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I 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 restar

I 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 ago
In 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 ago
  Same 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
  A 2012 Macbook Pro is going to be, yeah.
  - kjkjadksj 1y ago
    I used one quite recently. It’s no wimp for web browsing. Basically unnoticeable save for the constant warmth from this machine. It is still 2.5ghz per core after all, that’s not a complete slouch.
giancarlostoro 1y ago
I'm about the same, I don't even know what the loading speeds issue is about, I still remember Firefox Quantum beating the daylights out of Chrome, and I don't know if Chrome ever fully caught up to Quantum? What's really funny is for ages Chrome would load the browser window even if the whole browser UI wasn't done loading, and sometime after Quantum, Firefox started doing the same trick to make you feel as though it instantly runs. I've been using Firefox for about 20 years or so, and I don't regret it, but also I have not noticed a degrade in performance. I'm using it on Linux so I don't know if that's drastically different on a Mac these days.
- voxic11 1y ago
  Do you use Firefox for Android? I use it for the extension support but its noticeably slower than Chrome on Android.
  - glenstein 1y ago
    I use Firefox on Android and I don't think (?) I notice a speed difference. At least not a big one.
  - giancarlostoro 1y ago
    I'm on iOS, I guess I mainly use Firefox on Desktop, on iOS there's no point in me using Firefox since its forced to use Webkit under the covers.
    - grimgrin 1y ago
      firefox on all my devices for the simple pleasure of sending tabs between devices sometimes i'm reading something on phone and i "send to all devices", i'll sure as shit see it again this way (even librewolf allows you to continue doing this)
    - godelski 1y ago
      I browse with Orion (for ad blocking) but still have Firefox installed because I can click Share -> Firefox -> Send Tab. Maybe I stumble upon a video I want to watch but not now. Maybe I stumble upon a long form article or reference or something that just is shitty on a mobile interface and I push it to the computer I'm literally sitting next to while having my phone in hand too.
thinkingtoilet 1y ago
>I've never felt impeded by loading speeds I honestly think it's just something people here like to complain about. It's a complete non-issue. No everyday web experience is even close to being noticeably different. Full stop. It's almost like a meme, people say it because they think they should say it. I would ask those people that are complaining, what are you doing with all those extra milliseconds you claim you're saving?
- TedDoesntTalk 1y ago
  > what are you doing with all those extra milliseconds you claim you're saving? Watching more ads.
- rs186 1y ago
  When you have web pages that that completely freeze the Firefox browser but work smoothly on Chrome, you won't call it non-issue.
  - disgruntledphd2 1y ago
    This doesn't seem to happen to me anymore, certainly not since Quantum. Your experience may obviously differ. I've been running FF for like twenty years now, across Windows, Linux and Mac.
  - lillecarl 1y ago
    I don't know why I should lower my browsing standards to a Chrome experience because a small percentage of websites work poorly in Firefox. My password manager works in all browsers so I have Chrome with only PW manager and uBlock Lite so I can use it for the ONE website I use that doesn't work in FF. I don't think it's frustrating to press Ctrl+L, Ctrl+C, $launcher-bind(Meta+D), Ctrl+L, Ctrl+V, Enter to open another browser. My average experience is a lot better with Firefox and that's what I optimize for.
  - hunter-gatherer 1y ago
    I have been on Firefox for some years now on Mac, Linux, Windows, and Android. Last year the IRS website had some issues, but that seems to be resolved. Otherwise, I've had zero breakages that cone to mind. I use ublock origin, and pivacy badger, and a few other extensions. I wonder if sometimes the issues people experience with firefox are actually caused from their extensions??? If you haven't used Firefox in a minute, I recommend trying it oht again.
zamadatix 1y ago
> Much of what we said about Web Extensions support on desktop Orion stands, with further limitations in the scope of APIs we can support which are imposed by Apple. This results in a smaller number of extensions that are currently fully functional on iOS and iPadOS. This seems to say they do not expect to actually get to full coverage on iOS like the author is talking about? https://help.kagi.com/orion/browser-extensions/ios-ipados-extensions.html https://help.kagi.com/orion/browser-extensions/ios-ipados-ex...
shakna 1y ago
I was surprised to hit this one today. Government department, supporting exactly one browser on most people's main device. https://www.ato.gov.au/online-services/technical-support/minimum-system-requirements#Table2Supportedmobilebrowsers https://www.ato.gov.au/online-services/technical-support/min...
hk1337 1y ago
> there's occasionally sites that have bugs because, like was the case in the 90s with Internet Explorer Hol up! Are you saying Chrome is the new Internet Explorer? I'm being facetious... If so, then I agree. I have said and thought for a long time a lot of developers go all-in with everything google as if google could do no wrong. In short, they have become that which they swore to destroy.
warmedcookie 1y ago
