All of the other browsers have some other vector to push their browser. Safari, Edge and Chrome are all preinstalled on OSs and chrome is advertised on the biggest website in the world.
Even if firefox is slightly better than the rest it doesn't matter. Chrome only exists because IE was so bad people went out of their way not to use it.
To be fair, FF shot themselves in the foot. They didn't keep pace with Chrome. I use FF and think it is better NOW, but that wasn't always the case. I think that's where they lost their market share. I'm glad they put the work into Quantum. But it is going to be hard to regain that market share.
The classic problem of being first to market in software, is that your competition can learn from your design and move forward with a fresh code. Firefox is still trying to shed off code from a decade ago.
The history of browsers is littered with legacy code being defeated by new code.
Except Chrome wasn't some brand new project. It was Webkit which was KHTML and dated back to the mid 90s. They just wrote their, uh, chrome layer and js engine a half decade later which were, and still are, reaping tangible benefits.
Chrome only exists because Google were afraid of lacking control over the stack they use to deliver their content. Firefox was already 'good enough' long before it ever appeared, and Google could easily have dedicated engineering resources if the problem with Firefox was purely technical, much as they do with Linux.
FWIW a lot of Google behavior can be cast as an analogy to a paranoid control freak. Net neutrality is an obvious one, the incredible lack of any demarcating information useful for traffic shaping in QUIC is another. But of course both of these are really about citizen rights and privacy :)
Only if you as "good enough" define "with Javascript even slower than IE." I've personally never used Chrome, because since even the first days it already had more "protected" installation than some malware, and that never made me confident in their intentions (and I've never liked Chrome UI) but Firefox has always had performance problems. As Chrome appeared it had extremely fast JS, and only then others "woke up."
Mozilla was working on a tracing JIT for JS before Google announced V8, although I believe V8 was released before the first version of Firefox with TraceMonkey was.
Being visually nearly indistinguishable from chrome hasn't really worked in its favor. (quick, which is which: http://9ol.es/double-browser.png). Probably north of 95% don't know about or understand licensing differences or differences in rendering engines or core architecture. Interfaces and obvious features with compelling narratives are what matter because that's how the user engages with the product.
Asking users to go out of their way to install and use something that looks and feels identical to what they already have for reasons most people don't know, understand, or deeply care about and do not get surfaced in any meaningful way is not a winning strategy. A case has to be made in the battle of perception and the decreasingly small visual differentiation hasn't helped build it.
Al Ries's laws of marketing and branding and Donald Norman's models of differentiation apply equally to all products regardless of the economic and institutional structure that builds them.
Is that the timeline here? In that case it was Chrome using its market position cleverly and Firefox not responding adequately. I can only speak for linux interfaces btw.
Small "bullshit" interface changes can have dramatic user and marketshare impact. We can all sit around and wish the world didn't work this way but it's not going to change.
Firefox has alternatively had closer-to-curved-rects or boxy tabs for practically its whole lifetime. Chrome went heavy on diagonal-edged tabs early on, and relatively recently they've been undoing that.
they're even mimicking Firefox's scrollable tab-bar since it's such an obvious win over a million super-narrow tabs that you can't possibly identify.
> they're even mimicking Firefox's scrollable tab-bar since it's such an obvious win over a million super-narrow tabs that you can't possibly identify.
The non-scrollable tabs are what I miss most about Chrome. I know I'm not in a majority there, but I wouldn't call it an obvious win.
about:config has `browser.tabs.tabMinWidth` :) just set it to 0.
Though I firmly believe that about:config is in no way a user-viable option (as useful as it can be, for dev purposes), so I don't intend to imply that means "firefox has that too". It doesn't, it just has a workaround.
yea, doesn't really surprise me. most about:config is pretty hit or miss. out of curiosity tho: was that before the UI overhaul (i.e. have you done it since it became HTML+CSS instead of XUL)?
personally I'm loving Tree Style Tab, so I don't really pay attention to the tabbar any more.
It was within a month or so after the official release of Firefox's new theme that it became publicly known that Chrome was working on a new theme, too. So, there was no way they could have adequately responded to that. You just can't rebrand twice within a year.
I'd kinda agree. As described in Zero to One, to convince shift users to adopt, you need a product that is an order of magnitude superior to the incumbent. Incremental changes or parity mostly won't cut it. A browser would have to be radically innovative or better to gain share which is difficult considering the services Google has hooked into it.
Mozilla did this (below) once, about 15 years ago when knocking IE from it's 95+% 2004 marketshare, they need to find a way to do it again:
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” - R. Buckminster Fuller
It was quite a bit different then. IE was in the "first mover" batch. Chrome is the "last mover". It was easy to knock out the first mover as things had stalled yet there was still lots of innovation to be done. But browsers have since commoditized, and the door for differentiation has closed. Especially as browsers inherently need to match each other through web standards. I don't see a way for 2D browsers to rise up against Chrome. Firefox, after hundreds of millions of dollars over the last several years, hasn't made radical changes.
Personally, I'm chasing VR and AR to be the new wave of the Web, where browsing experience will be heavily differentiated.
Netscape Navigator had substantially beat IE as a first-mover in the market and the mind.
IE wasn't a first-mover, it was bundled with the computer, it won as the most available, just like Starbucks vs. Coffee Bean - later comers can be assumed as more readily available then their perceived equivalencies. Firefox broke through by shattering the consumer's perception of equivalence.
The door for differentiation in the same way as before has closed, but not for differentiation in other ways that people immediately perceive.
Lacking a prescriptive direction that Mozilla Inc should take to establish this doesn't invalidate the observation, you can describe an illness without knowing the cure.
It's more than just visually indistinguishable; historically a big chunk of the Firefox user base have been (a) power users, and (b) people who listen to power users for computer advice.
Power users ceased being particularly important or influential in the early 2010s. Computers have gotten easier for an average person to use and maintain without needing to be de-wormed every 4 months, all browsers are "good enough" unlike the times if IE6, Google's brand is ridiculously powerful and is further able to push Chrome via Android preinstall.
I didn't see any indication as to their methodology for how they're calculating these stats. It's probably been said a zillion times before, but if it's JavaScript-based you can safely assume that they are incorrect as it's likely there is a large intersection between people browsing with an ad-blocker, private browsing, or with content blocker and those people using Firefox.
> it's hard to argue that drop isn't related to a drop in the underlying number of users
We would need more data to determine that. What the site here is showing is a decline in the percentage of marketshare, which is a relative measure, not an absolute one. Even if Firefox were seeing a net gain of users, if it's doing so at a slower rate than the market is growing overall, then that would be reflected as a decline in marketshare.
Very interesting link, thanks! Frankly, I'd much rather see that submitted to HN than a site like netmarketshare, who are known for applying opaque weights to their data in an attempt to normalize regions.
Probably. Mozilla getting funding would depend on these numbers. And one of the most common addons is user agent switcher. For awhile Netflix allowed Chrome on linux and not Firefox (even though they assured me that wasn't the issue). But I could get around it by doing a user agent switch.
People do this for fingerprinting too. I'm sure there are plenty of people that always have it on and set to Chrome.
Also, Mozilla higher ups might be using these statistics to see how worthwhile the new features and work they have done.
In addition to the higher prevalence of privacy (/ad blocking) conscious users on Firefox, Mozilla has also been aggressively making it easier to enable tracker blocking natively, and turning it on by default in certain cases. This has been happening with progressive versions as they're more confident it won't break large numbers of sites. Rollout of those features does actually mean this type of data needs to be interpreted differently depending on methodology.
It probably almost doesn't matter if they're wrong - if they see this decline in users, true or not, then so will people monitoring users to their websites, and they will be likely to stop testing their sites on Firefox.
Also it's a drop - do you think the number of people turning off JavaScript has gone up since Quantum? Why would that be? It's either that or less Firefox users.
It's not so much that users have turned off all JavaScript but blocked tracking elements. Take a look at Content Blocking (formerly Tracking Protection): https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection. It makes it dead simple to enable and disable for an average user and blocks tracking elements like Google Analytics, etc.
Looking at netmarkshet website and web requests it seems this pulls from gator.io for metrics. Looks like 3k-4k websites have this data which lines up with the previous statment.
https://publicwww.com/websites/%22gator.io%22/
Chrome has adblocker too and I's say the number of people using them there is similar or even bigger. On the other side is the number of peiple actually using privacy-related addon very small. Even on Firefox it seems to be something around 5%.
Though, Firefox now has some blocking-mechanisms on it's own. Not sure if they are activated by default, but it would be interessting to see how they influence such usage-collecting scripts.
I flip flop between Firefox and Chrome often. Lately I am on Firefox because I was trying to isolate a fatal crash I kept having on my brand new Macbook Pro (it would lock up completely, but cursor would still move and audio would still work and then it would inevitably shut itself off)
Since ditching Chrome the issue has not come up again ... but not sure if it's correlation or causation.
There are a few things I do not like about Firefox but the web inspect or is definitely miles ahead of Webkit.
I give Firefox a chance every few months, and even after all their work I still feel like it has occasional performance issues and I end up right back in Chrome.
if there was a warning that said “all activity on this browser will be sent to google and sold to advertisers” chrome would still have 60% market share
I would love to use Firefox more for dev, but until it has a first class way to disable CORS, I can't. "CORS Everywhere" is not sufficient (it alters responses, but does not actually disable CORS, which doesn't cover all needs).
Chrome I can at least disable CORS via the command line, and Safari does it best by putting it in a Developer menu that I can easily toggle.
Firefox's dev tools also seem to still be behind — I haven't seen a good way to inspect WebSocket frames, for instance.
I would really prefer to use Firefox due to Mozzila's stances on privacy, especially in contrast to Google; however, I have to use the tool that lets me actually get work done.
I love using Firefox as my daily driver, and I can always pop open chrome if I really have to. What kind of life do you lead where your browser needs to have CORS constantly disabled?
This can be helpful in development scenarios. I’m supporting a team that uses localstack to support local development against some AWS services. Unfortunately, the CORS settings for localstack break the development environment. With Chrome allowing them to disable from the command-line, I can provide a shortcut to launch with degraded security, no plugins, no user settings, etc. My only wish is that Chrome would make it more obvious that it’s running with these protections disabled.
>My only wish is that Chrome would make it more obvious that it’s running with these protections disabled.
I know this is beginning to become off-topic, but why? Presumably, if you're using a flag that has to be run from the command-line, you're either doing it on purpose or using hardware you don't own (and a keylogger is a much greater risk than anything else at that point)
I can't speak for OP, but for me the problem is that I likely already have normal Chrome windows open when I start a "special" Chrome instance with a private profile and other settings. So now when I see a Chrome window I would like to be sure whether it's my normal user profile or the special profile.
In practice, it's not a problem for me, because the presence or absence of my usual row of extension icons and profile photo is enough of a clue.
But I could see where someone who doesn't normally sign into Chrome, or who doesn't have very many extensions in their normal Chrome profile, could have trouble distinguishing it from their a profile. The windows will tend to look pretty similar.
Exactly. If I need to run a browser in a special configuration, I want to take every precaution to avoid using it for anything but the intended purpose. Since I disable my profile and extensions, I get similar cues.
The problem I see is that not everyone takes the same precautions. And plenty of developers accumulate these sort of tweaks and hacks in their daily driver without realizing or remembering that they've crippled their own security posture.
From a UX perspective, my preference is to make it clear when normal security mechanisms are disabled.
Not really. In lots of relatively large companies there is a good relationship between infrastructure, development and security teams and they will work to find a solution that works for everybody.
It's 2 lines of code with most modern web frameworks with junior level knowledge required. Actually, any people with decent dev skills (any people that receives money for code should...) add a conf switch for that since the begining of the project.
Because having code that behaves differently on development and production is never a solution, it's a workaround. Having bugs that can't be reproduced locally is the worst thing that can happen to a developer. So yeah, you can _just_ put environment settings if you have no other possible way, but you should really avoid it if there is any other one (like using chrome with CORS disabled, here).
Mentioned this in another response. In this case, that requires the addition of another component. The app itself is serving a valid CORS policy. The stub we're using to support S3 development offline (LocalStack) ignores the configuration it's passed.
I agree with you that fixing the headers (via a proxy in this case) is the right solution. I'm just not able to prioritize right now.
Beyond that, there are always going to be occasions where developers, security analysts, and testers need to bypass default security enforcement. I'd like to see every browser provide a way to make these adjustments for a one-off session (e.g., via a command-line switch). It's an efficient solution that I can offer when I come across a nasty hack living permanently in a developer's web configuration.
By that same argument, using Chrome with CORS disabled is just as bad, if not worse. If you only test in Chrome with CORS disabled, how do you know that CORS works at all?
The web server is configuring CORS policy properly, but the browser is making client-side calls to localstack. As far as I can tell, localstack has hardcoded a CORS policy that is a mismatch for the requests being sent.
The cleanest solution is to extend the dev pipeline with a proxy for localstack. It won't take me long to knock that out, but it's not something I can prioritize at the moment.
Not sure if it might have this but have you tried using Firefox Developer Edition? I would suggest if disabling CORS is missing to request it for Firefox Developer Edition. Its Firefox bleeding edge with some developer focused plugins out of the box.
At the very least, CORS should be disabled for localhost. I build interfaces using create-react-app, which launches a dev server on localhost:3000 (useful for things like live reload), making requests on a go api on localhost:5000. On production, both are on :80 and the backend serves frontend production files. This is annoying to alter the application code just to handle dev environment (although, this already happen in many other places, so it's not critical).
For testing a client side app in development locally against a remote API, disabling cors is really handy.
I have localhost.com in my hosts file and a local web server to run around it, but it's still really frustrating not being able to turn it off entirely.
I develop browser based video games that talk to a central API that I control.
I mostly have the setup you describe, and most development happens against a CORS-free staging server. But it's often necessary to build a local prod version that is identical to the live version for debugging or analysis, that plays against real players and reads/writes to the same data store.
It's an edge case, and in the past when I've done web development simply turning off CORS on staging has trivially solved any issues. But it does feel a bit like the developers of the browsers have chosen not to include the feature in a "we're smarter than you, trust us, you don't want this" kind of way. For the most part, they're probably right.
This is one of my gotchas (and I prefer to do so from the commandline). I also need a good extension manager and a session/tab manager. The extension manager makes it easy to disable extensions that are only used occasionally. The session manage makes it easier for me to keep tab count down.
I have found a few session manager options on Firefox but most suffer from permission bloat and poor UI.
Last I checked, there was nothing to make it easier to manage add-ons.
