There was a time when Firefox felt a lot slower than Chromium, but for a few years now it's been close enough (even if still somewhat slower) to not bother me, while Firefox clearly offers superior functionality and much better performance under high load. The last time Chromium has felt attractive compared to Firefox was a really long time ago. Glad to see it moving in the right direction still.
I switched to Firefox from Chrome years ago because Chrome was slower. Specially, when there were many tabs opened, switching tabs in Chrome were usually prefaced with a blank white screen for about 2 seconds.
I've been staying with Firefox not for the performance (today Chrome loads Google sites like YouTube faster), but mainly for Tree Style Tab extension. I couldn't imagine opening more than a dozen of tabs without it.
I've stayed (edit: with Firefox) because of (1) containers and (2) password storage. I have to use Chrome for some things, and every now and then it prompts me for a password and refuses to use the auto-fill. Totally torques me off because my passwords are not easy.
But I completely trust Firefox on the password issue, to the point that I let it generate them for me.
>But I completely trust Firefox on the password issue, to the point that I let it generate them for me.
Not that I don't trust them but I always recommend using a dedicated PW manager like KeePassXC which is FOSS and has been security audited, plus it gives you full control over where you get to store your PWs and how they're secured and generated.
To be fair, Firefox is also FOSS, contains an integrated password manager with extraordinarily well-integrated browser compatibility, and by opting to use a master password to encrypt or decrypt the store also gives you control over securitization, storage location, and generation.
Not to say that KeePassXC isn’t useful if you want even more fine-grained controls, but it seems like in the
> Use password in browser
Use case, KeePass would actually weaken the security guarantee by adding a second component you need to trust.
My problem with Firefox's password manager is there doesn't seem to be a way to export/import to/from an encrypted file that I can back up to other places. I can export to an unencrypted text file (and no apparent way to import again), or I can use their sync service (or run my own maybe?), or I can backup the entire firefox profile.
This is what Firefox says when I go to export my logins: "[!] Your paswords will be saved as readable text (e.g., BadP@ssw0rd) so anyone who can open the exported file can view them."
KeePassXC on the other hand gives me a simple encrypted database file that I can copy around to different places for some peace of mind.
> "[!] Your paswords will be saved as readable text (e.g., BadP@ssw0rd) so anyone who can open the exported file can view them."
That's effectively what almost all of them say when you export your logins (usually as CSV, JSON, or XML), because they export in plain text, because you don't know what the user needs it for, up to and including manual imputation (better than expect a random user to have to learn how to print out a database, or worse submit that database file to some online service to print out).
Users aren't necessarily highly computer literate, we don't want to prevent people from having security, but even if they were they may still have use cases that do not accept such a database (migrating password manager that don't know your previous one, perhaps), so most of them use (unencrypted) plain text and just accept they'll have to leave it in the user's hands, and warn them it's exposed.
We'd absolutely love there to be safe, portable ways to move our data around such that it remains encrypted while migrating, yes, but that's just not something our current crop of software really enables fully these days, unfortunately.
I'd even say "adding a second vendor you need to trust". Yes, these days there seems to be a strong drive to just get a big package out of a single hand. Like having the browser closely tied to the OS. I don't like it. I prefer to choose the individual parts as i see fit. Keepass and some bit of custom sync, in this case.
Now, in the same vein I expect MS & Google making it easy to support different browsers, I'd want Mozilla making it easy to integrate other password managers. I'd love to be corrected, but afaik the "password manager with extraordinarily well-integrated browser compatibility" doesn't offer any way or API to connect my keepass with it. Its only for Mozilla's own stuff. Not the open, user controlled system i'd love Firefox to be.
The Firefox Android Addon system is even worse... only a very short list of pre-approved extensions are available. With the escape hatch for devs requiring some stupid online-account. Sorry, but how is that different from an App store without side-loading?
Still recommend using Firefox, since it is the best we have. But yeah, i don't like the less and less open direction apparently chosen by Mozilla. And wonder if not being a good role model will hurt them down the line...
It would limit the scope of the damage. Instead of getting the entire password database, the keylogger would only get those passwords that were used while the system was compromised.
True, but keyloggers aren't one of the threat vectors I am most concerned about, and as mcpackieh said, it still limits the potential damage quite a lot.
We all have to gear our security mechanisms toward our particular threat assessments.
What is your biggest concern? I would think key loggers are a more common threat than attacks on the password manager directly, especially if you're running something niche. What else do you gain from keeping it air gapped?
Keyloggers rank low for me because I'm only using my own devices that I have physical control over, so a dongle is unlikely. A keylogger would have to come in through malware.
That's certainly possible, but if malware were able to get installed despite my other protections, then I probably have much larger issues. And the keylogger would have to phone home with the data, which is unlikely (but not impossible) to happen without raising some alarms.
So I'm more worried about sharing data with the password management company systems themselves. If there's no real reason to send data over the net, then I don't want to send data over the net. The smaller the attack surface, the better.
It's just my personal policy. In reality, I don't consider either keyloggers or password management company computers to be huge enough risks that I lose sleep over them. Plus, I don't want to become reliant on a particular piece of software to do important things -- typing my password by hand means that I'll have the most common passwords memorized, so if something goes wrong that prevents the use of the password manager, I'm not locked out of anything.
This is unfortunately not robust against phishing which is for most users the bigger risk IMO (not necessarily power users, but I'd argue that most power users are too sure about themselves in this regard). It's always a question about the threat vectors and this weight you give them.
Firefox password management on desktop is great. I've got very frustrated with it on mobile (Android) over the last 6 months, with it failing to recognise password fields on account creation to generate passwords. I was relying on Firefox password management but have just transitioned to Bitwarden.
I've got 30 tabs open today, and the oldest of them is only a few hours old.
I look down a page, see interesting links, and middle click them all. They open tabs but don't actually load until I click that tab. I close each tab after I'm done reading it, or after a few hours if I never got around to reading it and lost interest.
Is that hoarding? I don't think so. But it's the sort of workflow that TST makes pleasant but is extremely frustrating with a horizontal tab bar.
It's just ADHD, there's not really a workflow reason that I have 1000+ tabs open. It just kind of happens.
Firefox/Sideberry is useful for mitigating that. I also have workflows set up for mass-exporting my tabs from Firefox to a text file and reorganizing them in plain-text and re-opening just the tabs I care about[0].
Bookmarking on any browser is cumbersome and leads to disorganization over time. Tree-style tabs helps make that organization at least a little bit easier.
