A couple weeks ago I made another try to switch back to FF, and I have found the experience to be very pleasant this time; desktop FF on both Windows and MacOS are, for me, better than Chrome. I recommend others give Firefox a try.
(There are a few reasons why you might want to: Privacy, fighting mono-culture, recent decisions by Google to neuter ad blocking addons, a general aversion to the power of the largest tech companies, just chasing the latest and fastest browser, a fondness for novelty or contrarianism. Some of those reasons may resonate; others may not, but if any of them do, give it a shot!)
My main gripe with Firefox at the moment is Sync. It just doesn’t sync everything you need. My Firefox profile is highly customized, with a lot of extensions that all have their own complex config. Sync will keep the actual extensions synced, but not their settings. You have to rely on manual import/export features provided by the extensions themselves. Some first party extensions (eg Containers) don’t even give you that option.
You can get some of that by syncing your profile folder directly, but it’s very fragile. It hasn’t played nice with the generic folder syncing tools I’ve tried.
I think this is painful because Firefox really encourages customization, and it’s really useful! I just don’t want to have to keep track of that customization on every device. I trust Firefox Sync’s security model and want to do more with it.
Containers is one of my favourite add-ons, and I have it highly customized. But I have to set it up everytime from scratch on a different computer - there's no sync even though Containers is from Mozilla themselves!
I haven't used Chrome since FF 67 and I'm not missing it.
Some websites just don't work on FF, so I have a chrome installation. Even a bare-bones (only 1Password and uBlock O) Chrome feels much slower than FF. Page loads in FF are near-imperceptible, but Chrome has blatantly obvious page-blanks during loading.
It really has come a long way, and I'm really looking forward to servo.
I remember after Quantum pages would render HTML so fast and asynchronously the CSS hadnt loaded just yet. Then a split second would occur where the CSS would kick in and the page would be styled.
if you are talking about buttons next to the address bar, like the home button, then you can customize that area and let it look nearly identical to Chrome.
On some sites FF is slower, but these tend to be Google properties or giant Enterprise shitshow behemoths (jira)
It performs well, feels snappy, the dev tools are on par with Chrome's and everything feels right.
The only negatives are that container tabs are still taking a bit of getting used to (why can't I have a 'Work' window in which all the new tabs are 'Work' tabs by default?) and the initial migration of passwords was a bit of a pain.
However, I'm glad to be back.
firefox --no-remote --profile "$XDG_CACHE_HOME/firefox/home" --class="browser-home"
firefox --no-remote --profile "$XDG_CACHE_HOME/firefox/work" --class="browser-work"
firefox --no-remote --profile "$(mktemp -d)"
I use 1Password (most polished) and there's also Bitwarden (hosted, but open source) and others. And I use my password manager every day, so if there's a cost associated, it's worth it.
This is a good thing. Browsers should be good at browsing. Password managers should be good at managing passwords. The two should have API’s as necessary to interact so that the user can choose what’s best for them.
Can you expound? After years of using various pw managers I found it being embedded in the browser very useful.
Besides the browser itself still has a lot of work to do. Apparently they had a known remote code execution vulnerability for 2 months waiting to be fixed. That is quite concerning and gives pause while deciding if we should make Firefox our primary browser.
Same. I've tried Firefox last month and it is the only no-go I've no. With Firefox profiles being a thing, I wonder if a front-end to manage them like in Chrome is in development.
1. You can open a new window, move the new tab in the "Work" container (if you use an extension [1] you can just type "co work" in the address bar), and use alt+c [2] to open new tabs in that window, ensuring they are all opened in your "Work" container.
2. You can create a separate profile for work, running "firefox -p" to first create it, and then create a desktop shortcut that links to that profile. This way you'll have two separate profiles on two separate Firefox "icons" that that you can launch at your will. There are ways to do this both on Windows and Linux (not sure about Mac, never used that), and the setup needs to happen only once. I've had separate Firefox profiles for years now that just keep working without any problem. I even ported some profile folders between different installs (same OS), and to my surprise they still didn't break.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/search-and-sw...
[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/new-container...
I had a similar issue on MacOS. After doing some research I found that exporting passwords from Chrome was literally impossible. It definitely worsened the experience of switching. Luckily I have most of my passwords in LastPass, and if I need a password that is only stored in Chrome, I'll add it to LastPass from Chrome on the fly.
I am not one to do extensive tweaking to my machine, but this is important to me, so I spent an hour experimenting. And I have to say, I am pretty satisfied. Even though it isn't straightforward, Firefox actually can look nice and uncluttered.
If you're like me and want both privacy and aesthetics, here are some pointers:
- Switch to the light theme.