Most folks set up a little proxy--or configure CORS if the other end of the pipe is owned or cooperative--rather than throw out the baby with the bathwater due to inability to disable an important security measure.
More devs should support and use it, lest we be beholden to Chrome for the rest of time.
Why support what already broke your work once without an actual transition plan? They didn't have a full replacement ready to go when they got rid of XUL, and seemed that they didn't really care.
Anyone who ignores prior treatment of folks is foolish.
Why would a web developer support one browser over others? They keep everyone honest by sticking to the middle road and not having a badge like "Works Best In FireFox".
At the end of August of 2018 they stopped supporting 52 ESR which is the last extended support release that supports the old addons.
During the 3 years between a and b mozilla worked to provide support for flexible interesting addons which is why all the notable interesting addons I'm aware of have new versions.
I'm sure that the will to port every useful addon in existence just isn't there but it seems challenging for firefox to move forward without ditching the old addons.
Did you realize the new addon system was released over 3 years ago? It kind of seems as if perhaps as a user you were only peripherally aware of matters and derived an erroneous interpretation of events.
Financially, Mozilla is currently entirely dependent on a search contract with Google, their mortal enemy.
They obviously see that this relationship is extremely risky, especially as Firefox becomes less popular and thus their userbase less valuable to Google. As such, they're trying to diversify their revenue stream.
Do you have any better solutions? Browsers are absurdly expensive to develop, by the way.
Firefox is improving by leaps and bounds every day.
But the market is not a meritocracy, as much as some people like to pretend it is. Success in the market is much more to do with things like marketing, momentum, inertia, and general opinions. All of these things are favoring Chrome right now, and Mozilla is not in a position to turn this around.
And you may not have noticed, but being popular doesn't actually give you money when your product is free and features no ads or tracking. All you are saying is that "google should give mozilla more money". How do you suggest they diversify their revenue stream?
I disagree. IMHO Chrome is a better browser than Firefox. A few examples from the top of my head why Firefox is worse than Chrome (on Linux):
1. Hardware acceleration is still disabled by default on Linux
2. Pocket
3. Unwanted notifications about wanting to update / being updated / having updated
3. Ugly spacing left and right of the adress bar
4. Takes longer to start
5. No integration with GNOME keychain.
6. Ctrl+Q quits the browser.
7. Laggy UI
> How do you suggest they diversify their revenue stream?
I would suggest that they don't need to diversify their revenue stream. As long as they are a major player, Google (or any other search engine) will continue to fund them.
Sure, you can also fix a lot of other annoyances. But those add up until the point where someone just installs Chrome in the first place where the defaults are sane.
DevTools are lacking and they broke a ton of add ons with the API update (with no simple way to side load.) I can't use it. I tried again about five months ago and, one two machines, pages would stutter as I scrolled. Not worth my time to mess around with.
Would love to know your favorite add-ons that are broken and not available in AMO for FF57+ some of the contributors during their free time working on to bring extensions. can you share link or about the addon ( https://github.com/firefox-addons/ideas )
Session managers no longer work reliably since the apis for reading and writing tab and window state are not exposed. This is the biggest one for me. Also vertical tabs addons have been fighting an uphill battle.
Well, it would help if they would resolve the serious quality issues. I wrote a webpage the other day, fully standards compliant (at least as I read it), and Firefox got it completely wrong (one of the bugs, three days old and not triaged[0]) in a way Ed.
I still have open bugs in Firefox from 2012. Firefox is riddled with layout and scripting bugs. I don't understand how they can afford all of this experimental development and "outreach" stuff, when the core product is basically just accumulating bugs which they will never address. Their tracker is full of untriaged bugs from as far back as a decade.
It is virtually never required. Even Chrome's interpretation of undefined behaviours is convenient (i.e. margin: auto on elements with only a max-height; this doesn't work in EdgeHTML or Gecko)
I'd support it if it felt like a first-class citizen on macOS. It's ironic that everyone decries Electron for not being native, then says you should use Firefox when it violates so much about the platform that it's not even funny.
A bug about overflow scrolling (the default bouncing when you scroll over in macOS) has been open for years. It doesn't fit in.
I'm not sure what Mozilla's deal is these days, to be honest, but Firefox really just doesn't feel like it fits in on Mac. It's frustrating, because I want to support it... but I just end up back in Safari because it feels far more smooth and integrated.
I got into using macOS later on but after 10 years of Firefox I had no issue with it on the Mac. I guess I possibly did not even notice the bugs mentioned. Ironically I couldnt use Chrome after beta cause I was too used to how Firefox works.
I was originally using chrome for pretty much everything, but I started getting annoyed with the performance hiccups and I wasn't switching over to Safari because of the failure of the extension ecosystem ($99 to publish an extension?). Firefox being the best choice out there has been positive to the point where I don't have Chrome installed on anything other than my phone.
I really would like to say that I find it ridiculous that mac users consistently bash Firefox due to feeling it doesn't belong while they use Google Chrome.
How is Google Chrome more AppleOS then Firefox? Granted I can't stand AppleOS and find the UI to be totally frustrating still in 2018 and how old it feels. How is Firefox any different then Google Chrome?
The reason was Mozilla killed embedding. Making everything an XULRunner app was supposed to be the future solution, but precluded native apps like Camino and K-Meleon from doing their thing, and while Mozilla had "reasons" I thought and continue to think it was incredibly shortsighted. Look at all the Chromium and WebKit shells. You just can't do that with Gecko on desktop (this may be changing on Android, though).
My main machines (both personal and work) runs macOS and I find Firefox to fit in fine. Certaintly does what I expect 99.9% of the time. Scrolling for instance seems to work as expected (and on par with Safari which I occassionally use). Can you share more examples?
On Linux with KDE that web-extension change killed the kwallet integration too. But you are right when you are saying that it degrades the user experience of MacOS users :-(
Does Apple provide a correct specification for implementing overflow scrolling on custom window controls? Or is a default behavior that only Apple-blessed graphic components have? Failing to follow the Apple guidelines would be bad for Firefox. If the issue is not having a spec, we'd be talking about Apple actively sabotaging apps like Firefox.
I'm a Firefox user on macOS and I don't remember issues with scrolling. I don't use a trackpad, maybe that's the issue?
Pinch to zoom is also non-existent so Firefox becomes useless for a many adults/elderly with poor eye-sight or even just many other users who like to browse and zoom on text/pictures etc.
It's so frustrating that this feature is not available in Firefox when you are promoting it. The absence of this feature in my small survey is the main reason people quit using Firefox.
I'm honestly a bit confused. This is the second comment I've seen regarding the lack of this feature. It's not one I ever use purposefully, so maybe I just don't understand what's missing. But, with Firefox on my Samsung Galaxy, I can zoom in and out of text and photos by pinching, with no issues at all. Was it a long time ago when you last tried it perhaps?
I think they mean desktop Firefox on a touchscreen laptop, rather than mobile Firefox. Personally, I can't imagine trying to pinch-zoom on a desktop, but maybe I'm just old.
They're talking about a gesture that's specific to the Macbook trackpad; namely, the implementation you see in Safari, which is not the typical browser 'zoom' function that increases the size of elements and reflows the page, but rather zooms in to show you a subset of the DOM canvas as rendered, like mobile browsers do. It is definitely a handy feature but to characterize it as a missing 'standard' functionality I don't think is fair. No desktop browser had this functionality until Safari ported it over from the mobile version a few releases back as I recall, though Chrome has since copied it.
On Microsoft Surface in tablet mode I often want to pinch zoom. It works but it's limited to the discrete zoom levels that you see with Ctrl+ and Ctrl- so you don't get the smooth zoom you get on Chrome. I still prefer FF for a variety of other reasons so to me it's just a nitpick.
Latest version on MacOS
It's one of the primary gestures of MacOS, and is in heavy use with casual users. It's f.x the primary method of reading material on websites that my parents use.
I like firefox, and use it a lot at work as generally my main browser with DDG as the , but I end up going back to chrome quite a bit
Things that bug me
- For some reason often when I have quite a few tabs, open link in new tab stops working, the tab appears then disappears instantly, oddly if I use Vimium to open the tab in a new link it works. Mostly I use Vimium so this is not too much of a problem
- Copy pasting of formatted html is worse than Chrome.
- Confluence runs like a pig on Firefox for some reason, completely unusable on some pages, not strictly a FF problem, but is problematic.
- Just something about the aesthetics that is somehow "off"
On the positive
- I like the developer tools
- "Column select" out of the box just works
- scrolling tab bar instead of teeny tiny tabs where you can't see anything is good
- I feel better that I'm hopefully leaking less data, not that I can really verify that, but I generally believe I should be better protected than if I was using chrome
Overall, while there is cool things about FF, I feel I'm using it not because its the better browser, but some vauge idea I'm helping browser diversity.
I agree more option other chrome is a positive. Started to use duck duck go browser on mobile and so far so good.
Firefox has always been a resource hog and crash prone for me on just about any system. Although I use it primarily for some of its features and prefer it over chrome.
It's been a really long time I experienced any crash from Firefox. Last time I had instabilities, it was due to my profile. Deleting it solved the issues.
This. And their dark theme is way better than any Chrome extension. The big deal is that Chrom(ium) has taken over the rapidly growing desktop webapp market with ElectronJS, and AFAIK there is no Electron competitor that uses the modern, Quantum FF stack.
I actually tried switching. I found Firefox to be still slower than Chrome. At least on Google sites it may not be their fault but knowing where to put the blame doesn't help me on my end. Marketing doesn't seem like the likely fix.
Are you on Mac? If yes, it's not a feeling, it's a real problem Mozilla is trying to address but have yet to crack. Firefox is an order of magnitude more performant on windows and linux.
This isn't because of that. Although even if it was, my entire point was that at the end of the day if Firefox is slower, even if it's Google playing dirty, that's going to make users like me not want to use it over Chrome.
Hasn't Firefox been around for longer than Chrome...? It's a bit off-putting when they can't seem to solve popular platform issues.
I've been on Chrome for a long time, tried to switch to FF when Quantum came out and couldn't hear myself think over the sound of my laptop winding up.
Yes it is. Given that their team is top notch and their intent has been great so far, I will go with "it's a freaking hard problem and google could afford spending millions of dollars to solve it" kind of explanation.
Another reason could be that Google
optimizes both sides of the Chrome/Google webapp interaction but doesn't care very much about optimizing for any other browser than Chrome.
Once you realize that not being evil isn't a priority at Google anymore this explanation actually makes some sense.
I've never had any issues on my Mac. Then again, I'm using an MBA 2012 sans Retina. If you are using displays with "non-standard" resolution (including Retina), even external ones, then you can refer to my other post[1] for background.
For personal email I'm on FastMail, but my work email is still Gmail (not my choice). I found Gmail to behave like shit in Firefox.
Then I tried it in Chrome and found that Gmail behaves like shit in Chrome too.
The solution however was to drop Gmail's web interface. Switched to a desktop client. If you're on MacOS I think MailMate is the best.
Couldn't be happier. And this advice is independent of your browser choice.
PS: the fact that Google's online properties are optimized for Chrome should make you realize that Chrome is the new IExplorer and it's our fault for allowing it to happen ;-)
I use Firefox for development, but I use safari (privately) and edge (professionally) for browsing, and see no real advantages to using either Firefox or Chrome for that.
I think modern Firefox is a much better browser than Chrome though, but Mozilla certainly lost the PR war and to no fault but their own, because Firefox sure sucked for a long while.
The advantage of Firefox / Chrome in general is that if you develop habits / shortcuts you can use them in any OS. Safari only works on macOS and edge on Windows.
Both their plugin ecosystems are significantly less robust as well e.g if you want to use any popular tools e.g shodan, google data saver, edit this cookie, etc
What I like in chrome is search shortcuts, example I start typing "thes" then press TAB, then I'm brought directly to https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/hello (possibly with little configuration).
I don't think Firefox has similar things, last time I checked we have to use bookmarks or something
If you think using Chrome is selling your soul to the devil I wonder what you think about me who is fully integrated in the Google ecosystem with Google Home and everything.
In Firefox you can add a bookmark and set a keyword for that bookmark. If the URL of the bookmark contains "%s", it'll get replaced by everything you type in the URL bar after the keyword. For example I have a bookmark for Wikipedia with the keyword "wp". So when I type "wp Y Combinator" I end up on the Wikipedia page about Y Combinator.
I really enjoy this feature and even catch myself regularly trying to use it on other computers, which obviously don't have such keywords defined.
Yeah, but the indicator that you’re using such a bookmark when typing “wp Foo” in the address bar is really poor. When you use the OpenSearch search engine integration you can also set a keyword but it’s highlighted properly. Downside is that you need to enable the separate search bar to get the option to add a site’s OpenSearch provider when visiting it because the small looking glass gets a tiny plus you need to click.
I recently switched from chrome to Firefox but the search engine situation is something I’m not really happy about.
> Downside is that you need to enable the separate search bar to get the option to add a site’s OpenSearch provider when visiting it because the small looking glass gets a tiny plus you need to click.
Nope, you can just right-click the site's own search bar, which is how I've been doing it forever.
I think that adds it as a bookmark which is not the same thing as an OpenSearch provider because it doesn’t give you the blue highlight when searching with it.
Actually this is exactly what lorenzhs said, and it is my experience too. I know this because I spent half an hour trying to get a “blue search” for BBFC.
Yup that’s what I meant. The right click -> add as search engine creates a bookmark which doesn’t get the blue highlight when using it. That distinction just doesn’t make sense to me.
Didn't know about this either. Awesome and helps alleviate a pain point... but a) how the hell would any normal user know to do this? And b) how long until it is yet another undocumented feature dropped by Firefox?
Yeah this is the worst in firefox. I'm desperately trying to stick to firefox out of principle, but Chrome is just sooo much more comfy beacuse of like 3 features.
Firefox actually has 2 domain specific search-shortcut features, but both take time to set up and then is not intuitive at all. Chrome just blows it out of the water.
Also wtf - if I type "hello" and press enter in the search bar in FF, it puts a "www." in front and ".com" at the end.. like holy hell, if I knew the domain I'll write .com myself, it really is no problem. I even went ahead and googled for 15 minutes and disabled this in some deep settings somewhere, but it still does it when I press enter too fast... damnit, it frustrates me every single day.
I hope they see this and fix this very-frustratingly-obvious anti-UX behaviour..
Typing a word or words that don't look like a url or file has so far as I can recall always searched the default search engine for the word or query. This so far as I can recall has always been the case. Can you replicate this in a fresh profile to ensure this isn't just something you have set?
