But that's the fault of Firefox.
I'm always astonished how bad/slow the mobile web experience is without Ublock with JS blocked by default.
For example, I prefer the address bar at the top. Firefox doesn't like that, so the new tab button stays on the bottom, meaning I have a six inch stretch between where my finger was to hit the tab manager and where it has to go to open a new tab. It's full of little things like that where the only explanation that comes to mind is that Mozilla decided they couldn't do it the best way because Chrome was already doing it that way.
Which phone / OS do you use?
Btw, to search for something I open Firefox and type in the URL bar.
If you have a good keyboard, you can even use DDG !bang syntax. I find this very helpful for finding what I want fast.
There are some quirks though, minor annoyances that every so often get introduced in updates. For example, when closing the last private browsing tab it doesn't automatically show the regular tabs any more, but instead requires three more taps. But I'm happy to ignore those for the sole reason of having fully functional ad-blocking.
How? Is there a hidden about:config?
uBlock Origin just happens to be so incredibly important and trusted that an exception should be made for it.
It's been fine so far. The biggest annoyance is that Firefox on iOS struggles a lot with form autofilling, and I don't think credit card autofill is allowed at all. You'd think this would be a minor annoyance (don't most sites save your payments methods?) but it's honestly been a big issue. So many sites are so broken on mobile that I actually can't create an account from mobile, and barely function well enough to get through the guest checkout flow.
Examples: Jersey Mike's (sub sandwich shop), and another local deli place that's too local for me to name without letting everyone know I live in a cornfield.
I would consider this a feature, not a bug.
So I am an FF user by ideology, but sometimes do use Chromium (basically only to not have to run electron).
1. Those test convey any useful information leading to
2. The average user is able to notice the difference in the real world
I think that things that are not js execution time for actual site functionality are much worse for the overall web experience, namely js execution time for ads/trackers and overall latency caused by bad connection quality or bandwidth. The overall experience on firefox with ublock is en par with chrome with ublock for your average mom.
I also recently started using Firefox full-time on my work machine despite IT strongly mandating that all our tools only work on Chrome and everyone should use that. Have had zero problems (and we use every Google service under the sun).
Really? It happens to me all the time. I can't log into my U.S. Bank account in Firefox, I can't submit a delivery order on Doordash in Firefox, and (just this morning) I couldn't validate a credit reporting form in Firefox.
Now, despite those and many other examples, I continue to use Firefox as my primary browser, because Chrome has bigger issues in my opinion. I don't blame FF for this, I blame the websites. I just think it sucks that places do not test in or support Firefox better.
"Access Denied You don't have permission to access "http://www.costco.com/" on this server."
Is this from running NoScript? Or does it affect all Firefox users? (Also the URL is https://, not http://, so the error message doesn't match the URL).
I also have some "unusual" settings in about:config that I mostly don't even remember, for instance disabling service workers outright.
The question becomes, why not disable them?
I am not aware of any attack vectors specifically related to service workers -- it's just normal JavaScript, but with more restrictions.
Before I disabled them, I saw a ton of service workers registered from sites that I visited once and likely will never visit again, so even if there are no attack vectors, it seems like it's at the very least, "stuff that I don't need."
> cache a web app locally in order to make it load faster
Uh, isn't there already a browser cache for this?
> run entirely offline
No thanks.
> push notifications
No thanks. :)
Like I said I've had them disabled for a long time now and haven't had any issues, so at this point I'm not going to think about it again until and unless stuff I care about starts breaking.
[0]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/troubleshoot-firefox-is...
Clearly not a universal thing then I guess.
There are other things I consider superior about Firefox that Chrome has yet to implement:
- Multi-account containers is a killer feature IMO. I have different containers for banking, Facebook, a container for every email, a container for every Google/YouTube account, and so forth.
- The option to enable canvas permission prompts and canvas obfuscation. (though there are some arguments that those make you *more* trackable)
- Autoplay blocking and permission prompt
- Pop-out videos (aka picture-in-picture) are awesome and make it easy to keep videos on screen while browsing other tabs and apps.
- Built-in anti-fingerprinting
- Blocks tracking cookies by default
What I always give as an example, is how to add custom searches (Amazon, Reddit, HN, etc), you save the query url and add a keyword. Works very well to type `rdt something` and have the results. But: there's no option in the menu to see all keywords/search engines you have registered.
Imperfect, but the convenience is worthwhile for the dozen-or-so keyword searches I use.
A non-sanctioned way to mitigate this might be achieved by editing containers.json, but I'm wary of inviting sync shenanigans.
Out of all my computers the only one I have is a Thinkpad T60, manufactured in 2006 if I'm not mistaken.
Chrome has this.
I know it sounds silly but I've used it for SpaceX launches to keep an eye various official and unofficial streams.
