It was my primary reason to drop Chrome twelve years ago. Every so often I try Chrome again, but other than a minor speed boost, I see no reason to switch back.
The UI isn’t great, nor is resource usage. These days I don’t bother installing an alternative browser and just use Safari.
We can only speculate about Google's true motivations and there is no reason to believe that it is only that. You can't deny that a privacy focused browser having their funding depend on one of the primary privacy violators on the web is a conflict of interest. Even if Google is not directly pressuring Mozilla to implement/not implement things, Mozilla is still going to be hesitant to piss off Google too much.
Ditch 'em all — Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Amazon (the "evil MAGA"). It's like when folks complain about CNN or Fox News but keep feeding the beast by paying for subscription television: Stop hurting yourself, folks!
That's strange. Chrome says it requires MacOS 10.11, Firefox says it requires MacOS 10.12. Based on that it would appear that Chrome is supporting older versions of MacOS than Firefox.
MacOS 10.11 supports every 2008 and newer Apple computer. There are also patches to get newer versions of MacOS on old hardware. I'm using one patch to get 10.13 running on a 2008 MacBook Pro and it runs great.
While I don’t share the aversion toward Mozilla, I do think it a strange company.
For some reason their focus seems directed towards everything that’s specifically not Firefox or browser related. Sort of if Microsoft forgot that they own Windows.
I haven't really tried using Edge for general use, but I do use it whenever I want text-to-speech. That's a lot better in Edge than other options I've tried.
I wouldn't touch Edge because I still remember the days when IE was dominating the market. As much as I despise Google being the one now, I do not miss those days and do not trust Microsoft to do anything good if they were in this position again.
So you can make fun of people concerned about privacy, but history proved there's a lot more concerns to have regarding Microsoft
I remember those times too, completely different group of management, and the way they've done business in the last near decade, has also been very different. Some throwbacks, but on the whole, vastly different. I've been watching, you clearly haven't. And aside from that, they're never going to be in the "same position", the market is entirety different.
I'm still using Firefox as my primary browser on desktop and mobile. I have minor complaints, but nothing to make me consider switching to something else.
I've always stuggled with NewPipe, not because of NewPipe itself, but because YouTube and it's algorthim.
People act as if the algorthim is some sort of evil entity, but my viewing habbits follow recommended videos and content aware search. I find sticking to subscriptions and trending videos to be very trapping.
Funny, for me it's the opposite. I'm very glad to have only default un-personalised suggestions, plus my hand-curated subscriptions.
No more watching one chess video and being bombarded with chess content for a month, or watching one harmless satirical video about a politician and being bombarded with videos from the local right-populist party propaganda channel (yes, this has happened to me exactly as described).
Fair enough, one of us may have been lucky/unlucky with how content is served to us.
I have experience the "bombardment" of a suggestion, but I think my subscriptions are vaired enough that a click off that topic straightens it all out.
The same thing annoys me. I do hit the ‘three vertical dots’ menu and select “not interested” and I think that is effective but that takes a few seconds and is a slight nuisance.
Off topic, but I have a love/hate relationship YouTube because of privacy issues, especially my political and spiritual views. Same thing with TikTok, but at least that material is mostly silly so if advertisers can buy information on which silly stuff I watch, that seems slightly less harmful than YouTube.
I wonder why there are sites in which the reader mode is not even available. I can't think of any right now but it happens with relative frequency to be annoying.
Because Reader Mode is using heuristics to fetch the content of the article, and that can fail if the article is weirdly formatted in HTML. You can read more about this on the repo for Mozilla's Readability, which is what Firefox uses under the hood: https://github.com/mozilla/readability
Been using FF for about a year now. Absolutely no complains. Before that I used Chrome for many years and really there is nothing I used to do con Chrome that I cannot do on FF.
I did not change because of privacy concerns or whatever, I just wanted to try something else, and FF has been quite alright.
And why not? Since it works so well on Firefox, it seems like a valid thing to do. You can quickly jump to any opened tab using the % thing in the URL or, if you have tagged bookmarks open, you can search by tag. Basically opened tabs are like a huge brain cache layer of things you want to look at.
I'm always curious about the use case of having so many open tabs. Is there some context you work in where so many tabs are needed? Are you able to find already open tabs, or do you just end up with 50 hacker news tabs because you just open new ones? Do you actually look at each tab, or do you open in the background and never load them? Are you using extensions to make tabs management easier, like tree style tabs?
Once I get past 40 or so I purge old tabs because it makes it hard to find others I'm actively using. Besides, opening a tab again isn't a huge burden.
I questioned it also but I guess tabs have become the replacement for bookmarks. AFAIk both chrome and Firefox have a search function specifically for open tabs so for some it's easier to track and store sites that way, especially since the browser can handle it well enough.
It's not my preference as I like having a clean browser window; too many tabs is distracting and it's harder for me to contextualize what work I'm focusing on (windows + tabs for tasks is my preference), but I can see how it works for some.
Yeah, using is 40 tabs is weird to me. Here is my strategy, just have current tabs open that are relevant for my computing session.
When I need something else that I visited, I use the history shortcut, search for the word (usually its in the title) and I got the info I need.
Same with bookmarks which I usually tag.
Tabs are just more concrete than bookmarks. Tabs aren't things I thought I would want to revisit in the future that I went out of my way to save to a list of such things that I will never visit again.
Rather, tabs are even more useful than that: things I was actually doing adjacent to the thing I was doing right next to it. There's a spatial element to it.
Nothing compares to tabs. Especially not browser history which is one long list of urls I once visited, who cares. Tabs are a list of urls I settled on.
I use an extension called autoTabDiscard (or something close) that unloads webpages that I didn't access the last 10 minutes, or that doesn't load any tab on startup, but the tabs keep existing in both cases. Then you can setup exceptions as well.
But why open so many tabs when you can just search history or bookmark (in FF you can also tag by double clicking the star icon)
Usually I find everything I needed by time, data, keyword, tag, or bookmark in a few seconds at most by opening history or bookmark by keyboard shortcut.
In my case I think I got used to have specific ff windows for specific stuff, and having the tabs "opened" feels quicker for me. But I guess I could get used to and switch to tags and bookmarking as you said.
I have no problem in Firefox with dozens of tabs. Meanwhile my extensionless Chromium install will consume all memory if it is left open for a couple weeks with just two or three tabs.
yawn I am a declared tab horder, with 500+ tabs open and Firefox shows no sign of any slowdown. Try that with Chromium derivates. In my experience Firefox outclasses Chromium based browsers for such a workload.
I rarely have fewer than double that number of tabs open in Firefox and never have crashes. Maybe it’s crashed on me in the past, but if so I don’t remember it happening.
Meanwhile I usually have 1000-2000 tabs open in Firefox and it doesn't slow down at all, while Chrome made the whole system slow down to a concerning degree with less than 100 tabs.
Using Firefox all the time ... Brave seems also to be a reasonable alternative. But I just don't like the Dev tools in Chrome ... The FF ones are way better (IMHO).
At the end it seems so that FF isn't blocking a lot of tracking by default while Brave do so. But FF with uBlockOrigin is a good match for privacy.
uBlock Origin can do a lot more than people think too... easy opt-in to JavaScript, cleaning tracking tokens from the URL, and allowing me to block features from websites trying to be a bit too 'social' or 'recommendy'. Fx will be skipping the part of the latest WebManifest that cripples uBlock's ability to block as well.
I honestly want to ditch Firefox and try a Chromium browser for a minute [1], but I'm stuck on Firefox because it's the only one with a killer feature: send a tab to/from iOS and my Linux desktop.
I skip Chrome and Edge for privacy reasons, Brave have a crappy and buggy sync feature that I don't know what OSes it supports, but not my combination. Can't send tabs with them. Vivaldi doesn't have an iOS port. Impossible to do with Chromium.
Firefox can send tabs to all my machines, and I use that feature multiple times daily, such as finding a cool article while I'm sitting on the couch and sending it to my desktop so I can read it later. Mr. Eich, if you're around here, please please fix syncing tabs in your browser, it's the only thing stopping me from switching honestly.
--
1: I quite like Firefox, but it's in a dying spiral, and I'm starting to see broken sites. The Web is such a complicated nightmare "protesting" won't change anything, and forking neither, because it's too bloody complex. Chromium has won. Our only hope is Mozilla takes their head out of their arse and start working on their browser instead of faffing about and making small, meaningless changes every release, but I don't see that happening any time soon.
The super-annoying thing about that, is that you need a Sync-Server, and an "Identity" server to run this all without having sign in to "Firefox Sync".
