One unique Firefox feature I love that I don't see talked about often is how awesome Firefox's address bar suggestions are. I can type just a snippet of a URL or a web page title and it'll instantly show me all matching URLs I've visited, whether on my desktop or on my phone. It's become my primary second brain for finding Google docs, or articles I've read, or GitHub issues. It's usually only a few characters before it finds exactly what I want.
Eg I type in "Ed"? It shows the URL to my "editions in solr" GitHub issues I've been working on recently. I vaguely recall an article I read months ago on CSS grid? I type "grid guide" and bam it's the first suggestion. The spreadsheet I made about user languages? "sheets lang". That vague API I can never remember the parameters to? Just type "/query.json?" And I get all my previous requests as examples!
I find Chrome's address bar has been way less reliable and much more frequently just gives me Google autocomplete suggestions -- even when I know that I visited a URL recently that should match!
It gets much better when you disable search suggestions then you only have results from your browsing history/bookmarks. And in the end if you get no results you just launch a search anyways.
There was a way to configure the relative weight of boomarks/history but I can't find it anymore.
Also worthy of notice, if you start with * in the search bar you only get bookmarks results and with ^ you get history results. Finally % is for tabs (on synced devices too) !
that's what i do too, disable suggestions so everything i type doesn't get sent to $searchEngine. i also make use of a few keywords for my most frequently visited sites (like 'hn' for hacker news) so that my keywords always override firefox's dynamic suggestions in case of any conflicts.
i just learned about the ^ % * prefixes a few months ago, and now use them all the time.
To add to this, my experience has been that Chrome's address bar does only matching on whole "fragments" of URLs - that is, if I visited a URL with /foobarbaz/ in the name, Firefox will match that with "bar" while Chrome won't - which is pretty terrible behavior.
And then there's the bookmarks mess, lack of tree-style tabs, and crippled ad-blocker API.
As an information management tool, Firefox is light-years ahead of Chrome.
I've only been using Chrome for about a year, but if I want the find something in my history, I have to open the history window (ctrl-h). The address bar is very inconsistent about returning pages that I've been to recently or often.
You can also add tags to bookmarks and let it search only through bookmarks. Now I just bookmark everything, so I don't need to use google's search a second time and filter again all that SEO and other crap. Moreover, I even bookmark some of my local files, since adequate tagging capabilities in file systems are still technologies from future, apparently.
Ever since version 2 or so, the Firefox autocompletion has made me never use bookmarks. It's simply that good.
As others have said, it requires some tweaking nowadays. If anyone at mozilla is reading... why?! I mean, I get it, newbies... but... why?!
Anyhow, bookmarks and keeping them, clicking through endless expanding nested menus of them, just the very concept... very much something for the hostages of a corporation that wants every contact with the web to start (and end) with a visit to google.com
Amazing. That is the one feature of Firefox I hate so much I had to write an extension that uses a regex-based whitelist to allow entries in my browser history.
Otherwise my history, and thus autocomplete suggestions, is full of URls from single-page applications (webmail etc) that differ only in the 1000-character-long hashes in the URL.
Whatever logic Chromium does to filter out this chaff from autocomplete works much better for me.
Firefox's address bar always seems to show me example.com/xyz when I want example.com, but shows me example.com when I want example.com/xyz. Furthermore, sometimes the "switch to tab" suggestion is at the top, and other times it isn't.
If they picked one and stuck to it, I'd get used to it either way and be a happy camper. But the inconsistency drives me up a wall. I don't know how this compares to Chrome, I haven't used that shit in years.
if you want example.com, type exam in the awesomebar and example.bar will show up in suggestions, if, of course, you visited it before or if it's bookmarked.
if you want example.com/xyz, type example xyz or example x or just xyz.
> if you want example.com, type exam in the awesomebar and example.bar will show up in suggestions
I just tried it. I have example.com in my history, and typed "exam". Example.com is the second thing firefox suggests. Before it, is a duckduckgo image search result page for the query "botanist", with an image titled "Young Botanist Examines The Plants In A Greenhouse Stock Photo". Firefox is picking up the "exam" in "Examines" and puts that result before example.com.
I don't really care which is first, I just want one or the other to be consistently first.
Please go to: Settings(preferences) --> Search
Then:
Search Suggestions:
Disable: Show search suggestions in address bar results
That should be it.
Below, go to Change settings for other address bar suggestions
it will navigate to: Address Bar / When using the address bar, suggest
Disable or enable as you see fit. I think the Search engines under the "Address Bar" is about the custom search engines one can define (i have a custom search for youtube, for example: y <search term>).
I already have "Provide search suggestions" turned off. It's pulling both of these suggestions out of my browser history. The order firefox uses for suggestions pulled from your history is inconsistent.
When searching your history from the address bar, firefox sometimes puts entries matched by domain name first, and sometimes puts entries matched by page contents first.
I'm not in front my my desk right now, but is it possible the results from History are weighted by frequency and/or recency? I know these attributes are recorded in the History db.
That's by design, to feed Google Search (and show you ads). Firefox has that, too, but you can easily turn it off so it will only show suggestions based on your history. Not sure about Chrome.
FireFox Containers are a killer feature for me. It allows you to run sandboxed sessions. So you can ostensibly make every site a private tab by default but have a small few sites persistent.
Eg I’ll have a work group with GitHub, Okta, etc in it so I only need to log in once a day. But random websites cannot track me between sites.
Couple that with DNS blocking of trackers and ads, and the web is actually a lot more pleasant to use.
Unfortunately you cannot fix everything locally though.
Yup, it's not great. Still seems easier to just turn them off with the new tab settings panel than recompile the whole browser, but I guess everyone has their own preferences.
There are better browsers than Firefox if you care about privacy. Both Brave and Tor have better results in this comparison that was shared here recently: https://privacytests.org/, same with this tool from the EFF https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ it gives better results for Brave than Firefox (even with blockers installed on my Firefox). Mozilla themselves give the same score in their very limited comparsion: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browsers/compare/
Multi-account containers are really the only killer feature in Firefox for me, they're super convenient for my work, but that's about the only thing it has left going for it.
The Librewolf project appears to be the best of all! I will try it.
edit: Statement below is incorrect, Brave is a Chromium fork.
I do note that Brave, Tor, and Librewolf are forks of Firefox. This in my opinion is an additional reason to support Firefox. Everyone else appears to be plundering naive users' browser telemetry.
Be prepared for stuff to break. I recently tried it and DRM content sometimes doesn't work no matter what you enable (my recent example is Udemy, which the devs claim happens in other FF forks). Also, by default it wipes history/sessions when you close it, which can be a rude surprise.
The https://privacytests.org/ test is... bullshit, as it only test the DEFAULT browser settings when you initially install it without changing anything.
And, even worse, they don't even mention this on their website.
A crucial feature which is missing for me in containers is the ability to limit AddOns to specific containers.
My employer's org deploys a Microsoft SSO AddOn which re-uses the OS-level identity to auto-login to Microsoft/Office365/Azure and causes me quite some headaches when dealing with my customers' logins, which are usually in separate containers.
I switched to FF profiles for those use-cases for now, but it's far from the container experience in terms of usability and integration.
This is one of the reasons I’m stuck in the Chrome world. Having separate windows for different profiles and having MacOS open a link from another app in the window your last had focus of is so incredibly convenient. But having a personal and work password manager is something I couldn’t overcome in Firefox. Especially with the Firefox profiles being so archaic and painful to use.
You can also set a proxy per container (and assign specific websites to always use it), and when you combine that with an ultra-cheap VPS running e.g. a Shadowsocks server you have what I think is the real way to circumvent censorship and bypass regional restrictions (as opposed to using snake oil "VPN" providers or even the Tor Browser).
Are most VPN provides unreliable? I don’t know - never researched this.
I use Proton VPN because it is bundled with ProtonMail. I very much like preventing my national Internet service provider from selling my browsing history.
Most VPN providers you typically see pushed are very suspect at best. Especially the ones you see commonly pushed by Youtubers like NordVPN, ExpressVPN etc. I think the only VPNs that have actually been externally audited are Mullvad and ProtonVPN.
Funnily, both ExpressVPN and NordVPN which you call out have been externally audited.
