Currently the main attack facing Firefox is coming from advertising companies such as YouTube.<p>It’s crazy to think that some software engineers might actually intentionally degrade user experience on non-Google browsers or for people using adblockers. The mentality here is pretty disturbing: it’s almost like punishing users for making the choice to browse the web without ads, or without the surveillance mechanisms that come with them. Instead of building a better experience, these engineers seem to be focused on sabotaging alternatives in the name of profit or control. The kind of mindset behind this reeks of the same tactics we see in some ad networks or big tech companies - if we can’t convince you to opt in, we’ll make sure you’re inconvenienced or frustrated until you do.<p>It’s a dangerous precedent because it introduces a toxic game of cat-and-mouse, where the user is constantly playing defense, trying to protect themselves from deliberate misdirection. It’s not just an ethical concern, but also an issue of how we value user autonomy in the digital space.<p>For the hackers out there, this is a opportunity to dig into the JavaScript code responsible for this. There’s almost certainly some interesting obfuscation or odd behavior hiding in the code, and by pulling it apart, we can both understand how these tactics work and build tools or methods to counteract them. Let’s make sure the only thing that slows down the web is bad design or slow servers, not malicious code aimed at punishing the user for making their own choices.
It's the closest we have to a browser not controlled by the corporate giants.
Sometimes Mozilla makes unpopular choices and people raise a stink about it, but we do that because we hold them to a higher standard. With Microsoft and Google, we just <i>expect</i> them to Do More Evil, with Mozilla we expect Good and will complain loudly when they fail to uphold our principles, and we recommend Firefox because we feel like it is possible to expect Good from them.
I have been using mozilla for _years_ it got shit, then better, then shit, and now its close enough.<p>The thing I _Love_ is container tabs. I can isolate empires by using container tabs to sandbox cookies and other web state. This means that ebay doesn't change my adverts to the last thing I searched on every site, and autoplay embedded youtube doesn't fuck up my video recommendations.<p>It means I can hide my work gmail from my home, and separate search histories (although thats less relevant now with AI.)<p>lastly, being able to scroll left and right on my tabs, rather than new ones being unaccesable is great.
My personal experience: I use Firefox because all its issues are fixable either via about:config or extensions. It's not slow or crashing.<p>- Embedded telemetry can be disabled via about:config
- Running ublock origin in advanced mode blocks all third party domains, websites are often broken but easily fixable
- Cookie Autodelete deletes a website cookie after the tab closes
- Decentraleyes as a local CDN to avoid external requests for common libraries
- Redirector to change request to alternative no tracking frontends for famous websites
- Simple tab groups keep tabs organized by "job"
- Bitwarden to manage passwords<p>I rarely encounter websites that are not working and I just switch to another website, and I use Vivaldi for things like meet where I want things to "just work".
I've been on Firefox Dev Edition for Mac for the last 4 years I think, and I can't remember more than 1 or 2 websites that didn't work correctly on it. It's been flawless, more battery and memory efficient than Chrome, less finicky and problematic than Safari, and with all the extensions that I need.<p>I seriously don't see any disadvantage in picking Firefox over Chrome. I still have Chrome around if any website requires it specifically, but I haven't launched it in ages.<p>There were a few Chrome extensions that weren't there on Firefox [1] [2] but I fixed that _easily_ by getting the crx file, unpacking it, then adding the <a href="https://github.com/mozilla/webextension-polyfill">https://github.com/mozilla/webextension-polyfill</a> to the extension to make it cross-browser.<p>It's easy enough to make an extension work on both Firefox and Chrome, I've done it myself with SideHN (<a href="https://github.com/alin23/sidehn">https://github.com/alin23/sidehn</a>), but I guess Firefox is not really in the mind of Chrome extension devs.<p>[1] <a href="https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/anchor-headings/lggjnoadjgfilclcmbakfkkfjjkhdpfo" rel="nofollow">https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/anchor-headings/lgg...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/xpath-helper/hgimnogjllphhhkhlmebbmlgjoejdpjl" rel="nofollow">https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/xpath-helper/hgimno...</a>
This seems like a good place to mention my favorite Firefox Addon for Android: <a href="https://github.com/mozilla/video-bg-play">https://github.com/mozilla/video-bg-play</a><p>Some days ago I was wondering how it works and was kinda surprised just now that this is from mozilla itself. Reading the project Readme makes this even straight up sound like a privacy addon. I wonder why this is not natively supported.
