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Since you brought up logging out and in, remember that Firefox Containers are very useful for things you wanna let logged in all the time (e.g., Facebook, maybe Google) so their tracking gets a little worse because your cookies are more isolated.

My preferred anti-tracking setup is Firefox with the Multi-Account Containers and the Temporary Containers addons (and uBlock Origin of course.)

Multi-Account Contaners lets me set up permanent containers for (groups of) sites I want to stay logged in to. I check the "always open this site in <container name>" box.

Temporary Containers is set up to open new sites (on middle / control click) in new, temporary containers. These containers work like private browsing windows, but store their data for 10 minutes after being closed. So undo close tab works, history works, but each new site is in its own container. And 10 minutes after its closed (or when the browser as a whole closes) all the cookies get deleted.

Don't forget Facebook Container

Don’t forget Privacy Badger. Thanks EFF!

I ran Privacy Badger for a while, but I have never actually seen it do anything. Not sure I messed up something, or if it was due to me already having an aggressive block list on uBlock Origin that left PB with nothing to do.

Yes, uBlock Origin leaves little (anything?) for Privacy Badger to do.

An aggressive block list could do it. Privacy Badger "learns" what is tracking you, so it does take a little bit to start being effective when you first start using it. It caches 34 trackers on theverge.com with uBlock Origin turned off for me, and 9 with uBlock Origin turned on.

My preferred anti-tracking adds Cookie Auto delete [0] to this. In the HN container, I keep HN cookies. Anything opened from HN will stay in the HN container and non-HN sites get cookies deleted shortly.

[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autode...

One thing that turns me off using Firefox Containers in earnest is that they are not integrated into Firefox Sync and nor does there appear to be a way to backup the URLs/containers as with other extensions - so I end up having to rebuild the containers on another machine or when I need to delete a buggy profile.

https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers/pull/161... was just merged earlier today that introduces the sync function.

Good news, thank you.

It's been merged and is currently going through the Addon approval process. You should see it in about 48 hours.

That's a great change. Containers are one of the things that made me move back from Chrome, it just feels far more useful to me to mix different contexts in one window than having to run entirely separate browser profiles as I had in Chrome. The one thing that prevented me from creating more elaborate container setups was the lack of sync, it just gets too annoying to set that kind of stuff up repeatedly. But with sync I'll probably look at creating more fine-grained containers than the basic work/personal setup I have right now, e.g. separating out Google in a separate container.

https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2020/02/06/multi-account-c...

Firefox member here – thanks a lot for reporting those bugs! Thanks to detailed reports Debugger could improve and glitches should become more and more a rarity.

You're welcome. Thanks a lot for your work on Firefox!

Wish I could have reported the breakpoint page refresh bug, but I wasn't sure how I could possibly isolate/replicate or describe beyond what I described above. And that's probably not very useful? The small one I linked was easy to describe and replicate.

Anyway, reporting bugs to Firefox definitely seems worth the time spent because it means having a browser that doesn't exist solely to benefit Google. Long live the World Wide Web!

PS. Really like so many other DevTools details I didn't mention in my post above. For example, the '...', 'scroll' and 'flex' indicators/toggles: https://imgur.com/a/yIlhDcJ. Also the console reverse-search with Ctrl-R. And many others.

Something I have noticied about Firefox team, it's reporting bugs to them do actually means something. They do put effort to solve them.

Thanks for your work on Firefox! I feel more comfortable with Firefox Devtools overall, but I keep using Chrome for debugging for one single reason : Firefox can't handle extensive log.

I'm working on code where sometimes infinite loops occurs. When I want to investigate on these loops, I cannot use any breakpoints because it's using the same route than it used 10 000 times before, so I usually log a lot of data, then manually kill the Chrome tab and I can still run through 1 million console lines smoothly.

Really hope Firefox will be able to handle that one day.

That is on our list for sure and some fixes have landed in 74 and 75. More to do for sure, but these issues are a priority in our performance program.

> then manually kill the Chrome tab and I can still run through 1 million console lines smoothly

How does that work with DevTools – closing the tab and reading logs?

Yeah the debugger certainly still leaves some things to be desired. When using a fairly sizeable react project, I set a XHR breakpoint, it was triggered, then the whole tab became unresponsive (dev tools included)

This happens to me a lot in the Chrome developer tools as well. Especially with hot reloading, so would love any advice to help with it. Chrome is the only application I ever have to force quit.

Happens to me in Chrome too, specifically when I reload a page that's stopped at a breakpoint. Instead of force quitting the whole application, check out Window -> Task manager. There you can force quit just a single, specific tab without closing the whole application.

The chrome task manager (hotkey Shift+Esc) is good for killing tabs

For large pages where source changes cause problems I will sometimes put logic inside conditional breakpoints. It's not great for huge changes (though you technically can put a lot of code in there) but for small things like quickly sanitizing null inputs it works fine.

Favorite thing about firefox devtools is in the network tab you can right-click a network request and just resend it as-is. Don't think you can do that in chrome.

You can - right click and press "Replay XHR", which will resend the request as is.

You can replay XHR in Chrome, but in Firefox you can edit/resend any request (XHR, image, et al.)

Editing the request isn't as accessible though and I often need to tweak requests.

They fixed the performance issues recently on MacOS too, well worth trying to switch again if anyone previously had a poor experience.

