Yesterday I downloaded Firefox on my 2018 Macbook because Chrome slowed the thing down to an absolute crawl.
What. A. Difference! Firefox is so snappy, and at one point it was using less CPU than iTerm2. Mozilla has received a lot of crapped these past years, as did Firefox, but throughout my life this software has been free and open for me to use. I thank the contributors a lot for it.
That's not really the car with Firefox in my experience that is an issue that's common to chrome (and as such electron etc...). I haven't refreshed my Firefox in probably 5+ years and it's very snappy despite me having a lot of extensions installed.
There does seem to be some internal limit to the history size though. My installation is also more than 5 years old, but I can't browse back more than ~6 months.
I have not experienced a noticable slow down over the last ten years of using Firefox, even on modest hardware from from the early 2010's.
That said, this year I enabled clearing the browsing history and cache every time I close Firefox, which keeps my address bar clutter free and hyper responsive. Searching trough my bookmarks is instant! It keeps the browser lean and clean.
I'm really looking forward to seeing this improve.
[I'm also hoping that things like this and the Common Voice project might eventually lead to an open / privacy respecting Mozilla voice asistant service. Maybe that's just optimism, who knows?]
The most recent version of the plugin seems broken, so I had to revert to a previous version. Using this plugin for a few months now, and it works quite well.
when was the last time you tried them? the official mozilla one is certainly still behind chrome's, but it's leagues better than what was available on ff in the past
I would say though, that twitch is one of the worst offenders in terms of bloat, of all websites I have ever visited, so I guess, if one visits it with not a good machine and allows all the bloat to load, it can make for a crap user experience.
1. Containers! This is one of the biggest reasons to stick with Firefox. Along with the multi-account containers extension, you can restrict opening of specific domains to specific containers. Gives a huge privacy boost.
Sidebery[0] and Tree Style Tab[1] are excellent reasons to stay with Firefox (or any of its derivatives).
> Containers! This is one of the biggest reasons to stick with Firefox.
Too bad you still can't chose what add-ons that should run in a certain container. In that sense it is more limited than profiles in Firefox (or Chrome). Speaking of containers, Temporary Containers[2] is a cool add-on too. Not recommended[3] though...
The "recommended extensions" vetting process is another excellent reason to stick with Firefox.
>Recommended extensions differ from other extensions that are regularly reviewed by Firefox staff in that they are curated extensions that meet the highest standards of security, functionality, and user experience. Firefox staff thoroughly evaluate each extension before it receives Recommended status.
> Too bad you still can't chose what add-ons that should run in a certain container.
Using the same settings, including extensions, is why I use containers.
Creating several containers is something that I can do in under a minute. If I decided to add an extension, it applies to all containers. Creating a single profile takes several minutes. Maintenance is also a concern, since the configuration of those profiles will diverge unless I am conscientious about updating them all at the same time.
Profiles and containers serve different purposes and can be used in parallel. The main problem with Firefox lays in the difficulty in accessing profiles.
>Sidebery[0] and Tree Style Tab[1] are excellent reasons to stay with Firefox (or any of its derivatives).
I'm using Sideberry (moved from TST) on FF and i think it's good but Edge has great native vertical tabs implementation which doesn't require any "advanced" configuration to make it work.
Yeah, even though I use TST on Firefox, the native vertical tab feature on Edge feels snappier and lighter to use probably because it's a native feature. Even if it lacks tree style tabs, Edge did a nice job with its vertical tabs and tab groups.
Can I ask how you use Sidebery and Tree Style Tab? I found that they both create a panel on the left side of screen and will stay there forever, which reduces the space for web content. The left panel also makes my small laptop screen look even smaller.
Sidebery and Tree Style Tabs make sense when used on a display with decent screen real estate when the viewport width is significantly higher than viewport height. I usually have more than 250 tabs open at a time which would be impossible to navigate without these vertical tree tab extensions.
