
Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try - MilnerRoute
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/06/20/technology/personaltech/firefox-chrome-browser-privacy.html
======
radmuzom
Most of the comments here are about using or not using Firefox, depending on
it's features as compared to primarily Chrome. However, for me, it is not
about being better or having more features at all - it is because I like
Firefox and want to support Mozilla and believe that Google should not control
the web. It is somewhat similar to the free software vs. open source debate -
one should use free software not because it is better, but because it is the
right thing to do (I understand that not many people agree with this
philosophy, which is fine).

Having said that, all sites which I regularly use work perfectly for me in
Firefox with acceptable performance. So I never found a reason to switch at
all. Rarely, I come across a website which is "best viewed with Chrome"; my
default action is to close that site immediately.

~~~
kees99
> website which is "best viewed with Chrome"

I'm stunned. Is this still a thing? Last time I remember seeing websites
recommending a browser, it was late 90s with "get Netscape" gifs.

~~~
latexr
Not only is it still a thing, Google itself is a major culprit of it. Seems
like every new experiment they release is “best viewed” in — or worse,
“requires” — Google Chrome.

~~~
Rovanion
Not just experiments. Neither Google Hangouts nor Meet worked in Firefox until
the 22nd of May this year.

~~~
novaRom
Google Flights is still not working in Firefox

~~~
baobrain
What is not working? I have been using google flights to book trips for months
without issues now. The only google services I've had some trouble with
firefox are hangouts, and even that is fixed.

~~~
callahad
Try it on Android, where Google controls more of the market, and has less
incentive for interop. You get a door slammed in your face:
[https://twitter.com/andrewhobden/status/1007668509826928640](https://twitter.com/andrewhobden/status/1007668509826928640)

Great response from Alex Russell, but it's clear that the sentiments of the
Chrome team aren't translating into policy elsewhere in Google, or we wouldn't
be dealing with something like this every few months.

~~~
baobrain
Oh wow, I never noticed this before, this must be a recent thing...Thanks!

------
fencepost
I haven't seen anyone mention this, but Firefox is my "daily driver" for
almost all browsing, and is also locked down with uMatrix, uBlock Origin,
DecentralEyes and Ghostery (though I could probably drop Ghostery without
missing it). Chrome has uBlock Origin and a few other things but interferes
with pages less. I keep a set of pages for some specific web apps (e.g. GMail,
Google Calendar, task management, etc.) open in Chrome, but otherwise only use
it when something _just won 't work_ in my locked-down Firefox.

I also can't recommend highly enough Firefox on Android, particularly with
uBlock Origin and the "Dark Background and Light Text" addon (currently at
version 0.6.8 for ease of finding). For HN you'll want to use the "Simple CSS"
dark setting instead of the default - that keeps the arrows, but you do lose
the greying-out of downvoted comments.

Edit: I also think it's interesting how much Chrome now minimizes and almost
hides the Chrome App Store to add new extensions. It's almost as if it's not
making Google any money and people keep installing adblockers through it.

~~~
mikedilger
Is there a reason to use both uBlock Origin and uMatrix? I thought uMatrix was
a more explicit version of the same functionality as uBlock Origin (and
written by the same guy).

~~~
drewmol
I use them together, uMatrix as a fine grained control tool where I can setup
a saved profile and click-allow until functionality & appearance are
acceptable to me, and for 'one-off' or 'fuck-it no time' situations I just
toggle uMatrix off. It is very rare I have to turn off uBlock Origin as well
(the nuclear option). This leaves me four-five quick clicks away from the
median or average user experience.

~~~
chopin
uBlock Origin offers part of the uMatrix functionality as well in the
"advanced user" mode.

------
bad_user
Just dropping a note in support of Firefox ...

It's a great browser and I've came back to it even before the changes in
Quantum, because the UI is better and it's also a browser I can trust to
protect my interests.

Just one thing to consider ... recently in Chrome 66 they introduced the means
for cosmetic ads blocking via stylesheets that can no longer be overridden, as
Google finally succumbed to demands for it. Firefox has been supporting the
feature for years and is on the cutting edge in regards to protecting privacy.

For example I'm using Multi-Account Containers + Facebook Container, an add-on
which sandboxes Facebook. Along with the blocking of trackers that's now
built-in, Firefox is leading the offense against privacy invading web services
(although granted Apple's Safari doesn't do a bad job either).

The only downside of Firefox is that Chrome's dev tools are still better,
however Firefox has been improving _a lot_ lately and I'm pretty sure they'll
be on par pretty soon. After all, lets not forget that Firebug, which then
inspired every other browser, was an add-on that happened for Firefox.

Oh, and I love that they are refactoring its internals via Rust. That's an
awesome development.

~~~
davedx
Yep, same here. I use it as my regular browser. Occasionally I switch to
Chrome for miscellaneous "other reasons", sometimes just to maintain
separation between work and personal browsing sessions (I use FF for work).

I'm about to start a new contract doing React development again though. I
wonder if I'll stick to FF or if I'll get dragged back to Chrome for DevTools
support...

~~~
manveru
I can recommend [https://support.mozilla.org/en-
US/kb/containers](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers) highly, i
have a bunch of containers for work, personal, projects, research, etc...

~~~
Polarity
it also allows to be logged into twitter/fb with multiple accounts in the same
window.

------
susam
Firefox was never away, at least for me. Therefore the expression "Firefox is
back" sounds a little odd to me.

I have been using it since 2006 (Firefox 2.0). Back then, the presence of the
Firebug extension for Firefox made me switch to Firefox as my primary browser.

Two years later, Chrome arrived but Firefox remained as my primary browser
because I wanted to continue using the Vimperator extension for Firefox that
allowed mouseless browsing with Vim-like key bindings and commands.

Firefox still remains as my primary browser with Chrome being an additional
browser that I use sometimes. These days, I use the Vimium extension for both
to use Vim-like key bindings. I occasionally use Safari and qutebrowser too.

~~~
chme
The same for me, but with the recent Firefox they broke the old addons and the
current ones cannot do the same.

I hope they fix that regression.

~~~
Yoric
WebExtensions (aka new generation addons) are getting more powerful with each
version :)

~~~
chme
Thanks for the info. :) Great work so far!

High on my list is for the extensions to work on about:* and
addons.mozilla.org pages.

I like to use Vimium everywhere and 'Dark Background and Light Text' to also
work on the preferences.

Also I really miss DownThemAll... I tried a couple of replacements, but they
didn't for instance download all books from a Humble Book Bundle.

~~~
bovine3dom
> High on my list is for the extensions to work on [...] addons.mozilla.org
> pages.

There's actually an about:config setting that fixes this already. I put a
helper in Tridactyl for it called `:fixamo` [1], but you can easily do it
manually by setting

"privacy.resistFingerprinting.block_mozAddonManager" = true

and

"extensions.webextensions.restrictedDomains" = ""

(Unfortunately, this does nothing about about: pages or the PDF viewer which
used to work but was "fixed" :( ).

[1]
[https://github.com/cmcaine/tridactyl/blob/8c49d26340cdc0db3c...](https://github.com/cmcaine/tridactyl/blob/8c49d26340cdc0db3c5a8011958339ac49051d03/src/excmds.ts#L290)

~~~
chme
privacy.resistFingerprinting.block_mozAddonManager does not exist in my
about:config.

Just changing "extensions.webextensions.restrictedDomains" is apparently not
enough.

I also tried :fixamo in tridactyl, but it just returns: "# Error: Attempt to
postMessage on disconnected port"

I was using version 1.13.1pre1454 with FF 60.0.2.

~~~
bovine3dom
Have you tried adding the setting that doesn't exist manually? There's a
little + button you can click on about:config.

\---

That's a particularly unhelpful error, sorry about that. It usually means that
Tridactyl can't access the native messenger. Did you install it with
`:installnative`? What is the output of `:native`?

~~~
chme
> That's a particularly unhelpful error, sorry about that. It usually means
> that Tridactyl can't access the native messenger. Did you install it with
> `:installnative`? What is the output of `:native`?

I did not, but now I have.

:fixamo now doesn't return any error but still doesn't work.

Adding "privacy.resistFingerprinting.block_mozAddonManager" manually and
setting it to true did the job. Thanks!

So far I like Tridactyl, especially the useful commands, but since it seems to
be incompatible with other addons that overwrite the NewTab page. I think I
will have to disable it.

I also miss the smooth scrolling experience with j,k from VimiumFF, jumping
lines like Tridactyl does makes me loose the point were I left of. I might
check back how the progress is going tough.

~~~
bovine3dom
> :fixamo now doesn't return any error but still doesn't work.

You need to restart the browser afterwards. Sorry, people usually find the
command through the help page where it has all of these caveats.

We have smooth scrolling, you just need to do `set smoothscroll true`. It's a
bit rubbish, though.

You can often fix the new tab page by disabling and re-enabling the new tab
add-on you want. Every time Tridactyl is updated it will steal the page back,
so I'd suggest that you don't use the beta releases and instead use the normal
ones.

We could reasonably easily provide a build that didn't use the new tab page
(we occasionally get people who feel very strongly about this) but I'm afraid
it's quite low down my list of priorities. If you're feeling up to it there's
an issue open:
[https://github.com/cmcaine/tridactyl/issues/534](https://github.com/cmcaine/tridactyl/issues/534)

But I won't hold it against you if you use Vimium. It's very well polished : )

~~~
chme
> You need to restart the browser afterwards. Sorry, people usually find the
> command through the help page where it has all of these caveats.

:help fixamo

Does not state that I need to restart firefox afterwards. [1]

I did restart firefox after I installed `native` and before I run :fixamo.
:native also returned that the it was installed correctly before I run
:fixamo.

[1]: fixamo

    
    
        fixamo(): Promise<void>
    
            Defined in src/excmds.ts:290
    
        Simply sets
    
         "privacy.resistFingerprinting.block_mozAddonManager":true
         "extensions.webextensions.restrictedDomains":""
    

in about:config via user.js so that Tridactyl (and other extensions!) can be
used on addons.mozilla.org and other sites.

    
    
        Requires native.
        Returns Promise<void>

~~~
bovine3dom
Ah, good spot. I've added that to the documentation now.

If you're saying that a restart didn't make fixamo work, would you mind filing
an issue so we can try to fix it?

Edit: sorry, I should have been clearer: fixamo edits a file which is only
read at Firefox startup, so you need to run fixamo and then restart.

~~~
chme
> If you're saying that a restart didn't make fixamo work, would you mind
> filing an issue so we can try to fix it?

No I haven't tried that. After I run :fixamo and that didn't work I just
opened about:config and change those settings myself without restarting
firefox.

