These days, it's much more common for me to encounter a website that works in firefox but not chrome than the other way around. I actually switched for good when I had to use firefox to file my taxes, because the IRS free self-file site was hopelessly broken on chrome.

Source: I am a Firefox-first user who occasionally uses plugin-less Chrome because the aforementioned plugins (and "ClearURLs", "Consent-o-matic", and a few others) occasionally break websites.

Firefox doesn't cause broken websites. Websites developers that target only Chrome cause websites to inadvertently become broken in Firefox.

Be evil

Honestly, we should take the same stand against them. Those who are hostile towards Firefox should be publicly named and shamed for sheer incompetence and/or malice.

There are definitely websites that don't work with Firefox out of the box. Just one example that annoys me is https://mtgarena-support.wizards.com. "Firefox users: Firefox's Enhanced Tracking Protection may interfere with Sign In. Temporarily disable it in Firefox Privacy Settings to load the sign in screen."

I know of several sites that break if you go beyond Standard, but none if you don't.

I use Chrome at work (corporate provisioned device) and Firefox at home so both get a good amount of usage

That’s not “working out of the box”, but leads to a much less broken experience than chrome (especially with the manifest v3 BS).

Remember when Google killed the Edge render engine per YouTube problems?

So I'm curious, which sites are broken in vanilla FF?

This is usually the case if there might be forms or something like that. It's minor enough that it doesn't bother me.

Now, on the other hand, tab management is so much better with chrome and I've considered using Chrome for that reason alone. At work I do use chrome because I usually have 10-15 websites open at a time (for example I like to keep one tab group per ticket and every related item to it there).

I do use simple tab groups on Firefox but it's not good enough at least to replace my workflow at work.

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

https://github.com/jessebeard/firefox_settings

What can go wrong is if you've set a certain site to always open in a certain container and another site redirects you to this site. This can happen with Identity Providers like Okta, ADFS etc. They will then open in a different container (the assigned one) and lose context. Especially microsoft services have an annoying habit of redirecting through 25 different URLs on every sign-in. But if configured correctly it's a godsend, you can use this tool to sign into multiple MS tenants at the same time, something with chrome and not even Edge can do right now (switching teams between multiple tenants is a nightmare).

But I don't think it's the multi accounts containers at fault here, it's the user. Just don't do that :P

Occasionally, sites are obstinate and I need to use Normie mode (e.g. for Maps)

Normie mode just has uBlock O, containers. I really have zero problems with sites breaking here.

If no engineering time was spent on Firefox, and it’s broken in Firefox, that’s a Firefox problem.

If active engineering time was spent on _deliberately breaking_ Firefox, then yes, I don’t think that’s a Firefox problem. I think it’s a website problem at that point.

im curious to see what effect ublock not working as well on chrome as it will on firefox will have to the demographics, if there's no shift then that's a hurdle that has to be overcome by either firefox by some sort of engineering, google, or via legislation

Do people honestly believe that if they keep recommending FF, people will magically switch to FF and Google will be forced to stop its anti-competitive practices?

Because holding that against Firefox is exactly what Google is counting on. And the more you recommend it the harder it is for Google to continue its anti-competitive practices.

The more you fall a fool for Google's (or Microsoft a decade ago) practices, the worse the experience for everyone is in the future.

Anyways, there's simple extensions that will sidestep Chrome's bs. In addition, you'll soon to be able to get an adblocked experience that you can only get on Firefox. That means less network traffic, faster loading websites, and better user privacy

Before that they had a popup that would timeout after 15s (?). At that point I tried disabling uBlock on Youtube but found the ads stacked up to much longer, so the 15s delay was more acceptable.

As expected, this will probably continue to be a cat and mouse game.

My move back to FF has been slow (as mentioned already too) but I've been recommending it to others, who don't have my self-inflicted blocker, for some time. Maybe some will stop listening if I keep mentioning it, but people online I'll never meet in person are hardly a great loss in my life. The sort of people who are going to take such issue in RealLife™ are likely those just paying me attention in exchange largely for free tech support (the matter isn't likely to come up in other contexts) and they can do one anyway too.

Do you honestly believe that it's OK for Google to just keep being anti-competitive? Or that this is a completely inevitable and unfixable state of affairs?

We can, should, and will hold Google accountable for its monopolistic conduct, and this is absolutely part of that.

