Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox
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Eg I type in "Ed"? It shows the URL to my "editions in solr" GitHub issues I've been working on recently. I vaguely recall an article I read months ago on CSS grid? I type "grid guide" and bam it's the first suggestion. The spreadsheet I made about user languages? "sheets lang". That vague API I can never remember the parameters to? Just type "/query.json?" And I get all my previous requests as examples!
I find Chrome's address bar has been way less reliable and much more frequently just gives me Google autocomplete suggestions -- even when I know that I visited a URL recently that should match!
And then there's the bookmarks mess, lack of tree-style tabs, and crippled ad-blocker API.
As an information management tool, Firefox is light-years ahead of Chrome.
If they picked one and stuck to it, I'd get used to it either way and be a happy camper. But the inconsistency drives me up a wall. I don't know how this compares to Chrome, I haven't used that shit in years.
if you want example.com/xyz, type example xyz or example x or just xyz.
I just tried it. I have example.com in my history, and typed "exam". Example.com is the second thing firefox suggests. Before it, is a duckduckgo image search result page for the query "botanist", with an image titled "Young Botanist Examines The Plants In A Greenhouse Stock Photo". Firefox is picking up the "exam" in "Examines" and puts that result before example.com.
I don't really care which is first, I just want one or the other to be consistently first.
Disable: Show search suggestions in address bar results
That should be it.
Below, go to Change settings for other address bar suggestions it will navigate to: Address Bar / When using the address bar, suggest Disable or enable as you see fit. I think the Search engines under the "Address Bar" is about the custom search engines one can define (i have a custom search for youtube, for example: y <search term>).
A better guide here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-autocomplet...
When searching your history from the address bar, firefox sometimes puts entries matched by domain name first, and sometimes puts entries matched by page contents first.
That’s actually called the “Awesome Bar”, which was first introduced in Firefox 3 (which was 14 years ago). [1] It has been improved over time.
There was a way to configure the relative weight of boomarks/history but I can't find it anymore.
Also worthy of notice, if you start with * in the search bar you only get bookmarks results and with ^ you get history results. Finally % is for tabs (on synced devices too) !
i just learned about the ^ % * prefixes a few months ago, and now use them all the time.
Ever since version 2 or so, the Firefox autocompletion has made me never use bookmarks. It's simply that good.
As others have said, it requires some tweaking nowadays. If anyone at mozilla is reading... why?! I mean, I get it, newbies... but... why?!
Anyhow, bookmarks and keeping them, clicking through endless expanding nested menus of them, just the very concept... very much something for the hostages of a corporation that wants every contact with the web to start (and end) with a visit to google.com
I think Chrome does this too, no? Maybe Firefox does it better?
Otherwise my history, and thus autocomplete suggestions, is full of URls from single-page applications (webmail etc) that differ only in the 1000-character-long hashes in the URL.
Whatever logic Chromium does to filter out this chaff from autocomplete works much better for me.
Eg I’ll have a work group with GitHub, Okta, etc in it so I only need to log in once a day. But random websites cannot track me between sites.
Couple that with DNS blocking of trackers and ads, and the web is actually a lot more pleasant to use.
Unfortunately you cannot fix everything locally though.
EDIT: Just for completeness sake, here is the command to open Firefox with profile manager and new instances:
firefox --new-instance --ProfileManager %u
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profile-switc...
You'll need to install a connector for it to work. (The add-on gives instructions during the onboarding process.) Both the add-on and the connector are free and open source (GPLv3).
I use profiles and containers together on Firefox. Each profile has its own set of add-ons, browser settings, and containers. Containers in the same profile share the same add-ons and browser settings. For example, you could have separate personal and work profiles, with containers for different online accounts in each profile.
On Firefox, you have the option of using only profiles, only containers, both profiles and containers, or none of the above.
Anything for that?
If you're trying to create a shortcut to Firefox that launches a profile other than the one you've selected as the default, the instructions for Linux and Windows are here:
https://kb.mozillazine.org/Shortcut_to_a_specific_profile
This is not necessary to use the profile feature, but some people prefer to launch profiles from shortcuts instead of a menu.
The two final things that would get me off Chrome entirely:
* When I'm using my external USB microphone in a web-based conference system (mostly Cleanfeed but I've also seen it with Streamyard and Jitsi) my audio gets extremely robotic after a few minutes and it somehow impacts my entire system - I have to unplug the microphone to fix it.
* Dropbox, for some reason, hangs at 1 second left when uploading larger files (appx 60MB or so)
Also Firefox hasn't been doing itself any favors by alienating both the average Joe consumers and the professional devs over the years.
Maybe the other commenter is on to something regarding extensions. The only extensions I have are ones to simplify management of containers, plus my password manager.
I wasn't super paying attention at the time, but wasn't that basically how Firefox initially established itself at the expense of Internet Explorer?
Whole process takes a couple years or so.
