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Comment by chinathrow | Hacker News Reader

Look, we're having a good time on Firefox since November 9, 2004. Come join us!

My Ad Limiter add-on is down to 19 users on Firefox. Used to be thousands. It won't work on Chrome at all now. I'm shutting down SiteTruth, after almost 20 years.[1]

[1] https://www.sitetruth.com

Fwiw, I've been using Firefox for 20+ years, I hate ads with passion and yet I never heard of your add-on until just now.

I don't remember what I've used before uBlock Origin, but since its appearance it's basically solved the ad blocking on Firefox and became the de-facto standard for the browser.

You probably lost all your users to it, rather that they all stopped using FF.

> I don't remember what I've used before uBlock Origin

Most likely AdBlock Plus. It was basically the standard until they started allowing advertisers to pay to not have their ads blocked.

I hate to be the guy to say this, but uBlockOrigin outcompeted you half a decade ago. It's the first extension Install on a fresh install and I have never heard of your extension or site.

It was never intended to be a volume product. It was a demo of a system which fetched background info about companies. I'd hoped to license it to a search company. Then Google turned to the dark side and Yahoo gave up.

That's the first I've heard of it - I would have been using it! Still, thanks for contributing something good to the community.

or even since 2002 when it started as Phoenix

https://website-archive.mozilla.org/www.mozilla.org/firefox_...

I used to have Phoenix in a zip disk to use it every time I will go to my college computer lab. Good times.

I use both daily and Chrome is still faster and more intuitive, which is unfortunate because I'd really like to degoogle.

Use Un-googled Chromium - https://ungoogled-software.github.io/about/ ... it's Chrome without the Google crap.

Will ublock work with this?

Last I remember, they were contemplating retaining MV2 too in future releases so that uBlock (and other extensions don't lose functionality) - https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium/iss... ...

Was that the year they fired the Rust team to focus on paying their executives?

Let's not exchange crap behaviour. I think google would win hands down. Firefox at least has adblocking.

The classic 'those guys did something bad, so I am going to go with the guys who are absolute assholes doing several orders of magnitude more bad things now instead' response.

That usually means that whoever utters it was just looking for a sycophantic excuse to go with the bigger threat because it is more convenient to them (for now).

It's remarkable how often this happens, isn't it? One incident of someone not living up to standards is suddenly an opportunity to abandon standards and go with known bad actors. It's like people giving up on the MSM and immediately latching onto propaganda Youtubers instead.

People latch onto consistency and hypocrisy as their filters.

The problem is that anyone trying to actually be better is usually inconsistent and hypocritical at some level as in that "you criticize society, yet you participate in it" comic.

If you attempt to filter out all traces of hypocrisy from your trusted sources, you wind up listening to the absolute worst people.

The people trying to do better are usually the ones struggling with conflicts and inconsistencies.

Let's be real. People love their shiny big brands, and will find any tiny excuse to keep using them.

Not at all. Firefox is a trap to keep motivated people from banding together to create a real user-respecting alternative.

As a user at least I have an option to use ublock origin extension in Firefox. So I'm somewhat grateful I can still browse the net peacefully and safely.

That's exactly my point: You and many others accept a local optimum.

Maybe "wicked problem" is the new tech buzzword, but browsers certainly are one, and Mozilla messed it up. I blame Mitchell Baker for a big chunk. We don't need a new browser though. We need a new web.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem

Other way around isn't it? Google are the worst assholes for the time being so many as well go with the less bad assholes?

No it doesn't. Unlike Brave, Firefox needs an extension to block ads just like Chrome.

Yes, though it has the most powerful and customizable adblocker available.

Support Servo btw: https://opencollective.com/servo I do

Firefox did similar 10 years ago when they discontinued XPCOM and XUL

Right after they reach at least ~80% of customization Vivaldi offers!

This isn't the gotcha you think it is. Every time I try Vivaldi I am right back at Firefox and I am surely not alone. I have never understood the obsession with tree style tabs or vertical tabs. I don't need to customise my browser at all and I like supporting engine diversity.

went from Firefox to Vivaldi, never looked back for many years

on Android phone tried many, most recently was using Kiwi Browser, then for some time Firefox until they fucked up UI, so moved to Cromite, though my phone broke (never buy Google Pixel again, first broken phone after 15 years with smartphones and various brands including very low budget), so now I am on my old phone which for some reason doesn't support Cromite, so I am back at Firefox temporarily

Why not Vivaldi on android as well, and benefit from sync etc? That's what I've been doing for about 8 months now. Generally quite happy.

no extensions, cant live without uBlock Origin and few others

I use cromite also.Your old phone may work with version 138.0.7204.184 I believe uptown app store offers that version.

thanks for the tip, I assumed some older version would work but anyway using it only temporarily until I switch to something more modern and can deal with that UI for few days/weeks at worst, anyway Cromite has its cons as well, it regularly exit UbO which need to be relaunched (plus also the UbO menu is cropped and not fully displayed), that's sort of deal breaker compared to UI, I am experiecing it quite frequently, I wish there would be Kiwi Browser successor which would have stable UbO support, Helium doesn't even support MV2 and Ultimatum also didn't work very good to me, so might as well return to FF even on new phone despite the horrible UI

The motivation for vertical tabs is pretty straightforward, screens are mostly wider than they are tall, browsers are often used in fullscreen mode, yet much of the web does not use much of the screen's width. So it's a better use of screen space to put tabs on the side than on top.

tabs also contain horizontal text

True. And when I first saw that Tor browser (i.e. Firefox) offered a vertical tabs mode without the tab title (and only the favicons), I thought it was the stupidest vertical tab UI design possible. But then I decided to try it for a week, and guess what - I appreciated the extra space, and it wasn't as hard identifying the tabs through their favicons as I thought it would be. And if needed you can always drag the vertical tab sidebar to reveal the tab title. (Note though that I am not one of these people who opens 100's of tabs and keeps it open. In fact, I find too many tabs cluttering and distracting and if I need to scroll to find my tabs I start closing the tabs).

