Firefox Browser: best for a free web

It makes me sad that FF browser share has continued to decline steadily. The past couple years of releases have been some its the best in terms of my own UX, since perhaps the Phoenix era.<p>It&#x27;s pretty fast these days, the UI is good, has a lot of great extensions and privacy features.<p>I use Brave at work to have a better chrome-based experience with gsuite. It&#x27;s also a fast, excellent browser with good privacy features, built-in ad&#x2F;tracker blocking and for the time being seems to be user-not-revenue-first.<p>But using a non-free browser feels like a trap to me. Just as what happened with Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Netscape before, being the middle man between the user and the rest of the internet is just too tempting for any company not to try to leverage for their own advantage.<p>FF hasn&#x27;t been always perfect, but for 20 years now they have made a browser that didn&#x27;t have a shady corporate agenda. It feels like the writing is on the wall though. Even people I know who care about FLOSS are using Chrome as their daily driver these days.<p>Mozilla is great and I hope they continue to focus on building a best-in-class browser.

I&#x27;d like to mention (once again), that Firefox on Android is a huge leap in everyday browsing experience over Chrome - and you should try it if you haven&#x27;t. Due to mainly one reason: ad blocker extensions; which aren&#x27;t supported on Chrome.<p>Since that&#x27;s where most users are, I hope Mozilla will be able to communicate these advantages better. Chrome is arguably better on the desktop for most users, unless they&#x27;re in the tiny subset of users who care about privacy.

The fact alone that FF is the best-optimized browser for uBlock Origin makes it an easy choice for me.<p>It&#x27;s interesting to me that many of my favorite&#x2F;most used web technologies in the past decade or so have come from individual, non-profit developers just trying to make something useful, free and flying in the face of a lot of legal and industry norms (e.g., gorhill, elbakyan). In my experience, these tend to work best on FF + VPN, or on Tor (built from FF).

Too many distractions from Mozilla (Firefox OS, VPN etc and a complete dissonance from the core- browser. It doesn&#x27;t help when senior management takes fat bonuses and fires away employees during the pandemic. That doesn&#x27;t make for pleasant optics and also distanced me away from their product.

I&#x27;d been using Firefox ever since the Phoenix days. And somehow, sometime, I moved to Chrome like everyone did... until I had enough of Google, and came back to Firefox right at the start of the Quantum days. Haven&#x27;t left since.<p>Firefox is a really good browser (at least on Linux, even though the lack of HW-acceleration on NVIDIA cards is a pain) made even greater with best-in-class uBlock Origin support, and of course piroor&#x27;s Tree Style Tab. Containers are also a great feature (I containerize Google, Facebook, Amazon and Twitter properties in their own silo). Tab unloaders (I don&#x27;t remember which I&#x27;m currently using) is also a good idea to reduce memory usage (even though with 32 GB I have NEVER run into issues)<p>I&#x27;ve been rocking it and a custom user stylesheet to hide the tabs on top, reorder and customize the address bar to be tighter, have more contrast; and the whole UI to be black (I use the dark variant of Adwaita all day on my desktop). Having an ultrawide display, I have plenty of horizontal space. Here&#x27;s an screenshot if that interests you: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;8PEKED5" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;8PEKED5</a><p>Edit: How could I have missed that?! Picture-in-picture is incredibly good as well! I use it daily, mainly to watch a YT video on the side while continuing to browse the web. They even added multiple PIP windows a while back, which is a god-send when I watch livestreams such as a rocket launches (eg. official livestream in one window, and EverydayAstronaut&#x27;s in another)

More like:<p>&quot;Firefox Browser:<p>1. It is not google.<p>2. It&#x27;s not a Chrome fork maintained by potentially flaky&#x2F;untrustworthy players.<p>3. uBlock Origin.<p>4. Multi-Account Containers.&quot;

I&#x27;ve used Firefox since release but I&#x27;m curious what other less popular browsers people are using these days?<p>For example, I have tried Bromite on my phone but the adblocking is limited. I&#x27;ve tried ungoogled-chromium on desktop and the speed is impressive.<p>The main things I want:<p>1. Speed<p>2. Speed<p>3. Native plugins that can preempt network requests<p>4. Configurable for privacy (referrer, first party isolation, etc)<p>All these are doable in Firefox but I&#x27;ve doubted them ever since Pocket integration

Are the three headline features important to you? They are:<p>- Picture in Picture<p>- Expanded Dark Mode<p>- DNS over HTTPs<p>I really like Firefox, but features like this are not going to cause people to switch browsers. I&#x27;m pretty sure most end users would never even notice them. DNS over HTTPs is actually a bit of a pain if you want to host your own DNS.

Firefox: We&#x27;re the &quot;best for a free web&quot;.<p>Also Firefox: We support internet censorship.<p>(source: CEO of Mozilla, link: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.mozilla.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;mozilla&#x2F;we-need-more-than-deplatforming&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.mozilla.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;mozilla&#x2F;we-need-more-than-deplat...</a>)

I loved Firefox and I still believe it is the best bastion for a free web, though that view has been slowly fading. Years and years of user hostile moves (drastic UI changes, breaking am entire generation of addons) have really hurt the brand IMHO. And this PR just feels hollow.

