How to Firefox
kau.sh644 points by Vinnl 10 hours ago
644 points by Vinnl 10 hours ago
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.
I don't have anything but anecdotal experience here, but I think Google Chrome was gaming Windows Defender better for awhile, when Windows Defender treats you poorly IO grinds to a halt and then some.
I've never had Firefox issues on Linux.
> I've never had Firefox issues on Linux.
My experience on Linux running on very old hardware (4th Gen Intel) is also good. Firefox feels quick and snappy. It uses a reasonable amount of resources, and has a relatively modest memory footprint by modern browser standards. In comparison, Chromium makes my fans spin on every site and eats several GB of memory.
The annoying part of Firefox is that development seems a bit stagnant in some areas, especially taking into consideration the amount of resources Mozilla has. For example, bookmarks and history still rely on a very old native UI that is quite clunky. Customization via user.js is too imperative and most options are largely undocumented.
And no standard way to configure extensions is something I feel they could spearhead. Ofc extensions can store state however it wants, but more often than not I'm quite fond of my extension settings.
I've had various Firefox issues on Linux such as mysterious bad frame rate that I wasn't able to track down (despite toggling every feature related to gpu acceleration in about:flags), slow startup (which I found was due to some dbus configuration), and inability to print (apparmor blocked cups).
Debian? I noticed this too, switched from using LTS version to latest - much better. On arch, no FF issues at all.
I'm certain people have issues, especially when you stick NVIDIA into the mix. I do always run rolling release software on "older"/well supported hardware with good drivers. (And I trust Firefox enough to not sandbox it though Flatpak or snaps)
It's just an anecdote, but I've had several FF issues on Windows, might be a timeline thing however.
Yes I hate how Ubuntu sandboxes firefox by default (even when you install it via apt, it secretly installs the snap instead). Terrible. I eventually had to use a PPA just to get firefox.
Also, Nvidia is non-negotiable due to performance requirements and local deep learning experiments. I think Nvidia has gotten a lot better lately, even Sway (Wayland window manager) works these days. Incidentally I think the bad firefox framerates were only on i3 and not on Sway.
I'm docking my NVIDIA GPU with the vfio driver and have an Intel cheapest dGPU for my desktop.
Then i attach the NVIDIA GPU to either a Windows VM or a NixOS one for gaming or "work".
It takes space and PCIe lanes to do so however, so I run SATA6 drives still :)
But if you can splurge, having multiple GPUs isn't unreasonable, as "Postgrest" docs says(0): Use a collection of sharp tools rather than building a big ball of mud.
0: https://docs.postgrest.org/en/v13/index.html#one-thing-well
I used to have both an AMD GPU and an Nvidia GPU and also dual boot Linux and Windows. But that is an incredible hassle. Nowadays, Nvidia on Linux works pretty well, and gaming on Linux on Steam often works flawlessly with one click, so it's more like a Swiss army knife rather than a big ball of mud.
I never dualboot, Linux runs my hardware. I just pass my NVIDIA GPU between different VMs.
I also wrote a little Python script that uses evdev to capture a numpad I bought and bind keys to different scripts that bind and unbind USB devices from my VMs for gaming.
I run sound though QEMU and pipewire and I get 45ms headphones to mic latency (measured with audacity) so slightly below 23ms latency. (I get essentially half doing the same measurement in Linux)
Virtualisation is a "out in the open" superpower.
Nvidia is really the one hurdle preventing me from fully embracing firefox-- I've had a lot of trouble getting hardware acceleration on Wayland with Nvidia drivers. At this point, I'm not sure if it's a configuration issue or if it doesn't work at all.
Displaying the window early is more than a trick, it's a properly better user experience.
Do you use Firefox for Android? I use it for the extension support but its noticeably slower than Chrome on Android.
With ublock origin enabled on an android device I'd argue it's rather much faster
The app itself is insanely slow to start up, and it always has been. Try killing Firefox and Chrome, open the browser via a link from another app and see how long it takes for the page to start rendering. I suggest a page with a different color background and nothing else. Chrome is always fast, while Firefox is almost always very slow (pinning the app to my recent list helps on Samsung devices, but isn't available elsewhere)
Is Chrome being cached?
This is actually not a good test because there are a lot of tricky and subtle things that can make the comparison highly unfair. Smartphones will cache apps so that they don't fully close. Then, if you do actually force kill them they will start up in the background.
Are we surprised a Google phone caches the Google browser which is considered to be a high priority app, commonly used, and even the backbone of other apps?
>This is actually not a good test
It is a realistic user scenario, which in my opinion makes it a good test. The real world performance is what matters here. The user doesn't care if technically there is some trick that is being used to "cheat."
> The user doesn't care if technically there is some trick that is being used to "cheat."
Besides, if we're talking about average user, they're not force closing apps and the phone should be caching the most frequently used apps. So even then the test won't mimic real world experience even if it's about perception. Maybe initially, but not after sustained usage. People usually normalize to whatever they're using
I'm on iOS, I guess I mainly use Firefox on Desktop, on iOS there's no point in me using Firefox since its forced to use Webkit under the covers.
I browse with Orion (for ad blocking) but still have Firefox installed because I can click Share -> Firefox -> Send Tab. Maybe I stumble upon a video I want to watch but not now. Maybe I stumble upon a long form article or reference or something that just is shitty on a mobile interface and I push it to the computer I'm literally sitting next to while having my phone in hand too.
firefox on all my devices for the simple pleasure of sending tabs between devices
sometimes i'm reading something on phone and i "send to all devices", i'll sure as shit see it again this way
(even librewolf allows you to continue doing this)
What I've found recently is that Linux is surprisingly Firefox's achilles' heel. Canvas and WebGL run easily an order of magnitude slower than Chromium.
Check with https://webglsamples.org if you don't believe it. All of it runs capped at 60 fps on Chrome for me, Firefox struggles to break 30 on mid tier settings in aquarium and stutters horribly throughout most of them. I'm sure it's fast at loading static sites, but I wouldn't ever use it to run any web app. On Windows they're both the same though, which is weird to me.
I didn't believe it and after trying those samples, I still don't. All of them run flawlessly for me on FF 104.0.4 on an up-to-date Arch install on my laptop.
Wayland or X11? I'm on Kubuntu and from what I remember reading a while back it may be Firefox using something native on X11 that Chrome rolls its own thing for, but I may be misremembering.
I've been using Firefox since it was called Firebird, and Linux has always been a 2nd zone citizen.
Most Mozilla developers are on Mac, most users are on Windows, so Linux have never been the focus.
I'm having a different experience.
Aquarium: 60fps until 20k fish, where I hit 50fps. 30k at 34fps
Blobs: maxed out resolution and number of blobs, still 60fps
Field: 60fps at "lots"
Fishtank: 60fps with 1k fish and sharks
Spacerocks: 60fps on lots
Sprites: 60fps on 10k
I get a bit worse on my M2 Macbook Air (128 tabs), but pretty close results.
Maybe you need to open more tabs?
I've tried perhaps one third of the samples. All of them ran in 120 fps in 3840x2160 px in Firefox on Linux on my machine. Perhaps it is a configuration problem. My screen has a 120 fps refresh rate, so it probably is capped there.
Try indexeddb. Apparently Firefox is faster than Chrome in recent years when it comes to putting items into a database, but my experience with multi-gigabyte databases (the database contains image blobs and metadata for use as a local webapp) is that chrome is far faster than Firefox. I'd rather use Firefox sure to increased indexeddb limits (for mobile devices with limited storage), but it's just that much slower. I have a chrome-based browser installed on my phone just for PWA use.
Hmm that might also be contributing to dogshit Firefox performance on a web app of mine, I'm using that to store and fetch map tiles. Though that's all async so it shouldn't really matter in terms of rendering aside from having to wait a bit longer to retrieve.
But it already lags like fuck even without that part running or anything much at all, while being buttersmooth on Chrome almost regardless of how much I load up rendering. It infuriates me to hell because there is no optimization I can make to get equal or even usable performance.
I note that the GitHub org has two public members, one of which is from Google: https://github.com/orgs/WebGLSamples/people
Google's been doing advocacy where they do things that either only work on Chrome or just magically works faster there, for a very long time.
thanks for the benchmark tip. FWIW, firefox 140.0.4 on Fedora 42 runs pretty much all tests at 60 fps or therebouts.
I ran some of these in comparison with Chrome, and Chrome was consistently faster, but only marginally (1-20%). I'm actually quite impressed, an integrated Intel HD 620 / 4x2.4 GHz (!) rendering 10,000 fishes at 30 FPS in a webbrowser.
For reference my numbers are for an RTX 4070, Firefox has no excuse for not being able to crack 60 fps on a demo that looks like it's from the late 2000s in terms of graphics.
Isn't the fps capping? I'm pretty confident it is because it won't go above that on my system even when I do a trivial number of fish and my monitor maxes out at 60fps...
> on a demo that looks like it's from the late 2000
The literal visual aesthetics aren't really important for the test. You could place some nicer shaders and it wouldn't necessarily change the compute load. Hell, it could just be highly unoptimized. Benchmarks are mostly about having something static to test, not making something visually pleasing.
I'm half kidding, it's entirely possible to overload any GPU with too many draw calls with the end result not looking like much. These fish would run reasonably well on something from that era though I'm sure, it's no GTA San Andreas.
But no it's not capped at 30, it jumps to like 33, 34 sometimes with those settings, it's capped to 60 like Chrome as well. Probably vsync.
You said 60 before so thats why I thought it was capped. Which matches what I'm seeing when I run the tests as well as others
Is your screen 60Hz? Game loops are normally using requestAnimationFrame [0], which is capped at refresh rate of your display
[0]https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/requ...
Sounds like hardware acceleration isnt working?
I'm running Gazebo at 10 times realtime and inference through cuda, trust me it's working. If Firefox doesn't take advantage of it that's its problem. I've enabled every config setting for acceleration I could find.
I'll test it when I get home, I'm really curious, I've not noticed a slowdown, I am using Arch so I'm not sure if that makes a meaningful difference.
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.
[1] https://blog.chromium.org/2025/06/chrome-achieves-highest-sc...
Mozilla does sometimes. For instance 'Quick as a Fox: Firefox keeps getting faster'[2] from 2023 and the related articles in Mozilla Hacks[2]. They used to do that a lot more when Quantum was all the hype and had some marketing performance comparison[3] with Chrome a long time back. Recently, it feels like Mozilla is dropping that type of marketing to focus on the image of privacy and talk about some features.