- Hide everything you can in the address/nav bar by clicking through the UI. Some settings are obscure, but you can get rid of a lot.
- Hide even more using userChrome.css [0], including the outdated blue bar at the top of an active tab.
Now we just need Mozilla to come up with a more modern-looking logo.
Like the one Mozilla announced last week? :)
https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/firefox-the-evolution-of...
They have been working on it for almost a year.
https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/evolving-the-firefox-bra...
I highly recommend people to not use this css unless they feel comfortable editing it to unbreak things and don't want any of the per site options. This UI change reduces the usability of Firefox to the point I would consider it broken.
If you don't like the container colors in the tabs, you can edit them to be colors you prefer.
Note on the color bars: I'd rather not have extra noise in the tabs because I determine which container I’m in through the address bar and automated domain containers. Of course, for someone who wants an overview of how many tabs are in each container, the color bars might be useful. It's a good point that this might be unexpected, even though it's noted in the CSS. So I've commented out that line and will let people enable it themselves.
You're in luck: https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2019/06/11/firefox-the-evo...
I do give Firefox a chance, but it gets tiring.
Many years ago, I dropped Firefox's ancestor for Opera 6. The UI and the features were miles ahead (e.g. Mozilla had no tabs). Yet I wanted to support free software so, once in a while, I tried to use Mozilla/Firefox again, but so many features where lacking, and the reactivity was really bad. When Opera dropped their engine and UI to become a new Chromium derivative, I switched to Firefox. I tried to get used to it, but for the past year my main desktop browser has been Vivaldi, a Chromium derivative.
I still use Firefox, but I'm getting more and more irritated against it. I had to search the web in order to change the tile of empty tabs (no buttons, no context menu, only drag-n-drop from bookmarks). Who designed such an unguessable interface?
I can't stand horizontal tabs in my brower. The Tree Style Tab extension was a strong point of pre-quantum FF, though its CPU usage was noticeable. Unfortunately, it's been a pain since I upgraded to Quantum, with many bugs and slowness.
Another example: my last FF ESR upgrade introduced a calamitous rewrite of the download interface. It's inconsistent, error-prone and ridden with several bugs. For weeks, I duplicated many downloads because the notification is absurdly small and quick. Now I've learned to click on the FF icon to check if the download started.
A last example: this morning, I selected 5 finished downloads and removed them. No reaction for 2 seconds, so I pressed the key again, just as the suppression begin, in slow motion. It took FF 3 seconds to remove 6 entries from the log.
With uBlock against tracking, DDG+Qwant for search, and a custom cookie handler (no third-party, white-list for those that persist after a tab closes), I don't think FF has anything to offer me on privacy. So the only reasons that keep me interested in Firefox are Free Software and Web diversity. I'm afraid these moral incentives don't weight much against many practical reasons.
Whenever I hear people complain about the settings being impossible to figure out, I always open them up and try.
So I opened settings, which has a search input at the top, and search "new tab".
It has an option to choose "Firefox Home (Default)" or "Blank page" for new tabs, in the section titled "New Windows and Tabs". (With windows, you can choose "Custom URLs" as well).
But you don't want blank. Hmmm. So I open a new tab. Every section has a dropdown menu with a "Remove Section" option (it also has "Manage Settings" links that takes me to the preference page I was on initially.)
Drag-and-drop from bookmarks, though, is stumping me. For what it's worth, it's also stumping me in Chrome. I don't think I've ever tried Vivaldi.
For the most part, basic customization seems intuitive and straightforward. If there is a way to customize by dragging your bookmarks onto the page, though, it isn't intuitive and straightforward. Not sure if that should fall under edge-case customizations (which I expect to be hidden).
It is annoying when things I consider obviously the correct design are treated as obscure things few would want, but I recognize that some of them truly are.
EDIT: I will say, though, that it seems really strange that "New window" has a custom URL option, but new tab doesn't. I guess they're concerned about people setting slow new tab URLs and then being frustrated.
In fact, this problem was not directly mine, it was a request from my parents.
I made my parents (nearly 70 years old) use Firefox. After an upgrade of their FF, they lost their usual homepage. In empty tabs their custom links were replaced by the dynamical list of their most visited sites. At the time of change, most tiles were not even relevant because their recent activity was not representative. They were annoyed, tried to fix it, and failed.
There was no contextual help, and searching technical info is hard for non technical persons, especially if they don't understand English. So my parents called me for help. On my next visit to them, I tried to do it myself, but did not manage to guess how it worked. DDG helped. After this episode, I wondered if FF was the right browser for them. It seems that Chromium's UI is more stable, and that is important for ageing people.
