Switch browser while you can. Firefox might not be perfect (or even getting slightly worse), but at least it's an alternative and I can easily say it's better than Chromium in most. At least ad blocking worka as it should.
Edge has an ok-ish implementation of vertical tabs but it still has a ways to go to match tree-style tabs.
Once Firefox moved to the per-process approach and removed the ability to hack the UI, I saw no more reason to stay on what was a terribly slow browser back then, compared to Chrome. Startup times of 10+ seconds and such shenanigans.
As I don't like getting bug reports that boil down to "doesn't work", I don't create them myself.
You may get a helpful reply from someone on the team with suggestions on how to troubleshoot it, like enabling specific logging flags or pulling some info out of the console.
I've filed lots of bug reports against Firefox in the past and just because you don't have an isolated reproduction case for a devtools issue, that doesn't mean it can't be fixed.
I still do all my development in Firefox regardless, I'm sure if I switched to Chrome I'd quickly discover a set of equally annoying bugs and quirks there too. Better the devil you know.
FWIW, it has only been getting better for me
Both at home and work, Firefox desktop (with uBlock Origin) has been a pretty frictionless tool in terms of my browsing experience these past years, across Linux, Windows, and Mac machines.
Which is not to say it's not useful, and TIL - I didn't know they had released this, so thanks :) But I don't think it particularly applies to this thread.
Anything I need to know?
Then they released a preview of a re-design which also broke all extensions. That's arguably fine for a preview, though a bit concerning. Many were raising alarms at this point.
Then they released the re-design to the stable release, with still-broken extensions. This pretty unambiguously is "a mess", if not earlier.
Then they released built-in support for a couple dozen Mozilla-selected extensions (uBO included, I believe). This is still a mess, and rightfully raises a few eyebrows.
... and we're still there now, after over a year of "this will be fixed soon". I believe you can install nightly + manually tweak config and still install other extensions, but Firefox for Android does not support extensions right now. That's A Problem™, and not a good sign for extension-longevity that it was ever allowed out of preview. It broadly implies extensions are very low on their priority list, which is concerning, as extensions have been the clear leaders on preserving privacy and user control in general. Browsers overwhelmingly follow popular extension behaviors, not the other way around - cripple extensions and you also cripple advancement and experimentation.
No access to extensions and blocking about:config was to me just heretic. Those two are the raison d'être of Firefox.
Nightly build thankfully reverted this babysitting of users but indeed we are still stuck with 'vetted' add-ons downgrade in the official Firefox release for Android.
Also lots of other little papercuts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26470454
I know that Firefox also has a syncing feature ("Sign into Firefox", "Continue to Firefox Sync").
My problem is that I don't trust Mozilla's ability to keep this data secure. I believe that sooner or later they are going to get hacked, and that data will leak. The same might happen to Google, but I also believe that no other company has the degree of expertise of Google to protect that data.
Am I wrong in this assumption? Does Firefox Sync end-to-end encrypt the data, without knowing the key, like Google's Sync Passphrase feature?
What are your experiences with Firefox Sync? Does it work just as good as Chrome's, or even better?
The sync server is open source and free, so you can host an instance yourself if you'd like.
Firefox accounts have 2FA support, and passwords are end to end synced anyway, so even if your Firefox account is compromised, nobody can recover data without the key.
For about a decade in the working, there were zero breaches in mozilla AFAIK.
I use Firefox sync in my Windows laptop, Firefox on Android beta. There is also an app called Lockwise that can work as a standalone app and a password fill feature for other apps as well.
And yes, I'm aware of the extensions that offer similar functionality, but unfortunately they still have some way to go before they can reach parity with Chrome translator.
Honestly I don't know and I think I should. I have uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, ClearURLs installed on Firefox, I'm running pi-hole at home, it's just so much.
Privacy badger is largely useless ever since they got rid of heuristics. ClearURLs is useful, but you'd probably be fine without it. And pi-hole doesn't block anything that uBo doesn't in Firefox (but is still useful for applications outside of the browser).
On the other hand, maybe you're like me and want to squeeze as much privacy out of your browser as you can, even if it means breaking some websites. If that's the case, check this website out. Just remember that the tweaks listed here are nice, but not entirely necessary.
Dunno if it's better than the one in Firefox, but it's the one I know =)
I've switched to Vivaldi and it's just much snappier and doesn't have the papercuts FF mobile is currently struggling through.
Total rewrites are cool, but they're real rough around the edges at first.
I strongly disagree. There are certainly issues, many of which are a result of the recent redesign, but I still find it a much better experience than Chrome on mobile and I think calling it "awful" is hyperbolic. Here are some examples of why I think FF > Chrome on mobile:
Firefox mobile supports extensions which I consider necessary at this point, such as uBlock Origin.
I can put the address bar at the bottom, where my fingers are.
The reader features makes many websites much easier to read - particularly on mobile.
Chrome defaults to opening things in tab groups now, which I find to be much more finicky to use than normal tabs. Bookmarks are for saving pages long-term, not tabs.
- I've noticed it crashes much more.
- It still doesn't support all the extensions I used to have, like uMatrix.
- All my bookmarks disappeared when it updated to the new version. I know syncing bookmarks would've let me recover, but I didn't realize it'd happen on the first place. And it seems like an easy problem to Amos even if a user didn't sync.