I run into the same thing somewhat frequently. it's the only real issue that I have with firefox. it's definitely not related to the profile, and it only seems to happen with fast enough input+enter.
it's really jarring to be sent to a random domain when looking up something in a hurry.
As others have mentioned and I believe you were referring to, Firefox does let you create bookmarks with keywords to accomplish the same thing.
Funnily enough, I've often seen Firefox users unaware that they can do the same with custom search keywords in Chrome, so the problem runs both ways.
As someone who uses these features in both Firefox and Chrome, I do think it would be nice if Firefox copied how Chrome automatically adds these search actions, and perhaps a bit of the UI polish too (like how Chrome's omnibox will recognize you're performing a keyword search and adapt accordingly). It doesn't make much of a difference for existing power users, but it could help new users discover and use the feature.
You could just set duckduckgo as your default search provider. Then you can use their bangs[1] to quickly search on specific sites. "!thes test" will find synonyms for you.
I switched to DDG for the privacy, and a general desire to ensure that competitors to Google survive. But I've found I use the "bang" commands all the time.
Firefox/Chrome: You can right-click any search field on any web you visit and add it as a search engine, with the keyword of your choosing. I've been using "w foo" to directly search on English Wikipedia. It's half the characters! :)
The advantage of Duck's bangs is that you don't have to install or configure anything beyond searching with DuckDuckGo. I've managed to guess the correct bang-abbreviation plenty of times (Urban Dictionary? ud, OpenStreetMap? osm, Hacker News? Guess!).
To add to the comments that show you how to configure something similar yourself, Firefox recently started including search shortcuts by default. This means you can now type `@google <query>` in a recent Firefox installation to search Google. More info here: https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2018/10/17/searching...
It's still not as smooth and doesn't support as many OpenSearch providers as Chrome's, but might already help a bit.
As someone who switched from Chrome to Firefox not that long ago this is the only feature I miss. Searching e.g. YouTube involves typing the query and then using the mouse to click the YouTube icon in the address bar dropdown. It's not nearly as effortless.
> I think modern Firefox is a much better browser than Chrome though, but Mozilla certainly lost the PR war and to no fault but their own, because Firefox sure sucked for a long while.
This gets said often, but I've been using Firefox continually since 2003 and I've never noticed it sucking.
When you log out, Firefox will block it and warn you that you are about to close number of tabs. When you select "OK", your tabs are gone.
But Chrome will quietly exit, and when you start it next time, will offer to restore the tabs that were open last time. Chrome approach wins, hands down.
That's a setting in both browsers. Default is "Start with Startpage or empty page" in both browsers as well. You can always select "Restore last session" in both browsers.
The problem is that if Firefox is getting this default wrong, what else are they getting wrong? And it should realize user state is sacred, I would even expect if I quit browser with something written in the address bar (or search bar, etc), when it starts up again, it should be able to preserve this half-entered user input!
I'm very happy that when I close my browser it kills all my tabs. If I really want something back I just view it from the history.
> I would even expect if I quit browser with something written in the address bar (or search bar, etc), when it starts up again, it should be able to preserve this half-entered user input!
I'm pretty sure no one expects nor wants this. You're definitely in a minority here. The problem you describe isn't very technical, it's simply that you want something else than most people else and you don't want to take the time to configure your browser to how you want it to behave.
Lots of people actually expect that. It's how phone apps work. There's no concept of "closing an app" in the iOS and Android guidelines. You just get the app out of the way.
I think the lack of improvements in desktop UX in the last 10 years is making every desktop OS to slowly adopt mobile UX conventions. Some of those new conventions are a step back.
But this isn't wrong, it's just your entirely subjective personal preference being different to someone else's.
Personally, I don't like it when browsers implicitly keep tracking things when I close the application and then fire up some half-baked version of the same stuff when I come back later. If I want to remember where I am, I can easily bookmark some or all of my tabs.
Firefox has had a particular problem in recent versions where it seems to think it crashed on the previous shutdown, even though there was no user-visible evidence of this, and then tries to restore the previous session even when it otherwise wouldn't. That's not helpful if your previous session involved shopping for surprise Christmas presents for the SO who is now standing behind you as you open the browser again several hours later for some entirely unrelated purpose, in a totally hypothetical example.
Defaults really matter. Probably 1% of users would ever think to look for a way to change that behavior.
I think Firefox for a long time tried to optimize for those users who do want to tweak their software, and doing that can even be a way to make superior software (instead of aiming for the lowest common denominator), but it is certainly not the right approach to maximizing _web browser market share._
I didn't use Firefox for many years (because I thought it sucked; slow, bad defaults, always apologizing in this anoying way for having crashed the last time I used it) but I now use it every day again (though not as my default browser; I tend to keep all the major ones open) and I'm glad to see Mozilla recently seems to have changed their priorities and focused on usability and performance. I hope it's not too late.
When I last installed Chrome in a fresh installation of Windows (so no saved settings from previous installations), it defaulted to an empty startpage. Might just have been me, mind.
Isn't this google applications will track what you do all the time, and even after you close the application and restart it knows who you are and what you did?
I use FF too, and I notice it sucking periodically, often after a big update - as things will - there have been periods of a month maybe two times in the last 10 years where I had to switch to another browser because it sucked too bad.
Sadly this is my story also. I use Vivaldi as my main browser now, which is Chromium based. Firefox does work awesome and is normally what I program my scripts through headlessly but in personal use FF just gets bad periodically.
I switched from Chrome to Firefox after the google login controversy, and have been happy with the transition too.
The only only thing that really annoys me is that when you snap a tab out of a window into a new window, the gesture is similar with snapping a tab into the favorite bar, and I end up with lots of "New Tab" or other unwanted favorites.
Also a small personal annoyance. I got into the habit of always launching the browser by clicking the shift key on the windows task bar icon, so that I always get a new window, irrespective of whether some session is already running or not. But in firefox, when no session is running, launching with the shift key pressed results in the "safe mode" prompt. I wish there was a way to disable that.
If you haven't used Chrome, no wonder you haven't noticed Firefox sucking. But a side-to-side speed and responsiveness comparison of Chrome and Firefox is unfair even today.
I have used Chrome and Firefox side-by-side, consistently since Chrome's original release. I have used Netscape and Internet Explorer since before both existed. I have performance gaming rigs of all generations, and I develop software. I have multiple generations of Apple machines as well. I run Windows and Linux.
Firefox doesn't suck, and matches Chrome. But there's no accounting for user behavior. I have seen user behavior that is mind-blowingly stupid, and subcultures of user activity and tendencies trace well with product loyalty trends.
Some user subcultures are retardedly dependent on browser extensions, never clear their cache, retain cookies for the lifetime of their laptop battery, and seemingly need hundreds of tabs open. And none of this shit makes sense to me.
These are likely the same people who carry around phones on the brink of overheating while locked, and in their pocket, because they have to have a thousand apps installed, in order to feel like they're getting the $1,000 phone they paid for, I guess. Their emails are constantly peppered with "sent from [app|device|service]" signatures, and they claim microphone permissions are why ads target them.
Honestly, if you've been blaming the browser, it's more likely that you're the one being your own worst enemy.
So...what are you trying to say here?
That if you don't feel comfortable with a browser, you are the issue?
That if you have different use-cases and behavior, you are the issue?
Each browser has different look and feel and is unique in its own way, even if some differences are tiny.
And, yeah, if Mozzila likes dropping numbers, nothing has to change.
Chrome handles PDF and printing (with the preview) better than Firefox in my opinion. I probably like Chrome a bit more for dev work as well but as a user they're pretty similar with the exception of the PDFs that I mentioned.
"Chrome handles..." can be said for a lot of things really.
Just this last month I've had Firefox crash tabs daily that Chrome handled perfectly fine, I've seen it crash the entire browser when Chrome did just fine. Underlying both those issues was a janky Windows install that was partially broken. But still, Chrome carried on like a trooper.
I've even just switched back to Linux and immediately saw Firefox stumble over scrolling frame rates. That was caused by using an Nvidia graphics card and the proprietary drivers on Kubuntu which was a bit janky again to say the least. But Chrome carried on through again with no problem.
Just today I've switch to an AMD graphics card and the opensource drivers on Fedora and only now is Firefox seemingly playing nice.
It's a great browser (though Dev Tools don't seem as good to me) and I love the containers but it does seem it needs a bit more of a particular environment to operate just right whereas Chrome 'just works' more of the time. That is possibly why lots of people say 'fine for me' (it is for me now, yey!) but others say "it's broken" or 'slow' or whatever.
All the users I forced to use Firefox, decided that Chrome was faster, and they were more than 100s of them.
( And as a user I knew that too. I just wanted to support Firefox. )
So saying Firefox Doesn't suck may be partially right. As we will have to define "suck" first. But saying it is as fast as Chrome during Firefox 4 and early Chrome era is just the same as saying earth is flat.
When I notice a difference in responsiveness between Chrome and Firefox, it's usually due to the webpage being Chrome-optimized. I don't know why: maybe it was developed and tested under Chrome, maybe it uses features that work better on Chrome because they were developed and pushed by Google, or maybe the differences between the rendering engines favor Chrome.
Google's own websites are some of the major culprits. The funny thing is that similar webs don't have this issue, and I don't notice any slowdowns that push me to do side-by-side tests.
I've noticed worse performance of firefox on macos compared to windows, to the point where firefox is unusable on many websites on a 2 core macbook pro. Even fucking facebook is slow on firefox, even with recent improvements.
I use Firefox daily, alongside Chrome for a very long time. Firefox manages system resources much better, works way more stable, and behaves the way I want, without any exceptions.
Chrome feels like an untamed animal which does stuff without telling you, and I don't like it.
This gets said often, but I've been using Firefox continually since 2003 and I've never noticed it sucking.
To this day, my browsing experience is still worse with Firefox than it was before 57, because so many useful little add-ons have never been replaced or have been replaced only with inferior versions. In some of those cases, that useful functionality can't be provided in the new environment, because the APIs to support it aren't there. I was unpleasantly reminded of this just a few days ago, when the same problem infected the latest Thunderbird update.
More seriously, I am running into increasing numbers of sites that simply don't work properly with Firefox. Sometimes this is because of the privacy/blocker extensions I use, but often the problem persists even if I disable those. Whether it's due to bad web developers doing Chrome-only things or bugs in recent versions of Firefox, the unfortunate result is still the same from the user's point of view.
This I can relate with, but I would like to note that Firefox seems to be continually expanding its APIs and regaining functionality that was lost. In particular, [Tridactyl](https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl) (which tries to reimplement Pentadactyl, a kitchen-sink extension API consumer) works rather well. There are still some pain points, like the keyboard shortcut API which still hasn't been merged, but I am hopeful they eventually will be.
I too experience privacy extensions breaking websites frequently, since I'm a heavy user of those, but so far I have never encountered a case of a website that was truly broken under Firefox. It was always one of my settings and worked under a clean profile.
They rushed it and I find it hard to not see it as a giant "screw you".
They didnt release the specifications early enough for people to rewrite their addons and at the end of ESR52 there where still multiple bugs open which prevented people from porting their addons. We didnt even get a normal 1 year ESR support frame for gods sake. All that ignoring the fact that there was no warning for the end users that all their security addons were disabled after the automatic update.
I am still furious about the absolute arrogance and carelessness Mozilla showed here.
This. Ever since the plugin fiasco, it’s really hard for me to see Firefox as anything other than a worse Chrome. Extensibility was Firefox’s main selling point; and they pissed that away.
I was very pissed at them for exactly this reason and I still am to some degree. I would love to find an acceptable alternative that goes back to the roots, so to speak. For instance, I've been looking at qutebrowser, but it's still too limited (and might remain so for some time).
But Chrome as an alternative? That's not even on the table. Firefox is definitely the lesser of two evils.
I'm just amazed that you can't even manually remap keyboard commands. Seriously Mozilla? $500 million/year in funding and you can't support that customization?
Thanks for the heads-up! I locally maintained Pentadactyl for my own browser until Mozilla banned unsigned addons (which ticked me off enough to write a Hiter parody[1]). That extension was also what got me into vim.
I'm still upset that they broke custom keyboard shortcuts for ... two years now? All the replacements will only remap keys after a tab's JS has loaded. I used to be able to just zoom through the tabs with shift-j and shift-k, but now it will randomly stop on pages that need to reload, which breaks the whole experience.
I've had Super NES games that offered key customizations, and had much less memory and money to work with. That's really disappointing.
I used Chrome since its early alpha versions on Linux, and I have to disagree. Even in its first days Chrome was a far superior browser speed, responsiveness and security wise. Firefo caught on some of these nowadays, but not nearly e ough for me to switch back.
For several years, Firefox was punishingly slow and had awful tab control compared to Chrome. It may not have 'sucked', in the sense that I still vastly preferred it to IE or even Safari, but switching was an immediate and dramatic improvement.
There have been major speedups since, and container tabs help fix the other issue. At this point, I still find Firefox worse than Chrome in a large number of ways, but they're small and often preference-based - but lots of people seem to agree that were a lot of users lost (or not gained) during a stretch where Firefox was pretty much objectively behind.
I think it's more like a new generation of people started using Mac OS on which I heard Firefox suck. So being already in a walled garden environment they did not care about entering Google's.
Firefox was always good on other OS. And you got noscript there with full access to block everything Chrome does not want you to block.
FWIW, I use Firefox on High Sierra and I don't think it sucks at all.
About noscript:
Recently I was playing with it, in an attempt to curate which site is allowed to make connections to which domain but I discovered that I cannot do it on a per domain basis and every whitelisted entry was applied everywhere. Apparently that was something that could be configured at noscript's ABE panel which doesn't exist in the latest versions.
If you want per domain rules I would suggest trying umatrix instead.
Firefox sucking wasn't their own fault? I would say it was. I would also say that their continued bloating of firefox and ancilliary projects/services shows that they still haven't return to their original mission.
> but Mozilla certainly lost the PR war and to no fault but their own, because Firefox sure sucked for a long while.
The last part is true, it did suck for a while. But I can't say "no fault but their own". Even if they rocked, they would have taken a big hit: chrome was advertised for a long time, and at no cost, using solicitating prompts directly on the most consultated and trusted web page in the world.
1. The biggest thing keeping me tied to Chrome over any other browser is the extension support. Extensions are second class citizens in any other browser. This is partly because other browsers keep overhauling their systems and deprecating old software which discourages extension developers, and mainly because (as an extension developer) why would you code for browser X when you can get more users on browser Y?