I open the preferences window. Well, not quite. Instead of a preferences window like every other application I've ever used, it's some sort of webpage which opens in a new tab in the same window as the webpage I'm browsing. The controls are all completely custom, and the layout looks nothing like any preferences window I've seen since Netscape.
Also, the Firefox UI doesn't use the same language as the rest of the OS (which is English), or even the webpage content displayed by Firefox (also English). It's all displayed in the language I tried to learn last year, for some reason.
In the search box at top, typing "language" finds nothing, and typing the word for language in the language I'm seeing shows a fancy control with "English (United States)" at the top. There's nothing I see which would indicate why the UI is not English. I google for "how to change firefox ui language", and all the pages I find say to set it here, and restart.
Thus ends another adventure in attempting to use Firefox, and it ends the same way all my adventures do: nothing is standard, everything is custom, and so it doesn't work right. This time, I didn't even get far enough along to complain that all the keyboard shortcuts are broken.
Dear Mozilla: for Firefox to win me back, it has to be a good web browser. Stop trying to be an operating system. I already have one of those. "Look/act like every other application" is the correct answer in every case.
> I still use Firefox, but I'm getting more and more irritated against it. I had to search the web in order to change the tile of empty tabs (no buttons, no context menu, only drag-n-drop from bookmarks). Who designed such an unguessable interface?
The people who design unguessable interfaces are usually called ux designers. Removing every trace of help , including but not limited to hiding the menu, removing tooltips on hover, keyboard shortcuts, getting started wizards etc etc is what they do it seems - all in the name of usability I guess.
I recently got myself an iPads and while I love it, googling even the simplest things is getting a habit.
Feel your frustration on this one, but I guess it is just "modern" and you happened to move from one modern thing that worked your way to another modern thing that worked in someone elses way.
That said: I think Mozilla really messed up when they cut the old APIs before the new ones where ready.
Edit: in defense of modern ux designers and other designers - some things work so much better now that we don’t need manuals for everything longer and many things do look better ;-)
With that said, good UX is REALLY difficult and, as a non-profit, I give FF a pass. I give them more of a pass because UX gets more difficult when you also emphasize customization and options. However, it’s one area they should definitely work on if they want to capture more of the market. Most people I know use Chrome because it’s “easier to use”.
I could say that of every dev.to article I’ve ever encountered. I have no idea why that’s the case — I could understand it if they were all by the same author, but they’re not. Maybe I’ve been unlucky and unlikely amount of times.
> Lastly, an appeal to fight Chrome's monopole. Surprisingly, not a word about privacy.
I have the feeling the author is rehashing arguments they’ve read without fully understanding them. They’re curious about Brave[1], which goes against the stated goal of decreasing Google’s dominance (being based on Chromium).
I am using safari for a while now, but every now and then you just have to admit chrome does some things much better, like tab management and the dev tools are more user friendly. Which, i realize, is the case for firefox btw. Ff tab management and dev tools are quite nice.
I had to move from Chrome to Safari because it just pegged the fans on constantly once I had a few tabs open.
Then I got tired with some sites not working well in Safari and moved back to FF which is much improved.
It's equally useful both on Windows and macOS.
I've used Chrome here and there through the years, but the more invasive Google became about data collection, the less inclined I've been to use their tools. The latest moves to block ad blockers, coupled with nearly every other browser using their engine, had only reinforced my decision to stay with Firefox.
Diversity makes for a healthier ecosystem.
I liked the Firebug for web development, and the built-in dev tools that came later was good for me too. Sometimes even better than Chrome's.
In a comparison today, Firefox dev tools still are better with a nice profiler, font tab, CSS layout helper, etc. The only few things I use Chrome's dev tools are for their CSS/JS code coverage tools and accessiblity tester.
It periodically gets worse when site authors make changes, and in practice a lot of these are site bugs. I file reports on Bugzilla when I see FF leaking memory on these sites and it usually doesn't turn out to be an FF bug. Maybe worth making reports on bugzilla though, the team is very responsive and they might be able to figure out a workaround for its memory usage in your scenario.
I tried again with Quantum, but then there were still stability problems causing the whole browser to lock up (just like Edge. But same problem existed in FF since long ago too), so I've never tried it anymore since then. Twice bitten, thrice shy.
I am a tab junky (regularly > 200+ tabs, sometimes 1000+) and Firefox never died, and it is used on a laptop that has also IntelliJ + java apps which use quite a big chunk of memory.
You might consider reducing number of processes used by Firefox, I set it to 3 even when I have 4 cores available, it helps reduce memory usage.
Linux with 16GB of RAM.
