Most of the comments here are about using or not using Firefox, depending on it's features as compared to primarily Chrome. However, for me, it is not about being better or having more features at all - it is because I like Firefox and want to support Mozilla and believe that Google should not control the web. It is somewhat similar to the free software vs. open source debate - one should use free software not because it is better, but because it is the right thing to do (I understand that not many people agree with this philosophy, which is fine).
Having said that, all sites which I regularly use work perfectly for me in Firefox with acceptable performance. So I never found a reason to switch at all. Rarely, I come across a website which is "best viewed with Chrome"; my default action is to close that site immediately.
I haven't seen anyone mention this, but Firefox is my "daily driver" for almost all browsing, and is also locked down with uMatrix, uBlock Origin, DecentralEyes and Ghostery (though I could probably drop Ghostery without missing it). Chrome has uBlock Origin and a few other things but interferes with pages less. I keep a set of pages for some specific web apps (e.g. GMail, Google Calendar, task management, etc.) open in Chrome, but otherwise only use it when something just won't work in my locked-down Firefox.
I also can't recommend highly enough Firefox on Android, particularly with uBlock Origin and the "Dark Background and Light Text" addon (currently at version 0.6.8 for ease of finding). For HN you'll want to use the "Simple CSS" dark setting instead of the default - that keeps the arrows, but you do lose the greying-out of downvoted comments.
Edit: I also think it's interesting how much Chrome now minimizes and almost hides the Chrome App Store to add new extensions. It's almost as if it's not making Google any money and people keep installing adblockers through it.
It's a great browser and I've came back to it even before the changes in Quantum, because the UI is better and it's also a browser I can trust to protect my interests.
Just one thing to consider ... recently in Chrome 66 they introduced the means for cosmetic ads blocking via stylesheets that can no longer be overridden, as Google finally succumbed to demands for it. Firefox has been supporting the feature for years and is on the cutting edge in regards to protecting privacy.
For example I'm using Multi-Account Containers + Facebook Container, an add-on which sandboxes Facebook. Along with the blocking of trackers that's now built-in, Firefox is leading the offense against privacy invading web services (although granted Apple's Safari doesn't do a bad job either).
The only downside of Firefox is that Chrome's dev tools are still better, however Firefox has been improving a lot lately and I'm pretty sure they'll be on par pretty soon. After all, lets not forget that Firebug, which then inspired every other browser, was an add-on that happened for Firefox.
Oh, and I love that they are refactoring its internals via Rust. That's an awesome development.
This is a great point. It's evident in Chrome's course so far that the browser has put Google's interests first, whereas Firefox puts the users' interests first. That's why I stuck with FF when it was slow, and I'm very glad that's all fixed now.
Plus, FF for Android is amazing. I can run Privacy Badger and uBlock Origin on my mobile browser!
Pretty much the only time I use chromium now is when I need to debug Websockets, since the traffic is impossible to see in Firefox. Really hope they fix https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1373639 some day.
Yep, same here. I use it as my regular browser. Occasionally I switch to Chrome for miscellaneous "other reasons", sometimes just to maintain separation between work and personal browsing sessions (I use FF for work).
I'm about to start a new contract doing React development again though. I wonder if I'll stick to FF or if I'll get dragged back to Chrome for DevTools support...
Typical for me is to have Firefox as a default browser - all links from external apps like email, Slack, etc. is opened there. But when I do web development I open the page I work on in Chrome. When I need to search Stackoverflow or MDN I switch to Firefox.
> Firefox is leading the offense against privacy invading web services (although granted Apple's Safari doesn't do a bad job either).
I thought Safari was leading the charge, so I did a little digging. I haven’t reached a conclusion yet but found out about Firefox’s Tracking Protection[1]. Any idea how it compares to uBlock Origin? If you’re the kind of person that’d rather use as few extensions as possible, would using Firefox’s TP with a solid list be as effective as using uBlock Origin with the same list?
