I’m gonna be honest.
The main reason I don’t like Firefox is the ui.
It’s one of those things where I’ve been using chrome for so long that switching to anything else is infuriating. Trying to learn the layout and all the features. Trying to figure out how to do things that are intuitively design on Google.
If someone made pretty much a 1 to 1 copy of Google without all the bullshit I’d use it in a heartbeat.
You can drag and drop your toolbar, extensions, and layout.
Well bud, you can literally customize Firefox with css. So get to learning
fuck it, where do i start? if spending a little bit of my time writing a css sheet results in Google losing market share i’m 1000% down.
https://www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/ Don’t flame me for a Reddit link lol
not at all, thank you!
frantic ignoring reddit sounds
dishing out the tools to help users take back control of their lIves. hero quality.
That’s the worst part about all of this.
I don’t even know what css is 😭
It’s what makes HTML look fancy. You can also find something you already like https://www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/
How did I never know about this? This might make me switch to Firefox sooner than planned. Thanks for sharing!
shots fired! Shots fired!
I have the same problem the other way around. When I use chrome it feels like I’m using a kids browser. Slightly cutesy with too many curvy bits. Sort of like the difference between Duplo (chrome) and Lego (Firefox). Basically the same thing, but also not.
This is certainly a hurdle to overcome. Google helped by changing the Chrome UI for the worse in some ways I care about, but migrating to a new browser and getting used to different UI is enough of a hassle that I’m still holding out until adblock actually stops working before I make the switch.
Everything enshitifies… Everything, problem that worries me that, Firefox will enshitify like this too one day
Mozilla has no traditional profit motive. The Mozilla Corporation, which develops Firefox, is a 100% subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, which is legally a non-profit organisation.
So, if the Mozilla Corporation makes a profit, they cannot pay out that profit to shareholders. Practically all they can do with that money, is to pay higher wages or set it aside for future invest in their products.
That does not mean that they cannot stagnate or use money badly. And it does not either mean that they never need to make money. But it does mean that there’s no shareholders demanding short-term profit above all else.
Thank you for new info, i didn’t know about that, but it’s not what I’m worried, I’m worried about manifest v3 going forced by Google and other corpos and being adopted by Firefox, but we still have dns adblockers for now, like pihole and such
Firefox already supports Manifest V3. Crucially, though:
- Firefox continues to support Manifest V2 for the foreseeable future.
- Firefox will not adopt the arbitrary limitation of content/ad blocking rules in Manifest V3, which is what’s bad about it.
- Firefox offers APIs in addition to Manifest V2 and V3, with which more powerful extensions can be built. This is why uBlock Origin has been better on Firefox for quite a while already.
Source for the first two points: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2024/03/13/manifest-v3-manifest-v2-march-2024-update/
The browsers are all quite good at copying your links, tabs, and history. Don’t worry, there will always be a good option, especially since open source has no strong path to enshittification
At that point it will be forked yet again, and that fork will take over. Mozilla is a very active open source member though.
Then it will be forked and the cycle continues.
boss i’m tired of those cyclesHow close did we come to being a footnote in the history of a future species that would happen upon our ruins ten thousand years from now? Would they indulge in the fiction of their own immortality until the Shivans came for them? And how long had this gone on? Did the Ancients stumble upon the monoliths and the tombs of their predecessors in this distant corner of space, dismissing the warnings carved into the walls of the sepulchre? And when the destroyers came at last, what did the Ancients think as they sifted the cremation of dust and bones, staring into the mute remains for a key; some solution to their plight?
What if there had been countless races stretching back into infinity? And like the nine cities of Troy each civilization had been built on the rubble of one that came before. Each annihilated by the Shivans.
The Ancients died eight thousand years ago, as humanity emerged from its neolithic infancy. They believed their voyage across the sea of stars awoke the dragon that slept beneath the waves. That the Shivans were birthed from the flux of subspace and their destruction was the revenge of an angry cosmos.
Mfw when plebs are still using GUI browsers while I use Lynx.
w3m with framebuffer image support, my man.
Pfhh images. Back in my dad we had ASCII art. And we liked it!
I’ve switched to Firefox but there’s definitely a few things that irritate me about it.
First thing is when I boot up my computer, launch Firefox, it launches long enough for me to click a bookmark then closes to perform an update. And then doesn’t automatically reopen…
I also have it set to not “remember” my tabs after closing. Yet when I launch Firefox for the first time after rebooting or closing ally tabs, it gives me a “hmm… we’re having a hard time finding your previous session” message. Uh, yeah, I told you not to look for it… can I just have the regular “new tab” page?
It also might just be because I’m used to chrome, but I feel the mobile app is severely lacking. I hate that I can’t access my bookmarks directly from the new tab page, and that the tablet version doesn’t show you your bookmark bar. The synchronization between mobile and desktop isn’t great either, I’ll have a very long specific search query that I’ve used multiple times on my phone, yet it doesn’t offer it for auto-complete on desktop, I have to search the entire term again or go digging through my history. When you’re searching long model numbers and the like, this is incredibly frustrating.