Though it depends on how you use your screen: if you like to tile windows horizontally, it takes more of your space. Tree Style Tab has a keyboard shortcut, F1 by default, to toggle its sidebar panel, and when I’m tiling side-by-side I often use it to close the tab bar for the moment. I’ve been surprised just how many pages are at least a little broken at 618px wide (what I get for two windows side-by-side, with the sidebar open)—I expected it to be rare, but while it’s not the norm, it’s hardly rare.
I've tried Sideberry and TST, but tend to prefer Simple Tab Groups[0] to either of them. The advantage is that STG reduces the clutter of tabs on the top-pane and of course allows one to group them and move them about. Sure, Sideberry allows you to group them and it shows the grouping in the side-pane, but all the tabs still show up on the top-pane.
Temporary Containers is the best extension for Firefox.
Every new tab is its own separate container. I configured it so Ctrl + clicking a link will open a tab in the same container, should I need this for "traditional browsing" where I want to share a session/cookies.
I couldn't enumerate for you all the things isolated to a container; I am no expert. However, I believe first-party isolation only concerns itself with cookies.
IIRC cache is also isolated, I can't seem to find the blog post now, but as I remember mozilla essentially said that temporary containers are replaced by their site isolation.
So FPI would cover the common need, to completely isolate 1 site from another. Containers would still be applicable if you wanted to maintain separate sessions to the same site. Like viewing a site without logging in, and in another tab doing so.
which is a rebranded mullvad. mullvad is pretty cool (doesn't require any private info for creating an account or paying, and they recently disabled recurring payments so they don't need to store credit card info, even though this has a financial hit to the company https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2022/6/20/were-removing-the-opti...)
I think I should have said "my own proxy" rather than wireguard. I just happen to access it via wireguard. Though I did want to point out that any vpn proxy would work.
The Multi Account Containers extension has an Advanced proxy settings at the bottom when you go in to Manager Containers. I have a go based socks proxy running on docker somewhere. I enter the details for that there. Syntax is socks://ip:port .
I have two socks implementations installed. I A/B test them sometimes but they seem to be basically equivalent in terms of performance.
Note: If you're using a chromium based browser you can use the excellent SwitchyOmega plugin to do this much easier and with more functionality. No containers of course.
I am on a laptop so I don't have an extra screen to put video on, but every now and then I will have something playing in the background. It's nice to be able to have a small view of it in the corner while working.
This is a big one I don't see mentioned often. Chrome requires a separate extension for PiP, it doesn't support multiple PiP windows, you can't freely resize them, there's less controls on the pop-up, etc.
Agreed, containers are great. I love them and wish they were a standard feature across browsers. Still some room for improvement though. It would be nice if the containers acted like an entirely different instance of a browser, with different settings, history, extensions, etc. With the current design it's still possible to accidently leaked details across containers by visiting something in the wrong one if you havent set up exclusive browsing for a particular site, and history is shared across containers. Would be nice to be able to export container settings as well as a lot of work can go into setting them up.
If you use Firefox profiles regularly, you might enjoy the Profile Switcher for Firefox add-on, which provides a Chrome-like interface for loading and managing profiles in Firefox:
Considering Thunderbird still doesn't support a multi-line message list after 19 years[1], if you need that feature I suggest using the addon linked earlier because Mozilla does not move quickly.
I've stated this so many times for decades now. Profile support is something that I would literally pay towards funding support but there isnt a good way of setting up a bounty which I'll pay £100 into each month until the bounty is large enough to motivate someone to do it.
My understanding is that uMatrix is a bit different. By default, it will block just about all third-party requests. It can sometimes be a pain to manage, in particular for sites with many redirects and an absurd number of domains. I'm thinking Azure/Office365.
It's not a full replacement for uBO either because it won't attempt to do anything fancy to block ads specifically.
However, uMatrix is no longer maintained. Its GitHub page [0] says the project has been archived. I'm still using it, don't know whether there are any risks in doing so.
Not everyone will like it, but uMatrix comes with more fine-grained control, and the defaults are set to block all third-party and cross-site loads, including static content hosted on other domains. So a lot of sites will break by default, and you've to go enable anything that you actually want. uBlock on the other hand will only block the (list) filters you've enabled.
