[HN Gopher] How to Firefox
___________________________________________________________________
How to Firefox
Author : Vinnl
Score : 677 points
Date : 2025-07-22 10:51 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (kau.sh)
(TXT) w3m dump (kau.sh)
| thoroughburro wrote:
| > Here's something the iPhone isn't getting anytime soon: honest-
| to-god browser extensions that you use on your desktop, also on
| your phone.
|
| This convinces me the author is not knowledgeable about current
| browser capabilities. They probably haven't tried anything but
| Firefox in a long time.
|
| Orion runs desktop (Firefox) extensions on iOS, and is in many
| ways a breath of fresh air. Instead of parroting "all iOS
| browsers are Safari" and throwing their hands in the air, they
| actually got hacking on it.
|
| https://kagi.com/orion/
|
| Edit:
|
| > With adopting the Web Extensions API, we show our support for
| creating a unified browser extensions experience across all three
| major web rendering engines. We ended up porting hundreds of
| APIs, one by one, that were never meant to work with WebKit. Took
| us a few years, but here we are!
|
| > Orion currently supports about 70% of Web Extensions APIs, and
| we add more every day. On top of that, we built advanced security
| features that give our users granular control over extensions,
| beyond what Chrome and Firefox offer. For example, you can choose
| to allow an extension to run only on certain websites.
| inopinatus wrote:
| by family tree, almost all current browsers are descendants of
| '90s-era Konqueror.
| elashri wrote:
| While orion is good option, it is not there yet in terms of
| comparison with Firefox on Android. Many of the extensions will
| install but will not actually work. Even uBlock origin will
| have problems. Also it is common that an update will make the
| browser crash very often (happened with few updates). Also they
| don't provide a list of APIs they support and it is not open
| source (although they said they will but at this point I don't
| think they will any time soon).
| thoroughburro wrote:
| But you agree the quote I responded to was incorrect, right?
| elashri wrote:
| Orion is based on WebKit, that's usually what people mean
| when they say it is all safari. So it is technically
| correct but orion approach ia to try to implement web
| extensions API in WebKit. Otherwise, apple wouldn't have
| allowed orion on App Store because the requirement is not
| to use any other engines (holding off to see what EU DMA
| effect would have).
| cwillu wrote:
| You agree that your statement that it runs firefox
| extensions is misleading, right?
|
| If I said "linux runs windows software and games" without
| further remarks, people would be correct to call me out on
| it.
| thoroughburro wrote:
| No, I don't agree. And Linux does run Windows software
| and games; I use this ability all the time.
|
| Are there really people who read that and think "ALL
| Windows software and games" is implied? Bizarre to me.
| rwc wrote:
| Yes. If you say you're compatible with Windows software
| and games, my expectation as a user is that everything
| "just works".
| thoroughburro wrote:
| You changed the phrase from "runs Windows software and
| games" to "compatible with Windows software and games".
| I'm talking about the former phrase. The latter does
| imply more, but I didn't say it; you did.
| sshine wrote:
| You're arguing about average assumptions.
|
| Your biases are leaning in different directions.
|
| Running Windows software on Linux requires a bit of
| domain knowledge; e.g. Wine, Lutris, Proton. E.g. which
| software actually works really well, which software works
| with tweaks, and which software largely works but you
| need to avoid certain features. The fact that you need to
| install special software, and it isn't some core OS
| compatibility layer like 32-bit support makes it lean
| towards "runs Windows software and games" being a little
| ambitious. It's not a perfect user story, that's all.
| homebrewer wrote:
| By your definition, Windows is not compatible with
| Windows.
| echoangle wrote:
| Yes, some windows versions aren't compatible with other
| windows versions. That's not a contradiction.
| treyd wrote:
| If you wrote a function in a dynamically typed language
| and the documentation said "this accepts integers", but
| actually it crashed if you gave a prime integer and you
| only expected people to give it composite integers,
| people would say that the documentation was inaccurate.
| echelon wrote:
| It doesn't even matter if you're right.
|
| 0.0001% of users will use this. It's a non-starter.
|
| The only solution to this problem is antitrust
| enforcement against Google.
| dleeftink wrote:
| Not op, but you cannot fault the author for not knowing
| every app or trend. With any luck, your reply will inform
| the original author, who may learn a thing or two from the
| discussion we are having here!
| navigate8310 wrote:
| The author definitely is not being very knowledgeable. In the
| comments, they didn't try Zen because they assumed, it can't
| sync bookmarks and extensions, which in fact it can and has
| Mozilla account baked into it.
| sorcercode wrote:
| yep that's something I learned later.
|
| fwiw though: Zen does have other challenges at the moment
| with the Widevine licence. so you effectively can't use it to
| watch most video services today.
|
| But point taken, from a technical accuracy perspective.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I tried Orion after reading this, but other than uBlock Origin
| I haven't had much luck with getting extensions to work. I
| guess the extensions I use don't really overlap with the 70%
| they do support. If they've been working hard on this for
| years, I have to wonder what will happen first, actual mobile
| extension support on iOS through Kagi or a Firefox release for
| iOS.
|
| The entire Orion browser feels like a beta product to me. But
| at least I've got uBlock on my work phone now, so that's cool I
| guess.
| freeAgent wrote:
| It is literally in beta, so it feeling like a beta product
| isn't surprising. It does work with the extensions I need and
| it's my primary browser on iOS, but I still find it too buggy
| and crash-prone on the desktop. That seems to be improving,
| but it's not convinced me that it's reliable enough yet.
| lol768 wrote:
| > parroting "all iOS browsers are Safari"
|
| But they are? It's a rendering engine monoculture. Sure, they
| might have different skins and some stuff bolted on top, but
| let's not pretend that that constitutes a different browser
| (and this is precisely why Apple got bitch-slapped by the
| European Union).
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| It's still something of an exaggeration. If you take a look
| at the source for iOS browsers, the amount of unique code is
| non-trivial.
|
| At minimum, it's a sliding scale rather than binary and iOS
| browsers are less Safari reskins than Chromium-based browsers
| (most of which share a much higher percentage of code) are
| Chrome reskins. There's exceptions like Arc which uses a
| bespoke AppKit/SwiftUI/WinUI UI instead of the standard
| Chromium stuff but that's pretty rare.
| fsflover wrote:
| > the amount of unique code is non-trivial
|
| This doesn't matter as long as essential features of
| Firefox aren't allowed by Apple.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| Orion has proven that web extensions are allowed, even if
| its implementation isn't complete. There's no guideline
| preventing a browser with a user-hackable UI (like
| Firefox userChrome) but nobody's tried that yet. What's
| left? As far as I'm aware, it's just the small handful of
| manifest v2 request interceptor APIs that uBlock Origin
| depends on that can't be supported fully.
| fsflover wrote:
| > small handful of manifest v2 request interceptor APIs
| that uBlock Origin depends on that can't be supported
| fully
|
| ... which is the most important Firefox extension.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| The author is very clearly an Android user, so I'll give them
| some leeway on this. It's not like it's the crux of their
| opinion, it's just one extra layer. Also, until Orion is
| available on Windows and Linux, it's a no-go for a lot of
| people.
| abyssin wrote:
| Thank you so much for this comment that made me learn about
| Orion on iOS. It seems to be filling a gap that had been open
| for years.
| DavideNL wrote:
| > "Orion runs desktop (Firefox) extensions on iOS"
|
| Most extensions _can_ be installed, but they _do not_ actually
| function properly. Or, maybe only for 50%.
|
| The most annoying part is, you do not know which extensions
| don't work (like content blockers, etc.)
| esskay wrote:
| I really struggled going back to Firefox after being a Chrome
| user for so long, it just feels so incredibly slow in comparison
| - I know it's probably just perception but I couldn't shake that
| feeling.
|
| I ended up going with Brave. Once you turn off their crummy VPN
| and crypto advert it's effectively just google chrome with a
| built in ad blocker.
|
| I know there were arguments/concerns about the crypto thing, but
| I did a bit of research before picking a new browser (as should
| you) and once I realised it was a simple thing to turn off and
| never see again I was fine with it, it's all opensource as well
| so you can see how things work.
|
| Of course it's just a chrome fork, so is still somewhat
| influenced by Googles decisions but that really wasn't the issue
| here, I just wanted to keep ublock origin and that's been the
| outcome.
|
| I still have syncing and such all running between my desktop and
| mobile, I still have all the same extensions I've used for over a
| decade, so it's been relatively pain free to switch.
| eclecticfrank wrote:
| Give us an example where Chrome is faster than Firefox, so we
| can see if it is more important than having uBlock Origin.
|
| I use both Firefox and Chrome for work and haven't noticed any
| speed differences (without measuring).
| esskay wrote:
| As I said I think it's more of a perception thing than an
| actual slowness.
|
| I don't think Firefox is actually any slower in a practical
| test of loading a site for example, I just perceived it as
| being slower, perhaps more likely its something like the
| transitions between tabs and other actions being different
| enough to feel slower.
| homebrewer wrote:
| If your life has been as unfair to you as it has been to some
| of us, and forced you to work on SPAs as the result, try
| opening any large frontend project that uses Vite (or any
| other dev server that serves each file separately instead of
| bundling them).
|
| If you're unfamiliar with this stuff, it results in your
| browser fetching thousands of JavaScript files from the local
| dev server.
|
| Any Chromium-based browser handles that just fine in about
| 1-2 seconds. Firefox takes at least ten, including full page
| reloads. No adblocking on either, and yes I've tried all
| combinations of about:config knobs, fresh/empty profiles,
| etc.
|
| That's the only reason I use Chromium for development work.
| _benj wrote:
| > If your life has been as unfair to you as it has been to
| some of us, and forced you to work on SPAs as the result...
|
| Hehe
| CafeRacer wrote:
| Life is unfair to me and Firefox works just fine.
| chamomeal wrote:
| I use firefox to work on SPA's and occasionally use chrome
| for compatibility checks. I haven't really noticed a
| difference in speed, except for startup time (which firefox
| is definitely slower, but I also have it open pretty much
| all the time anyway)
| jhasse wrote:
| https://www.browserating.com/#rankings
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Chrome is faster and smoother on my Linux machines and on
| Android. On Windows and macOS, the difference is much less
| obvious.
|
| I still use Firefox everywhere, but Mozilla still has some
| catching up to do in my experience.
| pixelesque wrote:
| I suspect part of it might be interactive-ity with the event
| loop: let me explain.
|
| I regularly have to use web browsers (I try and want to use
| Firefox, but Chrome is faster for me in this scenario) on an
| under-provisioned (yes I know, but I don't have any control
| over that!) VM which runs VDI sessions on both Linux and
| Windows (with VMWare on Windows).
|
| On both Windows and Linux, Firefox's UI (in this CPU-
| constrained env - it fluctuates, and sometimes is okay, but
| often is slow) in terms of UI interaction is very notice-ably
| much slower than Chrome, especially when there's animated
| content in the document. It seems like Firefox prioritizes
| thread-wise the HTML/JS content at the expense of any UI
| signals/presses/drags or other interaction, and so sometimes
| clicking close tab does nothing for > 30 seconds, but
| animated content within the document keeps playing perfectly.
|
| Chrome does none of this (on same VM machines) with same
| content: I click the close button, and instantly a tab
| closes, or I can drag a tab around instantly.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| I think that Chromium's UI stack is also just more solid,
| being closer to "native" and being drawn with Skia and
| such, as opposed to the Firefox approach (previously XUL,
| which was always slow and clunky and later switching to a
| web tech based UI).
|
| There used to be Gecko based browsers that fixed this with
| alternative native UIs (Camino, K-Meleon, and Epiphany aka
| GNOME Web), but then Mozilla removed embedding support and
| ever since anybody wanting to use Gecko are stuck with the
| design decisions of the Firefox team whether they want to
| be or not.
| buzer wrote:
| One example that I can give is that when Firefox has been
| running for long time, especially in Private window, the
| memory usage of "main" processes will grow a lot (normal &
| GPU). Compacting memory via about:memory does free up a bit
| but Chrome in similar situation will use a lot less memory.
| This does slow down Firefox (especially in system where you
| don't necessarily have a lot of memory), restarting it will
| make it a lot snappier.
|
| For example I currently have Firefox & Chrome sessions which
| have been open for about a month on my laptop (16GB of
| memory). I closed every tab and only left the "blank" page
| open. Firefox's process manager shows 4GB GPU usage, a bit
| under 1GB usage for Firefox & about 250MB for extensions.
| After clicking "minimize memory usage" the GPU memory dropped
| to 3GB and Firefox process memory usage dropped by about
| 50MB.
|
| For comparison Chrome uses 400MB of GPU, about 200MB for
| "Browser", ~150MB for for "utility" processes and about 100MB
| for extensions (extension list is different so we can ignore
| the memory usage difference for them, listed it just for
| completeness sake).
|
| Despite this I do use Firefox as my primary browser.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| May be a leaky extension, I rarely get over 1gb with
| firefox.
| EbNar wrote:
| https://arewefastyet.com/win11/benchmarks/overview?numDays=6.
| ..
|
| This is from Mozilla themselves.
| moltar wrote:
| Interesting. I don't notice any difference in stock browsers.
| With a ton of privacy extensions I do feel FF gets a bit laggy
| but that's a price I'm willing to pay. On chrome I can't even
| do these things.
| karel-3d wrote:
| I still see random crypto ads on new tab page.
|
| I never bothered to turn it off, it's possible I guess but it's
| an interesting window to a bizarro world for me. (Oh some new
| blockchain NFT game! People still do that in 2025 apparently?
| Now with AI hype crap instead of metaverse hype crap?)
|
| It's never bothering me as it never advertises anything that I
| am actually interested in.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| I have used Firefox for many years now on all my devices, and I
| find it much better at almost anything: password management
| works better accross devices, history syncs better, etc. With
| chrome I could never really rely on saving a password on
| desktop, taking the phone and having a password just there.
|
| Maybe it improved in the past few years, I didn't bother to
| check.
|
| Also, Firefox is the last non-chrome-engined browser so it is
| worth using for that reason alone. Browser monopoly is bad and
| WILL be used against you, eventually.
| nasso_dev wrote:
| I don't know if it's just me but in my case the problem isn't
| really the crypto bs, but rather Brendan Eich himself.
|
| As much as Mozilla and Firefox can be criticized for both
| technical and non-technical reasons, at least I share the same
| core values. I don't seem to share any core value with Brave or
| its creator. Plus, yeah, still smells like Google :)
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Brendan Eich's contributions to computing are immeasurable.
| Your opinions of his social or political views don't change
| that.
|
| Do you not use Linux because you don't like Linus? He's quite
| a controversial figure. And before you say Linux is not
| Linus, the same can be said about Brave and Brendan.
|
| Many other people work on these projects than just the
| leader.
|
| Do you not use JavaScript because you don't like Brendan?
| crashabr wrote:
| > No moral choice is possible unless all your choices are
| moral.
|
| https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-
| som...
| scottydelta wrote:
| As someone who was exclusively Firefox until a month ago due to
| privacy had to go back to chromium on MacOS due to Firefox's
| inability to handle multiple dev react frontends. They just
| seems slow and would stall Firefox with that loader in blank
| screen.
|
| The dev experience has been better with chromium so I have been
| using chromium for development and Firefox for regular usage.
| stby wrote:
| The article implies that tabs, bookmarks, passwords can only be
| synchronised between Firefox installations and not with Zen or
| Libre (I assume this refers to LibreWolf?), but at least Zen can
| be connected to the Mozilla account and synchronises everything
| with the other connected Firefox, Firefox for Android, ...
| installations.
| thoroughburro wrote:
| LibreWolf also connects and syncs seamlessly to Firefox
| Accounts.
| Propelloni wrote:
| Same for Waterfox.
| silvanocerza wrote:
| > Zen can be connected to the Mozilla account and synchronises
| everything with the other connected Firefox, Firefox for
| Android, ... installations.
|
| They made this work? I remember testing it out some months ago
| and it didn't work because of some reason.
