Firefox @lemmy.world

2y ago

I hope others consider doing the same

180 comments

me and mozilla go way back, to the days of netscape navigator. we're old friends.. even through the worst of times (aol ownership), i've stood by my best bud.
- Lol, not me! I dropped that shit when it was the slowest, most bloated memory hog! Luckily, it's much improved now, and is easily the best browser out there...
- Firebird for me.
- Same

I remember back then when people stop using FF because it used more PC resources than the OS itself and all started using Chrome because it was fast and lightweight.
- Joke's on them, I never stopped using Firefox.
- Mental how it is genuinely the other way around now, but on the masses people might not even know that a computer has limited resources so that's probably a contributor to no mass exodus to FF.
  
  The average person definitely doesn’t have a good understanding of computational resources, but they will use an application they find smoother and less clunky than another. Realistically the performance and resource usage of chrome is not going to be bad enough to drive most people to Firefox these days, and Firefox won’t be enough of an improvement for most people to notice. Chrome also had a huge marketing campaign when it launched… I suspect that was crucial for getting people to adopt chrome (otherwise how do you even get people to think about switching?), but I don’t think Mozilla has the resources for such a campaign. Time will tell, though. I hope we’ll see more people switching to Firefox in the future.
- Free resources are wasted resources.
  
  Excessive resources usage is wasted energy.

Always has been.
As someone using Firefox for basically ever, Chrome has always seemed like bloated garbage to me. Deleted it a while back and never looked back.
- same story here
- I switched about 2 years ago when I turned on sync. It's just so reliable and fast, it's simple and does its job perfectly. Frequently send tabs between devices and it's instantaneous, bookmarks get synced immediately as well. Also they promise they don't sell our data to advertisers which is a plus, though I can't verify it and they could go rogue in the future idk. Also the fact that the browser is not intrusive at all is a huge plus. No annoying popups "try feature X" "login with your google account now" etc etc.
  I do have some issues with it but that's mostly because some people/companies don't properly test their website on firefox. Also had an issue with its performance in the past, but now lately it feels as fast as chrome both on android and pc.
- In that case, you never got to use Chrome's first versions. Because Chrome felt 20x faster than any other browser including Firebird/Firefox. It was later that it became a bloated beast.
- True debloaters use qutebrowser
  
  browsh, that way you don't need one of those pesky desktop environments.
  
  I used Vimprobable for a while. But I came to miss some of the gui features.

I had my first website tell me today that I can't access their domain on FF. It was Adobe. Fuck em
- Please report the issue at https://webcompat.com/
- You're better off without them, for sure!
- Maybe changing the user agent will work

I’m not a fan of the inability to drag a tab into a snapping position, I have to drag it out, then drag the new window to the snap location.
And apparently this has been a documented issue for 15 years, and there’s been little to no progress in all that time.
- The open source community works in mysterious ways. This bug reminds me about the audio via HDMI bug for old radeon video cards. A simple flag in kernel configuration could have fixed it, yet the bug has been present in kernels from something like 4.1 to 6.0. It only recently has been fixed, after years of having to patch your kernel for a very simple bug.
  
  The secret is fixing it yourself and submitting a pull request for approval/further additions.
  Unless its GNOME in which case the maintainers will tell you to screw off and you will promptly switch to a better alternative.
- When it comes to open-source software, usually it's absolutely critical bugs that get patched or necessary features that get worked on, since it's really just volunteer work.
  Pay every contributor a salary to make the program "feel" nice instead of actually bloody work (hi every ms app), then we'll talk.

They went from Chromium based, to just Based.

you can pry the vivaldi tab management out of my cold dead hands
- I do not know Vivaldi, but I live and die by Tree-Style Tabs. It puts the tabs on the side and arranged them in trees that can be managed as groups. It's the add-on that has kept me on Firefox.
  
  Same. Treestyle Tabs and wide-screen are the perfect couple.
  