I will say that it is amusing that loading speeds is the argument for sticking with Chrome. Chrome loads faster so that you can see all of those ads faster and have to take the time to close each one of them, hehe! If the slop doesn't bother you, stick with Chrome. Plenty of people still watch network/cable TV.
globular-toast 1y ago
Same, no problems here, in the almost 20 years I've been using it. Whenever I've used Chrome I find it weird and annoying. Which just goes to show it's all down to what you're used to. If people would just try switching they'd find it normal in just a week or so. Are you really going to let Google control your computing just because you can't stand the very mild discomfort associated with change?
- glenstein 1y ago
  >Are you really going to let Google control your computing just because you can't stand the very mild discomfort associated with change? Exactly that's the big picture question and I find it mind-boggling when when people can't look past an idiosyncratic user experience to more fundamental things like Google seizing long-term control over web standards, getting rid of ad block, imposing DRM, and creating a paradigm or even its own competitors are increasingly dependent on Chromium development.
lucumo 1y ago
> there's occasionally sites that have bugs because [...people build for Chrome...] I hear that a lot, but when I tried Firefox for a couple of months I only found that in a single case[1]. It's really not something that happened to me at all. I did encounter issues with ad blockers breaking sites. Disabling uBO helps quite often on misbehaving sites, but it does so on Chrome as well. > I am surprised how many people have so many problems with Firefox. I'm not really. Nor am I surprised it works for you and others. It has been this way with Firefox for all of its 20+ years of existence. In its history it made one big leap in that, somewhat ironically given current affairs, when they removed XUL extensions. But Firefox has always had weird, unexplainable and unreproducible failure scenarios. Some of that is because of its customizability, but also nobody really cares about it.[2] The standard advice of "throw away your profile and try again" is a huge fuck you to users. 1) People have spend time customizing their browser and throwing that away hurts. 2) It doesn't help anybody. If it's still broken you know nothing, and if it isn't you still don't know what caused it. I guess that was okay in 2004. Lots of software had weird bugs. Nowadays the competition is much more stable. For me, I dropped Firefox again after a couple of months fighting to get a stable sync working.[3] It just kept failing on Android. The only resolution was to log out and log back in again. Only for it to break in the next couple of hours. I did the "commit profile suicide and rebirth" thing without a solution. Chrome's sync at least is very stable. Sometimes it falls an hour or so behind. Not good, but so much better than Firefox. [1] And that was intentional. Typical Google assholery. Google Photos added (adds?) extra HTML to block right-click on photos when a Firefox User-Agent was used. Using a UA switcher extension "solved" it. [2] Makers of software for power users so often forget to give power users the tools to investigate issues themselves. It's great you allow me to add so many extensions, how about a detailed log to see which is misbehaving? [3] Firefox's sync also has fewer features. Bookmarks don't get synced, nor do extension settings.
- lucumo 1y ago
  > Bookmarks don't get synced, *Search engines. Bookmark sync works fine.
- kevincox 1y ago
  Compatibility bugs are rare but definitely occur. If a key component of your workflow has bugs it can be hugely inconvenient. For example Slack Huddles blocks Firefox Firefox, if your team uses them regularly it is a big productivity loss. It is also very annoying when the first step of every troubleshooting process is "Try using Google Chrome" and if it works the consider your problem solved.
mentalgear 1y ago
100 tabs? Step aside, buddy. I have currently around ~2000 tabs. Firefox is a beast.
vladvasiliu 1y ago
I was in your boat up until a few days ago, when it randomly decided in wouldn't load properly. I force quit it, and then it forgot all my tabs. Now, it actually remembered what seemed like the correct number of tabs, each with the correct container, only the address was gone from every tab! Other than that, it works well enough for me. My only beef is I can't completely disable tabs, but I don't know of any equivalent browser that can.
- ksec 1y ago
  Are you on Linux? In any case there should have been a List of Tabs backup file ( cant remember what is was called ) and you can manually replace it to recover your Tabs. "About:unloads" allows you to manually unload all tabs.
- oAlbe 1y ago
  > My only beef is I can't completely disable tabs, but I don't know of any equivalent browser that can. There is an addon[1] that allows you to discard tabs both manually and with a degree of automation. I've been using it for a while and it works quite well. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-discard/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...
  - vladvasiliu 1y ago
    Oh, I wasn't talking about "unloading" tabs, but about completely disabling the tabs ui feature. By that I mean always create a new window instead of a tab.
bashkiddie 1y ago