It's ADHD sure, but it's also an unwillingness to close tabs, and (generally) that we have poor windowing systems that force us into ~1-2 browser windows at a time because browser windows are harder to manage than tabs.
The big change for me has been realizing that all my "tabs" are still there, in the form of my browser history, or if not, via Google search. If I can't find my way back to a website via my history or via searching the web, then I probably also wouldn't be able to find it among 1000 tabs. So why not close the tabs and be free of them?
Most of the times when I've tried finding stuff in (Firefox) history, I wasn't able to. Unless it's in the last week or so. In my experience, history filtering and search options are too basic to be useful. Once I was even desperate enough to try to load some Firefox sqlite file directly, hoping to query history entries, but that didn't work out.
The only reliable way that I've come across for finding stuff after a long time has passed is saving every sightly interesting webpage to Zotero and using fulltext search afterwards (including webpage body).
I'm curious, do you find the builtin browser history facilities sufficient for your needs, or are you using some third party tool for that?
I do find the built-in browser history is sufficient for _my_ needs, in that I mostly want a super-fadt autocomplete of certain hot items. Everything else that I know I want to revisit and find again I've bookmarked, but I don't bookmark that many things, maybe ~1 new bookmark a month.
Mostly though I realize I have focused heavily on not having clutter vs. being able to recall quickly everything I've ever found necessary or useful. It's a trade off I like, but it may not be for everyone.
> Most of the times when I've tried finding stuff in (Firefox) history, I wasn't able to. Unless it's in the last week or so.
I mentioned this below, but check to see what your history limits are in Firefox (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1039372). It's possible if you do enough browsing that you might have trouble finding older pages because they're not there anymore.
I'm not sure what the best mitigation is for that, I've kind of accepted that history for Firefox is short-term, not long-term. It might be possible to rig up a webextension to save history more permanently, but I suspect it would need to do native messaging I think to do that, and at that point maybe it's better to just do regular copies of the SQLite database.
Relying on Firefox history less also has the kind of minor advantage of allowing you to be more aggressive about cleaning it yourself, which can have a noticeable performance impact in some cases.
I stopped using persistent browser history because I realized without it I become more diligent at bookmarking pages. Deliberately bookmarked pages are alot less clutter than my entire browsing history, so with my address bar only searching my bookmarks and current session's history, it's easier for me to find what I'm looking for. It results in smaller haystacks for my needles to get lost in. I loath using general purpose search engines to pull up pages when I already know what page I'm trying to get to, so I bookmark any page I think I'll care about in the future.
> because browser windows are harder to manage than tabs.
I find that browser windows are much easier to manage than tabs and make it possible to see more than one site at a time as well as have different sites/pages sized differently. If I'm doing heavy web research, I'll typically have many browser instances, each with three or four tabs.
> in the form of my browser history, or if not, via Google search.
So I do have bad news about this that may or may not be news: Firefox cycles history even if you never clear it. Unbelievably it's not permanent.
This has bitten me a couple of times in the past because I always assumed that naturally history wouldn't just get randomly deleted in the background, so I'd search for a tweet or article from an obscure blog and couldn't figure out why nothing was coming up in my history searches. Took me a long time to actually check "is this article I looked up 6 months ago even there anymore?"
There is a way to set up recurring database backups manually if you're willing to do some gruntwork, but it's kind of a pain and means you need to break out an SQLite browser across multiple backups in order to search.
---
Where searching is concerned, :shrug: that doesn't generally work for me, but I'm happy for anyone that it does work for :) My tabs aren't just so that I remember where a document is (although they serve that purpose as well), they're also a reminder that the thing exists at all. When it gets to 1000 tabs, is that useful? Arguably no, but the process getting there is pretty organic, it's not really a conscious choice.
---
In support of your comment though, being able to just stick all of my tabs in an open text file does genuinely help a lot[0] because it's permanent history and it serves the same purpose of being a reminder. It could be better, sometimes I leave tabs open on images that I forget to get around to saving or on open sessions and then the link rot hits whatever I'm looking at -- but it helps a lot. Being able to have an intermediary step between "leave everything open" and "categorize and organize everything you're looking at and save what you need" does allow me to do things like grab 500 tabs that I haven't checked in weeks and just stick them in a text file and write some notes at the top about what I was working on.
Split browser sessions, better windowing would help a lot with this, although I worry I'd end up with similar situations as my Emacs window, where everything looks clean but behind the scenes I have 1000 open files and 20 of them are unsaved scratch buffers ;) But the text file does kind of work the way you're describing; you can be free of the clutter, but if you really need to find everything, you know it's in a static text file that you can grep through at any time and that you know the browser won't do anything shifty with in the background.
[0]: I say that it's common to have 1000 tabs open, and it is, but currently I only have about 200, largely because of that method. I went through a bunch of stuff a few weeks ago and stashed most of the stuff I had open.
If your advice to someone struggling to stay organized is "be organized", you probably don't have much experience with ADHD or disorganization problems.
If you say "just" then you're trying to justify it without effort. Most of the people I interact with have ADHD and yes it's annoying as fuck but I don't fault them or blame them when they communicate in good faith. Using "just" to justify it means it's bad faith.
You choose to open tabs. Don't open tabs if you know you cannot handle that.
> If you say "just" then you're trying to justify it without effort
This is an interestingly narrow take on what is a pretty common broadly used phrase with multiple meanings. If you're familiar with people with ADHD, you should realize that ADHD isn't something you can "just" choose to ignore or decide not to be affected by. Executive dysfunction isn't something you get to opt out of.
That knowledge should clue you in that when I use the word "just" in this context that I'm not dismissing anything or treating ADHD like a joke or using it as an excuse to be lazy. Particularly given that I immediately follow up that usage by talking about practical strategies and techniques I've developed to try and mitigate the outcome.
My point with the word "just" is that there isn't some complicated reasoning going on in my head for why it's good for me to have 1000 tabs open, in the same way that it's not some kind of life strategy that I forget to eat when I'm hyperfixated. It's not a workflow or a decision that I've made about my life, it's just a consequence of ADHD.
> you're trying to justify it
Having a lot of tabs open doesn't need to be justified. It's not a moral failing. I don't need an excuse for having a lot of tabs open because it's not behavior that needs to be excused.
The only reason to mitigate it is because mitigating it makes my individual life better. It's not really relevant whether you or anyone else approves beyond that. I'm not trying to justify anything because there is nothing about the number of browser tabs a person has open that needs to be justified or condemned. Opening a browser tab is a morally neutral act.