Edit: Since I now continued to test tridactyl I found that this newtab
overwriting function gets pretty annoying from a usability perspective. When I
start a new Tab with [Ctrl]+[t] and immediately type my desired address part
of it will be overwritten when 'about:blank' is inserted. I guess you want
people to use just a binding to :tabopen, but I do like my options. Also since
:tabopen do not contain my bookmarks I prefer using the address line.

~~~
bovine3dom
> Since I now continued to test tridactyl I found that this newtab overwriting
> function gets pretty annoying from a usability perspective. When I start a
> new Tab with [Ctrl]+[t] and immediately type my desired address part of it
> will be overwritten when 'about:blank' is inserted. I guess you want people
> to use just a binding to :tabopen, but I do like my options. Also since
> :tabopen do not contain my bookmarks I prefer using the address line.

Huh, that is annoying. I hadn't noticed that. There's not much we can do about
it though, short of just disabling the new tab page.

The lack of bookmarks in tabopen is annoying, I agree. We rushed to get the
completions out with Tridactyl, and did it shoddily and haven't bothered to
rewrite it yet.

There is bmarks which just completes from bookmarks, but that opens things in
the current tab.

------
joeblau
I just ran both of the speed test benchmarks [1][2] mentioned in the article,
plus two other tests [3][4].

    
    
                        |     Firefox    |     Safari      |    Chrome 
        ----------------|----------------|-----------------|-----------------
        Speedometer 2.0 | 83.0 ±0.91     | 92.1 ±2.8       | 75.7 ±3.4
        JetStream       | 219.40 ±8.5563 | 294.79 ±11.138  | 201.81 ±15.171
        Motion Mark     | 203.71 ±5.41%  | 525.77 ±6.56%   | 388.85 ±4.79
        ARES-6          | 54.06 ±0.95ms  | 16.85 ±1.19ms   | 20.26 ±0.56ms
    
    

It looks like Firefox beats Chome in some perfomrance tests but Safari is
still faster than Chrome and a lot faster than Firefox. At this point, I'm not
sure any of Firefox's features are compelling enough to get me to switch back.
I started using Firefox at 0.4 back when I was in college then I switched to
Chrome when Firefox got slow, but I think the way I use the web now has
changed. I really only use a few sites and I just want better security/ad-
block/tracking block tools (which Apple is committing to) and speed.

edit: If someone uses Windows, I would be curious to see how Edge compares to
Firefox and Chrome.

[1] -
[https://browserbench.org/Speedometer2.0/](https://browserbench.org/Speedometer2.0/)

[2] -
[https://browserbench.org/JetStream/](https://browserbench.org/JetStream/)

[3] -
[https://browserbench.org/MotionMark/](https://browserbench.org/MotionMark/)

[4] - [https://browserbench.org/ARES-6/](https://browserbench.org/ARES-6/)

~~~
nothrabannosir
Firefox’s biggest problem is rapacious battery draining. Unplug your charger
and Safari feels like a dainty butterfly in a soft summer breeze, while
Firefox thrashes around like a drunken Godzilla in mid-90s Tokyo.

The energy usage tab on the activity monitor consistently shows Firefox at a
~40 “score” (whatever that unit is), and Safari more around 4. Anecdotally,
the difference in battery time is real.

This is the biggest reason to keep using Safari on Mac in battery mode. (Or
Always Be Charging :) )

I hope they can ever fix this :( sounds pretty fundamental, but I know little.

~~~
more-coffee
It is pretty fundamental. While Safari lacks features, it feels so much
lighter and is noticeably less memory/CPU intensive. As a developer who needs
every MB of memory, this makes me resort to Safari for pretty much everything.
I'll occasionally use Firefox/Chrome when I really really need their superior
webdev tools.

~~~
Raidion
What tools in FF do you think are better than Chrome? Honestly, my computer is
beefy (and firmly attached to a power source) enough that performance is
rarely an issue with any browser, and Chrome dev tools seem to be superior in
most ways, with the slight exception that it's harder to see what events are
bound to an element, but the software I develop usually has fairly tight
couplings so that feature isn't needed often.

I need someone to make a case that FF dev tools are better than Chrome, simply
because without performance being an issue, I need confidence that switching
would be a net productivity increase despite having to learn the slightly
different tooling of the FF dev tools.

~~~
more-coffee
Well don't listen to me, my work is mainly backend. The only frontend work I
do is restricted to side projects. But most frontend devs I know prefer
Chrome. My personal preference to FireFox is paranoid me trying to avoid
Google (but that's another topic).

------
f311a
I've switched to Firefox on most of my devices.

And there is only one thing which I don't like — high CPU usage compared to
chrome. It makes my old MacBook air very noisy because of the fan spinning.
When I use chrome it's completely silent.

~~~
z6
Same experience here on a MBP. Tried to switch a couple months ago and the
fans run in overdrive.

~~~
spiderfarmer
It’s a known issue that pops up in every FF thread. But it’s hopeless.
Everytime it pops up some people subscribe to the issue and thats it.

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1407536](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1407536)

Honestly, I’ve given up on Firefox.

------
didgeoridoo
Ironically, the thing that drove me to Firefox was the excellent Account
Containers system that I found necessary to manage being logged into multiple
Google Apps accounts simultaneously (I have _five_ ). Each tab owns one
account — that way, Google Drive files from my work don't randomly refuse to
open because I'm also logged into my personal account.

(Chrome has no solution for containing accounts across tabs, last I checked.
You have to spawn entire new Chrome instances.)

~~~
atombender
Google's account management is infuriating!

First, it almost never remembers what account you used with what service. If I
do some Google Cloud stuff under my work account, I don't want Google Maps
using my work account, or vice versa. The list of accounts in the upper right
corner, and what's signed in/out, seems completely random and broken.

The second problem is that Google's various apps are wildly inconsistent in
how they deal with multiple accounts. Some (like Maps) have apparently been
"modernized". Others (like BigQuery; I've had issues with Google Drive, too)
don't understand multiple accounts at all. It doesn't matter that you sign
into a work account. Open that app and it will use some other account.

A sign they've not mastered this at all is that it doesn't work at the URL
level. You can bookmark a Google Docs document, for example, and then switch
your accounts. Going to the bookmark (or just going back) to the Docs page
gives you a "permission denied" error because you're using the wrong account.
Same thing with sharing URLs — if someone at work sends me a Google Docs URL,
it's bound to not work because it'll try to use what I try to keep as my
default account, which is my personal one. Sometimes I just munge the
"authuser=1" part in the URL.

It's amazing that a Google app can't simply resolve the _union_ of identities
you're signed in as. I have two accounts, work and personal, and _one_ of them
has access, after all.

I might consider FF just to work around this.

~~~
greggman
I just setup multiple profiles in chrome which is one thing it seems to do
better than FF imo. You can select a profile in the top right corner.
Everything about them is separate. cookies, history, extensions , theme so I
give each one a different theme make it clear what profile I'm using.

in FF afaict you can only use one at a time and you have to choose at launch

~~~
Vinnl
You can use multiple profiles at the same time through about:profiles

That said, do try multi-account containers, unless you really rely on
extensions and theme being different per profile - they're great:
[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-
account...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-
containers/)

------
ProfessorLayton
I never really "switched" to any particular browser, I use
Safari/Vivaldi/Firefox concurrently, but have noticed how much better Firefox
has gotten recently, after years of painful decline (Speed, and resource
hogging being my biggest peeves).

The only major thing I wish it did better is if it conserved battery power as
well as Safari does. If I want to maximize my laptop's battery life I don't
really have a choice other than Safari on my MBP.

~~~
noobermin
I don't think that is Firefox's fault vs. Safari being optimized for usage on
MacOS machines obviously.

~~~
savoytruffle
It's a native Mac application. Why shouldn't it be "optimized"?

~~~
outworlder
Because being a native app is not enough. You actually need to do extra work
if you want it to be energy efficient.

------
severine
I always refrain from talking in Firefox threads because my use case is so
different from the HN crowd, but still...

I have a netbook with 1Gb RAM. It was a handout from the owner, as it was
painfully slow even after cleaning and tweaking the Win 7 install. Eventually,
the owner got a new beefier laptop and I got the netbook.

Long story short: I put Xubuntu on it, and it's still my daily driver and main
computer 6 years in.

I have always used Firefox and, believe this 1Gb RAM multitasker, it's getting
noticeably better year after year.

Thank you mozillians!

edit: i mean ubuntians, debianists, xfcers, fossers, hners, party people!

~~~
quickthrower2
Do you do any coding on that machine? If so, very cool.

~~~
isostatic
If it can run something as hungry as a webbrowser, of course you can do
coding. The resources to run vim (or even emacs) are tiny in today's world.
You probably wont be doing any 3D work or massive amounts of video
manipulation, but even in the latter case it will be more than powerful
enough.

~~~
quickthrower2
I was thinking more of compilation times, but of course if you write JS for
example in VIM then this is not an issue (given that it can run a browser).

~~~
isostatic
Do people write compiled programs any more? (en-mass) Especially large ones?

I remember compiling a 2.4 kernel on a 486 once, only kernel to suppose the
PCMCIA network card. It didn't go quickly. If you really want to compile the
program, vou can always do the compilation on a server.

~~~
kbart
Of course they do. Where do you think you get your kernels, drivers, firmware
for various IoT from etc.? Compiling a small (~100 MB), custom OS purely (as
much as it's possible) from source code can still take hours even on modern
laptop.

~~~
isostatic
Well yes, of course, however as a percentage of people writing code, how many
write in a traditional compile-once run-many language which are large enough
projects they take a significant amount of time to compile.

When dkms recompiles one custome module I use on an 8 year old laptop it takes
a few seconds. Even when you're working on projects that take a long time (say
on ffmpeg), you're not typically recompiling the entire thing each time. On
the other hand doing a full build for all architectures takes hours on a
desktop, so is far more sensible to ship off to a build service running
elsewhere on the network.

Large scale compiling on a desktop machine feels like a fairly niche problem
compared with the vast majority of "code" written today.

------
tyteen4a03
When it stops being a battery hog on Macs, sure.

On Android the performance is comparable to Chrome, but I can never get used
to some of their UXes (pressing the X button doesn't clear the address bar,
instead closes it). Also no seamless page opening with Google search app
(although I suspect they can't do much about this)

~~~
itsjloh
I keep trying to switch back to it on my Mac Pro (I've tried three times in
the last 12 months) but after a week or two I always end up switching back to
Chrome because the CPU/battery impact it has.

I can have the same amount of tabs/workload in Chrome and my laptop copes fine
with good performance. If I do the same in FF (with likely less plugins
installed) it often spikes to 100% CPU usage, chews through my battery like
nothing else and just gets bogged down/slow. I _want_ to use FF but can't
sacrifice having a burning hot laptop with terrible battery life on my lap.

~~~
crispinb
Exact same deal here. That plus the lack of keyboard shortcuts for many
extensions keeps pushing me back to Chrome. But I love the account containers
enough that I keep trying again. I imagine it will get there eventually.

------
furgooswft13
I find it kind of ironic that Mozilla rewrote Netscape Navigator from scratch
with the lofty idea of creating an entire cross-platform application
development platform, not just a browser. XUL, XULRunner etc. But it never
caught on and they abandoned all that to focus on just the browser. Yet now
Electron is everywhere...

Before its time and abandoned in the nick of it. And no one cares about native
GUI's anymore apparently.

~~~
jploh
I remember XUL. Not a fan but it's sad it didn't take off. We need an Electron
alternative.

~~~
furgooswft13
The idea was essentially the same, except instead of HTML + JS it was XUL +
JS. And XUL provided a far richer set of built in controls, and was far more
powerful and flexible than HTML, especially at the time it was conceived and
still arguably today. Critically it tried to render all the standard GUI
elements we were accustomed to in the 90s and early 00s using the native APIs
of whatever OS it was running on.

Webdevs have tried for 20 years to recreate these interfaces from scratch in
HTML with still highly questionable results, and of course no real
integration, visual or otherwise, with the host OS.

For me, the biggest impediment for writing XUL, when I was into FF extension
development, was the extremely lackluster documentation. Despite Mozilla's
ambitions they never seemed to promote the app development part of their
platform much. It also suffered from much the same problems as Electron does
today with performance and bloated memory usage compared to native apps.
Though I imagine if they stuck with it, with the much improved JS and
rendering engines (and multicore CPUs and 16gb standard RAM) in-use today, it
would have become just as good enough as Electron is considered.

Fact is, HTML/CSS/JS benefits hugely from it's own inertia, and the near
instant answers to most any question on Google/Stackoverflow. Hard to compete
when you are basically an internal Mozilla project.

I'm sure Mozilla, or someone, could package the current Firefox stack in a
similar way to Electron as an alternative, but it would be largely the same
thing and have similar issues compared to native. So why bother I guess.

How's wxWidgets doing? Does anyone still use that?

