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Comment by jcalvinowens | Hacker News Reader

I switched back to firefox last year and haven't looked back. I still use chrome on another laptop sometimes, the performance difference from my human perspective is literally zero.

These days, it's much more common for me to encounter a website that works in firefox but not chrome than the other way around. I actually switched for good when I had to use firefox to file my taxes, because the IRS free self-file site was hopelessly broken on chrome.

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Firefox out of the box indeed does not cause broken websites. However, the demographic of this forum probably will use Firefox with "Multi-Account Containers", "Temporary Containers", "uBlock Origin", and a few more. These are amazing for privacy and productivity, but will occasionally cause broken websites.

Source: I am a Firefox-first user who occasionally uses plugin-less Chrome because the aforementioned plugins (and "ClearURLs", "Consent-o-matic", and a few others) occasionally break websites.

> Firefox out of the box indeed does not cause broken websites.

Firefox doesn't cause broken websites. Websites developers that target only Chrome cause websites to inadvertently become broken in Firefox.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish

Be evil

Firefox doesn't. But publishers de-prioritizing or being hostile to Firefox does. I keep Chrome up for VirusTotal to scan PortableApps.com releases. In Firefox, it'll throw broken ReCaptcha prompts over and over and over after a certain number of scans per day (pick the thing, next, pick the thing, next x10, etc). And that's with all extensions disabled. Possibly related: VirusTotal and ReCaptcha are owned by Google.

When these sites break I prefer to spam their support or just not use them. If they won't support firefox then they don't deserve my patronage.

It's not patronage if you don't pay. Google would rather not have you as a user if it costs them any amount of time to support you. The relationship here is adversarial on both sides and pretending otherwise doesn't help anyone.

if firefox users keep flooding their support line with problems then that means firefox users are costing them money. eventually it will be cheaper to build software that actually works.

Google chooses to provide those services for "free" which means thez actually do benefit from the users.

For those that don't know, Virustotal saves all samples and provides them to researchers.

> But publishers de-prioritizing or being hostile to Firefox does.

Honestly, we should take the same stand against them. Those who are hostile towards Firefox should be publicly named and shamed for sheer incompetence and/or malice.

> Firefox out of the box indeed does not cause broken websites.

There are definitely websites that don't work with Firefox out of the box. Just one example that annoys me is https://mtgarena-support.wizards.com. "Firefox users: Firefox's Enhanced Tracking Protection may interfere with Sign In. Temporarily disable it in Firefox Privacy Settings to load the sign in screen."

Alternatively read as: “We are actively hostile to user-chosen browser privacy settings such that we develop our application to coach our users to turn these settings off as a necessary means of accessing their account”. I guess that’s what they call a death spiral given that the behavior discourages me from attending any would-have-been-DCI events.

Are you sure that your tracking protection is set to "Standard"? You'd have to change it manually to stricter protection.

I know of several sites that break if you go beyond Standard, but none if you don't.

It's probably third party cookies but not for long, Chrome will also remove them next year so they will have to do something about it.

Yeah, I find more broken websites out of the box with Firefox than Chrome (even disabling extensions/ad blockers)

I use Chrome at work (corporate provisioned device) and Firefox at home so both get a good amount of usage

There is a filter list for ublock origin that bypasses such things (and cookie consent popups).

That’s not “working out of the box”, but leads to a much less broken experience than chrome (especially with the manifest v3 BS).

I have had sites that are definitely broken in Firefox even after a stock install with every last toggle/extension/script blocker turned off. It's fairly rare, but there are a slowly growing list of sites that don't behave properly under Firefox but work in Chromium.

The question is if the problem is Firefox or the webpage.

Remember when Google killed the Edge render engine per YouTube problems?

I always read that some sites don't work with Firefox but the writers never mentions which sites are broken.

So I'm curious, which sites are broken in vanilla FF?

I use a home video appliance called camect which is accessed through a web interface which explicitly only works in chromium browsers. Oddly, I often find that the bbc news page doesn't load images on the first attempt in Firefox, but always does in Chrome.

One of them happens to be the educational site https://www.deltamath.com/

OK so what is broken? The homepage comes up fine and a few clicks seem fine. Do I have to sign up to see issues?

I only use Firefox, and I very rarely notice any kind of broken sites. I remember one bank site last year had a minor issue.