I replied to a comment that was curious about why someone might have that many tabs open: was it easier to work that way? Is there some browser config that makes 1000s of tabs more efficient than bookmarks? No, the cause is just ADHD.
> You choose to open tabs. Don't open tabs if you know you cannot handle that.
??? I genuinely have no idea what you're suggesting or getting at here. People who open too many (?) tabs shouldn't be using browsers? What does this mean?
Given that you are saying you're familiar with ADHD, I know you're definitely not suggesting that the solution is to just choose not to open a lot of tabs in the first place. Because you know what executive dysfunction and impulsivity is and you're familiar with how people with ADHD operate, and so I know that you wouldn't make such a pointless or useless suggestion. But I'm at a loss for what you're actually trying to convey then.
Agreed, but once I switched to vertical tabs (via Sidebery with Firefox), it is WAY more manageable. Multiple tab spaces, named groupings, and a scrollable view that doesn't crowd and shorten names make it great for having many items in there with little downside.
If I'm still thinking about something and there is a related tab for it, it stays open. When researching/debugging/developing things, I usually end up with tangents, tries, multiple things to read/try and so on, so naturally, having a tree to represent my thoughts and my tabs makes sense.
I use Simple Tab Groups in addition to Tree Style Tabs. Simple Tab Groups allows you to show tabs from only one group.
So, I have groups for casual browsing, work, volunteer work, etc. So I don't have to close tabs when switching from one to the other. I just switch and those tabs are still there when I want to next look at them.
> I can't imagine having more than a dozen tabs open, period. You tab hoarders will never make sense to me...
Dashboards can easily take two or three tabs.
The bug tracker is opened on a tab as well as the ticket page. You have a pull request opened to review it, and you check something in the repository. Pop open a couple of diffs to check where someone messed up in the past.
And in the meantime you have Spotify/YouTube.
A dozen tabs easily.
Factor in task switching, checking CICD pipelines, and of course HackerNews opened somewhere, and you can get multiples of that.
A bunch is reasonable but I’ve seen people here on HN claim to have multiple windows with thousand of tabs on them. That is beyond comprehension for me but if it works for them that’s awesome.
One thing I've noticed since I started using Sideberry extension (a different/better take on Tree Style Tabs) is that after a day or two, the whole tab panel I separated specifically for HN tends to accumulate 100+ tabs. Having them laid out vertically in tiny font makes this apparent in a way that the regular tab bar doesn't.
Fortunately, I also habituated the simple behavior of "If I realize I have a lot of HN tabs open, right-click and close the entire pane". That's how I know I'm clocking about 100 tabs per two days on HN alone.
Also, Sideberry changed my tab hoarding habit in a way that still results in keeping hundreds of tabs, but using them in much more sensible way. I keep them arranged in trees stemming from topical groups on high-level panels, and trim or kill as they're no longer useful. Most of those tabs are unloaded anyway, but the interface works as excellent short-term (days to weeks, sometimes a few months) bookmarking system - and I don't lose tabs anymore (as in knowing the tab is there somewhere, but not being able to find it in the vast sea of other tabs).
Except for the annoying interaction (I think) with "open new tabs next to current tab", which causes Sideberry to somehow leave behind lots of stupid empty tabs named after the page the real new tab had. I deal with it, but it's annoying.
Oh, I'm yet to hit that problem. My current annoyance is that sometimes it gets confused after Firefox restarts, and I end up with a flat dump of tabs + an unending spam of those tiny warning popups at the bottom of its UI. The few times that happened, I ended up restarting Firefox again to stop the warnings, and then rearranging the flat list of tabs into groups and panels I want them to be in. Fortunately, it's not that big of a chore.
I switched to Sidebery a couple of months ago, and I find that it's somewhat better at restoring trees (though that could just be luck). I feel it's a bit more responsive, but these days I trim my tabs a bit more aggresive than I used to so my TST memories are somewhat biased.
I was surprised at how decent it converted TST tabs, but I can't remember how low my bar was; maybe try a new profile?
One thing I'm finding really nice in Sidebery though that TST can't do, is that I can create a parent node that is not attached to a specific page (via grouping).
Panels I'm undecided on. They seem useful, but they also seem like a bandaid over window management tools. One problem I'm having is that they don't restore, and all the tabs go back to the main panel. That may be some setting I toggled though.
Honestly, I don't remember. A year ago when I was considering going back to vertical tabs, I read a bunch of discussion thread and articles, and got the impression Sideberry might be better. Tried it, and it resonates with me - unlike TST, which I tried and quickly abandoned several times over the year.
Can't really point to any concrete issue, other than I have a distinct feeling Sideberry is much faster/lighter, and feels more like part of Firefox vs. some bunch of JS faking an UI on top of it. Sorry I can't give you a more objective comparison. I did find this though:
I'm convinced that a significant proportion of people today don't use bookmarks and have never leveraged their power because they grew up with tabs and never bothered to explore their other options for organizing websites.
You can save all of the tabs of your current session as a bookmark folder in one fell swoop! Your research tabs can be all saved together and opened as a group! Your gift ideas that you won't close because you don't want to forget about them can be saved in a folder named gift ideas so the next time you need them you have them, without the cost of using up your extra RAM and CPU cycles!
There were extensions for it more than a decade ago already, but these days it is indeed the regular out-of-box behavior (though Chrome got it only a few months ago IIRC).
Nah, I grew up with bookmarks and was constantly annoyed at the terrible UI for them and then when tabs got good enough I stopped using bookmarks since the default bookmarks UI is terrible.
For me I just type titles or word back into the browser bar and Firefox searches history. How are you searching/navigating to find the right tab of several hundred to go back to that tab?
Too many sites have useless titles, or URLs that if you go back to you don't get to the same state you had when you closed the window. So, I find that history is for the most part useless. Sometimes it works - but not reliably.
I hardly use it, though, because I usually have < 100 open tabs, not thousands like others have. I identify tabs by their tree structures (parents, children, siblings tabs) and the prefixes of the titles, whose lengths don't depend on how many tabs opened, because the tabs are arranged vertically.
Bookmarks are long-term useful things to keep saved, and don't serve the same purpose as these open tabs.
As for history, imagine you're researching a topic and have gone through fifteen search results, decided three of them were relevant, and closed the others. Your history is polluted with all fifteen, whereas this tab search will directly return you these most relevant pages only.
I switched about a year ago as well, partially because of performance pains but also because I tried to leave as many google products behind as I could for privacy reasons. I have not been disappointed so far... There are a few plugins I miss on Chrome but nothing I couldn't live without or find an acceptable alternative.