NordVPN had the clients audited by VerSprite last year, and their No-log policy audited by PwC in 2018 and 2020. And a bug bounty program on HackerOne. [1]
ExpressVPN - Windows Client was just audited by F-Secure in March, and server side audits by Cure54, and PwC in 2021 and 2019 respectively. And a bug bounty program on Bug Crowd. [2]
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For comparison
Mullvad has been audited (Client security and Infrastructure (for privacy)) by Cure53 through 2020, and first was in 2018. Has no bug bounty, but they do still have a vulnerability disclosure program. [3]
ProtonVPN, audits of the no-log policy in April, and clients in 2020. And they run their own bug bounty program.[4]
---
I actually find it kinda interesting that while they've all had audits regarding privacy on the server side, only ExpressVPN has had a security audit of server side components. (Granted I've not look that deeply at this)
[1] Annoying, you can only download the audit reports if you Login then click Reports in the menu
What's is the concern about VPNs being "suspect" or "reliable"? I hear this a lot about VPN providers but not sure why. If the VPN is logging your activity/IP you'd have to be doing something super illegal for the police to want to get a search warrant for your data.
It's not just that they're suspect or unreliable. They're complete bullshit.
The actual use of VPN technology is to create virtual networks that are private (hence the name). It's a system level technology. There are several types of network topologies you can set up, when I was learning about this I found this article which is quite nice: https://www.procustodibus.com/blog/2020/10/wireguard-topolog.... You can proxy traffic through a VPN, but the only scenario I can think of in which it makes sense is if you are an OSINT researcher and you need a safe system on which to conduct your research.
If you need to proxy traffic and "hide" your IP, just use a flipping proxy. It's an application level technology (e.g. for torrenting, every torrent client under the sun supports a SOCKS5 proxy). If you don't have the patience to set up a VPS yourself, you can even use something like Outline (https://getoutline.org) which automates that (and it has a mobile client app as well).
If you need privacy (and to actually hide your IP), then use Tor.
Unfortunately that doesn’t fix the real reason most people use VPNs, which is torrenting. Nobody should be using NordVPN to hide from a nation state, but for torrenting they add one level of obfuscation.
I specifically mentioned torrenting, please re-read. There is no reason to have all the network I/O of your computer go through an extra hop just for one application (e.g. a torrent client) when that application can be configured to use a proxy instead. It increases the network latency, complexity and attack surface of your system.
Between sponsorblock and ublock origin, I never see ads or paid promotions on youtube or any other website like that. That mostly leaves [presumably] unpaid promotion of Mullvad on sites like HN.
I frequently have DNS issues with Mullvad, and also speeds are lower.
Proton is also more expensive though...
Also, there's a long outstanding issue (on their Github [1] ) which they have confirmed) that the Mullvad app causes iCloud services to stop syncing (bookmarks, Files, etc.). That's a showstopper if you use Apple devices...
I'm a big fan of multi-account containers.. or at least, was. Recently I inadvertantly added a domain to one of the ascribed containers on my laptop and I'll be damned if I can work out how to undo it, other than uninstalling and starting over, which'll be a pain, because I've customised it quite a bit.
...This is a plea for help, by the way, in case it wasn't obvious :) I'm sure there must be a json file or something, somewhere, I can just edit.
There is no reason to feel stupid. Browser containers are tricky and relatively new, and I was bitten by some quirks, too. Nevertheless, they're definitely worth it.
Not stupid, I also accidentally added something to the wrong container and it took me a while and some searching to find the answer. The feature is great, but the UX is still a little lacking.
The 'Manage Site List' feature is relatively new, it wasn't there in earlier versions.
Also, the UI is... not great. For example you cannot add new urls here. Some websites forward you to some other external url through another domain for example. there is no way to add these custom domains. So annoying. There yet another extension to solve that problem, but... it doesn't support Firefox 'sync'.
I do not know how to directly manipulate the container, but I think what you can do is, that you open a new tab of another container and copy paste the URL there. Then you can set it to always open the domain in that container, effectively changing the container. Not sure how to remove a domain from all containers though.
Although Firefox had profiles for ages and you could start Firefox with the profile manager and "new instance allowed" to choose a profile at the start of each new instance. More hidden then in Chromium, but definitely possible.
EDIT: Just for completeness sake, here is the command to open Firefox with profile manager and new instances:
I'm pretty sure the profile manager stuff in Firefox goes all the way back to the Netscape 4 days. If I recall correctly, back in the way back, it used to throw you into Profile Manager and walk you through creating your initial one on first launch of fresh installs. At some point they tucked that under the rug and just started creating the default profile automatically - maybe because it made less sense to ask for a bunch of personal information up-front when the browser was broken off from the mail client? Now most people have forgotten that Profile Manager even exists, but it's been there the whole time.
my parents rely on Profile Manager. I set that up for them years ago, since my mom uses my dad's computer a bit every day. She has no need for a whole user account. Separating the stuff in the browser is enough.
You'll need to install a connector for it to work. (The add-on gives instructions during the onboarding process.) Both the add-on and the connector are free and open source (GPLv3).
I use profiles and containers together on Firefox. Each profile has its own set of add-ons, browser settings, and containers. Containers in the same profile share the same add-ons and browser settings. For example, you could have separate personal and work profiles, with containers for different online accounts in each profile.
On Firefox, you have the option of using only profiles, only containers, both profiles and containers, or none of the above.
I'm going to have to give this a try. I manage multiple Google Workspace accounts for clients and have stuck to Chrome for those as I have a profile set up for each account. Yes, you can log in to multiple Google accounts in any browser, but then it defaults to the first account for new windows.
The two final things that would get me off Chrome entirely:
* When I'm using my external USB microphone in a web-based conference system (mostly Cleanfeed but I've also seen it with Streamyard and Jitsi) my audio gets extremely robotic after a few minutes and it somehow impacts my entire system - I have to unplug the microphone to fix it.
* Dropbox, for some reason, hangs at 1 second left when uploading larger files (appx 60MB or so)
I've been looking for something like that. Thanks. But ideally, I don't want to swithswitch profiles. I want to have muliple instances of FF open, each with a different profile. Just like Chromium based browsers and users.
When you choose a different profile in the Firefox Profile Switcher menu, it opens a new instance of Firefox with the new profile. The add-on experience will be very familiar if you've used Chromium's profile management features.
If you're trying to create a shortcut to Firefox that launches a profile other than the one you've selected as the default, the instructions for Linux and Windows are here:
Yes, but with this UX it may as well not exist for 99% of users. Container tabs while still a little power-user is something that can be explained to the average user.
One of the major problems with container tabs is that they share a lot of persistent state between them, such as browsing history. Profiles are mostly isolated by comparison.
No it wouldn't, that's just pessimism. The entire HN community switching would have massive second-order effects. People would see experts (us) using it, we'd promote it and install it for people, we'd speak positively about it, we'd develop with it, etc. (I won't write the whole list.)
> People would see experts (us) using it, we'd promote it and install it for people, we'd speak positively about it, we'd develop with it, etc. (I won't write the whole list.)
I wasn't super paying attention at the time, but wasn't that basically how Firefox initially established itself at the expense of Internet Explorer?
Pretty much. People say that tech people switching doesn't do anything, but when tech people switch, semi-technical people get it via osmosis (forum posts for FF the first time, presumably reddit posts today). Suddenly when someone asks their friend that's slightly more technical than them for a recommendation, they get recommended the new thing instead of the old one.
All the techies aren't hyping it. Most people that I know just use Chrome. My running joke whenever I see someone else using it in a Zoom share or something is "found the other Firefox user!"
Not only that. Every few weeks I come across a site that works better in Chrome than in FF or has some quirks (Google's spreadsheets are a good example - they feel slower in FF). Although I have no hope of changing the mindset of HNers working at Google, the rest of us could make a difference.
Yeah I hate that. I still have a problem seeing comments on youtube in firefox, even when I'm logged in. Not sure we're going to be able to fix if google targets their properties to only their browser, outside of a lawsuit or gov't action.
Can’t say I’ve have any issues with comments in YouTube. Not that I spend much time in the comments section but when I do read the comments they always work fine.
Maybe the other commenter is on to something regarding extensions. The only extensions I have are ones to simplify management of containers, plus my password manager.
Firefox maker, Mozilla, is in the uneasy position of being financially dependent on its search deal with Google, which accounts for the majority of the organization's revenue.
I wonder how Google will be able to twist its arms (and trust me, they will use all their power and abuse their position to attempt it) to either implement V3 or find some other way to kill ad blockers / allow ads on Firefox.
Is there a public page/link which mentions that they're not removing V2 support? Please share. Thanks.
All I can find is:
We have not yet set a deprecation date for Manifest v2 but expect it to be supported for at least one year after Manifest v3 becomes stable in the release channel.
On the same page: "We will support blocking webRequest until there’s a better solution which covers all use cases we consider important, since DNR as currently implemented by Chrome does not yet meet the needs of extension developers."
I don’t think that’s true. If the entire HN community which I assume includes tons of casual weekly reading non-logged in users, that would be massive. The number of people outside HN who would try out FF again would be a sizable multiple of the HN community.
