Tell HN: Firefox Is an awesome browser right now

1310 points by rrishi ↗ HN
I was having trouble loading GMail in Chrome. I wasn't sure if it was my spotty internet or the browser acting up so I gave Firefox a shot. And behold! Firefox opened it in a jiffy.

What impressed me most was that it was able to import saved passwords, bookmarks and websites history from Chrome pretty quickly. Previously, I had imported these to Chromium based web browsers (Brave & Edge) but was afraid that it might be an issue for non-Chromium browser like Firefox, but to my pleasant surprise, it wasn't.

Some really cool observations in first 30 mins of using it :

1. It opens websites really quickly, much faster than Chrome

2. All parts feel really customizable. I was able to get rid of the Firefox View tab really easily (I may explore it in the future because it seemed quite interesting to send links from phone to desktop). It was also easy enough to customize bookmarks bar to only show up in new tab.

3. Extensions ecosystem is thriving . I was glad to find my old favorite: Dark Reader. But I have also found a new favorite - Tab Stash. I also found an extension to download Youtube videos - Video Downloader, something I didn't find in Chrome

4. Clean look that gets out of your way.

I had given Firefox a shot in the past and had found Chrome to be a better performing browser at the time. But this time, Firefox seems to really have clicked with me.

I'd be glad to learn of any other cool features and extensions that y'all might want to share.

618 comments

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Firefox on Mobile supports uBlock origin, and is very nice as well.

edit: on Android

Do note this is Firefox on Android.
What is?
Support for ublock is only available on Android's Firefox
i'm using ublock origin in chromium for desktop linux and firefox for desktop linux
They're talking about mobile. Since Apple doesn't let browsers use their own engine, uBlock Origin doesn't work on Firefox for iOS, only on Firefox for Android. On the desktop, it works everywhere.
Not just on Android, I'm using it with uBlock Origin on a GNU/Linux phone as well. Only iOS is an exception.
Yep. Firefox on Android is really awesome. If I only could replace the android WebView with it...
If all you need is for apps to open browser window on firefox instead of chrome, you can just disable chrome. That's what I have done and it works fine for me.
Unfortunately Firefox on Android is noticeably slower than Chrome / Kiwi browser. But on desktop it is great!
It's a mixed bag. Ad blocking speeds up some websites substantially. IMO that makes Firefox mobile faster overall.
Vivaldi puts Firefox Mobile to shame when it comes to speed.
Unfortunately, Vivaldi is not FOSS which makes it a non-starter for many.
Brave is FOSS and fills the gap (if you can find all the crypto ads toggles hidden as hamburgers).
I find Brave slower than Chrome on my phone even on sites filled with ads.
Enable JavaScript JIT (disabled by default on Brave for something like a year) to trade some safety for performance.
Kiwi browser also has ublock (and supports adding any desktop add-on) and still does not crash or slow down like firefox does. I'd really like to use firefox in mobile too but with Kiwi being an option, there's almost 0 reason to use firefox.
I frequently have to close all my tabs because the browser has become unresponsive.
This doesn't happen to me. I currently have 60 tabs open, and that's only because I have 'auto close after 1 month' turned on.
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Yes, Firefox on Android is really fantastic now.

I've been impressed to find literally zero compatibility issues in the last year with it being my primary browser on mobile. Works perfectly with my bank, works with heavy WebRTC apps, etc. It's quite a feat, especially given its market share is so low, and so there are relatively so few users to report feedback.

I've found that <input> with <datalist> doesn't work on Firefox Android — and the issue has been reported for years.
Does Firefox on Android still reload idle tabs when returning to them?

If I open a page, navigate away from it for a few days, and come back, I do not want the page to reload automatically, ever. Firefox was doing that, Vivaldi does not. I moved to Vivaldi.

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I love that browser menus and address bar are at the bottom instead at of top.
I found having the address bar at the bottom of the screen odd, but within a few minutes I realised it was the right way and now having it anywhere else feels wrong on mobile.
Meanwhile Apple fanatics .....Muhahahah
Wonder what’s preventing this on iOS. iirc Orion manages to do it.

Update: Just tried it in Orion. I could install the extension but it seems to be broken. This is what I remember reading though:

## Wait, are you saying I can run uBlock Origin and other Chrome/Firefox extensions in Orion?!

Yes, Orion makes it possible!

## Wait, are you sure? No browser on iOS can use Chrome/Firefox extensions!

Orion makes it possible!

https://web.archive.org/web/20220329163943im_/https://browse...

Apple has a very strict browser policy on iOS: you must use either Safari or an Apple approved skin over the same underlying rendering engine.

Apple policy is preventing Mozilla/Gecko from being built/distributed for the app store.

It's so notorious that there has been legislation considered to address that practice: https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/26/apple_ios_browser/

But only a handful of other extensions, a deliberate restriction that strikes me as almost malicious.
God I wish they would let me pull-down to refresh a page though...
Firefox was my go-to 3 years ago because it was just lighter than Chrome (and easier on my battery).

I still hate the fact that different browser profiles and profile switching aren't surfaced like they are in Chrome. I think it's such a major use case for modern web browsing, I find it hard to believe they aren't prioritizing it. (FWIW this isn't even supported in Safari, which I would have preferred using)

I still keep it around because I love it's download manager, but I tend to use a lot of Google services, and out of habit, I stick to Chrome.

(ps. I was an early Chrome adopter, so it's quite sticky with me)

Out of curiosity, what do you need different profiles for? Kids/SO?
I have separate profiles for personal/work.
Work. I count 5 profiles on my current laptop. I like to compartmentalize my work/external projects, so I don't mix things like search histories, multiple Google accounts, etc.

These are the profiles I currently have:

1. Default, personal. My personal Gmail and other sites.

2. Non-profit that I run, signed in to its Gmail and other email account, etc

3. 3 profiles for different volunteer/contract roles, each signed in to their Gmail and other accounts.

I use it when I need to log into multiple AWS accounts.
The official Container Tabs extension on Firefox seems to be perfect for that. You can login to different accounts on the same profile.
One example - my shopping profile runs the extensions Rakuten/Honey to find coupon codes. I don't want those running on every single page I load outside of the shopping intent, so I use a separate profile.