~~~
dblohm7
We actually had a prototype of an Electron-style embedding solution for Gecko
called Positron, but I believe work on it was stopped.

~~~
cpeterso
Latest commit on Mar 8, 2017

[https://github.com/mozilla/positron](https://github.com/mozilla/positron)

------
isolli
I have always used Firefox, ever since they implemented tabbed browsing (an
incredible improvement, for those who don't remember the time before that).

However, in recent times I have had to switch more and more apps to Chrome
because the UI breaks in Firefox: intercom.io, trello.com, notion.so.

Probably no fault of Firefox, but if a UI is broken there is no choice but to
migrate.

~~~
ar0
Are you sure this isn't some Firefox add-on that you are using that is causing
this? (E.g. uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger or activating Firefox's built-in
anti-tracking protection or maybe just blocking third-party cookies; which
could be solved by whitelisting the problematic webpages.)

I am using Firefox exclusively and I rarely find sites that don't work with
Firefox after I disable blocking extensions.

~~~
isolli
Thanks for the suggestion, but I don't have any blocking extensions installed.
If you use Notion you can check for yourself: there is no way to scroll down a
page with the down arrow if the content exceeds the screen.

------
kerng
I have been mainly using Firefox for the last 3 months on desktop, and for
over a year on phone - and it's amazing. Highly recommend it. I even
uninstalled Chrome now on my main machine- sometimes you run into what appears
"Chrome optimized" sites, like back in IE6 days but its rare.

~~~
bufferoverflow
Chrome is still king when it comes to fast JS execution and modern
technologies. I'm talking about real world use, I know some benchmarks put FF
and Edge ahead.

The recent post about real time pose estimation was a pretty example of that -
pretty unusable in FF, runs great in Chrome (on Windows at least)

[https://storage.googleapis.com/tfjs-
models/demos/posenet/cam...](https://storage.googleapis.com/tfjs-
models/demos/posenet/camera.html)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17283525](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17283525)

~~~
the_duke
I've been using FF again since 57 came out.

The only real world pages that sometimes crawl to a halt on FF are some Google
pages like the old Gmail and Youtube.

~~~
konart
Pretty much any page with paralax scrolling or great ammount of images - and
you can barely scroll the page. It's gets better with 62, but Fx still
struggles with pages like
[https://www.hellomonday.com/](https://www.hellomonday.com/)

------
grundymonday
I switched to Vivaldi a year or two ago after using Firefox as my main browser
for the longest time. I've considered switching back, but every time I run up
against several features in Vivaldi that I am just not ready to part with yet:

1) tab stacks, 2) the ability to save and reopen an entire session, 3) a page
load progress indicator in the URL bar, 4) using Ctrl-F highlights the
position of all matching locations in the page in the right-hand scroll bar,
and 5) the window panel, which keeps track of all closed tabs and windows so
you can reopen everything if you accidentally close a window.

Some of those are small perks, and some of them are major. I'd love to see
Firefox implement some of them.

~~~
TACIXAT
I'm on Vivaldi right now and I love it. The window panel is so much nicer than
tabs (for those that don't know, it's tabs along the side, kinda bookmark
style). Tab stacks are amazing. The background downloading is nice where it
starts the download while you decide to Save, Save As, or Open. There is a lot
of little stuff too, like in the window panel you can select multiple tabs and
copy the URLs. The closed tabs stack. Oh, and backspace still goes back a
page.

I don't usually shill for products but Vivaldi is a really good browser.

~~~
kilburn
> The background downloading is nice where it starts the download while you
> decide to Save, Save As, or Open.

AFAIK firefox does that too, it just doesn't show it. Just test it: click on a
large file download link and leave the dialog alone for some seconds. Once you
actually click on Save, Save As or Open... it opens instantly (or already has
a large downloaded chunk, depending on the file's size and your bandwidth of
course).

------
thermodynthrway
I switched back a few months ago on all of my devices and only go back when I
need Chrome devtools, Firefox is absolutely back in its prime. Feels just as
speedy as Chrome on desktop and mobile, and handles large numbers of tabs
better.

Ironically, or maybe intentionally, Google services are the only thing
degraded. Google even refuses to give you the regular home page. Thankfully
you can just get an extension that fakes Chrome useragent on the offending
pages, but it's the darkest pattern I've ever seen

~~~
sp332
What's different about the home page?

~~~
Sylos
I don't know, if he's talking specifically about this, but on Firefox for
Android, Google serves a version of their search page from a few years ago.

~~~
thermodynthrway
Yes exactly, looks like a website from 1995

------
whalesalad
I switched cold turkey to Firefox a few months ago. It was fine for a bit but
eventually became unbearably slow. I made the switch on both my work MacBook
Pro (retina) and my personal MacBook Air. Both had similar issues. That and
the fact that it ships with things like Pocket made me jump back to Chrome.

~~~
addicted
How is Pocket any different from Safari’s Read It Later, or all of Google’s
equivalents? And unlike the other browsers, Pocket while included by default,
is still an extension instead of baked into the browser.

~~~
abcdqwerty
How to uninstall Pocket from firefox ?

~~~
cpeterso
How to remove the Pocket icon from the Firefox toolbar:

[https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/disable-or-re-enable-
po...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/disable-or-re-enable-pocket-for-
firefox)

How to remove the "Recommended by Pocket" stories on the about:newtab page:

[https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/hide-or-display-
content...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/hide-or-display-content-new-
tab)

------
zaarn
From other comments it seems FF is having some perf problems on MacOs.

I'll weigh in with Linux + Windows experience: FF is currently the best
browser. It pulls a bit more CPU but it also trumps with very good privacy
options out of the box and in about:config (first party isolation, which I've
been using as daily driver for a few months now)

Containers allow me to isolate aspects of myself and contain tracking or
otherwise unwanted websites in their own little world.

The only item on my wishlist is to make multi-window tab handling better, I
think Chrome still wins that on the UI/UX front (since FF sometimes feels like
it's about to crash when I drag a tab out of the window)

------
aplummer
> The web has reached a new low

Strongly disagree. The web is just the medium, the places people visit might
have reached a new low, but the platform is only getting better. Just at the
state of cross browser in 2015 vs 2018!

~~~
hotwire
yeah but.... actually, crap you're right. tech is better than ever. pity that
it's being wasted on today's trivialities.

~~~
aplummer
Maybe in general but Wikipedia and kiva exist

------
samuell
I switched to Brave on mobile, and hasn't looked back. Works flawlessly. It is
only the desktop app on Linux/Xubuntu that can have a bit of micro-lagging at
times, enough to cause frustration, and also is not as well integrated in the
UI as chromium. Hope to switch there as well, as soon as laggyness improves a
bit.

------
com2kid
After running for a few hours, Firefox starts making my entire computer lag,
eventually to the point of freezing up for seconds at a time multiple times
per minute.

Over time Firefox's video playback gets more and more janky, until it drops
more frames than it shows. In task manager I can see FF using 50% of my GPU to
play a 720p stream from Twitch.

Closing FF completely and reopening it fixes the problem, until it happens
again.

Chrome has none of these issues.

Love the privacy, not a big fan of the performance problems.

~~~
bholley
Sounds like ghost windows. Try disabling all your add-ons to see if the
problem persists? You can also record a profile via perfht.ml and send it to
me, I'm happy to have a look.

~~~
ferongr
Admittedly, my own experience was with older versions up to 57, but what it
felt like e10s did not really help with responsiveness, especially after very
long sessions (24 hours+). Restarting Firefox used to be a daily ritual (with
all the lost website state that entailed) as JS pauses started becoming very
noticeable. Fx would also keep the CPU in high power states with constant
10-20% CPU usage near the 24 hour mark.

I don't know if it's an architectural limitation of how e10s was implemented,
but Firefox still feels like a single-process browser. On the other hand,
Chrome remains responsive even after a week of being open.

------
nathan_f77
I switched to Firefox 5 months ago, and the experience hasn't been great. I
expecting good things after reading about Firefox Quantum, but it's noticeably
slower than Chrome. There's often a lag while scrolling, and it just doesn't
feel as smooth.

It also doesn't support Chromecast, so I have to switch to Chrome whenever I
want to play a YouTube video on the TV. I've seen quite a few websites with JS
or CSS bugs on Firefox, and some Chrome extensions don't have Firefox versions
(e.g. Streak CRM.) I also have to switch to Chrome whenever I use "Google
Meet" for a call. (That's not Firefox's fault, but it's an issue you
experience when you use Firefox.)

The only reason I switched to Firefox is so that I could remove the little
blue dot on pinned tabs [1]. I would get a new email, and the Gmail favicon
would update with a (1). I'd read the email on my phone, and the icon would go
back to (0). But there would be a little blue dot telling me about a change on
the page, so I'd still have to click the tab to remove the dot. Same issue for
Drift chat, Trello, etc. After months and months of clicking the tab just to
remove that little blue dot, I finally cracked and switched to Firefox.
Firefox also has that little blue dot, but at least you can disable it by
hacking some CSS [2]. If Chrome gave me the option to disable that blue dot,
I'd switch back immediately.

[1]
[https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/sxDEUm...](https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/sxDEUmMy07o)

[2] [https://support.mozilla.org/en-
US/questions/1181537](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1181537)

------
stevekemp
It was only a couple of months ago that I remembered I paid to have my name
included in the Firefox advert, as printed in the New York Times:

[https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2004/12/mozilla-foundation-
pl...](https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2004/12/mozilla-foundation-places-two-
page-advocacy-ad-in-the-new-york-times/)

That was back in 2003!

~~~
danso
How much did you have to pay?

~~~
stevekemp
I just checked my email archive:

    
    
      Donation ID: 1184
      Donation Amount: $30.00
      Donation Name: Steve Kemp
      Placed On: 12:07 PM Tuesday October 19, 2004
      Payment Type:  (paid in full)

------
alistproducer2
I've switched back from chrome for the quantum release. Overall, it works fine
99% of the time but since chrome became the new IE there are a few sites that
break in non-webkit browsers. Not enough of an inconvenience to make me go
back to handing over all my info to Google.

------
azinman2
I spent the last 6 months or so in Firefox after having been out of it for
years. It generally has caught up, and was generally pleasurable to use. I’m
in the Apple ecosystem, so I wish there was a way to better sync with it like
using the system keychain and Safari bookmarks, but it was otherwise holding
up nicely. I loved the new containers feature, feeling like I had a
fundamentally new way to approach web security.

That was until last week. My Mac lost power due to some construction, and when
I turned it back on Firefox had completely erased its previous profile. All my
data, all my containers, all my cookies and bookmarks were gone. No evidence
on disk for my old profile, despite a faq suggesting it’d be there. Firefox
sync somehow was preserved in this blank profile, yet it synced barely
anything (a few extensions).

Sorry Firefox, you lost my trust. I’m now back to Safari.

~~~
analogmemory
I'm guessing you didn't signup for a Firefox account to save the sync the
bookmarks?

Do you not have any backup services running?