If everyone thinks negatively, then no change will happen. Keeping reality in perspective is important, but improving things is really important too.
https://developer.chrome.com/blog/mv2-transition/
Firefox maker, Mozilla, is in the uneasy position of being financially dependent on its search deal with Google, which accounts for the majority of the organization's revenue.
I wonder how Google will be able to twist its arms (and trust me, they will use all their power and abuse their position to attempt it) to either implement V3 or find some other way to kill ad blockers / allow ads on Firefox.
All I can find is:
We have not yet set a deprecation date for Manifest v2 but expect it to be supported for at least one year after Manifest v3 becomes stable in the release channel.
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2021/05/27/manifest-v3-updat...
So they will eventually remove it sooner than later.
...This is a plea for help, by the way, in case it wasn't obvious :) I'm sure there must be a json file or something, somewhere, I can just edit.
You can click on "Manage Containers", choose a container and then remove the site with "Manage Site List".
Also, the UI is... not great. For example you cannot add new urls here. Some websites forward you to some other external url through another domain for example. there is no way to add these custom domains. So annoying. There yet another extension to solve that problem, but... it doesn't support Firefox 'sync'.
Can this not (at least partly) solved by copying over the correct files in combination with settings sync?
I use Proton VPN because it is bundled with ProtonMail. I very much like preventing my national Internet service provider from selling my browsing history.
The actual use of VPN technology is to create virtual networks that are private (hence the name). It's a system level technology. There are several types of network topologies you can set up, when I was learning about this I found this article which is quite nice: https://www.procustodibus.com/blog/2020/10/wireguard-topolog.... You can proxy traffic through a VPN, but the only scenario I can think of in which it makes sense is if you are an OSINT researcher and you need a safe system on which to conduct your research.
If you need to proxy traffic and "hide" your IP, just use a flipping proxy. It's an application level technology (e.g. for torrenting, every torrent client under the sun supports a SOCKS5 proxy). If you don't have the patience to set up a VPS yourself, you can even use something like Outline (https://getoutline.org) which automates that (and it has a mobile client app as well).
If you need privacy (and to actually hide your IP), then use Tor.
I think the reason why the method you mention isn't commonly used is that it is complicated to understand/set up and hard to verify.
I've seen more advanced users encapsulate everything in a VM so that non-VPN traffic can be blocked globally by the OS.
Ironically (I hope?), Mullvad is by far the one I see pushed the most.
NordVPN had the clients audited by VerSprite last year, and their No-log policy audited by PwC in 2018 and 2020. And a bug bounty program on HackerOne. [1]
ExpressVPN - Windows Client was just audited by F-Secure in March, and server side audits by Cure54, and PwC in 2021 and 2019 respectively. And a bug bounty program on Bug Crowd. [2]
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For comparison
Mullvad has been audited (Client security and Infrastructure (for privacy)) by Cure53 through 2020, and first was in 2018. Has no bug bounty, but they do still have a vulnerability disclosure program. [3]
ProtonVPN, audits of the no-log policy in April, and clients in 2020. And they run their own bug bounty program.[4]
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I actually find it kinda interesting that while they've all had audits regarding privacy on the server side, only ExpressVPN has had a security audit of server side components. (Granted I've not look that deeply at this)
[1] Annoying, you can only download the audit reports if you Login then click Reports in the menu
[2] https://www.expressvpn.com/blog/?s=audit
I frequently have DNS issues with Mullvad, and also speeds are lower. Proton is also more expensive though...
Also, there's a long outstanding issue (on their Github [1] ) which they have confirmed) that the Mullvad app causes iCloud services to stop syncing (bookmarks, Files, etc.). That's a showstopper if you use Apple devices...
Given all the ways there are to fingerprint browsers these days, this belief is likely to be overly optimistic.
My employer's org deploys a Microsoft SSO AddOn which re-uses the OS-level identity to auto-login to Microsoft/Office365/Azure and causes me quite some headaches when dealing with my customers' logins, which are usually in separate containers.
I switched to FF profiles for those use-cases for now, but it's far from the container experience in terms of usability and integration.
DNS encrypted
"Total Cookie Protection"
uBlock Origin
multi-account containers
built-in screen capture
*various other extensions, such as Copy All Tab URLs
Bravo Mozilla!
I still don't like the fact that it has sponsored links then - that is what rubs me the wrong way.
Multi-account containers are really the only killer feature in Firefox for me, they're super convenient for my work, but that's about the only thing it has left going for it.
The Librewolf project appears to be the best of all! I will try it.
edit: Statement below is incorrect, Brave is a Chromium fork.
I do note that Brave, Tor, and Librewolf are forks of Firefox. This in my opinion is an additional reason to support Firefox. Everyone else appears to be plundering naive users' browser telemetry.
On Android, look at Mull until Libre Wolf is available there.
On iOS, lol, you get Safari or skinned Safari due to Apple's app store rules.
And, even worse, they don't even mention this on their website.