Both of those will seriously hamper a more advanced adblock like UBlock Origin

The limits are 30,000 static rules and 30,000 dynamic rules. Running tens of thousands of regexs for each request can lead to a performance impact. Allowing for even higher limits may result in people having a worse experience from the browser becoming slower. The API was designed such that these limits can be increased in the future as available computation and user needs change over time. Getting extension developers to design their extensions in a way where they have to think about not slowing down the browser too much I think is a good thing and I would not call these current limits severe.

>also prevents plugins from updating block lists themselves

declarativeNetRequest lets rules be added and removed dynamically by the extension.

>forces those updated lists to go through the plugin store

The Chrome team has said that configuration can be updated outside of a store update. What the Chrome web store does not want are extensions that download and run code. This policy does not related to mv3.

Unless you use Edge on Windows you still have the same limitation (or the windows store Netflix app).

It is unfortunate that Firefox doesn’t do more to help us avoid sites programmed by devs who are too incompetent to follow standards, really.

This, again, can be restated as incompetent developers cause broken websites (!)

("... do not attribute to bad faith that which can be explained by stupidity")

Not the same problem, but I wonder when faxes will disappear... For example, Progressive Insurance wanted me fax, mail pictures or bring them in person... email didn't work... Of course they didn't have a safe way to transfer them digitally but I would not care if everyone in the world saw those emails.

The useless requirements that they set just proves that they don't understand technology.

I have good luck just using a private window, since that has no extensions by default. Bonus: It's really fast; ctrl-l ctrl-c ctrl-shift-p ctrl-c enter

FTFY

EDIT: Mine was wrong too. Thanks to ipython for the correction.

Yes some sites are "broken" with uBlock Origin. I don't find it to be many, however. I run into paywalls much more often than I do problems with my browser settings.

    about:profiles

Exactly, simply use a second “plugin-less” FireFox profile.

And if you really need a Chromium browser, Brave is a better choice than Google Chrome (for privacy reasons…)

I regulary ran across something that does not work or has a broken style. And I know how to turn UO off.

And why should that be a surprise? FF has way less manpower than Chrome. (And even fired lots of engineers, to raise the CEO bonus)

Chrome leads the way and probably the vast majority developes for chrome and with chrome dev tools. So most of the time FF works, but not always. And performance is just worse, but not noticable on a desktop and on mobile it is offset by the working adblock. Meaning perceived performance is usually better, because ads are blocked, unlike in chrome mobile.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Firefox-Chrome-109-Benchmarks

And sadly it can be worse, with my quite complex app, that I absolutely did not tailor for chrome, but gone out of my way to also support FF - the result is that chrome is just 3x faster.

- Some websites still will just not work in FireFox. It's not super common anymore, but if I sense something is fishy, I pop open the console and see some strange error and swap over to Chrome. Things will just work then. All extensions disabled even. I even ran into this on Vanguard's website, albeit for some obscure forms.

- When I worked at a company that had a larger web app presence, I would have to test in Chrome. That's a given, but my Chrome counterparts did not do the same with FireFox. I would fairly regularly (few times a quarter) find things that were completely broked on FireFox.

All that said, I don't really care about my choice in browser very much, but I'd rather support Mozilla over Google still. Especially since they're the only non-Chromium and v8 engine out there aside from Safari, which is also owned by a massive for profit company. I'd like to help support a more open web, even if it's just a little bit.

You know, it's not necessarily a bad thing that another enormous company is competing with Chrome. It might be less than ideal than Firefox having Safari's share, but it still eats at Google's monopoly more effectively.

I run into this as well, but I just use Safari as my backup browser and that usually is good enough. The only thing I still need to use Chrome for is my Nest thermostat.

Edge works fine in those incredibly rare instances since I can't get it off my computer anyway. I think I have one

* Try the same site in a private window (assuming plugins are disabled when in private)

* If on dev or nightly, try those sites on the regular release.

I haven’t bumped into anything in GCP that fails to work on ff, though likely don’t use the console as extensively.

I'd not encountered anything broken in Chrome that was fixed by FF though.

I'll still be primarily Chrome in DayJob though, as most of our clients' users are (with some on Edge, a few using FF, and a couple of idiots still not off IE though we don't officially support that) so that makes sense even though I very rarely touch anything front-end these days.