~~~
ddtaylor
> Firefox sync somehow was preserved in this blank profile, yet it synced
> barely anything (a few extensions).

------
zmix
This journalist does not seem to know about the tech world he reports about.
Not a single word has been shed about all those high quality addons, that
Firefox users once had, and how huge the quality gap is between Chromium based
add-ons and what was available for Firefox. In my opinion, this is so extreme,
that I switched over to Vivaldi browser, now that XUL is gone.

~~~
bovine3dom
What add-ons are available for Chrome-likes that you miss in Firefox?

~~~
zmix
I meant, that there are XUL add-ons, that are neither available for Chrome-
likes or the new Firefox. Like DownThemAll, Ubiquity and so many more.

------
thirdsun
While Firefox is my primary browser there's still something off with their CSS
transform / CSS transition performance. Take these hover effects, particularly
demo #4, as an example: [http://preview.codecanyon.net/item/card-
css3-portfolio-cards...](http://preview.codecanyon.net/item/card-
css3-portfolio-cards-with-hover-effects/full_screen_preview/21558172)

While certainly excessive those demos run flawlessly and smoothly on Chrome,
but are struggling on Firefox. An observation I made often when it comes to
complex transform effects in Firefox. Does anyone else experience this?

~~~
teekert
Nothing looks strange to me with Demo nr. 4? (FF 60.0.2)

~~~
thirdsun
For me the frame rate is struggling to keep it even remotely close to 60fps.
It's certainly not smooth.

This happens in FF 61.0 Beta on an iMac 5K, but the issue applies to versions
that date back to pre-Quantum days. I noticed the problem is more visible if
large elements are affected by the transform effects, a smaller window renders
those smoother for example.

~~~
dreamer_
For me, it works perfectly on both FF and Chrome (Linux), but I wonder how
WebRender will deal with it; can you test Firefox Nightly with
"gfx.webrender.all" set to true?

~~~
thirdsun
Thanks! gfx.webrender.enabled (not .all) alone does indeed solve the
performance issues, however only in Nightly (v62), not in the Beta (v61)
channel.

------
greggarious
Some of us never left :)

~~~
Avshalom
Yeah, I mean I only switched from IE because it froze my computer if it ever
opened more than one window (this was a Windows ME system with about half the
ram ME claimed as required). I've been Mozilla since ~2002. The idea of
switching for anything short of the apocalypse just seems weird, like getting
rid of a car because it's a couple years old.

------
andrepd
>The browser, made by the nonprofit Mozilla, emerged in the early 2000s as a
faster, better designed vessel to surf the web. But it became irrelevant after
Google in 2008 released Chrome, a faster, more secure and versatile browser.

Irrelevant? More versatile (even though it didn't even have extensions until
v5)? Why?

~~~
exodust
It's simply an incorrect statement. Firefox did not become irrelevant. I'm not
sure where the author is coming from with his remarks, but obviously he lived
in a Google Chrome bubble for a long time.

~~~
vntok
Have a look at the trends[0] and tell me it does not show a descent to
darkness.

1\. Firefox was at ~30% market share at its apex (it's now half that)

2\. It got surpassed by a newcomer with no previous experience in browser
making in less than 3 years

3\. And the newcomer was so much better at technical stuff and marketing that
it not only kept superseding Firefox but it kept growing uninterrupted ever
since

3\. Meanwhile, instead of stabilizing and reversing the trend, Firefox's usage
share just kept tumbling down to the level of Internet Explorer's (Internet
Explorer!)

4\. It. Never. Recovered. Seriously, it had around 12% market share a month
ago[1], below IE's share. That's ridiculous.

Of all those points, I think maybe #4 shows Firefox's irrelevancy best: the
most generous estimates now place it around 14% global market share, barely
above while Chrome is striving at around 60%. If IE is becoming more and more
irrelevant (it is, right?), then surely Firefox _is_ becoming just as
irrelevant as well.

Even though the data isn't ideal and there are probably some +/\- percent
point errors between Netmarketshare, W3counter, Alexa, Google, etc., the trend
is identical among all these reporting platforms.

0:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/m...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/media/File:Usage_share_of_web_browsers_\(Source_StatCounter\).svg)

1: [https://netmarketshare.com/browser-market-
share.aspx?options...](https://netmarketshare.com/browser-market-
share.aspx?options=%7B%22filter%22%3A%7B%22%24and%22%3A%5B%7B%22deviceType%22%3A%7B%22%24in%22%3A%5B%22Desktop%2Flaptop%22%5D%7D%7D%5D%7D%2C%22dateLabel%22%3A%22Trend%22%2C%22attributes%22%3A%22share%22%2C%22group%22%3A%22browser%22%2C%22sort%22%3A%7B%22share%22%3A-1%7D%2C%22id%22%3A%22browsersDesktop%22%2C%22dateInterval%22%3A%22Monthly%22%2C%22dateStart%22%3A%222017-06%22%2C%22dateEnd%22%3A%222018-05%22%2C%22segments%22%3A%22-1000%22%7D)

~~~
ar0
While the trend is correct, I would argue that the original authors statement
that this is due to Chrome having been "a faster, more secure and versatile
browser" is omitting the elephant in the room:

The main reason for Firefox's (and IE's) decline IMHO is the pink line "Mobile
vs Desktop" in the chart you linked to. People won't bother installing a
different browser if the one that comes with the device they use is halfway
decent (on iOS, they don't even have a choice). And so as more and more
browsing comes from smartphones and tablets, more and more people will use
Chrome (Android) or Safari (iOS).

Unfortunately, this is quite a depressing finding for Firefox, because it
means that all technical enhancements will not be able to move the needle
much. (The rise of Firefox on the desktop was arguably helped by the EU
requiring Microsoft to implement the browser choice window in Windows; unless
something like this comes along for the dominant mobile platform(s) it will be
an uphill struggle.)

Edit: And the move to mobile might even affect desktop browser usage because
of things like link- and password-syncing. If you use Chrome on mobile, you
might want to also install Chrome on your PC to be able to sync your settings
across.

~~~
vntok
I agree with you on everything.

> Unfortunately, this is quite a depressing finding for Firefox, because it
> means that all technical enhancements will not be able to move the needle
> much

Precisely, and this is exactly what becoming irrelevant is. _It does not
matter_ anymore.

------
Blindedwino
Sadly, FF still slows to a crawl on OSX and it makes it unusable for me. I
can't even watch a Youtube video without it skipping frames.

~~~
blauditore
That sounds like graphics drivers issues to me; I would double-check that.

~~~
Longhanks
Unless you're running a Hackintosh or a customized Mac Pro, there's no such
thing as a "graphics driver issue" on macOS (if the rest of the system works
fine).

------
nojvek
I gave Firefox a new try. Mostly because after a chrome update my location bar
search is broken. I think due to some bug the text and selection colors are
all white. Well someone at Chrome dropped the ball.

Firefox feels really fast and light. I think I’m Making it my primary browser
from now on.

------
Accacin
It's great Firefox 'is back' but I never really left, and when I did try to
use Chrome I just felt a bit 'dirty'.

For me, whether FF is faster or slower than Chrome is largely irrelevent
(unless ofc it's extreme). What matters to me is that it feels like Mozilla
are fighting for me, and Chrome are fighting for the advertising revenue.

Mozilla, for all their mistakes, do care about their users and privacy (but
make some stupid mistakes).

~~~
MaxBarraclough
Agree. They're not-for-profit (well, mostly - Mozilla has a famously curious
structure) and generally share my appreciation of privacy and FOSS values.

But sometimes they _really_ drop the ball. And by 'sometimes', I mean
'repeatedly'.

* The time they dragged their heels fixing a bug whereby Firefox didn't clear IndexedDB when it clearly should have [0]

* Integrating with a proprietary bookmark-management solution, 'Pocket', presumably for the money [1][2]

* Making it difficult to disable address-bar search (no, I don't want Google getting a record of every URL I type in) [3]

* Their general mismanagement isn't really the point here, but it's still true: dumbing down the UI and turning Firefox into a me-too Chrome and annoying power-users, breaking plugin compatibility (Firefox's big killer feature), and pretending for the longest time that their performance was competitive with Chrome when it quite clearly wasn't (evidenced in the release of Quantum, when they finally _really were_ performance-competitive with Chrome). Also the Mr. Robot fiasco.

[0] [https://superuser.com/a/1250955/](https://superuser.com/a/1250955/)

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9876504](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9876504)

[2] [https://news.slashdot.org/story/15/06/09/1722236/mozilla-
res...](https://news.slashdot.org/story/15/06/09/1722236/mozilla-responds-to-
firefox-user-backlash-over-pocket-integration)

[3] [https://support.mozilla.org/en-
US/questions/1134010](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1134010)

------
Improvotter
I've tried using Firefox for a month last month and decided to switch back to
Chrome for a couple of reasons.

Firstly and most importantly none of the extensions that I use seem to sync
settings which make it very annoying when you have 3 computers that you're
using daily (Linux, MacOS, and Windows).

Sometimes it just still crashes and it's annoying.

Firefox doesn't support debugging websockets like Chrome does.

Opening file types in Firefox is a bit annoying, it constantly asks it every
single time for a file type it never saw before. Just let me save it damnit, I
don't want to be bothered about the file type.

How do you even open PDFs in Firefox? If I set the file handler to Firefox
itself, then it will recursively open the file in Firefox.

Firefox doesn't play well with window manager like i3. Sometime when I'm
working with Firefox, I'll need to force a resize of the window before Firefox
notices that it's not a 1000px wide, but 500px wide. This happens very often.
If you're saying that I should report this. I really cannot be bothered most
of the time because I'm not a huge fan of their issue tracking software and
most of these already have bug reports, but are just ignored.

Firefox sometimes doesn't know how to handle a font and it makes it unreadable
for some reason, alright?

Firefox and dark mode GTK themes don't mix well together. You still have to
manually add some CSS to what Firefox loads on every page just to make website
input text readable or not black. Firefox uses the theme's settings for most
stuff when it doesn't make sense when the whole web assumes you're using a
white theme.

That's about it I guess?

~~~
baby
Chrome doesn’t have tree style tabs. It’s hard to use as a power user.

------
AlvaroRuiz
I am really surprise that there is not a single mention to the Brave browser.
I know it is not one of the major player, I don't even used myself as a daily
driver, but still surprise nevertheless.

------
WhitneyLand
Ff has portable plugins across systems even Android if I recall correctly.

Is the lack of plugin suppport for iOS 100% legal/policy issues? Is there even
a shread of any techicnal issue preventing it?

I wonder if there is any poisbble way to reimagine the way plugins work, such
that powerful extensibility could exist within an iOS browser and pass the
appstore appproval gauntlet.

~~~
SXX

      > Is the lack of plugin suppport for iOS 100% legal/policy issues? Is there even a shread of any techicnal issue preventing it?
    

It is both legal, but also technical issue since Apple doesn't allow
alternative rendering engines on iOS. Firefox for iOS is basically same webkit
as Safari using and so Mozilla can do nothing about extension support since
it's completely different code base from Desktop and Android versions.

------
chrischen
One thing browser makers (except Apple) tend to ignore is battery impact:
[https://www.guidingtech.com/59385/battery-conserving-mac-
bro...](https://www.guidingtech.com/59385/battery-conserving-mac-browsers/)

Safari leaves everyone in the dust (at least on a Mac).