The sync-server is trivial to run via docker, but (last time i checked) running the other essential part yourself is (intentionally?) not easy at all.
Mozilla really can’t win can they? They’re the only browser company that even attempts to provide the ability to run your own syncing service, and yet the insinuation is that they’re going out of their way to make it difficult.
I'm not sure, that can be stated as fact, but for this subtopic (How to run all FXA and syncserver selfhosted) the docs make it sound easy to deploy/run. As expected, after all, the featureset needed isn't huge for "Maintain a list of tabs per browsers per User, authenticated via some backend plugin for the syncserver".
But then you read, that you need to run half a dozen "fxa-something" servers, in addition to the SyncServer. And a clear writeup of those is what I briefly check for every few months, but haven't found yet.
to be clear, by "intentionally" I meant, that I could understand, if it were a business decision to allocate less/no developer time to making the "100% self-hosted"-option very attractive/documented/easy. I did not mean to insinuate intentional hurdle-introductions via code, or some-such.
No, I meant, they make it look like you could do this all easily without external clouds, but then the Identity-server, which I cannot imagine to be much more complicated w.r.t. functionality that e.g. a Samba4 AD-DC, is/was(last time i checked) basically undocumented and looked intentionally overbuilt (again, comparing with e.g. Samba4-AD). And not open-source (iirc).
Also, why can't I use a standard Directory Server, instead of their home-built one-off-solution?
Standard directory servers aren't specifically built for end-to-end encryption, while data in Firefox Sync is end-to-end encrypted by default. Firefox Sync must also scale to support the millions of Firefox users who use Mozilla's instance.
Hi, thanks for replying with information. You seem to more than me about the current situation, i'm happy to learn more.
So the above (synstorage-rs_in_container) is now the only required software needed, and now includes the identity-server portion?
I would really like to use the "beam-a-tab-to-some-other-firefox", been a FF user since before it got that name. But i wanted to self-host all parts, and then found some info, that suggested, that 2 parts are needed: the SyncServer, the above open-source thing, and the Identity-server, on which i did not find much info at the time.
Do you have a link to recent-ish write-up of the current situation, that you can validate to be correct-ish?
Thanks again
Also, w.r.t Directory-Servers/Security: Enterprise printers have been able to authenticate Users with SSL/TLS-secured connection for more than a decade. So why not a "syncserver for URLs of open tabs per User"?
I don't think Mozilla has a recent write-up (blog post) about the Sync Server. The most recent one I found is an announcement from 2020, which explains some of Mozilla's motivations:
The syncserver is the trivial part. The less-well-documented web of 5-8 fxa-yxzablgt services (FX-Account-server) that you need to also run is the issue. The docker github readme warns against anything but "messing around" type usage, and the last update there was 7 years ago.
( fxa-content-server
fxa-profile-server
fxa-auth-server
fxa-oauth-server
browserid-verifier
fxa-auth-db-mysql )
I've tried this before, and you're right about it not being easy to follow, at least compared to previous incarnations. The above documentation is for a much older version, and the latest I found is here:
There's a lot of components directly hooked into Google Cloud that also make it difficult in terms of configuration. At some point I think creating an actual user's guide for this would be good for the community interested in self-hosting this on their own.
What are some examples of this? I keep seeing this complaint and I keep asking for examples but I always get "just various sites"-like answers. FF is my primary browser and I am not seeing it. I am genuinely curious as to whether it is starting to fall behind but I can recall maybe two or three instances the past couple of years where I opened a site in Brave to see if it worked there.
I use firefox and don't see broken sites per se, but there are many sites where performance, especially js performance, suffers. Gmail and other Google sites are sluggish for example, as well as Amazon. It sometimes takes a minute after visiting amazon.com for their js to initialize and I can begin to interact with the site. This is not the case for chromium. I stick with firefox because of multi-account containers, a mobile app that I can add adblockers to, and multi-device sync that works well with linux and android, but performance lags and it's getting worse.
Google sites have long been suspected to do things intentionally in a way that is only optimizing for Chrom(e/ium), maybe even intentionally slow on other browsers, which is mostly Firefox. No surprise there at all.
However I do not see this stuff about JS init to take that long on amazon. It might be a special thing in your case. Did you try things like a new profile, to test, whether it still happens?
It's not so much "intentionally broken on Firefox" as it is "between adding features and debugging Firefox performance issues, one gets you promoted and one doesn't." Because the former benefits all users and the latter benefits about 5% of users at most.
The banal evil of neglect vs. intentional maliciousness.
That may be a small part of the truth but even a 12 year old me wouldn't believe such a fairy tale to be the whole reason.
MS also used to optimize DOS in ways that clearly hurt their competitors. We've seen Intel aggressively optimize their compiler to slow down AMD... I am sure people have been "optimizing" in such ways for as long as there have been people.
I can agree that Google simply neglects Firefox performance and features. I think this alone is enough to explain why Google products work better on Chrome.
Are you saying that there are people at Google whose job description is to tweak Google web products to perform worse on Firefox, just so Chrome appears better in comparison?
Google doesn't have to do any of that. They can literally just keep implementing WHATWG features that are hard to get right because they're technically challenging and let Mozilla not have the resources to keep up. They don't control the operating system, but they have the resources to propose a protocol or API they can implement correctly and competitors might not (well, one competitor... Apple and Microsoft seem to keep up).
Name a feature that Firefox doesn't have that prevents people from using the web. I can't. But I can name several that I've seen work more correctly on Chrome because they have the resources to make it work in the context of very complicated and legacy-filled rendering engines (flexbox comes to mind) where Mozilla appears to not (ask me about my favorite Firefox-only flex performance issues... To their credit, they have all been fixed, but FF spent a lot of time behind the curve).
Firefox Android’s can install the “Google Search Fixer” add-on to request the full Google Search UI (by sending a Chrome User-Agent string to google.com):
asos.com did not work properly on FF until recently. Opening some categories would yield an "oops" error. Seems it's fixed in the latest release, but it goes to show how fucked up is webdev if nobody from asos.com tested it with Firefox.
I use this feature to stick it to them and never use logged in Google properties from my main Firefox. I can discard their cookies at will. I have a Chromium sandbox they can track me in for Gmail.
And another one - google search any time series graphs such as stock price, currency convertion etc. Works so far on FF. Click any of the non-default resolution (5D, 1M, 6M) and you'll get a "No chart available" on FF.
I've had problems when organizing online tournaments using Challonge. I've had to switch to Chrome a few times to do something, since it would regularly break in FF. Also their support page requires you to enter a combination of keys to reveal the email address: sadly this didn't work in FF, too.
I've had a few other problems over time, but none that I remember off the top of my head. I've used FF for the past 15+ years and don't usually mind small problems, though.
Firefox is my main browser for many years now, but there are two categories of sites that I only open in Chrome:
Video heavy sites, especially YouTube. It loads extremely slowly compared to Chrome. And has much more video stuttering. Probably Google is sabotaging YouTube in Firefox.
Complex interactive sites, like crypto exchanges. They are slow and with many rendering artefacts in Firefox. Probably because they don't even bother testing in Firefox.
> Video heavy sites, especially YouTube. It loads extremely slowly compared to Chrome. And has much more video stuttering. Probably Google is sabotaging YouTube in Firefox.
Hmmm... I've never had this problem and I use YouTube heavily. You sure your video acceleration and codecs and all that are set up right?
I don't remember but I had to enable something in FF for acceleration at one point and I assume you'd have to have the right codecs installed. This is on Arch Linux.
It's a known issue https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1658392
I have a laptop with Intel HD graphics and Firefox can't play fullhd video on x2 speed. It freezes every second. Chrome on the same machine plays the same video flawlessly.
It has always been possible to open YouTube links on VLC. If you want to do so with even less clicks from your browser, there's a open with mpv extension. Can't link it now as am on mobile.
I still haven't found any except a local dating site that can detect my ad blocker in Firefox but not Chrome. Every other site that doesn't work in FF so far also doesn't work in Chrome.
HomeDepot.com often won't let me add things to cart. The past couple months it has been working again, but there were a few months where I couldn't.
This morning, I couldn't buy a key off cdkeys.com - tried two totally different methods, email addresses, credit cards. Didn't try a second browser yet but I'm not sure I am that persistent...
A news site, I think the New Yorker, would only show the first two paragraphs of an article but in other browsers, would show the full article.
