I'm sure others will be sharing it as I type this comment as well, but for many HN readers, Multi-Account Containers [1] are bound to be a godsend. Easily log in to different accounts for any website, in different tabs. Great feature that's not available in other browsers.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/multi-account-conta...
I vehemently disagree with almost all of its design decisions, and with every new release they seem to stray even farther from sane UX.
It has hamburger menus on desktop and a lot of weird space-saving design that makes no sense on a modern high resolution display. Buttons are small, have cryptic flat Linear B icons with no labels, and the menus are hard to navigate.
It's also nearly impossible to disable all the tracking they do. Even if you do, they'll sometimes remotely change your settings, so there's no guarantee settings will stay the way you configured them. They love to talk about how privacy is important and keep building tools to disable other people's tracking, but their own data gathering is sacrosanct and must be retained at all costs.
Overall Mozilla seems to wage an all-out war on user agency, constantly trying to take away configuration options, while pushing shit nobody wants like Pocket or their themes.
1. Sign up to Firefox sync
2. Install the Multi-Account Containers extension. Create containers to partition your identities. Eg: Banking, Shopping different Gmail accounts, different AWS console accounts etc
3. Install the "containerise" extension so you can create URL rules that automatically open sites in the correct container. (It can match URL regexes, allowing you to identify different accounts on each platform. Eg: on gmail, 'mail.google.com/mail/u/[email protected]', which you can bookmark as "Hunter12 Gmail")
4. Kagi search
5. uBlock Origin extension
6. Simple Tab Groups extension
edit: on Android
And then Iceraven[2] is even better, because it's just Firefox for Android, but with several hundred extensions enabled and a few other annoyances fixed.
(A few years ago all extensions were enabled on Firefox on Android, but a few didn't work so they decided to limit it to a very short list of allowed ones. And then they let that list stagnate for years. Kind of a dick move IMO.)
If you use iOS, then "Firefox" is really just a skin on Safari, so no extensions (this is entirely Apple's fault), but the sync features work, so that's something if you use Windows or Linux.
[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/search/?promoted=re...
- ability to zoom out images. Firefox has two different zooms, but none of them can zoom out images. If an image doesn't fit your screen, you can't see it period.
- ability to open an image in the same window
- ability to use different search engine in the search bar and URL bar
- ability to quickly change search engine clicking the magnifier icon top right
- custom search engine URLs
- showing download speed
Firefox 2 years ago was a way better browser than it is now. And a lot of things still missing, like proper profiles.
[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
I still hate the fact that different browser profiles and profile switching aren't surfaced like they are in Chrome. I think it's such a major use case for modern web browsing, I find it hard to believe they aren't prioritizing it. (FWIW this isn't even supported in Safari, which I would have preferred using)
I still keep it around because I love it's download manager, but I tend to use a lot of Google services, and out of habit, I stick to Chrome.
(ps. I was an early Chrome adopter, so it's quite sticky with me)
I personally go full utilitarianism about the tools/software I use, so I can't care less about the companies behind them.
I was an avid Firefox user since version 1.5, simply because it was objectively superior than competitors and way more polished (at the time, other browsers like IE didn't even have tabs).
Then Chrome came out, which was indeed blazingly fast but the feature set just wasn't there (in both basic features and the extension scene. It didn't even have a proper multi-language font setting which was a deal breaker for me).
A few years past, XUL-based Firefox became unbearably slow (it didn't help that I have 50+ addons), and Chrome was steadily catching up in every aspect. Right before Firefox's transition to Quantum, I couldn't take it any more and started to use Chrome primarily.
After 57, Firefox Quantum was obviously great, but at that point I just didn't have any reason to switch back. All the heavy lifting parts (webext) are the same, so it's down to some minor details, which TBH, I'm getting used to the "Chrome way".
The final nail in the coffin of Firefox for me, is its development. I'm not a professional software developer, and lack the ability to contribute code to large open source projects like browsers. So instead, I tried my best to help by reporting bugs. I've filed at least 50~100 tickets on both Mozilla's bugzilla and chromium's trackers.
