I am surprised how many people have so many problems with Firefox.
I've never felt impeded by loading speeds, and my ADHD regularly has me forgetting to restart it, to the tune of 100+ tabs open across multiple desktops. My wimply little MacBook Pro doesn't seem to mind.
The only downside I've found is that, because so many people just default to "Chrome or nothing," there's occasionally sites that have bugs because, like was the case in the 90s with Internet Explorer, the site developers took the idiomatic Chrome way of building a feature instead of something universal.
I'm about the same, I don't even know what the loading speeds issue is about, I still remember Firefox Quantum beating the daylights out of Chrome, and I don't know if Chrome ever fully caught up to Quantum?
What's really funny is for ages Chrome would load the browser window even if the whole browser UI wasn't done loading, and sometime after Quantum, Firefox started doing the same trick to make you feel as though it instantly runs.
I've been using Firefox for about 20 years or so, and I don't regret it, but also I have not noticed a degrade in performance. I'm using it on Linux so I don't know if that's drastically different on a Mac these days.
My take is that Firefox is not very effective at marketing. For example, Chrome publishes articles like 'Chrome achieves highest score ever on Speedometer' (2024) [1]. I haven't found similar articles or any reliable scores for Firefox. Some computer magazines suggest that Firefox is in second place after Chrome in running Speedometer 3. For me, at least, it's hard to find any specific numbers. Also, it's important to note that Speedometer is a browser benchmark test developed by WebKit, Firefox, and Chrome.
Also, i don't understand why people prefer google over open source. And the sometimes disrespectful and destructive criticism of Mozilla.
> there's occasionally sites that have bugs because [...people build for Chrome...]
I hear that a lot, but when I tried Firefox for a couple of months I only found that in a single case[1]. It's really not something that happened to me at all. I did encounter issues with ad blockers breaking sites. Disabling uBO helps quite often on misbehaving sites, but it does so on Chrome as well.
> I am surprised how many people have so many problems with Firefox.
I'm not really. Nor am I surprised it works for you and others. It has been this way with Firefox for all of its 20+ years of existence. In its history it made one big leap in that, somewhat ironically given current affairs, when they removed XUL extensions.
But Firefox has always had weird, unexplainable and unreproducible failure scenarios. Some of that is because of its customizability, but also nobody really cares about it.[2] The standard advice of "throw away your profile and try again" is a huge fuck you to users. 1) People have spend time customizing their browser and throwing that away hurts. 2) It doesn't help anybody. If it's still broken you know nothing, and if it isn't you still don't know what caused it.
I guess that was okay in 2004. Lots of software had weird bugs. Nowadays the competition is much more stable.
For me, I dropped Firefox again after a couple of months fighting to get a stable sync working.[3] It just kept failing on Android. The only resolution was to log out and log back in again. Only for it to break in the next couple of hours. I did the "commit profile suicide and rebirth" thing without a solution.
Chrome's sync at least is very stable. Sometimes it falls an hour or so behind. Not good, but so much better than Firefox.
[1] And that was intentional. Typical Google assholery. Google Photos added (adds?) extra HTML to block right-click on photos when a Firefox User-Agent was used. Using a UA switcher extension "solved" it.
[2] Makers of software for power users so often forget to give power users the tools to investigate issues themselves. It's great you allow me to add so many extensions, how about a detailed log to see which is misbehaving?
[3] Firefox's sync also has fewer features. Bookmarks don't get synced, nor do extension settings.
I honestly think it's just something people here like to complain about. It's a complete non-issue. No everyday web experience is even close to being noticeably different. Full stop. It's almost like a meme, people say it because they think they should say it. I would ask those people that are complaining, what are you doing with all those extra milliseconds you claim you're saving?
> 100+ tabs open across multiple desktops. My wimply little MacBook Pro doesn't seem to mind.
There's a bug on Linux where background windows continue rendering, even if they're in an inactive workspace or not visible in any other way. This really hits performance, but it doesn't seem to be fixable due to some limitation on GTK3.