1. Open about:memory?verbose in a new tab.
2. Click Measure and save...
3. Attach the memory report to a new bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Core&comp...
4. Paste your about:support info (Click "Copy text to clipboard") to your bug.
> If you are experiencing a bug, the best way to ensure that something can be done about your bug is to report it in Bugzilla. This might seem a little bit intimidating for somebody who is new to bug reporting, but Mozillians are really nice! http://dblohm7.ca/blog/2014/08/14/diffusion-of-responsibilit...
Chrome would reach about 150 MB a tab, in my experience.
I have plenty of memory to spare, but still.
Additionally, I've begun trying out Brave/Vivaldi/Opera to see if I can uninstall Chrome from my system entirely; They all run Blink, so I assume I can open the occasional compatibility-issue pages on those.
I don't see myself going back with my current experience.
I'm not super pleased about Vivaldi being closed-source, but with the direction Mozilla has been going I didn't see it as too much of a betrayal.
There are some minor hicups here and there (mostly with video playback on Linux and the rare browser detection logic going off the rails), but nothing so major that I would consider switching away.
As someone that likes to use open tabs as a sort of todo list, I can't live without that extension. Allows me to keep different trees open for various purposes: PRs in one tree, Issues in another, academic/scientific paper to-read list, forum posts, etc
A little bit of UX work is clearly needed to make them more mainstream and a first-class feature in Firefox.
I use this in concert with the Multi-Account Containers[1] Add-on. I create names containers for things where I need persistence (“work” “personal” “LinkedIn”) and then everything else is isolated by default.
The main challenges are:
1) I have complex rules defining a whitelist on Temporary Containers. I have to sync this manually with setting import/export because Firefox Sync doesn’t handle this for you
2) Multi-Account Containers doesn’t expose its settings AT ALL, so I’m constantly hitting unnecessary “always open site.com in Personal container?” modals.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
Perhaps on faster hardware, the switch to the temporary container happens faster than you can begin typing.
Also it's hard to export them... it's my understanding they don't travel with sync, you have to manually set them up on each machine.
I have a pretty complex setup, so that frustrates me.
Mobile sites, especially HN just don't work properly on HF. The simple act of collapsing posts often seems to overwhelm the browser on my Pixel.
Not to mention there's this bug where videos create notifications on FF Android, and these notifications keep your phone alive from the background, burning through an entire battery in 30 minutes.
OH, there's also the issue where mobile videos don't play in window, instead opening a new window to play... Highly annoying
Oh, and that thing where FF videos often don't show a bar for your time if the video is playing vertically
And maybe this is just my brain, but FF doesn't seem to detect the back button too well, necessitating many double clicks
Oh and the fact that it can't open Google maps links straight from the browser, yuu have to right click
So yeah, I've tried it and it's just not as good, not even close TBH
> no add on support (even for those add-ons who had an an FF product)
Assuming we’re talking about Android here, what do you mean by this? Mobile Chrome has no extensions, whereas Firefox supports the full suite of desktop addons. I can use uMatrix and even developer extensions on my phone with Firefox.
Also, I think the point of the “videos creating notifications” thing is so that you can continue listening to the audio after turning off your phone, like on iOS and iPadOS. Apple got the battery thing better in general. Maybe Firefox should stop playing videos in the background after a certain period without user intervention?
Some of the other things can be chalked up to bugs (it would be nice of you to submit something to their Bugzilla!), while some I have never seen myself (especially the videos thing... for me they’ve always played in window, with the bottom UI, correctly; it could be a problem with your favorite video site?)
I can't remember the last time any modern browser felt 'slow'. I don't even know what that means any more with regards to browsers, on a fast internet speed they all seem pretty fast.
* Lack of AppleScript support (my main complaint, every other was lifted from other comments).
* Lack of other basic features such as pinch-to-zoom.
* Poor Keychain support.
* Slow.
* Resource-hungry.
And this article comes out just after reports of a 0-day exploit of Firefox on macOS[1].
If you want people to give Firefox a chance, make it good. For many of us it isn’t, and shouting over and over that it’s good doesn’t make it so. Fine if it works for you, but it doesn’t for many.
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/06/poten...
Are you arguing that Firefox is not even "good," or just not perfect?
(I use Firefox on a Mac all day and the only kind of "resource hunger" I've observed can be pinned to the web pages that it's running.)
The vast majority of computer users are still not using MacOS and those people can also do some good by using Firefox even if you can't.
When it comes to "slow" and "resource hungry" the Firefox devteam is very responsive to bugs. I've had approaching a dozen performance issues I personally reported get fixed.