Finally, and I don’t know if this is a Firefox issue, but there’s some memory leak that occurs when viewing a webcam stream from my raspberry pi that only has happened in Firefox. The first time I noticed it happening my PC slowed to a crawl, when task manager finally opened Firefox was taking 23GB of RAM. So I have to use chrome to keep that steam open for more than a few minutes at a time.
This might be fixed on Firefox nightly
I’m curious as to why Firefox is checking for updates, have you configured it to do so? I’ve never seen Firefox do that (and it feels weird to have a program sidestep the update mechanism of the package manager)
They’re probably on windows
Firefox auto updates itself by default I’ve found
Firefox is slower, not because it’s worse, but Gecko is a minority engine in the web (~3-4%) and because of this the most webs are optimized for Blink. That is the only reason and because most current Browsers are using it, a devils circle. The result of leaving Google hands-free for too long and that for 20 years the number of available engines has remained stagnant (3 and some testimonial exotic forks) because it is the most complicated part of a browser. Little can be done now.
does anyone recommend any Firefox alternatives? I genuinely hate Firefox’s UI and keybinds and the scrolling tabs
you may not even have to change to another browser or fork, please have a look at some designs in https://trickypr.github.io/FirefoxCSS-Store.github.io/ select a design and follow the page, and you shall find the instructions (usually just downloading/pasting userChrome/Content.css)
and for scrolling tabs, if your problem is very small tab size, then try changing
browser.tabs.tabMinWidthin about:configFloorp, I use it and I love it. It’s especially great for Opera refugees, it has workspaces and stuff. Soon Firefox will support tab groups natively, and then Floorp will be perfect. It’s a Firefox fork though.
Tab groups and non-independent tab muting (seems like it was domain-specific rather than tab-specific last I tried) are the two main things that kept me from switching back to FF as my primary browser (still use it for DTA, for example, but DTA got a big nerf back during the major extension overhaul, so that was a letdown). Tried some extensions, but none really worked in a way I considered usable and didn’t want to just keep trial and erroring through them given I already have a browser that functionally meets my needs, even if I’d rather not be using a chromium browser.
If native tab groups work well enough, I’ll probably give it another chance.
That we all need something like tab muting really shows that the internet has gone to shit.
I sometimes just need to mute something for a second that I’m otherwise listening to. Or I’m switching between multiple sources, and don’t want like 3 or more playing at the same time… usually all on the same domain. I don’t want to have to actually go to the tab and mute it. I’m frequently muting and unmuting things that way to the point that even if its the only source of sound, I still mute by tab instead of just turning my computer volume off sometimes out of habit, so its a deal breaker.
I think this just says more about the perils of embracing untreated ADHD than the internet itself.
I love Firefox, but I can’t shake the feeling that it it’s slower on YouTube. My tinfoil hat theory is that Google somehow throttles YouTube on Firefox.
One thing you can test is to apply a Chrome user-agent on Firefox when visiting YouTube. In my personal experience that actually noticeably improves the situation.
That’s super interesting! I’m not versed enough though, do you have like a tutorial you recommend or should I just Google it?
There’s a bunch of extensions that allow you to switch user-agent easily, I personally use this one, it includes a list of known strings to choose between as well.
And to check that it’s working, there are websites you can go to which will tell you what browser they have detected you are using.
Google does that a lot with their own web properties. I remember Google Meet didn’t support background replacement on Firefox, but switching Firefox’s user agent to Chrome suddenly fixed it.
I’m pretty sure someone discovered that is true recently, but can’t be assed to try to find it right now.
They used to also use the unreleased version 0 of shadow DOM for building the Polymer UI, which - being a Chrome-only prototype - understandably didn’t work on Firefox, and therefore instead used a really slow Javascript polyfill to render its UI.
I haven’t checked on it lately, but I imagine they must’ve changed at least that by now.
Firefox is good for webpages not web apps
That’s a really weird take. Like… what even is the difference supposed to be?
This sounds more like “everything should be as it was back when <insert arbitrary point in time here>! When there were still Webpages, and we were frolicking about the internet! Until
the fire nation attackedWeb apps took over!”What an oddly aggressive take on someone’s opinion
Basically I am saying Firefox is not as performant as chromium when loading JavaScript.
Don’t agree, nothing noticeable for me anyhow. Chrome has the ultimate drawback: being under the control of a monopolistic evil corporation
In general, browser benchmarks seem to often favor Firefox in terms of startup and first interaction timings, and often favor Chrome when it comes to crunching large amounts of data through JavaScript.
I.e. for pages which use small amounts of JavaScript, but call into it quickly after loading, Firefox tends to come out on top. But for pages which load lots of JavaScript and then run it constantly, Chrome tends to come out on top.We’re usually talking milliseconds-level of difference here though. So if you’re using a mobile browser or a low-power laptop, then the difference is often not measurable at all, unless the page is specifically optimized for one or the other.
