I switched to Firefox this month. Had to, with everything that's going on in Chrome. After struggling to remember to use Firefox, I just signed out of all my accounts in Chrome. Now I reach for Firefox much more naturally. Soon enough it should take.
Great to see the emphasis on DevTools in this release. DevTools have definitely much improved since I last tried, but they are still glitchy compared to Chrome. For example, I was using the JS debugger, and for some reason breakpoints wouldn't "hold"—after being stopped for some period of time (not long), the page would refresh. Also little things like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1613957, which I was able to report. It was frustrating. Had to go back to Chrome for development. Still, it was nice to see many features that Chrome doesn't have, like breakpoint logging, which is nice when you want to insert a log into third party code.
And as a browser from a non-dev perspective, it's great. Great to know this browser is all about privacy instead of just trying to provide the bare minimum to keep people on board. Great to have the Facebook Container.
Since you brought up logging out and in, remember that Firefox Containers are very useful for things you wanna let logged in all the time (e.g., Facebook, maybe Google) so their tracking gets a little worse because your cookies are more isolated.
My preferred anti-tracking setup is Firefox with the Multi-Account Containers and the Temporary Containers addons (and uBlock Origin of course.)
Multi-Account Contaners lets me set up permanent containers for (groups of) sites I want to stay logged in to. I check the "always open this site in <container name>" box.
Temporary Containers is set up to open new sites (on middle / control click) in new, temporary containers. These containers work like private browsing windows, but store their data for 10 minutes after being closed. So undo close tab works, history works, but each new site is in its own container. And 10 minutes after its closed (or when the browser as a whole closes) all the cookies get deleted.
I ran Privacy Badger for a while, but I have never actually seen it do anything. Not sure I messed up something, or if it was due to me already having an aggressive block list on uBlock Origin that left PB with nothing to do.
An aggressive block list could do it. Privacy Badger "learns" what is tracking you, so it does take a little bit to start being effective when you first start using it. It caches 34 trackers on theverge.com with uBlock Origin turned off for me, and 9 with uBlock Origin turned on.
My preferred anti-tracking adds Cookie Auto delete [0] to this. In the HN container, I keep HN cookies. Anything opened from HN will stay in the HN container and non-HN sites get cookies deleted shortly.
One thing that turns me off using Firefox Containers in earnest is that they are not integrated into Firefox Sync and nor does there appear to be a way to backup the URLs/containers as with other extensions - so I end up having to rebuild the containers on another machine or when I need to delete a buggy profile.
That's a great change. Containers are one of the things that made me move back from Chrome, it just feels far more useful to me to mix different contexts in one window than having to run entirely separate browser profiles as I had in Chrome. The one thing that prevented me from creating more elaborate container setups was the lack of sync, it just gets too annoying to set that kind of stuff up repeatedly. But with sync I'll probably look at creating more fine-grained containers than the basic work/personal setup I have right now, e.g. separating out Google in a separate container.
Firefox member here – thanks a lot for reporting those bugs! Thanks to detailed reports Debugger could improve and glitches should become more and more a rarity.
You're welcome. Thanks a lot for your work on Firefox!
Wish I could have reported the breakpoint page refresh bug, but I wasn't sure how I could possibly isolate/replicate or describe beyond what I described above. And that's probably not very useful? The small one I linked was easy to describe and replicate.
Anyway, reporting bugs to Firefox definitely seems worth the time spent because it means having a browser that doesn't exist solely to benefit Google. Long live the World Wide Web!
PS. Really like so many other DevTools details I didn't mention in my post above. For example, the '...', 'scroll' and 'flex' indicators/toggles: https://imgur.com/a/yIlhDcJ. Also the console reverse-search with Ctrl-R. And many others.
Thanks for your work on Firefox!
I feel more comfortable with Firefox Devtools overall, but I keep using Chrome for debugging for one single reason : Firefox can't handle extensive log.
I'm working on code where sometimes infinite loops occurs. When I want to investigate on these loops, I cannot use any breakpoints because it's using the same route than it used 10 000 times before, so I usually log a lot of data, then manually kill the Chrome tab and I can still run through 1 million console lines smoothly.
Really hope Firefox will be able to handle that one day.
Yeah the debugger certainly still leaves some things to be desired. When using a fairly sizeable react project, I set a XHR breakpoint, it was triggered, then the whole tab became unresponsive (dev tools included)
This happens to me a lot in the Chrome developer tools as well. Especially with hot reloading, so would love any advice to help with it. Chrome is the only application I ever have to force quit.
Happens to me in Chrome too, specifically when I reload a page that's stopped at a breakpoint. Instead of force quitting the whole application, check out Window -> Task manager. There you can force quit just a single, specific tab without closing the whole application.
The chrome task manager (hotkey Shift+Esc) is good for killing tabs
For large pages where source changes cause problems I will sometimes put logic inside conditional breakpoints. It's not great for huge changes (though you technically can put a lot of code in there) but for small things like quickly sanitizing null inputs it works fine.
Favorite thing about firefox devtools is in the network tab you can right-click a network request and just resend it as-is. Don't think you can do that in chrome.
I had to ditch chrome because it performed abysmally, tried to use Safari but just couldn't get used to it, so went back to Firefox and was very pleasantly surprised ... great Mac OS experience.
That has to be a joke, zooming barely works on macOS (and has to be enabled using an about:config flag). It's decent if you just use an old fashioned mouse though and not a magic trackpad.
They have in theory, but the fix isn't working for a lot of people, and Firefox continues murdering their battery. Firefox devs are aware but AFAIK their attention is focused elsewhere at the moment. Quite sad, because of all the people I got to switch to Firefox, all but one that experiences this issue has switched back to Chromium.
Privacy and fighting browser hegemony is great, but stark few people are willing to sacrifice nearly half their battery life for it.
If you're interested in dev tools, I can't recommend eval villain enough. It only works on Firefox, but it helps a lot with identifying xss vulnerabilities.
FF dev tools are on par or even better (IMO) than Chrome, but the last few versions, it seems they have changed/dropped sourcemap support so it doesn't work at all. I went back to FF a couple years ago, but now I'm disappointed that the dev tools are not working properly and will go back for dev purposes only. I hope FF gets it working. I'd file a bug, but 'sourcemap support not working' isn't exactly all that helpful. Anyway, it doesn't work on any of my apps and works fine in Chrome. I hope they fix it at some point as I think their dev tools are generally better than Chrome (esp. the console).
Yeah, new Edgium is just as slick as Chrome was when it started. I'm now using only Edgium exclusively; Super fast; No lagging anywhere. Super smooth scrolling etc; I hope it stays like that;
i feel a bit guilty using windows and edge these days. like i'm betraying my principles. but it's just so easy and i have to prioritize stress to what matters.
Breakpoint logging sounds like just using conditional breakpoints with a console.log wrapper around the expression, which you can do today. Not saying it's better or worse, but if you need that functionality in Chrome there's your solution :)
Ah, the self-anointed "Brave" browser, that believes what humanity really needs is a middleman between publishers and readers, skimming off the ad revenue.