I really want to switch to Firefox but cannot because it doesn't sync bookmark favicons.<p>My bookmarks bar is filled with bookmarks without names that I can recognize by the icons. I refuse to re-visit every bookmark when I login from a new PC, which is often.<p>This has been requested for 17 years: <a href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=428378" rel="nofollow">https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=428378</a><p>Every other browser sync solution has this feature. Firefox insists on not implementing it because what, it's too much data to sync? I'd pay for it if it was a premium feature.<p>If anyone has a browser agnostic bookmark syncing solution that can sync the favicons, let me know.
Firefox is great and IMO it's important to have a browser that is open source and not controlled by Microsoft, Google or Apple. For that reason I would probably continue to use it even if the user experience was slightly worse, but thankfully it's not. When I switched from Chrome years ago I didn't notice any drop in performance and I've never really had any major issues since then. Every now and again I run into a website that is broken and think "ah, this must be what everyone is talking about online when they say Firefox sucks" but then I check the same page from a different browser and have the same problem. I hope it continues to survive and gets the support it needs from the community.
On my work laptop I use Chrome. There are a couple of things I sorely miss from Firefox<p>* The omnibar: I have a couple IPs I connect to frequently. One ends in 36, the other in 243. In Firefox I can just type 36 (or 243) + Tab + Enter. In Chrome I have to type the whole address. And why can't I search for the title of a page I know is in my history or even just a tab I already have opened directly from the search bar? I do that all the time in Firefox<p>* Ctrl+Tab to switch back and forth between tabs instead of cycling them in order (not the default in Firefox either, but at least it can be configured without having to install an extension and a native executable as I had to do in Chrome)
Firefox wins for me for multi container tabs that integrate with AWS SSO, so I can have multiple envs open in coloured tabs.<p><a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/aws-sso-containers/" rel="nofollow">https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/aws-sso-conta...</a>
Recently I preventively migrated from Vivaldi, and Firefox lacked:<p>Gestures, "search with" context menu, "add active tab" in a bookmarks bar folder, autorenaming downloads, custom keybindings, tab squeezing (it keeps them wide and shows scroll buttons), last tab standing, proper double-click-drag selection and text editing in general. Probably a dozen more things that I cannot remember now. Also "sync" just doesn't work, something went wrong, try again.<p>For gestures I used Gesturefy - isn't a mess and has "rocker". For "search with" I just had to write my own extension with hardcoded searches. I'm autorenaming through AHK - external tool, non-general use case. Tab squeezing and last tab solved through about:config.<p>"Add active tab", custom keys, text editing still unsolved.<p>In general I'm sort of satisfied with the results, but it took quite a while to migrate. Firefox is <i>sort of</i> extensible but not hacker-ish. Extension store is not generic-developer-hacker spirited either. FF is almost as dumb as Chrome, with a few settings that can make it better if you know where to look and have time for that.
I've used Firefox on desktop since 2019. It's upsetting how often (it's not every day, but more often than it should) a website just doesn't work because of the devs didn't test on Firefox at all. I even ran into this on Vanguard, a firm that manages god knows how much in assets, on a page to download PDFs...<p>I used to get teased (all in good fun) at my last company for being the only dev that used Firefox. Then I'd be the only one to ever catch the Firefox only bugs in PRs.<p>I get it - it's got way less market share, and for a small company, you may be able to argue the value of the time vs the probability of a bug, but not having your website work on all browsers in the 2020s (aside from new browser features like WebGPU and file system access) is a let down.
I could never leave it — even in its worst times of version 4 onwards — for a simple reason of how autoscrolling works (i.e. scroll on middle click). The acceleration curve used by Chromium is awkward, and scrolling in nested containers causes the outer container to start scrolling when you run to the end of the nested one (which makes nested scrolling pretty much unusable if you value efficient interaction with the machine). Pretty minor thing overall, but has been surprisingly important for me.
I switched to Firefox for privacy reasons, and it took a while to get used to it, but I'm completely enjoying Firefox.<p>There is some subtle tab / link click behavior that takes a bit to get used to, but after a while it just doesn't bother you any more because you're used to the behavior.
I use Firefox 90% of the time. The other 10% is a mix of Edge, Safari, Brave and Chrome.<p>The good of Firefox:<p>* the extensions ecosystem (KeepassXc, TamperMonkey, AdBlock, Disable Javascript, Youtube Audio, etc)<p>* the defaults in privacy and performance are good enough for me<p>The bad of Firefox:<p>* it is a minority web client engine so a few technologies and sites have problems with it. E.g: it is easy to debug WASM in Chrome, it isn't in Firefox
My very old, and bad, laptop takes an extremely long time to start Firefox.
However, forks like Floorp are a lot quicker to start.
And since I'm pretty strict about using the same tools everywhere (no matter the OS) I'm now using Floorp on my main PC as well.