Umm...you can do all of those things. You might have to right click the video twice to get the picture-in-picture option (to get around the contextual menu of many video players including YouTube) or you can use the official extension that you click to popout whatever video is on the webpage.
Now how do I get Chrome to stop auto-installing itself in my login items on macOS everytime there's some kind of update.
Edit:
Also, if you're on Android, set Firefox Focus as your default browser! It's amazing to not have to think about the tracking consequences everytime you click a link somewhere on your phone. It's basically a new "container" for every link click. If you need the cookies, then there's a handy "Open With" menu to let you re-open the page with regular Firefox, or Chrome.
And uBO works on the regular Firefox Android browser.. Again, game-changer for me.
Even with multiple containers, it still means logging into AWS SSO multiple times and selecting the right account.
It’s unfortunate. Plan to try it again but it was borderline burdensome that x containers or place settings wouldn’t sync or that the Mac mini or linux box would start sounding like a jet engine.
Not sure about the container connection, but Firefox also now has 'about:performance' which is pretty much like 'top for browser tabs'. When things start getting bogged down I can now find the culprit and nuke it.
about:memory is also useful, it allows you to force garbage collection on the browser as a whole.
(There's an experimental sidebar extension that works better and gives a graphical history, but I'm pretty sure it's unfinished and unavailable for general use. Hopefully it'll come out sometime.)
Was not aware of those. My observations were mostly noted while trying to figure out why one specific browser wouldn’t simply not sync any custom containers. And then I noticed my fans spin up on my macmini. I only used system monitors at the time before just disabling the add-on.
I’ll definately look at those in the future. Didn’t even know they existed.
Agreed on all points. It's funny, I've been using Firefox 20+ years and when I saw them recently boasting about PiP I thought "another useless feature".
Until I decided to try it out. Now I use it constantly.
I get the situation is different, but my parents escaped from two civil wars in Central America in the 70s and the stories they told me about political persecution were scary enough to make me distrust organizations that don't seem to understand nuance when it comes to politics.
I remember that post, and I think you're mischaracterizing it. The point wasn't that "deplatforming is a good start, but we need to go even farther"; it was "deplatforming is not the right solution, we need something better".
As for trying to block harmful content -- Mozilla is already doing that, all the time, so you're certainly not going to get any promise there. Firefox blocks malware, sites with expired/mismatching certificates, things on the (un)safe browsing list, 3rd party cookies in some configurations, etc. Whether any of those constitute censorship is up for you to decide. Right now, it feels fine to me, but I agree that there's reason for concern. All the browsers have all the mechanisms necessary for censorship, and there's no way to crisply define "harmful".
I still use Firefox not only because the browser is not necessarily the same as the foundation, but the alternatives are organizations with far, far worse track records. (putting aside the advantages I mentioned)
I cant find the link right now, but there was a nice timings done where Chrome was using less CPU at lower tab counts, but when it increased count, the CPU utilization was considerably higher than FF.
I'll be giving it a fair shake for a few months.
Or more specifically, I'm wondering what change you could be referring to. We've had incremental GC for many years now, which does exactly what you describe. It's true that we keep splitting up more of the uninterruptible pieces into smaller chunks, but I don't recall any major change there recently. (I'm not very good at marketing, am I?)
And according to telemetry, the incremental slices have been working quite well for most people, at least within the last dozen releases or so. We have a budget, and it's rare that we go over it. Not that I fully trust telemetry; if you have counterexamples please file a bug. (I'd love to have a nice set of scenarios that are problematic for the GC. Our telemetry errs strongly on the side of privacy, as it should, so I can't get URLs automatically.)
At a first try Sidebery looks and feels more modern/slick! Might be what I was looking for!
Go to: about:telemetry#scalars-tab
Then look at: browser.engagement.max_concurrent_tab_count
(Pretty clever to use telemetry for this, though.)
Then I started to think about what kind of tracking google was doing with it, so I tried out firefox... which was just as snappy and just as memory efficient.
Then I deleted chrome.
That was also an era of websites crashing all the damn time - in firefox it was crashing the entire browser.
Chrome was a significantly better browser for a while. Now it's just "why switch?" to your average consumer.
- command+d will save a bookmark to the last folder used
- command-y will open the history in a new, full tab
- bookmark manager also open full by default
- Recently closed shows windows and tabs together without separating them
- I can actually see and edit a list of all search engines I have registered that use the tab to autocomplete. Firefox's keywords don't
That sounds pithy, and it is, but Mozilla burned every ounce of goodwill they ever had with me over the last 5 years or so.
What technically do you find missing in FF?
Can’t Mozilla “just copy” the look and feel of Chrome or Safari while keeping FF’s internals untouched?
Saying this as a former uBlock Origin fanatic.