------
mattlondon
I've been using it for a few months now as my daily borwser on my personal
Win10 machine and its been great.

I cant say I noticed any compelling reason to move off of Chrome, but I
thought I'd at least try out modern Firefox to see what I am missing.

It feels a bit faster than Chrome for day-to-day browsing in totally non-
scientific testing. Where it really shines though is in WebGL where it is
HUGELY faster than Chrome for me. My laptop has a fairly high-end discrete GPU
and Chrome feels like it is doing software rendering, but Firefox feels silky
smooth so I guess Firefox is actually using the GPU and Chrome is not.

I've just installed it on my work 2016 MBP. Keyboard still sucks, but I cant
blame Firefox for that. However, on OSX, Firefox feels sluggish compared to
Chrome.

~~~
paulie_a
To be fair the MBP keyboard always sucks regardless of browser.

------
kranner
Firefox also seems to have better support for WebVR than Chrome, at least on
Windows. As a very rough measure, half of the A-frame official demos don't
render for me on Chrome, but all of them render on Firefox. They're also
choppy on Chrome compared to Firefox.

~~~
dblohm7
Considering that both WebVR and A-Frame originated at Mozilla, this is
unsurprising.

------
snarfy
I've been using nightly ever since chrome started asked me to sign in. I'm not
'signing in' to my browser.

Performance is on par with chrome, memory usage is a bit more. I still use
both, but I only use chrome for google's sites.

------
JumpCrisscross
Has anyone tested the battery efficiency of Firefox versus Safari on the
MacBook Air?

~~~
konart
Nothing to test there. Firefox eats battery on macOS like a beast. Even
compared to Chrome.

------
wintorez
I really wanted to go back to Firefox, but there was a lot in there I didn't
like or ask for. For example, why I get Pocket integration out of the box?
This could have been a plug-in.

------
icelancer
I switched and while I use it daily, even on plain installs it has huge, huge
memory footprints. I thought switching over was going to be a huge memory
saver over Chrome, but it hasn't proven to be the case for me unfortunately.

And of course, it "doesn't" support USB keys like Yubikey, as in, it totally
does if you change a config flag, but websites like Vanguard and even Google
just check user-agent and if it returns Firefox, it prompts you to use other
methods because the key "isn't supported."

------
molteanu
I've been using Firefox for 10+ years. The latest Quantum release broke some
addons, specifically keysnail. I just couldn't replace it. The last one I've
tried was surfingkeys but it was buggy and lacked the good features of
keysnail. Eventually I've switched to CVim + Chromium. I couldn't be happier.

I mean, how is this not a bug? You wouldn't expect the latest Emacs release to
not support user config files (I'm stretching the analogy here a bit) or
something, right?

~~~
bovine3dom
I think a better analogy is expecting a Counter-Strike: Source modification to
work with Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.

I was also upset by the death of most of my favourite add-ons, particularly
Vimperator, so I bullied a friend into writing Tridactyl with me [1]. If you
tried it around the death of keysnail it might be worth giving it another go
now, as I think it is a lot less bad than it used to be (although I can
guarantee it still has bugs). It certainly is not as polished as cVim.

Other alternatives include Vim Vixen and Sakakey.

[1]
[https://github.com/cmcaine/tridactyl](https://github.com/cmcaine/tridactyl)

~~~
PurpleRamen
Tridactyl (and all similar addons) will only be a bad replacement as long as
they are limited to inject code in loaded sites to fetch keys. The problems
emerging from this are really bad.

~~~
bovine3dom
Yeah, I see where you're coming from. cmcaine started on an extension to the
WebExtension API [1] that would fix that, but progress has stalled. It got
preliminary approval and was split up into loads of bugs on Bugzilla at which
point we all got a bit lost. If you feel very strongly about it, perhaps you
could pick up the baton?

Part of the reason I haven't done so is because I disagree with you -
Tridactyl is pretty usable to me, and there's loads of things I want to fix in
that that are a higher priority to me.

[1] [https://github.com/cmcaine/keyboard-
api](https://github.com/cmcaine/keyboard-api)

~~~
PurpleRamen
This is sad on so many levels... If I understand this correctly: Firefox sucks
now because they want everything asynchronus, to the point that they are even
unable to implement something as simple as a reliable key-event-api? And you
think it's ok because it's not the worst problem around if users of a
keyboard-first-interface are forced to often use the mouse or botherd with
regulary hiccups in the workflow?

OK, I understand that your priorities are different, and this problems seems
quite hard to solve, considering how many problems other addons have with the
enforced async-architecture. But just accepting the clusterfuck and live with
it is really sad.

~~~
bovine3dom
No, the extension to the API and code is quite simple.

The problem is bureaucratic - the schedules of those involved rarely overlap,
and they have very little motivation to work on it.

The meta bug for the API is here:
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215061](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215061)

Again, I strongly recommend that if you care about this, you look through the
issue on the BMO (especially see depends on and blocks), figure out what the
next step is, and do it :)

I suspect it would not take very much time at all, although there could be a
reasonable amount of waiting for replies from Mozillians.

------
penglish1
Firefox is indeed, much faster and less memory intensive than it used to be. I
started using it heavily (again) roughly when Quantum came out after giving up
on it for years as unusable. (like many, I think - hence the article).

However.

I still find it very crash-prone. Less so over time, since Quantum came out,
but still.. very crash-prone.

Perhaps I use it differently from others?

I use different Profiles to separate concerns (and give myself some small
modicum of cross-concern privacy - if nothing else auth cookies are reliably
separated). At any given time, I have up to 5 separate Profiles running.

With Firefox, each Profile is a fully separate PID (I assume their newer
Containers are not), and there are affiliated PIDs for "Firefox CP Web
Content" (similar to Google Chrome Helper, I assume).

On any given day when I log into my system in the am, one or more of those
Profiles has crashed, all affiliated PIDs are dead and the Crash Reporter is
up.

I don't believe anything I'm doing in any of the Firefox Profiles is
particularly unusual, or extreme. No social networking, or anything with
infinity-scroll. No video streaming (eg: Youtube).

So Mozilla - what gives?

Despite that complaint, I still happily use it because I believe Mozilla is
much more interested in my privacy, and much more dedicated to FOSS, and
because I mistrust Google. Thanks Mozilla!

~~~
penglish1
I meant to add - Chrome has maybe crashed on me a couple of times in that same
year (versus one or more crashes per day from FF!), despite arguably much much
heavier use, including all of my Youtube, social networking with infinity
scroll etc.

------
auslander
> And both support uBlock Origin, the ad blocker recommended by many security
> experts.

Finally a big media outlet with the right advice, the only extension you need
is uBO. And a wrong one - using 1Password [0]. KeepassXC is safer, but hey,
baby steps, right? :))

Chrome is snitching to Google, IE is Windows I stopped using, Safari is best,
if you're rich :) Other browsers are too rare - easy for fingerprinting.

[0] www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/28/flaws_in_password_management_apps

~~~
firepoet
Dang. I just switched from KeepassX from Enpass, and this article doesn't
mention anything about them. Have to say the experience in Enpass is far
superior to KeepassX, but I get that security is quite important!

If I had data that Enpass was full of holes, I'd switch back instantly!

~~~
auslander
What made you to switch, I'm curious? Passwords is by far most sensitive data
ever, way above tracking. So for passwords I trust no service to store them.
KeepassXC encrypts them with your master password that you type every time,
and you can now sync that encrypted database safely using iCloud Drive or
Dropbox or whatever.

I do store some non-critical passwords in Safari, it uses Keychain and Apple
is pretty good on security. I would not store passwords in other browsers
though.

------
juzffoo
I'm stuck with Chrome for more of my daily browsing because have been using
Chrome browser as my password manager as well for non critical application
accounts. Now every time I browse those apps/sites using firefox, i do not
remember all of those passwords and need to go back to chrome again. And I
been too lazy to go through the forgot password song and dance too. Is there
any way to move the Chrome saved passwords over to Firefox?

------
teekert
I never left Firefox, but I was able to completely drop all other browsers
when they introduced containers. All the tracking stuff can only see each
others cookies whereas my default session only logs me into my own services
and some that I trust. I love it. I use Privacy Badger (doesn't block non-
tracking ads by default) and sometimes uBlock origin but I unblock sites I
like with an ad policy that shows some thought went into it.

~~~
dmortin
What about browser fingerprinting? If you use the same browser then they know
it's you from the same fingerprint, so they can still track you if they want.

~~~
teekert
Hmm, yes good point. Still waiting for the browser-finger-print-obfuscation
plugin ;)

~~~
clouddrover
Mozilla is integrating Tor into Firefox. Anti-fingerprinting measures are part
of that project:

[https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Fusion](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Fusion)

[https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/meetings/2...](https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/meetings/2018Rome/Notes/FusionProject)

------
oelmekki
I've switched to firefox last year for privacy reasons, but soon realized it
was way not enough.

I used different profile to do what sandboxing is doing for facebook. Both
methods are very good at isolating cookies, but it's still an easy job to know
who you are based on IP address and a bit of easy fingerprinting (IP address +
screen resolution + browser version gets you a long way).

This year, I decided to start using tor-browser as my main browser, keeping a
firefox profile for facebook and making an other for google products.

It's a bit slower, I had to change a few habits (like being always logged in
or retrieving url from history by simply typing part of it), but in the end,
I'm glad to not have this paranoid-friendly feeling of constantly being
watched anymore. I realized that even if I never thought anyone was looking at
me specifically, I was acting as if it was the case, because of the perception
that everything was recorded and could be used. Mass-surveillance and private
social profiling are creating generations of paranoid, this can't be good.

------
fbn79
I'm missing something or Firefox inspector console (the base of web
development) is still far from reaching Chrome levels?. For example, if I
inspect an element and change window size I don't see applied media query
updated in the element tab. Chrome instead let me see in real-time what media
query rules are applied. This is really a strong limitation in web
development.

~~~
Theodores
Depends on what matters, if you are using CSS grid then Firefox is the goto
browser.

If you are using CSS grid then media queries are not where it is at, the
design is content driven and not screen size driven.

~~~
fbn79
No. I'm not using CSS Grid

------
nneonneo
One Firefox addon single-handedly changed my browsing experience - Tree Style
Tabs. With a little bit of styling & userChrome modification, you get a
browsing experience that (a) handles huge numbers of tabs in a sane fashion,
(b) takes up only a bit of space on the side, freeing up valuable vertical
room & making all your tab names nice and readable, and (c) makes organizing
and pruning tabs a snap. It's heavily customizable (but works well out of the
box), and it's pretty exclusively for Firefox - similar things for Chrome rely
on separate windows and can't remove the top tab bar (making them somewhat
redundant).

I also use multiple profiles via Profile Manager pretty frequently - it's
super handy to have the ability to launch a clean browser environment for
debugging purposes, and to have separate work profiles for different jobs to
avoid cross-contamination. Firefox Sync also works quite well between all of
my devices, and it's properly end-to-end encrypted for improved security.

~~~
VexorLoophole
Can you post your styling and userChrome setup?

Sounds stupid but i like the concept of TreeStyleTabs but i always disabled it
after some time. Firefox finally looks slick again on MacOS. And i want
something nice to look at when i work 8+ hours with it. And Tree Style Tabs
always turned me off somehow.

~~~
nneonneo
I use the "Sidebar" style on my Mac, with the TST add-on from piro_or. I
previously used a different tree style tab addon but it was not updated for
WebExtensions.