| krige wrote:
| Yeah, it works as of ~3 months ago until now. t. user
| Geezus_42 wrote:
| I'm eagerly awaiting Zen to enable tab groups/folders. I've
| been watching feat:9355, but its gotten bogged down in a debate
| about the whether tab folders in the tab bar should be the same
| as bookmarks, ala Arc. I personally did not like that Arc
| considered tabs and bookmarks to be the same because it made
| management and syncing a pita. Having to use a third script to
| export your bookmarks is not a good look.
| godshatter wrote:
| I haven't used tab groups, is it like the indenting done in
| tree style tabs? I find workspaces and vertical tabs in Zen
| sufficient for my needs in organizing tabs, but I'm a
| complete amateur when it comes to the fine art of loading
| extreme numbers of multiple tabs from what I've seen of
| others.
| akazantsev wrote:
| Firefox has no profiles. It has a bunch of hacks, such as
| containers, which are cumbersome to use. Chromium provides
| separate windows with different profiles, and Firefox should
| follow Chromium here. Firefox's "solution" forces you to switch
| Github tabs between personal and work containers constantly.
| uallo wrote:
| > Firefox has no profiles.
|
| It does now, it is being rolled out gradually:
|
| https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-management
| jraph wrote:
| I didn't know about this new feature, that looks nice. One
| can force-enable it with the browser.profiles.enabled config.
|
| Firefox havs always had profiles (about:profiles, firefox
| -P). I do hope this new feature will be able to manage
| profiles created with the current method.
| lmz wrote:
| It definitely has "profiles" as in the entire set of settings/
| preferences/history[1]. Whether or not they are usable as a
| replacement for Chrome's however...
|
| [1]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-
| create-...
| VerdisQuo5678 wrote:
| firefox has had profiles for years, maybe decades its hidden in
| about:profiles i guess they're just adding a proper ui now
| paavope wrote:
| I use profiles on Firefox daily and they work fine
|
| https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...
| akazantsev wrote:
| The only way to access it with `about:profiles`? It looks
| like a joke. How could users possibly find this?
|
| UPD. The more I look at this, the worse it gets. Hidden under
| a special URL, requires you to launch the default profile
| before you can switch to another profile (yes-yes, there are
| command-line hacks). It's more like a user data manager for
| devs than profiles for users. Even containers look better
| than these profiles.
| arp242 wrote:
| You can use "firefox -ProfileManager". I didn't even know
| about about:profiles. There is some work on improving the
| UI: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-management
|
| Anyway, your claim was "Firefox has no profiles". That is
| not true.
| akazantsev wrote:
| Really? Then you can claim that Chrome has supported
| "profiles" since its inception, with the `--user-data-
| dir` command-line switch. If something is not user-
| visible, it is as good as non-existent. Firefox has no
| profiles as far as a regular user is concerned.
| ReadCarlBarks wrote:
| The new profile manager has already been enabled for most
| users.
|
| If you don't see it in the main menu yet, type
| `about:config` into the address bar and toggle
| `browser.profiles.enabled`.
| josephd79 wrote:
| what in the world are you talking about? you click settings
| in the upper right hand corner and its right there.
| keyringlight wrote:
| Another thing you can do is run multiple profiles at the same
| time with the -no-remote argument , so "firefox -P
| profilename -no-remote"
| jraph wrote:
| You don't need the -no-remote parameter anymore btw from
| what I can see.
| elashri wrote:
| > Firefox has no profiles
|
| That is not true [1]. Firefox has profiles and while you can
| argue that their UX is worse than chrome but that doesn't mean
| it does not have profiles.
|
| [1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-
| create-...
| MatejKafka wrote:
| Containers feel like a much more useful feature to me than
| profiles - I don't wanna open a new window for each website
| that I want to isolate from my main session, but with
| containers, it's trivial.
| l72 wrote:
| I mostly agree, and I personally just use containers (and
| heavily!) However, that has not been the case for my spouse.
| Profiles are important to her in two scenarios:
|
| 1. The primary website she uses for grad school (canvas)
| REQUIRES third party cookies to be enabled for it to work.
| Containers cannot have different settings here, but profiles
| can. So she can have a School profile that enables 3rd party
| cookies and she just uses this profile for Canvas.
|
| 2. She likes to keep ALL of her work stuff separate and not
| have that sync to her personal mobile. So she has Personal
| Profile (with containers) and a Work Profile (also with
| containers). The two profiles are themed differently, so it
| makes it very clear if she is in her "work" browser or
| "personal" browser.
|
| Firefox's profile management has been a struggle for her (I
| found creating different application icons for each profile
| worked best), and I am very excited about the new profile
| manager!
| pta2002 wrote:
| This is weird to me because I so much prefer Firefox's per-tab
| containers to having to use separate windows for profiles. I
| wish chrome had something like it.
| germandiago wrote:
| The problem here IMHO is that when many tabs are open it
| becomes confusing quickly which tabs have what. With a
| profile everything is clear.
|
| I used Firefox and I like it but honestly the profiles were
| more difficult to use than Chrome's.
| Larrikin wrote:
| Are you one of those people with a thousand tabs open so
| the tabs shrink to just the icon? Even in that extreme
| case, everything is color coded and the URL bar labels it.
| eitland wrote:
| Not GP and I rarely get into the thousands anymore but I
| am clearly of the opinion that computers can remember
| much better than me.
|
| So many of the things I start looking into starts with a
| search in a single tab and then every link I ctrl-click
| during the process ends up in a tree underneath it (yes,
| I use Tree Style Tabs).
|
| This has a few benefits:
|
| - I can easily see things in context
|
| - when I end up on a particularly useful (or useless)
| page I can easily see what page linked me there
|
| - I can read the root pages and follow links from every
| one of them without losing track ( _the_ root page is
| usually a kagi search)
|
| - when I am finished I can either export the whole tree
| as a nested markdown list (yes, there is a nice TST
| extension that allows me that, and yes, you read that
| correctly, it is an extension to an extension) or just
| close it.
| pritambaral wrote:
| > Firefox has no profiles.
|
| Patently false. Been using profiles for years.
|
| > bunch of hacks, such as containers, which are cumbersome to
| use. Firefox's "solution" forces you to switch Github tabs
| between personal and work containers constantly.
|
| Rarely have I had to that. Until I added rules to open certain
| URLs in specific containers.
|
| > Chromium provides separate windows with different profiles,
| and Firefox should follow Chromium here.
|
| Absolutely not. Profiles are a poor "alternative" to
| containers. How do I add a rule to pin URLs to specific
| profiles? How would that even work, if it did? A new window for
| some links? Re-use some random window with the same profile?
| How do I switch to it? Switch back? Don't tell me to use the
| Window Manager via Alt-Tab. I organise tabs into windows by
| shared context.
|
| Then there's the whole issue of sync. Profiles don't share
| anything. Each profile needs to be configured individually. I
| like not having to add uBlock Origin to every browser profile.
| I like not having to think if I have my password for this
| rarely visited site in this profile or another one. Or a
| bookmark. Or form info.
|
| ----
|
| Just because containers have no use to you / you couldn't find
| a use for them, doesn't mean the rest of us also shouldn't have
| the luxury of using this feature. Feel free to use Profiles as
| you'd like. Leave what works for us alone.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| I personally prefer containers to profiles. Rather have one
| window with many tabs than many windows.
| leoapagano wrote:
| Firefox's "answer" to profiles is to run essentially two (or
| more) copies of the browser rather than only copying the
| profile-specific parts of each profile. This leads to a lot
| of wasted CPU cycles and RAM and is a very suboptimal
| solution compared to what Chromium and Safari do these days,
| not to mention that the ability to create and switch profiles
| is not included in the UI by default and requires an
| extension to access.
| Liquid_Fire wrote:
| I think you may be mixing up profiles and containers.
|
| Profiles do have a built-in UI at about:profiles or by
| launching Firefox with -P, neither of which requires an
| extension. Admittedly this UI is a bit basic, but a better
| version is being rolled out
| (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-management).
| Running multiple profiles side by side does indeed involve
| running multiple instances of the browser.
|
| Containers are an internal API and need an extension like
| Multi-account Containers to provide a GUI (though this is
| an official extension by Mozilla), however they don't
| require running multiple copies of the browser.
| ReadCarlBarks wrote:
| The new profile manager has already been enabled for most
| users.
|
| If you don't see it in the main menu yet, type
| `about:config` into the address bar and toggle
| `browser.profiles.enabled`.
| ReadCarlBarks wrote:
| The new profile manager has already been enabled for most
| users.
|
| If you don't see it in the main menu yet, type
| `about:config` into the address bar and toggle
| `browser.profiles.enabled`.
| godshatter wrote:
| I just did this and it doesn't see the multiple profiles
| I've been using for years through about:profile. Strange.
| leoapagano wrote:
| Just tried it out - definitely an improvement UX-wise,
| but it still essentially runs two copies of Firefox
| rather than only isolating profile-specific features.
| sorenjan wrote:
| I have a shortcut that starts a separate profile like this:
| <path to firefox.exe> -profile <path to profile folder> -no-
| remote
|
| Separate bookmarks, separate search engines, separate history,
| etc. I've been using it for years, I usually have a Firefox
| window for each profile open on separate desktops, there's no
| problems running them at the same time.
| ketanmaheshwari wrote:
| Does anyone know how to reliably use Firefox from command line to
| take screenshots? It used to work well a few years ago but now it
| does not. For one, it asks that Firefox is already running and I
| need to kill it. This is surprising -- why can't two Firefox
| processes run at the same time?
| moltar wrote:
| Script with Playwright?
| jdalt wrote:
| Use playwright?
| mdaniel wrote:
| It is whining about the shared use of your main profile
| directory. You can give it a temporary profile directory to
| more clearly express your intentions via "--
| profile=/tmp/$(uuidgen)" or similar. I'd guess you could even
| just straight up point <<env HOME=$(tmpdir) firefox
| --screenshot...>> for even stronger isolation
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| PROFILEDIR="$(mktemp -d)" firefox --no-remote --profile
| "$PROFILEDIR" --screenshot $PWD/output.png https://xkcd.com
| rm -r "$PROFILEDIR"
|
| (You don't _have_ to create and destroy a profile directory
| every time, but it 's cleaner to do that way and you need one
| per instance you're going to run anyways)
| WorldMaker wrote:
| The CLI has long had `-noremote` for a long time to tell it you
| want a second Firefox. It's useful with `-ProfileManager` or
| `-P $profileName` for multi-profile workflows, which are out of
| fashion this decade, especially with Multi-Account Containers
| being able to do most of those workflows in the same browser
| window now with different tags. But some of us still have
| ancient profiles for ancient reasons and ingrained habits
| regarding them.
|
| Ancient documentation: https://www-
| archive.mozilla.org/docs/command-line-args.html
| iamkonstantin wrote:
| I tried Firefox just a few days ago, but it didn't work out. I
| just missed too many things out of the box. My main browser is
| Vivaldi (so all the chromium goodies + privacy + made in EU).
| Safari comes in as a close second, I tend to use it on the go
| because it syncs well with my Mac and Apple throttles any other
| browser on iOS.
| fsflover wrote:
| > I just missed too many things out of the box.
|
| Another very vague comment bashing Firefox without any real
| explanation.
| iamkonstantin wrote:
| I'm not sure making a list that's been done time and time
| again here would make a difference. But if you're truly
| interested, here are my top 3:
|
| - Firefox comes packed with all kinds of telemetry and
| analytics turned on.
|
| - No workspaces/profiles. I know there are extensions that
| can enable various flavours of this functionality, but it's
| just too much overhead to experiment and test every-single-
| one.
|
| - Widgets! I love Vivaldi's Dashboard for when one needs more
| than just a homepage.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| > No workspaces/profiles. I know there are extensions that
| can enable various flavours of this functionality, but it's
| just too much overhead to experiment and test every-single-
| one.
|
| Most of it is built-in and these days there is generally
| only one recommended extension: Multi-Account Container.
| Containers (tabs in the same window with different cookie
| jars/etc) are built-in, the UI for working with them is
| not, and MAC is the generally agreed best UI. It lets you
| create as many named Containers as you want and assign them
| a color to gently stripe your tabs. You can right-click the
| new tab button and get a list of Containers to open the
| next tab in. You can right-click an existing tab and reopen
| it in a new Container. (TIL from this article there's an
| option to have left click on the new tab button always open
| the Container menu. I don't think I'd use that, but it's
| nice to know.)
|
| If you want to go older school, Profiles (browser windows
| with different extensions/cookie jars/everything) have been
| around since the beginning of Firefox (and it shows in how
| old and ugly some of the UI still is, hah).
| `about:profiles` is a profile manager when you are already
| inside a Firefox browser. The `-ProfileManager` command
| line switch is the ancient startup option to manage
| profiles before opening a browser window at all. If you
| like to use side-by-side profiles often you want `-noremote
| -ProfileManager` and/or `-noremote -P $profileName`
| shortcuts. (`-noremote` says not to send it to any
| currently open Firefox window.)
| everybodyknows wrote:
| > Multi-Account Container
|
| Last I looked, it was not possible to bind a bookmark to
| a preferred MAC.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| The MAC UI itself allows to assign a domain to always
| open in a specific container. If you need it more
| specific than an entire domain there are other extensions
| that can allow you to automate containers, but personally
| all I've needed are the domain-wide assignments.
|
| Admittedly, I also tend to use unloaded tabs more than
| bookmarks, so if I need a very specific address in a
| specific container I am probably likely to just unload it
| but leave it open somewhere. (Sideberry "helps" me in
| this bad habit with multiple tab panels and tree grouping
| of tabs.)
| fsflover wrote:
| > - No workspaces/profiles.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44645720
| Mashimo wrote:
| Ah, nice share.
|
| I was looking at different chrome alternatives and most of them
| had ~something~ wrong with them. I have not tried vivaldi yet,
| but from a bit of research it seems just like the browser I was
| looking for. Thanks for sharing.
|
| Any specific thing a first time user should know? Use build in
| ad blocker or install uBlock Origin?
| cwillu wrote:
| I prefer stylebot to stylus, as it doesn't require an unnecessary
| dance to make a specific theme and then mark it as only for the
| current site, before you can plop some css into the sidebar for
| that specific site.
| midnitewarrior wrote:
| Just use Brave Browser. https://brave.com/
|
| It's like de-Googled Chrome, as it's based on the same Open
| Source Chromium browser, has all of the ad-blocking and anti-
| fingerprint tools built in, and all of the Google taken out.
|
| You can also run popular browser extensions published for Chrome,
| but you don't need to worry about ad blocking, as Brave has you
| covered by default.
|
| It also blocks YouTube ads effectively, by default. There's
| nothing you have to do to make this work.
| eclecticfrank wrote:
| Brave wants to replace "bad" ads from third parties with their
| own "good" ads.[1]
|
| They have also in the past been caught adding their own
| referral codes to crypto transaction URLs pasted into their
| browser. [2]
|
| [1] https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/how-to-earn-and-use-
| cryptocurre... [2] https://www.pcmag.com/news/brave-browser-
| caught-redirecting-...
| dartharva wrote:
| You can disable Brave Shields and just use classic uBO (which
| Brave supports) instead.
| esskay wrote:
| I'm not sure trying to bad mouth it by bringing up a 5+ year
| old long fixed thing is the right way to go about making a
| point. Heck if we're doing that theres vastly more "wrong"
| over at Mozilla and Google to complain about in that
| timeframe.
|
| Aa of right now Brave has two "features" that you can disable
| - the crypto thing and a vpn advert. Once those are off, they
| are off. You don't see them anymore, they aren't sitting in
| the background running, and they aren't calling home.
|
| It's no different to Mozilla's constant and blatant attempts
| to reactivate telemetry data in Firefox updates despite
| opting out - I'd argue that's a bigger offence.
| midnitewarrior wrote:
| Yeah, this seems a bit disingenuous given the nature of, and
| the time since that issue existed.
|
| I did their ads, I made hundreds of dollars leaving them on
| in the early days. I value my attention more so I've shut
| them off.
