I think modern Firefox is a much better browser than Chrome though, but Mozilla certainly lost the PR war and to no fault but their own, because Firefox sure sucked for a long while.
This gets said often, but I've been using Firefox continually since 2003 and I've never noticed it sucking.
But Chrome will quietly exit, and when you start it next time, will offer to restore the tabs that were open last time. Chrome approach wins, hands down.
> I would even expect if I quit browser with something written in the address bar (or search bar, etc), when it starts up again, it should be able to preserve this half-entered user input!
I'm pretty sure no one expects nor wants this. You're definitely in a minority here. The problem you describe isn't very technical, it's simply that you want something else than most people else and you don't want to take the time to configure your browser to how you want it to behave.
I think the lack of improvements in desktop UX in the last 10 years is making every desktop OS to slowly adopt mobile UX conventions. Some of those new conventions are a step back.
Personally, I don't like it when browsers implicitly keep tracking things when I close the application and then fire up some half-baked version of the same stuff when I come back later. If I want to remember where I am, I can easily bookmark some or all of my tabs.
Firefox has had a particular problem in recent versions where it seems to think it crashed on the previous shutdown, even though there was no user-visible evidence of this, and then tries to restore the previous session even when it otherwise wouldn't. That's not helpful if your previous session involved shopping for surprise Christmas presents for the SO who is now standing behind you as you open the browser again several hours later for some entirely unrelated purpose, in a totally hypothetical example.
I wouldn't expect this at all!
I think Firefox for a long time tried to optimize for those users who do want to tweak their software, and doing that can even be a way to make superior software (instead of aiming for the lowest common denominator), but it is certainly not the right approach to maximizing _web browser market share._
I didn't use Firefox for many years (because I thought it sucked; slow, bad defaults, always apologizing in this anoying way for having crashed the last time I used it) but I now use it every day again (though not as my default browser; I tend to keep all the major ones open) and I'm glad to see Mozilla recently seems to have changed their priorities and focused on usability and performance. I hope it's not too late.
The only only thing that really annoys me is that when you snap a tab out of a window into a new window, the gesture is similar with snapping a tab into the favorite bar, and I end up with lots of "New Tab" or other unwanted favorites.
Also a small personal annoyance. I got into the habit of always launching the browser by clicking the shift key on the windows task bar icon, so that I always get a new window, irrespective of whether some session is already running or not. But in firefox, when no session is running, launching with the shift key pressed results in the "safe mode" prompt. I wish there was a way to disable that.
Firefox doesn't suck, and matches Chrome. But there's no accounting for user behavior. I have seen user behavior that is mind-blowingly stupid, and subcultures of user activity and tendencies trace well with product loyalty trends.
Some user subcultures are retardedly dependent on browser extensions, never clear their cache, retain cookies for the lifetime of their laptop battery, and seemingly need hundreds of tabs open. And none of this shit makes sense to me.
These are likely the same people who carry around phones on the brink of overheating while locked, and in their pocket, because they have to have a thousand apps installed, in order to feel like they're getting the $1,000 phone they paid for, I guess. Their emails are constantly peppered with "sent from [app|device|service]" signatures, and they claim microphone permissions are why ads target them.
Honestly, if you've been blaming the browser, it's more likely that you're the one being your own worst enemy.
And, yeah, if Mozzila likes dropping numbers, nothing has to change.
Just this last month I've had Firefox crash tabs daily that Chrome handled perfectly fine, I've seen it crash the entire browser when Chrome did just fine. Underlying both those issues was a janky Windows install that was partially broken. But still, Chrome carried on like a trooper.
I've even just switched back to Linux and immediately saw Firefox stumble over scrolling frame rates. That was caused by using an Nvidia graphics card and the proprietary drivers on Kubuntu which was a bit janky again to say the least. But Chrome carried on through again with no problem.
Just today I've switch to an AMD graphics card and the opensource drivers on Fedora and only now is Firefox seemingly playing nice.
It's a great browser (though Dev Tools don't seem as good to me) and I love the containers but it does seem it needs a bit more of a particular environment to operate just right whereas Chrome 'just works' more of the time. That is possibly why lots of people say 'fine for me' (it is for me now, yey!) but others say "it's broken" or 'slow' or whatever.
( And as a user I knew that too. I just wanted to support Firefox. )
So saying Firefox Doesn't suck may be partially right. As we will have to define "suck" first. But saying it is as fast as Chrome during Firefox 4 and early Chrome era is just the same as saying earth is flat.
Google's own websites are some of the major culprits. The funny thing is that similar webs don't have this issue, and I don't notice any slowdowns that push me to do side-by-side tests.
Chrome feels like an untamed animal which does stuff without telling you, and I don't like it.