Multi-account-containers doesn't really break websites in my opinion. It's just like running a separate browser (in fact it's simply a firefox profile under the hood).

What can go wrong is if you've set a certain site to always open in a certain container and another site redirects you to this site. This can happen with Identity Providers like Okta, ADFS etc. They will then open in a different container (the assigned one) and lose context. Especially microsoft services have an annoying habit of redirecting through 25 different URLs on every sign-in. But if configured correctly it's a godsend, you can use this tool to sign into multiple MS tenants at the same time, something with chrome and not even Edge can do right now (switching teams between multiple tenants is a nightmare).

But I don't think it's the multi accounts containers at fault here, it's the user. Just don't do that :P

I have chrome installed. In the rare occasion that Firefox does not do a good job I just switch to chrome for that website and then go back.

This is usually the case if there might be forms or something like that. It's minor enough that it doesn't bother me.

Now, on the other hand, tab management is so much better with chrome and I've considered using Chrome for that reason alone. At work I do use chrome because I usually have 10-15 websites open at a time (for example I like to keep one tab group per ticket and every related item to it there).

I do use simple tab groups on Firefox but it's not good enough at least to replace my workflow at work.

Have you tried Tree Style Tabs [1]?

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

Hey! So I finally felt inspire and made a demo of my Firefox userchrome.css and Tree Style Tabs customization and CSS on my Github here [1]. It makes it so that the Tree style tabs expand and contract over the page, showing just the favicon and number of sub-tabs when contracted, along with a few other things, like reducing border sizes and adding better indication for sound in a tab. It's pretty nifty I think; I hope someone finds it to their liking. :)

https://github.com/jessebeard/firefox_settings

I wish tab groups to be implemented natively. Or that extensions can manage the tab bar instead of using a sidebar. That’s the best experience we can get so far, but it does not feel right to me.

This extension alone is sufficient justification to shift to Firefox.

In general, browsers do not cause broken websites

This, again, can be restated as incompetent developers cause broken websites (!)

("... do not attribute to bad faith that which can be explained by stupidity")

I don't mind breaking websites, if I can fix them on my own terms.

I have two profiles for firefox dorkily called "hax0r mode" and "normie mode", each with different theming so I can tell the diff. I try to do as much as I can in hax0r mode, which has uBlock O, NoScript, auto cookie delete and a few other privacy settings like no 3rd party cookies. Sites usually start pretty broken before I tweak NoScript for them, which I'm OK with.

Occasionally, sites are obstinate and I need to use Normie mode (e.g. for Maps)

Normie mode just has uBlock O, containers. I really have zero problems with sites breaking here.

Nah, there's plenty of examples of sites breaking on Firefox. For example, the recent degraded performance on Youtube linked to Firefox User Agent strings.

Yeah but that's not on Mozilla in any way. That's just Google's anti-competitive practices. Firefox refuses to jump on Google's attempts to ban adblockers with Manifest V3 so Google wants to punish them

I feel like it doesn't matter how many examples of Firefox not working properly you are faced with, you will simply respond "well that's not Mozilla's fault, that on the website developer" for each and every one. At the end of the day it's the Firefox user who is faced with the problem.

I do feel that there’s a difference in kind between: “a website was built with Chrome in mind, and has problems rendering in Firefox”, and “a website was built specifically to degrade in Firefox”.

If no engineering time was spent on Firefox, and it’s broken in Firefox, that’s a Firefox problem.

If active engineering time was spent on _deliberately breaking_ Firefox, then yes, I don’t think that’s a Firefox problem. I think it’s a website problem at that point.

which means other than a small handful of power users most people will continue using chrome, and websites will continue prefering to put it first, continuing the cycle

im curious to see what effect ublock not working as well on chrome as it will on firefox will have to the demographics, if there's no shift then that's a hurdle that has to be overcome by either firefox by some sort of engineering, google, or via legislation

Nowadays there's very few websites that work on Chrome but not Firefox. Hell I'd even throw modern Safari in that. Interop 2021-2023 has made a huge difference

Besides specific Google products, most everything works across all 3 major engines.

In addition, Mozilla adds specific code to Firefox to counteract anti-competitive practices on specific websites

What matters for the end user is the experience. If using FF will lead to a poor experience on certain websites, then why recommend it?

Do people honestly believe that if they keep recommending FF, people will magically switch to FF and Google will be forced to stop its anti-competitive practices?

