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.
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.
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.
to be fair they are the only ones i know of putting it to actual good use.
ai itself is not the problem.
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
Yeah, it’s been a huge waste of resources trying to reinvent everything.
Steam’s strategy was to be first to market and essentially the only player in the game for a decade, making themselves the default.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Google Sheets is a mess on FF too. Cell selection is broken af.
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.
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.
Don’t agree, nothing noticeable for me anyhow. Chrome has the ultimate drawback: being under the control of a monopolistic evil corporation
A web app is just a fancy name for a dynamic web page. Change my mind.
Umm yeah? Like I do like access to collaborative software within browser so that’s kind of important.
Do 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.
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.
For YouTube on IOS, I use Brave. It does a decent (but not perfect) job of hiding ads on YT.
I tried both and the videos played at the same speed for me
Google definitely did extend video loading times on FF a while ago, not sure if they still do it.
Google somehow throttles YouTube on Firefox.
Because they do. A while back, it was discovered they were injecting delays if they detected Firefox as your user agent.
Ironically I use a chrome type browser for YouTube and mail checking only. This is also the only browser in which I am logged in with my Google account.
My main Firefox is for everything else including search.
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.
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.
It’s all telemetry so the advertising company that made Chrome can harvest your data for resale at bargain bin prices
Yes, but not neccesary other Chromium do it, that depends only on the corresponding devs. Chrome is a RAM and Data Hog, because use for every tab a own process, but Vivaldi Hibernate the background tabs and because of this use less RAM than other Chromium and even FF. But generally all US browsers send data to Alphabet, googleanalytics and googletagmanager, except Edge (also Chromium), but in change it sends data to other MS partners which are even worst (Towerdata). I use Vivaldi for this, because it’s the only existing EU browser (after the French UR browser died some years ago) maybe apart Konqueror from KDE (Linux only, KHTML or KDE WEBKit engine), no data for third parties, nor Google, despite the Chromium base. The Browser companies are the problem, not the engine which they use.
I don’t know what rock you’ve been living under where you think base Firefox wasn’t ever improved
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.
firefox is going on a steady decline more recently with ads on the homepage by default, plus new telemetry being introduced. hopefully it can change direction
People saying FF is slower: like how much slower? are we taking like 14 millisecond slower? Cause everything seems pretty instantaneous here. Maybe its because i’m old enough to remember DSL and 56k internet, but I think FF os crazy fast and even if Chrome would be 25% faster I wouldn’t switch to evil google for that.
It used to be a lot slower, which is why when Chrome showed up with its shiny new V8 engine (and other features) people switched from Firefox en masse. Now the performance difference is no longer noticeable.
Ye a few months ago I remember that the benchmarks showed firefox was just as fast as chrome again or minimally faster/slower in certain benchmarks
61 Firefox windows and 427 tabs (don’t judge, I know I have a problem) and I have no performance complaints - admittedly, not all of them are active/rendering simultaniously, but still…
Firefox (and its forks) have been my go-to for 15 years.
I’m actually interested what you have open with this many windows.
indeed! had I not posted this, I would be asking the same question!
so, its quite a bit more mundane than you might have hoped for.
a mix of…
- ~40% locally served internal pages (mostly zabbix, mail/web server monitoring, some development pages, etc).
- ~60% non-local pages - currently lots of retro computing stuff, debian stuff, github (sigh)
the most recent page I opened was an
archive.orgpage on TI-84 firmware disassembly.I make heavy use of Firefox containers for separation. honestly, Firefox is an absolute workhorse for me. if the Firefox ecosystem were to fall into the void, I would be dead in the water.
That’s a really interesting set of pages!
I remember opening hundreds of random github repos and starring them for “further research”, and never looking at them again.
Also yes, life without Firefox would be miserable.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Firefox-Chrome-109-Benchmarks
I wish firefox was faster but benchmarks are pretty common, it’s not hard to test. It’s kind of an unfair fight at this point honestly, large swaths of the web are just built for chrome. There are other benchmark options out there, but even using Mozilla’s own kraken benchmarking solution, it loses tremendously more than it wins. I honestly really respect them for not building their benchmarking system to make their solutions come out on top.
In some benchmarks the lag from firefox is very significant and then on the other hand, when firefox does win, chrome is usually right behind it. It’s not ideal.