If everyone thinks negatively, then no change will happen. Keeping reality in perspective is important, but improving things is really important too.
HN community represents a very attractive economic segment. If we switched, advertisers and web designers would pay attention. Firefox would instantly be getting paid for our searches by Google.
What's the difference between a burner container and a private window (Ctrl+Shift+P)?
I suspect it would be fairly straightforward to make an extension that set a per-window default container, but I agree that it should be built in functionality. (Whether that default should override site-specific container rules, I'm not sure... I kind of want both options, but I guess that's where it starts getting complex.)
I'm annoyed by the lack of integration between container and history. I never really want to clear history for a non-private window, but I do want to be able to restrict what I see by container when it makes sense and not restrict when it doesn't. My main grievance: searching for open tabs (either by prefixing the location bar entry with "% " or by choosing the Open Tabs option from the dropdown that appears when you start entering something) should match across all tabs, at least in the context of a freshly-opened new tab.
Though I absolutely agree that the implementation is disappointing, most concerns about history pretty much disappear if you disable history globally. Having lived without history in my browser for years now, I ponder whether that should be the default because I haven't missed it one bit.
> Containers are only tabs - so you can't, for instance, create a window and have all future tabs created in that window inherit that container
True, but if that's something you want, you can do that without the multi-account container tabs. Just create a new profile that's separate from the default one. The drawback to that is you have to reinstall any extensions you use because they won't be shared.
In my opinion, history access is a major advantage of Firefox over Chrome. There are many sites that I don't bother to bookmark because I know typing a substring into the location bar will bring it up as a suggestion faster than I would be able to choose it from a bookmark menu. Plus, it displays a bunch of related URLs which are surprisingly often useful.
I definitely would not want to default to disabling it. It's my browser, and letting it remember where I've been enables it to be much more useful to me.
That + the Temporary Containers extension can make every new tab a new container by default. I also use Container Proxy so I can route traffic from each tab through a different proxy if needed (mitmproxy). I've wanted to go to Chrome but Chrome has nothing like per-tab sessions/isolation. I looked at first party isolation but it's vague and doesn't seem like what Firefox provides.
Firefox is the only browser that can do this. Also Google's UI decisions are just unilateral and awful. At least with Firefox we can still tweak some of it.
I don’t get why random websites cannot track you across sites. The IP is still the same and so is the hardware/OS combination it’s running on. They can absolutely track you.
I honestly want to ditch Firefox and try a Chromium browser for a minute [1], but I'm stuck on Firefox because it's the only one with a killer feature: send a tab to/from iOS and my Linux desktop.
I skip Chrome and Edge for privacy reasons, Brave have a crappy and buggy sync feature that I don't know what OSes it supports, but not my combination. Can't send tabs with them. Vivaldi doesn't have an iOS port. Impossible to do with Chromium.
Firefox can send tabs to all my machines, and I use that feature multiple times daily, such as finding a cool article while I'm sitting on the couch and sending it to my desktop so I can read it later. Mr. Eich, if you're around here, please please fix syncing tabs in your browser, it's the only thing stopping me from switching honestly.
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1: I quite like Firefox, but it's in a dying spiral, and I'm starting to see broken sites. The Web is such a complicated nightmare "protesting" won't change anything, and forking neither, because it's too bloody complex. Chromium has won. Our only hope is Mozilla takes their head out of their arse and start working on their browser instead of faffing about and making small, meaningless changes every release, but I don't see that happening any time soon.
> Our only hope is Mozilla takes their head out of their arse and start working on their browser
Are you reporting these to the webcompat project? Mozilla is absolutely funding QA testers and engineers to check what's broken and triage issues that affect specific browsers and not others.
A great number of the issues that Mozilla contractors and employees investigate that are reported via the webcompat project actually turn out to be the site owner's fault. They're not using standardised web technologies, not testing their work in multiple browsers. Mozilla employees and contractors will try to perform outreach to these site owners, but they're often not interested.
There's no easy answer here short of governments forcing a browser ballot on new computers. Regular people just don't care enough if the web devolves into a monoculture. And businesses don't want to use standards when it's easier to just do whatever works in Blink.
What are some examples of this? I keep seeing this complaint and I keep asking for examples but I always get "just various sites"-like answers. FF is my primary browser and I am not seeing it. I am genuinely curious as to whether it is starting to fall behind but I can recall maybe two or three instances the past couple of years where I opened a site in Brave to see if it worked there.
HomeDepot.com often won't let me add things to cart. The past couple months it has been working again, but there were a few months where I couldn't.
This morning, I couldn't buy a key off cdkeys.com - tried two totally different methods, email addresses, credit cards. Didn't try a second browser yet but I'm not sure I am that persistent...
A news site, I think the New Yorker, would only show the first two paragraphs of an article but in other browsers, would show the full article.
I don't log which sites break - if it's important I tend to cave and open Edge for that site, do my business, and then go back to Firefox for everything else. If it's less important, I'll opt to just not to business with them. But I'm a grain of sand so it doesn't make much difference.
Most sites just have really obnoxious CAPTCHA, often requiring more than one "pick the things" but I don't know if my experience is specific to Firefox.
> HomeDepot.com often won't let me add things to cart. The past couple months it has been working again, but there were a few months where I couldn't.
I checked for webcompat issues matching this description and couldn't find anyone reporting that adding items to the cart didn't work.
I attempted to reproduce the issue myself, but HomeDepot block visitors from my location.
> This morning, I couldn't buy a key off cdkeys.com - tried two totally different methods, email addresses, credit cards. Didn't try a second browser yet but I'm not sure I am that persistent...
Can't reproduce, I was able to buy a CD Key ("Garfield Kart - Furious Racing PC") at 28 May 2022, 16:51:52 BST using Firefox 100.0.2 and a debit card.
> A news site, I think the New Yorker, would only show the first two paragraphs of an article but in other browsers, would show the full article.
I'm not saying you've not experienced these issues, but they're definitely not widespread and your post doesn't give enough information to go on to diagnose if there's an issue with Firefox or not.
The best thing you can do is report issues to the webcompat project as and when you come across compatibility issues. It takes about 20 seconds, less time than you probably spent writing this comment.
> I'm not saying you've not experienced these issues
It really sounds like you are. I hate these "Well did you report it? I can't reproduce it. Did you rebuild in debug mode and check the logs? Did you learn C++ and fix it?" responses.
Which is obviously why I explicitly said I wasn't!
> I hate these "Well did you report it? I can't reproduce it."
How do you expect progress to be made if we can't precisely discuss browser issues & how to reproduce them in a way that enables them to be investigated and fixed?
For all we know at the minute, the OP has an extension installed that's causing all this.
> "Did you rebuild in debug mode and check the logs? Did you learn C++ and fix it?"
What is the "webcompat project"? I just tried googling for it and there were some articles about it, but no page I could submit.
I can say I recently found I couldn't make a new account at 'wise.com' in firefox (had to switch to chrome), and an internal university website doesn't work in Firefox -- but of course, I can't share that page publicly, so there's not a lot useful I can do with that.
It's tricky, because now that Firefox is a (small) minority browser I often assume any breakage is Firefox-specific. But at least 80% of the time, when I retry something in Chrome, it's still broken. I usually don't, mentally file it as "broken in Firefox", and decide I don't need to use that site for now anyway. So my estimation of Firefox-specific breakage is probably much higher than the reality. A lot of the web is just plain broken, for all browsers, much of the time.
The one major category of real problems I run into are related to captchas.
> HomeDepot.com often won't let me add things to cart.
Try opening the site in incognito mode. It usually fixed these random issues.
> Most sites just have really obnoxious CAPTCHA, often requiring more than one "pick the things" but I don't know if my experience is specific to Firefox.
Installing the "Privacy Pass" extension can significantly reduce captcha challenges when visiting sites that use cloudflare.
> A news site, I think the New Yorker, would only show the first two paragraphs of an article but in other browsers, would show the full article.
Sorry if this is a silly question, but is this maybe just the paywall? I'm not sure if you've been reading more articles on Firefox and then only opened on Chrome or something after this started happening, but it sounds like that could be what's going on.
I use firefox and don't see broken sites per se, but there are many sites where performance, especially js performance, suffers. Gmail and other Google sites are sluggish for example, as well as Amazon. It sometimes takes a minute after visiting amazon.com for their js to initialize and I can begin to interact with the site. This is not the case for chromium. I stick with firefox because of multi-account containers, a mobile app that I can add adblockers to, and multi-device sync that works well with linux and android, but performance lags and it's getting worse.
Google sites have long been suspected to do things intentionally in a way that is only optimizing for Chrom(e/ium), maybe even intentionally slow on other browsers, which is mostly Firefox. No surprise there at all.