I switched to Orion[0] as a test, discovered the awesomeness of superbly integrated, native, tree style tabs, and now I'm stuck with this browser where sites I need for work are half broken.
I tried Firefox with Tree Style Tab extension, but it's not nearly as good :(
On firefox you can also use sidebery. If I recall correctly it worked decently well. Currently I'm using Arc which performs well enough for my use cases, although being locked into chromium kinda sucks.
Tree style tabs along with changing the CSS to remove the tabs from the top of the screen has been a game changer for me. Back when I had an M1 macbook air, it was the difference between everything feeling cluttered to feeling like a real laptop screen.
Edge has had vertical tabs with tab groups natively for a couple years now. It also has a nice Reader mode, good text-to-speech, and a screenshot tool built in. And it supports uBlock Origin as an add on.
Yeah, that's not the same, or even functionally close. Just a superficial resemblance. The value of tree style tabs is that you don't manually organize anything, and the tabs are nested arbitrarily deep so that you literally end up with a hierarchical tree of tabs that shows you the logical view of your browsing history with no manual input on your part. (Note the comparison to edge has been made before, which is why I specifically said tree-style tabs, not vertical tabs.)
Unfortunately due to limitations of chrome's extension model, there is no way to have a built-in extension sidebar like on firefox. I just manually position the tab window next to the browser window and it's fine. The window sizes are remembered and so it's really a non-issue.
Same. Recently I tried Brave because of all the praise but turns out the browser can only display around 80 tabs on the tab bar and every further tab simply never shows up even if it's in the foreground. I've seen mobile browsers handle many tabs better. I'm staying with Firefox, though I think Brave is probably still a good recommendation for users that don't want to go through the effort of installing an ad blocker.
Edit: so I just looked and it turns out you can enable tab bar scrolling on chrome://flags/#scrollable-tabstrip. Why is that even disabled by default?
It also has nice privacy centric and QoL features that strip tracking URLs, removes "Open in App" banners and AMP pages + redirects (e.g. old.reddit) for mobile, fingerprint randomisation and of course, will probably be the best Chromium-based browser adblocker post Manifest V3, but yeah you can also spin these features into a bundled Firefox or use one of those Libre* forks which already does most of this afaik.
"I see people talking about the Brave browser in the whole Firefox vs chrome debate, and while people rightly point out that it's just chromium and that they do shady cryptocurrency shit, I never see anyone point out that Brave's founder and CEO is Brandan Eich.
"He founded Brave after massive protests against him becoming CEO of Mozilla, resigning after 11 days. And the reason for those protests? He donated a lot of money to the Prop 8 campaign to ban gay marriage.
"So just remember: it's not just another chromium fork, it's not just a browser with cryptocurrency bullshit, it's also the browser founded by a homophobe because he got kicked out of his former organization for being a homophobe.
"Also, he invented Javascript. I'm willing to believe that maybe he has grown on the gay marriage issue, and made amends for his former mistakes. But Javascript cannot be forgiven."
A number of Mozilla's LGBT+ employees spoke out at the time saying that they'd already known about the donation but since he'd been utterly professional at work they still felt quite sufficiently supported by the company and leadership.
The donation getting publicised, going viral and becoming a shitstorm was what forced the end of his tenure as CEO, and I've heard comments since that his being replaced with a more business-y CEO has been a disappointing experience.
(I've no idea what percentage of the relevant subset of employees made such comments and/or held such opinions, and I'm not expressing an opinion on should/shouldn't about any given event, but it does seem to have been a little more complicated than "he got kicked out ... for being a homophobe")
Regardless of what you think about gay marriage, the mere fact that Mozilla forced out its CEO for having an unpopular political opinion is reason enough not to trust its leadership. Its one of the reasons I use Brave and not Firefox.
It seems disingenuous to sweep "actively working to deny people civil rights" under the rug of "having an unpopular political opinion."
Partially because this wasn't just a matter of having an opinion; this was an extremely concrete _action._ Even if you want to take the (dubious) stance that people should not be held responsible for their beliefs, surely we should still hold people responsible for their actions?
I invite you to imagine the equivalent but reversed scenario. What if Brendan Eich had been contributing money to the pro-gay-marriage campaign and had been forced out by right-wing staff at Mozilla? Would that have been appropriate?
Nope! But that's because extending civil rights more uniformly to more people is a good thing, and selectively denying civil rights is a bad thing.
Any reductive moral framework that abstracts every possible political position into interchangeable spherical cows in a vacuum does a disservice to its users.
You think that gay marriage is a good thing, but many people do not.
The two scenarios are precisely symmetrical. The only difference is that the cause on one side is one that you agree with, and on the other side is one that you disagree with.
You cannot decide moral questions by couching them in terms of “rights” and assuming that whichever side “advances rights” must be the correct side. Why? Because you can do that arbitrarily either way and for anything. e.g. “admitting gay marriage denies people the right to live in a society where traditional marriage is protected”.
Now what do you do? Both sides can say their cause is “advancing rights”.
> The two scenarios are precisely symmetrical. The only difference is that the cause on one side is one that you agree with, and on the other side is one that you disagree with.
Yep! That's pretty much what agreeing or disagreeing with something means.
But the reasoning you seem to be proposing is "here is something you agree with and something you disagree with, therefore those two things are interchangeable and you should not favor one over the other."
> Now what do you do? Both sides can say their cause is “advancing rights”.
I exercise human discretion and decide which of those rights is better, more valuable, more important.
In this case, that's not a tough call. Marriage provides a bunch of very concrete mechanical effects, from inheritance to medical decision making to finances to immigration. Whereas some people feeling happy about the fact that some other people can't access those rights is, at best, abstract and intangible.
And you'll also note that some of my previous references were to the uniformity of rights. Generally speaking, making rights more uniformly accessible to all people is better than having rights be selectively, arbitrarily limited to some people.
>> The two scenarios are precisely symmetrical. The only difference is that the cause on one side is one that you agree with, and on the other side is one that you disagree with.
>Yep! That's pretty much what agreeing or disagreeing with something means.
Not to me. The difference between us is that I am perfectly happy to work with people who do not share my political viewpoints.
Whereas I feel that Desmond Tutu covered this pretty well already: "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor."
the general discussion about crypto aside, if the genuine purpose had been to faciliate direct payments the obvious solution would have been to integrate some currency like Ethereum or Bitcoin, not pre-mined Brave Bucks, which is effectively like "paying" your users in your own quasi worthless gift cards.
