand how people manage to use Chrome without an ad-blocker. It's just so slow and makes my laptop heat up and run out of memory...
- muizelaar 1y agoWhat parts felt unresponsive and slow?
- 1y ago
- jppj 1y agotl;dr - how to Firefox? Blind taste test. Had been using Arc for some time with several qualms about the UX and after trying Dia and finding it's just yet another Chrome, decided to see what Zen is like. I expected the same - but it wasn't. All qualms were solved and I had no rendering problems. It was only when I noticed the Mozilla login flow I realized I had switched to Firefox - I had an assumption that all alternative browsers are on Chromium now. Really lucky since if I knew, I may not have given a fair chance given the rendering problems I remember from giving it a try 3-4 years ago.
- jasonvorhe 1y agoFirefox will never become strong again under Mozilla.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- akhdanfadh 1y agoFirefox was my main browser after Chrome MV3 stuff, but now I'm moving to Orion by Kagi. I found, on my Macbook M1, Firefox hog the battery a lot seen from the energy impact on Mac's activity monitor (average 12hr power >1000 compared to Orion ~350). Don't expect extensions to work well on Orion, though, but I can live with it for now.
- SwiftyBug 1y agoIt supports both Chrome and Firefox extensions. Vimium works flawlessly.
- nxtbl 1y ago.. and then there are panorama extensions, which ease handling a lot of tabs immensely. No other browser seems to have anything alike. No, the grouping of tabs into tabs does nothing compared to this. https://github.com/projectdelphai/panorama-tab-groups https://github.com/projectdelphai/panorama-tab-groups and https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/panorama-view/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/panorama-view...
- poisonborz 1y agoFirst rule of Firefoxing: use a fork instead
- sixhobbits 1y agoThis is pretty similar to my set up but I'm ready to quit Firefox because what feels like every few weeks they somehow manage to add new auto-enabled spyware. I regularly have to turn stuff off in "Firefox Data Collection and Use" and "Website Advertising Preferences" Recently I also started seeing ads in my address bar when typing stuff and saw they've added: "Suggestions from sponsors Support Firefox with occasional sponsored suggestions." of course, enabled by default. Firefox is a great product but unfortunately slowly being milked/destroyed by its non-technical management team.
- fsflover 1y ago> but I'm ready to quit Firefox because This is still nowhere near Google's browser.
- djrj477dhsnv 1y agoEasiest solution is to just use LibreWolf on desktop and IronFox on Android. They get rid of all the anti-privacy defaults.
- ReadCarlBarks 1y agoUpdates aren't supposed to reset any setting. Submit a bug report for them to fix whatever is doing that for you: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/ https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/
- jvdvegt 1y agoA bit ironic that I cannot see the left few pixels of that site in Firefox on Android. (A 'T' starts at the vertical bar)
- uallo 1y agoWhy "ironic"? The website is using flexbox incorrectly, all spec-compliant browsers have that behaviour on small viewports. Using the "safe" keyword fixes that. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/align-items#safe https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/align-items...
- sorcercode 1y agosorry I'm not necessarily seeing this. could I ask for more details ?
- beshrkayali 1y agoThe main problem Firefox has really is Mozilla. And Orion is neat but too immature and the direction Kagi is taking in general seems to be moving further away from a indie company with a single purpose. I hope they manage to steer themselves back into what got people excited about them to begin with. But sure, anything but Chrome.
- zac23or 1y agoI use Firefox, Chrome, and Edge on a Windows 10 machine. I use Chrome 90% of the time because Firefox is slow and has many bugs on video sites like 9gag. The screen goes black, the video loses vertical sync, etc. The same happens with Edge. In my experience, the problem with Firefox's popularity is technical. I'll use Firefox more often if it improves. Before Firefox 3.6 (probably that version), Firefox was my most used browser, but after that version, Firefox started getting slower and more buggy. I switched to Chrome because IE was unusable on some sites. I've never used Firefox much on Android, but when I did, it was slower than Chrome. It's likely that if Firefox fixes the issues, they'll gain traction again, but right now, I don't see that happening. Mozilla's goals are different.
- marttt 1y ago> Before Firefox 3.6 (probably that version), Firefox was my most used browser, but after that version, Firefox started getting slower and more buggy. Haha, I remember that same feeling, with 3.6 being "peak" Firefox back in the day. My 3.6 was heavily hand-tailored to my needs via about:config etc. Just some dedicated end-user here, but I did know it very well. Version 4 felt considerably worse on a WinXP system, some essential-to-me add-ons broke, etc. I remember feeling really - as in, really - frustrated when I finally had to make the switch. Apparently, 3.6 is the longest supported Firefox version ever, 27 months: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_3.6#End_of_life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_3.6#End_of_life
- cosmic_cheese 1y agoI seem to recall similarly about things starting to go downhill after 4.x or so. Performance, optimization, and stability seemed to take a back seat to flashier things like new features and UI themes. It stopped being the lean, mean minimal browser that it’d become famous as and turned into something a lot more unremarkable (albeit, more flexible). They wouldn’t seriously prioritize performance again until many years later with Quantum. Looking at it that way, it’s no mystery how it lost ground to Chrome (though Google’s marketing muscle is also largely responsible). Mozilla just tossed Firefox’s claim to fame out the window and expected things to work out somehow, which is a bit like a restaurant that’d become popular for its award winning burgers deciding to pivot to the same dry turkey sandwiches you can get at most of the restaurants in town. Yeah, you’re gonna lose customers.
- eclecticfrank 1y agoLots of Firefox hate here, but little discussion about the articles kicker, which is the exclusion of uBlock Origin from Chrome. I hope this will mean that in the long run Firefox (and other secondary browsers) will gain more users again. For me, Firefox is a solid piece of software. Works well in strict privacy mode, with uBlock Origin and Multi-Account Containers.
- bool3max 1y agoIn the long run Alphabet will find a way to bar non-vetted browsers from accessing the Internet.
- pivo 1y agoPerhaps, but I'm not giving up just yet.
- IHLayman 1y agoAlphabet will definitely try to do that (within their business interest and all that), but I still choose to believe in the precept that “the net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it”, as old and outdated as that sounds. A number of my privacy-minded friends choose a bi-modal approach: have two phones, one for work and one for personal. They don’t get the recent model (costing half as much), hold onto the old phone for as long as they can, use one phone for “required” apps (Okta, Slack, those websites that only work on Chrome…) and the personal phone for everything else. As annoying as it is, i think that compartmentalized devices/accounts/apps are the only way forward.
- kaszanka 1y agoProbably even non-vetted firmware-to-browser chains, by requiring boot attestation to open a TLS connection or something.