I am a heavy user of firefox and I am still unhappy with mozillas policy. * Firefox-Hello is a easy to pick example of a broken service run by a 3rd party being imposed on users. * Pocket is another service I never asked for. * Instead of focusing on the browser, mozilla puts their effort into an English language database. It appears to me mozilla does not understand their target audience. Recently I tried to customize firefox for screen recording and ran into lots of outdated documentation about userChrome.css
- WorldMaker 1y ago
  Pocket is shutting down soon and fresh Firefox installs don't install its extension any more.
  - deepsun 1y ago
    Which kinda makes sense. It was actually cool when it could save webpages for later reading offline (camping, airplane). Once it lost that feature, there's nothing left but bookmarks.
    - GregWWalters 1y ago
      This is the most disappointing part for me—Pocket could sync with Kobo e-readers for offline, e-paper reading later. Great for traveling.
    - xcf_seetan 1y ago
      I have been using the extension SingleFile to save pages for offline reading and archival for ages. I started using it on the basis of reading something online and later talk to someone about it and when i try to find it again, it may be gone, dont find it, etc. So i started to save all the relevant pages to have a local reference of what i have read online.
- exiguus 1y ago
  What is the reason for criticizing Mozilla for integrating a new feature into their browser? Or am I misunderstanding the term feature, and Pocket isn't a feature for you? I mean, other browsers like Chrome have similar functionality.
raffael_de 1y ago
Where does the article mention anything about loading speed?
exiguus 1y ago
My take is that Firefox is not very effective at marketing. For example, Chrome publishes articles like 'Chrome achieves highest score ever on Speedometer' (2024) [1]. I haven't found similar articles or any reliable scores for Firefox. Some computer magazines suggest that Firefox is in second place after Chrome in running Speedometer 3. For me, at least, it's hard to find any specific numbers. Also, it's important to note that Speedometer is a browser benchmark test developed by WebKit, Firefox, and Chrome. Also, i don't understand why people prefer google over open source. And the sometimes disrespectful and destructive criticism of Mozilla. [1] https://blog.chromium.org/2025/06/chrome-achieves-highest-score-ever-on.html https://blog.chromium.org/2025/06/chrome-achieves-highest-sc...
- Sayrus 1y ago
  Mozilla does sometimes. For instance 'Quick as a Fox: Firefox keeps getting faster'[2] from 2023 and the related articles in Mozilla Hacks[2]. They used to do that a lot more when Quantum was all the hype and had some marketing performance comparison[3] with Chrome a long time back. Recently, it feels like Mozilla is dropping that type of marketing to focus on the image of privacy and talk about some features. [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/uncategorized/quick-as-a-fox-firefox-keeps-getting-faster/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/uncategorized/quick-as-a-fox-fir... [2] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2023/10/down-and-to-the-right-firefox-got-faster-for-real-users-in-2023/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2023/10/down-and-to-the-right-fire... [3] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/firefox-private-browsing-vs-chrome-incognito/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/firefox-private-browsing...
- godelski 1y ago
  Interestingly I did much worse on my Linux FF (13.6) on Speedometer3.1[0] than my M2 Air (29.6), though for the WebGL benchmarks from above the Linux machine (which has significantly more compute power) has no problems with the WebGL tests and the Air does worse. Backbone and jQuery were real killers for the Linux machine. Looks to be mostly Adding100Items for Backbone and literally everything for jQuery was half a magnitude slower. > Also, i don't understand why people prefer google over open source. And the sometimes disrespectful and destructive criticism of Mozilla. Certainly Mozilla deserves criticism. All companies do, right? But what I don't get is the passionate hate and how the result often ends up being contradictory. Like complaining about FF with that Mr Robot thing (yeah, bad move) and then saying that's why they use Chrome (or some Chromium based browser). It feels like calling someone an idiot for falling face first into dog shit while you're sitting in a jacuzzi full of it. Yeah, both situations are shitty, but come on... there's a lot more shit in one of these... [0] https://browserbench.org/Speedometer3.1 https://browserbench.org/Speedometer3.1
stronglikedan 1y ago
I use Firefox and Chrome to separate work from personal, and I can tell you that I have to close and restart Firefox at least once a day due to spinning fans and crawling performance, whereas with Chrome it's about once a week.
- glenstein 1y ago
  Since we're sharing our respective anecdotes your experience, interestingly mirrors mine in that I do the same thing for work. Microsoft Edge for work tasks (not my choice but the IT team remotely manages the bookmarks on that one), Firefox for personal. But no issues with speed or needing to shut things down just on an ordinary Lenovo laptop.
- sionisrecur 1y ago
  For another anecdotal experience, I use both in the same way and never have to restart neither of them until they ask to restart because of updates. Chrome asks much more often.
esafak 1y ago
I just switched from Firefox to Chromium and it is much faster. I switch back and forth.
caycep 1y ago
I half suspect w/ UBO, any Firefox slowdowns would still beat Chrome with ads. I personally haven't had issues, I do actually use safari as my main (Mac user), but Firefox gets a lot of use on my Mac and PC and it hasn't been noticeably slower than chrome for me.
