I use FF, too, but I can see why someone wouldn't want to: It's just not a very good Mac app. Weird windowing and focus bugs in fullscreen mode. Keyboard shortcuts that randomly stop working. Zero scripting capabilities (it used to have the bare minimum, but Mozilla bizarrely ripped it out), and just poor integration in general. My system-wide shortcuts — the ones that are so important I've added them to every context menu on the system? That's a big nope because FF devs apparently think showing poxy extension icons is more important.

Google had the good sense to copy Safari's keyboard shortcuts in Chrome. Mozilla didn't.

The bookmark manager is straight out of Windows 95. Awful UX.

I do like Firefox, but it's just not up to snuff on macOS.

And I don't mind dated UX of bookmarks manager, I even think that compared to other browsers it is the most usable one.

Firefox may be open source, but Mozilla is a company with a paid development team. It is exactly these types of issues - UX, UI - on which the dev team should be working. I'm sure that a lot of features come from the open source community, but the polish and sound implementation is on the dev team.

For what it's worth, Firefox on KDE is fine.

For the past 6+ years I only use Chrome rarely and as an Internet Explorer replacement.

401 - Chrome

446 - Firefox

546 - Safari

511 - Chrome without any extensions

433 - Clean firefox install

500 - Clean edge install

On an AMD Ryzen 7950X3D / 5600MHz RAM

Interestingly, I got substantially different results depending on whether I used chrome with my typical extensions or not. Looking at the flamegraph, I don't seem to see the full picture of why there's such a substantial difference. Bitwarden/React Developer tools (the 2 primary extensions I use) don't seem to make enough of an impact to account for the roughly 40% performance increase seen without them. The browserbench javascript accounted for ~38.6% of the overall time taken for the benchmark, but the sum of my extensions was only 6.5%. I'm not incredibly familiar with browser performance profiling, so there's probably more to the story.

  457 - Chrome
  444 - Safari
  348 - Firefox

202 ± 4.7 - Chrome

184 ± 5.0 - Firefox

171 ± 2.6 - Safari

It was my only reason to launch Chrome on my job laptop and it's been six months that I use Google Meet daily on FF without issue.

For whatever reason, the experience just isn't there. Maybe it's Mozillas fault, maybe it's Google's, maybe it's even Apple's.

Of course, that is exactly the model used by Mozilla. It exports search query data to Google for capture, by default, in return for payment.

"Thank goodness for Mozilla and all its collaborators."

Indeed, thank goodness for long-time Mozilla collaborator Google, LLC. Mozilla employees left to join Google beginning in 2005. They wrote Chrome.

Without Google's payments to Mozilla, who knows what might happen.

But I still use of because of the cookie Mgmt mainly, and secondly because we need at least one alternative browser engine on desktop... Safari WebKit is a fork (or the original if you prefer), it's not really that different.

The web interfaces for both Jitsi and Zoom fail to recognise my web camera. I've gone through the permissions settings a dozen times and Firefox says that it sees camera, but it only displays a black feed. Vivaldi correctly accesses the camera on both sites.

imascientist.org.uk makes it "impossible" to sign up for outreach sessions under Firefox. The div with the sessions has a `max-width` parameter, but the contents are significantly larger than this width, resulting in the buttons being outside the rendering area and inaccessible. I have to go into the dev tools and edit the CSS every time I open the page.

These are just the issues that I've dealt with today. Don't get me wrong - I'm literally typing this in Firefox at this moment. However, it doesn't help anyone to pretend that these issues never pop up. I simply feel that the benefits outweight these annoyances.

On imascientist.org.uk I don't see a sign up button, only login.

zoom worked without problem.. both audio and video..

imascientist.org.uk i opened the registration page and it showed without problem buttons where in the end of the page as i would expect.

It look like it is something in your end and not with firefox..

The "give me examples" is sort of a moving target, anecdotally I have run into many more completely or partially broken sites when using Firefox as compared to Chrome and Safari. It is likely that some or all of those examples are now fixed but the pain in the moment is enough to keep me from using the browser long term.