There's flags for Firefox style scrolling horizontal tabs, and native scrollable vertical ones don't need a flag at all. Plus you get collapsible tab groups built in.
I'm old and I code for a living, I have maybe at most a dozen tabs open on any day. I can't imagine needing 80 but now I see why chrome has that new search tabs drop down.
On my main Firefox profile I'm rarely below 1000 tabs. I also use them as bookmarks and backlog, and every couple of months I scroll through the entire tab bar and close everything unimportant. The address bar also searches all open tabs and lets me jump to matches.
This is blowing my mind right now, how do you operate with so many tabs? For me, as soon as I can’t tell which site is in which tab it means I need to close some. And I don’t see the utility of having so many tabs open, since you can obviously only use one at a time. So if you have 100 or 1000 open, most are not being used most of the time, so why not close them?
What do you lose from closing tabs versus what do you gain from keeping them open? For me, if I use a site open it’s bookmarked or already in history so it’s fast to reopen. Closing tabs keeps my machine fast and memory usage low and also makes me faster at switching between the open tabs as I don’t need to search or parse through many UI bits.
I don't keep hundereds of tabs open, but tabs do serve two purposes that are not covered by either the browser history or by bookmarks.
One is as a sort of ad-hoc to-do list. When I leave a tab open it's because something is unfinished and I mean to come back to it soon. (I just wish there was a chronological view so that I could easily delete the oldest tabs).
The second purpose is to store the scroll position of longer articles that I haven't finished reading.
Tabs are the RAM of my TODO list, my README bookmark folder is the disk. Every so many months I purge the README folder, while regretting never really learning Blender, GIMP, SVG, d3, Godot, Rust, Julia, React, Svelte, CSS, shaders, machine learning, wavelets, Ableton, ....
If you can't tell which site is open, that's likely due to Chrome's poor tab UX. Constantly shrinking the click target makes tabs harder to work with. Not being able to read the tab title doesn't help either. Thus, Chrome incentivizes people to close tabs.
With vertical tabs, you don't have this problem. Every tab is the same width, making them easier to interact with. You'll need to vertically scroll the list if it gets too large, but that's a natural enough action. In this situation, you now close tabs because you want to, not because the browser is strong-arming you into it.
Where things really get fun is with vertical tabs that track ancestry, like Tree Style Tabs or Firefox or what's built into Orion. These tabs will nest as you follow links from one page to another, capturing context.
HN is a perfect example of where this works well. I can go to the home page, see a few stories that look interesting, open each comment page as a child tab. Then on each child I can open the associated article. And, as I read the comments, I can open new links that look interesting and that page is now associated with the root story.
I could bookmark all of these pages, but short of creating folders for each story there's no good way to capture that context. Naturally, that makes it harder to restore the same state when opening bookmarks. Instead, I leave the tabs open and when I'm ready to take an action on them (read an article, make notes in Obsidian, bookmark into a topic of interest) I do so and then I close them out. It makes context switching much easier when I know I'm not going to lose the context I just left. As an added benefit, I find if I leave tabs open I get better use of the browser cache than I do if I close an open later from a bookmark.
Btw, you can bookmark the entire tree, to re-open the entire tree later. I mostly have the same workflow as you, though, except for a few regularly scheduled things (book clubs, DnD sessions, etc), where I have a bookmarked tree ready to open for necessary context.
I never have 1000+ open but I do have many open in a couple different windows for long periods. Firefox does unload tabs when you restart (at least, it can be set that way. And there are extensions that let you unload them manually or after a time period). Unloaded tabs take no resources (or an unnoticeable amount if any) and allow this trick to work. That and vertical tab addons (I use sideberry).
A tab bar is similar to a bookshelf for me: I see the icon and title of open websites in a neat list. Closing tabs and banishing them to some hidden history/bookmark menu is like putting your books into boxes in the basement instead of a shelf. Sure they're still there, but you might forget you have a book because you never see it and you have to dig through boxes to find it.
If a closed tab only remains in the bookmarks or history it might as well not exist for my brain.
> Closing tabs keeps my machine fast and memory usage low
I just restart the browser now and then, which will unload all tabs again. They're still in the tab bar but require almost no memory until I use them.
FWIW the Firefox address bar also searches your history and bookmarks, so you can still retrieve those sites by searching for them without keeping a tab open for each one. Feel free to do what you like, obviously, but if having a zillion tabs open is causing you problems, know that there are other solutions :)
Just curious, what does that UI look like with 1,000 tabs open? Isn't it just like, one pixel per tab, or a scrollbar 50 times wider than your monitor? Is that actually useful?
The handy part about Firefox, unlike Chrome, will shrink tabs to a minimum width and then make them a horizontally scrolling list. I am somewhat of a tab hoarder (I also keep browser windows on vertical monitors), so using Chrome, where it would shrink tabs more and more until there's nothing but a sliver, wouldn't work. Below are screenshots of examples. Firefox keeps things usable; Chrome not so much. (I also know it isn't 1000 tabs, nor is it close to the amount I keep open on my work laptop).
Also, if you're wondering why my tabs look like they're from 2017, that's just another benefit of using Firefox [1]. Although as nice as it being able to actually customize our browsers, it would be nice for Mozilla to stop breaking things for sake of breaking things.
I was not aware of this, I will probably check this out on my Windows machine, since I've had a nasty bug where Firefox will decide to just use ALL of my GPU resources, crashing whatever game I am playing. Very annoying bug and I should probably take the time to report it, but every time I encounter it I'm usually focused on my game.
If it weren't for TreeStyleTab, the browser would be barely usable for me. This is the biggest reason that I won't use Chrome at all, and stay away from Edge.
I have Safari, Anybox, and Alfred, and the three works together in a nice way to save anything interesting quickly. And once in a while, I comb through the inbox and sort them out. If I ever need to explore a subject, I then have a collection of links ready. I feel uncomfortable whenever I have 10+ tabs open. It felt that I’m not focusing enough on my research (taking the proper time to read and reflect in order to find a solution).
The only things I hoard are books. They are more like my antilibrary (things I’d like to have read already) than collecting everything I encounter.
I usually have 600 tabs across several windows and desktops. Doesn't hurt performance if you have 64G or more so the real question is "why not?". Switching to an open tab using title text search is way faster than opening a bookmark
Hard for me to say, I guess I feel better not using more memory than needed, I think my security surface may less than it would be with a lot of tabs open but don't hold me to that as researched opinion, it isn't, can't think of anything else though.