Firefox's containers don't allow for limiting extensions, so you have to use profiles. Chrome only has profiles.

Multi-Account Containers are like profiles, but in tabs instead of other windows. They're pretty great.

It's an official Mozilla Firefox extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

If I understand correctly, these only compartmentalise cookies and browsing history, whereas full profiles (via the -ProfileManager switch in Firefox) compartmentalise the whole browser config (add-ons, permissions, etc.) as well, which I think is much more useful.
To me it's the opposite. I'd like the same browser config, use the same window, keep my bookmarks, history etc., just want different logins and website contexts. I love Firefox's implementation of containers, and find Chrome's way of doing profiles useless.

But Firefox supports profiles as well if that's what you want, as you say. So best of both worlds.

If you want to open 5 of the same website but with different accounts, containers are the way to go.

The AWS console comes to mind.

I don't want separate configs, just separate accounts.

I have also used it as a proxy manager. Different proxy config in a different container.

Both have their merits, in my opinion.

Given that Firefox already has multi-profile support internally, it would only be a matter of adding a GUI similar to Chrome's to make it the best of both worlds.

Yes, containers compartmentalise the web-facing side of the browser, not the user-facing side.

This fits with my use case for profiles.

Depends on usage.

I use distinct profiles for testing, but during the day, I open versions of the site for personal and work for example. Or at work for different clients.

It depends on workflow IMO. There are uses for both.

Yes, perhaps I should have said 'more powerful'. Utility is definitely relative to usage.
I've been using a multi-profile setup in firefox for years, just by launching it with

    firefox --new-instance -ProfileManager %u
which lets me pick a profile at startup, each with its own settings, cookies, history, and add-ons, etc.. This works fine for me, I don't really feel the need to launch into a different profile from the browser's own menu, if that's what you're referring to?
Can you run multiple profiles at the same time using this approach?
Firefox doesn’t restrict how many profiles you run at the same time. You can start them either via -ProfileManager, or by going to about:profiles.
The --new-instance flag lets you run multiple copies of even the same profile.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/CommandLineOptions#-new-ins...

IME, starting Firefox with this flag, then (from the profile manager) picking an already-running profile, I get the fatal error:

> Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To use Firefox, you must first close the existing Firefox process, restart your device, or use a different profile.

So I guess it allows multiple instances but only with different profiles, at least on my system.

If that's true (I haven't tested), then --no-remote is what you're looking for.
I think Container Tabs are a better fit for the way most people use multiple accounts online.

Plus it enables the Facebook Container extension, which sandboxes all facebook-directed network requests so they can't track you across the web.

And the third party Container Proxy extension lets you set different proxy setting for different containers. So your work tabs can use a different network route.

Container Tabs are not a replacement for profiles though. It doesn't let you have different bookmarks, extensions, theme, etc, which doesn't work when you want to have a separation between work and personal stuff.

Firefox already supports profiles, all it needs it's a simple UI to switch between them. Profiles + Containers (and everything that comes with them) would be perfect.

I use Firefox as my daily driver but I really miss user profiles and tab groups from Chrome. None of the tab related extensions for Firefox give quite the same ease of use as the built in tab groups do in Chrome.
As noted by others in this thread, you want the -ProfileManager flag when you start it. You should be able to either have it remember you always want the profile manager on startup, or change the application shortcut to always use the flag.

It would be great if they made this more easily available though. It was the default once upon a time.

I hear you on profiles. My go-to for this is to use firejail or podman to keep truly separate browsers on all my alternate profiles.
What's wrong with using about:profiles?

Edit: you even can set it as bookmark into the toolbar.

Nothing really, it just feels like I'm "breaking glass" whenever I do it, so I end up using Chrome for the multi-profile use case.

If Firefox was to add a similar GUI, I'd probably get by completely without Chrome.

2 clicks instead of one. There’s an extension to make it one click, but it requires a helper app installed, which is not great.
Open new tab, type: "about:profiles" create as many profiles as you want. Or as others have said you can use tab containers or the profile manager switch.
I don't think profiles are that important when most users have their own account these days.
I prefer Firefox, even though I don't experience the benefits you seem to be experiencing. I find Firefox to be more sluggish than Chrome, and it's less compatible with websites than chrome.

I love it for tab containers - a game changer in web browsing. And ublock origin, and the fact that it isn't chrome.

I just switched back to chrome for the same reason. Every page in Firefox was taking 60+second to load. Tried it on chrome and pages were loading instantly.

I had originally switched to Firefox for privacy concerns but that and the memory usage/occasional crashing were too much for me.

edit: not sure what the downvotes are for. I'm glad there's a second option out there. It didn't work for me but figured it was worth sharing my anecdote along with OPS. I just wish there was a third option, or more.

60+ seconds seems really odd. It sounds like less of a rendering issue and more like some more fundamental technical problem. Have you tried all the usual things, e.g. reinstalling, previous versions, etc.?
I think you got confused here, OP had the exact opposite experience
> Every page in Firefox was taking 60+second to load

That really sounds like a broken installation. Out of curiosity, would you care to share what add-ons you have/had installed?

Yeah good point, could be that. Just keeper and ublock, on windows
Snappyness is really a feeling. It could be cache or something else. Sometimes you want to use something else. Like cpu doing some work on something else while it put the browser on pause. All browsers should be able to render all sites really fast.

I don’t have a dedicated browser, I use edge chrome safari and Firefox interchangeably. However, I work on websites for a living. Using different browsers is part of the job and if I don’t I might miss something breaking somewhere.

Generally my thinking has been get passwords into 1P, store bookmarks and interesting sites in zotero. Now, all I use the browsers for its pure rendering capabilities.

It wasn't a rendering issue, it was a network connectivity issue. I probably sound like I don't know what I'm talking about, but it is what it is. Switched to chrome and the network issue resolved immediately.
Did you try to clean up Firefox (i.e. remove the whole Firefox profile on the disk)?
No, but at the same time I don't really want to diagnose my browser. I just want something that works.
Occasionally, the first page takes 30+ second to load. I am on Lubuntu 20.04 and only have ublock extension active.

Usually to "fix it" (bringing time to below 10s), Hamburger Menu -> Help -> More troubleshooting information -> Clear Startup Cache. Also making sure my dns/network is up by pinging successfully a external website before launching Firefox.