I still don't see what's to like on brave. It's basically chrome with ublock origin and https anywhere and like maybe one or two more privacy-oriented extension - why is there a need for a different browser, like why isn't that only an extension? Also, once chrome disables adblockers I doubt they would have the manpower to fork chromium.
One more Firefox release, one more long list of people on HN who:
* have switched from Chrome because <...> reasons why Chrome is worse or has become worse
* have always used Firefox and never left it
* have used Firefox but have faced issues and would want to try it if <...>
What I, as a long time Firefox user and evangelist, would like to know is how we can have Firefox thrive and grow, what Mozilla Corporation is doing (or not doing) to get more funding for Firefox, and why we aren't seeing all those services that they wanted to sell to generate revenue. The Firefox team has reduced in size recently, and more money might probably help avoid such situations (or postpone them).
P.S.: Donations on mozilla.org go to Mozilla Foundation, which is the non-profit parent of Mozilla Corporation (the maker of Firefox). I do not know of any direct way for end users/supporters to fund Firefox development.
Not that anyone is asking me, but I think the mobile browser is a limiter. No matter how much I like a given desktop browser, I like bookmark & password syncing more. Unfortunately for me I find the Firefox desktop browser is first class, but the mobile browser is not. As a result it's almost immediately ruled out.
I've never seen anyone else mention this so I might be a tiny minority.
You're not alone, Firefox mobile is practically unusable. But! For a while now, Mozilla has been putting all their development effort into Fenix (Firefox Preview on the Play Store), which has all the speed and responsiveness main Firefox doesn't, plus a better UI and general slickness. It even has limited extension support in the alpha, which should make it to the release version very soon. I've been using it as my main mobile browser for a few months now and it's great. There are still occasional bugs, but it's finally a legitimate Chrome alternative.
I was using Firefox mobile with uBlock Origin, and I found that Chrome with no adblocking was a better experience. Page loads, scrolling, zooming, and the other interactions were so slow they counteracted the advantage.
That said, new Firefox mobile is way faster and the nightly build already has uBlock support. Best of both worlds.
I had extreme response time issue on my old phone. I recorded my screen, and I measured a reliable 3-5 60Hz frames between the touch indicator and the page scrolling. Chrome reliably had just 1.
Things got a bit better over time, but unfortunately the thing that eventually fixed it was when I got a new phone. Now I get around 2-3 90Hz frames, which is still worse than chrome, but far less noticeable. I have not measured "New Firefox"/Fenix/Preview yet, but it does feel like it's a bit closer to chrome.
I'm not too bothered about ublock - I already run blokada so the worst adverts are already blocked at the network level - but being in Europe I can't manage without the I don't care about cookies add-on.
Whenever I've tried other browsers - Chrome, Brave, DDG - having to click "I accept" on every single webpage to remove the "This site uses cookies!" pop-up is really tedious. I hope the Firefox on Mobile add-ons support doesn't just start and end at ublock origin.
I tried it on a Galaxy Tab s5e and an LG v35, which have last year's mid-range Qualcomm chip and 2018's high-end chip respectively. On the v35 loading was slow, and sometimes it would crash or make all my tabs blank until restarted. On the tablet it couldn't even scroll down a page without lagging. I haven't run into any other apps that do this on either device. Zooming was always laggy and a bit off--bad acceleration curves or something--enough that they've redone it from scratch for other platforms instead of trying to fix the code.
There's a reason Mozilla is rewriting the whole thing.
That LG v35 outspecs my BlackBerry KEYone by a good margin, and Firefox is just as fast as Chrome for me. Which is to say, snappy.
I read more details about your performance problems in another comment, and it sounds horrible; I can't imagine anyone using that. Sounds like a nasty bug, I guess..?
Sadly you're right. This is Apple's fault: they refuse to allow alternate browser engines on iOS, so iOS "Firefox" is really a Safari web view with some Firefox buttons on it. Chrome and other browsers have the same problem.
Say what? It's the only browser I use on mobile for years, can't say I have faced any issue, not major issue, didn't face any issue, apart from very rare stuff that were fixed, can't even remember which.
Really? Huh. I'm surprised other people's experiences have been so different. There are tons of forum complaints about the problems I've had. There's even an official faq about all the tabs going blank [1], which tells you to restart the browser and hope it goes away. Mozilla themselves gave up on the whole codebase two and a half years ago and started work on Firefox Preview/Fenix instead [2].
FWIW, my experience is exactly the same. Zero problems, snappy, supports uBlock Origin, does not contain Google spyware and I therefore vastly prefer it to Chrome.
When I first heard of people complaining that it is atrocious, it was as much news to me as it is to you that it is excellent in my experience. I agree it's a weird phenomenon.
I've been using firefox preview for a few months now and love it. My only complaint is that even though it is set up as my default browser android still insists on using chrome to open some things, such as results from google assistant. But that's hardly Mozilla's fault.
With Preview or with stable?
Preview has a couple of minor bugs, like radio button popups that don't go away when I switch tabs, or the "undo close tab" toast not disappearing, or downloads resulting in empty files sometimes. Annoying, but not dealbreakers and I'm confident they'll be fixed soon.
My issue with stable is that it's slow. Everything about it is slow. Pages that load immediately in Chrome take double digit seconds in Firefox. When they do load, scrolling lags my finger and jerks around, and zooming is noticeable unresponsive. The acceleration curves feel off too. On my mid-range tablet performance is so bad it gives me a headache.
My biggest issue with FF mobile (android) is sometimes when you open a link from a different app, it opens in an existing tab navigating away from a page you already had open. It should always open a new tab.
So I might open a link in my email app, then when I tap the back button on the phone, the expected behaviour is it will close the tab and return to the email app. Instead I'm finding it navigating back to the page that was open previously on the tab that was already open.
On heavier sites it's inevitable that it will crash. Years ago Chrome/Chrome Beta also had this problem (the root cause is with the phone hardware/android) but somehow they managed to catch it and not bring down the whole browser app.
I still use it despite the other main drawback (being slower than chrome beta on heavy sites, like say twitter) because I like my uBlock and tab-sync, but every so often I get so annoyed at it that I avoid it for about a month until Chrome even with basic adblocking via Blokada makes me mad enough to switch back.
You're not alone. No matter how much I hate chrome, I've never been more displeased by an app as I am with Firefox's mobile app. We might see a new one though based off firefox preview so hopefully I can make the complete switch soon
Actually the equal-and-opposite thing was more true. They picked up the ball so hard that they believed they could compete with Android with an entire Mozilla mobile operating system. A lot of effort was wasted.
Firefox Mobile came out in 2010 for Maemo. There were more mobile operating systems at the time, and it was less clear which one was going to win out. Mozilla lead with support for the most open option.
The Android version was released a year later, three years after (the frankly pretty unappealing) Android 1.0 release. It was within months of Opera's Android launch. Hardly "very late."
Fortunately/unfortunately (hard to tell which), the answer for 'how to get Firefox to thrive and grow' might basically be to spend more money on ads, since Google Chrome was advertised everywhere in its early days. At one point, they were running TV commercials and putting ads on billboards at stations here in the UK.
A few people might have heard of the parent company too, like from their mobile OS, or from the search engine where they type their addresses in when browsing.