> I've seen mobile browsers handle many tabs better.
It's my understanding that on mobile, tabs are unloaded from memory nearly instantly. You lose state but they use almost no resources. (I wish this was an option out of the box on Desktop. I've had extensions that do this and it's a godsend)
Huh. And I actually had to play around in Android settings to exempt Firefox from regular memory management, so it stops unloading tabs so aggressively. Not only this was a huge annoyance when browsing[0][1], it actually prevented me from using the one PWA I cared about[2] - it would literally blank out every time I switched away from and back to it, while having as much as a single trivial other app open, forcing me to kill and relaunch it.
It's not that my phone was memory-constrained, we're talking a recent Samsung Galaxy flagship[3] - it's purely overly aggressive memory management on part of Firefox.
--
[0] - Have 5 tabs open, all something trivial like HN, put away phone, grab it 5 minutes later, switch to other HN tab, ... wait half a minute for it to reload on a spotty connection at my in-laws' countryside home.
[1] - Talking with others about how we experience technology, I'm starting to feel that I'm abnormally annoyed by large or unpredictable UI latency.
[2] - TypingMind.
[3] - I learned to save up and only buy high-end, thanks to the experience with my first smartphone, that turned out to be underspecced for its own functionality. It's probably a case of [1], but one time I deviated from this rule and got my wife a mid-range phone, we both started to regret it in a few months, so it's not only me who has low tolerance for jank.
That seems like a good way to lose work if you're not careful. Although I would also argue that any well-designed web app should be able to handle this gracefully so maybe it will lead to better web apps.
Infinite scroll is an especially bad offender here. If I'm 50 screens down on an infinite scroll that is work and a page refresh losing my place should be treated as a data-loss bug.
(an even better idea is not to use infinite scroll at all)
I've never lost any unfinished messages due to this. I'm pretty sure Chrome prioritizes tabs where you've typed in text. Link in that other comment suggests that Firefox does something similar: "This is a smart process that avoids unloading tabs that are playing media, using Picture-in-Picture, or WebRTC. For more technical information, see this blog post"
And yeah fuck infinite scroll. I usually interact with such sites via their API or data export. Eg searching my YouTube Likes playlist is impossible on the web because I'd have to spend an hour scrolling before I can Ctrl+F
> More precisely, why 100 tabs in 1 window instead of 10 tabs times 10 windows?
I still don't understand why some people believe that the correct answer is anything other than 100 windows.
My platform has 40 years of well refined tools for managing windows, all of which work nicely and consistently across all applications. By comparison, all of the tab management systems are crude amatuerish knockoffs trying to reinvent the same tools from first principles, and isolated to a single application that's then inconsistent with everything else.
I don't understand tab hoarding either but Chrome/Brave's tab bar poor design becomes a problem even in what I'd consider pretty mundane scenarios.
Imagine you snap your browser to half your screen. Assuming it's not an ultrawide, you'll be able to fit maybe a dozen tabs before they're so tiny to be essentially useless.
It's not something I ever do, but I imagine the answer to your question is that you can easily search for a particular tab when they are all in one window, but it would become a big chore if you had to switch between multiple windows and search each one to find a tab.
On Firefox, at least, search will surface tabs in other windows. I often have 2 browser windows open, one for each monitor (one mostly for streaming content while I dick around on the other one).
The thing that I really like in Chrome (which I use for work) is Tab Groups. There is nothing like it for Firefox. Even the "Simple Tab Groups" extension, which is well liked, cannot do the simple "grouping" of tabs in a larger window - it simply hides all the tabs that are not in current use (which defeats the purpose of tab groups, I can just use windows for that). Another thing that Chrome has is the ability to name individual windows for easy Alt-Tabbing. Shame that Firefox doesn't have these things (that I know of).
Honestly you are the first person I’ve ever heard that prefers chromes tab system. Check out tree style tabs it’ll change your life. I hate chrome now solely due to it
I installed it to see. I don't want something on the "side" - I want the tab organization to be on the top where the tabs ordinarily live anyway. That's what the Chrome tab groups does well. I can just visually see which tabs are grouped together, and collapse all of them.
I haven't used chrome tab system, but Safari's tab groups are nice. Point being, most other browser, including esoteric ones like Vivaldi, have a way to organize tabs beyond simple order and moving them to other windows. If you are in a corporate environment, it is unlikely a user can install extensions like sideberry.
Tab groups in Chrome are a relatively new feature (and might still be behind an experimental feature flag, or at least the ability to save tab groups might be).
They're a game changer; so much better than using a third party extension IMO.
>Tab groups in Chrome are a relatively new feature
I'm gonna die on this hill but I'd like to add that Opera had tab groups natively without extensions since 2010 [1]. Damn I feel old now.
Also, UX of tab groups in old-Opera was way nicer than current-Chrome since you could just drag and drop tabs on top of another and it would automatically create groups.
Firefox had them. In fact, it had them since version 4 [1]. Then Firefox got rid of them again [2]. For no clear reason. And then Chrome copied the idea. And that's just a messed up timeline of events.
But it should never have needed to be one. Every extension is an increase in security exploit surface. They removed it because "it wasn't popular enough", rather than "it had problems that don't have the capacity to fix" in a period where they had no idea what to do with FF in order to not bleed money all over the floor. Removing it was a short sighted decision that did nothing to push the needle up.
Use Sidebery in Firefox for vertical tabs and it has not only better grouping but also entire "tab spaces" (workspaces) which you can switch between as well, if wanted.
I've been trying Sidebery since about 2 minutes after I made my last comment, and I think I like Sidebery more--and I've been using Tree Style Tab for _years_
Sidebery responds noticeably faster, and the panels are a great feature.
In Tree Style Tab you can create a tab group (which is basically a custom tab whose title you can rename, e.g. "Docs"), then move all tabs you want to group as one "inside" it. That makes all the tabs the children of the tab group. Now you have the best of both worlds: tab groups and tree-based tab structures.
I am a longtime and proud Firefox user, but this feature of Chrome is the one thing I want. When I see colleagues using it, it just looks like the right way to tackle that need.
The Firefox extension API (which wasn't an API really at all when it was first used) was created to support cases like the DOM Inspector and others which abused Mozilla's XPInstall and XUL overlays (both created for other purposes) to invent extensions. The same people that created the APIs were the same people building those extensions (see Joe Hewitt for Firefox and DOMI and later Firebug.)
I also like that Firefox isn't putting artificial limitations on the plugins that we can use in order to appease their infinite hunger for ad revenue.
