Firefox instead desperately needs to focus on making it a high performance browser that people enjoy using for.....browsing.
They can start with fixing the spell check, which is hilariously awful for 2008. And we are in 2025.
Signed, a 20 year user.
97% of Windows users wouldn’t notice if it followed OS conventions and the remaining 3% would complain that it was following the current conventions instead of copying Word 2003 :)
There are so many improvements that can make the browsing experience significantly better. I wish they picked at least some of these things instead of stuffing AI in yet another sidebar.
Or they can steal vertical tabs from Vivaldi.
Or they can steal the built-in RSS client form Vivaldi.
Or they can steal the ability to save sessions from Vivaldi.
Or they can steal the built-in notes from Vivaldi.
Or they can steal the tab stacking from Vivaldi.
Or they can steal the profile switching from Vivaldi.
Honest question. What could Vivaldi "steal" from Firefox?
Firefox has this ability to separate cookies etc into different partitions, and users can make use of this feature by opening tabs in different containers. Many times when I use profiles in other browsers what I really want is container tabs.
That combined with sideberry makes Firefox the superior one when I was checking if Vivaldi was worth switching to.
I just ended up with mounds of rules about what to open in the same container vs not, what urls to force in a given container, etc.
I still want to like them, but TBH, I don't miss them in Vivaldi.
Totally willing to accept I was doing containers wrong, I guess, but in that case, I don't know what "right" would've looked like.
The game changer is Sideberry. It makes manually managed container tabs almost effortless. Instead of messing with auto rules, you would:
- Set default containers for each pane;
- Use shortcuts to open new sibling/child tab in the same container;
- Save/restore tabs as bookmarks keeping their containers.
It’s still not perfect UI, but in reality covers all the use cases where I’d reach for a container.
It’s just so much peaceful to know that I won’t accidentally tie anything to the google account, while still have gmail open in that cyan backgrounded tab just a ctrl-tab away.
Maybe I can go back to Zen just to get more layers out of my browser sammich.
Not being so weirdly buggy on Windows. It's my main browser but man does it have odd behaviors that need restarts occasionally.
Firefox already has vertical tabs and they work great.
> Or they can steal the profile switching from Vivaldi.
I'm pretty sure that Firefox has profile switching in some capacity, although I don't personally use it and can't vouch for it.
As for the rest of these, I agree completely. Firefox has too many wacky AI experiments and not enough normal browser features.
I think, obviously, that is not enough. I think we all know that, and are in various stages of denial. I think that fixing spell check is going to do jack fucking shit.
Is there a spell check feature implemented anywhere that isn't garbage? I swear half the time the red squiggles are false positives. I have taken to copy and pasting words into search engines to find spelling corrections because spell checkers are so fucking unreliable.