WhyNotHugo 1y ago
> 100+ tabs open across multiple desktops. My wimply little MacBook Pro doesn't seem to mind. There's a bug on Linux where background windows continue rendering, even if they're in an inactive workspace or not visible in any other way. This really hits performance, but it doesn't seem to be fixable due to some limitation on GTK3. If I hide/resize my system status-bar, every single window gets resized to match the new available screen space. Firefox re-renders all content in all windows, causing multiple CPUs to spike to 100%. See: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1880467 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1880467 In fact, there are a lot of bugs which are basically "unfixable due to limitations in GTK3". So the experience is likely quite different that on other platforms. Regrettably, there don't seem to by any plans to move away from GTK in future.
- Arnavion 1y ago
  Just an idea. In my SwayWM setup, a) I run every application in its own cgroup (via systemd-run), and b) I have a daemon that subscribes to window and workspace events, gets the current tree, figures out the PIDs corresponding to invisible vs visible windows, figures out the cgroups corresponding to those PIDs, and then uses cgroup freezer file to freeze / unfreeze them. Other than a few hard-coded exceptions that I want to run while invisible (IRC client etc), any invisible application is transparently frozen and unfrozen. For "single-instance applications" like firefox, launching a new firefox while the existing one is frozen will hang, so instead of launching /usr/bin/firefox directory I have an intermediate ~/.local/bin/firefox script that unfreezes the firefox cgroup and then exec's /usr/bin/firefox. Of course if at least one FF window is visible then this doesn't help with your problem, since the cgroup as a whole will be unfrozen. It only helps if none of the FF windows are visible.
- yellowapple 1y ago
  I can't seem to reproduce any CPU spikes on my end when repeatedly hiding/unhiding various GNOME toolbars (top or bottom).
godelski 1y ago
> my ADHD regularly has me forgetting to restart it, to the tune of 100+ tabs open across multiple desktops. My MacBook Air routinely will have 200-300 before I purge. Getting better at keeping under 100 but yeah... My Linux desktop is hooked up to my TV[0] and currently has over 100 YouTube tabs open. I'm going to watch those math videos, I swear, I'm just tired right now and so want to watch garbage. I do have ublock origin on both machines and some stricter privacy settings, maybe that's it? But otherwise yeah, FF is just as snappy as chrome. Which I do use regularly when on other people's machines. [0] it's a movie server, gaming machine, and for everything else there's ssh and ydotool (I wish Apple would let me make better iPhone scripts than Shortcuts allows. Shortcuts makes me want to throw my phone against a wall...)
- sinatra 1y ago
  I stopped having the same issue of 100s of tabs of "math videos that I was going to watch one day" when I started saving them in my private playlists. Now I just have 100s of videos in playlists that I just look at longingly but never watch.
  - godelski 1y ago
    lol I tried that once. What works best for me now is to do my best at putting tabs in the correct group tbh most gather while debugging and then I can just kill the group when I'm done. Problem is the ADHD and groups get contaminated. Mostly a few casualties is actually fine but sometimes the group gets too mixed. Eventually I nuke it all
consumer451 1y ago
There is only one website with a weird issue for me in Firefox: chatgpt.com of all things. When I open it and start typing, it resets the cursor position to the beginning after I already typed a few words. I assume this is some Next weirdness which requires a hack that only happens to work in Chrome.
davidgerard 1y ago
Every Firefox post has people claiming problems with it that are literally not true.
- glenstein 1y ago
  Or if true, extremely idiosyncratic. This thread is one of the more amazing case studies for people making blanket generalizations from problems that seem to be very specific to their setups and hard to reproduce elsewhere. I don't want to say the problems aren't happening, but there seems to be a wild overconfidence in generalizing from unusual case scenarios. Of course it's not limited to Firefox. I think it happens with everything from people's first experiences of Mastodon, to people having random bad experiences on some particular Linux distribution to any number of other things. I think to me the most have spending one I saw was people insisting F-Droid had problems that I could never reproduce when I was using it simultaneously across like four or five devices, including a pixel C tablet with lineage OS, and old Nexus 7 also with lineage OS, and two of my phones as I was in the process of transitioning from one to the other.
  - davidgerard 1y ago
    there's also a lot of straight up liars, to be clear
  - glenstein 1y ago
    >the most have spending Oops, meant to say most head spinning. Speech to text strikes again.
gonational 1y ago
100% agree. I've used FF since version 1.x, but I've used Chrome as a secondary at times, and I've had more problems in Chrome than FF. In fact, I've literally never experienced a bug in FF, except for, prior to and in the early days of the Servo Rust rewrite, I had a few crashes (tabs all reopened upon restarting). I haven't even had a crash in probably 8 years. Chrome is just spyware trash, IMHO.