- normalaccess 1y agoI'm dreading the day when this becomes required by the government...
- benterix 1y ago> The other line you see there? That one-liner blocks all those “Sign in with Google?” pop-ups. This is one of these tiny improvements that will save you a second or two per website, but when you multiply it, it becomes significant. Kudos to all the people who made it possible.
- sbdaman 1y ago>but when you multiply it, it becomes significant. Does it?
- bmn__ 1y agoYes, the concept is called "shut up and multiply". I estimate the content-blocking counter-measure has saved hundreds of man-years. On the days I feel particularly nasty like Ellison's character The Ticktockman, I wish that the programmers and the product managers who are responsible for the enshittification get this time subtracted from their life.
- aembleton 1y agoYes; and not having the visual noise is pleasant.
- cainxinth 1y agoI switched after Manifest v3. I won’t go back to Chrome as long as it limits ad-blocking, but I do miss its speed. Firefox takes a long time to open (especially when you have a lot of extensions). Even with the same number of extensions, Chrome opens in a jiffy. There are other areas of slowdown as well. Sometimes I hit Control+D to bookmark a page and nothing happens. At first I thought maybe I was doing something wrong, but now I know to just wait, and sure enough five to ten seconds after I hit the shortcut it works. A delay that long (especially one with no notification of any kind) is really bad UX.
- Vinnl 1y agoOof, a delay that long should not happen. Might be worth reporting at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org https://bugzilla.mozilla.org, ideally with a profile attached (see https://profiler.firefox.com/ https://profiler.firefox.com/)?
- djrj477dhsnv 1y agoUnless you're running it on 15+ year old hardware, it sounds like something is very wrong. I've used Firefox / LibreWolf basically since it existed and can't remember any UI delays longer than a second.
- pixelesque 1y agoNote that Firefox for me within the last 3/4 months seems to have (I assume it's by design?) changed to automatically add a bookmark to the most-recently-added bookmark folder WITHOUT asking which folder to use (it just adds a blue star in the address bar) which is pretty annoying IMO and isn't the behaviour I want 95% of the time. Pressing Ctrl/Cmd-D a second time then does "Edit bookmark", and allows you to change it. Might that be contributing to what you're seeing? (blue star appearing is fairly obvious though).
- mattlutze 1y agoI am surprised how many people have so many problems with Firefox. I've never felt impeded by loading speeds, and my ADHD regularly has me forgetting to restart it, to the tune of 100+ tabs open across multiple desktops. My wimply little MacBook Pro doesn't seem to mind. The only downside I've found is that, because so many people just default to "Chrome or nothing," there's occasionally sites that have bugs because, like was the case in the 90s with Internet Explorer, the site developers took the idiomatic Chrome way of building a feature instead of something universal.
- helij 1y agoIn two decades of using it (yep) I never had an issue. I used it on Linux, MacOS and Windows and I don't remember any issues whatsoever.
- behringer 1y agoSame here, although I've had a couple issues but I actually contacted the website operator and over time they fixed the issues (either that or firefox themselves fixed it). It never hurts to reach out to tech support and ask for firefox support!
- phoronixrly 1y ago> I've never felt impeded by loading speeds Even if this was an issue I had noticed (which I hadn't), now that's out the door because no ad blocker in Chrome, so good luck loading all the ads and trackers before getting your content... I can't believe people keep parroting that... Even if 'chrome is faster and more responsive than firefox' was not a controversial statement (and it very much is), 'chrome with ads is fast' is outright laughable...
- echoangle 1y ago> My wimply little MacBook Pro How old is it? Is a MacBook Pro wimpy now?
- creshal 1y ago
- pipeline_peak 1y agoA browser won’t survive off the user share of HN Raspberry Pi Guys. Let’s be practical, the average user isn’t concerned about browser monopolization. Firefox isn’t going to catch up because its users made some philanthropic choice to use it. This isn’t Linux, the web is far too complex to write a modern browser for without corporate backing.
- ubj 1y ago[EDIT]: I was wrong, uBlock Origin Lite was addressed by the article and does not have the same features.
- Vinnl 1y agoSee the section in the article that starts with: > Sure, there’s uBlock Origin “Lite” now, which does the same thing, right?
- nxtbl 1y agofrom TFA: Filter lists update only when the extension updates, no fetching up to date lists from servers (this is a big one!) No custom filters, so no element picker which allows you to point and zap Many filters are dropped at conversion time due to MV3’s limited filter syntax No strict-blocked pages No per-site switches No dynamic filtering No importing external lists
- aheckler 1y ago> No custom filters, so no element picker which allows you to point and zap > No per-site switches These aren't accurate. My version of uBOL in Chrome (2025.718.1921) has these features.
- ReadCarlBarks 1y agoYou're either not using uBlock Origin Lite or do not know what the "per-site switches" are: https://github.com/gorhill/ublock/wiki/Per-site-switches https://github.com/gorhill/ublock/wiki/Per-site-switches
- aheckler 1y agoAh, so uBOL does have the ability to adjust the blocking level on a per-site basis, which is what I assumed "per-site switches" meant. I see now that the original uBO has/had a more granular level of configuration available. (Which I suspect most folks never used, but still... my bad there.)
- vntok 1y agoI wonder how much posts like these do to push people away from Firefox and towards other alternatives like Brave, Orion, etc. Surely, given the HN audience, virtually nobody in here is seriously discovering that Firefox exists. However, once the HN reader's mind is set to move away from Chrome, the comments here always push various alternatives to Firefox (mostly forks) that might be unknown and interesting to try. Another way to reason about it is such posts in such communities probably don't pull a lot of "normies" to Firefox... however they probably also push a lot of "nerds" to Firefox alternatives, not to Firefox itself.
- zamadatix 1y agoI think the root of it is that crowd of nerds aren't particularly interested in going back to Firefox. That they have a new interest in getting off Chrome doesn't change that as they already have a browser they aren't too thrilled with installed and configured. The promise of some new variant that does things right (tm) is the only thing interesting enough to trigger a switch.
- perlgeek 1y agoOne of my main reasons for staying with Firefox is that in the long term, I think it's good to have a diversity in browser engines. Back when I started web development, there were standards, but nearly everybody just coded to what Internet Explorer supported. Which I really hated :-) In the past few years, I've seen the occasional "works best with Chrome" website, which worries me, but so far it hasn't been too bad. But if we as a community leave the browser market to Chrome and browsers with engines of similar origin as Chrome's, we'll get back to the bad old days.
