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What's wrong with Firefox? I've used it as my main browser for the best part of 20 years now and have no issues. The last time I used Chrome there were ads all

by jmkni 1y ago

What's wrong with Firefox? I've used it as my main browser for the best part of 20 years now and have no issues. The last time I used Chrome there were ads all over the place because the ad blockers don't work properly anymore (I'm guessing because of manifest v3)

zac23or 1y ago
> What's wrong with Firefox Speed and bugs. My Firefox crashes on some sites, like 9gag. And it's very slow to load websites. The latest version of Chrome loads websites instantly! Firefox takes a few seconds!
- Insanity 1y ago
  I use chrome on my work machine and Firefox on my personal machine. Haven’t ran into breaking bugs with FF (that I can remember), and I don’t notice a meaningful performance difference. Have been using FF for probably 10-15 years now.
  - damnesian 1y ago
    No bugs to report here, and I use it all the time, and heavily. No undue burden on the system either, unlike Chrome which gets sluggish and will crash before ff. I see no reason to abandon ff at this point.
  - itake 1y ago
    Do you have FF's higher levels of privacy protection enabled? With fingerprinting protection enabled, image uploading breaks. oAuth doesn't seem to work properly on some sites. Enabling encrypted DNS breaks captive portals or private VPNs. its really easy to configure FF to break the internet.
    - Insanity 1y ago
      Ah, I can't recall the last time I uploaded an image to the web, so I guess I wouldn't run into this. Interesting if reproducible.
- birksherty 1y ago
  None of these is true. Either you're lying or somthing is wrong with your PC or OS
  - alephnerd 1y ago
    I use FF as well and it's extremely non-performant on MacOS. It quickly eats up much of the power usage and a number of websites (especially MS Office/365 related sites) don't render or work correctly. The former is a FF issue, but the latter is most likely a website to website issue, as most web devs tend to optimize for the Chromium experience.
    - mog_dev 1y ago
      Seems like a MacOS issue rather. I've been using Firefox on Debian for 15 years and never had this issue (except a borked release here and there)
      - alephnerd 1y ago
        FF for Linux will have a different team from FF for MacOS or FF for Windows. Given how different each OS is, they will have different internals. You don't see the same kind of performance degradation on other browsers on MacOS like Chrome, Safari, Orion, Brave, Arc, or even Edge. It's a uniquely FF issue, but I'll deal with it as long as uBO is blocked on Chrome. And saying "migrate to $myFlavorOfLinux" is an unrealistic answer for most users, because even though Linux has progressed leaps and bounds, it's user experience still requires a fairly technical background so that limits personal usage, and isn't offered as a default OS option by most IT teams who give corporate laptops. Linux as a personal OS will be limited as long as a Linux project that is actually lead by an actual UX Designer instead of an OS enthusiast doesn't arise. Elementary OS shows some promise, but it still has UX and workflow issues that deserve attention from a professional UX designer instead of OS devs alone. The various Android flavors are a great example of how if you put UX minds to work on an OSS project, you can end up with a quality user experience, but most Android projects also enforce a common design language and support non-CLI based user workflows, whereas most Linux oriented projects overindex on technical users, leading to the chicken-and-egg situation for Linux adoption.
- binary132 1y ago
  That can’t possibly be true, Firefox uses rust and rust is blazingly fast.
anentropic 1y ago
Yes, Chrome with ad blockers was perfect until that came along. YouTube sucks now
gryn 1y ago
as a long time user of firefox (also around 20years). it still has many pain points especially if you're a tab hoarder. try closing a window with 400 mid to heavy tabs and see how long it takes, you can select the tabs individually and they will close way faster. (even on the best PC you can find) this is niche but I wish there was a watered down /minimalist version that dropped, bookmarks, history, sqlite (I know HN likes sqlite a lot, but in this context chromes usage of levelDB beats it by a lot but you lose the advantage of running SQL queries directly to the file), basically everything besides extensions, containers, profiles. - can't control it from the command line, only open urls and can't have them open in a specific container because the implementation is this weird mix of internal browser code + extension. (tools like brotab are limited, wish I could have a better flexibility to integrate into my i3/sway workflow, with things like the ability to merge all windows in a workspace into a single one) - you can't run separate profiles on separate processes, so having a different network namespace for each profile is a pain (my use case, each profile is routed through a different VPN). there are many mores minor grievances I forgot with time, but I still wouldn't go back to chrome.
- soulofmischief 1y ago
  I currently have 8260 tabs open across 9 windows, and that's just on my main laptop, across all devices I probably have over 20k tabs, and I don't really have any issues regarding tab management. I used to have issues with Firefox randomly nuking my state on load and having to restore backups, but now I use Tab Session Manager for that and never think twice about it.
  - Topgamer7 1y ago
    Y'all are crazy. What is even the possible value in this?
    - titusjohnson 1y ago
      Not who you're talking to, but there is none. Browsers have had "Bookmark all tabs" functionality for ages, which completely replaces tab hoarding. Especially now that the content of the page you visited 5 months ago isn't actually loaded in memory. It's basically a bookmark, switch to the tab and the content is reloaded.

by jmkni 1y ago

zac23or 1y ago

> What's wrong with Firefox Speed and bugs. My Firefox crashes on some sites, like 9gag. And it's very slow to load websites. The latest version of Chrome loads websites instantly! Firefox takes a few seconds!