helij 1y ago

In 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 ago
Same 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
A 2012 Macbook Pro is going to be, yeah.
- kjkjadksj 1y ago
  I used one quite recently. It’s no wimp for web browsing. Basically unnoticeable save for the constant warmth from this machine. It is still 2.5ghz per core after all, that’s not a complete slouch.

giancarlostoro 1y ago

I'm about the same, I don't even know what the loading speeds issue is about, I still remember Firefox Quantum beating the daylights out of Chrome, and I don't know if Chrome ever fully caught up to Quantum? What's really funny is for ages Chrome would load the browser window even if the whole browser UI wasn't done loading, and sometime after Quantum, Firefox started doing the same trick to make you feel as though it instantly runs. I've been using Firefox for about 20 years or so, and I don't regret it, but also I have not noticed a degrade in performance. I'm using it on Linux so I don't know if that's drastically different on a Mac these days.

voxic11 1y ago
Do you use Firefox for Android? I use it for the extension support but its noticeably slower than Chrome on Android.
- glenstein 1y ago
  I use Firefox on Android and I don't think (?) I notice a speed difference. At least not a big one.
- giancarlostoro 1y ago
  I'm on iOS, I guess I mainly use Firefox on Desktop, on iOS there's no point in me using Firefox since its forced to use Webkit under the covers.
  - grimgrin 1y ago
    firefox on all my devices for the simple pleasure of sending tabs between devices sometimes i'm reading something on phone and i "send to all devices", i'll sure as shit see it again this way (even librewolf allows you to continue doing this)
  - godelski 1y ago
    I browse with Orion (for ad blocking) but still have Firefox installed because I can click Share -> Firefox -> Send Tab. Maybe I stumble upon a video I want to watch but not now. Maybe I stumble upon a long form article or reference or something that just is shitty on a mobile interface and I push it to the computer I'm literally sitting next to while having my phone in hand too.

thinkingtoilet 1y ago

>I've never felt impeded by loading speeds I honestly think it's just something people here like to complain about. It's a complete non-issue. No everyday web experience is even close to being noticeably different. Full stop. It's almost like a meme, people say it because they think they should say it. I would ask those people that are complaining, what are you doing with all those extra milliseconds you claim you're saving?

TedDoesntTalk 1y ago
> what are you doing with all those extra milliseconds you claim you're saving? Watching more ads.
rs186 1y ago
When you have web pages that that completely freeze the Firefox browser but work smoothly on Chrome, you won't call it non-issue.
- disgruntledphd2 1y ago
  This doesn't seem to happen to me anymore, certainly not since Quantum. Your experience may obviously differ. I've been running FF for like twenty years now, across Windows, Linux and Mac.
- lillecarl 1y ago
  I don't know why I should lower my browsing standards to a Chrome experience because a small percentage of websites work poorly in Firefox. My password manager works in all browsers so I have Chrome with only PW manager and uBlock Lite so I can use it for the ONE website I use that doesn't work in FF. I don't think it's frustrating to press Ctrl+L, Ctrl+C, $launcher-bind(Meta+D), Ctrl+L, Ctrl+V, Enter to open another browser. My average experience is a lot better with Firefox and that's what I optimize for.
- hunter-gatherer 1y ago
  I have been on Firefox for some years now on Mac, Linux, Windows, and Android. Last year the IRS website had some issues, but that seems to be resolved. Otherwise, I've had zero breakages that cone to mind. I use ublock origin, and pivacy badger, and a few other extensions. I wonder if sometimes the issues people experience with firefox are actually caused from their extensions??? If you haven't used Firefox in a minute, I recommend trying it oht again.

zamadatix 1y ago

> Much of what we said about Web Extensions support on desktop Orion stands, with further limitations in the scope of APIs we can support which are imposed by Apple. This results in a smaller number of extensions that are currently fully functional on iOS and iPadOS. This seems to say they do not expect to actually get to full coverage on iOS like the author is talking about? https://help.kagi.com/orion/browser-extensions/ios-ipados-extensions.html https://help.kagi.com/orion/browser-extensions/ios-ipados-ex...

shakna 1y ago

I was surprised to hit this one today. Government department, supporting exactly one browser on most people's main device. https://www.ato.gov.au/online-services/technical-support/minimum-system-requirements#Table2Supportedmobilebrowsers https://www.ato.gov.au/online-services/technical-support/min...

hk1337 1y ago

> there's occasionally sites that have bugs because, like was the case in the 90s with Internet Explorer Hol up! Are you saying Chrome is the new Internet Explorer? I'm being facetious... If so, then I agree. I have said and thought for a long time a lot of developers go all-in with everything google as if google could do no wrong. In short, they have become that which they swore to destroy.