> What matters for the end user is the experience. If using FF will lead to a poor experience on certain websites, then why recommend it?

Because holding that against Firefox is exactly what Google is counting on. And the more you recommend it the harder it is for Google to continue its anti-competitive practices.

The more you fall a fool for Google's (or Microsoft a decade ago) practices, the worse the experience for everyone is in the future.

Anyways, there's simple extensions that will sidestep Chrome's bs. In addition, you'll soon to be able to get an adblocked experience that you can only get on Firefox. That means less network traffic, faster loading websites, and better user privacy

Speaking of adblock experience with Firefox (and uBlock origin), Google has managed to slip ads into my Youtube experience. So far I can skip them after watching the first 5 seconds so it's not too bad.

Before that they had a popup that would timeout after 15s (?). At that point I tried disabling uBlock on Youtube but found the ads stacked up to much longer, so the 15s delay was more acceptable.

As expected, this will probably continue to be a cat and mouse game.

My adblock on Firefox works seamlessly (0s downtime) and I dread the idea of having to navigate YouTube on any other browser.

Immediately giving every bully whatever they want with no resistance is certainly one way to navigate life.

Yea - because Google is just outright acting evil in a number of ways. A good example is the fact that background blur isn't supported in google meet in FF and that audio translation is similarly blocked in FF. These are just arbitrary ways that Google is degrading the FF experience because of their commanding market share.

I use Google meet with Firefox on Ubuntu. Background blur works for me, as well as auto-caption. Haven’t tried auto-translation though.

Well, there's also the fact that Google is currently being prosecuted for antitrust violations on both sides of the Atlantic...

Do you honestly believe that it's OK for Google to just keep being anti-competitive? Or that this is a completely inevitable and unfixable state of affairs?

We can, should, and will hold Google accountable for its monopolistic conduct, and this is absolutely part of that.

If you want an experience that includes privacy violations, knock yourself out. Personally, as an end user, that is exactly what I don’t want, which is why I use Firefox

What good does not recommending it achieve? Maintaining the status quo which as well discussed elsewhere in these threads is hardly generally desirable?

My move back to FF has been slow (as mentioned already too) but I've been recommending it to others, who don't have my self-inflicted blocker, for some time. Maybe some will stop listening if I keep mentioning it, but people online I'll never meet in person are hardly a great loss in my life. The sort of people who are going to take such issue in RealLife™ are likely those just paying me attention in exchange largely for free tech support (the matter isn't likely to come up in other contexts) and they can do one anyway too.

Manifest v3 does not ban adblockers, nor does the Chrome web store

It doesn't ban a blockers outright but does severely hamper them. It severely limits how many filters that can exist within the plugin, and also prevents plugins from updating block lists themselves and forces those updated lists to go through the plugin store.

Both of those will seriously hamper a more advanced adblock like UBlock Origin

>It severely limits how many filters that can exist within the plugin

The limits are 30,000 static rules and 30,000 dynamic rules. Running tens of thousands of regexs for each request can lead to a performance impact. Allowing for even higher limits may result in people having a worse experience from the browser becoming slower. The API was designed such that these limits can be increased in the future as available computation and user needs change over time. Getting extension developers to design their extensions in a way where they have to think about not slowing down the browser too much I think is a good thing and I would not call these current limits severe.

>also prevents plugins from updating block lists themselves

declarativeNetRequest lets rules be added and removed dynamically by the extension.

>forces those updated lists to go through the plugin store

The Chrome team has said that configuration can be updated outside of a store update. What the Chrome web store does not want are extensions that download and run code. This policy does not related to mv3.

It bans the ability for them to block or reroute network requests. Some adblockers might still work on some sites, but it'd mostly be an aesthetic feature. Your browser is still receiving the data, your network is still clogged, and websites are still slower.

And Netflix STILL refusing to play above 720p on Firefox if you’re running Linux, which I’m sure many here are.

I'll just keep pirating personally, I don't see why I should be treated worse if I'm paying.

To be fair, this is not a Firefox issue.

Unless you use Edge on Windows you still have the same limitation (or the windows store Netflix app).

One solution is not to use poorly coded websites.

It is unfortunate that Firefox doesn’t do more to help us avoid sites programmed by devs who are too incompetent to follow standards, really.