It works fine for me.

I've occasionally run into relatively minor visual issues (I think from before the :has pseudo-class was made generally available in FF) but I cannot think of a single instance where a site was unusable and then worked when I tried it in Chrome.

Do you have some examples of websites that really behave that differently depending on the browser you're using?

Having lived through the "best viewed with..." days I'd hoped we were past all that by now!

I don't know your specific reasons. But commonly this is just familiarity bias.

That doesn't say that X is better than Y in general (it often isn't) just that you know X better than Y and therefore it's better for you.

It's why I've never been able to switch to emacs despite trying it out. It's why I'm forever stuck on Ubuntu, despite the fact that there are DEs/distros out there that suit my use case better, probably.

It’s probably fixable, though. One of these days when I have some surplus time I’d like to grab a copy of the Firefox source, see how practical changing its UI is, and figure out if the root cause of lack of polish is technical or organizational. If it’s the latter a fork may be in order.

(Mozilla and Goog were smart to start offering account-based sync because this creates a moat for regular adoption. But anyone can and should go window-shopping for browsers - it's cheap entertainment, at the very least.)

Any non OSS browser makes me feel weird. The amount of trust you place in a browser is insane.

> Mozilla develops their own browser engine

This is key. Without Mozilla we are aproaching monopoly as Safari aproaches gradually Internet Explorer.

Chrome is doing the "I make my own web standards and push them through, ups now my feature is standard incompatible so I try to force change the upcoming standard just before it gets committed" thing IE had done in the past (it's e.g. the main reason why you sometimes end up with CORS issues on FF, the site isn't standard compatible as it doesn't handle a certain thing the standard requires from websites but due to a last minute exception for chrome doesn't require browsers to enforce).

And Safari does the "I don't adopt new standards forever and have strange bugs" IE think. Funnily like IE there are a lot of devs which swear that it has no strange bug problem (because they mainly use libraries developed on/for or at least tested with safari, but if you use some more newer tech it Safari support can be quite costly).

I think people make too much of Safari lagging in the adoption of standards. Yes, they lag behind on what Chrome is pushing but they're also ahead on other features, like color spaces.

I'm familiar with Safari strange bugs but it's usually while I'm testing with VoiceOver so I have fewer occasions to notice bugs with Chrome or Firefox, which don't work as well with VoiceOver overall.

I think of Safari being the new IE because it's not as evergreen as other browsers; old but still usable iPhones and iPads can't run the current version and aren't allowed to run anything else. Thus, developers have more reason to care about what a browser from 2+ years ago supports.

The only time new features were released was when IE or Netscape pushed them.

Google is a better steward of their default position than Microsoft was, by a mile, so far.

But the web and the internet is more important than Google.

Use Firefox. :)

So it's like Google wearing a mask.

Comment A) "Screw Mozilla, all their funding comes from their Google Search deal, they're just Google in a mask"

Comment B) "Screw Mozilla, they waste all this money on side projects (that would provide diversification and non-Google revenue streams) when they should be spending all of their effort on Firefox (which is effectively un-monetizable apart from the search deal - and you can bet hard money that there would be screaming if they tried)"

- Rust

- LetsEncrypt (collaboration)

- Opus (collaboration)

- AV1 (collaboration)

- Mozilla Common Voice database

- FirefoxOS

- MozillaVPN

- Lockwise

- Relay

- Bugzilla

- Servo

- Pocket

- MDN

- The VR projects - even if you think they're dumb they're hardly political feel-good stuff.

- The new privacy monitoring services

- The Scroll partnership (defunct because Twitter bought them and destroyed it)

most of them where not

especially if you look at resource distributions

Like tab containers, browser sync, firefox SSO, VR, FirefoxOs, Pocket, the send file thing, relay, VPN, privacy preserving Translation, TTS, reader mode, pdf.js.