However I do not see this stuff about JS init to take that long on amazon. It might be a special thing in your case. Did you try things like a new profile, to test, whether it still happens?
Firefox Android’s can install the “Google Search Fixer” add-on to request the full Google Search UI (by sending a Chrome User-Agent string to google.com):
It's not so much "intentionally broken on Firefox" as it is "between adding features and debugging Firefox performance issues, one gets you promoted and one doesn't." Because the former benefits all users and the latter benefits about 5% of users at most.
The banal evil of neglect vs. intentional maliciousness.
That may be a small part of the truth but even a 12 year old me wouldn't believe such a fairy tale to be the whole reason.
MS also used to optimize DOS in ways that clearly hurt their competitors. We've seen Intel aggressively optimize their compiler to slow down AMD... I am sure people have been "optimizing" in such ways for as long as there have been people.
Google doesn't have to do any of that. They can literally just keep implementing WHATWG features that are hard to get right because they're technically challenging and let Mozilla not have the resources to keep up. They don't control the operating system, but they have the resources to propose a protocol or API they can implement correctly and competitors might not (well, one competitor... Apple and Microsoft seem to keep up).
Name a feature that Firefox doesn't have that prevents people from using the web. I can't. But I can name several that I've seen work more correctly on Chrome because they have the resources to make it work in the context of very complicated and legacy-filled rendering engines (flexbox comes to mind) where Mozilla appears to not (ask me about my favorite Firefox-only flex performance issues... To their credit, they have all been fixed, but FF spent a lot of time behind the curve).
I can agree that Google simply neglects Firefox performance and features. I think this alone is enough to explain why Google products work better on Chrome.
Are you saying that there are people at Google whose job description is to tweak Google web products to perform worse on Firefox, just so Chrome appears better in comparison?
I've seen a couple pages on CNBC where it would render the content, then delete it all. (Like, the containing DOM element was made empty.)
Disabling JS kept the content from vanishing.
Of course, this is almost certainly bad coding on the website's side, and not the fault of Firefox. But it seems like it's but getting the QA attention it needs from the site owners.
I most commonly find it during payment processing and other spots where devs are trying to do fancy input validation or styling in forms, especially on mobile. The most common issue is that the the cursor isn't moved correctly when accounting for automatically inserted spaces or hyphens and it can be pretty much impossible to enter the correct numbers without overwriting previous numbers. Autofill also generally fails in these scenarios.
Firefox is my main browser for many years now, but there are two categories of sites that I only open in Chrome:
Video heavy sites, especially YouTube. It loads extremely slowly compared to Chrome. And has much more video stuttering. Probably Google is sabotaging YouTube in Firefox.
Complex interactive sites, like crypto exchanges. They are slow and with many rendering artefacts in Firefox. Probably because they don't even bother testing in Firefox.
> Video heavy sites, especially YouTube. It loads extremely slowly compared to Chrome. And has much more video stuttering. Probably Google is sabotaging YouTube in Firefox.
Hmmm... I've never had this problem and I use YouTube heavily. You sure your video acceleration and codecs and all that are set up right?
It's a known issue https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1658392
I have a laptop with Intel HD graphics and Firefox can't play fullhd video on x2 speed. It freezes every second. Chrome on the same machine plays the same video flawlessly.
I don't remember but I had to enable something in FF for acceleration at one point and I assume you'd have to have the right codecs installed. This is on Arch Linux.
It has always been possible to open YouTube links on VLC. If you want to do so with even less clicks from your browser, there's a open with mpv extension. Can't link it now as am on mobile.
And another one - google search any time series graphs such as stock price, currency convertion etc. Works so far on FF. Click any of the non-default resolution (5D, 1M, 6M) and you'll get a "No chart available" on FF.
I use this feature to stick it to them and never use logged in Google properties from my main Firefox. I can discard their cookies at will. I have a Chromium sandbox they can track me in for Gmail.
I still haven't found any except a local dating site that can detect my ad blocker in Firefox but not Chrome. Every other site that doesn't work in FF so far also doesn't work in Chrome.
I've had problems when organizing online tournaments using Challonge. I've had to switch to Chrome a few times to do something, since it would regularly break in FF. Also their support page requires you to enter a combination of keys to reveal the email address: sadly this didn't work in FF, too.
I've had a few other problems over time, but none that I remember off the top of my head. I've used FF for the past 15+ years and don't usually mind small problems, though.
Twitch has been broken for the entire pandemic and will not be ever improved at this point. I gave up and just went with Chrome for anything media related. Mozilla has stopped caring and so I have.
time.com, pages simply didn't appear -- at least this was the case in recent versions of FF, can't swear it's so in latest. Other sites can lack "Search" buttons that appear in Chrome & Safari, or their forms don't work in FF but do in other browsers. It's a real problem.
asos.com did not work properly on FF until recently. Opening some categories would yield an "oops" error. Seems it's fixed in the latest release, but it goes to show how fucked up is webdev if nobody from asos.com tested it with Firefox.
Every time something is broken for me on a site it is because of an addon/extension, not because of Firefox. I beleave Firefox get much blame for broken sites when it actually is an addon that the user installed which is to blame.
I even have some vague recollection of Mozilla mentioning just this. Like 99% when something is broken it not because the browser but because some addon the user installed.
So test a site that you dont think works with the "troubleshoot mode" in Firefox that inactivate addons etc to see if it works then. And if it works, then figure out which addon it is that makes the mess and to blame.
This matches my experience - it's not Firefox that's getting worse, but I'm encountering more and more sites that don't function correctly when uBlock Origin is enabled. Whenever I run into a site seems busted, I disable uBlock, reload, and suddenly everything works. I'm not sure if the filters I'm using are getting worse or if the JS on the sites I'm visiting is.
I used to use Decentraleyes but I ended up uninstalling that completely because it broke so many sites.
> Our only hope is Mozilla takes their head out of their arse and start working on their browser instead of faffing about and making small, meaningless changes every release, but I don't see that happening any time soon.
Tab syncing is a small meaningless change to me, but not to you. Some of these things you find small and meaningless could be important to some other people (for example, multilingual spell-checking is very important to some people, X11 isolation is very important to some others).
What do you actually expect from Mozilla by "taking their head out of their arse" ?
> What do you actually expect from Mozilla by "taking their head out of their arse" ?
Investing in their browser. Investing in an alternative ecosystem.
Brave have added in-browser Torrent, TOR, IPFS support. That's what I would expect from Mozilla, trying to differentiate itself. Now we've lost the compact UI, got coloured themes for one release. What's cooking that's really exciting? What's the plan to retake some of the lost market share? I can't see any thirst to improve over there.
Useless bloat. Dedicated torrent clients are made better and work better.
> TOR
Interesting, but the popular advice is to only use the Tor Browser. I don't know if that's good advice or not, but it certainly dampens my enthusiasm for Brave supporting Tor.
> IPFS support.
When I actually find a real use for IPFS, then I'll be able to form an opinion on it. Until then, it's just an obscure novelty to me. What can I actually do with it? Torrents and traditional websites together work for downloading/hosting/sharing anything I can think of.
Hard disagree. I don't want Tor and torrents and email and other crapware on my browser. And not on my Firefox. It already has too much of that with pocket. They can focus on the engine and the UI. Leave useless stuff as separate applications.
It’s quite easy if all you do is repackage chrome. Firefox manages to maintain and develop the only completely separate, open and free browser implementation which is nigh impossible a task.
Google Chrome for iOS (well, iPadOS to be precise) will send a web page (not a tab) to desktop Chrome. I know because I do it regularly. The disadvantage of that app is that it lets through most ads blocked by the combination of Safari and the ad blocker Wipr (and I have not bothered to look for an ad blocker that works better with Chrome on iPadOS) with the result that I do most of my iOS browsing in Safari, which means that before I can send a page to my desktop, I usually need to "send" it to the Chrome app, which requires 3 taps, the first of which is a tap on the "share" button near the top right corner of the Safari app. But even with those 3 taps, it ends up being an easier method than the method that begins with my using the same "share" button to mail the page's URL to myself.
I just discovered the "share" item in the tab contextual menu includes AirDrop (on mac naturally) and while this doesn't help you, I was always copying and pasting a site between firefox and safari in order to send it to my iPhone, and was previously frustrated that I couldn't hit the airdrop function from firefox directly Thanks, your comment made me look for it!
It takes 20x as much time and work to copy a link, context switch to another app, paste, then, when you're on the desktop, _remember_ to check that shared document, and open the link, than to just press option menu, send tab, choose linux desktop and bam!, it's there as soon as you open your browser the next day.