I don't log which sites break - if it's important I tend to cave and open Edge for that site, do my business, and then go back to Firefox for everything else. If it's less important, I'll opt to just not to business with them. But I'm a grain of sand so it doesn't make much difference.
Most sites just have really obnoxious CAPTCHA, often requiring more than one "pick the things" but I don't know if my experience is specific to Firefox.
> HomeDepot.com often won't let me add things to cart. The past couple months it has been working again, but there were a few months where I couldn't.
I checked for webcompat issues matching this description and couldn't find anyone reporting that adding items to the cart didn't work.
I attempted to reproduce the issue myself, but HomeDepot block visitors from my location.
> This morning, I couldn't buy a key off cdkeys.com - tried two totally different methods, email addresses, credit cards. Didn't try a second browser yet but I'm not sure I am that persistent...
Can't reproduce, I was able to buy a CD Key ("Garfield Kart - Furious Racing PC") at 28 May 2022, 16:51:52 BST using Firefox 100.0.2 and a debit card.
> A news site, I think the New Yorker, would only show the first two paragraphs of an article but in other browsers, would show the full article.
I'm not saying you've not experienced these issues, but they're definitely not widespread and your post doesn't give enough information to go on to diagnose if there's an issue with Firefox or not.
The best thing you can do is report issues to the webcompat project as and when you come across compatibility issues. It takes about 20 seconds, less time than you probably spent writing this comment.
What is the "webcompat project"? I just tried googling for it and there were some articles about it, but no page I could submit.
I can say I recently found I couldn't make a new account at 'wise.com' in firefox (had to switch to chrome), and an internal university website doesn't work in Firefox -- but of course, I can't share that page publicly, so there's not a lot useful I can do with that.
> I'm not saying you've not experienced these issues
It really sounds like you are. I hate these "Well did you report it? I can't reproduce it. Did you rebuild in debug mode and check the logs? Did you learn C++ and fix it?" responses.
Which is obviously why I explicitly said I wasn't!
> I hate these "Well did you report it? I can't reproduce it."
How do you expect progress to be made if we can't precisely discuss browser issues & how to reproduce them in a way that enables them to be investigated and fixed?
For all we know at the minute, the OP has an extension installed that's causing all this.
> "Did you rebuild in debug mode and check the logs? Did you learn C++ and fix it?"
> A news site, I think the New Yorker, would only show the first two paragraphs of an article but in other browsers, would show the full article.
Sorry if this is a silly question, but is this maybe just the paywall? I'm not sure if you've been reading more articles on Firefox and then only opened on Chrome or something after this started happening, but it sounds like that could be what's going on.
> HomeDepot.com often won't let me add things to cart.
Try opening the site in incognito mode. It usually fixed these random issues.
> Most sites just have really obnoxious CAPTCHA, often requiring more than one "pick the things" but I don't know if my experience is specific to Firefox.
Installing the "Privacy Pass" extension can significantly reduce captcha challenges when visiting sites that use cloudflare.
It's tricky, because now that Firefox is a (small) minority browser I often assume any breakage is Firefox-specific. But at least 80% of the time, when I retry something in Chrome, it's still broken. I usually don't, mentally file it as "broken in Firefox", and decide I don't need to use that site for now anyway. So my estimation of Firefox-specific breakage is probably much higher than the reality. A lot of the web is just plain broken, for all browsers, much of the time.
The one major category of real problems I run into are related to captchas.
I most commonly find it during payment processing and other spots where devs are trying to do fancy input validation or styling in forms, especially on mobile. The most common issue is that the the cursor isn't moved correctly when accounting for automatically inserted spaces or hyphens and it can be pretty much impossible to enter the correct numbers without overwriting previous numbers. Autofill also generally fails in these scenarios.
I've seen a couple pages on CNBC where it would render the content, then delete it all. (Like, the containing DOM element was made empty.)
Disabling JS kept the content from vanishing.
Of course, this is almost certainly bad coding on the website's side, and not the fault of Firefox. But it seems like it's but getting the QA attention it needs from the site owners.
time.com, pages simply didn't appear -- at least this was the case in recent versions of FF, can't swear it's so in latest. Other sites can lack "Search" buttons that appear in Chrome & Safari, or their forms don't work in FF but do in other browsers. It's a real problem.
Twitch has been broken for the entire pandemic and will not be ever improved at this point. I gave up and just went with Chrome for anything media related. Mozilla has stopped caring and so I have.
Firefox can share history and bookmarks with other instances running on other machines even if the other is not running at the time and you don't need to do anything to make it happen once you have set it up.
With an online account that syncs the Firefox profile across all devices. And part of that is the ability to send a link to a specific device, which will then automatically load that URL in a new tab.
It takes 20x as much time and work to copy a link, context switch to another app, paste, then, when you're on the desktop, _remember_ to check that shared document, and open the link, than to just press option menu, send tab, choose linux desktop and bam!, it's there as soon as you open your browser the next day.
Google Chrome for iOS (well, iPadOS to be precise) will send a web page (not a tab) to desktop Chrome. I know because I do it regularly. The disadvantage of that app is that it lets through most ads blocked by the combination of Safari and the ad blocker Wipr (and I have not bothered to look for an ad blocker that works better with Chrome on iPadOS) with the result that I do most of my iOS browsing in Safari, which means that before I can send a page to my desktop, I usually need to "send" it to the Chrome app, which requires 3 taps, the first of which is a tap on the "share" button near the top right corner of the Safari app. But even with those 3 taps, it ends up being an easier method than the method that begins with my using the same "share" button to mail the page's URL to myself.
Every time something is broken for me on a site it is because of an addon/extension, not because of Firefox. I beleave Firefox get much blame for broken sites when it actually is an addon that the user installed which is to blame.
I even have some vague recollection of Mozilla mentioning just this. Like 99% when something is broken it not because the browser but because some addon the user installed.
So test a site that you dont think works with the "troubleshoot mode" in Firefox that inactivate addons etc to see if it works then. And if it works, then figure out which addon it is that makes the mess and to blame.
This matches my experience - it's not Firefox that's getting worse, but I'm encountering more and more sites that don't function correctly when uBlock Origin is enabled. Whenever I run into a site seems busted, I disable uBlock, reload, and suddenly everything works. I'm not sure if the filters I'm using are getting worse or if the JS on the sites I'm visiting is.
I used to use Decentraleyes but I ended up uninstalling that completely because it broke so many sites.
> Our only hope is Mozilla takes their head out of their arse and start working on their browser instead of faffing about and making small, meaningless changes every release, but I don't see that happening any time soon.
Tab syncing is a small meaningless change to me, but not to you. Some of these things you find small and meaningless could be important to some other people (for example, multilingual spell-checking is very important to some people, X11 isolation is very important to some others).
What do you actually expect from Mozilla by "taking their head out of their arse" ?
> What do you actually expect from Mozilla by "taking their head out of their arse" ?
Investing in their browser. Investing in an alternative ecosystem.
Brave have added in-browser Torrent, TOR, IPFS support. That's what I would expect from Mozilla, trying to differentiate itself. Now we've lost the compact UI, got coloured themes for one release. What's cooking that's really exciting? What's the plan to retake some of the lost market share? I can't see any thirst to improve over there.
Useless bloat. Dedicated torrent clients are made better and work better.
> TOR
Interesting, but the popular advice is to only use the Tor Browser. I don't know if that's good advice or not, but it certainly dampens my enthusiasm for Brave supporting Tor.
> IPFS support.
When I actually find a real use for IPFS, then I'll be able to form an opinion on it. Until then, it's just an obscure novelty to me. What can I actually do with it? Torrents and traditional websites together work for downloading/hosting/sharing anything I can think of.
Hard disagree. I don't want Tor and torrents and email and other crapware on my browser. And not on my Firefox. It already has too much of that with pocket. They can focus on the engine and the UI. Leave useless stuff as separate applications.
It’s quite easy if all you do is repackage chrome. Firefox manages to maintain and develop the only completely separate, open and free browser implementation which is nigh impossible a task.
> Our only hope is Mozilla takes their head out of their arse and start working on their browser
Are you reporting these to the webcompat project? Mozilla is absolutely funding QA testers and engineers to check what's broken and triage issues that affect specific browsers and not others.
A great number of the issues that Mozilla contractors and employees investigate that are reported via the webcompat project actually turn out to be the site owner's fault. They're not using standardised web technologies, not testing their work in multiple browsers. Mozilla employees and contractors will try to perform outreach to these site owners, but they're often not interested.
There's no easy answer here short of governments forcing a browser ballot on new computers. Regular people just don't care enough if the web devolves into a monoculture. And businesses don't want to use standards when it's easier to just do whatever works in Blink.