2. Anecdotal evidence, but every time an update of Firefox (and most notably Quantum) is released people laud how fast it is. On my 2015 Macbook running Mac OS Firefox has never been faster. Maybe there are things behind the scenes such as caching playing a role, but web pages load slower, scrolling feels sluggish, videos drop frames and freeze or get out of sync. It isn't an enjoyable experience compared to Chrome or Safari.
There are a few niche plugins I use for specific sites to enhance usability that I definitely don't expect to be ported to Firefox, but even the ones that are take an understandable backseat in terms of developer priority.
For example, for more than 10 years I've been using Chrome extensions that allow you to hover over image links to view them without clicking. There are dozens of these extensions in almost any browser, but they require constant updating to keep up with 1) new image/video hosts and 2) changes to existing image/video hosts.
For me, these extensions are an essential part of the browsing experience of many websites. I've found that the same extensions by the same developers often lag behind 6+ months on Firefox vs. Chrome which makes them really useless when gfycat, streamable, imgur, etc. all stop working.
It's kinda strange how bad mozilla is in doing the obvious good. Building in a direct support for chrome-store should be a priority. Solutions like this addon have such a bad experience..
For #2, might be the same issue I posted about on HN a while back, particularly if you have a 13” MBP. I corresponded with Mozilla employees, but I still don’t think it has made much movement toward getting fixed.
> 2. Anecdotal evidence, but every time an update of Firefox (and most notably Quantum) is released people laud how fast it is. On my 2015 Macbook running Mac OS Firefox has never been faster. Maybe there are things behind the scenes such as caching playing a role, but web pages load slower, scrolling feels sluggish, videos drop frames and freeze or get out of sync. It isn't an enjoyable experience compared to Chrome or Safari.
This is my experience too, unfortunately. I keep using Firefox instead of Chrome now to support Mozilla and their positive attitude towards end-user privacy, but compared to when I use Chrome it is an annoying product to use with the endless waiting and lag. Using Linux, so maybe it is just really only optimised for Windows PCs (arguably their largest user base)?
Really? I'm on Linux and I saw immediate changes once Quantum hit. It runs better for me on Ubuntu{16,18} and Arch. I had some glitches at the beginning, but not anymore.
The only glitch I have now is that I can't use send tabs to push a tab to my phone (but the reverse works and it is fine to any other computer). So that's not that big of an issue.
I wish I had your experience. But I switched from Chrome when Quantum came out, and it felt like a big downgrade in performance. And I feel that is still the case these days when comparing Firefox and Chrome. Granted, I hadn't used Firefox prior to the Quantum release for a long time because of the performance so I likely didn't notice the improvement as you did.
I just wish it was better, because while it does get annoying at times, I do want to support Mozilla :-/
> other browsers keep overhauling their systems and deprecating old software which discourages extension developers
Note that this is why Firefox underwent the extensionpocalypse last year; the prior extensions model made it impossible not to regularly break the ecosystem. The next bit about "why code for browser X?" is also why they based their new APIs on Chrome's, to make it easy for existing Chrome extensions to support both browsers.
Not OP, but I currently have around 80 tabs open spread/organized over 6 different windows (and two different Chrome profiles). And a bunch more "snoozing" with OneTab.
The XUL extension I miss most is Pentadactyl. Tridactyl is a pale imitation, and still immature. Qutebrowser has potential, but still lacks critical extensions like uMatrix and uBlock Origin.
(To clarify: it does have an adblocker, but it's quite basic, only based on a blacklist of hosts. You can also selectively enable JavaScript for individual domains, but not yet based on both webpage and its origin like with uMatrix)
I built a browser for this: https://cretz.github.io/doogie/. Granted I haven't uploaded the binaries for the current Chromium version (easy to do, just lazy) and I also don't support extensions and there's no macOS support yet. But the sheer productivity increase for me is substantial.
Lol, I usually organize tabs by location so pinning them (and minimizing their horizontal footprint) is good enough for me. Further, I personally found that when I had a million tabs open, at least 50% of them were duplicates so I just started using tab deduping extensions to cull them.
Session Buddy and The Great Suspender. I have ~800 tabs open in Chrome right now on this PC. I haven't used Tree Style Tab, but Chrome's tab-shrinking is actually better for lots of tabs (up to a point) than Firefox's tab-scrolling. I have yet to try tab suspension extensions in Firefox, so there may be a workflow that works for me there (Chrome is not ideal).
My experience is exactly the opposite. Each time I'm past 200 tabs or something (i.e. all the time), Chrome's UI starts occasionally lagging and glitching, and I'm not even talking about memory usage (overall or even just parent process alone) and how it's affecting the operating system. Even with pre-Quantum Firefox I was always pushing limits much, much further.
However I'm avoiding media- and script-heavy websites as much as possible, and block a couple of ad networks solely because of the stress that rich media ads (videos flying all over iframes and whatnot) causes for the hardware I'm running the browser on. (I don't mind ads if they don't take 8 CPU cores to render, but they seem to be disappearing from the internet.)
That's weird. I currently have ~100 tabs open in Firefox (yes, on the same computer as 800 in Chrome), and it's fine. Back in 2008, I had ~800 tabs in Firefox on Linux for a project (with TabMixPlus); it was pretty slow and unstable, but it worked.
> 1. The biggest thing keeping me tied to Chrome over any other browser is the extension support. Extensions are second class citizens in any other browser.
You say this, but on mobile, the only major browser that supports extensions is Firefox. Not Chrome. Not Safari.
I'm a heavy Firefox+addon user, but I just don't use phone browser enough to even bother using addons. (And Firefox for Android is pretty bad otherwise, unfortunately.)
Since I refuse to install apps on my phone for services I use that have websites, I'm a fairly heavy phone browser user.. so being able to adblock, block arbitrary JS (noscript), and kill tracking cookies is wonderful.
> And Firefox for Android is pretty bad otherwise, unfortunately
One problem I have with Firefox on Android is that it doesn't support the Samsung DeX desktop environment, while all the other browsers do (Chrome, Edge, Bing, Samsung Internet). Presumably that means it doesn't run well on ChromeOS laptops either. It's also noticeably slower than the other browsers.
That said, I keep going back to Firefox as my preferred phone browser, I still like it more than the others. And Firefox is definitely my favorite desktop browser, ever since Quantum. It was an enormous speed improvement over Safari on Mac for me when it came out, and I'm enjoying Firefox on my new PC laptop too.
Scrolling feels really off (non-native) to me, at least on Android - e.g. it coasts at a noticeably lower velocity than other apps after a sharp flick.
Firefox Focus is my go to browser on Android, and it has ad blocking built in (as well as cookie / history erasure).
That said, have you tried installing Blokada from FDroid? It sets up a local VPN on your phone and routes all network traffic through it, blocking all ads in all apps. It's astonishing how many ads and trackers your phone would otherwise download in a week.
Having a VPN for ad blocking is unfortunately a really bad option, as you should already have a VPN to prevent your "open WiFi" and LTE provider spying on you.
yeah and yet there it's single add-on for pull down to refresh which barely works and Firefox was constantly crashing on pretty ordinary sites i was visiting until i gave up after few weeks and returned to Brave where i don't need to be afraid to open porn website or pharmacy website without crashing whole browser
using Firefox on desktop though, can't complain much over there, but it's useless on android if it crash even on ordinary sites
I just deleted Chrome, and switched to Brave as my full-time personal browser: faster, more secure, and based on Chromium so full extension support[1].
I still use and support Firefox for development purposes, and am wedded to containers, but apart from that it's Brave all the way (especially on mobile, which has been my default browser for over a year now).
[1] Excluding anything that bakes in Google spyware, and I believe they'll do a bit more curating of extensions from a security perspective.
Even better is that it's optional, so those of us who don't want to see any ads but still want to support sites are in a position to tip / donate / potentially subscribe to sites across the web using a browser-native crypto wallet.
That also means I can financially support sites without handing over any PII data as well.
It's up to them to offer a deal to get subscriber data (marketers gonna market), but the bar is increasingly high as we see hacks like Quora.
I think we're moving to a world where publishers will see that an MVP business model is 'dollars without data', and BAT with ZKP anonymity enables that.
> Extensions are second class citizens in any other browser.
I'd say Firefox's support for extensions is better than Chrome's, even after the change to WebExtensions. The author of NoScript, for example, thinks Firefox has the best environment for add-ons:
I am an edge-case but my favourite extensions are AdNauseum [1], CookieAutoDelete and NoScript. The first isn't even available on the Chrome store (although you can install it via Dev Mode [2]), and that's before I weight concerns like Google's dragnet. Totally agree with the Network Effect point though, and I hear Chrome's dev tools are quicker than Firefox's in DOM rendering.
With regard to 2, I've not found it to be noticeably slow, nor experienced dropped frames or the other complaints (ran on a 2014 and a 2017), but that's more likely me being unobservant.
My recreational browsing is mostly on an iPad, and the user story there is pretty desperate. I'd prefer to mimic my Desktop setup, but the walled garden doesn't afford me that opportunity. I'm cautiously optimistic that situation will catch up before I move platforms though!
Anyway, thank you for helping me see the other side a little better.
[2] - I don't know if anyone else has noticed this, but there's a needless and incessant Chrome (and Chromium) prompt on each startup as follows:
"""
Disable Developer Mode Extensions
Extensions running in developer mode [sic] can harm your computer. If you're not a developer, you should disable these extensions running in developer mode to stay safe
"""
I personally find it inherently hostile, but perhaps I'm just an old man disregarding the use-case of other people!
I used NoScript forever, but recently switched to uMatrix, and it's so much better in that it gives you much more fine-grained control over what to block/allow. I'd recommend giving it a try.
uBlock Origin is a great complement to it, for when I want to block specific page elements.
I use both in parallel and sometimes it's annoying to make a video player work (or captcha). I don't know how a video player can rely on 5000 injected dependencies from 5000 different domains.
Extensions get to modify the same about:config in FF as the firefox internal settings.
Some extensions dont work after a year of being undeveloped, because the API changes. Is this really a bad thing? Opensource software uses patching as a "heartbeat" to discern whether a project is still developed or not. Hackers find holes over time, and when devs no longer fill them, the project needs to be left for dead.
Why should browser addons be any different?
I guess its a different philosophy - if the devs leave a browser addon for dead, the users should too.
Once every couple of years, the API changes and cleans out dead addons. Im not sure this is often enough.
But the best addons stay. NoScript. Adblock Plus or uBlock Origin. httpsEverywhere. The best Canvas blockers. These stay up to date.
Quantum would make my work laptop (Macbook pro, 13 inch touchbar 2017) overheat constantly. It just always had performance issues and I troubleshooted every way I could. I never figured out what exactly was causing it. I tried to switch to Firefox for 2 solid months, but I just couldn't do it :(
You can improve the performance by setting "gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque" to true in the about:config settings. This will disable the transparency of the window, but it will reduce the overall resource consumption. The reduction is significant, approximately several extra hours of Firefox use, and your lap will thank you.
Sad news. Firefox is my favorite browser, and I like their Dev tools the best.
All the important stuff done in a browser should not be trusted to one that is closed source. (I know chromium is open source, but almost no one is using it).
A good balance of browsers is important, I've already seen "you must use chrome to view this site."
I wonder how many FF users roll with a user agent that identifies as chrome or some other browser, and how much (if even significantly) it affects surveys like the one in this article.
I wonder that too. I used to have it always on and set to Chrome when Netflix was blocking DRM enabled FF. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people just always have it on, especially considering how popular of an add on it is.
Dropping support for legacy extensions absolutely gutted what made Firefox different from every other browser. I'll use Firefox 56 and NoScript until the end of time before I use a browser with tabs above the address bar.
Dropping support for these extensions made it possible to create Firefox Quantum. Also, I'm using Firefox with tabs on the side with Tree Style Tab and a simple userChrome.css hack. No need to stay with an outdated version just for that.
Yeah, I resisted the upgrade to FF Quantum for a while, but ultimately made the move and it's worked out well. The biggest things I needed were a WebExtension version of Tree Style Tabs, plus the restyling options from https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomCSSforFx .
Having the tabs at the top is much better because of Fitts's law [0], essentially making their size infinite in one direction and therefore much easier to reach with a quick flick of the mouse.
Although it is possible to move the tab bar using user CSS [1].
You're also missing out on a much faster browsing experience with the newer versions. In the older version I remember the scrolling lagged when I opened a new tab in the background, that hasn't happened in a while.
Not enough people are using addons to be such significant. It seems more that firefox had a slight growth last year because of quantum, but market grew faster, while some of that growth inflated again.
Usernumbers went something like 250->300->275 Million. Seems they are somewhat stable in numbers.
I still use Firefox on my work computers and personal. The reason simply being that I feel the performance is better than chrome most times. I used Firefox / Mozilla for many years, then went to chrome when it was new and shiny, but I’m back to Firefox as I believe it truly is the better product. They just need to somehow market it better to people.
It's nice and responsive on my 4-year-old Win8.1 desktop and my 1-year-old Win10 laptop, with dozens of tabs open. I'd be curious to see the common factor between the people who say it's slow, because it certainly isn't for most (some?) of us.
I had close to ~220 tabs open in 3 windows open on a windows machine that's not especially powerful and didn't have any performance issues. It wasn't even using that much memory...
Firefox is only browser where multi-row tabs works -- all other browsers are impossible to navigate with more than 8 tabs open. I frequently have 30+ tabs open in Firefox (sometimes as much 100).
That being said, Firefox has a bunch of small performance / hang issues that have nothing to do with the number of tabs but add up over time.
I might have mistaken the cause for my lagging problems but in any case the nagging feeling of Firefox being laggy and not always very responsive is there, and as you said it adds up over time.
I mentioned in another sibling comment of mine that my 2nd gen i7 CPU was very heavily hit by all Spectre and Meltdown mitigation fixes and is noticeably slower now. Still though, Chrome works snappily and Firefox does not. :(
To clarify: my Win10 PC has a 2nd-gen i7 CPU and it has been very heavily hit by the dozens of Spectre and Meltdown fixes. Compared to a year ago, it feels like it's running twice as slow. :(
Many apps are not affected but Firefox definitely is. It starts hiccuping with only several tabs open while Chrome is working just fine.
The PC has 32GB of RAM so it's definitely not memory.
I have switched to Firefox on mobile as well. There are some occasional hiccups (rare), but the speedup and battery life you gain from ad-blocking makes it totally worth it.
For those who are evaluating, please install AdBlock before you take a call - and do try it for a few days.