But sooner or later startup time will creep-up again. I'm not quite sure what's happening. Maybe it's trying to load various file from disk (and not the SSD), or waiting for some blocking network request. I guess maybe I'll get luckier when I'll migrate to 22.04. My chrome is completely broken and cannot be installed at all since I've inactivated Snap forever for botching the migration process from 18.04 to 20.04.

This sounds like it might be the same issue tbh, although I'm on windows. I'll give it a shot if I feel like switching back, thanks.
Portability of saved passwords is a hassle that might get regulated in the next decade or two.

I have 15 years of saved Keychain credentials that I’ve been very slowly porting over to Firefox Sync since switching to Windows. The fact that I let Apple generate complex passwords makes entry by hand even more slower.

Apple’s Chrome iCloud plug-in for Windows is just paying lip service.

> I have 15 years of saved Keychain credentials that I’ve been very slowly porting over to Firefox Sync since switching to Windows. The fact that I let Apple generate complex passwords makes entry by hand even more slower.

Do you know you can export all Safari passwords to an unencrypted .csv from the Safari Preferences page? (Preferences Passwords, click the “circle with 3 dots” pop-up, choose “Export All Passwords”)

I had no idea! My faith in technology companies is restored!

I tried to export from Keychain Access before without success.

I love Firefox but some JS heavy demos etc. just don't work fast enough. I hate that I know exactly why. It's because they were only ever tested on Chrome during development.
It's interesting that you put the blame for the slowness on Firefox. I blame web developers for failing to build things for browsers rather than just Chrome.
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This isn't blaming Firefox any more than one would blame other web browsers for a bad enterprise app requiring Internet Explorer, it's just the sad reality that users have to deal with.
Which part of their comment reads as blaming Firefox?
I love Firefox but some JS heavy demos etc. just don't work fast enough.
Have you read the last sentence as well?

> It's because they were only ever tested on Chrome during development.

That only means the developers didn't care if it was fast, or even works, in other browsers. It says nothing about Firefox. The first sentence, where the author complains that JS heavy apps are too slow in Firefox, is the part that's about Firefox.
What the OG commenter meant (as I read it) was that the page was slow in FF solely because the developer didn’t test the page in FF.

It does in no way imply that FF is worse than Chrome, but it does imply that (some) web developers are lazy.

That sentence is a simple statement of fact - that some apps are too slow in Firefox. It places no blame for the slowness. The blame comes later, and is put on lazy developers.
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If developers are writing in a vanilla style based on open standards, then why should there be performance idiosyncrasy among browsers?
> why should there be performance idiosyncrasy among browsers?

Because the engines work differently, some are better at some parts and worse at others. That's just the name of the game when you have different implementations of something.

Not saying that work shouldn't be done do make them on-par with each other, just providing a reasoning why things are like they are. I remember at one point some Google product was using some JavaScript API for lots of things and obviously only tested things in Chrome, when testing it in Firefox the performance was a lot worse, as Gecko performed worse than V8 using the data structure/API. They ended up disabling Firefox access to it because of this.

Eventually, Firefox got the bug fixed I think, so the product enabled support for Firefox.

I guess the point is, the standards around the web platform say how the user should be able to use some API/format/structure, not much about how said API/format/structure is internally implemented.

Interesting, I haven't run into it as upto now and I was checking some pretty cool and intense CodePens earlier.

I'll look into some threeJS demos to see how it goes (ex. https://bruno-simon.com/ ). Are there any other specific JS demos you've had a bad experience with?

That 3D website ( https://bruno-simon.com/) ran well enough though it did cause my laptop's fans to run but I believe that happens in Chrome too.

So far, I haven't found much of a difference in performance of websites but it's still early times for me.

I tested this on FF/Chrome/Safari on an M1 Max, couldn't see any difference at all between FF and Chrome but on Safari it was incredibly slow (which actually let me drive the car, that thing turns fast). I also wasn't aware prior to clicking that it was even possible to create web apps like this.
That person (Bruno Simon) is fantastic at creating 3D experiences on the web. He has a course on three.js too that I hope to buy and go through hopefully within this year.
For me a good example have always been https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/ which rendered very poorly on Firefox. I see it's better now, but still, try to hover over the table (do couple of mouse movement, some circles or something) and see that it's not as responsive as Chrome is.

Another example is iD[0] Editor on https://www.openstreetmap.org/. But there, to be fair, it's also slow on Chrome but I feel it's a bit slower on Firefox.

[0] https://github.com/openstreetmap/iD

> https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/

Oh man this was a rough one both for FF and Chrome but Chrome did perform better slightly on cursory glance.

Thanks for providing these links, they're definitely a good rule of thumb benchmarks to test new browsers

Doppio (JVM implemented in JS) is absurdly slower for running java programs in Firefox compared to Chrome.
Lets be clear here. They were only tested on some developer's fast machine on Chrome. All the users are going to be using it on some bag of shit $300 laptop running crapware infested Edge so they will be suffering like your Firefox users are.

The problem is the left hand side of the chain. Stop pulling in thousand layer garbage abstractions and making the user pay the penalty for it.

All web developers should be required by law to work on 4gb 3ghz laptops with a 3G mobile connection.
No, Firefox just flat out has some worse JavaScript performance and bugs/incompatibility with other browsers.

I’ve been/am currently burned by Firefox’s pretty poor IndexedDB support and performance. IDBObjectStore.getAll() fails with a cryptic exception if you store too much in IndexedDB (iirc 256mb is the limit), whereas Chrome and Safari have no problem with it. It also has terrible performance - about 4x slower than Chrome, with Safari having the best performance.

That's a microscopic problem in a macroscopic ocean of shit.
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I recently wrote a small JS page, the core of it is a table of tens of thousands of items and a for(let i=0; i<len(array); i++) loop with DOM CSS changes to hide/show rows matching a filter in the inner loop.

In Edge the page loads quickly and the loop is typically under 20ms.

In FireFox the page lags many seconds while loading and rendering, and several seconds when the loop involves a lot of hide/show of the table.

It's not that I haven't tested, it's that FireFox just isn't as fast as Edge. This simple approach relies on the browser handling a lot of items because I can't write a complex indexer in JavaScript and don't want to spend more effort on a low-use page and I refuse to put up with 'paging'.

