Testing the Firefox Alternatives
tommorris.org
tommorris.org
I'm a constant critic of most things Mozilla (as well as an avid Firefox user... there's a lot of overlap in that venn diagram) and most of what this intro rails against resonates, but I'll never understand why they get hammered for not implementing vertical tabs.
This is a feature that a small but passionate subset of their users use, but it's also a feature that already has an extension that said subset of their users uses. Further, said subset has a strong overlap with the never-Chromium crowd, so they're not going to lose them any time soon. Out of the thousand and one things that Mozilla could be doing to make Firefox more competitive, vertical tabs is solidly in the second half of the list.
Regardless, the question isn't really whether vertical tabs would be a useful feature, it's whether it would be the most useful thing Mozilla could be working on.
I'd much rather see them pour resources into making Firefox's devtools the best again. I'm pretty much the lone pure-Firefox holdout among my coworkers, with everyone else at least switching into Chrome for serious devtools work, and most now run it all the time. Make Firefox the best for devtools and you ensure it has reliable support across all browsers and put it back in the hands of the biggest browser-evangelists.
For a base/intermediate user, that's not a simple thing to do.
I agree that it's probably still an 'enthusiast' feature, but it's one that I think is starting to catch the road and has a pretty solid future trajectory.
That is how tree style tabs worked before Firefox switched to webextensions. And when Firefox switched to the we extensions API, a ticket was immediately opened requesting an API allowing hiding the horizontal tab bar. But despite some initial interest, nothing really ever happened with that.
https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-fo...
Making it sound like Edge and Vivaldi has the upper hand, when it comes to vertical tabs, is not fair.
ALSO it is now native in Nightly anyway, so we won and it is good. :)
The same with the AI stuff, i don't mind that in the browser. It does an okay job though it needs a lot of work. And I can already use it with my local AI server. Unlike the copilot crap in edge and whatever AI Google has in Chrome (I've not used chrome in years, only chromium)
Also Edge/Vivaldi have sidebar/vertical tabs, but they don't nest which reduces their utility in my opinion.
The Miller Columns view implemented in a recent HN post[1] would be great way to view history. Each column could be linked visually with its sidebar tab. I use my sidebar tab tree structure to give additional context on what I've viewed, I can see that page G is a child of B, etc.
Vertical tabs don't nest; however, you can group them using Chromium's native groups. In Brave, I can also assign custom keyboard shortcuts, so I have Ctrl+G for starting a new group, and Ctrl+T for opening a new tab in the same group.
I've also been a user of Firefox for years, and the tree-style tabs extension are all slightly broken, enough to make me disable them. I also never found much value in nesting.
Pale Moon: IIRC initially it was a fork of Firefox ESR then project switched to own Goanna engine, which in turn is a fork of Gecko; it also tries to keep alive XUL extensions platform. There were some dramas happening in the past around the project, esp. regarding porting browser to OpenBSD. It's kinda a niche project I'd say - surely it has some community but it's not that big.
As for IceCat - I'm surprised it's still around; seems it runs own extensions database (https://gnuzilla.gnu.org/mozzarella/) but these aren't keeping up with official releases, at least on the page. Perhaps autoupdate bumps these to the current versions; still, uBlock Origin is stuck at 1.51.0 from last December, while the current version is 1.59.0.
I tried Zen recently - it's kinda hard to get used to tabs sidebar. For some people this might be useful but not for me - I prefer tabs on top.
Two features I love about Safari is:
- Pinch/Zoom to view all my tabs as windows to switch between tabs
- What at least appears to be total isolation between tabs when in private browsing mode. If I login to Facebook in one tab, then open up a new tab and go to Facebook, it will not see me as logged in.
Chrome nor Firefox have either of those features.
I've been using vertical tabs in Firefox ever since Mozilla implemented it back in 2016 as "Tab Center" long before any Chromium-based browser decided to do so too. Of course the official feature has been discontinued long time ago, but I've been a happy user of its webext-based replacement ever since. Just a bit of CSS goes a long way in making it compact and well-integrated, unlike stuff like Sidebery or Tree Style Tabs that always felt big, clunky and filled with stuff I never use. For the past 8 years, my Firefox looked like this: https://dosowisko.net/firefox-tabcenter.gif and I never stumbled upon a reasonable alternative, including the native implementation Mozilla recently added back into Firefox (though it's a step in the right direction).
After 2016 then Vivaldi and in the last couple of years Safari (there was a horrible admin 10 years ago)
My own thoughts on the AI feature: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/share-your-feedba... - LLM integrations can be useful and actually supporting end-users, but it must be based on entirely different paradigm (all about user agent automation, not a website in a sidebar) and it's probably best left out of the core application itself and rather be a external co-program.