> have used Firefox but have faced issues and would want to try it if <...>
You’re right that every time there’s a Firefox release, it rises to the top of HN with the same comments. I’ve stopped commenting, but I’ll do so now since you asked.
Gripes with Firefox I’ve seen on HN include bad midi support and lack of (or broken) support for macOS features such as the Keychain.
My reason for not using Firefox (and I inadvertently get people out of it) is that it’s atrocious for automation on macOS. It’s the only major browser without AppleScript support, and the bug report open for it is old enough to vote.
When I’ve talked to people from Mozilla about it, I’ve gotten the reply that AppleScript is a power user feature that regular users don’t care for. What they fail to understand is that power users build features for others. I have several tools that interact with web browsers that are relatively popular with non-power users. Every time they ask “can you add support for Firefox?” my answer needs to be “I’d like to, but they don’t provide the functionality”. You can be certain that several of those abandon Firefox, because they’d rather have the convenience of the tool.
You can have Firefox “thrive and grow” by giving its users what they need. It doesn’t matter how “private” Firefox is (and Mozilla has done plenty to not be trusted blindly on that regard) if people can’t use it as their daily browser.
What I, as a long time Firefox user and evangelist, would like to know is how we can have Firefox thrive and grow
Probably the same as anything else: find a USP that resonates with a large number of potential users.
It used to be customisation and extensions, but it's been more than 2 years since Quantum and there are still numerous ways that my everyday browsing experience is worse now than it was before. I suspect that for a lot of people, Firefox is no longer particularly associated with being more customisable than any other browser, even if it was before.
Today I suspect the best shot for a solid USP is the privacy/security angle, which is what kept me on Firefox as my default browser in the end despite it being much inferior after 57. But the marketing for that is inconsistent and gets drowned out in all the who-cares features that Firefox keeps introducing.
Ironically, the breakage of extensions has probably contributed significantly to the loss of confidence in the security/privacy side, since it took out a lot of useful enhancements in those areas. Normal people don't understand tools like uBlock Origin, which are powerful but have UIs that make Git's look intuitive and well-designed, and in 2020 a simple, effective ad-blocker is entry-level for a decent browsing experience.
AdGuard offers a simpler interface than uBlock Origin for users who prefer one. It's also free and open source, and includes most of the same filter lists.
I think it might have been the first case you described. I have only recently switched over to Firefox and that was my first debugging experience with it, so I didn't realise it was a specific case and a known bug. Thank you.
I don't like to say this but Mozilla leadership sucks. In the light of previous layoffs, there was a discussion that the CEO, who doesn't even have a proper technical background, is getting too high of compensation. I have also heard Mozilla has become a Suits-first company lately.
A self-hostable Firefox Accounts server + sync server would be great. AFAIK the FXA server is not self-hostable yet, only the sync which leaves a bad taste in owning your privacy.
Fascinating (and disappointing..) comment thread about implementing the WebMIDI API in Firefox.
The issue was reported (7 years ago) by Chris Wilson, who's been at Google working on WebAudio stuff for years and has published lots of related articles and repos. I'm a big fan. https://github.com/cwilso
There's even a comment from someone at Ableton, expressing interest and support ("testing with preliminary builds as well as providing hardware for implementers to test with"). That was 2 years ago, and no one from Firefox engaged them?! Sounds like a huge missed opportunity.
Sadly, the last comment a year ago was from a person no longer at Mozilla, saying the issue is stalled and that it's "very low priority work".
---
Edit: Aah, now I'm imagining what might have been, a collaboration between Firefox and Ableton, would have been so cool..
Most people don’t want to keep changing web browsers for every task. In particular if you do a lot of work (be it paid or a hobby) in a technology your web browser lacks, it’s less frustrating to use for everything the one that has the feature.
I use a slightly more compact layout that saves space and lets me see more tabs; put this in "Advanced->Extra style rules" in the addon preferences:
/* Compact tab layout */
:root { --tab-height: 20px !important; }
.tab { height: 20px !important; }
/* Shrink space between pinned tabs and tab bar, only when pins are present */
#tabbar[style*="margin"] { margin-top: 20px !important; }
I've used this extension for nearly a decade at this point, and I could never imagine switching back to a top tab bar. It scales very nicely to an arbitrary number of tabs, organizes them in a highly natural way, and gives you a bunch of new power-user ways to manage your tabs (close a whole tree, migrate subtrees to new windows, ...).
It's specifically an addon for folks who normally have dozens (or hundreds) of tabs open, and I can only imagine it's actively detrimental to someone who only has a handful of tabs at a time.
IMO you should just be thankful that your workflow/habits haven't develop in such a way that you benefit from the organizational power of tree style tabs ;-P
I'm a zillion tab person. But even aside from that, it improves the usability of the browser.
A problem with browser UI is that - given our monitor form factor - it makes text hard to read. Studies show that very wide columns of text are harder to read than something relatively narrower.
By changing the viewing pane of the browser, moving the tabs off the top and to the side, we mitigate that extra-wide shape somewhat, making the text more easily readable while giving ourselves a bit more vertical space.
You can make it look better by giving FF a dark theme. I agree it doesn't look great out of the box.
As for the use case, I don't think it's an understatement to say it changed how I browse the web. Before I discovered Tree Style Tabs, I was like you -- I only kept a few tabs open and was diligent about maintaining a coherent working set.
Now, I build hierarchical structures of nested tabs based on what I'm working on, and I easily reach the 60+ tab range on a daily basis. Instead of those tabs feeling like a burden, it's trivial to make use of all of them without feeling like anything is cluttered. I can maintain so much more organized information at my finger tips in Firefox than I ever could before.
I don't think it would work for me. My Firefox windows are 1366 pixels wide and screen height tall on a 4K screen. I don't have any sidebar space to waste. Maybe it's OK for people who maximize their browser windows on 16:9 screens.
I generally size my browser so that the viewport is roughly square - a wide squat browser usually leaves acres of margin, or on sites that don't have decent margin, enormously long lines that are all but impossible to read.
A square viewport on a widescreen monitor leaves loads of space for a sidebar.
This is how I do it, too. Given those 16:9 monitors, moving the tabs to the side is definitely an improvement in readability and efficient space usage.
> To date, CORS network errors have been shown as warnings, making them too easy to overlook when resources could not load. Now they are correctly reported as errors, not warnings, to give them the visibility they deserve.
I know this is a small improvement (s/warning/error), but like it nevertheless. What I would _LOVE_ however is that CORS errors would be displayed where it would make sense - in the Network tab. When I'm debugging connections I am looking there, not in Console.
Very glad to hear that! Now that I know what is going on, I check the console whenever the request doesn't appear in Network tab, but it is very unintuitive. Keep up the good work!
This would be amazing. It's one of the last holdouts of why I develop on Chrome - I need to be able to see the failed request to debug what's getting sent and what isn't!
Actually in my experience Firefox CSP debugging is light years ahead of Chrome's. Not only debugging - CSP in Firefox at least works as intended, while with Chrome(ium) it's hit and miss. [0]
That said, it does happen that Firefox gives a cryptic error message, and running in Chromium gives enough clues to solve the problem. But usually FF is much better with CSP, at least in my experience (and I work with CSP pretty often).