> It's not that I haven't tested, it's that FireFox just isn't as fast as Edge.

Only in this one specific case. You don't know the other cases. What you do is write code and check if it's fast enough in Chrome. If it's not you change your code. You never check if it's fast in Firefox instead and then go on with your day, saying "well chrome's just slow".

> "You don't know the other cases."

Why would I care about the other cases? It's no use to me if FireFox is really fast at caching if I'm not using caching.

> "What you do is write code and check if it's fast enough in Chrome. If it's not you change your code."

I can't change my code, it's at the limit of (my understanding of JavaScript/web performance) crossed with (how much work time I can spend developing this page). I've already got rid of function calls in the inner loops, trimmed the data set aggressively, pushed more into SQL than in client side, have an out-of-band dataset generator so querying the DB isn't part of page load it's a static page served with static compression, it's taken days longer than I wanted to get even this functionality fast enough to be as fast as I want, if it needs double the time and SpiderMonkey performance expertise to cater for FireFox then the result is tell people to use Edge for it.

> "You never check if it's fast in Firefox instead and then go on with your day, saying "well chrome's just slow""

I did check if it was fast in FireFox and it wasn't. I carried on trying to make it faster until I ran out of ability and it went from 'okay I guess' on Edge to 'great that's what I hoped for' on Edge. And sluggish on FireFox. The reason I don't go on saying "Chrome's just slow" is because Chrome isn't.

> Why would I care about the other cases?

Because you talk about the other cases when you make general statements like:

> it's that FireFox just isn't as fast as Edge.

> I can't change my code,

I wasn't suggesting you change anything about your code. Remember, the context of this conversation is this Statement by GP:

> I hate that I know exactly why. It's because they were only ever tested on Chrome during development.

The reality is that Firefox has a tiny market share at this point, so it is questionable how much time should be invested into optimizing pages to make them fast on Firefox. But that is a problem with Firefox's market position, not technology.

My point was that when code is slow in Chrome, you change it and never notice whether Firefox would have been faster in those cases. You only test code that is sufficiently fast in Chrome in Firefox. Thus, you don't usually see the cases where Firefox is faster than Chrome.

The context from the GP is relevant, my reply was to say no don't accuse laziness and ignorance, I do use FireFox as my daily browser, I did test with FireFox, I wanted my page to be equally good and I couldn't achieve that. The effort of rewriting to get 'great' responsiveness in Edge got 'sub-par' in FireFox - and it's not because I didn't bother trying.

Your last paragraph is probably true in general, and true specifically for me because the Windows server I was using had Edge and didn't have Chrome or FireFox.

I wouldn't make dom changes in a tight loop like that. Better would be to accumulate the changes that need to be made and then do a batch change operation instead of one at a time like it sounds like you're doing. That code would be slow in any browser.
You say "it would be slow in any browser" but that's not true. It's fast in Edge and Chrome and slow in FireFox.

> "then do a batch change operation"

What would the 'batch change' be if not a loop over all the changes, making the changes one by one?

One possibility would be to create all the matching rows of the table in text (<tr><td>...</td></tr>), and then replace the contents of the table in one assignment. That's pretty fast, although I'm not sure about OP's case.
It shouldn't matter honestly, I didn't notice any performance difference in benchmarks for react.
When that happens I just fire up a vanilla chrome and look at the js thingy there. It doesn't happen more than once per week.
Can you give an example of something JS heavy that is slow in Firefox? I haven't encountered something like that in a very long while.
Idk if being JS heavy was the issue here, but Twitch had terrible performance on Firefox for years. I installed Brave specifically for Twitch (and Twitch alone), and could finally use the site without everything feeling sluggish and super laggy.

I don't use Twitch much anymore, but the one time I opened it recently (for NeoVimConf), it seemed much better.

To me it's not only a speed problem. Some pages directly won't work on Firefox because of some JS issue, but they do work in Chrome.
On the contrary, colossal GitHub diffs routinely crashed Chrome for me [in the past], while Firefox dealt with them effortlessly. Different browsers have different strengths.
Been on Firefox for many years for one reason only - TreeStyle Tab. Once other browsers implement it, if ever, would consider jumping ship.

Orion has something similar, but it's a baby version of that, really...

I had to switch to Sidebery after some bugs with TST (broken hierarchy, etc.).
I don't know when you had those problems but I had similar problems in the past (>1 year ago) but they all seem to have been fixed.
I had to uninstall Sidebery as it would put my CPU on a high spin and hurt battery life.
I've also recently switched back to Firefox. The Simple Tab Groups is the killer feature for me. It allows me to group tabs by task which is a godsend if I ever need to work on multiple unrelated tasks concurrently.
The suggestions you get when typing in the address bar are miles better than the chrome counterpart imo. Otherwise I think these browsers are more equal now than ever.
Just tangentially related, but on Windows I find that Edge is way faster than Chrome nowadays. No idea why, and it feels stupid to even consider it, but the difference is staggering.
I did try Edge a couple of years ago and I would agree with your observation too. I just didn't stick with Edge and came back to for some reason that is escaping me right now.
I'm even happily using Edge on Linux. I know, sacrilege.
Not on Android (it stutters on scrolling even on newest Pixel). And I also think it's not the most safest browser on Android because Chromium is much more hardened there.

Source: https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing

Firefox for Android does not stutter when scrolling for me on a phone much weaker than a Pixel. That suggests it's not a universal issue but something more specific to your setup.
FWIW we don't have that issue on a Pixel 5a, OnePlus 7 Pro or Galaxy S21 Ultra.
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I’ll pile on and say that it doesn’t stutter on my old and slow OnePlus Nord. Only on one weird page that was recently on the frontpage, but I guess they were simply also doing some fuckery with the scrollbar.
I love Firefox and use it as my main browser. I do sometimes see issues with JavaScript on some sites which I assume are the result of developers mainly testing on Chrome these days.
Feels a bit PG submarine-ish, but I'll bite.

Firefox took away a lot of accessibility options in a large August 2021 and broke my trust in them. Good that they brought back extension options in Android, as I read other comments, but taking away the text size render option killed me.

    but taking away the text size render option killed me.
 