I don't recommend using dynamic filters because they completely override any matching static filters. Makes the point of filter lists useless, if uBo had a way to set dynamic filters to a lower priority than static they might actually be useful. At the moment the only way I found to replicate uMatrix was to use static filters to block by default on a per domain basis and whitelist domains per request type. It is a lot more work so I only do so for sites with user generated content (e.g. hn or reddit) that have links to who knows where that you might want to prevent from loading.
I certainly don't have a problem with it being 'done', I just had 'move to nuTensor' on my mental to-do list just for the potential security/API fixes, ensuring it remains available etc.
The new offline translations feature is also a great addition - it is not as good as Google Translate, but it is very good, and it is offline and completely local.
They've been developing a (first-party) extension that already supports about a dozen languages and does translations completely client-side: https://browser.mt/
I'm assuming it's gonna merge into Firefox once they're satisfied with it.
Isn't this on uBlock? I still get the occasional report from Brave/uBlock users when I've accidentally included "ad" in a class name or ID, but I really don't believe that I should be working around that 100% of the time. If uBlock breaks the site, the problem is uBlock.
No. A lot of sites have ad tracking added to their app bundles which aren't wrapped in a try/catch block.
The tracking code is usually initialized first, before the rest of the code in the app bundle. So if the network request fails due to ad blocking, the tracking code breaks. And if it isn't caught, the rest of the code doesn't load.
Not the op but the point was for the benefit of the site dev. I'm sure you can understand that I would rather keep uBlock on than diagnose why it may have broken on your site.
While you may be completely trustworthy, there is simply no way to know; I'll just click through.
They do... Another thing is that they proxy analytics/ad traffic through their own servers to circumvent ad blockers. There are even fully fledged pre-built services just for this, see DataUnlocker.
No. Mozilla doesn't deserve this. They are purposely making Firefox worse with each stupid update. I'm not going to tell someone to use something that I think it sucks.
I have been using FF+uBlockO for years now as my primary browser and I have zero complaints; everything is fast and smooth; reader mode is essential and works on most text-heavy sites (substack breaks it sometimes).
In general, I don't find any noticeable performance issues using ubo on Chrome, but again I'm the "install it and forget it" type.
I do encountered a weird specific performance bug that is when cosmetic filtering is enabled, some heavy sites become very lagging, even affecting typing [1][2]. It also happens with other ad blockers. Unfortunately the author was unable to reproduce it.
It's great to see Fx capabilities optimized for instead of trying to reach a common denominator. Firefox's forks offer some of the best privacy options (Tor, LibreWolf) too for the uBlock audience. Hopefully this can help shepherd folks back to Gecko as I know a many have little interest in browsing without adblock.
Unfortunately a great deal of the web works best on chromium. I use FF every day for reasons such as TFA, but it's getting harder and harder. On the same (old-ish) machine Brave runs rings around FF in basic web performance.
Care to give any examples? I am not having any issues at all. Not only that, but I don't feel like FF is getting in my way somehow and that I should try a different browser.
Discord is broken on Firefox. It's fast when you restart it, but over a few days it turns into a slog to the point where if you click on a different channel, it takes over 20 seconds sometimes to load. Then when you type a message, you can only type about 5 characters before it locks up for another 20 seconds.
If you look on the mozilla bugtracker, there are many people having this same issue
If you would like to write home about this Discord problem, please consider filing Bugzilla bug report with a memory log from Firefox’s about:memory page and a performance profile using the Firefox Profiler:
MS Teams video and voice doesn't work at all in Firefox. Google "gadgets" don't work in mobile Firefox unless you spoof the user agent. There are also a handful of other sites I've run into where certain functionality only works in chrome based browsers. Sometimes, spoofing the user agent is enough to get it working in firefox.
> MS Teams video and voice doesn't work at all in Firefox
Actually, I noticed voice started working last month. I could see the video but not send mine, but it might in the future.
Please don't force Teams on anybody though, this is unacceptable in 2022 for a company like Microsoft when its alternatives have been working in Firefox for years.
