It's never been a better time to switch to Firefox | Hacker News Reader

It's never been a better time to switch to Firefox

androidpolice.com

226 pointsHary0686 comments

I'm all in on FF on desktop.

The only thing stopping on mobile for last 4-5 years is Translations. Project Bergamot is incredibly successful, thanks again to Mozilla for investing in this! Open Translation is such an important thing, it's a game changer.

It went from beta to addon to bring built into desktop Firefox since the latest release. No words can express the amount of gratitude for this. Now, just waiting for it to be enabled in android builds.

Edit: Another not so highlighted feature of Firefox is: Mac always shows Chrome as "significantly consuming energy". But never for Firefox. I don't know what magic they did here.

Edit 2: Don't get me started on the benefits of containers, profiles and temporary containers as a default.

I struggled so long with having to use Chrome for translations on Android until I found out that my favourite translating extension works with mobile Firefox just perfectly. See [3] on how to install it in Firefox Beta (maybe this method or even the extension itself is already available in Firefox Release).

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/traduzir-pagi... [2] https://github.com/FilipePS/Traduzir-paginas-web [3] https://www.ghacks.net/2022/10/20/firefox-beta-for-android-n...

The best time to switch to Firefox was many years ago. The second best time is now.

This is such a bad saying. I guess all the people who switched this year should have waited until now, because now is a better time to switch?

It's not a bad saying, proverbs don't have to be mathematically rigorous to be resonant and get a point across.

The point of the saying is that it's a rolling "now".

I switched when it was Phoenix.

I stopped liking it some time around v2. Maybe late 1.x series, don’t remember.

I left over a decade ago.

Well, probably they haven't changed it at all in the last 10 years, right?

Had to download it again just yesterday because I needed a certain plugin for piracy reasons. Couldn’t browse at all until I disabled ipv6 via flag in about:config. Other browsers on same system need no such fiddling.

Still bloated with a bad UI and offering little I can’t get in almost any other browser, all of which qualities are sharply contrary to the ones that made me start using it in the first place. They’ve changed none of what made me stop liking it.

What browser do you use instead?

Firefox extensions on mobile are already a game changer. I switched a few months ago.

The only downside so far: the way you manage/view downloads isn't so great/intuitive.

I wish Firefox mobile put tabs on the bottom of the screen so it's more accessible to switch back and forth. Also the two-column layout of tab viewer is a subpar experience IMO.

edit: Thanks to the replies, I figured 1) You can put the address bar at the bottom of screen 2) You can swipe on address bar to traverse through the tabs and 3) You can change the tab viewer layout to list view.

(Still, I wished there was an option to list tabs on the bottom like the way Chrome does in on Android.)

you can swipe the address bar to switch between tabs. Better than nothing.

You can do that. It even asks you whether to put it at the bottom when you run Firefox (Android, not sure about iOS) the first time.

The biggest pain point with Android FF for me is that there's no way to get it to close all of the tabs when you close the application.

I have to go through and close each tab one by one first. It's driving me up the wall.

Hit tabs, three dots, close all tabs.

Slightly quicker than doing them one by one.

That's a little better, thank you, but it's still really irritating. I should be able to just close the app and be done with it.

But truly, if this is the biggest issue I have with it, that's pretty good. It just makes me actively irritated every time I use it.

When I was searching around trying to find a resolution with this problem, I found numerous comments saying that Mozilla does not intend to change this behavior in the future. That made me a little mad.

Update: vorticalbox gave me the solution to this in another comment. I take this all back.

Ah, yes that is a nice solution.

My only issue with Firefox is the lack of easy access multiple profiles.

I can live with that, although I wish I could pay to get that fixed.

The tab selector view has a menu with -> close all, does this work for you?

There actually is if you click "delete browsing data on quit"

You can toggle "open tabs" to close all your tabs

> "delete browsing data on quit"

Doesn't that delete all browsing data, though? That's not what I want. I admit that I haven't dared to touch it because I assumed it deleted all browsing data. I'd be thrilled to be mistaken about this.

Not at all you have a selection of things you can turn on.

Open tabs, browse history, cookies, cache, site permissions and downloads.

You can enabled as many as you like.

Just having "open tabs" ticked will only close tabs and nothing else which is what I use

Woah!! Thank you! I guess I shouldn't have been afraid to touch that setting.

