Tell HN: Firefox Is an awesome browser right now

I love Firefox too but this is a really weird post.<p>The OP is clearly having performance issues with Chrome presumably due to extensions interfering or something else. I can guarantee you that Google makes sure Gmail loads at least as fast in Chrome as in Firefox.<p>Chrome is customizable too (panes you can open&#x2F;close), Chrome extensions are also thriving, and Chrome was the one who invented the &quot;clean look&quot;, same as Firefox invented tabs.<p>This post just feels like weird marketing. There&#x27;s nothing actually substantive about it. It doesn&#x27;t feel like it belongs on HN.

&gt; I&#x27;d be glad to learn of any other cool features and extensions that y&#x27;all might want to share.<p>I&#x27;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&#x27;s not available in other browsers.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;multi-account-containers&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;multi-account-conta...</a>

I use Firefox sort of begrudgingly. It&#x27;s marginally less bad than the other options, but it&#x27;s still an awful browser.<p>I vehemently disagree with almost all of its design decisions, and with every new release they seem to stray even farther from sane UX.<p>It has hamburger menus on desktop and a lot of weird space-saving design that makes no sense on a modern high resolution display. Buttons are small, have cryptic flat Linear B icons with no labels, and the menus are hard to navigate.<p>It&#x27;s also nearly impossible to disable all the tracking they do. Even if you do, they&#x27;ll sometimes remotely change your settings, so there&#x27;s no guarantee settings will stay the way you configured them. They love to talk about how privacy is important and keep building tools to disable other people&#x27;s tracking, but their own data gathering is sacrosanct and must be retained at all costs.<p>Overall Mozilla seems to wage an all-out war on user agency, constantly trying to take away configuration options, while pushing shit nobody wants like Pocket or their themes.

Recommend:<p>1. Sign up to Firefox sync<p>2. Install the Multi-Account Containers extension. Create containers to partition your identities. Eg: Banking, Shopping different Gmail accounts, different AWS console accounts etc<p>3. Install the &quot;containerise&quot; extension so you can create URL rules that automatically open sites in the correct container. (It can match URL regexes, allowing you to identify different accounts on each platform. Eg: on gmail, &#x27;mail.google.com&#x2F;mail&#x2F;u&#x2F;?authuser=hunter12@gmail.com&#x27;, which you can bookmark as &quot;Hunter12 Gmail&quot;)<p>4. Kagi search<p>5. uBlock Origin extension<p>6. Simple Tab Groups extension

Firefox on Mobile supports uBlock origin, and is very nice as well.<p>edit: on Android

If you use Android, Firefox on Android is also really nice because it can sync with your desktop and also has about a dozen extensions (ublock origin, dark reader, etc.)[1].<p>And then Iceraven[2] is even better, because it&#x27;s just Firefox for Android, but with several hundred extensions enabled and a few other annoyances fixed.<p>(A few years ago <i>all</i> extensions were enabled on Firefox on Android, but a few didn&#x27;t work so they decided to limit it to a very short list of allowed ones. And then they let that list stagnate for years. Kind of a dick move IMO.)<p>If you use iOS, then &quot;Firefox&quot; is really just a skin on Safari, so no extensions (this is entirely Apple&#x27;s fault), but the sync features work, so that&#x27;s something if you use Windows or Linux.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;android&#x2F;search&#x2F;?promoted=recommended&amp;sort=random&amp;type=extension" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;android&#x2F;search&#x2F;?promoted=re...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;fork-maintainers&#x2F;iceraven-browser">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;fork-maintainers&#x2F;iceraven-browser</a>

I love Firefox but some JS heavy demos etc. just don&#x27;t work fast enough. I hate that I know exactly why. It&#x27;s because they were only ever tested on Chrome during development.

No it is not. In the past months&#x2F;years they removed:<p><pre><code> - ability to zoom out images. Firefox has two different zooms, but none of them can zoom out images. If an image doesn&#x27;t fit your screen, you can&#x27;t see it period. - ability to open an image in the same window - ability to use different search engine in the search bar and URL bar - ability to quickly change search engine clicking the magnifier icon top right - custom search engine URLs - showing download speed </code></pre> I bump these into like every day, and they cause me minutes of annoyances. (and probably some others I can&#x27;t recall now)<p>Firefox 2 years ago was a way better browser than it is now. And a lot of things still missing, like proper profiles.

The Tree Style Tab extension[1] is wonderful for &quot;keeping tabs&quot; on our modern &quot;to forget&quot; lists (unclosed tabs). Putting tabs on the left is also a good screen real estate trade for wide aspect ratio screens.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;tree-style-tab&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;tree-style-ta...</a>

Firefox was my go-to 3 years ago because it was just lighter than Chrome (and easier on my battery).<p>I still hate the fact that different browser profiles and profile switching aren&#x27;t surfaced like they are in Chrome. I think it&#x27;s such a major use case for modern web browsing, I find it hard to believe they aren&#x27;t prioritizing it. (FWIW this isn&#x27;t even supported in Safari, which I would have preferred using)<p>I still keep it around because I love it&#x27;s download manager, but I tend to use a lot of Google services, and out of habit, I stick to Chrome.<p>(ps. I was an early Chrome adopter, so it&#x27;s quite sticky with me)