Ah, that explains the telemetry and experiemnts that are enabled by default without explicit user consent.
Firefox is the only browser that can do this. Also Google's UI decisions are just unilateral and awful. At least with Firefox we can still tweak some of it.
They are a killer idea but their implementation is disappointing.
In no particular order ...
- You can't clear history for a particular container space [1]
- Containers are only tabs - so you can't, for instance, create a window and have all future tabs created in that window inherit that container
- No "private" (or "burner") container that saves nothing outside of each individual tab
No, I am not interested in solving these basic, first-order use-cases with some rando extension from joey75 @ gitlabusercontent.downloads.tv.
> Containers are only tabs - so you can't, for instance, create a window and have all future tabs created in that window inherit that container
True, but if that's something you want, you can do that without the multi-account container tabs. Just create a new profile that's separate from the default one. The drawback to that is you have to reinstall any extensions you use because they won't be shared.
I definitely would not want to default to disabling it. It's my browser, and letting it remember where I've been enables it to be much more useful to me.
I suspect it would be fairly straightforward to make an extension that set a per-window default container, but I agree that it should be built in functionality. (Whether that default should override site-specific container rules, I'm not sure... I kind of want both options, but I guess that's where it starts getting complex.)
I'm annoyed by the lack of integration between container and history. I never really want to clear history for a non-private window, but I do want to be able to restrict what I see by container when it makes sense and not restrict when it doesn't. My main grievance: searching for open tabs (either by prefixing the location bar entry with "% " or by choosing the Open Tabs option from the dropdown that appears when you start entering something) should match across all tabs, at least in the context of a freshly-opened new tab.
I skip Chrome and Edge for privacy reasons, Brave have a crappy and buggy sync feature that I don't know what OSes it supports, but not my combination. Can't send tabs with them. Vivaldi doesn't have an iOS port. Impossible to do with Chromium.
Firefox can send tabs to all my machines, and I use that feature multiple times daily, such as finding a cool article while I'm sitting on the couch and sending it to my desktop so I can read it later. Mr. Eich, if you're around here, please please fix syncing tabs in your browser, it's the only thing stopping me from switching honestly.
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1: I quite like Firefox, but it's in a dying spiral, and I'm starting to see broken sites. The Web is such a complicated nightmare "protesting" won't change anything, and forking neither, because it's too bloody complex. Chromium has won. Our only hope is Mozilla takes their head out of their arse and start working on their browser instead of faffing about and making small, meaningless changes every release, but I don't see that happening any time soon.
This was actually the killer feature for me on chrome about 5 years ago and then Google did what Google did, and killed it.
The sync-server is trivial to run via docker, but (last time i checked) running the other essential part yourself is (intentionally?) not easy at all.
https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncstorage-rs
It includes a Docker Compose setup.
Standard directory servers aren't specifically built for end-to-end encryption, while data in Firefox Sync is end-to-end encrypted by default. Firefox Sync must also scale to support the millions of Firefox users who use Mozilla's instance.
So the above (synstorage-rs_in_container) is now the only required software needed, and now includes the identity-server portion?
I would really like to use the "beam-a-tab-to-some-other-firefox", been a FF user since before it got that name. But i wanted to self-host all parts, and then found some info, that suggested, that 2 parts are needed: the SyncServer, the above open-source thing, and the Identity-server, on which i did not find much info at the time.
Do you have a link to recent-ish write-up of the current situation, that you can validate to be correct-ish?
Thanks again
Also, w.r.t Directory-Servers/Security: Enterprise printers have been able to authenticate Users with SSL/TLS-secured connection for more than a decade. So why not a "syncserver for URLs of open tabs per User"?
https://blog.mozilla.org/services/2020/09/15/the-future-of-s...
But, as you mentioned, the current documentation is here:
https://mozilla-services.readthedocs.io/en/latest/howtos/run...
You might also find the unofficial Arch User Repository package, comments, and PKGBUILD file helpful:
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/firefox-syncstorage-git
I hope it works out for you!
https://mozilla.github.io/ecosystem-platform/tutorials/devel...
There's a lot of components directly hooked into Google Cloud that also make it difficult in terms of configuration. At some point I think creating an actual user's guide for this would be good for the community interested in self-hosting this on their own.
What are some examples of this? I keep seeing this complaint and I keep asking for examples but I always get "just various sites"-like answers. FF is my primary browser and I am not seeing it. I am genuinely curious as to whether it is starting to fall behind but I can recall maybe two or three instances the past couple of years where I opened a site in Brave to see if it worked there.
However I do not see this stuff about JS init to take that long on amazon. It might be a special thing in your case. Did you try things like a new profile, to test, whether it still happens?
The banal evil of neglect vs. intentional maliciousness.
MS also used to optimize DOS in ways that clearly hurt their competitors. We've seen Intel aggressively optimize their compiler to slow down AMD... I am sure people have been "optimizing" in such ways for as long as there have been people.