Chrome's manifest v3's entire purpose for existence is to ultimately snuff out ad blockers so they can make the internet worse for everyone and get more money in the process.
And if you don't believe me then you are wrong.
Of course they won't do it immediately. They won't entirely rug pull their browser's user base.
They'll just keep raising the bar to get approved for Chrome Store, making it harder and harder to comply with their extension requirements while also changing the way they deliver their ads.
This way the ad blockers have to be updated and then go back through the extension store review process until the developers either get tired of jumping through their hoops and gives up or until they can no longer afford to keep the extension alive.
And then they'll rug pull, just like Reddit and Twitter, and all of a sudden ad blocking extensions will require that the users pay Google for the privilege of having fewer ads while still letting some ads through anyway, and that will be that.
Best to jump ship now, things are nice and cozy over here in "user wants are respected within reason" land.
Edge provides a compelling alternative that is a drop-in replacement for Chrome for most users. I wonder if the competition will keep Google in check. I also wonder if Edge will end up providing its own ad-blocker if Google's restrictions become too onerous. Probably easier than forking the core browser to maintain a parallel build without the extension limitations.
AFAIK all chromium based browsers will follow Manifest V3. Edge will also as otherwise adblockers and the like would impact M$ revenue.
Manifest v3 is just everyone's get out of jail free card for not being responsible for the destruction of ad blocking and privacy extensions. Blame it on Google, who says they "had to do it" for some reason that ultimately profits them and their ilk to the detriment of humanity.
>Chrome's manifest v3's entire purpose for existence is to ultimately snuff out ad blockers
There is no evidence of that, while there is evidence that manifest v3 provides security, privacy, and performance benefits. Manifest v3 doesn't stop ad blocking from working.
>so they can make the internet worse for everyone
Ads make the internet better for everyone since it provides a monetization model for sites to give away valuable services for free instead of everything being behind a paywall.
>And if you don't believe me then you are wrong.
This way of arguing doesn't convince people. This kind of stance only appeals to people who are antitech or antigoogle.
>They'll just keep raising the bar to get approved for Chrome Store, making it harder and harder to comply with their extension requirements
Adblockers are highly priviledged. They steered have a high bar to make it into a extention store.
That is what always irks me when people (usually only on here) say FF should have stayed with xpi and their old architecture. Only after all those changes did FF finally become performant enough for me to use it again, before it was a slow drag to me.
And I know, people with limited resources would have had a different experience, I don't know, I never had RAM issues. With enough RAM, FF was noticably slower than chrome.
TL;DR: Windows Defender had a bug that made certain system calls expensive on CPU cycles when Defender's Real-time Protection feature is enabled. After discovery, Mozilla reported this issue to Microsoft. Microsoft is releasing a patch that should result in lower CPU usage when using Firefox on sites like YouTube (a ~75% CPU usage reduction was noted when browsing YouTube in Firefox with the fixed version of Defender).
For example, Mozilla compiles Firefox’s official macOS and Windows builds on Linux because cross-compilation is faster and cheaper than compiling on macOS or Windows in the cloud.
Windows does not fork processes as fast as Linux, although this is improved somewhat in the in the Windows Subsystem for Linux.
Here is a somewhat foolish test with a shell script, that forks "/bin/true" 10 million times.
C:\>busybox sh
~ $ echo 'x=10000000; while [ $x -gt 0 ]; do true; x=$((x-1)); done' > timetest
~ $ time sh timetest
real 0m 46.86s
user 0m 46.76s
sys 0m 0.04s
Here is the same test with Debian's dash shell, one of the fastest:
$ cat timetest
x=10000000; while [ $x -gt 0 ]; do true; x=$((x-1)); done
$ time dash timetest
0m33.79s real 0m33.50s user 0m0.05s system
Not a great test, but there is quite a difference there.
No other browser has something like container tabs. Temporary Containers is an excellent extension to make each new tab its own isolated browser session too. First Party Isolation is 1 thing, but Chrome cannot do containers.
2K? Not bad. My main linux box is running around 7500 tabs in 34 windows right now. Takes about 30s to start, which is fine since that browser gets restarted only every few weeks. My secondary desktop (windows) only has 2750 tabs.
And there are users of Firefox out there with >15000 tabs.
Two reasons for tab hoarding:
1) spatial -- related tabs are close together (frequently open a bunch of related search results; if I come back to them to continue later, they're all together).
2) history -- unlike bookmarks or history entries, tabs retain the forward and back history, so when you return to them you can know how you go there (go back to the search for example).
I do periodically clear out tabs, especially duplicates. The Tab Stats extension by glandium is very handy for tab hoarders
I just mass-bookmark mine into a new bookmark folder periodically. Keeps it from getting anywhere near 2k.
I've been doing this for years and have never, not once, looked at the bookmarks. But it gives me the peace of mind I need to close all tabs and start over.
Exactly. You can even name the bookmark folder either with the thing you're researching/interacting with or just by the date if it's a ton of miscellaneous stuff. Then later on you can go thru and delete all the date-named bookmarks older than 6 months. At that point just search your browser history
As a fellow tab hoarder, I recommend using Tab Session Manager plugin. You can easily save all tabs, although from my own experience I've almost never restored them anyway lol
I prefer Tab Stash. It can be also used as a side bar for your tabs, but can close every currently open one and put them into a group you can optionally name for later reuse.
Pocket is builtin to Firefox, but in my experience, searching something you saved to Pocket (a thing that should be pretty core to the Pocket product) sucks and you really need simonw's https://github.com/dogsheep/pocket-to-sqlite to actually search it.
Not sure how it works now, but 2k tabs in Chrome used to be outright impossible on any reasonable hardware anyway, while Firefox always handled it pretty well aside of slowdowns ;)
As a fellow tab hoarder, I recommend Auto Tab Discard. Tabs are still open but aren't actually loaded until you click on them. With various configurable options for how that works.
I have five windows open with about 1000 tabs in each, no performance problems at all. It's great!
If you restart Firefox, it won't load a restored tab until you navigate to it, so presumably most of his are already backgrounded.
I find it useful to periodically prune, though. Save to Pocket or other "to read" list for things I intend to eventually read. Bookmark things I may want sometime, but don't need open. Potentially use Tab Stash to save groups of references for particular research tasks. Toss things that realistically I'm just not going to get to ever.
- I'm likely to return back to some of them. I might not know which ones. Typing in the address bar brings them back fast and the page does not need to be loaded again. Having the tab already open is also a strong signal that this is what I'm looking up.