Maybe you're talking about something different but zooming text only is still there on the View -> Zoom menu for me in current Firefox.
"BypassPaywallsClean" is a must-have extension for the modern internet.

Does anybody else use multiple browsers? Maybe it's just because I'm doing web-dev right now, but I think using as many browsers as possible is necessary as I find inconsistencies that could become bugs all the time. I use Firefox as my "main" and Chrome as my "alt".

I have to use Chromium for MS teams unfortunately (calls and screen sharing are not allowed on FF)
I use chrome as a backup. Though initially I only did this to support some legacy software that only worked through Flash (don't ask), so if I'm forced to use Chrome I get the distinct impression that I'm looking at a buggy/legacy/badly written webpage.
> "Does anybody else use multiple browsers?"

Yes, now everything is in a browser there aren't different programs visible on the taskbar so I make do with different browsers for different tasks. It's not because I love browsers, it's a bodge for the decline of good dedicated desktop GUI programs.

Time for my rant as a Firefox user since the beta Phoenix versions, stating that I'm a daily MacOS and Android tablet user

* Firefox uses much more battery on MacOS than any chromium based browser. Bugzilla ticket exists since ages, few things have change

* Firefox on Android tablet after the change to Fenix is a stretched phone browser, with no tabs support, no default desktop support. Firefox developers treat this as a ER instead of bug totally ignoring that it was there before and they dropped it, no development whatsoever

At the same time, Firefox history sync is like no other but balancing what I care for the most, I had to drop firefox after literally decades and every now and then I look if at least there is something on the tablet support, hoping that I'll be able to change back at some point

You consider it a bug that you don't like the UI?
It is not if I like the UI or not, the UI after fenix on a tablet is just the phone UI and is a waste of space and functionality. Before Fenix you had a proper tablet UI with visible tabs like a desktop browser, utilizing the extra space properly, so this is a downgrade regardless of the “like” factor you mention. And missing a desktop mode is a huge omission.
> Firefox uses much more battery on MacOS than any chromium based browser.

I really don't see that. Firefox with certain extensions is a battery hog but the browser itself is pretty lightweight on CPU for me.

Not sure on MacOS memory usage (I stick with Safari and Edge on respective laptops for battery life reasons), but agreed 100% about Firefox on Android tablet. It's just awkward.

They need to make the Android UI in general a closer match for the desktop and iOS (skinned Safari) browsers. For instance, note how buried things like "passwords" are in the Android menus compared to iOS and desktop browsers:

Desktop: Menu->Passwords iOS: Menu->Passwords Android: Menu->Settings->Logins & Passwords->Saved logins

It's almost like the Android team doesn't even use their own browser on other platforms, or there's no product lead to make things consistent.

Your Gmail/Google cookies are probably in a weird state with chrome. Clear the cache and all saved cookies (will log you out of every site fyi) and I bet it will load right up again.

But all that said, yes, Firefox is very good. I wish it was a little more bleeding edge with stuff like experimental web standards (native filesystem access, USB, etc.) but I still use it for most of my browsing.

> Your Gmail/Google cookies are probably in a weird state with chrome. Clear the cache and all saved cookies (will log you out of every site fyi) and I bet it will load right up again.

That's definitely a likely candidate. I'll try that, thanks!

It doesn't support the webkit scrollbar variables.

-webkit-scrollbar

-webkit-scrollbar-track

-webkit-scrollbar-thumb

That's because Firefox is not based on webkit. Of course, nonstandard webkit extensions only work on webkit browsers.
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Yeah, because they are -webkit variables.
So? Chrome doesn't support hyphenation yet.
Switched from FF to Brave, just because FF spins up my fans and uses far more battery than Brave on arch linux. Wish I could switch back.
Can't use it on a Mac as it won't play ball with Keychain. Not going to reenter all my passwords.
I don't use Keychain as I have BitWarden but, AFAIK, the only browser able to connect to Keychain is Safari, isn't it ?
Sadly, Apple has just completely cut off 3rd parties from Keychain for website passwords (they can use the Keychain for their own isolated items, but can't touch any shared password data). All non-Safari browsers are affected.

Firefox on iOS a loophole for this, because it's forced to use Safari's WebView, so it gets Safari's keychain, but it can also then prompt to save in its own password sync. Far from ideal, but at least a way to escape Apple lock-in.

I agree it's annoying, but it's also not that big of a deal. I have 200 or so passwords duplicated in both Keychain and Keepass.
> I'd be glad to learn of any other cool features and extensions that y'all might want to share.

I'm sure others will be sharing it as I type this comment as well, but for many HN readers, Multi-Account Containers [1] are bound to be a godsend. Easily log in to different accounts for any website, in different tabs. Great feature that's not available in other browsers.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/multi-account-conta...

And some more tips:

- Translate web pages locally, without sending any data to remote servers: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/firefox-translation...

- Vertical/tree-style tabs: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/sidebery/

- If you're in the EU: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/consent-o-matic/

- If you use RSS: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/feed-preview/

And I assume you've already got uBlock Origin. And as others mentioned, try also using Firefox as your mobile browser, so you can send tabs from one to the other, which is pretty neat.

In addition:

- SponsorBlock - Automatically tag and skip portions of youtube videos, such as sponsors, intros, recaps, and others. - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sponsorblock/

- Firefox Relay - Automatically create up to 5 (for free, more if paying for it) email addresses that redirect to your actual address, to avoid giving your private address to everyone. - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/private-relay...

Ha, thanks for sharing Firefox Relay - I actually work on that, so I was a bit hesitant about sharing it. I'll add that "paying for it" is €1 a month for unlimited email addresses.
Not a paying customer but if there was a way to sign up and pay anonymously (crypto and/or cash via mail), I'd be banging on the door even at a significant markup.
Is something like privacy dot com (virtual card numbers) not anonymous enough? I kinda don’t wanna know what you’re doing with these email addresses
There are a lot of people who just want privacy wherever they can get it. It's not necessarily something nefarious, but the result of the question "Does this person need to know who I am? No. Therefore there is nothing to gain and only something to lose by telling them."
For me it's more like "Do I want to waste time dredging this info back up in case they ever get breached", to which the answer is almost always "No".
Those are some really interesting extensions you've suggested.