As for the alternatives - to be honest, I don't really see much difference beyond various cosmetics. Both Zen and Floorp are basically the same Firefox for me, containing all the things I hate about Firefox ("sponsored" stuff everywhere, Firefox Account and Sync overengineering abomination, all the "safety" features that "protect" browser from its users, hardcoded built-in things that should be pluggable rather than fixed), while bringing nothing I actually care about and want to see (such as decluttering websites aggressively minimizing all the noise I don't care about - kinda like improved reader mode for everything by default, flexible automatic workflows for personal routine things, advanced history with optional content indexing for finding back things I vaguely remember seeing somewhere, automatic tab management to solve 100 open tabs problem, removal of tightly integrated bits like password or download management in favor of replaceable classic UNIX-way style external programs so I can use any tool I want while feeling those tools are properly truly and fully integrated and aren't some hacks like those password manager extensions messing with HTML).
Honestly, I'm sad that niche stuff like surf and Uzbl had essentially died, instead of evolving towards a pre-packaged "batteries included out of the box, but you can replace everything with your own" suites. I wished for a non-monolithic browser for technical/power users, with replaceable components for about a decade now - don't think I'll ever see it happening.
[1] I've been enjoying my self-hosted instance of LibreChat a lot, but I also started using Kagi's assistant lately. Besides those two I'm also using 'aichat' cli tool for quick queries, particularly for helping with cli commands since the context is already there.
I wouldn't mind a good novel application of machine learning that does something that can benefit me.
But a dedicated chatbot button to open a website in a sidebar, or, worse, spending resources on proxying requests to OpenAI/Anthropic/whoever, or even worse, running yet-another-GPU-cluster... all that doesn't make any sense to me (firefox "AI" integration is the first option). It's not something I actively want, and not even something that feels useful - it's rather a net negative as it distracts developer resources from doing something meaningful.
If Mozilla wants to tick some "AI" upper management bingo checkbox, at least please try doing something actually useful with it.
- web panel: to show/hide messenger/mail quickly. I don’t see it — no distractions — but it is instantly there when I need it - hor/vert. grid/tiling on keyboard shortcut: pair some web pages together so that they are visible/hidden at the same time - Firefox addons work (that I use) e.g., Vimium C - vertical tabs combined with compact mode that show/hides them on keyboard shortcut
It is available at http://o.rthost.win/palemoon/ , but make sure you don't download a 64-bit version by mistake. (Providing a non-secure http link because the MSIE version that ships with Windows XP is not compatible with modern https websites)
This only happens if you close a tab just above the bottom of your screen. You can scroll the entire list up past the point where any tabs will be obscured by the toast (which has an undo button), and it even does so by default when you open the list with one of the lower tabs active.
To reproduce your complaint I have to either explicitly scroll the tab I want to close into the area that will be obscured, or I have to have a tab higher in the list active, then open the list, and then close one of the tabs at the bottom of the screen.
> If I full-screen a video, the "you fullscreened a video!" message blocks the entire video progress bar so I can't move forward or back.
This is/was indeed annoying. It's been resolved in a recent update for me on Beta.
I've never seen the other two things you mention and I can't reproduce them, but they don't seem like UX issues, just bugs.
- I open link in new tab, a button to switch to it appears - and disappears right before I manage to click it (unless I'm on redbull, then it's fine). Every. Single. Time.
- extensions - why do I need to create my own list of extension and publish it, just to include some extension Mozilla didn't approve? It's not like they are checking them much anyway.
- stop the telemetry. Seriously. If I wanted someone spying on me I would have used Chrome. And even worse, stop contacting Google (firebaseinstallations.googleapis.com)! I'm blocking it all with NetGuard, but it's annoying knowing I can't trust the browser.
Not much else really. It works pretty nicely once you have the obligatory uBlock Origin installed and blocking in NetGuard set up.
- Installing custom addons is so obnoxiously complicated it makes me think Mozilla has it out for me sometimes. It's actually easier to sideload apps on Android than it is to "sideload" addons into Firefox mobile.
- You can either close all tabs or methodically select and close every individual tab, no in-between. Makes cleaning them up super tedious. Wish there was atleast an option to close all above or below (like close all left/right on desktop)
- Swiping left/right on a tab in the tab page will close it, closing tabs this way is slower than hitting the x button and seems to have some kind of rate limit? In practice it exists solely so I can accidentally trigger a swipe when scrolling and close an important tab I wanted (the undo pop-up only lasts a couple seconds so I only manage to undo about 2/3s the time. It seems to get dismissed if I don't perfectly select the right spot, but maybe that's just in my head).