| JLemay wrote:
| Just fell to my knees in a Walmart, this is how I find out that
| Chrome pulled the trigger on uBlock Origin. While I haven't used
| Firefox in a while (brave user) it's still a shame such a thing
| happened, although it was just a matter of time. It's like every
| day the enshittification of the internet keeps accelerating.
| javier_e06 wrote:
| Firefox is all that.
|
| Except on my arm-based crhomebook. There it gets confused and do
| not resize properly thinking is in phone format.
|
| Also cast to chromecast is a no-go.
|
| If it wasn't by those 2 issues I would have ditched chrome long
| time ago.
| skrebbel wrote:
| I would just like to add that in my experience, "How to Firefox"
| is just:
|
| - Download Firefox
|
| - Install uBlock Origin
|
| - Use Firebox
|
| Somehow this blog post makes it seem like adopting Firefox is
| hard, or overwhelming, or some multi step process, and if you
| don't do those steps you're effectively downgrading. But really
| it isn't. It's a browser. Its UX is great. It just... works.
|
| The suggestion that to use it properly you need to customize it
| to the max is simply flat out wrong.
| boobsbr wrote:
| You forgot
|
| - Disable all telemetry
|
| in your list.
| skrebbel wrote:
| In the context of switching from Chrome? No, I very much did
| not. On the privacy front, I'm absolutely convinced that
| switching from Chrome to Firefox is an upgrade even if you
| don't do stuff like this.
|
| This is my entire point. Yes, you _can_ tweak Firefox to the
| max and yes you _can_ complain about the more questionable
| stuff Mozilla has done, but compared to the privacy /goodness
| you get just from ditching Chrome (or Edge for that matter),
| all that is pretty marginal.
| ReadCarlBarks wrote:
| Disabling anonymous telemetry just harms the project. It
| doesn't give you any "privacy" benefit.
| voidUpdate wrote:
| - Work out how to transfer everything across from whatever you
| were using before
| sfink wrote:
| Which is actually not bad these days. Firefox imports a lot
| of stuff from a bunch of different browsers. (Or so I've
| heard; I haven't used a bunch of different browsers and built
| up enough stuff to know for myself.)
| adithyassekhar wrote:
| This is really hard to read. I can't get the tone of the article
| or how I'm supposed to feel about it. Or is it a generation gap,
| I was born in 2000.
| skotobaza wrote:
| >I can't get the tone of the article or how I'm supposed to
| feel about it
|
| It's a tech article. What do you expect to feel while reading
| it?
| alt227 wrote:
| > This is really hard to read.
|
| I am old and I agree.
|
| It is full of things that break the flow of reading like asking
| a hypothetical question to the reader and following it up with
| a plosive like 'BOOM!', or inserting useless conversational
| stops like like 'sure,' 'But...', and '...Nope!'.
|
| Makes it sound/feel like an excited toddler is desperate to
| tell you something, but cant really get to the point.
| sto11z wrote:
| I tried transitioning to FF from Chrome several times, but it
| just feels so unresonsive and slow in comparison. I really wanted
| to, but ultimately couldn't.
|
| On a side note: You can manually install uBlock and just continue
| using it:
|
| - Enter chrome://flags in chrome's URL input
|
| - Search for 'Allow legacy extension manifest versions'
|
| - Enable it and relaunch browser
|
| - Download the latest zip file of uBlock version from github:
| https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/releases
|
| - Under Assets, download the chromium zip and extract it
|
| - Open the extension page in chrome, click the Load Unpacked
| button on top left side load (enable Developer Mode in the top
| right if it doesn't appear), then select the extracted folder.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| Understandable. I tried moving from Firefox to Chrome but I
| couldn't. Pages are so slow to load and there are adds
| everywhere.
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| I'm curious what would make you even want to try with all the
| shenanigans Google has been up to. It seems obvious that its
| a bad idea.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| I wanted to see just how bad is raw Chrome experience on
| Android. I've learned my lesson.
| phoronixrly wrote:
| Right there with you. I cannot understand how people manage
| to use Chrome without an ad-blocker. It's just so slow and
| makes my laptop heat up and run out of memory...
| muizelaar wrote:
| What parts felt unresponsive and slow?
| uallo wrote:
| > You can manually install uBlock and just continue using it
|
| Only with Chrome 138 and lower. Chrome 139 will not support
| Manifest V2 anymore.
|
| https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/develop/migrate...
|
| Seriously, use Firefox if you want to use uBlock Origin.
| sto11z wrote:
| Oh! :/
| aheckler wrote:
| FWIW uBlock Origin Lite (the MV3 version of uBlock Origin)
| seems pretty much just as good, at least to me.
|
| https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin-
| lite/...
|
| I don't use a ton of custom filters or rulesets though, so
| YMMV.
| fsflover wrote:
| https://www.quippd.com/writing/2024/10/16/google-is-
| killing-...
| jppj wrote:
| tl;dr - how to Firefox? Blind taste test.
|
| Had been using Arc for some time with several qualms about the UX
| and after trying Dia and finding it's just yet another Chrome,
| decided to see what Zen is like. I expected the same - but it
| wasn't. All qualms were solved and I had no rendering problems.
|
| It was only when I noticed the Mozilla login flow I realized I
| had switched to Firefox - I had an assumption that all
| alternative browsers are on Chromium now. Really lucky since if I
| knew, I may not have given a fair chance given the rendering
| problems I remember from giving it a try 3-4 years ago.
| jasonvorhe wrote:
| Firefox will never become strong again under Mozilla.
| akhdanfadh wrote:
| Firefox was my main browser after Chrome MV3 stuff, but now I'm
| moving to Orion by Kagi. I found, on my Macbook M1, Firefox hog
| the battery a lot seen from the energy impact on Mac's activity
| monitor (average 12hr power >1000 compared to Orion ~350). Don't
| expect extensions to work well on Orion, though, but I can live
| with it for now.
| SwiftyBug wrote:
| It supports both Chrome and Firefox extensions. Vimium works
| flawlessly.
| nxtbl wrote:
| .. and then there are panorama extensions, which ease handling a
| lot of tabs immensely. No other browser seems to have anything
| alike. No, the grouping of tabs into tabs does nothing compared
| to this.
|
| https://github.com/projectdelphai/panorama-tab-groups and
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/panorama-view...
| poisonborz wrote:
| First rule of Firefoxing: use a fork instead
| sixhobbits wrote:
| This is pretty similar to my set up but I'm ready to quit Firefox
| because what feels like every few weeks they somehow manage to
| add new auto-enabled spyware.
|
| I regularly have to turn stuff off in
|
| "Firefox Data Collection and Use"
|
| and
|
| "Website Advertising Preferences"
|
| Recently I also started seeing ads in my address bar when typing
| stuff and saw they've added:
|
| "Suggestions from sponsors Support Firefox with occasional
| sponsored suggestions."
|
| of course, enabled by default.
|
| Firefox is a great product but unfortunately slowly being
| milked/destroyed by its non-technical management team.
| fsflover wrote:
| > but I'm ready to quit Firefox because
|
| This is still nowhere near Google's browser.
| djrj477dhsnv wrote:
| Easiest solution is to just use LibreWolf on desktop and
| IronFox on Android.
|
| They get rid of all the anti-privacy defaults.
| ReadCarlBarks wrote:
| Updates aren't supposed to reset any setting. Submit a bug
| report for them to fix whatever is doing that for you:
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/
| jvdvegt wrote:
| A bit ironic that I cannot see the left few pixels of that site
| in Firefox on Android. (A 'T' starts at the vertical bar)
| uallo wrote:
| Why "ironic"? The website is using flexbox incorrectly, all
| spec-compliant browsers have that behaviour on small viewports.
| Using the "safe" keyword fixes that.
|
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/align-items...
| sorcercode wrote:
| sorry I'm not necessarily seeing this. could I ask for more
| details ?
| beshrkayali wrote:
| The main problem Firefox has really is Mozilla. And Orion is neat
| but too immature and the direction Kagi is taking in general
| seems to be moving further away from a indie company with a
| single purpose. I hope they manage to steer themselves back into
| what got people excited about them to begin with.
|
| But sure, anything but Chrome.
| zac23or wrote:
| I use Firefox, Chrome, and Edge on a Windows 10 machine.
|
| I use Chrome 90% of the time because Firefox is slow and has many
| bugs on video sites like 9gag. The screen goes black, the video
| loses vertical sync, etc. The same happens with Edge.
|
| In my experience, the problem with Firefox's popularity is
| technical. I'll use Firefox more often if it improves. Before
| Firefox 3.6 (probably that version), Firefox was my most used
| browser, but after that version, Firefox started getting slower
| and more buggy. I switched to Chrome because IE was unusable on
| some sites.
|
| I've never used Firefox much on Android, but when I did, it was
| slower than Chrome.
|
| It's likely that if Firefox fixes the issues, they'll gain
| traction again, but right now, I don't see that happening.
| Mozilla's goals are different.
| marttt wrote:
| > Before Firefox 3.6 (probably that version), Firefox was my
| most used browser, but after that version, Firefox started
| getting slower and more buggy.
|
| Haha, I remember that same feeling, with 3.6 being "peak"
| Firefox back in the day. My 3.6 was heavily hand-tailored to my
| needs via about:config etc. Just some dedicated end-user here,
| but I did know it very well. Version 4 felt considerably worse
| on a WinXP system, some essential-to-me add-ons broke, etc. I
| remember feeling really - as in, _really_ - frustrated when I
| finally had to make the switch.
|
| Apparently, 3.6 is the longest supported Firefox version ever,
| 27 months:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_3.6#End_of_life
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| I seem to recall similarly about things starting to go
| downhill after 4.x or so. Performance, optimization, and
| stability seemed to take a back seat to flashier things like
| new features and UI themes. It stopped being the lean, mean
| minimal browser that it'd become famous as and turned into
| something a lot more unremarkable (albeit, more flexible).
| They wouldn't seriously prioritize performance again until
| many years later with Quantum.
|
| Looking at it that way, it's no mystery how it lost ground to
| Chrome (though Google's marketing muscle is also largely
| responsible). Mozilla just tossed Firefox's claim to fame out
| the window and expected things to work out somehow, which is
| a bit like a restaurant that'd become popular for its award
| winning burgers deciding to pivot to the same dry turkey
| sandwiches you can get at most of the restaurants in town.
| Yeah, you're gonna lose customers.
| phoronixrly wrote:
| So after all of the things you outlined, you're still fine with
| using Chrome _despite the ads_?
| zac23or wrote:
| Yes, in my case, for some sites like 9gag, Chrome is the only
| browser that works!
|
| Nothing is free, and ads are inevitable (Firefox makes money
| from... ads). I don't think ads are the worst thing about the
| internet.
|
| Where I'm sure Firefox works without problems, I use it:
| (hackernews, for example), OR on sites where ads are the
| problem, pop-ups are the problem. I hope it improves so I can
| use it more.
| eclecticfrank wrote:
| Lots of Firefox hate here, but little discussion about the
| articles kicker, which is the exclusion of uBlock Origin from
| Chrome.
|
| I hope this will mean that in the long run Firefox (and other
| secondary browsers) will gain more users again. For me, Firefox
| is a solid piece of software. Works well in strict privacy mode,
| with uBlock Origin and Multi-Account Containers.
| bool3max wrote:
| In the _long run_ Alphabet will find a way to bar non-vetted
| browsers from accessing the Internet.
| pivo wrote:
| Perhaps, but I'm not giving up just yet.
| IHLayman wrote:
| Alphabet will definitely try to do that (within their
| business interest and all that), but I still choose to
| believe in the precept that "the net interprets censorship as
| damage and routes around it", as old and outdated as that
| sounds.
|
| A number of my privacy-minded friends choose a bi-modal
| approach: have two phones, one for work and one for personal.
| They don't get the recent model (costing half as much), hold
| onto the old phone for as long as they can, use one phone for
| "required" apps (Okta, Slack, those websites that only work
| on Chrome...) and the personal phone for everything else.
|
| As annoying as it is, i think that compartmentalized
| devices/accounts/apps are the only way forward.
| kaszanka wrote:
| Probably even non-vetted firmware-to-browser chains, by
| requiring boot attestation to open a TLS connection or
| something.
| normalaccess wrote:
| I'm dreading the day when this becomes required by the
| government...
| jorvi wrote:
| With the ramping up of 18+ verification in Australia and
| now Europe (and South Korea and China already having such
| a programme for many years, including game time locks for
| young people), yeah.
|
| It doesn't seem that big a leap to connect the dots from
| device attestation > web browser integrity > identity
| verification > verified web access
|
| There is actually a relatively old game series of the
| 2000s called Bluesky Hacker Replay that has this as the
| core element of its worldbuilding. Governments and
| corporations became tired of the internet being overrun
| with spam, viruses, porn and cyberterrorism and decide to
| create an internet 2.0, tightly controlled by corporate
| interests. Hackers persist on the old 1.0 internet called
| the SwitchNet.
|
| And really, when you think about it.. if you composed an
| internet solely from the big name social media,
| entertainment, work, food, news and knowledge services,
| running atop Cloudflare who verifies everyone via
| government ID, how many would really complain? 99% of
| their internet time is already spent inside that bubble.
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| The future is now (actually 2 years ago):
| https://github.com/explainers-by-googlers/Web-Environment-
| In...
| prasadjoglekar wrote:
| Hopefully in the slightly shorter run, they get broken up via
| anti trust.
| seanclayton wrote:
| Some of us want a different world and believe it's possible.
| psionides wrote:
| How would they do that?
| Twirrim wrote:
| Multi-Account Containers is a major feature I can't sing the
| praises for enough. I use it all the time, both to isolate
| stuff to break cookie tracking, and to enable me to log into
| things with two different accounts without opening a separate
| browser, which happens more often than I'd have thought.
| carlhjerpe wrote:
| When I was doing IT support for ~50 SMBs I was using multi
| account containers + temporary locations ALL THE TIME to log
| into customer accounts in various places, now I don't really
| have the usecase but the addons are still there for the rare
| occasion.
| ReadCarlBarks wrote:
| > both to isolate stuff to break cookie tracking
|
| You don't need containers for this: https://total-cookie-
| protection-test.netlify.app/
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| There's a few pain points with containers; whenever I'm
| browsing in a container tab, I wish CMD-T opened a new
| container tab, not my default tab. I haven't been able to
| find a setting for this :/
|
| I also wish there were more keyboard shortcuts for opening
| links in specific containers, or re-opening a current tab in
| a different one.
|
| I know you can set certain domains to always open in certain
| containers - fine for Facebook, when I occasionally have to
| use it - but annoying when I'm trying to do things in
| different (e.g.) Bluesky accounts.
| sorcercode wrote:
| > I also wish there were more keyboard shortcuts for
| opening links in specific containers, or re-opening a
| current tab in a different one.
|
| fwiw, there are add-ons that allow you to do this - in one
| way or the other (Container Hotkeys
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/container-
| hot... for example).
|
| but out of curiosity,
|
| > I know you can set certain domains to always open in
| certain containers - fine for Facebook, when I occasionally
| have to use it - but annoying when I'm trying to do things
| in different (e.g.) Bluesky accounts.
|
| on this one btw, the Containerise extension i talk about
| (if it wasn't clear) allows you to also map "portions" of
| the url in specific containers. so /u/0 in one /u/1 in
| another; ofc, this requires the service/website to
| distinguish the accounts via the url. i do this for github
| a lot (work repos in specific containers)
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Very cool, thank you - I'll check out the hotkeys add-on!
|
| The other extension won't work for me, mostly - for
| example, Bluesky doesn't give me different URLs depending
| on who I'm logged in as. (Which is the correct thing to
| do, but it does make my life slightly harder. :/)
|
| edit: oh, nevermind. It looks like it adds a single
| hotkey to open a new tab in a single, specified
| container. I was at least hoping the hotkey would work by
| opening a new tab in the same container I'm in currently
| :/
| ddejohn wrote:
| Not having subdomains work for container assignments is a
| baffling design decision. It's a well-known issue and oft-
| requested feature that the devs seemingly have no plan to
| fix. It's incredibly frustrating.
|
| > whenever I'm browsing in a container tab, I wish CMD-T
| opened a new container tab
|
| Not exactly what you're looking for, but Temporary
| Containers (no longer maintained, fwiw) at least will open
| every new tab in a new temporary container that will be
| wiped after a configurable amount of time after closing.
| hbn wrote:
| On my list of concerns for big tech abusing power, the ad
| company with the browser monopoly leveraging their position to
| essentially end ad blocking on the web by disabling it on the
| browser people are using in practice is very high on the list,
| and I would have been fine waiting on forcing Apple to let you
| uninstall the camera app, or switching the iPhone to USB-C if
| it could have prevented this. This didn't come out of nowhere,
| we've known about manifest v3 for years now.
|
| In fact Google's browser monopoly only looks like it's gonna
| get further cemented as Apple is forced to allow other browser
| engines, which is the only thing keeping any sort of
| competition against Chrome.
|
| I feel like the anti-Apple snark that's been so popular since
| around the late 2000s (and I took part in in my angsty teen
| years) has been affecting the priority of what's being dealt
| with from regulators and it annoys me.
| beeflet wrote:
| >which is the only thing keeping any sort of competition
| against Chrome.
|
| It's hardly competition. People complain about the safari
| monopoly on iOS because it lags behind competitors and has
| awful support for PWAs.
