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.
That's been my experience/preference as well. In fact I have been very taken aback by all the "Firefox is back" and "time to try Firefox again" headlines. I guess I didn't realize what sort of exodus occurred when chrome came out. But honestly, I never ran into performance issues with Firefox over the years and various versions, including the overhaul with Firefox 3.
I typically have 2-8 tabs open (hasn't changed much over the years). Maybe other usage patterns used to cause problems... Also worth noting I was always on Linux; maybe Windows/Mac versions weren't as good?
When quantum came out, I didn't personally notice a big performance improvement in terms of user experience (though I don't doubt it's there, and I don't watch CPU/MEM constantly). I've seen these headlines and have just been thinking to myself "but it's always been good!"
This is an interesting take, since it's so difference from my experience. There's definitely some difference in use cases that had a large impact - whether that's device memory, open tabs, or even choice of websites.
I didn't switch to Chrome when it first came out, but over the next couple of years I found Firefox frustratingly slow and crash-prone. When I cut over, everything was drastically faster and more reliable, plus the feature set (extensions, url completion, incognito for parallel sign-ins, and so on) was noticeably better. High memory usage was the only price, and Chrome surrenders that somewhat gracefully when it's needed.
I'm hoping to make the switch back. Chrome has become more frustrating as Google adds brand alignment, and moreover I simply don't like being siloed by a brand. But the usability gain was massive when I first switched, and I'm only making the move now because there's been a lot of good news out of Mozilla.
It really depends on the websites. Firefox has long been significantly faster than it was in the Firefox-1.x days, when it was the fastest browser. It's always been perfectly snappy and efficient for hackernews, craigslist, 10,000-line colored diffs in the cgit web frontend ... but popular web sites got many times slower. Chrome enabled web developers to do atrociously inefficient things and just not care.
Even today, Travis-CI really struggles in firefox, it's modern pleasing animations are just so atrociously coded. And remember when the Reason (facebook language) website was unveiled, it really killed firefox, because of some strange shadow effect applied to all letters or something ...
The web is a complex platform, so it's definitely not hard to wind up using some feature that performs well in one browser but poorly in another. I don't know that it necessarily reflects badly on any individual browser--software is complex and it's hard to determine what combinations of web features will wind up being widely used. I do think it's a shame when this happens because sites don't get tested in anything but Chrome. There's no excuse when large companies release webapps and don't test in multiple browsers.
i remember years back when people were installing Chrome simply because it had Adobe Flash built in and didn't require a system wide install anymore. For a while, that was the biggest reason my friends installed it. Then Flash started going away, and they were still using it, and wrapped up tightly in the Googleverse with Gmail and then Android.
That's very interesting. I wonder what the environmental difference was/is. I'd say I've had Firefox crash only a handful of times over the years, and in some cases that involved me doing very bad things in JavaScript.
>* I guess I didn't realize what sort of exodus occurred when chrome came out.*
It wasn't really a mass exodus, but a gradual wax & wane over time (with more moves FF->C over the long term than C->FF).
In development fields the count is complicated by people who regularly use both, but prefer one.
> I typically have 2-8 tabs open
I tend to have many open[1], over several windows on different desktops. I use open tabs more than I use bookmarks! Every once in a while I go through the open tabs and close those I've not touched in a while that I don;t expect to touch any time soon (obviously the need to have it open has passed). I currently use Chrome more then FF, and here The Great Suspender[1] is a godsend for saving RAM (and to a lesser extent CPU time) Chrome would otherwise consume.
[1] TGS lists my current use on this machine as "22 windows, 148 tabs"
Thank you for link to TGS, I have similar browsing patterns, and I do notice chrome closing in on 5gb of RAM, slowing down alot of other stuff. Hopefully this will help :)
I typically have 25-250 tabs open at a time, and also never left Firefox. Though maybe this is the other end of the spectrum because managing this number of tabs in Chrome is impossible.
I should have also said that it depends on one's definition of open. For instance, when expo mode was added to Firefox (I was sad to see it go), I used it to have about 4-5 groups of 2-8 tabs each, but only was ever actively using one group.
I regularly have 50+ tabs open... i know friends who will have multiple browser windows open and im talking like 5 - 10 windows with 50-100+ tabs in each window. Browser developers absolutely have to account for the fact that some people are lazy and dont want to close tabs or browser windows. If a browser can handle these extreme cases, its got a bright future.
I have used Firefox since forever as well and fell the same way. I have never run into memory issues or slow loading with Firefox while I kept hearing about Chrome constantly using too much memory recently.
As a developer i noticed some minor default CSS bugs with the new Firefox Quantum that didn't used to be there but that's about it.
I also use Chrome in my development cycle so it does seem to have some neat features that Firefox is lacking but I doubt regular users would ever notice that.
It was just never enough to make me switch although I would appreciate Mozilla putting more effort into their developer tools.
P.S. I end up having over 100 tabs open so yeah... although my OS is Linux not Windows so your mileage may vary.
That's also been my experience for long years and 99% on firefox. I could never actually get over the fact you can't close all the tabs without it forcing the closing of the window that happens on chrome. Many other paper cuts exist in browsers not firefox that make it really hard to switch. Anyway almost all the time I see someone saying firefox is bad they are usually using Mac. So I blame Firefox on mac being the problem, not firefox itself.
Yeah. I like to keep my active set very organized to not lose myself in a sea of tabs. I also use Alt+# shortcuts to quickly switch. I think one behavior I've seen people do is treat tabs as if they are bookmarks, which would definitely result in 10s-100s of them open.
>> I didn't personally notice a big performance improvement in terms of user experience
I've seen no difference in performance in recent years, at least on my home machines. My browser performance is basically limited by my internet connection, making all the browser v browser speed tests moot. (At work I have to use windows+IE+bing+outlook because work are idiots.) I switched to chrome last year because a couple quality of life plugins were not longer compatible with the latest versions of firefox.
What I want is firefox from a couple years ago, back when all the plugins I wanted worked nicely together (mostly privacy and dev tool stuff). Firefox needs to simplify itself, to get rid of things that can be handled much better by plugins.
Though there is undoubtedly a marketing campaign going on right now, there's nothing suggesting they're engaged in the kind of reddit manipulation you're describing.
Agree - and I don't think the lead New York Times consumer technology reporter would have publicly documented all the reasons why he's switching back to Firefox unless he genuinely felt that way.
They assumed that removing their last distinctions from chrome - the extensions that had become integral parts of the workflows of millions for up to a dozen years, and the lack of tab processes - would somehow get people to switch from chrome instead of to chrome in resentment. This was where the organization had fixed all of their hopes - once they got rid of extensions and got chrome's primary marked feature (on release), then they would stop hemorrhaging users, because now people could choose to have a browser that was almost exactly like chrome, just a little bit off, and a little bit slow on google-owned sites, but without google, and run by a non-profit.
Since this had no effect, except causing an instant loss of a lot of users (one that hasn't been completely felt yet due to esr), and a slight bump in chrome's user numbers, there's no resort other than advertise heavily the benefits of not using google's browser, without mentioning google negatively because they generally rely on google for funding. So just weird platitudes about "freer people web standard access foundation" or something. Or talk about start-up times that no one cares about, and which don't make them distinctive from chrome.
The immediate problem is the vast majority of people who are sympathetic to that branding were already firefox users, and at some point were turned off because firefox killed some plugin or other or it just stopped being updated, or because of some UI change which are now explicitly not mitigatable in quantum. The way firefox responded to those complaints (which is not materially, even once; when a meeting of firefox management has determined something is going to be done, it is going to be done, and exactly in that way) has assured that target audience that development by a non-profit is no more amenable to consumer desires than development by the largest, most predatory companies in the US. At least Microsoft and Google are big enough that user complaints catch fire in the mainstream media, and they're forced to respond to a critical audience. If firefox decides that they're going to take out the back button, because "in a modern internet, users shouldn't be moving backwards", you're just going to find a closed WONTFIX bug with 400 angry comments from users on it, and a few comments from Mozilla explaining how their user testing showed that people don't want a back button, the bug tracker isn't for general complaints, that the tone of the thread was very negative and regrettable, and that the thread was being closed for further comments.
The real problem is that Firefox has 10x as many employees as it needs, and is just another corporate bureaucracy collapsing under its own weight. Should have been slim and user-focused, and instead of rhetoric about a "free people web standard internet brings people together", central and visible in every conflict regarding the internet and its architecture, and the distribution of knowledge in general. It used to be almost that, but I think the fight over h264 broke it.
Now, the only reason it's alive is to keep the forces of antitrust from google's door.
Their employees, whether intentionally or inadvertantly, also brigade message boards.
The only way to make it faster at this point was to replace large parts of the engine, the old extensions are wedded to that, that's why the old extensions are going.
A lot of people forget that the only browser used by most everyone was IE and that was stagnant and smelly as they come. Firefox nudged the web forward when it was introduced, and made quite a splash on its own by capturing about a fourth to a third of usage from IE, but a small company can't fend itself from Microsoft. It took Google and Chrome, later, to knock IE and Microsoft into its place with its big push forward.
And that was a good thing. However, I regrettably find Google now pushing and pulling the rest of us harder than we want or need. Now that they are in the lead, they give the impression they are the writer of the scrolls. (In fact, a Google employee is the editor of HTML.)
Now, one cannot complain too much. Google's leadership has done far more good for the web and we should be grateful, but too many developers are turning first to them for what to do and how to do things rather than seeing the whole forest.
> Google's leadership has done far more good for the web and we should be grateful
Only time will tell.
Personally I'm not that grateful to Google. Like you said, it all started out as a good thing - rather innocent. And of course it turned to "profit at all cost" soon after that.
IMHO most people not quite understand the trade-offs involving technology choice. Large companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple (in no particular order) take advantage of that in the interest of their stakeholders. Violating their user's freedom and privacy along the way.
Conflating freedom and privacy to lump them all in together is a bit unfair I feel.
Apple for example is a privacy leader. Easier to secure their walled garden perhaps and they have their own pros and cons but they shouldn’t be in a set with google, Facebook and to a lesser extent, MS.
The power of a company like Google can be great when harnessed appropriately. When Chrome was the new kid on the block, they had every incentive to be compatible, faster, better, more flexible, etc. Now that they are the leader, their incentives are very different. I'm very concerned about the rapid move away from straightforward text-based protocols to opaque binary protocols. Yes the performance is better, but the protocol itself is far less flexible, harder to troubleshoot, and harder to build on. The whole reason HTTP took off was because it was simple, human-readable, and easy to implement, and built on TCP which was well understood and simple. It was a liberating change from the rigid, corporate, non-standard binary protocols coming from the Microsofts and IBMs and Oracles of the world. There are plenty of ways HTTP/1.1 could have been improved for better performance without sacrificing its fundamental openness. But HTTP/2 and QUIC are taking us back into the realm of non-standard and more rigid and opaque binary protocols. Performance on poorly designed sites that load tens of megabytes of crap from hundreds of URLs on each page load is the hook Google is using to push us back into what I consider a dark age of network communication. But it doesn't have to be this way.
> But HTTP/2 and QUIC are taking us back into the realm of non-standard and more rigid and opaque binary protocols.
This whole BINARY vs. PLAINTEXT paradox where the binary tends to be more efficient where the plaintext more open and intermediate ground between humans and machines, for me can be solved in a optimal way where the final output is always binary, but where you can assist humans with plaintext latter.
Just look how many beautiful and expressive computer languages we have now where the output is a pure obscure binary.
So i think if you follow this path you can have the best of both worlds. And because of that i tend to disagree with your point of view, where the default must be plaintext.. The layered approach is probably much more sophisticated and less amateurish when you care about waste of CPU cycles and RAM memory, without the need to have only a obscure and opaque representation.
Is it really ? I was under the impression that a large influence and a precursor to wasm was NaCL from Chrome along with ASM.js from Mozilla. Also Microsoft seems to be very involved in WASM.
If they're not all involved, it won't work, but firefox really lead asm.js, which was the actual precursor to webassembly. NaCL was more like a competitor that tried to do something similar but never got the kind of mainstream adoption needed for cross-browser support.
> a small company can't fend itself from Microsoft. It took Google and Chrome, later, to knock IE and Microsoft into its place with its big push forward.
It wasn't Google that dethroned Microsoft, it was Apple. The combination of Microsoft neglecting Mac, and the resurgence of Apple were the primary drivers away from IE. Chrome had almost nothing at all to do with it, they just out maneuver Apple and Mozilla to steal the crown form the fallen king.
In the late 90s IE was king and many websites demanded it. Netscape lost the browser wars and opensourced Communicator under Mozilla in 1998. Mozilla was in no position to compete with Microsoft so it instead pushed for standards compliance.
Internet Explorer 4 on Mac and PC were based on the same code but when IE5 launched in 1998, it wasn't available on Mac. When it did eventually land, IE5 for Mac was based on a different code base and rendering engine. This caused a problem for Apple because their platform was no longer on feature parity with the PC when it came to the Internet. IE in general was slow but IE5 on the Mac was worse.