I'll be sure to keep Relay in the back of my mind, I haven't had need of it yet.

Though I do have requirement for SponsorBlock avid watcher of YT that I am, I am a little hesitant to add SponsorBlock as I am not quite sure how it would work flawlessly without some really complicated algorithms potentially involving ML work. I am curious to know if in your experience it has ever erred and automatically skipped portions it wasn't supposed to ? Or any other type of errors ?

It's crowdsourced. The downside to that is that less popular videos may not have the sponsor information skipped, although you do have the ability to post start and end timestamps for videos that don't have it in place yet.
From my understanding SponsorBlock doesn't use any ML stuff, but is simply a database that allows other users to submit what they think is a sponsor (or other annoyance). I've found it to sometimes not get all sponsors (especially for more niche videos), and the self-promotion sections are usually too agressive (but they can be disabled). I'd say give it a go honestly
Yeah, the word "automatically" does a lot of heavy lifting there. But like others said, it's crowsourced. You watch a video, tag it, done. There's some anti abuse tools, like tags done by new users being served not all the time and tested by other users before it's trusted.

I have never seen bad section tagging over the past two years.

> Translate web pages locally

This is a good start for a but what I'm looking for is Local Full Text Search of every page in my history. It shouldn't be hard to automatically maintain a text index of the pages I've browsed so that I can search them by keyword without bookmarking everything. Maybe it's just me but chronological history is useless beyond a few days.

This is one of those moments where I realize other folks on HN have almost exactly the same Firefox setup as me. Nice list of add-on recommendations!

I would add in a couple more, for anyone tempted to switch away from Chrome or Safari:

- Redirector: https://www.einaregilsson.com/redirector/ Very helpful for redirecting "new" reddit to old.reddit.com, AMP links to normal links, Twitter to Nitter, etc.

- RES (Reddit Enhancement Suite): https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/reddit-enhanc... Provides built-in image preview and lots of other subtle goodies for old.reddit.com. I have a very hard time browsing reddit without it!

- Sponsorblock for Youtube: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sponsorblock/ If you watch any amount of YouTube on channels with lots of sponsors, this is a great way to keep your sanity. Works just like sponsor skipping in the Overcast podcast client.

I love tree style tabs and I really want to encourage people to set it up and really customize their user stylesheet to make the best use of it. I have removed all traces of the original tab bar at the top and the three primary window buttons (close, restore, minimize) giving me back lots of that precious vertical space. Their GitHub has a ton of CSS snippets to help you with customization. I'd also be happy to share my user CSS file.
@DangitBobby please share your user CSS file
>- Vertical/tree-style tabs: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/sidebery/

This is the biggest reason why Chrome sucks - they have no workable version of vertical tabs.

Reasons why horizontal tabs are clearly inferior:

1. Screens (generally) have way more horizontal space than vertical and you read webpages vertically. I already have an OS top bar and a browser top bar taking some of this valuable vertical space.

2. Most webpages have predefined right and left margins, so vertical tabs don't take away from the visible space of the page.

3. The size of the tab header is critical for being able to read the name of the tab. I have my vertical tabs set to 30 characters. If I had horizontal tabs with 30 characters, I could fit maybe 6 tabs on the screen at once.

4. Ease of having many more concurrently open tabs. I easily have 38 tabs open and visible without scrolling. 8 of those are pinned tabs which take up the space of one tab. I use 6 different windows (which are category titled using the Titler extension). That is 228 tabs open at once and very easily accessible and readable. (of course I use Total Suspender to keep them from taking too many resources)

All this said, Firefox still sucks because vertical should be the default or at least a simple toggle. As it is, you have to trust some extension and then you have to jump through obnoxious hoops just to get the damn horizontal tabs turned off. And yes, there are some other browsers that have vertical tabs built in, but I am not touching Edge or Opera as they are from dubious companies. I also think that Brave is working on it, but they seem dubious as well.

Now to my complaints about Sidebery (which is superior to Tree Style Tabs). Sidebery has tree style as well, but I turn it off as it undermines the value of #3 above. It has panels, which are goofy and, while you don't have to use them, you still lose a tab worth of space for it. You also lose an even larger tab space to the Sidebery title (which is a menu and an X that aren't necessary. Sidebery doesn't work well with the Titler extension - when you want to move a tab to another window, it doesn't show you the title.

I used to work on the Opera browser. I quit when it got sold to China. Also wanted to do that, since most people as well as main Oslo HQ was fired from Poland a year earlier.

Opera was very much a not-dubious company. But that is what it has turned in to.

-- I use Firefox as my main work-browser, and have for a long time, and the last few years I've used Vivaldi as my main personal browser.

I find it easier to just have separate browsers rather than do anything more advanced for context. :)

feed preview seemed to break my browser since I have a ton of tabs open all the time. Not sure why the extension causes this, but just a head's up

Firefox has a really great json viewer that I prefer even over my IDE, but it's one weakness is it's lack of XML support which Chrome does have :/

I'd love to be able to enable DRM for a single container. Until then, I have to continue with profiles.
You're right, but for a counter-point versus Chromium, multi-account containers are worse for security compared with profiles…

This matters when you can't 100% trust your browser session, or the installed extensions. Did you ever load https://my.1password.com in your browser? How do you feel about it? Do you trust your installed extensions to not take a peak? I don't.

Chrome solves this elegantly via profiles. Even more, you can install websites as “apps”, with a shortcut that gets indexed by the OS, and Chrome remembers the profile. I simply type “1Password Online” or “Banking” and my Chromium opens a new window in my “Private” profile that has no extensions installed. Firefox dropped the ball on both PWA shortcuts, and on profiles.

Even for using multiple accounts, I feel like Chromium profiles are a better solution.

For example, my workplace has very strict security requirements, and when looking at company documents it's not cool to provide access to extensions like LanguageTool or Grammarly. I'd be in trouble. And Chromium always had finer grained permissions for extensions, like activating or deactivating them per website.

Wouldn't Firefox's profiles accomplish the same thing? (Yes, I understand they are difficult to access but they are still there.)

That said, containers are a handy tool for people who want to access multiple accounts without the trouble of setting up individual profiles. Keep in mind, if you're only trying to access a personal and work Google account you probably don't want to spend time setting up a separate profile for each then keeping the settings synchronized.