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| > Lots of Firefox hate here, but little discussion about the
| articles kicker, which is the exclusion of uBlock Origin from
| Chrome.
|
| I'll complain about Firefox a lot, because I'm exposed to all
| its issues. That doesn't mean I hate it: I see issues in all
| products that I use, even the ones that are really useful or
| essential. I'm sure I'm not unique in this aspect in the HN
| crowd.
| MattSayar wrote:
| My experience with uBlock Origin Lite seems basically the same.
| I also use NextDNS so that probably does a lot of heavy lifting
| too
| benterix wrote:
| > The other line you see there? That one-liner blocks all those
| "Sign in with Google?" pop-ups.
|
| This is one of these tiny improvements that will save you a
| second or two per website, but when you multiply it, it becomes
| significant. Kudos to all the people who made it possible.
| sbdaman wrote:
| >but when you multiply it, it becomes significant.
|
| Does it?
| bmn__ wrote:
| Yes, the concept is called "shut up and multiply". I estimate
| the content-blocking counter-measure has saved hundreds of
| man-years.
|
| On the days I feel particularly nasty like Ellison's
| character The Ticktockman, I wish that the programmers and
| the product managers who are responsible for the
| enshittification get this time subtracted from their life.
| aembleton wrote:
| Yes; and not having the visual noise is pleasant.
| cainxinth wrote:
| I switched after Manifest v3. I won't go back to Chrome as long
| as it limits ad-blocking, but I do miss its speed.
|
| Firefox takes a long time to open (especially when you have a lot
| of extensions). Even with the same number of extensions, Chrome
| opens in a jiffy. There are other areas of slowdown as well.
| Sometimes I hit Control+D to bookmark a page and nothing happens.
| At first I thought maybe I was doing something wrong, but now I
| know to just wait, and sure enough five to ten seconds after I
| hit the shortcut it works. A delay that long (especially one with
| no notification of any kind) is really bad UX.
| Vinnl wrote:
| Oof, a delay that long should not happen. Might be worth
| reporting at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org, ideally with a
| profile attached (see https://profiler.firefox.com/)?
| djrj477dhsnv wrote:
| Unless you're running it on 15+ year old hardware, it sounds
| like something is very wrong.
|
| I've used Firefox / LibreWolf basically since it existed and
| can't remember any UI delays longer than a second.
| pixelesque wrote:
| Note that Firefox for me within the last 3/4 months seems to
| have (I assume it's by design?) changed to automatically add a
| bookmark to the most-recently-added bookmark folder WITHOUT
| asking which folder to use (it just adds a blue star in the
| address bar) which is pretty annoying IMO and isn't the
| behaviour I want 95% of the time.
|
| Pressing Ctrl/Cmd-D a second time then does "Edit bookmark",
| and allows you to change it.
|
| Might that be contributing to what you're seeing? (blue star
| appearing is fairly obvious though).
| mattlutze wrote:
| I am surprised how many people have so many problems with
| Firefox.
|
| I've never felt impeded by loading speeds, and my ADHD regularly
| has me forgetting to restart it, to the tune of 100+ tabs open
| across multiple desktops. My wimply little MacBook Pro doesn't
| seem to mind.
|
| The only downside I've found is that, because so many people just
| default to "Chrome or nothing," there's occasionally sites that
| have bugs because, like was the case in the 90s with Internet
| Explorer, the site developers took the idiomatic Chrome way of
| building a feature instead of something universal.
| helij wrote:
| In two decades of using it (yep) I never had an issue. I used
| it on Linux, MacOS and Windows and I don't remember any issues
| whatsoever.
| behringer wrote:
| Same here, although I've had a couple issues but I actually
| contacted the website operator and over time they fixed the
| issues (either that or firefox themselves fixed it). It never
| hurts to reach out to tech support and ask for firefox
| support!
| phoronixrly wrote:
| > I've never felt impeded by loading speeds
|
| Even if this was an issue I had noticed (which I hadn't), now
| that's out the door because no ad blocker in Chrome, so good
| luck loading all the ads and trackers before getting your
| content...
|
| I can't believe people keep parroting that... Even if 'chrome
| is faster and more responsive than firefox' was not a
| controversial statement (and it very much is), 'chrome with ads
| is fast' is outright laughable...
| echoangle wrote:
| > My wimply little MacBook Pro
|
| How old is it? Is a MacBook Pro wimpy now?
| creshal wrote:
| A 2012 Macbook Pro is going to be, yeah.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| I used one quite recently. It's no wimp for web browsing.
| Basically unnoticeable save for the constant warmth from
| this machine. It is still 2.5ghz per core after all, that's
| not a complete slouch.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I'm about the same, I don't even know what the loading speeds
| issue is about, I still remember Firefox Quantum beating the
| daylights out of Chrome, and I don't know if Chrome ever fully
| caught up to Quantum?
|
| What's really funny is for ages Chrome would load the browser
| window even if the whole browser UI wasn't done loading, and
| sometime after Quantum, Firefox started doing the same trick to
| make you feel as though it instantly runs.
|
| I've been using Firefox for about 20 years or so, and I don't
| regret it, but also I have not noticed a degrade in
| performance. I'm using it on Linux so I don't know if that's
| drastically different on a Mac these days.
| voxic11 wrote:
| Do you use Firefox for Android? I use it for the extension
| support but its noticeably slower than Chrome on Android.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I'm on iOS, I guess I mainly use Firefox on Desktop, on iOS
| there's no point in me using Firefox since its forced to
| use Webkit under the covers.
| grimgrin wrote:
| firefox on all my devices for the simple pleasure of
| sending tabs between devices
|
| sometimes i'm reading something on phone and i "send to
| all devices", i'll sure as shit see it again this way
|
| (even librewolf allows you to continue doing this)
| godelski wrote:
| I browse with Orion (for ad blocking) but still have
| Firefox installed because I can click Share -> Firefox ->
| Send Tab. Maybe I stumble upon a video I want to watch
| but not now. Maybe I stumble upon a long form article or
| reference or something that just is shitty on a mobile
| interface and I push it to the computer I'm literally
| sitting next to while having my phone in hand too.
| VHRanger wrote:
| With ublock origin enabled on an android device I'd argue
| it's rather much faster
| efreak wrote:
| The app itself is insanely slow to start up, and it
| always has been. Try killing Firefox and Chrome, open the
| browser via a link from another app and see how long it
| takes for the page to start rendering. I suggest a page
| with a different color background and nothing else.
| Chrome is _always_ fast, while Firefox is almost always
| very slow (pinning the app to my recent list helps on
| Samsung devices, but isn 't available elsewhere)
| godelski wrote:
| Is Chrome being cached?
|
| This is actually not a good test because there are a lot
| of tricky and subtle things that can make the comparison
| highly unfair. Smartphones will cache apps so that they
| don't fully close. Then, if you do actually force kill
| them they will start up in the background.
|
| Are we surprised a Google phone caches the Google browser
| which is considered to be a high priority app, commonly
| used, and even the backbone of other apps?
| charcircuit wrote:
| >This is actually not a good test
|
| It is a realistic user scenario, which in my opinion
| makes it a good test. The real world performance is what
| matters here. The user doesn't care if technically there
| is some trick that is being used to "cheat."
| godelski wrote:
| > The user doesn't care if technically there is some
| trick that is being used to "cheat."
|
| You framed the "benchmark" around performance, not
| perceived performance. Those are two very different
| things. We're on HN, so don't be surprised when people
| correct you or nitpick. Either accept the clarification
| (if it is correct), clarify what you originally intended
| to say (without being overly defensive), or move on.
|
| Besides, if we're talking about average user, they're not
| force closing apps and the phone should be caching the
| most frequently used apps. So even then the test won't
| mimic real world experience even if it's about
| perception. Maybe initially, but not after sustained
| usage. People usually normalize to whatever they're using
| bobbob27 wrote:
| Uhhh... he followed your own advice better than you did.
| carlhjerpe wrote:
| I don't have anything but anecdotal experience here, but I
| think Google Chrome was gaming Windows Defender better for
| awhile, when Windows Defender treats you poorly IO grinds to
| a halt and then some.
|
| I've never had Firefox issues on Linux.
| nextos wrote:
| > I've never had Firefox issues on Linux.
|
| My experience on Linux running on very old hardware (4th
| Gen Intel) is also good. Firefox feels quick and snappy. It
| uses a reasonable amount of resources, and has a relatively
| modest memory footprint by modern browser standards. In
| comparison, Chromium makes my fans spin on every site and
| eats several GB of memory.
|
| The annoying part of Firefox is that development seems a
| bit stagnant in some areas, especially taking into
| consideration the amount of resources Mozilla has. For
| example, bookmarks and history still rely on a very old
| native UI that is quite clunky. Customization via user.js
| is too imperative and most options are largely
| undocumented.
| carlhjerpe wrote:
| And no standard way to configure extensions is something
| I feel they could spearhead. Ofc extensions can store
| state however it wants, but more often than not I'm quite
| fond of my extension settings.
| porphyra wrote:
| I've had various Firefox issues on Linux such as mysterious
| bad frame rate that I wasn't able to track down (despite
| toggling every feature related to gpu acceleration in
| about:flags), slow startup (which I found was due to some
| dbus configuration), and inability to print (apparmor
| blocked cups).
| carlhjerpe wrote:
| I'm certain people have issues, especially when you stick
| NVIDIA into the mix. I do always run rolling release
| software on "older"/well supported hardware with good
| drivers. (And I trust Firefox enough to not sandbox it
| though Flatpak or snaps)
|
| It's just an anecdote, but I've had several FF issues on
| Windows, might be a timeline thing however.
| porphyra wrote:
| Yes I hate how Ubuntu sandboxes firefox by default (even
| when you install it via apt, it secretly installs the
| snap instead). Terrible. I eventually had to use a PPA
| just to get firefox.
|
| Also, Nvidia is non-negotiable due to performance
| requirements and local deep learning experiments. I think
| Nvidia has gotten a lot better lately, even Sway (Wayland
| window manager) works these days. Incidentally I think
| the bad firefox framerates were only on i3 and not on
| Sway.
| carlhjerpe wrote:
| I'm docking my NVIDIA GPU with the vfio driver and have
| an Intel cheapest dGPU for my desktop.
|
| Then i attach the NVIDIA GPU to either a Windows VM or a
| NixOS one for gaming or "work".
|
| It takes space and PCIe lanes to do so however, so I run
| SATA6 drives still :)
|
| But if you can splurge, having multiple GPUs isn't
| unreasonable, as "Postgrest" docs says(0): Use a
| collection of sharp tools rather than building a big ball
| of mud.
|
| 0: https://docs.postgrest.org/en/v13/index.html#one-
| thing-well
| porphyra wrote:
| I used to have both an AMD GPU and an Nvidia GPU and also
| dual boot Linux and Windows. But that is an incredible
| hassle. Nowadays, Nvidia on Linux works pretty well, and
| gaming on Linux on Steam often works flawlessly with one
| click, so it's more like a Swiss army knife rather than a
| big ball of mud.
| carlhjerpe wrote:
| I never dualboot, Linux runs my hardware. I just pass my
| NVIDIA GPU between different VMs.
|
| I also wrote a little Python script that uses evdev to
| capture a numpad I bought and bind keys to different
| scripts that bind and unbind USB devices from my VMs for
| gaming.
|
| I run sound though QEMU and pipewire and I get 45ms
| headphones to mic latency (measured with audacity) so
| slightly below 23ms latency. (I get essentially half
| doing the same measurement in Linux)
|
| Virtualisation is a "out in the open" superpower.
| dhruvmittal wrote:
| Nvidia is really the one hurdle preventing me from fully
| embracing firefox-- I've had a lot of trouble getting
| hardware acceleration on Wayland with Nvidia drivers. At
| this point, I'm not sure if it's a configuration issue or
| if it doesn't work at all.
| crmi wrote:
| Debian? I noticed this too, switched from using LTS
| version to latest - much better. On arch, no FF issues at
| all.
| moffkalast wrote:
| What I've found recently is that Linux is surprisingly
| Firefox's achilles' heel. Canvas and WebGL run easily an
| order of magnitude slower than Chromium.
|
| Check with https://webglsamples.org if you don't believe it.
| All of it runs capped at 60 fps on Chrome for me, Firefox
| struggles to break 30 on mid tier settings in aquarium and
| stutters horribly throughout most of them. I'm sure it's fast
| at loading static sites, but I wouldn't ever use it to run
| any web app. On Windows they're both the same though, which
| is weird to me.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I'll test it when I get home, I'm really curious, I've not
| noticed a slowdown, I am using Arch so I'm not sure if that
| makes a meaningful difference.
| h3lp wrote:
| thanks for the benchmark tip. FWIW, firefox 140.0.4 on
| Fedora 42 runs pretty much all tests at 60 fps or
| therebouts.
| mook wrote:
| I note that the GitHub org has two public members, one of
| which is from Google:
| https://github.com/orgs/WebGLSamples/people
|
| Google's been doing advocacy where they do things that
| either only work on Chrome or just magically works faster
| there, for a very long time.
| doph wrote:
| I didn't believe it and after trying those samples, I still
| don't. All of them run flawlessly for me on FF 104.0.4 on
| an up-to-date Arch install on my laptop.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Wayland or X11? I'm on Kubuntu and from what I remember
| reading a while back it may be Firefox using something
| native on X11 that Chrome rolls its own thing for, but I
| may be misremembering.
| funcDropShadow wrote:
| I've tried perhaps one third of the samples. All of them
| ran in 120 fps in 3840x2160 px in Firefox on Linux on my
| machine. Perhaps it is a configuration problem. My screen
| has a 120 fps refresh rate, so it probably is capped there.
| eloisant wrote:
| I've been using Firefox since it was called Firebird, and
| Linux has always been a 2nd zone citizen.
|
| Most Mozilla developers are on Mac, most users are on
| Windows, so Linux have never been the focus.
| stuaxo wrote:
| The recently work with DMABUF on Linux might help a lot of
| things get faster.
| phil294 wrote:
| I ran some of these in comparison with Chrome, and Chrome
| was consistently faster, but only marginally (1-20%). I'm
| actually quite impressed, an integrated Intel HD 620 /
| 4x2.4 GHz (!) rendering 10,000 fishes at 30 FPS in a
| webbrowser.
| moffkalast wrote:
| For reference my numbers are for an RTX 4070, Firefox has
| no excuse for not being able to crack 60 fps on a demo
| that looks like it's from the late 2000s in terms of
| graphics.
| Xss3 wrote:
| Sounds like hardware acceleration isnt working?
| moffkalast wrote:
| I'm running Gazebo at 10 times realtime and inference
| through cuda, trust me it's working. If Firefox doesn't
| take advantage of it that's its problem. I've enabled
| every config setting for acceleration I could find.