warmedcookie 1y ago

I will say that it is amusing that loading speeds is the argument for sticking with Chrome. Chrome loads faster so that you can see all of those ads faster and have to take the time to close each one of them, hehe! If the slop doesn't bother you, stick with Chrome. Plenty of people still watch network/cable TV.

globular-toast 1y ago

Same, no problems here, in the almost 20 years I've been using it. Whenever I've used Chrome I find it weird and annoying. Which just goes to show it's all down to what you're used to. If people would just try switching they'd find it normal in just a week or so. Are you really going to let Google control your computing just because you can't stand the very mild discomfort associated with change?

glenstein 1y ago
>Are you really going to let Google control your computing just because you can't stand the very mild discomfort associated with change? Exactly that's the big picture question and I find it mind-boggling when when people can't look past an idiosyncratic user experience to more fundamental things like Google seizing long-term control over web standards, getting rid of ad block, imposing DRM, and creating a paradigm or even its own competitors are increasingly dependent on Chromium development.

lucumo 1y ago

> there's occasionally sites that have bugs because [...people build for Chrome...] I hear that a lot, but when I tried Firefox for a couple of months I only found that in a single case[1]. It's really not something that happened to me at all. I did encounter issues with ad blockers breaking sites. Disabling uBO helps quite often on misbehaving sites, but it does so on Chrome as well. > I am surprised how many people have so many problems with Firefox. I'm not really. Nor am I surprised it works for you and others. It has been this way with Firefox for all of its 20+ years of existence. In its history it made one big leap in that, somewhat ironically given current affairs, when they removed XUL extensions. But Firefox has always had weird, unexplainable and unreproducible failure scenarios. Some of that is because of its customizability, but also nobody really cares about it.[2] The standard advice of "throw away your profile and try again" is a huge fuck you to users. 1) People have spend time customizing their browser and throwing that away hurts. 2) It doesn't help anybody. If it's still broken you know nothing, and if it isn't you still don't know what caused it. I guess that was okay in 2004. Lots of software had weird bugs. Nowadays the competition is much more stable. For me, I dropped Firefox again after a couple of months fighting to get a stable sync working.[3] It just kept failing on Android. The only resolution was to log out and log back in again. Only for it to break in the next couple of hours. I did the "commit profile suicide and rebirth" thing without a solution. Chrome's sync at least is very stable. Sometimes it falls an hour or so behind. Not good, but so much better than Firefox. [1] And that was intentional. Typical Google assholery. Google Photos added (adds?) extra HTML to block right-click on photos when a Firefox User-Agent was used. Using a UA switcher extension "solved" it. [2] Makers of software for power users so often forget to give power users the tools to investigate issues themselves. It's great you allow me to add so many extensions, how about a detailed log to see which is misbehaving? [3] Firefox's sync also has fewer features. Bookmarks don't get synced, nor do extension settings.

lucumo 1y ago
> Bookmarks don't get synced, *Search engines. Bookmark sync works fine.
kevincox 1y ago
Compatibility bugs are rare but definitely occur. If a key component of your workflow has bugs it can be hugely inconvenient. For example Slack Huddles blocks Firefox Firefox, if your team uses them regularly it is a big productivity loss. It is also very annoying when the first step of every troubleshooting process is "Try using Google Chrome" and if it works the consider your problem solved.

mentalgear 1y ago

100 tabs? Step aside, buddy. I have currently around ~2000 tabs. Firefox is a beast.

vladvasiliu 1y ago

I was in your boat up until a few days ago, when it randomly decided in wouldn't load properly. I force quit it, and then it forgot all my tabs. Now, it actually remembered what seemed like the correct number of tabs, each with the correct container, only the address was gone from every tab! Other than that, it works well enough for me. My only beef is I can't completely disable tabs, but I don't know of any equivalent browser that can.

ksec 1y ago
Are you on Linux? In any case there should have been a List of Tabs backup file ( cant remember what is was called ) and you can manually replace it to recover your Tabs. "About:unloads" allows you to manually unload all tabs.
oAlbe 1y ago
> My only beef is I can't completely disable tabs, but I don't know of any equivalent browser that can. There is an addon[1] that allows you to discard tabs both manually and with a degree of automation. I've been using it for a while and it works quite well. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-discard/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...
- vladvasiliu 1y ago
  Oh, I wasn't talking about "unloading" tabs, but about completely disabling the tabs ui feature. By that I mean always create a new window instead of a tab.

bashkiddie 1y ago

I am a heavy user of firefox and I am still unhappy with mozillas policy. * Firefox-Hello is a easy to pick example of a broken service run by a 3rd party being imposed on users. * Pocket is another service I never asked for. * Instead of focusing on the browser, mozilla puts their effort into an English language database. It appears to me mozilla does not understand their target audience. Recently I tried to customize firefox for screen recording and ran into lots of outdated documentation about userChrome.css