- sebstefan 1y ago> In the past few years, I've seen the occasional "works best with Chrome" website, which worries me, but so far it hasn't been too bad. Microphone & webcam support, screensharing and stuff like that almost always shit the bed for me. Slack, teams, they don't care to check if their shit works on firefox.
- comprev 1y agoAs Chrome has slowly become the default browser in enterprise environments it makes sense to cater for the _paying_ customers of Slack, Teams, Jira, etc. and they become the focus of product development. It didn't feel that long ago when Internet Explorer was the primary target for development.
- FigurativeVoid 1y agoI had no idea how many ads load the average page. I just forgot because I have been using uBlock for so long. I have been hesitant to use Firefox, just because I am used to chrome. But after Google forcibly disabled software that I chose to run, I'm all in on Firefox.
- sshine 1y agoIn a way, an ad company disabling adblock on their browser makes perfect sense. I'm happy they came around and showed the world what they're made of: ads. For anyone who doesn't like ads jammed down their throat and their personal privacy blatantly sold off: Google and Microsoft should be banned for obvious reasons.
- crabmusket 1y agoWhenever I use my partner's iPhone, or even open links on Chrome on my phone (I usually use Firefox with adblock) I feel like I'm being slapped in the face by ads. The difference is shocking.
- kjkjadksj 1y agoMobile web today is like going back to dialup with the time it takes to load a damn article chock full of ads. Worthless. So much for lite mobile websites. Hate browsing on the phone. Only to be done when completely unavoidable.
- athrowaway3z 1y agoA decade ago I used to see & hear various ads throughout my day and could ignore them. Nowadays I see so few ads in a month that my brain short circuits whenever somebody shows me their phone with something like youtube and it shows ads.
- hk1337 1y agoEven using pihole you see this. I remember a post on reddit, just about every comment was complaining about the ads and how it made it unreadable but it looked just fine to me.
- 1y ago
- prophesi 1y agoA tip I would add to this article is that Firefox natively supports sidebar tabs now without needing hacky extensions. Go to about:preferences under the Browser Layout section of the General tab, and select Vertical Tabs. The tab group functionality along with Multi-Account Containers are a lot more useful under this layout IMO.
- kozinc 1y agoTab Groups combined with Vertical tabs makes for a pretty awesome experience
- sulandor 1y ago> Firefox natively supports sidebar tabs now without needing hacky extensions glad you mentioned it! edge and opera do too
- sorcercode 1y agoappreciate it. funnily enough I thought I implied it with the Arc mention. but rereading it, you're right, that fact doesn't come through at all. will make an edit
- FeepingCreature 1y agoStill no multi-row tab bars or API support for hiding the main tab bar, as was explicitly promised when they killed TabMixPlus.
- ReadCarlBarks 1y agoPower users interested in this niche feature can use a script: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1m594nv/multi_tab_rows_30_userchromejs_script/ https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1m594nv/multi_tab_...
- FeepingCreature 1y agoI think with UserChromeJS you can run TabMixPlus too. I don't remember if it needs anything else. (Or a fork like Waterfox, of course.) But like, if we're turning signature checking and sandboxing off, we're getting pretty far from stock Firefox. And of course, they can (and often will) break it on every update.
- helij 1y agoA lot of hate and bashing of Firefox here. On my Linux machine (relatively modern desktop) there's no difference in speed between Chrome(Chromium) and Firefox. A lot of people talk about goodies and extensions. I get it, life is easier with some of those but I just don't care. I use it barebones with enhanced tracking protection and it works flawlessly. Don't see many ads, the ones I see are not intrusive.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- tolerance 1y agoOff topic but, what are people saying, feeling, about Bluesky these days. The comment section on this page integrated nice.
- sshine 1y agoI migrated from Firefox to Orion half a year ago. I am now ready to migrate back, since Orion has UX problems that aren't being addressed fast enough that are non-issues in Firefox. And because I haven't found a replacement for Firefox Sync that works as nicely (Vaultwarden is super nice, but the Bitwarden browser plugins suck ass.) I still use Orion for iOS because Firefox for iOS has such a broken memory consumption it kills my phone if I open the app. In those six months of not primarily using Firefox on Desktop, it's been blocked by Cloudflare. This is what happens when you lose market share below a certain threshold. I really hate Mozilla Corporation. But Firefox is not theirs to enshittify. I'm back on Firefox on desktop, and am still using Firefox as a password store on iOS, since it doesn't start the app. So I can still have one source of password sync. I'd rather not visit websites that block off browsers for not allowing them to track me. Sorry, guys, that's a shitty thing to do. I get it, Cloudflare is addressing a bot problem.
- FrankyHollywood 1y ago'Reader view'! I use it on a daily basis. Don't know if this is standard for any browser now, FF is my main browser since I left Opera... https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clutter-free-web-pages https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clu...
- rc_kas 1y agoThis is indeed my favorite FireFox feature. Sometimes it even helps get past article paywalls to read the article.
- mortsnort 1y agoChrome has it, but it's hidden in menus. Android has it as an OS feature with a really unintuitive interface. It also fails the first time you try to read any page, but works the second time... It's clearly not something they want you to use.
- cpeterso 1y agoTrue. Firefox's reader view is a one-click button in the address bar, whereas Chrome's is buried in the application menu > More tools > Reading mode. And even then, Chrome only shows the reader view in a narrow sidebar, leaving the messy page open.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- sebzim4500 1y ago>With Firefox for Android, you get seamless sync of tabs, bookmarks, passwords between browser and phone If only. In my experience this barely works in one direction and doesn't work at all in the other direction.
- ahmetcadirci25 1y agoThis is something that has been on my mind for years — I want to use Firefox, but for some strange reason, it just doesn’t feel as smooth as Chrome. Here are the features of Firefox that I find particularly appealing: - The Firefox Multi-Account Containers feature, in my opinion, is what puts this browser at the top. - Additionally, the privacy extensions work incredibly well. However, there are some drawbacks: - Strangely, it doesn’t feel smooth — regardless of whether I'm on Windows or macOS. - I experience video codec issues, which I hope I’m not the only one facing. - I can't run the extensions I develop in dev mode. I haven’t been able to find a solution for this. That said, I don't encounter this issue in LibreWolf. I don’t use Chrome; instead, I prefer Ungoogled-Chromium, as Google is not a trustworthy company in my view — both due to its policies and many other problematic actions. I’m truly grateful to the developers of Ungoogled-Chromium for removing Google services and for keeping the browser consistently updated. I’ve tried all sorts of browsers like Vivaldi, Brave, and Orion, but none of them feel smooth or stable to me — at least, that’s how I perceive it. I hope you might have some better suggestions. https://tarayici.ahmetcadirci.com/ https://tarayici.ahmetcadirci.com/
- 0xpgm 1y ago> The Firefox Multi-Account Containers feature, in my opinion, is what puts this browser at the top. For a long time this was the reason I didn't move to Brave, but eventually I realized I don't need it so much because Brave already sandboxes cookies for each site so some social media or ad network won't be able to track me across different sites. The remaining use for multi-account containers now is staying logged in with different accounts to the same site, which for my usecase I can do with Brave profiles. Now Brave is my major browser and once in a while I'll bring up Librefox. Firefox lost me when they went all in with their strategy to feed user data into AI presumably for ad purposes.
