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Comment by iqanq | Hacker News Reader

If you've got this dated view about Firefox it might be worth giving it another try. It's come on leaps and bounds, pretty much equally on par of speed against Chrome/Edge etc.

Sent from my Firefox install

Only/One thing I hate about Firefox (under Windows) is it updates in the background with the helper service but the update isn’t fully applied until next launch. So you start Firefox, wait the requisite time for the entire browser to load, then your screen flashes and FF disappears, then it relaunches again for real.

The old experience of manually updating it yourself when you felt like it was less annoying than this evergreen implementation!

If you use multiple profiles (e.g. i have a "personal" and a "work" profile), the experience is pretty bad -- if you close all windows of one profile, it considers itself as "exited" and overwrites the program files. And then your other profile windows no longer work: any page navigation results in "We're sorry, we just need to do one small thing" and a required restart of your browser.

It's still my favorite browser though.

> "We're sorry, we just need to do one small thing"

I get that even with a single profile. It's infuriating, because it happens when I go to a new site, and that new site is often not restored after it restarts - sometimes I lose it completely.

You could use Firefox Containers for that.

Firefox is basically as good as Chrome but it also has a default stance of protecting the users instead of giving all of your data directly to Google. Certainly it isn't perfect, but you feel like a bit less of a product when you use it. To make the HN crowd happy they have (re)written a bunch of the codebase in Rust.

Tongue out of cheek, I worry less about Firefox's future than I would a browser with an equivalent market share but without a lot of developers aware of how the sausage is made backing it out of opposition to a Google monopoly. It might be a minority brower, but by virtue of who it attracts that minority is pretty important when it comes to the web.

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