For me Firefox desktop differentiates itself from all other major browsers for their built-in content blocker and support for other privacy-oriented features.
How sad... I have switched to Firefox about 8 months ago and have been really enjoying the browser. It's just difficult to compete against the giants of Google and Microsoft. I mean anywhere you go there will be messages like "Try a faster browser- Download Chrome" on any Google site, or the extremely difficult user interface to switch default browser on Windows. I really wish for Firefox to succeed in the long run, just dont know how it could be possible.
It's not really a button, they convert the button to switch to a weird link and clicking the actual button means to keep Edge. Its misleading, and most people thought they switched because the clicked the button but actually that didnt do the switch. But agree it's not necessarily difficult, just misleading.
Unfortunately this is becoming more and more frequent. We are back to 2000s I.E. only websites... :(
I'm afraid there are only some options:
1) Mozilla aggressively tries to be Chrome compatible.
2) Focus on Developer Tools in order to "motivate" Developers to use Firefox instead to develop their apps.
3) Somehow a miracle comes and they gain market share.
Actually i like the direction of Mozilla is taking now days where they are adding lots of interesting usability to Firefox. Like taking screenshots, share/send menu etc... But it seems this is not enough to get new users :(
I'd like to use Firefox. I've tried it out several times the last year. It's okay. Unfortunately, I always end up going back to Safari. Despite the performance improvements, Safari still feels like a faster, smoother browser.
Firefox is still pretty ugly, too. On macOS, it feels chunkier and less natively integrated.
Safari's "omnibar" is superior to Firefox's. Safari actually suggests web sites, which I use all the time. Wikipedia is a major one. Start typing "Richard Fey", for example, and the first hit will be the Wikipedia page for Richard Feynman, complete with a short summary and photo. Firefox forces me through a Google search.
I also tried out Firefox on iOS some time ago, and it wasn't as nice as Safari. For there to be a point to this, I'd need the same browser in both places, with perfect syncing of bookmarks, cookies, tabs, etc., just like Safari.
Lastly, migrating is a pain. There's apparently no way to import my current Safari session (I have probably 60-70 tabs) or history (I keep everything I visit, going back years), which means I'd lose stuff by migrating and would have to migrate tabs over incrementally. Hard to try out a browser in any significant way this way.
I really want to use Safari, but for me the deal breaker is the fact that Safari doesn't seem to block pop-ups properly.
Yes, they've changed it in the latest version. I have Block and Notify option selected in Privacy tab. But many popups still go through -- sometimes they open in a new tab, sometimes in a new window.
Is there a way to fix that?
Also, is there a Tree Style Tab alternative for Safari?
The worst thing about Safari is the “Do you want to receive notifications from this website?” pop-up that appears every time you hit some random notification-supporting website for the first time.
There has got to be a better way to implement notification subscriptions than this annoying pop-up.
You can turn this off. Go to Preferences, then Websites, then Notifications, then at the bottom of the window there's a checkbox: "Allow websites to ask for permission to send push notifications".
Agreed, popups are annoying. But Firefox doesn't seem to block them all properly, either. For example, try this [1] site. It's notorious for hijacking its own clicks; about 50% of the time you load that site, the search field will open a popup when you click on it to type. Same goes for real links. Unfortunately, I don't think there's a fix for Safari.
I don't know of a tree-style tab extension for Safari, sorry.
I agree about the performance on OS X. I still find myself trying to figure out which tab is pegging the CPU and about:performance is not helpful.
Another nice feature Safari has that I rely on is "show all tabs". Yes there are various "works in progress" trying to replicate the old tab groups / panorama functionality but I find them lacking or incomplete. Mozilla really hasn't done anything to improve the many tabs UX. Even Chrome might get something like tab groups:
What specs are your device? On a mid-2012 non-Retina MBP with a regular HDD, Firefox Quantum made my laptop feel like an entirely new machine. It was significantly faster than Safari, nevermind Chrome.
Not to mention the inability to integrate with iCloud Keychain. I have over 500 passwords that work across every app on my phone, my computer, and tablet. That’s a big switching cost for me. Add to that the performance/stuttering that I still seem to get even with Quantum’s improvement, and I can’t see myself switching from Safari anytime soon.
While switching will still be a pain, have you considered a 3rd-party password manager?
I'm using Enpass which works with the three major browsers, has apps for iOS and Android, and has desktop apps for Mac, Windows, and Linux. The best part about it, in my opinion, is that their syncing backend lets you choose which cloud provider you want to sync with (they support six or seven different ones), including a generic WebDAV/ownCloud one if you want to host your own.
It's not perfect, but having something cross-platform and cross-browser has a lot of appeal.
We all have wants, but I can't blame FF for not pursuing them if the numbers in the link can be believed. Safari has a much smaller adoption rate than even FF, so it could be argued FF are doing more things right. On a link about desktop browser adoption, I don't see the value of complaining about FF issues compared to a lesser adopted browser or comparing to a mobile browser on an OS that doesn't allow real browser competition anyways.
> Safari's "omnibar" is superior to Firefox's. Safari actually suggests web sites, which I use all the time. Wikipedia is a major one. Start typing "Richard Fey", for example, and the first hit will be the Wikipedia page for Richard Feynman, complete with a short summary and photo. Firefox forces me through a Google search.
I don't use a Mac, so I am not sure if there are other features of the Safari omnibar which are appealing. But the example you provided is especially concerning to me since it suggests that Safari is sending user input in the location bar to some external service for analysis. This is what allows the browser to find and render a snippet of a Wikipedia article that best matches what you've typed in the location bar. If I were using Safari, I would definitely be looking for a way to turn that off. I can't tell you how many times I've (accidentally) pasted something into the location bar that I would never voluntarily send to any third parties.
On Firefox, I have a Wikipedia bookmark that uses the 'w' keyword and uses the URL
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s
So I would type "w Richard Feynman" to reach the same destination. Maybe not quite as elegant, but I have another that does a Wikipedia search if I don't feel like typing the whole name of an article.
For whatever it's worth, I find the Firefox omnibar superb for many reasons, one being that it prioritizes my bookmarks and my history higher than directing me to a third-party search engine.
Yes, I use also an extension that lets me type "w richard feynman". I also use DuckDuckGo, which has a lot of these shortcuts. But Safari will still offer the first "best hit", when I'm not sure where to look something up.
As for privacy, I'm already deep in Apple. They take care of my stuff: My entire Safari history (synced with iCloud), backup of my iPhone, my iMessage chat history, and a lot of other things. Given their stance on privacy, I choose to trust them. I've never accidentally pasted anything in the search bar.
The feature which the person was talking about is called search suggestions and, indeed, the searches get routed through the selected search provider. There is a related feature, Safari Suggestions, which seems to use the system's Spotlight search service to provide other suggestions.
For people's information, these can be turned off in Safari preferences -> Search.
Safari's autosuggest of the numeric code from 2FA text messages is outstanding. I don't hear anyone talk about this feature, but I could never live without it. I use 2FA for every website possible and this makes it easy.
Yeah that feature (along with iOS 12 native OS-level password manager integrations) was a major leap forward. I no longer dread enabling 2FA on websites when push/HOTP tokens aren’t supported - at least from a usability perspective. The security of SMS-based 2FA is still poor, though generally better than nothing.
Almost nobody implements the API for password managers. It's either apples password store or bust. I use 1password and frequently have to switch to the app to grab a password. Although, with face ID enabled this is relatively painless.
I’ve never had to use it because I use hardware/software 2FA, but while developing an app recently it worked in a native app. I was stunned and thrilled.
> I also tried out Firefox on iOS some time ago...
I was in the process of switching to Firefox from Chrome, and a few days after installing Firefox on iOS it interrupted me with a notification advertising Pocket. I immediately uninstalled it and haven't looked back.
I use Pocket, though not with Firefox. It is a very good and useful (and free!) service. I wouldn't disregard a browser just because it comes with built-in integration.
It wasn't about Pocket itself but that Firefox was rudely using notifications to advertise to me. So I went back to Chrome, which has never done anything like that.
Lol, you mean apart from prodding you on every single Google site to "switch to a better browser" or the websites which misleadingly show the "Sign in" button with your name already filled in(!!)
> Firefox is still pretty ugly, too. On macOS, it feels chunkier and less natively integrated.
Mozilla have put a tremendous amount of effort into the "ugly on every platform" cross platform tools over the years, from XUL to whatever the current one is. Developing a native UI for each platform would have been less effort and given much better results than continuing with this tried and failed approach.
Their latest attempt at theme support is just laughable and was very obviously not QA'd. In text areas I get the dark background theme from my desktop and the dark text foreground from the website css and it's made firefox unusable for me.
This is on top of things like their recent breakages to extensions so things that used to work (vertical tabs) still don't. And this only broke so they could go multi-threaded and then quickly had to add throttles so random sites couldn't hog every core.
But it seems mozilla are more concerned with re-writing things in rust, tying users into various web services and god knows what other side projects while they continue to avoid improving their core product.
I'd love to see firefox regain market share, we need an open source browser that's not controlled by a spyware company, but on their current trajectory firefox will dissapear into history and mozilla themselves will be the primary cause.
Every single rewrite of a Gecko component in Rust has been accompanied with architectural improvements, most notably Stylo. Nobody is rewriting things just because Rust.
And those architectural improvements broke things that worked for me previously, from my point of view they aren't improvements at all.
I'm a user, we should I care that they are making architectural improvements while they rewrite things in a different language when there are so many obvious issues preventing me from using it?
At this rate they will be rewriting it for no one.
I'm sorry you had a bad experience. But architectural improvements are done to improve performance and stability. I can't think of a single Rust component that shipped without extensive performance measurement to demonstrate improvements in the important metrics that users care about.
> demonstrate improvements in the important metrics that users care about
And yet market share is plummeting, doesn't that indicated that your metrics for what users care about are completely wrong?
It's hardly me alone having this experience, most firefox users had there extensions break for no visible benefit. Anyone with the non-default ubuntu theme has the same issue with text boxes, which indicates a complete lack of QA.
I also have a 15 year long emotional attachment to firefox and a desire to see it succeed, if you can't convince me these changes are for the better then good luck with the rest of the world.
Unfortunately market share is more about being about to efficiently distribute your product than just the quality of said product.
Mozilla is suffering from not having its own platform - they could have done so by keeping FirefoxOS alive and use the growing success of KaiOS today. Looks like they are not ready to come back because... reasons.
Firefox OS was a terrible idea. Gecko is horribly slow as it is, and they put it on low-end, under-powered mobile phones. As it was expected, using it for a few minutes made you want to hang yourself. I know they met with bosses from telecos, I wonder what faces they made when they showed them how the mobile behaved.
I used to have a Flame, the FirefoxOS development phone (which was the higher-end FFxOS device but was still bellow $200), and it was WAY snappier than my current Android phone (which is a $400 one!).
> Unfortunately market share is more about being about to efficiently distribute your product than just the quality of said product.
Firefox has broken out of this before by being a better product. Not being default on any platform is nothing compared to back in the day when IE had >95% market share and sites were made to work with it only.
These days even many linux distros are defaulting to chromium, that's the one place where it could be the "native" browser.
Has it? I've got a vertical tab extension that was made not long after but the tab bar along the top is still there. It broke something that worked great for the better part of a decade.
I moved back to Safari exactly because the User Interface is much better and it does not feel like an electron app like firefox (and chrome) does. I love the native look and feel and it’s a pity Safari is the only browser on Mac OS working this way.
on my iMac my issue with Safari is that if I tab away from streaming content or such it reduces the quality so when I switch back to that tab or the browser I have to wait a few seconds for the quality to go back up.
this was very noticeable with twitch where I tend to have more than one stream up. I will pop up mail to reply to something and watch Safari drop the resolution behind mail yet firefox does not do this. I haven't found a solution to it yet
And yet, it is one of the only usable browser for most users thanks to the Tree Style Tabs extension. I still don't understand how people can browse the web with Chrome :|
With how bug-infested TST is now, this is not a strong reason anymore. Also TST has not many users anyway. Seems it's something around 115k, so majority can live well without it.
Although there is some vested interest, although indirectly. Decisions are still tied to money, which is why Google has traditionally been the default search engine in Firefox.
> Google has traditionally been the default search engine in Firefox.
There is little if anything wrong in tracking people who don't care about being tracked, those who do can easily switch the search engine to startpage.com, duckduckgo.com, Searx, Seeks or whatever.
Agree. Though default options hold great power, Chrome users could also navigate to DDG. Also hard to advertise themselves as the user champion of privacy going up against Google, and then route everyone to Google, while pocketing their money. I think it's okay to take their money but seems hypocritical.
I switched from Firefox to Chrome around 2009. I switched back to Firefox this year with the release of Quantum. Its performance has seemed fine to me even on my late 2012 iMac.
I think the switch back to Firefox was worth it if only for the privacy and to claw back some control from Google.
That's less than proportion of the population with color blindness, yet I bet more developers test their sites for Firefox compatibility than making them usable by differently-abled people.
I don't want to attack a strawman here, but your comment makes it seem like you think that programmers simply write code that they're told to write, providing no input on the project at all. This isn't true at all: just because you're not a product manager doesn't mean that you don't have a chance to influence the final product; in the extreme case that you're told to essentially "shut up and code", you can exercise your control by walking away from the project if you don't like where it's going.
The most common complaints I've seen have been that it doesn't support their extensions or they need their web sessions to sync to their Android/Windows/Linux device.
I used Safari as my primary browser for about a year, mainly because it was easier on the battery. I gave up on it because:
1. I kept running into Safari-only issues on websites. The most memorable one was on the American Express website. I couldn't switch between cards because the selection widget was broken on Safari.
2. The marketplace for Safari extensions is anemic, a problem which is only going to get worse[1] as legacy extensions are about to be totally deprecated[2]. Firefox did the same thing, but at least they moved to the WebExtension API. Safari App Extensions are very limited in what they can do.
3. Safari's developer tools were not as good as Chrome's or Firefox's.
If you're looking to see adoption rate, what you really want to be comparing isn't absolute numbers of Chrome vs Firefox users, but rather the adoption rate of your add-on vs your potential users.
If Chrome has 10,000 potential users of your add-on, Firefox has 100, and you have 98 Chrome users and 2 Firefox users, then the add-on adoption rates are 0.98% for Chrome and 2% for Firefox.
Of course that's just shifting the hard bit, which is figuring out who your potential users are.
Immediately after install, it prompts you to install a chrome extension, it has a big google chrome icon that takes up 1/16th of my screen. It has no mention of how to do the same in firefox.