Firefox can share history and bookmarks with other instances running on other machines even if the other is not running at the time and you don't need to do anything to make it happen once you have set it up.
With an online account that syncs the Firefox profile across all devices. And part of that is the ability to send a link to a specific device, which will then automatically load that URL in a new tab.
The super-annoying thing about that, is that you need a Sync-Server, and an "Identity" server to run this all without having sign in to "Firefox Sync".
The sync-server is trivial to run via docker, but (last time i checked) running the other essential part yourself is (intentionally?) not easy at all.
Mozilla really can’t win can they? They’re the only browser company that even attempts to provide the ability to run your own syncing service, and yet the insinuation is that they’re going out of their way to make it difficult.
to be clear, by "intentionally" I meant, that I could understand, if it were a business decision to allocate less/no developer time to making the "100% self-hosted"-option very attractive/documented/easy. I did not mean to insinuate intentional hurdle-introductions via code, or some-such.
I'm not sure, that can be stated as fact, but for this subtopic (How to run all FXA and syncserver selfhosted) the docs make it sound easy to deploy/run. As expected, after all, the featureset needed isn't huge for "Maintain a list of tabs per browsers per User, authenticated via some backend plugin for the syncserver".
But then you read, that you need to run half a dozen "fxa-something" servers, in addition to the SyncServer. And a clear writeup of those is what I briefly check for every few months, but haven't found yet.
No, I meant, they make it look like you could do this all easily without external clouds, but then the Identity-server, which I cannot imagine to be much more complicated w.r.t. functionality that e.g. a Samba4 AD-DC, is/was(last time i checked) basically undocumented and looked intentionally overbuilt (again, comparing with e.g. Samba4-AD). And not open-source (iirc).
Also, why can't I use a standard Directory Server, instead of their home-built one-off-solution?
Standard directory servers aren't specifically built for end-to-end encryption, while data in Firefox Sync is end-to-end encrypted by default. Firefox Sync must also scale to support the millions of Firefox users who use Mozilla's instance.
Hi, thanks for replying with information. You seem to more than me about the current situation, i'm happy to learn more.
So the above (synstorage-rs_in_container) is now the only required software needed, and now includes the identity-server portion?
I would really like to use the "beam-a-tab-to-some-other-firefox", been a FF user since before it got that name. But i wanted to self-host all parts, and then found some info, that suggested, that 2 parts are needed: the SyncServer, the above open-source thing, and the Identity-server, on which i did not find much info at the time.
Do you have a link to recent-ish write-up of the current situation, that you can validate to be correct-ish?
Thanks again
Also, w.r.t Directory-Servers/Security: Enterprise printers have been able to authenticate Users with SSL/TLS-secured connection for more than a decade. So why not a "syncserver for URLs of open tabs per User"?
I don't think Mozilla has a recent write-up (blog post) about the Sync Server. The most recent one I found is an announcement from 2020, which explains some of Mozilla's motivations:
The syncserver is the trivial part. The less-well-documented web of 5-8 fxa-yxzablgt services (FX-Account-server) that you need to also run is the issue. The docker github readme warns against anything but "messing around" type usage, and the last update there was 7 years ago.
( fxa-content-server
fxa-profile-server
fxa-auth-server
fxa-oauth-server
browserid-verifier
fxa-auth-db-mysql )
I've tried this before, and you're right about it not being easy to follow, at least compared to previous incarnations. The above documentation is for a much older version, and the latest I found is here:
There's a lot of components directly hooked into Google Cloud that also make it difficult in terms of configuration. At some point I think creating an actual user's guide for this would be good for the community interested in self-hosting this on their own.
Among all the other extensions that help guard my privacy and improve QoL, Containers is another great feature that integrates well with FF. I like maintaining profiles for privacy and security, and it helps me navigate certain sites where I have different accounts.
I honestly don’t get the lean toward Chrome — or Safari for that matter. I don’t detect such a big jump in performance that I’d ever consider sacrificing privacy to Google’s or Apple’s end. Brave is a nice browser but in the end I don’t see how I’m better off with it. Maybe I’m too much of a layman and don’t understand benchmarks or just don’t pay attention to latency, but purely from a daily driver perspective, I’ve never been happier with Firefox.
It also integrates extremely tightly into the Apple ecosystem and has always had fantastic performance with very little resource usage. Unlike chrome (although that’s gotten much better).
I'm still using Firefox as my primary browser on desktop and mobile. I have minor complaints, but nothing to make me consider switching to something else.
I've always stuggled with NewPipe, not because of NewPipe itself, but because YouTube and it's algorthim.
People act as if the algorthim is some sort of evil entity, but my viewing habbits follow recommended videos and content aware search. I find sticking to subscriptions and trending videos to be very trapping.
Funny, for me it's the opposite. I'm very glad to have only default un-personalised suggestions, plus my hand-curated subscriptions.
No more watching one chess video and being bombarded with chess content for a month, or watching one harmless satirical video about a politician and being bombarded with videos from the local right-populist party propaganda channel (yes, this has happened to me exactly as described).
Fair enough, one of us may have been lucky/unlucky with how content is served to us.
I have experience the "bombardment" of a suggestion, but I think my subscriptions are vaired enough that a click off that topic straightens it all out.
The same thing annoys me. I do hit the ‘three vertical dots’ menu and select “not interested” and I think that is effective but that takes a few seconds and is a slight nuisance.
Off topic, but I have a love/hate relationship YouTube because of privacy issues, especially my political and spiritual views. Same thing with TikTok, but at least that material is mostly silly so if advertisers can buy information on which silly stuff I watch, that seems slightly less harmful than YouTube.
Long time Firefox user. Using it now. Used it in the early days for features liked tabbed browsing, good performance and Linux support. These days I really mainly use it to be contrarian to avoid using Google for everything. I just want to support a competitor.
Firefox user for about five years and very satisfied with it.
Firefox's multi account containers are very useful - when I started using them a few years ago I very quickly noticed that my Web searches stopped showing up in Amazon or as FB ads, and vice versa.
And just generally not using a browser that is aligned with the interests of a global advertising company seems like a good thing.
It was my primary reason to drop Chrome twelve years ago. Every so often I try Chrome again, but other than a minor speed boost, I see no reason to switch back.
The UI isn’t great, nor is resource usage. These days I don’t bother installing an alternative browser and just use Safari.
We can only speculate about Google's true motivations and there is no reason to believe that it is only that. You can't deny that a privacy focused browser having their funding depend on one of the primary privacy violators on the web is a conflict of interest. Even if Google is not directly pressuring Mozilla to implement/not implement things, Mozilla is still going to be hesitant to piss off Google too much.
Been using FF for about a year now. Absolutely no complains. Before that I used Chrome for many years and really there is nothing I used to do con Chrome that I cannot do on FF.
I did not change because of privacy concerns or whatever, I just wanted to try something else, and FF has been quite alright.
Funny, I've done the opposite. Firefox has always been my default as far as I can remember but for the past several releases it has been heavy in terms of macOS memory. The author is obviously using Windows, but on macOS it is the opposite. Every startup, Firefox seems to throttle my MBP fans and will get sluggish as I keep on using it.
Same for me too (I'm using Windows), I've moved on to Chrome because of annoying performance issues with Firefox. Much better in that area after switching , although I still miss Tree Style Tabs sometimes... (you can't find a replacement for that in Chrome)
Ditch 'em all — Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Amazon (the "evil MAGA"). It's like when folks complain about CNN or Fox News but keep feeding the beast by paying for subscription television: Stop hurting yourself, folks!
That's strange. Chrome says it requires MacOS 10.11, Firefox says it requires MacOS 10.12. Based on that it would appear that Chrome is supporting older versions of MacOS than Firefox.
MacOS 10.11 supports every 2008 and newer Apple computer. There are also patches to get newer versions of MacOS on old hardware. I'm using one patch to get 10.13 running on a 2008 MacBook Pro and it runs great.
I'm always curious about the use case of having so many open tabs. Is there some context you work in where so many tabs are needed? Are you able to find already open tabs, or do you just end up with 50 hacker news tabs because you just open new ones? Do you actually look at each tab, or do you open in the background and never load them? Are you using extensions to make tabs management easier, like tree style tabs?
Once I get past 40 or so I purge old tabs because it makes it hard to find others I'm actively using. Besides, opening a tab again isn't a huge burden.
I questioned it also but I guess tabs have become the replacement for bookmarks. AFAIk both chrome and Firefox have a search function specifically for open tabs so for some it's easier to track and store sites that way, especially since the browser can handle it well enough.
It's not my preference as I like having a clean browser window; too many tabs is distracting and it's harder for me to contextualize what work I'm focusing on (windows + tabs for tasks is my preference), but I can see how it works for some.