  For me it's the killer app of Firefox. Chrome actually has a tree style tab but it functions different and sucks.
  I just don't want to use the internet if I can't use tree style tab. It's so much better than default tabs.
- I'm not sure if the entire functionality can really be replicated, but Firefox does have a pretty good add-on selection, maybe you can find one that suits your needs.
  Because this is not the first time I've heard about Vivaldi tab management, I looked over a couple videos and it really seems impressive, props to them for doing something really cool in this department. However I know myself, and I'd use maybe half the features that are present, most likely even less. If this is also true for you, I'm almost sure a Firefox add-on could be a suitable replacement:
  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-manager-plus-for-firefox/
  https://addons.mozilla.org/blog/too-many-open-tabs-extensions-to-the-rescue/
  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/
  At the end of the day you obviously don't need to switch if you don't want to, I would just be really amazed if it turned out the main tab mgmt features from Vivaldi were never added to an add-on.
- You can just pry Vivaldi out of my cold, dead hands. No other browser comes close to its customisability. As long as it runs adblockers and sponsor block, I'm using it.
- Amen brother.

I really want to switch back but... honestly: Chromium Edge, despite a few annoying features being shoved in your face, is actually a really nice browser IMO. It's definitely going to take some time to get used to FF again.
I'm so used to things like vertical tabs, icon only bookmarks, etc... I know I can change a lot in FF myself, but having to add custom css and whatnot on every device I use FF on is just annoying.
- Firefox Sync should keep all your settings and extensions synced for each install
  
  I had custom css in FF and Firefox sync did not sync those manual edits.
- There are tons of extensions for tab management for Firefox. If vertkcal tabs is just that they're arranged in lines instead of columns, I've used Tree Style Tab and Sidebery, and there are many others.
- Use the sidebery add-on, along with a vertical Firefox CSS theme = problem solved.

Switched last night and damn, Firefox has gotten so much better. Used to be the first browser I manually installed around 2004, until Chrome released around 2008 or something. I love that it has extensions on mobile and bookmark/history sync now.
- Yup, uBlock Origin makes the mobile web actually usable!
  
  Oh wow thanks! I didn't know there were mobile add-ons. (I just didn't check)
- Yeah after they got the sync up and running it's been so awesome. Welcome to the right side :D
- One sneaky thing I love is the ability to put the bookmarks bar to the right of the search bar. Get a little extra real estate that way.

Should show edge and brave in the corners
- Edge is chromium based
  
  That's the joke
  
  So is Brave, and more or less every popular browser aside from FF.

So actually, Mudasir is the other guy
- /lore

Firefox is King 👑

Just so that I can keep track of the score, I actually moved from Firefox to DuckDuckGo, because Firefox was considered not respecting privacy. This was not so many years ago.
Are we now saying today that the tables are turned? Or just that both are bad, but one is less bad?
- Everything > Chrome/Chromium
  
  The reality is that to the average user all browsers are the same. A lot of technologies have sort of peaked for regular people and browsers are one of those. There was a time when you needed plugins to do basic things like view PDFs or videos, to play games (flash, java) and there would be a new major change to HTML or CSS every few months etc.
  That's no longer a problem. All browsers are near equal in their ability to render pages. So people are naturally going to go with what feels familiar. We lost the battle for market share the minute Google decided to advertise Chrome on their search page.
  
  Everything > Chrome/Chromium
  Today.
  Previously, it was Firefox > Everything, so that's why I was asking.
- ff forks like librewolf are based
  
  ff forks like librewolf are based
  Heard good things about Librewolf.

Switched from Brave to LibreWolf few weeks ago and I love it.
- LibreWolf is extra blessed

I've moved back to Firefox but damn it keeps mangling my streaming audio in some cases and there doesn't seem to be a fix despite spending most of last night going through the limited solutions. Seems like this is a common problem for many Firefox users so Chrome will stay in play for some of these uses.
Previously Chrome did it all...
- try librewolf, maybe it works :)

I love this meme! Haha
- https://youtu.be/-wmfpoq_Y0E
  
  Friendship regain?! I cant believe!

Librewolf is pretty decent too

Please firefox just add the goddamn custom key bindings
- I'm working on this...
- Check Tridactyl, bindings, autocmd and a lot more
- And the ability to be able to Import and Export your bookmarks freely without having to use their website to do so.
  
  What? I just migrated all my Chrome stuff to Firefox without using any website.