I honestly don&#x27;t think there is much difference between each major browsers nowadays, so just pick whatever you like.<p>I personally go full utilitarianism about the tools&#x2F;software I use, so I can&#x27;t care less about the companies behind them.<p>I was an avid Firefox user since version 1.5, simply because it was objectively superior than competitors and way more polished (at the time, other browsers like IE didn&#x27;t even have tabs).<p>Then Chrome came out, which was indeed blazingly fast but the feature set just wasn&#x27;t there (in both basic features and the extension scene. It didn&#x27;t even have a proper multi-language font setting which was a deal breaker for me).<p>A few years past, XUL-based Firefox became unbearably slow (it didn&#x27;t help that I have 50+ addons), and Chrome was steadily catching up in every aspect. Right before Firefox&#x27;s transition to Quantum, I couldn&#x27;t take it any more and started to use Chrome primarily.<p>After 57, Firefox Quantum was obviously great, but at that point I just didn&#x27;t have any reason to switch back. All the heavy lifting parts (webext) are the same, so it&#x27;s down to some minor details, which TBH, I&#x27;m getting used to the &quot;Chrome way&quot;.<p>The final nail in the coffin of Firefox for me, is its development. I&#x27;m not a professional software developer, and lack the ability to contribute code to large open source projects like browsers. So instead, I tried my best to help by reporting bugs. I&#x27;ve filed at least 50~100 tickets on both Mozilla&#x27;s bugzilla and chromium&#x27;s trackers.<p>I hate to say it, but I can see the sheer difference between the maintenance effort of the two projects, even in basic triage. I understand the two companies are not really comparable in their sizes, but Firebox&#x27;s is declining hard. It was much better several years ago. More and more bug tickets are not touched by anyone. Legit problems got closed for no reason. Sometimes you can even spot management-level interference despite clear objection from users and even internal developers, which I would think I should see more on Chrome&#x27;s end. Filing bugs about Firefox no longer feel fulfilling or even fun, because I KNEW if it&#x27;s a minor issue, it won&#x27;t get fixed in years, if at all (hell, it took them 5+ years to fix something major like full-range video playback). I just don&#x27;t have faith in its future.

Feels a bit PG submarine-ish, but I&#x27;ll bite.<p>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.

Always has been<p>I used Firefox when it came out, then I moved to Chrome when Chrome came out because Firefox was terribly slow (and it was because of the addons). When Chrome became slow because of the addons, I jumped back to Firefox, and I haven&#x27;t looked back.<p>It is specially important to use Firefox now given that there are very few non-Chromium alternatives for web browsers. Keep the web open!

I use both Chrome and Firefox daily and I must say that over the years, from personal experience, Firefox has improved to the point of being about as fast and stable as Chrome. The downside is that Firefox lost most of its identity, the big one being XUL, which made for more powerful plugins and customization.<p>So yeah, Chrome and Firefox are more of less interchangeable now and the choice is essentially about how much you like Google, and specific details. Details include the presence or absence of a plugin you particularly like, support for video codecs and DRM (for streaming platforms), and specific features and bugs. Generally, I find Chrome better on the &quot;specific details&quot;, one of it ( <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugzilla.mozilla.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=791429" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugzilla.mozilla.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=791429</a> ) actually was the trigger that made me switch to Chrome some years ago.<p>About extensions, I think all the extensions I use are available on both platforms or have equivalents. Now using<p>- uBlock Origin (of course)<p>- SponsorBlock for YouTube (autoskips sponsors in YouTube videos, user-contributed)<p>- Behind the overlay (remove most overlays, have many equivalents)<p>- URL to QR code (shows the current URL as a QR code, so you can scan it to open it on your phone, have many equivalents too)

For my new job, I&#x27;ve switched to using the Orion Browser [1] from Kagi since I was noticing some weird typing lag on my MacBook in Firefox. I still use Firefox at home on Windows, but native vertical tabs in Orion are enough for me to use it full time. It&#x27;s also handy that it supports both Firefox and Chrome extensions, albeit some features don&#x27;t fully work (e.g. &quot;Block element&quot; of uBlock Origin doesn&#x27;t let me choose anything).<p>I&#x27;m not a fan of Mozilla currently, but they do have the least bad non-chromium, multiplatform browser out there.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;browser.kagi.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;browser.kagi.com</a>

Proud to say I never left. I used Mozilla, and as soon as Phoenix was released I jumped on it. Stuck with it through thick, thin and name changes. Just had a short period when Firefox became too bloated for my 256M FreeBSD laptop so I had to use Opera temporarily. But as soon as I upgraded my laptop I was back with Firefox.<p>For a long time, maybe still, noscript was unchallenged on FF. Something about Chrome API not allowing the deep JS blocking required. I consider JS to be the number one threat online, so I must block it by default to feel safe(r).<p>But really it&#x27;s a no brainer to me that my web browser, my most used graphical program, should be FLOSS.

Your Gmail&#x2F;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.<p>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.

Funny timing for me to see this on HN today<p>After some years of love&#x2F;hate relationship with Vivaldi, I&#x27;m currently trying (once again...) to go back to Firefox after one too many chrome-based browsers fuck-up: opening Edge in a windows VM suddenly got my RAM usage up by 32GB, which were shared with my non-VM chrome-based browsers (chromium, vivaldi). First time just crashed my whole computer, second time I had to kill it all (the memory usage moved to chromium and then vivaldi when I closed the VM).<p>Vivaldi performance issues (and some bugs) was already putting me on the edge very often, but I really like the features so switching is very hard and will take a lot of time getting used to. Mouse gestures, panels, integrated mail (took way too long to come), tab stacking&#x2F;tiling, command palette, etc. Sure some of these have firefox extensions doing something similar but it&#x27;s still far from being the same.

Time for my rant as a Firefox user since the beta Phoenix versions, stating that I&#x27;m a daily MacOS and Android tablet user<p>* Firefox uses much more battery on MacOS than any chromium based browser. Bugzilla ticket exists since ages, few things have change<p>* 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<p>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&#x27;ll be able to change back at some point

If you are on Firefox and you run into an overall system slowdown, check how many subprocesses it has spawn.<p>With the release of Fission (their website isolation tech) this number becomes unbound. In my case it was close to 100, each eating up at least 50MB with some well into hundreds megs. It was a swap fest. Not sure what they were thinking, but a simple post-update warning would&#x27;be been nice... or perhaps it <i>was</i> there, behind all that &quot;aww, let&#x27;s select your mood color&quot; nonsense that now refularly surfaces after every second update. In any case Fission is easy to disable once you know it exists.