Are you saying that there are people at Google whose job description is to tweak Google web products to perform worse on Firefox, just so Chrome appears better in comparison?
Name a feature that Firefox doesn't have that prevents people from using the web. I can't. But I can name several that I've seen work more correctly on Chrome because they have the resources to make it work in the context of very complicated and legacy-filled rendering engines (flexbox comes to mind) where Mozilla appears to not (ask me about my favorite Firefox-only flex performance issues... To their credit, they have all been fixed, but FF spent a lot of time behind the curve).
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/google-search...
Shot in the dark: sounds like a timeout in TCP, DNS, or something like that.
Oh, and I did turn off uBlock Origin, for that matter.
Video heavy sites, especially YouTube. It loads extremely slowly compared to Chrome. And has much more video stuttering. Probably Google is sabotaging YouTube in Firefox.
Complex interactive sites, like crypto exchanges. They are slow and with many rendering artefacts in Firefox. Probably because they don't even bother testing in Firefox.
Hmmm... I've never had this problem and I use YouTube heavily. You sure your video acceleration and codecs and all that are set up right?
I recently had similar issues, and it turned out that Firefox’s cache was constantly nearly-full. Clearing the cache returned YouTube to normal.
Right-click -> Open With mpv
It's a pain in the ass, but the performance gap is immense. On a desktop I wouldn't bother, but on my laptop this has a real impact on battery life.
web.skype.com
Jitsi Meet (https://meet.jit.si/) -- apparently no support for insertable streams
stuff.co.nz from outside NZI tried stuff.co.nz from the UK and it looked like this: https://imgur.com/a/tibMwHE
Articles loaded fine; I'm not sure what is broken about it.
This morning, I couldn't buy a key off cdkeys.com - tried two totally different methods, email addresses, credit cards. Didn't try a second browser yet but I'm not sure I am that persistent...
A news site, I think the New Yorker, would only show the first two paragraphs of an article but in other browsers, would show the full article.
I don't log which sites break - if it's important I tend to cave and open Edge for that site, do my business, and then go back to Firefox for everything else. If it's less important, I'll opt to just not to business with them. But I'm a grain of sand so it doesn't make much difference.
Most sites just have really obnoxious CAPTCHA, often requiring more than one "pick the things" but I don't know if my experience is specific to Firefox.
I checked for webcompat issues matching this description and couldn't find anyone reporting that adding items to the cart didn't work.
I attempted to reproduce the issue myself, but HomeDepot block visitors from my location.
> This morning, I couldn't buy a key off cdkeys.com - tried two totally different methods, email addresses, credit cards. Didn't try a second browser yet but I'm not sure I am that persistent...
Can't reproduce, I was able to buy a CD Key ("Garfield Kart - Furious Racing PC") at 28 May 2022, 16:51:52 BST using Firefox 100.0.2 and a debit card.
> A news site, I think the New Yorker, would only show the first two paragraphs of an article but in other browsers, would show the full article.
Can't reproduce. Visiting https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-baby-formul... in Firefox shows me the exact same content as when I use Chromium.
I'm not saying you've not experienced these issues, but they're definitely not widespread and your post doesn't give enough information to go on to diagnose if there's an issue with Firefox or not.
The best thing you can do is report issues to the webcompat project as and when you come across compatibility issues. It takes about 20 seconds, less time than you probably spent writing this comment.
I can say I recently found I couldn't make a new account at 'wise.com' in firefox (had to switch to chrome), and an internal university website doesn't work in Firefox -- but of course, I can't share that page publicly, so there's not a lot useful I can do with that.
> but no page I could submit
Click the large "Report bug" button and you'll get to https://webcompat.com/issues/new
It really sounds like you are. I hate these "Well did you report it? I can't reproduce it. Did you rebuild in debug mode and check the logs? Did you learn C++ and fix it?" responses.
It's open source victim blaming.
Which is obviously why I explicitly said I wasn't!
> I hate these "Well did you report it? I can't reproduce it."
How do you expect progress to be made if we can't precisely discuss browser issues & how to reproduce them in a way that enables them to be investigated and fixed?
For all we know at the minute, the OP has an extension installed that's causing all this.
> "Did you rebuild in debug mode and check the logs? Did you learn C++ and fix it?"
Because that's totally what I asked :eyeroll:
Just to be sure I went back again today. Still could not purchase Horizon Zero Dawn. The error in the console was "No recaptcha clients exist."
I then went to Edge, and I able able to successfully make the purchase.
I'm a Firefox user. I'm a fan. But to pretend that there aren't sites that test in Chromium and call it a day isn't reality.
I mean, I have the game code right in front of me, ready to redeem.
> Just to be sure I went back again today. Still could not purchase Horizon Zero Dawn. The error in the console was "No recaptcha clients exist."
Still can't reproduce with this item - have you tried it in a fresh profile?