If i were willing to get an iPhone, then i'd be quite happy with Safari (i don't have Chrome installed on my Mac), but I want the ability to have my bookmarks available on multiple phones & computers... so firefox profiles (in LibreWolf) is the mechanism i've decided to use for that (for now)

I tried FF for a long time but finally switched to Brave. Yes, I'll be downvoted for saying this but it's objectively one of my top 3 favorite browsers rn.

1. Brave

2. Edge

3. Safari

I like each of them for different reasons. Brave (after disabling annoying features such as crypto and VPN) is awesome and its iOS app is the only one which can play videos in the background, has dark mode, and syncs really well with the desktop app.

Edge is so tempting esp. with recent Microsoft Copilot which makes it so useful (I can summarize pages right in the browser, organize my tabs by telling so to the Copilot, etc.)

Safari is not a good browser per se and lacks many features and plugins, but it's minimal and doesn't drain the battery like Brave and FF.

I really wanted to like FF but it's just not cutting it anymore.

They recently added a chatbot that runs locally they call Leo based on llama2. It's pretty impressive that you can perform LLM tasks on the current page without the use of any 3rd party service. And of course you can pay them for the souped up version. https://brave.com/leo-release/

Feels like I am alone in thinking the crypto features of Brave are cool. And not because I think that industry generally isn't full of slime. But micropayments for content has been a good, latent idea for a generation, and here they've simply built it as a default feature.

I still use FF and Brave equally because of my experience with the first browser wars and my mistrust of Chrome, having become the new IE.

My big gripe with FF honestly is the lack for PWA ( progressive web apps) If they resurrect that effort I’d give it a shot. I’m not really interested in running another browser for that feature.

Also the brave privacy settings are remarkably better “by default” across all my devices. I’m sure Firefox can be configured to be hardened I just have other ways I’d like to spend my time. Heck I’d even pay for better option for all my devices.

I have used Brave more on Android. I have bounced between Firefox, Brave, and custom builds of Chromium for years. I am currently on Firefox.

Bro. You’re still using chrome.

Ironically, focusing on the window chrome does not matter for a healthy web, let alone a healthy open standard.

Considering both Firefox and Chromium are open-source it should be entirely possible.

Which is, well, fine, because LinkedIn is mostly a dumpster anyways.

When I have problems with a site it's usually because I'm blocking most JavaScript with uMatrix and I have to find the correct combination of scripts to make the site work for me without having to give away my soul to the gods of tracking.

As a software developer, it's been years since a customer told me that the sites I develop on Firefox don't work on Chrome or Safari. I don't even bother to check anymore. I couldn't check with Safari anyway and they are OK with that. The point is that if it works in Firefox it works everywhere. Of course we're not using any Chrome-only API but we never had to use one of them as far as I can remember.

(I absolutely agree - especially when it's google turning off features when you're using FF... it feels blatantly anticompetitive).

V8 on its own is a technological miracle.

But all funded by a firehose of crazy privacy invading ad revenue.

So. I'll live with the odd pause and a bit of battery drain. I gave Google 10 years of my life as an employee in exchange for $$, I'm not interested in giving them the rest of my life for free.

What if you could take the benefits of the spending and jettison the side-effects?

It's called Brave, they have their own ad blocker in the source code written in C, so it can't be hamstrung.

Perhaps you haven't heard of Chromium. If so, that may be because Chromium doesn't spend as much on marketing as Brave.

https://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/download-chromium/

What helped me was that I switched my phone browser to DuckDuckGo browser. This kind of opened my horizons.

For a time, Firefox performed worse than a rabid dog. Chrome ate their lunch and gained market share fast. I and many of my colleagues switched around that time.

That isn't the main reason they gained market share fast. It's sabotage: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1116871245021220875.html

I used Firefox pretty extensively, then switch to Chrome when Firefox fell behind on speed, but the developer tools absolutely sucks in Chrome, so I tried Opera which had a great feature set, speed and wonderful developer tools. It was a pretty sad day when Opera dropped Presto, and more so when they where bought by some Chinese company.

On desktop, various Firefox updates would change my settings subtly and nag me about features I had no interest in. On top of that, it was simply a slower browser, both with DOM manipulation and Javascript.