[0] EDIT: "miss" meaning that the request, forbidden by CSP rules, is not stopped. Firefox correctly stops the same request.
About time! This has been the single thing keeping me from making the switch to Firefox for my personal profile. The Chromium-vaapi patch works well enough to justify being my default browser so far.
This is bought to you by the people that think /etc/sudoers is best replaced with javascript rules and the solution to a mash up of javascript and compiled languages not freeing memory is to ignore the issue for 7 or 8 years then admit that the issue is unfixable and solve it by manually running the gc constantly and noting that this performs in practice way better than you would imagine for such a hacky crappy solution.
In practice most users not using fedora are "apt" to see wayland not sooner than they upgrade to ubuntu 24.04 LTS or Debian 11 or later and as users will naturally upgrade when they feel like it as opposed to release day one would expect the majority to transition between 2024 and 2028.
Apps which don't work on X before this period would be even more niche than usual.
I wish I could take Wayland for a spin but it feels like HL3 vaporware that only a select few individuals are actually capable of using. (I have an nVidia card)
"Select few" being anybody with an Intel or AMD GPU? That's actually quite a lot of people. Shit not working properly is one of the prices you choose to pay when you choose to purchase hardware with poor FOSS driver support.
My poor little Intel GPU can't do 4K and the last 2 AMD GFX cards I purchased had such brutally bad coil whine I decided to switch brands out of sheer frustration.
The Nvidia card I have now is silent and works pretty well.
One day I'll get to take Wayland for a test drive.
Using it with Nvidia/Gnome 3 on OpenSuse Leap 15.1. Screen jumped left repeatedly today, and I'm having trouble turning it off. Other than that seems to be okay...
There's a slight possibility that you could construct an SVG that would load another resource, but it shouldn't (as in RFC 2119 "MUST NOT") be possible.
What's the point of spending time on that?? Some bugs have been open for a very long time that don't appear to have been fixed in this release [0]... but we can select a background color in the console????
The point is it's open source, so people will volunteer to work on what they want. Just because the bugs you cared about weren't worked on doesn't mean this work took any resources away that could have been applied to them.
Yes, but presumably Moz with their $300M from Google, or whatever it is (pretty sure it's of that order) also surely employ a few programmers to squash bugs, so just waving your hand and saying "volunteer developers" doesn't quite answer the parent commenters dissatisfaction.
I switched to Firefox Dev Edition last year and havnt gone back since. It really does have a noticeably smoother feel to it. I do miss certain Chrome dev tools such as Lighthouse, however its not a difficult transition at all.
You can always boot up Chrome for the few times a month you need lighthouse. Run the test, get the data, then quite chrome.
That's what I do. I use Firefox as my daily. But I still have chrome installed and boot it up probably once a month. So it's there, but I don't stay logged in, and I don't use it very often.
One issue with Dev Edition is that it shares the base code with Beta. With the new 4-weeks release cycle, most of QA testing now happens in Beta, meaning the chances of serious bugs in Beta and Dev Edition increased quite a lot.
Previously, most of the testing happened in Nightly, and only tested code was moved to Beta and Dev Edition.
I use Chrome to benchmark my local version of a website. The use case is very limited, because the results fluctuate a lot depending on the overall load on my machine (including the dev server), so I usually do three passes on the master branch of my project, get scores like 53, 56, 51, then switch to my development branch, three passes again, if I see e.g. 58, 56, 61 then it's fine, if the results are noticeably lower than master then time to investigate.
In any case we have a dedicated environment with lighthouse-ci and this is where the real pre-release benchmarks are executed.
With Safari removing my ability to use uBlock in version 13, I've been wanting to make the jump back to Firefox on the desktop. The one thing that has been holding me back is that Firefox can't use the OSX Keychain for passwords. All my passwords are in my OSX/iCloud Keychain, and this is great. It works on my iOS devices and on my Mac and everything is lovely, but its keeping me using Safari on the desktop.
There was an extension that did this, but the API it relies on was removed in FF 57 with the switch to the extension API.
Long time Safari user as well, primarily for its speed and OSX feature integration (keychain). Made the jump back to Firefox in December and installed uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, HTTPS Everywhere, NoScript and a video ripper/transcoder.
While entering my passwords into FF and exporting/importing bookmarks was a minor (and brief) annoyance, the utter joy of using a feature rich and secure browser with no ads made it worth the switch, even if I don't have keychain integration.
I'm an avid, avid, avid Firefox user, but I switched to Vivaldi last month after doing a comparison of RAM load with the same exact open tabs and seeing a difference of:
Firefox sitting at 12 gigs
Vivaldi sitting at 5 gigs
This is on MacOS, so mileage may vary and all that, but with the same tabs open, why would there be such a difference?
Edit: And there's no difference in the plugins. I use the same plugins on both browsers: password manager, uBlock Origin, React dev tools, and Redux dev tools and that's it.
Modern operating systems will grant large amounts of RAM to web browsers in general to improve caching. That RAM is easily relinquished back to the OS if another app needs it.
Was the 12GB with another RAM-intensive app running? Or just Firefox by itself.
In addition to the MEM_RESET, MEM_RESET_UNDO mentioned, there's also OfferVirtualMemory[1], ReclaimVirtualMemory[2] to let the system potentially use the memory if it needs it.
Unlike MEM_RESET, this allows you to prioritize the memory you offer, as well as provides some extra safeguards it seems.
That seems to be something different; instead of getting the memory when some other application needs it, the OS receives the memory when the application (browser) doesn't need it any longer, so it can't be used for caching.
This actually looks exactly like the malloc/free use case.
How can't it be used for caching? Say you decode an image, then offer the memory backed by it to the OS. If you need to access the image data again you try to reclaim the memory, if it fails it's a cache miss.
What I was seeing was the same in both cases. Firefox would be using the same amount of RAM either running by itself or alongside Ableton Live (and the performance of Ableton Live would suffer).
is how it should work. If the first step doesnt happen, its not clear if the second one should execute by itself. Id be much more concerned about background CPU usage. Eats battery, and actually slows the computer down.
That all said, its pretty clear that browsers are leaking RAM sometimes. I remember bed bath and beyond using 9 or 12GB of ram the other month.
That's not how it works. Browser might monitor free system memory actively and release memory if the system runs low, but at least Firefox doesn't do that.
There is no mechanism (in Windows, Linux) that allows the OS to notify applications of memory pressure or that allows the application to tell the OS that some allocations can be thrown out if need be. (Windows has a mechanism - MEM_RESET - that only works with paged out allocations)
Edit: Windows 10 (8?) actually expands on MEM_RESET with Offer/ReclaimVirtualMemory, but I kinda doubt browsers use this, because these have similar semantics to MEM_RESET (except they seem to work without paging, which is good). For an application that wants to cache not-well-defined amounts of data itself these might be very useful though, because you can make the data structure simple enough that it works with these.
https://dblohm7.ca/blog/2015/07/28/interesting-win32-apis/ notes that Windows has the required APIs, and that Firefox already supports handling memory pressure notifications on non-Windows platforms. Not sure how up-to-date this information is.