It&#x27;s beyond me why they haven&#x27;t thrown it up on GitHub yet. Let the community have a way bigger involvement and drive the future of the browser. Yes, I can go find the source for Firefox, but I sincerely doubt the engagement is anywhere near as high as it could be.

I have used Firefox as my daily driver for 2+ years now. Zero problems with compatibility, including many &quot;Chrome only&quot; business apps. A couple Google-owned sites are the only ones that give me trouble, and spoofing the user agent on those has worked great.

I’ve opted to using librewolf as I prefer its out of the box changes removing everything that sucks about firefox. I refuse to use chrome (unless its for work in that case I use an isolated chromium) I despise the monopoly of the web and I despise google. Personally I think Brave is a honeypot and even if it isn’t, it’s still supporting the monopolized web standard. I hope things get better because we need more choice.

I&#x27;ve been a FF user for years. This week, FF became so unusable under Wayland I had to install Brave.

Firefox 92 discussion from 6 days ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28444315" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28444315</a> (122 comments)

Mozilla charge money for Firefox. I’m tired of “free” software that sell my data and attention.

Mozilla does really love to milk &quot;Open source&quot; and &quot;free&quot; for Firefox marketing. How about about if they actually gave users what they wanted?

It isn&#x27;t enough for FF to be the best &quot;for a free web&quot;. To reclaim market share, it needs to be best for users. They&#x27;re self-interested.

I was a long time Chrome user, I switched to Firefox 1 year ago and I won&#x27;t look back:<p>1. Firefox has Ctrl+Tab MRU<p>2. Firefox has a way more usable address bar - Chrome breaks it on purpose and returns weak results to push you to use Google search for things which should immediately pop up in the address bar.<p>3. Firefox has container tabs - a feature so crucial to browsing the web (whenever you need to login to 2 different accounts on the same site) that you would wonder why on Earth would the leading web browser not implement it (until you remind yourself that the browser is brought to you by a certain company that has the word &quot;evil&quot; in it&#x27;s motto and likes tracking too much).<p>4. Firefox has a sidebar, enabling interesting extensions.<p>5. This is small - but I recently noticed how Chrome broke the bookmark UI, after clicking the star icon, you don&#x27;t add bookmark immediately, no. You have to choose between a bookmark or reading list first.

From HN News Guidelines [0] “ In Submissions<p>Please don&#x27;t do things to make titles stand out, “<p>The title you wrote isn’t even in the article as far as I can tell. Please correct me if I’m wrong.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html</a>

Firefox is great now, but getting people to change from something that works for them is like pulling teeth<p>I&#x27;d also imagine it&#x27;s hard to convince younger folks (eg. those who didn&#x27;t leave firefox in the first place) on firefox over brave which includes adblock out of the box, no setup or extensions required

The main problem with Firefox is Gecko.<p>Technically it&#x27;s a great rendering engine, fast, standards-compliant, maybe only slightly more buggy than Webkit. Unfortunately it has a different set of bugs than webkit. Web developers have just so much time to debug the apps. Once the app works for ~90% of users on webkit, spending as much time or more testing and debugging for ~7% of FF users is not always justified.<p>This is a catch 22: FF users get more bugs - more pressure to move to Chrome, fewer users on FF - less money to develop Gecko leading to more bugs. My prediction is that FF will either drop Gecko or die.

Lack of WebUSB is the major issue to me.

What is the Firefox business model? ...Oh yeah, that&#x27;s right, indirect subsidies from Google<p>Besides, there&#x27;s only one mainstream browser that&#x27;s better than Chrome, and that browser is Edge

when did &quot;In-browser screenshot tool&quot; become a key feature, seems like a job that most operating systems handle quite well.<p>Anyone who uses this feature, feel free to chime in.

Firefox has a number of security issues:<p>From here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grapheneos.org&#x2F;usage#web-browsing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grapheneos.org&#x2F;usage#web-browsing</a><p><i>Avoid Gecko-based browsers like Firefox as they&#x27;re currently much more vulnerable to exploitation and inherently add a huge amount of attack surface. Gecko doesn&#x27;t have a WebView implementation (GeckoView is not a WebView implementation), so it has to be used alongside the Chromium-based WebView rather than instead of Chromium, which means having the remote attack surface of two separate browser engines instead of only one. Firefox &#x2F; Gecko also bypass or cripple a fair bit of the upstream and GrapheneOS hardening work for apps.</i><p><i>Worst of all, Firefox runs as a single process on mobile and has no sandbox beyond the OS sandbox. This is despite the fact that Chromium semantic sandbox layer on Android is implemented via the OS isolatedProcess feature, which is a very easy to use boolean property for app service processes to provide strong isolation with only the ability to communicate with the app running them via the standard service API. Even in the desktop version, Firefox&#x27;s sandbox is still substantially weaker (especially on Linux, where it can hardly be considered a sandbox at all) and lacks support for isolating sites from each other rather than only containing content as a whole.</i>