It didn't work at all in Chromium too, because apparently it relied on the Widevine DRM on Chrome (?!). That's nuts. That's bullshit. If you don't have it, it fails with an obscure error message like "Unable to join the conference" without any reason. Good luck guessing why.
If video and sound don’t work in firefox it sounds more like a microsoft issue than a firefox issue. Webcam and Microphone APIs are following the standard and are well documented on MDN.
Sounds like user agent / window.navigator sniffing in order to block the browser.
Oh, it's absolutely Microsoft's fault. In this case they are using (or at least were) pre-standard chrome specific apis.
The problem isn't that Firefox is bad. It's that many site are designed specifically for chrome, and they don't bother testing against Firefox. And for the average user, all they really notice is thay some sites don't work in Firefox.
Which I what many here who worked through the IE dominance have been warning against - yet the only thing we hear is that other browsers are the “new IE”.
It's not. That doesn't change the fact that some sites work better on chrome. Just like some sites worked best in IE, back when that was the dominant browser.
My bank's internet banking page to pay multiple beneficiaries pages is a jumbled mess in Firefox. I haven't bothered to check why but I am guessing it's some grid layout issue. I did write to bank highlighting the issue. It's been over a year and still issue persists so I just switch to Chromium for internet banking.
I do have some sites which are consistently slower on Firefox than on Chrome. Chrome (and Edge) just feel all-round snappier (at least when "new", ie with few tabs open). The difference is not enough for me to switch my daily driver, though.
Things that come to mind that I use often:
* AWS console
* Google Maps
* Confluence
Hell, even the front page of Hacker News loads a bit faster on Chromium than on Firefox. Sure, the difference is negligible in absolute terms, but still. I get around 5-600 ms for Chromium, and around 8-900 for Firefox. Both running on X11/Linux 5.19-zen on a Ryzen 5650U with 32 GB of RAM.
I haven't used Chrome intensively in a long while, but I seem to me remember at the time (many years ago, on a Mac) it would slow to a crawl after a few days with many open tabs. I don't have any such issue with Firefox on Linux.
I just tried on my mobile. Chrome is much slower. Firefox is sub second, while chrome was a noticeable wait. I actually checked if I didn't have connection issues and opened a new private tab in Firefox to check.
Google Maps, I can confirm. It works, but it's noticably slow on Firefox. Tiles appear a tab bit slower, and street view navigation takes a fraction of a second to respond. It didn't stop me from using Firefox, but I can absolutely understand if someone finds it as a deal breaker if they use Google maps often.
Well I can't say I have ever experienced performance quite that bad myself. On my i7-2700K desktop I'm only seeing about 6s-7s each. Kind of hard to tell when maps is really finished loading though.
I share the experience with Maps, though I never see it these days as the G gets its own ungoogled-chromium sandbox and don't get to play with other domains here anyway.
For me Twitch, Netflix, a bunch of my banking websites and random others all have issues in Firefox. For twitch and Netflix it’s massive cpu spikes and battery loss, for the others typically just a complete failure to load properly.
My experience is the same - I'm mostly Max/Linux and have issues on both but the times I have used FF Windows it has actually seemed decent on battery etc
Are you running uBlock Origin? As when a site fails to load properly for me it's usually requires loading stuff I have blocked, unblocking it fixes the issue.
Indeed and almost always for that reason. It's more the performance that hurts me, perhaps my 'many tabs' style is better handled with the chromium process model.
I have Firefox containers and Simple Tab Groups extension installed, which keeps my tabs in the browser, but automatically suspends them when they are not visible. This was my sweet spot for tabs, because I do not have to bookmark them permanently, and I can instantly switch to my "workspace" anytime.
I experience the opposite of you with Chrome struggling with several tabs.
At around 30 tabs, Chrome absolutely throttles my moderately powerful 8 core 16 thread CPU laptop with 24GB RAM, while Firefox has no issues with it. Firefox doesn't even sweat even if I have those tabs open with Spotify and Gmail, one that presumably uses hardware DRM decryption, and the other websockets for email and chat, plus whatever tracking Google wants to do.