Yes, but Firefox's profiles are very hard to use (apart from keeping multiple Firefox channels installed, e.g., stable, beta), I tried, and I couldn't.

Starting a profile is difficult, and also switching between windows, since the OS sees profiles as different apps. It's probably not hard to fix, but Mozilla has had other priorities.

Just open about:profiles. You can create new ones, remove old ones, set which one is the default and can open them in a new browser. I use this all the time to open a browser as a new SSO functional user without having to log out.

I don't know why they don't add this somewhere in the menus and I don't know why you can't bookmark about:profiles, but this works well for me as it is.

The -ProfileManager command line flag opens it up as a startup window.
Try Profile Switcher for Firefox, which provides a Chrome-like interface for managing and switching between profiles in Firefox.

Add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profile-switc...

Source: https://github.com/null-dev/firefox-profile-switcher

My problem is opening links from apps. Sometimes I want a link in Slack (or other desktop apps) to open in my personal profile and sometimes I want it to use my work profile. With Brave/Chrome, the link will open in whatever profile window is active. I can't find a way to make this work with Firefox.
The -ProfileManager flag to Firefox gives a startup window to manage, create, and select profiles (and has existed forever).

You can create shortcuts (or shell scripts) by hand with --no-remote -p ProfileName to auto-open specific sites in specific profiles. It's certainly less convenient than PWA installs, but is an old tool with all sorts of old ways to automate it.

Multi-account Container is far easier than all that though and does reduce the number of windows to manage in your OS taskbars. Obviously you need to be careful with which extensions you install that they are safe for every container you want to use, but that's a given and a good idea in general no matter how many profiles you use: keep extensions to the bare minimum you are comfortable with. Vet their permissions manifests and keep additional permissions you grant them to a minimum.

Holy crap thank you!

I have to log into multiple Microsoft365 tenants and it drove me crazy with the amount of signing OUT I needed to do when switching accounts, to the point where my crappy workaround was to use different browsers for each account (Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Opera, Brave, etc) but I started to run out of different browsers.

This multi-account container extension is a godsend

Chrome supports multiple user profiles. I assume Edge and Brave do too.
Or you can start them pointing to a completely different user-profile-directory.

I do that, no chance for one to leak into the others.

Or you can just use FF containers - which is 99% less work.
Yea, but those came about after I'd built the wrapper for quickly launching different profiles of either Chrome or FF.

FF containers are more work than the 2 clicks I do now, powered by some Python I wrote like 15 years ago (with minor maintenance).

you still have to switch through browser windows right? with containers it is just a tab click and you can put related tabs for a particular topic in a single window
that works to some of the same things firefox can do, but you can also tell firefox to "Always open this site in my banking container" and the next time you load it up, from any container, it will switch it the one you prefer. Also, I really love having amazon and facebook on their own containers, to cut down on all the weird advertising stuff I see..
Chrome's support is way more invasive on google sites. Once you "go multi-profile" you are forced on every google site to do the same thing, because of the borderline-illegal tight integration of Chrome with google sites.

For instance, I can't have Youtube Music playing something on one profile while doing a Google Meet on another profile in a different tab (has to be the other profile window). In Firefox it's site-based (and tab-based) but Chrome locks down on any Google site.

Finally it's actually really hard to undo multi-profile in Chrome once you switch to it, I had to throw out all my Chrome profiles to get back to the old, preferred behavior.

Use profiles to separate work for each tenant, whether you use firefox or chrome. Firefox supports multiple profiles too! Chrome supports multiple profiles. And launching chrome/firefox with certain profiles requires setting up shortcuts with --flags. So you can have one browser shortcut for one tenant and another shortcut for another tenant.
simple tab groups + Firefox counters are far superior that using different profiles
Not sure how containers can be superior than profiles for separating sessions between work clients. Auto switch container feature is not applicable. And reloading tabs in another container should not ever be required. Plus, logins and passwords of different work clients do not get merged into one profile.
You can also make new profiles on about:profiles and open a browser as another user without destroying SSO for your current user. I'm assuming Chrome has something similar, but I've never installed it so I don't know.
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Oh that's definitely a use case that had arisen in my workflow. I'll be sure to check it out. Thanks!
Multi account containers + Temporary Containers [1] + I don't care about cookies [2] are an awesome combination I use, I have ~10 fixed containers and for almost everything it's a new container that lives as long as the tab is open.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con... [2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/i-dont-care-a...

Why do you need a container for almost everything? It's it for privacy reasons? If yes, what do containers offer which is not already provided by the total cookie protection feature?
Would love to know this too! It's a bit confusing the amount of options available.
Hate to be a black cloud, but as much as I love containers, my containers and their settings often disappeared. I can no longer remember exactly why. it may be if i disabled containers and then re-enabled them. (Containers may be a source of glitches so disabling is to help with troubleshooting.)

getpocket.com needs to be logged in via container 0. if you put getpocket to a personal container, and don't login to getpocket from container 0, then firefox's save to pocket feature does not work.

i cannot save bookmarks to automatically open in set containers (personal gmail to open in one container, work gmail to open in another container, etc.).

Otherwise, containers is something i miss and i have used workarounds to implement the same with MS Edge.

Why not start firefox with the -P flag for troubleshooting? And keep your default Profile using containers.
Not sure what the flag does but your context tells me another profile without my extensions is established. The problem is I am trying to figure out which extension is causing the problem. So enabling and disabling each one is supposed to be a procedure.

Regardless, enabling/disabling should not cause losing settings.

instead of bookmarking if are fine using another extension, then use "Session Boss" to save and restore sessions
I wrote about my favorites here [1]. I make an active effort to sculpt my online experience into something useful rather than intellectually draining; every time I fire up an unconfigured browser instance on a new machine I'm taken aback at how much I lean on various extensions and configurations to make the web usable.

[1] https://alexplant.org/post/my-favorite-firefox-plugins-produ...