Insanity 1y ago
I use chrome on my work machine and Firefox on my personal machine. Haven’t ran into breaking bugs with FF (that I can remember), and I don’t notice a meaningful performance difference. Have been using FF for probably 10-15 years now.
- damnesian 1y ago
  No bugs to report here, and I use it all the time, and heavily. No undue burden on the system either, unlike Chrome which gets sluggish and will crash before ff. I see no reason to abandon ff at this point.
- itake 1y ago
  Do you have FF's higher levels of privacy protection enabled? With fingerprinting protection enabled, image uploading breaks. oAuth doesn't seem to work properly on some sites. Enabling encrypted DNS breaks captive portals or private VPNs. its really easy to configure FF to break the internet.
  - Insanity 1y ago
    Ah, I can't recall the last time I uploaded an image to the web, so I guess I wouldn't run into this. Interesting if reproducible.
birksherty 1y ago
None of these is true. Either you're lying or somthing is wrong with your PC or OS
- alephnerd 1y ago
  I use FF as well and it's extremely non-performant on MacOS. It quickly eats up much of the power usage and a number of websites (especially MS Office/365 related sites) don't render or work correctly. The former is a FF issue, but the latter is most likely a website to website issue, as most web devs tend to optimize for the Chromium experience.
  - mog_dev 1y ago
    Seems like a MacOS issue rather. I've been using Firefox on Debian for 15 years and never had this issue (except a borked release here and there)
    - alephnerd 1y ago
      FF for Linux will have a different team from FF for MacOS or FF for Windows. Given how different each OS is, they will have different internals. You don't see the same kind of performance degradation on other browsers on MacOS like Chrome, Safari, Orion, Brave, Arc, or even Edge. It's a uniquely FF issue, but I'll deal with it as long as uBO is blocked on Chrome. And saying "migrate to $myFlavorOfLinux" is an unrealistic answer for most users, because even though Linux has progressed leaps and bounds, it's user experience still requires a fairly technical background so that limits personal usage, and isn't offered as a default OS option by most IT teams who give corporate laptops. Linux as a personal OS will be limited as long as a Linux project that is actually lead by an actual UX Designer instead of an OS enthusiast doesn't arise. Elementary OS shows some promise, but it still has UX and workflow issues that deserve attention from a professional UX designer instead of OS devs alone. The various Android flavors are a great example of how if you put UX minds to work on an OSS project, you can end up with a quality user experience, but most Android projects also enforce a common design language and support non-CLI based user workflows, whereas most Linux oriented projects overindex on technical users, leading to the chicken-and-egg situation for Linux adoption.
binary132 1y ago
That can’t possibly be true, Firefox uses rust and rust is blazingly fast.

anentropic 1y ago

Yes, Chrome with ad blockers was perfect until that came along. YouTube sucks now

gryn 1y ago

as a long time user of firefox (also around 20years). it still has many pain points especially if you're a tab hoarder. try closing a window with 400 mid to heavy tabs and see how long it takes, you can select the tabs individually and they will close way faster. (even on the best PC you can find) this is niche but I wish there was a watered down /minimalist version that dropped, bookmarks, history, sqlite (I know HN likes sqlite a lot, but in this context chromes usage of levelDB beats it by a lot but you lose the advantage of running SQL queries directly to the file), basically everything besides extensions, containers, profiles. - can't control it from the command line, only open urls and can't have them open in a specific container because the implementation is this weird mix of internal browser code + extension. (tools like brotab are limited, wish I could have a better flexibility to integrate into my i3/sway workflow, with things like the ability to merge all windows in a workspace into a single one) - you can't run separate profiles on separate processes, so having a different network namespace for each profile is a pain (my use case, each profile is routed through a different VPN). there are many mores minor grievances I forgot with time, but I still wouldn't go back to chrome.

soulofmischief 1y ago
I currently have 8260 tabs open across 9 windows, and that's just on my main laptop, across all devices I probably have over 20k tabs, and I don't really have any issues regarding tab management. I used to have issues with Firefox randomly nuking my state on load and having to restore backups, but now I use Tab Session Manager for that and never think twice about it.
- Topgamer7 1y ago
  Y'all are crazy. What is even the possible value in this?
  - titusjohnson 1y ago
    Not who you're talking to, but there is none. Browsers have had "Bookmark all tabs" functionality for ages, which completely replaces tab hoarding. Especially now that the content of the page you visited 5 months ago isn't actually loaded in memory. It's basically a bookmark, switch to the tab and the content is reloaded.