Firefox was never away, at least for me. Therefore the expression "Firefox is back" sounds a little odd to me.
I have been using it since 2006 (Firefox 2.0). Back then, the presence of the Firebug extension for Firefox made me switch to Firefox as my primary browser.
Two years later, Chrome arrived but Firefox remained as my primary browser because I wanted to continue using the Vimperator extension for Firefox that allowed mouseless browsing with Vim-like key bindings and commands.
Firefox still remains as my primary browser with Chrome being an additional browser that I use sometimes. These days, I use the Vimium extension for both to use Vim-like key bindings. I occasionally use Safari and qutebrowser too.
I have a very similar background with Firefox / Firebug and Vimperator, but there was a period where - despite all JS benchmarks seemingly proving otherwise - Chrome's real / perceived performance completely blew FF out of the water. Specifically things like startup time, opening a new window or tearing a tab off one, time to first content displayed when clicking a link, etc. As a result from about 2011 to 2017, I kept periodically checking back with FF, but was effectively a Chrome convert (Vimium was a good enough replacement for Vimperator). Once Servo hit the FF mainstream, it immediately felt faster, and I switched back. I still find myself switching back to Chrome for web dev debugging, probably for familiarity reasons. In this sense though, I'm sure I'm not the only one for whom "Firefox is back".
I can also use it on android with ublock etc.
Chrome hasn't even been installed in my main computer in maybe a year, firefox works for everything I need, including google apps for business mail and youtube.
My biggest reason for using it is the fact that it is open source, the other is that ad-block software actually block calls to adds not just the display of them as in chrome.
It looks like Firefox beats Chome in some perfomrance tests but Safari is still faster than Chrome and a lot faster than Firefox. At this point, I'm not sure any of Firefox's features are compelling enough to get me to switch back. I started using Firefox at 0.4 back when I was in college then I switched to Chrome when Firefox got slow, but I think the way I use the web now has changed. I really only use a few sites and I just want better security/ad-block/tracking block tools (which Apple is committing to) and speed.
edit: If someone uses Windows, I would be curious to see how Edge compares to Firefox and Chrome.
And there is only one thing which I don't like — high CPU usage compared to chrome. It makes my old MacBook air very noisy because of the fan spinning. When I use chrome it's completely silent.
Ironically, the thing that drove me to Firefox was the excellent Account Containers system that I found necessary to manage being logged into multiple Google Apps accounts simultaneously (I have five). Each tab owns one account — that way, Google Drive files from my work don't randomly refuse to open because I'm also logged into my personal account.
(Chrome has no solution for containing accounts across tabs, last I checked. You have to spawn entire new Chrome instances.)
I never really "switched" to any particular browser, I use Safari/Vivaldi/Firefox concurrently, but have noticed how much better Firefox has gotten recently, after years of painful decline (Speed, and resource hogging being my biggest peeves).
The only major thing I wish it did better is if it conserved battery power as well as Safari does. If I want to maximize my laptop's battery life I don't really have a choice other than Safari on my MBP.
Firefox has enough features and customization available that it's the only non-native browser that I'll use. I don't think Chrome or the others are worth it.
Otherwise in general, the native browser is usually the best bet for battery life. They render differently and have tighter integration overall as you noted. Firefox or native is the way to go, and if native browsers keep improving, even Firefox should watch out.
I've been using safari for a few months as my main browser and while it does feel quick, I can't say I've noticed a huge difference in battery life compared to chrome or firefox.
Are there any (recent) tests you know of that compare battery life between safari and the other major browsers?
I always refrain from talking in Firefox threads because my use case is so different from the HN crowd, but still...
I have a netbook with 1Gb RAM. It was a handout from the owner, as it was painfully slow even after cleaning and tweaking the Win 7 install. Eventually, the owner got a new beefier laptop and I got the netbook.
Long story short: I put Xubuntu on it, and it's still my daily driver and main computer 6 years in.