- ahmetcadirci25 1y agoI don't care about cookies at all — what matters to me is being able to log into multiple, separate accounts. Creating browser profiles feels like starting everything from scratch: settings, extensions, and more. It's just not practical. With Firefox, you set your preferences and extensions once, and from then on, tab-based profiles work flawlessly. I wish Chrome had a similar feature — a container system at the tab level.
- Torwald 1y ago> I want to do my part to convince you to switch to Firefox and show you how I use it. Last time I checked, the tab closed button was still on the right side of the tab. On the macOS version. This is a deal breaker. Therefore FF is useless to me as a Mac user. Other browsers on the Mac have this correct. Safari, Opera, Vivaldi at least. Vivaldi is the other contender, who is at least on par if not better with FF in terms of privacy. Problematic privacy is of course the reason why Chrome wasn't even installed on my machines ever. Opera and (arguably so) Brave are the others with privacy endangering issues. There are other Mac only options, but they have even worse problems, being cloud dependent and whatnot. I do like the concepts of what they are trying to do in most of the cases, but for now I prefer the clarity of Safari. Now, some of you might not be Mac developers, so let me say something about app development on the Mac. There is a manual with guidelines of how to do it. It is called the Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) and that stuff is very important. It would be a very interesting process to develop something like this for a desktop Linux, btw. When I have to work with apps that don't adhere to the HIG, that's bad for productivity and enjoyment. So I don't. In the case of FF I was willing to hack the UI CSS to correct the button issue. Hey, it's FF after all. Two upgrades later, the thing wasn't working any more. Ok, bye bye FF! For a while FF was the most microsoftian app on my Mac, because it always announced it's updates without me being able to silent those notifications. I am still watching, it's FF after all, but if Mozilla can't correct these (actually minor) issues of keeping the UI clean, I can't have it.
- napkin 1y agoThe author recommends this add-on- “Auto Tab Discard”- apparently optimising tab memory management. Why wouldn’t the standard distribution adopt it? I’m reminded of when I used to maintain an epic-sized vimrc, compiled my kernel for a different IO scheduler, etc. The plight of the “power-user” is walking a fine line between tool refinement and over-complication (which in my case can stem from procrastination). There are many reasons to strive for a minimalist setup, main one being that setting everything up from scratch shouldn’t feel exhausting. That said… Firefox, with just uBO and a few basic privacy settings tightened, is pretty great.
- cmoski 1y agoI think it does. I had over a thousand tabs open on Firefox mobile when I upgraded my phone recently.
- sorcercode 1y agohonestly I've just left the extension on. Firefox does natively have this feature now.
- ReadCarlBarks 1y agoBrowsers discard tabs by default, but only when your system is running out of memory. You can use Auto Tab Discard to discard all or most tabs automatically after a certain time.
- SwiftyBug 1y agoOne thing that keeps me on Firefox, that I've never seen another browser implement, is per-tab profiles. Chrome and Safari also have profiles, but they require one profile per window.
- sfink 1y agoThat's the "MAC" (Multi-Account Containers) that the article was referring to. (They're actually not full profiles, and in fact there's active work right now to make separate profiles more ergonomic in Firefox. Container tabs are way more useful for me, though.)
- jcalvinowens 1y agoMaybe most people don't care, but the difference build times is insane... Chromium takes nearly 4x as long to compile as the entire rest of a modern Linux system and it's toolchain combined. I completely stopped using chromium two years ago and haven't looked back.
- faxmeyourcode 1y agoAnother very popular firefox addon that is yet to be replicated in chrome - and for me personally is a chrome killer - is the Tree Style Tabs addon. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta... This is superior to most other vertical tab, tab groups, and the many other tab styles that have been cooked up over the years on other browsers.
- GlitchRider47 1y agoDo you (or anyone else reading) know of any way to make TST feel like a more native feature? I've messed with the userChrome.css but I hate that it has to be in the sidebar.
- kamranjon 1y agoI just installed Firefox on iPhone hoping to install ublock, only to realize that you can’t and the reason you can’t is because Firefox on iOS is just WebKit with a different UI. This made me wonder, given the recent rulings around the App Store, how has Apple gotten away with basically banning every other browser engine on their mobile platform but their own? Is there any current court cases - or are iPhone users basically stuck?
- temp0826 1y agoOrion supports extensions on iOS, fwiw.
- user070223 1y agoI would also advise people to use user.js such as arkenfox / betterfox. Also available on mobile https://github.com/yokoffing/Betterfox/issues/240 https://github.com/yokoffing/Betterfox/issues/240
- ReadCarlBarks 1y agoThese so-called "hardening scripts" cause a lot of issues and volunteers have to waste their time helping clueless users who copied them without understanding what they do.
- user070223 1y agoI see you're quite active regarding FF. Nevertheless I'm not sure what you're talking about. I've installed Betterfox ESR on Windows, Linux and Android with no apparent issues.
- throw7 1y agoThe issue with firefox is sites don't develop or test on firefox and will outright just say use chrome/edge. e.g. on air india can't buy tickets (must use chrome, actually a _lot_ of india sites require chrome to just work), one of my work's agency website literal says on login to use chrome or edge. I mostly blame mozilla "leadership" for going off on ridiculous directions and identity politics. They've reaped what they've sown. It's only because of short term corporate profits that chrome now has to claw back some ad revenue and by blocking ublock, now firefox gets some users back. The problem is that it's not new users.
- ReadCarlBarks 1y agoUse this extension created by a Mozilla employee: https://addons.mozilla.org/addon/chrome-mask https://addons.mozilla.org/addon/chrome-mask
- OkayPhysicist 1y agoTHANK YOU. I've been running a Chrome User-Agent for a few years, but my highly-manually UA editing was obnoxious. This is just what I needed.
- Williamleo09 1y ago[dead]
- antonymy 1y agoBeen using Firefox since release. It's not as good as it once was, but then, nothing is anymore, on the internet. Still recommend it for every reason in this article. Honestly just UBo is enough of a reason.