Sorry if this is a silly question, but is this maybe just the paywall? I'm not sure if you've been reading more articles on Firefox and then only opened on Chrome or something after this started happening, but it sounds like that could be what's going on.
Try opening the site in incognito mode. It usually fixed these random issues.
> Most sites just have really obnoxious CAPTCHA, often requiring more than one "pick the things" but I don't know if my experience is specific to Firefox.
Installing the "Privacy Pass" extension can significantly reduce captcha challenges when visiting sites that use cloudflare.
The one major category of real problems I run into are related to captchas.
Disabling JS kept the content from vanishing.
Of course, this is almost certainly bad coding on the website's side, and not the fault of Firefox. But it seems like it's but getting the QA attention it needs from the site owners.
finding a cool article while I'm sitting
on the couch and sending it to my desktop so
I can read it later
I solve this by having a list of links on the web that I can access from everywhere.
I'm more concerned with Firefox's lack of per-tab screenshare in meet/jitsi/etc.
It takes 20x as much time and work to copy a link, context switch to another app, paste, then, when you're on the desktop, _remember_ to check that shared document, and open the link, than to just press option menu, send tab, choose linux desktop and bam!, it's there as soon as you open your browser the next day.
I also send pages in the opposite direction.
I even have some vague recollection of Mozilla mentioning just this. Like 99% when something is broken it not because the browser but because some addon the user installed.
So test a site that you dont think works with the "troubleshoot mode" in Firefox that inactivate addons etc to see if it works then. And if it works, then figure out which addon it is that makes the mess and to blame.
I used to use Decentraleyes but I ended up uninstalling that completely because it broke so many sites.
Have you tried KDEconnect? I use it to share/send links from Android to Linux and vice versa with the KDEconnect browser extension.
Tab syncing is a small meaningless change to me, but not to you. Some of these things you find small and meaningless could be important to some other people (for example, multilingual spell-checking is very important to some people, X11 isolation is very important to some others).
What do you actually expect from Mozilla by "taking their head out of their arse" ?
Investing in their browser. Investing in an alternative ecosystem.
Brave have added in-browser Torrent, TOR, IPFS support. That's what I would expect from Mozilla, trying to differentiate itself. Now we've lost the compact UI, got coloured themes for one release. What's cooking that's really exciting? What's the plan to retake some of the lost market share? I can't see any thirst to improve over there.
Useless bloat. Dedicated torrent clients are made better and work better.
> TOR
Interesting, but the popular advice is to only use the Tor Browser. I don't know if that's good advice or not, but it certainly dampens my enthusiasm for Brave supporting Tor.
> IPFS support.
When I actually find a real use for IPFS, then I'll be able to form an opinion on it. Until then, it's just an obscure novelty to me. What can I actually do with it? Torrents and traditional websites together work for downloading/hosting/sharing anything I can think of.
> Our only hope is Mozilla takes their head out of their arse and start working on their browser
Are you reporting these to the webcompat project? Mozilla is absolutely funding QA testers and engineers to check what's broken and triage issues that affect specific browsers and not others.
They've handled 103k issues: https://github.com/webcompat/web-bugs/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is...
A great number of the issues that Mozilla contractors and employees investigate that are reported via the webcompat project actually turn out to be the site owner's fault. They're not using standardised web technologies, not testing their work in multiple browsers. Mozilla employees and contractors will try to perform outreach to these site owners, but they're often not interested.
I still use it, though.
https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/1523
It's exactly this type of behaviour that Firefox doesn't seem concerned with addressing.
I honestly don’t get the lean toward Chrome — or Safari for that matter. I don’t detect such a big jump in performance that I’d ever consider sacrificing privacy to Google’s or Apple’s end. Brave is a nice browser but in the end I don’t see how I’m better off with it. Maybe I’m too much of a layman and don’t understand benchmarks or just don’t pay attention to latency, but purely from a daily driver perspective, I’ve never been happier with Firefox.
Also, you only get to see top level comments. (Maybe that's a feature for some people.)
People act as if the algorthim is some sort of evil entity, but my viewing habbits follow recommended videos and content aware search. I find sticking to subscriptions and trending videos to be very trapping.
No more watching one chess video and being bombarded with chess content for a month, or watching one harmless satirical video about a politician and being bombarded with videos from the local right-populist party propaganda channel (yes, this has happened to me exactly as described).
I have experience the "bombardment" of a suggestion, but I think my subscriptions are vaired enough that a click off that topic straightens it all out.
Off topic, but I have a love/hate relationship YouTube because of privacy issues, especially my political and spiritual views. Same thing with TikTok, but at least that material is mostly silly so if advertisers can buy information on which silly stuff I watch, that seems slightly less harmful than YouTube.
Firefox's multi account containers are very useful - when I started using them a few years ago I very quickly noticed that my Web searches stopped showing up in Amazon or as FB ads, and vice versa.