Apple announced Safari at Macworld in early 2003 with a big emphasis on performance, during the demo Steve Jobs spent 30 seconds closing and reopening the browser to drive home the fact that it loaded fast. Apple went to great lengths to make Safari standards compliant and fast but they went one step further and worked with the most popular websites around to make sure they too were standards compliant too.
Around the same time Apple brought Safari out of Beta at the 2003 WWDC, Mozilla released Phoenix (Firefox) with an emphasis on standards compliance and performance. This set the stage because Apple and Mozilla were now aligned in a common goal, to make the web fast and standards compliant, and neither of them registered on Microsoft's radar.
It was Apple's push for the adoption of standards compliance by major websites that allowed Firefox to capture 25% of the PC market and by the time Microsoft responded with IE7 in 2006, it was already too late. Microsoft had lost, the world had decided that IE was garbage and there was nothing they could do to save the sinking ship.
Apple saw this power void IE left and so in addition to launching full Safari on the iPhone in 2007, they also launched Safari for Windows in a bid to become the dominate browser on all the major platforms. Unfortunately Google saw that same vacancy but Google was the default search engine in Safari and in Firefox. Apple and Mozilla were contractually obligated to promote Google Search so in 2008 when Chrome was launched, there was nothing they could do to stop Google promoting Chrome on google.com.
When Chrome arrived in 2008 it touted compatibility with Safari and adherence to standards compliance but the killer feature was stability. At the time all browsers crashed, it was accepted as an eventuality. It was so bad that Session Restore had been touted as a major feature. Chrome launched with multi-process isolation so that when something crashed, it didn't bring down the whole browser. Google's other innovations were rapid development cycles and background updates. This meant their browser always had the latest features and their users were always up to date. It took Mozilla years to catch up, Apple still has not.
Google themselves launched or re-launched five Chrome-only sites last year (Hangouts, Meet, Adwords, Earth, and Allo). Six if you count the Google Advanced Protection Program.
Google Flights began blocking Firefox for Android last week, and Google still serves a degraded Search experience to Firefox users on Android (but hey, no AMP).
Despite well-meaning concern from the Chrome team, it's abundantly clear that Google's other product managers do not view interoperability with open, cross-browser standards as a requirement. And while many products eventually gain Firefox support, that support usually only comes months after launch, if at all. To wit, Earth was recently rebranded from "Earth on Web" to "Earth for Chrome," so who knows what's going to happen there.
If the system is cheating you it's only fair you cheat it back... but I get what you mean; most users won't even know to do that or would be interested in doing it.
It's shady for Google to lie to their users especially when they imply its the browsers fault and not just their dev team being lazy gits and not validating that features work on Firefox.
Because that's the only valid excuse I could come up with that would make sense as to why they don't support it beside being shady that is...
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.
Oh, wow, Hangouts and Meet are working in Firefox now? I've been keeping Chrome running just for that for a couple of years, will be glad to stop having to do that.
Meet didn't even work in Chrome on Ubuntu 16.04 last time I checked. A customer of mine that went all Google talked about going back to Skype, which fixed most problems in the last months (with the obvious exception of the uselessly sparse layout.)
I've found that "work" in this case is still even a stretch. With it being the only application that I have open, with one tab on Firefox, these sites (but especially Inbox) cause my zBook to sound like it's mining Bitcoin or running SETI analysis.
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.
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.
Well yeah, if it's an experiment that demonstrates a feature that Firefox doesn't support then of course it will be best viewed in Chrome. Experiments shouldn't count here.
You'll be surprised how well it works by just switching the user-agent. It's more of a "too lazy to make sure it works" than a "actually doesn't work and Chrome should be used" situation.
Too lazy to test probably. If you support IE, Safari, Chrome both on the desktop and mobile, chances are that your site supports practically everything.
Unfortunately, often giving the official thumbs up requires passing some test suite. If companies have gotten better with their development methodology, their testing methodology is still often "Take a bunch of guys in India and have then run through that extensive check list".
I'm dealing with this now. We're working on a very complex map visualization with D3, and Firefox runs it choppy as hell. On the other hand, WebKit/Blink browsers (Chromium, GNU Web (Epiphany), others) run it buttery smooth.
Given that everyone else on my team uses Chrome, I think we'll likely be sporting a "works best in Chrome" banner soon, especially as most people would be confused by "works best in WebKit/Blink".
Are you in a position to file a Firefox bug with a link to a page showing the problem? If you can do that and tell me the bug report url, I'll take a look.
Don't know if it is an issue of Firefox or Google just makes it slow, but viewing custom Google maps with few thousands of pins takes much longer time to parse and render in Firefox than in Chrome, where it feels almost instantaneous compared to Firefox.
Just today I tried browsing Google Flights on (the latest version of) Firefox mobile and not only did it recommend getting a "browser upgrade", it would not let me use the site at all.
Outside of the Google projects people have mentioned, I hardly ever see this. Well, I do see "doesn't work on IE" or "please dear god stop visiting with IE 6" pretty often, but I can hardly blame sites for that...
There are many job postings, payment forms(!?) and financial websites that only work properly in Firefox. The best part is, for job postings, it's a great "not going to work there" filter.
Don't be too quick to dismiss a workplace because of something like that. Teams that are hiring often have very little control over the initial process (e.g.: the site where jobs are posted), but may be doing amazing things and be great to work with.
Well, at least this new IE is open-source, cross-platform, and way better than that browser which reached a 90% usage peak some time ago.
Joking aside, I've never really known the difference between Google Talk, Hangouts, etc, but I regularly chat with my contacts from the Gmail website, using Firefox, without any problem so far.
Well, "best viewed in IE" was the thing till 2010 or so. The Chrome version I have never seen except on sites experimenting with advanced features unavailable elsewhere.
I switched to Firefox a week or so ago for the same reasons. My issue is that I can't make Firefox usable for me without a bunch of tweaks. For example, scrolling with the mouse wheel feels like scrolling through mud. I like smooth scrolling but the defaults are too slow. Font rendering is also janky unless I disable hardware acceleration, which is a real shame. On Chrome, I do nothing but add a home button to the toolbar and I'm done. I still haven't found the magical combination of settings that makes Firefox feel natural.
yeah, performance-wise I can't complain :) I'm a compulsive tab hoarder with about 400 open (admittedly, have to enable the "don't load until focused"-setting) on a 5 yo laptop with lots of other stuff running. No problem at all.
I am a tab hoarder as well and switched to Firefox last year for this reason. I have a 16GB MBP and I had to restart Chrome twice a day due to memory usage. The most I saw was 25GB of RAM used by Chrome (thank you solid state swap!)
When Quantum was released, I did a side by side comparison, opening the exact same tabs in each browser, switching browsers each day, manually keeping tabs in sync. Did this for about two weeks. For my use case at that time, Firefox's memory usage was 1/4 of Chrome's right off the bat. After a full day of use, Firefox's memory would double, while Chrome's would triple. Given the starting numbers, this meant at the end of the day, Firefox would be using 4-6GB of RAM, while Chrome's memory usage would be something like 16-24GB.
By the time I switched, I had already moved to Rambox for Hangouts and Gmail and stopped using Keep, in an effort to reduce Chrome memory usage. Rambox mem usage was about half of what I saw with the Chrome Hangouts plugin.
Although I use FF 90% of the time now, I still prefer Chrome, probably due to using it for so long. I especially prefer the Chrome bookmark manager. I really wish I could find a good way to keep bookmarks in sync between browsers! Any suggestions??
A big bonus has been the huge improvement in battery life. I had no idea how much I was losing to Chrome. Safari is supposed to be great for that, but plugins and the fact I'm an Android user means it doesn't offer me much.
The downside is that FF has made my tab hoarding worse. Still, despite doubling the number of tabs, mem usage is still half of what I saw with Chrome.
As for the unused memory is wasted memory argument (which may be tongue in cheek re: browsers), my browser is not my OS and I have a lot more going on than just a browser. 32GB MBP can't come soon enough.....or a touchpad experience on any other hardware+Linux experience+lots'o'RAM. 3 yrs ago, I finally gave in and tried Mac. Touchpad experience is probably the number 1 thing that keeps me here.
Recently I've found out that touchpad experience is mostly determined by software. Windows drivers for common laptops are usually bad, and so are defaults on common GNU/Linux distributions (most of them use libinput now, which isn't quite ready for touchpads yet), however, playing with Synaptics X11 driver can make wonders. I have never understood why people believe Mac touchpads are so good until I've tried Wayland and Windows on my Lenovo Yoga - and wow, it sucked big time. Turns out I just happened to accidentally, cluelessly configure it just right when I was setting up my Arch on this machine.
(don't get me wrong, I like libinput's idea and I know old synaptics driver is an awful mess when it comes to its code, but there are still lots of papercuts libinput needs to handle. I believe it will get there, but it's not there yet)
Once you register, all you have to do to save a bookmark is go to "saved.io/www.google.com", for example, and it will save www.google.com.
If you want to save to a subfolder, all you have to do is go to "subfolder.saved.io/www.google.com".
To access your bookmarks you just go to saved.io in whatever browser on whatever device you want. I use Safari on the iPad, Chrome on my Android phone, and Firefox on my desktops and it works great in all of them.
> A big bonus has been the huge improvement in battery life. I had no idea how much I was losing to Chrome. Safari is supposed to be great for that, but plugins and the fact I'm an Android user means it doesn't offer me much.
I am genuinely interested: why so many and how can you handle 400 open tabs?? How do you navigate between them? I am lost as soon as I have more than 10 tabs open at the same time...
Oh, that's not hard. First, Firefox doesn't squeeze tabs past certain limit, so you don't have these tiny-tiny tabs that you can't click. You get the scrolling, but it won't bother you after a while. Thus, visually even with 1000 or 2000 tabs browser UI stays clean.
Second, when you type stuff into the address bar Firefox searches through opened tabs and suggests switching to that. This minimizes the number of times you'd open a new tab.
Third, there are many addons that help you organize your tabs. There are ways to search for tab content, group them into containers, find duplicates, etc.
How to start having many tabs open? Just change your MO when you use the browser. Want to search for something? Hit new tab and go. Researching something? Open every link you find somewhat promising in a new tab. When you have 200+ tabs opened, another 8-12 won't be a big change. Done with your research? Why close tabs? Just keep them open in case you'll need them later.
Often when I work on a project for, say, half a year I don't close tabs at all, and keep getting back to stuff I accidentally stumbled upon 2-3 months ago. It's very helpful at times to be able to dig stuff up one tab away. One could argue that bookmarks and history could be as helpful, but in practice when you switch to an old tab you see the context around it. What else I was looking at at that time, often information in the neighboring tabs is relevant, yet bookmarks and browser history don't have a good UI to surface it if front of you.
Yes, your browser becomes a memory hog, but as people noticed Firefox has means to compensate that. At 200+ tabs it consumes significantly less memory than Chrome (even with Chrome's load on demand turned on).
It takes time to get used to, and ones or twice a year you'd be doing tab cleaning, but I've being using browsers like this for 15+ years and really see benefits in this workflow.
For context: right now I have 330 tabs opened, Firefox consumes 1.8 GiB of RAM
Exactly this! I'm also using Tab Center Redux to have tabs on the left side, which seems better UX- and space-wise for me even with just a few tabs open, although in the past I've used Firefox's default UI as well for a long time and it worked fine, unlike Chrome's UI.
Once a while I'm getting to 1000-2000 open tabs and this is a point where the whole UI starts to feel a bit heavy, which is the only reason I clean them up then - navigating is a non-issue.
Ha, as with any hoarding, they are not all useful and I'm the first to admit it :).
It's a symptom of my non-optimal behavior. Blame the wetware between my ears. On any given moment, I might have perhaps 5-50 new tabs that I actually work in, closing them as I go along (but along those numbers). The rest are mostly left-overs since previous days.
My weakness is eg "this is an interesting read, but I don't have time now", or "this is a good reference, better save that". Over time, those add up.
To actually make it work, I set FF to not load tabs until focused. Then, when I start up, there are in reality a couple of hundred place holder tabs where I can see the icon and page name so I can find them again.
The second enabler is the plugin to have the tabs vertically, in a list on the side, instead of horizontally on top.
I really should just close them all and never look back, but I gotta admit, it's hard to say goodbye to dear friends. In this case though, I only know them by name :P
On Firefox at least, it doesn't actually load those tabs until you click on them. I have about 400 tabs on this session of FF Nightly, on a 2010 4GB Ubuntu laptop.
API documentation. It's very, very useful to have the structure of the APIs represented in a tree of open tabs. It gets messy eventually, but the groups can be easily rearranged.
Extensions. Back in the mid-to-late 2000s Tax Mix Plus was released, I had it configured so that after a configurable number of tabs appeared on the tab row, a new row would be created, up to a configurable number of rows after which I think you'd have to start scrolling the tab rows. You could also unload tabs and have them only load when clicked on, thus the memory usage was typically inconsequential even though my laptops back then only had something like 256MB - 1 GB of RAM. I had a tab colorizer installed too. Thus formed my habit of accumulating tabs.