- no noticeable slowdown anyway, Firefox is actually quite efficient.
- I don't care for taking the time of closing them progressively. It happens that I will close them all at the same time at some point when I feel like I need some clean up. Usually when I'm done with something.
- I think I learned to mostly ignore this part of the screen. Everything happens in the address bar.
In short, it's a combination of intentionally leaving tabs open so I can go back to them later without reloading the page, and not wanting to spend the time to manage them.
I usually have under 100 tabs open though, often even fewer.
Same applies to thousands of them, the "close everything" time just happens later in that case. I usually clean them up once Firefox starts slowing down, which is at tens of thousands.
With a good UI the unused ones just don't bother you anymore anyway until you scroll or filter them. They show me my train of thoughts without having to consciously organize anything. Unused tabs get unloaded from RAM anyway, so the cost of keeping them open is minimal.
A few years ago there was a version of Firefox that didn't slow down and opened quickly even at tens of thousands of tabs, but unfortunately it quickly regressed, so throwing everything out periodically is still inevitable:)
What cripples FF DevTools for me is being unable to find the setting for timeout on HTTP GET, during full-stack development. If I've set a breakpoint in a debugger on my server and proceed to single-step there, FF aborts the GET request with an error. So client-side JS doesn't see the eventual result of the GET, it has to recover from the error to proceed, e.g. by a full page-reload.
Chromium, last I tried it, by default sets the necessary HTTP timeout(s) to infinity if its DevTools is open.
My searches of Firefox docs/wiki, StackExchange, HN Algolia for a fix have come up empty.
Navigating to "about:config" and searching for "timeout" finds 27 different settings prefixed with the substring "network". Some are obviously in units of milliseconds, others perhaps whole seconds.
Anyone know which one (or what combination) might incant the necessary black magic?
One of the reasons I stopped using Firefox was that the columns in the devtools were unexpandable. I couldn’t see any data past what Firefox decided was enough to show. Did they fix this?
I'm assuming you're talking about table views like the Network or Storage/Cookies tabs? You can resize columns and each cell has a tooltip that shows the full content if it's hidden.
I really like that the Chrome profiler shows you the profile right there. Firefox insists on opening the profile in a browser tab. This is fine, but is an unnecessary context switch for me.
I use the FF devtools daily, and for what I'm working on, it has everything I need to help me get the things I need done. Knowing that I'm not everyone and have plenty to learn, what things are missing from the devtools for you?
Chrome's ability to temporarily edit and save changes to JS sources through the debugger editor is fantastic though.
Other than that it's mostly just improvements to what FF already has.
Search could be made much more useful, especially network requests. Searching all request bodies/responses for a particular string/json/regex would be a huge step up.
You can search the response of individual requests but there's a UI bug that makes it look like your filter is no longer applied when you select the next one in the list.
>Chrome's ability to temporarily edit and save changes to JS sources through the debugger editor is fantastic though.
Does this affect the live code so the change is available immediately? I once had a thought about wondering if this was possible to have the change available without refreshing
It made no sense for how that could work that I could imagine, but it would be holycrapthatscool if it could. some sort of second JIT or something, but i can only imagine the security nightmare that'd open up
The only issue I have (which, is happening less and less lately) is my debugger doesn't jump to the source. It hits and everything pauses, but I don't get routed to it and have to start progressing just to get it to work, which can make the debugger useless as you've gone past what you were looking at. This has happened across machines for years for me, and happens much less in chrome. But doesn't happen enough for me to switch.
Me too. I'm using FF since 3.6, and before that Camino (a derived version for the mac), and the only thing Google has done is strengthen my resolve to keep using Firefox, but I still prefer to debug on Chrome (well, Chromium). It just feels better, even though it's starting to slip and FF is improving slowly.
Looking at https://www.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/developer/ I'm a bit confused... Which features are just new features which will soon be in the main Firefox DevTools, and which are specific to installing the Developer Edition?
AFAIK, Firefox Developer Edition is currently just a repackaging of Firefox Beta and doesn’t have different devtools. It used to be a rebranding of Firefox Aurora (an alpha release channel between Firefox Nightly and Beta, now retired) with a different theme and a few different devtool setting changes.
I have been using the Developer Edition since 2014, when it was released, without issue. You are not locked into a single browser. Personally I use more then one browser, and professionally I always validate against multiple browsers.
I find different browsers excel at different things in regards to the developer experience. As an example I appreciate that Firefox had a formatted JSON view without requiring an extension. However Chrome also has capabilities that I wish were included in Firefox.
Firefox's GC seems to be much slower than chromium at least as of 109. Certain Vue websites are rather prolific in their garbage generation and The performance difference between chromium and firefox is easily noticeable, particularly if you leave an SPA open for a while.
I have never doubted the performance of Firefox. There’s a really old computer sitting in my house, never updated it for almost a decade now and my parents occasionally use it. The Chrome on it kept getting slower and laggier, while the Firefox always work fine. At some point, I just removed Chrome and told my parents to use Firefox: “the red fox is the Internet”
Chrome definitely lit a fire under Firefox, and that’s saying something because, at the time chrome came out, Firefox was “fast”.
I switched to chrome early on for the speed benefits.
At some point, Firefox started getting pretty close. Albeit not on parity with chrome, but chrome started major spying oriented pushes. So the minor loss in speed was worth it.
Now chrome could never win me back anyway. Google is evil.
Fx provided a decent enough performance boost with its builtin tracking blocker that more than made up for any difference in real world scenarios. …But I never switch away from Gecko since Fx v2.x.
“Fx” is and basically has always been (v1.5) the official abbreviation for “Firefox”. This abbreviation is basically the only one used inside Mozilla & you can see it reflected in their project names to this day.
> How do I capitalize Firefox? How do I abbreviate it?
> Only the first letter is capitalized (so it's Firefox, not FireFox.) The preferred abbreviation is "Fx" or "fx".
I tested Chrome and Firefox about 1 week ago. On about 30 tabs, Firefox uses about 1G more RAM than Chrome. Their speed is difference is unnoticeable. I also tested Edge and Vivaldi for RAM usage. The result is Chrome < Edge < Firefox < Vivaldi.
Those results say nothing. Were you RAM-constrained? When I am not, I have found that Firefox tries to use more memory. If I use Firefox while also having 3 VMs running and compiling stuff it stays down, whereas if I don't it easily starts using over 4gb (i have 64).
I think it's worth mentioning the caveat, that it doesn't natively support PWA in the same way WebKit browsers do. It has little to no support (depending on your definition of support).