> ...that allows the OS to notify applications of memory pressure or that allows the application to tell the OS that some allocations can be thrown out if need be.
There are mechanisms for both of these in up-to-date Linux - pressure stall information and volatile ranges, respectively.
MADV_FREE didn't work properly until fairly recently, though, because it behaved like Windows' MEM_RESET. AIUI MADV_FREE is not intended for ranges that you actually want to work with (i.e. you want to keep the data, not just the virtual addresses), but rather as an optimization for allocators.
Firefox does have a mechanism for reducing memory pressure, there's a button for it in about:memory. I can't guarantee that this flow actually happens upon low memory states on Windows etc but it wouldn't be hard to at least hack it together. Monitoring available memory (say, on a timer) is not a difficult thing to do on Windows - it would just be difficult to make it completely robust.
It's important to specify your test scenario here and the behavior you expect, as it's a known issue in general that Linux behaves poorly under OOM conditions. It's not necessarily Firefox specific.
If all of my memory is "in use" but half of it is cached file pages, should Firefox compact its heap and evict cached images? What if all of my memory is spoken for but a bunch of it isn't actually committed, due to overcommit?
Those aren't interesting questions tbh. Obviously most of the time the page cache grows to use all memory, that's the whole point of having it (using all memory that is not committed to applications as a disk cache). Overcommit obviously doesn't create memory pressure because it only exhausts address space, not memory (physical memory + swap). The relevant question is how the system behaves if it needs to allocate pages but can't find any clean (just throw'em out) or unused pages. Linux, and to a lesser degree, Windows start to thrash heavily in these scenarios. I've never seen e.g. Firefox unload a tab when this happens, regardless of OS.
I considered other browsers too (Vivaldi, Brave), but they all seem to be Blink/V8. It seems like Firefox is the only other extant, viable platform for running the web. Personally, I'm not one to frequently compromise quality/convenience for some ideal, but the idea that we'll have a future with only one way to render the web is terrifying.
There's webkit too by Apple. And browsers based on it is available for Linux too. And no, webkit and Blink are not the same engine. Blink is a fork of webkit by Google and while they share a heritage they have different feature set now.
Also worth noting how different the different goals/approaches differ between the WebKit and Blink teams. The WebKit team is very deliberate in their development, only committing to new features once they have some level of assurance that it can be done with minimal negative impact to efficiency, privacy, and user control where the Blink team moves almost entirely in interest of getting as many new features out as quickly as possible with comparatively little regard to negative side effects.
Both approaches are needed to maintain a balance and to preserve real choice for users — there is no practical difference between Chrome, MS Edge, and Brave because their differences are skin-deep at best.
I was thinking of webkit too, but I'm not aware of any browsers expect Safari and the Linux browsers you mention. Neither seem to be cross platform or practical, "viable" alternatives to Blink domination.
I'd say the scenario is similar to Firefox/Gecko and Chrome/Blink. Sure there are clones that use the Gecko and Blink engines, but none of these really are as popular as their original.
I am waiting for another Opera / Presto browser platform to emerge. Till it did, the browser market dominated by Internet Explorer was literally stagnant. Opera with a Presto engine was a game changer with their light-weight and super fast browser engine with feature sets that all other browsers copied (and still lack even today).
I miss the plain UI speed of Presto-based Opera. I could cycle between tabs at my keyboard repeat speed - now my PCs are an order of magnitude faster and can't manage more than a couple tabs per second if I hold ctrl+tab.
When I do it I can see the URL cycling at my keyboard repeat speed (~30 fps), but the selected tab and page displayed in the foreground refresh about an order of magnitude more slowly. (1-5 fps) (So with a dozen tabs open, the effect is to select/show tabs in essentially a random order.)
edit: FF cycles smoothly (although with a weird white strobing effect with the main blank content area) if I open a bunch of blank tabs, but not if they're actual web pages.
It depends on the use case, but for a lot of modern render heavy sites, I find Gecko to be strictly better, both in terms of overall time to render and giving a user experience with less flashes of unstyled context.
Can you articulate why do you think a single engine is terrifying? KHTML is the precursor of WebKit that was used by Chrome and Safari for a while. It didn’t prevent Apple and Google to drive their products. Google eventually fork Blink out of WebKit. Other browser vendors follow a similar path (Brave, Opera, Oculus Browser, Samsung Internet, Supermedium...) Start with Blink and modify as they see fit and eventually fork if needed. I consider a single good reusable engine a level playing field for new browsers akin to the Linux Kernel for OSs. Engines are commoditized and differentiation comes from browser features.
It means that Google can push technologies that benefit their ad tracking business, or choose to use non-standard APIs to make their apps run faster than competitors. Both of these things they're already doing. While they might not go the route of Microsoft, putting their Active-X plugins in IE, using deprecated and non-standard APIs is pretty damn close.
Furthermore, all these forks result in bugfixes and new features making it back into Chromium. That allows Chromium to evolve faster than other browsers. That's not to say that Firefox hasn't been keeping up and pushing past Chrome on some important fronts (CSS Sub-Grid, for one), but I'm afraid a point will come where Firefox can't keep up with all the new web APIs that developers will want to use.
Another fork of Chromium doesn't lessen Google's influence over the market.
> It means that Google can push technologies that benefit their ad tracking business, or choose to use non-standard APIs to make their apps run faster than competitors. Both of these things they're already doing.
Thanks for asking. I was wondering if I could. I'll try:
> Start with Blink and modify as they see fit and eventually fork if needed
One of the foundational ideas behind the web is that you have a set of open standards that specify the web, and then people can go ahead and implement those standards and provide some unique set of features on top of those standards. For example: privacy.
I believe that Google and other big-tech actors are working to make the scope of these standards so vast and so fast-moving that it becomes impossible for a small or mid-range operation to implement and maintain a web browser. I mean, who was able to successfully fork and maintain a fork of KHTML/Webkit? Google! No small organization is capable of this. These are massive, complicated codebases that must keep up with evolving standards.
Therefore, even though you theoretically have "open standards," we're seeing a future with possibly a single implementation of those standards. And if you only have one implementation, then the whole foundation doesn't hold, i.e. you can't make a privacy-oriented browser because you can't make a browser in the first place. What if some day Google decides to stop contributing to Blink, to fork Blink and only update it closed source, against a set of fast-moving standards that they de-facto control? Or what if, at that point, with total domination, they stop following open standards entirely. I think that would be the end of the web.
Notice that a fork doesn’t have to maintain the whole code base, only your tweaks on top. Cases I know like Oculus Browser, Samsung Internet, Brave or Supermedium (I’m co-founder) have very small teams. They start with Chromium and have total freedom to modify privacy policies, ship remove any APIs or standards. At the same time they can take all Web compatibility for granted that I agree is not tenable by a small org.
How many tabs? I've used Firefox for years on 8 or less total gigabytes of RAM, and I've hit 40 tabs occasionally and regularly 20, and never ran out of RAM because of Firefox.
I've had my whole system lock up for minutes with 10 tabs open on Firefox as recently as last week. I still use it as my primary, but that does happen on occasion.