I hate to say it, but I can see the sheer difference between the maintenance effort of the two projects, even in basic triage. I understand the two companies are not really comparable in their sizes, but Firebox's is declining hard. It was much better several years ago. More and more bug tickets are not touched by anyone. Legit problems got closed for no reason. Sometimes you can even spot management-level interference despite clear objection from users and even internal developers, which I would think I should see more on Chrome's end. Filing bugs about Firefox no longer feel fulfilling or even fun, because I KNEW if it's a minor issue, it won't get fixed in years, if at all (hell, it took them 5+ years to fix something major like full-range video playback). I just don't have faith in its future.
Firefox took away a lot of accessibility options in a large August 2021 and broke my trust in them. Good that they brought back extension options in Android, as I read other comments, but taking away the text size render option killed me.
I used Firefox when it came out, then I moved to Chrome when Chrome came out because Firefox was terribly slow (and it was because of the addons). When Chrome became slow because of the addons, I jumped back to Firefox, and I haven't looked back.
It is specially important to use Firefox now given that there are very few non-Chromium alternatives for web browsers. Keep the web open!
So yeah, Chrome and Firefox are more of less interchangeable now and the choice is essentially about how much you like Google, and specific details. Details include the presence or absence of a plugin you particularly like, support for video codecs and DRM (for streaming platforms), and specific features and bugs. Generally, I find Chrome better on the "specific details", one of it ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=791429 ) actually was the trigger that made me switch to Chrome some years ago.
About extensions, I think all the extensions I use are available on both platforms or have equivalents. Now using
- uBlock Origin (of course)
- SponsorBlock for YouTube (autoskips sponsors in YouTube videos, user-contributed)
- Behind the overlay (remove most overlays, have many equivalents)
- URL to QR code (shows the current URL as a QR code, so you can scan it to open it on your phone, have many equivalents too)
I'm not a fan of Mozilla currently, but they do have the least bad non-chromium, multiplatform browser out there.
For a long time, maybe still, noscript was unchallenged on FF. Something about Chrome API not allowing the deep JS blocking required. I consider JS to be the number one threat online, so I must block it by default to feel safe(r).
But really it's a no brainer to me that my web browser, my most used graphical program, should be FLOSS.
But all that said, yes, Firefox is very good. I wish it was a little more bleeding edge with stuff like experimental web standards (native filesystem access, USB, etc.) but I still use it for most of my browsing.
After some years of love/hate relationship with Vivaldi, I'm currently trying (once again...) to go back to Firefox after one too many chrome-based browsers fuck-up: opening Edge in a windows VM suddenly got my RAM usage up by 32GB, which were shared with my non-VM chrome-based browsers (chromium, vivaldi). First time just crashed my whole computer, second time I had to kill it all (the memory usage moved to chromium and then vivaldi when I closed the VM).
Vivaldi performance issues (and some bugs) was already putting me on the edge very often, but I really like the features so switching is very hard and will take a lot of time getting used to. Mouse gestures, panels, integrated mail (took way too long to come), tab stacking/tiling, command palette, etc. Sure some of these have firefox extensions doing something similar but it's still far from being the same.
* Firefox uses much more battery on MacOS than any chromium based browser. Bugzilla ticket exists since ages, few things have change
* Firefox on Android tablet after the change to Fenix is a stretched phone browser, with no tabs support, no default desktop support. Firefox developers treat this as a ER instead of bug totally ignoring that it was there before and they dropped it, no development whatsoever
At the same time, Firefox history sync is like no other but balancing what I care for the most, I had to drop firefox after literally decades and every now and then I look if at least there is something on the tablet support, hoping that I'll be able to change back at some point
With the release of Fission (their website isolation tech) this number becomes unbound. In my case it was close to 100, each eating up at least 50MB with some well into hundreds megs. It was a swap fest. Not sure what they were thinking, but a simple post-update warning would'be been nice... or perhaps it was there, behind all that "aww, let's select your mood color" nonsense that now refularly surfaces after every second update. In any case Fission is easy to disable once you know it exists.