I just discovered the "share" item in the tab contextual menu includes AirDrop (on mac naturally) and while this doesn't help you, I was always copying and pasting a site between firefox and safari in order to send it to my iPhone, and was previously frustrated that I couldn't hit the airdrop function from firefox directly Thanks, your comment made me look for it!
Tree style tabs is what brought me over. I have dozens of tabs I want to keep an eye on, without necessarily having them actually open and loaded. Kinda like bookmarks but quickly available. There's no way to arrange that many tabs across the top, so a bit of CSS magic removes the top tabs. With modern screens being so wide it makes sense to just have them vertically, in a tree.
Firefox user for about five years and very satisfied with it.
Firefox's multi account containers are very useful - when I started using them a few years ago I very quickly noticed that my Web searches stopped showing up in Amazon or as FB ads, and vice versa.
And just generally not using a browser that is aligned with the interests of a global advertising company seems like a good thing.
That is exactly why I no longer use Firefox. I moved to germany and I don't speak german, so you can imagine browsing without this functionality is impossible.
Firefox is lacking many major enterprise controls making it unsuitable for many large companies. An example of this is the lack of ability for administrators to apply additional restrictions on the domains specific extensions can access. Other basic enterprise features that are missing are the inability to force restarts when updates are available.
Funny, I've done the opposite. Firefox has always been my default as far as I can remember but for the past several releases it has been heavy in terms of macOS memory. The author is obviously using Windows, but on macOS it is the opposite. Every startup, Firefox seems to throttle my MBP fans and will get sluggish as I keep on using it.
Same for me too (I'm using Windows), I've moved on to Chrome because of annoying performance issues with Firefox. Much better in that area after switching , although I still miss Tree Style Tabs sometimes... (you can't find a replacement for that in Chrome)
FireFox Containers are a killer feature for me. It allows you to run sandboxed sessions. So you can ostensibly make every site a private tab by default but have a small few sites persistent.
Eg I’ll have a work group with GitHub, Okta, etc in it so I only need to log in once a day. But random websites cannot track me between sites.
Couple that with DNS blocking of trackers and ads, and the web is actually a lot more pleasant to use.
Unfortunately you cannot fix everything locally though.
Although Firefox had profiles for ages and you could start Firefox with the profile manager and "new instance allowed" to choose a profile at the start of each new instance. More hidden then in Chromium, but definitely possible.
EDIT: Just for completeness sake, here is the command to open Firefox with profile manager and new instances:
Yes, but with this UX it may as well not exist for 99% of users. Container tabs while still a little power-user is something that can be explained to the average user.
One of the major problems with container tabs is that they share a lot of persistent state between them, such as browsing history. Profiles are mostly isolated by comparison.
You'll need to install a connector for it to work. (The add-on gives instructions during the onboarding process.) Both the add-on and the connector are free and open source (GPLv3).
I use profiles and containers together on Firefox. Each profile has its own set of add-ons, browser settings, and containers. Containers in the same profile share the same add-ons and browser settings. For example, you could have separate personal and work profiles, with containers for different online accounts in each profile.
On Firefox, you have the option of using only profiles, only containers, both profiles and containers, or none of the above.
I've been looking for something like that. Thanks. But ideally, I don't want to swithswitch profiles. I want to have muliple instances of FF open, each with a different profile. Just like Chromium based browsers and users.
When you choose a different profile in the Firefox Profile Switcher menu, it opens a new instance of Firefox with the new profile. The add-on experience will be very familiar if you've used Chromium's profile management features.
If you're trying to create a shortcut to Firefox that launches a profile other than the one you've selected as the default, the instructions for Linux and Windows are here:
I'm going to have to give this a try. I manage multiple Google Workspace accounts for clients and have stuck to Chrome for those as I have a profile set up for each account. Yes, you can log in to multiple Google accounts in any browser, but then it defaults to the first account for new windows.
The two final things that would get me off Chrome entirely:
* When I'm using my external USB microphone in a web-based conference system (mostly Cleanfeed but I've also seen it with Streamyard and Jitsi) my audio gets extremely robotic after a few minutes and it somehow impacts my entire system - I have to unplug the microphone to fix it.
* Dropbox, for some reason, hangs at 1 second left when uploading larger files (appx 60MB or so)
I'm pretty sure the profile manager stuff in Firefox goes all the way back to the Netscape 4 days. If I recall correctly, back in the way back, it used to throw you into Profile Manager and walk you through creating your initial one on first launch of fresh installs. At some point they tucked that under the rug and just started creating the default profile automatically - maybe because it made less sense to ask for a bunch of personal information up-front when the browser was broken off from the mail client? Now most people have forgotten that Profile Manager even exists, but it's been there the whole time.
my parents rely on Profile Manager. I set that up for them years ago, since my mom uses my dad's computer a bit every day. She has no need for a whole user account. Separating the stuff in the browser is enough.
No it wouldn't, that's just pessimism. The entire HN community switching would have massive second-order effects. People would see experts (us) using it, we'd promote it and install it for people, we'd speak positively about it, we'd develop with it, etc. (I won't write the whole list.)
Not only that. Every few weeks I come across a site that works better in Chrome than in FF or has some quirks (Google's spreadsheets are a good example - they feel slower in FF). Although I have no hope of changing the mindset of HNers working at Google, the rest of us could make a difference.
Yeah I hate that. I still have a problem seeing comments on youtube in firefox, even when I'm logged in. Not sure we're going to be able to fix if google targets their properties to only their browser, outside of a lawsuit or gov't action.
Can’t say I’ve have any issues with comments in YouTube. Not that I spend much time in the comments section but when I do read the comments they always work fine.
Maybe the other commenter is on to something regarding extensions. The only extensions I have are ones to simplify management of containers, plus my password manager.
> People would see experts (us) using it, we'd promote it and install it for people, we'd speak positively about it, we'd develop with it, etc. (I won't write the whole list.)
I wasn't super paying attention at the time, but wasn't that basically how Firefox initially established itself at the expense of Internet Explorer?
Pretty much. People say that tech people switching doesn't do anything, but when tech people switch, semi-technical people get it via osmosis (forum posts for FF the first time, presumably reddit posts today). Suddenly when someone asks their friend that's slightly more technical than them for a recommendation, they get recommended the new thing instead of the old one.
All the techies aren't hyping it. Most people that I know just use Chrome. My running joke whenever I see someone else using it in a Zoom share or something is "found the other Firefox user!"
I don’t think that’s true. If the entire HN community which I assume includes tons of casual weekly reading non-logged in users, that would be massive. The number of people outside HN who would try out FF again would be a sizable multiple of the HN community.
If everyone thinks negatively, then no change will happen. Keeping reality in perspective is important, but improving things is really important too.
HN community represents a very attractive economic segment. If we switched, advertisers and web designers would pay attention. Firefox would instantly be getting paid for our searches by Google.
Firefox maker, Mozilla, is in the uneasy position of being financially dependent on its search deal with Google, which accounts for the majority of the organization's revenue.
I wonder how Google will be able to twist its arms (and trust me, they will use all their power and abuse their position to attempt it) to either implement V3 or find some other way to kill ad blockers / allow ads on Firefox.
Is there a public page/link which mentions that they're not removing V2 support? Please share. Thanks.
All I can find is:
We have not yet set a deprecation date for Manifest v2 but expect it to be supported for at least one year after Manifest v3 becomes stable in the release channel.
On the same page: "We will support blocking webRequest until there’s a better solution which covers all use cases we consider important, since DNR as currently implemented by Chrome does not yet meet the needs of extension developers."
I'm a big fan of multi-account containers.. or at least, was. Recently I inadvertantly added a domain to one of the ascribed containers on my laptop and I'll be damned if I can work out how to undo it, other than uninstalling and starting over, which'll be a pain, because I've customised it quite a bit.
...This is a plea for help, by the way, in case it wasn't obvious :) I'm sure there must be a json file or something, somewhere, I can just edit.
I do not know how to directly manipulate the container, but I think what you can do is, that you open a new tab of another container and copy paste the URL there. Then you can set it to always open the domain in that container, effectively changing the container. Not sure how to remove a domain from all containers though.
There is no reason to feel stupid. Browser containers are tricky and relatively new, and I was bitten by some quirks, too. Nevertheless, they're definitely worth it.
Not stupid, I also accidentally added something to the wrong container and it took me a while and some searching to find the answer. The feature is great, but the UX is still a little lacking.