On chrome I've had 60+ tabs open for weeks without my system taking a dive.
This is on an ubuntu 19.10 system with 32gb of ram.
This seems extremely weird, never seen anything like that (I tend to have >100 tabs open). But of course "it doesn't happen for others" doesn't help you if somehow on your machine it does.
It's definitely strange. And I do at times have 50+ tabs open on Firefox, so I'm not saying it's a constant issue, but I do see it overload my system from time to time. When it does, I close a few tabs, restart firefox, and go on my merry way.
That's what I'm talking about in the beginning of the post. 'firefox|Web' captures 1 one less process than `--full /usr/lib/firefox/firefox`. That one process is 0.1mb in my case.
Google polyfill badly done JS because firefox doesn't implement some "advanced" features that google tought but is not(or will never be) in the standard.
It result in more usage of CPU and RAM.
I noticed that Facebook have a memory leak on firefox for exemple (12Go, then 3Go after closing facebook).
my only issue with Firefox on Mac is that streaming video from twitch will just randomly stall but this did not occur with Safari. The oddest part is that is stalls randomly when clicking back to the tab with the stream. Even with multiple streams its wholly random if one will stall the video portion or not; the audio continues and chat bar works too.
memory wise it will consume quite a bit when managing streaming content and even leave the code in memory when all related tabs are gone; I assume this happens because of the dearth of video content on many web pages
I was having the exact same issues on Twitch allll the time on FF on Mac. I haven't since switching to Vivaldi, probably have frozen two or 3 times since.
Just restarted for the new release, but I currently got 3 windows with a total of 73 tabs (no shame please ^^) and just focused each of them to ensure they are loaded due to the restart.
Waited a bit and now have:
* Resident Set Size: ~ 500 MB
* Virtual memory: ~ 3300 MB
Not much, IMO, especially as virt. memory doesn't tells one much.
In Firefox, if you go to about:memory and click on "Measure", you can get some kind of breakdown of where the memory is being used. I don't know how useful it will be to understand why it is using more memory, but it can be interesting.
Wouldn't you prefer your browser use more RAM? I'd much rather it cache as much as possible than have unused RAM sitting idle. Hell, I even stick my `~/.cache/` in RAM.
When it completely bogs down the browser so that opening a new window stakes 5s and other normal actions are extremely laggy, no other features matter. This can happen even on my 64GB workstation when Firefox hasn’t consumed all the available memory yet. Performance is a feature.
(That said I continue to use Firefox exclusively b/c 1) Firefox is really good now, 2) best addon/extension support, 3) Google’s leadership is Evil now, and 4) I don’t want a rendering engine monoculture).
It's weird, I keep seeing people complain about the memory usage and it being slow, but I've literally never experienced any of these kinds of issues, and I have 80 tabs open right now. Are you using some weird plugin or what?
Having multiple tabs (or "too many tabs") is a neat and very visible way to keep track of what's to be read and processed. It does result in keeping things for far too long sometimes, but there is no better interface that surfaces all the different sites/URLs to be processed. It's very useful when you're troubleshooting or researching something (could be some tech stuff in general, some software development/debugging stuff or anything else you're researching).
I used to do something similar too with Opera (the original one with Presto engine) but with their "Speed Dial" feature. I miss Presto Opera - it was light-weight, fast and wasn't bogged down by even with 100's of open tabs and had fantastic browser features that nearly all their competitors copied.
It's actually way better than bookmarks because it stores the content in a quickly accessible way (unless the tab has been unloaded manually or through another extension), and it also stores history (you can go back and forward in each of those tabs). Bookmarks and "Speed Dial" (which is available on Firefox) do not support tab history. I do not know how Opera's Speed Dial worked though.
> It's actually way better than bookmarks because it stores the content in a quickly accessible way
I am skeptical about this part. If you tag your bookmark's, it then becomes easy to look it up right from the address bar by just typing a tag name. That is actually much easier and faster than searching through 100's or 1000's of tabs.
> ... and it also stores history
That's a very good point that I hadn't considered.
"read it later" window, sites for research, Slack in the browser, podcasts or music in the background, etc.
I usually don't close my research tabs until I've completed the task I was working on. Not having to worry about memory means I don't have to worry about finding useful webpages again.
Inbox, rather than bookmarks. Bookmarks suggest repeated visits; an open tab is something to be visited at least once, but not known to be worth keeping a link to.
Open tabs = bookmarks for unread stuff, basically. Once I’m done, optionally bookmark it if necessary and close the tab.
The problem with bookmarks is my list of bookmarks eventually grows even larger than my open tabs, far larger, and stuff just gets lost in there. Once out of site, then out of mind. Leaving it open in a tab I’m more likely to go back and read it when I have time.
What exactly is the thought process behind having so many tabs open? For example, I close tabs when I am done with a site and / or when I can't read the site title on the tabs any more.
What’s the thought process behind closing them? Using tree style tabs I have a forest of tabs. I am working with lots of ‘web apps’ (currently mainly the AWS console) and closing tabs would mean having to go and find the particular resources every time I want to work with them. I probably hit each of around 50 tabs - across two or three windows - an average of 20 times today. Then there were dozens of ephemeral tabs too.
Not the person you're replying to, but may as well answer since I also use tree-style tabs similarly.
> - Why keep a site open when you are done with it?
Why assume you're done with it? I have a number of tabs just for Grafana dashboards I'm monitoring. Re-finding the particular configuration from the home page every time would be annoying, bookmarks would require reloading the page (and thus re-running the slow queries that happen on load instead of on data update), etc.
> - Too many tabs and it gets difficult and irritating to find and open the site you want.
That's what tree-style tabs solves. Tabs are a hierarchy, just like bookmarks or folders normally are. It's much easier to navigate.
> - Have never needed to keep many, many sites open in the first place.
I've got email, calendar, a bunch of Grafana tabs, plus a few datasheets, a schematic, Jira, Confluence, and Github.
And that's just for work, for news I tend to open articles in tabs with HN comments in child tabs and then go through & read them in sequence, but I keep work & non-work in different windows.
Another Tree Style Tabs user here, I'm not really satisfied with the other explanations, so: With TST and Auto Tab Discard, tabs have become self-organized bookmarks for me. I simply don't use actual bookmarks anymore, and have open tabs for each site I regularly visit, with subtrees for any stray thought.
I'm up to around 500 tabs across 3 windows. Maybe a dozen root trees. Youtube, Android docs, HN, Reddit, etc, for example. Because opening links in a new tab creates a child tab in the tree, they're automatically well-organized in a way that follows my thoughts, collapsible when I'm done with one for the moment, and rearrangeable if I don't like where they were put in the tree.
I don't do any bookmarking or tagging, so either it's an open tab or something I can dig up in the history. So I tend to keep tabs open if I think there's a chance I might need to refer to it soonish. Or I just forget them after my focus moves on to something else.
"Bookmark, tag, and close" loses active state and requires a full page refresh. It also loses the history (where it was opened from). Bookmarks are useful, but they're not the same thing as tabs.
My wife leaves all of her tabs open, but it's not for any specific reason. If she opens a new tab and goes to a website, the browser will just switch to the tab that's already on that website instead of fetching the website again.