WorldMaker 1y ago
Pocket is shutting down soon and fresh Firefox installs don't install its extension any more.
- deepsun 1y ago
  Which kinda makes sense. It was actually cool when it could save webpages for later reading offline (camping, airplane). Once it lost that feature, there's nothing left but bookmarks.
  - GregWWalters 1y ago
    This is the most disappointing part for me—Pocket could sync with Kobo e-readers for offline, e-paper reading later. Great for traveling.
  - xcf_seetan 1y ago
    I have been using the extension SingleFile to save pages for offline reading and archival for ages. I started using it on the basis of reading something online and later talk to someone about it and when i try to find it again, it may be gone, dont find it, etc. So i started to save all the relevant pages to have a local reference of what i have read online.
exiguus 1y ago
What is the reason for criticizing Mozilla for integrating a new feature into their browser? Or am I misunderstanding the term feature, and Pocket isn't a feature for you? I mean, other browsers like Chrome have similar functionality.

raffael_de 1y ago

Where does the article mention anything about loading speed?

exiguus 1y ago

My take is that Firefox is not very effective at marketing. For example, Chrome publishes articles like 'Chrome achieves highest score ever on Speedometer' (2024) [1]. I haven't found similar articles or any reliable scores for Firefox. Some computer magazines suggest that Firefox is in second place after Chrome in running Speedometer 3. For me, at least, it's hard to find any specific numbers. Also, it's important to note that Speedometer is a browser benchmark test developed by WebKit, Firefox, and Chrome. Also, i don't understand why people prefer google over open source. And the sometimes disrespectful and destructive criticism of Mozilla. [1] https://blog.chromium.org/2025/06/chrome-achieves-highest-score-ever-on.html https://blog.chromium.org/2025/06/chrome-achieves-highest-sc...

Sayrus 1y ago
Mozilla does sometimes. For instance 'Quick as a Fox: Firefox keeps getting faster'[2] from 2023 and the related articles in Mozilla Hacks[2]. They used to do that a lot more when Quantum was all the hype and had some marketing performance comparison[3] with Chrome a long time back. Recently, it feels like Mozilla is dropping that type of marketing to focus on the image of privacy and talk about some features. [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/uncategorized/quick-as-a-fox-firefox-keeps-getting-faster/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/uncategorized/quick-as-a-fox-fir... [2] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2023/10/down-and-to-the-right-firefox-got-faster-for-real-users-in-2023/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2023/10/down-and-to-the-right-fire... [3] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/firefox-private-browsing-vs-chrome-incognito/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/firefox-private-browsing...
godelski 1y ago
Interestingly I did much worse on my Linux FF (13.6) on Speedometer3.1[0] than my M2 Air (29.6), though for the WebGL benchmarks from above the Linux machine (which has significantly more compute power) has no problems with the WebGL tests and the Air does worse. Backbone and jQuery were real killers for the Linux machine. Looks to be mostly Adding100Items for Backbone and literally everything for jQuery was half a magnitude slower. > Also, i don't understand why people prefer google over open source. And the sometimes disrespectful and destructive criticism of Mozilla. Certainly Mozilla deserves criticism. All companies do, right? But what I don't get is the passionate hate and how the result often ends up being contradictory. Like complaining about FF with that Mr Robot thing (yeah, bad move) and then saying that's why they use Chrome (or some Chromium based browser). It feels like calling someone an idiot for falling face first into dog shit while you're sitting in a jacuzzi full of it. Yeah, both situations are shitty, but come on... there's a lot more shit in one of these... [0] https://browserbench.org/Speedometer3.1 https://browserbench.org/Speedometer3.1

stronglikedan 1y ago

I use Firefox and Chrome to separate work from personal, and I can tell you that I have to close and restart Firefox at least once a day due to spinning fans and crawling performance, whereas with Chrome it's about once a week.

glenstein 1y ago
Since we're sharing our respective anecdotes your experience, interestingly mirrors mine in that I do the same thing for work. Microsoft Edge for work tasks (not my choice but the IT team remotely manages the bookmarks on that one), Firefox for personal. But no issues with speed or needing to shut things down just on an ordinary Lenovo laptop.
sionisrecur 1y ago
For another anecdotal experience, I use both in the same way and never have to restart neither of them until they ask to restart because of updates. Chrome asks much more often.

esafak 1y ago

I just switched from Firefox to Chromium and it is much faster. I switch back and forth.

caycep 1y ago

I half suspect w/ UBO, any Firefox slowdowns would still beat Chrome with ads. I personally haven't had issues, I do actually use safari as my main (Mac user), but Firefox gets a lot of use on my Mac and PC and it hasn't been noticeably slower than chrome for me.