I have always used Firefox and, believe this 1Gb RAM multitasker, it's getting noticeably better year after year.
Thank you mozillians!
edit: i mean ubuntians, debianists, xfcers, fossers, hners, party people!
I'm curious as to why you haven't replaced it with something with better performance. It just seems masochistic to use a netbook with such a pathetic amount of RAM on it as your main computer.
On Android the performance is comparable to Chrome, but I can never get used to some of their UXes (pressing the X button doesn't clear the address bar, instead closes it). Also no seamless page opening with Google search app (although I suspect they can't do much about this)
I keep trying to switch back to it on my Mac Pro (I've tried three times in the last 12 months) but after a week or two I always end up switching back to Chrome because the CPU/battery impact it has.
I can have the same amount of tabs/workload in Chrome and my laptop copes fine with good performance. If I do the same in FF (with likely less plugins installed) it often spikes to 100% CPU usage, chews through my battery like nothing else and just gets bogged down/slow. I _want_ to use FF but can't sacrifice having a burning hot laptop with terrible battery life on my lap.
I find it kind of ironic that Mozilla rewrote Netscape Navigator from scratch with the lofty idea of creating an entire cross-platform application development platform, not just a browser. XUL, XULRunner etc. But it never caught on and they abandoned all that to focus on just the browser. Yet now Electron is everywhere...
Before its time and abandoned in the nick of it. And no one cares about native GUI's anymore apparently.
Skills have centralized too heavily around HTML/CSS/JS for GUI development, that to do otherwise locks out talent, and or oppurtunity, depending on your budget.
Electron enabled cross-platform localized applications where nothing else stayed within the budget, with developers you already had.
It isn't that no one cares about native GUI's, it is that it isn't commerical, except in rare circumstances (games, visualization software, giant applications built by 1000s of developers, probably).
I have always used Firefox, ever since they implemented tabbed browsing (an incredible improvement, for those who don't remember the time before that).
However, in recent times I have had to switch more and more apps to Chrome because the UI breaks in Firefox: intercom.io, trello.com, notion.so.
Probably no fault of Firefox, but if a UI is broken there is no choice but to migrate.
Are you sure this isn't some Firefox add-on that you are using that is causing this? (E.g. uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger or activating Firefox's built-in anti-tracking protection or maybe just blocking third-party cookies; which could be solved by whitelisting the problematic webpages.)
I am using Firefox exclusively and I rarely find sites that don't work with Firefox after I disable blocking extensions.
I've notice that some of the new fancy webapps that boosted of being write once run everywhere have issues in firefox.
Most notably is asana (it sometimes makes firefox use 100% cpu) and slack. Unfortunately we have slack at work but we're working to replace it as it has become increasingly bloated, user-unfriendly and buggy.
I recall using a very early version of tabbed browsing that arranged the tabs on the left by default instead of on top. I think this was Mozilla Browser on Red Hat Linux 6, around 2000. At the time, neither I nor my computer was able to handle more than one website at once, so I didn't use the feature much!
I have been mainly using Firefox for the last 3 months on desktop, and for over a year on phone - and it's amazing. Highly recommend it. I even uninstalled Chrome now on my main machine- sometimes you run into what appears "Chrome optimized" sites, like back in IE6 days but its rare.
I switched to Vivaldi a year or two ago after using Firefox as my main browser for the longest time. I've considered switching back, but every time I run up against several features in Vivaldi that I am just not ready to part with yet:
1) tab stacks,
2) the ability to save and reopen an entire session,
3) a page load progress indicator in the URL bar,
4) using Ctrl-F highlights the position of all matching locations in the page in the right-hand scroll bar, and
5) the window panel, which keeps track of all closed tabs and windows so you can reopen everything if you accidentally close a window.
Some of those are small perks, and some of them are major. I'd love to see Firefox implement some of them.