I use FF as my daily driver (but I&#x27;m also a Linux desktop user so take my views with a grain of salt lol) and I can&#x27;t say the experience is any better than Chrome. But honestly I think that is probably the best thing that can be said about it. It works just as well as Chrome for all of my use cases and it isn&#x27;t run by Google.

I also use Firefox as my main daily driver and have been for 5 years or so. Recently I started trialing Arc (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arc.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arc.net&#x2F;</a>) and it&#x27;s interesting. They try to be quirky and have a bit of a different approach. What I like is that they also have the idea of different profiles (like Firefox Multi-account Containers) built in. I&#x27;m not 100% convinced of Arc yet, but it&#x27;s good enough for my secondary browser (also for stuff that required Chrome, since it&#x27;s based on Chromium).

&gt; 1. It opens websites really quickly, much faster than Chrome<p>I wonder if it&#x27;s a question of accumulated cruft.<p>My main browser is Firefox, but there is this one site that&#x27;s broken on it, so I use Chrome for that. It&#x27;s the only thing I use Chrome for. But I find that it&#x27;s much faster (even when testing other sites) than Firefox.

Also it feels &quot;more on the side of the user&quot;. Like for instance if you do shift right click it bypasses the website&#x27;s attempt to hijack your contextual menu. I think Chrome disabled that.

Been on Firefox for many years for one reason only - TreeStyle Tab. Once other browsers implement it, if ever, would consider jumping ship.<p>Orion has something similar, but it&#x27;s a baby version of that, really...

I love firefox except for a fairly recent feature adopted by chrome, which is the ability to update usb device firmware through a web browser via the Web Serial API. I do a lot of ESP32 stuff and it&#x27;s so much nicer to be able to go to a webpage and just install the firmware directly rather than having to actually configure and compile it from scratch in vscode&#x2F;platformio.<p>For instance, if you want to install WLED, just go to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;install.wled.me" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;install.wled.me</a>, select the version, select the usb port your device is connected to and &quot;install.&quot; Bam, done.<p>Firefox team views it as insecure: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mozilla&#x2F;standards-positions&#x2F;issues&#x2F;336">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mozilla&#x2F;standards-positions&#x2F;issues&#x2F;336</a>

I prefer Firefox, even though I don&#x27;t experience the benefits you seem to be experiencing. I find Firefox to be more sluggish than Chrome, and it&#x27;s less compatible with websites than chrome.<p>I love it for tab containers - a game changer in web browsing. And ublock origin, and the fact that it isn&#x27;t chrome.

Opposite experience here. Long time Firefox user and in the past 3 years it&#x27;s gotten incredibly bad for me as sites have gone more JS heavy, and video in particular has become a huge problem for my Firefox install it seems. Major sites like Youtube (~25% of videos get an error, forcing me to open in chrome), Reddit (yeah this one sucks for everyone, but at least loads on chrome if you have a high end pc+connection, which i do) and Instagram can&#x27;t be reliably used for watching video. For years i used Firefox with a bunch of privacy&#x2F;security-hardening settings but I&#x27;ve had to undo a lot of it to even use the web as of recent as the number of broken websites was getting too ridiculous.

&gt; All parts feel really customizable.<p>This is one of the selling points for me as well. Literally just before opening HN I&#x27;ve looked at my overflowing bookmarks toolbar and thought <i>&quot;Those folder icons and default favicons feels quite unnecessary any only occupies precious space. Let&#x27;s get rid of them.&quot;</i> and then did exactly that in few lines in the userChrome CSS [1] and voilà, toolbar no longer overflows.<p>I don&#x27;t think any other major browser lets you do that.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;myfonj&#x2F;f5415dd0580663a82ea18407ef2ee5de#file-_userchrome-css-L420-L446" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;myfonj&#x2F;f5415dd0580663a82ea18407ef2ee...</a>

Firefox is my primary browser at present but definitely has annoyances:<p><pre><code> - unable to close pinned tabs without custom extensions - unable to undo close open tabs after closing last window (also solved with extension) - pins itself to taskbar and install desktop icon on every install - I prefer how downloads&#x27; progress is handled in Chrome better - Not all settings are synchronized (esp. around privacy), making it very hard to configure computers the same consistently </code></pre> Favorite extensions:<p><pre><code> - Vimium - Undo Close Tab - Shortkeys (using it specifically to move tabs around) - Aardvark Duex</code></pre>

Tab Stash is amazing. This is how bookmarking should work in the modern age, where it&#x27;s normal to have &gt; 50 tabs open, and not want to close any of them.<p>Click one button, and all your open tabs are saved in a nice, tabular view. If you saved tabs from yesterday as well, those will be visible in another grid on the same screen, so you can drag and drop tabs into categories, which you can then rename. Brilliantly simple.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-CA&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;tab-stash&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-CA&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;tab-stash&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;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.

IIRC the thing that turned me away from Firefox most recently was the &quot;Pocket&quot; spam on the front page. I vaguely recall that you couldn&#x27;t customize it, and the content that was pushed had a strong ideological bent that I just didn&#x27;t want to have to deal with every time I opened my browser. I might be misremembering some of the details; it&#x27;s been a few years.<p>I tried Safari, Brave, etc as well but they all had usability issues in one form or another. I didn&#x27;t really want to settle with Chrome, but it has been the least grating for me personally.