Later on TreeStyle Tab came out, and I've used that ever since. I've got 501 tabs right now (thanks tab count extension), I usually go on purges every so often when it gets around this high and close large groups of them, reading some before closing, bookmarking many of them before closing with a current month/year annotation and other tags, so I can get back down to a more reasonable ~100-200. Even if it didn't have its tree collapsing functionality (I've got 25 tabs collapsed in a tree right now related to setting up and using some new software I started doing last night, it takes up one tab of space when collapsed) I would still use it just for the fundamental insight that with widescreen resolutions being standard vertical screen real estate is much more important than horizontal real estate. Admittedly that's not as big an insight anymore with 4k screens (and I use a big 42inch one). Anyway with TreeStyle Tab I can have tabs that are on the left side of the browser, that grow down, with scrolling, but I can still read the titles of each tab unlike in Chrome where each tab after ~10-20 is just an icon (at best).
The URL bar is also just superior to Chrome's. It's not called the Awesome Bar for no reason. The table at the bottom of https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-search-fire... has a list of commands you can use to match things -- I actually often have that page in my sea of tabs since sometimes I forget a couple sigils but I found it immediately with ctrl+L + "awesome %".
This submission's title is kind of hilarious. Firefox never went away, I started using it pre 1.5 on a Windows 95 machine and though now I use Chrome/Chromium for some things I've never felt the need to leave Firefox. Well, except until recently with the Quantum updates, ironically. For my personal desktop, I'm still pre-Quantum, it works just as it always has, while on my other machines I've been giving the new Firefox a fair chance and am just hoping it gets better. The tree tabs addon port especially isn't as good, I really miss my right click context menu for noscript, etc.
Opened up Firefox too and ctrl-tabbed around a bit to cause it to actually load some pages (hundreds of open tabs too, similar uBlock setup), and Windows reports
Chrome 5.3 GB
Firefox 4.2 GB
I couldn't find a tally of where Windows applies its "memory compression" logic, to be honest I don't even know what exactly it does, but let's assume it's some background task and it did more to Chrome than to Firefox since Chrome had been running longer.
So yes, Chrome needs noticeably more memory, and I prefer Firefox overall, but both can handle tons of tabs in my experience. Chrome also appears to be more responsive under pressure, I assume this is because it splits work into lots more processes than Firefox does, which is both probably a memory drain and a security benefit.
Jumped to 950 MB, settled at ~800 MB. Deferred loading seems to do a lot, so I could imagine that different usage patterns make a big difference, but that would need a detailed look into how Firefox and Chrome manage memory for "stale" tabs. If I remember right Mozilla recently added improvements there, getting rid of their memory more aggressively?
So, under actual usage (not ctrl-tabbing around to aggressively force-load things) it is 950 MB vs 5.3 GB. (I imagine for a comparable number of tabs?)
------
EDIT in response to your reply:
Please do! I agree that logging would be interesting.
Do you know, does Firefox defer/discard tabs again if they do fully load but you don't use them for a long time? Or are the only deferred tabs, ones that you never looked at this session?
I don't think you can count a freshly started browser that has only loaded 7 tabs (one per window) as "actual usage". I'd guess tabbing around triggered <50 tabs, that doesn't seem like a totally unrealistic working set, at least not when I'm actively researching something.
Maybe I should set up logging for this, might be interesting.
Please do! I agree that logging would be interesting.
Do you know, does Firefox defer/discard tabs again if they do fully load but you don't use them for a long time? Or are the only deferred tabs, ones that you never looked at this session?
I have a Chromium install without an ad blocker. And it takes one bad out of control page with a shitty advert, to down my entire machine. Something like: outlook.com.
(Doesn't matter if I have 2 or 100 tabs if there is one bad apple.)
People have different workflows and different priorities in that department, the best thing a browser could do to try and gain market share is keep their mind open to these differences and try and enable all of them. Something most browsers fail at to one degree or another.
For example, I loved firefoxes two address bar approach over chrome's omnibar. I would set the default search on the address bar to route to google's browse by name (it auto selects showing a search results page or going to the first result (i'm feeling lucky) based on how confident it was that the first result was what the user wanted) and the default search on the search bar to google. If I wanted to go somewhere by name I'd type in the address bar, if I wanted to search for something and be sure i got a results page I could just type it in the search bar.
I've used chrome for my daily driver despite loving firefox for one simple reason, and that's the Google Voice extension. It has a little number in the icon next to the address bar, that tells me how many unread voicemails or text messages or missed calls I have on my cell phone, its always visible in the window I have active on at least 1 monitor 99% of the time, and it's the primary way I keep track of incoming text messages as well as missed calls.
I would be lost without this so despite firefox having a lot of features I prefer over chrome, chrome is still my daily driver because of one extension that firefox doesn't have last time I checked.
> 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
But then sometimes the free option is also, i.e. in addition, the better choice for other reasons as well. And those cases (e.g. Postgres, Darktable, etc.) are worth pointing out, because they may serve as gateway drugs to free software, for users that may not initially care for it because they associate it with invariably bad user experience.
I have an article brewing on this, because I increasingly think it's important. When free software does not suck from an UX perspective, there is zero reason not to use it. That's a huge market.
> ... and believe that Google should not control the web.
I don't have a whole lot to add to this discussion that hasn't already been said except:
I'm the frontend developer at my job, and my coworkers are slowly discovering that I'm not joking when I say that Chrome is the new IE, for reasons pertaining to this. One example that I think made a few of them realize what I mean when I say that was during that short time recently when Chrome Experiments worked in every browser except Chrome, and the reason why that was the case: a (shady, to me) built in whitelist.
The open source statement isn’t accurate because Chromium is open source.
But I do agree that one company shouldn’t control the internet or browsing experience end to end. Although as far as pushing web standards and browsing Google has mostly been a good citizen. Let’s just pretend AMP wasn’t a thing.
one feature directly related to it is support for extensions. why can chrome run extensions on the desktop (ie ad blocker) but not on mobile? the answer should be obvious.
Firefox broke off backwards compatibility with massive amount of extensions - without them stock FF is quite shite and unusable. Not only that, some of the features of the old extensions are impossible to implement in the new extension engine.
Personally, I port my Chrome extension to a Firefox addons without much trouble, except for the stringent review process by a human developer which raised a lot my opinion of the firefox community.
The new extension engine shipped to the general public as part of Firefox 57 in November 2017.
While magicalbeans may be a bit hyperbolic in their criticism, as a web developer who uses all the major browsers, I am still annoyed every day by little things that are worse in Firefox since that time. It is a reasonable and valid criticism that many useful extensions were broken by the change and that a significant part of the functionality that was lost can't be reimplemented in the new system. The claims that the general reduction in functionality through loss of previous extensions would be a temporary problem and would be corrected as the new model evolved over subsequent versions have proven to be optimistic.
It is also fair to say that claims of extensions being better contained and more stable in the new model have been exaggerated. I see far more problems caused by the smaller number of extensions I now use than I ever saw before, and I have done consistently ever since the change, through three more major versions of Firefox itself and several updates to most of the extensions.
I appreciate the intent to make Firefox faster and more reliable and more secure. Surely no-one would argue that those aren't good things. But the fact is, a lot of stuff did get broken and hasn't been fixed, and for the class of users who valued Firefox for its customisability, it is a worse browser today than it was 9 months ago.
> some of the features of the old extensions are impossible to implement in the new extension engine
I am stuck on FF 53 (and reinstalling it whenever automatic updates sneak past me) since it still has the XUL API Pentadactyl uses to receive keyboard input[0]. The new WebExtension API don't expose the same level of functionality, so it can't be simply ported to them as is.
One approach to coping with quantum is to run 2 (or more)
Firefox profiles, one for the old, or ESR, or pre-quantum
executable; and the other for Quantum:
/usr/bin/firefox53 -P esr
/usr/bin/firefox -P quantum
and if you want access to the same saved bookmarks,
just use Firefox Sync to match them up.
It won't help with Pentadactyl, but folks with other use cases may find it useful.
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.
I'd remove Ghostery. Not only is it useless once you are running uMatrix & uBlock Origin, they also used to sells your data (page visit, blocking, and advertising statistics) if you activated a feature called "GhostRank". Not sure whether it's still true or not.
If you want, you can create an account to ‘sync your ghostery settings’. The username of the account is your email address.
The exposure happened because they sent a mail with a lot of people in the CC: field. Amateurish but it happens. The irony is that the mail was to inform you of the privacy changes due to GDPR.
Ghostery is convenient in that it categorizes what it's blocking - most of the time it's obvious, particularly with uBlock Origin in Advanced mode, but sometimes I'll look at things in uMatrix and say "OK, X is blocked, but why was it on the page and will unblocking it resolve things?" For example, looking at jumpcloud.com Ghostery breaks the 7 blocked items into 2 advertising trackers, 2 "Essential" trackers, 2 analytics trackers and 1 social media tracker.
As for Ghostery having a breach and exposing email, etc. that would require that I actually create an account for Ghostery. It works just fine without.
> As for Ghostery having a breach and exposing email, etc. that would require that I actually create an account for Ghostery. It works just fine without.
For now, sooner or later it's going to be mandatory for sure.
+1 for ff on android (because it can run extensions)
recommend checking out 'night light mode' for night browsing -- it does some things a little nicer like dims images and uses low contrast (full disclosure: i am the author. feedback welcome!)
I really love addons like 'Dark Background and Light Text', but they don't work with the 'New Tab', 'about:*' and addons.mozilla.org pages like most other addons in recent Firefox.
For the 'New Tab' page I now use 'New Tab Tools' to set the background to black. But I am still unhappy that its not possible to set all other pages to a dark theme.
Also that Vimium doesn't work with those pages is a shame as well. I hope Mozilla fixes that regression soon. Web Extensions should have the same abilities as the XUL extensions.
You can still tweak Firefox internals but you have to resort to its native `userChrome.css` [0] since current extensions API does not allow access to every corner. Luckily you can use devtools for that [1] what makes it quite pleasant (at least you don't have to restart browser to see the change). You can use pre-made package ([2][3]) and toggle what you want.
Thanks, but I do like it to be easily switchable. Some pages expect certain background colors and changing them makes embedded svgs hard or impossible to see.
Maybe you can get away with using the solarized theme, but I prefer having a black background...
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).
I dug into this myself just now. At it's core, uMatrix is "default deny" so it doesn't need all the blacklists. But there are things that uBlock Origin provides that uMatrix does not perhaps including cosmetic filtering, popup blocker, zapper/picker element, etc. The author Raymond Hill (gorhill) has switched back to uMatrix himself and dedicates more development efforts to it now.
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.
Other than the issue of cosmetic filters (which I don't personally use), the main difference is that for uBlock you can subscribe to really good lists, collected and curated by a lot of people - so it is "defauly allow, except for these...", whereas uMatrix is "default deny, except for what you explicitly allowed".
I run both, occasionally have to allow something in uMatrix, never have to turn uBlock off.
Upvoted for the info, but I'll restate why I use both:
uBlock is my blacklist. uMatix is my whitelist. For various reasons, I occasionally need to skip the whitelist, but I never had a reason to turn off the blacklist in a few years of using uBlock.
They can do similar things, uBlock Origin is setup to block ads and other elements on the page (depending on the lists you subscribe to). But uMatrix is more like Noscript, it's blocking the loading of resources from the web. So you can block javascript from some domains, while allowing images or video, etc. I use both so i can block a lot of third party scripts even without them being ads (so most tracking scripts and such).
I only have FF Developer Edition (IE and Edge, blegh) installed on my host. The only time I open Chrome or otherwise is inside a VM. If a website doesn't work I just close the tab. That is assuming that ever happens; off the top of my head this hasn't happened since the Quantum beta launched.
Even with Quantum I still find Firefox is almost unusably slow on some pages. It also causes very spikey resource usage. I’d like to use it exclusively but sometimes when I want to cool down my laptop I just switch to Chrome. This is on a Retina MacBook.
Have you tried setting the screen scaling back to the default, or using Firefox Nightly? I believe we recently resolved a bug around that, though I could be mis-remembering.
I second this. I've been using FF with uBlock origin on the desktop and on Android for years now. I'm using fairly demanding and rapidly changing web apps for my customer's cloud stuff, and FF runs it flawlessly where it would have memory-leaks etc just three years ago.
The only complaint I've had was with dog-slow SVG animations a couple years ago (for a simplistic game programming project with the kids), but I believe that has since long improved as well.
I hope we can keep the level of relatively mature support for Web standards accross browsers as it is, rather than make the Web more complex all the time.
Also very simple but highly useful Extension: Cookie AutoDelete
Deletes cookies & local storage after you leave a website. You can whitelist a few domains like Github etc. for convenience. The only downside is you'll get "privacy reminder / cookie accept" popups every time anew.
Actually I would really like to use FF again. But each and every time I try it I'm impressed with the desktop version, install the Android version and instantly am driven away from FF.
Not only that FF on Android is awfully slow for me. But they also refuse to support either Android accessability services or the new auto completion services which makes them basically totally useless if you want to use a password manager on Android.
This one thing (and the performance, but that I could ignore) is what totally prevents me from using FF.
Depending on what password manager you use, you can try getting the Firefox extension for it. I use Bitwarden, and their extension just works. Although I agree with you that they should have support for it through the accessibility/auto-completion services. The ability to have uBlock in a mobile browser is too convenient to give up.