- No way to duplicate existing tabs, this is honestly the silliest one to me, why wouldn't they let you do this? Who thought it was okay to leave this one out? Perhaps I've simply missed the option for this because I certainly can't find it anywhere. This isn't even a power user feature, it's like not being able to close the passenger window in the drivers seat of your car.
- The process for making new tabs is confusing, it will have an option to "jump back in" to the last tab you had opened but sometimes it will also replace that tab entirely and I can't understand why. Wish it was just a normal new tab page instead of whatever this is.
- Scrolling always seems fucked up on a bunch of sites, it sort of forces you to move the address bar to the top to make things work but the interface is so over-designed for your thumbs this ends up always being terrible.
- The interface just objectively sucks on tablets because of the over-designed for thumbs thing, Chrome reverts to standard tabs like you see on desktop, wish Firefox did the same, or at least something similar. Looks ridiculous.
Good Parts:
- I liked the way bookmarks/pinning works, use that all the time
- I love that I can use uBlock Origin, frankly this is the main reason I'm even using this thing
- I like the general idea of a page that shows all my tabs as little window boxes, just wish it was executed better.
- Reader mode is awesome, I barely use on desktop but it's critical on mobile. This is indirectly because the scrolling is fucked up on most sites because of the bar thing though so maybe this one only half counts. It would also be nice if they put the slightest bit of extra effort into the customization options for the reader page. This is literally just updating some values in a style-sheet after all... I would do it myself if addons weren't so painful
- It actually plays media when I change the app focus unlike the user hostile Chrome does, in practice this still doesn't actually work very reliably but I appreciate the effort
- I can install it from F-Droid
- I like that really old tabs get smushed into a menu that makes it easy to delete them. It's sort of niche and makes me wonder why they would implement this before any of the other more obvious features for managing tabs, but I digress, better than nothing.
True. Firefox sucks on DeX too because it lacks tabs in tablet mode..
- From a UX/UI perspective, its design feels outdated and lacks intuitive features that have become standard elsewhere.
- Features like 'tab previews', 'tab grouping', or built-in 'swipe gestures' for back/forward navigation are noticeably absent.
- While extensions may offer some workarounds, these should ideally be core functionalities, as relying on third-party solutions adds unnecessary complexity for users.
- It would be a significant improvement if Firefox natively supported these features or, at the very least, provided clearer documentation to help users seeking these features.
This has been in Firefox mobile for as long as I can remember.
Swiping for back navigation also works fine, but not forwards as near as I can tell.
Maybe these features are specific to Android?
And ublock origin on mobile really makes the web actually useful.
> Yes, I get that some people want it, and you can turn it off.
It is already off. You have to opt in to the 'experiments' area.
Edit: via Firefox. The odd thing about eww and ycombinator, the line size is limited on eww and you are limited to 1 line in eww. It is a eww thing, but surprisingly eww renders pages rather well.
I co-use Ffx alts to segment browsing - and as a quick fix for when sites develop Broken Control Syndrome.
Outside of the Ffx ecosystem, I'm using Brave (today) to test Google products and deal with Google's passive-aggressive hostility to Firefox.
I had tried Opera before Brave but it felt like being trolled. Something is very wrong in that house.
Well said! I do the same.
"That’s rather disconcerting if you’d like Mozilla to focus on making a good browser instead of chasing the new and shiny because it is new and shiny." - contradiction, you just conceded that there are Firefox users that want these new AI features, so no it's not just a shiny because it's shiny. Just because you don't want it doesn't mean it's "shiny for shiny".
"I’ll note that some of the AI stuff Mozilla is pursing is reasonable. The translation feature uses a local model for translation, which is a great idea. It doesn’t support all the languages that Google Translate does, but it’s good."
Great, it's not as good as one of the largest, richest companies on the planet, that has had translation as a feature for what like 20 years now. Firefox introduced translation like this year! Can't we just celebrate the successes when they happen and recognize it as an important step?
"the rollout of the ghastly Proton UI, which necessitated (and still necessitates) setting up Lepton aka Firefox-UI-Fix"
I'm so tired of this view, why can't people recognize when a UI preference is just a preference? The UI is fine. This is why browsers are configurable, so you can shape it to your preferences.
Don't get me wrong, there are lots of problems with Mozilla and things they could be doing better, but when these are being touted as the primary problems at the top of the article, it just seems petty and overly negative.