But I'm not sure Floorp can be trusted... does anyone have anything to say about it?
Unfortunately, I have had to move in the opposite direction. I have been a Firefox user for more than a decade but after an upgrade to Linux Mint 22 I have had very regular crashes on Firefox which took the entire computer down and so now I am on Brave which seems to be so much faster.
I have definitely looked back. And also gotten to a stable state with Firefox for most things and Vivaldi for most things needing Chrome since web standards when Chrome is around is not a respected thing.<p>Unfortunately, companies treat chrome like they treated IE. Hard to get rid of.
How are the Firefox dev tools these days? Every time I've tried in the past I end up missing the Chrome dev tools, and it's too much of a pain to have one browser for development and one for browsing. I would love to switch, though.
Today I tried to start Firefox on a file:// type of url. It said the file could not be reached while I was sure it was there, as md5sum could read it.<p>Then it turned out that because Firefox was installed using Snap, and the file was apparently on a mount point that was out of reach of Snap, the file could not be read.<p>I think Mozilla should refuse package managers that are clearly broken.
If someone is missing the workspaces from chrome/Arc. You can try the zen browser [1] which is Firefox fork that will have it. So you get the best of two world. Containers and workspaces. It is very good and they keep up with upstream with frequent updates.<p>[1] <a href="https://zen-browser.app/" rel="nofollow">https://zen-browser.app/</a>
Firefox is guilty of every single thing Chrome is accused of.<p>* It includes advertisements in the New Tab page without user consent
<a href="https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/sponsor-privacy" rel="nofollow">https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/sponsor-privacy</a><p>* It shared browsing history without user consent
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliqz#Integration_with_Firefox" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliqz#Integration_with_Firefox</a><p>* It enabled a new tracking protocol for advertisers without user consent
<a href="https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2024/08/22/ppa-update/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2024/08/22/ppa-update/</a><p>* It blocked uBlock Lite from their store without notice
<a href="https://www.pcworld.com/article/2474353/popular-ad-blocker-removed-from-firefox-extension-store.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.pcworld.com/article/2474353/popular-ad-blocker-r...</a><p>* It's ~80% funded by Google
<a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-05-05/why-google-keeps-paying-mozilla-s-firefox-even-as-chrome-dominates" rel="nofollow">https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-05-05/why-go...</a><p>* Their main focus lately has been white-labelling dubious products
<a href="https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/03/mozilla-drops-onerep-after-ceo-admits-to-running-people-search-networks/" rel="nofollow">https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/03/mozilla-drops-onerep-aft...</a><p>Mozilla is a tech company that stopped caring about tech and loves to portray itself as a victim.<p>Since they fired the entire Servo (& Rust) team, the project joined the Linux Foundation. Servo is now my best hope for a truly independent browser.
I've been a Chrome user since literally the day it came out. On my iPhone 13 though I just noticed Chrome was getting slower and slower. At first I thought it was the phone, since I spend most of my time on the phone in the browser it was hard to tell the difference.<p>Then I switched to Firefox for iOS. It is SO MUCH FASTER. It's like getting a new phone. Idk what the Chrome team is doing but it's slow.
I use firefox for daily tasks. (I am an old user since firefox 3 from the age that firefox is truly customizable). But for frontend develop, I use edge. Firefox is basically unusable in current state. Not able to jump from profiler to debugger makes the whole thing completely useless. How on the earth do I lookup line column like `1:19995` by myself? You just can't. And it remain in this state for years already.<p>And about other stuff. The UX is also becoming more and more confusing recently. You now have 3 places to look for browser history. The menu, the standalone history window. the firefox view. And except for the menu. Thye all miss certain stuffs. The standalone window miss tabs from other devices and recent closed window. The firefox view don't have bookmark and recent closed window.
I used Firefox before Chrome took over, and then stuck with Chrome until about a year ago when I started using Brave.<p>Last week I switched to Edge. I know some people will turn up their nose at such a choice, but it turns out to actually be a very nice browser. I'm even using it on my phone now too.
Has slashdot started showing ads in the last 48 hours for anyone else using Firefox and ublock on Android? It was a very weird experience to see an ad on my phone for the first time in over a decade. My brain kinda froze and took a second to process what it was seeing.
Firefox works fine and I like the privacy focus and general features. However, it still randomly causes the CPU usage to spike and makes the fans run full tilt (top shows 90-100% usage for god knows what), even when the same tabs are open doing the same things. I don't see this (atleast not as often) in Chrome, which I don't want to use, but end up using it until Google does one more privacy destroying thing, in a long line of such things, which makes me angry enough to go back to FF until the cycle repeats.<p>I guess I have resigned being like a ping-pong ball bouncing between these two browsers.