WhyNotHugo 1y ago

> 100+ tabs open across multiple desktops. My wimply little MacBook Pro doesn't seem to mind. There's a bug on Linux where background windows continue rendering, even if they're in an inactive workspace or not visible in any other way. This really hits performance, but it doesn't seem to be fixable due to some limitation on GTK3. If I hide/resize my system status-bar, every single window gets resized to match the new available screen space. Firefox re-renders all content in all windows, causing multiple CPUs to spike to 100%. See: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1880467 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1880467 In fact, there are a lot of bugs which are basically "unfixable due to limitations in GTK3". So the experience is likely quite different that on other platforms. Regrettably, there don't seem to by any plans to move away from GTK in future.

Arnavion 1y ago
Just an idea. In my SwayWM setup, a) I run every application in its own cgroup (via systemd-run), and b) I have a daemon that subscribes to window and workspace events, gets the current tree, figures out the PIDs corresponding to invisible vs visible windows, figures out the cgroups corresponding to those PIDs, and then uses cgroup freezer file to freeze / unfreeze them. Other than a few hard-coded exceptions that I want to run while invisible (IRC client etc), any invisible application is transparently frozen and unfrozen. For "single-instance applications" like firefox, launching a new firefox while the existing one is frozen will hang, so instead of launching /usr/bin/firefox directory I have an intermediate ~/.local/bin/firefox script that unfreezes the firefox cgroup and then exec's /usr/bin/firefox. Of course if at least one FF window is visible then this doesn't help with your problem, since the cgroup as a whole will be unfrozen. It only helps if none of the FF windows are visible.
yellowapple 1y ago
I can't seem to reproduce any CPU spikes on my end when repeatedly hiding/unhiding various GNOME toolbars (top or bottom).

godelski 1y ago

> my ADHD regularly has me forgetting to restart it, to the tune of 100+ tabs open across multiple desktops. My MacBook Air routinely will have 200-300 before I purge. Getting better at keeping under 100 but yeah... My Linux desktop is hooked up to my TV[0] and currently has over 100 YouTube tabs open. I'm going to watch those math videos, I swear, I'm just tired right now and so want to watch garbage. I do have ublock origin on both machines and some stricter privacy settings, maybe that's it? But otherwise yeah, FF is just as snappy as chrome. Which I do use regularly when on other people's machines. [0] it's a movie server, gaming machine, and for everything else there's ssh and ydotool (I wish Apple would let me make better iPhone scripts than Shortcuts allows. Shortcuts makes me want to throw my phone against a wall...)

sinatra 1y ago
I stopped having the same issue of 100s of tabs of "math videos that I was going to watch one day" when I started saving them in my private playlists. Now I just have 100s of videos in playlists that I just look at longingly but never watch.
- godelski 1y ago
  lol I tried that once. What works best for me now is to do my best at putting tabs in the correct group tbh most gather while debugging and then I can just kill the group when I'm done. Problem is the ADHD and groups get contaminated. Mostly a few casualties is actually fine but sometimes the group gets too mixed. Eventually I nuke it all

consumer451 1y ago

There is only one website with a weird issue for me in Firefox: chatgpt.com of all things. When I open it and start typing, it resets the cursor position to the beginning after I already typed a few words. I assume this is some Next weirdness which requires a hack that only happens to work in Chrome.

davidgerard 1y ago

Every Firefox post has people claiming problems with it that are literally not true.

glenstein 1y ago
Or if true, extremely idiosyncratic. This thread is one of the more amazing case studies for people making blanket generalizations from problems that seem to be very specific to their setups and hard to reproduce elsewhere. I don't want to say the problems aren't happening, but there seems to be a wild overconfidence in generalizing from unusual case scenarios. Of course it's not limited to Firefox. I think it happens with everything from people's first experiences of Mastodon, to people having random bad experiences on some particular Linux distribution to any number of other things. I think to me the most have spending one I saw was people insisting F-Droid had problems that I could never reproduce when I was using it simultaneously across like four or five devices, including a pixel C tablet with lineage OS, and old Nexus 7 also with lineage OS, and two of my phones as I was in the process of transitioning from one to the other.
- davidgerard 1y ago
  there's also a lot of straight up liars, to be clear
- glenstein 1y ago
  >the most have spending Oops, meant to say most head spinning. Speech to text strikes again.

gonational 1y ago

100% agree. I've used FF since version 1.x, but I've used Chrome as a secondary at times, and I've had more problems in Chrome than FF. In fact, I've literally never experienced a bug in FF, except for, prior to and in the early days of the Servo Rust rewrite, I had a few crashes (tabs all reopened upon restarting). I haven't even had a crash in probably 8 years. Chrome is just spyware trash, IMHO.