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.
This is a great point. It's evident in Chrome's course so far that the browser has put Google's interests first, whereas Firefox puts the users' interests first. That's why I stuck with FF when it was slow, and I'm very glad that's all fixed now.
Plus, FF for Android is amazing. I can run Privacy Badger and uBlock Origin on my mobile browser!
Pretty much the only time I use chromium now is when I need to debug Websockets, since the traffic is impossible to see in Firefox. Really hope they fix https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1373639 some day.
On the other hand, Chrome refuses to show binary WebSocket traffic, so I just use SSLKEYLOGFILE + Firefox + Wireshark/tshark to debug secured WS traffic. tshark can even be configured to dump out the packets basically as they come in.
("firefox-bin" on some Linuxes, "/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox" on Mac, etc.). This launches a Profile Manager; pick a profile that isn't being used by any other running Firefox. This avoids accidentally logging keys for normal browsing traffic, making it easier to pick out the target SSL traffic and avoiding a security risk.
Second, launch tcpdump:
tcpdump -i en0 -w dump.pcap
(where en0 is your primary Internet interface).
Browse to the site you want to debug and make some websocket requests.
Finally, you can use tshark to inspect the traffic:
The -e fields I chose there are just examples; this particular example dumps out all the websocket payloads to a file.
You can also configure Wireshark to use the log file, so that you can inspect the traffic interactively; to do so, edit Preferences -> Protocols -> SSL and set the (Pre-)Master Secret key log filename appropriately.
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...
Typical for me is to have Firefox as a default browser - all links from external apps like email, Slack, etc. is opened there. But when I do web development I open the page I work on in Chrome. When I need to search Stackoverflow or MDN I switch to Firefox.
> Firefox is leading the offense against privacy invading web services (although granted Apple's Safari doesn't do a bad job either).
I thought Safari was leading the charge, so I did a little digging. I haven’t reached a conclusion yet but found out about Firefox’s Tracking Protection[1]. Any idea how it compares to uBlock Origin? If you’re the kind of person that’d rather use as few extensions as possible, would using Firefox’s TP with a solid list be as effective as using uBlock Origin with the same list?
FF devtools also allow you to edit network requests and replay them all in the browser. This was super useful in my QA days as well as for general fun hacking around.
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.
I have a very similar background with Firefox / Firebug and Vimperator, but there was a period where - despite all JS benchmarks seemingly proving otherwise - Chrome's real / perceived performance completely blew FF out of the water. Specifically things like startup time, opening a new window or tearing a tab off one, time to first content displayed when clicking a link, etc. As a result from about 2011 to 2017, I kept periodically checking back with FF, but was effectively a Chrome convert (Vimium was a good enough replacement for Vimperator). Once Servo hit the FF mainstream, it immediately felt faster, and I switched back. I still find myself switching back to Chrome for web dev debugging, probably for familiarity reasons. In this sense though, I'm sure I'm not the only one for whom "Firefox is back".
And don't forget about those thousands (millions?) of users who suddenly found Chrome installed on their computer because they updated their Virus Scanner or installed some Freeware where it was bundled with Chrome.
Still an upgrade from IE8 the same group would be using. I'm not advocating bundled installs, but installing secure (compared to old IE) browser alongside antivirus software is one of the very few cases where it makes sense.
From my private IT support perspective: I hate it!
My "customers" have FF installed and are every time utterly confused missing their favorites on their "Internet Program".
There is so much wrong with this bundling but yes, it's probably still better then IE...
> 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
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`?
> 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.
> :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
But I won't hold it against you if you use Vimium. It's very well polished : )
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
Oh really ... Not having DownThemAll just breaks my entire workflow, and there's no replacement. They should have at least considered the "most popular add-ons" to be in working condition before even releasing WebExtensions to all.
Breaking "old" add-ons with no working replacement and no way to implement quite a few of them killed FF for me. What those idiots at Mozilla don't get is that without the add-ons their stock browser is no better than any other.
I can also use it on android with ublock etc.
Chrome hasn't even been installed in my main computer in maybe a year, firefox works for everything I need, including google apps for business mail and youtube.
My biggest reason for using it is the fact that it is open source, the other is that ad-block software actually block calls to adds not just the display of them as in chrome.
Isn’t it essentially the prototype for all modern browser dev tools though? As in, they are all substantially similar to what Firebug was like, and Firebug existed before any of the others?
I could be getting my history wrong, but from what I remember Firebug was absolutely mind-blowing.
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.
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.
As someone who has worked a bit on energy usage: it's a really, really hard problem, and the tools used to develop/optimize for energy are really, really bad.
Also, being cross-platform complicates things a lot: I'm certain that Safari has access to a number of libraries that are energy-efficient but exist only on macOS/iOS.
I have a vague hope that maybe the Rust community can find a way to somehow develop a standard benchmarking tool that takes into account energy use. This would help considerably on the front of refactoring Firefox towards better energy efficiency.
I switched over to Firefox for about 3 months. The following were dealbreakers for me and I switched back to Chrome:
- Battery draining...it's seriously really bad. Even if the app is just open on my MacBook, I go from ~8hours of battery to like ~2hrs. I travel a lot...it's untenable
- Performance is generally pretty good, but it never felt better than Chrome.
- At first CPU on streaming video (Twitch, YT, etc) was better on Firefox, but over time I got the infamous "fan spinning" and CPU churning issues.
- Site compatibility: about 10-15% of sites I would visit broke.
- Nitpick, but not deal breaker: icons on my bookmark toolbar didn't work consistently. I would save a bookmark and it would stick to some other site and I could never clear the cache to fix it. It also frequently used non-retina images.
I also observe the same problem with Firefox on Windows and Linux. I have an impression that their developers don't have any priority on the battery drain, instead they just measure speed, and don't want to investigate too much on reducing actual work done, even when, from the user perspective, we're "doing nothing" (e.g. just keeping the browser open on some pages). I know there are many sites today that have tracking codes etc that "always run" but it seems that it's an excuse not to investigate what the browser "always does" in all the scenarios when it should just do as little as possible. Also, different kind of "movement" on the pages (videos, animated gifs, sounds) all take more battery than the competition.
My measurements are that on some specific pages, even when I "do nothing" Firefox uses up to twice as much CPU. Luckily, it's not always twice as much battery drain, because even idle uses power. But it's definitely visible and measurable: from 3 hours of other browsers you'd probably have only 2 of Firefox.
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.
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.
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).
It would be useful to indicate whether higher results are better or not for each of the tests. From what I know, Speedometer: higher is better; ARES-6: lower is better.
FYI, firefox is working on switching to rendering the entire page in opengl which should bring it's motion mark score up substantially. Details on that (and how to enable it in nightly at the bottom of each post) at https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com
Webrender (the new renderer maxyme was talking about) will move to gfx-rs later on [1]. That allows the renderer to run on Vulkan, DirectX 11 and 12, Metal and OpenGL.
Work on WebRender started before Vulkan API was widely available (even now there are lots of users, that can't use it) and right now they focus on integrating it in Firefox. Vulkan support is kept to be implemented "later", as it should enable further opportunities for parallelization in future.
Sadly a substantial number of Mac users are on os versions that don't support Metal. And a substantial number of then wouldn't even get support if they updated their OS.
So Metal-only isn't really an option for many projects, it's OpenGL + Metal or just OpenGL (for now).
That's a problem that Apple fabricated themselves. All MacOS games would also have to switch and I don't see that happening other than through the MoltenVK library if they support Vulkan at all.
FWIW the major factor driving user experience is content blocking. It is good to know the subtle diffrences, but any browser that ships with content blocking enabled by defult smashes the browser with the fastest rendering speed when it comes to actual browsing.
Moz://a could easily ship the best browser on the market if they actually cared about the users, instead of taking Google money and pretending to be a competition.
If they stopped taking the Google money it would be much harder to pay developers. I think this would be worse overall for the users, and I bet Mozilla thinks the same.
They would be if the revenue from search engine deals fell away. They've been experimenting with different, user-respecting sources of funding (and still are), but also have to face with enormous amounts of backlash every time they do, so finding alternative funding is not as simple as you make it out to be.
I know that at least for the Jetstream benchmark, higher scores are better (ie they're not just time measurements). If you make an assumption that makes the parent comment contradict itself, it seems like it would make sense to investigate your assumption instead of thinking the parent comment is contradictory.
I've also switched to Opera a couple of months ago. I'm running Opera touch on android too. I've found Opera on desktop (Linux) to be faster than Firefox and Chrome and the only functionality I'm missing is "to move the tabs to left and right". Even the chromecast works on Opera, which is fantastic.
I've been using the Flow functionality ever since I've started using Opera, and I think that is the second reason (well, after it being fast) I'm going to stick with Opera.
Yeah I agree with your assessment ancedotally. Firefox a few months ago had horrible performance in google maps and strangely facebook. I checked again today, it's improved a lot, but it is still noticeably slower for those two cornerstone websites. It was enough to make me stop using firefox again
I'm glad that the perf issues have been improved. They just need to get a little bit better and most objections for firefox would go away. Maybe as a workaround someone could make an extension that opens specific urls in chrome/safari when you open them. Only use chrome for maps and facebook for example :p
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.
Interestingly, for me Chrome is the browser that causes my machine to sound like a helicopter on take off (though maybe my usage is atypical). Safari still has the best power efficiency on the macOS, but between Firefox and Chrome anecdotally it seems like a toss up.
Would be curious to see some actual benchmarks comparing the latest browsers, does anyone do those on a regular basis? A quick google search didn't turn up anything more recent than last december: http://themainframe.ca/comparing-firefox-chrome-and-safari-b...
Do you have details? I noticed that Youtube on Firefox makes the fan spin up on my 2013 rMBP a lot. I currently use Firefox but as a heavy Youtube watcher this is a pretty big negative.
Same here. I have been a longtime Firefox user and don't recall having performance issues with YouTube on macbook before Quantum. But now if I'm watching anything more than a short clip on YouTube, the MBP's fans start to annoy me and it feels like it is going to burn a hole in my lap. YouTube in Chrome is totally fine. YouTube on Firefox on my Windows Intel NUC desktop is also totally fine. It seems to be a mac only Firefox issue. Would really love a solution!
Firefox uses H.264 for YouTube on macOS, so it can use the system's H.264 hardware decoder, which should be faster and use less power than a software decoder. Chrome uses a VP9 software decoder on YouTube. You can try VP9 in Firefox by setting the about:config pref "media.mediasource.webm.enabled" = true, but it is disabled by default for good reasons. :)
This is because Youtube pushes VP8/VP9-encoded video by default to save on bandwidth. Unfortunately, absence of a hardware decoder consumes a ton of battery. Both Firefox and Chrome receive VP9 encoded video.
Safari doesn't understand VP9. So Youtube pushes H.264 video which can be hardware accelerated.
I do. For me, it looks like Firefox is struggling with rendering when it comes to any kind of animation/effects, e.g videos, images, as well as js powered animations using SVG/canvas. Even simple things make my laptop boil.
Maybe I'm wrong about CPU and it's all about integrated Intel GPU.
You can check in about:support whether it is disabled. There's a section at the bottom of the article about how to force-enable various features if you want to see how glitchy it really is on your machine.
I'm having similar issues on a fairly modern laptop with i7-7700hq and GTX1050. After a few minutes of watching YouTube, it gets all jerky and not smooth. I'm guessing something is throttling, though video playback isn't taking a high percentage of either the CPU or the GPU. I tried forcing the builtin Intel GPU on firefox.exe, that didn't change anything.
YouTube prefers VP9, when available. You can try disabling VP9 in Firefox by setting the about:config pref "media.mediasource.webm.enabled" = false. Depending on your GPU, Firefox may be able to decode H.264 using a hardware decoder.
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.)
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 dont want this, it's better to be explicit with the accounts. However they are just using cookies and Chrome gives each "profile" a separate cookie container which works well and I prefer it to the mess it would be at the tab level. I have separate window profiles for work and personal and can keep everything (including passwords) completely separate.
I use Safari, which doesn't have profile handling at all. The web should not rely on clumsy browser hacks. Chrome profiles are way too coarse-grained — all the settings and state (history, bookmarks, etc.) are separate. It also interacts badly with everything else on a computer. If I click on a Slack link to a Google document, then nothing knows which Chrome window to open it in.
Google's mistake was the account switcher. Supporting multiple accounts is fine, but pretending they support concurrent logins is nonsensical.
But I have no choice to use multipel Google accounts, since my company uses Google Apps or G-Suite or Google For Work or whatever it is called today, and I'm consulting for a third company that also does this.
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
Your comment has convinced me to do this. This is pretty fantastic. It was driving me nuts being signed into both work and personal gmails to access either my files or adwords. Not to mention YouTube which would open under the work account sometimes or drive. Plus now I can rip out all the work bookmarks and shove that into a work only profile.
My only concern now is with using multiple devices. Do I just sign into to both profiles on each device? I only worry because there was a big snafu that occurred with their password manager that synced nothing and everything disappeared. (I no longer trust google with that stuff).
Chrome profiles are too coarse-grained: Not only is the entire window associated with that profile but each profile also has separate settings, histories, bookmarks, everything. All I'd want here are separate cookie spaces.