Tabs are just more concrete than bookmarks. Tabs aren't things I thought I would want to revisit in the future that I went out of my way to save to a list of such things that I will never visit again.
Rather, tabs are even more useful than that: things I was actually doing adjacent to the thing I was doing right next to it. There's a spatial element to it.
Nothing compares to tabs. Especially not browser history which is one long list of urls I once visited, who cares. Tabs are a list of urls I settled on.
Yeah, using is 40 tabs is weird to me. Here is my strategy, just have current tabs open that are relevant for my computing session.
When I need something else that I visited, I use the history shortcut, search for the word (usually its in the title) and I got the info I need.
Same with bookmarks which I usually tag.
I use an extension called autoTabDiscard (or something close) that unloads webpages that I didn't access the last 10 minutes, or that doesn't load any tab on startup, but the tabs keep existing in both cases. Then you can setup exceptions as well.
But why open so many tabs when you can just search history or bookmark (in FF you can also tag by double clicking the star icon)
Usually I find everything I needed by time, data, keyword, tag, or bookmark in a few seconds at most by opening history or bookmark by keyboard shortcut.
In my case I think I got used to have specific ff windows for specific stuff, and having the tabs "opened" feels quicker for me. But I guess I could get used to and switch to tags and bookmarking as you said.
I have no problem in Firefox with dozens of tabs. Meanwhile my extensionless Chromium install will consume all memory if it is left open for a couple weeks with just two or three tabs.
And why not? Since it works so well on Firefox, it seems like a valid thing to do. You can quickly jump to any opened tab using the % thing in the URL or, if you have tagged bookmarks open, you can search by tag. Basically opened tabs are like a huge brain cache layer of things you want to look at.
yawn I am a declared tab horder, with 500+ tabs open and Firefox shows no sign of any slowdown. Try that with Chromium derivates. In my experience Firefox outclasses Chromium based browsers for such a workload.
Meanwhile I usually have 1000-2000 tabs open in Firefox and it doesn't slow down at all, while Chrome made the whole system slow down to a concerning degree with less than 100 tabs.
I rarely have fewer than double that number of tabs open in Firefox and never have crashes. Maybe it’s crashed on me in the past, but if so I don’t remember it happening.
I fired up Firefox and Chrome on Kubuntu on a 2008 iMac and was surprised to find that Firefox could play 1080p video on YouTube but Chrome kept dropping frames at 480p. It's definitely worth trying both to see which is faster.
I don't know how long I'm using FF, a couple years of Opera ages ago, some time with the early Chrome when FF was a hog but now I'm on FF only on Mac, iOS and Linux. It is perfect for every use case of mine, also it is fantastic on iOS.
There is only one reason why I'm using Chrome: at work we use Google Workshit for Business or whatever it is called now and every Google service has issues anywhere besides Chrome and it is getting worse as the time goes by. Meet is terribly unreliable and since some months simply won't open the calls because of some unknown error, Docs and Sheets cannot be edited, Drive is slow as fuck and sometimes doesn't finish loading the page, Gmail has low res icons and is significantly slower, etc...
How did Chrome become so popular instead of Firefox in the first place? Was it purely Google's advertising of their browser? Brand recognition is so important to typical consumers.
IMHO, performance. Chrome's V8 engine (for running JavaScript) was way ahead of competition when it was released. It took Firefox many years to come close to it.
Disclosure: Happy Firefox user since v1. Sometimes I was jealous of Chrome's speed, sometimes I was weary of Firefox's memory leaks, but never enough to leave the flexibility and customizability the Firefox provided.
EDIT: ... and now Firefox is fast enough, and isn't a memory hog anymore, so I continue to be a very happy Firefox user.
This matches my memory as well. Safari was dramatically faster but it was limited to the Mac (let’s just ignore the Windows version).
Chrome was based on Safari and was far far faster than anything else available on Windows at the time. Not only that but they moved fast and kept improving.
Firefox is great now but it took a long time to catch up.
Good point. V8 gave us Node.js, right? Also I've been out of the loop for a while now about Firefox. My understanding was Firefox had a pretty bad memory leak for a long time. Was that ever resolved?
Edit: Saw your edit. Glad the firefox memory problem was resolved.
That is exactly why I no longer use Firefox. I moved to germany and I don't speak german, so you can imagine browsing without this functionality is impossible.
Firefox is here to stay. Or so I hope. It's my daily driver, and I definitely prefer it over Chromium's uncertain future of curbing ad blockers.
I work in web development, and all our products are built with 100% compatibility with Firefox and it being the priority browser. The rest are secondary including Chromium based ones.
If it works on FF, it works elsewhere (except that steaming pile of crap that Safari is)
Tree style tabs is what brought me over. I have dozens of tabs I want to keep an eye on, without necessarily having them actually open and loaded. Kinda like bookmarks but quickly available. There's no way to arrange that many tabs across the top, so a bit of CSS magic removes the top tabs. With modern screens being so wide it makes sense to just have them vertically, in a tree.
I tried using Firefox on Android for a while but had to switch back to Chrome mainly because Firefox reloads the page if you put it in the background even for a few seconds. This caused real issues when I had to approve a payment on a banking app I'm using - after aproval going back to Firefox the page got refreshed and I had to do it again. Chrome somehow manages to keep the page loaded even with tens of open tabs.
Another thing missing in the Android version is the Print function. Such a basic feature!
I've been using it on the desktop too and there it works ok, no major issues - just the print dialog was much poorer then Chrome's and I had to print from Chrome.
Firefox has a many people rooting for it but not enough people contributing.
Brave strangely decided to go with Chromium rather than Firefox as a base even though Brendan knew Firefox much better. And many other browsers have decided the same Vivaldi, Edge, etc. At this stage I'm afraid Firefox has too many unpolished edges, especially on mobile to match the competition.
I use Firefox in android even though it has too many rough edges.
But I primarily use Bromite and Brave. I have disabled Chrome altogether. Bromite has some rough edges, but Brave is ready to be used as a primary browser. DDG android is nice, too.
I was using Firefox for a kiosk project and netstat/wireshark kept showing connections to Google. I tried to de-Google firefox and it wouldn't run. I was amazed Firefox is so tied to Google. It was disheartening. Ive left Firefox for Brave after being a Firefox evangelist for 15 years. Brave isn't perfect, but it doesn't hide what it really is.
I mainly use Firefox, because of vertical tabs (Tab Center Reborn), Reader, TPRB/NoScript etc BUT sometimes I fall back on Chromium simply because I want to access a webcrapplication that does not work and I do not want to dig how many js and co I have to allow to make it works...
Yes, I can use still FF with different profiles, but I'm simply a bit too lazy for that...
I recently switched to vertical tabs in FF (Sidebery) and it is an incredibly better approach. Why the hell is this not built in to the browser??? It is lame that Mozilla isn't baking this kind of core functionality in. On top of that, they make it a PITA to kill the stupid horizontal tabs.
Supposedly Edge has a vertical tabs option. Chrome doesn't seem to even have a plug in for it.
Perhaps because they are still on very small monitor where horizontal space is precious, Mozilla is FLOSS but definitively not a free project, they act as a corporate one so maybe they have some guidelines written in the era of 1024x760 CRT monitor, I can't tell...
However I'm glad I can have them (hiding the tab-bar also to avoid clutter) since with them I can have many tabs open, seeing a sufficient amount of text to identify any and sparing precious vertical space on my modern normal 19:9 monitor...
I do not use Windows, thankfully, so I do not know Edge, I've looked for something similar for Chromium but finding nothing like you... Honestly I see modern WebVM improperly named browsers for legacy reasons as a necessary evil since unfortunately the modern world is web2.0-centric and I have not much choice for that, but I have not much expectations from both nor not much interests beside the minimum protection and ergonomic of my daily digital life...
As Mozilla loses core dev resources, just like IE, Firefox will go extinct.
It will no longer be able to render modern pages as the web continues to grow increasingly complex.
Hopefully someday there will be a major backed FOSS project that forks web kit and can compete. But there are far too many more important problems out there for something as complex as a modern browser.
My reasons for switching to Firefox were IT related. IT security divisions in some orgs are so paranoid that they won’t allow saving form data or passwords. Or even let sessions persist and will make work hell. They do this for corp standard browser - Google Chrome it is. Firefox saves the day.
I always use Firefox, but there is one annoying thing they do not seem able to fix: The debugger. It often happens to me, that I can step through code, but I simply cannot see the value of variables at all, not by hovering, not by adding them to watched variables. This often happens when working on JupyterLab. And some days it works suddenly. Maybe JupyterLab has become so overheady, that the debugger gives up or something. No idea. When it does not work, I just use GNU Guix as follows:
guix shell ungoogled-chromium -- chromium
(a double minus there)
That runs an instance of ungoogled Chromium without me having to install it in the system packages or so. After the first time the build should be cached until you update your Guix packages and start up quite quickly.