I love firefox and have been using it for nearly 20 years now, but my latest employer doesn&#x27;t support it so they recommended I switch to Edge on my work machine... Don&#x27;t get a job in academia

Firefox was my main browser on Mac for years, but a year or two ago it got demoted to secondary primarily because of one issue: spelling. I just found myself spending too much time when writing anything in Firefox dealing with false positives in its spell checker [1].<p>I <i>still</i> have no idea why it has so many false positives. They use the same open source spell checker that LibreOffice, Chrome, and MacOS use, and none of those have trouble with the words that Firefox does. (I don&#x27;t know what Microsoft uses, but Office on Mac and Windows and Edge on Windows also are fine with the words Firefox can&#x27;t handle).<p>That suggests they just need a better English dictionary, which they could get from LibreOffice.<p>[1] Here are some words it incorrectly flags as misspelled: manticore survivorship misclassified ferrite massless rotator dominator untraceably synchronizer. Those were reported on their Bugzilla bug for reporting spell check problems 25 months ago.<p>Here are some more, reported 19 months ago: ad hominem backlight coaxially hatchling impaction intercellular irrevocability licensor measurer meerkats mischaracterization misclassification misclassified partygoers passthrough plough retransmission seatbelt sensationalistic trichotomy underspecified untyped.<p>All the words in batches I submitted 30 months or more ago have been fixed.

At least for me (Linux, Wayland) it is literally unusable, due to this bug[1] and related issues in the comments. I finally stopped putting up with it and switched to Chrome this year, after being a loyal user since the browser was called Firebird.<p>In retrospect I should have jumped after Mozilla ruined Firefox on Android.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugzilla.mozilla.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=1789602" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugzilla.mozilla.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=1789602</a>

I&#x27;m a tab hoarder, and I love the scrolling tab bar. No matter how many tabs I keep open, they remain readable, instead of squishing into ||||||||||||||.

The reasons why I continue to use Safari right now despite wanting to use Firefox really badly:<p>1. Apple Pay integration only works in Safari. 2. Firefox on iOS uses MobileWebKit underneath, which is basically just Safari with a mustache 3. Firefox on iOS is (was?) also buggy in weird ways, like tabs would close unexpectedly or pages would fail to load. 4. (Biggest reason) Firefox on iOS does not support extensions. Safari does.

Don&#x27;t use it on macOS. It has no protections at all for cookie theft. Unencrypted SQLite DB sitting in a user-readable directory. Chrome and (I think) Safari both use encryption keys in the secure enclave. That&#x27;s still not perfect (Chrome remote debugging and Safari code injection can get around those), but better than nothing at all.

&gt; I was having trouble loading GMail in Chrome<p>You should avoid using GMail. Messages sent from and to GMail addresses are occasionally copied to the US government, and analyzed and possibly copied by various commercial companies who pay Google&#x2F;Alphabet for the privilege. (You should also encourage your friends to stop using GMail).<p>Also, regardless of whether it&#x27;s GMail or not - use an email client. GMail and all other email providers suppose access using the IMAP and&#x2F;or POP3 protocols. That (mostly) guarantees no ads, and is much faster.<p>As for Firefox - Mozilla has decided to block extensions&#x27; access to most APIs and limit them only to a &quot;WebExtensions&quot; API (even though Mozilla&#x27;s internal UI code is basically just like an extension, i.e. they don&#x27;t _have_ to do this.) So, FF is only partially customizable and manipulable, and the extension ecosystem is somewhat stunted. I use FF, but let&#x27;s not go overboard with the praise.

I&#x27;m a daily Firefox user for many years, because they have the best devtools, in my opinion. But Firefox and Mozilla have weird priorities that are not focused on their users. I just don&#x27;t understand them. Firefox added a &quot;temporary feature&quot; called Colorways that let&#x27;s you, I guess, change the browser&#x27;s color theme to one out of, like, five colors? Wasn&#x27;t this a thing that you could already do twenty years ago, and it wasn&#x27;t temporary?<p>They also moved &quot;Close tabs on the right&quot; from the bottom of the menu and moved it to a submenu next to &quot;Close tabs on the left&quot;. So now it&#x27;s a multi-step process to close tabs on the right with a higher chance of misclicking on the action opposite of what I want, that I also will never use in my life.<p>Just seems like they&#x27;re fond of making many odd, small UI decisions to create the appearance of progress without really moving forward.

This post feels a bit like fanboy without much data backing, but I think the OP could have mentioned a big win of FF over Chromium-based browsers: support for Manifest V2.<p>As an extension developer who makes heavy use of HTTP requests and header sniffing, I feel like V3 literally put me in a cage carefully crafted by Google (and their explicit hatred for ad-blockers, no matter if making life difficult to uBlock developers eventually makes life hard for all other developers too).<p>I feel like V3 is a grave mistake that eventually will make Chromium-based browsers less flexible. No matter if Brave announced that they&#x27;ll keep supporting V2 extensions: they don&#x27;t have their own store, they still rely on the Chrome store, and the Chrome store now only accepts V3 extensions.<p>So FF announcing their continuous support for V2 is really a breeze of fresh air, and eventually it&#x27;ll be (at least for me) their biggest selling point over Chromium.

&gt; Some really cool observations in first 30 mins of using it :<p>&gt; 1. It opens websites really quickly, much faster than Chrome<p>This is the same thing everyone says whatever new browser they move to. Once some one hoards 100 tabs it becomes slow.<p>(Again,I am not against firefox or chrome - just meaning that everything is quick initially - somehow becomes slow in a few weeks)

&gt; 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&#x27;t find in Chrome<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.mozilla.org&#x2F;addons&#x2F;2020&#x2F;09&#x2F;29&#x2F;expanded-extension-support-in-firefox-for-android-nightly&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.mozilla.org&#x2F;addons&#x2F;2020&#x2F;09&#x2F;29&#x2F;expanded-extensio...</a><p>About 2.5 years ago, extensions came back in Firefox mobile Nightly and it is still a hidden feature in mainstream Firefox?<p>I just had to reinstall Firefox Mobile, and tried to re-add my addon collection and I get the following error messages &quot;No addons here&quot;, &quot;Failed to query addons&quot; ... Why are cumbersome collections required to access the addons that you love?