Naturally, I responded by searching both "polar firefox addon" and "Save to polar firefox addon" on both DuckDuckGo and Google. All return a long list of results that don't include a save to polar addon.
I go to addons.mozilla.org and search "Save to Polar", I don't find your extension.
At this point I would typically have given up and assumed you just don't have a firefox version of the extension... but since you've just told me that there exists a firefox extension and I'm curious I'll keep going.
Your website mentions it nowhere.
The chrome store doesn't let me install it in firefox.
The GitHub readme doesn't mention it.
No GitHub issues mention it.
The subreddit linked from the website has no sidebar. Searching on it finds no mention of firefox.
Checking the other github repos under the same account as the polar repo I see a "Polar Chrome Extension" and not a "Polar Firefox Extension", but maybe those are the same things these days since both support web extensions. Nope, that repo is a placeholder with nothing in it.
Going back to addons.mozilla.org and just searching "polar", filtering for extensions, and scrolling through the results (only 5 thankfully) reveals nothing.
I search "Save to Polar" github' on both duckduckgo and google, hoping to at least find the source of the addon. Neither return any relevant results.
At this point I'm astonished there are any firefox users of that addon... as far as I can tell it doesn't exist for firefox.
Edit:
It occurs to me that maybe you meant looking at other people's addons. So I looked at the most popular addon I know of, ublock origin. Chrome says "10,000,000+", Firefox says "4,794,583"... which is 40%!
Sorry.. didn't see your comment. I never said we had a Polar FF extension.. We don't have one yet but should soon. I think since ours is reasonably small it won't take time to get on FF.
You did not say much about your methodology, so just general things that I imagine played into this:
- What is a "user"? Is it someone who downloaded it once? Is it just straight up the number of installs that ever happened? Or is it someone who actively uses the extension on a frequent basis? If you go by the numbers on the Chrome Store and on AMO, they likely have different definitions.
- Firefox recently introduced support for an extension API which is quite similar to the Chrome extension API (for the most part a superset), so lots of Chrome extensions have been ported over from Chrome just as recently and as a result will naturally not yet have as high user numbers.
- Firefox has traditionally had more powerful extensions and still continues to have a more powerful extension API. So, there's going to be extensions that are better, which only exist on Firefox, whereas similar extensions that were ported over from Chrome, therefore exist on both, will largely be ignored.
Analysing this on a non-empirical level:
- Firefox has less users.
- Chrome has somewhat less functionality built-in, which means users will have a higher need for extensions.
- With Firefox's extensions having traditionally been more powerful, the user base should still have many tinkerers.
- Firefox extensions are much more thoroughly vetted and malware is essentially a non-issue. On Chrome, it happens more often and I have seen people removing non-essential extensions for that reason.
- Chrome users are less likely to be privacy-conscious, which somewhat negates the previous point again and means they're more likely to just install an extension without thinking about it too much. On the other hand, Firefox users should be more likely to install privacy-enhancing extensions.
- Firefox for Android supports many extensions as well (though its user base is not the biggest).
754 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 134 ms ] threadEven if firefox is slightly better than the rest it doesn't matter. Chrome only exists because IE was so bad people went out of their way not to use it.
The history of browsers is littered with legacy code being defeated by new code.
FWIW a lot of Google behavior can be cast as an analogy to a paranoid control freak. Net neutrality is an obvious one, the incredible lack of any demarcating information useful for traffic shaping in QUIC is another. But of course both of these are really about citizen rights and privacy :)
Only if you as "good enough" define "with Javascript even slower than IE." I've personally never used Chrome, because since even the first days it already had more "protected" installation than some malware, and that never made me confident in their intentions (and I've never liked Chrome UI) but Firefox has always had performance problems. As Chrome appeared it had extremely fast JS, and only then others "woke up."
Asking users to go out of their way to install and use something that looks and feels identical to what they already have for reasons most people don't know, understand, or deeply care about and do not get surfaced in any meaningful way is not a winning strategy. A case has to be made in the battle of perception and the decreasingly small visual differentiation hasn't helped build it.
Al Ries's laws of marketing and branding and Donald Norman's models of differentiation apply equally to all products regardless of the economic and institutional structure that builds them.
Chrome changed its style more recently and ended up being more similar to Firefox.
Small "bullshit" interface changes can have dramatic user and marketshare impact. We can all sit around and wish the world didn't work this way but it's not going to change.
they're even mimicking Firefox's scrollable tab-bar since it's such an obvious win over a million super-narrow tabs that you can't possibly identify.
The non-scrollable tabs are what I miss most about Chrome. I know I'm not in a majority there, but I wouldn't call it an obvious win.
Though I firmly believe that about:config is in no way a user-viable option (as useful as it can be, for dev purposes), so I don't intend to imply that means "firefox has that too". It doesn't, it just has a workaround.
personally I'm loving Tree Style Tab, so I don't really pay attention to the tabbar any more.
And good point about Tree Tabs. I've been wanting to try it for a while, might as well do it now :)
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” - R. Buckminster Fuller
Personally, I'm chasing VR and AR to be the new wave of the Web, where browsing experience will be heavily differentiated.
IE wasn't a first-mover, it was bundled with the computer, it won as the most available, just like Starbucks vs. Coffee Bean - later comers can be assumed as more readily available then their perceived equivalencies. Firefox broke through by shattering the consumer's perception of equivalence.
The door for differentiation in the same way as before has closed, but not for differentiation in other ways that people immediately perceive.
Lacking a prescriptive direction that Mozilla Inc should take to establish this doesn't invalidate the observation, you can describe an illness without knowing the cure.
When this becomes necessary you know you've lost your power user audience: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18589555
Even if the measure is somewhat flawed it's hard to argue that drop isn't related to a drop in the underlying number of users.
Mozilla is awesome, but growing Firefox is an uphill struggle.
We would need more data to determine that. What the site here is showing is a decline in the percentage of marketshare, which is a relative measure, not an absolute one. Even if Firefox were seeing a net gain of users, if it's doing so at a slower rate than the market is growing overall, then that would be reflected as a decline in marketshare.
People do this for fingerprinting too. I'm sure there are plenty of people that always have it on and set to Chrome.
Also, Mozilla higher ups might be using these statistics to see how worthwhile the new features and work they have done.
that's probably a drop in the bucket. really at best a few tens of thousands of people.
Also it's a drop - do you think the number of people turning off JavaScript has gone up since Quantum? Why would that be? It's either that or less Firefox users.
They say: "...widely distributed over thousands of websites." https://netmarketshare.com/methodology
Looking at netmarkshet website and web requests it seems this pulls from gator.io for metrics. Looks like 3k-4k websites have this data which lines up with the previous statment. https://publicwww.com/websites/%22gator.io%22/
Though, Firefox now has some blocking-mechanisms on it's own. Not sure if they are activated by default, but it would be interessting to see how they influence such usage-collecting scripts.
Since ditching Chrome the issue has not come up again ... but not sure if it's correlation or causation.
There are a few things I do not like about Firefox but the web inspect or is definitely miles ahead of Webkit.
Chrome is faster based on the butt-dyno: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=butt-dyno
Market dominance has almost nothing to do with technical merits.
Chrome I can at least disable CORS via the command line, and Safari does it best by putting it in a Developer menu that I can easily toggle.
Firefox's dev tools also seem to still be behind — I haven't seen a good way to inspect WebSocket frames, for instance.
I would really prefer to use Firefox due to Mozzila's stances on privacy, especially in contrast to Google; however, I have to use the tool that lets me actually get work done.
I know this is beginning to become off-topic, but why? Presumably, if you're using a flag that has to be run from the command-line, you're either doing it on purpose or using hardware you don't own (and a keylogger is a much greater risk than anything else at that point)
In practice, it's not a problem for me, because the presence or absence of my usual row of extension icons and profile photo is enough of a clue.
But I could see where someone who doesn't normally sign into Chrome, or who doesn't have very many extensions in their normal Chrome profile, could have trouble distinguishing it from their a profile. The windows will tend to look pretty similar.
The problem I see is that not everyone takes the same precautions. And plenty of developers accumulate these sort of tweaks and hacks in their daily driver without realizing or remembering that they've crippled their own security posture.
From a UX perspective, my preference is to make it clear when normal security mechanisms are disabled.
If you're not a lone wolf, or working in the SV bubble, the IT and security departments are going to tell you to go pound sand.
CORS is allowed while running locally and then set while running in development and finally production.
I don't buy your comment at all.
I agree with you that fixing the headers (via a proxy in this case) is the right solution. I'm just not able to prioritize right now.
Beyond that, there are always going to be occasions where developers, security analysts, and testers need to bypass default security enforcement. I'd like to see every browser provide a way to make these adjustments for a one-off session (e.g., via a command-line switch). It's an efficient solution that I can offer when I come across a nasty hack living permanently in a developer's web configuration.
The cleanest solution is to extend the dev pipeline with a proxy for localstack. It won't take me long to knock that out, but it's not something I can prioritize at the moment.
This is what we do while running docker for local development with node.
Then you can change the theme for that profile which makes it obvious which instance you're using.
Is it for 3rd party domains and APIs or response that you control? Either way, controlling it in browser doesn't sound like the right way.
I have localhost.com in my hosts file and a local web server to run around it, but it's still really frustrating not being able to turn it off entirely.
If yes, you can setup different environments (dev, staging, production) and set CORS accordingly for each of them.
If no, how is it working in production?
I mostly have the setup you describe, and most development happens against a CORS-free staging server. But it's often necessary to build a local prod version that is identical to the live version for debugging or analysis, that plays against real players and reads/writes to the same data store.
It's an edge case, and in the past when I've done web development simply turning off CORS on staging has trivially solved any issues. But it does feel a bit like the developers of the browsers have chosen not to include the feature in a "we're smarter than you, trust us, you don't want this" kind of way. For the most part, they're probably right.
Just a wild idea that I haven't tried yet:
Would it work if you configure your etc/hosts to point production domain to localhost and open the production domain in the browser?
I'm gonna try this when I get free time.
I have found a few session manager options on Firefox but most suffer from permission bloat and poor UI.
Last I checked, there was nothing to make it easier to manage add-ons.
Agreed with the missing WebSocket inspection.
Why support what already broke your work once without an actual transition plan? They didn't have a full replacement ready to go when they got rid of XUL, and seemed that they didn't really care.
Why would a web developer support one browser over others? They keep everyone honest by sticking to the middle road and not having a badge like "Works Best In FireFox".
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-dev...
At the end of August of 2018 they stopped supporting 52 ESR which is the last extended support release that supports the old addons.
During the 3 years between a and b mozilla worked to provide support for flexible interesting addons which is why all the notable interesting addons I'm aware of have new versions.
I'm sure that the will to port every useful addon in existence just isn't there but it seems challenging for firefox to move forward without ditching the old addons.
Did you realize the new addon system was released over 3 years ago? It kind of seems as if perhaps as a user you were only peripherally aware of matters and derived an erroneous interpretation of events.
The websocket inspector was a feature request filed 6 years ago. [1]
Maybe Firefox devs didn't have time for it. But somehow they got all the time in the world to add clickbait Pocket articles on my new tab page.
[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=885508
They obviously see that this relationship is extremely risky, especially as Firefox becomes less popular and thus their userbase less valuable to Google. As such, they're trying to diversify their revenue stream.
Do you have any better solutions? Browsers are absurdly expensive to develop, by the way.
But the market is not a meritocracy, as much as some people like to pretend it is. Success in the market is much more to do with things like marketing, momentum, inertia, and general opinions. All of these things are favoring Chrome right now, and Mozilla is not in a position to turn this around.
And you may not have noticed, but being popular doesn't actually give you money when your product is free and features no ads or tracking. All you are saying is that "google should give mozilla more money". How do you suggest they diversify their revenue stream?
1. Hardware acceleration is still disabled by default on Linux
2. Pocket
3. Unwanted notifications about wanting to update / being updated / having updated
3. Ugly spacing left and right of the adress bar
4. Takes longer to start
5. No integration with GNOME keychain.
6. Ctrl+Q quits the browser.
7. Laggy UI
> How do you suggest they diversify their revenue stream?
I would suggest that they don't need to diversify their revenue stream. As long as they are a major player, Google (or any other search engine) will continue to fund them.
Those spacers are easily removed via customize mode.
https://www.downthemall.net/
I still have open bugs in Firefox from 2012. Firefox is riddled with layout and scripting bugs. I don't understand how they can afford all of this experimental development and "outreach" stuff, when the core product is basically just accumulating bugs which they will never address. Their tracker is full of untriaged bugs from as far back as a decade.
[0]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1511514
A bug about overflow scrolling (the default bouncing when you scroll over in macOS) has been open for years. It doesn't fit in.
I'm not sure what Mozilla's deal is these days, to be honest, but Firefox really just doesn't feel like it fits in on Mac. It's frustrating, because I want to support it... but I just end up back in Safari because it feels far more smooth and integrated.
How is Google Chrome more AppleOS then Firefox? Granted I can't stand AppleOS and find the UI to be totally frustrating still in 2018 and how old it feels. How is Firefox any different then Google Chrome?
Keychain does not work, FF57 killed KSE.
On Linux with KDE that web-extension change killed the kwallet integration too. But you are right when you are saying that it degrades the user experience of MacOS users :-(
I'm a Firefox user on macOS and I don't remember issues with scrolling. I don't use a trackpad, maybe that's the issue?
Things that bug me - For some reason often when I have quite a few tabs, open link in new tab stops working, the tab appears then disappears instantly, oddly if I use Vimium to open the tab in a new link it works. Mostly I use Vimium so this is not too much of a problem
- Copy pasting of formatted html is worse than Chrome.
- Confluence runs like a pig on Firefox for some reason, completely unusable on some pages, not strictly a FF problem, but is problematic.
- Just something about the aesthetics that is somehow "off"
On the positive
- I like the developer tools
- "Column select" out of the box just works
- scrolling tab bar instead of teeny tiny tabs where you can't see anything is good
- I feel better that I'm hopefully leaking less data, not that I can really verify that, but I generally believe I should be better protected than if I was using chrome
Overall, while there is cool things about FF, I feel I'm using it not because its the better browser, but some vauge idea I'm helping browser diversity.
https://medium.com/firefox-test-pilot/firefox-containers-are...
Firefox has always been a resource hog and crash prone for me on just about any system. Although I use it primarily for some of its features and prefer it over chrome.
Even if the money is simply spent on marketing, I think that could be a good thing.