Non of them are "politically motivated feel-good marketing distractions" but bets to diversification (which also mostly failed for one reason or another) (and yes Pocket contains political motivated nonsens in it's recommendation system, but by itself isn't a politically motivated features, but a feature I would want to see more of deeper integrated into FF, just REALLY without the recommendation system and a somehow more natural part-of-FF felling UI/UX).

I mean sure that color theme nonsense was politically motivated feel-good nonsense. But using that as point to get hung up on is exactly what the OP comment meant, people tend to be very selective about remembering things so that they fit their narrative.

I didn’t know about Text to Speech (TTS) but personally wouldn’t have much use for it. The other things I didn’t recognise is VR. I’m guessing this refers to Firefox Reality on the Oculus Go VR Headset² (which seems to be no longer available).

¹ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc7HmhrgTuQ

² https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-reality...

Saying Firefox is Google wearing a mask is some wild conspiracy theory.

This is the first time I've ever heard someone say this. The overwelming sentiment is that safari is leagues behind, lacks features, lacks performance is has the worst standards support of all common browsers.

What areas are you referring to?

All we ever did at my jobs, when people complained "it doesn't work on safari" is put up a banner for safari users pointing them to either the app-store for our app, or to the fact their browser is not supported.

I've only ever gotten complaints from safari users that stuff was broken (It wasn't, their browser just did stuff wrong/differently/not-yet)

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/

It currently mentions "Google" a number of times, along with "Microsoft", "eBay", "AdMarketplace", "Cloudflare", "Comcast", "Adjust", "Fastly", "our partners", and other entities.

I think a lot of people believe that Firefox respects its users' privacy more than it actually does.

They may be surprised to learn how many, and which, third-parties might be involved when using Firefox.

- User Styles: I can customize pretty much everything about the browser UI using CSS.

- Containers: Shared history, form data, bookmarks,etc. But containerized cookies.

- Separate search field next to the address bar.

Plus worth mentioning that Firefox has native support for real user stylesheets with own origin layer, just as specified by standards. It is userConent.css file in the "chrome" folder in the profile directory. Slightly cumbersome compared to Stylus' provided "UserCSS" injections, but I think it is super important for any user agent to keep this functionality that is by the way required for CSS2.1+ compliance, and UAAG [1]

And also, to my knowledge, Firefox is one of few browsers that lets you (still) hack its interface ("chrome") through css (userChrome.css in aforementioned folder). [2]

[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/2015/NOTE-UAAG20-Reference-20151215/#s... [2] https://twitter.com/myfonj/status/1387584962354982912

De-selecting the box and specifying my preferred fonts is the absolute first setting I change on every Firefox installation.

Not the controls, though. For that you’d need Firefox 2016.

  /* to hide the native tabs */
  #TabsToolbar {
      visibility: collapse;
  }

  /* to hide the sidebar header */
  #sidebar-header {
      visibility: collapse;
  }

As of now, extensions can kind of customize this like before, they just don't do it in a fully general way (like you'd get from a supported settings feature). The extensions will only apply after a given tab's page has loaded. So if I want to go left three tabs, I will get stuck on any tab which needs to reload, or doesn't have a page loaded, or any number of exception.

So, bottom line, I can't customize controls in a general sense anymore.

Comment A) "Screw Mozilla, all their funding comes from their Google Search deal, they're just Google in a mask"

Comment B) "Screw Mozilla, they waste all this money on side projects (that would provide non-Google revenue streams) when they should be spending all of their effort on Firefox (which is effectively un-monetizable apart from the search deal - and you can bet hard money there'd be screaming if they tried)"

Can we at least acknowledge that most of the side projects did lead to improvements in the browser and web ecosystem? FirefoxOS led to a bunch of focus on memory usage & responsiveness as well as web APIs that provided more parity between web and native apps. LetsEncrypt got a big boost from Mozilla as did Opus and AV1. Rust is in a class of its own. The VPN deal doesn't require that much investment from Mozilla since it's based on Mullvad. The voice & language database is a big boon to the current open source AI training movement, etc.