I had to ditch chrome because it performed abysmally, tried to use Safari but just couldn't get used to it, so went back to Firefox and was very pleasantly surprised ... great Mac OS experience.

That has to be a joke, zooming barely works on macOS (and has to be enabled using an about:config flag). It's decent if you just use an old fashioned mouse though and not a magic trackpad.

Perhaps your experience not only isn't universal, but the magic trackpad may not be all that magical after all.

True - zooming is an abomination compared to Safari ... but I don't zoom that often, so of course, YMMV.

They have in theory, but the fix isn't working for a lot of people, and Firefox continues murdering their battery. Firefox devs are aware but AFAIK their attention is focused elsewhere at the moment. Quite sad, because of all the people I got to switch to Firefox, all but one that experiences this issue has switched back to Chromium. Privacy and fighting browser hegemony is great, but stark few people are willing to sacrifice nearly half their battery life for it.

If you're interested in dev tools, I can't recommend eval villain enough. It only works on Firefox, but it helps a lot with identifying xss vulnerabilities.

https://www.hurricanelabs.com/blog/making-easy-dom-xss-actua...

Thank you! I'll check that out.

Yep, did the same thing. Took about two weeks to take.

Same experience for me. One huge upside is how great the Firefox mobile browser is (as an Android phone user; unsure for iOS).

Having uBlock + Dark Reader on my phone has felt like a god-send.

Thanks for the Dark Reader suggestion, I was looking for exactly that on mobile.

Unfortunately Firefox on iOS doesn't have access to content blockers and can't install its own ad-blockers.

Install Firefox Focus. You can set it as a content blocker for Safari!

Iphone user here. I actually don't bother installing FF on my Iphone because Safari isn't bad at all.

yes this. uBlock on Android mobile has become my main reason not to buy any new iOS devices.

FF dev tools are on par or even better (IMO) than Chrome, but the last few versions, it seems they have changed/dropped sourcemap support so it doesn't work at all. I went back to FF a couple years ago, but now I'm disappointed that the dev tools are not working properly and will go back for dev purposes only. I hope FF gets it working. I'd file a bug, but 'sourcemap support not working' isn't exactly all that helpful. Anyway, it doesn't work on any of my apps and works fine in Chrome. I hope they fix it at some point as I think their dev tools are generally better than Chrome (esp. the console).

Firefox dev here – do you have an example page? We worked a lot on source maps, so things should have improved but maybe you hit a regression.

One thing I did to help it "make it stick" when I made the switch was I made a FF Color theme that matches chrome's colors. https://color.firefox.com/?theme=XQAAAAIWAQAAAAAAAABBKYhm849...

Same, except I used Chrome's classic colours: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/familiar-blue...

The only thing I'm really missing is how easily you can set up and switch between different profiles in Chrome.

There used to be an extension that made profile handling aboutvas easy as in Chrome.

99% of the time I don't miss chrome. Google brand has faded in my mind.

TBH chrome still has an edge (slightly slicker, slightly leaner). But it's not worth it.

MS Edge now has an edge over Chrome too - it’s even leaner, lighter and faster.

If they would just release it for Linux already I’d be using it everywhere.

Yeah, new Edgium is just as slick as Chrome was when it started. I'm now using only Edgium exclusively; Super fast; No lagging anywhere. Super smooth scrolling etc; I hope it stays like that;

You may like Iridium - it’s chromium with all the google stuff removed.

Isn't chromium itself chrome with all the google stuff removed?

https://github.com/iridium-browser/tracker/wiki/Differences-...

i feel a bit guilty using windows and edge these days. like i'm betraying my principles. but it's just so easy and i have to prioritize stress to what matters.

I consider Firefox to be slightly slicker and leaner so it's now probably well into subjective territory.

Maybe it's a question of laptop, because on my side it's pretty obvious how everything is just 15% quicker UI wise. Not that it's critical.

FWIW, among other computers, I use it on a 2012 T530 ThinkPad.

Everything that's going on?

https://www.wired.com/story/google-chrome-ad-blockers-extens...

Well, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20044430. Bunch of other things too.

Just Google tracking everything you do in their browser, and preventing you from blocking other trackers.

Breakpoint logging sounds like just using conditional breakpoints with a console.log wrapper around the expression, which you can do today. Not saying it's better or worse, but if you need that functionality in Chrome there's your solution :)

The flex/grid stuff in Firefox's dev tools is really nice.

How much of it is a struggle to "remember how to use Firefox"? It's a web browser. You type your stuff into an address bar and go...

I'm still on honeymoon with Brave browser. Let's see how long it's going to last. So far, so good.

Ah, the self-anointed "Brave" browser, that believes what humanity really needs is a middleman between publishers and readers, skimming off the ad revenue.

Brave ads are entirely opt-in. By default it only blocks ads in the same way that Firefox's tracking protection does.

That's no longer true. I seem to have been opted in to ads on the new tab screen recently.

It's Chrome with everything that people want from Firefox (privacy features). I use it too. Brendan Eich did it again.

I still don't see what's to like on brave. It's basically chrome with ublock origin and https anywhere and like maybe one or two more privacy-oriented extension - why is there a need for a different browser, like why isn't that only an extension? Also, once chrome disables adblockers I doubt they would have the manpower to fork chromium.