I wonder if it's a question of accumulated cruft.
My main browser is Firefox, but there is this one site that's broken on it, so I use Chrome for that. It's the only thing I use Chrome for. But I find that it's much faster (even when testing other sites) than Firefox.
Orion has something similar, but it's a baby version of that, really...
For instance, if you want to install WLED, just go to https://install.wled.me, select the version, select the usb port your device is connected to and "install." Bam, done.
Firefox team views it as insecure: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/336
I love it for tab containers - a game changer in web browsing. And ublock origin, and the fact that it isn't chrome.
This is one of the selling points for me as well. Literally just before opening HN I've looked at my overflowing bookmarks toolbar and thought "Those folder icons and default favicons feels quite unnecessary any only occupies precious space. Let's get rid of them." and then did exactly that in few lines in the userChrome CSS [1] and voilà, toolbar no longer overflows.
I don't think any other major browser lets you do that.
[1]: https://gist.github.com/myfonj/f5415dd0580663a82ea18407ef2ee...
- unable to close pinned tabs without custom extensions
- unable to undo close open tabs after closing last window (also solved with extension)
- pins itself to taskbar and install desktop icon on every install
- I prefer how downloads' progress is handled in Chrome better
- Not all settings are synchronized (esp. around privacy), making it very hard to configure computers the same consistently
- Vimium
- Undo Close Tab
- Shortkeys (using it specifically to move tabs around)
- Aardvark DuexClick one button, and all your open tabs are saved in a nice, tabular view. If you saved tabs from yesterday as well, those will be visible in another grid on the same screen, so you can drag and drop tabs into categories, which you can then rename. Brilliantly simple.
I tried Safari, Brave, etc as well but they all had usability issues in one form or another. I didn't really want to settle with Chrome, but it has been the least grating for me personally.
I still have no idea why it has so many false positives. They use the same open source spell checker that LibreOffice, Chrome, and MacOS use, and none of those have trouble with the words that Firefox does. (I don't know what Microsoft uses, but Office on Mac and Windows and Edge on Windows also are fine with the words Firefox can't handle).
That suggests they just need a better English dictionary, which they could get from LibreOffice.
[1] Here are some words it incorrectly flags as misspelled: manticore survivorship misclassified ferrite massless rotator dominator untraceably synchronizer. Those were reported on their Bugzilla bug for reporting spell check problems 25 months ago.
Here are some more, reported 19 months ago: ad hominem backlight coaxially hatchling impaction intercellular irrevocability licensor measurer meerkats mischaracterization misclassification misclassified partygoers passthrough plough retransmission seatbelt sensationalistic trichotomy underspecified untyped.
All the words in batches I submitted 30 months or more ago have been fixed.
In retrospect I should have jumped after Mozilla ruined Firefox on Android.
1. Apple Pay integration only works in Safari. 2. Firefox on iOS uses MobileWebKit underneath, which is basically just Safari with a mustache 3. Firefox on iOS is (was?) also buggy in weird ways, like tabs would close unexpectedly or pages would fail to load. 4. (Biggest reason) Firefox on iOS does not support extensions. Safari does.
They also moved "Close tabs on the right" from the bottom of the menu and moved it to a submenu next to "Close tabs on the left". So now it's a multi-step process to close tabs on the right with a higher chance of misclicking on the action opposite of what I want, that I also will never use in my life.
Just seems like they're fond of making many odd, small UI decisions to create the appearance of progress without really moving forward.
You should avoid using GMail. Messages sent from and to GMail addresses are occasionally copied to the US government, and analyzed and possibly copied by various commercial companies who pay Google/Alphabet for the privilege. (You should also encourage your friends to stop using GMail).