| godelski wrote:
| Isn't the fps capping? I'm pretty confident it is because
| it won't go above that on my system even when I do a
| trivial number of fish and my monitor maxes out at
| 60fps... > on a demo that looks like it's
| from the late 2000
|
| Okay... now I think I shouldn't take you seriously...
|
| The literal visual aesthetics aren't really important for
| the test. You could place some nicer shaders and it
| wouldn't necessarily change the compute load. Hell, it
| could just be highly unoptimized. Benchmarks are mostly
| about having something static to test, not making
| something visually pleasing.
| moffkalast wrote:
| I'm half kidding, it's entirely possible to overload any
| GPU with too many draw calls with the end result not
| looking like much. These fish would run reasonably well
| on something from that era though I'm sure, it's no GTA
| San Andreas.
|
| But no it's not capped at 30, it jumps to like 33, 34
| sometimes with those settings, it's capped to 60 like
| Chrome as well. Probably vsync.
| godelski wrote:
| You said 60 before so thats why I thought it was capped.
| Which matches what I'm seeing when I run the tests as
| well as others
| rypskar wrote:
| Is your screen 60Hz? Game loops are normally using
| requestAnimationFrame [0], which is capped at refresh
| rate of your display
|
| [0]https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/API/Window/requ...
| efreak wrote:
| Try indexeddb. Apparently Firefox is faster than Chrome in
| recent years when it comes to putting items into a
| database, but my experience with multi-gigabyte databases
| (the database contains image blobs and metadata for use as
| a local webapp) is that chrome is _far_ faster than
| Firefox. I 'd rather use Firefox sure to increased
| indexeddb limits (for mobile devices with limited storage),
| but it's just that much slower. I have a chrome-based
| browser installed on my phone just for PWA use.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Hmm that might also be contributing to dogshit Firefox
| performance on a web app of mine, I'm using that to store
| and fetch map tiles. Though that's all async so it
| shouldn't really matter in terms of rendering aside from
| having to wait a bit longer to retrieve.
|
| But it already lags like fuck even without that part
| running or anything much at all, while being buttersmooth
| on Chrome almost regardless of how much I load up
| rendering. It infuriates me to hell because there is no
| optimization I can make to get equal or even usable
| performance.
| godelski wrote:
| I'm having a different experience.
| Aquarium: 60fps until 20k fish, where I hit 50fps. 30k at
| 34fps Blobs: maxed out resolution and number of
| blobs, still 60fps Field: 60fps at "lots"
| Fishtank: 60fps with 1k fish and sharks Spacerocks:
| 60fps on lots Sprites: 60fps on 10k
|
| System: - FF 140.0.4 - Kernel: 6.12.37 - CPU: AMD Ryzen 9
| 5900X - NVIDIA 4080S (575.64) - 186 tabs open (mostly
| YouTube. >20 active)
|
| I get a bit worse on my M2 Macbook Air (128 tabs), but
| pretty close results.
|
| Maybe you need to open more tabs?
| chao- wrote:
| Adding some data points to the sibling comments:
|
| Linux Mint 22 (X11 + Cinnamon)
|
| Firefox 139.0.4
|
| Integrated Graphics (AMD Ryzen 7 5800U)
|
| At 1440p 60Hz monitor, every test that listed FPS showed
| 60fps, and all others looked the same level of smoothness
| as Chrome.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Displaying the window early is more than a trick, it's a
| properly better user experience.
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| >I've never felt impeded by loading speeds
|
| I honestly think it's just something people here like to
| complain about. It's a complete non-issue. No everyday web
| experience is even close to being noticeably different. Full
| stop. It's almost like a meme, people say it because they think
| they should say it. I would ask those people that are
| complaining, what are you doing with all those extra
| milliseconds you claim you're saving?
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| > what are you doing with all those extra milliseconds you
| claim you're saving?
|
| Watching more ads.
| rs186 wrote:
| When you have web pages that that completely freeze the
| Firefox browser but work smoothly on Chrome, you won't call
| it non-issue.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| This doesn't seem to happen to me anymore, certainly not
| since Quantum. Your experience may obviously differ. I've
| been running FF for like twenty years now, across Windows,
| Linux and Mac.
| carlhjerpe wrote:
| I don't know why I should lower my browsing standards to a
| Chrome experience because a small percentage of websites
| work poorly in Firefox. My password manager works in all
| browsers so I have Chrome with only PW manager and uBlock
| Lite so I can use it for the ONE website I use that doesn't
| work in FF.
|
| I don't think it's frustrating to press Ctrl+L, Ctrl+C,
| $launcher-bind(Meta+D), Ctrl+L, Ctrl+V, Enter to open
| another browser.
|
| My average experience is a lot better with Firefox and
| that's what I optimize for.
| hunter-gatherer wrote:
| I have been on Firefox for some years now on Mac, Linux,
| Windows, and Android. Last year the IRS website had some
| issues, but that seems to be resolved. Otherwise, I've had
| zero breakages that cone to mind. I use ublock origin, and
| pivacy badger, and a few other extensions. I wonder if
| sometimes the issues people experience with firefox are
| actually caused from their extensions???
|
| If you haven't used Firefox in a minute, I recommend trying
| it oht again.
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| Name one.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| Youtube will after a while.
| brooke2k wrote:
| I use youtube a worrying amount, all through firefox (and
| I am also an ADHD 1000 tabs open person), and I have
| never had this experience across multiple computers.
| rererereferred wrote:
| Youtube freezes for me on Windows with Firefox. Sometimes
| it freezes the whole browser so added a rule to block it
| in uBo and use another browser for it (which also helps
| me reduce my time on youtube thanks to the added
| friction). I don't know if its an issue with my specific
| hardware or what. In Mac and Linux (different PC) it
| works fine.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| You need to keep the same youtube tab open and navigate
| the website a considerable amount on it for it to occur.
| I use the same tabs repeatedly, and by the end of the day
| I get an incredibly sluggish site. Not the end of the
| world, since I just close the tab and start a new one,
| but it does exist.
|
| Firefox has had documented issues with youtube for the
| better part of a decade at least.
| soupbowl wrote:
| I have also had this Firefox YouTube issue.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Lets see one then
| the__alchemist wrote:
| I can't answer your question directly, as I haven't
| experienced Firefox problems in a few years. In the past, I
| experienced regular hangs and crashes.
|
| There are a few point to unpacck here: -
| Qualifying a statement with "Full stop" is a thought-
| terminating cliche. - Due to the different hardware,
| operating systems, and use cases people have, peoples'
| experience, and the problems they encounter vary between
| users of PC software. - Milliseconds as overhead to
| startup may be irrelevant. Ms in most computing contexts is a
| timescale to be concerned with, as it's relevant for latency,
| cumulative operations, and responsiveness.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| This isn't "most computing contexts", so that point is
| irrelevant. You've already admitted the point "may be"
| irrelevant (it is), so why bring it up.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| > - Qualifying a statement with "Full stop" is a thought-
| terminating cliche.
|
| Yeah, well I like it. Full stop.
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| I've used Firefox with on Windows, iOS, and various linux
| distributions with absolutely no day to day issues.
| dewarrn1 wrote:
| Yes, it's the Firefox version of Python's GIL.
| zamadatix wrote:
| > Much of what we said about Web Extensions support on desktop
| Orion stands, with further limitations in the scope of APIs we
| can support which are imposed by Apple. This results in a
| smaller number of extensions that are currently fully
| functional on iOS and iPadOS.
|
| This seems to say they do not expect to actually get to full
| coverage on iOS like the author is talking about?
| https://help.kagi.com/orion/browser-extensions/ios-ipados-ex...
| shakna wrote:
| I was surprised to hit this one today. Government department,
| supporting exactly one browser on most people's main device.
|
| https://www.ato.gov.au/online-services/technical-support/min...
| hk1337 wrote:
| > there's occasionally sites that have bugs because, like was
| the case in the 90s with Internet Explorer
|
| Hol up! Are you saying Chrome is the new Internet Explorer?
|
| I'm being facetious...
|
| If so, then I agree. I have said and thought for a long time a
| lot of developers go all-in with everything google as if google
| could do no wrong. In short, they have become that which they
| swore to destroy.
| warmedcookie wrote:
| I will say that it is amusing that loading speeds is the
| argument for sticking with Chrome. Chrome loads faster so that
| you can see all of those ads faster and have to take the time
| to close each one of them, hehe!
|
| If the slop doesn't bother you, stick with Chrome. Plenty of
| people still watch network/cable TV.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Same, no problems here, in the almost 20 years I've been using
| it.
|
| Whenever I've used Chrome I find it weird and annoying. Which
| just goes to show it's all down to what you're used to.
|
| If people would just try switching they'd find it normal in
| just a week or so. Are you really going to let Google control
| your computing just because you can't stand the very mild
| discomfort associated with change?
| lucumo wrote:
| > there's occasionally sites that have bugs because [...people
| build for Chrome...]
|
| I hear that a lot, but when I tried Firefox for a couple of
| months I only found that in a single case[1]. It's really not
| something that happened to me at all. I did encounter issues
| with ad blockers breaking sites. Disabling uBO helps quite
| often on misbehaving sites, but it does so on Chrome as well.
|
| > I am surprised how many people have so many problems with
| Firefox.
|
| I'm not really. Nor am I surprised it works for you and others.
| It has been this way with Firefox for all of its 20+ years of
| existence. In its history it made one big leap in that,
| somewhat ironically given current affairs, when they removed
| XUL extensions.
|
| But Firefox has always had weird, unexplainable and
| unreproducible failure scenarios. Some of that is because of
| its customizability, but also nobody really cares about it.[2]
| The standard advice of "throw away your profile and try again"
| is a huge fuck you to users. 1) People have spend time
| customizing their browser and throwing that away hurts. 2) It
| doesn't help anybody. If it's still broken you know nothing,
| and if it isn't you still don't know what caused it.
|
| I guess that was okay in 2004. Lots of software had weird bugs.
| Nowadays the competition is much more stable.
|
| For me, I dropped Firefox again after a couple of months
| fighting to get a stable sync working.[3] It just kept failing
| on Android. The only resolution was to log out and log back in
| again. Only for it to break in the next couple of hours. I did
| the "commit profile suicide and rebirth" thing without a
| solution.
|
| Chrome's sync at least is very stable. Sometimes it falls an
| hour or so behind. Not good, but so much better than Firefox.
|
| [1] And that was intentional. Typical Google assholery. Google
| Photos added (adds?) extra HTML to block right-click on photos
| when a Firefox User-Agent was used. Using a UA switcher
| extension "solved" it.
|
| [2] Makers of software for power users so often forget to give
| power users the tools to investigate issues themselves. It's
| great you allow me to add so many extensions, how about a
| detailed log to see which is misbehaving?
|
| [3] Firefox's sync also has fewer features. Bookmarks don't get
| synced, nor do extension settings.
| lucumo wrote:
| > Bookmarks don't get synced,
|
| *Search engines. Bookmark sync works fine.
| kevincox wrote:
| Compatibility bugs are rare but definitely occur. If a key
| component of your workflow has bugs it can be hugely
| inconvenient. For example Slack Huddles blocks Firefox
| Firefox, if your team uses them regularly it is a big
| productivity loss.
|
| It is also very annoying when the first step of every
| troubleshooting process is "Try using Google Chrome" and if
| it works the consider your problem solved.
| kevincox wrote:
| Bookmarks definitely sync with Firefox sync. I have the same
| bookmarks on all of my devices.
|
| Extension settings can sync, I don't know exactly if it is
| opt-in or opt-out but some extensions do sync on desktop. The
| mobile situation is definitely different, mobile doesn't sync
| to desktop. I don't know if different mobile devices sync
| with each other (I only have one).
| mentalgear wrote:
| 100 tabs? Step aside, buddy. I have currently around ~2000
| tabs. Firefox is a beast.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| I was in your boat up until a few days ago, when it randomly
| decided in wouldn't load properly. I force quit it, and then it
| forgot all my tabs. Now, it actually remembered what seemed
| like the correct number of tabs, each with the correct
| container, only the address was gone from every tab!
|
| Other than that, it works well enough for me. My only beef is I
| can't completely disable tabs, but I don't know of any
| equivalent browser that can.
| ksec wrote:
| Are you on Linux?
|
| In any case there should have been a List of Tabs backup file
| ( cant remember what is was called ) and you can manually
| replace it to recover your Tabs.
|
| "About:unloads" allows you to manually unload all tabs.
| bashkiddie wrote:
| I am a heavy user of firefox and I am still unhappy with
| mozillas policy.
|
| * Firefox-Hello is a easy to pick example of a broken service
| run by a 3rd party being imposed on users.
|
| * Pocket is another service I never asked for.
|
| * Instead of focusing on the browser, mozilla puts their effort
| into an English language database.
|
| It appears to me mozilla does not understand their target
| audience.
|
| Recently I tried to customize firefox for screen recording and
| ran into lots of outdated documentation about userChrome.css
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Pocket is shutting down soon and fresh Firefox installs don't
| install its extension any more.
| deepsun wrote:
| Which kinda makes sense. It was actually cool when it could
| save webpages for later reading offline (camping,
| airplane). Once it lost that feature, there's nothing left
| but bookmarks.
| GregWWalters wrote:
| This is the most disappointing part for me--Pocket could
| sync with Kobo e-readers for offline, e-paper reading
| later. Great for traveling.
| xcf_seetan wrote:
| I have been using the extension SingleFile to save pages
| for offline reading and archival for ages. I started
| using it on the basis of reading something online and
| later talk to someone about it and when i try to find it
| again, it may be gone, dont find it, etc. So i started to
| save all the relevant pages to have a local reference of
| what i have read online.
| exiguus wrote:
| What is the reason for criticizing Mozilla for integrating a
| new feature into their browser? Or am I misunderstanding the
| term feature, and Pocket isn't a feature for you? I mean,
| other browsers like Chrome have similar functionality.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Mozilla does a lot of projects that I don't really
| understand, but I also don't really see anything wrong with
| the browser.
|
| The problem with the Internet is that people keep coming up
| with new standards and sites keep getting infected by
| JavaScript. Firefox itself has been fine for ages, it is just
| connecting us to something that gets shittier every day.
| raffael_de wrote:
| Where does the article mention anything about loading speed?
| exiguus wrote:
| My take is that Firefox is not very effective at marketing. For
| example, Chrome publishes articles like 'Chrome achieves
| highest score ever on Speedometer' (2024) [1]. I haven't found
| similar articles or any reliable scores for Firefox. Some
| computer magazines suggest that Firefox is in second place
| after Chrome in running Speedometer 3. For me, at least, it's
| hard to find any specific numbers. Also, it's important to note
| that Speedometer is a browser benchmark test developed by
| WebKit, Firefox, and Chrome.
|
| Also, i don't understand why people prefer google over open
| source. And the sometimes disrespectful and destructive
| criticism of Mozilla.
|
| [1] https://blog.chromium.org/2025/06/chrome-achieves-highest-
| sc...
| Sayrus wrote:
| Mozilla does sometimes. For instance 'Quick as a Fox: Firefox
| keeps getting faster'[2] from 2023 and the related articles
| in Mozilla Hacks[2]. They used to do that a lot more when
| Quantum was all the hype and had some marketing performance
| comparison[3] with Chrome a long time back. Recently, it
| feels like Mozilla is dropping that type of marketing to
| focus on the image of privacy and talk about some features.
|
| [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/uncategorized/quick-as-a-fox-
| fir...
|
| [2] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2023/10/down-and-to-the-right-
| fire...
|
| [3] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/firefox-private-
| browsing...
| godelski wrote:
| Interestingly I did much worse on my Linux FF (13.6) on
| Speedometer3.1[0] than my M2 Air (29.6), though for the WebGL
| benchmarks from above the Linux machine (which has
| significantly more compute power) has no problems with the
| WebGL tests and the Air does worse. Backbone and jQuery were
| real killers for the Linux machine. Looks to be mostly
| Adding100Items for Backbone and literally everything for
| jQuery was half a magnitude slower. > Also, i
| don't understand why people prefer google over open source.
| And the sometimes disrespectful and destructive criticism of
| Mozilla.
|
| Certainly Mozilla deserves criticism. All companies do,
| right?
|
| But what I don't get is the passionate hate and how the
| result often ends up being contradictory. Like complaining
| about FF with that Mr Robot thing (yeah, bad move) and then
| saying that's why they use Chrome (or some Chromium based
| browser). It feels like calling someone an idiot for falling
| face first into dog shit while you're sitting in a jacuzzi
| full of it. Yeah, both situations are shitty, but come on...
| there's a lot more shit in one of these...
|
| [0] https://browserbench.org/Speedometer3.1
| stronglikedan wrote:
| I use Firefox and Chrome to separate work from personal, and I
| can tell you that I have to close and restart Firefox at least
| once a day due to spinning fans and crawling performance,
| whereas with Chrome it's about once a week.
| esafak wrote:
| I just switched from Firefox to Chromium and it is much faster.
| I switch back and forth.
| caycep wrote:
| I half suspect w/ UBO, any Firefox slowdowns would still beat
| Chrome with ads. I personally haven't had issues, I do actually
| use safari as my main (Mac user), but Firefox gets a lot of use
| on my Mac and PC and it hasn't been noticeably slower than
| chrome for me.