There's some more you should do to increase privacy: Disable Firefox sending each keystroke into the address bar to all the numerous search engines (includes google). Best to just enable the separate bar for search and disable search suggestions entirely.

"Firefox out of the box indeed does not cause broken websites" .. for you.

I regulary ran across something that does not work or has a broken style. And I know how to turn UO off.

And why should that be a surprise? FF has way less manpower than Chrome. (And even fired lots of engineers, to raise the CEO bonus)

Chrome leads the way and probably the vast majority developes for chrome and with chrome dev tools. So most of the time FF works, but not always. And performance is just worse, but not noticable on a desktop and on mobile it is offset by the working adblock. Meaning perceived performance is usually better, because ads are blocked, unlike in chrome mobile.

This has absolutely not been my experience. Must be a different extension you installed.

Or I just visit different websites?

Not the worst idea to avoid a website for breaking in FF (or take a chance to touch grass), but unfortunately when you can't pay your credit card bill or need something for your work and it only works in Chromium it can't be avoided.

Then we can compare brave and firefox in terms of speed. I don’t see any noticeable performance difference (I use both on linux and macos)

Then ... maybe have a look at some numbers:

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Firefox-Chrome-109-Benchmarks

And sadly it can be worse, with my quite complex app, that I absolutely did not tailor for chrome, but gone out of my way to also support FF - the result is that chrome is just 3x faster.

Thank you, never looked at these. The benchmarks show a big margin, but still, I use both daily and do not notice such a gap

I also had problems recently with an online notary service... they forced me to use Chrome...

Not the same problem, but I wonder when faxes will disappear... For example, Progressive Insurance wanted me fax, mail pictures or bring them in person... email didn't work... Of course they didn't have a safe way to transfer them digitally but I would not care if everyone in the world saw those emails.

The useless requirements that they set just proves that they don't understand technology.

> Source: I am a Firefox-first user who occasionally uses plugin-less Chrome because the aforementioned plugins (and "ClearURLs", "Consent-o-matic", and a few others) occasionally break websites.

I have good luck just using a private window, since that has no extensions by default. Bonus: It's really fast; ctrl-l ctrl-c ctrl-shift-p ctrl-c enter

> ctrl-l ctrl-c ctrl-shift-p ctrl-v enter

FTFY

EDIT: Mine was wrong too. Thanks to ipython for the correction.

Wouldn’t it be Ctrl-v not ctrl-p? To paste instead of print a blank page?

Yep! My mistake, nice catch.

Shouldn't we say "Some sites break user browsing experience"?

Zero broken websites here, and I use those and more extensions. I also use FF on Android and iPadOS (although that's a Safari reskin, it provides some niceties on top like send tab to device).

I use Firefox with uBlock Origin. I don't use containers but I do use profiles.

Yes some sites are "broken" with uBlock Origin. I don't find it to be many, however. I run into paywalls much more often than I do problems with my browser settings.

Temporary and Multi-Account containers do not break websites.

Not sure about the others but uBlock Origin allows you to disable it for specific websites and remember the setting.

It’s probably the ublock origin breaking websites and not the multi-account containers, right?

i also use ublock matrix so i get to play "which third party hosts are needed to make this page work" for every new website

consent-o-matic lets a lot of them through.... I need to find an alternative that works better

you might want to try

    about:profiles

create a new profile and use that for testing

> ”who occasionally uses plugin-less Chrome”

Exactly, simply use a second “plugin-less” FireFox profile.

And if you really need a Chromium browser, Brave is a better choice than Google Chrome (for privacy reasons…)

Yeah im still a bit surprised that Github doesnt work in firefox for me. It wont load a repository page, its just blank with nothing but the navigation on the page. This happens after turning off all plugins. dont know if github has made it so only chrome works but thats a pretty major site for firefox to not work with.

That’s something weird with your setup, GitHub works just fine on Firefox for everyone else.

GitHub works with Firefox. I use that combination every day.

Might have something stuck in your profile that's causing that. Wiping your profile can usually fix that, even if you re-sync your preferences.

> However, the demographic of this forum probably will use Firefox with "Multi-Account Containers", "Temporary Containers"

Never even heard of these... hmm

I've been using FireFox for about 4.5 years now, but I have to have Chrome installed for a few reasons unfortunately.