Also, regardless of whether it's GMail or not - use an email client. GMail and all other email providers suppose access using the IMAP and/or POP3 protocols. That (mostly) guarantees no ads, and is much faster.
As for Firefox - Mozilla has decided to block extensions' access to most APIs and limit them only to a "WebExtensions" API (even though Mozilla's internal UI code is basically just like an extension, i.e. they don't _have_ to do this.) So, FF is only partially customizable and manipulable, and the extension ecosystem is somewhat stunted. I use FF, but let's not go overboard with the praise.
As an extension developer who makes heavy use of HTTP requests and header sniffing, I feel like V3 literally put me in a cage carefully crafted by Google (and their explicit hatred for ad-blockers, no matter if making life difficult to uBlock developers eventually makes life hard for all other developers too).
I feel like V3 is a grave mistake that eventually will make Chromium-based browsers less flexible. No matter if Brave announced that they'll keep supporting V2 extensions: they don't have their own store, they still rely on the Chrome store, and the Chrome store now only accepts V3 extensions.
So FF announcing their continuous support for V2 is really a breeze of fresh air, and eventually it'll be (at least for me) their biggest selling point over Chromium.
> 1. It opens websites really quickly, much faster than Chrome
This is the same thing everyone says whatever new browser they move to. Once some one hoards 100 tabs it becomes slow.
(Again,I am not against firefox or chrome - just meaning that everything is quick initially - somehow becomes slow in a few weeks)
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...
About 2.5 years ago, extensions came back in Firefox mobile Nightly and it is still a hidden feature in mainstream Firefox?
I just had to reinstall Firefox Mobile, and tried to re-add my addon collection and I get the following error messages "No addons here", "Failed to query addons" ... Why are cumbersome collections required to access the addons that you love?
2 big issues I have are the tendency to freeze, and then say "restart to keep using Firefox" because it updated in the background and can't continue.
The other was almost a deal breaker, and still could be. When using a barcode scanner, Firefox can't keep up with the characters coming from the scanner. It will randomly drop characters. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why some scans weren't working, and the scanner works perfectly in Chrome, works perfectly in a text editor and intermittently drops characters randomly in Firefox.
If it were just the start character, or the end character it wouldn't matter so much, but it drops characters in the middle of a barcode. It has for years, it's a known issue, I don't see it ever being fixed.
[0] Better History NG (my fork of the unmaintained non-NG version, so far I only fixed bugs, so it works again, same performance issues as before), apparently inspired by the Vivaldi history.
[1] uMatrix, which has the superior interface for blocking/unblocking of domains compared to uBlock (which you obviously have as main adblocker ;) )
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/better-histor...
When I ask them... they have not even tried Firefox. Chrome is all they know, and therefore they do not want to even look at Firefox. As a longtime user of Firefox, I find it odd. I suppose if you put me on a new box, with Chrome as the only browser that came up, I guess I would ask you to install Firefox :)
FF has awesome privacy tools and extensions. I use it because I can configure it to be extremely pendantic about a lot of stuff.
For example, my setup requires me to whitelist each and every JS external script I ran to. The NoScript extension provides me granularity to choose whether fetch requests are allowed, fonts are loaded, etc. It remembers my choices and provides a quick UI for making these decisions.
For normal, non-paranoid users, I would recommend Chrome though. Not exactly because it is better, but because some pages will only work properly on it (due to lack of testing by the page authors, this is not FF fault)
On benchmarks, both Firefox and Chrome have their advantages and disadvantages. One thing about Firefox is it has a richer extension ecosystem so you're probably even more likely to fall into the trap of overloading your browser with extensions
However since real adblocking is threatened in Chrome's future and adblockers can significantly improve performance on some sites, I wouldn't be surprised if eventually this works to Firefox's benefit
- printing (to a pdf or a printer). - copy paste
In both cases chromium is much better at keeping the styling.
Bugs have been reported for the later, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1772785 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1646515 but no progress is happening.
The lack of that single feature makes firefox unpleasant to use for me.