I switched back a few months ago on all of my devices and only go back when I need Chrome devtools, Firefox is absolutely back in its prime. Feels just as speedy as Chrome on desktop and mobile, and handles large numbers of tabs better.
Ironically, or maybe intentionally, Google services are the only thing degraded. Google even refuses to give you the regular home page. Thankfully you can just get an extension that fakes Chrome useragent on the offending pages, but it's the darkest pattern I've ever seen
I switched cold turkey to Firefox a few months ago. It was fine for a bit but eventually became unbearably slow. I made the switch on both my work MacBook Pro (retina) and my personal MacBook Air. Both had similar issues. That and the fact that it ships with things like Pocket made me jump back to Chrome.
From other comments it seems FF is having some perf problems on MacOs.
I'll weigh in with Linux + Windows experience: FF is currently the best browser. It pulls a bit more CPU but it also trumps with very good privacy options out of the box and in about:config (first party isolation, which I've been using as daily driver for a few months now)
Containers allow me to isolate aspects of myself and contain tracking or otherwise unwanted websites in their own little world.
The only item on my wishlist is to make multi-window tab handling better, I think Chrome still wins that on the UI/UX front (since FF sometimes feels like it's about to crash when I drag a tab out of the window)
Strongly disagree. The web is just the medium, the places people visit might have reached a new low, but the platform is only getting better. Just at the state of cross browser in 2015 vs 2018!
I switched to Brave on mobile, and hasn't looked back. Works flawlessly. It is only the desktop app on Linux/Xubuntu that can have a bit of micro-lagging at times, enough to cause frustration, and also is not as well integrated in the UI as chromium. Hope to switch there as well, as soon as laggyness improves a bit.
After running for a few hours, Firefox starts making my entire computer lag, eventually to the point of freezing up for seconds at a time multiple times per minute.
Over time Firefox's video playback gets more and more janky, until it drops more frames than it shows. In task manager I can see FF using 50% of my GPU to play a 720p stream from Twitch.
Closing FF completely and reopening it fixes the problem, until it happens again.
Chrome has none of these issues.
Love the privacy, not a big fan of the performance problems.
[+] [-] radmuzom|7 years ago|reply
Having said that, all sites which I regularly use work perfectly for me in Firefox with acceptable performance. So I never found a reason to switch at all. Rarely, I come across a website which is "best viewed with Chrome"; my default action is to close that site immediately.
[+] [-] fencepost|7 years ago|reply
I also can't recommend highly enough Firefox on Android, particularly with uBlock Origin and the "Dark Background and Light Text" addon (currently at version 0.6.8 for ease of finding). For HN you'll want to use the "Simple CSS" dark setting instead of the default - that keeps the arrows, but you do lose the greying-out of downvoted comments.
Edit: I also think it's interesting how much Chrome now minimizes and almost hides the Chrome App Store to add new extensions. It's almost as if it's not making Google any money and people keep installing adblockers through it.
[+] [-] bad_user|7 years ago|reply
It's a great browser and I've came back to it even before the changes in Quantum, because the UI is better and it's also a browser I can trust to protect my interests.
Just one thing to consider ... recently in Chrome 66 they introduced the means for cosmetic ads blocking via stylesheets that can no longer be overridden, as Google finally succumbed to demands for it. Firefox has been supporting the feature for years and is on the cutting edge in regards to protecting privacy.
For example I'm using Multi-Account Containers + Facebook Container, an add-on which sandboxes Facebook. Along with the blocking of trackers that's now built-in, Firefox is leading the offense against privacy invading web services (although granted Apple's Safari doesn't do a bad job either).
The only downside of Firefox is that Chrome's dev tools are still better, however Firefox has been improving a lot lately and I'm pretty sure they'll be on par pretty soon. After all, lets not forget that Firebug, which then inspired every other browser, was an add-on that happened for Firefox.
Oh, and I love that they are refactoring its internals via Rust. That's an awesome development.