A friend of mine has over 3,000 open in a vanilla Firefox at this very moment. Firefox restores the tabs on each restart without loading them and suspends inactive tabs automatically.
Curious if that's still the case if you disguised the User Agent as Chrome. I used to have to do that on FF mobile to make any of the Google products usable.
Probably depends on device people are using. I'm using FF on the M1 Macbook and it runs extremely fast but on a more limited device the difference may be noticeable.
They obviously can. But why would you expect anything good to come out of this? I don't think any government entity is particularly known for writing excellent consumer software, nor would I want my tax dollars to be spend on such a project that is better provided by the private sector.
(Not literally my tax dollars, since I don't live in the EU any longer.)
More realistically, the EU could give some money to Mozilla (or similar) to make Firefox better.
That would get over my first objection of them likely being incompetent by themselves.
Government entities aren't any good at building almost anything, but that's why they contract work out to private companies. I wouldn't expect EU government employees to work directly on FF, but rather for it to be contracted out to some EU company or companies.
The reason for forking rather than throwing money at Mozilla is that Mozilla doesn't seem to be doing a great job of managing themselves. Maybe they need some competition. Also, Mozilla is an American company; the EU would naturally want to give money to an EU company that hires EU citizens to do such high-value, high-paid work, not send that money to the US. Plus, they can get a lot more software talent for their Euro in the EU (esp. eastern EU) than in America.
> Government entities aren't any good at building almost anything, but that's why they contract work out to private companies. I wouldn't expect EU government employees to work directly on FF, but rather for it to be contracted out to some EU company or companies.
I skimmed over the issue here: my more precise point is that government entities generally aren't good at building things when they outsource the actual building, either.
(Some people even go so far as claiming that outsourced government projects are worse than in-house ones.)
> The reason for forking rather than throwing money at Mozilla is that Mozilla doesn't seem to be doing a great job of managing themselves.
That might be true. Or perhaps they just have different priorities, and the EU can specifically pay them to do some work on EU priorities?
> Also, Mozilla is an American company; the EU would naturally want to give money to an EU company that hires EU citizens to do such high-value, high-paid work, not send that money to the US.
That's, alas, true from a political point of view. But not from a macroeconomic economic point of view, or just getting bang-for-your-buck.
> Plus, they can get a lot more software talent for their Euro in the EU (esp. eastern EU) than in America.
Mozilla can already hire from anywhere, too, can't they?
In any case, I already mentioned in my comment that the EU can pay someone other than Mozilla. The point I wanted to make is that the EU should not fork Firefox, but rather try to get their favourite contributions upstreamed, if possible.
In any case, I still think it would be a waste of taxpayer money for the EU to pick winners (ie award the project to someone). Instead they should focus on streamlining bureaucracies and regulation etc so that private entities (companies, or foundations or otherwise) that provide what people want (software or otherwise) can flourish in the EU.
I don't feel that your comment respects the government funded origins of much of our technology. DARPA has quite an impact.
Private companies tend to settle into local-maxima, it takes a lot of cash to explore outside those bounds, i.e. apollo, ITER.
Regardless, control of the software and distribution channels that govern the effective online life of about a billion people is power, and if the shoe were on the other foot I'd bet there'd be USGov investment to rebalance it.
The absolute impact of DARPA (nor sending a clown to the moon or ITER) doesn't say anything about whether the money was well spent. Opportunity costs are a thing.
To bring up another example: in our timeline, government-funded militaries were an earlier driver of electronic computing.
But IBM was hot on their heels. Similarly Konrad Zuse was starting to build computers in Germany.
If there hadn't been a war to divert so many resources globally from the private sector into the militaries, these business driven efforts would have started the early computer age at about the same time (perhaps earlier even?). At no cost to the taxpayer.
>Mozilla can already hire from anywhere, too, can't they?
No, not that I'm aware of. Sure, they can hire someone from EU and fly them to the US to work, but I'm not aware of them having offices in the EU. Why would the EU want to pay for EU devs to be flown to the US and paid inflated US salaries, instead of just keeping that talent at home?