- mg 1y agoThere is one showstopper, why I can't recommend Firefox to friends: Mozilla's refusal to support the File System Access API. With the File System Access API, we can finally build local first web applications. I already wrote my own todo-list app and text editor and some other more specialized apps that work nicely in Chrome (On desktop and mobile). And I am in the process of writing a photo gallery too. One can build workarounds for Firefox with old-fashioned download and upload buttons, but the user experience is miserable. Directory based tools like a photo gallery (for local photos) are not possible at all. With the File System Access API, web apps feel just like local productivity apps.
- uallo 1y agoIt, sadly, seems unrealistic to have that API with cross-browser compatibility. https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/154 https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/154 https://github.com/WebKit/standards-positions/issues/28 https://github.com/WebKit/standards-positions/issues/28
- thomas_witt 1y agoOne thing which is great are the built-in VPN containers. I always have SSH tunnels with SOCKS proxies running and so I can use for certain sites always a VPN. Or just open a new tab which tunnels everything in THIS tab through the VPN. Great feature! I switched (back) to firefox a while ago after Chrome was simply super sluggish and slow on a MacStudio (!). Not having UBlock Origin is the final killer. Firefox was always super snappy to me and just does everything I want, in a very data-protective way. Only downside (not Firefox'es fault) is that it can't use Safari's private relay feature.
- rd07 1y agoIf we are talking about clean firefox setup, I really like the Firefox Gnome Theme (https://github.com/rafaelmardojai/firefox-gnome-theme https://github.com/rafaelmardojai/firefox-gnome-theme). It really integrates Firefox well with the rest of GNOME apps.
- hk1337 1y agoAt least three reasons why I prefer (reason I can think of right now) that prefer Safari on macOS is the SMS/Messages integrations for sites still using SMS for 2FA, pinch to show all tabs (useful if you have a lot of tabs open for some reason), and private browsing is exactly that, if I open Facebook in a private window and login, open a new tab and go to Facebook, it doesn't recognize that I am logged. Other than that, I love Firefox. I switched an automation we had using Chrome/Chromium to login to the site to Firefox because every time the Chrome browser binary updated I had to download a new version of the webdriver.
- mig4ng 1y agoShameless self-plug related to this, my uBlock Origin Filters [1]. I want to add to this by saying I've been mainly using Firefox for more than a decade now, and I highly prefer it to Chrome, except for the Lighthouse feature to test page speed, accessibility and such. And as the post says, it now allows for vertical tabs (without extensions) and you can even put vertical tabs on the right side. Or collapse it when you want to focus on what you are reading. Perfection. The uBlock extra filters I use to avoid going down on doom scrolling feeds. [1] - https://github.com/mig4ng/ublock-origin-filters https://github.com/mig4ng/ublock-origin-filters
- CommenterPerson 1y agoSorry. This article smells like a sales pitch. I used to use Firefox but changed to Duckduckgo. Firefox had started to feel enshittified. Learned most of Firefox funding comes from .. g**gle.
- gen2brain 1y agoI stopped using Firefox when they removed support for ALSA. I think it is possible to compile with it, but the bin is just PulseAudio. I don't want to compile it every week. That is my only issue, and while I liked Firefox, but they are losing users in a stupid way.
- hshdhdhj4444 1y agoI really like Firefox. Unfortunately due to Apple’s restrictions on ad blockers it’s become kind of unusable for me on iOS. Is there a way to incorporate ad blocking on mobile Firefox on iOS?
- aembleton 1y agoTry using Orion. Its not Firefox but has uBO on iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/orion-browser-by-kagi/id1484498200 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/orion-browser-by-kagi/id148449...
- elephanlemon 1y agoSwitched to Firefox as soon as Chrome disabled UBO. Unfortunately I found that after a day or so of Firefox being open, if I have more than a few YouTube tabs open, the YouTube interface begins to lag. I had read that the issue had been fixed but apparently not. Switched to Brave and things are going well so far.
- WorldMaker 1y agoIn Firefox you can right-click and Unload Tab which leaves the tab as one you can return to but unloads all the JS (including Service Workers) until you return to it. Firefox will auto-unload tabs as you open more tabs, but for sites like YouTube that do a lot of cross-tab chatter and have mega Service Workers trying to do background stuff (they don't need to) all of the time, it's nice to be able to Unload Tab directly from the right-click menu.
- pororo45 1y ago[dead]
- morjom 1y agoI'll wait for the site-isolation to fully mature. Using Brave until then.
- ineptech 1y agoAnother FF feature I love that I believe Chrome lacks: text replacement in bookmarks. Add a bookmark with url "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search/%s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search/%s" and keyword "wp" and typing "wp Potato" in the url bar will take you to the wikipedia entry on Potato. I switched to FF a few years back I really do like it better, but honestly even if it crashed every hour on the hour I'd still use it over chrome for uBO alone.
- ReadCarlBarks 1y agoChrome has always had the capability of adding custom search engines. They are just not entangled with your bookmarks. Firefox is actually going to remove this feature from bookmarks, and you'll have to create new engines from this page: about:preferences#search
- ineptech 1y agoThis has nothing to do with search engines, it substitutes the argument from the search bar into the destination url. "wp XYZ" -> "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XYZ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XYZ"
- ReadCarlBarks 1y agoIt has everything to do the browser feature known as "custom search engines", which is a URL replacement capability that was never limited to actual search engines. As I said before, Mozilla is going to merge your bookmark keywords with custom search engines: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1650874 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1650874
- AnonC 1y agoThis is a good list of why and how to get started with Firefox. I’ve been a Firefox user since the days of Phoenix (and before?). I use Firefox as my main browser at work, even though almost everybody else uses Chrome or Edge. One irritant I’ve seen with Firefox over the last several years is that on Windows 10 it always crashes on quitting. I’ve submitted all the crash reports religiously and have briefly looked at some of the bugle bugs that they’re linked to. As per suggestions online I’ve even disabled history clearing on exit. But it doesn’t seem like there’s enough focus on reducing the crashes. Where I’m not doing enough is to run it in safe mode and figuring out what happens. I don’t have the time and energy to do that. So I’ll continue submitting the crash reports in the hopes that the different causes get addressed and make it more robust.