I have been a long time problems with videos on firefox, sometimes the browser broke, and it's not only on YouTube, but Twitch and Crunchyroll for example.<p>Even with issues I have using firefox and switching with brave/chrome.
I had two issues, possibly due to my own perception, with Firefox. One is that it still froze in the same way Netscape did: the UI had no response whatsoever and a there was a hanging process in the process viewer. Granted, it didn't happen often, but it was noticeable enough that I got back my PTSD of using Netscape back. The other is somehow Firefox still feels less responsive than Chrome. This may well be just my unfounded perception, but pager loading, typing, and opening on a new tab somehow always felt a little delay, compared to using Chrome.
My only problem with Firefox is that getImageData does not return the actual encoded pixel values, but the values rendered to the screen after any sort of OS color profiles.<p>This makes it impossible to offer remote sensing processing tools that care about radiometric values to Firefox users. I specifically have to tell them to use a different browser if they want to use that toolset.<p>Mind you I haven’t checked this issue in almost a year so maybe they finally offer a way to make it behave like every other browser.
For me it’s the cookie containers, always moving between (MS365) orgs, using different social (Google) accounts etc, just with a click in the containers plug-in.
One of the nice things about Firefox on mobile is that you can install extensions like uBlock Origin to block ads. Mobile Chrome doesn’t let you do that.
I know this is contrarian, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable installing many of the browser extensions offered on Firefox given that they can still be manifest v2.<p>After building a fairly involved browser extension this last year, I’ve become way more paranoid knowing just how insecure browser extensions can be; especially manifest v2 extensions. It’s not just about ad blockers unfortunately.
Been pretty happy with Firefox after changing some default settings, but I still have what I assume is a bug where add-ons keep getting disabled every time I start up the browser. Only solution I've seen so far is deleting all add-on files on my computer, but nuking all settings is a bit extreme with all the time that went into the configuration in the first place.
Also Mozilla is not completely white, they offer many services that could be seen like they siphon data.<p>Although to be fair, as long as it's done properly, it's fine, but I don't know if Mozilla communicates on those products.<p>I remember one security employee mentioning that monitoring chrome with wire shark showed an insane amount of unnecessary traffic that went to google and others.
I'm using "Firefox" since Netscape Navigator 3.x times. As long as I'm using web at all.<p>Never used Chrome on desktop. Never had one installed.<p>Ok, as Windows user I have "Edge" installed inevitably, but never used it more than 1 time to download FireFox installer.<p>Using FireFox on Android from early betas, no problem.<p>Is it something worth to write article about?<p>Edit: grammar (maybe, not enough).
macOS user here. I know Firefox is great, and I'd love to use it (again), but Mozilla's decision to remove all user-facing, OS-level scripting capabilities from it (i.e., AppleScript) made me drop it a few years ago. Getting anything out of FF on macOS, locally, is a major pain in the ass, actually. Try to grab the current URL from the active tab…<p>Add to that the non-macOS text handling, macOS-unlike font rendering, its insistence to not use the system-wide spell checker provided by the OS etc. It feels a bit rude at times.<p>I think it's a super-solid browser that unfortunately doesn't give a shit about the platform it's running on. Irritatingly, it's fine with being a black box, so much more than the Chromiums are (for all their various faults).
I dislike that chrome still searches faster:<p>Type in skinflint (price comparison) page I often use, tab toward "search on this site". Then I press enter.<p>All non-Chromeengine browsers have
- type website, enter
- wait to load, use search bar on site<p>as a workflow.<p>Made me stay with Chrome way too long. Now, I use Firefox, but miss this.
If firefox worked with Chromecast audio I would be all set.<p>I have 2 of those hockey puck's audio dongles Google used to make to connect to your stereo.
They only work with Chrome, SiriusXM, VLC, CalmRadio and Youtube, Chrombooks.<p>They don't work with Firefox.<p>Sad.<p>Maybe Mozilla should start IoT devices for Firefox.
I've done a round-trip through a few browsers in the latter half of last year, and now I'm back to Chrome.<p>It's usually sync that was too broken for me to use. Chrome's sync works nearly immediately. Firefox on Android would stop syncing open tabs so frequently that I barely remember it working at all. I had to log out and log back in from my Firefox account to get it to sync. But an hour or so later it wouldn't work anymore.<p>Vivaldi has better sync, but it seems to just randomly break a LOT. It would recover itself after a while, so in that sense it was superior to Firefox. (I liked Vivaldi's amazing configurability, but it's lack of bookmarklet support was breaking some of my workflows too, so in the end I abandoned it.)<p>I tried Opera too, but I think it had similar issues and I abandoned it quickly.<p>Syncing extension settings (the settings of an extension, e.g. custom filters in uBlock Origin) seems to only be supported on Chrome. Firefox doesn't have it.