Firefox profiles are similar to Chrome's. But the container tabs that people are talking about in this thread are better than Chrome profiles. They're per tab, and last I checked they only separate out cookies and local storage.
I have this problem with JIRA: ever since Google authentication was enabled there I can not login on two separate JIRA instances with the same browser.
This kind of defeats the purpose of multiple accounts.
Remember, we started to have them to separate our work/home/personal lives, to build separate digital profiles that companies (like Google) store on their servers. Now you beg Google to recognize and unify them (which I guess they have almost done already by themselves).
I'm not begging anything of Google, but I would want them to make this work better.
Google accounts are not just about data and personalities, but also about permissions. As long as I'm "logged into" multiple accounts, it should be able to map the content I'm trying to see to an account. Or at least offer to switch to that account. For example, if I'm trying to view a company document, but my default account is my personal account, then I don't want to see an often obscure "permission to view denied" error, which always freaks me out and makes me think I've been locked out or something.
Better yet, build this badly-needed auth stuff into the browser and allow apps to negotiate access with the browser.
Yeah, but they probably get punished by managers for implementing unnecessary features. And that's probably why, even if we have one, the multiple accounts feature sucks so much.
Right, Chrome can't silo things like that between tabs, but can between windows using separate chrome profiles. Not as handy as container tabs but not horrible either.
Agree that you shouldn't try mixing personal and Google apps account in the same session...it always breaks eventually. (Why can't Google get that right?)
Supposedly you can be logged-in to multiple Google accounts but… it's very broken most of the time and works only for basic gmail browsing sadly.
And containers in firefox are simply amazing! I use it very often to access "admin accounts" on the occasion without the hurdle to use private browsing.
That's probably because your work account is a Google Apps account, which works much better especially for Drive (the problem is that you can't have more than one non-Apps account using drive at once in the same session. I have no idea why, but it seems to be deliberate). I'm unsure if the brokenness is fixed with Apps accounts on other Google services that are bad at handling multiple accounts.
Support for multiple accounts in drive is pretty great (minor papercuts here and there) as long as all but one of your accounts is an Apps account. This feels like an issue that they've fixed but not rolled out.
Except this has been a problem for years, and according to a friend of mine who's had a "personal" Apps account from back when it was free, never has been a problem for Apps users, so I'm not sure what's going on on their end.
stackdriver.com has to be one of the worst! selecting the right account just causes an infinite loop if the correct account isn't index[0] in your logged in accounts!
ADDED: In general a lot of services don't handle multiple accounts terribly well. I've had issues with Wordpress as well. I actually have two different soft-key authenticator programs related to making personal and work accounts play nice.
Sounds like you're using the Google Accounts feature, and using the [separate] browser profiles feature would exactly solve your problem.
In particular: you can log into different profiles in the browser (each window can be associated with up to one profile, and they can be different), by clicking the little "Sign In" tab in the upper right corner. See also https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2364824?hl=en&co=GE....
You can then open tabs under the different profiles with right-click, "Open link as", and selecting the appropriate profile.
(Personally, once I tried profiles, I never touched multiple-accounts-logged-in again.)
> the thing that drove me to Firefox was the excellent Account Containers system
Though unfortunately, history and bookmarks are not isolated to their individual containers, and Firefox's profile management system is a PITA compared to Chrome's easy button in the title bar.
I spent about three hours trying to figure out why apps scripts were breaking and refusing to open the editor until finally finding a helpful blog post: logged into multiple accounts? You may have trouble with apps scripting-something I had come to rely on with Sheets.
I wouldn't call it 'infuriating', but it's something that I can't figure out "how does this of all things break this of all things?"
What does that mean in terms of resources? Is 2 FF tabs that much less taxing than 2 Chrome instances?
fwiw, I use multiple Chromes, each with its own project / client, own password manager, etc. I don't think I could maintain the silos I do with FF. I wish I could sack Google (Chrome) but I can't, afaik.
Firefox supports both, completely separated browser profiles and these more lightweight Container Tabs.
You can type "about:profiles" into the URL-bar to manage your profiles (which you can also bookmark for easier access).
You can also run "firefox -P" in a terminal to access a similar GUI. With "firefox -P profile_name", you can start a specific profile. To run multiple profiles in parallel from the CLI, you have to start further profiles with "firefox -P profile_name --new-instance" (Linux) or "firefox.exe -P profile_name --no-remote" (Windows). This is because when you click on a link in an application, it needs to know in which browser instance to open that link.
As for resource usage, the profiles separate everything. Browsing history, bookmarks, logins, add-ons etc. It's essentially like a second Firefox installation. This also means that it actually runs two instances, so twice the RAM usage and somewhat more CPU usage to move that data around.
The Container Tabs on the other hand only separate what needs to be separated in order to look towards webpages like two different browsers. So, there's a different cookie jar, different localStorage, different HTML5 Web Storage etc., but other than that it's the same as just opening two tabs. So, probably not even 1% more RAM usage than using Firefox without any separation.
Yeah, in about:profiles, there's a "Launch profile in new browser"-button.
For launching multiple profiles in parallel from the command-line, I already tried to explain it in my previous comment, though it is more finicky that way.
Not even tabs usually live in the same process, so you must be misinterpreting something.
I think, the Windows Task Manager groups processes in the most stupid of ways, where when a (parent-)process has spawned many child-processes, then only the parent-process and its resource usage is shown. You have to go into the "Processes"-tab to see all Chrome-processes and manually add up their resource usage.
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.
Firefox has enough features and customization available that it's the only non-native browser that I'll use. I don't think Chrome or the others are worth it.
Otherwise in general, the native browser is usually the best bet for battery life. They render differently and have tighter integration overall as you noted. Firefox or native is the way to go, and if native browsers keep improving, even Firefox should watch out.
I've been using safari for a few months as my main browser and while it does feel quick, I can't say I've noticed a huge difference in battery life compared to chrome or firefox.
Are there any (recent) tests you know of that compare battery life between safari and the other major browsers?
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!
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.
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).
Yeah, when I've tried, those kind of things seemed like could get really annoying, but for those I have a Proxmox install in another handout (4Gb RAM laptop with broken screen) :)
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.
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.
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.
No, I don't, but as isostatic says, I think I could.
Of course there are tradeoffs when using such a machine but the point is that "modern" web browsing is a resources hog and GNU/Linux+Firefox makes it possible for everyone.
I'm curious as to why you haven't replaced it with something with better performance. It just seems masochistic to use a netbook with such a pathetic amount of RAM on it as your main computer.
More seriously, both personal and economic issues make this a reasonable tradeoff for me. I assure you it has nothing of masochistic, though maybe it has a stoic streak.
edit: Again, to not derail the point, Firefox works great, even multitasking, in a low-powered netbook.
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)
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.
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.
I've never found that confusing. Tapping the address bar opens a whole new navigate/search view. X closes that view. The most common use case is entering a new search or url, just start typing, the existing text is already selected so it will overwrite. On the off chance you want to edit the current URL, it's there. I can't think of a more streamlined workflow. Whatever you're used to is only good because you're used to it, but it's adding extra steps and/or unnecessary UI elements.
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.
Skills have centralized too heavily around HTML/CSS/JS for GUI development, that to do otherwise locks out talent, and or oppurtunity, depending on your budget.
Electron enabled cross-platform localized applications where nothing else stayed within the budget, with developers you already had.
It isn't that no one cares about native GUI's, it is that it isn't commerical, except in rare circumstances (games, visualization software, giant applications built by 1000s of developers, probably).
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?
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.
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.
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.
I've notice that some of the new fancy webapps that boosted of being write once run everywhere have issues in firefox.
Most notably is asana (it sometimes makes firefox use 100% cpu) and slack. Unfortunately we have slack at work but we're working to replace it as it has become increasingly bloated, user-unfriendly and buggy.
Hm you're right. At some point I could no longer move lists around, but it's back now. It was the third UI to break after Intercom (customer replies not shown unless I reloaded) and Notion (down arrow does not scroll the page down), so I tried Chrome and it fixed the problem. Maybe I should have tried restarting Firefox...
Yes, I've found that now and then after a few weeks of heavy use without a restart, FF will become unresponsive in weird ways (refuse to open new tabs, or won't load URLs but already-loaded pages keep working, or won't allow you to drag links to other apps). It's a bit frustrating but a restart usually fixes that.
No. It's a work computer (Ubuntu 16.04) so I just use Firefox as is. I checked and the Trello bug was gone, but the Notion bug is still there: for content that exceeds the screen, the down arrow will not let you go down further than the visible content.
I recall using a very early version of tabbed browsing that arranged the tabs on the left by default instead of on top. I think this was Mozilla Browser on Red Hat Linux 6, around 2000. At the time, neither I nor my computer was able to handle more than one website at once, so I didn't use the feature much!
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.
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)
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/
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.
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.
> 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).
1) sounds like you should try Tree Style Tabs addon
5) FF has this too. I'm not exactly sure but I think it's under "history" > "recently closed windows/tabs"
Vivaldi is an amazing browser! The team behind it actually considers very niche suggestions and implements them in their snapshot releases. Very fast and stylish -- I would definitely recommend!
I am in the same boat as you are. After the Firefox Quantum release, I decided to switch from Vivaldi and try Firefox out for a little bit. While I did like it, and it did seem to have a slightly faster performance, there are just many QoL feature s that Vivaldi offers that Firefox doesn't (or at least isn't immediately apparent). Simple things such as rebinding keys or reorganizing the top sites were such a headache that I very quickly switched back.
i would have a hard time switching back as well. a lot of the features could be added with extensions but i like having it all baked into the browser.
search shortcuts is probably my favourite feature (putting "r" in front of a search term to search directly on rotten tomatoes, or "d" to search on dictionary.com), its a great timesaver
Vivaldi does have a sync feature!
But I don't know if you're aware of that already, and FF/Chrome sync have something special in their Sync that Vivaldi doesn't.
It's been there at least 6 months already.
I think I started using it around the time it was added. According to my password safe, I put the sync name/password in there on 1st of December last year.
EDIT: I want to add that I run the Snapshot versions of Vivaldi (currently 1.16.1211.3), and it could be that the Sync was introduced only in a Snapshot in December. So I have no idea if the sync can be found in the Stable releases as well. Anyways, it's under Tools/Settings/Sync tab if it's there, otherwise it isn't :)
I've used the snapshot versions as my primary browser at work and home at least since... (referring again to KeePass, checking creation date of credentials for some vivaldi related thing) ...beginning on April 2016, and for me it has worked great.
I might not be the heaviest of the heavy users (figuratively speaking :), for example I have total of 3 Chrome extensions installed (uBlock origin, some exif viewer and Google translate), so I am not aware of things that may not have worked correctly.
I used to use Opera (first 12, then the Chrome version of Opera which I didn't like), and then switched to Vivaldi when I found out about it.
i use the snapshot version as my default on mac and it's definitely usable (and then some). you do run into the odd bugginess, but anything major is usually fixed within a few days.
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
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.
I use it as a daily driver since quite a long time (2 years I guess (* )) and I find the performance not to be an issue (MBP retina late 2013), especially considering having open most of the time 4 windows with about 50 tabs. It can warm the machine on opening 5-10 amazon pages at once but there is no slowdown.
As for Pocket - I don't use it, but prefer this non-inclusive addon instead of Google spying on my every move (yes, you don't have to log-in to google account and you can install ad-blockers but still). And also I don't want to end up with "Best viewed with Inter^WChrome" Internet.
(* ) (using Firebird, then long time Opera user until version 12, then made a switch to Firefox, then to Vivaldi for a 1-2 years and now back to Firefox again)
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.
It really isn't, but neither Chrome nor Safari are in the habit of making obnoxious UI changes, force-pushing addons I don't want, putting ads on the new tab page (which you would think would be more Chrome's bailiwick, but they don't), and so forth.
I don't want to be using Firefox when whatever the next boneheaded move they make lands. Mozilla burned every bit of goodwill I ever for them had when they destroyed an odd decade or so of muscle memory and customization of a tool I use every day. Yeah, so they're supposedly pro privacy. Neat. Whatever. They also have the organizational attention span of a toddler on Red Bull.
What you didn't find to be true in your case - Firefox becoming slower over time (as OP says) or Firefox shipping with Pocket? Or both?
Personally my reason was Pocket incident and since then I never went back to Firefox. Checked few months ago and they still had Pocket. Besides I am pretty happy on Safari except the lack of extensions which I am kind of used to by now.
They still have Pocket, but it's both less in the way and now actually owned by the Mozilla Foundation though that's not really made obvious.
The most obvious place you'll see it is on the default new tab/blank tab page where top trending stories being saved on Pocket are listed. It's a crowd-curated list of stories that people have found interesting enough to save to read or return to later, almost like a technology news site where people vote stories up...... But no commenting.
The way Pocket is integrated in Firefox is a problem for me, may not be a problem for others and that's completely understandable.
For me Mozilla was the "open" browser (and "clean" too). Integrating Pocket in it by default, in a way that it cannot be "completely" removed, put me off. Heck, they could just ship the browser with it installed as a "normal" extension that can be "completely" removed like any other extension. And maybe disable this extension by default, or keep it enabled they'd really want it that way.