To this day, my browsing experience is still worse with Firefox than it was before 57, because so many useful little add-ons have never been replaced or have been replaced only with inferior versions. In some of those cases, that useful functionality can't be provided in the new environment, because the APIs to support it aren't there. I was unpleasantly reminded of this just a few days ago, when the same problem infected the latest Thunderbird update.
More seriously, I am running into increasing numbers of sites that simply don't work properly with Firefox. Sometimes this is because of the privacy/blocker extensions I use, but often the problem persists even if I disable those. Whether it's due to bad web developers doing Chrome-only things or bugs in recent versions of Firefox, the unfortunate result is still the same from the user's point of view.
I too experience privacy extensions breaking websites frequently, since I'm a heavy user of those, but so far I have never encountered a case of a website that was truly broken under Firefox. It was always one of my settings and worked under a clean profile.
They didnt release the specifications early enough for people to rewrite their addons and at the end of ESR52 there where still multiple bugs open which prevented people from porting their addons. We didnt even get a normal 1 year ESR support frame for gods sake. All that ignoring the fact that there was no warning for the end users that all their security addons were disabled after the automatic update.
I am still furious about the absolute arrogance and carelessness Mozilla showed here.
But Chrome as an alternative? That's not even on the table. Firefox is definitely the lesser of two evils.
They simply changed the default bookmark location with no option to change it back.
I need an addon to change the default bookmark location to keep my earlier filing approach.
I mean really?
I'm still upset that they broke custom keyboard shortcuts for ... two years now? All the replacements will only remap keys after a tab's JS has loaded. I used to be able to just zoom through the tabs with shift-j and shift-k, but now it will randomly stop on pages that need to reload, which breaks the whole experience.
I've had Super NES games that offered key customizations, and had much less memory and money to work with. That's really disappointing.
I ditch all Alphabet services, I do not like to waste my system and network resources for it's sake.
There have been major speedups since, and container tabs help fix the other issue. At this point, I still find Firefox worse than Chrome in a large number of ways, but they're small and often preference-based - but lots of people seem to agree that were a lot of users lost (or not gained) during a stretch where Firefox was pretty much objectively behind.
The last part is true, it did suck for a while. But I can't say "no fault but their own". Even if they rocked, they would have taken a big hit: chrome was advertised for a long time, and at no cost, using solicitating prompts directly on the most consultated and trusted web page in the world.
Both their plugin ecosystems are significantly less robust as well e.g if you want to use any popular tools e.g shodan, google data saver, edit this cookie, etc
Firefox was always good on other OS. And you got noscript there with full access to block everything Chrome does not want you to block.
About noscript:
Recently I was playing with it, in an attempt to curate which site is allowed to make connections to which domain but I discovered that I cannot do it on a per domain basis and every whitelisted entry was applied everywhere. Apparently that was something that could be configured at noscript's ABE panel which doesn't exist in the latest versions.
If you want per domain rules I would suggest trying umatrix instead.
I really enjoy this feature and even catch myself regularly trying to use it on other computers, which obviously don't have such keywords defined.
I recently switched from chrome to Firefox but the search engine situation is something I’m not really happy about.
Nope, you can just right-click the site's own search bar, which is how I've been doing it forever.
Actually this is exactly what lorenzhs said, and it is my experience too. I know this because I spent half an hour trying to get a “blue search” for BBFC.
Firefox actually has 2 domain specific search-shortcut features, but both take time to set up and then is not intuitive at all. Chrome just blows it out of the water.
Also wtf - if I type "hello" and press enter in the search bar in FF, it puts a "www." in front and ".com" at the end.. like holy hell, if I knew the domain I'll write .com myself, it really is no problem. I even went ahead and googled for 15 minutes and disabled this in some deep settings somewhere, but it still does it when I press enter too fast... damnit, it frustrates me every single day.
I hope they see this and fix this very-frustratingly-obvious anti-UX behaviour..
it's really jarring to be sent to a random domain when looking up something in a hurry.
Funnily enough, I've often seen Firefox users unaware that they can do the same with custom search keywords in Chrome, so the problem runs both ways.
As someone who uses these features in both Firefox and Chrome, I do think it would be nice if Firefox copied how Chrome automatically adds these search actions, and perhaps a bit of the UI polish too (like how Chrome's omnibox will recognize you're performing a keyword search and adapt accordingly). It doesn't make much of a difference for existing power users, but it could help new users discover and use the feature.
It works flawlessly in all browsers I use.
Typing "w! foo" beats "wikipedia foo" every time.
It's still not as smooth and doesn't support as many OpenSearch providers as Chrome's, but might already help a bit.
I find it intriguing that each incognito window in Chrome is not sandboxed between each other. Am I missing anything here?