TST addon preference style:

    
    
        /* Compact tab layout */
        :root { --tab-height: 20px !important; }
        .tab { height: 20px !important; }
        /* Shrink space between pinned tabs and tab bar, only when pins are present */
        #tabbar[style*="margin"] { margin-top: 20px !important; }
    

userChrome.css:

    
    
        /* Hide tab bar in FF Quantum */
        @-moz-document url("chrome://browser/content/browser.xul") {
          #TabsToolbar {
            visibility: collapse !important;
            margin-bottom: 21px !important;
          }
    
          #sidebar-box[sidebarcommand="treestyletab_piro_sakura_ne_jp-sidebar-action"] #sidebar-header {
            visibility: collapse !important;
          }
        }
    

Then I needed to turn on the title bar (right click toolbar -> customize ->
check title bar at the bottom), and select Density -> Compact. The whole thing
ends up looking like this:
[https://imgur.com/a/c4j9QxR](https://imgur.com/a/c4j9QxR)

With some very small tweaks you could change it to look more like a Mac
toolbar, I guess, but as it stands it's pretty svelte.

------
nsm
I'm typing this comment from Firefox running inside a container on a Pixelbook
(ChromeOS) :)

Firefox has been my daily driver for over 5 years, with all my history and
bookmarks synced across all devices I had to have it on ChromeOS too.

It does a great job. The Tree Style Tabs extension really makes life easy and
with u2f support, there are very few things I need to use Chrome for now
(Looks at hangouts!).

~~~
dblohm7
My understanding is that Hangouts has finally been fixed.

~~~
cpeterso
Yes. Google now supports Firefox in legacy Hangouts and Meet, the enterprise
version of Hangouts:

[https://blog.mozilla.org/webrtc/firefox-is-now-supported-
by-...](https://blog.mozilla.org/webrtc/firefox-is-now-supported-by-google-
hangouts-and-meet/)

------
BuckRogers
Run DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials, Containerize & uBlock Origin.

If you setup Containerize properly you'll never use anything else other than
FF again. It can accept wildcards to break out of containers.

DDG Privacy Essentials is also a must-have, as you get the functionality of
Privacy Badger & HTTPS Everywhere in one addon. It also works a little better
in my tests when compared to HTTPS Everywhere. DDG PE also gives you a privacy
grade on sites you visit, which is a pretty nice addition.

I've been using Firefox since it was in beta (as Phoenix). Never left. I used
Navigator before and so it was a natural transition. It has always been better
than everything else if you knew how to to utilize the features it has that
others don't.

------
chillydawg
I use it by default, on my linux workstation and mbp. On my linux workstation,
the browser needs periodic restarts as it gets laggy. Chrome does not need
this, but I've stopped trusting google and so am removing as much google as
practical. The firefox android app is pretty good, too, except there's no pull
to refresh which is pretty annoying.

------
aoner
I want to use the chrome dev tools on safari, it's the only thing keeping me
at chrome. Is there a way to do this?

------
slededit
I really hope they take some time to introspect on how this happened for a
second time. From an outsiders perspective it was placing everything on a
rewrite and zero perceived progress for years.

It's good for the internet that Firefox succeeds. If they managed to take back
the lead I hope they don't give it up a third time.

------
arf
I did give it a try. I used it like I use Chrome. Many tabs open and keeping
them open for a couple of days. I did that a couple of times. It, of course,
crashed every single time and for some reason made my 4GHz quad-core i7 with
64Gb memory freeze for 5 minutes where I couldn't even ^d in a terminal.

~~~
toss1
Interesting, I do the same -- dozens of tabs open in multiple windows, for
multiple days, and it hasn't crashed in probably over a year.

Different machines, this one is: Intel I-6700-HQ 2.6GHz 4-core/8 logical 16GB
RAM...

~~~
abrowne
Same for me, and I even usually use Firefox Nightly with a Core 2 Duo, 4 GB
RAM and nouveau graphics forced on in the about:config . . .

------
Grue3
I still cannot switch from the old Firefox because the new one is missing a
decent proxy add-on. It needs to

1) automatically switch proxy based on URL regex/wildcard

2) I should be able to quickly add a new rule for the current website with a
keyboard shortcut

3) should be able to import rulesets from old Foxyproxy

Foxyproxy pre-Quantum could do all of this, but the new version cannot do 2).
Also none of proxy add-ons work with Firefox Android. I really need this
functionality to have normal Internet access because of stuff like [1].

[1] [https://meduza.io/en/news/2018/04/17/russia-s-federal-
censor...](https://meduza.io/en/news/2018/04/17/russia-s-federal-censor-
blocks-millions-of-ip-addresses-in-crackdown-on-telegram-disrupting-internet-
services-across-the-country)

------
rusk
Can anyone comment on what's driving this sudden intensification of effort on
the engineering side of things at Mozilla? Has there been a change of
management or something? Presumably Firefox is still Mozilla these days ...
will they be updating any of their other apps as well?

------
vladimir-y
I was a Firefox user long time ago, but then switched to Chrome since Firefox
was freezing as hell. But just recently I switched back to Firefox Quantum and
have been happy so far. No freezing anymore, open source, all the needed
features. So totally agree, Firefox is back.

------
babbit999
The best thing about FF is the “about:config”. It really gives you the control
like it should be. I don’t care if it’s slower than other browsers. Sadly,
this is not possible yet on iOS. Like others, I use chrome if my locked down
FF don’t work on a specific site.

~~~
NiLSPACE
Firefox, like any other browser on iOS, is based on webkit because Apple
doesn't allow other engines. That's why you don't have 'about:config' there.

------
elvirs
I would really love if Firefox didnt make me wait until it install an update
while I need to quickly test something on an alternative browser. Can I be the
one who decides if I want to install the update right now or do whatever I
wanted to do in the first place.

~~~
Larrikin
Turn off automatic updates. You'll get prompted when you open Firefox instead.

------
zabil
I've talked about this before.

Firefox is my main browser but I find chrome's developer ecosystem better.

For e.g. the Chrome Dev tools protocol, puppeteer etc. I hope there's some
kind of standardization (other that Webdriver) or easier automation and
testing on Firefox.

------
dvcrn
The main reason why I am still with Safari is battery. Nothing else compares
(or compared last time I checked) when it comes to battery life. Did this
change?

(But well, after the latest privacy changes announced by Apple, I might just
stay with Safari for good)

------
billysielu
I switched from Chrome to Firefox a few months ago and I'm very happy with it.

Day to day, the biggest difference I notice is that my adblocker extension
works on Android, no more "[vibrate] omg ur phone haz been hax0red download
our stuffz".

Extensions:

uBlock Origin - great ad blocker, works on Android.

DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials - includes privacy tracker list, https
everywhere, and visible privacy rating

Settings:

First Party Isolation On - IMO this is a top feature and should be on by
default.

Tracking Protection On (with Strict Block List).

I also took the opportunity to change my search engine from Google to
DuckDuckGo, which has been mostly fine. It's a bit more work to find something
on Google Maps, but that's understandable.

------
BadassFractal
How do you all feel Firefox compares with Brave these days as a normal daily
driver?

------
polski-g
Best part of FFX is you can use the element inspector to screenshot a specific
node.

------
Rebelgecko
I switched from Chrome to Firefox a few months ago and am mostly happy, with
just a few annoyances:

There's a setting to prompt "are you sure" before closing Firefox, but it
doesn't actually work. I really miss this feature (which works as expected in
Chrome) since unless I'm turning my machine off a pretty much never close my
browser intentionally

Shortcuts in text input also work differently than every other program on my
computer. Command-backspace deletes the whole text field, not just the text
before the cursor. ^t doesn't transpose, ^k behaves differently when text
wraps, etc

~~~
nayuki
> "are you sure" before closing Firefox

I believe this feature gets disabled if you enable the feature that
automatically restores your previous session when Firefox is opened.

~~~
Rebelgecko
Yeah, there's some arguments about that on their bug tracker page and it looks
like someone tried to change that code but it never went anywhere. If you
horde tabs like I do it can still waste a lot of time to restart the browser
and wait for the session to be restored.

~~~
callahad
Huh. Is this consistent for you? Since Firefox 55, we should be able to
restore 1500+ tabs in under 15 seconds:
[https://metafluff.com/2017/07/21/i-am-a-tab-
hoarder/](https://metafluff.com/2017/07/21/i-am-a-tab-hoarder/)

~~~
Rebelgecko
Pretty consistent. I haven't timed it, but it certainly feels like more than
15 seconds for my 50-100 tabs. I'm not in quite as pure of a situation as that
benchmark though-- I have plenty of other programs using memory and I'm
waiting for the page to actually render. During some of my Firefox launches
lately I also had a bunch of other applications launching at the same time
since I was trying to debug a WebGL page that sporadically hangs/reboots my
machine (in both Firefox and Chrome)

------
ductr
If Firefox wants to be taken seriously they have to stop showing ads in the
home page. Period. It looks way too unprofessional. Like some adware browser
you’d have to uninstall from your grandmas Windows XP computer.

------
stockkid
I use Firefox but I find the developer experience constantly lacking. Many
times I have no choice but to switch to Chrome to carry out certain tasks.

For example, in the developer tools, you are not able to pick an element when
the page is frozen using `debugger` command. Also there is no way to hijack a
particular event and enter debug mode.

There are many things like these that make me constantly go back to Chrome
while developing. Although small, they really add up. As much as I like and
support Firefox, I do not think it is quite there with the same level as
Chrome.

------
ggm
I must be an outlier. I find the chrome 'one person per instance' thing works
fine, with multiple virtual desktops.

I have colour coded my chrome personalities for me, me-as-lists and me-at-work
and I slide desks sideways in OSX to get between them. I never mistake one for
the other, I have distinct cache state, distinct password/form completion, and
unified plugins within limits.

Not that I dislike FF, but the 'chrome does it worser' meme about how to be
multiple google people: Chrome does it _different_

------
p3llin0r3
Firefox mobile has as extensions and ad blockers. That is all I needed to
switch. Been using Firefox for years, rarely any problems I'm the days of
babeljs and transpilers

------
hirundo
I disagree with Brendan Eich on same-sex marriage. And I'm not neutral or
ambivalent on the subject; I wholeheartedly approve of the practice. But I
disapprove of the way Eich was treated for his heresy. I think that he is a
fine man and a great technologist and Firefox is a poorer product due to his
excommunication.

So for me it isn't time to give Firefox another try. It's time to keep using
Eich's far more innovative new browser, Brave.

~~~
dagenix
He was the CEO. How are Mozilla employees supposed to believe he is going to
look out for them when he literally spent money to advance a cause that was
harmful to some of his employees and in no way beneficial to anyone. It wasn't
like he was just some dude that didn't have people management responsibilities
and kept his mouth shut. The decisions he made would impact lots of peoples
lives. Mozilla employees were absolutely right to demand more from someone
with that power.

~~~
mongol
It was a political opinion. People have different political opinions, even as
CEOs.

~~~
ambicapter
Turns out politics has an effect on people's lives, who knew?

~~~
TillE
It's utterly bizarre how so many people can view politics as if it were as
value-neutral as supporting a football team, or as if it's all some high-
minded abstract debate.

~~~
mongol
There is such a thing as respecting a differing opinion. I see more and more
tendencies to view differing opinions as something that is simply not
acceptable, even for opinions that have been ordinary just a short while back.
That is bizarre to me.

~~~
dagenix
Not all opinions are the same.

Some opinions are trivial. I think Wendy's produces a superior burger to
Burger King. Someone else might disagree. We can have a friendly discussion
about our points of view.