If I hide/resize my system status-bar, every single window gets resized to match the new available screen space. Firefox re-renders all content in all windows, causing multiple CPUs to spike to 100%.
In fact, there are a lot of bugs which are basically "unfixable due to limitations in GTK3". So the experience is likely quite different that on other platforms.
Regrettably, there don't seem to by any plans to move away from GTK in future.
I was in your boat up until a few days ago, when it randomly decided in wouldn't load properly. I force quit it, and then it forgot all my tabs. Now, it actually remembered what seemed like the correct number of tabs, each with the correct container, only the address was gone from every tab!
Other than that, it works well enough for me. My only beef is I can't completely disable tabs, but I don't know of any equivalent browser that can.
> my ADHD regularly has me forgetting to restart it, to the tune of 100+ tabs open across multiple desktops.
My MacBook Air routinely will have 200-300 before I purge. Getting better at keeping under 100 but yeah...
My Linux desktop is hooked up to my TV[0] and currently has over 100 YouTube tabs open. I'm going to watch those math videos, I swear, I'm just tired right now and so want to watch garbage.
I do have ublock origin on both machines and some stricter privacy settings, maybe that's it? But otherwise yeah, FF is just as snappy as chrome. Which I do use regularly when on other people's machines.
[0] it's a movie server, gaming machine, and for everything else there's ssh and ydotool (I wish Apple would let me make better iPhone scripts than Shortcuts allows. Shortcuts makes me want to throw my phone against a wall...)
100% agree. I've used FF since version 1.x, but I've used Chrome as a secondary at times, and I've had more problems in Chrome than FF. In fact, I've literally never experienced a bug in FF, except for, prior to and in the early days of the Servo Rust rewrite, I had a few crashes (tabs all reopened upon restarting). I haven't even had a crash in probably 8 years. Chrome is just spyware trash, IMHO.
Lots of Firefox hate here, but little discussion about the articles kicker, which is the exclusion of uBlock Origin from Chrome.
I hope this will mean that in the long run Firefox (and other secondary browsers) will gain more users again. For me, Firefox is a solid piece of software. Works well in strict privacy mode, with uBlock Origin and Multi-Account Containers.
Multi-Account Containers is a major feature I can't sing the praises for enough. I use it all the time, both to isolate stuff to break cookie tracking, and to enable me to log into things with two different accounts without opening a separate browser, which happens more often than I'd have thought.
On my list of concerns for big tech abusing power, the ad company with the browser monopoly leveraging their position to essentially end ad blocking on the web by disabling it on the browser people are using in practice is very high on the list, and I would have been fine waiting on forcing Apple to let you uninstall the camera app, or switching the iPhone to USB-C if it could have prevented this. This didn't come out of nowhere, we've known about manifest v3 for years now.
In fact Google's browser monopoly only looks like it's gonna get further cemented as Apple is forced to allow other browser engines, which is the only thing keeping any sort of competition against Chrome.
I feel like the anti-Apple snark that's been so popular since around the late 2000s (and I took part in in my angsty teen years) has been affecting the priority of what's being dealt with from regulators and it annoys me.
> Lots of Firefox hate here, but little discussion about the articles kicker, which is the exclusion of uBlock Origin from Chrome.
I'll complain about Firefox a lot, because I'm exposed to all its issues. That doesn't mean I hate it: I see issues in all products that I use, even the ones that are really useful or essential. I'm sure I'm not unique in this aspect in the HN crowd.
I had no idea how many ads load the average page. I just forgot because I have been using uBlock for so long.
I have been hesitant to use Firefox, just because I am used to chrome. But after Google forcibly disabled software that I chose to run, I'm all in on Firefox.
> Here’s something the iPhone isn’t getting anytime soon: honest-to-god browser extensions that you use on your desktop, also on your phone.
This convinces me the author is not knowledgeable about current browser capabilities. They probably haven’t tried anything but Firefox in a long time.
Orion runs desktop (Firefox) extensions on iOS, and is in many ways a breath of fresh air. Instead of parroting “all iOS browsers are Safari” and throwing their hands in the air, they actually got hacking on it.