For a reason I'm not yet sure about, the official website for provincial parks in my province refuse to establish a secure connection with Firefox. I've switched to FF a few months ago now and aside from that specific website not working correctly, the rest is fine to me.
- have you tried spoofing your user agent with the useragent switcher extension?
  
  Not yet. I just use a different browser for now. It's an intermittent issue where it just randomly fails the SSL handshake.
  Secure Connection Failed
  An error occurred during a connection to www.sepaq.com. SSL received an unexpected Server Hello handshake message.
  Error code: SSL_ERROR_RX_UNEXPECTED_SERVER_HELLO
  Apparently I can also try to change SSL and TLS options. I'll experiment a bit and see. I guess I should also let the website know. Maybe it's just a configuration issue on their end, and other Firefox users are facing the same error. I use this website to make camping reservations and as winter is coming where I am, I have a few months to try different options before it becomes a bit more annoying again.

Been using Firefox on desktop since it was called Firebird. I've jumped to different browsers on mobile, but Firefox on mobile has gotten a lot better since the last time I've tried it years ago, so I switched back to it recently.

Firefox is fine rn

I only keep edge around so I can Chromecast to my TV from my PC. Otherwise Firefox all the way.

Am I out of the loop on what the issue with chromium is? Currently I mainly use ungoogled chromium on my desktop.
- Chromium is google regardless of the search engine
  
  That’s not what ungoogled chromium means.
- It gives Google a huge amount of control over the internet, like recently when they thought about getting websites to add DRM so they could only be accessed from official Chrome browsers on authorized devices and such. They also added ad tracking directly into the browser, which might not be in ungoogled chromium but it'd be more work for them to remove it, and maybe later google makes it required to use chromium. And if they get their way with the website DRM they could try to force everyone to use specifically Google Chrome and then they can track everyone. It's important that we have other browsers such as Firefox so that Google can't just do whatever they want.

I did it on my phone and work PC. I'm still running Brave on this little linux laptop by my TV. Not sure if I have to change that.
- Thats up to you to decide. Some think brave is the best browser out there with the best of both worlds, others think its a lying piece of shit with a shitty ceo.

What about internet explorer?
- It's a fantastic browser.
  Unrelated, would you mind taking a few Facebook personality quizzes and do you have a lot in your bank account?
  
  Nope, wish the second one was true lol

I actually uninstalled Firefox a few months ago on my mobile devices because certain websites for my work were not displaying well now thankfully they have been fixed. Installed the Iceraven fork which is amazing.
- I use edge for work and firefox for everything else.

riyal

I wish Firefox had native tab grouping. That's the only thing I miss from chrome.

On my phone Firefox is terrible. It closes the app when I try to watch video full screen. When I reopen Firefox after the video crash all but 1/4 of the screen is black, and it doesn't respond to clicks on the tabs button to close or open new tabs.
So if it's a YouTube video, I try to view it in the YouTube app. Firefox will open YouTube to the home page but leaves me to find the video again within the YouTube app.
Click the navigate with GPS button inside the browser, and it opens Google maps to the last destination instead of the address you were looking at in Firefox. That made me late to 2 appointments before I figured out what was happening.
The auto fill is terrible or non-existent. The password management feature got stuck in a loop the other day and I had to force close.
Fuck Firefox. Maybe it's better on a new phone, but my experience with Firefox has been absolutely dog shit.
- Isn't Firefox on android/iOS not using it's own engine but rather a modded version of chrome or something? I might be wrong
  
  Only on iOS
  
  On iOS every browser has to use the same engine. Not so on android.
  
  its* own engine
  
  You're wrong.

Only thing that sucks is needing an account to sync your stuff around. Brave does this through a "sync chain" using a QR code/some big passcode, all without an email account. Not to mention the built-in adblocker, so less extensions are needed.
If Firefox had this, I'd come back.

I use Firefox as a Main Browser and Thorium(Chromium) as Second for PWM feature.

Firefox webdev tools are worthless. My heart belongs to Vivaldi. Nothing else comes closer.