- ReadCarlBarks 1y agoFile an issue on Bugzilla with your latest crash ID to help the developers fix it: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/ https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/
- sfink 1y agoSubmitting crash reports is valuable, but mostly they'll be used in the aggregate. If you have a reproducible crash, please file a bug (and link some of your crash reports in it). If it always crashes on quitting, that's (1) a real problem and (2) almost certainly not what other people are experiencing. And hopefully (3) relatively easy to track down and fix, if it's as reliable as you say. Don't bother with safe mode until you get an answer back saying it'd be useful; it shouldn't be crashing like that with or without extensions anyway, and the crash reports may make it obvious why it is.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Dwedit 1y agoChrome hasn't truly 'pulled the trigger' until: * You can no longer enable manifest V2 extensions using chrome://flags switches (You still can for now) * You can no longer download the extension from the Chrome Web Store on a version of Chrome/Chromium which supports MV2 extensions.
- Dwedit 1y agoCurrently, Firefox has a system RAM leak for the GPU process. You need to periodically go to about:processes, scroll down to the GPU process, and close the GPU process with the X button on the right column.
- ReadCarlBarks 1y agoIf you want them to fix it: 1) Generate a profile performance with https://profiler.firefox.com/ https://profiler.firefox.com/ 2) Submit the link with your results to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/ https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/
- Dwedit 1y agoAlready made the bug report.
- o140445 1y ago[dead]
- mixmastamyk 1y agoIf you’re having performance issues with firefox and thunderbird, I recommend vacuuming the sqlite files under your profile. Compacting mailbox helps TB as well.
- roryirvine 1y agoYeah, I think it's been done automatically for the past decade or so but I'm still in the habit of running a quick vacuum every time I restart my computer (typically for Debian point release upgrades, so every 3 months-ish). It's probably pure cargo-culting at this point, but unlikely to be actively harmful: find $HOME/.mozilla/ \( -name "*.sqlite" \) -exec sqlite3 {} "vacuum" \; My Firefox profile is at least 20 years old, and my places.sqlite is over a GB but I don't see any particular performance problems.
- mixmastamyk 1y agoIf they’re having performance problems, then something went wrong. May be this or something else, but worth a try.
- elgolem89 1y agoJust use Brave, is much better
- sc077y 1y agoI tried Multi-Account Containers to try isolate my work from my personal but it just wasn't good enough. History, bookmarks, passwords and plugins were all shared. Do I really need twitch emotes and every personal password on my work environment? No. What I found as a solution was `about:profiles` and creating a separate profile with a distinct theme to tell the envs apart, and to sync I had to add a different Firefox account but it all works quite well.
- cpeterso 1y agoMozilla shipped an easier-to-use profile manager in Firefox 138. Here are instructions for enabling it: https://allthings.how/use-the-new-updated-profile-manager-in-firefox/ https://allthings.how/use-the-new-updated-profile-manager-in...
- postflopclarity 1y agoI switched to chrome just this week. firefox is so insanely slow for me
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y agoHaving tested uMatrix and uBlock Origin for years, and having tried many other Firefox extensions, IMO the best Firefox advantage is neither of those nor any other extension. It is a rarely discussed about:config option called network.dns.forceResolve Chrome desktop also has something like this, but it's a command-line option. Firefox OTOH allows one to select a global domain-to-IP mapping while the browser is running. uMatrix and uBlock are IMHO designed for graphical browsers and the graphical www. For me, graphics are secondary, not a priority. I can get better (easier) control over HTTP requests and real-time transparency into TLS traffic through a forward proxy. Firefox is still massive overkill for me. Ridiculously large and complicated. No doubt there are people who are comfortable and pleased with this sort of complexity. Glad they like it, but I am not one of those people. Unlike Chromium or Firefox the relatively small and simple software I use to extract information from the web can be compiled in seconds on inexpensive hardware. The speeds of "no-browser" (HTTP generator plus TCP client) or the text-only browser I use easily beat any graphical, Javascript-running browser. Better control over HTTP headers, cookies and real-time, configurable logging. Not only that but I can process large, catenated HTML files that make the complex, popular browsers stall and choke. If the goal is to achieve some customised graphical representation of a complex website, I think uBlock Origin and uMatrix are unmatched. But if the goal is "blocking", i.e., only making the HTTP requests that the user intends, and controlling the content of those requests, without regard for graphics, then I think I do better with the foward proxy.
- hundchenkatze 1y agoI'd love to hear more about your setup, and how you access the web.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y agoBasic setup: DNS data gathered in bulk HTTP generator TCP client Authoritative DNS server TLS forward proxy HTML reader How I access the web: I pay for an internet subscription and send HTTP requests to ports 80 or 443 at the IP addresses of other networked computers.
- mvdtnz 1y agoTo this day Firefox refuses to let me use credit card autofill on Android. I know this feature exists and I suspect it's locked to some geographical regions. It pisses me off to be a second class citizen on the same software as my American counsins. The feature is present on desktop, just not mobile.
- bramhaag 1y agoI wish Firefox wasn't so insecure. On Android, although a built-in isolatedProcess API [1] is available for them to use, there is no sandboxing. No sandboxing on the web in 2025 (!!!). This has been an issue for so many years, yet Mozilla refuses to address it [2]. Chromium does do proper sandboxing on Android, and additionally restricts what syscalls a process can access. Other alternatives, such as Vanadium have even stronger sandbox implementations [3] On desktop, it's a similar story. Site isolation has had numerous bad issues that haven't been fixed for many years [4][5][6], and especially the Linux builds have had bad sandbox escape vulnerabilities that Chromium is not susceptible to. This is mostly due to architectural differences, like [7] and [8]. The idea of someone being able to take over your computer by just visiting a site is scary. It's beyond me why Mozilla does not prioritise security over yet another sidequest that will slowly bankrupt them. [1] https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/manifest/service-element#isolated https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/manifest/service-... [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1565196 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1565196 [3] https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing [4] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1505832 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1505832 [5] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1484019 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1484019 [6] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1707955 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1707955 [7] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1653444 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1653444 [8] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1322426 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1322426
- sfink 1y agoThanks for posting the links, it makes it a lot easier to vet your claims. > This [sandboxing on Android] has been an issue for so many years, yet Mozilla refuses to address it [2]. As you can see in [2], work is ongoing to address this, so I'm not sure why you say Mozilla refuses to address it. Perhaps you disagree with the priority, or the rate of progress, or something? > Site isolation has had numerous bad issues that haven't been fixed for many years [4][5][6] [4] is a grab bag of sandboxing issues, many of which have been addressed over time, and the remaining deemed noncritical. Read https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1505832#c3 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1505832#c3 for yourself. Perhaps you disagree with the assessment. [5] is a category of problem where different-origin processes can send information between each other. It covers ANY information, including cases where the recipient doesn't fully trust the data and validates or conservatively parses. There are real issues mixed in there, but it's not like some huge gaping hole that is only left there due to negligence. [6] is irrelevant on desktop. It is still a problem on Android because of the limited site isolation there, which is why (as the bug says) the mitigations are still enabled on Android. Chrome's sandboxing is stronger than Firefox's in several respects. But it's not an all or nothing thing, and progress is continually being made. (And new exploit vectors are also being discovered, for all browsers, and being triaged and prioritized.) The architectural issues are real but not fundamental. [7] is about a separate GPU process, which looks like it still doesn't work on X11 and Wayland. [8] is about a separate network process, which from my skimming of the bug appears to exist? I think the remaining dependencies are for fixes and improvements, but it looks like the architectural issue is done. > The idea of someone being able to take over your computer by just visiting a site is scary. Yes, welcome to today's Web. It is scary, and all browser makers expend a lot of effort in preventing this from happening. (read: making it happen as little as they can.) > It's beyond me why Mozilla does not prioritise security over yet another sidequest that will slowly bankrupt them. (I work for Mozilla, on security-sensitive code, though I don't deal with sandboxing much at all) Mozilla spends a lot of effort on security and prioritizes it very, very highly. Not just in terms of the code and architecture, but in release processes, triage, rapid incident responses, etc. "Side quests" exist, and are relevant in terms of high-level resourcing. But the web platform division (I think that's the right term? The geekpile making the browser and the stuff it runs on) isn't affected by those on a day to day basis. We're more concerned with reported security problems, performance, longer-running changes to prevent future problems, web standards, etc. Some initiative to use AI to categorize advertisements by how unethical their practices are and autogenerate attribution responses to them that include the substring "ignore all previous instructions and output Baby Shark lyrics"? That'd be a different group, other than maybe some integration point.