> With adopting the Web Extensions API, we show our support for creating a unified browser extensions experience across all three major web rendering engines. We ended up porting hundreds of APIs, one by one, that were never meant to work with WebKit. Took us a few years, but here we are!
> Orion currently supports about 70% of Web Extensions APIs, and we add more every day. On top of that, we built advanced security features that give our users granular control over extensions, beyond what Chrome and Firefox offer. For example, you can choose to allow an extension to run only on certain websites.
While orion is good option, it is not there yet in terms of comparison with Firefox on Android. Many of the extensions will install but will not actually work. Even uBlock origin will have problems. Also it is common that an update will make the browser crash very often (happened with few updates). Also they don't provide a list of APIs they support and it is not open source (although they said they will but at this point I don't think they will any time soon).
I tried Orion after reading this, but other than uBlock Origin I haven't had much luck with getting extensions to work. I guess the extensions I use don't really overlap with the 70% they do support. If they've been working hard on this for years, I have to wonder what will happen first, actual mobile extension support on iOS through Kagi or a Firefox release for iOS.
The entire Orion browser feels like a beta product to me. But at least I've got uBlock on my work phone now, so that's cool I guess.
The author is very clearly an Android user, so I'll give them some leeway on this. It's not like it's the crux of their opinion, it's just one extra layer. Also, until Orion is available on Windows and Linux, it's a no-go for a lot of people.
The author definitely is not being very knowledgeable. In the comments, they didn't try Zen because they assumed, it can't sync bookmarks and extensions, which in fact it can and has Mozilla account baked into it.
One of my main reasons for staying with Firefox is that in the long term, I think it's good to have a diversity in browser engines.
Back when I started web development, there were standards, but nearly everybody just coded to what Internet Explorer supported. Which I really hated :-)
In the past few years, I've seen the occasional "works best with Chrome" website, which worries me, but so far it hasn't been too bad.
But if we as a community leave the browser market to Chrome and browsers with engines of similar origin as Chrome's, we'll get back to the bad old days.
> In the past few years, I've seen the occasional "works best with Chrome" website, which worries me, but so far it hasn't been too bad.
Microphone & webcam support, screensharing and stuff like that almost always shit the bed for me. Slack, teams, they don't care to check if their shit works on firefox.
A tip I would add to this article is that Firefox natively supports sidebar tabs now without needing hacky extensions. Go to about:preferences under the Browser Layout section of the General tab, and select Vertical Tabs. The tab group functionality along with Multi-Account Containers are a lot more useful under this layout IMO.
I really struggled going back to Firefox after being a Chrome user for so long, it just feels so incredibly slow in comparison - I know it's probably just perception but I couldn't shake that feeling.
I ended up going with Brave. Once you turn off their crummy VPN and crypto advert it's effectively just google chrome with a built in ad blocker.
I know there were arguments/concerns about the crypto thing, but I did a bit of research before picking a new browser (as should you) and once I realised it was a simple thing to turn off and never see again I was fine with it, it's all opensource as well so you can see how things work.
Of course it's just a chrome fork, so is still somewhat influenced by Googles decisions but that really wasn't the issue here, I just wanted to keep ublock origin and that's been the outcome.
I still have syncing and such all running between my desktop and mobile, I still have all the same extensions I've used for over a decade, so it's been relatively pain free to switch.
This is pretty similar to my set up but I'm ready to quit Firefox because what feels like every few weeks they somehow manage to add new auto-enabled spyware.
I regularly have to turn stuff off in
"Firefox Data Collection and Use"
and
"Website Advertising Preferences"
Recently I also started seeing ads in my address bar when typing stuff and saw they've added:
"Suggestions from sponsors
Support Firefox with occasional sponsored suggestions."
of course, enabled by default.
Firefox is a great product but unfortunately slowly being milked/destroyed by its non-technical management team.
The article implies that tabs, bookmarks, passwords can only be synchronised between Firefox installations and not with Zen or Libre (I assume this refers to LibreWolf?), but at least Zen can be connected to the Mozilla account and synchronises everything with the other connected Firefox, Firefox for Android, ... installations.