Well, Google Workspace is the best for work environments. Every company I have worked for in the last decade uses GSuite, then Workspace. I am happy running Google’s stuff on my corporate/job laptops, and more privacy preserving options on my own systems.
Even without all great features Firefox has, it is the last bastion of open internet, and this reason alone makes it worth using instead of Chrome and its derivatives.
For many years, Firefox is my development browsers because I thought I would run into perf issue, problematic/weird behaviour more often. But recently I develop on app on Firefox for many months, then test it on Chrome, dang! It's almost 3x slower (rendering lots of dom nodes). So now I've switched to Chrome for development because if it's fast on Chrome it's going to be very fast on Firefox.
I switched to Chrome a while back after years on Firefox because of Firefox's terrible spell checking.
It is quite puzzling because Firefox uses the same open source spell checker that Chrome uses and that is also used by LibreOffice and is the OS provided spell checker on Mac.
Here are some examples of words that it botched that nearly everything else (Chrome, Edge, Safari, LibreOffice, anything on Apple that uses the OS provided spell check) got right:
All of those were reported to their bug tracker item for spell check errors. They do eventually fix those, but the lag was in the one to two year range. As of now they have fixed all of #1 except for initializer, all of #2, none of #3, and none of #4 except for algorithmically, ballistically, implementer, and inductor.
I've used Firefox as my main browser since it was called Phoenix. Never had a reason to change. When I have to use Chrome (as right now on this Chromebook) I'm not a fan because of the lack of a built-in reader view button. That's a critical part of my web usage due to the small fonts used on many sites. The extensions providing this functionality for Chrome just aren't as good IMO.
There is a recent development that might get me to switch to Chrome after this long. Chrome-based browsers will give apps access to the local filesystem. The Firefox team has said you can't do that safely because users don't understand the concept of a file. Using Chrome, I can for instance go to the Logseq website, click the button to give access to that directory, and start writing. No signing in, no need to store my data in the cloud. It's so nice to be able to avoid the cloud - but only using Chrome.
The timing on this article is interesting. My Firefox just "refreshed" itself, turned Pocket back on, turned DNS over HTTPS back on, removed all of my plugins, and then somehow leaked itself up to 10gb of RAM (I'll blame Discord for that I guess).
The browser ecosystem under Google's benevolent dictatorship is languishing.
I had two similar experiences recently. DOH turned itself on a few weeks ago for everyone, I think, out of band from a new release.
And when they released v100, the Ubuntu snap just updated itself automatically and killed a firefox process that I was actively using. (Not sure exactly whose fault that was, but I think we can give Mozilla some of it.) After restarting, I was greeted with that bullshit-purple-neon-themed "100 Thank You's" modal dialog, with no useful information, that had to be acknowledged before continuing.
Thanks for the link! I have been using Safari on macOS and it is not so bad on privacy (please correct me on this if I am wrong) but I will try LibreWolf on my System76 Linux laptop.
Using Firefox all the time ... Brave seems also to be a reasonable alternative. But I just don't like the Dev tools in Chrome ... The FF ones are way better (IMHO).
At the end it seems so that FF isn't blocking a lot of tracking by default while Brave do so. But FF with uBlockOrigin is a good match for privacy.
uBlock Origin can do a lot more than people think too... easy opt-in to JavaScript, cleaning tracking tokens from the URL, and allowing me to block features from websites trying to be a bit too 'social' or 'recommendy'. Fx will be skipping the part of the latest WebManifest that cripples uBlock's ability to block as well.
A very nice feature that is only available in FF and not Chrome is the ability to display subtitles/closed captions in Picture-in-picture (PIP) mode. It's a game changer for me, who uses PIP heavily on my ultrawide monitor to watch Youtube videos.
That said... I now use Chrome for all video calls. Firefox just isn't battery efficient for those. Blame Google, blame Zoom, blame whoever. On EVERY service I've tested (check my post history, complained about this to nauseam)... I can call one browser from the other, and no matter what Firefox on Mac uses at minimum 50% more power according to Apple's power use tool.
Also, any time I take or receive a streaming call on Firefox, my MBP gets very hot. Much hotter than Chrome. Wish someone at Mozilla would take battery usage / CPU usage on Mac more seriously. It's been a problem for years.
I ditched chrome and switched to MS Edge (Not sure if many would have done that). Chrome would heat up my Mac a lot and slows eventually, it always shows up eating lots of power. MS Edge seems lighter so far. Main reason to choose MS Edge (and not firefox) was the outlook web. I don't use outlook client and I use outlook web. Outlook web is slow on chrome, I found it lighter on Edge. I also switched to Bing from Google and found not much difference in day to day searches. However if I need to search address/people/places I go to Google.
These points about edge vs. chrome seem questionable to me given that Microsoft just takes Google’s browser engine for edge . I guess they each do their own optimization, but it’s not like Google is inexperienced in this area.
I really like Firefox but have recently started using Edge a lot more because Firefox is unable to do virtual backgrounds in Google Meet. At first I tried to run 2 browsers, Edge for meetings and Firefox for everything else but that got cumbersome and frustrating. Clicking into a meeting invite would open in the wrong browser (if FF was the default browser) or constantly copying & pasting links to open them in FF.
I was hoping Camo would eventually add in virtual backgrounds to their app but it hasn’t happened yet. Would love to ditch Edge/Chromium.
Question: how good is Edge privacy wise? Microsoft doesn’t make their big money selling advertising targeting services, right? I noticed that Edge is even available on iOS.
Edge is worse for privacy than Chrome. Even edge "private" browsing mode is significantly less private than Chrome's private browsing. It's one of the worst browsers for privacy.
Edge makes lots of calls to Bing for advertising purposes.
"Lighter on system resources" contradicts to my experience: at least on js-heavy websites FF made my laptop notably hotter than Chrome, so on CPU side it didn't feel light at all
I've been using FF as my main browser again since (I think) Quantum, and kept it at version 91 to avoid the constant breaking UI changes. Performance since Quantum is generally good, but for more intense things like video or apps I am going back to Chrome now. FF keeps my CPU 20C higher than Chrome for some simple Youtube videos, which is just ridiculous (Macbook 12, 2017).
For daily non-performance relevant use, I still like the Container feature a lot though, doesn't look like Chrome will get it anytime soon.
Does anyone here know how to change the keyboard shortcut to focus the URL bar on Firefox?
I'd like to map it to Cmd+D instead of Cmd+L since it's (Alt+D) been in my muscle memory since forever. It's the main reason that keeps me from switching. With Chrome I simply assign it to the menu entry File -> Open Location ... but Firefox doesn't have a menu entry for focusing the URL bar (or at least didn't have last time I checked[0]).
[0] Checked again, v100 still doesn't have a menu entry
I've always used "Firefox", since it was called Netscape 2.4. I use Chrome to watch streaming and a few sites that don't work with Firefox.
That said, I might start using Chromium because I want to make some improvements to the browser (to use it as a tool) that would need me to compile the browser myself.
As far as I know, Firefox is no longer just C/C++ but it's migrating, at least partially, to Rust, so it's a moving target.
I switched to Firefox a little over two years ago because of the whole Manifest V3 snafu (and wild and unfounded invocations of "security" to justify it), and never looked back. It works perfectly well for everything -- and I couldn't live without reader mode.
(TBH, I still use Chrome for developing, as I find the dev tools on Chrome easier to use than on FF, and much better looking. But I could also let go of that if needed be.)
The feature I use most is Firefox Sync and the ability to not only send browser tabs to instances of Firefox running on other machines but also to look at and load tabs from another machine, even when it is offline.
Routinely I'll be reading something on my laptop in the evening and want to reference it from my Dev VM the next day. With Sync I can just pull up the list of open tabs on my laptop that's asleep and retrieve the URL.
One of the reasons I've been reluctant to go back to FF is the lack of support for users (that Chrome). I like to set up a Chrome user (effectively a new instance of the browser) for each project / client. Each gets ends up with its own password manager, history, bookmarks, etc.
Having users helps me silo things abd stay organized. I can also have multiple users' browsers open at the same time.
I have been using FF on desktop as my primary browser for many years and continue doing so but I switched to Kiwi Browser on mobile since FF Mobile made a "major update" and removed about:config and reduced the amount of extensions available for mobile. Kiwi Browser is a Chromium fork with full extension support. It is not perfect but it is currently the best mobile option for me.