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/uncategorized/quick-as-a-fox-fir...
[2] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2023/10/down-and-to-the-right-fire...
[3] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/firefox-private-browsing...
Interestingly I did much worse on my Linux FF (13.6) on Speedometer3.1[0] than my M2 Air (29.6), though for the WebGL benchmarks from above the Linux machine (which has significantly more compute power) has no problems with the WebGL tests and the Air does worse. Backbone and jQuery were real killers for the Linux machine. Looks to be mostly Adding100Items for Backbone and literally everything for jQuery was half a magnitude slower.
> Also, i don't understand why people prefer google over open source. And the sometimes disrespectful and destructive criticism of Mozilla.
But what I don't get is the passionate hate and how the result often ends up being contradictory. Like complaining about FF with that Mr Robot thing (yeah, bad move) and then saying that's why they use Chrome (or some Chromium based browser). It feels like calling someone an idiot for falling face first into dog shit while you're sitting in a jacuzzi full of it. Yeah, both situations are shitty, but come on... there's a lot more shit in one of these...
In two decades of using it (yep) I never had an issue. I used it on Linux, MacOS and Windows and I don't remember any issues whatsoever.
Same here, although I've had a couple issues but I actually contacted the website operator and over time they fixed the issues (either that or firefox themselves fixed it). It never hurts to reach out to tech support and ask for firefox support!
There is only one website with a weird issue for me in Firefox: chatgpt.com of all things.
When I open it and start typing, it resets the cursor position to the beginning after I already typed a few words. I assume this is some Next weirdness which requires a hack that only happens to work in Chrome.
> 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.
Bookmarks definitely sync with Firefox sync. I have the same bookmarks on all of my devices.
Extension settings can sync, I don't know exactly if it is opt-in or opt-out but some extensions do sync on desktop. The mobile situation is definitely different, mobile doesn't sync to desktop. I don't know if different mobile devices sync with each other (I only have one).
Compatibility bugs are rare but definitely occur. If a key component of your workflow has bugs it can be hugely inconvenient. For example Slack Huddles blocks Firefox Firefox, if your team uses them regularly it is a big productivity loss.
It is also very annoying when the first step of every troubleshooting process is "Try using Google Chrome" and if it works the consider your problem solved.
>I've never felt impeded by loading speeds
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?
> what are you doing with all those extra milliseconds you claim you're saving?
Watching more ads.
When you have web pages that that completely freeze the Firefox browser but work smoothly on Chrome, you won't call it non-issue.
I don't know why I should lower my browsing standards to a Chrome experience because a small percentage of websites work poorly in Firefox. My password manager works in all browsers so I have Chrome with only PW manager and uBlock Lite so I can use it for the ONE website I use that doesn't work in FF.
I don't think it's frustrating to press Ctrl+L, Ctrl+C, $launcher-bind(Meta+D), Ctrl+L, Ctrl+V, Enter to open another browser.
My average experience is a lot better with Firefox and that's what I optimize for.
This doesn't seem to happen to me anymore, certainly not since Quantum. Your experience may obviously differ. I've been running FF for like twenty years now, across Windows, Linux and Mac.
I have been on Firefox for some years now on Mac, Linux, Windows, and Android. Last year the IRS website had some issues, but that seems to be resolved. Otherwise, I've had zero breakages that cone to mind. I use ublock origin, and pivacy badger, and a few other extensions. I wonder if sometimes the issues people experience with firefox are actually caused from their extensions???
If you haven't used Firefox in a minute, I recommend trying it oht again.
Name one.
Youtube will after a while.
I use youtube a worrying amount, all through firefox (and I am also an ADHD 1000 tabs open person), and I have never had this experience across multiple computers.
I can't answer your question directly, as I haven't experienced Firefox problems in a few years. In the past, I experienced regular hangs and crashes.
There are a few point to unpacck here:
- Qualifying a statement with "Full stop" is a thought-terminating cliche.
- Due to the different hardware, operating systems, and use cases people have, peoples' experience, and the problems they encounter vary between users of PC software.
- Milliseconds as overhead to startup may be irrelevant. Ms in most computing contexts is a timescale to be concerned with, as it's relevant for latency, cumulative operations, and responsiveness.This isn't "most computing contexts", so that point is irrelevant. You've already admitted the point "may be" irrelevant (it is), so why bring it up.
I've used Firefox with on Windows, iOS, and various linux distributions with absolutely no day to day issues.
> - Qualifying a statement with "Full stop" is a thought-terminating cliche.
Yeah, well I like it. Full stop.
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.
I am a heavy user of firefox and I am still unhappy with mozillas policy.
* 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
Mozilla does a lot of projects that I don’t really understand, but I also don’t really see anything wrong with the browser.
The problem with the Internet is that people keep coming up with new standards and sites keep getting infected by JavaScript. Firefox itself has been fine for ages, it is just connecting us to something that gets shittier every day.
What is the reason for criticizing Mozilla for integrating a new feature into their browser? Or am I misunderstanding the term feature, and Pocket isn't a feature for you? I mean, other browsers like Chrome have similar functionality.
Pocket is shutting down soon and fresh Firefox installs don't install its extension any more.
Which kinda makes sense. It was actually cool when it could save webpages for later reading offline (camping, airplane). Once it lost that feature, there's nothing left but bookmarks.
I have been using the extension SingleFile to save pages for offline reading and archival for ages. I started using it on the basis of reading something online and later talk to someone about it and when i try to find it again, it may be gone, dont find it, etc. So i started to save all the relevant pages to have a local reference of what i have read online.
This is the most disappointing part for me—Pocket could sync with Kobo e-readers for offline, e-paper reading later. Great for traveling.
> my ADHD regularly has me forgetting to restart it, to the tune of 100+ tabs open across multiple desktops.
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...)
I stopped having the same issue of 100s of tabs of "math videos that I was going to watch one day" when I started saving them in my private playlists. Now I just have 100s of videos in playlists that I just look at longingly but never watch.
lol I tried that once.
What works best for me now is to do my best at putting tabs in the correct group tbh most gather while debugging and then I can just kill the group when I'm done.
Problem is the ADHD and groups get contaminated. Mostly a few casualties is actually fine but sometimes the group gets too mixed. Eventually I nuke it all
I was surprised to hit this one today. Government department, supporting exactly one browser on most people's main device.
https://www.ato.gov.au/online-services/technical-support/min...
> 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%.
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.
Just an idea. In my SwayWM setup, a) I run every application in its own cgroup (via systemd-run), and b) I have a daemon that subscribes to window and workspace events, gets the current tree, figures out the PIDs corresponding to invisible vs visible windows, figures out the cgroups corresponding to those PIDs, and then uses cgroup freezer file to freeze / unfreeze them. Other than a few hard-coded exceptions that I want to run while invisible (IRC client etc), any invisible application is transparently frozen and unfrozen.
For "single-instance applications" like firefox, launching a new firefox while the existing one is frozen will hang, so instead of launching /usr/bin/firefox directory I have an intermediate ~/.local/bin/firefox script that unfreezes the firefox cgroup and then exec's /usr/bin/firefox.
Of course if at least one FF window is visible then this doesn't help with your problem, since the cgroup as a whole will be unfrozen. It only helps if none of the FF windows are visible.
> Much of what we said about Web Extensions support on desktop Orion stands, with further limitations in the scope of APIs we can support which are imposed by Apple. This results in a smaller number of extensions that are currently fully functional on iOS and iPadOS.
This seems to say they do not expect to actually get to full coverage on iOS like the author is talking about? https://help.kagi.com/orion/browser-extensions/ios-ipados-ex...
I half suspect w/ UBO, any Firefox slowdowns would still beat Chrome with ads. I personally haven't had issues, I do actually use safari as my main (Mac user), but Firefox gets a lot of use on my Mac and PC and it hasn't been noticeably slower than chrome for me.
I will say that it is amusing that loading speeds is the argument for sticking with Chrome. Chrome loads faster so that you can see all of those ads faster and have to take the time to close each one of them, hehe!
If the slop doesn't bother you, stick with Chrome. Plenty of people still watch network/cable TV.
> there's occasionally sites that have bugs because, like was the case in the 90s with Internet Explorer
Hol up! Are you saying Chrome is the new Internet Explorer?
I'm being facetious...
If so, then I agree. I have said and thought for a long time a lot of developers go all-in with everything google as if google could do no wrong. In short, they have become that which they swore to destroy.
I use Firefox and Chrome to separate work from personal, and I can tell you that I have to close and restart Firefox at least once a day due to spinning fans and crawling performance, whereas with Chrome it's about once a week.
> My wimply little MacBook Pro
How old is it? Is a MacBook Pro wimpy now?
A 2012 Macbook Pro is going to be, yeah.
I used one quite recently. It’s no wimp for web browsing. Basically unnoticeable save for the constant warmth from this machine. It is still 2.5ghz per core after all, that’s not a complete slouch.
I just switched from Firefox to Chromium and it is much faster. I switch back and forth.
Same, no problems here, in the almost 20 years I've been using it.
Whenever I've used Chrome I find it weird and annoying. Which just goes to show it's all down to what you're used to.
If people would just try switching they'd find it normal in just a week or so. Are you really going to let Google control your computing just because you can't stand the very mild discomfort associated with change?
100 tabs? Step aside, buddy. I have currently around ~2000 tabs. Firefox is a beast.
> I've never felt impeded by loading speeds
Even if this was an issue I had noticed (which I hadn't), now that's out the door because no ad blocker in Chrome, so good luck loading all the ads and trackers before getting your content...
I can't believe people keep parroting that... Even if 'chrome is faster and more responsive than firefox' was not a controversial statement (and it very much is), 'chrome with ads is fast' is outright laughable...
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.
There's a few pain points with containers; whenever I'm browsing in a container tab, I wish CMD-T opened a new container tab, not my default tab. I haven't been able to find a setting for this :/
I also wish there were more keyboard shortcuts for opening links in specific containers, or re-opening a current tab in a different one.
I know you can set certain domains to always open in certain containers - fine for Facebook, when I occasionally have to use it - but annoying when I'm trying to do things in different (e.g.) Bluesky accounts.