You don't need to copy/paste this to all your comments. Some people may disagree with you and dismissing them like that will only lead to resentment.

> Can we at least acknowledge that most of the side projects did lead to improvements in the browser and web ecosystem?

Indeed, a lot of the stuff you mentioned _indirectly_ improved some things in Firefox-the-web-browser. Now image how much better it could have been be if all that resources had been invested in the browser quality directly.

I have a low opinion of Lunduke. Most of his criticisms are, if not entirely false, in extreme bad faith.

I don't dabble in US politics too much because I'm European, but it felt a bit odd to read the article and encounter the way it frames things.

As if donating money to a bunch of organizations that care about trans issues, pro-choice, vaccine acceptance and a bunch of other social justice stuff is somehow a horrible thing to do, especially when the amount of money being donated is equivalent to the salaries of a few qualified engineers.

>> Why does Mozilla give so much money to political speakers that have no relationship to their core business?

What exactly is wrong with a company choosing to support a left political leaning? From what I've read of USA, those might in general be more grounded and regard privacy higher, than the right leaning stuff like needing an ID to watch pornography, banning books and all that other weird stuff, which might lead to some surveillance state.

>> Why does Mozilla seem unconcerned with alienating a large portion of their user base (which is already shrinking)?

I don't get it, who cares about this so much that it'd alienate them? It's akin to me seeing that my KitKat chocolate bar supports planting more trees, going on some charade about climate change and then boycotting their products. Surely nobody gets so worked up over some money going towards initiatives that'd arguably make lives better?

>> Why do some of the recipients of Mozilla money appear to be nothing more than empty shells of companies — not even having a simple website?

This is a better point, as are the other questions in my opinion. But at the same time, if there are corporations that support the far right, I don't mind Mozilla throwing some money in a direction to balance things out, even if it might be a bit performative due to the comparatively small sums.

HN loved to hate on it's decision but a lot of them (like XUL removal) where strictly necessary for firefox to still have any chance for relevancy.

And while they did try out a lot of things but FF fundamentally has a hard time gaining new users as they have very little killer features. So stuff like pocket, VR or FirefoxOS where needed tries of FF to gain some feature with which you can gain users. Tries they lost but I would say failing to try would have been worse leadership.

You know what else could have gained them new users? Best in class mobile browser supporting full range of FF extensions! Instead they dragged their feet on extension support for years and its performance on Android is still inconsistent for me.

Seeing how many people are now criticizing Apple for hobbling PWAs with Safari on iOS, I'd say they were just ahead of their time.

By doing that you have to contend with low-to-nonexistent margins, green unoptimized software struggling to run on weak hardware, and the fact that nobody (users and devs alike) really gets excited or talks about entry level devices.

Mozilla might’ve caught some transitory flack for focusing on flagships initially, but it would’ve made for a much more usable product out of the gate and helped to fund R&D to make more affordable models a reality.

It didn’t end up challenging the Apple/Google duopoly like Mozilla wanted but I think they should have stuck with it anyways.

Rust was a project started by Mozilla Research employees but not affiliated with Mozilla. Though they did sponsor it in 2009.

Now browsers will be allowed to use their custom engine (they were forced to all use Safari up until now), so thank you EU for the new DMA!

Admittedly I haven't tried disabling extensions and finding the root cause. I just switch to Chrome for that task.

No doubt Chrome's more modern stack and hefty resources help in ironing out hardware-specific quirks.

I've been meaning to try different Firefox distributions though because switching away from Firefox isn't really an option for the reasons you've stated.

Mozilla's motives alone for creating a web browser are why I trust FF. I don't like the idea of Chrome subsisting (to the point it's their actual business model) on my personal info

I've been a fan since the Firebird days--which I wish they'd been able to stick with because the antisocial fox still irritates me in a very low-key, unserious way--but the browsing experience is not modern, and the extension-based solutions are ... functional. Every few months I check again to see if one of them has improved, and I try them, and I switch back quickly. Which leaves me feeling disappointed in myself, but there you go.