I have tried doing the several times in past because of chromes arrogant and monopoly like attitude on forcing feature addition or removal
But browsing works better and faster in chrome and most consumer base blindly use chrome
If you want to build a extension with a user base you will have to use chrome
If you want your website to work properly it must satisfy chrome first
I've been using Firefox on all my devices for years now, and I am never stopping. Google sells you ads: Chrome is how Google shows you ads and gets your data.
If you believe in a privacy respecting, open web where users own their own devices then you have choices other then Firefox - but nobody should be using Chrome.
It is doing its job. The media query for your theme is a point of data for fingerprinting, so disabling it is a good thing.
However, it would be nice to have a way to select which measures should be applied, so you can costumise it to your preference.
I actively tried to switch to Firefox this year, but couldn't due to issues with saving tabs on sudden shutdown. Due to a separate issue, my apple laptop was crashing and restarting a couple times a week. Several times Firefox was not able to restore the browsing session, and I lost all of my tabs :(
All of the browsers (including all of the Trident based ones) have had this issue for me. Most of my browser hopping in the past was driven by losing a session, being unable to recover it, and moving on to the next browser hoping it is more stable now.
Nowadays I aggressively save to bookmarks. Still a lot of tabs open, though.
Ability to customize browser UI should not be overlooked either, especially in the day when application rarely allow user to rearrange controls in toolbar. And if you want to go deeper there still is "userChrome.css" file, where you can change how Firefox UI looks by editing simple CSS file.
I regularly use Chromium and Firefox on an older/slower laptop, and Firefox seems much more restrained in memory usage. Chromium frequently consumes all available memory and swap, and brings the whole system to a crawl, and I never really see that behavior with Firefox.
Anything has more privacy than a google product. Firefox/mozilla at least have products adjacent to their browser so its believable they aren't only sustaining by selling peoples personal information to the nearest data broker.
Killer feature for me, why I migrated to FF recently - add blocking in mobile. When I migrated to FF on mobile there was no choice but to migrate to FF on desktop. And I don't regret anything after doing that.
Although with the removal of old extensions Firefox has lost most of its customizability. I really wish they kept those around. Even if they came with scary warnings and would break frequently because only a few APIs were kept stable.
Those old XUL/XPCOM extensions weren't really safe, and the only big loss was UI manipulation, which was kind of stupid anyway, and not at all portable.
Hence the "scary warnings". I don't think UI manipulation is stupid, I don't believe that Mozilla makes the best UI and extensions can definitely improve on it for many more specific use cases. Portability is also nice but not everything needs to be widely portable, I would rather have a nice feature in Firefox than not having it because it wasn't portable across browsers.
To be clear I am hugely in favour of WebExtensions. I am glad that they were implemented and I think that they should be the recommended API. But I would love to still have the full-power backdoor for the extensions that are no loner possible. For example I maintained VimFx for about a year after they stopped officially supporting these extensions and it was fine. The biggest pain wasn't actually keeping up with the internal API changes, it was the fact that it wasn't allowed in addons.mozilla.org anymore and there is no good way to distribute self-signed or third-part signed extensions.
Well, for a start e.g. mass downloaders have become relatively useless because they can't download to outside of the OS downloads directory without resorting to weird hacks, can no longer intelligently handle already existing files, etc.
Then user scripts no longer being able to live normally on the file system (and therefore being editable outside of whatever limited UI the extension can provide, being easily searchable) are another victim of webextensions.
I'm using Mozilla Firefox, but it annoys me how it has no support for what is probably the least bad digital document format : MHTML = EML... even though Mozilla Thunderbird does support it !
Haha very similarly, at some point I tried switching to chrome, and went back to ff because I could remove the x button on tabs. for ff there was tabmixplus back then.
I have only one issue with Firefox - Google Streetview is sluggish for GeoGuessr use. Otherwise it is my default browser on my Linux box. On Macbook Safari is still the best.
I wish LibreWolf supported Firefox Sync. I appreciate how they removed Firefox's sell-out advertising, promotions for Mozilla Corporation products, and telemetry by default. But I couldn't get sync to work; it's my main blocker from using it as my daily driver. (Some smaller annoyances as a developer are not having about:crashes to examine, debug, and upload coredumps on an opt-in basis, and Firefox Profiler not having LibreWolf's C++ symbols.)
Running LibreWolf on Windows 7 on an older machine, with ublock0 set to default-deny JS for performance reasons. I tried enabling Firefox Sync in about:preferences#librewolf, visiting the settings, and logging in again. This time I got further, when I logged in I got asked for 2FA, but it logged into accounts.firefox.com but not the browser.
When I restarted LibreWolf, a Tools -> Sign In option appeared, but https://accounts.firefox.com/signin?action=email&service=syn... asked for the password of a now-removed email (which is now neither a primary nor secondary email, why is it still in Firefox's servers?!) under the same account. Entering my password said that I should use my primary email again, and selecting "Use a different account", entering my email and password, and another 2FA did not sign into sync (Tools still says "Sign in", as did about:preferences#sync). Logging in a third time emailed me instead of asking for a 2FA code, but yet again did not sign into my browser.
This accounts.firefox.com bug scares me; it reminds me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30169435. At this point, I think I'm going to delete and recreate my Firefox account to remove all traces of my old email.
EDIT: I tried deleting my Firefox account, but realized it would remove my Fenix addon collections too. I tried signing into addons.mozilla.org... and again saw my removed email on the login screen.
I recently switched to LibreWolf too where the privacy setting involve opting in to keeping instead of destroying cookies, WebGL support, etc. I know that when upstream Fx pushes a new feature, the LibreWolf team will choose the strict privacy option as the default.
Mozilla is a joke when it comes to privacy and being dependent of Google's money and it is quite a funny sight to see that after 14 years [0] of trying to figure a way to make money after 'promising' to not rely on Google, they still can't and continue to aid their surveillance capitalism
With that, I have heard all the (very weak) reasons listed in this article and at this point, you might as well use Brave browser since everything listed here is already implemented by them.
Firefox (really) has no killer features and the chronic decrease in users shows that it is only going down as Edge has already over taken it. [1][2][3]
Firefox is lacking many major enterprise controls making it unsuitable for many large companies. An example of this is the lack of ability for administrators to apply additional restrictions on the domains specific extensions can access. Other basic enterprise features that are missing are the inability to force restarts when updates are available.
I tried to switch to Firefox, is almost one year that I've tried but it just does not work for me. I can't express what it might be in words, but the experience is just worse than Chrome.
I wonder why there are sites in which the reader mode is not even available. I can't think of any right now but it happens with relative frequency to be annoying.
Because Reader Mode is using heuristics to fetch the content of the article, and that can fail if the article is weirdly formatted in HTML. You can read more about this on the repo for Mozilla's Readability, which is what Firefox uses under the hood: https://github.com/mozilla/readability
I wouldn't touch Edge because I still remember the days when IE was dominating the market. As much as I despise Google being the one now, I do not miss those days and do not trust Microsoft to do anything good if they were in this position again.
So you can make fun of people concerned about privacy, but history proved there's a lot more concerns to have regarding Microsoft
I remember those times too, completely different group of management, and the way they've done business in the last near decade, has also been very different. Some throwbacks, but on the whole, vastly different. I've been watching, you clearly haven't. And aside from that, they're never going to be in the "same position", the market is entirety different.
I haven't really tried using Edge for general use, but I do use it whenever I want text-to-speech. That's a lot better in Edge than other options I've tried.
Ironically the reason why Google supports Firefox financially (mainly with web search deals) might be to make a competitor float (barely) alive so they don't need to get sued by antitrust/monopoly issues in the future.
While I don’t share the aversion toward Mozilla, I do think it a strange company.
For some reason their focus seems directed towards everything that’s specifically not Firefox or browser related. Sort of if Microsoft forgot that they own Windows.
Most chromium hit pieces come across as evangelical and this one is no exception.
From my personal perspective, Firefox gets the job done but Chromium is undoubtedly the better browser. On desktop and mobile, the difference is felt even more on mobile.
Every time I found an obvious bug or got an unpolished experience on Firefox, I hated it even more.
Whatever data the author thinks they are hiding away from Google, they are (un)knowingly giving it to Mozilla. Even worse if they are using Google to search.
Eg I type in "Ed"? It shows the URL to my "editions in solr" GitHub issues I've been working on recently. I vaguely recall an article I read months ago on CSS grid? I type "grid guide" and bam it's the first suggestion. The spreadsheet I made about user languages? "sheets lang". That vague API I can never remember the parameters to? Just type "/query.json?" And I get all my previous requests as examples!
I find Chrome's address bar has been way less reliable and much more frequently just gives me Google autocomplete suggestions -- even when I know that I visited a URL recently that should match!