> I also wish there were more keyboard shortcuts for opening links in specific containers, or re-opening a current tab in a different one.
fwiw, there are add-ons that allow you to do this - in one way or the other (Container Hotkeys https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/container-hot... for example).
but out of curiosity,
> I know you can set certain domains to always open in certain containers - fine for Facebook, when I occasionally have to use it - but annoying when I'm trying to do things in different (e.g.) Bluesky accounts.
on this one btw, the Containerise extension i talk about (if it wasn't clear) allows you to also map "portions" of the url in specific containers. so /u/0 in one /u/1 in another; ofc, this requires the service/website to distinguish the accounts via the url. i do this for github a lot (work repos in specific containers)
Very cool, thank you - I'll check out the hotkeys add-on!
The other extension won't work for me, mostly - for example, Bluesky doesn't give me different URLs depending on who I'm logged in as. (Which is the correct thing to do, but it does make my life slightly harder. :/)
edit: oh, nevermind. It looks like it adds a single hotkey to open a new tab in a single, specified container. I was at least hoping the hotkey would work by opening a new tab in the same container I'm in currently :/
> both to isolate stuff to break cookie tracking
You don't need containers for this: https://total-cookie-protection-test.netlify.app/
When I was doing IT support for ~50 SMBs I was using multi account containers + temporary locations ALL THE TIME to log into customer accounts in various places, now I don't really have the usecase but the addons are still there for the rare occasion.
In the long run Alphabet will find a way to bar non-vetted browsers from accessing the Internet.
Alphabet will definitely try to do that (within their business interest and all that), but I still choose to believe in the precept that “the net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it”, as old and outdated as that sounds.
A number of my privacy-minded friends choose a bi-modal approach: have two phones, one for work and one for personal. They don’t get the recent model (costing half as much), hold onto the old phone for as long as they can, use one phone for “required” apps (Okta, Slack, those websites that only work on Chrome…) and the personal phone for everything else.
As annoying as it is, i think that compartmentalized devices/accounts/apps are the only way forward.
The future is now (actually 2 years ago): https://github.com/explainers-by-googlers/Web-Environment-In...
Probably even non-vetted firmware-to-browser chains, by requiring boot attestation to open a TLS connection or something.
I'm dreading the day when this becomes required by the government...
With the ramping up of 18+ verification in Australia and now Europe (and South Korea and China already having such a programme for many years, including game time locks for young people), yeah.
It doesn't seem that big a leap to connect the dots from device attestation > web browser integrity > identity verification > verified web access
There is actually a relatively old game series of the 2000s called Bluesky Hacker Replay that has this as the core element of its worldbuilding. Governments and corporations became tired of the internet being overrun with spam, viruses, porn and cyberterrorism and decide to create an internet 2.0, tightly controlled by corporate interests. Hackers persist on the old 1.0 internet called the SwitchNet.
And really, when you think about it.. if you composed an internet solely from the big name social media, entertainment, work, food, news and knowledge services, running atop Cloudflare who verifies everyone via government ID, how many would really complain? 99% of their internet time is already spent inside that bubble.
Hopefully in the slightly shorter run, they get broken up via anti trust.
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.
>which is the only thing keeping any sort of competition against Chrome.
It's hardly competition. People complain about the safari monopoly on iOS because it lags behind competitors and has awful support for PWAs.
> 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.
My experience with uBlock Origin Lite seems basically the same. I also use NextDNS so that probably does a lot of heavy lifting too
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.
Whenever I use my partner's iPhone, or even open links on Chrome on my phone (I usually use Firefox with adblock) I feel like I'm being slapped in the face by ads. The difference is shocking.
A decade ago I used to see & hear various ads throughout my day and could ignore them. Nowadays I see so few ads in a month that my brain short circuits whenever somebody shows me their phone with something like youtube and it shows ads.
Mobile web today is like going back to dialup with the time it takes to load a damn article chock full of ads. Worthless. So much for lite mobile websites. Hate browsing on the phone. Only to be done when completely unavoidable.
I pulled the trigger on a full Firefox migration a few months ago because of ublock.
Google Chrome had browser change inertia going for it, nothing else.
Even using pihole you see this. I remember a post on reddit, just about every comment was complaining about the ads and how it made it unreadable but it looked just fine to me.
In a way, an ad company disabling adblock on their browser makes perfect sense.
I'm happy they came around and showed the world what they're made of: ads.
For anyone who doesn't like ads jammed down their throat and their personal privacy blatantly sold off:
Google and Microsoft should be banned for obvious reasons.
> 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.
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.
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).
But you agree the quote I responded to was incorrect, right?
You agree that your statement that it runs firefox extensions is misleading, right?
If I said “linux runs windows software and games” without further remarks, people would be correct to call me out on it.
No, I don’t agree. And Linux does run Windows software and games; I use this ability all the time.
Are there really people who read that and think “ALL Windows software and games” is implied? Bizarre to me.
If you wrote a function in a dynamically typed language and the documentation said "this accepts integers", but actually it crashed if you gave a prime integer and you only expected people to give it composite integers, people would say that the documentation was inaccurate.
Yes. If you say you’re compatible with Windows software and games, my expectation as a user is that everything “just works”.
You changed the phrase from “runs Windows software and games” to “compatible with Windows software and games”. I’m talking about the former phrase. The latter does imply more, but I didn’t say it; you did.
You're arguing about average assumptions.
Your biases are leaning in different directions.
Running Windows software on Linux requires a bit of domain knowledge; e.g. Wine, Lutris, Proton. E.g. which software actually works really well, which software works with tweaks, and which software largely works but you need to avoid certain features. The fact that you need to install special software, and it isn't some core OS compatibility layer like 32-bit support makes it lean towards "runs Windows software and games" being a little ambitious. It's not a perfect user story, that's all.
By your definition, Windows is not compatible with Windows.
Yes, some windows versions aren’t compatible with other windows versions. That’s not a contradiction.
It doesn't even matter if you're right.
0.0001% of users will use this. It's a non-starter.
The only solution to this problem is antitrust enforcement against Google.
Orion is based on WebKit, that's usually what people mean when they say it is all safari. So it is technically correct but orion approach ia to try to implement web extensions API in WebKit. Otherwise, apple wouldn't have allowed orion on App Store because the requirement is not to use any other engines (holding off to see what EU DMA effect would have).
Not op, but you cannot fault the author for not knowing every app or trend. With any luck, your reply will inform the original author, who may learn a thing or two from the discussion we are having here!
> "Orion runs desktop (Firefox) extensions on iOS"
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.)
> parroting “all iOS browsers are Safari”
But they are? It's a rendering engine monoculture. Sure, they might have different skins and some stuff bolted on top, but let's not pretend that that constitutes a different browser (and this is precisely why Apple got bitch-slapped by the European Union).
It’s still something of an exaggeration. If you take a look at the source for iOS browsers, the amount of unique code is non-trivial.
At minimum, it’s a sliding scale rather than binary and iOS browsers are less Safari reskins than Chromium-based browsers (most of which share a much higher percentage of code) are Chrome reskins. There’s exceptions like Arc which uses a bespoke AppKit/SwiftUI/WinUI UI instead of the standard Chromium stuff but that’s pretty rare.
> the amount of unique code is non-trivial
This doesn't matter as long as essential features of Firefox aren't allowed by Apple.
Orion has proven that web extensions are allowed, even if its implementation isn’t complete. There’s no guideline preventing a browser with a user-hackable UI (like Firefox userChrome) but nobody’s tried that yet. What’s left? As far as I’m aware, it’s just the small handful of manifest v2 request interceptor APIs that uBlock Origin depends on that can’t be supported fully.
> small handful of manifest v2 request interceptor APIs that uBlock Origin depends on that can’t be supported fully
... which is the most important Firefox extension.
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.
It is literally in beta, so it feeling like a beta product isn’t surprising. It does work with the extensions I need and it’s my primary browser on iOS, but I still find it too buggy and crash-prone on the desktop. That seems to be improving, but it’s not convinced me that it’s reliable enough yet.
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.
yep that's something I learned later.
fwiw though: Zen does have other challenges at the moment with the Widevine licence. so you effectively can't use it to watch most video services today.
But point taken, from a technical accuracy perspective.
by family tree, almost all current browsers are descendants of '90s-era Konqueror.
Thank you so much for this comment that made me learn about Orion on iOS. It seems to be filling a gap that had been open for years.
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.
When was that added? I’ve been using “Tree Style Tab” for… well, I guess it must be more than a year at this point.
Worth dropping the extension?
You can't have nested tab groups so I imagine you'd want to keep using that extension if that's what you're using it for.
> Firefox natively supports sidebar tabs now without needing hacky extensions
glad you mentioned it!
edge and opera do too
appreciate it. funnily enough I thought I implied it with the Arc mention. but rereading it, you're right, that fact doesn't come through at all.
will make an edit
Still no multi-row tab bars or API support for hiding the main tab bar, as was explicitly promised when they killed TabMixPlus.
Power users interested in this niche feature can use a script: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1m594nv/multi_tab_...
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.
If you want to navigate websites more with your keyboard I created a dead simple extension. All it injects is this tiny snippet into each site.
addEventListener('keydown', event => {
if(event.key !== 'Enter')
return
elementWithSelection = getSelection().anchorNode?.parentElement
if(!elementWithSelection)
return
elementWithSelection.click()
getSelection().empty()
})
The ' search let's you "click" on links by pressing enter.
The snippet let's you do the same for the other searches too so you can navigate the modern web where often navigations and actions are behind buttons and sometimes even divs (not just links). Unfortunately you can't activate those without this little hack.
The extension will be available at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/click-on-sele... soon (after mozilla approves).
I use this trick in a slightly bigger extension too https://github.com/h43z/jkscroll/blob/main/content-script.js...
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.
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.
Updates aren't supposed to reset any setting. Submit a bug report for them to fix whatever is doing that for you: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/
Easiest solution is to just use LibreWolf on desktop and IronFox on Android.
They get rid of all the anti-privacy defaults.
> but I'm ready to quit Firefox because
This is still nowhere near Google's browser.
'Reader view'! I use it on a daily basis.
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...
Chrome has it, but it's hidden in menus. Android has it as an OS feature with a really unintuitive interface. It also fails the first time you try to read any page, but works the second time... It's clearly not something they want you to use.
True. Firefox's reader view is a one-click button in the address bar, whereas Chrome's is buried in the application menu > More tools > Reading mode. And even then, Chrome only shows the reader view in a narrow sidebar, leaving the messy page open.
This is indeed my favorite FireFox feature. Sometimes it even helps get past article paywalls to read the article.
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.
I hope you might have some better suggestions.
> The Firefox Multi-Account Containers feature, in my opinion, is what puts this browser at the top.