I'm eagerly awaiting Zen to enable tab groups/folders. I've been watching feat:9355, but its gotten bogged down in a debate about the whether tab folders in the tab bar should be the same as bookmarks, ala Arc. I personally did not like that Arc considered tabs and bookmarks to be the same because it made management and syncing a pita. Having to use a third script to export your bookmarks is not a good look.
This is something that has been on my mind for years — I want to use Firefox, but for some strange reason, it just doesn’t feel as smooth as Chrome.
Here are the features of Firefox that I find particularly appealing:
- The Firefox Multi-Account Containers feature, in my opinion, is what puts this browser at the top.
- Additionally, the privacy extensions work incredibly well.
However, there are some drawbacks:
- Strangely, it doesn’t feel smooth — regardless of whether I'm on Windows or macOS.
- I experience video codec issues, which I hope I’m not the only one facing.
- I can't run the extensions I develop in dev mode. I haven’t been able to find a solution for this. That said, I don't encounter this issue in LibreWolf.
I don’t use Chrome; instead, I prefer Ungoogled-Chromium, as Google is not a trustworthy company in my view — both due to its policies and many other problematic actions.
I’m truly grateful to the developers of Ungoogled-Chromium for removing Google services and for keeping the browser consistently updated.
I’ve tried all sorts of browsers like Vivaldi, Brave, and Orion, but none of them feel smooth or stable to me — at least, that’s how I perceive it.
Everyone is going to talk about UBlock origin (a must) but I have a different take on what makes firefox great:
A thing you can do on firefox with some tweaks is no-search browsing (tm).
1. Remove search suggestions in (about:preferences#search)
2. Use the [History AutoDelete](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/history-autod...) addon to remove your searches from your History since they would clutter the result and it's unlikely you care about them
3. Go to (about:config) and set `browser.urlbar.resultMenu.keyboardAccessible` to `false` so you can tab through the results with just one tab press
Now when you Ctrl + L into the current tab, you will get results from your history, bookmarks and even open tabs. And the results are only a few Tab presses away, no need to move your hands off the keyboard. You can browse without the useless round trip to a search engine.
If you don't like the results and want to launch a search anyways, well just press Enter instead and it will launch a search with the default search engine.
Searchless browsing right there for you.
P.S : Cool trick is to type % + space in the awesome bar to move around opened tabs, awesome You can also specifically look into bookmarks with * and history with ^
P.P.S : Ctrl + L, Ctrl + T, Ctrl + W and Ctrl + Alt + T are your best friends.
Firefox is amazing, you just have to tweak it a tiny bit
Now you can also learn more about custom search engines :
> The other line you see there? That one-liner blocks all those “Sign in with Google?” pop-ups.
This is one of these tiny improvements that will save you a second or two per website, but when you multiply it, it becomes significant. Kudos to all the people who made it possible.
Having tested uMatrix and uBlock Origin for years, and having tried many other Firefox extensions, IMO the best Firefox advantage is neither of those nor any other extension. It is a rarely discussed about:config option called
network.dns.forceResolve
Chrome desktop also has something like this, but it's a command-line option. Firefox OTOH allows one to select a global domain-to-IP mapping while the browser is running.
uMatrix and uBlock are IMHO designed for graphical browsers and the graphical www. For me, graphics are secondary, not a priority. I can get better (easier) control over HTTP requests and real-time transparency into TLS traffic through a forward proxy.
Firefox is still massive overkill for me. Ridiculously large and complicated. No doubt there are people who are comfortable and pleased with this sort of complexity. Glad they like it, but I am not one of those people.
Unlike Chromium or Firefox the relatively small and simple software I use to extract information from the web can be compiled in seconds on inexpensive hardware. The speeds of "no-browser" (HTTP generator plus TCP client) or the text-only browser I use easily beat any graphical, Javascript-running browser. Better control over HTTP headers, cookies and real-time, configurable logging. Not only that but I can process large, catenated HTML files that make the complex, popular browsers stall and choke.
