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Comment by hayst4ck | Hacker News Reader

I am extremely surprised by all the negative Firefox sentiment here. I switched from Chrome as soon as manifest v3 was announced and I have been almost completely happy with it. In all the ways I'm unhappy with it, chrome is even worse.

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Whenever all the negative comments come up I mostly just assume there is a silent majority that continues to be happy with Firefox and doesn't say anything. I've been using it for years with basically 0 issues.

And I'm not using it to "stick it to Google" either. Containers and tree-style tabs are a huge productivity win.

I love treestyle tabs and being able to autohide it until I mouse over, but I can't get containers to ever work as expected. I would expect when I click a link to e.g. ebay it would open in my ebay container in a new tab, and when I google something it puts me in a google container, and when I click a reddit link it puts me into the reddit container. Instead I am often still in the ebay container. Temporary containers are even worse with this, I would think opening up a new link to a different domain would put me into a new temporary container, but I am still in tmp7 or whatever the numbers have marched up to. I have regressed to just facebook container because its simpler to deal with just one container and associated issues.

The "Containerise" extension is sadly practically required to ged containers working as you'd expect.

Thanks for this, I had been trying every setting there was in the standard container extensions to no avail. Too bad that the way containers fundamentally works hijacks your back button, this was another annoyance I was remembering.

I honestly don't know which side the silent majority/plurality is on. What makes you think they're on FF's side? Probably vis-a-vis Chrome that's true, but there are several other up-and-coming browsers out there.

Also, TST isn't a FF-only feature now (Brave has started the rollout, Orion has a great implementation, and Edge has it also).

My personal path was decades with FF and its predecessors, then Brave because it was much, much faster. Now I'm debating between Orion (which might win on performance/battery, due to being webkit), Brave (which is fast, and is evolving its TST capability), and Firefox (which works fine, but IME is a bit slower).

I don't know how anyone browses the modern web without ublock origin. I don't even go on websites on my iphone anymore because they are unusable with the banner ads, the footer ads, the autoplay videos, and trying to gleam information from 1 inch worth of text on my phone. I blow through my datacap in no time. Like why did we make these phone screens so big, just to fit more ads?

I use Firefox Focus as a content blocker on iOS. It's night and difference for how much data the average news site takes to load.

I also use Firefox Focus on Android. Latest Android versions took away the option to NOT have a default application to open files/links, so I had to pick Firefox Focus as default, even though I immediately open it in Chrome for things I want to have a session active for.

Firefox is interesting because its roots as an open source project go back a long time and Mozilla has generally been one of the most open companies working in that space. That's lead a lot of people to identify as members of that community, which is good in some aspects but also means that you have a vocal group of people who appear to feel that having participated in a few Bugzilla issues over a few decades means that they should be consulted on every change.

Over the same time period, web browsers have gone from a hot new technology to a part of daily life for most people in developed countries, and that's created areas for conflict where someone at Mozilla is trying to figure out how to retain users against a hostile trillion-dollar company and coming to conclusions which are different than some of the more conservative members of the user community want. We saw this with things like XUL's deprecation where that feature was blocking a lot of improvements which benefit 100% of users and a small group of users felt very strongly that someone else should do the extensive amount of work needed to maintain and modernize a lightly-used feature.

I literally just switched back to a Chromium-based browser because Google Meet background features are not supported on Mozilla Firefox. Everything else, I like or I’m quite content with on Firefox. I so just want to have Google Meet with background blur on Firefox, it’s the only thing I need to fully switch back.

Because we all want to use Firefox. No one wants to use Google's browser. Firefox is incredibly important software and it has squandered billions of dollars and a massive market lead. The CEO should be removed immediately and someone who actually believes in and understands the mission should be placed there.

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