I've been on Chrome for a long time, tried to switch to FF when Quantum came out and couldn't hear myself think over the sound of my laptop winding up.
Once you realize that not being evil isn't a priority at Google anymore this explanation actually makes some sense.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18599707
Then I tried it in Chrome and found that Gmail behaves like shit in Chrome too.
The solution however was to drop Gmail's web interface. Switched to a desktop client. If you're on MacOS I think MailMate is the best.
Couldn't be happier. And this advice is independent of your browser choice.
PS: the fact that Google's online properties are optimized for Chrome should make you realize that Chrome is the new IExplorer and it's our fault for allowing it to happen ;-)
I think modern Firefox is a much better browser than Chrome though, but Mozilla certainly lost the PR war and to no fault but their own, because Firefox sure sucked for a long while.
I find it intriguing that each incognito window in Chrome is not sandboxed between each other. Am I missing anything here?
Both their plugin ecosystems are significantly less robust as well e.g if you want to use any popular tools e.g shodan, google data saver, edit this cookie, etc
I really enjoy this feature and even catch myself regularly trying to use it on other computers, which obviously don't have such keywords defined.
I recently switched from chrome to Firefox but the search engine situation is something I’m not really happy about.
Nope, you can just right-click the site's own search bar, which is how I've been doing it forever.
Actually this is exactly what lorenzhs said, and it is my experience too. I know this because I spent half an hour trying to get a “blue search” for BBFC.
Firefox actually has 2 domain specific search-shortcut features, but both take time to set up and then is not intuitive at all. Chrome just blows it out of the water.
Also wtf - if I type "hello" and press enter in the search bar in FF, it puts a "www." in front and ".com" at the end.. like holy hell, if I knew the domain I'll write .com myself, it really is no problem. I even went ahead and googled for 15 minutes and disabled this in some deep settings somewhere, but it still does it when I press enter too fast... damnit, it frustrates me every single day.
I hope they see this and fix this very-frustratingly-obvious anti-UX behaviour..
it's really jarring to be sent to a random domain when looking up something in a hurry.
Funnily enough, I've often seen Firefox users unaware that they can do the same with custom search keywords in Chrome, so the problem runs both ways.
As someone who uses these features in both Firefox and Chrome, I do think it would be nice if Firefox copied how Chrome automatically adds these search actions, and perhaps a bit of the UI polish too (like how Chrome's omnibox will recognize you're performing a keyword search and adapt accordingly). It doesn't make much of a difference for existing power users, but it could help new users discover and use the feature.
It works flawlessly in all browsers I use.
[1]: https://duckduckgo.com/bang
Typing "w! foo" beats "wikipedia foo" every time.
It's still not as smooth and doesn't support as many OpenSearch providers as Chrome's, but might already help a bit.
This gets said often, but I've been using Firefox continually since 2003 and I've never noticed it sucking.
But Chrome will quietly exit, and when you start it next time, will offer to restore the tabs that were open last time. Chrome approach wins, hands down.
> I would even expect if I quit browser with something written in the address bar (or search bar, etc), when it starts up again, it should be able to preserve this half-entered user input!
I'm pretty sure no one expects nor wants this. You're definitely in a minority here. The problem you describe isn't very technical, it's simply that you want something else than most people else and you don't want to take the time to configure your browser to how you want it to behave.
I think the lack of improvements in desktop UX in the last 10 years is making every desktop OS to slowly adopt mobile UX conventions. Some of those new conventions are a step back.
Personally, I don't like it when browsers implicitly keep tracking things when I close the application and then fire up some half-baked version of the same stuff when I come back later. If I want to remember where I am, I can easily bookmark some or all of my tabs.
Firefox has had a particular problem in recent versions where it seems to think it crashed on the previous shutdown, even though there was no user-visible evidence of this, and then tries to restore the previous session even when it otherwise wouldn't. That's not helpful if your previous session involved shopping for surprise Christmas presents for the SO who is now standing behind you as you open the browser again several hours later for some entirely unrelated purpose, in a totally hypothetical example.
I wouldn't expect this at all!
I think Firefox for a long time tried to optimize for those users who do want to tweak their software, and doing that can even be a way to make superior software (instead of aiming for the lowest common denominator), but it is certainly not the right approach to maximizing _web browser market share._
I didn't use Firefox for many years (because I thought it sucked; slow, bad defaults, always apologizing in this anoying way for having crashed the last time I used it) but I now use it every day again (though not as my default browser; I tend to keep all the major ones open) and I'm glad to see Mozilla recently seems to have changed their priorities and focused on usability and performance. I hope it's not too late.
The only only thing that really annoys me is that when you snap a tab out of a window into a new window, the gesture is similar with snapping a tab into the favorite bar, and I end up with lots of "New Tab" or other unwanted favorites.
Also a small personal annoyance. I got into the habit of always launching the browser by clicking the shift key on the windows task bar icon, so that I always get a new window, irrespective of whether some session is already running or not. But in firefox, when no session is running, launching with the shift key pressed results in the "safe mode" prompt. I wish there was a way to disable that.
Firefox doesn't suck, and matches Chrome. But there's no accounting for user behavior. I have seen user behavior that is mind-blowingly stupid, and subcultures of user activity and tendencies trace well with product loyalty trends.
Some user subcultures are retardedly dependent on browser extensions, never clear their cache, retain cookies for the lifetime of their laptop battery, and seemingly need hundreds of tabs open. And none of this shit makes sense to me.
These are likely the same people who carry around phones on the brink of overheating while locked, and in their pocket, because they have to have a thousand apps installed, in order to feel like they're getting the $1,000 phone they paid for, I guess. Their emails are constantly peppered with "sent from [app|device|service]" signatures, and they claim microphone permissions are why ads target them.
Honestly, if you've been blaming the browser, it's more likely that you're the one being your own worst enemy.
And, yeah, if Mozzila likes dropping numbers, nothing has to change.
Just this last month I've had Firefox crash tabs daily that Chrome handled perfectly fine, I've seen it crash the entire browser when Chrome did just fine. Underlying both those issues was a janky Windows install that was partially broken. But still, Chrome carried on like a trooper.
I've even just switched back to Linux and immediately saw Firefox stumble over scrolling frame rates. That was caused by using an Nvidia graphics card and the proprietary drivers on Kubuntu which was a bit janky again to say the least. But Chrome carried on through again with no problem.
Just today I've switch to an AMD graphics card and the opensource drivers on Fedora and only now is Firefox seemingly playing nice.
It's a great browser (though Dev Tools don't seem as good to me) and I love the containers but it does seem it needs a bit more of a particular environment to operate just right whereas Chrome 'just works' more of the time. That is possibly why lots of people say 'fine for me' (it is for me now, yey!) but others say "it's broken" or 'slow' or whatever.
( And as a user I knew that too. I just wanted to support Firefox. )
So saying Firefox Doesn't suck may be partially right. As we will have to define "suck" first. But saying it is as fast as Chrome during Firefox 4 and early Chrome era is just the same as saying earth is flat.
Google's own websites are some of the major culprits. The funny thing is that similar webs don't have this issue, and I don't notice any slowdowns that push me to do side-by-side tests.
Chrome feels like an untamed animal which does stuff without telling you, and I don't like it.
To this day, my browsing experience is still worse with Firefox than it was before 57, because so many useful little add-ons have never been replaced or have been replaced only with inferior versions. In some of those cases, that useful functionality can't be provided in the new environment, because the APIs to support it aren't there. I was unpleasantly reminded of this just a few days ago, when the same problem infected the latest Thunderbird update.
More seriously, I am running into increasing numbers of sites that simply don't work properly with Firefox. Sometimes this is because of the privacy/blocker extensions I use, but often the problem persists even if I disable those. Whether it's due to bad web developers doing Chrome-only things or bugs in recent versions of Firefox, the unfortunate result is still the same from the user's point of view.
I too experience privacy extensions breaking websites frequently, since I'm a heavy user of those, but so far I have never encountered a case of a website that was truly broken under Firefox. It was always one of my settings and worked under a clean profile.
They didnt release the specifications early enough for people to rewrite their addons and at the end of ESR52 there where still multiple bugs open which prevented people from porting their addons. We didnt even get a normal 1 year ESR support frame for gods sake. All that ignoring the fact that there was no warning for the end users that all their security addons were disabled after the automatic update.
I am still furious about the absolute arrogance and carelessness Mozilla showed here.
But Chrome as an alternative? That's not even on the table. Firefox is definitely the lesser of two evils.
They simply changed the default bookmark location with no option to change it back.
I need an addon to change the default bookmark location to keep my earlier filing approach.
I mean really?
I'm still upset that they broke custom keyboard shortcuts for ... two years now? All the replacements will only remap keys after a tab's JS has loaded. I used to be able to just zoom through the tabs with shift-j and shift-k, but now it will randomly stop on pages that need to reload, which breaks the whole experience.
I've had Super NES games that offered key customizations, and had much less memory and money to work with. That's really disappointing.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taGARf8K5J8
I ditch all Alphabet services, I do not like to waste my system and network resources for it's sake.
There have been major speedups since, and container tabs help fix the other issue. At this point, I still find Firefox worse than Chrome in a large number of ways, but they're small and often preference-based - but lots of people seem to agree that were a lot of users lost (or not gained) during a stretch where Firefox was pretty much objectively behind.
Firefox was always good on other OS. And you got noscript there with full access to block everything Chrome does not want you to block.
About noscript:
Recently I was playing with it, in an attempt to curate which site is allowed to make connections to which domain but I discovered that I cannot do it on a per domain basis and every whitelisted entry was applied everywhere. Apparently that was something that could be configured at noscript's ABE panel which doesn't exist in the latest versions.
If you want per domain rules I would suggest trying umatrix instead.
The last part is true, it did suck for a while. But I can't say "no fault but their own". Even if they rocked, they would have taken a big hit: chrome was advertised for a long time, and at no cost, using solicitating prompts directly on the most consultated and trusted web page in the world.
1. The biggest thing keeping me tied to Chrome over any other browser is the extension support. Extensions are second class citizens in any other browser. This is partly because other browsers keep overhauling their systems and deprecating old software which discourages extension developers, and mainly because (as an extension developer) why would you code for browser X when you can get more users on browser Y?
2. Anecdotal evidence, but every time an update of Firefox (and most notably Quantum) is released people laud how fast it is. On my 2015 Macbook running Mac OS Firefox has never been faster. Maybe there are things behind the scenes such as caching playing a role, but web pages load slower, scrolling feels sluggish, videos drop frames and freeze or get out of sync. It isn't an enjoyable experience compared to Chrome or Safari.
For example, for more than 10 years I've been using Chrome extensions that allow you to hover over image links to view them without clicking. There are dozens of these extensions in almost any browser, but they require constant updating to keep up with 1) new image/video hosts and 2) changes to existing image/video hosts.
For me, these extensions are an essential part of the browsing experience of many websites. I've found that the same extensions by the same developers often lag behind 6+ months on Firefox vs. Chrome which makes them really useless when gfycat, streamable, imgur, etc. all stop working.
It's kinda strange how bad mozilla is in doing the obvious good. Building in a direct support for chrome-store should be a priority. Solutions like this addon have such a bad experience..
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18072091
This is my experience too, unfortunately. I keep using Firefox instead of Chrome now to support Mozilla and their positive attitude towards end-user privacy, but compared to when I use Chrome it is an annoying product to use with the endless waiting and lag. Using Linux, so maybe it is just really only optimised for Windows PCs (arguably their largest user base)?
The only glitch I have now is that I can't use send tabs to push a tab to my phone (but the reverse works and it is fine to any other computer). So that's not that big of an issue.
I just wish it was better, because while it does get annoying at times, I do want to support Mozilla :-/
Note that this is why Firefox underwent the extensionpocalypse last year; the prior extensions model made it impossible not to regularly break the ecosystem. The next bit about "why code for browser X?" is also why they based their new APIs on Chrome's, to make it easy for existing Chrome extensions to support both browsers.
Modernly Firefox can't be customized much more than chrome - extreme hacks are needed: https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-fo...
(To clarify: it does have an adblocker, but it's quite basic, only based on a blacklist of hosts. You can also selectively enable JavaScript for individual domains, but not yet based on both webpage and its origin like with uMatrix)
However I'm avoiding media- and script-heavy websites as much as possible, and block a couple of ad networks solely because of the stress that rich media ads (videos flying all over iframes and whatnot) causes for the hardware I'm running the browser on. (I don't mind ads if they don't take 8 CPU cores to render, but they seem to be disappearing from the internet.)
You say this, but on mobile, the only major browser that supports extensions is Firefox. Not Chrome. Not Safari.
> And Firefox for Android is pretty bad otherwise, unfortunately
I disagree. Why do you think it is "pretty bad"?
Sync is the worst by a mile. You can NEVER expect a tab you opened (or history) on computer to show up reliably on mobile device in timely fashion.
That said, I keep going back to Firefox as my preferred phone browser, I still like it more than the others. And Firefox is definitely my favorite desktop browser, ever since Quantum. It was an enormous speed improvement over Safari on Mac for me when it came out, and I'm enjoying Firefox on my new PC laptop too.
Firefox Focus is my go to browser on Android, and it has ad blocking built in (as well as cookie / history erasure).
That said, have you tried installing Blokada from FDroid? It sets up a local VPN on your phone and routes all network traffic through it, blocking all ads in all apps. It's astonishing how many ads and trackers your phone would otherwise download in a week.
Wipr is the one I use, and I basically never see ads anymore on iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wipr/id1030595027?mt=8
using Firefox on desktop though, can't complain much over there, but it's useless on android if it crash even on ordinary sites
I still use and support Firefox for development purposes, and am wedded to containers, but apart from that it's Brave all the way (especially on mobile, which has been my default browser for over a year now).
[1] Excluding anything that bakes in Google spyware, and I believe they'll do a bit more curating of extensions from a security perspective.
That also means I can financially support sites without handing over any PII data as well.
It's up to them to offer a deal to get subscriber data (marketers gonna market), but the bar is increasingly high as we see hacks like Quora.
I think we're moving to a world where publishers will see that an MVP business model is 'dollars without data', and BAT with ZKP anonymity enables that.
I'd say Firefox's support for extensions is better than Chrome's, even after the change to WebExtensions. The author of NoScript, for example, thinks Firefox has the best environment for add-ons:
https://hackademix.net/2017/11/21/noscript-1011-quantum-powe...
With regard to 2, I've not found it to be noticeably slow, nor experienced dropped frames or the other complaints (ran on a 2014 and a 2017), but that's more likely me being unobservant.