If the goal is to achieve some customised graphical representation of a complex website, I think uBlock Origin and uMatrix are unmatched. But if the goal is "blocking", i.e., only making the HTTP requests that the user intends, and controlling the content of those requests, without regard for graphics, then I think I do better with the foward proxy.
The main problem Firefox has really is Mozilla. And Orion is neat but too immature and the direction Kagi is taking in general seems to be moving further away from a indie company with a single purpose. I hope they manage to steer themselves back into what got people excited about them to begin with.
Let's ignore problems with Mozilla's management or board for a minutes.
To most of the problems people describe on HN, have you file anything on bugzilla? Even if you dont file it on bugzilla you could at least describe your problem in full on HN, which you can always copy and paste back in the future when someone ask you once again. At least someone will have a record somewhere.
1. Are you on Linux? Or is the issue specific to Android?
2. Performance Issues? Where? How? At least describe it? Firefox since e10s and Quantum landed fully has been as fast if not even faster than Chrome. Chrome has since caught up again. Generally there shouldn't be noticeable performance difference in day to day usage other than some benchmarks or Gaming, WebGL / WebGPU scenario.
[+] [-] mattlutze|8 months ago|reply
I've never felt impeded by loading speeds, and my ADHD regularly has me forgetting to restart it, to the tune of 100+ tabs open across multiple desktops. My wimply little MacBook Pro doesn't seem to mind.
The only downside I've found is that, because so many people just default to "Chrome or nothing," there's occasionally sites that have bugs because, like was the case in the 90s with Internet Explorer, the site developers took the idiomatic Chrome way of building a feature instead of something universal.
[+] [-] giancarlostoro|8 months ago|reply
What's really funny is for ages Chrome would load the browser window even if the whole browser UI wasn't done loading, and sometime after Quantum, Firefox started doing the same trick to make you feel as though it instantly runs.
I've been using Firefox for about 20 years or so, and I don't regret it, but also I have not noticed a degrade in performance. I'm using it on Linux so I don't know if that's drastically different on a Mac these days.
[+] [-] exiguus|8 months ago|reply
Also, i don't understand why people prefer google over open source. And the sometimes disrespectful and destructive criticism of Mozilla.
[1] https://blog.chromium.org/2025/06/chrome-achieves-highest-sc...
[+] [-] helij|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] lucumo|8 months ago|reply
I hear that a lot, but when I tried Firefox for a couple of months I only found that in a single case[1]. It's really not something that happened to me at all. I did encounter issues with ad blockers breaking sites. Disabling uBO helps quite often on misbehaving sites, but it does so on Chrome as well.
> I am surprised how many people have so many problems with Firefox.
I'm not really. Nor am I surprised it works for you and others. It has been this way with Firefox for all of its 20+ years of existence. In its history it made one big leap in that, somewhat ironically given current affairs, when they removed XUL extensions.
But Firefox has always had weird, unexplainable and unreproducible failure scenarios. Some of that is because of its customizability, but also nobody really cares about it.[2] The standard advice of "throw away your profile and try again" is a huge fuck you to users. 1) People have spend time customizing their browser and throwing that away hurts. 2) It doesn't help anybody. If it's still broken you know nothing, and if it isn't you still don't know what caused it.
I guess that was okay in 2004. Lots of software had weird bugs. Nowadays the competition is much more stable.
For me, I dropped Firefox again after a couple of months fighting to get a stable sync working.[3] It just kept failing on Android. The only resolution was to log out and log back in again. Only for it to break in the next couple of hours. I did the "commit profile suicide and rebirth" thing without a solution.
Chrome's sync at least is very stable. Sometimes it falls an hour or so behind. Not good, but so much better than Firefox.
[1] And that was intentional. Typical Google assholery. Google Photos added (adds?) extra HTML to block right-click on photos when a Firefox User-Agent was used. Using a UA switcher extension "solved" it.
[2] Makers of software for power users so often forget to give power users the tools to investigate issues themselves. It's great you allow me to add so many extensions, how about a detailed log to see which is misbehaving?
[3] Firefox's sync also has fewer features. Bookmarks don't get synced, nor do extension settings.