For some they're something that I check daily so I just focus then refresh, and for some I keep them open thinking it's something I am going to revisit and read some day.
I'm a front end and back end developer that uses multiple libraries and tech stacks and need to find answers to stuff immediately. I leave them open as a resource while I'm working, which may be on multiple things at once. In addition, I have mail, messaging, music, and other work-related things open in the browser.
It's really one of the only features that matters.
I'm surprised you're having issues with RAM. I had 1050 opened tabs in firefox nightly and my x201 (1st gen i5) has only 8GB and only 50% of it was used on average by ffx.
I'm not sure tab count is really a viable metric here. You'd think there'd be a strong correlation, but...
On one Windows PC, I keep 2-3 tabs constantly open (may as well pin them tbh), and open/close others as needed. Average tab footprint is probably 3-8 tabs. Average RAM footprint is 1700MB. I have different tab footprints on different machines, of all sorts of different hardware and OS combinations; let's say the general tab footprint is 5-30 tabs, and general memory footprint is 800MB-3GB.
On the other hand, one user here reported a few thousand tabs at ~500MB RSS.
Obviously factors like assets and JavaScript affect RAM consumption, but a lot of these heavy tab users have to be running a good number of web apps. There must be something else at play.
Depends on the tabs. I can get the Slack tab to eat over 6GB of memory if I just let it sit there without periodically reloading the tab... auto-reload extensions FTW.
Sure some web apps will naturally consume immense amout of ram. My tabs were not heavy apps, but diverse usual web pages github, hn, reddit, youtube, pubmed, wikipedia, pdfs etc
Frankly I don’t get what the complaints about RAM usage are all about. With video, high res images, megabytes of javascript and 30 tabs open, modern browsing simply takes a lot of resources. I rather have the browser use a lot of cache than having to reload shit constantly.
Note that donations go to Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit parent of Mozilla Corporation that works on an open web and other social initiatives. Mozilla Corporation, the maker of Firefox, does not get anything from your donations because of the way these organizations are structured.
I've asked about this here before (how to support MoCo and Firefox with money), but there doesn't seem to be a way to do that so far. This is one of the reasons Mozilla Corporation has been looking at other services, like the VPN service we've heard of, to get more revenue. Mozilla Corporation also laid off several people from the Firefox team recently because...not enough money, in very simple terms! This is not to say that one must not donate to Mozilla Foundation. Just be aware of where your money can go and what it can be used for.
On the other hand, donations to Mozilla Thunderbird go directly to Thunderbird development, maintenance, etc.
Edit: Removed an erroneous statement about the search engine partnerships.
Thanks for bringing this up. I remember reading something similar in a previous thread, but while making the donation I couldn't think of why it would be a reason not do donate anyway.
If I could donate directly towards ff development, I would probably choose to do so. Anyway from your comment I get the impression that donating to Moz Foundation is not such a great idea. If so, could you elaborate why?
My reasoning is this: I wish to donate to the people that brought me FF. If they believe those funds are better allocated to something else (instead of FF development), I guess it is should be their choice. Unless they start neglecting FF I see no reason not to donate some small amount anyway.
> Anyway from your comment I get the impression that donating to Moz Foundation is not such a great idea. If so, could you elaborate why?
Sorry, that wasn't my intention. Donating to Mozilla Foundation does a lot of good around the world. It just doesn't support Firefox development. I just wanted to make that distinction clearer.
I use Tab Mix Plus. (I'm on Waterfox just for that one extension.)
Back when Firefox switched to the new UI backend and broke approximately all of the addons, it was promised that the missing APIs they'd ditched would be re-added post release as JS APIs. This is now many years overdue.
Frnakly, I disagree that it should be their choice, and will not donate until they give me an avenue to donate to Firefox Browser specifically.
I miss Tab Mix Plus too. I also miss Session Manager, Lazarus form recovery, etc. It's been very frustrating that Firefox hasn't provided adequate support for these fantastic extensions to continue in the WebExtensions world.
Tab Session Manager is a WebExtension. I'm not familiar enough with the others to know what's missing and can't be replicated, but session management is alive and well.
A somewhat cynical take: If users could contribute directly to Firefox development, it would still pale in comparison to the amount of money they get from Google for search.
While it would be a noble cause to support the browser directly, it sounds like Mozilla Corp could make better use of the funds.
I think Firefox shines when it comes to flexbox, grid, CSS animations & dealing with fonts. Aside from those key features, Firefox and Chrome are roughly identical when it comes to debugging capabilities and being memory hogs.
I recently started using Firefox more. I love containers. Firefox should make the extension part of the Firefox install wizard or ask the user to install it after you install the firefox.
Even better, delete all cookies, session and local data for each domain after all tabs for this domain have been closed (after 15 seconds), unless the user specifically whitelist a particular website. Like the amazing Cookie AutoDelete addons, that has completely changed my browser usage.
It took some time, but I finally feel comfortable with Firefox. I stuck with Brave for a while but the weird blockchain bookmarks syncing worked like total shit, and I'd open a browser on my nth device and it'd reset my bookmarks to what they were three weeks ago. Total nightmare.
Firefox is working great currently.
I have one gripe and it's that the DevTools frame doesn't let you drag-resize on the _entire_ bar. That is, the tab bar (Inspector, Console, Network, Debugger, etc). On Chrome, you can click anywhere on the bar and drag it up. As a web developer, I'm constantly resizing the viewport, and sometimes it's nice to have a larger console, but I have roughly ~2px to work with every time, and it takes some trial and error a lot of the time.
Previously I had managed to force Firefox not to make unwanted automatic connections using gHacks user.js [0] and this official guide [1], but this new version makes a connection to firefox.settings.services.mozilla.com after startup no matter what. Not a big deal, but leaves a bad aftertaste from the upgrade.
> and the Acid Tests are correspondingly no longer being maintained. Acid3, in particular, contains some controversial tests and no longer reflects the consensus of the Web standards it purports to test, especially when it comes to issues affecting mobile browsers. The tests remain available for historical purposes and for use by browser vendors. It would be inappropriate, however, to use them as part of a certification process, especially for mobile browsers.
>...The General tab in Preferences now has a Zoom tool. You can use this feature to set the magnification level applied to all pages you load. You can also specify whether all page contents should be enlarged, or only text. We know this is a hugely popular feature because of the number of extensions that offer this functionality. Selective zoom as a native feature is a huge boon to users.
This is terrific! I have been shocked that this has not been a feature with accessibility otherwise having decent focus from major software vendors.
I no longer have to have the zoom level preference in my toolbar to tune every site.
The developer tools still need a lot of performance work. Why does the UI crash or become unresponsive? The UI needs to be decoupled from whatever state is being managed by the tools and incrementally updated on whatever state changes. It doesn’t feel like that when using the tools as they get slower and slower the larger and more complex the application.
There doesn’t appear to be any notion of paging. A good example is the console. I should be able to have an infinite log, limited by my available memory. Under no circumstances should the tools crash or get slow when dealing with a large or complicated console output. It feels like that although I’m only viewing a few dozen lines of the console the entire buffer is rendered and then clipped out. The console and many other features get slower and slower the more data I’m working with. Expanding and inspecting an array with 100 items should be no different from inspecting a list with 50 million items. This is something that chrome devtools just works, so whatever they are doing Firefox just needs to copy that in order for the tools to be useable on anything other than trivial demo’s.