Sites render badly (names colors and fonts look wrong on Firefox but look the same on Edge Chrome and Safari (macOS))
It hangs multiple times a day
Some heavy JS sites are much slower in FF than Chromium
It takes dev tools minutes to become responsive on the site I work on, while in Chromium they load up very quickly.
Chrome also has regular zero-days.
The only problems I have are regarding PDF files:
1) Dark mode (via dark reader) won't work on PDFs.
2) The Print-to-file (Ctrl + P) save location defaults to "~/mozilla.pdf" and there seems to be no option in preferences to change this default (titles often are multi-word long and copy pasting is a huge pain. Chrome just picks up the title of the webpage and the default downloads directory as the location, which IMO is the sensible thing to do.)
In my experience, Chrome is really better at handling PDFs (even better than the native reader, Okular, in terms of fine-grained zooming, dark theming(again via the Dark Reader extension.)) and I'm mulling over switching back, because I use pdfs a lot. (As for other stuff though, like lagginess, I don't find any noticeable difference.)
And Firefox was the first browser to use js to render PDF. A complete miracle really.
I think the reason why majority of people are using Chrome and Safari is not because of speed, it is because of synchronization, because of integration of ecosystem. IMO, if Mozilla provided a suit of paid services with built-in privacy like mail, contacts, maps, they might have a better chance that people would also use Firefox as their browser. Nowadays, Microsoft follows that approach; they provide Android launcher, Edge browser, mail, and pretty much every other service you need. I am actually considering to give Microsoft ecosystem on Android a try, at least their main income is not selling your data. But it would be even better if Mozilla launched a similar suite of services.
I've been a Firefox desktop user for years, but I just switched to the Firefox mobile apps. On the iPad it's fine. It's basically safari with Firefox sync. On Android it feels like someone finally made a full powerful browser for mobile. You can run standard browser extensions and that is a big win for me.
I think most people use Chrome simply because they switched once and never looked back, especially when “lol other browsers use Chrome” is pretty much a meme.
Firefox Sync is great and I don't think it's lacking some key feature Google offers.
The main reason I stick to Safari on my Macbook is that I still get significantly better battery life from it than either Chrome or Firefox. Chrome has also switched to a UX breaking requirement to hold cmd+q to quit instead of just tapping it. I'm sure I could configure it back to what literally every single other app on my Mac uses, but it's incredibly annoying that they think they are special enough to deviate from the OS design.
It's literally one click in the "Chrome" menu.
The last straw for me was when it started to prevent my computer from sleeping because some unspecified page had active WebRTC connections. There is no option to disable WebRTC in Chrome.
I don't understand: why do they dare prevent my system from sleeping just because some page is doing some p2p stuff in the background? Why would a page even be allowed to do p2p stuff in the background?
Anyway, these days i use Safari (with its nice battery related optimizations) as my main browser with Firefox as a backup. Not missing Chrome in the least.
Edit: I just noticed i had a Chrome instance (with no pages) open and pressed cmd+Q to close it... and it told me "hold cmd q to quit. What the hell Google? Why do you think you're so special?
That's not necessarily a bad thing, and of course people have the right to complain about whatever they wish.
But, can we please all of us stop pretending that we care about freedom, privacy, etc? Because if we did care, we'd put our proverbial money where our mouths are and try to cope with these defects, just to make sure that a higher purpose is served.
(Genuinely don't want to offend anyone nor do I dismiss anyone's problems with Firefox, especially on macosx)
> Genuinely don't want to offend anyone
I think you worded it just fine. Since there's always room for improvement, the "let's stop pretending we care" might be recast as, "what we're saying doesn't line up with what we're doing," which is a bit more factual and avoids claims on anyone's inner motivations.
I wish I could switch to Firefox for privacy reasons, but good security is table stakes and Firefox just doesn't have nearly the security credentials that Chrome does at the moment.
This definitely could change in the future, and I hope it does, but for now, I'm stuck in privacy hell because I can't compromise on security.
All complex codebases, especially web browsers, will suffer from 0-days and other critical bugs. You cannot use the occurrence of 0-days as a measure of security maturity. what matters is how such occurrences are handled, incidentally Mozilla handled the last 0-day well.
In between Google crippling Chrome users ability to control the code that runs on their machines and Mozilla’s investment in security innovation at the lowest levels(Rust) I am pretty happy as a Firefox user.
I think this claim deserves a justification. Not saying you're wrong but I'm interested in how to compare browser security.
(Counteranecdote: the HN-popular article [0] which explained the Firefox zero-day, mentioned in it's last paragraph a Chrome zero-day from March 2019.)
[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-patches-firefox-zero-d...
And this happened to Chrome last month: https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-reveals-chrome-zero-day...