Sync'ing is great, general use is pretty good. I keep Chrome in backup for a handful of sites that just don't work on Firefox.
Not sure if it has changed recently but for ages the regular version of Firefox on Android lacked several things that were in Firefox Nightly (eg pull down to refresh, which might seem trivial but it's annoying as anything when it's not there!)
This is a killer feature for me. Last time I used chrome it supported "pulling" tabs between devices but not "pushing". It seems like a minor difference but it really improves the UX for me. Often I am reading something on my phone but get interrupted so just fire it to my desktop. This is much better for me than remembering that I wanted to finish something and then find it in my list of tabs.
Before last October, I would have recommended Firefox to anyone who asked. Now, I would recommend Chrome for their ability to fix bugs in a timely manner.
Some lesser known extensions:
LocalCDN
Tab Session Manager
Feedbro
Enhancer for YouTube
Request Control
Trace
There is a lot of configuration you can do with a user.js file as well. I took a lot of options from the tor browser config since I value privacy.
I just tried it last week. :/
I built an extension to inject your Mastodon timeline into Twitter[0], recently added Firefox support as well. Especially useful as a stop gap in light of Twitter getting rid of their API access and hopefully will be a first step for many to transitioning to Mastodon.
The downside of that is that ReCaptcha sucks more than usual. Because Google knows less about me, I sometimes have to do a ReCaptcha two or three times before it will grudgingly acknowledge my humanity.
Usually I see ReCaptcha as a sign not to use that site.
[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
I have 15 years of saved Keychain credentials that I’ve been very slowly porting over to Firefox Sync since switching to Windows. The fact that I let Apple generate complex passwords makes entry by hand even more slower.
Apple’s Chrome iCloud plug-in for Windows is just paying lip service.
Bug is known, but I haven't seen a solution even though it's not recent.
Reinstalling doesn't help. Disabling extensions doesn't help. Same thing on another computer with same google account logged in.
I’ve kinda browser wrapper thing with a chrome based browser for few google apps, like Keep, Gmail and Calendar on Windows.
I love firefox.
I’m still bitter they dropped that workspaces feature where you could group tabs together and switch to a completely different group of tabs witha few keystrokes.
And no, the replacement feature is not equivalent nor better in anyway.
Still better than that bag of spyware trash that google chrome is.
In Safari, I can use command+1-9 to open bookmarks. So command+1 is my PRs, command+2 is the JIRA board for the current sprint, etc.
Mozilla has some really weird stuff going on in their financials that bother me, and as a result, I just can’t use their products anymore. This is similar to my feelings about Google, Microsoft, and so on. I prefer tech companies to just be tech companies and not branch into other fields. I understand that Brave’s stance on certain things bleeds into politics with things like thwarting censorship and encouraging encryption, but those are also still technical problems. Tossing money at social issues isn’t what I want out of a tech company.
Full disclosure: philosophically, I am an anarchist. You should look for yourself at Mozilla’s financials if you don’t agree with my politics.
https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-202...
https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/
https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-990...
Also, just search up some of the organizations and stuff that get mentioned here. It’s weird.
————-
Edit: so, of their 1.1billion dollars in assets (the foundation, and two wholly owned for profit subsidiaries) Mozilla cut 100 million from software development expenses, while at the same time spending large sums of money on groups with no tie to software at all. It also seems that the vast majority of their revenue comes from Google search inclusion as default in Firefox… so why cut the software development funding?
Regarding Brave, it’s funded by Founders Fund, Pantera Capital, Digital Currency Group, Pathfinder, Foundation Capital, Rising Tide, Hone Capital, Propel Venture Partners and through their BAT tokens. I find the crypto side annoying, but that doesn’t feel as morally “icky” as some of things Mozilla appears to do (calling themselves a non-profit without mentioning for-profit subsidiaries, spending money on things that have nothing to do with software, reducing funding to the development of their core product).
