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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
i 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
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-firefox
I’d like to try out ff but I’d have to use it for a few days. Is it possible to possible to sync passwords and bookmarks with my Google account like chrome? How’s the touchscreen support?
Firefox mobile isn’t there yet. Passwords will conveniently autofill from your Google account thanks to the Android level implementation of password management, but more importantly it’s resource heavy and bad UI design. Ublock support is nice but some websites just don’t deal with it well. The nightly builds do fix my main problems with the UI but they crash all the time. So there’s hope for the future, but for now it’s not great unless you absolutely need proper browser level ad blocking rather than Blokada.
Tbh I switched to Firefox mobile from Chrome and have the opposite experience. While it is in someway less convenient for auto fill, as long as my Google account is logged in on another browser page I can always use it for that and they have password and credit card auto fill features should you want to take care of them.
Maybe not the best image to use. Sheep bleating on about Firefox.
pretty sure thats a goat. rugged, contrary and independent. one might even say… the Greatest Of All Time.
If you’re switching a couple extensions are uBlock origin and no script with Firefox, prevents most ads and lets you choose which hosts to accept JavaScript from temporarily or permanently.
Mouse gestures is the killer-app for me on Firefox. Hate surfing without it.
P.S. Do wish Firefox had tab groups tho.
Surely there is an add on for that
Firefox add-on for Tab Groups? I looked and couldn’t find one. At some point they appeared to try to support tab groups, but gave up? I dunno. I’ve only used Chrome a little. I don’t personally care for Chrome, but I found the tab groups useful.
I just searched “tab groups Firefox” and found results saying it has them. No idea as I wasn’t able to find relevant settings last time I tried on a PC. Mobile just now I tried adding tabs to a collection, but it doesn’t look like it did anything
Thanks, but I tried a few weeks back to get tab groups working for Firefox on MacOS. No joy.
Hope someone else chimes in on how to do this. I typically have hundreds of tabs open, groups were a godsend
On mobile chrome I have “:D” tabs open which I occasionally go through and cull
noscript is your web condom. I will not touch a page without it.
I use ghostery to remove the obnoxious cookie popups here in the EU.
Vivaldi has in its inbuild ad/trackerblocker also filters to block cookie popups, no problem with this
Do you need noscript if you have ublock?
You can use the advanced mode of ublock to replace noscript too
FF is doing great. All the have to do now is the Steam strategy. Do nothing and wait for the competition to fuck themselves over.
Steam’s strategy was to be first to market and essentially the only player in the game for a decade, making themselves the default.
You mean hope that they too don’t become subject to enshittification? I don’t have a lot of faith in that.
Besides that, Google is controlling as fuck. They might keep fucking themselves over but there’s no way they won’t start attempting to ruin things for the rest of us.
It seems Mozilla is not immune to the AI hype. I just hope their AI endeavour won’t kill them when the AI hype finally ends.
to be fair they are the only ones i know of putting it to actual good use.
ai itself is not the problem.
Thankfully the AI use is very tame so far, used for stuff like offline alt text generation and offline translation. I’m personally still concerned about copyrights and ethics of the models used, but at least it’s directed towards providing specific features, not a magic cure-all.
I’m more concerned with Mozilla spending its meager resources to chase some fads instead of focusing on improving firefox.
Thats the problem tho, the new mozilla leadership is on the “do anything but nothing” ship. I really hope they either dont do anything too horrible or someone forks it if they do.
there are already forks in place if you’re dissatisfied with firefox like librewolf, floorp or the new one from mullvad
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.
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.
Well bud, you can literally customize Firefox with css. So get to learning
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!
You can drag and drop your toolbar, extensions, and layout.
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
chrome used to be good. Emphasis on the past tense.
Firefox was always good. Chrome was very briefly better. Firefox has not suffered enshittification like chrome did.
I mean, I clearly remember firefox being terrible back when Chrome was just beginning to take off.