And no, if I want curated trending stories I will go the website I want to read those from. Or I'll install a relevant extension of my choice; maybe Pocket.
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)
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!
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.
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.
I've been having the exact same problems. Been trying to use Firefox primarily for the past few months but it gets frustrating having to restart it all the time.
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.
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.
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.
I remember going to a Firefox 1.0 release party at Dragonmead brewery near Detroit and meeting a bunch of local nerds from IRC and various LUGs. A party with strangers just to celebrate the release of a browser we didn't get paid to promote or develop.
I feel like the era where people were passionate about open source as a goal in itself has really waned in recent years. Maybe because a lot of the major battles were won, or because more companies are realizing that open source is a logical business choice in a lot of cases.
Or maybe it's just rosy retrospection at play and I've just become jaded.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I use animation and transitions a lot in my work and manly use firefox. I have noticed this problem as well, it does not manage transitions as well as chrome for some reason.
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.
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?
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.
>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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
"Irrelevant" is a strong, dismissive word that comes with a certain arrogance that I don't think fits the facts at all in this case.
The author said FF became irrelevant after 2008, which is false. It was popular for a long time after.
The answer to the question "how popular is a browser" should not be answered by anything other than stats for your own sites. Global stats don't interest me.
While Chrome certainly did rise in popularity and overtake FF, it was absolutely not in 2008 that happened according to the browser stats of the network of mainstream popular sites I worked on for a few years at that time. I do remember seeing a discrepancy in the "global stats" vs the actual stats from Google analytics I was accessing on a regular basis, which told a different story.
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).
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
> 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.
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!
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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; }
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
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.
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!).
I tried this out, but it said "experimental" and didn't really work on the pixelbook. It only asked for microphone permission, not camera, and neither speakers nor microphone worked.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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].
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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
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.
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)
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
He did keep his mouth shut about it. Nobody at the company claims that he made any mention of his support for Prop 8. He was outed for it. And interviews with several of his openly gay employees revealed nothing but his support and empathy for them. Yes, he could have been more supportive by opposing Prop 8. He is no saint in my book. But neither is he a monster that must be removed. He's a complex person, like pretty much everyone else I've ever worked with, and it's wrong to other him for one unfortunate but not necessarily malicious opinion.
He wasn't outed - his donation was public. Its not like some secret conversation was recorded and then reported out of context. He didn't accidentally donate $1,000 to oppose same sex marriage. Once called out on it, he didn't apologize or drop his support of Prop 8.
He made a decision and he stuck with it. And Mozilla employees also made a decision. His decision was to oppose their right to be married. Their decision was to oppose his privilege to be their CEO.
I think that is wrong too. Anonymous speech is important, and therefore so is anonymous support for speech. That was a lot more clear to LGBT folks before their opinions gained cultural ascendancy, when they benefited from anonymity when expressing their previously heterodox opinions. It helped them win. And there is much more winning to be done for other good causes that are still taboo.
Anonymous speech is super important. Even terrible anonymous speech. But this wasn't anonymous speech. Maybe it was speech he hoped no one would find. But, he made the conscious decision to speak in a public forum by donating money to a cause he supported. Then, when called out on it, he made the conscious decision to publicly re-affirm his support for that opinion.
I won't argue about donation disclosure policies. Maybe donations should be public, maybe they shouldn't - I dunno. But, even if they should be private, they weren't and I don't believe he should get a pass because in an alternate world maybe no one would have known what he did.
There exists no universal perspective of what is harmful and what is not. In fact, the notion that prohibiting gay marriage is harmful is nowhere near as universally accepted as your comment makes it out to be. Remember, California passed Proposition 8 (the proposition to ban gay marriage) with a 52% majority in 2008. Eich's views were in line with the majority. Mozilla sent the message that the majority of Californian voters are not welcome at their company.
The mere fact that a lot of people believe something, doesn't make it right or just. Justice is protecting the weak and the powerless from the powerful, not voting on who has human rights and who doesn't from week to week.
Also, Prop 8 was in 2008. He was appointed to the CEO position in 2014 - 6 years later. He had every opportunity to apologize. Everyone makes mistakes, even big ones. But, he refused to apologize. He held the same opinion in 2014 that he did in 2008 and he made that clear.
Why would he have the right to express his opinion on same-sex-marriage but Mozilla employees wouldn't have the right to express their opinion on his fitness to be their CEO?
And who gets to say what protections people should and should not receive? If a company genuinely believes that pro-LGBT views are harmful, then in your framework they're equally justified to fire employees that donated in opposition to Proposition 8.
I think a lot of people forget that there's a world beyond liberal urban areas. Allowing it to become socially acceptable for companies to fire employees for their political views is also handing a tool for conservatives to suppress their employees' liberal politics.
And again, it's sending the message that the majority of Californians are not welcome at the company. It makes Mozilla hypocrites whenever they purport to support diversity or inclusion, and gives credence to the idea that Silicon Valley companies are deliberately hostile towards non-liberals.
You can't just throw your hands up in the air and say that because there is no absolute scale with which to measure human rights, everything goes. And I think its also not good policy to say that because an organization might* fire a pro-LGTB employee for their views, that everyone should be let to act however they want without consequences. In your view, what publicly expressed opinions would disqualify someone to be a CEO? Anything?
Views on gay marriage shifted rapidly between 2008 and 2014. I think its wrong to assume that just because 52% of people voted to support Prop 8 in 2008 that 6 years later opinions hadn't changed. And lets not forget that Prop 8 was ruled unconstitutional in 2010 - 4 years before he was made CEO and continued to publicly support Prop 8.
* - By "might", I mean "has happened a lot for a long time". LGTB people have faced discrimination for a long time for wanting to live their life in a way that harms literally no one. Anti-LGBT people facing consequences for their actions to discriminate against others in a way that benefits literally no one is a relatively recent occurrence.
I don't believe being against LGBT marriages necessarily implies that you are against all forms of LGBT relationships / lifestyles.
Marriage has become regulated by the state due to its implications on all citizens. Just because someone doesn't agree with how the state legislates sexual relationships doesn't mean they should be antogonized. Their views can be beneficial to the argument regardless of which side they take.
Simply shutting down conflicting political ideologies doesn't really lead to any rational discussion on the matter. To give an example, consider the current legal strife with gun control. Some people want the state to increase gun regulation and others don't. If each party simply supports their case by saying the other party is discriminating against their way of life, the discussion wouldn't lead to anything sensibly intelligent.
People should have the ability to defend any argument they wish, so long as they remain civil about it. This is especially the case in matters which actually concern the people themselves. Their propositions may be wrong and detrimental to society but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be able to express their thoughts.
Everyone has the right to free speech - but no one has the right to avoid consequences for that speech. In 2008, he spoke, via a $1,000 public donation, of his opinion to support Prop 8. It wasn't just some random thought - he had a very specific outcome in mind that he wanted to see enacted that would impact _other_ people's lives. He got the consequence he wanted - Prop 8 passed and same-sex marriage was outlawed. In 2014, Mozilla employed exercised that very same right to speak against his fitness to be CEO. The consequence of that was that he was forced to resign. He doesn't get to pick and choose which consequences he'll allow. Once he speaks, other people get to respond, and thats what they did.
> Everyone has the right to free speech - but no one has the right to avoid consequences for that speech
This is actually not true. For example, it would have been illegal for Mozilla to fire Eich for his donation. This is because political activity is considered protected in California (like gender, race, etc.), so firing someone for making a political statement or for donating to a political cause is illegal.
We will probably learn more about this defense as the Google/Damore case proceeds.
Hi, you are mistaken on many facts here. I'll start with this claim. No employees at the Mozilla Corporation demanded that I resign. Six Mozilla Foundation (the non-profit .org with arms-length management and separate board) tweeted that I should step down (see https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/03/mozil... which fails to note their employer was not the company to which I had been appointed CEO, although I was founder of both orgs). They never worked for me.
At the Mozilla Corporation? That was what @dagenix specified in the grandparent comment by "... his employees ...." Unless they deleted their tweets, let's see those twitter links.
A green handle of "communist_" does not inspire automatic belief that you truly had friends at Mozilla Corporation or know of any such tweets.
Again, if you mean the six Mozilla Foundation employees who tweeted against me as (poorly) reported by Ars Technica (see https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/03/mozil...), they were not "his employees". They worked for an entirely separate organization from the one I was running.
Back-story: Mozilla Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit set up in 2003 (I was founding board member, and a co-founder of mozilla.org in 1998 at the start). Mozilla Corporation is the for-profit, wholly-owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation which exists at arms length to make taxable revenue from Firefox. The two orgs are loosely connected; the Mozilla Foundation is much smaller and all about getting and giving grants.
> Everyone has the right to free speech - but no one has the right to avoid consequences for that speech.
Incorrect. At least, it's incorrect as far as consequences levied by their employers. In the United States, government employees are protected by the First Amendment. E.G. a government department that fired employees for pro or anti gay marriage donations would mean that the government is privileging one political opinion over the other:
> the rationale now is that while government may deny employment, or any benefit for that matter, for any number of reasons, it may not deny employment or other benefits on a basis that infringes that person’s constitutionally protected interests. “For if the government could deny a benefit to a person because of his constitutionally protected speech or associations, his exercise of those freedoms would in effect be penalized and inhibited. This would allow the government to ‘produce a result which [it] could not command directly.’ . . . Such interference with constitutional rights is impermissible."
> In his case, his employees exercised their right to speak, said they thought he wasn't fit to be CEO, demanded his resignation, and he resigned.
This is not entirely correct, and is omitting a substantial part of the story. The company board (who are effectively Eich's bosses) told him to step down as CEO. The CEO doesn't have have a manager and so can't really be fired like a normal employee, but the board telling him to resign is functionally the same thing.
I wasn't saying that there aren't certain protections for speech - there are, and there should be. Its not like once you speak everyone in the room has the right to punch you in the face. What I'm saying, is that once you speak, there are some consequences you must face - one being that other people get to respond with their own speech. In his case, his employees exercised their right to speak, said they thought he wasn't fit to be CEO, demanded his resignation, and he resigned.
> You can't just throw your hands up in the air and say that because there is no absolute scale with which to measure human rights, everything goes. And I think its also not good policy to say that because an organization might* fire a pro-LGTB employee for their views, that everyone should be let to act however they want without consequences. In your view, what publicly expressed opinions would disqualify someone to be a CEO? Anything?
No political views should be inherently fireable offenses, only things like harassment that have nonpartisan criteria. E.g. Supporting proposition 8 is not a fireable offense, actually calling gay employees slurs is. Conversely, opposing stricter border controls is not a fireable offense on its own, saying that anyone who supports Trump's border policies is a Nazi that deserves to be punched is a fireable offense because it's a threat of violence. Firing must be made on non-partisan criteria.
> Views on gay marriage shifted rapidly between 2008 and 2014. I think its wrong to assume that just because 52% of people voted to support Prop 8 in 2008 that 6 years later opinions hadn't changed. And lets not forget that Prop 8 was ruled unconstitutional in 2010 - 4 years before he was made CEO and continued to publicly support Prop 8.
Should anyone that supported the McCain–Feingold Act (the act overturned by the Citizens United case), or Chicago's handgun ban be fired as well? Both of those were found to be infringements on people's constitutional liberties. Again, this is what I'm referring to when I say that people many of the justifications for Eich's termination aren't really well thought out, and end up justifying the termination of lots of other people as well. The blanket statement that a certain political view should be a fireable offense because it was later determined to be unconstitutional is going to end up justifying the firing of lots of other people.
If all political views are valid, what about someone that has documented pro-segregation views? Is that person qualified to make decisions that impact the lives of a diverse workforce? If not, where do you draw the line? I'm not trying to make a strawman argument - I'm seriously asking why would this be any different?
The problem isn't that he had some thought in his head - its that he took that thought in his head and turned it into action. And those publicly documented actions made it impossible for his employees to trust him to make decisions in their best interest. Having the trust of his employees is 100% part of his job - the fact that he lacked that made him unfit to be CEO.
Supporting something that turns out to be unconstitutional clearly shouldn't be a fireable offense. But, both of the examples you cite are cases where a person can cite reasonable reason for their support that aren't merely about controlling the lives of others for no purpose. I probably made a mistake in mentioning it was overturned at all - I'm just saying, he continued to argue for something that wasn't even relevant anymore - in 2014 when this controversy erupted, same sex marriages were actively occurring in California. It seems likely that some of his employees may have benefited from this. And, yet, in 2014 he continued to support the prohibition of same-sex marriage - actively advocating against the life choices that his employees were making at that very time.
Should people that donate to women-only colleges be fired? After all, that's supporting a type of segregation, and you didn't specify which type of segregation you're referring to. But to answer your point seriously (presuming that you're referring to Jim Crow era segregation), the people that genuinely support those kinds of heinous policies will almost certainly end up committing actual harassment and be fired with cause. I haven't met a single pro-segregationist that hadn't used slurs against Africans within seconds of making their views known. Granted, my sample size isn't particular big.