For example, when I made my latest research project (https://pl.aiwright.dev) Firefox would routinely struggle with the large complex graphs (over 100k nodes, though only a few hundred nodes attached to the DOM at any given time). Safari handles it with no issues whatsoever. I'm sure there are likely workarounds to speed things up on Firefox, but I don't have the time or energy for something like that since it's a research project, not an end-user facing product.

Maybe you can make the argument that switching to Firefox will incentivize improvements, but so far that hasn't been my experience. I've now moved away from Firefox to things like Orion (which is still quite buggy, but useful enough). Safari seems to be getting better over time, with things like containers now and extensions like Userscripts [2].

[1]: https://pl.aiwright.dev

[2]: https://github.com/quoid/userscripts

If Firefox suited my needs 100% as well as Safari, this is why I’d still not use it. God damn is it noisy. You’re a browser, I have no interest in engaging with you more than necessary, whatever-I-was-trying-to-do is what I care about. Please stop acting like a kid who’s not getting enough attention. It’s off-putting.

What is this noise you're referring to? I'm 90% Firefox and 10% Safari and I don't understand this comment.

[1] https://imgur.com/a/dLr6E0C

I may be forgetting about nags that don't allow themselves to be disabled, but if so, they're infrequent enough that they seem insignificant and obviously non-memorable.

Edit: I should add, when I had to have Chrome installed I really didn't like the fact that it updated itself automatically via a daemon process. I don't think having a constantly running background process for a browser, especially one from a giant advertising company, is a good alternative.

I had literally just installed Firefox minutes ago (inspired by this thread). During the install it asked me if I wanted to make it the default browser, and I had said no. This is what we mean by nagging. Firefox needs to know when to shut up and get out of the way.

> you'll have had to endure the burden of responding to this nag just once in years of using Firefox.

Twice. For this one particular nag. Next time Mozilla releases some shitty VPN or AI program, it will nag me again. If I don't log in to a Mozilla account, it will nag me to. If I don't try Pocket, I will be nagged to try it.

Let's not even talk about Apple and their dark patterns (the whole green bubble messages as one example).

The only reason Safari doesn't is because they aren't developing it because it's too broken already. So much doesn't work with Safari.

> shitty VPN

The Mozilla VPN is a rebranded Mullvad VPN, AFIK which I understand is very good.

Even if there are a few more nags than Chrome or whatever, I guess, I'm happy knowing that I'm making it a bit harder for Google to know what I'm doing online.

Even if one wants a particular version for testing. Chromium doesn't do this ime. And this isn't to say it's a reason not to use FF but it is a counter-example to simply being able to dismiss something without it being annoying.

The noisy part was this notification steals focus so you can't type into the search bar immediately, you have to hit escape or click out to gain focus again. And the popup kept appearing until I realized you had to specifically press "yes, keep changes" on the notification to get it to stop (usually I canceled out of it reflexively to do actually important things). If you just hit Escape or tried to use the URL bar it would come back next session and steal focus again.

It sounds like something minor but the idea of stealing focus to re-confirm a change you already confirmed is a mild source of headaches, and not necessary in my view. Not to mention, this process would repeat itself for every Firefox installation synced with, since the extension counts as a fresh install each time. In a world where switching browsers is trivial, I think minor annoyances like those are best removed.

The primary reason I don't use it 100%, but 90/10 like you, is due to extensions and those few sites that doesn't work in Firefox.

Yes, definitely agree with that. But I think of "noise" as stuff that interrupts your normal interaction with web sites and in that regard I don't think Firefox is particularly noisy.

There are definitely a lot of features, settings and extensions with Firefox and while I don't use very many of them I do really appreciate the ones that I do use.

Firefox displayed a pop-up ad for Mozilla VPN over an unrelated page (382 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36077360

I tabbed away from Firefox for a bit, and when I tabbed back I had a full screen popup ad for Mozilla VPN overlayed on top of the webpage I had been using.

Once I get the browser installed and running, what you describe matches 0% of my experience with it.

Most of what they’re nagging me about won’t even make them money. It’s marketing-changelog pages nobody reads. They could save some money by keeping text change logs where people who care can find them, and dropping those altogether.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Negative_salary...

There’s platform-agnostic issues too, however. Firefox is my primary browser on Windows and Linux, but it has a pile of UI papercuts which I’ve kinda-fixed with userchrome.css hacks, and the result is underwhelming (as is the possibility of these hacks periodically breaking with updates). It’s enough of a frustration that forking Firefox to properly fix them would be tempting if keeping up with the firehose of security patches from mainline weren’t so daunting.