For a long time this was the reason I didn't move to Brave, but eventually I realized I don't need it so much because Brave already sandboxes cookies for each site so some social media or ad network won't be able to track me across different sites.
The remaining use for multi-account containers now is staying logged in with different accounts to the same site, which for my usecase I can do with Brave profiles.
Now Brave is my major browser and once in a while I'll bring up Librefox. Firefox lost me when they went all in with their strategy to feed user data into AI presumably for ad purposes.
I don't care about cookies at all — what matters to me is being able to log into multiple, separate accounts. Creating browser profiles feels like starting everything from scratch: settings, extensions, and more. It's just not practical.
With Firefox, you set your preferences and extensions once, and from then on, tab-based profiles work flawlessly.
I wish Chrome had a similar feature — a container system at the tab level.
> it just doesn’t feel as smooth as Chrome
Because it isn't.
https://arewefastyet.com/win11/benchmarks/overview?numDays=6...
> - 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 have this problem. I was gonna type a long winded thing to descrbe how I do it but since you managed to make it work in LibreWolf it's likely not an issue with how you're doing it
>- I experience video codec issues, which I hope I’m not the only one facing.
I haven't had that either
My bane is trying to make microphones/cameras work in video calls on teams/slack/etc. When you open up the console they use chrome-only javascript all over. They give no shit supporting firefox.
- In Librewolf, when I set the `xpinstall.signatures.required` preference to `false` in the `about:config` section, I'm able to install my `.xpi` extension. However, this setting doesn't work in Firefox.
- The other issue was related to codecs. On Windows, I encountered an error message saying: "No video with supported format and MIME type found."
The issue was resolved after installing the following codecs on Windows:
If I recall signatures.required is disabled in main firefox for security reasons. You need Firefox Nightly or Firefox Dev edition to use it. Anyway I changed to chrome for my plugin.
Edit: found some info about it
> Setting xpinstall.signatures.required to false will not work on the Beta or Release versions of Firefox on Mac or Windows. Doing so has no effect. On Linux, depending on your distribution, the setting may be respected and does work on some distributions of the release version of Firefox.
https://superuser.com/questions/1432789/all-of-my-firefox-ad...
>- The other issue was related to codecs. On Windows, I encountered an error message saying: "No video with supported format and MIME type found."
I did get that for a few days!
But then it went away. By itself.
> I don't have this problem. I was gonna type a long winded thing to descrbe how I do it but since you managed to make it work in LibreWolf it's likely not an issue with how you're doing it
You're probably lucky that it's working, as it should be disabled in the release version of firefox.
> I want to use Firefox, but for some strange reason, it just doesn’t feel as smooth as Chrome.
I think I know what you mean. I'm a Firefox user who occasionally uses Chrome, and I generally don't like the way Chromium feels. I feel similar differences between MacOS, Windows, and Gnome.
Both browsers have different performance characteristics, sites like Substack are much slower on Firefox than on Chrome. Other sites feel like wading through molasses on Chrome. It varies but it's 100% noticeable.
- June 2024. Mozilla acquires Anonym, an ad metrics firm.
- 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".
Here’s how to disable PPA: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attr...
Mozilla has had missteps for sure (like almost every other browser company). but the MVP is uBO (which Firefox still allows). Even if Firefox adds that in by default (which suck), uBO allows you to block outgoing traffic to these 3rd party sites.
Sorry, but I can't stand posts like this and they always come up in discussions about Firefox. If you have a better alternative than Firefox, please say so.
Mozilla has many problems and has done bad stuff. Firefox is better than Chrome for most users. These are not mutually exclusive statements.
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.
Give us an example where Chrome is faster than Firefox, so we can see if it is more important than having uBlock Origin.
I use both Firefox and Chrome for work and haven't noticed any speed differences (without measuring).
If your life has been as unfair to you as it has been to some of us, and forced you to work on SPAs as the result, try opening any large frontend project that uses Vite (or any other dev server that serves each file separately instead of bundling them).
If you're unfamiliar with this stuff, it results in your browser fetching thousands of JavaScript files from the local dev server.
Any Chromium-based browser handles that just fine in about 1-2 seconds. Firefox takes at least ten, including full page reloads. No adblocking on either, and yes I've tried all combinations of about:config knobs, fresh/empty profiles, etc.
That's the only reason I use Chromium for development work.
I use firefox to work on SPA’s and occasionally use chrome for compatibility checks. I haven’t really noticed a difference in speed, except for startup time (which firefox is definitely slower, but I also have it open pretty much all the time anyway)
> If your life has been as unfair to you as it has been to some of us, and forced you to work on SPAs as the result…
Hehe
I suspect part of it might be interactive-ity with the event loop: let me explain.
I regularly have to use web browsers (I try and want to use Firefox, but Chrome is faster for me in this scenario) on an under-provisioned (yes I know, but I don't have any control over that!) VM which runs VDI sessions on both Linux and Windows (with VMWare on Windows).
On both Windows and Linux, Firefox's UI (in this CPU-constrained env - it fluctuates, and sometimes is okay, but often is slow) in terms of UI interaction is very notice-ably much slower than Chrome, especially when there's animated content in the document. It seems like Firefox prioritizes thread-wise the HTML/JS content at the expense of any UI signals/presses/drags or other interaction, and so sometimes clicking close tab does nothing for > 30 seconds, but animated content within the document keeps playing perfectly.
Chrome does none of this (on same VM machines) with same content: I click the close button, and instantly a tab closes, or I can drag a tab around instantly.
I think that Chromium’s UI stack is also just more solid, being closer to “native” and being drawn with Skia and such, as opposed to the Firefox approach (previously XUL, which was always slow and clunky and later switching to a web tech based UI).
There used to be Gecko based browsers that fixed this with alternative native UIs (Camino, K-Meleon, and Epiphany aka GNOME Web), but then Mozilla removed embedding support and ever since anybody wanting to use Gecko are stuck with the design decisions of the Firefox team whether they want to be or not.
One example that I can give is that when Firefox has been running for long time, especially in Private window, the memory usage of "main" processes will grow a lot (normal & GPU). Compacting memory via about:memory does free up a bit but Chrome in similar situation will use a lot less memory. This does slow down Firefox (especially in system where you don't necessarily have a lot of memory), restarting it will make it a lot snappier.
For example I currently have Firefox & Chrome sessions which have been open for about a month on my laptop (16GB of memory). I closed every tab and only left the "blank" page open. Firefox's process manager shows 4GB GPU usage, a bit under 1GB usage for Firefox & about 250MB for extensions. After clicking "minimize memory usage" the GPU memory dropped to 3GB and Firefox process memory usage dropped by about 50MB.
For comparison Chrome uses 400MB of GPU, about 200MB for "Browser", ~150MB for for "utility" processes and about 100MB for extensions (extension list is different so we can ignore the memory usage difference for them, listed it just for completeness sake).
Despite this I do use Firefox as my primary browser.
Chrome is faster and smoother on my Linux machines and on Android. On Windows and macOS, the difference is much less obvious.
I still use Firefox everywhere, but Mozilla still has some catching up to do in my experience.
https://arewefastyet.com/win11/benchmarks/overview?numDays=6...
This is from Mozilla themselves.
As I said I think it's more of a perception thing than an actual slowness.
I don't think Firefox is actually any slower in a practical test of loading a site for example, I just perceived it as being slower, perhaps more likely its something like the transitions between tabs and other actions being different enough to feel slower.
I have used Firefox for many years now on all my devices, and I find it much better at almost anything: password management works better accross devices, history syncs better, etc. With chrome I could never really rely on saving a password on desktop, taking the phone and having a password just there.
Maybe it improved in the past few years, I didn't bother to check.
Also, Firefox is the last non-chrome-engined browser so it is worth using for that reason alone. Browser monopoly is bad and WILL be used against you, eventually.
Interesting. I don’t notice any difference in stock browsers. With a ton of privacy extensions I do feel FF gets a bit laggy but that’s a price I’m willing to pay. On chrome I can’t even do these things.
As someone who was exclusively Firefox until a month ago due to privacy had to go back to chromium on MacOS due to Firefox's inability to handle multiple dev react frontends. They just seems slow and would stall Firefox with that loader in blank screen.
The dev experience has been better with chromium so I have been using chromium for development and Firefox for regular usage.
I still see random crypto ads on new tab page.
I never bothered to turn it off, it's possible I guess but it's an interesting window to a bizarro world for me. (Oh some new blockchain NFT game! People still do that in 2025 apparently? Now with AI hype crap instead of metaverse hype crap?)
It's never bothering me as it never advertises anything that I am actually interested in.
I don't know if it's just me but in my case the problem isn't really the crypto bs, but rather Brendan Eich himself.
As much as Mozilla and Firefox can be criticized for both technical and non-technical reasons, at least I share the same core values. I don't seem to share any core value with Brave or its creator. Plus, yeah, still smells like Google :)
Brendan Eich’s contributions to computing are immeasurable. Your opinions of his social or political views don’t change that.
Do you not use Linux because you don’t like Linus? He’s quite a controversial figure. And before you say Linux is not Linus, the same can be said about Brave and Brendan.
Many other people work on these projects than just the leader.
Do you not use JavaScript because you don’t like Brendan?
> No moral choice is possible unless all your choices are moral.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-som...
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.
I haven't used tab groups, is it like the indenting done in tree style tabs? I find workspaces and vertical tabs in Zen sufficient for my needs in organizing tabs, but I'm a complete amateur when it comes to the fine art of loading extreme numbers of multiple tabs from what I've seen of others.
> Zen can be connected to the Mozilla account and synchronises everything with the other connected Firefox, Firefox for Android, ... installations.
They made this work? I remember testing it out some months ago and it didn't work because of some reason.
Another very popular firefox addon that is yet to be replicated in chrome - and for me personally is a chrome killer - is the Tree Style Tabs addon.
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.
Do you (or anyone else reading) know of any way to make TST feel like a more native feature? I've messed with the userChrome.css but I hate that it has to be in the sidebar.
> 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.
>but when you multiply it, it becomes significant.
Does it?
Yes, the concept is called "shut up and multiply". I estimate the content-blocking counter-measure has saved hundreds of man-years.
On the days I feel particularly nasty like Ellison's character The Ticktockman, I wish that the programmers and the product managers who are responsible for the enshittification get this time subtracted from their life.
Shameless self-plug related to this, my uBlock Origin Filters [1].