Banning certain political views almost always going to harm overall inclusion. According to some of the first results on Google 33% of Americans oppose gay marriage [1]. For comparison, the total African American population in the us is under 14% - less than half. Firing an employee for anti-gay marriage politics and then turning around and claiming it is attempting to be an inclusive company is hypocrisy.
Refraining from firing people regardless of their political views would not cause the world to fall apart. Government employers are legally obligated to tolerate employees political views by the 1st Amendment, and can only fire them for other just causes. Over 20 million people are employed by the Federal, State, and local governments in the US so respecting employers' politics clearly feasible.
> But, both of the examples you cite are cases where a person can cite reasonable reason for their support that aren't merely about controlling the lives of others for no purpose.
The people that supported Proposition 8 can also cite what they believe are reasonable justifications for their support of Proposition 8. Sure, you may not agree that their justifications are reasonable. But that works both ways. Plenty of gun-rights supporters would claim that gun control is "merely about controlling the lives of others for no purpose". So in your moral framework, a gun-rights supporting company would be equally justified in firing pro-gun control employees as Mozilla was in firing Eich, just as long as they consider gun control to be "merely about controlling the lives of others for no purpose".
I really hope you realize that you're supporting the ability of a privileged elite (stockholders, CEOs, managers, etc.) to police their employees' political activity and coerce them into political submission through the threat of termination. Sure, bosses where I live (a liberal costal city) are usually liberal. But in much of the country, they're not.
I was clearly referring to Jim Crow era segregation. And, if your point is that all supporters of Jim Crow era segregation, which is super racist, will inevitably do more things that are super racist, why must we wait for them to do additional super racist things before judging them to be unfit to be a CEO of a large company? Similarly, once someone has demonstrated that they hold opinions contrary to the best interests of their employees, why must those employees wait until after they become CEO for them to demonstrate that fact yet again? If they have demonstrated that they are unfit, they are unfit, and they shouldn't have the position.
> Banning certain political views almost always going to harm overall inclusion.
Nothing was banned here. His position was that same-sex marriage should be illegal. Their position was that someone who supports same-sex marriage isn't fit to be a CEO of a large company, making decisions about a diverse workforce, based in a state where same-sex marriage is legal.
I'm also unclear about your definition of inclusion - is it just finding the largest number of people that happen to agree with each other?
> Refraining from firing people regardless of their political views would not cause the world to fall apart.
Its not about the world falling apart. Its about the right of employees to express their opinion of someones fitness to be their CEO. Which is totally the right of the employees of Mozilla to do.
> I really hope you realize that you're supporting the ability of a privileged elite (stockholders, CEOs, managers, etc.) to police their employees' political activity and coerce them into political submission through the threat of termination.
You are literally arguing that employees (ie: not the privileged elite) shouldn't speak out against the opinions of their CEO (ie: the privileged elite).
> And, if your point is that all supporters of Jim Crow era segregation, which is super racist, will inevitably do more things that are super racist, why must we wait for them to do additional super racist things before judging them to be unfit to be a CEO of a large company? Similarly, once someone has demonstrated that they hold opinions contrary to the best interests of their employees, why must those employees wait until after they become CEO for them to demonstrate that fact yet again? If they have demonstrated that they are unfit, they are unfit, and they shouldn't have the position.
Because there is no non-partisan determination of what is a 'super racist' or otherwise intolerable view, while there is a non-partisan (or at least fairly non-partisan) determination of what is harassment. Plenty of people I know think that any and all race-based affirmative action policies are 'super racist'. Would they justified in telling their direct reports that support affirmative hiring policies, or who donated against Proposition 209 (the proposition that banned race based affirmative action in California public universities) to quit? Sure, it may mean that occasionally someone with extreme political views get hired. But if they genuinely hold views that are truly extreme, they will inevitably end up committing harassment. Again, how for do you think that somebody who genuinely believes in Nazism or enslaving Africans is going to get without making an HR violation? They'd probably make an HR violation during the interview and not even get the job. And if they don't, then that's an indicator that the notion that their views were intolerably extreme wasn't correct.
> Nothing was banned here. His position was that same-sex marriage should be illegal. Their position was that someone who supports same-sex marriage isn't fit to be a CEO of a large company, making decisions about a diverse workforce, based in a state where same-sex marriage is legal.
You're missing the part where Eich's bosses tell him to quit. If managers are going around telling employees to quit when they support X, then the company is effectively banning or at least drastically reducing employee's ability to support X.
> I'm also unclear about your definition of inclusion - is it just finding the largest number of people that happen to agree with each other?
No - the whole point I've been arguing since the beginning is that attempting to cultivate political homogeneity is inevitably going to end up hurting inclusion.
> Its about the right of employees to express their opinion of someones fitness to be their CEO. Which is totally the right of the employees of Mozilla to do.
> You are literally arguing that employees (ie: not the privileged elite) shouldn't speak out against the opinions of their CEO (ie: the privileged elite).
Nowhere do I argue that employees shouldn't speak out against their CEO. Judging by statements made in your other comments, this seems to stem from the erroneous belief that Eich was entirely motivated to resign by Mozilla employees' displeasure to learn his political views. This is not the case. Eich's bosses (the Board) told him to resign. To make Eich's situation analogous to a normal employee, it'd be as if your manager scheduled a meeting with an employee and told them, "We noticed that you donated to ______. We do not tolerate this political view. You need to quit".
So, what, do we hire first grade teachers to be brain surgeons and wait to fire them until they kill a patient? Its preposterous to say that we can't look at past behavior and use it to judge someone's fitness for a job. He advocated against same-sex marriage in 2008. In 2014, same-sex marriage was legal in California. In 2014, he re-affirmed his opposition to same-sex marriage. Why on earth would his employees believe that he would be a good leader for them?
> You're missing the part where Eich's bosses tell him to quit.
If his bosses told him to quit, its because it was clear his employees didn't trust him. And they had every right not to trust him. And absolutely no reason to trust him. He hadn't screwed them in the 11 days he had been CEO, but had in the past and, by reaffirming his beliefs, made it very reasonable for the employees to believe he would in the future. What is the board supposed to do? Fire everyone but him?
> No - the whole point I've been arguing since the beginning is that attempting to cultivate political homogeneity is inevitably going to end up hurting inclusion.
Inclusion isn't about finding the worst examples of humanity and including them - its about including actually diverse people (which his employees actually were), trying to live their own lives, on their own terms, and not dictating to others how to live theirs. Its not about taking a single person, the CEO, and letting them say and do whatever they want. It is totally irrelevant what portion of the US still disagrees with same-sex marriage, unless you are going to argue thats OK. Its not. Its disgusting. Either tell me you believe thats OK or stop arguing that because X% of people believe in discrimination that somehow makes it legitimate. I don't care if you live in LA or in a single stoplight town in the middle of nowhere - discrimination is bullshit and cloaking it in the idea of everyone being allowed to have their own opinions only enables discrimination.
> Nowhere do I argue that employees shouldn't speak out against their CEO
So, what, the employees get to speak out as long as nothing comes of it? If something comes of it, thats the problem? What is the actual point of speaking out then?
Its been 4 years since he was sacked. Since then, there has not been a wave of pro-LGTB firings across the US. At least not, any more than were being fired before. Since then, there has been a greater recognition of LGTB rights, same-sex marriage is legal across the US, and opinions such as his have been further pushed into the trash can of history where they can live with other bullshit opinions. If employee outrage against a CEO that is clearly mis-aligned with their values, basic human values, is going to cause so many unintended consequences - where are they?
There are no moral absolutes. Life isn't math. But, his opinions, his positions, are abhorrent to any decent human being. You can try to cloak your argument in to a hand-wavy invocation of the idea that morality is changing and the norms of society aren't fixed - but try to defend what he actually advocated for. Is that ok? Tell me its ok to discriminate against your LGTB employees. Put that on record. Tell me that actively working against LGTB rights is ok and is something we should tolerate. Tell me that people that support LGBT rights in a state where same-sex marriage is legal should suck it up and support someone that doesn't believe in their rights. I don't want to hear about some hand-waving side effects - tell me about the actual issue here.
> So, what, do we hire first grade teachers to be brain surgeons and wait to fire them until they kill a patient? Its preposterous to say that we can't look at past behavior and use it to judge someone's fitness for a job.
This is a blatant straw man. Of course people skills and abilities must be considered. At all points in this discussion I have only focused on employee's political behavior. The notion that I have stated that candidates' skills should not be taken into account is a total fabrication on your part.
> Inclusion isn't about finding the worst examples of humanity and including them - its about including actually diverse people (which his employees actually were), trying to live their own lives, on their own terms, and not dictating to others how to live theirs. Its not about taking a single person, the CEO, and letting them say and do whatever they want. It is totally irrelevant what portion of the US still disagrees with same-sex marriage, unless you are going to argue thats OK. Its not. Its disgusting. Either tell me you believe thats OK or stop arguing that because X% of people believe in discrimination that somehow makes it legitimate. I don't care if you live in LA or in a single stoplight town in the middle of nowhere - discrimination is bullshit and cloaking it in the idea of everyone being allowed to have their own opinions only enables discrimination.
You're writing this with the erroneous notion that the people in charge are going to agree with your views. What about the people who have bosses that are part of the 1/3 of the population that doesn't believe in gay marriage? Are they supposed to just suck it up and get told to quit if they donate to pro-LGBT causes? You make broad statement like, "discrimination is bullshit and cloaking it in the idea of everyone being allowed to have their own opinions only enables discrimination" but don't consider the fact that lots of people consider things like affirmative action to be unjust discrimination. Heck, even here in California it was banned by popular vote. Does it follow that companies should grep for donors that were against Proposition 209 and tell them to quit? You claim that letting people have their own opinion enables discrimination. Sure, to a degree that's true but letting companies police their employees' opinions is an even bigger enabler of discrimination.
> What is the board supposed to do? Fire everyone but him?
This is another fallacious argument. The board doesn't need to choose between retaining Eich and firing everyone but him. They can fire nobody. Believe it or not, plenty of adults cooperate and work with people that have views different from theirs.
> So, what, the employees get to speak out as long as nothing comes of it? If something comes of it, thats the problem? What is the actual point of speaking out then?
I'm not sure why you're fixating on the employees. I did not mention them until you brought them up. My point has, since the beginning, been about the choice Eich's firing (or if you want to get pedantic, the asking of his resignation) from his superiors. As I have written before, the employees are equally entitled to make their opinions known.
> There are no moral absolutes. Life isn't math. But, his opinions, his positions, are abhorrent to any decent human being. You can try to cloak your argument in to a hand-wavy invocation of the idea that morality is changing and the norms of society aren't fixed - but try to defend what he actually advocated for. Is that ok? Tell me its ok to discriminate against your LGTB employees. Put that on record. Tell me that actively working against LGTB rights is ok and is something we should tolerate. Tell me that people that support LGBT rights in a state where same-sex marriage is legal should suck it up and support someone that doesn't believe in their rights. I don't want to hear about some hand-waving side effects - tell me about the actual issue here.
If your point of view is that the majority of Californians in 2008 we're "abhorrent to any decent human being" then your views are likely fringe. If you can't bring yourself to see what a decade ago was the majority of people, and what is 1/3 today, with even the most basic degree of respect then I don't think your have any business attempting to portray yourself as advocating tolerance. Dismissing half to a third of your countrymen's politics (assuming you're American) as "abhorrent to any decent human being" is the opposite of tolerance.
> "Yes" or "No" - LGTB people have rights?
Yes, LGBT people have rights. Refraining from firing Eich would not have been an infringement of those rights, though. Simply working with a co-worker who believes that civil liberties and rights should be regulated differently than you do is not a violation of those rights and liberties. No more than employing a pro-bussing employee is violating our 14th Amendment rights. No more than employing an employee that disagrees with Citizens Unitied is violating our right to free speech.
You seem to be operating under the noting that mere tolerance of a point of view is tantamount to an endorsement of that view. This kind of thinking is highly corrosive, and it is impossible to build an inclusive group composed of people that harbor this perspective. If a group if such people come together, the only way they would reach harmony is when they achieve political homogeneity. The notion that tolerance of a view is an endorsement of that view is implicitly a demand to be intolerant towards views one disagrees with. It is sobering to meet someone on HN that follows this line of thought.
And who gets to say what protections people should and should not receive?
In the US, the notion of equal protection under law is stated unequivocally in our founding documents. It is not the government's business to sanction some personal relationships but not others.
Not debatable at all, IMO, when looked at objectively,
So to support policies that are later determined to be unconstitutional become fireable offenses? That means anyone that supports public school racial integration policies (as in, deliberately balancing out student populations to counteract de-facto segregation) should be fired. This was determined unconstitutional in 2007 [1]. Anyone that supports racial quotas in higher education also needs to be fired, because that was ruled illegal back in Bakke vs. Regents. Using constitutionality as a basis for whether certain political beliefs are fireable offenses is going to entail the firing of lots of liberals in addition to anti-gay marriage proponents. I don't think this justification was thought through.
It's also worth mentioning that at the time of his firing, the Supreme Court had yet to rule that banning gay marriage was illegal. Eich was fired before the Supreme Court made Proposition 8 unconstitutional.