[+] [-] StavrosK|7 years ago|reply
Plus, FF for Android is amazing. I can run Privacy Badger and uBlock Origin on my mobile browser!
[+] [-] manveru|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davedx|7 years ago|reply
I'm about to start a new contract doing React development again though. I wonder if I'll stick to FF or if I'll get dragged back to Chrome for DevTools support...
[+] [-] andrewl-hn|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] latexr|7 years ago|reply
I thought Safari was leading the charge, so I did a little digging. I haven’t reached a conclusion yet but found out about Firefox’s Tracking Protection[1]. Any idea how it compares to uBlock Origin? If you’re the kind of person that’d rather use as few extensions as possible, would using Firefox’s TP with a solid list be as effective as using uBlock Origin with the same list?
[1]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection
[+] [-] rptv|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] susam|7 years ago|reply
I have been using it since 2006 (Firefox 2.0). Back then, the presence of the Firebug extension for Firefox made me switch to Firefox as my primary browser.
Two years later, Chrome arrived but Firefox remained as my primary browser because I wanted to continue using the Vimperator extension for Firefox that allowed mouseless browsing with Vim-like key bindings and commands.
Firefox still remains as my primary browser with Chrome being an additional browser that I use sometimes. These days, I use the Vimium extension for both to use Vim-like key bindings. I occasionally use Safari and qutebrowser too.
[+] [-] danielbarla|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] casefields|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alex_duf|7 years ago|reply
Looking at the past market share we're clearly the minority
[+] [-] chme|7 years ago|reply
I hope they fix that regression.
[+] [-] tyfon|7 years ago|reply
I can also use it on android with ublock etc. Chrome hasn't even been installed in my main computer in maybe a year, firefox works for everything I need, including google apps for business mail and youtube.
My biggest reason for using it is the fact that it is open source, the other is that ad-block software actually block calls to adds not just the display of them as in chrome.
[+] [-] paulie_a|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] growlist|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joeblau|7 years ago|reply
edit: If someone uses Windows, I would be curious to see how Edge compares to Firefox and Chrome.
[1] - https://browserbench.org/Speedometer2.0/
[2] - https://browserbench.org/JetStream/
[3] - https://browserbench.org/MotionMark/
[4] - https://browserbench.org/ARES-6/
[+] [-] f311a|7 years ago|reply
And there is only one thing which I don't like — high CPU usage compared to chrome. It makes my old MacBook air very noisy because of the fan spinning. When I use chrome it's completely silent.
[+] [-] didgeoridoo|7 years ago|reply
(Chrome has no solution for containing accounts across tabs, last I checked. You have to spawn entire new Chrome instances.)
[+] [-] ProfessorLayton|7 years ago|reply
The only major thing I wish it did better is if it conserved battery power as well as Safari does. If I want to maximize my laptop's battery life I don't really have a choice other than Safari on my MBP.
[+] [-] noobermin|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BuckRogers|7 years ago|reply
Otherwise in general, the native browser is usually the best bet for battery life. They render differently and have tighter integration overall as you noted. Firefox or native is the way to go, and if native browsers keep improving, even Firefox should watch out.
[+] [-] mediocrejoker|7 years ago|reply
Are there any (recent) tests you know of that compare battery life between safari and the other major browsers?
[+] [-] spiderfarmer|7 years ago|reply
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1407536
[+] [-] severine|7 years ago|reply
I have a netbook with 1Gb RAM. It was a handout from the owner, as it was painfully slow even after cleaning and tweaking the Win 7 install. Eventually, the owner got a new beefier laptop and I got the netbook.
Long story short: I put Xubuntu on it, and it's still my daily driver and main computer 6 years in.
I have always used Firefox and, believe this 1Gb RAM multitasker, it's getting noticeably better year after year.
Thank you mozillians!
edit: i mean ubuntians, debianists, xfcers, fossers, hners, party people!