I still miss bits of Chrome, the Chrome UX is still better, especially suggestions for sites you've already visited in the omni-bar and FF's 'Top Sites' logic seems a bit screwy, it includes pages I've visited once and leaves out pages I use every couple of hours but I think it's incumbent upon people to send a message to Google that their behaviour as a virtual monopoly is unacceptable by switching to a non-Chrome browser.
(I also started using an ad-blocker once I switched to Firefox, wow the web is a lot better without adverts!)
(from Google AMP because I'm on mobile and haven't made the switch on mobile yet)
As I say I'm not particularly concerned personally about not being able to use ad-blocking but it points to an abuse of monopoly power.
Pins. Loved the idea. Unfortunately, they often go missing. Loading the browser, about 15% of the time, I get the "oh this is embarrassing" screen, with "restore your session". If I don't restore right then, all pins are gone. For good. Forever. I've lost way too much time recreating those over the last couple of years.
Have never had this happen ever in Chrome. I can't say it never happens in Chrome ever - maybe for someone it has - but not for me. However, I don't even know how to report this. "My pins get lost". If they're just special tabs, and tabs are known to get lost, is this even a 'bug'? Or just... "I'm doing it wrong" (as in, expecting pins to be more useful than they are?)
It's really irritating (as you can probably tell).
Chrome almost never beach balls, and very very rarely crashes. I painfully gave up on firefox again for now. Its gotta be stable and fast and it just wasn't for me.
Edit: Holy smokes, it works now! How long has that been a thing?
Shift will select the tabs between current and clicked, while Ctrl will select / deselect clicked tab.
The new built-in tracking protection is pretty great, and the only extension most people really need is uBlock Origin.
Also, I never thought I'd say this, but good on Apple for maintaining webkit. It's a darn good engine, and I'm happy to have a third player. Plus, it's easier to wrap it with your own custom browser (see surf).
There's one piece of feedback; I wish people could do with firefox what they do with chrome. Maybe then the next cool browser could be based on firefox.
These are super minor problems though. I don't need to see what I'm typing so I don't need it and it happens only a few times a month. I would like to send stuff to my phone but more often I'm sending the other direction. Battery life? Who isn't almost always plugged into their charger.
Unlike many here I'm not a browser power user--few to no plugins, no sync, and no customization. I'm not a web developer, so I rarely use the dev tools.
It's fine. The only annoying thing is that there are a few webpages here and there that just don't work. Reminds me of when IE was dominant and sometimes you had to use it to got to a bank's website.
There’s no technical problem with the idea; but I would worry that smoothing over the problems some pages have when rendered with anything other than the Chromium renderer, would just cement Chrome’s hegemony, since nobody would have any incentive to fix Chromium-renderer-only pages any more.
Perhaps it would still make sense specifically for enterprise use-cases: if the whitelisting (blacklisting?) of sites to trigger the compatibility mode on was only ever manual, or due to GPOs/MDM profiles, but never by predefined compatibility lists or extensions or auto-detected, then it would only get used in practice by enterprises who needed it for their legacy Intranet sites. Corporate Intranets are certainly where most IE-only websites reside these days—but is the same true of Chromium-renderer-only websites?
- Battery life on both iOS and macOS is poor compared to alternative (Safari)
- Dev tooling is poor compared to alternative (Chromium)
Really? Other than the websocket thing everyone keeps bringing up, I find Firefox devtools ahead of everything else. Especially for CSS layout.
I have to login into too many systems with different credentials and I need NOT to be remembered by the browser even if I happen to forget to put it into private mode.
The only time I had to use chrome recently was because I had to login into google cloud and my company just don't support Firefox as a browser option and cannot install firefox.
I compared the same set of tabs in Chrome and it consumes about half or 2/3rd of the memory. (Tested under macOS only) While I work on machines with 16GB & 32GB, I find it unreasonable to waste so much memory usage on the browser windows. I'm looking into alternatives. I think most pages would be better viewed by just extracting the text content and the links, like Reader View mode...
I've checked out pretty much all active projects on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_lightweight_web_... and https://qutebrowser.org/ seems to be the most usable one which consumes even less memory than Chrome, while still supporting JavaScript and video playback. Or maybe I shall switch back to Opera/Brave/Chromium? I've tried so many...
I'm already used to keep closing tabs manually which I don't need, like web.whatsapp or gmail and the like. I even came across the Tab Wrangler extension, which automatically cleans my tabs up. I can highly recommend it to conserve memory!
So other than the memory usage issue, I'm satisfied with the current FF. It's web developer console is almost as good as Chrome's. It supports Ctrl-Tab jumping to the MRU (Most Recently Used) tab. Has built-in reader view. The Multi-touch Zoom add-on even brings "zooming by 2 finger pinching" capability to FF, which is almost as good as the auto-zoom by 2 finger tap.