Of course, Firefox does support vertical tabs nowadays :) (Not tree-style though.)

What are you on about? :) Give Sidebery a try. The king of all tree-style tab browsers and the #1 reason I won't move away from Firefox.

Heh true, I did actually use Sidebery before switching to the built-in vertical tabs, which is what I was referring to - but yes, extensions can add tree-style tabs.

Firefox and Firefox-derivative browsers have and continue to be seriously sluggish and memory and energy hogs. This should not be swept under the rug.

Even today it is difficult for me to use Firefox, Mullvad, etc. When I used to use them, almost every time my machine became slow the solution was to kill Firefox.

EDIT: It's true folks, I would love to be able to use Firefox as my primary browser. But all my experience with it (and I used it for more than a decade) has been dogged by its sluggishness.

Firefox is only sluggish because Chrome uses your data to prefetch pages.

This does not make sense. Firefox would be taking minutes to open a page that Chrome opens within a second or two. And if Chrome was doing aggressive pre-fetching, then it should be using more memory, no? And yet the opposite is the case.

Not denying your experience but if it is taking "minutes" then that sounds like a highly specific glitch that you should try to debug.

Speaking personally I have used Firefox pretty much exclusively for 20+ years, always on low-end hardware. It's been years since I last had any performance issues.

I use Firefox mobile pretty much exclusively. I haven't noticed any meaningful performance difference between it & Chrome. It also seems to perform fine on my Fedora laptop.

Mobile is different. I rarely even use mobile. I do however use a lot of tabs on desktop, and Firefox is found very wanting in the performance department.

I don't even think its about number of tabs. Just yesterday and today, Mullvad browser takes minutes to load a set of about 7 pinned tabs (with no other tabs) on startup, whereas Helium (which is based on Chromium) loads in a second or two close to a hundred tabs.

My Firefox currently has 33 tabs open (way more than usual). It opens in seconds on my 9 year old i7-7700k desktop.

I feel for people who have this issue--wish I could help you solve it, but I can't repro. My 10-year-old laptop with 16 GB runs it great with low memory usage.

I found that in general, Firefox works fast enough that I can't tell the difference in performance between it and Chromium-based browsers. I have 128 GB of RAM on my desktop, so even if it's a memory hog, I'd never notice.

However, occasionally I'd run into sites with terrible performance issues. Facebook [0] was often insanely slow on Firefox and would sometimes freeze up entirely.

I wanted a Chromium-based browser but didn't want Chrome, Edge, or Brave. I ended up landing on Vivaldi and have been happy with it so far.

[0] Yeah, yeah, ridicule me all you want for still using Facebook, but I enjoy it because I don't have shitty friends.

Then again, our laptop battery only lasts 1/3 as much on MacOS.

I know, I know. The community keeps pretending this isn’t an issue for the last, hum, 15 years? But it is, and for people that are looking for a tool and not for a statement, it quickly drives them away from Firefox back to Chrome browsers.

Anything to back those claims up? I use Firefox and didn't really notice this (although I am rarely on battery), and other than Google Meet making my machine throttle (and I blame that on Google not on Mozilla), I don't use Chrome for anything else for my browsing.

I've used Firefox across devices, across the years. This just isn't my experience, at all, remotely. And I have had to use Chrome (now it is Edge) for many work functions, so I do have the A/B comparisons. I'm not doubting your experience, fine, but I also know I'm not "pretending" anything in my own experience.

Firefox on Android 16, it sucks the battery up in background mode (even with permission to use background turned off).

If I manually close it no issue.

I believe you.

I also do not, and have never, experienced this. I've been using Pixel phones since the 3a in 2019/2020.

doesn't happen in my case (OnePlus 15/Android 16, Firefox background usage allowed in some "smart" mode whatever that means, doesn't suck the battery in background although it's on most of the time).

Doesn't happen in my case, either. Pixel 9a, Android 16.

I have better battery life on Furi FX1s than any of my Android devices (Pixel 6a, Fairphone 4). This is with closing applications when I no longer need them on all devices.

Sorry, forgot to say pixel 7a, not sure why I got downvoted though?

I'm still going to use Firefox, I just hope the battery issue I experience goes away.

ublock origin lite + adguard on safari are pretty decent.

yeah I love Firefox - but it takes a lot of memory + drains battery faster

I never went back to Firefox after they killed the Pimpzilla theme.

Conventionally, jokes not terminated with smileys aren't accepted on HN.

It's not a joke. The Pimpzilla theme stopped working due to changes that Mozilla made to Firefox's layout system, and I dropped Firefox for Safari. Never went back.

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