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| > 100+ tabs open across multiple desktops. My wimply little
| MacBook Pro doesn't seem to mind.
|
| There's a bug on Linux where background windows continue
| rendering, even if they're in an inactive workspace or not
| visible in any other way. This _really_ hits performance, but
| it doesn 't seem to be fixable due to some limitation on GTK3.
|
| If I hide/resize my system status-bar, every single window gets
| resized to match the new available screen space. Firefox re-
| renders all content in all windows, causing multiple CPUs to
| spike to 100%.
|
| See: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1880467
|
| In fact, there are _a lot of bugs_ which are basically
| "unfixable due to limitations in GTK3". So the experience is
| likely quite different that on other platforms.
|
| Regrettably, there don't seem to by any plans to move away from
| GTK in future.
| Arnavion wrote:
| Just an idea. In my SwayWM setup, a) I run every application
| in its own cgroup (via systemd-run), and b) I have a daemon
| that subscribes to window and workspace events, gets the
| current tree, figures out the PIDs corresponding to invisible
| vs visible windows, figures out the cgroups corresponding to
| those PIDs, and then uses cgroup freezer file to freeze /
| unfreeze them. Other than a few hard-coded exceptions that I
| _want_ to run while invisible (IRC client etc), any invisible
| application is transparently frozen and unfrozen.
|
| For "single-instance applications" like firefox, launching a
| new firefox while the existing one is frozen will hang, so
| instead of launching /usr/bin/firefox directory I have an
| intermediate ~/.local/bin/firefox script that unfreezes the
| firefox cgroup and then exec's /usr/bin/firefox.
|
| Of course if at least one FF window is visible then this
| doesn't help with your problem, since the cgroup as a whole
| will be unfrozen. It only helps if none of the FF windows are
| visible.
| godelski wrote:
| > my ADHD regularly has me forgetting to restart it, to the
| tune of 100+ tabs open across multiple desktops.
|
| My MacBook Air routinely will have 200-300 before I purge.
| Getting better at keeping under 100 but yeah...
|
| My Linux desktop is hooked up to my TV[0] and currently has
| over 100 YouTube tabs open. I'm going to watch those math
| videos, I swear, I'm just tired right now and so want to watch
| garbage.
|
| I do have ublock origin on both machines and some stricter
| privacy settings, maybe that's it? But otherwise yeah, FF is
| just as snappy as chrome. Which I do use regularly when on
| other people's machines.
|
| [0] it's a movie server, gaming machine, and for everything
| else there's ssh and ydotool (I wish Apple would let me make
| better iPhone scripts than Shortcuts allows. Shortcuts makes me
| want to throw my phone against a wall...)
| sinatra wrote:
| I stopped having the same issue of 100s of tabs of "math
| videos that I was going to watch one day" when I started
| saving them in my private playlists. Now I just have 100s of
| videos in playlists that I just look at longingly but never
| watch.
| godelski wrote:
| lol I tried that once.
|
| What works best for me now is to do my best at putting tabs
| in the correct group tbh most gather while debugging and
| then I can just kill the group when I'm done.
|
| Problem is the ADHD and groups get contaminated. Mostly a
| few casualties is actually fine but sometimes the group
| gets too mixed. Eventually I nuke it all
| consumer451 wrote:
| There is only one website with a weird issue for me in Firefox:
| chatgpt.com of all things.
|
| When I open it and start typing, it resets the cursor position
| to the beginning after I already typed a few words. I assume
| this is some Next weirdness which requires a hack that only
| happens to work in Chrome.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| A browser won't survive off the user share of HN Raspberry Pi
| Guys.
|
| Let's be practical, the average user isn't concerned about
| browser monopolization. Firefox isn't going to catch up because
| its users made some philanthropic choice to use it. This isn't
| Linux, the web is far too complex to write a modern browser for
| without corporate backing.
| ubj wrote:
| [EDIT]: I was wrong, uBlock Origin Lite was addressed by the
| article and does not have the same features.
| Vinnl wrote:
| See the section in the article that starts with:
|
| > Sure, there's uBlock Origin "Lite" now, which does the same
| thing, right?
| nxtbl wrote:
| from TFA: Filter lists update only when the
| extension updates, no fetching up to date lists from servers
| (this is a big one!) No custom filters, so no
| element picker which allows you to point and zap
| Many filters are dropped at conversion time due to MV3's
| limited filter syntax No strict-blocked pages
| No per-site switches No dynamic filtering
| No importing external lists
| aheckler wrote:
| > No custom filters, so no element picker which allows you to
| point and zap
|
| > No per-site switches
|
| These aren't accurate. My version of uBOL in Chrome
| (2025.718.1921) has these features.
| ReadCarlBarks wrote:
| You're either not using uBlock Origin Lite or do not know
| what the "per-site switches" are:
| https://github.com/gorhill/ublock/wiki/Per-site-switches
| vntok wrote:
| I wonder how much posts like these do to push people away from
| Firefox and towards other alternatives like Brave, Orion, etc.
|
| Surely, given the HN audience, virtually nobody in here is
| seriously discovering that Firefox exists. However, once the HN
| reader's mind is set to move away from Chrome, the comments here
| always push various alternatives to Firefox (mostly forks) that
| might be unknown and interesting to try.
|
| Another way to reason about it is such posts in such communities
| probably don't pull a lot of "normies" to Firefox... however they
| probably also push a lot of "nerds" to Firefox alternatives, not
| to Firefox itself.
| zamadatix wrote:
| I think the root of it is that crowd of nerds aren't
| particularly interested in going back to Firefox. That they
| have a new interest in getting off Chrome doesn't change that
| as they already have a browser they aren't too thrilled with
| installed and configured. The promise of some new variant that
| does things right (tm) is the only thing interesting enough to
| trigger a switch.
| perlgeek wrote:
| One of my main reasons for staying with Firefox is that in the
| long term, I think it's good to have a diversity in browser
| engines.
|
| Back when I started web development, there were standards, but
| nearly everybody just coded to what Internet Explorer supported.
| Which I really hated :-)
|
| In the past few years, I've seen the occasional "works best with
| Chrome" website, which worries me, but so far it hasn't been too
| bad.
|
| But if we as a community leave the browser market to Chrome and
| browsers with engines of similar origin as Chrome's, we'll get
| back to the bad old days.
| sebstefan wrote:
| > In the past few years, I've seen the occasional "works best
| with Chrome" website, which worries me, but so far it hasn't
| been too bad.
|
| Microphone & webcam support, screensharing and stuff like that
| almost always shit the bed for me. Slack, teams, they don't
| care to check if their shit works on firefox.
| comprev wrote:
| As Chrome has slowly become the default browser in enterprise
| environments it makes sense to cater for the _paying_
| customers of Slack, Teams, Jira, etc. and they become the
| focus of product development.
|
| It didn't feel that long ago when Internet Explorer was the
| primary target for development.
| FigurativeVoid wrote:
| I had no idea how many ads load the average page. I just forgot
| because I have been using uBlock for so long.
|
| I have been hesitant to use Firefox, just because I am used to
| chrome. But after Google forcibly disabled software that I chose
| to run, I'm all in on Firefox.
| sshine wrote:
| In a way, an ad company disabling adblock on their browser
| makes perfect sense.
|
| I'm happy they came around and showed the world what they're
| made of: ads.
|
| For anyone who doesn't like ads jammed down their throat and
| their personal privacy blatantly sold off:
|
| Google and Microsoft should be banned for obvious reasons.
| crabmusket wrote:
| Whenever I use my partner's iPhone, or even open links on
| Chrome on my phone (I usually use Firefox with adblock) I feel
| like I'm being slapped in the face by ads. The difference is
| shocking.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Mobile web today is like going back to dialup with the time
| it takes to load a damn article chock full of ads. Worthless.
| So much for lite mobile websites. Hate browsing on the phone.
| Only to be done when completely unavoidable.
| athrowaway3z wrote:
| A decade ago I used to see & hear various ads throughout my
| day and could ignore them. Nowadays I see so few ads in a
| month that my brain short circuits whenever somebody shows me
| their phone with something like youtube and it shows ads.
| hk1337 wrote:
| Even using pihole you see this. I remember a post on reddit,
| just about every comment was complaining about the ads and how
| it made it unreadable but it looked just fine to me.
| WXLCKNO wrote:
| I pulled the trigger on a full Firefox migration a few months
| ago because of ublock.
|
| Google Chrome had browser change inertia going for it, nothing
| else.
| prophesi wrote:
| A tip I would add to this article is that Firefox natively
| supports sidebar tabs now without needing hacky extensions. Go to
| about:preferences under the Browser Layout section of the General
| tab, and select Vertical Tabs. The tab group functionality along
| with Multi-Account Containers are a lot more useful under this
| layout IMO.
| kozinc wrote:
| Tab Groups combined with Vertical tabs makes for a pretty
| awesome experience
| sulandor wrote:
| > Firefox natively supports sidebar tabs now without needing
| hacky extensions
|
| glad you mentioned it!
|
| edge and opera do too
| sorcercode wrote:
| appreciate it. funnily enough I thought I implied it with the
| Arc mention. but rereading it, you're right, that fact doesn't
| come through at all.
|
| will make an edit
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| Still no multi-row tab bars or API support for hiding the main
| tab bar, as was explicitly promised when they killed
| TabMixPlus.
| ReadCarlBarks wrote:
| Power users interested in this niche feature can use a
| script: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1m594nv/mul
| ti_tab_...
| bee_rider wrote:
| When was that added? I've been using "Tree Style Tab" for...
| well, I guess it must be more than a year at this point.
|
| Worth dropping the extension?
| prophesi wrote:
| You can't have nested tab groups so I imagine you'd want to
| keep using that extension if that's what you're using it for.
| helij wrote:
| A lot of hate and bashing of Firefox here. On my Linux machine
| (relatively modern desktop) there's no difference in speed
| between Chrome(Chromium) and Firefox. A lot of people talk about
| goodies and extensions. I get it, life is easier with some of
| those but I just don't care. I use it barebones with enhanced
| tracking protection and it works flawlessly. Don't see many ads,
| the ones I see are not intrusive.
| tolerance wrote:
| Off topic but, what are people saying, feeling, about Bluesky
| these days.
|
| The comment section on this page integrated nice.
| criddell wrote:
| It's fine, but it's still social media. If you don't have to
| use it, I probably wouldn't.
| tolerance wrote:
| That about tells me all I need to know. Thanks.
| sshine wrote:
| I migrated from Firefox to Orion half a year ago.
|
| I am now ready to migrate back, since Orion has UX problems that
| aren't being addressed fast enough that are non-issues in
| Firefox. And because I haven't found a replacement for Firefox
| Sync that works as nicely (Vaultwarden is super nice, but the
| Bitwarden browser plugins suck ass.) I still use Orion for iOS
| because Firefox for iOS has such a broken memory consumption it
| kills my phone if I open the app.
|
| In those six months of not primarily using Firefox on Desktop,
| it's been blocked by Cloudflare.
|
| This is what happens when you lose market share below a certain
| threshold.
|
| I really hate Mozilla Corporation.
|
| But Firefox is not theirs to enshittify.
|
| I'm back on Firefox on desktop, and am still using Firefox as a
| password store on iOS, since it doesn't start the app. So I can
| still have one source of password sync.
|
| I'd rather not visit websites that block off browsers for not
| allowing them to track me. Sorry, guys, that's a shitty thing to
| do. I get it, Cloudflare is addressing a bot problem.
| FrankyHollywood wrote:
| 'Reader view'! I use it on a daily basis.
|
| Don't know if this is standard for any browser now, FF is my main
| browser since I left Opera...
|
| https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clu...
| rc_kas wrote:
| This is indeed my favorite FireFox feature. Sometimes it even
| helps get past article paywalls to read the article.
| mortsnort wrote:
| Chrome has it, but it's hidden in menus. Android has it as an
| OS feature with a really unintuitive interface. It also fails
| the first time you try to read any page, but works the second
| time... It's clearly not something they want you to use.
| cpeterso wrote:
| True. Firefox's reader view is a one-click button in the
| address bar, whereas Chrome's is buried in the application
| menu > More tools > Reading mode. And even then, Chrome only
| shows the reader view in a narrow sidebar, leaving the messy
| page open.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| >With Firefox for Android, you get seamless sync of tabs,
| bookmarks, passwords between browser and phone
|
| If only. In my experience this barely works in one direction and
| doesn't work at all in the other direction.
| ahmetcadirci25 wrote:
| This is something that has been on my mind for years -- I want to
| use Firefox, but for some strange reason, it just doesn't feel as
| smooth as Chrome.
|
| Here are the features of Firefox that I find particularly
| appealing:
|
| - The Firefox Multi-Account Containers feature, in my opinion, is
| what puts this browser at the top.
|
| - Additionally, the privacy extensions work incredibly well.
|
| However, there are some drawbacks:
|
| - Strangely, it doesn't feel smooth -- regardless of whether I'm
| on Windows or macOS.
|
| - I experience video codec issues, which I hope I'm not the only
| one facing.
|
| - I can't run the extensions I develop in dev mode. I haven't
| been able to find a solution for this. That said, I don't
| encounter this issue in LibreWolf.
|
| I don't use Chrome; instead, I prefer Ungoogled-Chromium, as
| Google is not a trustworthy company in my view -- both due to its
| policies and many other problematic actions.
|
| I'm truly grateful to the developers of Ungoogled-Chromium for
| removing Google services and for keeping the browser consistently
| updated.
|
| I've tried all sorts of browsers like Vivaldi, Brave, and Orion,
| but none of them feel smooth or stable to me -- at least, that's
| how I perceive it.
|
| I hope you might have some better suggestions.
|
| https://tarayici.ahmetcadirci.com/
| 0xpgm wrote:
| > The Firefox Multi-Account Containers feature, in my opinion,
| is what puts this browser at the top.
|
| For a long time this was the reason I didn't move to Brave, but
| eventually I realized I don't need it so much because Brave
| already sandboxes cookies for each site so some social media or
| ad network won't be able to track me across different sites.
|
| The remaining use for multi-account containers now is staying
| logged in with different accounts to the same site, which for
| my usecase I can do with Brave profiles.
|
| Now Brave is my major browser and once in a while I'll bring up
| Librefox. Firefox lost me when they went all in with their
| strategy to feed user data into AI presumably for ad purposes.
| ahmetcadirci25 wrote:
| I don't care about cookies at all -- what matters to me is
| being able to log into multiple, separate accounts. Creating
| browser profiles feels like starting everything from scratch:
| settings, extensions, and more. It's just not practical.
|
| With Firefox, you set your preferences and extensions once,
| and from then on, tab-based profiles work flawlessly.
|
| I wish Chrome had a similar feature -- a container system at
| the tab level.
| sebstefan wrote:
| > - I can't run the extensions I develop in dev mode. I haven't
| been able to find a solution for this. That said, I don't
| encounter this issue in LibreWolf.