I am asking because RAM is meant to be used, high allocations to Firefox on a (mostly) idle system isn't too interesting as a metric on its own and should automatically decrease if others need it.
However its content blockers are inferior to what's available on Firefox. It's also not portable, so if you use various devices (Android, iOS, Windows, Linux, MacOS) it's pretty cool having your history synchronized.
Firefox is really good for privacy. For example you can sandbox Facebook with Firefox's containers extension such that they can't follow you around the web.
Firefox is probably the best for power users. I usually use it with more than 100 tabs opened. Its tree-style tab extension and the Awesome Bar makes it painless.
Firefox is also good as a development browser. It lags behind Chrome in some areas but is ahead in others.
At work I only use Chrome for testing our web interface, but I use Firefox most of the time, even on my iPhone (nice UI plus the sync).
Though there are two big issues imo:
- When running Firefox on my late 2013 Macbook Pro, it doesn't feel as fast as Chrome or Safari, it feels very sluggish. I am forced to use h264ify to force YouTube to use h264 instead of VP8/9 as it makes my Macbook Pro turn into a steam engine. Besides the fact that this is Google's fault and its "monopoly?", it all around just feels slower elsewhere as well and it takes more power compared to even Chrome it seems to me.
- Lastly it does not sync all of my settings that I want. Why does it not do that? I run Firefox on Linux, MacOS, and Windows and I have to change my settings everywhere every time I make a change and it's a pita. Google Chrome just syncs all of my settings across all of my devices except for extension settings (which is a bummer).
Out of all the data they can collect about me, what I’d be least worried about is how wide I’d like the width of the address bar to be.
I'm curious to know where Safari stands in that regard: how much and how often does it "call home"?
Oh, and also : how much of it is Open Source? In my experience, Apple is particularly good at OpenSourcing lots of pieces while keeping the juicy bits proprietary. Can Safari be 100% rebuilt from source?
> Safari is on the second place just because of macOS popularity.
Shouldn’t this be “iOS” instead of “masOS”?
Working on moving to Firefox on desktop, it's my default browser and whathaveyou, but I must admit any time I get confused by something I instinctively flip back to chrome. With that level of a struggle, I can only imagine how hard it'd be to get more casual users to switch over.
Anyone able to tell me how much of a difference there is between Chrome and Firefox on Android? Is it a swap I could get friends to do without it being much of an adjustment?
https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix
The difference between the nightlies of this and the current Firefox Android is night and day.
Perhaps wait until it's out?
They're the same speed, right?
Web pages on the other hand... 2 seconds to bring in the bulk of the content. Another second spent firing ajax requests to all the trackers. 2 seconds for me to click through all the Cookie notifications, GDPR violations, and bald-faced lies that the site values my privacy. What's a ballpark figure for the actual render bit? 10-50 ms?
What sites are you guys using which are fast enough to notice slowdown in the browser?
Chrome is also much better for web video. Sites like Youtube and twitch.tv perform better on Chrome. I don't have any benchmarks on hand, but that's how I feel after switch between two browsers for a while. I think I'm sticking to Chromium.
I use it to set which site I'd like to keep cookies for multiple sessions for, and which I'd like cookies to be forgotten for as soon as I've left. It doesn't have per-cookie granularity however, if that's what you're looking for.
Also, the Firefox UI for the main window / tabs looks terrible on macOS compared to Chrome or Safari. Really non-native and ugly.
I've tried multiple times, and as much as I like what Mozilla is doing for privacy on the web, I keep coming back to Chromium.
I guess it’s a pain for people who hate switching context, or don’t have a hard line between the two.
Chrome dev tools are definitely great, I keep Chrome basically for that for sites I dev. Everything else is in firefox, and anythting private in Safari for synching.
The only issue is battery life, but as long as there’s Chrome there’s no way out anyway.
Just having tabs laid out vertically makes it worth it.
It can't hide the horizontal tabs though because of the strict rules imposed on FF extensions, so you have to hack around it yourself as described here: https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-fo...
To me Chrome is IE+Flash+PC Bloatware+Spyware.
Just check your Task Scheduler on windows and see for yourself.
Yet somehow mobile Firefox works just completely fine on these pages and more.
I have a Motorola G5 so yes a budget phone. But still. It shouldn't be this terrible on chrome. I don't get what's failing so badly.
- UI responsiveness is poor. Scrolling through the about:config window feels like I'm drunk. If they can't get the row highlighting to keep up with the mouse cursor, they should just turn it off.