Last time I tried it? Like freeze and be unresponsive on my phone for seconds at a time slow. (My phone doesn’t lock up though, I can still go to the home screen, swipe to see notifications so it’s not the phone locking up completely)
Yes, this. Many pages have a 5-15 second blank delay for reasons I can’t figure out when using Firefox. I still use Firefox, but that delay is rough on my blood pressure some days.
It’s clear, slower is relative. FF is slower in the startup and rendering some heavy loading webs, but the difference certainly isn’t sooo dramatic. It’s not a reason to avoid it, the only reason depends of the use of a browser, if it fits your needs or not.
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.
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
…ew.
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.
The Vivaldi team is working hard to gut the Google spyware in Chromium on every update. Because of this only security patches are in realtime, all other updates are 1-2 weeks behind. The rest remains as user choice in the settings (save browsing, Chrome Store (without Vivaldi isn’t even recognized as Chromium), G DNS and little else). Therefore, Vivaldi can be seen a hard fork. No data sended to Google, nor other third party companies (excepting naturally extensions and search engines you use, they can be not so private in any browser, Mullvad also recommend to use less extensions possibles).
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.
Well, Apples WebKit is even worse than Gecko, as a small consolation for FF users.
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.
noscript is your web condom. I will not touch a page without it.
Do you need noscript if you have ublock?
yes, noscript blocks all javascript from running unless allowed, while ublock just blocks ads and trackers to my knowledge.
You can set uBlock to disable/enable JavaScript per site too, as per wiki page.
interesting, good to know!
Would noscript allow you to block things like when a site packs your history with their website making it impossible to back out to the page you came from? How does it work considering so many sites now are built with JavaScript libraries like React?
I dunno about the history but single page apps like react apps you can just accept the JS from the actual host in the address bar and leave all the rest turned off. Just tested on twitch. Accepting no JS loaded the home page and a spinner gif after selecting a stream. Accepted just twitch.tv and I could see the video stream and chat without having to accept any of the other hosts blocked.
Rad. Thank you. Working on my switch to Firefox today. Between this noscript stuff and learning about styling Firefox with CSS I’m absolutely sold on the switch and no longer dread the process of ditching Chrome (mostly due to familiarity than anything else).
Thanks for the info!
You can use the advanced mode of ublock to replace noscript too
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
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
Firefox masterrace
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.
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.
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!
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.
shots fired! Shots fired!
You can drag and drop your toolbar, extensions, and layout.
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.
UI in Vivaldi is unique, you can set it to simple as an old IE or to an dashboard of an Spaceshuttle and everything in between in the settings and more with CSS. Also using of more than 4000 themes, or made and share your own. You can install Chrome extensions, but most are redundant because of the own inbuild ones, or even install directly userscripts as extensions.
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.
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.
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
I feel like including WebGPU and WebHID is kind of unfair. They are both still in the working draft state as far as web standards go and are experimental. Codec support, on the other hand, is fair though.
Though webgpu is coming and h.265 support only kinda there on chrome and all chromium forks
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.
have you tried changing
security.ssl.enable_ocsp_staplingto false in yourabout:config?
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.
Everything enshitifies… Everything, problem that worries me that, Firefox will enshitify like this too one day
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.
How close did we come to being a footnote in the history of a future corporations that would happen upon our ruins ten years from now? Would they indulge in the fiction of their own immortality until the shareholders 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 economy, dismissing the warnings carved into the walls of the sepulchre? And when the MBAs came at last, what did the Ancients think as they sifted the cremation of infrastructure, staring into the mute remains for a key; some solution to their plight?
What if there had been countless corporations 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 shareholders.
The Ancients died many years ago, as humanity emerged from its naivety. They believed their voyage across the sea of capitalism awoke the dragon that slept beneath the waves. That the shareholders were birthed from the flux of money and their destruction was the revenge of an trickle down economy.
At that point it will be forked yet again, and that fork will take over. Mozilla is a very active open source member though.
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
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.
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
That has a background update service. It’ll only immediately kick you out for serious security updates. Unless you f’ed with the configuration.
Firefox auto updates itself by default I’ve found
This might be fixed on Firefox nightly
Lol the webcam thing hanned to me too.
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.
I never really cared that a browser could load a page in 1.5 seconds instead of 1.9… I mean who cares?
I didn’t care until it consistently loaded faster.
That’s now my new baseline, and anything slower than ‘instant’ is annoying.
I would care if that was no longer the case, because I don’t like being constantly annoyed.That said, I don’t think the page loading speed is noticeably different between major browsers.
The addons, customisation, privacy and resource usage are where it’s at.I’m just hoping that some competition to chromium stays afloat.