I've been using Firefox for years personally and I love it. But it's cumbersome to try to use it for work, at least in a separate browser instance a la Chrome Profiles or Safari profiles. I wish they'd make that easier.
My experience has been very similar. I don't use the pocket feature though. But I'm loving the first class ad blocking and the container feature. I wish they would let you create container windows and not just tabs.
Same.<p>I use Firefox on all my devices. Actually, I am now experimenting with Zen Browser (FF-based fork prettier than Firefox, and even more privacy-focused). My wife and my kids get no say in it: it's Firefox in the whole household.
I really want to like FF, but it just feels so clunky and inefficient when compared to Chrome (for my usage patterns anyway). It's nice that we have choices (and competition to spur innovation).
I'm on a Mac, so I use Safari, too, but were I on any other platform I can't imagine NOT using Firefox.<p>How did we get to a point where the dominant browser is designed to be hostile to user choice?
I've been using Safari for a few years now and I love it. Snappy all the time. Syncs between devices flawlessly and doesn't eat up battery as fast as other browsers.
I've got Firefox and Chrome and tend to use Chrome because some things like Google Lens are so handy, and translate works better. Containers are good in Firefox though.
This might be a hot take but Firefox has always been a bit heavy and sluggish for me. I've been using Brave the last 3 years or so and so far I love it.. Say what you want about using the chromium engine but it's solid.. And with continuing support for manifest v2 I can't complain.
seems ff has been relegated to strictly technical users now.<p>It's 90% of my personal browsing, and effectively the only option considering UBO is a requirement for the modern web. I've always loved the `user.js` configurability, extensions for actual tree-style tabs, etc.
Problem for Android users like me is Chrome is the default on mobile, so all passwords bookmarks etc are there. Of course we can install Firefox but I find Chrome better on mobile. Just couldn't get used to FF on Android.<p>Moving to laptop it then makes sense to continue using it instead of installing Firefox over and above Edge anyway there plus Chrome.<p>So it gets crowded out.
I switched to Mozilla and never looked back.
I switched to Opera and never looked back.
I switched to Firefox and never looked back.
I switched to Chrome and never looked back.
I switched to Firefox and never looked back.
I switched to Brave and never looked back.
I switched to Tor and never looked back.
how is the webauthn story for FF? I recall that some hardware tokens could sometimes play weird with FF on Mac, I am not sure if Windows had the same thing. that was one practical advantage Chrome had.
I use Pocket, and I love it. However, I would prefer if it wasn’t built into Firefox but instead remained as an extension. One thing that astonishes me is that, even as a built-in feature, every few weeks, when I click "Save," I find that I’ve been logged out. It shows me a login flow, and after completing it, the link isn’t even saved—I have to click "Save" again. That’s frustrating.
Firefox still crashes for me. Multiple computers and laptops, PC’s and Macs - it always crashes. I test it every few years and the crashes still occur. It makes it an unusable browser. Instead I use Brave.
I've been back on Firefox for 2-3 years now since the Manifest v3 stuff was initially brewing. Still eagerly waiting for Fission/tab isolation to land on Android.<p>Every morning I open a bookmarks folder with my dailies (news/blogs/Wordle/XKCD etc) that includes <a href="https://mrotherguy.github.io/fx-nightly-changelog/" rel="nofollow">https://mrotherguy.github.io/fx-nightly-changelog/</a>, and CTRL+F hoping for Fission on Fenix :(
Sidebery/TST is the main reason I use FF but this article points out a lot of other reasons I forgot I liked so much: keyword searching, the Library window, and other browser customization... looking forward to the AI features when they come to the main release.
I use both, but I wish FF had an easier to way setup "custom" searches, like:<p>bg3 foo => searches on the baldurs gate 3 wiki<p>r tragedeigh => goes to the reddit.com/r/tragedeigh subreddit
...<p>It can be done, but it's far too difficult.
Containers are the absolute bomb though.
I'm glad the writer is enjoying Firefox, but posts like these make me realize we've forgotten how to use computers.<p>Built-in screenshot tool? "You don't need to install extensions"! Really? Dude just press Print Screen, it even works outside a browser, if one day you have to be put through the unspeakable torture of using a native application! Single-use burner emails are also nice and all, but why exactly does this have to be linked to my browser?<p>Of course switching browsers it's gonna be a big deal, when you actively walk out of your way to lock yourself to your browser's "ecosystem", but better Mozilla than Google I guess.