I switched to Firefox several years ago out of principal, but it&#x27;s been a struggle to stay with it.<p>2 big issues I have are the tendency to freeze, and then say &quot;restart to keep using Firefox&quot; because it updated in the background and can&#x27;t continue.<p>The other was almost a deal breaker, and still could be. When using a barcode scanner, Firefox can&#x27;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&#x27;t working, and the scanner works perfectly in Chrome, works perfectly in a text editor and intermittently drops characters randomly in Firefox.<p>If it were just the start character, or the end character it wouldn&#x27;t matter so much, but it drops characters in the middle of a barcode. It has for years, it&#x27;s a known issue, I don&#x27;t see it ever being fixed.

I wasn&#x27;t happy when they moved the &quot;Close tabs to the right&quot; menu option into a submenu and then not have that configurable. It&#x27;s an important feature for me. I now need to install an add-on to get the desired behavior. Which just seems a bit silly to me. For the rest it&#x27;s wonderful.

For extensions:<p>[0] Better History NG (my fork of the unmaintained non-NG version, so far I only fixed bugs, so it works again, same performance issues as before), apparently inspired by the Vivaldi history.<p>[1] uMatrix, which has the superior interface for blocking&#x2F;unblocking of domains compared to uBlock (which you obviously have as main adblocker ;) )<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;better-history-ng&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;better-histor...</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;umatrix&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;umatrix&#x2F;</a>

I use firefox a lot. When I have to build a PC &#x2F; workstation for grad-students or labs, I install linux, and the distro I use has Firefox by default and no chrome installed. The number one complaint &#x2F; request I receive when I build a PC &#x2F; workstation for the grad-students after they get it? Can you please install Chrome?<p>When I ask them... they have not even tried Firefox. Chrome is all they know, and therefore they do not want to even look at Firefox. As a longtime user of Firefox, I find it odd. I suppose if you put me on a new box, with Chrome as the only browser that came up, I guess I would ask you to install Firefox :)

Nice coincidence: I&#x27;ve been using Teams in Chromium for a few months because audio just wouldn&#x27;t work in Firefox. The Chromium experience then kept degrading until I couldn&#x27;t reliably receive video or audio. Usually it would &quot;fix&quot; itself with a reload or two, but when even a reboot didn&#x27;t help I tried Firefox again. Lo and behold, everything worked immediately! I swear MS must be on their old &quot;let&#x27;s make sure the customers have to spend XX% of their time trying dumb shit to keep our products working, and the sunk cost fallacy will keep them using our software&quot; shtick.

LibRedirect by ManeraKai redirects YouTube, Twitter, TikTok... requests to alternative privacy friendly frontends and backends.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;libredirect.github.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;libredirect.github.io&#x2F;</a>

I agree. Maybe not for the same reasons:<p>FF has awesome privacy tools and extensions. I use it because I can configure it to be extremely pendantic about a lot of stuff.<p>For example, my setup requires me to whitelist each and every JS external script I ran to. The NoScript extension provides me granularity to choose whether fetch requests are allowed, fonts are loaded, etc. It remembers my choices and provides a quick UI for making these decisions.<p>For normal, non-paranoid users, I would recommend Chrome though. Not exactly because it is better, but because some pages will only work properly on it (due to lack of testing by the page authors, this is not FF fault)

I run Firefox in its own network namespace with Firejail so I can more easily observe traffic from Firefox with Wireshark. Unexpected traffic gets added to nftables to be dropped and logged. I almost feel like automating this process, but then I consider that I&#x27;d probably be better off running a fork of Firefox under different stewardship in the first place. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;librewolf.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;librewolf.net&#x2F;</a> looks very interesting for this reason. The health of the Librewolf project is interesting to look into.

People use a browser, overload it with extensions, then try a new one and are impressed by how fast it is lol<p>On benchmarks, both Firefox and Chrome have their advantages and disadvantages. One thing about Firefox is it has a richer extension ecosystem so you&#x27;re probably even more likely to fall into the trap of overloading your browser with extensions<p>However since <i>real</i> adblocking is threatened in Chrome&#x27;s future and adblockers can significantly improve performance on some sites, I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if eventually this works to Firefox&#x27;s benefit

Yay. I&#x27;m glad to hear more and more folks are moving back to Firefox. It really is the best browser IMO. Like you said, it&#x27;s fast, stable, has all my extensions and gets out of my way. Love it.

I love Firefox, it&#x27;s my daily driver except for two things:<p>- printing (to a pdf or a printer). - copy paste<p>In both cases chromium is much better at keeping the styling.<p>Bugs have been reported for the later, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugzilla.mozilla.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=1772785" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugzilla.mozilla.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=1772785</a> and <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugzilla.mozilla.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=1646515" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugzilla.mozilla.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=1646515</a> but no progress is happening.

I want to begin typing a website&#x27;s name, have firefox recognize it and indicate it to me, and press &#x27;tab&#x27; to begin searching.<p>The lack of that single feature makes firefox unpleasant to use for me.

I considered switching a while back, but it only got compelling when I took the leap and switched on Android and my various desktops.<p>Sync&#x27;ing is great, general use is pretty good. I keep Chrome in backup for a handful of sites that just don&#x27;t work on Firefox.<p>Not sure if it has changed recently but for ages the regular version of Firefox on Android lacked several things that were in Firefox Nightly (eg pull down to refresh, which might seem trivial but it&#x27;s annoying as anything when it&#x27;s not there!)

&gt; it seemed quite interesting to send links from phone to desktop<p>This is a killer feature for me. Last time I used chrome it supported &quot;pulling&quot; tabs between devices but not &quot;pushing&quot;. It seems like a minor difference but it really improves the UX for me. Often I am reading something on my phone but get interrupted so just fire it to my desktop. This is much better for me than remembering that I wanted to finish something and then find it in my list of tabs.

I use Waterfox personally, but it&#x27;s a minor difference.<p>Some lesser known extensions:<p>LocalCDN<p>Tab Session Manager<p>Feedbro<p>Enhancer for YouTube<p>Request Control<p>Trace<p>There is a lot of configuration you can do with a user.js file as well. I took a lot of options from the tor browser config since I value privacy.