>In any case, I already mentioned in my comment that the EU can pay someone other than Mozilla. The point I wanted to make is that the EU should not fork Firefox, but rather try to get their favourite contributions upstreamed, if possible.
That's impossible. Any time you have a different entity working on a software project, it becomes forked. So either you just keep the internal fork and upstream as much as you can, and hope that the parent org takes these submissions, or you release your fork publicly if the parent org isn't cooperative enough. Either way, it's a fork. Quite simply, every time you clone a git repo, it's a fork.
Anyway, sure, they should try to get their contributions upstreamed, but what if Mozilla is recalcitrant? The EU would be correct to release their own version for EU use.
>In any case, I still think it would be a waste of taxpayer money for the EU to pick winners (ie award the project to someone). Instead they should focus on streamlining bureaucracies and regulation etc so that private entities (companies, or foundations or otherwise) that provide what people want (software or otherwise) can flourish in the EU.
So, just let Google own the browser market? I don't see how this is useful or productive. Streamlining regulations isn't going to magically make it economically feasible for some start-up to somehow make money making a web browser.
The EU already invested €3M for client-side translations, so I'm sure they can: https://browser.mt/
> The Bergamot Project Consortium is coordinated by the University of Edinburgh with partners Charles University in Prague, the University of Sheffield, University of Tartu, and Mozilla. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 825303.
The plugin basically kills tabs if you are not using them, after you click on them they get restored and forms get refilled. There is also a way to exclude websites, but I have not yet found a site breaks.
I've found Brave without its bells and whistles to be really great compared to FF. On macOS, FF was causing heat problems (M1 Pro) but Brave has been consistently using half CPU.
My mac and Linux laptop setup are ultimately what made me give up on FF. The heat and battery aren’t a consideration on desktops really but chrome et al really shines on battery comparatively
Do we yet know what the status of uBlock or a uBlock fork for Manifest V3 is? I know it won't be able to have all the same features, but it certainly will be doable, but have the authors fully set their minds up about not converting their extension? Has anyone decided to fork it and do it?
I don't really care about all the fight about Chrome vs Firefox, I just want to know if someone will port uBlock to MV3.
The fact that I don't want to partake in childish browser wars is the reason Chrome has larger user share?
Apple has the exact same limitation on Safari yet no one claims "Apple forced Declarative API down people's throat" and actually praise them for the privacy it brings.
I'm perfectly fine with extensions not being able to snoop of every single request I make. It's fine for you to disagree. If anything, it sounds like people here trying to shove their preference of Firefox down everyone's throat.
> I just want to know if someone will port uBlock to MV3.
What's the point in porting uBlock to MV3 if it means neutering it? You already have numerous other ad blockers which don't go all the way and have stuff like "acceptable" ads.
How is it neutering it? Can you specifically list the features that would not be possible under MV3, and how commonly used said features are by the average people who install the extension and don't customize anything?
You can follow the issue tracker for any progress related to MV3 development of uBO but from what I can see, there isn't much interest yet in porting uBO to MV3 because it's not worth it.
This EFF article also goes into details about why MV3 is harmful for adblockers.
That comment you link is from 2019, and Google has made many substantial changes to MV3 since in response to the feedback. It obviously still doesn't give as much power as WebRequest API, but they still addressed many complaints and increased a lot of the limits.
The EFF article is pretty recent and it doesn't look good either. I haven't come across ongoing work for a port of uBO to MV3. If there isn't, that says a lot as well.
Whatever MV3 may offer, I for one do not want adblockers to be compromised. If anything, they should be more powerful rather than less. Hypothetically and optimistically speaking, even if a MV3 port of uBO offers 80% of the current functionally, it would still be detrimental for browsing the "modern" web.
Personally I'm not going to worry about switching until the old API is deprecated, but it should be very simple to write an adblocker for Manifest v3. You could put together an MVP by plugging EasyList into the new APIs in probably ten minutes. Obviously a fully-featured blocker requires a lot more time than that though.