Then I hope you enjoy spyware.
Well… If you're okay with a unique browser ID for each installation or using a browser that contacts a 3rd party analytics company no matter your settings then Firefox is for you. Just fire Wireshark and see for yourself how much snitching Firefox does.
Also Mozilla isn't what people paint it to be, they've shady finances and are now hosting code at Github. Mozilla allegedly stands for a bunch of stuff that is be definition incompatible with hosting code on GitHub as it is
If you're serious about having a decent browser pick Ungoggled Chromium or LibreWolf.
- Tor is also nice, even though it's part Firefox.
- The thing with Firefox is that while you're absolutely right on all your points, it's the only mainstream browser that at least tries to care for your privacy, much more so than the current big players, and something that has the best chance of having computer "normies" switch to. You won't get them onto LibreWolf, Ungoogled Chromium, IceCat, Mullvad Browser, not in mass. If you push everyone to one of those super privacy browsers where pages may not load correctly and they're generally more clunky, then that's just turning them further to stick with what they know, Chrome/Edge.
  I don't like touting companies, but at least for the current time I still recommend Firefox for those wanting to switch, and later on if they really care about privacy then a switch to LibreWolf isn't as jarring.

In my younger days I used Firefox as me default browser on Windows. It was fun to tinker with. The add-ons were especially interesting. Things like greasemonkey let you lay over a custom script over the websites you visited. But when I started to concern myself about the security of all this tinkering, I stopped with running script that a very sympathetic Russian kid had created. So at that time I switched to Google Chrome and now I'm using Edge Chromium.
- So you made bad decisions, but Firefox was the problem? Alright.
  
  Oh, luckily I've never experienced problems. I just wanted to point out that the appeal of Firefox for me was the appeal of being able to tinker with it and create my own custom experience. But not being able to, with confidence, verify the safety of plug-ins that I used or things that I tried out, I just stopped doing these things. And because I stopped tinkering with the browser, I used Firefox less and less. I had the same feeling with using custom ROMs for Android phones. So definitely not anything wrong with Firefox. It's not Firefox that changed, I changed.

is that one xed out picture iron? because irons not bad.
- No, that's the Chromium project, the engine that most other browsers have adopted, including Microsoft.

I use both for different personal uses.
Chrome for my convenient daily living life.
Firefox for things like anonymous accounts as well as email masking and for things like Spotify manipulation with xManager or ReVanced.

I used to use firefox but switched back after I read Madaidan's article on the security of web browsers
- Is it this one? https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/
  
  This makes sense for anyone with a real threat model (companies, server hosts, internet drug dealers), for those who just meme and scream I'd say FF is better just for the health of the internet.

you don't seem to be friend with graphic design neither. :)
- .... That's the meme.
- A little young for the wu-tang username aren't you?
  
  I think you are the youngest, being upset on a critic, while it was true, it was before all just a quip.
  I'm hosted on lemmy.ninja, so you know, staying in the Asian folklore mixed with "pop" culture...

At this point, there's no real clear winner. All browser companies have some sort of shit to them. It's really a matter of which bowl of shit you're willing to tolerate.
- Mozilla is not a browser company, it's a browser non-profit organization (well, the structure is a bit more complicated, but it is ultimately governed by a non-profit organization).
  
  Also you can get a Firefox fork with no organization behind it, Librewolf, if you hate Mozilla.

I tried, nearly every system I tested it on (Physical and virtual, 16 GB RAM to 64, Windows, MacOS and Linux (Ubuntu and Arch)) it bogs down and crashes after 60-100 tabs. FF has performance issues and can't keep up with me, chrome might eat a lot of ram to do it, but at least it'll keep up at 300, 400, 600+ tabs.
Unfortunately, I can't switch until these performance problems have been fixed :(
Edit: lol at the downvotes for bringing up a legit potential issue
Edit2: lmao, c/Firefox: come over to Firefox and our community we're welcoming. (As long as you only talk about how perfect and infallible FF is)
- If you have that many tabs open you are doing something seriously wrong. Consider a better book marking system, download what ever PDFs you are looking at or context switching way way less. I cannot even imagine a scenario that would warrant this many tabs
  
  If you have that many tabs open you are doing something seriously wrong
  No, not really. This is rather common. The line might be blurry with tabs unloading, but bookmarks and tabs are still different things. And don't just reject people's workflows - that's how you end up with chrome.
  I cannot even imagine a scenario that would warrant this many tabs
  One common scenario is shopping for parts for complex systems, like cars for example. One might have a dozen tabs open for parts themselves, a tab or two each for specifications, a dozen tabs per part for listings in different shops, each with a few tabs looking for ways to deliver the thing. It blows up to 100+ really quickly. And you really need them all open because you need to jump back and forth comparing and cross-checking all of them. And then if you haven't managed to get everything done in one session, bookmarking them and re-opening again later takes considerable amount time, so you're better off just opening a new window and keeping it all in the background until you return. At least that's how I've seen people do it.
  