In my web searching to find a resolution to this problem, I didn't find a single mention of this. Oh, web, you have failed me again!

Did the web fail you? Looks like the web brought you vorticalbox to help you with this :)

A big issue Firefox mobile has is the refresh-tab-on-change be it switching to different tab or app.

Hmmm. This wasn't happening to me on airplane mode last week. I opened a bunch of tabs on Wikipedia with a connection, and I was able to read them on the plane. It didn't destroy the data.

Is Firefox getting low memory killed on your device?

Thing is it is also happening (not always but very often) merely switching tabs. Maybe Firefox wrongly recognizes a low memory state and unloads tab when moving away from it. It's an open bug[0] for 3y+ (from when was originally reported on GH) now.

[0]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1807364

Hi, macOS user here. I know Firefox is great, and I'd love to use it (again), but Mozilla's decision to remove all user-facing, OS-level scripting capabilities from it (i.e., AppleScript) made me drop it a few years ago.

Getting anything out of FF on macOS, locally, is a major pain in the ass, actually. Try to grab the current URL from the active tab…

I think it's a super-solid browser that unfortunately doesn't give a shit about the platform it's running on. Irritatingly, it's fine with being a black box, so much more than the Chromiums are (for all their various faults).

Weird thought, but have you tried using Selenium?

Seems like launching a browser tab with:

    from selenium import webdriver
    driver = webdriver.Firefox()

and navigating to duckduckgo.com:

    print(driver.current_url) # https://duckduckgo.com/

works.

I have. (Web dev here.) I know it works but I don't want to set up all the things just to get some basic scripting capability.

My point is that there is zero local API surface for interacting with the application. That's the reason why tools like Keyboard Maestro support Chromium-based browsers but not Firefox. Which, in return, doesn't help Firefox's popularity, because it's nigh impossible to work with it from other apps.

Disclaimer: I am in a weird spot here, for I am serious about automation both as a consumer and as a software maker -- I write macOS automation tools myself, e.g. https://actions.work/browser-actions

I’ve also given up on using Firefox on macOS. I used to be a hard core fan, but Mozilla consistently ignores bugs.

For example, years later Firefox still doesn’t support macOS password autofill api. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1650212

+1 everything about firefox on macos just screams non-native. And I'm not just talking about minor things like context menus not behaving natively (maybe this was fixed recently, don't remember). There's major stuff that would seem to be trivial to implement that they just haven't bothered doing, like making sure the computer doesn't go to sleep when downloading files [1].

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=825914

I'd switch if they would support the File System Access API. It's a really convenient API and IMO as someone who has worked with it extensively, is very secure. It supposedly has privacy concerns, but I think it would primarily be used for FOSS and hobby projects since Bigco likes to store all the data on their servers anyways, that's a feature and not a bug for them. In fact, I think it would be a security/privacy improvement since it would encourage storing data locally (privacy) and is way more secure than asking users to install a native app (which has access to pretty much everything on the device and not just the directory/file a user gives it access to).

This! It is frustrating that web apps like draw.io can't save to file directly using Firefox. It gets old having to save a new file every time you make a change.

Beyond that, the File System API would also allow for streamed downloads directly from the web-app. This would allow for web-apps to generate large download files without having to store a copy on a database (external server or IndexedDB), which is a privacy improvement. The only way to do this now is by using convoluted techniques to essentially do a MITM to a fake endpoint [1].

[1] https://github.com/jimmywarting/StreamSaver.js

> It supposedly has privacy concerns, but I think it would primarily be used for FOSS and hobby projects since Bigco likes to store all the data on their servers anyways

Privacy concerns don't only apply for entities of a particular size

I have Firefox 120 on Android, but I'm unable to search for my extension (IPvFoo) on the addons page. It works on Firefox Nightly 122, and previously worked when Nightly was at 120.

Maybe the launch still requires a server-side change?

Afaik on ff original you'll still not have full list of extensions, just a more extended list

I use Firefox at home and Chrome at work, and I can't imagine going back to Chrome or Chromium at home. Firefox in 2023 is in great shape as a piece of software.

Firefox could do some relatively small things to push it ahead of Chrome in some areas.