[+] [-] quickthrower2|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wilsonnb2|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tyteen4a03|7 years ago|reply
On Android the performance is comparable to Chrome, but I can never get used to some of their UXes (pressing the X button doesn't clear the address bar, instead closes it). Also no seamless page opening with Google search app (although I suspect they can't do much about this)
[+] [-] itsjloh|7 years ago|reply
I can have the same amount of tabs/workload in Chrome and my laptop copes fine with good performance. If I do the same in FF (with likely less plugins installed) it often spikes to 100% CPU usage, chews through my battery like nothing else and just gets bogged down/slow. I _want_ to use FF but can't sacrifice having a burning hot laptop with terrible battery life on my lap.
[+] [-] furgooswft13|7 years ago|reply
Before its time and abandoned in the nick of it. And no one cares about native GUI's anymore apparently.
[+] [-] tyfon|7 years ago|reply
This is not written by us btw :)
[+] [-] thespirit|7 years ago|reply
Electron enabled cross-platform localized applications where nothing else stayed within the budget, with developers you already had.
It isn't that no one cares about native GUI's, it is that it isn't commerical, except in rare circumstances (games, visualization software, giant applications built by 1000s of developers, probably).
[+] [-] jploh|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] isolli|7 years ago|reply
However, in recent times I have had to switch more and more apps to Chrome because the UI breaks in Firefox: intercom.io, trello.com, notion.so.
Probably no fault of Firefox, but if a UI is broken there is no choice but to migrate.
[+] [-] ar0|7 years ago|reply
I am using Firefox exclusively and I rarely find sites that don't work with Firefox after I disable blocking extensions.
[+] [-] tyfon|7 years ago|reply
Most notably is asana (it sometimes makes firefox use 100% cpu) and slack. Unfortunately we have slack at work but we're working to replace it as it has become increasingly bloated, user-unfriendly and buggy.
[+] [-] ChrisSD|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] enriquto|7 years ago|reply
you also have the choice of not using the broken website
[+] [-] peteretep|7 years ago|reply
This sounds like something you've done; do you have some weird extensions installed?
[+] [-] sevensor|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] kerng|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grundymonday|7 years ago|reply
1) tab stacks, 2) the ability to save and reopen an entire session, 3) a page load progress indicator in the URL bar, 4) using Ctrl-F highlights the position of all matching locations in the page in the right-hand scroll bar, and 5) the window panel, which keeps track of all closed tabs and windows so you can reopen everything if you accidentally close a window.
Some of those are small perks, and some of them are major. I'd love to see Firefox implement some of them.
[+] [-] thermodynthrway|7 years ago|reply
Ironically, or maybe intentionally, Google services are the only thing degraded. Google even refuses to give you the regular home page. Thankfully you can just get an extension that fakes Chrome useragent on the offending pages, but it's the darkest pattern I've ever seen
[+] [-] whalesalad|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zaarn|7 years ago|reply
I'll weigh in with Linux + Windows experience: FF is currently the best browser. It pulls a bit more CPU but it also trumps with very good privacy options out of the box and in about:config (first party isolation, which I've been using as daily driver for a few months now)
Containers allow me to isolate aspects of myself and contain tracking or otherwise unwanted websites in their own little world.
The only item on my wishlist is to make multi-window tab handling better, I think Chrome still wins that on the UI/UX front (since FF sometimes feels like it's about to crash when I drag a tab out of the window)
[+] [-] aplummer|7 years ago|reply
Strongly disagree. The web is just the medium, the places people visit might have reached a new low, but the platform is only getting better. Just at the state of cross browser in 2015 vs 2018!
[+] [-] samuell|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] com2kid|7 years ago|reply
Over time Firefox's video playback gets more and more janky, until it drops more frames than it shows. In task manager I can see FF using 50% of my GPU to play a 720p stream from Twitch.
Closing FF completely and reopening it fixes the problem, until it happens again.
Chrome has none of these issues.
Love the privacy, not a big fan of the performance problems.