The 'Manage Site List' feature is relatively new, it wasn't there in earlier versions.
Also, the UI is... not great. For example you cannot add new urls here. Some websites forward you to some other external url through another domain for example. there is no way to add these custom domains. So annoying. There yet another extension to solve that problem, but... it doesn't support Firefox 'sync'.
You can also set a proxy per container (and assign specific websites to always use it), and when you combine that with an ultra-cheap VPS running e.g. a Shadowsocks server you have what I think is the real way to circumvent censorship and bypass regional restrictions (as opposed to using snake oil "VPN" providers or even the Tor Browser).
Are most VPN provides unreliable? I don’t know - never researched this.
I use Proton VPN because it is bundled with ProtonMail. I very much like preventing my national Internet service provider from selling my browsing history.
Most VPN providers you typically see pushed are very suspect at best. Especially the ones you see commonly pushed by Youtubers like NordVPN, ExpressVPN etc. I think the only VPNs that have actually been externally audited are Mullvad and ProtonVPN.
What's is the concern about VPNs being "suspect" or "reliable"? I hear this a lot about VPN providers but not sure why. If the VPN is logging your activity/IP you'd have to be doing something super illegal for the police to want to get a search warrant for your data.
It's not just that they're suspect or unreliable. They're complete bullshit.
The actual use of VPN technology is to create virtual networks that are private (hence the name). It's a system level technology. There are several types of network topologies you can set up, when I was learning about this I found this article which is quite nice: https://www.procustodibus.com/blog/2020/10/wireguard-topolog.... You can proxy traffic through a VPN, but the only scenario I can think of in which it makes sense is if you are an OSINT researcher and you need a safe system on which to conduct your research.
If you need to proxy traffic and "hide" your IP, just use a flipping proxy. It's an application level technology (e.g. for torrenting, every torrent client under the sun supports a SOCKS5 proxy). If you don't have the patience to set up a VPS yourself, you can even use something like Outline (https://getoutline.org) which automates that (and it has a mobile client app as well).
If you need privacy (and to actually hide your IP), then use Tor.
Unfortunately that doesn’t fix the real reason most people use VPNs, which is torrenting. Nobody should be using NordVPN to hide from a nation state, but for torrenting they add one level of obfuscation.
I specifically mentioned torrenting, please re-read. There is no reason to have all the network I/O of your computer go through an extra hop just for one application (e.g. a torrent client) when that application can be configured to use a proxy instead. It increases the network latency, complexity and attack surface of your system.
Between sponsorblock and ublock origin, I never see ads or paid promotions on youtube or any other website like that. That mostly leaves [presumably] unpaid promotion of Mullvad on sites like HN.
Funnily, both ExpressVPN and NordVPN which you call out have been externally audited.
NordVPN had the clients audited by VerSprite last year, and their No-log policy audited by PwC in 2018 and 2020. And a bug bounty program on HackerOne. [1]
ExpressVPN - Windows Client was just audited by F-Secure in March, and server side audits by Cure54, and PwC in 2021 and 2019 respectively. And a bug bounty program on Bug Crowd. [2]
---
For comparison
Mullvad has been audited (Client security and Infrastructure (for privacy)) by Cure53 through 2020, and first was in 2018. Has no bug bounty, but they do still have a vulnerability disclosure program. [3]
ProtonVPN, audits of the no-log policy in April, and clients in 2020. And they run their own bug bounty program.[4]
---
I actually find it kinda interesting that while they've all had audits regarding privacy on the server side, only ExpressVPN has had a security audit of server side components. (Granted I've not look that deeply at this)
[1] Annoying, you can only download the audit reports if you Login then click Reports in the menu
I frequently have DNS issues with Mullvad, and also speeds are lower.
Proton is also more expensive though...
Also, there's a long outstanding issue (on their Github [1] ) which they have confirmed) that the Mullvad app causes iCloud services to stop syncing (bookmarks, Files, etc.). That's a showstopper if you use Apple devices...
A crucial feature which is missing for me in containers is the ability to limit AddOns to specific containers.
My employer's org deploys a Microsoft SSO AddOn which re-uses the OS-level identity to auto-login to Microsoft/Office365/Azure and causes me quite some headaches when dealing with my customers' logins, which are usually in separate containers.
I switched to FF profiles for those use-cases for now, but it's far from the container experience in terms of usability and integration.
This is one of the reasons I’m stuck in the Chrome world. Having separate windows for different profiles and having MacOS open a link from another app in the window your last had focus of is so incredibly convenient. But having a personal and work password manager is something I couldn’t overcome in Firefox. Especially with the Firefox profiles being so archaic and painful to use.
I don’t get why random websites cannot track you across sites. The IP is still the same and so is the hardware/OS combination it’s running on. They can absolutely track you.
Yup, it's not great. Still seems easier to just turn them off with the new tab settings panel than recompile the whole browser, but I guess everyone has their own preferences.
There are better browsers than Firefox if you care about privacy. Both Brave and Tor have better results in this comparison that was shared here recently: https://privacytests.org/, same with this tool from the EFF https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ it gives better results for Brave than Firefox (even with blockers installed on my Firefox). Mozilla themselves give the same score in their very limited comparsion: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browsers/compare/
Multi-account containers are really the only killer feature in Firefox for me, they're super convenient for my work, but that's about the only thing it has left going for it.
The Librewolf project appears to be the best of all! I will try it.
edit: Statement below is incorrect, Brave is a Chromium fork.
I do note that Brave, Tor, and Librewolf are forks of Firefox. This in my opinion is an additional reason to support Firefox. Everyone else appears to be plundering naive users' browser telemetry.
Be prepared for stuff to break. I recently tried it and DRM content sometimes doesn't work no matter what you enable (my recent example is Udemy, which the devs claim happens in other FF forks). Also, by default it wipes history/sessions when you close it, which can be a rude surprise.
The https://privacytests.org/ test is... bullshit, as it only test the DEFAULT browser settings when you initially install it without changing anything.
And, even worse, they don't even mention this on their website.
That + the Temporary Containers extension can make every new tab a new container by default. I also use Container Proxy so I can route traffic from each tab through a different proxy if needed (mitmproxy). I've wanted to go to Chrome but Chrome has nothing like per-tab sessions/isolation. I looked at first party isolation but it's vague and doesn't seem like what Firefox provides.
Firefox is the only browser that can do this. Also Google's UI decisions are just unilateral and awful. At least with Firefox we can still tweak some of it.
Though I absolutely agree that the implementation is disappointing, most concerns about history pretty much disappear if you disable history globally. Having lived without history in my browser for years now, I ponder whether that should be the default because I haven't missed it one bit.
> Containers are only tabs - so you can't, for instance, create a window and have all future tabs created in that window inherit that container
True, but if that's something you want, you can do that without the multi-account container tabs. Just create a new profile that's separate from the default one. The drawback to that is you have to reinstall any extensions you use because they won't be shared.
In my opinion, history access is a major advantage of Firefox over Chrome. There are many sites that I don't bother to bookmark because I know typing a substring into the location bar will bring it up as a suggestion faster than I would be able to choose it from a bookmark menu. Plus, it displays a bunch of related URLs which are surprisingly often useful.
I definitely would not want to default to disabling it. It's my browser, and letting it remember where I've been enables it to be much more useful to me.
What's the difference between a burner container and a private window (Ctrl+Shift+P)?
I suspect it would be fairly straightforward to make an extension that set a per-window default container, but I agree that it should be built in functionality. (Whether that default should override site-specific container rules, I'm not sure... I kind of want both options, but I guess that's where it starts getting complex.)
I'm annoyed by the lack of integration between container and history. I never really want to clear history for a non-private window, but I do want to be able to restrict what I see by container when it makes sense and not restrict when it doesn't. My main grievance: searching for open tabs (either by prefixing the location bar entry with "% " or by choosing the Open Tabs option from the dropdown that appears when you start entering something) should match across all tabs, at least in the context of a freshly-opened new tab.
Among all the other extensions that help guard my privacy and improve QoL, Containers is another great feature that integrates well with FF. I like maintaining profiles for privacy and security, and it helps me navigate certain sites where I have different accounts.
I honestly don’t get the lean toward Chrome — or Safari for that matter. I don’t detect such a big jump in performance that I’d ever consider sacrificing privacy to Google’s or Apple’s end. Brave is a nice browser but in the end I don’t see how I’m better off with it. Maybe I’m too much of a layman and don’t understand benchmarks or just don’t pay attention to latency, but purely from a daily driver perspective, I’ve never been happier with Firefox.