- Setting up keyword search is tedious. Import from Chrome should allow importing all the search engines, either into the Firefox search engine functionality or into a bookmark folder with keywords.
- Setting up security is tedious. The previous functionality of importing certificates via "Open with..." leads to this: https://imgur.com/H2V2bUn
- The UI is ugly. Look at the drop-shadow in that same screenshot at https://imgur.com/H2V2bUn
EDIT: Went through the tedious process of installing DoD certificates into Firefox, and it hangs about half the time on Marine Corps websites... and 100% of the time on OWA. It's completely unusable for me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Oh right, it's annoying when it auto updates in the background and shows some generic error message that looks like a network error and it takes me a few minutes to realize I need to restart it.
But at work, I use Chrome. I bet most of you do, too. There's kind of just not another option.
For one thing, if you work on a product that has to meet accessibility standards (and if you don't: consider advocating for doing so anyway, it's good for users), FF's accessibility testing tools are frustratingly hard to use. Google's lighthouse is just way way more advanced.
And, my company (like most, if not all) _targets Chrome_, so I need to be doing most of my work in the target browser.
Personal browser choice is one thing, but products actually being built with non-Chrome browsers in mind is another. If people leave Chrome then discover that websites don't work as well (probably because those sites were built with Chrome in mind, and only ever tested in Chrome), they'll go back to Chrome.
I see lots of browsers mentioned here that are chromium derived, but add extra features. I switched several years ago from chrome to chromium and have never missed any features from chrome ever. If you have concerns about privacy, you can read the source code.
I use the builds edited by "Nik", which include video codecs, widevine, and auto-updating.
If you are considering switching from chrome but aren't sure you will like the added features of another chromium-derived browser, I would suggest trying this first to see if you would really miss anything.
I don't recall if I used this but I am running all of the chrome extensions I had in firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-store-...
Not to mention, their new side view feature is great to have reference and code on a single window.
Next, my laptop has a touch screen, and I cannot use it to scroll. When I'm listening to music on YouTube, even if it is in the background, it uses so much CPU that my whole laptop becomes extremely hot. Also, I'm developing a website where there is an element that has overflow:auto on it, and has some inner paddings, Firefox doesn't render the bottom one. The buttons are rendered with the text off center on all Bootstrap 3 websites, and for example on Github a bunch of buttons, badges, labels, and pagination elements have their text vertically off center too.
I know that all of these could be happenning, because we (developers) optimize things for Chrome now, but when the CSS styling works as expected in Chrome, and not in Firefox, then it certainly feels like Firefox has the bugs, because Chrome does what I expect it to do.
Lastly, on my iPhone, the browsing experience was really bad. Frequent freezes, slow page loads, when I closed a tab, the whole tab screen scrolled to unexpected positions.
All in all, the small things are the ones that ruin the experience for me, and Firefox has a lot of them (at least for me).
My custom benchmark: https://speedtest.surge.sh/
More benchmarks: https://jsperf.com/
I change the default rules to allow only first-party by default, then the first time I load a page turn stuff on and save:
* * * block
* * frame block
* 1st-party * allow
* 1st-party frame allow- Safari (general browsing)
- Safari Technology Preview (studying, reference)
- Chrome Canary (development, debugging)
- Chrome (main QA)
- Firefox (work account related stuff)
- Brave (consuming video content)
This is all on MacBook Air from 2013, so performance concern is also a moot point really.
If you want me to use your product, make it actually work.
Edit: This is an article that literally says I should give FF a chance, and I respond that I did and still don't like it, and you downvote me in your fanboyism. Welcome to /r/svwebdev I guess.
Better support for modern crippled extensions you mean. It's still impossible to really theme or customize Firefox Quantum. Most of the good theme developers just gave up and left. If I can't make Firefox work the way I want why should I use it instead of other browsers I also can't customize and who don't make kindergarten-level mistakes like forgetting to renew key security certificates and disabling extensions for everyone on the planet for tens of hours?
why you need != we need
I could recommend only links2[0] and Pale Moon[1]
Performance on my Macbook Pro is horrible. It will often peg the cpu so badly that the laptop appears to be locked up. This is a known issue which Mozilla has chosen not to address and instead seems to hope the switch to webrender will fix. I say "seems to hope" because the bug for the issue doesn't give confidence that the full cause is truly understood and specify exactly how a switch to webrender will fix it. Maybe Mozilla knows and has done testing but it certainly isn't reflected in the bug report.
Firefox on Android is bloated, slow and is a terrible UX experience. Mozilla obviously recognizes this because they have already announced an effort to completely replace it. There are other Mozilla provided browsers for Android which do perform better but they have a limited feature set compared to Firefox and don't meet my needs.