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Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

I think Firefox's shortcomings are overstated. Often they're actually Mozilla's rather than Firefox's.

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

I simply won't use a browser that doesn't have these things.

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Privacy considerations aside, containers are great for using multiple AWS accounts simultaneously. Since we use an AWS account as a deployment container, it’s typical to have 10s of different accounts you have to jump between and it’s just not possible to effectively do ops with another browser.

Mutli-account containers is really a game-changing feature for me. I switched from Chrome back to Firefox about 3 years ago (even before containers were available) and at this point there's no going back. I keep chrome around for some sites that require it, but that's it.

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.

This is honestly a killer feature! I use Temporary Containers and load the AWS console in a fresh container automatically, making it very easy to switch between accounts and have multiple open at once. (Caveat emptor: be sure which account you're using at any given time!)

It really is. I think this is one of the features they (Mozilla) spend some more resources into. It's really unique and could drive non-tech savvy users to it.

I really wish AWS would figure out multiple accounts on one session.

Even with multiple containers, it still means logging into AWS SSO multiple times and selecting the right account.

By any chance you are using nightly. I am not able to login as IAM user in firefox nightly. For last couple of months always get 403 from AWS.

You can use the aws switch roles addon that lets you do that in one container.

Strong agree on multi account containers. Keep in mind though if you disable them they drop all settings, unlike every other add-on ... ever. Bug is three years old but maybe we can push it over the top: https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers/issues/1...

There is also no way to rearrange your containers aside from deleting them and making new ones in the desired order. Since I am using this for o365 administration it is a little annoying that I can't keep them in alphabetical order to find them easily.

Are you on the latest version? I can rearrange them on mine. If click on "manage containers" there is a gray on gray bar on the right. If you hover it, your cursor should change to an arrow to rearrange them.

That allows for visual rearrangement of that particular menu, but as far as I can tell the new tab button's list does not change and the extension keyboard shortcuts are still limited to the first 10 containers, which are bound by their creation order.

A non-sanctioned way to mitigate this might be achieved by editing containers.json, but I'm wary of inviting sync shenanigans.

This is something that I don't like about firefox. They have a ton of cool stuff, but I feel that they are always lacking a few things.

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.

My workaround for this is to title the bookmark, e.g. "kw:rdt Page Title".

Imperfect, but the convenience is worthwhile for the dozen-or-so keyword searches I use.

Yeah, but that's kinda the point: seems that there's always a need for a workaround. Also, I know I'm going to forgot to rename a bunch :/

Yes there is. Saved keywords are just (Parametersteuerung) bookmarks so open the bookmark manager and you will find them.

I know they are bookmarks. But the point is that there is no way in the bookmark manager to filter bookmarks that have keywords.

Let's not forget Tree Style Tabs, no other browser can do it. Great for the tab hoarders amongst us.

I don't often keep many tabs open, but still vastly prefer Tree Style Tabs. I primarily work on a widescreen monitor and would rather give up horizontal space rather than vertical.

Is there anyone on the planet who doesn't use a widescreen monitor these days?

Out of all my computers the only one I have is a Thinkpad T60, manufactured in 2006 if I'm not mistaken.

Simple Tab Groups awesome complement. In special with Firefox, not loading tabs that you not have opened. And if you combine with Total Suspender... Like having infinite tabs with paying any price.

I had some serious performance problems on my MBP last year, back when a lot of the major Rust changes came out (no idea if that's relevant). Was super laggy trying to play videos. Gave it another try a couple months ago and everything is fixed! Very happy user now, won't be going back to Chrome. The features you highlighted are some nice added bonuses on top of removing another layer of Google tracking.

> Pop-out videos (aka picture-in-picture) are awesome

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 love FF. It's fantastic on macOS and the customization beats every single other browser out of the water. BUT, and I know this is controversial, and I know the foundation is not the same as those who manage the browser, after the events on the capitol they released and statements saying something like "deplatforming is not enough" and even though I asked several times, I could never get a confirmation from anyone within the Mozilla Foundation assuring me they would never use telemetry data to spy on "undesirables" or that they would never try to block content they deemed harmful.

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 certainly can't offer any official word, but telemetry doesn't have enough data to spy on anyone, and the privacy policy spells this out pretty clearly. And if something snuck in, it's all open source and I imagine people would raise a big stink pretty quickly (whatever their political leanings were).

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 feel very much the same way. I don't particularly like the direction Mozilla has taken, both in terms of current day politics and the "resignation" Brendan Eich. Granted, it's part and parcel with today's mainstream, but that blog post they published last year was kind of chilling IMO. Their statement was totally out of the bounds of what Mozilla should be responsible for.

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)

> Pop-out videos (aka picture-in-picture)

Chrome has this.

No it doesn't? I'm on Chrome right now and cannot pop out vimeo videos. Youtube appears to have a "pseudo" pop-out that I suspect is their own js-driven miniplayer thing. Just a fancy change to the DOM. You can't resize, drag the video around, or watch it from other tabs or with chrome unfocused/minimized.

> You can't resize, drag the video around, or watch from other tabs or with chrome unfocused/minimized

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.

Multiple pop-outs simultaneously?

I know it sounds silly but I've used it for SpaceX launches to keep an eye various official and unofficial streams.

Firefox puts the option right in front of me, and I regularly use it. But I have to hunt for it / even google it to find the option in Chrome.

Multi-account containers are a killer feature for sure. There is an ancient bug out there to provide "home page" for the container. That would truly make it a home run.

I had to remove multi-account containers due to issues with syncing, namely on a windows 8.1 install, and it causing a TON of browser bloat and CPU usage on MacOS and Linux and my windows 10 desktop in a fairly recent past.

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.

> 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.

That’s super interesting.

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.

about:performance is a little limited, especially if you have a single window, because switching to it makes it the foreground tab and all the other tabs background tabs. Background tabs can be throttled, and generally behave very differently.

(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.)

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