It also integrates extremely tightly into the Apple ecosystem and has always had fantastic performance with very little resource usage. Unlike chrome (although that’s gotten much better).
Long time Firefox user. Using it now. Used it in the early days for features liked tabbed browsing, good performance and Linux support. These days I really mainly use it to be contrarian to avoid using Google for everything. I just want to support a competitor.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 377 ms ] threadThe UI isn’t great, nor is resource usage. These days I don’t bother installing an alternative browser and just use Safari.
Pretty sure they covered that in the last reason of TFA
It's still almost exclusively funded by Google though.
Case in point: Chrome started to misbehave on my fathers rather old Macbook (missing root certs, refuses to render google drive, etc...)
When I open Google drive, after being a completely cryptic (to a non-tech person) set of error messages, I realized I needed to upgrade Chrome.
I tried to upgrade Chrome and was told I'm on an unsupported version of OSX.
I tried to upgrade OSX and was told, no such thing exists on this older hardware.
Lo and behold, firefox has none of these issues.
Ditch Google as soon as you can, and Apple as well.
MacOS 10.11 supports every 2008 and newer Apple computer. There are also patches to get newer versions of MacOS on old hardware. I'm using one patch to get 10.13 running on a 2008 MacBook Pro and it runs great.
http://dosdude1.com/software.html
For some reason their focus seems directed towards everything that’s specifically not Firefox or browser related. Sort of if Microsoft forgot that they own Windows.
But oh boy, does edge on android phone home. You'd think a phone home party was going on, as the tcpdump flies off your screen...
No thanks.
Don't let the "M$ teh hacking my dataz!" tin-foilers dissuade...
Performant, good mix of features, stable, solid compatibility, & flexible.
Problem is Electron as the backend for Edge.
Also, you only get to see top level comments. (Maybe that's a feature for some people.)
People act as if the algorthim is some sort of evil entity, but my viewing habbits follow recommended videos and content aware search. I find sticking to subscriptions and trending videos to be very trapping.
No more watching one chess video and being bombarded with chess content for a month, or watching one harmless satirical video about a politician and being bombarded with videos from the local right-populist party propaganda channel (yes, this has happened to me exactly as described).
I have experience the "bombardment" of a suggestion, but I think my subscriptions are vaired enough that a click off that topic straightens it all out.
Off topic, but I have a love/hate relationship YouTube because of privacy issues, especially my political and spiritual views. Same thing with TikTok, but at least that material is mostly silly so if advertisers can buy information on which silly stuff I watch, that seems slightly less harmful than YouTube.
https://gitlab.com/coolcoder/fractal-toolbar/-/tree/fractal
I did not change because of privacy concerns or whatever, I just wanted to try something else, and FF has been quite alright.
And then this very site has an automatic playing video in the article lmao
Also a lot of these claims are so-so imo.
"Lighter on system resources"
"Speedier website browsing"
I usually have 60-70 tabs open across 5-6 windows. Firefox absolutely shits itself all the time but Chromium doesn't.
Anyways I use ungoogled-chromium https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
Last time I checked I had a few thousand tabs open with Firefox and it doesn't do anything except use memory.
Once I get past 40 or so I purge old tabs because it makes it hard to find others I'm actively using. Besides, opening a tab again isn't a huge burden.
It's not my preference as I like having a clean browser window; too many tabs is distracting and it's harder for me to contextualize what work I'm focusing on (windows + tabs for tasks is my preference), but I can see how it works for some.
When I need something else that I visited, I use the history shortcut, search for the word (usually its in the title) and I got the info I need. Same with bookmarks which I usually tag.
So many tabs just seems redundant I feel.
Yes https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/search-open-tabs-firefo...
This search also returns results for tabs open in Firefox on other devices.
Opening the tab again isn't hard if you can remember what that tab was to begin with.
Rather, tabs are even more useful than that: things I was actually doing adjacent to the thing I was doing right next to it. There's a spatial element to it.
Nothing compares to tabs. Especially not browser history which is one long list of urls I once visited, who cares. Tabs are a list of urls I settled on.
That's an essential for me.
Usually I find everything I needed by time, data, keyword, tag, or bookmark in a few seconds at most by opening history or bookmark by keyboard shortcut.
I use Firefox on desktop and mobile, and I'd tend to agree with you.
Sometimes I need to open up Chrome to test something and all of the pages load noticeably faster (things like FB messenger, Google search, etc.)
It's a tradeoff I guess because the extensions on Firefox mobile are a killer feature.
Reminiscent of this classic:
- "Among all the sites I visited, news sites, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, had the most tracking resources."
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/23/opinion/data-...
Note that browsers permit playing a video upon any "user interaction", i.e. a key press or a click.
My 'Tab counter' add-on tells me:
I skip Chrome and Edge for privacy reasons, Brave have a crappy and buggy sync feature that I don't know what OSes it supports, but not my combination. Can't send tabs with them. Vivaldi doesn't have an iOS port. Impossible to do with Chromium.
Firefox can send tabs to all my machines, and I use that feature multiple times daily, such as finding a cool article while I'm sitting on the couch and sending it to my desktop so I can read it later. Mr. Eich, if you're around here, please please fix syncing tabs in your browser, it's the only thing stopping me from switching honestly.
--
1: I quite like Firefox, but it's in a dying spiral, and I'm starting to see broken sites. The Web is such a complicated nightmare "protesting" won't change anything, and forking neither, because it's too bloody complex. Chromium has won. Our only hope is Mozilla takes their head out of their arse and start working on their browser instead of faffing about and making small, meaningless changes every release, but I don't see that happening any time soon.
This was actually the killer feature for me on chrome about 5 years ago and then Google did what Google did, and killed it.
The sync-server is trivial to run via docker, but (last time i checked) running the other essential part yourself is (intentionally?) not easy at all.
https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncstorage-rs
It includes a Docker Compose setup.
Standard directory servers aren't specifically built for end-to-end encryption, while data in Firefox Sync is end-to-end encrypted by default. Firefox Sync must also scale to support the millions of Firefox users who use Mozilla's instance.
So the above (synstorage-rs_in_container) is now the only required software needed, and now includes the identity-server portion?
I would really like to use the "beam-a-tab-to-some-other-firefox", been a FF user since before it got that name. But i wanted to self-host all parts, and then found some info, that suggested, that 2 parts are needed: the SyncServer, the above open-source thing, and the Identity-server, on which i did not find much info at the time.
Do you have a link to recent-ish write-up of the current situation, that you can validate to be correct-ish?
Thanks again
Also, w.r.t Directory-Servers/Security: Enterprise printers have been able to authenticate Users with SSL/TLS-secured connection for more than a decade. So why not a "syncserver for URLs of open tabs per User"?
https://blog.mozilla.org/services/2020/09/15/the-future-of-s...
But, as you mentioned, the current documentation is here:
https://mozilla-services.readthedocs.io/en/latest/howtos/run...
You might also find the unofficial Arch User Repository package, comments, and PKGBUILD file helpful:
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/firefox-syncstorage-git
I hope it works out for you!
https://mozilla.github.io/ecosystem-platform/tutorials/devel...
There's a lot of components directly hooked into Google Cloud that also make it difficult in terms of configuration. At some point I think creating an actual user's guide for this would be good for the community interested in self-hosting this on their own.
What are some examples of this? I keep seeing this complaint and I keep asking for examples but I always get "just various sites"-like answers. FF is my primary browser and I am not seeing it. I am genuinely curious as to whether it is starting to fall behind but I can recall maybe two or three instances the past couple of years where I opened a site in Brave to see if it worked there.
However I do not see this stuff about JS init to take that long on amazon. It might be a special thing in your case. Did you try things like a new profile, to test, whether it still happens?
The banal evil of neglect vs. intentional maliciousness.
MS also used to optimize DOS in ways that clearly hurt their competitors. We've seen Intel aggressively optimize their compiler to slow down AMD... I am sure people have been "optimizing" in such ways for as long as there have been people.
Are you saying that there are people at Google whose job description is to tweak Google web products to perform worse on Firefox, just so Chrome appears better in comparison?
Name a feature that Firefox doesn't have that prevents people from using the web. I can't. But I can name several that I've seen work more correctly on Chrome because they have the resources to make it work in the context of very complicated and legacy-filled rendering engines (flexbox comes to mind) where Mozilla appears to not (ask me about my favorite Firefox-only flex performance issues... To their credit, they have all been fixed, but FF spent a lot of time behind the curve).
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/google-search...
Shot in the dark: sounds like a timeout in TCP, DNS, or something like that.