I tried both and the videos played at the same speed for me
It’s not tinfoil, they have been caught doing it and they continue to do it. It’s a scumbag company.
How the fuck they haven’t been slapped with an anticompetitive is beyon - oohh right. End stage capitalism
Same happens with Safari. The page loads in a weird funky way, video sorta first and then comments and suggestions many seconds later.
On Chrome on the exact same computer it’s instant.
They’re doing it on purpose.
Well, Google will probably optimize their shit for their own
privacy invasion sniffing toolbrowser twice as hard as for Firefox and suchDo you use YouTube so much that a small performance difference on a single Site has an influence on your browser choice?
You haven’t experienced slow until you try to take Firefox through Google Cloud Console or Search Tools. 15 seconds in Chrome, somehow turns into 3 minutes in Firefox, funny how it does that.
For YouTube on IOS, I use Brave. It does a decent (but not perfect) job of hiding ads on YT.
Always gonna note too that Google Chrome (and chromium + derivatives to a lesser extent) kneecaps adblock plugins so that up to 50% fewer ad domains are blocked, blocklists are out of date, many in-page ads can’t be caught, it’s slower, and invisible trackers can bypass it.
Don’t care. I use Brave.
Ew.
Yay, another Chromium based web browser. That will show them…
You are definitely brave to admit that.
Firefox masterrace
One thing I’ve been annoyed with after switching to Firefox is the iffy password manager performance. It’s so common for it not to remember a password that it should, or, weirdly, for it to only remember the password once I’ve typed the whole username in and hit tab.
Functionality wise, chrome is better than Firefox but it’s bad when it comes to privacy and ads
What is literally one thing Chrome can do that Firefox cannot? Cause I can tell you right now, after tomorrow, only one can block ads.
To be fair, Chrome does generally render most websites faster and correctly. I have Chrome installed just in case of some webpages not working with Firefox. Now, that’s not Mozillas fault, but from user standpoint makes Chrome more attractive browser to use.
Skip the ssl error message. I log into IP addresses all day and that flag is sanity savimg.
WebGPU, WebHID and h.265 are all unsupported on firefox
that said, i still daily drive firefox with mostly no problems, but saying that it can do everything chrome can is just flat out wrong
this is by design mind you, chrome have a big enough market share that they can basically just add whatever they want to the web standards and all other browsers just have to try to keep up. i imagine that’s part of the reason that chromium skins are so widespread
By default, I doubt that Firefox is better at privacy than Chrome. Actually even worse than Chrome I’d say. But you can customize Firefox to be much more privacy friendlier than Chrome. That is the functionality Chrome lacks. The last time I tried out Ungoogled chromium, it sucked ass. Websites actually loaded slower than on Firefox for me. And both had uBlock Origin installed. I tried those fancy GPU stuff as well, almost nothing changed.
That kid is superior
I have been on the firefox train since it was new. I witnessed the rise of Chrome and Chromium, and never really felt the pull, and worried about everyone targeting the same platform. Figured I’d stay on FF until I had no choice. Don’t see myself leaving.
Figured I’d stay on FF until I had no choice. Don’t see myself leaving.
i’m in a similar boat and given the overwhelming majority popular use of chrome, it feels clear to me that firefox will eventually stop working and i wonder what surfing will like like for me in the future.
i suspect i’ll have to go back to use chrome again.
Honestly, I’m less worried about the speed and moreso I just don’t like supporting Google’s de facto monopoly of the Web’s infrastructure.
and ads.
ads are awful.
They have ads in Chrome now? Yikes, it’s worse than I thought.
Im’ma be honest. I’ve been using FF for so long that if that’s the case I didn’t even know.
Firefox has ads. Very many ads. Out of the box, Firefox sends everything you type into the URL bar to a ‘search provider’. They also place traditional ads in the New Tab page, in the URL area chrome, and in your bookmarks. And probably other places I’m forgetting right now.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/sponsor-privacy
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/change-your-default-search-settings-firefoxi was talking more about how mobile chrome can’t adblock, so it has ads just not on the app itself, and desktop chrome will soon not be able to effectively
The thing is, using a Chromium-based browser isn’t contributing to their monopoly unless Google holds sway over the fork. Brave, Vivaldi, those two are generally fine and stand against what Google has been up to.
I dunno. Using chromium with a little editing, but 90% og chromium is basically the same monopoly.
De-googled chromium works for me.
You can’t truly degoogle chromium without a hard fork. Soft forks are still enabling them and their grip on the web, even if they’re not specifically spying on you in particular.
Sure it is. Everyone starts trying to be sure things render correctly on Chromium based browsers and nothing else. Next thing you know people say “Wow Chromium based browsers render pages more reliably than everything else” and then you end up somewhere not too differently from where we were heading. Everything that’s not based on Chromium starts getting tossed aside.
They are contributing to Google’s hold over web specs. If Google decides to implement a feature off spec, then website developers will optimise for that implementation because it will be the implementation used by all chromium based browsers. And that leads to worse performance for other browsers with a more correct implementation.