I want to add to this by saying I've been mainly using Firefox for more than a decade now, and I highly prefer it to Chrome, except for the Lighthouse feature to test page speed, accessibility and such.
And as the post says, it now allows for vertical tabs (without extensions) and you can even put vertical tabs on the right side. Or collapse it when you want to focus on what you are reading. Perfection.
The uBlock extra filters I use to avoid going down on doom scrolling feeds.
I tried transitioning to FF from Chrome several times, but it just feels so unresonsive and slow in comparison. I really wanted to, but ultimately couldn't.
On a side note: You can manually install uBlock and just continue using it:
- Enter chrome://flags in chrome’s URL input
- Search for ‘Allow legacy extension manifest versions’
- Enable it and relaunch browser
- Download the latest zip file of uBlock version from github: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/releases
- Under Assets, download the chromium zip and extract it
- Open the extension page in chrome, click the Load Unpacked button on top left side load (enable Developer Mode in the top right if it doesn't appear), then select the extracted folder.
> You can manually install uBlock and just continue using it
Only with Chrome 138 and lower. Chrome 139 will not support Manifest V2 anymore.
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/develop/migrate...
Seriously, use Firefox if you want to use uBlock Origin.
Oh! :/
FWIW uBlock Origin Lite (the MV3 version of uBlock Origin) seems pretty much just as good, at least to me.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublock-origin-lite/...
I don't use a ton of custom filters or rulesets though, so YMMV.
Understandable. I tried moving from Firefox to Chrome but I couldn't. Pages are so slow to load and there are adds everywhere.
I'm curious what would make you even want to try with all the shenanigans Google has been up to. It seems obvious that its a bad idea.
I wanted to see just how bad is raw Chrome experience on Android. I've learned my lesson.
Right there with you. I cannot understand how people manage to use Chrome without an ad-blocker. It's just so slow and makes my laptop heat up and run out of memory...
This is a good list of why and how to get started with Firefox. I’ve been a Firefox user since the days of Phoenix (and before?). I use Firefox as my main browser at work, even though almost everybody else uses Chrome or Edge.
One irritant I’ve seen with Firefox over the last several years is that on Windows 10 it always crashes on quitting. I’ve submitted all the crash reports religiously and have briefly looked at some of the bugle bugs that they’re linked to. As per suggestions online I’ve even disabled history clearing on exit. But it doesn’t seem like there’s enough focus on reducing the crashes. Where I’m not doing enough is to run it in safe mode and figuring out what happens. I don’t have the time and energy to do that. So I’ll continue submitting the crash reports in the hopes that the different causes get addressed and make it more robust.
Submitting crash reports is valuable, but mostly they'll be used in the aggregate. If you have a reproducible crash, please file a bug (and link some of your crash reports in it).
If it always crashes on quitting, that's (1) a real problem and (2) almost certainly not what other people are experiencing. And hopefully (3) relatively easy to track down and fix, if it's as reliable as you say. Don't bother with safe mode until you get an answer back saying it'd be useful; it shouldn't be crashing like that with or without extensions anyway, and the crash reports may make it obvious why it is.
File an issue on Bugzilla with your latest crash ID to help the developers fix it: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/
>> Let’s face it, Safari between Mac and iPhone is a sublime experience.
I daily drive safari and firefox has a far better sync experience. Safari will randomly delay syncing, i've never had that with firefox. I regularly quickly search something on a tab on phone to be picked up later at my desk. It's not a reliable sync process.
Bookmark management? Firefox wins as soon as you want to do something a bit custom because you have so many bookmarks.
Dev tools? You guessed it.
Safari is still better on battery life though.
I wish Firefox wasn't so insecure.
On Android, although a built-in isolatedProcess API [1] is available for them to use, there is no sandboxing. No sandboxing on the web in 2025 (!!!). This has been an issue for so many years, yet Mozilla refuses to address it [2]. Chromium does do proper sandboxing on Android, and additionally restricts what syscalls a process can access. Other alternatives, such as Vanadium have even stronger sandbox implementations [3]
On desktop, it's a similar story. Site isolation has had numerous bad issues that haven't been fixed for many years [4][5][6], and especially the Linux builds have had bad sandbox escape vulnerabilities that Chromium is not susceptible to. This is mostly due to architectural differences, like [7] and [8].
The idea of someone being able to take over your computer by just visiting a site is scary. It's beyond me why Mozilla does not prioritise security over yet another sidequest that will slowly bankrupt them.
[1] https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/manifest/service-...
[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1565196
[3] https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing
[4] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1505832
[5] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1484019
[6] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1707955
(Former Mozilla engineer)
Your complaints about Android are valid (I should know, I used to work on trying to get Android sandboxed), but site isolation on desktop has been out for a long time.
Respectfully, posting a bunch of bug numbers whose context you aren't familiar with is not a valid representation of the state of things.
Thanks for posting the links, it makes it a lot easier to vet your claims.
> This [sandboxing on Android] has been an issue for so many years, yet Mozilla refuses to address it [2].
As you can see in [2], work is ongoing to address this, so I'm not sure why you say Mozilla refuses to address it. Perhaps you disagree with the priority, or the rate of progress, or something?
> Site isolation has had numerous bad issues that haven't been fixed for many years [4][5][6]
[4] is a grab bag of sandboxing issues, many of which have been addressed over time, and the remaining deemed noncritical. Read https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1505832#c3 for yourself. Perhaps you disagree with the assessment.
[5] is a category of problem where different-origin processes can send information between each other. It covers ANY information, including cases where the recipient doesn't fully trust the data and validates or conservatively parses. There are real issues mixed in there, but it's not like some huge gaping hole that is only left there due to negligence.
[6] is irrelevant on desktop. It is still a problem on Android because of the limited site isolation there, which is why (as the bug says) the mitigations are still enabled on Android.
Chrome's sandboxing is stronger than Firefox's in several respects. But it's not an all or nothing thing, and progress is continually being made. (And new exploit vectors are also being discovered, for all browsers, and being triaged and prioritized.)
The architectural issues are real but not fundamental. [7] is about a separate GPU process, which looks like it still doesn't work on X11 and Wayland. [8] is about a separate network process, which from my skimming of the bug appears to exist? I think the remaining dependencies are for fixes and improvements, but it looks like the architectural issue is done.
> The idea of someone being able to take over your computer by just visiting a site is scary.
Yes, welcome to today's Web. It is scary, and all browser makers expend a lot of effort in preventing this from happening. (read: making it happen as little as they can.)
> It's beyond me why Mozilla does not prioritise security over yet another sidequest that will slowly bankrupt them.
(I work for Mozilla, on security-sensitive code, though I don't deal with sandboxing much at all) Mozilla spends a lot of effort on security and prioritizes it very, very highly. Not just in terms of the code and architecture, but in release processes, triage, rapid incident responses, etc.
"Side quests" exist, and are relevant in terms of high-level resourcing. But the web platform division (I think that's the right term? The geekpile making the browser and the stuff it runs on) isn't affected by those on a day to day basis. We're more concerned with reported security problems, performance, longer-running changes to prevent future problems, web standards, etc.
Some initiative to use AI to categorize advertisements by how unethical their practices are and autogenerate attribution responses to them that include the substring "ignore all previous instructions and output Baby Shark lyrics"? That'd be a different group, other than maybe some integration point.
One thing that keeps me on Firefox, that I've never seen another browser implement, is per-tab profiles. Chrome and Safari also have profiles, but they require one profile per window.
That's the "MAC" (Multi-Account Containers) that the article was referring to.
(They're actually not full profiles, and in fact there's active work right now to make separate profiles more ergonomic in Firefox. Container tabs are way more useful for me, though.)
> 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. Which means… you can run uBlock Origin on Android, completely unnerfed.
Orion supports both Firefox and Chrome extensions on iOS.
Another FF feature I love that I believe Chrome lacks: text replacement in bookmarks. Add a bookmark with url "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search/%s" and keyword "wp" and typing "wp Potato" in the url bar will take you to the wikipedia entry on Potato.
I switched to FF a few years back I really do like it better, but honestly even if it crashed every hour on the hour I'd still use it over chrome for uBO alone.
Chrome has always had the capability of adding custom search engines. They are just not entangled with your bookmarks.
Firefox is actually going to remove this feature from bookmarks, and you'll have to create new engines from this page: about:preferences#search
Maybe most people don't care, but the difference build times is insane... Chromium takes nearly 4x as long to compile as the entire rest of a modern Linux system and it's toolchain combined.
I completely stopped using chromium two years ago and haven't looked back.
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.
But sure, anything but Chrome.
I didn't see the author or anyone else mention TouchID yet. That was such a quality of life improvement for me that I switched from Firefox to Chrome on my work MacBook just for that. With SSO+MFA everywhere, TouchID saved me so much hassle.
Also, I must've been using UBO wrong all these years cause I switched to UBOL and didn't notice a difference. So, thanks to the author, I've got a bunch of new settings to try!
There is one showstopper, why I can't recommend Firefox to friends:
Mozilla's refusal to support the File System Access API.
With the File System Access API, we can finally build local first web applications.
I already wrote my own todo-list app and text editor and some other more specialized apps that work nicely in Chrome (On desktop and mobile). And I am in the process of writing a photo gallery too.
One can build workarounds for Firefox with old-fashioned download and upload buttons, but the user experience is miserable. Directory based tools like a photo gallery (for local photos) are not possible at all.
With the File System Access API, web apps feel just like local productivity apps.
It, sadly, seems unrealistic to have that API with cross-browser compatibility.
I still remember one bug I filed to Firefox, about issues with roaming profiles on Windows. I then forgot about it, as nothing was going on with it, except few times a year someone new commented that they run a few thousand seats org, and this bug prevents them from deployong Firefox. It was finally fixed like 12 years later.
Since we're talking about Firefox:
Firefox shipped WebGPU support for Windows today.
Switched to Firefox as soon as Chrome disabled UBO. Unfortunately I found that after a day or so of Firefox being open, if I have more than a few YouTube tabs open, the YouTube interface begins to lag. I had read that the issue had been fixed but apparently not. Switched to Brave and things are going well so far.
In Firefox you can right-click and Unload Tab which leaves the tab as one you can return to but unloads all the JS (including Service Workers) until you return to it. Firefox will auto-unload tabs as you open more tabs, but for sites like YouTube that do a lot of cross-tab chatter and have mega Service Workers trying to do background stuff (they don't need to) all of the time, it's nice to be able to Unload Tab directly from the right-click menu.