I'd actually expect a small performance increase because the browser is preloading the block list, rather than querying it every time.
uBlock does provide some other feature like disabling network pre-fetching, and I'm not sure if those can be fully replicated. But I tend to prefer the performance improvement of pre-fetching anyway.
Surprised about Tor Browser though - it's basically Firefox ESR with some tweaks with the Tor package bundled (that can be deleted). Performance should have been the same. And since they also prioritise privacy (more than Mozilla) I figured it is a better bet for uBlock Origin - wonder which tweak causes that slight difference between it and Firefox?
Also, what about the new Orion (Beta) browser based on Safari / WebKit? If I remember right, they claimed they had made changes to WebKit to support uBlock Origin better and properly than either Safari or Chrome.
I believe that test was taken after CNAME-based blocking became available in Firefox but before it made its way to Tor browser (which, at least at the time, was based on Firefox ESR). I suspect a modern run of the test would show the browsers as similar.
I wonder if it's something like the default settings of Tor Browser already prevent some ads that uBO also would have blocked, so that just makes the numbers worse for uBO, even if the user isn't seeing any more ads.
Only other theories I can come up with would be Tor Browser interfering with uBO functioning optimally, or its version of FF not being new enough to work optimally with uBO.
On firefox nightly for Android, you can create an addon collection that will allow you to add uMatrix to the available addons. I've been using firefox nightly on Android for years without any noticeable downsides.
"Warning: Nightly is an unstable testing and development platform. By default, Firefox Nightly automatically sends data to Mozilla - and sometimes our partners - to help us handle problems and try ideas. Learn what is shared: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/#pre-release"
Easy to block this with NetGuard.
The "For Developers" schtick has really become pathetic. I am not a "developer". I am a user who does not care for sending free data to "tech" companies.
Perhaps Mozilla's partners can be sold the idea that Mozilla is only allowing "developers" to potentially have more control over surreptitious data collection, e.g., by using "add-ons", and the assumption by those partnering with Mozilla is that "developers" are all on the side of online advertising. Not quite.
Whatever the reasons for it may be, the entire "developer" vs "user" distinction has become absurd. It assumes (incorrectly) there are no people who know how to build, program and use computers who are not "developers". Not everyone wants to apply their computer know-how to profit from online advertising and associated surveillance.
Firefox on iOS is just UI chrome around webview. I use it because it syncs my tabs and bookmarks, but I don't expect any enhanced privacy over what Safari mobile offers.
It does work great, but for whatever reason, running Firefox on my Linux desktop eventually leads to CPU lockups and crashes. Using Chrome doesn't. I can't pinpoint what would be causing the issue, but it happens multiple times per day with Firefox. Even on a fresh install.
It's the CPU. I have NVIDIA and have tried both drivers. I can't pin down the cause or recreate it on demand, but it's always when I'm running Firefox. It's happening at least once per day now, which is frustrating, but I've sort of just accepted it after reinstalling Firefox, updating/switching drivers, and updating BIOS. Unfortunately I enjoy Firefox a lot more than Chrome!
I'd love to use Firefox as my daily driver for work. But due to lack of some extensions I'm not able to, mainly Tag Manager and Optimize, both Google products.
Interesting overview, but also incomplete - Safari is missing from the list of options. uBlock origin is unavailable on Safari, even though iOS/macOS offer a very powerful content blocking API.
> uBlock origin is unavailable on Safari, even though iOS/macOS offer a very powerful content blocking API.
Please define 'powerful'. Until pretty recently iOS was unable to block youtube ads. I'm still getting popunder ads even though I use a really comprehensive block list on my iPhone.
Safari blocking capabilities is just a "good enough" that most wont riot but definitely doesn't get even close to uBlock ballpark.
Safari’s content blocking APIs are far from powerful. Content blockers provide the rules and safari blocks what it is told to.
So you’re stuck with the (limited) features the browser exposes. Apple put limitations on what extensions can do, so uBlock would struggle on Mac and simply not work on mobile.