If the goal is to be able to develop UI’s in Firefox that can manage large datasets in the browser the devtools themselves need to be able to work with such data. Otherwise, what’s the point?
And still no support for RegExp features from ES2018(!), i.e. named groups [1]. I love FF as much as the next web dev, but sometimes features fall by the wayside, and it takes forever for FF to implement them. For example, it took literally years for FF to implement focusin/focusout events after they were standardized and all other browsers implemented them.
Still waiting for when Firefox starts supporting Matroska container for videos. Right now it cannot play h264 recorded by Chrome as Chrome puts it in Matroska for some reason.
Bugzilla: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1422891
One of the pain points of developing with Firefox dev tools, which has kept me on Chromium for development, is lack of proper formatting for tracebacks. Reading tracebacks in FF has been quite an eye strain, whereas Chromium offers syntax highlighting and formats tracebacks for readability.
It will be nice if Firefox restores support for high-quality scaling. transform(scale) used to work well, then for a long time it produced horribly pixelated text. They improved it a few months back, but it's still noticeably pixelated. Chrome is perfectly smooth.
This is an ongoing struggle for the graphics teams involved with both browsers, and the behavior will be different depending on OS. It really helps if you file bug reports for text quality issues that provide an example of the scenario that looks wrong. I've had multiple text/transform quality issues fixed in both Firefox and Chrome by providing examples of corner cases that perform badly.
The CSS + HTML specs (and the general nature of the primitives involved) make it very very difficult to get this right in every case.
Your issue is almost certainly not a question of 'high quality scaling' and instead a question of how the heuristics are selecting the source resolution to rasterize the text at.
fwiw in the long run it would be possible to solve many quality issues specifically for transformed text by using variable-rate shading (like Slug, maybe Pathfinder) but this is still effectively a research area, I'm not aware of it being shipped in real software.
On a related note, I find myself using Safari for its password management and Chrome for everything else because it’s so pleasant to use on mobile. They really nailed down the icons and animations (which doesn’t seem like it would be that important compared to other issues going on). You’d think privacy would be a major concern for me but when I observe my behavior honestly, it doesn’t seem to be that big of a factor.
The voice to text feature on Chrome is really useful too when you’re searching for something and don’t want to type it all out. Stunningly accurate. iOS has a built-in voice-to-text feature on their keyboard but it’s not as good.
Would love to see an option in FF to only give CPU to the visible tab and sleep all others.
I have a lot (!!!) of open tabs and ever so often one of them seems to go wild and CPU hogs. Have to restart FF for remedy.
Glad to see console background images being fixed. console.table is nice but sometimes you just need a console.plot, and that doesn't work without background-image styling.
Another Firefox release means yet again my browser's going to quit working while I'm busy in the middle of the workday. It'll offer to restart, but it won't work, and then I'll have to reload all my pages manually.
I've been using Firefox since it was Phoenix. I never switched to Chrome at any point. This behavior is so damn annoying that it might be the one thing that actually gets me to switch.
I am on Nightly which updates 2x daily without problems. If restart doesn't work maybe try a re-install. Filing a bug would be great so Firefox devs can work with you to find a root cause.
On Windows it should background update now as well.
Firefox Preview (early release of next generation Firefox on Android) has been improving fairly rapidly. Extension support landed in nightly a week or so ago, for those who have been holding off on checking it out.
I think you are being optimistic. Like, "Year of the Linux Desktop" optimistic. The fact is that Firefox has earned its tiny marketshare by not providing significant value for its drawbacks except to a relatively small segment of vocal people on HN. Their past hijinks don't help either.
A year or so ago they introduced a bug (was it with the Quantum release) that Firefox would eat huge amounts of CPU (basically pegged at 100%) if used on MacOS with a scaled resolution.
Any idea if there has been any progress on this issue?
Last time I tried a few months ago it still wasn't fixed.
Did a little more reading and, my bad. For both Android and iOS the LastPass app works within browsers. No extension needed. Was maybe trying to justify not switching my life to FF from Chrome because PITA. Oughtta just do it.
It's exactly how it sounds. Reddit loads in 1s on chrome and 30s in Firefox.
I used to blame my computer for not having enough free space, but now that I have 200GB of SSD free, I suppose I need to blame the software at some point.
Yeah but that's experimental and it's supposed to have failsafes and fallbacks. I guess it's possible that it malfunctioned, and I'd never rule out DNS more generally though.
I meant the other way around: Google's DNS being fast and the local one being slow. At least I've experienced on more than one occasion my ISP DNS taking forever to resolve some domain where Cloudflare's or Google's DNS responded quickly.
In version 74. I linked this to illustrate, that features for users are made hastily, as if by "intern", to check the box and get paid. I cannot imagine a job or a student project where I was tasked to make keyboard shortcuts editor and got away with implementation that lacked ability to delete shortcut. But I get it. Since Firefox is for free, I have to either a) shut up, or b) hail it positively. There's no room for negative feedback.
it would be nice if firefox would stop sending unapproved requests on the background to mozilla's infra. i am tired of blacklisting all those domains in my hosts file.
also the famous welcome screen full of google and other trackers... epic joke on the users.
also, still not having custom search engines via keywords in the url bar, like chrome, is so lame.
I thought they also had some defaults, but I use "g $word1 $word2" for Google search from the address bar for what feels like over a decade. The don't have the fancy UI to go with it that Chrome has.
I believe parent refers to Chrome's ability to autodetect OpenSearch websites. It is my 1 reason why I keep going back to Chrome.
How this works: Chrome automatically detects when a website supports OpenSearch.
So for instance, if I have previously visited English Wikipedia, next time I start typing "en.w" Chrome will not suggest autocompletiong to en.wikipedia.org, but will also say: "Press TAB to search Wikipedia(en)".
This is much easier than creating custom search keywords. For instance, it also adds quick searching for e-commerce sites I frequent, even though I'd never add a custom search keyword for it.
If there's a Firefox extension that replicates this functionality (autodetection of OpenSearch and integrating with the URL bar) I'd uninstall Chrome today.
> also the famous welcome screen full of google and other trackers
If you click on the gear icon on the welcome screen you can turn off all of those things in the Firefox Home Content settings. My welcome screen is completely blank.
Great to see the emphasis on DevTools in this release. DevTools have definitely much improved since I last tried, but they are still glitchy compared to Chrome. For example, I was using the JS debugger, and for some reason breakpoints wouldn't "hold"—after being stopped for some period of time (not long), the page would refresh. Also little things like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1613957, which I was able to report. It was frustrating. Had to go back to Chrome for development. Still, it was nice to see many features that Chrome doesn't have, like breakpoint logging, which is nice when you want to insert a log into third party code.
And as a browser from a non-dev perspective, it's great. Great to know this browser is all about privacy instead of just trying to provide the bare minimum to keep people on board. Great to have the Facebook Container.
Thank you Firefox!