- Some websites still will just not work in FireFox. It's not super common anymore, but if I sense something is fishy, I pop open the console and see some strange error and swap over to Chrome. Things will just work then. All extensions disabled even. I even ran into this on Vanguard's website, albeit for some obscure forms.

- When I worked at a company that had a larger web app presence, I would have to test in Chrome. That's a given, but my Chrome counterparts did not do the same with FireFox. I would fairly regularly (few times a quarter) find things that were completely broked on FireFox.

All that said, I don't really care about my choice in browser very much, but I'd rather support Mozilla over Google still. Especially since they're the only non-Chromium and v8 engine out there aside from Safari, which is also owned by a massive for profit company. I'd like to help support a more open web, even if it's just a little bit.

> Especially since they're the only non-Chromium and v8 engine out there aside from Safari, which is also owned by a massive for profit company.

You know, it's not necessarily a bad thing that another enormous company is competing with Chrome. It might be less than ideal than Firefox having Safari's share, but it still eats at Google's monopoly more effectively.

Unfortunately I had to move over to Vivaldi after using Firefox more than a decade due to performance.

On Linux, it consumes so much memory it actually slows down my machine...

> Some websites still will just not work in FireFox

I run into this as well, but I just use Safari as my backup browser and that usually is good enough. The only thing I still need to use Chrome for is my Nest thermostat.

Firefox became better, Chrome became worse. Every week one time I have to start Chrome for something.

I've been using Chrome for years and I never have to start Firefox for something.

Same, but other way around. Don’t even have Chrome installed. I don’t know what websites people are using, but I’m glad to not need them. The idea that a site could fail to render on any reasonably common browser seems pretty absurd.

The few times Firefox hasn't worked is on incredibly niche and outdated sites like a local kennel to board my dog or my university parking system.

Edge works fine in those incredibly rare instances since I can't get it off my computer anyway. I think I have one

I unfortunately switched back to Chrome last week after having used Firefox for years due to not being able to use sites I frequent. I constantly ran into issues with Heroku, GCP (go figure), and a few financial sites I'd log into regularly.

I know it’s mentioned elsewhere, but this does it for me:

* Try the same site in a private window (assuming plugins are disabled when in private)

* If on dev or nightly, try those sites on the regular release.

I haven’t bumped into anything in GCP that fails to work on ff, though likely don’t use the console as extensively.

What do those sites say about the problem when you report the error to them? Do any of them acknowledge their error?

did you check if you have any funky plugins enabled?

I'm fully switching to FF at home now. I'd half done it but had a large collection of tabs open in Chrome which kept pulling me back as I couldn't be bothered with reassessing them all (a fair I should have closed) and recording the ones I still wanted to keep elsewhere. Chrome gave me the final push the other day by completely forgetting most of those open items during an update.

I'd not encountered anything broken in Chrome that was fixed by FF though.

I'll still be primarily Chrome in DayJob though, as most of our clients' users are (with some on Edge, a few using FF, and a couple of idiots still not off IE though we don't officially support that) so that makes sense even though I very rarely touch anything front-end these days.

one-tab or supatabs extensions

SuperTabs is Chrom{e|ium} only which doesn't help as I'm moving to FF. OneTab looks partly useful, but often where I came from is important as well as the current tab location, if I've travelled through links “normally” rather than opening in a new tab every time, and I wouldn't expect it to keep that history.

Really, I need to get away from using tabs for long-term state rather than finding a better way to use tabs for that. It would make switching UA easier when I want to, and switching machine too for that matter.

Also, I've been burned by tab and/or session management extensions going stalky (TheGreatSuspender & friends), or stagnating and failing after a time.

I want to move as much state beyond active interactive use away from the browser. I've never kept passwords there or gone in for built-in sync options, but feel the need to take this further. The older I get, the more I see tight integration as a lock-in rather than a benefit.

I just switched back to firefox yesterday. Not a long sample period, but so far I completely agree, less painful than chrome.

Chrome is the new IE6

We need an updated version of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sKppwrLBY8

What would be really cool is a Firefox plugin that allowed you to replace the entire browser tab with a Chromium renderer on a specific website if you so wish, and remember that setting. That way there would really be no need to install Chrome for a few one-off websites.

Considering both Firefox and Chromium are open-source it should be entirely possible.

>\ Hot take:

I tried FF for a long time but finally switched to Brave. Yes, I'll be downvoted for saying this but it's objectively one of my top 3 favorite browsers rn.