Bookmarks sorely need an overhaul. For instance, it'd be really nice if bookmarks could appear in a side-pane instead of a popup window, and allow the user to sort by chronological order. That would discourage me from keeping so many tabs open, which would be a good thing. Just having a dumping ground for interseting pages that I can easily access and search through would be a good thing. It would also be amazing if bookmarks, or something like bookmarks, could optionally capture and store the body text on the page for searching purposes or even personal archiving.

Searching tabs through the URL bar is pretty much broken and has been for years. Actually, I'm not sure that ever really worked. If I begin typing something that matches the title of a tab I have open, it rarely ever shows up as a URL bar suggestion. WTF? Is it really that hard to traverse a small array of tab titles and do a regex? I don't get it. What about full-text search across all the pages I have open? Can't do that either, apparently. Then again, who would actually want to do that? /s Ok, sorry for the sarcasm. Sort of. I mean this in the most constructive way possible. If I get time again, maybe I'll eventually fix these things in Firefox, but for now I hope someone at Mozilla reads this and decides it's worth fixing.

> it'd be really nice if bookmarks could appear in a side-pane instead of a popup window

Ctrl+B on linux/windows or I guess Command+B does exactly this.

> and allow the user to sort by chronological order

This is possible in the main bookmarks window. There is a sort by last modified option which should do the trick. It would indeed be nice to have this option in the sidebar.

The other features you mention are more appropriate for an extension.

Edit: I just found out that you can open the bookmarks window in a tab by visiting chrome://browser/content/places/places.xhtml

Started using Firefox when it was still Phoenix, never stopped. Few years ago when they made Quantum, Firefox is awesome performance-wise: I can have hundreds of tabs open (with +- 50-90 always active), with no crashing (before Quantum, Firefox needed restarting once in a while). Chrome simply cannot handle that and consumes so much RAM.

I still have that old image from when I was a kid; it’s still relevant, though it was initially against IE… https://frostland.fr/adopt-firefox.jpg

Ironically I’m using Safari (and I love it).

>Ironically I’m using Safari (and I love it).

on iDevices?

And on my Mac. Safari does not exist elsewhere anyway (anymore).

I hope Kagi will succeed in bringing a credible alternative (Webkit) to chromium or Gecko on Windows/Linux, but it’ll take time even if they do it!

I really like Kagi Orion and hope it can succeed, but the keychain integration is still severely lacking, and also is my favorite advantage of safari. Maybe there are settings I'm missing, but migrating everything over to their keychain still has a substantially worse experience. No auto-filling, requires swapping all devices over to it, and seems much less aware of which password to suggest. It upsets me that Apple has Safari behind a usability moat like this, though someone has suggested that the recent mac/ios update has provided safari keychain access to third parties.

I remember while there was a push to adopt Firefox, there was another reactionary push against "alternate browsers", most likely from web devs who were frustrated that they had to support something other than Internet Explorer. What an interesting time.

Now they will unironically push back against Safari for not using enough bleeding-edge APIs. The lesson here is that web developers only have their own interests in mind, and what they want isn't necessarily what's best for the web.

> The lesson here is that web developers only have their own interests in mind, and what they want isn't necessarily what's best for the web.

True, but it's even more insidious than that. A ton of web devs seem to believe that what's in their own best interest is what's best for the web.

Web devs seem to love to sh*t on Safari for not adopting all the latest let-your-browser-do-this stuff, often calling it the new IE. However I use it as my main browser with Wipr for ad-blocking and it's glorious. I've tried FF many times and also Opera, Brave (ooh boy!) and Chrome and some other browsers and always come back to Safari. I don't think devs realise I don't want my browser to have more and more access and control. It's great for thin computing but is there really some distinction now to thin computing than the early Chromebook days? I don't think so. All I really want is a moderately effective way of blocking ads and snooping. Giving websites more control isn't going to achieve that. Ofc I could always delve into the tech and get this add-on or that thing but where does that end‽

Strangely enough, the one browser I've found that would challenge Safari most for me is duckduckgo's browser, it's simple and functional.

Now if only it had native tab grouping (and vertical tabs, sigh)... all the extensions supporting this are quirky, with subpar UI. I know it sounds nitpicky, but if I spend a lot of hours staring at a piece of software, I want it to be at least not displeasing.