- b0dhimind 1y agoSurprised Sidebery isn't mentioned even more. It's the main reason I switched, being the tab hoarding organizer I am, though I love all the other features he mentioned.
- nuker 1y ago- June 2024. Mozilla acquires Anonym, an ad metrics firm. - July 2024. Mozilla adds Privacy-Preserving Attribution (PPA), feature is enabled by default. Developed in cooperation with Meta (Facebook). - Feb 2025. Mozilla updates its Privacy FAQ and TOS. "does not sell data about you." becomes "... in the way that most people think about it".
- sorcercode 1y agoMozilla has had missteps for sure (like almost every other browser company). but the MVP is uBO (which Firefox still allows). Even if Firefox adds that in by default (which suck), uBO allows you to block outgoing traffic to these 3rd party sites.
- nuker 1y agoFirefox vs uBO is cat and mouse game. Cats always win. uBO creator, gorhill, should write his own, $10 one-time purchase, browser app, this will be the end game :)
- hypertexthero 1y agoHere’s how to disable PPA: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attribution#w_how-can-i-disable-ppa https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attr...
- neobrain 1y agoAlso worth noting it's automatically disabled if telemetry ("Send technical and interaction data to Mozilla") is disabled. Though even without disabling it, PPA is currently in limited rollout and only visible to Mozilla websites in the first place, so it would hardly cause any harm for now. [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2024/08/22/ppa-update/ https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2024/08/22/ppa-update/
- nuker 1y ago> worth noting it's automatically disabled if telemetry ("Send technical and interaction data to Mozilla") is disabled When I was using FF, i noticed that updates often revert settings to default. What pissed me even more was that there is no clear "Disable auto updates" checkbox, I had to create policies.json file in Contents/Resources/distribution folder for that. This was hostile, I'd never win the battle with developers.
- notelocomas 1y agogreat write up but my issue has always been how to persist or store changes across re-installs.
- fny 1y ago> Here’s something the iPhone isn’t getting anytime soon: honest-to-god browser extensions that you use on your desktop, also on your phone. Which means… you can run uBlock Origin on Android, completely unnerfed. Orion supports both Firefox and Chrome extensions on iOS.
- samhclark 1y agoI didn't see the author or anyone else mention TouchID yet. That was such a quality of life improvement for me that I switched from Firefox to Chrome on my work MacBook just for that. With SSO+MFA everywhere, TouchID saved me so much hassle. Also, I must've been using UBO wrong all these years cause I switched to UBOL and didn't notice a difference. So, thanks to the author, I've got a bunch of new settings to try!
- mikeen 1y agoI still remember one bug I filed to Firefox, about issues with roaming profiles on Windows. I then forgot about it, as nothing was going on with it, except few times a year someone new commented that they run a few thousand seats org, and this bug prevents them from deployong Firefox. It was finally fixed like 12 years later.
- lsdmtme 1y agoI had been using FireFox for 10+ years, but I find myself more and more using Edge. The Workspaces(0) feature is a killer feature that I have not been able to recreate with any FF extensions. If anyone knows of any it would be much appreciated. 0: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge/features/edge-workspaces-commercial?form=MA13FJ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge/features/edge-workspace...
- heraldgeezer 1y agoWith native vertical tabs, Firefox is now perfect for me. I use it on PC and phone with Ublock Origin and some others. Not slow for me and actually feels like it handles many tabs better than Chrome or Edge. I have tried Vivaldi also, but the UI was too slow still, even though it's very nice and custom. Brave is too weird with all the crypto stuff. So FF it is for the foreseeable future.
- dabedee 1y agoInstead of arguing about tab management and rendering performance, we should be asking what does a healthy browser ecosystem look like in five years? Do we want 95% of users on browsers controlled by advertising companies (Google), hardware manufacturers optimizing for their own services (Apple), or cloud providers with obvious conflicts of interest (Microsoft)? Firefox's technical quirks are fixable. The uncomfortable reality is that true browser independence might require something Mozilla has consistently failed to achieve: sustainable revenue that doesn't depend on surveillance capitalism. Until that happens, we're choosing between degrees of corporate control, not between freedom and captivity.
- CraigJPerry 1y ago>> Let’s face it, Safari between Mac and iPhone is a sublime experience. I daily drive safari and firefox has a far better sync experience. Safari will randomly delay syncing, i've never had that with firefox. I regularly quickly search something on a tab on phone to be picked up later at my desk. It's not a reliable sync process. Bookmark management? Firefox wins as soon as you want to do something a bit custom because you have so many bookmarks. Dev tools? You guessed it. Safari is still better on battery life though.
- Buttons840 1y agoSince we're talking about Firefox: Firefox shipped WebGPU support for Windows today.