Oh, and I did turn off uBlock Origin, for that matter.
Video heavy sites, especially YouTube. It loads extremely slowly compared to Chrome. And has much more video stuttering. Probably Google is sabotaging YouTube in Firefox.
Complex interactive sites, like crypto exchanges. They are slow and with many rendering artefacts in Firefox. Probably because they don't even bother testing in Firefox.
Hmmm... I've never had this problem and I use YouTube heavily. You sure your video acceleration and codecs and all that are set up right?
I recently had similar issues, and it turned out that Firefox’s cache was constantly nearly-full. Clearing the cache returned YouTube to normal.
Right-click -> Open With mpv
It's a pain in the ass, but the performance gap is immense. On a desktop I wouldn't bother, but on my laptop this has a real impact on battery life.
I tried stuff.co.nz from the UK and it looked like this: https://imgur.com/a/tibMwHE
Articles loaded fine; I'm not sure what is broken about it.
This morning, I couldn't buy a key off cdkeys.com - tried two totally different methods, email addresses, credit cards. Didn't try a second browser yet but I'm not sure I am that persistent...
A news site, I think the New Yorker, would only show the first two paragraphs of an article but in other browsers, would show the full article.
I don't log which sites break - if it's important I tend to cave and open Edge for that site, do my business, and then go back to Firefox for everything else. If it's less important, I'll opt to just not to business with them. But I'm a grain of sand so it doesn't make much difference.
Most sites just have really obnoxious CAPTCHA, often requiring more than one "pick the things" but I don't know if my experience is specific to Firefox.
I checked for webcompat issues matching this description and couldn't find anyone reporting that adding items to the cart didn't work.
I attempted to reproduce the issue myself, but HomeDepot block visitors from my location.
> This morning, I couldn't buy a key off cdkeys.com - tried two totally different methods, email addresses, credit cards. Didn't try a second browser yet but I'm not sure I am that persistent...
Can't reproduce, I was able to buy a CD Key ("Garfield Kart - Furious Racing PC") at 28 May 2022, 16:51:52 BST using Firefox 100.0.2 and a debit card.
> A news site, I think the New Yorker, would only show the first two paragraphs of an article but in other browsers, would show the full article.
Can't reproduce. Visiting https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-baby-formul... in Firefox shows me the exact same content as when I use Chromium.
I'm not saying you've not experienced these issues, but they're definitely not widespread and your post doesn't give enough information to go on to diagnose if there's an issue with Firefox or not.
The best thing you can do is report issues to the webcompat project as and when you come across compatibility issues. It takes about 20 seconds, less time than you probably spent writing this comment.
I can say I recently found I couldn't make a new account at 'wise.com' in firefox (had to switch to chrome), and an internal university website doesn't work in Firefox -- but of course, I can't share that page publicly, so there's not a lot useful I can do with that.
> but no page I could submit
Click the large "Report bug" button and you'll get to https://webcompat.com/issues/new
It really sounds like you are. I hate these "Well did you report it? I can't reproduce it. Did you rebuild in debug mode and check the logs? Did you learn C++ and fix it?" responses.
It's open source victim blaming.
Which is obviously why I explicitly said I wasn't!
> I hate these "Well did you report it? I can't reproduce it."
How do you expect progress to be made if we can't precisely discuss browser issues & how to reproduce them in a way that enables them to be investigated and fixed?
For all we know at the minute, the OP has an extension installed that's causing all this.
> "Did you rebuild in debug mode and check the logs? Did you learn C++ and fix it?"
Because that's totally what I asked :eyeroll:
Just to be sure I went back again today. Still could not purchase Horizon Zero Dawn. The error in the console was "No recaptcha clients exist."
I then went to Edge, and I able able to successfully make the purchase.
I'm a Firefox user. I'm a fan. But to pretend that there aren't sites that test in Chromium and call it a day isn't reality.
I mean, I have the game code right in front of me, ready to redeem.
> Just to be sure I went back again today. Still could not purchase Horizon Zero Dawn. The error in the console was "No recaptcha clients exist."
Still can't reproduce with this item - have you tried it in a fresh profile?
Sorry if this is a silly question, but is this maybe just the paywall? I'm not sure if you've been reading more articles on Firefox and then only opened on Chrome or something after this started happening, but it sounds like that could be what's going on.
Try opening the site in incognito mode. It usually fixed these random issues.
> Most sites just have really obnoxious CAPTCHA, often requiring more than one "pick the things" but I don't know if my experience is specific to Firefox.
Installing the "Privacy Pass" extension can significantly reduce captcha challenges when visiting sites that use cloudflare.
The one major category of real problems I run into are related to captchas.
Disabling JS kept the content from vanishing.
Of course, this is almost certainly bad coding on the website's side, and not the fault of Firefox. But it seems like it's but getting the QA attention it needs from the site owners.
I solve this by having a list of links on the web that I can access from everywhere.
I'm more concerned with Firefox's lack of per-tab screenshare in meet/jitsi/etc.
It takes 20x as much time and work to copy a link, context switch to another app, paste, then, when you're on the desktop, _remember_ to check that shared document, and open the link, than to just press option menu, send tab, choose linux desktop and bam!, it's there as soon as you open your browser the next day.
I also send pages in the opposite direction.
I even have some vague recollection of Mozilla mentioning just this. Like 99% when something is broken it not because the browser but because some addon the user installed.
So test a site that you dont think works with the "troubleshoot mode" in Firefox that inactivate addons etc to see if it works then. And if it works, then figure out which addon it is that makes the mess and to blame.
I used to use Decentraleyes but I ended up uninstalling that completely because it broke so many sites.
Have you tried KDEconnect? I use it to share/send links from Android to Linux and vice versa with the KDEconnect browser extension.
Tab syncing is a small meaningless change to me, but not to you. Some of these things you find small and meaningless could be important to some other people (for example, multilingual spell-checking is very important to some people, X11 isolation is very important to some others).
What do you actually expect from Mozilla by "taking their head out of their arse" ?
Investing in their browser. Investing in an alternative ecosystem.
Brave have added in-browser Torrent, TOR, IPFS support. That's what I would expect from Mozilla, trying to differentiate itself. Now we've lost the compact UI, got coloured themes for one release. What's cooking that's really exciting? What's the plan to retake some of the lost market share? I can't see any thirst to improve over there.
Useless bloat. Dedicated torrent clients are made better and work better.
> TOR
Interesting, but the popular advice is to only use the Tor Browser. I don't know if that's good advice or not, but it certainly dampens my enthusiasm for Brave supporting Tor.
> IPFS support.
When I actually find a real use for IPFS, then I'll be able to form an opinion on it. Until then, it's just an obscure novelty to me. What can I actually do with it? Torrents and traditional websites together work for downloading/hosting/sharing anything I can think of.
> Our only hope is Mozilla takes their head out of their arse and start working on their browser
Are you reporting these to the webcompat project? Mozilla is absolutely funding QA testers and engineers to check what's broken and triage issues that affect specific browsers and not others.
They've handled 103k issues: https://github.com/webcompat/web-bugs/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is...
A great number of the issues that Mozilla contractors and employees investigate that are reported via the webcompat project actually turn out to be the site owner's fault. They're not using standardised web technologies, not testing their work in multiple browsers. Mozilla employees and contractors will try to perform outreach to these site owners, but they're often not interested.
I still use it, though.
https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/1523
It's exactly this type of behaviour that Firefox doesn't seem concerned with addressing.
Firefox's multi account containers are very useful - when I started using them a few years ago I very quickly noticed that my Web searches stopped showing up in Amazon or as FB ads, and vice versa.
And just generally not using a browser that is aligned with the interests of a global advertising company seems like a good thing.
Otherwise Firefox+ multi-account containers + proxy per container is a really nice feature
(yes, it’s also possible to run your own sync service.)
https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncstorage-rs/issues/55...
https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncstorage-rs/issues/68...
It seems they are migrating the solution without having any instructions on how to self host it.
When I am away from a power outlet, Edge is what I use to work in GCP, AWS and Jupyter Notebook (via SSH or local).
I don't use Edge otherwise.
Eg I’ll have a work group with GitHub, Okta, etc in it so I only need to log in once a day. But random websites cannot track me between sites.
Couple that with DNS blocking of trackers and ads, and the web is actually a lot more pleasant to use.
Unfortunately you cannot fix everything locally though.
EDIT: Just for completeness sake, here is the command to open Firefox with profile manager and new instances:
firefox --new-instance --ProfileManager %u
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profile-switc...