Have not used Firefox for years and am interested in giving it another chance. Currently using Edge, I love the split screen and vertical tabs features. Also, I just realized, I have a lot of PWAs installed. Does Firefox support PWAs on the Desktop?

No PWA support unfortunately :( No split screen either. There are several extensions that provide vertical tabs

Oh nooo. Honestly, I dont want to miss out on PWAs.Oh well, guess I have to wait and see and potentially switch to another Chromium based one. Time to figure out which ones will adobt the new manifest.

I switched away from FF recently. On ubuntu 22.04, was irritated by the fortnightly snap update messages. Decided to switch to the ppa version instead. The ppa version had a "gmpopenh264" plugin has crashed problem on many sites. Switched back to Chrome. I don't have time for those hassles and the gmpopenh264 crash didn't have a googleable solution.

Due to the snap being the default installation on ubuntu, not enough users were on the ppa version to get even serious crashing problems fixed.

Haha, followed the link in Firefox but it was blocked because of my ad-blocker.

Who has the time to track all the stuff Google collects about you? At least spread out the tracking by NOT using every Google app. They've become the single largest surveillance organization in history, dwarfing even China's government.

Besides Firefox and Duckduckgo work so well I don't notice the difference.

Next, dropping Gmail...

This. FF and DDG work so well together that I hardly notice any downsides moving to it. DDG is my default search engine now and I rarely use google for sports updates. That's it.

Good thing I don’t need to switch, because I’ve been using it since moving off of IE back in mid 2000s :D

There was a bit of turbulence in our relationship when I strayed to Chrome for a brief moment because of the XUL extension deprecation. I was really pissed off because many great extensions stopped working.

But then I was back in a month, because chrome is just unbearable.

My biggest gripe with FF on Android is closing tabs, especially private tabs. Even though it puts up a notification to close all private tabs, it still takes like 7 clicks, or more, before looking at the last normal tab again.

If you have or had private tabs open, FF will ironically advertise that to the max, because of how clumsy it handles them.

With the 'Delete Data on Quit' option enabled on Firefox mobile, this used to adequately clear (or seemed to) any state for Youtube.com.

Some time over the last few months this seems to have changed - I have to now go to Settings > Delete All Browsing Data (or similar) to effectively get Youtube.com to forget everything.

Not sure what has changed there...

Things other browsers have these days like split screen, all kinds of tabs and bookmark groupings honestly don't matter too much to me...

I just want PWAs and some of the (available in extensions as well) APIs like filesystem api. I'd switch in a heartbeat.

Aside from all other advantages I'm on Firefox because can't live without MRU ctrl-tab tabs management. Chrome will never implement this, and plugins for different keys are not an option.

I'm all in on Firefox mobile and desktop except for switching to chrome when some odd site doesn't work. No issues generally and it's been years.

I'd gladly switch from Chrome to Firefox, but tab groups are what's preventing me to do so. :( I can't work without them.

Que Firefox breaking on 16K paged systems.

uBlock Origin, which is also available on Firefox for Android is also more than an adblocker when you add some additional filters

It can clean URL parameters for privacy reason

    https://raw.githubusercontent.com/DandelionSprout/adfilt/master/LegitimateURLShortener.txt

It can also bypass some soft-paywalls

    https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-clean-filters/-/raw/main/bpc-paywall-filter.txt

as well as blocking those annoying cookie banners, chatbot widgets, etc

Glad I never stopped using it

*Brave

Wow, AndroidPolice has fallen so much since the acquisition.

If switching today is better than yesterday, then by induction switching tomorrow will be better than today.

Did Firefox update at the end of the desktop browsing session instead of the beginning yet? If not, no, it's still not a good time to switch (back) to Firefox.

Yeah, they changed it I don't know how many years ago. It now gives a little bubble in the navbar asking the user to restart at his or her leisure.

Oh gosh, thank goodness. Firing up Firefox with a question burning in my brain to be answered only to be delayed by a browser update was the most annoying thing to me. I'll give them another shot.

I use Kiwi Browser. It is an open source fork of Chrome for Android that allows installing any extension. This is better than Chrome, which allows no extensions, and Firefox, which will only offer 200 or so. It also has its own ad blocking built in. Open source ftw.