In most jobs, there are plenty of ways to get fired even if you haven't broken any laws. This was just one of those ways, for one of those employees, at one of those jobs.
Sure, it's legal. What we're discussing is what justification there is to make it socially acceptable to fire or tell people to resign based on political views.
(Shrug) It's acceptable to me and to a bunch of other people, so that by definition makes it "socially acceptable." I reserve the right not to employ Nazi asshats, or to work for them. That's the upside to at-will employment... and the downside of being a Nazi asshat.
In most states, political beliefs do not, and should not, qualify employees for membership in protected classes. Under California law the situation is murkier, but most conservatives like Eich would agree with that sentiment, I'd hope. But then, the definitions of traditional terms like "conservative" are becoming hard to keep up with nowadays.
ICYMI, I've posted before on HN about false claims of unlawful harm that keep coming up. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14845509 as a source of links; also for the thread in which it lives, which unfortunately runs to high indentation level before trailing off.
Why does this matter now? Obviously it matters to lots of people (including here in these comments) who keep bringing me up, either to attack Mozilla or to attack me. You can search Twitter and try to keep score -- I think subtweeted sentiment has turned in my favor, but both sides keep going.
My Mozilla exit is a prop in the culture wars, even though I never harmed anyone and am still doing what I've always done: working with people from all backgrounds, innovating via open source and open web tech against the big Internet superpowers who emerge and, due to network effects, end up operating against their users' interests.
It's time to drop the prop and stop fighting. I don't expect everyone to listen, but I'll give it a shot here anyway:
What we need most, on the Web and in the world, is unity against big threats such as surveillance capitalism. Apple and Brave block third party tracking by default. I hope Mozilla will do the same if its search revenue-share deals allow that. In the mean time, if you do choose to use Firefox, you can enable its optional Tracking Protection feature.
It isn't a choice between attention to your case and attention to substance. If people who respect you heed you, and those who don't, don't, then your name by default becomes a cultural prop for the auto-da-fe. That's worth countering with an occasional dissenting web post.
I agree that our most critical current tech challenge, maybe on par with energy, curing disease or extraterrestrial diaspora, is the decentralization of internet services. You are peculiarly positioned to make a positive contribution to that. If the inquisition succeeds in quashing you they may accomplish genuine harm.
I would not exaggerate either my role, or the power of any would-be Inquisition. People give mobs too much credit (to bootstrap power they do not merit) or blame (to excuse or cover up prior problems that can be seen through the mob's crowd, if you are willing to look).
It's also the fact that CEOs embody and represent the entire organisation in a way that individual contributors and even mid-level managers do not. This is a part of the job, alongside the big salaries and the yacht parties.
Consider how people's opinions on Mark Zuckerberg colour their opinions on Facebook, or how often Satya Nadella is referenced in conversations on Microsoft's corporate culture and how it may or may not have changed (and how the previous culture is often literally referred to as the "Ballmer era").
He didn't just have an opinion. He acted on that opinion. In a way designed to harm some of his own employees. That action was publicly recorded. And its not just "some opinion". Its not like he preferred Turkey Club sandwiches to BLTs. He preferred that some of his own employees be denied basic human rights.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I followed Eich to the Brave browser. It's really great, but the devtools still don't dock within the window but they're working on it.
Firefox crucified their CEO over his PRIVATE conservative views and that was scary how quick the mob turns on someone. If they turned on the got damn inventor of javascript, how quick will they turn on your minion employee?
If a lot of employees are (very) uncomfortable with their CEO, that CEO is toxic for the company regardless of whether their views are private/public, right/wrong, just/unjust.
One of the two have to go: The CEO, or the employees. Do you want to live in the world where Mozilla fires thousands of employees who disagree with their CEO's view that gay marriage should be prohibited?
> One of the two have to go: The CEO, or the employees. Do you want to live in the world where Mozilla fires thousands of employees who disagree with their CEO's view that gay marriage should be prohibited?
No, this is a false scenario. Neither of the two have to go. It's totally possible for employees to continue to choose to work at the company even if they don't agree with their CEO's political views. Plenty of adults manage to work with people that have significant political differences. A more realistic second choice is that some employees choose to quite and most choose to stay.
The case that is being misrepresented even now in comments on this post consists of the six Mozilla Foundation employees tweeting that I should step down. They did not work for me. It may be they spoke for some who did work for me, but many on my staff were outraged by their tweets. I had support across a broad spectrum of people inside the Mozilla Corporation.
The point remains, the above poster was presenting a false dichotomy. No one had to be fired. Employees may choose to quit, but that is a decision they make themselves.
If where we are at now is the end result, then YES! The employees who truly had a problem should have simply quit and found another job. Most of them probably wouldn't have cared enough to quit.
Mozilla is irrelevant for me now. I just want a browser, I don't care about their political views.
This is also what I hate about Tim Cook and Apple, he's too political.
I'm a Mozilla employee who was there at the time, and I can tell you that there are a lot of misconceptions about how all of that went down. The least inaccurate coverage that I've seen on the topic is https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-under-fire-inside-the-9-da...
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
I do not believe that was the only alternative. I have spent a lot of time reading bug reports / feature requests relating to this functionality, and it certainly seems that much of it could be enabled, but apparently never will. The developers seem to think that giving extensions "too much power" would be dangerous, and thus it is best not to let anybody choose power over safety guarantees.
It seems a little too harsh to bring up Linus Torvald's "If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it" quote, but it tends to come to my mind whenever I read the abovementioned discussions.
I used VimFX before and I'm using Vimium now. It's okay, but it works nowhere near as well as VimFX did. The biggest problem is that it doesn't work until a page has loaded. So if I open a page and while it's loading I want to open a new tab, I can't use Vimium shortcuts to do it.
Want a bind to open something in mpv/youtube-dl
`";v": "hint -W exclaim_quiet mpv"`
Want to open a text field in gvim? Hit `ctl+i`
Want to remove the extra chrome: run `:guiset gui none`
I stuck on the ESR of firefox for a long time because I wasn't willing to give up vimperator. Its not the same, but its pretty close. There are 2 main pain points, which I don't know it will be possible to address. First the page has to before its functional. Second currently domain keybinds take priority (looking at you github).
You know how mathematicians get excited by exp(-i*pi)+1=0? This is like that but for all of the things I'm embarrassed about in Tridactyl:
- our documentation is not great, particularly of current configuration/possible configurations, hence why the GP didn't know about it
- hints don't support pipes - obviously this should be `hint | ! mpv`
- hints don't support pipes because of a bad architectural decision: we have most stuff living in a background script, when really we should probably have most stuff run on the web page where all the objects live, so that passing them around is easier
- we don't have an argument parser, so silent versions of commands have to be separate functions
...but I'm very glad you like it!
Regarding your pain points:
1. Tridactyl actually works really soon after the page starts loading, but only for commands that don't add UI. Personally I use quickmarks to escape from slow loading pages. Otherwise, this will probably never be fixed.
2. This isn't actually true. Tridactyl does override page binds. The reason you think GitHub is stealing a Tridactyl bind is because GitHub steals `/`, but Tridactyl doesn't bind anything to `/` - that's a default Firefox bind! (And whoever decided it would be a great idea to use that in GitHub should probably test their code in more browsers).
Yeah Tridactyl is great. While I'm not a great JS/TS developer I might be able to offer a couple of pull request for documentation. Is there anything I can help with currently?
> 2. This isn't actually true. Tridactyl does override page binds. The reason you think GitHub is stealing a Tridactyl bind is because GitHub steals `/`, but Tridactyl doesn't bind anything to `/` - that's a default Firefox bind! (And whoever decided it would be a great idea to use that in GitHub should probably test their code in more browsers).
The next big win in documentation is configuration docs, but there's a type doc bug I'm waiting on first before I can merge it.
However, the `tutor`, new tab page, help page introduction and addons.mozilla.org page (stored on repo as amo.md) always fall out of date, so time spent reading through those and adding things that are missing or out of date is always time well spent. The changelog is probably the easiest source of truth to work from.
WOW, thanks for this! This extension is awesome. This provides all the functionalities I use vimium (in chrome) for, but what does it for me is this:
> Want to remove the extra chrome: run `:guiset gui none`
Top bar with so much padding is one of the main reasons I am not using Firefox.
Also the awesome command bar at the bottom is something that I've always found missing in vimium, (which has an omnibar but it's placing feels awkward.)
Can native message fix the fundamental problems in keyhandling? Meaning it can react to keys without the site fully loaded? Work on all sites and dialogs? Have a predictable behaviour instead of timing-problems which can happen now if you type to fast? For example, opening the commandline and typing something to fast can have the effect that the typed text does not end in the commandline but instead is handled outside of it.
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.
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.
It goes away when you close the Private Browsing window. I cannot feasibly imagine a situation where you need your browsing history to be purged as you close individual tabs. Like, what are you gonna do? Close the tab to have its browsing history purged, when you take a pee break from searching wedding rings, but leave the Private Browsing window open? Just close the window entirely.
It's also very much expected behaviour for many users, to be able to reopen tabs and I'd consider it a bug, if I weren't able to.
What's more, Chrome has you covered for actual privacy concerns.
When you use Chrome Sync, Google gets your browsing history and bookmarks in readable form (and they declare that they use these in their privacy policy). Which means US intelligence agencies, as well as befriended intelligence agencies from other countries, also have access to your data.
When auto-filling data, Chrome will fill out all input fields on a page, even ones that you cannot see. So, dodgy webpages may very well have your address, phone number etc..
Chrome's extension store also has a massive malware problem. Mozilla has human reviewers to prevent this and also requires extension to get user consent for internet connections that are not necessary for the functioning of the extension (telemetry, ads).
To sort of mitigate this problem, Chrome doesn't allow extensions to run in Incognito Mode, which however also locks out privacy enhancing extension. Firefox also blocks tracking scripts and similar in Private Browsing mode by default.
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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
>The act was definitely "doxing" any way you slice it.
How exactly is taking publicly available information about a (comparatively) high profile individual and sharing it doxing?
Political donations are public information[1]. As far as I can tell, (and according to Mozilla), the group that made public the information about Eich was The LA Times, in 2012. Two years before he was made CEO[2][3].
In what way is retweeting a two year old newspaper headline about the recently promoted CEO of your company remotely doxxing?
> Folks at Mozilla actively chose to find a touchy topic
That's a strange way of referring to having someone run an organization who actively works to curtail the human rights of some of his employees. And said employees and their supporters speaking out against that.
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.
Doxing is publishing PII. Political donations are NOT PII and are in fact supposed to be public. It is completely legitimate for a CEO's political donations to be scrutinized.
> Mozilla as an organization makes me a bit uncomfortable
I thought you were going to mention the betrayal that caused a lot of ppl to switch (other than the slowness, inferior default tooling, etc). The deal with yahoo. Same thing that soured me on Java. If you're just going to sell out to maintain a company, because you can't support what you built, maybe you overbuilt. Or maybe it's just greed. Either way, never going back.
What did they do exactly? I'm reasonably familiar with the story, but wasn't aware of Mozilla breaching his privacy. Do you just mean the act of speaking out against him in a public way?
He made a publicly recorded donation of $1,000 to oppose same sex marriage. Mozilla employees spoke out against his fitness to run a diverse organization. He resigned.
The only real black eye for Mozilla in this story is that they promoted him at all. If he's just some dude that does his own work, doesn't manage people, and keeps his mouth shut, then, maybe you let his abhorrent opinion slide. But, he was literally the CEO and would make decisions that would impact lots of people.
At the risk of stating the extremely obvious to the Linux user that likes to build their browser from source: I don't think the advice in the article was intended for you.
1. Yes. The bug you linked to is prominently marked "RESOLVED WONTFIX."
2. We are not sending DNS data to third parties "for analytics." We are openly and transparently conducting a DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) experiment with a very small portion of users running Nightly test builds of Firefox. The experiment places a massive notification banner in the browser window with prominent buttons to disable or accept the experiment.
3. Firefox is Free Software, under an OSI-approved license. You're not "required" to build pocket, nor can or would we "forbid" you from removing it when you build Firefox.
Still seems like a really bizarre thing to get hung up on when the extent of "Pocket in Firefox" is a toolbar icon and a section of the new tab page, both of which can be hidden with 1-2 clicks, after which they're completely inert. But hey, whatever floats your goat.
That would be great. However, the webs standards are bloated as hell. I know you were probably being factitious. However, I think it's a big problem that web standards have gotten so complicated.
The browser would also have to backward compatible, and handle mal-formatted and bloated code written by god who knows. There are features that are the antithesis of privacy and disabling some of the features breaks quite a few sites. Sadly, the web is no longer linked documents, but has full blown apps. It's honestly freaking insane.
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.
First, they didn't own Pocket when it was first integrated. Second, for years Firefox removed features like tab groups in order to make the browser easier to maintain because that functionality could be added as a plugin. Then they force everyone to use a plugin for a proprietary service? It was very hypocritical of them and I still have a bad taste in my mouth from that.
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.
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.
I assume everyone hates the idea of websites being fully responsible for what they serve. It would be interesting to hear why rather than the anonymous negative response.
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.
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.)
"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/ 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.
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.
"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).
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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.