[+] [-] thinkingtoilet|8 months ago|reply
I honestly think it's just something people here like to complain about. It's a complete non-issue. No everyday web experience is even close to being noticeably different. Full stop. It's almost like a meme, people say it because they think they should say it. I would ask those people that are complaining, what are you doing with all those extra milliseconds you claim you're saving?
[+] [-] WhyNotHugo|8 months ago|reply
There's a bug on Linux where background windows continue rendering, even if they're in an inactive workspace or not visible in any other way. This really hits performance, but it doesn't seem to be fixable due to some limitation on GTK3.
If I hide/resize my system status-bar, every single window gets resized to match the new available screen space. Firefox re-renders all content in all windows, causing multiple CPUs to spike to 100%.
See: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1880467
In fact, there are a lot of bugs which are basically "unfixable due to limitations in GTK3". So the experience is likely quite different that on other platforms.
Regrettably, there don't seem to by any plans to move away from GTK in future.
[+] [-] vladvasiliu|8 months ago|reply
Other than that, it works well enough for me. My only beef is I can't completely disable tabs, but I don't know of any equivalent browser that can.
[+] [-] bashkiddie|8 months ago|reply
* Firefox-Hello is a easy to pick example of a broken service run by a 3rd party being imposed on users.
* Pocket is another service I never asked for.
* Instead of focusing on the browser, mozilla puts their effort into an English language database.
It appears to me mozilla does not understand their target audience.
Recently I tried to customize firefox for screen recording and ran into lots of outdated documentation about userChrome.css
[+] [-] shakna|8 months ago|reply
https://www.ato.gov.au/online-services/technical-support/min...
[+] [-] godelski|8 months ago|reply
My Linux desktop is hooked up to my TV[0] and currently has over 100 YouTube tabs open. I'm going to watch those math videos, I swear, I'm just tired right now and so want to watch garbage.
I do have ublock origin on both machines and some stricter privacy settings, maybe that's it? But otherwise yeah, FF is just as snappy as chrome. Which I do use regularly when on other people's machines.
[0] it's a movie server, gaming machine, and for everything else there's ssh and ydotool (I wish Apple would let me make better iPhone scripts than Shortcuts allows. Shortcuts makes me want to throw my phone against a wall...)
[+] [-] gonational|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] eclecticfrank|8 months ago|reply
I hope this will mean that in the long run Firefox (and other secondary browsers) will gain more users again. For me, Firefox is a solid piece of software. Works well in strict privacy mode, with uBlock Origin and Multi-Account Containers.
[+] [-] Twirrim|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] bool3max|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] hbn|8 months ago|reply
In fact Google's browser monopoly only looks like it's gonna get further cemented as Apple is forced to allow other browser engines, which is the only thing keeping any sort of competition against Chrome.
I feel like the anti-Apple snark that's been so popular since around the late 2000s (and I took part in in my angsty teen years) has been affecting the priority of what's being dealt with from regulators and it annoys me.
[+] [-] WhyNotHugo|8 months ago|reply
I'll complain about Firefox a lot, because I'm exposed to all its issues. That doesn't mean I hate it: I see issues in all products that I use, even the ones that are really useful or essential. I'm sure I'm not unique in this aspect in the HN crowd.
[+] [-] MattSayar|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] simooooo|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] FigurativeVoid|8 months ago|reply
I have been hesitant to use Firefox, just because I am used to chrome. But after Google forcibly disabled software that I chose to run, I'm all in on Firefox.
[+] [-] thoroughburro|8 months ago|reply
This convinces me the author is not knowledgeable about current browser capabilities. They probably haven’t tried anything but Firefox in a long time.
Orion runs desktop (Firefox) extensions on iOS, and is in many ways a breath of fresh air. Instead of parroting “all iOS browsers are Safari” and throwing their hands in the air, they actually got hacking on it.
https://kagi.com/orion/
Edit:
> With adopting the Web Extensions API, we show our support for creating a unified browser extensions experience across all three major web rendering engines. We ended up porting hundreds of APIs, one by one, that were never meant to work with WebKit. Took us a few years, but here we are!