Title needs "on mobile". For actual computers you should probably go further and switch to a user freedoms respecting Firefox fork. Mozilla stopped doing so in version 37 when they turned off the ability to users to install (or edit) extensions/add-ons without Mozilla's approval. It's only been downhill since in terms of removal of features to "protect users" and the addition of proprietary DRM.

you can still install .xpi files on desktop

You can opt into installing extensions directly from XPI files, in developer versions; it's just not the default. You can also disable DRM.

I don't like that the web added DRM, but given its existence, if Firefox said "you can't watch Netflix / Prime Video / etc in Firefox", they'd lose even more market share than they already have.

Correct, you can't install unsigned (not approved by Mozilla) extensions/add-ons in the main Firefox release. You have to use insecure/crashy versions (developer*) or you can dig deep and find the unbranded builds of Firefox and manually download and unpack them for every single update (they have updates disabled). It's tedious but I do it.

The ESR releases of FF main don't allow unsigned add-ons. You may be using a custom user freedom respecting build Debian specifically negotiated with Mozilla to allow in it's repositories?

*The developer version is literally the alpha release, later renamed aurora, later named developer. It is not acceptable to use an alpha release as a main driver for security and stability reasons.

You're right about disabling DRM though. That's not a deal breaker the way it's implemented.

Outdated information, sorry: some reports suggest that at one point they had disallowed it on standard builds but allowed it on ESR, but that doesn't seem to be the case anymore.

So, yes, you have to use a developer version, or a packaged version.

That said: What extensions, exactly, do you want to use on Firefox that aren't shipped on AMO? Other than the development of extensions themselves (for which it makes sense to use a developer version of Firefox), what is the use case?

For me it's not so much about which extensions but my ability to edit the extensions to fit my needs. Little tweaks to change appearance or text or or some internal list the extension uses. I do this fairly regularly (maybe once a month?).

> The developer version is literally the alpha release, later renamed aurora, later named developer. It is not acceptable to use an alpha release as a main driver for security and stability reasons.

It hasn't been for a long time, Mozilla dropped the Aurora channel in 2017 and rebased Developer Edition off Beta [0]. And as far as I'm concerned, beta is as stable as mainline (on my phone, at least).

> The ESR releases of FF main don't allow unsigned add-ons. You may be using a custom user freedom respecting build Debian specifically negotiated with Mozilla to allow in it's repositories?

Official documentation says you can still load unsigned extensions on ESR, but you need to enable a flag in about:config first [1].

[0] https://venturebeat.com/business/mozilla-kills-firefox-auror...

[1] https://extensionworkshop.com/documentation/publish/signing-...

I imagine if you use it on $latest OS and the like it's stable. But I can assure you if you're distro is a little older then the lib mismatches make developer edition a crashy experience.

I'm glad to hear about [1]. I'll have to try this in ESR myself. Hopefully all my extensions have the extra requirement of an add-on ID set. But I suppose I can edit that in myself for each if not.

> I don't like that the web added DRM, but given its existence, if Firefox said "you can't watch Netflix / Prime Video / etc in Firefox", they'd lose even more market share than they already have.

Firefox saying that now would have no effect, since they successfully managed to piss away approximately their entire market share despite going along with bullshit like that to not lose market share. Firefox saying that back when they had meaningful market share would've incurred significant cost calculations for everyone contemplating just throwing away the entire Firefox market.

Yes, I agree. They should have fought it tooth and nail when it was proposed, and held out as long as possible.

But if sites were willing to do it anyway, despite losing substantial numbers of users...

I would have liked to have seen that theory tested, but it may or may not have worked.

I switched over to IceRaven due to the extension lock out. The only extension I really needed outside of the Mozilla walled garden was to help getting past pay walls.

Pocket killed it for me. I got tired of re-disabling it.

You can add

  "DisablePocket": true

(and many other things) to your policies.json file. In my case that file is a symlink to a single master copy I maintain outside of the FF installation folder. See https://mozilla.github.io/policy-templates/

How about a one-liner to disable it globally via /etc/firefox/policies?

I encourage anyone reading this to try it. Good luck. I wrote a python wrapper to manage policies, and it's -deliberately- difficult and fragile. If I ever go back to the FF codebase, it will be a fork without pocket.

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