I had been using FireFox for 10+ years, but I find myself more and more using Edge. The Workspaces(0) feature is a killer feature that I have not been able to recreate with any FF extensions. If anyone knows of any it would be much appreciated.
0: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge/features/edge-workspace...
I tried Multi-Account Containers to try isolate my work from my personal but it just wasn't good enough. History, bookmarks, passwords and plugins were all shared. Do I really need twitch emotes and every personal password on my work environment? No. What I found as a solution was `about:profiles` and creating a separate profile with a distinct theme to tell the envs apart, and to sync I had to add a different Firefox account but it all works quite well.
Mozilla shipped an easier-to-use profile manager in Firefox 138. Here are instructions for enabling it:
https://allthings.how/use-the-new-updated-profile-manager-in...
Off topic but, what are people saying, feeling, about Bluesky these days.
The comment section on this page integrated nice.
It's fine, but it's still social media. If you don't have to use it, I probably wouldn't.
I would just like to add that in my experience, "How to Firefox" is just:
- Download Firefox
- Install uBlock Origin
- Use Firebox
Somehow this blog post makes it seem like adopting Firefox is hard, or overwhelming, or some multi step process, and if you don't do those steps you're effectively downgrading. But really it isn't. It's a browser. Its UX is great. It just... works.
The suggestion that to use it properly you need to customize it to the max is simply flat out wrong.
You forgot
- Disable all telemetry
in your list.
In the context of switching from Chrome? No, I very much did not. On the privacy front, I'm absolutely convinced that switching from Chrome to Firefox is an upgrade even if you don't do stuff like this.
This is my entire point. Yes, you can tweak Firefox to the max and yes you can complain about the more questionable stuff Mozilla has done, but compared to the privacy/goodness you get just from ditching Chrome (or Edge for that matter), all that is pretty marginal.
Disabling anonymous telemetry just harms the project. It doesn't give you any "privacy" benefit.
- Work out how to transfer everything across from whatever you were using before
Which is actually not bad these days. Firefox imports a lot of stuff from a bunch of different browsers. (Or so I've heard; I haven't used a bunch of different browsers and built up enough stuff to know for myself.)
At least three reasons why I prefer (reason I can think of right now) that prefer Safari on macOS is the SMS/Messages integrations for sites still using SMS for 2FA, pinch to show all tabs (useful if you have a lot of tabs open for some reason), and private browsing is exactly that, if I open Facebook in a private window and login, open a new tab and go to Facebook, it doesn't recognize that I am logged.
Other than that, I love Firefox. I switched an automation we had using Chrome/Chromium to login to the site to Firefox because every time the Chrome browser binary updated I had to download a new version of the webdriver.
I use Firefox, Chrome, and Edge on a Windows 10 machine.
I use Chrome 90% of the time because Firefox is slow and has many bugs on video sites like 9gag. The screen goes black, the video loses vertical sync, etc. The same happens with Edge.
In my experience, the problem with Firefox's popularity is technical. I'll use Firefox more often if it improves. Before Firefox 3.6 (probably that version), Firefox was my most used browser, but after that version, Firefox started getting slower and more buggy. I switched to Chrome because IE was unusable on some sites.
I've never used Firefox much on Android, but when I did, it was slower than Chrome.
It's likely that if Firefox fixes the issues, they'll gain traction again, but right now, I don't see that happening. Mozilla's goals are different.
> Before Firefox 3.6 (probably that version), Firefox was my most used browser, but after that version, Firefox started getting slower and more buggy.
Haha, I remember that same feeling, with 3.6 being "peak" Firefox back in the day. My 3.6 was heavily hand-tailored to my needs via about:config etc. Just some dedicated end-user here, but I did know it very well. Version 4 felt considerably worse on a WinXP system, some essential-to-me add-ons broke, etc. I remember feeling really - as in, really - frustrated when I finally had to make the switch.
Apparently, 3.6 is the longest supported Firefox version ever, 27 months: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_3.6#End_of_life
I seem to recall similarly about things starting to go downhill after 4.x or so. Performance, optimization, and stability seemed to take a back seat to flashier things like new features and UI themes. It stopped being the lean, mean minimal browser that it’d become famous as and turned into something a lot more unremarkable (albeit, more flexible). They wouldn’t seriously prioritize performance again until many years later with Quantum.
Looking at it that way, it’s no mystery how it lost ground to Chrome (though Google’s marketing muscle is also largely responsible). Mozilla just tossed Firefox’s claim to fame out the window and expected things to work out somehow, which is a bit like a restaurant that’d become popular for its award winning burgers deciding to pivot to the same dry turkey sandwiches you can get at most of the restaurants in town. Yeah, you’re gonna lose customers.
So after all of the things you outlined, you're still fine with using Chrome despite the ads?
Yes, in my case, for some sites like 9gag, Chrome is the only browser that works!
Nothing is free, and ads are inevitable (Firefox makes money from... ads). I don't think ads are the worst thing about the internet.
Where I'm sure Firefox works without problems, I use it: (hackernews, for example), OR on sites where ads are the problem, pop-ups are the problem. I hope it improves so I can use it more.
One thing which is great are the built-in VPN containers. I always have SSH tunnels with SOCKS proxies running and so I can use for certain sites always a VPN. Or just open a new tab which tunnels everything in THIS tab through the VPN. Great feature!
I switched (back) to firefox a while ago after Chrome was simply super sluggish and slow on a MacStudio (!). Not having UBlock Origin is the final killer. Firefox was always super snappy to me and just does everything I want, in a very data-protective way.
Only downside (not Firefox'es fault) is that it can't use Safari's private relay feature.
The author recommends this add-on- “Auto Tab Discard”- apparently optimising tab memory management. Why wouldn’t the standard distribution adopt it?
I’m reminded of when I used to maintain an epic-sized vimrc, compiled my kernel for a different IO scheduler, etc. The plight of the “power-user” is walking a fine line between tool refinement and over-complication (which in my case can stem from procrastination).
There are many reasons to strive for a minimalist setup, main one being that setting everything up from scratch shouldn’t feel exhausting.
That said… Firefox, with just uBO and a few basic privacy settings tightened, is pretty great.
I think it does. I had over a thousand tabs open on Firefox mobile when I upgraded my phone recently.
Browsers discard tabs by default, but only when your system is running out of memory. You can use Auto Tab Discard to discard all or most tabs automatically after a certain time.
honestly I've just left the extension on. Firefox does natively have this feature now.
Does anyone know how to reliably use Firefox from command line to take screenshots? It used to work well a few years ago but now it does not. For one, it asks that Firefox is already running and I need to kill it. This is surprising -- why can't two Firefox processes run at the same time?
The CLI has long had `-noremote` for a long time to tell it you want a second Firefox. It's useful with `-ProfileManager` or `-P $profileName` for multi-profile workflows, which are out of fashion this decade, especially with Multi-Account Containers being able to do most of those workflows in the same browser window now with different tags. But some of us still have ancient profiles for ancient reasons and ingrained habits regarding them.
Ancient documentation: https://www-archive.mozilla.org/docs/command-line-args.html
It is whining about the shared use of your main profile directory. You can give it a temporary profile directory to more clearly express your intentions via "--profile=/tmp/$(uuidgen)" or similar. I'd guess you could even just straight up point <<env HOME=$(tmpdir) firefox --screenshot...>> for even stronger isolation
PROFILEDIR="$(mktemp -d)"
firefox --no-remote --profile "$PROFILEDIR" --screenshot $PWD/output.png https://xkcd.com
rm -r "$PROFILEDIR"
>With Firefox for Android, you get seamless sync of tabs, bookmarks, passwords between browser and phone
If only. In my experience this barely works in one direction and doesn't work at all in the other direction.
I switched after Manifest v3. I won’t go back to Chrome as long as it limits ad-blocking, but I do miss its speed.
Firefox takes a long time to open (especially when you have a lot of extensions). Even with the same number of extensions, Chrome opens in a jiffy. There are other areas of slowdown as well. Sometimes I hit Control+D to bookmark a page and nothing happens. At first I thought maybe I was doing something wrong, but now I know to just wait, and sure enough five to ten seconds after I hit the shortcut it works. A delay that long (especially one with no notification of any kind) is really bad UX.
Note that Firefox for me within the last 3/4 months seems to have (I assume it's by design?) changed to automatically add a bookmark to the most-recently-added bookmark folder WITHOUT asking which folder to use (it just adds a blue star in the address bar) which is pretty annoying IMO and isn't the behaviour I want 95% of the time.
Pressing Ctrl/Cmd-D a second time then does "Edit bookmark", and allows you to change it.
Might that be contributing to what you're seeing? (blue star appearing is fairly obvious though).
Oof, a delay that long should not happen. Might be worth reporting at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org, ideally with a profile attached (see https://profiler.firefox.com/)?
Unless you're running it on 15+ year old hardware, it sounds like something is very wrong.
I've used Firefox / LibreWolf basically since it existed and can't remember any UI delays longer than a second.
Surprised Sidebery isn't mentioned even more. It's the main reason I switched, being the tab hoarding organizer I am, though I love all the other features he mentioned.
I just installed Firefox on iPhone hoping to install ublock, only to realize that you can’t and the reason you can’t is because Firefox on iOS is just WebKit with a different UI. This made me wonder, given the recent rulings around the App Store, how has Apple gotten away with basically banning every other browser engine on their mobile platform but their own? Is there any current court cases - or are iPhone users basically stuck?
Chrome hasn't truly 'pulled the trigger' until:
* You can no longer enable manifest V2 extensions using chrome://flags switches (You still can for now)
* You can no longer download the extension from the Chrome Web Store on a version of Chrome/Chromium which supports MV2 extensions.
A lot of hate and bashing of Firefox here. On my Linux machine (relatively modern desktop) there's no difference in speed between Chrome(Chromium) and Firefox. A lot of people talk about goodies and extensions. I get it, life is easier with some of those but I just don't care. I use it barebones with enhanced tracking protection and it works flawlessly. Don't see many ads, the ones I see are not intrusive.
Instead of arguing about tab management and rendering performance, we should be asking what does a healthy browser ecosystem look like in five years? Do we want 95% of users on browsers controlled by advertising companies (Google), hardware manufacturers optimizing for their own services (Apple), or cloud providers with obvious conflicts of interest (Microsoft)? Firefox's technical quirks are fixable. The uncomfortable reality is that true browser independence might require something Mozilla has consistently failed to achieve: sustainable revenue that doesn't depend on surveillance capitalism. Until that happens, we're choosing between degrees of corporate control, not between freedom and captivity.