Couldn&#x27;t disagree more. Between ~October and ~December of last year, Firefox mobile on iPhone was essentially broken. The main menu would take 30 seconds or more to pop up. Switching to another app and coming back (or bringing up the control center) would result in Firefox hanging for 20 seconds if not outright crashing.<p>Before last October, I would have recommended Firefox to anyone who asked. Now, I would recommend Chrome for their ability to fix bugs in a timely manner.

&gt; I&#x27;d be glad to learn of any other cool features and extensions that y&#x27;all might want to share.<p>I built an extension to inject your Mastodon timeline into Twitter[0], recently added Firefox support as well. Especially useful as a stop gap in light of Twitter getting rid of their API access and hopefully will be a first step for many to transitioning to Mastodon.<p>[0] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chirper.picheta.me" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chirper.picheta.me</a>

The FF JS engine is too slow. I like to check my Screeps account every now and then and even Chrome on my phone is faster than FF on my 2700x desktop.<p>I just tried it last week. :&#x2F;

You should checkout the ability to use containers (no not docker) in the browser for certain sites like social media, keeps their tracking nonsense contained.

It’s been that way since the mid-2010s, especially if you don’t have at least 16GB of RAM. I switched from Chrome circa 2015 but use both extensively. As a developer what I found worked best was to develop sites in Firefox and then test them in other browsers - it avoided relying on Chrome-only features but since the developer tools both have things they do better you’ll naturally find certain tasks are easier in one.

I prefer a fork of Firefox, focused on privacy: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;librewolf.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;librewolf.net&#x2F;</a><p>Highly recommended.

It&#x27;s not firefox exclusive but SponsorBlock is an incredible extension if you watch a decent amount of Youtube. It&#x27;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.

Biggest difference compared to Chrome, of course, is privacy. Of course Chrome cares about performance and all that other stuff, but significantly less about privacy.<p>The downside of that is that ReCaptcha sucks more than usual. Because Google knows less about me, I sometimes have to do a ReCaptcha two or three times before it will grudgingly acknowledge my humanity.<p>Usually I see ReCaptcha as a sign not to use that site.

Portability of saved passwords is a hassle that might get regulated in the next decade or two.<p>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.<p>Apple’s Chrome iCloud plug-in for Windows is just paying lip service.

I&#x27;m not sure how it compares or works with Tab Stash, but I have used Tree Style Tabs[0] for years and couldn&#x27;t live without it.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;tree-style-tab&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;tree-style-ta...</a>

For months my Chrome (on Windows) just stopped showing new tabs when there are so many that they are supposed to scroll.<p>Bug is known, but I haven&#x27;t seen a solution even though it&#x27;s not recent.<p>Reinstalling doesn&#x27;t help. Disabling extensions doesn&#x27;t help. Same thing on another computer with same google account logged in.

I&#x27;ve been using firefox for years... Firefox is cool. Slack huddle in my Firefox never works, I don&#x27;t know why. But that&#x27;s cool. If someone in the team needs a &quot;huddle&quot; I can give a reason and ask them to describe their problem instead. That works 99% and saves me a lot of time.<p>I love firefox.

I can&#x27;t use Firefox in my work environment. It doesn&#x27;t have some Chrome extensions that make it impossible for me to use, such as ones for Google services. It sucks because I dearly miss container tabs. If Firefox could support Chrome extensions, that would be game changer.

I mainly use firefox as well, but as lots of the people I have other browsers installed just in case. I like it, it’s fast and reliable for me, and I don’t want only-chrome future.<p>I’ve kinda browser wrapper thing with a chrome based browser for few google apps, like Keep, Gmail and Calendar on Windows.

Oh Firefox, the best of the worst browsers, as there are no new and exciting browsers any more. Added new unremovable extensions button, video conferencing support is still flaky, but I use it daily, no matter what. Maybe one day Andreas Kling&#x27;s browser Ladybird will replace it...

Firefox used to be even better.<p>I’m still bitter they dropped that workspaces feature where you could group tabs together and switch to a completely different group of tabs witha few keystrokes.<p>And no, the replacement feature is not equivalent nor better in anyway.<p>Still better than that bag of spyware trash that google chrome is.

I&#x27;d like to use FF but I&#x27;ve never been able to figure out how to replicate something Safari does that&#x27;s ingrained in my fingers at this point.<p>In Safari, I can use command+1-9 to open bookmarks. So command+1 is my PRs, command+2 is the JIRA board for the current sprint, etc.

I now use Brave on everything: Linux, Mac, iOS, iPadOS.<p>Mozilla has some really weird stuff going on in their financials that bother me, and as a result, I just can’t use their products anymore. This is similar to my feelings about Google, Microsoft, and so on. I prefer tech companies to just be tech companies and not branch into other fields. I understand that Brave’s stance on certain things bleeds into politics with things like thwarting censorship and encouraging encryption, but those are also still technical problems. Tossing money at social issues isn’t what I want out of a tech company.<p>Full disclosure: philosophically, I am an anarchist. You should look for yourself at Mozilla’s financials if you don’t agree with my politics.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;assets.mozilla.net&#x2F;annualreport&#x2F;2021&#x2F;mozilla-fdn-2021-fs-final-1010.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;assets.mozilla.net&#x2F;annualreport&#x2F;2021&#x2F;mozilla-fdn-202...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;foundation.mozilla.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;foundation.mozilla.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;assets.mozilla.net&#x2F;annualreport&#x2F;2021&#x2F;mozilla-fdn-990-ty21-public-disclosure.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;assets.mozilla.net&#x2F;annualreport&#x2F;2021&#x2F;mozilla-fdn-990...</a><p>Also, just search up some of the organizations and stuff that get mentioned here. It’s weird.<p>————-<p>Edit: so, of their 1.1billion dollars in assets (the foundation, and two wholly owned for profit subsidiaries) Mozilla cut 100 million from software development expenses, while at the same time spending large sums of money on groups with no tie to software at all. It also seems that the vast majority of their revenue comes from Google search inclusion as default in Firefox… so why cut the software development funding?<p>Regarding Brave, it’s funded by Founders Fund, Pantera Capital, Digital Currency Group, Pathfinder, Foundation Capital, Rising Tide, Hone Capital, Propel Venture Partners and through their BAT tokens. I find the crypto side annoying, but that doesn’t feel as morally “icky” as some of things Mozilla appears to do (calling themselves a non-profit without mentioning for-profit subsidiaries, spending money on things that have nothing to do with software, reducing funding to the development of their core product).<p>In short, I kind of hate all major browsers, but there aren’t good ones to choose from so I try to pick one that feels least-evil. When LadyBird browser gets to some kind of truly usable level, I will certainly switch to it for daily use.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;awesomekling.github.io&#x2F;Ladybird-a-new-cross-platform-browser-project&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;awesomekling.github.io&#x2F;Ladybird-a-new-cross-platform...</a>