If anyone&#x27;s wondering how to get Firefox mobile on F-Droid, it&#x27;s called &#x27;Fennec&#x27; and can be found here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;f-droid.org&#x2F;packages&#x2F;org.mozilla.fennec_fdroid" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;f-droid.org&#x2F;packages&#x2F;org.mozilla.fennec_fdroid</a>

Pleas into a niche tech communities to use a different browser isn&#x27;t going to stop FF&#x27;s slow slide to irrelevance. Microsoft saw the writing on the wall with IE and launched Edge which by comparison looks to have a much more promising future then Mozilla.<p>This does nothing to improve browser engine diversity but at this point Mozilla&#x27;s best path to commercial success would be to launch a new browser product that&#x27;s a rebranded Blink&#x2F;WebKit with a focus on privacy, e.g. ad&#x2F;tracker blockers, optional integrated VPN, simple UX for clearing browser history per site&#x2F;date range&#x2F;etc. Personally I&#x27;d prefer they adopt Safari&#x27;s WebKit over Chrome&#x27;s Blink to remove the dependency from Google.<p>I&#x27;m too old to deal with navigating the web with rendering inconsistencies of browser web developers don&#x27;t test against. For the same reason I&#x27;ve no hesitation to use their gorgeous Firefox Focus iOS browser over Chrome since they&#x27;re all forced to use the same rendering engine, and given all things being equal I trust Firefox to protect privacy much more than Google.

I use Firefox every day as a backup, but my primary browser is qutebrowser. I would fully switch in a heartbeat if Firefox allowed full keyboard shortcut configuration. Tridactyl gets pretty close, but the fact that keyboard shortcuts stop working in certain scenarios is a nonstarter for me.

FF might be better than Chrome etc now, but Surprisingly, firefox didn&#x27;t care about the declining usage till a long time. It seemed to me, they let it go to Google. Speed, crashes etc were too often then and it never got fixed in time. that mattered to lots of users

A &quot;free&quot; web where in Firefox&#x27;s default configuration Google controls what you can download. [0]<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.mozilla.org&#x2F;Security&#x2F;Safe_Browsing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.mozilla.org&#x2F;Security&#x2F;Safe_Browsing</a>

At home I only use Firefox (on my Linux machines). For many (not all) sites Firefox is actually the fastest choice.<p>Being reminded today I also just installed Firefox on my - relatively new - work machine. Somehow I am more tolerant there running Chrome than on my own machines.

Firefox is great on desktop, been my primary browser for 15+ years.<p>Sadly though, the mobile version (still) lacks support for &quot;pull to refresh&quot; gesture. Other than that, mobile FF is great (privacy features, browser addons...).

Mozilla went full in on their OS, which went nowhere, and got explicitly political. Plus Chromium (and hence blink) are open source. Why use Firefox? Yeah, I&#x27;m drawing a blank.

I recently switched back to Firefox mobile (I couldn&#x27;t remember why I switched to Chrome in the first place) because I was sick of using the web without ad blockers.<p>A few months in I&#x27;m really happy with it. Main tip is: I found the scroll behaviour janky when the URL bar was at the top. Once I put it at the bottom (IIRC this is the default anyway, and once I got used to it I realised it&#x27;s pretty unambiguously a better location) things behaved nicely.<p>I wish I could install an add-on to deal with GDPR spam but unfortunately without significant faffing you can only run vetted extensions from a fairly short list of adblockers and privacy tools. This seems like a smart move but I wish they&#x27;d expand this list, e.g. perhaps blanket-allowing extensions that only use certain safer API subsets.

People that have seen the inside of both: which has better codebase, Firefox or Chromium?<p>I have seen only inside Chrome as I was debugging some edgecases; it’s very google C++, but once you get used to the enormous size, it’s not that hard to follow.

50 million users lost in the last 2 years alone.<p>Sorry Mozilla, we love you, but all the good you think you&#x27;re doing means nothing when you end up with no one using your browser.<p>Of course, Mozilla can continue to arrogantly ignore its user base.

This is the same Firefox that said “deplatforming is not enough” Sorry Firefox, you’re not an arbiter of truth in my book.

I have been a devoted follower of firefox for a long time.<p>However, recently I have run into a lot of situations where foxfire does not work with some of the apps I need, and chromium based browsers do work. These apps are vital to what I do, and while I prefer firefox for all the usual reasons, I cannot use it. Sad really.

A &quot;free&quot; web where you are &quot;free&quot; to say&#x2F;do anything as long as we think it is ok: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.mozilla.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;mozilla&#x2F;we-need-more-than-deplatforming&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.mozilla.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;mozilla&#x2F;we-need-more-than-deplat...</a><p>A &quot;free&quot; web where you pretend to fight against Google, but copy every user-hostile anti-feature from them, take almost all your money from them, and put them as your default search engine.<p>Mozilla deserve every bit of their recent problems, just like they deserved their meteoric rise in the 2000s.