And just generally not using a browser that is aligned with the interests of a global advertising company seems like a good thing.
The UI isn’t great, nor is resource usage. These days I don’t bother installing an alternative browser and just use Safari.
Pretty sure they covered that in the last reason of TFA
It's still almost exclusively funded by Google though.
I did not change because of privacy concerns or whatever, I just wanted to try something else, and FF has been quite alright.
When I am away from a power outlet, Edge is what I use to work in GCP, AWS and Jupyter Notebook (via SSH or local).
I don't use Edge otherwise.
Case in point: Chrome started to misbehave on my fathers rather old Macbook (missing root certs, refuses to render google drive, etc...)
When I open Google drive, after being a completely cryptic (to a non-tech person) set of error messages, I realized I needed to upgrade Chrome.
I tried to upgrade Chrome and was told I'm on an unsupported version of OSX.
I tried to upgrade OSX and was told, no such thing exists on this older hardware.
Lo and behold, firefox has none of these issues.
Ditch Google as soon as you can, and Apple as well.
MacOS 10.11 supports every 2008 and newer Apple computer. There are also patches to get newer versions of MacOS on old hardware. I'm using one patch to get 10.13 running on a 2008 MacBook Pro and it runs great.
And then this very site has an automatic playing video in the article lmao
Also a lot of these claims are so-so imo.
"Lighter on system resources"
"Speedier website browsing"
I usually have 60-70 tabs open across 5-6 windows. Firefox absolutely shits itself all the time but Chromium doesn't.
Anyways I use ungoogled-chromium https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
Last time I checked I had a few thousand tabs open with Firefox and it doesn't do anything except use memory.
Once I get past 40 or so I purge old tabs because it makes it hard to find others I'm actively using. Besides, opening a tab again isn't a huge burden.
It's not my preference as I like having a clean browser window; too many tabs is distracting and it's harder for me to contextualize what work I'm focusing on (windows + tabs for tasks is my preference), but I can see how it works for some.
When I need something else that I visited, I use the history shortcut, search for the word (usually its in the title) and I got the info I need. Same with bookmarks which I usually tag.
So many tabs just seems redundant I feel.
Yes https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/search-open-tabs-firefo...
This search also returns results for tabs open in Firefox on other devices.
Opening the tab again isn't hard if you can remember what that tab was to begin with.
Rather, tabs are even more useful than that: things I was actually doing adjacent to the thing I was doing right next to it. There's a spatial element to it.
Nothing compares to tabs. Especially not browser history which is one long list of urls I once visited, who cares. Tabs are a list of urls I settled on.
That's an essential for me.
Usually I find everything I needed by time, data, keyword, tag, or bookmark in a few seconds at most by opening history or bookmark by keyboard shortcut.
I use Firefox on desktop and mobile, and I'd tend to agree with you.
Sometimes I need to open up Chrome to test something and all of the pages load noticeably faster (things like FB messenger, Google search, etc.)
It's a tradeoff I guess because the extensions on Firefox mobile are a killer feature.
Reminiscent of this classic:
- "Among all the sites I visited, news sites, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, had the most tracking resources."
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/23/opinion/data-...
Note that browsers permit playing a video upon any "user interaction", i.e. a key press or a click.
My 'Tab counter' add-on tells me:
Tabs in this window: 3221
Tabs in all windows: 3301 (I think this is because of a bug)
Number of windows: 6There is only one reason why I'm using Chrome: at work we use Google Workshit for Business or whatever it is called now and every Google service has issues anywhere besides Chrome and it is getting worse as the time goes by. Meet is terribly unreliable and since some months simply won't open the calls because of some unknown error, Docs and Sheets cannot be edited, Drive is slow as fuck and sometimes doesn't finish loading the page, Gmail has low res icons and is significantly slower, etc...
Don't be evil... go fuck yourself!
Disclosure: Happy Firefox user since v1. Sometimes I was jealous of Chrome's speed, sometimes I was weary of Firefox's memory leaks, but never enough to leave the flexibility and customizability the Firefox provided.
EDIT: ... and now Firefox is fast enough, and isn't a memory hog anymore, so I continue to be a very happy Firefox user.
Edit: Saw your edit. Glad the firefox memory problem was resolved.
Chrome was based on Safari and was far far faster than anything else available on Windows at the time. Not only that but they moved fast and kept improving.
Firefox is great now but it took a long time to catch up.
Firefox had some kind of glow up years ago, with Quantum, but that didn't hold for long.
A few years ago I switched to Brave and am pretty happy with it.
It has a Chromium base, but without Google's shenanigans. The integrated adblocker even makes it feel a bit more responsive.
Also, it comes with IPFS, Onion, and crypto wallet out of the box. Which isn't for everyone, but in my case it was a pretty nice cherry on top.
Otherwise Firefox+ multi-account containers + proxy per container is a really nice feature
I work in web development, and all our products are built with 100% compatibility with Firefox and it being the priority browser. The rest are secondary including Chromium based ones.