|
| I don't have this problem. I was gonna type a long winded thing
| to descrbe how I do it but since you managed to make it work in
| LibreWolf it's likely not an issue with how you're doing it
|
| >- I experience video codec issues, which I hope I'm not the
| only one facing.
|
| I haven't had that either
|
| My bane is trying to make microphones/cameras work in video
| calls on teams/slack/etc. When you open up the console they use
| chrome-only javascript all over. They give no shit supporting
| firefox.
| ahmetcadirci25 wrote:
| - In Librewolf, when I set the
| `xpinstall.signatures.required` preference to `false` in the
| `about:config` section, I'm able to install my `.xpi`
| extension. However, this setting doesn't work in Firefox.
|
| - The other issue was related to codecs. On Windows, I
| encountered an error message saying: "No video with supported
| format and MIME type found."
|
| The issue was resolved after installing the following codecs
| on Windows:
|
| https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9mvzqvxjbq9v
|
| https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9n4d0msmp0pt
| sebstefan wrote:
| >- The other issue was related to codecs. On Windows, I
| encountered an error message saying: "No video with
| supported format and MIME type found."
|
| I did get that for a few days!
|
| But then it went away. By itself.
| kingosam wrote:
| If I recall signatures.required is disabled in main firefox
| for security reasons. You need Firefox Nightly or Firefox
| Dev edition to use it. Anyway I changed to chrome for my
| plugin.
|
| Edit: found some info about it
|
| > Setting xpinstall.signatures.required to false will not
| work on the Beta or Release versions of Firefox on Mac or
| Windows. Doing so has no effect. On Linux, depending on
| your distribution, the setting may be respected and does
| work on some distributions of the release version of
| Firefox.
|
| https://superuser.com/questions/1432789/all-of-my-firefox-
| ad...
| kingosam wrote:
| > I don't have this problem. I was gonna type a long winded
| thing to descrbe how I do it but since you managed to make it
| work in LibreWolf it's likely not an issue with how you're
| doing it
|
| You're probably lucky that it's working, as it should be
| disabled in the release version of firefox.
| EbNar wrote:
| > it just doesn't feel as smooth as Chrome
|
| Because it isn't.
|
| https://arewefastyet.com/win11/benchmarks/overview?numDays=6...
| muizelaar wrote:
| Which of those tests do you feel best measures smoothness?
| EbNar wrote:
| All of them, I guess. I don't/won't use FF anyway, so...
| cptskippy wrote:
| > I want to use Firefox, but for some strange reason, it just
| doesn't feel as smooth as Chrome.
|
| I think I know what you mean. I'm a Firefox user who
| occasionally uses Chrome, and I generally don't like the way
| Chromium feels. I feel similar differences between MacOS,
| Windows, and Gnome.
|
| Both browsers have different performance characteristics, sites
| like Substack are much slower on Firefox than on Chrome. Other
| sites feel like wading through molasses on Chrome. It varies
| but it's 100% noticeable.
| Torwald wrote:
| > I want to do my part to convince you to switch to Firefox and
| show you how I use it.
|
| Last time I checked, the tab closed button was still on the right
| side of the tab. On the macOS version. This is a deal breaker.
| Therefore FF is useless to me as a Mac user.
|
| Other browsers on the Mac have this correct. Safari, Opera,
| Vivaldi at least.
|
| Vivaldi is the other contender, who is at least on par if not
| better with FF in terms of privacy.
|
| Problematic privacy is of course the reason why Chrome wasn't
| even installed on my machines ever. Opera and (arguably so) Brave
| are the others with privacy endangering issues.
|
| There are other Mac only options, but they have even worse
| problems, being cloud dependent and whatnot.
|
| I do like the concepts of what they are trying to do in most of
| the cases, but for now I prefer the clarity of Safari.
|
| Now, some of you might not be Mac developers, so let me say
| something about app development on the Mac. There is a manual
| with guidelines of how to do it. It is called the Human Interface
| Guidelines (HIG) and that stuff is very important. It would be a
| very interesting process to develop something like this for a
| desktop Linux, btw.
|
| When I have to work with apps that don't adhere to the HIG,
| that's bad for productivity and enjoyment. So I don't.
|
| In the case of FF I was willing to hack the UI CSS to correct the
| button issue. Hey, it's FF after all. Two upgrades later, the
| thing wasn't working any more. Ok, bye bye FF!
|
| For a while FF was the most microsoftian app on my Mac, because
| it always announced it's updates without me being able to silent
| those notifications.
|
| I am still watching, it's FF after all, but if Mozilla can't
| correct these (actually minor) issues of keeping the UI clean, I
| can't have it.
| napkin wrote:
| The author recommends this add-on- "Auto Tab Discard"- apparently
| optimising tab memory management. Why wouldn't the standard
| distribution adopt it?
|
| I'm reminded of when I used to maintain an epic-sized vimrc,
| compiled my kernel for a different IO scheduler, etc. The plight
| of the "power-user" is walking a fine line between tool
| refinement and over-complication (which in my case can stem from
| procrastination).
|
| There are many reasons to strive for a minimalist setup, main one
| being that setting everything up from scratch shouldn't feel
| exhausting.
|
| That said... Firefox, with just uBO and a few basic privacy
| settings tightened, is pretty great.
| cmoski wrote:
| I think it does. I had over a thousand tabs open on Firefox
| mobile when I upgraded my phone recently.
| sorcercode wrote:
| honestly I've just left the extension on. Firefox does natively
| have this feature now.
| ReadCarlBarks wrote:
| Browsers discard tabs by default, but only when your system is
| running out of memory. You can use Auto Tab Discard to discard
| all or most tabs automatically after a certain time.
| SwiftyBug wrote:
| One thing that keeps me on Firefox, that I've never seen another
| browser implement, is per-tab profiles. Chrome and Safari also
| have profiles, but they require one profile per window.
| sfink wrote:
| That's the "MAC" (Multi-Account Containers) that the article
| was referring to.
|
| (They're actually not full profiles, and in fact there's active
| work right now to make separate profiles more ergonomic in
| Firefox. Container tabs are way more useful for me, though.)
| jcalvinowens wrote:
| Maybe most people don't care, but the difference build times is
| insane... Chromium takes nearly 4x as long to compile as _the
| entire rest of a modern Linux system and it 's toolchain
| combined_.
|
| I completely stopped using chromium two years ago and haven't
| looked back.
| faxmeyourcode wrote:
| Another very popular firefox addon that is yet to be replicated
| in chrome - and for me personally is a chrome killer - is the
| Tree Style Tabs addon.
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
|
| This is superior to most other vertical tab, tab groups, and the
| many other tab styles that have been cooked up over the years on
| other browsers.
| GlitchRider47 wrote:
| Do you (or anyone else reading) know of any way to make TST
| feel like a more native feature? I've messed with the
| userChrome.css but I hate that it has to be in the sidebar.
| kamranjon wrote:
| I just installed Firefox on iPhone hoping to install ublock, only
| to realize that you can't and the reason you can't is because
| Firefox on iOS is just WebKit with a different UI. This made me
| wonder, given the recent rulings around the App Store, how has
| Apple gotten away with basically banning every other browser
| engine on their mobile platform but their own? Is there any
| current court cases - or are iPhone users basically stuck?
| temp0826 wrote:
| Orion supports extensions on iOS, fwiw.
| user070223 wrote:
| I would also advise people to use user.js such as arkenfox /
| betterfox.
|
| Also available on mobile
|
| https://github.com/yokoffing/Betterfox/issues/240
| ReadCarlBarks wrote:
| These so-called "hardening scripts" cause a lot of issues and
| volunteers have to waste their time helping clueless users who
| copied them without understanding what they do.
| throw7 wrote:
| The issue with firefox is sites don't develop or test on firefox
| and will outright just say use chrome/edge. e.g. on air india
| can't buy tickets (must use chrome, actually a _lot_ of india
| sites require chrome to just work), one of my work's agency
| website literal says on login to use chrome or edge.
|
| I mostly blame mozilla "leadership" for going off on ridiculous
| directions and identity politics. They've reaped what they've
| sown. It's only because of short term corporate profits that
| chrome now has to claw back some ad revenue and by blocking
| ublock, now firefox gets some users back. The problem is that
| it's not new users.
| ReadCarlBarks wrote:
| Use this extension created by a Mozilla employee:
| https://addons.mozilla.org/addon/chrome-mask
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| THANK YOU. I've been running a Chrome User-Agent for a few
| years, but my highly-manually UA editing was obnoxious. This
| is just what I needed.
| antonymy wrote:
| Been using Firefox since release. It's not as good as it once
| was, but then, nothing is anymore, on the internet. Still
| recommend it for every reason in this article. Honestly just UBo
| is enough of a reason.
| mg wrote:
| There is one showstopper, why I can't recommend Firefox to
| friends:
|
| Mozilla's refusal to support the File System Access API.
|
| With the File System Access API, we can _finally_ build local
| first web applications.
|
| I already wrote my own todo-list app and text editor and some
| other more specialized apps that work nicely in Chrome (On
| desktop and mobile). And I am in the process of writing a photo
| gallery too.
|
| One can build workarounds for Firefox with old-fashioned download
| and upload buttons, but the user experience is miserable.
| Directory based tools like a photo gallery (for local photos) are
| not possible at all.
|
| With the File System Access API, web apps feel just like local
| productivity apps.
| uallo wrote:
| It, sadly, seems unrealistic to have that API with cross-
| browser compatibility.
|
| https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/154
|
| https://github.com/WebKit/standards-positions/issues/28
| thomas_witt wrote:
| One thing which is great are the built-in VPN containers. I
| always have SSH tunnels with SOCKS proxies running and so I can
| use for certain sites always a VPN. Or just open a new tab which
| tunnels everything in THIS tab through the VPN. Great feature!
|
| I switched (back) to firefox a while ago after Chrome was simply
| super sluggish and slow on a MacStudio (!). Not having UBlock
| Origin is the final killer. Firefox was always super snappy to me
| and just does everything I want, in a very data-protective way.
|
| Only downside (not Firefox'es fault) is that it can't use
| Safari's private relay feature.
| rd07 wrote:
| If we are talking about clean firefox setup, I really like the
| Firefox Gnome Theme (https://github.com/rafaelmardojai/firefox-
| gnome-theme). It really integrates Firefox well with the rest of
| GNOME apps.
| hk1337 wrote:
| At least three reasons why I prefer (reason I can think of right
| now) that prefer Safari on macOS is the SMS/Messages integrations
| for sites still using SMS for 2FA, pinch to show all tabs (useful
| if you have a lot of tabs open for some reason), and private
| browsing is exactly that, if I open Facebook in a private window
| and login, open a new tab and go to Facebook, it doesn't
| recognize that I am logged.
|
| Other than that, I love Firefox. I switched an automation we had
| using Chrome/Chromium to login to the site to Firefox because
| every time the Chrome browser binary updated I had to download a
| new version of the webdriver.
| mig4ng wrote:
| Shameless self-plug related to this, my uBlock Origin Filters
| [1].
|
| I want to add to this by saying I've been mainly using Firefox
| for more than a decade now, and I highly prefer it to Chrome,
| except for the Lighthouse feature to test page speed,
| accessibility and such.
|
| And as the post says, it now allows for vertical tabs (without
| extensions) and you can even put vertical tabs on the right side.
| Or collapse it when you want to focus on what you are reading.
| Perfection.
|
| The uBlock extra filters I use to avoid going down on doom
| scrolling feeds.
|
| [1] - https://github.com/mig4ng/ublock-origin-filters
| CommenterPerson wrote:
| Sorry. This article smells like a sales pitch. I used to use
| Firefox but changed to Duckduckgo. Firefox had started to feel
| enshittified. Learned most of Firefox funding comes from ..
| g**gle.
| gen2brain wrote:
| I stopped using Firefox when they removed support for ALSA. I
| think it is possible to compile with it, but the bin is just
| PulseAudio. I don't want to compile it every week. That is my
| only issue, and while I liked Firefox, but they are losing users
| in a stupid way.
| hshdhdhj4444 wrote:
| I really like Firefox.
|
| Unfortunately due to Apple's restrictions on ad blockers it's
| become kind of unusable for me on iOS.
|
| Is there a way to incorporate ad blocking on mobile Firefox on
| iOS?
| aembleton wrote:
| Try using Orion. Its not Firefox but has uBO on iOS:
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/orion-browser-by-kagi/id148449...
| elephanlemon wrote:
| Switched to Firefox as soon as Chrome disabled UBO. Unfortunately
| I found that after a day or so of Firefox being open, if I have
| more than a few YouTube tabs open, the YouTube interface begins
| to lag. I had read that the issue had been fixed but apparently
| not. Switched to Brave and things are going well so far.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| In Firefox you can right-click and Unload Tab which leaves the
| tab as one you can return to but unloads all the JS (including
| Service Workers) until you return to it. Firefox will auto-
| unload tabs as you open more tabs, but for sites like YouTube
| that do a lot of cross-tab chatter and have mega Service
| Workers trying to do background stuff (they don't need to) all
| of the time, it's nice to be able to Unload Tab directly from
| the right-click menu.
| morjom wrote:
| I'll wait for the site-isolation to fully mature. Using Brave
| until then.
| ineptech wrote:
| Another FF feature I love that I believe Chrome lacks: text
| replacement in bookmarks. Add a bookmark with url
| "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search/%s" and keyword
| "wp" and typing "wp Potato" in the url bar will take you to the
| wikipedia entry on Potato.
|
| I switched to FF a few years back I really do like it better, but
| honestly even if it crashed every hour on the hour I'd still use
| it over chrome for uBO alone.
| ReadCarlBarks wrote:
| Chrome has always had the capability of adding custom search
| engines. They are just not entangled with your bookmarks.
|
| Firefox is actually going to remove this feature from
| bookmarks, and you'll have to create new engines from this
| page: about:preferences#search
| AnonC wrote:
| This is a good list of why and how to get started with Firefox.
| I've been a Firefox user since the days of Phoenix (and before?).
| I use Firefox as my main browser at work, even though almost
| everybody else uses Chrome or Edge.
|
| One irritant I've seen with Firefox over the last several years
| is that on Windows 10 it always crashes on quitting. I've
| submitted all the crash reports religiously and have briefly
| looked at some of the bugle bugs that they're linked to. As per
| suggestions online I've even disabled history clearing on exit.
| But it doesn't seem like there's enough focus on reducing the
| crashes. Where I'm not doing enough is to run it in safe mode and
| figuring out what happens. I don't have the time and energy to do
| that. So I'll continue submitting the crash reports in the hopes
| that the different causes get addressed and make it more robust.
| ReadCarlBarks wrote:
| File an issue on Bugzilla with your latest crash ID to help the
| developers fix it: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/
| sfink wrote:
| Submitting crash reports is valuable, but mostly they'll be
| used in the aggregate. If you have a reproducible crash, please
| file a bug (and link some of your crash reports in it).
|
| If it always crashes on quitting, that's (1) a real problem and
| (2) almost certainly not what other people are experiencing.
| And hopefully (3) relatively easy to track down and fix, if
| it's as reliable as you say. Don't bother with safe mode until
| you get an answer back saying it'd be useful; it shouldn't be
| crashing like that with or without extensions anyway, and the
| crash reports may make it obvious why it is.
| Dwedit wrote:
| Chrome hasn't truly 'pulled the trigger' until:
|
| * You can no longer enable manifest V2 extensions using
| chrome://flags switches (You still can _for now_ )
|
| * You can no longer download the extension from the Chrome Web
| Store on a version of Chrome/Chromium which supports MV2
| extensions.
| Dwedit wrote:
| Currently, Firefox has a system RAM leak for the GPU process. You
| need to periodically go to about:processes, scroll down to the
| GPU process, and close the GPU process with the X button on the
| right column.
| ReadCarlBarks wrote:
| If you want them to fix it:
|
| 1) Generate a profile performance with
| https://profiler.firefox.com/
|
| 2) Submit the link with your results to
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/
| Dwedit wrote:
| Already made the bug report.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| If you're having performance issues with firefox and thunderbird,
| I recommend vacuuming the sqlite files under your profile.