Firefox is alright, and I use it for some things, but the killer feature preventing me from transitioning over is the inability to cast to my TV. Even with the janky plugins, the friction is too great to allow me to commit to a full switch of my browsing experience.

I was going to buy a Pixelbook Go since it&#x27;s a well-made laptop and I like the simplicity of ChromeOS. Then I realized that the first app I&#x27;d install is Firefox since it&#x27;s vastly superior when it comes to ad-blocking especially on Android.

We had a case where Chrome was choking on really large Google Sheets when you tried to use filter views, it would freeze for 10-20 seconds. With Firefox there was no freezing, which is strange considering Sheets should be optimized for Chrome.

Putting aside all politics, end of the day, despite all of Google&#x27;s shortcomings - they actually got the UX of Google Chrome REALLY RIGHT.<p>The tabs are awesome. The unified search bar is awesome. The top panel UX is really tight and compact and looks good at the same time. The ability to sweitch between profiles which I now use a lot (work&#x2F;leisure) works great.<p>ps: did I mention the smaller details like the immediate visual feedback you get when you use a search keyword? It&#x27;s frigging awesome and one of the main reasons I abandoned Firefox and never looked back.<p>I mean even if you disliked Google you can just use Chromium or some un-Googled version.<p>Chrome is literally the BEST browser UX as far as mainstream is concerned. Obviously power users are always going to find issues with it. But as an attempt to provide a user friendly browser for the largest audience possible, it&#x27;s simply excellent.

I&#x27;ve been using it on desktop for a while, but on Android it&#x27;s pretty rough, at least with the address bar on the bottom. I think there&#x27;s a bug with touch locations being mapped to the correct place on a website.

Firefox has been my main browser for a long time.<p>At work we have one screen an an interface that has an extreme number of items in a grid control. Chrome is noticeably faster in that screen but otherwise I find Firefox performance to be great.

Firefox nightly has become nearly impossible to use, everyone is blocking, falsly assuming your version is too low, trying to get you to use chrome or assuming you&#x27;re a bot and forcing you into CAPTCHa hell.

Firefox&#x27;s default theme is just...bad.<p>I use ideaweb&#x27;s Safari theme <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ideaweb&#x2F;firefox-safari-style">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ideaweb&#x2F;firefox-safari-style</a>

Firefox is my default browser across devices. The killer feature of FF for me is primary password. One main password which protects all my other passwords and I have to enter it once after I start the browser.

I use firefox more and more these days on my android phone as it does ads-blocking _much_ better than chrome, like 100x better, after many years I somehow feel it might be time to retry firefox on desktops.

Multi-Account Containers made by Mozilla is the reason I can&#x27;t stop using Firefox. Chrome doesn&#x27;t have any similar extension that can display multiple profiles in one window like it does.

Front page of HN for what clearly is opinion and user error. Nice. Enjoy.

Just tangentially related, but on Windows I find that Edge is <i>way</i> faster than Chrome nowadays. No idea why, and it feels stupid to even consider it, but the difference is staggering.

Right now, I have had to move off of Firefox on my iOS iPhone because Google persistent ad is punching thru some websites.<p>Temporarily, Brave&#x2F;iOS is filling in that void of much needed ad blocker.

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.

My favorite is Library Extension which watches pages you surf for media titles and gives you a link to your library to check them out instead of buying them. Works well for me.

My browser preference is almost 100% tied to how well it blocks ads and auto play&#x2F;scripts and other enemies of attention. The rest is mostly irrelevant to me personally.

I love firefox but it&#x27;s kind of annoying that it doesn&#x27;t have the chromecast option in the android version for most videos. so i have to open chrome only to do that.

Pro tip: use Nightly on Firefox, it’s a much better experience

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.

There was a recently-resolved issue between macOS 13 + Chrome + Microsoft MDE that caused dragging tabs from one window to the other to either beachball or crash.

What always sucks me back into chrome.<p>* seamless japanese page translation<p>* Firefox always seem to be applying an update at that critical moment where you just need the browser to start RIGHT NOW

FF with Sidebery is nearly perfect, except that it seems that persisting pinned tabs across sessions is an alien technology that nobody has quite figured out.

Personally I find the most useful part of FF to be the events inspector in the console. More often than not I use it solely for that purpose.

Firefox View is decent, I don&#x27;t often wish to transfer tabs between devices, but Colorways has a home now which makes much more sense.

Last time I benchmarked, Firefox was using way more RAM than Chrome. Microsoft Edge has been using most less RAM so I went ahead with it.

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.

I’m using Edge because it’s like Chrome but has the vertical tabs which is a killer feature for me<p>Does Firefox have vertical tabs? If yes, I am switching

I feel it is the awesome browser since some years, already. With UBO, TSTabs and containers every other browser out there feels broken.