You'll need to install a connector for it to work. (The add-on gives instructions during the onboarding process.) Both the add-on and the connector are free and open source (GPLv3).
I use profiles and containers together on Firefox. Each profile has its own set of add-ons, browser settings, and containers. Containers in the same profile share the same add-ons and browser settings. For example, you could have separate personal and work profiles, with containers for different online accounts in each profile.
On Firefox, you have the option of using only profiles, only containers, both profiles and containers, or none of the above.
Anything for that?
If you're trying to create a shortcut to Firefox that launches a profile other than the one you've selected as the default, the instructions for Linux and Windows are here:
https://kb.mozillazine.org/Shortcut_to_a_specific_profile
This is not necessary to use the profile feature, but some people prefer to launch profiles from shortcuts instead of a menu.
The two final things that would get me off Chrome entirely:
* When I'm using my external USB microphone in a web-based conference system (mostly Cleanfeed but I've also seen it with Streamyard and Jitsi) my audio gets extremely robotic after a few minutes and it somehow impacts my entire system - I have to unplug the microphone to fix it.
* Dropbox, for some reason, hangs at 1 second left when uploading larger files (appx 60MB or so)
Also Firefox hasn't been doing itself any favors by alienating both the average Joe consumers and the professional devs over the years.
Maybe the other commenter is on to something regarding extensions. The only extensions I have are ones to simplify management of containers, plus my password manager.
I wasn't super paying attention at the time, but wasn't that basically how Firefox initially established itself at the expense of Internet Explorer?
Whole process takes a couple years or so.
If everyone thinks negatively, then no change will happen. Keeping reality in perspective is important, but improving things is really important too.
https://developer.chrome.com/blog/mv2-transition/
Firefox maker, Mozilla, is in the uneasy position of being financially dependent on its search deal with Google, which accounts for the majority of the organization's revenue.
I wonder how Google will be able to twist its arms (and trust me, they will use all their power and abuse their position to attempt it) to either implement V3 or find some other way to kill ad blockers / allow ads on Firefox.
All I can find is:
We have not yet set a deprecation date for Manifest v2 but expect it to be supported for at least one year after Manifest v3 becomes stable in the release channel.
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2021/05/27/manifest-v3-updat...
So they will eventually remove it sooner than later.
...This is a plea for help, by the way, in case it wasn't obvious :) I'm sure there must be a json file or something, somewhere, I can just edit.
You can click on "Manage Containers", choose a container and then remove the site with "Manage Site List".
Also, the UI is... not great. For example you cannot add new urls here. Some websites forward you to some other external url through another domain for example. there is no way to add these custom domains. So annoying. There yet another extension to solve that problem, but... it doesn't support Firefox 'sync'.
Can this not (at least partly) solved by copying over the correct files in combination with settings sync?
I use Proton VPN because it is bundled with ProtonMail. I very much like preventing my national Internet service provider from selling my browsing history.
The actual use of VPN technology is to create virtual networks that are private (hence the name). It's a system level technology. There are several types of network topologies you can set up, when I was learning about this I found this article which is quite nice: https://www.procustodibus.com/blog/2020/10/wireguard-topolog.... You can proxy traffic through a VPN, but the only scenario I can think of in which it makes sense is if you are an OSINT researcher and you need a safe system on which to conduct your research.
If you need to proxy traffic and "hide" your IP, just use a flipping proxy. It's an application level technology (e.g. for torrenting, every torrent client under the sun supports a SOCKS5 proxy). If you don't have the patience to set up a VPS yourself, you can even use something like Outline (https://getoutline.org) which automates that (and it has a mobile client app as well).
If you need privacy (and to actually hide your IP), then use Tor.
I think the reason why the method you mention isn't commonly used is that it is complicated to understand/set up and hard to verify.
I've seen more advanced users encapsulate everything in a VM so that non-VPN traffic can be blocked globally by the OS.
Ironically (I hope?), Mullvad is by far the one I see pushed the most.
NordVPN had the clients audited by VerSprite last year, and their No-log policy audited by PwC in 2018 and 2020. And a bug bounty program on HackerOne. [1]
ExpressVPN - Windows Client was just audited by F-Secure in March, and server side audits by Cure54, and PwC in 2021 and 2019 respectively. And a bug bounty program on Bug Crowd. [2]
---
For comparison
Mullvad has been audited (Client security and Infrastructure (for privacy)) by Cure53 through 2020, and first was in 2018. Has no bug bounty, but they do still have a vulnerability disclosure program. [3]
ProtonVPN, audits of the no-log policy in April, and clients in 2020. And they run their own bug bounty program.[4]
---
I actually find it kinda interesting that while they've all had audits regarding privacy on the server side, only ExpressVPN has had a security audit of server side components. (Granted I've not look that deeply at this)
[1] Annoying, you can only download the audit reports if you Login then click Reports in the menu
[2] https://www.expressvpn.com/blog/?s=audit
[3] https://mullvad.net/en/blog/tag/audits/
[4] https://protonvpn.com/blog/?s=audit
https://mullvad.net/en/
I frequently have DNS issues with Mullvad, and also speeds are lower. Proton is also more expensive though...
Also, there's a long outstanding issue (on their Github [1] ) which they have confirmed) that the Mullvad app causes iCloud services to stop syncing (bookmarks, Files, etc.). That's a showstopper if you use Apple devices...
[1] https://github.com/mullvad/mullvadvpn-app/issues/2401
Given all the ways there are to fingerprint browsers these days, this belief is likely to be overly optimistic.
My employer's org deploys a Microsoft SSO AddOn which re-uses the OS-level identity to auto-login to Microsoft/Office365/Azure and causes me quite some headaches when dealing with my customers' logins, which are usually in separate containers.
I switched to FF profiles for those use-cases for now, but it's far from the container experience in terms of usability and integration.
Bravo Mozilla!
I still don't like the fact that it has sponsored links then - that is what rubs me the wrong way.
Multi-account containers are really the only killer feature in Firefox for me, they're super convenient for my work, but that's about the only thing it has left going for it.
The Librewolf project appears to be the best of all! I will try it.
edit: Statement below is incorrect, Brave is a Chromium fork.
I do note that Brave, Tor, and Librewolf are forks of Firefox. This in my opinion is an additional reason to support Firefox. Everyone else appears to be plundering naive users' browser telemetry.
On Android, look at Mull until Libre Wolf is available there.
On iOS, lol, you get Safari or skinned Safari due to Apple's app store rules.
And, even worse, they don't even mention this on their website.
Ah, that explains the telemetry and experiemnts that are enabled by default without explicit user consent.
Firefox is the only browser that can do this. Also Google's UI decisions are just unilateral and awful. At least with Firefox we can still tweak some of it.
They are a killer idea but their implementation is disappointing.
In no particular order ...
- You can't clear history for a particular container space [1]
- Containers are only tabs - so you can't, for instance, create a window and have all future tabs created in that window inherit that container
- No "private" (or "burner") container that saves nothing outside of each individual tab
No, I am not interested in solving these basic, first-order use-cases with some rando extension from joey75 @ gitlabusercontent.downloads.tv.
[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1170863
> Containers are only tabs - so you can't, for instance, create a window and have all future tabs created in that window inherit that container
True, but if that's something you want, you can do that without the multi-account container tabs. Just create a new profile that's separate from the default one. The drawback to that is you have to reinstall any extensions you use because they won't be shared.
I definitely would not want to default to disabling it. It's my browser, and letting it remember where I've been enables it to be much more useful to me.
I suspect it would be fairly straightforward to make an extension that set a per-window default container, but I agree that it should be built in functionality. (Whether that default should override site-specific container rules, I'm not sure... I kind of want both options, but I guess that's where it starts getting complex.)
I'm annoyed by the lack of integration between container and history. I never really want to clear history for a non-private window, but I do want to be able to restrict what I see by container when it makes sense and not restrict when it doesn't. My main grievance: searching for open tabs (either by prefixing the location bar entry with "% " or by choosing the Open Tabs option from the dropdown that appears when you start entering something) should match across all tabs, at least in the context of a freshly-opened new tab.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1479858
I honestly don’t get the lean toward Chrome — or Safari for that matter. I don’t detect such a big jump in performance that I’d ever consider sacrificing privacy to Google’s or Apple’s end. Brave is a nice browser but in the end I don’t see how I’m better off with it. Maybe I’m too much of a layman and don’t understand benchmarks or just don’t pay attention to latency, but purely from a daily driver perspective, I’ve never been happier with Firefox.