If we are talking about clean firefox setup, I really like the Firefox Gnome Theme (https://github.com/rafaelmardojai/firefox-gnome-theme). It really integrates Firefox well with the rest of GNOME apps.
I stopped using Firefox when they removed support for ALSA. I think it is possible to compile with it, but the bin is just PulseAudio. I don't want to compile it every week. That is my only issue, and while I liked Firefox, but they are losing users in a stupid way.
Currently, Firefox has a system RAM leak for the GPU process. You need to periodically go to about:processes, scroll down to the GPU process, and close the GPU process with the X button on the right column.
If you want them to fix it:
1) Generate a profile performance with https://profiler.firefox.com/
2) Submit the link with your results to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/
A bit ironic that I cannot see the left few pixels of that site in Firefox on Android. (A 'T' starts at the vertical bar)
Why "ironic"? The website is using flexbox incorrectly, all spec-compliant browsers have that behaviour on small viewports. Using the "safe" keyword fixes that.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/align-items...
Firefox was my main browser after Chrome MV3 stuff, but now I'm moving to Orion by Kagi. I found, on my Macbook M1, Firefox hog the battery a lot seen from the energy impact on Mac's activity monitor (average 12hr power >1000 compared to Orion ~350). Don't expect extensions to work well on Orion, though, but I can live with it for now.
great write up but my issue has always been how to persist or store changes across re-installs.
I tried Firefox just a few days ago, but it didn't work out. I just missed too many things out of the box. My main browser is Vivaldi (so all the chromium goodies + privacy + made in EU). Safari comes in as a close second, I tend to use it on the go because it syncs well with my Mac and Apple throttles any other browser on iOS.
Ah, nice share.
I was looking at different chrome alternatives and most of them had ~something~ wrong with them. I have not tried vivaldi yet, but from a bit of research it seems just like the browser I was looking for. Thanks for sharing.
Any specific thing a first time user should know? Use build in ad blocker or install uBlock Origin?
> I just missed too many things out of the box.
Another very vague comment bashing Firefox without any real explanation.
I'm not sure making a list that's been done time and time again here would make a difference. But if you're truly interested, here are my top 3:
- Firefox comes packed with all kinds of telemetry and analytics turned on.
- No workspaces/profiles. I know there are extensions that can enable various flavours of this functionality, but it's just too much overhead to experiment and test every-single-one.
- Widgets! I love Vivaldi's Dashboard for when one needs more than just a homepage.
> No workspaces/profiles. I know there are extensions that can enable various flavours of this functionality, but it's just too much overhead to experiment and test every-single-one.
Most of it is built-in and these days there is generally only one recommended extension: Multi-Account Container. Containers (tabs in the same window with different cookie jars/etc) are built-in, the UI for working with them is not, and MAC is the generally agreed best UI. It lets you create as many named Containers as you want and assign them a color to gently stripe your tabs. You can right-click the new tab button and get a list of Containers to open the next tab in. You can right-click an existing tab and reopen it in a new Container. (TIL from this article there's an option to have left click on the new tab button always open the Container menu. I don't think I'd use that, but it's nice to know.)
If you want to go older school, Profiles (browser windows with different extensions/cookie jars/everything) have been around since the beginning of Firefox (and it shows in how old and ugly some of the UI still is, hah). `about:profiles` is a profile manager when you are already inside a Firefox browser. The `-ProfileManager` command line switch is the ancient startup option to manage profiles before opening a browser window at all. If you like to use side-by-side profiles often you want `-noremote -ProfileManager` and/or `-noremote -P $profileName` shortcuts. (`-noremote` says not to send it to any currently open Firefox window.)
> Multi-Account Container
Last I looked, it was not possible to bind a bookmark to a preferred MAC.
The MAC UI itself allows to assign a domain to always open in a specific container. If you need it more specific than an entire domain there are other extensions that can allow you to automate containers, but personally all I've needed are the domain-wide assignments.
Admittedly, I also tend to use unloaded tabs more than bookmarks, so if I need a very specific address in a specific container I am probably likely to just unload it but leave it open somewhere. (Sideberry "helps" me in this bad habit with multiple tab panels and tree grouping of tabs.)
I would also advise people to use user.js such as arkenfox / betterfox.
Also available on mobile
These so-called "hardening scripts" cause a lot of issues and volunteers have to waste their time helping clueless users who copied them without understanding what they do.
Been using Firefox since release. It's not as good as it once was, but then, nothing is anymore, on the internet. Still recommend it for every reason in this article. Honestly just UBo is enough of a reason.
.. and then there are panorama extensions, which ease handling a lot of tabs immensely. No other browser seems to have anything alike. No, the grouping of tabs into tabs does nothing compared to this.
https://github.com/projectdelphai/panorama-tab-groups and https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/panorama-view...
I really like Firefox.
Unfortunately due to Apple’s restrictions on ad blockers it’s become kind of unusable for me on iOS.
Is there a way to incorporate ad blocking on mobile Firefox on iOS?
Try using Orion. Its not Firefox but has uBO on iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/orion-browser-by-kagi/id148449...
I prefer stylebot to stylus, as it doesn't require an unnecessary dance to make a specific theme and then mark it as only for the current site, before you can plop some css into the sidebar for that specific site.
I switched to chrome just this week. firefox is so insanely slow for me
Firefox is all that.
Except on my arm-based crhomebook. There it gets confused and do not resize properly thinking is in phone format.
Also cast to chromecast is a no-go.
If it wasn't by those 2 issues I would have ditched chrome long time ago.
Just use Brave, is much better
This is really hard to read. I can't get the tone of the article or how I'm supposed to feel about it. Or is it a generation gap, I was born in 2000.
>I can't get the tone of the article or how I'm supposed to feel about it
It's a tech article. What do you expect to feel while reading it?
> This is really hard to read.
I am old and I agree.
It is full of things that break the flow of reading like asking a hypothetical question to the reader and following it up with a plosive like 'BOOM!', or inserting useless conversational stops like like 'sure,' 'But...', and '...Nope!'.
Makes it sound/feel like an excited toddler is desperate to tell you something, but cant really get to the point.
I'll wait for the site-isolation to fully mature. Using Brave until then.
[EDIT]: I was wrong, uBlock Origin Lite was addressed by the article and does not have the same features.
from TFA:
Filter lists update only when the extension updates, no fetching up to date lists from servers (this is a big one!)
No custom filters, so no element picker which allows you to point and zap
Many filters are dropped at conversion time due to MV3’s limited filter syntax
No strict-blocked pages
No per-site switches
No dynamic filtering
No importing external lists> No custom filters, so no element picker which allows you to point and zap
> No per-site switches
These aren't accurate. My version of uBOL in Chrome (2025.718.1921) has these features.
You're either not using uBlock Origin Lite or do not know what the "per-site switches" are: https://github.com/gorhill/ublock/wiki/Per-site-switches
See the section in the article that starts with:
> Sure, there’s uBlock Origin “Lite” now, which does the same thing, right?
With native vertical tabs, Firefox is now perfect for me. I use it on PC and phone with Ublock Origin and some others. Not slow for me and actually feels like it handles many tabs better than Chrome or Edge.
I have tried Vivaldi also, but the UI was too slow still, even though it's very nice and custom. Brave is too weird with all the crypto stuff. So FF it is for the foreseeable future.
I migrated from Firefox to Orion half a year ago.
I am now ready to migrate back, since Orion has UX problems that aren't being addressed fast enough that are non-issues in Firefox. And because I haven't found a replacement for Firefox Sync that works as nicely (Vaultwarden is super nice, but the Bitwarden browser plugins suck ass.) I still use Orion for iOS because Firefox for iOS has such a broken memory consumption it kills my phone if I open the app.
In those six months of not primarily using Firefox on Desktop, it's been blocked by Cloudflare.
This is what happens when you lose market share below a certain threshold.
I really hate Mozilla Corporation.
But Firefox is not theirs to enshittify.
I'm back on Firefox on desktop, and am still using Firefox as a password store on iOS, since it doesn't start the app. So I can still have one source of password sync.
I'd rather not visit websites that block off browsers for not allowing them to track me. Sorry, guys, that's a shitty thing to do. I get it, Cloudflare is addressing a bot problem.
Just use Brave Browser. https://brave.com/
It's like de-Googled Chrome, as it's based on the same Open Source Chromium browser, has all of the ad-blocking and anti-fingerprint tools built in, and all of the Google taken out.
You can also run popular browser extensions published for Chrome, but you don't need to worry about ad blocking, as Brave has you covered by default.
It also blocks YouTube ads effectively, by default. There's nothing you have to do to make this work.
Brave wants to replace "bad" ads from third parties with their own "good" ads.[1]
They have also in the past been caught adding their own referral codes to crypto transaction URLs pasted into their browser. [2]
[1] https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/how-to-earn-and-use-cryptocurre... [2] https://www.pcmag.com/news/brave-browser-caught-redirecting-...
I'm not sure trying to bad mouth it by bringing up a 5+ year old long fixed thing is the right way to go about making a point. Heck if we're doing that theres vastly more "wrong" over at Mozilla and Google to complain about in that timeframe.
Aa of right now Brave has two "features" that you can disable - the crypto thing and a vpn advert. Once those are off, they are off. You don't see them anymore, they aren't sitting in the background running, and they aren't calling home.
It's no different to Mozilla's constant and blatant attempts to reactivate telemetry data in Firefox updates despite opting out - I'd argue that's a bigger offence.
You can disable Brave Shields and just use classic uBO (which Brave supports) instead.
Yeah, this seems a bit disingenuous given the nature of, and the time since that issue existed.
I did their ads, I made hundreds of dollars leaving them on in the early days. I value my attention more so I've shut them off.
tl;dr - how to Firefox? Blind taste test.
Had been using Arc for some time with several qualms about the UX and after trying Dia and finding it's just yet another Chrome, decided to see what Zen is like. I expected the same - but it wasn't. All qualms were solved and I had no rendering problems.
It was only when I noticed the Mozilla login flow I realized I had switched to Firefox - I had an assumption that all alternative browsers are on Chromium now. Really lucky since if I knew, I may not have given a fair chance given the rendering problems I remember from giving it a try 3-4 years ago.
To this day Firefox refuses to let me use credit card autofill on Android. I know this feature exists and I suspect it's locked to some geographical regions. It pisses me off to be a second class citizen on the same software as my American counsins. The feature is present on desktop, just not mobile.