My biggest wish is for Gecko to re-gain embedding support on desktop platforms so I can build my own browser around it, making keeping it secure as simple as updating dependencies.

I somehow was lugging around up to 2,400 tabs for much of last year and it handled it surprisingly well. Got down to 30 at one point, now back up to nearly 400 :/

Very rarely a website won't load, I just change the user agent to Chrome and refresh and it almost always works fine.

(the bug is that text replacement does not work in FF on mac, something that saves me so much time daily)

I have to go to another app, insert an emoji there and copy it over.

I tried switching to Firefox like 3 times this year, but there's always something putting me off. I really really want to though.

> Firefox Quantum was a revolution in Firefox development. In 2017, we created a new, lightning fast browser that constantly improves. Firefox Quantum is the Firefox Browser.

[1]: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browsers/quantum/

Try running a very compute intensive script (that chokes your CPU/GPU). In my experience Firefox becomes unusable, Safari is still buttery smooth.

Now maybe Safari simply performs better, or maybe that's some OS level prioritization unfairly advantaging Safari, but to me as an end user, that's irrelevant.

TL;DR The truth is, no one has ever used Firefox or Chrome on iOS.

You say you know it's webkit based... but the entire engine for any browser on iOS is Safari, not merely webkit based. Apple doesn't have a policy of "your browser must be derived from webkit" they have a policy of forcing browsers to use the literal same engine built into iOS that Safari is using - i.e you are just using Safari with a different UI, there is only one browser engine on iOS.

This is an annoying detail to have to repetitively explain to people, and Apple benefits from this blurring of the lines in the army of users defending them for browser diversity. Honestly, if i had an iOS device I would use the Safari app - and as a web dev and a user I fucking hate Safari, but what's the point in using a different UI, they are all the Safari engine, the main browsing experience is by definition the exact same.

Orion is also webkit, but buggy, isn't it? I don't care for it.

Combine this with the fact that I still get E2EE sync and better integration with my OS, Firefox is no longer tempting to me. And I used to be a Firefox power user for years.

For me, the enhanced plugin ecosystem and additional control that Firefox offers simply isn't worth a slower browser that isn't as well integrated.

If I used windows or Linux I would probably give it a try again.

Or should I be stealing this content and leave everyone involved poorer for it?

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/googles-web-integrit...

Double-plus-good rights management!

Most users don't give a shit if their client is "honest", or if it's respects intellectual property. These are concerns of web admins and media companies. Users just want something to load websites.

There's a lot you can justify with a creative thought process.

sure, but in that situation, the "client" is you, and the "server" is the ATM. as the client, its not your job to worry or care if you are being "honest" with the "server". your concern is only getting the money. its the banks job to secure the ATM from bad actors, not yours.

A few years down the road, a surprising amount of companies insist you can only use their product on those secure smartphone browsers because of it's enhanced security, so Google helps you out by adding a special "Android Secure Mode" to desktop Chrome.

I literally said if they want people to visit anywhere they use a site and if not they lock down the experience with an app, and you said they lock down apps as 'proof' that they'd lock down web sites because somehow they are equal. Apps have never been about freedom. Starbucks doesn't want user choice and privacy when they ask you to download their app.

And I'm yet to see what business model it would work for. I'm going with 'none'.

Practically every banking site (or more importantly banking apps). And a lot of weird cases like bus/train timings app, mobile operator apps, etc. You don't see that a lot with websites yet because the web isn't so severely constrained as mobile apps are. But the moment they appear, it will go the other way. One good example of this is AMP - which thankfully fizzled out for other reasons.

> And I'm yet to see what business model it would work for. I'm going with 'none'.

You can go with whatever you feel like. But the real world experience corroborates what the other commenter said. And one good reason for this is the corporate security culture. 'Our app isn't secure if it doesn't use the PIntegrity' type of argument. They'll all fall for it even if it's detrimental to their users.

If they wanted to make it less accessible they could easily do that by forcing you to use newer browser versions which some boilerplate sites with frameworks do, from lack of expertise. No "safety" required. I'm not going off feeling, I'm going off facts. It will NEVER happen.

Website operators don't need to outright block you, they can just start putting certain features behind "the wall".