Using its own engine (exactly the opposite of the Apple way), uBlock can handle the most complex websites and offer more features and customisation.
I am curious of Brave that has a build in Adblocker that is based on uBlock Origin AFAIK but build partially in Rust I believe. If that is closer to the Chromium's core code and not merely dependent on what web extensions offer in Chromium. Maybe they can make things happen that are possible only in Firefox though extensions that way.
I think Brave is interestingly positioned, they sort of sound like a dream come true from a technical perspective, chromium with manifest v3 but still with fully functioning adblocking.
But I mean Brave has PLENTY of skeletons in its closet and is a dark horse that really doesn't seem to have the momentum. Firefox had TONS more momentum and they're still hardly relevant nowadays.
Well I do not have the numbers on Brave, and they themselves do not have them because it identifies as Chrome with its user agent AFAIK. So there are actually no stats on market share!
I would bet Brave has the same if not MOVE "momentum" as Firefox. Mozilla's things the old monetization model of the web should stay that way. They think ad blocking is bad, that is why they will never offer it by default. They also think the web should be even more censored than Big Tech wants. Used to be a big FX fan, but:
1. The above. And they were in bed with Google from day 1.
2. Chromium is just faster.
3. I am a web dev, and it feels extremely silly to use a browser engine that nobody uses as a browser.
Not sure when I made my switch to Brave, but it was like 1 or 2 years ago. I was holding strong on Firefox. Their Servo was promising, but then they ran out of money and laid off the staff working on it.
Brave also has their BAT going, that I find utterly stupid if not a straight scam. They advertise "no ads - no tracking" that is true by default. But then they want you to sign up for their stupid token to "get paid to look at ads that TRACK YOU" it's kind of hilarious how they market this shit. They do more or less exactly what Google is doing, except that the advertisers will probably get the real names of people who are this BAT BS. But the funny thing is they do not care, they get behavioral data of all kinds of browsing habits and that is EXACTLY what they want. Brave sells it as this great "privacy" thing, yet you have to give them your data for the payouts, so they know exactly who you are I am pretty sure. Not done it, will never do it but with all the Crypto regulation and KYC and so on they're just building a tiny "competitor" to Google that more or less does the same thing, maybe a little bit more privacy-friendly. I detest this idea. But a small community of people is all over this crap. Anyway, I stop my rant. Just deactivate the symbol for display on the address bar, thankfully they have a setting for that. Without BAT Brave is a great Browser.
>I would bet Brave has the same if not MOVE "momentum" as Firefox.
Five years after Firefox officially released, it was used by a third of the internet. People had a religious fervour around Firefox, Microsoft was the great satan for unleashing IE6 upon the planet, it was a great evil for sites to not support Firefox or god forbid actively block Firefox user agents.
For about two straight years Firefox after release absolutely slaughtered IE in almost every way (extensions, tabs, customization, performance, web standards), it was still clearly the best browser for the next two years, and Chrome had to create a bleeding-edge world-class browser and promote it with a gigantic large scale global ad campaign before Firefox started to falter.
By contrast, brave was released 6 years ago I've never seen a non-tech person use Brave in my life. It's biggest technical advantage seems to be a souped up adblocker. It really doesn't compare to Firefox's momentum.
For me it is that it opens all "most visited sites" in new tabs.
I usually go between 6-10 sites and use tabs mostly as a "read later". Sometime last year I started getting a lot of open tabs, and closing them one by one (to keep my read later tabs) is pretty darn annoying. I switched away from FF for that.
Well... Brave inbuilt adblocker has CNAME protection as well, so if uBO stops working on Chromium 'cause of MV3, changes for me would be minimal.
I refuse to use Firefox in its current state, with that dumb interface and the continuous feature removal. Waht's more, after being a FF advocate and user for something like 20 years, I seriously think that Mozilla should disappear sooner than later.
What. A. Difference! Firefox is so snappy, and at one point it was using less CPU than iTerm2. Mozilla has received a lot of crapped these past years, as did Firefox, but throughout my life this software has been free and open for me to use. I thank the contributors a lot for it.