It was a lumbering monolith that ate all your ram and loaded pages at a glacial pace. Chrome was a multi-process revolution from that.
Then, firefox got it’s shit together and chrome got overloaded with corpo bullshit.
It used to take firefox ages to open. I switched back after the big update in the mid 2010s that made it good again.
This. Firefox has always been just good. It wasn’t great or anything, it was just a good browser. Then chrome came around and it had more, better features. It was a bit more memory usage, but those were for the additional features Firefox didn’t have.
Firefox didn’t really change a whole lot, it added synching features across accounts, and didn’t get worse. It just stayed the same.
The people made Firefox better, because now they’re creating add-ons for Firefox, where chrome had more.
I feel like once chrome got the majority of browser users, it immediately started going to shit. I have no proof of this, just a memory of it being better until it was announced that chrome was the most used browser, and the near immediate heavier memory usage.
I don’t know what rock you’ve been living under where you think base Firefox wasn’t ever improved
It’s all telemetry so the advertising company that made Chrome can harvest your data for resale at bargain bin prices
I love Firefox, but I can’t shake the feeling that it is slower on YouTube. My tinfoil hat theory is that Google somehow throttles YouTube on Firefox.
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
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
Well, Google will probably optimize their shit for their own
privacy invasion sniffing toolbrowser twice as hard as for Firefox and suchGoogle 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.
For YouTube on IOS, I use Brave. It does a decent (but not perfect) job of hiding ads on YT.
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.
Functionality wise, chrome is better than Firefox but it’s bad when it comes to privacy and ads
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.
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.
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
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 saving.
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.
I usualy love it, but for some reason Firefox fails to retrieve web pages about 75% of the time when on the internet connection at my parent’s house, and I don’t know why.
It acts like a DNS failure, but the DNS settings are the same in Firefox, Chrome, and the router.
Meanwhile Chrome and Edge work great.
Probably secure DNS? Try disabling that in the privacy settings page.
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!
Shame YouTube and other sites are completely fucked on Firefox.
Are they? I watch YouTube on Firefox all the time, seems fine on my machine.
I think maybe 5+ years ago there were some performance issues caused by YT relying on features that were only implemented in Chrome, but I don’t recall having any issues wrt that for years.
I wouldn’t say “completely fucked”, but for a few years I noticed YouTube on Firefox has this occasional quirk where videos will quit playing and infinitely buffer at the exact same timestamp. Like there’s no way around it except skipping about 30 seconds ahead with the seek bar, or doing a Ctrl-F5 (hard refresh) and starting the whole video over. Opera GX doesn’t seem to have this problem at all.
But it’s still not a big enough deal to make me give up Firefox completely.
Wym? Youtube works just fine for me with uBlock Origin. Very rarely there’s some wonkiness but nothing unbearable.
I’ve got uBlock and Privacy Badger but turning them off or going incognito doesn’t help at all. The most common issue I get with YouTube is the video keeps freezing. Apparently this is because Google deliberately fuck it so that other browsers have to play catch up constantly. I have heard this is why Microsoft gave up and adopted Chromium.
The other issue is that if I open more than one YouTube tab my laptop sounds like it is about to take off into space. I can have an unlimited number of tabs from any other website open though.
Sounds to me like some hardware issue, I’ve literally never experienced any of this in the last 5 years on Firefox. My guess is considering it works fine with other browsers the graphics drivers are a bit wonky, or maybe Firefox is falling back to software rendering for some reason. Are you using Linux or Windows?
Are you using Linux or Windows?
Mac
Strange, usually things just work there considering the limited hardware variety. Is it an older Mac? I’m typing this on an M2 macbook and it works perfectly.
Anyway try to dig into the config and check if you’re using hardware rendering: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Firefox_Hardware_acceleration
If it turns out you’re using software rendering try forcing hardware rendering on: https://jamcity.helpshift.com/hc/en/6-genies-and-gems/faq/5737-how-do-i-enable-hardware-acceleration-on-my-browser/