  Is it really "something wrong" if it works perfectly fine in other browsers?
  It just seems like shunning an audience that might have a legitimate concern that could be looked into.
  
  Who are you to judge my workflow? It's what works for me and a browser should be able to support my workflow, not the other way around and it's obviously not an impossible workflow for a browser to support if Chrome can do it.
- I was thinking I haven't had this issue but
  after 60-100 tabs
  I'm finished way before I have that many tabs open
  
  60-100 tabs is a ridiculous amount of tabs. My husband makes fun of me for my "tab carcasses" pretty regularly, but I'm usually hitting the Onetab button around 40 open tabs. What this person is doing that they legitimately need hundreds of tabs open is beyond me.
- Have you heard of bookmarks?
- Dude… you are the problem in this situation. Get “tab sessions manager” for firefox or one of the many alternatives.
  Nobody but your “workflow” uses over 300 tabs ACTIVELY. And that coming from someone who routinely gets told that I have too many tabs open. Break your tabs into groups and save those instances.
  Also take the criticism like a champ instead of whining about how you’re being ganged up on by a community when you misuse the software.
  
  Ah yes, blame the user when they can literally point to a product that is not just adequately but completely supporting their use case and tell them they're the problem here.
  That always works.
  
  Lmao, sure even though a browser should be able to just work, let me go install more extensions and make changes to my usage patterns to fit a browser.
  This is an optimization problem that needs to be fixed and I sought to bring attention to it, not to bandaid it with this and that extension and go through the pains to change a well established years old workflow that works well for me.
  I'm a busy person (as evidenced by my unique tab count apparently), I don't have the time or energy to spend to change myself to fit FF, that's a whole new project to heap onto an already embarrassingly long backlog of other things I have to do.
  Thanks but no thanks, I'll revisit FF in a year or 2 of updates and retest.
- How do you navigate this many tabs? With an extension?
- If you're using that many tabs you may be interested in vivaldi, it's made for power users like you
- Well, generally speaking, Firefox handles lots of tabs better than Chrome. It's hard to say what problem happens on your specific system, but you shouldn't assume that it's universal...
  
  Not in my testing it doesn't, I don't have just one system to test with either.
  Like I said, I've tested it across all manner of systems virtual and physical.
  I've tested it from a system with an i5 7th gen w/16gb RAM on windows 10 all the way up to an i9 12th gen w/64 GB RAM on MacOS to Intel server e5 dual processors with 256 GB RAM on Win Server 2016 to ryzen 5 series 32 GB RAM on Ubuntu and a myriad of Win10/Ubuntu/Arch VMs in between.
  The story is the same between them all, somewhere around 100 tabs it gets unstable and eventually crashes.
- we have firefox on an old c2d era dual core, 8gb ram and now (had 7, and originally 4gb ram) win10. 170+ tabs currently, always restored on relaunches (which are infrequent). system never gets shut off--updates are 'managed', always left on, with firefox running, to sleep with that massive tab collection open. runs like a champ. only once in the last three years has that session been lost or any other issue been encountered (we've since added a session saver addon but haven't needed it).
  
  Idk man, maybe you have the fluke, maybe it's a problem that arises on newer CPUs, maybe it's a conflict with another common piece of software I install. Either way, it's happened multiple times over multiple systems over multiple configurations and OSes. I really don't have time to fuck with my browser and diagnose it fully, I need it to just be ready to install a couple extensions and hit the ground running
- At least you can get 60 tabs. Firefox brings my RAM to 98% just by starting it, and if I try to open more than 3 tabs it becomes the next victim of the OOM killer.
  
  Get more RAM?

180 comments