1. Brave

2. Edge

3. Safari

I like each of them for different reasons. Brave (after disabling annoying features such as crypto and VPN) is awesome and its iOS app is the only one which can play videos in the background, has dark mode, and syncs really well with the desktop app.

Edge is so tempting esp. with recent Microsoft Copilot which makes it so useful (I can summarize pages right in the browser, organize my tabs by telling so to the Copilot, etc.)

Safari is not a good browser per se and lacks many features and plugins, but it's minimal and doesn't drain the battery like Brave and FF.

I really wanted to like FF but it's just not cutting it anymore.

Brave is really good and always surprising me with features while largely staying lean and out of my way.

They recently added a chatbot that runs locally they call Leo based on llama2. It's pretty impressive that you can perform LLM tasks on the current page without the use of any 3rd party service. And of course you can pay them for the souped up version. https://brave.com/leo-release/

Feels like I am alone in thinking the crypto features of Brave are cool. And not because I think that industry generally isn't full of slime. But micropayments for content has been a good, latent idea for a generation, and here they've simply built it as a default feature.

I still use FF and Brave equally because of my experience with the first browser wars and my mistrust of Chrome, having become the new IE.

This also where I landed with Brave as it seems to be working great for all of devices. Runs smoothly and I don’t really have a problem full with many sites on aggressive mode. I’ve had the sync’ing feature go flaky a few times, but over all good experience.

My big gripe with FF honestly is the lack for PWA ( progressive web apps) If they resurrect that effort I’d give it a shot. I’m not really interested in running another browser for that feature.

Also the brave privacy settings are remarkably better “by default” across all my devices. I’m sure Firefox can be configured to be hardened I just have other ways I’d like to spend my time. Heck I’d even pay for better option for all my devices.

I have tried Brave multiple times. I find its desktop version as bad or worse than Firefox for things not working or bugginess.

I have used Brave more on Android. I have bounced between Firefox, Brave, and custom builds of Chromium for years. I am currently on Firefox.

Brave opens 99.9% of websites for me and I'm using "Aggressive" mode.

Brave is my primary also, but Orion is creeping up. It’s still a little buggy, but nested tree tabs is very nice.

I use FF on my desktop and Brave on mobile. I tried FF on mobile and it has too many issues, unlike its desktop counterpart. And there are no good maintained de-googled chromium alternatives on Android other than Brave.

Brave on iOS uses the WebKit engine right ? How can it be so different from Safari ?

Brave and Edge are just chromium.

Bro. You’re still using chrome.

Chromium !== Chrome.

That is true, but the Chrome/Chromium ecosystem is largely driven by Google. And Google makes use of this power position to push through web standards that benefit them, but not the users. Therefore I choose to use Firefox, to support a more open browser ecosystem.

How much do they really differ? Chromium browsers for the most part are just going to appear the same to site owners.

It'll all render the same using Chrome/Blink, but forks might take out tracking by Google (and potentially add other tracking), add adblock outside of plugins, or re-add support for Manifest V2 to name a few. Chromium forks can actually be pretty different.

Chromium is over 20 million lines of code. No Chromium fork is meaningfully different. Come back with that BS when Blink has 25% of its contributions coming from one of these Chrome skins.

It’s literally a technological monoculture controlled by one company that can’t be trusted.

Ironically, focusing on the window chrome does not matter for a healthy web, let alone a healthy open standard.

I've been using Firefox for regular browsing for years now, but I use Chrome for streaming videos (Firefox streaming quality is noticably worse) and LibreWolf for YouTube (blocks ads). It's annoying to have 3 browsers open basically all of the time.

I'm slowly migrating a lot of my browsing out of Safari and into LibreWolf, and using the opportunity to document accounts/passwords that i want to keep.

If i were willing to get an iPhone, then i'd be quite happy with Safari (i don't have Chrome installed on my Mac), but I want the ability to have my bookmarks available on multiple phones & computers... so firefox profiles (in LibreWolf) is the mechanism i've decided to use for that (for now)

The only site I've found behaves terribly in Firefox is LinkedIn. Weird pauses on page load that lock the whole browser (not just the tab) for like 5-10 seconds. No idea what they're doing to make this happen, but it's odd.

Which is, well, fine, because LinkedIn is mostly a dumpster anyways.