> Orion currently supports about 70% of Web Extensions APIs, and we add more every day. On top of that, we built advanced security features that give our users granular control over extensions, beyond what Chrome and Firefox offer. For example, you can choose to allow an extension to run only on certain websites.
[+] [-] elashri|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] lol768|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jeroenhd|8 months ago|reply
The entire Orion browser feels like a beta product to me. But at least I've got uBlock on my work phone now, so that's cool I guess.
[+] [-] thesuitonym|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] DavideNL|8 months ago|reply
Most extensions can be installed, but they do not actually function properly. Or, maybe only for 50%.
The most annoying part is, you do not know which extensions don't work (like content blockers, etc.)
[+] [-] navigate8310|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] inopinatus|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] abyssin|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] perlgeek|8 months ago|reply
Back when I started web development, there were standards, but nearly everybody just coded to what Internet Explorer supported. Which I really hated :-)
In the past few years, I've seen the occasional "works best with Chrome" website, which worries me, but so far it hasn't been too bad.
But if we as a community leave the browser market to Chrome and browsers with engines of similar origin as Chrome's, we'll get back to the bad old days.
[+] [-] sebstefan|8 months ago|reply
Microphone & webcam support, screensharing and stuff like that almost always shit the bed for me. Slack, teams, they don't care to check if their shit works on firefox.
[+] [-] prophesi|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] 1vuio0pswjnm7|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] FrankyHollywood|8 months ago|reply
Don't know if this is standard for any browser now, FF is my main browser since I left Opera...
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clu...
[+] [-] esskay|8 months ago|reply
I ended up going with Brave. Once you turn off their crummy VPN and crypto advert it's effectively just google chrome with a built in ad blocker.
I know there were arguments/concerns about the crypto thing, but I did a bit of research before picking a new browser (as should you) and once I realised it was a simple thing to turn off and never see again I was fine with it, it's all opensource as well so you can see how things work.
Of course it's just a chrome fork, so is still somewhat influenced by Googles decisions but that really wasn't the issue here, I just wanted to keep ublock origin and that's been the outcome.
I still have syncing and such all running between my desktop and mobile, I still have all the same extensions I've used for over a decade, so it's been relatively pain free to switch.
[+] [-] sixhobbits|8 months ago|reply
I regularly have to turn stuff off in
"Firefox Data Collection and Use"
and
"Website Advertising Preferences"
Recently I also started seeing ads in my address bar when typing stuff and saw they've added:
"Suggestions from sponsors Support Firefox with occasional sponsored suggestions."
of course, enabled by default.
Firefox is a great product but unfortunately slowly being milked/destroyed by its non-technical management team.
[+] [-] 1vuio0pswjnm7|7 months ago|reply
about:about
It certainly isn't mentioned here. Go figure.
[+] [-] stby|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Geezus_42|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] silvanocerza|8 months ago|reply
They made this work? I remember testing it out some months ago and it didn't work because of some reason.
[+] [-] thoroughburro|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ahmetcadirci25|8 months ago|reply
Here are the features of Firefox that I find particularly appealing:
- The Firefox Multi-Account Containers feature, in my opinion, is what puts this browser at the top.
- Additionally, the privacy extensions work incredibly well.
However, there are some drawbacks:
- Strangely, it doesn’t feel smooth — regardless of whether I'm on Windows or macOS.
- I experience video codec issues, which I hope I’m not the only one facing.
- I can't run the extensions I develop in dev mode. I haven’t been able to find a solution for this. That said, I don't encounter this issue in LibreWolf.
I don’t use Chrome; instead, I prefer Ungoogled-Chromium, as Google is not a trustworthy company in my view — both due to its policies and many other problematic actions.
I’m truly grateful to the developers of Ungoogled-Chromium for removing Google services and for keeping the browser consistently updated.
I’ve tried all sorts of browsers like Vivaldi, Brave, and Orion, but none of them feel smooth or stable to me — at least, that’s how I perceive it.