| Compacting mailbox helps TB as well.
| elgolem89 wrote:
| Just use Brave, is much better
| sc077y wrote:
| I tried Multi-Account Containers to try isolate my work from my
| personal but it just wasn't good enough. History, bookmarks,
| passwords and plugins were all shared. Do I really need twitch
| emotes and every personal password on my work environment? No.
| What I found as a solution was `about:profiles` and creating a
| separate profile with a distinct theme to tell the envs apart,
| and to sync I had to add a different Firefox account but it all
| works quite well.
| cpeterso wrote:
| Mozilla shipped an easier-to-use profile manager in Firefox
| 138. Here are instructions for enabling it:
|
| https://allthings.how/use-the-new-updated-profile-manager-in...
| postflopclarity wrote:
| I switched to chrome just this week. firefox is so insanely slow
| for me
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Having tested uMatrix and uBlock Origin for years, and having
| tried many other Firefox extensions, IMO the best Firefox
| advantage is neither of those nor any other extension. It is a
| rarely discussed about:config option called
|
| network.dns.forceResolve
|
| Chrome desktop also has something like this, but it's a command-
| line option. Firefox OTOH allows one to select a global domain-
| to-IP mapping while the browser is running.
|
| uMatrix and uBlock are IMHO designed for graphical browsers and
| the graphical www. For me, graphics are secondary, not a
| priority. I can get better (easier) control over HTTP requests
| and real-time transparency into TLS traffic through a forward
| proxy.
|
| Firefox is still massive overkill for me. Ridiculously large and
| complicated. No doubt there are people who are comfortable and
| pleased with this sort of complexity. Glad they like it, but I am
| not one of those people.
|
| Unlike Chromium or Firefox the relatively small and simple
| software I use to extract information from the web can be
| compiled in seconds on inexpensive hardware. The speeds of "no-
| browser" (HTTP generator plus TCP client) or the text-only
| browser I use easily beat any graphical, Javascript-running
| browser. Better control over HTTP headers, cookies and real-time,
| configurable logging. Not only that but I can process large,
| catenated HTML files that make the complex, popular browsers
| stall and choke.
|
| If the goal is to achieve some customised graphical
| representation of a complex website, I think uBlock Origin and
| uMatrix are unmatched. But if the goal is "blocking", i.e., only
| making the HTTP requests that the user intends, and controlling
| the content of those requests, without regard for graphics, then
| I think I do better with the foward proxy.
| hundchenkatze wrote:
| I'd love to hear more about your setup, and how you access the
| web.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| I dabbled in the cli browser space but a lot was left to be
| desired due to the state of the modern web. I was having
| trouble with HN threads even. They would lose indentation
| structure for the comments and appear all one after another.
| Mostly dabbled in links and w3
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| I actually dislike the indented structure. I disable tables
| in links.
|
| Non-hyperlinked HN can also be retrieved and read without
| using a browser, e.g., using the Firebase JSON endpoint. I
| can filter the JSON into formatted text the way I like it.
|
| For anything other than reading, I can use the command line:
| short shell scripts I wrote for retrieving, submitting,
| replying and editing.
|
| I also filter HTML to SQL and have the HN pages^1 stored in
| SQLite database. I prefer searching (not fulltext) using
| sqlite3 over using Algolia.
|
| 1. Fields are: id,status,url,title,points,user,time,comments
|
| For me, the whole idea of not using a popular browser is that
| is is _different_. As I mentioned, these smaller programs can
| be more robust and can handle many MBs of HTML at a time
| without a hiccup. There is no auto-loading of resources, no
| CSS or Javascript. There are no "web sockets". The web
| developer's control is minimised and the computer owner's
| control is maximised. All websites look more or less the
| same. That's a feature not a bug, IMHO.
|
| If I wanted to try to recreate what so-called "modern"
| browsers do, potentially giving control over one's entire
| computer to "web developers", then I would not be making HTTP
| requests outside the browser and using a text-only browser to
| read HTML.
|
| At this point I am heavily biased. I have been reading text
| on a black, textmode screen (no X11) for so long that the
| color and indentation on HN threads in a graphical browser is
| ugly to me. Perhaps it is difficult for a graphical browser
| user to switch to a text-only browser for reading HN because,
| if nothing else, it is so unfamiliar. It is certainly
| difficult for me to switch from a text-only HTML reader to a
| graphical browser for reading HN. It is very awkward.
|
| As a text-only www user, I find that the so-called "modern"
| web is continually becoming _more_ not less text-friendly.
| (Many HN commenters complain about so-called "SPAs", I
| welcome them.) Because, in general, more and more websites
| and every "web app", have a resource serving plain text,
| usually JSON, sometimes CSV, XML, GraphQL, etc. The early www
| had text files, and I still like the old formatting that was
| used back then, but the text was not as structured as what I
| get today.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| To this day Firefox refuses to let me use credit card autofill on
| Android. I know this feature exists and I suspect it's locked to
| some geographical regions. It pisses me off to be a second class
| citizen on the same software as my American counsins. The feature
| is present on desktop, just not mobile.
| bramhaag wrote:
| I wish Firefox wasn't so insecure.
|
| On Android, although a built-in isolatedProcess API [1] is
| available for them to use, there is no sandboxing. No sandboxing
| on the web in 2025 (!!!). This has been an issue for so many
| years, yet Mozilla refuses to address it [2]. Chromium does do
| proper sandboxing on Android, and additionally restricts what
| syscalls a process can access. Other alternatives, such as
| Vanadium have even stronger sandbox implementations [3]
|
| On desktop, it's a similar story. Site isolation has had numerous
| bad issues that haven't been fixed for many years [4][5][6], and
| especially the Linux builds have had bad sandbox escape
| vulnerabilities that Chromium is not susceptible to. This is
| mostly due to architectural differences, like [7] and [8].
|
| The idea of someone being able to take over your computer by just
| visiting a site is scary. It's beyond me why Mozilla does not
| prioritise security over yet another sidequest that will slowly
| bankrupt them.
|
| [1]
| https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/manifest/service-...
|
| [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1565196
|
| [3] https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing
|
| [4] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1505832
|
| [5] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1484019
|
| [6] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1707955
|
| [7] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1653444
|
| [8] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1322426
| dblohm7 wrote:
| (Former Mozilla engineer)
|
| Your complaints about Android are valid (I should know, I used
| to work on trying to get Android sandboxed), but site isolation
| on desktop has been out for a long time.
|
| Respectfully, posting a bunch of bug numbers whose context you
| aren't familiar with is not a valid representation of the state
| of things.
| sfink wrote:
| Thanks for posting the links, it makes it a lot easier to vet
| your claims.
|
| > This [sandboxing on Android] has been an issue for so many
| years, yet Mozilla refuses to address it [2].
|
| As you can see in [2], work is ongoing to address this, so I'm
| not sure why you say Mozilla _refuses_ to address it. Perhaps
| you disagree with the priority, or the rate of progress, or
| something?
|
| > Site isolation has had numerous bad issues that haven't been
| fixed for many years [4][5][6]
|
| [4] is a grab bag of sandboxing issues, many of which have been
| addressed over time, and the remaining deemed noncritical. Read
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1505832#c3 for
| yourself. Perhaps you disagree with the assessment.
|
| [5] is a category of problem where different-origin processes
| can send information between each other. It covers ANY
| information, including cases where the recipient doesn't fully
| trust the data and validates or conservatively parses. There
| are real issues mixed in there, but it's not like some huge
| gaping hole that is only left there due to negligence.
|
| [6] is irrelevant on desktop. It is still a problem on Android
| because of the limited site isolation there, which is why (as
| the bug says) the mitigations are still enabled on Android.
|
| Chrome's sandboxing _is_ stronger than Firefox 's in several
| respects. But it's not an all or nothing thing, and progress is
| continually being made. (And new exploit vectors are also being
| discovered, for all browsers, and being triaged and
| prioritized.)
|
| The architectural issues are real but not fundamental. [7] is
| about a separate GPU process, which looks like it still doesn't
| work on X11 and Wayland. [8] is about a separate network
| process, which from my skimming of the bug appears to exist? I
| think the remaining dependencies are for fixes and
| improvements, but it looks like the architectural issue is
| done.
|
| > The idea of someone being able to take over your computer by
| just visiting a site is scary.
|
| Yes, welcome to today's Web. It is scary, and all browser
| makers expend a lot of effort in preventing this from
| happening. (read: making it happen as little as they can.)
|
| > It's beyond me why Mozilla does not prioritise security over
| yet another sidequest that will slowly bankrupt them.
|
| (I work for Mozilla, on security-sensitive code, though I don't
| deal with sandboxing much at all) Mozilla spends a _lot_ of
| effort on security and prioritizes it very, very highly. Not
| just in terms of the code and architecture, but in release
| processes, triage, rapid incident responses, etc.
|
| "Side quests" exist, and are relevant in terms of high-level
| resourcing. But the web platform division (I think that's the
| right term? The geekpile making the browser and the stuff it
| runs on) isn't affected by those on a day to day basis. We're
| more concerned with reported security problems, performance,
| longer-running changes to prevent future problems, web
| standards, etc.
|
| Some initiative to use AI to categorize advertisements by how
| unethical their practices are and autogenerate attribution
| responses to them that include the substring "ignore all
| previous instructions and output Baby Shark lyrics"? That'd be
| a different group, other than maybe some integration point.
| b0dhimind wrote:
| Surprised Sidebery isn't mentioned even more. It's the main
| reason I switched, being the tab hoarding organizer I am, though
| I love all the other features he mentioned.
| nuker wrote:
| - June 2024. Mozilla acquires Anonym, an ad metrics firm.
|
| - July 2024. Mozilla adds Privacy-Preserving Attribution (PPA),
| feature is enabled by default. Developed in cooperation with Meta
| (Facebook).
|
| - Feb 2025. Mozilla updates its Privacy FAQ and TOS. "does not
| sell data about you." becomes "... in the way that most people
| think about it".
| sorcercode wrote:
| Mozilla has had missteps for sure (like almost every other
| browser company). but the MVP is uBO (which Firefox still
| allows). Even if Firefox adds that in by default (which suck),
| uBO allows you to block outgoing traffic to these 3rd party
| sites.
| hypertexthero wrote:
| Here's how to disable PPA: https://support.mozilla.org/en-
| US/kb/privacy-preserving-attr...
| CivBase wrote:
| Sorry, but I can't stand posts like this and they always come
| up in discussions about Firefox. If you have a better
| alternative than Firefox, please say so.
|
| Mozilla has many problems and has done bad stuff. Firefox is
| better than Chrome for most users. These are not mutually
| exclusive statements.
| nuker wrote:
| It is just facts.
|
| I use Safari with Wipr and iCloud Private Relay, better than
| FF if you have Apple devices.
| notelocomas wrote:
| great write up but my issue has always been how to persist or
| store changes across re-installs.
| fny wrote:
| > Here's something the iPhone isn't getting anytime soon: honest-
| to-god browser extensions that you use on your desktop, also on
| your phone. Which means... you can run uBlock Origin on Android,
| completely unnerfed.
|
| Orion supports both Firefox and Chrome extensions on iOS.
| samhclark wrote:
| I didn't see the author or anyone else mention TouchID yet. That
| was such a quality of life improvement for me that I switched
| from Firefox to Chrome on my work MacBook just for that. With
| SSO+MFA everywhere, TouchID saved me so much hassle.
|
| Also, I must've been using UBO wrong all these years cause I
| switched to UBOL and didn't notice a difference. So, thanks to
| the author, I've got a bunch of new settings to try!
| mikeen wrote:
| I still remember one bug I filed to Firefox, about issues with
| roaming profiles on Windows. I then forgot about it, as nothing
| was going on with it, except few times a year someone new
| commented that they run a few thousand seats org, and this bug
| prevents them from deployong Firefox. It was finally fixed like
| 12 years later.
| lsdmtme wrote:
| I had been using FireFox for 10+ years, but I find myself more
| and more using Edge. The Workspaces(0) feature is a killer
| feature that I have not been able to recreate with any FF
| extensions. If anyone knows of any it would be much appreciated.
|
| 0: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge/features/edge-
| workspace...
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| With native vertical tabs, Firefox is now perfect for me. I use
| it on PC and phone with Ublock Origin and some others. Not slow
| for me and actually feels like it handles many tabs better than
| Chrome or Edge.
|
| I have tried Vivaldi also, but the UI was too slow still, even
| though it's very nice and custom. Brave is too weird with all the
| crypto stuff. So FF it is for the foreseeable future.
| dabedee wrote:
| Instead of arguing about tab management and rendering
| performance, we should be asking what does a healthy browser
| ecosystem look like in five years? Do we want 95% of users on
| browsers controlled by advertising companies (Google), hardware
| manufacturers optimizing for their own services (Apple), or cloud
| providers with obvious conflicts of interest (Microsoft)?
| Firefox's technical quirks are fixable. The uncomfortable reality
| is that true browser independence might require something Mozilla
| has consistently failed to achieve: sustainable revenue that
| doesn't depend on surveillance capitalism. Until that happens,
| we're choosing between degrees of corporate control, not between
| freedom and captivity.
| CraigJPerry wrote:
| >> Let's face it, Safari between Mac and iPhone is a sublime
| experience.
|
| I daily drive safari and firefox has a far better sync
| experience. Safari will randomly delay syncing, i've never had
| that with firefox. I regularly quickly search something on a tab
| on phone to be picked up later at my desk. It's not a reliable
| sync process.
|
| Bookmark management? Firefox wins as soon as you want to do
| something a bit custom because you have so many bookmarks.
|
| Dev tools? You guessed it.
|
| Safari is still better on battery life though.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Since we're talking about Firefox:
|
| Firefox shipped WebGPU support for Windows today.
| h43z wrote:
| If you want to navigate websites more with your keyboard I
| created a dead simple extension. All it injects is this tiny
| snippet into each site.
| addEventListener('keydown', event => { if(event.key !==
| 'Enter') return
| elementWithSelection = getSelection().anchorNode?.parentElement
| if(!elementWithSelection) return
| elementWithSelection.click() getSelection().empty()
| })
|
| This allows you to use the native CTRL+f and / search basically
| like the ' search.
|
| The ' search let's you "click" on links by pressing enter.
|
| The snippet let's you do the same for the other searches too so
| you can navigate the modern web where often navigations and
| actions are behind buttons and sometimes even divs (not just
| links). Unfortunately you can't activate those without this
| little hack.
|
| The extension will be available at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
| US/firefox/addon/click-on-sele... soon (after mozilla approves).
|
| I use this trick in a slightly bigger extension too
| https://github.com/h43z/jkscroll/blob/main/content-script.js...
| isthisfoss wrote:
| Just use librewolf and be done with it. 99% of sites work and the
| 1% that don't I have ungoogled chromium for.
| ksec wrote:
| Let's ignore problems with Mozilla's management or board for a
| minutes.
|
| To most of the problems people describe on HN, have you file
| anything on bugzilla? Even if you dont file it on bugzilla you
| could at least describe your problem in full on HN, which you can
| always copy and paste back in the future when someone ask you
| once again. At least someone will have a record somewhere.
|
| 1. Are you on Linux? Or is the issue specific to Android?
|
| 2. Performance Issues? Where? How? At least describe it? Firefox
| since e10s and Quantum landed _fully_ has been as fast if not
| even faster than Chrome. Chrome has since caught up again.
| Generally there shouldn 't be noticeable performance difference
| in day to day usage other than some benchmarks or Gaming, WebGL /
| WebGPU scenario.
|
| 3. Websites having issues? Which one?
| ndkap wrote:
| The article said ubo lite does not have element zapper. Last time
| I used it, it does. Maybe the article is old?
| jerhewet wrote:
| I use Firefox and uBlock Origin, but I'm also routing everything
| through AdGuard Home on an RPi5 (my router points to the RPi for
| DNS), and it's been an eye-opening experience.
|
| Just checked AGH, and it's blocking 49.56% of my DNS queries for
| everything that's connected. I cannot recommend AGH on an RPi
| highly enough. It's amazing.
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