I don't understand why this (and all the rest) is not driving people back to Firefox. Are we really going to wait for Mozilla to die, and then lament that Google has taken over the web?
If Firefox does implode, it will be because of Mozilla's garbage leadership/product vision, not market conditions.
Regarding Mozilla's direction, we already have years of evidence. It all starts with Brendan Eich's resigning. Whether you agree the reasoning is immaterial; that decision lead him to start a direct competitor that is now fighting them for the ever-shrinking demographic of people that don't use Chrome. And then there's stuff like acquiring Pocket, something completely antithetical to Firefox's core values. Money-wasters like FoxOS (or whatever that mobile OS was called) that distracted from Firefox. And then lots of tick-tacky stuff like FF devtools being inferior to Chrome for years (people say it's better now, but I don't care to check it out, I've been using Chrome's for years), over-focusing on frivolous things like social justice issues. It will be death by 1000 cuts that kills Mozilla from the inside.
> And then there's stuff like acquiring Pocket, something completely antithetical to Firefox's core values.
Pocket itself isn't antithetical to Firefox's values. It not being open source is, but from what I understand they're still working on making the server open source, though at disappointingly low priority.
Pocket is Firefox trying not to fall behind on features.
And presumably from Mozilla's perspective, if it has some sponsored content giving them some non-Google income, so much the better.
There are services, of which Pocket is not the only one, that save you personal hard copies of content so you can have it available offline and keep things even if they're gone. Like a personal Wayback Machine. It's a very sensible thing to integrate into a browser in my opinion, although a lot of the Firefox fanbase, being idiots in love with the idea of FOSS donationware, are hostile to. I used to be one of those idiots.
There was a few years there they got off google in favor of Yahoo Money.
Then Yahoo mismanagement imploded that company and back to google they went
Even if I am looking for Microsoft's own documentation on some library or class google returns a better result for MS Docs than Bing does....
See also: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dashboard:-Settings#u...
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2021/05/27/manifest-v3-updat...
And there are advantages as well, such as better autoplay avoidance.
about://media-engagement according to the docs (which implies engaging with the site is required, but I don’t think it is for YouTube).
I wish I could find a extension that removes all motion on a page (video, js animated stuff) but I suspect that would be too difficult to do. I do use a extension that removes all color, but it doesn't work terribly well, and some UIs on websites are too dependant on color as differentiators.
Been using it happily ever since (FF on MacOS). The only time I open Chrome now is to test websites I'm working on.
The privacy disaster that's new Edge is constantly doing really good UI innovation with powerful but simple features like collapsible sidebars while retaining native UI.
Vivaldi, well, the whole point of the browser is features, and they deliver. They have three different ways to use tab stacks, for heaven's sake. And they do privacy, and aren't interested in telling me what I should see.
Brave, same. Privacy focus, try to build standalone revenue streams. They actually ship new things, if less aggressively in the UI department than Edge or Vivaldi. And they're not interested in telling me what I should see on the web.
I'd gladly use Mozilla, but they have to deserve it first by being genuinely good in terms of attitude and/or product, preferably both, not just being "not Google". By my count, product's getting worse and the attitude is complete garbage.
This rant is also more or less on point: http://dpldocs.info/this-week-in-d/Blog.Posted_2021_09_06.ht...
Google, Microsoft and Apple all push their browsers forward by their external footprint - Google and Microsoft cloud platforms, and all three by being the default.
Brave's building their own platform, Vivaldi a bit of the same, but also just built-in tools in the browser like a simple notetaker and mail/calendar/RSS apps.
Firefox has Pocket, which is good and a good idea, but their userbase is stupidly hostile to ventures like that, the only thing they accept is a pristine FOSS project funded by donations.
It's a lot of effort to move everything: current session, bookmarks, extensions, sync (which mean I need to move on my 5+ devices at once). I have been bitten twice -- not sure if I want to risk it again. No matter how much people are saying how good it is now, it's hard to muster up the effort to move again.
EDIT: Perhaps I wasn't clear enough. Back when Firefox was saying it's as fast as Chrome without being multi-process. They were saying that it's better. I tried. I moved. I got f*cked up. I move back. Twice. You'd excuse me if I no longer believe what the Firefox dev were saying about their browser.
You could try, and them move if conclusive? If you consider switching anyway.
Moving everything before being sure seems expensive.
And back then I was told the exact same thing I was told this time, too.
I have thousands of open tabs, managed with the Tree Style Tabs (TST) plug-in.
I have no experience migrating from Chrome to Firefox, but FF can certainly handle lots of tabs. Vertical tab layouts are very helpful for navigating them.
My limited experience using Chrome says that Firefox requires vastly less RAM to handle multiple tabs (anything more than a dozen!).
Re: Conspicuous tab consumption: If I pared down, I'd be more like 50-100 active tabs. I appreciate that Firefox remains completely usable even when I do not pare down. Chrome fails for me at about 20 tabs due to lack of usable vertical tabs layout, even before RAM becomes an issue on this machine.
I want to say this is a feature of the browser itself, but the extension (add-on, whatever we call them now) gives you a lot more control.
As for session migration, maybe an extension like 'Tab Session Manager' will help? It supports several different formats, so surely one of those formats is something that Chrome can export. That would let you move everything in one fell swoop, at least.
i.e. Use it exclusively for HN (say for a few weeks) and see how it goes.
So for this HN article. You can't use FF to try it out. You HAVE to add it to the 200+ tabs to Chrome?
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bulkurlopener...
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bulk-url-opener/kg...