One thing I haven't figured out with container tabs: say I'm currently in one of the container tabs and I want cmd + T to open a new container tab. This doesn't work by default, AFAICT...instead it opens a regular non-container tab. How can I make it so that I get a new tab for the same container I'm currently on. Right now, I have to either go to File > new container tab or right-click the tab and click "new tab"..but I don't like using the mouse.
Control + Shift + a number key should open a tab in a specific container. You can map containers to specific number keys in the addon settings.
cmd + shift + <number>

You can configure 10 different tabs in extensions settings

I never understood the concept of Multi-Account Containers. I would guess it makes sense when one hardly closes the browser (and clears the cache) and has dozens of tabs open? What is a standard use case (home/work)?

I simply use Temporary Containers to isolate tabs (or different domains) and login to websites either by hand or via KeepassXC's browser integration. No per-container setup needed, every tab just lives briefly in its own little container.

There are lots of different use cases.

1. Further defense in depth against common XSS attacks: if you only ever log into banking sites in a Banking container, then some random ad-sprung malware trying to access your bank in any other container will never find a logged in banking session to hijack (no matter how good your bank thinks they are at XSS protection and auto-timeouts).

2. Isolating tracking cookies from major ad companies. This reduces cross-correlation between/among them. I have separate containers at this point for all of: Google account usage, Twitter account usage, Facebook account usage, and Amazon account usage. The amount of targeted advertising I see decreases every time I sequester one of these major accounts into its own container. The trade-off is the increase in ReCaptchas needed and the increase in advertising companies complaining I must be using an "ad blocker". (I don't have any ad blocker extension installed, just this strategy of isolating major cookies to specific containers and Firefox built-in Enhanced Tracking Protection.)

This is very obviously an ad… at the top of the front page…

Y’all crack me up sometimes.

It is opinionated, but is it en vougue nowadays to call everything an ad? Come one.
It’s literally a product name drop and elevator pitch of user features.

I mean, I can appreciate your trying to take a nuanced approach, but it is quite literally and quite clearly an advertisement.

This level of cynicism would make more sense if you spent any time on the Internet, where normal people regularly evangelize for their browser of choice simply because they feel strongly about it. It's a very common thing. Check out Reddit.
I switched to Firefox several years ago out of principal, but it's been a struggle to stay with it.

2 big issues I have are the tendency to freeze, and then say "restart to keep using Firefox" because it updated in the background and can't continue.

The other was almost a deal breaker, and still could be. When using a barcode scanner, Firefox can't keep up with the characters coming from the scanner. It will randomly drop characters. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why some scans weren't working, and the scanner works perfectly in Chrome, works perfectly in a text editor and intermittently drops characters randomly in Firefox.

If it were just the start character, or the end character it wouldn't matter so much, but it drops characters in the middle of a barcode. It has for years, it's a known issue, I don't see it ever being fixed.

> the tendency to freeze, and then say "restart to keep using Firefox" because it updated in the background and can't continue.

I never encountered that, neither freezing nor being forced to restart. By default Firefox will only download updates in the background and inform you that the update will be installed if you restart.

That is incorrect. By default, it installs in the background and then displays the behaviour reported by GP. You probably have it set to not install before prompting you.
No, I'm using the default settings of Firefox for Windows. I just installed Firefox in a new Windows VM to confirm this. Automatic installation of updates in the background is enabled by default there. There's also a checkbox to use use a background service for installing updates which is enabled by default, though that's likely a Windows specific feature.
> Automatic installation of updates in the background is enabled by default there.

I'm confused. That's what I said is the default, and you said it isn't. Now you start by saying "no" to me, and confirming what I had said. Sorry if I've missed something though, I'm really tired right now.

You're right to be confused, sorry. I meant to day "Automatic installation of updates when Firefox is not running is enabled by default there."

I said "no" to "have it set to not install before prompting you" because I use the default settings. Now I'm actually also a bit confused whether you meant "it installs in background [while browsing]" or "it installs in background [while Firefox is not running, using the background update server]"

With the default "when Firefox is not running" setting, the updates should _download_ in the background and then inform you that it will be installed next time you restart.

The freezing and forced restart as reported by pontifier does not sound like default behaviour, it sounds like "when Firefox is not running" is unchecked.

Assuming you're talking about an actual barcode scanner device: barcode scanners commonly present as USB keyboards to the OS. The thing about USB keyboards is that events aren't pushed to the computer but are polled at a set rate (commonly 125Hz). It could be that the scanner produces the numbers quick enough to approach the USB polling rate, and maybe Chrome has some additional smarts to handle it, or maybe Firefox just adds a bit of overhead that's enough to lose some of the characters. You could try increasing the computer's polling rate and see if that helps.
The scanner works perfectly in everything except Firefox. I've tried multiple scanners, I've tried different settings. I think I even tried setting an inter-character delay. Firefox is the only thing that seems to drop characters. I basically had to write the back end of my web app to do error checking after the fact and reject barcodes that didn't have the right number of characters. Which doesn't help at all when some barcodes are different lengths. I had to add an extra step for the user to tell the back end how many characters were in the barcode before they can scan one.
Just a guess but you could avoid the step with length input (if the only purpose is to check for errors) if you checked the CRC checksum of the barcode. But that's just an uneducated guess, I have no idea how your app works.
It's not firefox exclusive but SponsorBlock is an incredible extension if you watch a decent amount of Youtube. It's not just about skipping sponsorships (which it does well of course), but having a bunch of crowdsourced metadata about every video is so useful if you just want to skip to the point of the video. You can also skip non-music portions of music videos, filler content, etc.
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Maybe, but I've been noticing the same in the late week or so. Github was actually unbearably lagging the other day and some pages perform really terribly on occasion. It's probably some of the new haphazardly implemented garbage from manifest v3, after all it's all about Google shooting the browser in the foot to save their adsense business.

I haven't really checked if it's better on FF because it can't screenshare specific tabs so it's dead to me.

>Also FF shits itself over +100 tabs

10 years ago, sure. I currently have 235 tabs open, plus another window with 172. Firefox is at 5.3G of RAM, 0% CPU. Most of these tabs have gone to sleep and get restored in less than a second. Tabs have not been a problem with firefox in years.

Huh, I regularly have 300+ tabs open in Firefox and have never had a problem (macOS).
I love firefox but it's kind of annoying that it doesn't have the chromecast option in the android version for most videos. so i have to open chrome only to do that.
It is the same on desktop. But that is probably because of Chromecast being proprietary to Google, so sadly nothing Mozilla could do.