If it works on FF, it works elsewhere (except that steaming pile of crap that Safari is)
Another thing missing in the Android version is the Print function. Such a basic feature!
I've been using it on the desktop too and there it works ok, no major issues - just the print dialog was much poorer then Chrome's and I had to print from Chrome.
Firefox has a many people rooting for it but not enough people contributing.
Brave strangely decided to go with Chromium rather than Firefox as a base even though Brendan knew Firefox much better. And many other browsers have decided the same Vivaldi, Edge, etc. At this stage I'm afraid Firefox has too many unpolished edges, especially on mobile to match the competition.
But I primarily use Bromite and Brave. I have disabled Chrome altogether. Bromite has some rough edges, but Brave is ready to be used as a primary browser. DDG android is nice, too.
> had to switch back to Chrome
Give Brave a try?
Yes, I can use still FF with different profiles, but I'm simply a bit too lazy for that...
Supposedly Edge has a vertical tabs option. Chrome doesn't seem to even have a plug in for it.
However I'm glad I can have them (hiding the tab-bar also to avoid clutter) since with them I can have many tabs open, seeing a sufficient amount of text to identify any and sparing precious vertical space on my modern normal 19:9 monitor...
I do not use Windows, thankfully, so I do not know Edge, I've looked for something similar for Chromium but finding nothing like you... Honestly I see modern WebVM improperly named browsers for legacy reasons as a necessary evil since unfortunately the modern world is web2.0-centric and I have not much choice for that, but I have not much expectations from both nor not much interests beside the minimum protection and ergonomic of my daily digital life...
I love this so much. Perfect vim key binds. I also removed menu, address and tab bars, which subjectively occupy 25% of vertical space.
And the infamous ublock, but that's also available on Chrome(ium).
[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimium-ff/
It will no longer be able to render modern pages as the web continues to grow increasingly complex.
Hopefully someday there will be a major backed FOSS project that forks web kit and can compete. But there are far too many more important problems out there for something as complex as a modern browser.
guix shell ungoogled-chromium -- chromium
(a double minus there)
That runs an instance of ungoogled Chromium without me having to install it in the system packages or so. After the first time the build should be cached until you update your Guix packages and start up quite quickly.
Of course I'd like to find a Google Workspace replacement but I can't seem to find any so, I am married to Google.
It is quite puzzling because Firefox uses the same open source spell checker that Chrome uses and that is also used by LibreOffice and is the OS provided spell checker on Mac.
Here are some examples of words that it botched that nearly everything else (Chrome, Edge, Safari, LibreOffice, anything on Apple that uses the OS provided spell check) got right:
1. 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
2. ballistically chewable counterintuitive exonerations mistyped "per se" phosphine programmability recertification shapeshifting tradeoffs webmail
3. manticore survivorship misclassified ferrite massless rotator dominator untraceably synchronizer
4. "ad hominem" algorithmically another's backlight ballistically coaxially hatchling impaction implementer inductor intercellular irrevocability licensor measurer meerkats mischaracterization misclassification misclassified partygoers passthrough plough retransmission seatbelt sensationalistic trichotomy underspecified untyped
All of those were reported to their bug tracker item for spell check errors. They do eventually fix those, but the lag was in the one to two year range. As of now they have fixed all of #1 except for initializer, all of #2, none of #3, and none of #4 except for algorithmically, ballistically, implementer, and inductor.
There is a recent development that might get me to switch to Chrome after this long. Chrome-based browsers will give apps access to the local filesystem. The Firefox team has said you can't do that safely because users don't understand the concept of a file. Using Chrome, I can for instance go to the Logseq website, click the button to give access to that directory, and start writing. No signing in, no need to store my data in the cloud. It's so nice to be able to avoid the cloud - but only using Chrome.
The browser ecosystem under Google's benevolent dictatorship is languishing.
And when they released v100, the Ubuntu snap just updated itself automatically and killed a firefox process that I was actively using. (Not sure exactly whose fault that was, but I think we can give Mozilla some of it.) After restarting, I was greeted with that bullshit-purple-neon-themed "100 Thank You's" modal dialog, with no useful information, that had to be acknowledged before continuing.
That said... I now use Chrome for all video calls. Firefox just isn't battery efficient for those. Blame Google, blame Zoom, blame whoever. On EVERY service I've tested (check my post history, complained about this to nauseam)... I can call one browser from the other, and no matter what Firefox on Mac uses at minimum 50% more power according to Apple's power use tool.
Also, any time I take or receive a streaming call on Firefox, my MBP gets very hot. Much hotter than Chrome. Wish someone at Mozilla would take battery usage / CPU usage on Mac more seriously. It's been a problem for years.
I was hoping Camo would eventually add in virtual backgrounds to their app but it hasn’t happened yet. Would love to ditch Edge/Chromium.
Edge makes lots of calls to Bing for advertising purposes.