For example, every major browser nowadays not only supports tabbed browsing but enforces it.

I think tabbed browsing is misdevelopment of UX because I need to handle window management on the OS and browser level. I'm using the tabbing feature in sway/i3 so every application has tabs not only browsers and they all act in the same way.

I know that not many people think this way. But that's the whole point. We should be able to tailor software to our needs.

Ok, I guess?

Personally I don’t trust anybody, I just recognize I have to give my data to someone at some point (don’t have the time to setup everything needed in order not to…). I’ve chosen Apple (gougle is out of the question because I actively distrust them), but I don’t particularly trust them…

I hate that no one has yet made a third party tab sharing system. I don't think it would be rocket science to have an app you can "share" URLs with which sends it elsewhere. I remember years ago while shopping for browsers that Firefox was the only one with this feature, which boggles the mind. Brave last I tried didn't support it.

Not sure what you mean, but you can click the URL, then click on Share, then select "Send to devices". In a way, it works better than Firefox, because the list of active devices is more up to date. On the other hand, it can have latency, but I noticed latency in Firefox's sharing too.

Also, you can go to the Menu, then click on "Recent Tabs", which will show you the tabs on other devices.

    browser.tabs.closeWindowWithLastTab = false
    prevents the entire browser window from closing when the user closes the last tab (I find this behavior annoying)

I just build up tab groups in windows and occasionally declare bankruptcy on the whole thing and close all of it. So technically that counts as closing the last tab? But it's a housekeeping operation I do maybe four times a year, and usually I'm rebooting the computer so closing the browser is also fine by me. I kill entire groups when I'm done with them but there's always a couple windows which just accrete tabs endlessly, like the one with Twitter pinned.

Firefox lets you pop out the video feeds of call participants, so you can have them in a corner when sharing a full-screen window.

No more 404s in dev tools for local websites, thanks!

Also, if you say you don't like this - corporate monopoly ==>> corporate abuse of monopoly - then how about a bit of action, to go with your words?

Lately I tell people about about:about because I had only recently learned of it. Maybe you’ll find some use there too

Many more people should be using it.

1200 thumbs up since 2022 and 22 pages of comments. I wonder when we'll get native vertical tabs.

To get it that way takes a bit of code in the advanced options, and tinkering with a user definition file in FF to remove the top tab bar, but it's worth it.

The other killer feature of FF for me is the ability to containerize domains and control how cross-domain containerization occurs (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/containers-wi...). My interactions with google (for example) never leak out of my google container, so my search queries or browsing aren't explicitly linked to my google account, because I do that outside my google container. Want to watch a video on yt without it tanking your recommendations? Do it outside the google container.

Of course there are a lot of other ways for google to infer it's "me", so I don't know if this is pure security theater or it actually hinders them building my profile. Either way, it's nice to be able to explicitly determine when and where my google profile is built as I traverse the web.

I will not defend this use model to any skeptics, but FWIW I have no performance issues!

Sidebery lets you set colors on tabs explicitly, or by pattern. I use this sparingly but it's very useful when I do.

That approach may even be more tax efficient, too.

To contribute, here's what Firefox does well, from my perspective:

    + History sync actually works — most Chromium browsers don't sync all history;
    + DNS-Over-HTTPS works in parallel to corporate DNS (fallback to system);
    + Tree-style-tabs;
    + Bookmarks management is better;
    + Very nice Reader View (Android & desktop);
    + Ctrl+Tab which actually works;
    + Non-admin upgrades, most of the time, making upgrades on managed laptops less annoying;
    + uBlock Origin, on both desktop and mobile;
    + Total Cookie Protection;
    + Multi-account containers (e.g., second Reddit user);
    + Android: accessibility zoom actually works;
    + Android: multiple search engines;
    + Android: Open in app;
    + Android: Dark reader / Cookie AutoDelete / other extensions;