This prompted me to check LinkedIn after months of having it parked in a tab and it worked with no problems.

When I have problems with a site it's usually because I'm blocking most JavaScript with uMatrix and I have to find the correct combination of scripts to make the site work for me without having to give away my soul to the gods of tracking.

As a software developer, it's been years since a customer told me that the sites I develop on Firefox don't work on Chrome or Safari. I don't even bother to check anymore. I couldn't check with Safari anyway and they are OK with that. The point is that if it works in Firefox it works everywhere. Of course we're not using any Chrome-only API but we never had to use one of them as far as I can remember.

Also checked LinkedIn, no issues in FF on a mid-2014 mbp.

Ubuntu 23.10 on Wayland, Firefox 119.0 from Snap, only extensions are uBlock Origin and Bitwarden.

Long weird pause.

Any site that is on the edge of performance (often due to bad engineering, which you can blame on time constraints) will perform vastly better in Chromium.

I don't much care, TBH. Having worked in the Chromium codebase before, I know what an absolutely mammoth amount of engineering hours goes into that.

V8 on its own is a technological miracle.

But all funded by a firehose of crazy privacy invading ad revenue.

So. I'll live with the odd pause and a bit of battery drain. I gave Google 10 years of my life as an employee in exchange for $$, I'm not interested in giving them the rest of my life for free.

I get it, it's a nice story, but here's a nice little life-hack:

What if you could take the benefits of the spending and jettison the side-effects?

It's called Brave, they have their own ad blocker in the source code written in C, so it can't be hamstrung.

If you're trying to go "chrome but better" than Brave is a move in the wrong direction, given its bundled cryptocurrency and ad platform.

Perhaps you haven't heard of Chromium. If so, that may be because Chromium doesn't spend as much on marketing as Brave.

https://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/download-chromium/

It's funny because I worked in that repository for a few years, and routinely built a custom "shell" (what Chromecast is) and when this guy suggested Brave my thought was... eh, yeah, sure, but I could also just roll my own or just run stock chromium :-)

I personally like that Firefox isn't based on webkit/blink.

Crypto crap, no thanks.

This isn't an intelligent statement. I have used Brave for years and literally never see anything related to "crypto".

Social networks really have no business being "on the edge of performance", FFS.

Look, Google and Facebook are just mom and pop businesses - they can't afford to support all these fancy browsers!

(I absolutely agree - especially when it's google turning off features when you're using FF... it feels blatantly anticompetitive).

Okay, well, they're using React and most React engineers aren't very good so it ends up being a clusterfuck that most people don't even notice given how well Chromium is optimized.

Bigquery studio is an absolute dog in Firefox even on S-tier desktop hardware. It works better in chrome. Go figure.

Same here. Chrome was just too buggy for me. This year was when I finally made the switch.

What helped me was that I switched my phone browser to DuckDuckGo browser. This kind of opened my horizons.

I'm a FF-first user but I definitely have had to keep Chrome around for a few things— my investment banking doesn't load in FF nor do some parts of Office 365.

Which parts of office365? I don't have any issues using it on FF. That said I'm not a heavy user (mainly outlook, word, sometimes PowerPoint).

Teams maybe? Tbh I'm not totally sure as I'm new to office so I don't spend a lot of time trying to make it work when it's being hinky.

I love & support Firefox but feel nervous about going all in on it when Mozilla appears to be pivoting away from investing in it.

This is a funny comment - why'd you leave Firefox to have to come back to it?

If GP is anything like me, they used Firefox before Chrome was released. The Mozilla/Netscape suite that spawned Firefox is older than Google itself.

For a time, Firefox performed worse than a rabid dog. Chrome ate their lunch and gained market share fast. I and many of my colleagues switched around that time.

> Chrome ate their lunch and gained market share fast.

That isn't the main reason they gained market share fast. It's sabotage: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1116871245021220875.html

This exactly, I should've added that context

That’s what I did.

In my case: Because Opera stopped using Presto and switched to Chromium. That does says a bit about when I switched.

I used Firefox pretty extensively, then switch to Chrome when Firefox fell behind on speed, but the developer tools absolutely sucks in Chrome, so I tried Opera which had a great feature set, speed and wonderful developer tools. It was a pretty sad day when Opera dropped Presto, and more so when they where bought by some Chinese company.

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