For daily non-performance relevant use, I still like the Container feature a lot though, doesn't look like Chrome will get it anytime soon.
I'd like to map it to Cmd+D instead of Cmd+L since it's (Alt+D) been in my muscle memory since forever. It's the main reason that keeps me from switching. With Chrome I simply assign it to the menu entry File -> Open Location ... but Firefox doesn't have a menu entry for focusing the URL bar (or at least didn't have last time I checked[0]).
[0] Checked again, v100 still doesn't have a menu entry
That said, I might start using Chromium because I want to make some improvements to the browser (to use it as a tool) that would need me to compile the browser myself.
As far as I know, Firefox is no longer just C/C++ but it's migrating, at least partially, to Rust, so it's a moving target.
(TBH, I still use Chrome for developing, as I find the dev tools on Chrome easier to use than on FF, and much better looking. But I could also let go of that if needed be.)
Routinely I'll be reading something on my laptop in the evening and want to reference it from my Dev VM the next day. With Sync I can just pull up the list of open tabs on my laptop that's asleep and retrieve the URL.
Having users helps me silo things abd stay organized. I can also have multiple users' browsers open at the same time.
How can I replicate this with FF?
If you believe in a privacy respecting, open web where users own their own devices then you have choices other then Firefox - but nobody should be using Chrome.
Nowadays I aggressively save to bookmarks. Still a lot of tabs open, though.
I keep Chromium around for web development, but it has a lot of issues with Wayland (not to be confused with XWayland) currently.
When I say customizability I mean user.js.
To be clear I am hugely in favour of WebExtensions. I am glad that they were implemented and I think that they should be the recommended API. But I would love to still have the full-power backdoor for the extensions that are no loner possible. For example I maintained VimFx for about a year after they stopped officially supporting these extensions and it was fine. The biggest pain wasn't actually keeping up with the internal API changes, it was the fact that it wasn't allowed in addons.mozilla.org anymore and there is no good way to distribute self-signed or third-part signed extensions.
Well, for a start e.g. mass downloaders have become relatively useless because they can't download to outside of the OS downloads directory without resorting to weird hacks, can no longer intelligently handle already existing files, etc.
Then user scripts no longer being able to live normally on the file system (and therefore being editable outside of whatever limited UI the extension can provide, being easily searchable) are another victim of webextensions.
would we want that? in a future that we are officially a monoculture, would we prefer no firefox, or a traitor firefox?
I'm regretably looking for alternatives. Probably Safari if I manage to get adblock.
I think it's better on Linux.
(yes, it’s also possible to run your own sync service.)
https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncstorage-rs/issues/55...
https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncstorage-rs/issues/68...
It seems they are migrating the solution without having any instructions on how to self host it.
Similarly for vscode, there is vscodium.
When I restarted LibreWolf, a Tools -> Sign In option appeared, but https://accounts.firefox.com/signin?action=email&service=syn... asked for the password of a now-removed email (which is now neither a primary nor secondary email, why is it still in Firefox's servers?!) under the same account. Entering my password said that I should use my primary email again, and selecting "Use a different account", entering my email and password, and another 2FA did not sign into sync (Tools still says "Sign in", as did about:preferences#sync). Logging in a third time emailed me instead of asking for a 2FA code, but yet again did not sign into my browser.
This accounts.firefox.com bug scares me; it reminds me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30169435. At this point, I think I'm going to delete and recreate my Firefox account to remove all traces of my old email.
EDIT: I tried deleting my Firefox account, but realized it would remove my Fenix addon collections too. I tried signing into addons.mozilla.org... and again saw my removed email on the login screen.
With that, I have heard all the (very weak) reasons listed in this article and at this point, you might as well use Brave browser since everything listed here is already implemented by them.
Firefox (really) has no killer features and the chronic decrease in users shows that it is only going down as Edge has already over taken it. [1][2][3]
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.compu...
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share
[2] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...
I find browser choice heavily depends on the OS you're using.
For instance, I can't stand anything but Safari on macOS. There's nothing better than Firefox on Linux. But on Windows, Chrome is king.
But oh boy, does edge on android phone home. You'd think a phone home party was going on, as the tcpdump flies off your screen...
No thanks.
Don't let the "M$ teh hacking my dataz!" tin-foilers dissuade...
Performant, good mix of features, stable, solid compatibility, & flexible.
Problem is Electron as the backend for Edge.
I'll stick with Chromium
For some reason their focus seems directed towards everything that’s specifically not Firefox or browser related. Sort of if Microsoft forgot that they own Windows.
From my personal perspective, Firefox gets the job done but Chromium is undoubtedly the better browser. On desktop and mobile, the difference is felt even more on mobile.
Every time I found an obvious bug or got an unpolished experience on Firefox, I hated it even more.
Whatever data the author thinks they are hiding away from Google, they are (un)knowingly giving it to Mozilla. Even worse if they are using Google to search.