    - They dropped the ball on PWA support — mobile has unfixed bugs, desktop dropped SSB, has trouble keeping up with features [1];
    - Poor performance on Android, known problems when scrolling (e.g., Mastodon, Twitter);
    - incompatibility with online services (e.g., Microsoft Teams), although, granted, they're working hard to remedy that;
    - No customizable keyboard shortcuts, which is surprising for a project that supposedly cares about accessibility;
    - Firefox is still funded almost entirely by Google's search ads, which means they can't actually compete with Chrome;
    - Mozilla has had poor and overpaid management, spending people's donations on political activism, while firing people working on next-gen improvements (e.g., Rust, Servo).

It’s not like vertical tabs are that strange of a feature at this point… Vivaldi, Edge, and Orion have them built in and they’re the only option in Arc. I understand why Mozilla might not want to have to deal with maintaining a full vertical tabs feature themselves but at least give extension authors the tools they need.

Can it? You can set an additional password for synchronization. I was under the impression this implies end-to-end encryption.

Of course, Chrome might send this data back to Google once synced and decrypted by the user. But Mozilla might do that just the same.

Given the approximately same setup and use-case: Who do you trust more to keep encryption strong and unbroken?

OFC trustless verification and such would be my ideal for a very impractical version of "ideal". Where I'd run my own server software, read all it's source code, read all the source code of the client, monitor all my network traffic, and do so for all updates. Given this is unattainable for me (for one: I lack the skills to really vet encryption software), I'll revert to a more practical "I trust Mozilla to at least try and implement secure and proper encryption and to be open about it".

Chrome never gained that ability for whatever reason.

Sideberry is what I use: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/sidebery

Lately, on my older computer, I've been unloading a lot more? Similar to closing and reopening your browser with tab restoration (restores tabs, doesn't _load_ tabs). Or.. similar to about:unloads and clicking a button a bunch.

May as well link it here, I didn't put it on the store yet

https://github.com/shmup/firefox-tab-unloader/releases/tag/v...

This is the crux of it: https://github.com/shmup/firefox-tab-unloader/blob/main/back...

(I should point out, it unloads tabs in all windows -- this might not be a nice default but it's for me right now hehe)

> Google can. Apple claims that they can’t, but they have disclosed user data to law enforcement in the past, so I don’t trust them. Mozilla says that they can’t, and I trust them.

Google does offer end-to-end encryption, with a separate "sync passphrase". I honestly suspect all of the major vendors actually do a good enough job here if you configure things right. Google's UX is crummy for it though, and I think iCloud has at least an optional account recovery feature that you can't really trust. So Firefox Sync is probably winning for user privacy, but it's not due to the lack of proper end-to-end encryption from the other vendors, it seems a bit more complicated than that.

Firefox now has an edge. If they win mobile, desktop will follow.

On Windows I install Chrome, though. Android usually comes with Chrome as well so I stick with that. Only some apps seem to open the "built in" Xiaomi browser which is a piece of crap almost as stinky as Facebook app, which again absolutely must use it's terrible own browser implementation if I happen to click on some link (which I learned not to because of how terrible the experience is).

Also I use Firefox for web development tutorials because of the Mozilla docs: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Guid...

At the very least as a supplement to the money they receive from Google.

And even better, to fund more research projects, like their sponsorship of research into Rust and WebAssembly.

https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/18b6tdp/mozilla_c...

It's in the footer to Mozilla's website.

In actual practice, Mozilla grabs all the donations intended for FF and pools it with all donations, which then gets used for social justice programs.

Whenever I’ve been lucky enough to get Glastonbury tickets it has been on Firefox

When applying I run Chrome as well to cover that base. But for me the Firefox windows are the ones that make it through. YMMV

I don't. I still neuter Firefox (LibreWolf, mostly.) and disable all the sync nonsense.

https://librewolf.net/docs/faq/#can-i-use-firefox-sync-with-...

See https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/165139.

I'm running the old Python sync server for the time being.