My recreational browsing is mostly on an iPad, and the user story there is pretty desperate. I'd prefer to mimic my Desktop setup, but the walled garden doesn't afford me that opportunity. I'm cautiously optimistic that situation will catch up before I move platforms though!
Anyway, thank you for helping me see the other side a little better.
[1] - https://adnauseam.io
[2] - I don't know if anyone else has noticed this, but there's a needless and incessant Chrome (and Chromium) prompt on each startup as follows:
""" Disable Developer Mode Extensions
Extensions running in developer mode [sic] can harm your computer. If you're not a developer, you should disable these extensions running in developer mode to stay safe """
I personally find it inherently hostile, but perhaps I'm just an old man disregarding the use-case of other people!
uBlock Origin is a great complement to it, for when I want to block specific page elements.
Some extensions dont work after a year of being undeveloped, because the API changes. Is this really a bad thing? Opensource software uses patching as a "heartbeat" to discern whether a project is still developed or not. Hackers find holes over time, and when devs no longer fill them, the project needs to be left for dead.
Why should browser addons be any different?
I guess its a different philosophy - if the devs leave a browser addon for dead, the users should too.
Once every couple of years, the API changes and cleans out dead addons. Im not sure this is often enough.
But the best addons stay. NoScript. Adblock Plus or uBlock Origin. httpsEverywhere. The best Canvas blockers. These stay up to date.
What is missing?
You can improve the performance by setting "gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque" to true in the about:config settings. This will disable the transparency of the window, but it will reduce the overall resource consumption. The reduction is significant, approximately several extra hours of Firefox use, and your lap will thank you.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17934764
All the important stuff done in a browser should not be trusted to one that is closed source. (I know chromium is open source, but almost no one is using it).
A good balance of browsers is important, I've already seen "you must use chrome to view this site."
I wonder how many FF users roll with a user agent that identifies as chrome or some other browser, and how much (if even significantly) it affects surveys like the one in this article.
Although it is possible to move the tab bar using user CSS [1].
You're also missing out on a much faster browsing experience with the newer versions. In the older version I remember the scrolling lagged when I opened a new tab in the background, that hasn't happened in a while.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law
[1] https://www.userchrome.org/what-is-userchrome-css.html#movet...
Usernumbers went something like 250->300->275 Million. Seems they are somewhat stable in numbers.
I keep giving Firefox a chance but not much is changing.
Not sure if the rewrite in Rust was worth it.
That being said, Firefox has a bunch of small performance / hang issues that have nothing to do with the number of tabs but add up over time.
I mentioned in another sibling comment of mine that my 2nd gen i7 CPU was very heavily hit by all Spectre and Meltdown mitigation fixes and is noticeably slower now. Still though, Chrome works snappily and Firefox does not. :(
Many apps are not affected but Firefox definitely is. It starts hiccuping with only several tabs open while Chrome is working just fine.
The PC has 32GB of RAM so it's definitely not memory.
For those who are evaluating, please install AdBlock before you take a call - and do try it for a few days.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...
Whenever I'm roped into fixing some family member's computer, I always install all of those except privacy badger.
I agree that it's annoying and user hostile, but "extremely difficult"? It's one button in settings.
I'm afraid there are only some options:
1) Mozilla aggressively tries to be Chrome compatible. 2) Focus on Developer Tools in order to "motivate" Developers to use Firefox instead to develop their apps. 3) Somehow a miracle comes and they gain market share.
Actually i like the direction of Mozilla is taking now days where they are adding lots of interesting usability to Firefox. Like taking screenshots, share/send menu etc... But it seems this is not enough to get new users :(
Firefox is still pretty ugly, too. On macOS, it feels chunkier and less natively integrated.
Safari's "omnibar" is superior to Firefox's. Safari actually suggests web sites, which I use all the time. Wikipedia is a major one. Start typing "Richard Fey", for example, and the first hit will be the Wikipedia page for Richard Feynman, complete with a short summary and photo. Firefox forces me through a Google search.
I also tried out Firefox on iOS some time ago, and it wasn't as nice as Safari. For there to be a point to this, I'd need the same browser in both places, with perfect syncing of bookmarks, cookies, tabs, etc., just like Safari.
Lastly, migrating is a pain. There's apparently no way to import my current Safari session (I have probably 60-70 tabs) or history (I keep everything I visit, going back years), which means I'd lose stuff by migrating and would have to migrate tabs over incrementally. Hard to try out a browser in any significant way this way.
Yes, they've changed it in the latest version. I have Block and Notify option selected in Privacy tab. But many popups still go through -- sometimes they open in a new tab, sometimes in a new window.
Is there a way to fix that?
Also, is there a Tree Style Tab alternative for Safari?
Also: Some parts of NYTimes, and Slack.
There has got to be a better way to implement notification subscriptions than this annoying pop-up.
But the way the subscription mechanism is implemented with a pop up is annoying and archaic.
There must be a better way to let users know that notifications are enabled than sticking a pop-up in their face.
I don't know of a tree-style tab extension for Safari, sorry.
[1] http://rarbg.to/torrents.php
Another nice feature Safari has that I rely on is "show all tabs". Yes there are various "works in progress" trying to replicate the old tab groups / panorama functionality but I find them lacking or incomplete. Mozilla really hasn't done anything to improve the many tabs UX. Even Chrome might get something like tab groups:
https://www.chromestory.com/2018/11/how-to-enable-tab-groups...
I'm using Enpass which works with the three major browsers, has apps for iOS and Android, and has desktop apps for Mac, Windows, and Linux. The best part about it, in my opinion, is that their syncing backend lets you choose which cloud provider you want to sync with (they support six or seven different ones), including a generic WebDAV/ownCloud one if you want to host your own.
It's not perfect, but having something cross-platform and cross-browser has a lot of appeal.
I don't use a Mac, so I am not sure if there are other features of the Safari omnibar which are appealing. But the example you provided is especially concerning to me since it suggests that Safari is sending user input in the location bar to some external service for analysis. This is what allows the browser to find and render a snippet of a Wikipedia article that best matches what you've typed in the location bar. If I were using Safari, I would definitely be looking for a way to turn that off. I can't tell you how many times I've (accidentally) pasted something into the location bar that I would never voluntarily send to any third parties.
On Firefox, I have a Wikipedia bookmark that uses the 'w' keyword and uses the URL
So I would type "w Richard Feynman" to reach the same destination. Maybe not quite as elegant, but I have another that does a Wikipedia search if I don't feel like typing the whole name of an article.For whatever it's worth, I find the Firefox omnibar superb for many reasons, one being that it prioritizes my bookmarks and my history higher than directing me to a third-party search engine.
https://imgur.com/a/dY2SWKB
Yes, I use also an extension that lets me type "w richard feynman". I also use DuckDuckGo, which has a lot of these shortcuts. But Safari will still offer the first "best hit", when I'm not sure where to look something up.
As for privacy, I'm already deep in Apple. They take care of my stuff: My entire Safari history (synced with iCloud), backup of my iPhone, my iMessage chat history, and a lot of other things. Given their stance on privacy, I choose to trust them. I've never accidentally pasted anything in the search bar.
You don't really need two bookmarks for that. Wikipedia will redirect to the article if the search string happens to be exactly the same.
For people's information, these can be turned off in Safari preferences -> Search.
And some people are okay with storing their history somewhere in the cloud.
I was in the process of switching to Firefox from Chrome, and a few days after installing Firefox on iOS it interrupted me with a notification advertising Pocket. I immediately uninstalled it and haven't looked back.
Mozilla have put a tremendous amount of effort into the "ugly on every platform" cross platform tools over the years, from XUL to whatever the current one is. Developing a native UI for each platform would have been less effort and given much better results than continuing with this tried and failed approach.
Their latest attempt at theme support is just laughable and was very obviously not QA'd. In text areas I get the dark background theme from my desktop and the dark text foreground from the website css and it's made firefox unusable for me.
This is on top of things like their recent breakages to extensions so things that used to work (vertical tabs) still don't. And this only broke so they could go multi-threaded and then quickly had to add throttles so random sites couldn't hog every core.
But it seems mozilla are more concerned with re-writing things in rust, tying users into various web services and god knows what other side projects while they continue to avoid improving their core product.
I'd love to see firefox regain market share, we need an open source browser that's not controlled by a spyware company, but on their current trajectory firefox will dissapear into history and mozilla themselves will be the primary cause.
I'm a user, we should I care that they are making architectural improvements while they rewrite things in a different language when there are so many obvious issues preventing me from using it?
At this rate they will be rewriting it for no one.
And yet market share is plummeting, doesn't that indicated that your metrics for what users care about are completely wrong?
It's hardly me alone having this experience, most firefox users had there extensions break for no visible benefit. Anyone with the non-default ubuntu theme has the same issue with text boxes, which indicates a complete lack of QA.
I also have a 15 year long emotional attachment to firefox and a desire to see it succeed, if you can't convince me these changes are for the better then good luck with the rest of the world.
Mozilla is suffering from not having its own platform - they could have done so by keeping FirefoxOS alive and use the growing success of KaiOS today. Looks like they are not ready to come back because... reasons.
But yes, I agree that FF market share problems are not due to problems with the product itself.
Firefox has broken out of this before by being a better product. Not being default on any platform is nothing compared to back in the day when IE had >95% market share and sites were made to work with it only.
These days even many linux distros are defaulting to chromium, that's the one place where it could be the "native" browser.
The breakage in question is more than one year old now, and most things has been restored since then (including vertical tabs).
this was very noticeable with twitch where I tend to have more than one stream up. I will pop up mail to reply to something and watch Safari drop the resolution behind mail yet firefox does not do this. I haven't found a solution to it yet
You mean, it's the only usable browser for users like you. I assure you, most users don't use this and don't really care for it.
Unfortunate to see these results.
Although there is some vested interest, although indirectly. Decisions are still tied to money, which is why Google has traditionally been the default search engine in Firefox.
There is little if anything wrong in tracking people who don't care about being tracked, those who do can easily switch the search engine to startpage.com, duckduckgo.com, Searx, Seeks or whatever.
I think the switch back to Firefox was worth it if only for the privacy and to claw back some control from Google.
On a MacBook Pro it is not only faster but your battery life lasts noticeable longer.
Not to mention the Safari engineers' stand on privacy as compared to Google Chrome...
1. I kept running into Safari-only issues on websites. The most memorable one was on the American Express website. I couldn't switch between cards because the selection widget was broken on Safari.
2. The marketplace for Safari extensions is anemic, a problem which is only going to get worse[1] as legacy extensions are about to be totally deprecated[2]. Firefox did the same thing, but at least they moved to the WebExtension API. Safari App Extensions are very limited in what they can do.
3. Safari's developer tools were not as good as Chrome's or Firefox's.
[1]: https://redditenhancementsuite.com/safari/
[2]: https://9to5mac.com/2018/06/09/safari-12-extensions-more/
I did a big analysis of the distribution of extensions on Firefox vs Chrome.
You could expect Firefox to be maybe 1/3rd that of Chrome.
Nope... it's 1/40th.... So 40x more people use the same extension on Chrome vs Firefox.
I'm not sure why this is... it might be that Chrome users adopt extensions more readily than Firefox users?
I think there's a lesson here on long term user growth but it's somewhat complicated.
Link to our chrome extension btw.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/save-to-polar/jkfd...
Google has consistently pushed Chrome and profits from it.
If Chrome has 10,000 potential users of your add-on, Firefox has 100, and you have 98 Chrome users and 2 Firefox users, then the add-on adoption rates are 0.98% for Chrome and 2% for Firefox.
Of course that's just shifting the hard bit, which is figuring out who your potential users are.
I just installed polar.
Immediately after install, it prompts you to install a chrome extension, it has a big google chrome icon that takes up 1/16th of my screen. It has no mention of how to do the same in firefox.
Naturally, I responded by searching both "polar firefox addon" and "Save to polar firefox addon" on both DuckDuckGo and Google. All return a long list of results that don't include a save to polar addon.
I go to addons.mozilla.org and search "Save to Polar", I don't find your extension.
At this point I would typically have given up and assumed you just don't have a firefox version of the extension... but since you've just told me that there exists a firefox extension and I'm curious I'll keep going.
Your website mentions it nowhere.
The chrome store doesn't let me install it in firefox.
The GitHub readme doesn't mention it.
No GitHub issues mention it.
The subreddit linked from the website has no sidebar. Searching on it finds no mention of firefox.
Checking the other github repos under the same account as the polar repo I see a "Polar Chrome Extension" and not a "Polar Firefox Extension", but maybe those are the same things these days since both support web extensions. Nope, that repo is a placeholder with nothing in it.
Going back to addons.mozilla.org and just searching "polar", filtering for extensions, and scrolling through the results (only 5 thankfully) reveals nothing.
I search "Save to Polar" github' on both duckduckgo and google, hoping to at least find the source of the addon. Neither return any relevant results.
At this point I'm astonished there are any firefox users of that addon... as far as I can tell it doesn't exist for firefox.
Edit:
It occurs to me that maybe you meant looking at other people's addons. So I looked at the most popular addon I know of, ublock origin. Chrome says "10,000,000+", Firefox says "4,794,583"... which is 40%!
Out of curiosity, are you going to open source the chrome one?
- What is a "user"? Is it someone who downloaded it once? Is it just straight up the number of installs that ever happened? Or is it someone who actively uses the extension on a frequent basis? If you go by the numbers on the Chrome Store and on AMO, they likely have different definitions.
- Firefox recently introduced support for an extension API which is quite similar to the Chrome extension API (for the most part a superset), so lots of Chrome extensions have been ported over from Chrome just as recently and as a result will naturally not yet have as high user numbers.
- Firefox has traditionally had more powerful extensions and still continues to have a more powerful extension API. So, there's going to be extensions that are better, which only exist on Firefox, whereas similar extensions that were ported over from Chrome, therefore exist on both, will largely be ignored.
Analysing this on a non-empirical level:
- Firefox has less users.
- Chrome has somewhat less functionality built-in, which means users will have a higher need for extensions.
- With Firefox's extensions having traditionally been more powerful, the user base should still have many tinkerers.
- Firefox extensions are much more thoroughly vetted and malware is essentially a non-issue. On Chrome, it happens more often and I have seen people removing non-essential extensions for that reason.
- Chrome users are less likely to be privacy-conscious, which somewhat negates the previous point again and means they're more likely to just install an extension without thinking about it too much. On the other hand, Firefox users should be more likely to install privacy-enhancing extensions.
- Firefox for Android supports many extensions as well (though its user base is not the biggest).