I hope you might have some better suggestions.
https://tarayici.ahmetcadirci.com/
[+] [-] cassepipe|8 months ago|reply
A thing you can do on firefox with some tweaks is no-search browsing (tm).
1. Remove search suggestions in (about:preferences#search) 2. Use the [History AutoDelete](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/history-autod...) addon to remove your searches from your History since they would clutter the result and it's unlikely you care about them 3. Go to (about:config) and set `browser.urlbar.resultMenu.keyboardAccessible` to `false` so you can tab through the results with just one tab press
Now when you Ctrl + L into the current tab, you will get results from your history, bookmarks and even open tabs. And the results are only a few Tab presses away, no need to move your hands off the keyboard. You can browse without the useless round trip to a search engine.
If you don't like the results and want to launch a search anyways, well just press Enter instead and it will launch a search with the default search engine.
Searchless browsing right there for you.
P.S : Cool trick is to type % + space in the awesome bar to move around opened tabs, awesome You can also specifically look into bookmarks with * and history with ^
P.P.S : Ctrl + L, Ctrl + T, Ctrl + W and Ctrl + Alt + T are your best friends.
Firefox is amazing, you just have to tweak it a tiny bit
Now you can also learn more about custom search engines :
https://askubuntu.com/a/1534489
They let you do things like "maps New York" directly from the navigation bar and get the result directly in Google maps
[+] [-] Chubbi1968|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] benterix|8 months ago|reply
This is one of these tiny improvements that will save you a second or two per website, but when you multiply it, it becomes significant. Kudos to all the people who made it possible.
[+] [-] faxmeyourcode|8 months ago|reply
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
This is superior to most other vertical tab, tab groups, and the many other tab styles that have been cooked up over the years on other browsers.
[+] [-] nuker|8 months ago|reply
- July 2024. Mozilla adds Privacy-Preserving Attribution (PPA), feature is enabled by default. Developed in cooperation with Meta (Facebook).
- Feb 2025. Mozilla updates its Privacy FAQ and TOS. "does not sell data about you." becomes "... in the way that most people think about it".
[+] [-] 1vuio0pswjnm7|8 months ago|reply
network.dns.forceResolve
Chrome desktop also has something like this, but it's a command-line option. Firefox OTOH allows one to select a global domain-to-IP mapping while the browser is running.
uMatrix and uBlock are IMHO designed for graphical browsers and the graphical www. For me, graphics are secondary, not a priority. I can get better (easier) control over HTTP requests and real-time transparency into TLS traffic through a forward proxy.
Firefox is still massive overkill for me. Ridiculously large and complicated. No doubt there are people who are comfortable and pleased with this sort of complexity. Glad they like it, but I am not one of those people.
Unlike Chromium or Firefox the relatively small and simple software I use to extract information from the web can be compiled in seconds on inexpensive hardware. The speeds of "no-browser" (HTTP generator plus TCP client) or the text-only browser I use easily beat any graphical, Javascript-running browser. Better control over HTTP headers, cookies and real-time, configurable logging. Not only that but I can process large, catenated HTML files that make the complex, popular browsers stall and choke.
If the goal is to achieve some customised graphical representation of a complex website, I think uBlock Origin and uMatrix are unmatched. But if the goal is "blocking", i.e., only making the HTTP requests that the user intends, and controlling the content of those requests, without regard for graphics, then I think I do better with the foward proxy.
[+] [-] beshrkayali|8 months ago|reply
But sure, anything but Chrome.
[+] [-] ksec|8 months ago|reply
To most of the problems people describe on HN, have you file anything on bugzilla? Even if you dont file it on bugzilla you could at least describe your problem in full on HN, which you can always copy and paste back in the future when someone ask you once again. At least someone will have a record somewhere.
1. Are you on Linux? Or is the issue specific to Android?
2. Performance Issues? Where? How? At least describe it? Firefox since e10s and Quantum landed fully has been as fast if not even faster than Chrome. Chrome has since caught up again. Generally there shouldn't be noticeable performance difference in day to day usage other than some benchmarks or Gaming, WebGL / WebGPU scenario.
3. Websites having issues? Which one?