I think people just don't know what they don't know. Firefox containers is awesome. I can type amazon.com and it will automatically open in my shopping container (after some configuration). I can type messenger.com and it opens in Facebook container out of the box. We even have container sync now so you can sync these settings across browsers.

Mozilla isn't perfect though. I don't understand the decision to get rid of lockwise, my default password manager on iPhone and Android.

» https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29321796

I don't get why they removed FTP browsing either

» https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27896541

Oh and is the source code for Pocket's server infrastructure available publicly as was promised when pocket was integrated into Firefox?

Don't get me wrong. I love Firefox. I just think we have a lot of room for improvement.

I've been using Firefox for more than 15 years, so I'm not a hater or anything like that.

Maybe it's just a MacOS thing, but parts of Firefox are a mess and it has downsides compared to Chromium or Safari.

- Javascript-heavy sites are often slower on Firefox for me.

- On the security side of things (sandboxing, etc), Firefox often lags behind Chromium.

- There's a site or two that don't work well. Sometimes it's the site's fault, sometimes it's Firefox that is lagging behind on something.

- It would use way more power than Chrome until last year. It has improved and I think they're more or less the same now, but both are still worse than Safari.

- Profile management is there, but nothing compared to Chromium. And no, containers are not the same thing (although they are nice).

- The UI is all over the place. You have windows that still look like Firefox 3... and they've been through 2 or 3 major UI redesigns. The margins on the bookmarks bar doesn't even fit the new design. There are amateur projects out there that do a better job at this.

- Talking of bookmarks, why the heck the cmd/ctrl+click behaviour is different on bookmark links and links on web pages?

- It doesn't handle different languages well. No in-page translation, no automatic language detection for text correction, etc.

Firefox works. If Chromium disappeared tomorrow, it would be good enough for many... but is it the best browser? For uBlock Origin? Sure! But is it the best browser overall? Nope. At least not on Macs.

If Mozilla wants people to use Firefox, they need to create a better product because the "help the open web!", "google bad!", etc, only works with people that use HN.

Firefox burned me too bad to ever want to use it again, they too have deprecated extension frameworks (of which I maintained a couple and were subsequently broken). The Australis release was my last straw, it was so bad and ugly and took away most of the ui customizations. That release stated they didn’t care what there users felt, they’d change things so they could make money not preserve the web.

> Firefox is better in every way

I stopped using Firefox largely because I got tired of having to pause when commenting to deal with its spell checker. Firefox has worse spell checking by far than any other major browser. It's also worse that LibreOffice which is odd because it uses the same open source spell checker as LibreOffice (and as Chrome and MacOS). All the words mentioned below were handled correctly in the other browsers (and LibreOffice, Microsoft Office, and Apple TextEdit).

Here are words I submitted to their spell checker error Bugzilla bug over a year ago that are still not fixed: manticore survivorship ferrite massless rotator dominator untraceably synchronizer.

Here are words I reported about 11 months ago that are still not fixed: another's backlight coaxially hatchling impaction intercellular irrevocability licensor measurer meerkats mischaracterization misclassification misclassified partygoers passthrough plough retransmission seatbelt sensationalistic trichotomy underspecified untyped.

Here are words that I reported that are now fixed, but took a year or more to be fixed: all-nighter auditable automata blacksmithing bubonic cantina commenter conferenced epicycle ethicist fineable initializer lifecycle micropayments mosquitos pre-programmed preprogrammed prosecutable responder solvability spectrogram splitter subparagraphs subtractive surveil tradable transactional tunable verifiability verifier ballistically chewable counterintuitive exonerations mistyped phosphine programmability recertification shapeshifting tradeoffs webmail.

Chrome does have a spelling annoyance. It frequently flags "of". It seems to be flagging it for grammar, not spelling, since rewording the sentence after the "of" can make it go away.

This is a bit annoying, but an order of magnitude or more less annoying than Firefox's false flagging because I can always immediately recognize that I have in fact spelled "of" correctly. With Firefox's false flagging of words like "manticore" or "survivorship" or "ferrite" I'd have to check a dictionary or the web.

Firefox show ads for Firefox all the time. The “WE CARE ABOUT YOUR PRIVACY” tab that opens every second time, is the most “big browser” warning to me. Anyone who says so much that they care (while asking me to create an account to upload my browser history, which is the best antipattern in our surveillance states) can’t possibly be honest.

Plus they fire CEOs who are against at-will abortion, so they’re literally against my religion. And they’re not selecting on technical ability but on political opinions.

Firefox is better in every way for you.

I personally find the Firefox UI very annoying and slow. Every time I try it, I end up back at Chromium within a week.

That said, I'll take an annoying UI over broken ad-blocking...

FF gpu acceleration doesn't work with nvidia and xorg.

> Firefox is better in every way

That has been my experience as well

Pretty much the only reason for me is security. I use Chrome when I need to access email, banking or other sensitive site, and I don't trust Firefox sandboxing or other security features nearly as much as Google.

I used Firefox for months. It is noticeably slower than Chrome on macOS