Other opinions aren't so trivial. Take, for example, denying the right to
marry to a whole segment of the population, a right that you yourself enjoy,
for no reason whatsoever. Its kinda hard to have a friendly discussion between
one group of people that are asking for basic rights for themselves and
another group of people that are trying to specifically deny those rights,
benefit themselves in no way, and have no good reason why. I'm not really sure
why the people being denied those rights are supposed to just throw up their
hands and accept that.

And its not a right to be a CEO - its a privilege. Its a false moral
equivalency to say that the privilege of being a CEO is somehow equivalent to
the basic right to be treated equally.

It doesn't really matter what people thought 10 years ago. Or 100. Recently
isn't a proxy for right.

~~~
batteryhorse
It's neither a right, nor a privilege. It's a job. Was he doing a good job? I
would say yes. Did Firefox prosper after he left? I would say no. User
marketshare has gone down. I don't care about 'morality', I just want a good
browser.

~~~
dagenix
he was CEO for 11 days. I'm not quite sure how you can say he was doing a good
job. As far as his technical chops, his qualifications are impeccable. And
those qualifications have nothing to do with his terrible views. Thats a very
different thing than discussing if he has the right stuff to lead a company
and make decisions that impact the lives of many, many people.

------
sneakycr0w
I have been switching back and forth between Chrome/Chrome Canary and
Firefox/Firefox Dev Edition, and I think I've finally come to the conclusion
that Firefox is my preferred source, especially as a web developer. There's
small things the dev tools does that I really appreciate, like showing
variable types by default.

Also, the constant updates to the dev tools like the Shape Path Editor is
amazing!

------
adamc
In the last year, my experience is that Firefox has become far more sluggish.
It often has quite perceptible delays in responding to input. Slow JavaScript
in one tab often affects other tabs. It also acts weirdly when using it over
rdp.

On paper, Quantum does lots of good things. In practice, my experience with it
is not nearly so positive. And the plugin breakage of the last few years has
been extremely irksome.

------
russelldavis
Scrolling on chrome (via the keyboard) has become incredibly slow and janky.
One example: log in to twitter, click any tweet, then click outside the
lightbox to return to the main page. Then hold the down arrow key. It's
unusably slow (and choppy). This also happens on amazon and a bunch of other
sites.

Firefox, on the other hand, has consistently fast & buttery smooth scrolling.

I'm surprised this doesn't get called out more.

------
dghughes
Firefox on Android continually crashes at least for me and many other people
going by comments on Google's Play Store. It must be at least six months since
something changed to the Firefox Android app making it randomly crash. It has
occurred across the last few versions.

I wish I could figure out why because I miss uBlock Origin since Chrome on
Android doesn't offer it.

------
bdz
Not sure how popular or known here but I use ungoogled-chromium. Personally I
never had any problem with Chrome (features and performance) but more with all
the ties to Google (telemetrics etc) [https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-
chromium](https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium)

------
colshrapnel
I always wanted to have an incognito browser as default option on my mobile.
Recently I chanced to discover Firefox Focus on Google Play and that's exactly
what I wanted. Now it's the default option to open random links, whereas
Chrome and vanilla Firefox are used for the several trusted cities with
permanent authorization.

------
nikisweeting
I love Firefox with all my heart, but it's still slower than Chrome for me on
an Intel Iris i7 2014 MacBook Pro. They seem comparable with <10 tabs open,
but Chrome pulls ahead once I have 50-100 suspended tabs open. I trust Firefox
will keep improving though, so I try to use it regularly despite it not being
my primary browser.

------
flgr
I'm impressed by how well [http://webclonk.flgr.me/](http://webclonk.flgr.me/)
runs in Firefox on my 5 years old MBP, even when zooming out quite a lot.

This used to run much much better in Chrome than in Firefox. Mozilla must have
done a ton of optimization to their JavaScript engine.

------
amelius
Nice.

There are still many things to be fixed on the internet, though:

\- social media

\- trust networks, moderation, reviewing, discovery

\- openness of OSes/devices, native programming frameworks

\- open implementations of ML/AI applications such as speech
recognition/synthesis, NLP, web search

\- decentralization of services, like IPFS

Any chance Mozilla will be working on these problems or funding
research/development?

------
catchmeifyoucan
The biggest reason I use Chrome is for Casting purpose. I would have dropped
Chrome a long time ago if it weren't for that. I use Safari as my primary
because of the battery benefits but still have Chrome. How are the dev tools
on Firefox? Not a big fan of the Safari dev tools. Chrome is also my go-to for
dev stuff.

------
kerhackernews
The only issue I have is that Firefox works poorly with 3D view in Google
Maps, which is something I use a lot.

------
k__
I was a long time Chrome user and switched back to Firefox a few months ago.

It really has taken up speed and feature-wise it can compare itself with
Chrome no problem.

Only issues I have are videos (sometimes FB makes problems here) and the
"Multi-Account Containers" log me out of some sites (Twitter) when I closed
Firefox.

------
niklasd
I really like and use Firefox. Just the pdf-viewer is subpar – especially to
Safari. If I print Latex-made pdfs from the browser, the font looks odd. Also
I can't zoom properly/continuously in via my Mac Trackpad. Can anyone
recommend a plugin with a better pdf-viewer for Firefox?

------
samuell
Ah, just discovered it (still?) supports live bookmarks, based on RSS/Atom
feeds (Right click on toolbar, add the "Subscribe" button, etc).

Having live feed icons in the bookmark bar has been the best way to follow
news I ever used. Hope this gets support in other browsers, like Brave, too.

------
andyjohnson0
Took this as a hint to move my personal browsing from Chrome over to Firefox.
Fairly quick process to move bookmarks etc over, and so far its looking pretty
good. Real test will be how much friction I get with using FF on my android
phone. Anyone here gone down this route recently?

------
imagetic
The only thing Firefox feels behind on is video, at least that I notice in day
to day operation. Chrome runs much more efficiently. When using Firefox my
laptops fans spin up, battery life takes a hit, and it's overall more
sluggish.

------
crashocaster
I'd love to use Firefox full-time, but I have always had font rendering issues
whenever I've tried it out (on debian). Not only cosmetic issues, like
blurriness or ugly rendering, but sometimes even simply incorrect rendering of
characters.

------
booleandilemma
I didn’t realize it went anywhere.

------
metmirr
Yeah things have changed but on windows and Ubuntu there is still significant
performance between chrome and Firefox. On virtualbox it is really slow and
annoying. It fires up almost with pycharm at the same time.

------
deventis
I never left FireFox, because I think it's spooky to use a browser from Google
that connects profiles with their identity management. But I have to say,
FireFox is finally getting better again!

------
GnarfGnarf
I want Firefox and Mozilla to succeed, but the last time I upgraded a few
months ago, Firefox was generating 12,000 page faults/sec. (on a 16GB PC). I
said bye-bye and switched to Chrome.

------
noobermin
Since the recent updates to Firefox which prompted a lot of press, have the
numbers for Firefox usage actually moved at all?

BTW, haven't used Chrome/chromium in years unless it was for testing purposes.

------
fareesh
I would use Firefox if their track record for adding feature support was as
good as Google. Also I vastly prefer the webkit inspector to the Firefox one,
which feels very clunky and slow.

------
aceshades
My only gripe using Firefox on Linux is that my 1Password doesn't interface
with it as well (or at all). Though I guess that's an issue with 1Password
than with Mozilla.

------
ojuara
Guys, I use Safari and I’ve a little question.

Talking about privacy, Firefox can do a better job than Safari? I heard Apple
talking a lot about how Safari is becoming great at this.

------
digitalpacman
It doesn't have built-in websocket support so it can F off. Build better dev
tools and feel bad. Even the plugin that used to be usable isn't supported on
the new FF.

~~~
arendtio
Yes, the FF Dev-Tools need some love. They have some cool features which are
unavailable in Chrome (e.g. the CSS Grid view), but overall they tend to be
less accessible (managing (wifi/usb) connected devices and service workers
should be much easier and more reliable).

------
Fej
I understand that this is not a compelling argument for most people - but I
would buy instantly a Firefox t-shirt that said "Live Free or Die".

------
josefresco
I never stopped using Firefox. I just started running Chrome in my left
monitor for my G Suite services, and Firefox on my right for everything else.

------
trumped
If I would have ever switched to Chrome, it would have been to save probably
less then one minute per day (when Chrome was faster)... not worth it for me.

------
manemobiili
I engourage to try out old school text based browsers. w3m with youtube-dl &
media player. Text, images and video. That goes a long way.

------
pmoriarty
Firefox permanently broke Pentadactyl. I'm really not going to be excited
about Firefox until it has something of that caliber again.

~~~
jszymborski
With all due respect, less than 0.1% of browser users likely feel that way.

Don't mean to discredit or invalidate your feelings, I just feel the need to
disclaim that it's impossible to meet people's need with that granularity.

The alternative is that they keep XUL, make 0.1% of the install base happy,
and ditch the performance increases that Quantum/WebExtension have given us...
at which point there wouldn't be a NYT article and we'd all just be stuck in a
browser monoculture.

~~~
greglindahl
The one thing I wanted from XUL was tree style tabs, and Firefox managed to
add enough APIs to make tree style tabs work in the post-XUL era.

~~~
PurpleRamen
Work is relative. It's so bugged in filled with failures, that it's not really
the same.

------
joelrunyon
I switched to Firefox because Chrome kept taking over my entire CPU and making
my computer sound like a drone.

Anyone else run into that?

------
senthilnayagam
I use Firefox for my streaming needs, amazon video, hotstar.

I am on beta channel, small 2-3 mb updates every couple of days.

firefox is stable.

I would recommend it.

------
kerhackernews
The mobile version has improved by a lot. It used to be slow as shit but now
it's comparable to Chrome.

------
federicoponzi
Is there an easy way to export all my stuff from chrome (logins, bookmarks
etc) and import it in firefox?

~~~
federicoponzi
Yeah, here it is :D [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/import-bookmarks-
data-a...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/import-bookmarks-data-another-
browser)

------
dorianm
Firefox is dead, it's at 6% market share now:

    
    
        Chrome	57.36%	60.60%	47.77%
        Safari	13.96%	17.27%	22.16%
        UC       	7.88%	1.69%	0.32%
        Firefox	5.45%	5.89%	6.21%
    

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers)

~~~
isostatic
Firefox works fine for me, so I'm not sure what "dead" means.

------
tzfld
>But it became irrelevant after Google in 2008 released Chrome

I've never felt Firefox becoming irrelevant

------
daxorid
Security continues to be a concern. If FF can go a year without critical UAF
bugs, maybe.

------
ece
It's been better than anything else for a while, at least 2 years or so.

------
Animats
It was gone?

------
largote
I'm way too invested in Chrome Sync to change browsers at this point.

------
elvirs
Also, Print options really suck on Firefox. They should copy from Chrome.

~~~
bittercynic
I think it's pretty annoying that Chrome doesn't use the system print dialog
by default. It repeatedly confuses the less savvy users where I work.

~~~
jacobsenscott
The chrome print dialog is totally broken for us. It always tries to use the
wrong size paper from an empty paper tray. We always need to click through to
the system print dialog. I need to tell people to do that every single time
because they forget every single time. I should switch everyone to FF just for
that.