If you’re having performance issues with firefox and thunderbird, I recommend vacuuming the sqlite files under your profile. Compacting mailbox helps TB as well.
> I want to do my part to convince you to switch to Firefox and show you how I use it.
Last time I checked, the tab closed button was still on the right side of the tab. On the macOS version. This is a deal breaker. Therefore FF is useless to me as a Mac user.
Other browsers on the Mac have this correct. Safari, Opera, Vivaldi at least.
Vivaldi is the other contender, who is at least on par if not better with FF in terms of privacy.
Problematic privacy is of course the reason why Chrome wasn't even installed on my machines ever. Opera and (arguably so) Brave are the others with privacy endangering issues.
There are other Mac only options, but they have even worse problems, being cloud dependent and whatnot.
I do like the concepts of what they are trying to do in most of the cases, but for now I prefer the clarity of Safari.
Now, some of you might not be Mac developers, so let me say something about app development on the Mac. There is a manual with guidelines of how to do it. It is called the Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) and that stuff is very important. It would be a very interesting process to develop something like this for a desktop Linux, btw.
When I have to work with apps that don't adhere to the HIG, that's bad for productivity and enjoyment. So I don't.
In the case of FF I was willing to hack the UI CSS to correct the button issue. Hey, it's FF after all. Two upgrades later, the thing wasn't working any more. Ok, bye bye FF!
For a while FF was the most microsoftian app on my Mac, because it always announced it's updates without me being able to silent those notifications.
I am still watching, it's FF after all, but if Mozilla can't correct these (actually minor) issues of keeping the UI clean, I can't have it.
I wonder how much posts like these do to push people away from Firefox and towards other alternatives like Brave, Orion, etc.
Surely, given the HN audience, virtually nobody in here is seriously discovering that Firefox exists. However, once the HN reader's mind is set to move away from Chrome, the comments here always push various alternatives to Firefox (mostly forks) that might be unknown and interesting to try.
Another way to reason about it is such posts in such communities probably don't pull a lot of "normies" to Firefox... however they probably also push a lot of "nerds" to Firefox alternatives, not to Firefox itself.
I think the root of it is that crowd of nerds aren't particularly interested in going back to Firefox. That they have a new interest in getting off Chrome doesn't change that as they already have a browser they aren't too thrilled with installed and configured. The promise of some new variant that does things right (tm) is the only thing interesting enough to trigger a switch.
Just fell to my knees in a Walmart, this is how I find out that Chrome pulled the trigger on uBlock Origin. While I haven’t used Firefox in a while (brave user) it’s still a shame such a thing happened, although it was just a matter of time. It’s like every day the enshittification of the internet keeps accelerating.
Sorry. This article smells like a sales pitch. I used to use Firefox but changed to Duckduckgo. Firefox had started to feel enshittified. Learned most of Firefox funding comes from .. g**gle.
A browser won’t survive off the user share of HN Raspberry Pi Guys.
Let’s be practical, the average user isn’t concerned about browser monopolization. Firefox isn’t going to catch up because its users made some philanthropic choice to use it. This isn’t Linux, the web is far too complex to write a modern browser for without corporate backing.
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First rule of Firefoxing: use a fork instead
Firefox will never become strong again under Mozilla.
Firefox has no profiles. It has a bunch of hacks, such as containers, which are cumbersome to use. Chromium provides separate windows with different profiles, and Firefox should follow Chromium here. Firefox's "solution" forces you to switch Github tabs between personal and work containers constantly.
> Firefox has no profiles.
Patently false. Been using profiles for years.
> bunch of hacks, such as containers, which are cumbersome to use. Firefox's "solution" forces you to switch Github tabs between personal and work containers constantly.
Rarely have I had to that. Until I added rules to open certain URLs in specific containers.
> Chromium provides separate windows with different profiles, and Firefox should follow Chromium here.
Absolutely not. Profiles are a poor "alternative" to containers. How do I add a rule to pin URLs to specific profiles? How would that even work, if it did? A new window for some links? Re-use some random window with the same profile? How do I switch to it? Switch back? Don't tell me to use the Window Manager via Alt-Tab. I organise tabs into windows by shared context.
Then there's the whole issue of sync. Profiles don't share anything. Each profile needs to be configured individually. I like not having to add uBlock Origin to every browser profile. I like not having to think if I have my password for this rarely visited site in this profile or another one. Or a bookmark. Or form info.
----
Just because containers have no use to you / you couldn't find a use for them, doesn't mean the rest of us also shouldn't have the luxury of using this feature. Feel free to use Profiles as you'd like. Leave what works for us alone.
Firefox's "answer" to profiles is to run essentially two (or more) copies of the browser rather than only copying the profile-specific parts of each profile. This leads to a lot of wasted CPU cycles and RAM and is a very suboptimal solution compared to what Chromium and Safari do these days, not to mention that the ability to create and switch profiles is not included in the UI by default and requires an extension to access.
I think you may be mixing up profiles and containers.
Profiles do have a built-in UI at about:profiles or by launching Firefox with -P, neither of which requires an extension. Admittedly this UI is a bit basic, but a better version is being rolled out (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-management). Running multiple profiles side by side does indeed involve running multiple instances of the browser.
Containers are an internal API and need an extension like Multi-account Containers to provide a GUI (though this is an official extension by Mozilla), however they don't require running multiple copies of the browser.
The new profile manager has already been enabled for most users.
If you don't see it in the main menu yet, type `about:config` into the address bar and toggle `browser.profiles.enabled`.
The new profile manager has already been enabled for most users.
If you don't see it in the main menu yet, type `about:config` into the address bar and toggle `browser.profiles.enabled`.
Just tried it out - definitely an improvement UX-wise, but it still essentially runs two copies of Firefox rather than only isolating profile-specific features.
I just did this and it doesn't see the multiple profiles I've been using for years through about:profile. Strange.
I personally prefer containers to profiles. Rather have one window with many tabs than many windows.
I use profiles on Firefox daily and they work fine
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...
The only way to access it with `about:profiles`? It looks like a joke. How could users possibly find this?
UPD. The more I look at this, the worse it gets. Hidden under a special URL, requires you to launch the default profile before you can switch to another profile (yes-yes, there are command-line hacks). It's more like a user data manager for devs than profiles for users. Even containers look better than these profiles.
You can use "firefox -ProfileManager". I didn't even know about about:profiles. There is some work on improving the UI: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-management
Anyway, your claim was "Firefox has no profiles". That is not true.
Really? Then you can claim that Chrome has supported "profiles" since its inception, with the `--user-data-dir` command-line switch. If something is not user-visible, it is as good as non-existent. Firefox has no profiles as far as a regular user is concerned.
The new profile manager has already been enabled for most users.
If you don't see it in the main menu yet, type `about:config` into the address bar and toggle `browser.profiles.enabled`.
what in the world are you talking about? you click settings in the upper right hand corner and its right there.
Another thing you can do is run multiple profiles at the same time with the -no-remote argument , so "firefox -P profilename -no-remote"
Containers feel like a much more useful feature to me than profiles - I don't wanna open a new window for each website that I want to isolate from my main session, but with containers, it's trivial.
I mostly agree, and I personally just use containers (and heavily!) However, that has not been the case for my spouse. Profiles are important to her in two scenarios:
1. The primary website she uses for grad school (canvas) REQUIRES third party cookies to be enabled for it to work. Containers cannot have different settings here, but profiles can. So she can have a School profile that enables 3rd party cookies and she just uses this profile for Canvas.
2. She likes to keep ALL of her work stuff separate and not have that sync to her personal mobile. So she has Personal Profile (with containers) and a Work Profile (also with containers). The two profiles are themed differently, so it makes it very clear if she is in her "work" browser or "personal" browser.
Firefox's profile management has been a struggle for her (I found creating different application icons for each profile worked best), and I am very excited about the new profile manager!
> Firefox has no profiles
That is not true [1]. Firefox has profiles and while you can argue that their UX is worse than chrome but that doesn't mean it does not have profiles.
[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...
> Firefox has no profiles.
It does now, it is being rolled out gradually:
I didn't know about this new feature, that looks nice. One can force-enable it with the browser.profiles.enabled config.
Firefox havs always had profiles (about:profiles, firefox -P). I do hope this new feature will be able to manage profiles created with the current method.
This is weird to me because I so much prefer Firefox's per-tab containers to having to use separate windows for profiles. I wish chrome had something like it.
The problem here IMHO is that when many tabs are open it becomes confusing quickly which tabs have what. With a profile everything is clear.
I used Firefox and I like it but honestly the profiles were more difficult to use than Chrome's.
Are you one of those people with a thousand tabs open so the tabs shrink to just the icon? Even in that extreme case, everything is color coded and the URL bar labels it.
Not GP and I rarely get into the thousands anymore but I am clearly of the opinion that computers can remember much better than me.
So many of the things I start looking into starts with a search in a single tab and then every link I ctrl-click during the process ends up in a tree underneath it (yes, I use Tree Style Tabs).
This has a few benefits:
- I can easily see things in context
- when I end up on a particularly useful (or useless) page I can easily see what page linked me there
- I can read the root pages and follow links from every one of them without losing track (the root page is usually a kagi search)
- when I am finished I can either export the whole tree as a nested markdown list (yes, there is a nice TST extension that allows me that, and yes, you read that correctly, it is an extension to an extension) or just close it.
I have a shortcut that starts a separate profile like this:
<path to firefox.exe> -profile <path to profile folder> -no-remote
It definitely has "profiles" as in the entire set of settings/ preferences/history[1]. Whether or not they are usable as a replacement for Chrome's however...
[1]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...
firefox has had profiles for years, maybe decades its hidden in about:profiles i guess they're just adding a proper ui now
The issue with firefox is sites don't develop or test on firefox and will outright just say use chrome/edge. e.g. on air india can't buy tickets (must use chrome, actually a _lot_ of india sites require chrome to just work), one of my work's agency website literal says on login to use chrome or edge.
I mostly blame mozilla "leadership" for going off on ridiculous directions and identity politics. They've reaped what they've sown. It's only because of short term corporate profits that chrome now has to claw back some ad revenue and by blocking ublock, now firefox gets some users back. The problem is that it's not new users.
Use this extension created by a Mozilla employee: https://addons.mozilla.org/addon/chrome-mask
THANK YOU. I've been running a Chrome User-Agent for a few years, but my highly-manually UA editing was obnoxious. This is just what I needed.