In short, I kind of hate all major browsers, but there aren’t good ones to choose from so I try to pick one that feels least-evil. When LadyBird browser gets to some kind of truly usable level, I will certainly switch to it for daily use.
https://awesomekling.github.io/Ladybird-a-new-cross-platform...
The tabs are awesome. The unified search bar is awesome. The top panel UX is really tight and compact and looks good at the same time. The ability to sweitch between profiles which I now use a lot (work/leisure) works great.
ps: did I mention the smaller details like the immediate visual feedback you get when you use a search keyword? It's frigging awesome and one of the main reasons I abandoned Firefox and never looked back.
I mean even if you disliked Google you can just use Chromium or some un-Googled version.
Chrome is literally the BEST browser UX as far as mainstream is concerned. Obviously power users are always going to find issues with it. But as an attempt to provide a user friendly browser for the largest audience possible, it's simply excellent.
At work we have one screen an an interface that has an extreme number of items in a grid control. Chrome is noticeably faster in that screen but otherwise I find Firefox performance to be great.
I use ideaweb's Safari theme https://github.com/ideaweb/firefox-safari-style
Y’all crack me up sometimes.
Temporarily, Brave/iOS is filling in that void of much needed ad blocker.
* seamless japanese page translation
* Firefox always seem to be applying an update at that critical moment where you just need the browser to start RIGHT NOW
Does Firefox have vertical tabs? If yes, I am switching
(this is my own experience, FWIW, but I understand not everyone has this.)
-Emily
Basically, Google services are mostly dead eventually, given enough time.
Firefox also has a lot of telemetry and experiments enabled, even if users opt out in the GUI. These have to be disabled in the about:config setting.
It is the slow and uses a lot of RAM, but despite all these thing it’s the second most popular for a reason (kept alive as an easy way for Google Chrome to avoid anti-trust)
How many core devs are working on changing things to make ff secure, faster and (not-so-dumb-)user-friendly? Telemetry opt out? Sure, but… you need to patch and build your own version of firefox to make it really privacy-friendly. And do not forget about re-branding.
For me, OP looks overly excited and hallucinogenically optitimistic.
Dealing with multiple AWS accounts would be awful without them.
Does anybody else use multiple browsers? Maybe it's just because I'm doing web-dev right now, but I think using as many browsers as possible is necessary as I find inconsistencies that could become bugs all the time. I use Firefox as my "main" and Chrome as my "alt".
It is more customizable than Chrome.
But it isn't fast. Especially not on iOS.
* I cannot automatically clean cookies when I close it * I even have to close tabs manually
In Firefox, the scroll multiplier can be tuned to perfection.
[0] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=127008...
Yikes
-webkit-scrollbar
-webkit-scrollbar-track
-webkit-scrollbar-thumb
But the pilfering of Mozilla by its management (giving themselves million dollar bonuses and pretending they're managing a billion dollar corporation) and their illogical and fickle decisions has reduced IMHO the need for an independent open-source browser.
The only rationale for having a browser like Firefox now is to push back against megacorps like Google adding extensions to prop up their agenda (like preventing ad-blockers from working).
Mozilla had its day in the sun. I still use it but if it were to go away I wouldn't lose too much sleep over it.
Firefox has been a failure since their values shifted from developing an extensible browser for advanced users to protecting lgbtq+$^! rights.
I had originally switched to Firefox for privacy concerns but that and the memory usage/occasional crashing were too much for me.
edit: not sure what the downvotes are for. I'm glad there's a second option out there. It didn't work for me but figured it was worth sharing my anecdote along with OPS. I just wish there was a third option, or more.
The OP is clearly having performance issues with Chrome presumably due to extensions interfering or something else. I can guarantee you that Google makes sure Gmail loads at least as fast in Chrome as in Firefox.
Chrome is customizable too (panes you can open/close), Chrome extensions are also thriving, and Chrome was the one who invented the "clean look", same as Firefox invented tabs.
This post just feels like weird marketing. There's nothing actually substantive about it. It doesn't feel like it belongs on HN.