And if you use it longer than 30 mins the memory leak will crash your computer. &#x2F;s<p>(this is my own experience, FWIW, but I understand not everyone has this.)<p>-Emily

I used Firefox exclusively for years, but I switched away when they bundled “pocket” and kept trying to force it down my throat.

It&#x27;s not about Chrome, it&#x27;s more about Google itself i think.<p>Basically, Google services are mostly dead eventually, given enough time.

It also supports a subset of extensions on the Android app vs most other browser apps that support no mobile extensions

Firefox is cool and would be great if it wasn&#x27;t overly uptight about 2FA. Vivaldi is the best browser by far.

Awsome, yeah, sure… what are the most interesring speed or usability improvements were in ff during past 2 years?<p>How many core devs are working on changing things to make ff secure, faster and (not-so-dumb-)user-friendly? Telemetry opt out? Sure, but… you need to patch and build your own version of firefox to make it really privacy-friendly. And do not forget about re-branding.<p>For me, OP looks overly excited and hallucinogenically optitimistic.

Firefox&#x27;s best engineers left after they fired Brendan Eich. That was the worst decision they ever made.

Can&#x27;t use it on a Mac as it won&#x27;t play ball with Keychain. Not going to reenter all my passwords.

Shout out to all the peeps who never left firefox, and recognized Chrome for what it was. A cynical grab for influence and surveillance dominance it was from the beginning. Chrome always offered technical and ui excellence in exchange for your soul. Personally googles motto &quot;don&#x27;t be evil&quot; always made me sick because corporations are by their very nature psychopathic. Now their motto is &quot;do the right thing&quot;, yes, right by the company. Let&#x27;s all be clear about what going on here.

Firefox&#x27;s killer feature is isolated Containers.<p>Dealing with multiple AWS accounts would be awful without them.

Indeed. It&#x27;s the best. Unless you have a veeeery old PC (if you do then Chrome feels faster).

I just use firefox bc its opensource. I use it with the duckduckgo extension as my search engine

The real reason to use Firefox is to prove Netscape won the browser war and Microsoft sucks.

Wait till you discover container tabs.. you&#x27;re gonna love the way you browse!!!!

Not on Android (it stutters on scrolling even on newest Pixel). And I also think it&#x27;s not the most safest browser on Android because Chromium is much more hardened there.<p>Source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grapheneos.org&#x2F;usage#web-browsing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grapheneos.org&#x2F;usage#web-browsing</a>

I only use firefox, because people don&#x27;t use it. I always choose the 3rd

&quot;BypassPaywallsClean&quot; is a must-have extension for the modern internet.<p>Does anybody else use multiple browsers? Maybe it&#x27;s just because I&#x27;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 &quot;main&quot; and Chrome as my &quot;alt&quot;.

I love Firefox, too.<p>It is more customizable than Chrome.<p>But it isn&#x27;t fast. Especially not on iOS.

Firefox&#x27;s &quot;Take Screenshot&quot; feature is too good.

It always has been. No real reason to use any other browser.

best for desktop for me, too, but absolutely very very bad for mobile, since<p>* I cannot automatically clean cookies when I close it * I even have to close tabs manually

Still waiting for FIDO2 support on macOS, unfortunately.

I recently switched from Chrome to Firefox and have not looked back. What eventually threw me over the edge is a recent &quot;fix&quot; [0] in Chromium after which Chrome will scroll an enormous distance per click of the scroll wheel from my MX Anywhere mouse. Of course, there&#x27;s no way to get the old behavior back (see: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1172&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1172&#x2F;</a>).<p>In Firefox, the scroll multiplier can be tuned to perfection.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugs.chromium.org&#x2F;p&#x2F;chromium&#x2F;issues&#x2F;detail?id=1270089#c27" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugs.chromium.org&#x2F;p&#x2F;chromium&#x2F;issues&#x2F;detail?id=127008...</a>

i started using firefox for spotify since i dont want to install the app and it would stop playing during potcasts after about ~1hour on chrome

Right now? It&#x27;s been like this for years.

Still, firefox drains battries on MacOS.

Firefox enjoyer since 2008 over here :)

Obvious shill post is obvious

&gt; &quot;import saved passwords&quot;<p>Yikes

Any must have extensions?

chrome still has some slick and instantaneous-ness over firefox

Hsolo8553@gmail.com

It doesn&#x27;t support the webkit scrollbar variables.<p>-webkit-scrollbar<p>-webkit-scrollbar-track<p>-webkit-scrollbar-thumb

Yep, its the best!

I&#x27;ve been using Firefox for twenty odd years now. It&#x27;s performance is comparable to that of other browsers.<p>But the pilfering of Mozilla by its management (giving themselves million dollar bonuses and pretending they&#x27;re managing a billion dollar corporation) and their illogical and fickle decisions has reduced IMHO the need for an independent open-source browser.<p>The only rationale for having a browser like Firefox now is to push back against megacorps like Google adding extensions to prop up their agenda (like preventing ad-blockers from working).<p>Mozilla had its day in the sun. I still use it but if it were to go away I wouldn&#x27;t lose too much sleep over it.

This is very obviously an ad… at the top of the front page…<p>Y’all crack me up sometimes.

Firefox gets all their operating funding from Google’s Search agreement. This prevents FF from protecting user privacy as it’d jeopardize their primary source of income.<p>Firefox also has a lot of telemetry and experiments enabled, even if users opt out in the GUI. These have to be disabled in the about:config setting.<p>It is the slow and uses a lot of RAM, but despite all these thing it’s the second most popular for a reason (kept alive as an easy way for Google Chrome to avoid anti-trust)

Firefox WAS a good browser.<p>Firefox has been a failure since their values shifted from developing an extensible browser for advanced users to protecting lgbtq+$^! rights.

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.<p>I had originally switched to Firefox for privacy concerns but that and the memory usage&#x2F;occasional crashing were too much for me.<p>edit: not sure what the downvotes are for. I&#x27;m glad there&#x27;s a second option out there. It didn&#x27;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.