------
esturk
Until Firefox address privacy concerns, I'm not going back. Try opening
private tabs and going some where. Now close it and reopen it with
Ctrl+Shift+T. All the browsing history is still there. Safaria dna Chrome
doesn't do this.

~~~
rpenm
You can reopen tabs in a private window, but the session appears to be lost
when you close the window.

~~~
cpeterso
That's correct. And all private tabs and windows share the same private
session, which is discarded when the last private tab is closed.

------
jmh530
It runs awful on my work computer, but fine on home computer.

------
known

      Mobile - Opera
      Office - Chrome
      Home -- Firefox

------
mezod
Firefox never left. Proud user through the bad times :D

------
dilap
Still no bounce scrolling! That's like table-stakes if you want to pretend
like you're making a decent Mac app.

------
usermac
The Dev Edition is superfine.

------
NVRM
Never switched off.

------
yolo1897
they added 2FA to firefox sync recently, finally !

------
epsilon_machine
Wait, it had left?

------
OscarTheGrinch
Make pockets easy to disable, stop re-enabling it on upgrade.

------
LoSboccacc
Unless they fixed their outline shit and other weird css inconsistencies I
want none of it.

------
Yizahi
> But it became irrelevant after Google in 2008 released Chrome

No, it didn't.

> Chrome, a faster, more secure and versatile browser.

No, it wasn't.

Articles like this are perpetrating the myth about "better" Chrome, while it
had always been slower and had less features than Firefox.

~~~
konart
>it had always been slower

Only if at the very beginnning. For a long time now Chrome is much faster than
Fx both in rendering (withough Fx WebRender) and general responsiveness.

~~~
Yizahi
I know it is anecdotal experience, not a proper test, but personally I tried
Chrome for several months as a main browser when FF had been in 3x versions,
and Chrome always felt less responsive. It had some weird micropauses in
initial page rendering, and since I'm mainly opening/closing new different
pages from multiple sites (as opposed to have several pages open constantly
from few sites) it had been less pleasant to use compared to FF. And I'm not
even mentioning addons and privacy, just from performance standpoint.

PS: at that time I was working for almost full time on Asus Eee PC, with 1Gb
memory and early model of Atom CPU, so that was the reason to try Chrome
widely marketed as "faster" (as I said above, it wasn't in practice, at least
for me).

------
eldfuthark
I was a Chrome/Firefox/IE user for many years due to my job (utilizing many
web browsers to test customer and application behavior through network
devices). Over the last few years I’ve realized that Chrome is the new IE.

------
alf-pogz
Mozilla as an organization makes me a bit uncomfortable. I still haven't
forgotten the entire Brendan Eich fiasco. Who is to say that extremely
politically motivated folks at Mozilla may consider it their duty to expose
user(s) in a similar way? How can they purport to be a champion of user
privacy after what they did to Brendan Eich?

~~~
rpearl
What? His donation (of public record) specifically against same sex marriage--
indicated that he was not a good culture fit. People (inside and outside the
organization) chose to point that out when he was promoted.

This really doesn't have anything to do with user privacy in any way
whatsoever--nothing about user privacy was surfaced or breached in any way.
Nor is there any indication, in mozilla's extremely open source code, that
Mozilla would be collecting any information like this.

So, uh, what do you mean by "in a similar way"?

~~~
alf-pogz
The act was definitely "doxing" any way you slice it. Folks at Mozilla
actively chose to find a touchy topic, and expose it to cause the "bad culture
fit" argument.

I'm not here to start conspiracies, I'm simply stating that the entire event
left me feeling that there are some big players at Mozilla that will use
ethically gray areas to achieve their goals, and the people who indulged in
that gray area won and are still part of the organization.

Due to that, I am out. I should state that, politically speaking, I was not in
solidarity with Eich's position. I am opposed to what people at Mozilla did.

~~~
siddboots
It's not doxing by any definition I'm familiar with. Also, this sentence...

> Folks at Mozilla actively chose to find a touchy topic, and expose it to
> cause the "bad culture fit" argument.

You are insinuating that folks at Mozilla exploited his position on same sex
marriage towards a hidden agenda of some kind.

Another interpretation is that folks at Mozilla simply took issue with his
position on same sex marriage.

~~~
alf-pogz
I'm absolutely insinuating that, and the agenda was not hidden. They did not
want Brendan Eich to be CEO. It was a hit job.
[https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-under-fire-inside-
the-9-da...](https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-under-fire-inside-the-9-day-
reign-of-fallen-ceo-brendan-eich/)

~~~
rpearl
I don't know why you keep missing the mental leap here: Yeah, people at the
company--and outside it--did not want a CEO willing to spend money to actively
remove the rights of a group of people. That is the thing they did not want.

They didn't go digging to find something to hurt him: he took action, public
and on the record, specifically taking away the rights of others.

It is true, people did not want that, and they did not hide that fact.

Signed, a gay, now married, 2011 Mozilla intern who did not pick up a full
time offer in part because some 2012 news of Eich's donation surfaced around
the time I was considering pursuing it.

------
nimbius
1\. does it still require me to use pulseaudio to compile it.
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1345661](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1345661)

2\. does it still send DNS data to third parties for analytics.
[https://www.ghacks.net/2018/03/20/firefox-dns-over-https-
and...](https://www.ghacks.net/2018/03/20/firefox-dns-over-https-and-a-
worrying-shield-study/)

3\. Am i still required to build Pocket when I build Firefox? are we still
forbidden from removing pocket?

4\. Is telemetry still shipped on by default?
[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/24/mozilla_considers_m...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/24/mozilla_considers_move_to_opt_out_telemetry_for_firefox/)

Then no, its certainly not time for me to try firefox.

~~~
tomnipotent
This sums it up nicely. I refuse to use Firefox until they remove Pocket, it's
an absolute tragedy that it was ever included by default and forced onto a
user base that never asked for it.

~~~
jasonlotito
What's your problem with them including a technology they own in their
browser?

~~~
tomnipotent
It was acquired so that Mozilla could create a new revenue stream with
recommended & sponsored content. To rephrase, they forced a feature on me so
that they could sell ads.

~~~
jasonlotito
Gotcha, that's reasonable.

And thanks for answering and not just dismissing the question.

------
harry8
Why doesn't everyone use multiple browsers all the time? I've got chrome,
chromium, firefox, opera and use them all in amounts that vary with mood. That
mood is probably affected by the differing ways those browsers develop. I
don't recall firefox ever being a bad browser or so dramatically worse than
others that I would consider stopping using it. I can see the reservations
people have with chrome, mostly it's not that it performs badly but that maybe
it does things you don't want behind your back. I'm not even 100% sure what
chrome does behind our backs - is it nothing interesting? Is it a disgrace?
Easy for me to switch if it turns out to be the latter and I'm sure it will
become more clear.

I think it would be interesting if browsers did not allow a page to make
requests from multiple domains. nyt.com has to serve the ads and the images or
forget it. Everyone having to take full responsibility for what they serve
seems to me that it would result in an all-around more pleasant web.

~~~
AlexCoventry
A few years ago, at least, chrome had a significantly better design, from a
security perspective. Hopefully FF has caught up, but I haven't looked into
it.

~~~
harry8
From /some/ security perspectives, not all. Enough to actually ditch firefox
for all websites? The convenience of only using one browser seems to me to be
pretty limited and is clearly a security concern in itself as opposed to using
multiple. (How many is optimal? - Well how many are there? How easy is it for
you to use each of them - make the call that suits you given your assessment
of the concern.)

~~~
AlexCoventry
I don't see the security issue with using the one browser which is least
likely to let a webpage root you.

~~~
harry8
"root you" what does that mean in this context? Does it mean the exploit can
read what you're typing in that browser? It can see your browser history? It
actually has root on your machine and can and will do anything and everything?
Does it mean less than any of that? All of these exploits are possible and
none desirable.

What is your chance of getting an exploit that gives some remote entity
administrator permissions against your will from say, your bank? If you have a
browser that use say for your bank logins and nothing else I'd estimate the
chance of you falling victim to an exploit and suffering loss has decreased.

Given a website: which browser is most likely to lead to you being exposed to
an exploit. Answer will depend on the website.

If you fall victim to a cross site scripting security issue, the sites you
visit in another browser are not vulnerable.

The cookies you accumulate containing information that you have probably not
confirmed is all harmless are not available to a different browser if your
browser has a problem.

"Least likely" is not a constant and is quite challenging to estimate
accuratel as it depends on your browsing pattern which is not constant and the
vagaries of exploits in the wild which are un-knowably not-constant. If the
exploited security flaw you encounter is in browser A, browser B is the safer
option. Using one browser exposes all of your internet activities to the
exploit. Using multiple browsers exposes a subset.

You might get stuck with a mono-culture if everything else is a disaster, but
choosing a mono-culture of your own volition is not great practise if your
second and later options aren't dead losses. I don't think firefox has ever
been a dead loss, if you do and can justify it to yourself, great.

If it is necessary to be more paranoid [https://www.qubes-
os.org/](https://www.qubes-os.org/) is probably a reasonable option. As it is
our operating systems, be they proprietary or open source, suck and pointing
it out is not terribly controversial. Qubes is a reasonable response - is it a
reasonable cost for each of us in time and hassle? Individual decisions are
required for each of us to say.

One browser? No reason to be stuck with it, you can do better for basically
zero hassle.

------
Digital-Citizen
From the article: "But [Firefox] became irrelevant after Google in 2008
released Chrome, a faster, more secure and versatile browser."

Google Chrome is proprietary software. There's no way to back up any claim of
it being "secure" because there's no way to determine what proprietary
programs do. Users lack the permission to inspect the program's source code,
alter the program, or distribute altered versions.

Firefox, by comparison, was never proprietary. Users were and are free to run,
inspect, share, and modify Firefox (with perhaps a minor naming hurdle that
apparently isn't hard to overcome as Debian demonstrated for years). In fact,
this is likely a reason why TorBrowser is based on Firefox. Software freedom
isn't about guaranteeing the user security, it's about addressing the inequity
between users and developers inherent in non-free software. The technical
advantages or disadvantages come and go and are apparently only as far as
developers want to take them. People can and do learn to become software
developers. And free software's technical merit can be improved by anyone
willing to do the work. So we can add impressive technical features to free
software. But we have no way to make proprietary software free. So the path to
getting software we can evaluate against a claim of "security" and back up
that claim starts and ends with software freedom.

~~~
nkkollaw
"secure" probably refers to the sandboxing functionality that Chrome has had
since version 1.

~~~
Digital-Citizen
"Probably refers to"? That you don't know what "secure" refers to is itself a
problem. But more problematic is anyone's defense of Google Chrome's
architecture while overlooking that that architecture is implemented with
secret software which you aren't allowed to vet, alter, or share with others
(parts of software freedom).

This proprietary software apparently allowed for sending Google every URL a
Chrome user types in ([http://www.favbrowser.com/google-chrome-spyware-
confirmed/](http://www.favbrowser.com/google-chrome-spyware-confirmed/)) and
making it easy for extensions to spy on Chrome users
([https://labs.detectify.com/2015/07/28/how-i-disabled-your-
ch...](https://labs.detectify.com/2015/07/28/how-i-disabled-your-chrome-
security-extensions/)) which many Chrome extensions apparently do, or
activating a Chrome user's microphone and sending the captured data to Google
([https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2015/06/google-
ch...](https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2015/06/google-chrome-
listening-in-to-your-room-shows-the-importance-of-privacy-defense-in-depth/)).
Hardly behavior users are likely to call "secure" because such behavior does
not look out for the security of its users, but instead securing access to
Chrome user's data.