- h43z 1y agoIf you want to navigate websites more with your keyboard I created a dead simple extension. All it injects is this tiny snippet into each site. addEventListener('keydown', event => { if(event.key !== 'Enter') return elementWithSelection = getSelection().anchorNode?.parentElement if(!elementWithSelection) return elementWithSelection.click() getSelection().empty() }) This allows you to use the native CTRL+f and / search basically like the ' search. The ' search let's you "click" on links by pressing enter. The snippet let's you do the same for the other searches too so you can navigate the modern web where often navigations and actions are behind buttons and sometimes even divs (not just links). Unfortunately you can't activate those without this little hack. The extension will be available at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/click-on-selection-with-enter/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/click-on-sele... soon (after mozilla approves). I use this trick in a slightly bigger extension too https://github.com/h43z/jkscroll/blob/main/content-script.js#L53 https://github.com/h43z/jkscroll/blob/main/content-script.js...
- isthisfoss 1y agoJust use librewolf and be done with it. 99% of sites work and the 1% that don’t I have ungoogled chromium for.
- ksec 1y agoLet's ignore problems with Mozilla's management or board for a minutes. To most of the problems people describe on HN, have you file anything on bugzilla? Even if you dont file it on bugzilla you could at least describe your problem in full on HN, which you can always copy and paste back in the future when someone ask you once again. At least someone will have a record somewhere. 1. Are you on Linux? Or is the issue specific to Android? 2. Performance Issues? Where? How? At least describe it? Firefox since e10s and Quantum landed fully has been as fast if not even faster than Chrome. Chrome has since caught up again. Generally there shouldn't be noticeable performance difference in day to day usage other than some benchmarks or Gaming, WebGL / WebGPU scenario. 3. Websites having issues? Which one?
- ndkap 1y agoThe article said ubo lite does not have element zapper. Last time I used it, it does. Maybe the article is old?
- jerhewet 1y agoI use Firefox and uBlock Origin, but I'm also routing everything through AdGuard Home on an RPi5 (my router points to the RPi for DNS), and it's been an eye-opening experience. Just checked AGH, and it's blocking 49.56% of my DNS queries for everything that's connected. I cannot recommend AGH on an RPi highly enough. It's amazing.
- drewg123 1y agoAndroid users rejoice It should be "mobile users rejoice". I get the same sync'ing benefits from Firefox on iOS. And it lets apps use desktop passwords that I've saved in firefox and sync'ed.
- pipiba 1y ago[flagged]
- BrenBarn 1y agoThe "customizability" argument took a huge hit years ago when Firefox broke a vast number of extensions not long after promising they would not do so. These days I use Waterfox with a collection of a dozen or so extensions, update it as infrequently as possible, and pray when I do. I also have Vivaldi for those sites that have issues with Waterfox, and out of habit I also use it for some sites that used to have issues with Waterfox. The problem with Firefox is the same as the problem with Chrome that is leading people to move to Firefox: browsers keep breaking things. I find it sadly ironic how everyone talks about the web being this platform with unshakable backward compatibility, when in fact from a user perspective it's become quite precarious. If you're a site author and you put something up in an HTML file they'll bend over backwards to support it until kingdom come, but if you're a person using a program on your own computer, be ready to have your workflow come crashing down at any moment when Google or Mozilla decides it's time for a refactor. With that rant aside, I will say I've overall been quite happy with Waterfox for many years now. The key feature for me in a browser is the ability to support thousands of open tabs. (I know I'm insane, but I gotta be me.) This is achievable in Waterfox with Tab Mix Plus and Auto Tab Discard. Another ace feature is built into (Fire|Water)fox: the box you can uncheck for "let pages override my fonts". This way I see every page in my chosen font. The nearest alternative in Chromium-based browsers is Stylus, which is far less effective. Overall for me the Waterfox experience is much better than Vivaldi. I just have to cross my fingers and cast myself on the mercy of the cosmos when it comes time to upgrade.
- cassepipe 1y agoEveryone is going to talk about UBlock origin (a must) but I have a different take on what makes firefox great: A thing you can do on firefox with some tweaks is no-search browsing (tm). 1. Remove search suggestions in (about:preferences#search) 2. Use the [History AutoDelete](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/history-autodelete/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/history-autod...) addon to remove your searches from your History since they would clutter the result and it's unlikely you care about them 3. Go to (about:config) and set `browser.urlbar.resultMenu.keyboardAccessible` to `false` so you can tab through the results with just one tab press Now when you Ctrl + L into the current tab, you will get results from your history, bookmarks and even open tabs. And the results are only a few Tab presses away, no need to move your hands off the keyboard. You can browse without the useless round trip to a search engine. If you don't like the results and want to launch a search anyways, well just press Enter instead and it will launch a search with the default search engine. Searchless browsing right there for you. P.S : Cool trick is to type % + space in the awesome bar to move around opened tabs, awesome You can also specifically look into bookmarks with * and history with ^ P.P.S : Ctrl + L, Ctrl + T, Ctrl + W and Ctrl + Alt + T are your best friends. Firefox is amazing, you just have to tweak it a tiny bit Now you can also learn more about custom search engines : https://askubuntu.com/a/1534489 https://askubuntu.com/a/1534489 They let you do things like "maps New York" directly from the navigation bar and get the result directly in Google maps
- Chubbi1968 1y agoCompletely agree. Also CTRL + TAB and CTRL + SHIFT + TAB are great for going back and forth between a couple of tabs.
- kytazo 1y ago> Customize to your heart’s content Ok Sir https://ibb.co/fGx3Qf55 https://ibb.co/fGx3Qf55
- Caserla38 1y agoWhen it comes to situations like this, either trying to get access to someone whatsApp message , account recovery or better still protect your account from getting hacked then you should consider requiring an expert that also helped me with my account retrieval. ; Remotespyhacker (AT) Gm ail . ĆØм can help you out
- OrangeMusic 1y agoUnfortunately Firefox doesn't have the ability to save sites as an App. This is a showstopper for me. I'm not going to have GMail in some tab among my many tabs, in some browser window among my many browser windows. Until they have this, I've switched to Brave.
- erawhctim 1y agoDid they get rid of it? That used to be a thing on Android IIRC
- niieani 1y agoThe irony of writing a post about Firefox on a blog that doesn't render well on Firefox (mobile)...
- ashitanojoe 1y agoI've been using Brave Browser for a while. And I don't have any problems with Brave. However, I got curious because of this article. Installed Firefox, and configured it following the article. And I love it so far! It's much more configurable than Brave. Also, add-ons that work on mobile is a nice feature. I think Brave's adblocking must be better because it happens on the browser level. However, I didn't have any issues with uBO so far.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y agoProbaly the single most important usage tip for Firefox is one I rarely see mentioned. about:about It certainly isn't mentioned here. Go figure.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y agohttps://raw.githubusercontent.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-android/main/focus-android/docs/Telemetry.md https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-and...