TST is literally the killer feature for FF. It's actually the only reason I went to FF, it was getting out of hand to have all my tabs across the top, and it makes little sense with modern screens being so wide that giving up a little horizontal space to get legible titles is absolutely worth it.
Someone in Chrome/Edge/Safari must be thinking about doing this, I don't know why it hasn't been cloned. Can't be too hard to do.
When I saw the title of this article, I assumed it had to be about Tree Style Tags. No other browser feature has so immediately become a feature I must have so quickly.
Privacy and ad-blocking are great, but I could see myself being lazy and switching to a browser with a better UX, if one existed. But you'll have to take Tree Style Tabs from my cold, dead hands
You need to use userChrome.css (that's what I do and it works great). it's a bit of a hidden feature, I hope they expose it to extensions eventually, maybe with a different API
You can hide the tab bar through userstyles css. It can't be done from Firefox itself unfortunately, but once you set it up you never have to do it again.
> I'm looking for a way to have the tab bar hidden.
That's possible by editing userChrome.css. I don't remember the exact incantations, but I'm pretty sure it's mentioned in TST's docs and/or settings page.
I find multi-account-containers* incredibly useful re: tab groups. Coupled with a few pinned tabs (email), I generally always know where to look for what when I have the browser open.
This fixes most of the links on HN for me - I'm one of those people who doesn't like the browser to save anything, so every time I visit a site it's for the first time - so anyway reader mode just cuts right through all the shit in one click, no cookie banners, no subscribe banners, no interruption banners, it gets straight to the content if it's there (sometimes even cuts through shallow front end paywalls) - honestly if the site looks horrible and reader mode doesn't work, close tab - can't be arsed.
It also makes far better use of screen space than most site designs, e.g those common yet horrible headers with css position: sticky. Pretty much every big news site is made better by pulling any content into reader mode.
I wish they also had a way to search tabs without the address bar. I insist that address bars act solely as address bars so I've disabled all other features from it including search.
Simple Tab Groups is how tab groups should have been done in Firefox from the start. I think if they would be like that they would not have to rip them out. Tab search or rather filtering is included and is such a splendid addition. Also automatic backup of groups is a fine feature, but so far I only needed to use it for migration.
I'd like to add that it combines very nicely with Gesturefy, defining a couple of mouse gestures to switch between tab groups (either through a small popup or switching moving back/forth) is what got me to actually use the tab groups meaningfully.
I should be clear. What I was referring to when I said `keybindings` is browser/developer keybindings that are not yet made configurable.
There's been an open issue for 7 years asking for a shortcut key for the eyedropper[0]. The navigation between developer panels is also a bit tedious. The page focus key, F6, is not configurable.
These are some instances I was thinking when I said I wanted good keybinding support. I'll be really willing to try an extension that achieves these but it's really the browser's job.
With that said, I've tried a bunch of these extensions in the past! I'm not a vim guy so I settled with Link Hints[1] for in-page navigation. I cannot recommend it enough for non-vim guys. It's really underrated.
For what it's worth, Chrome has a reader mode, just hidden behind an experimental flag, and a native PiP mode for videos, accessible with the media controls icon that appear when a video is playing.
I use Panorama Tab Groups. It lets me create groups of tabs (obviously) for each project. Each project has 10-20 tabs and I can quickly switch between them. It means that most times, I only have 10-20 tabs visible. Makes things much easier to navigate and keep track of.
There is tab search (and history, and bookmarks for that matter) from the address bar (i.e. typing `% foo` will search all tabs for `foo`). I don't know if it's turned on by default, but you can set it up from “Search shortcuts” settings section.
What do you dislike about tab groups? Or is Chrome's implementation on mobile not good?
I think the current design is ugly. The way Edge handles them in the vertical tabs sidebar looks a lot better than the way other Chromium derivatives handle them in the tab strip, but still not the best. I like Vivaldi's implementation better, but the UI is relatively laggy. I miss old Opera.
> Yes, you can get extensions for this in Chrom(e/ium) but having these as a native feature is really nice.
I've been using Brave for a while and I'm considering going back to FF, partly to get out of Chromium.
However, this is a point I don't get. What do I care if these features are native or plug-ins? My Brave plugins are synced, so whenever I install Brave and set it up I immediately. If the plugin is well done, there is no difference, and for people who don't care about that particular feature it could be less bloat to have it on a feature.
Specifically for the Reader mode, the Chromium Addon I use comes from the Firefox code for the same functionality, so it's just as good. Kudos to FF, OSS is awesome.
Really wondering why this is so neglected in all browsers. I know quite a few users that like to accidentally press CTRL + T when trying to write a capital T after sitting 2h on a site to put in some info.
It is good that browsers grow more sceptical of sites capturing hotkeys, but some sites really benefit from the question if you really want to leave that page. As far as I know this is the only long-term supported solution. Restoring tab might work but not on all sites.
two leading spaces changes text to code formatting
perhaps lines are closer together here.
It definitely does with me. I used Edge when I was using Windows and I liked it!
I went back to Windows after almost 2 years for work and MS has managed to bloat it too. Don't understand why I need a Math solver. Edge bar is annoying. Favorites and bookmarks are 2 separate things?
I turned them all off obviously but defaults matter.
One irritation I have with FF is its confoundingly difficult way to add arbitrary "search engines" with a keyword. eg: I want to just type `r subreddit` and have it expande to `https://reddit.com/r/subreddit`. You can DO it, but natively if FF doesn't "see" the URL as a search (so it doesn't provide the 'add search engine' option in the search bar right-click) it's overly hard to accomplish. Had to install a plugin, and/or hope project Mycroft has it.
I want to see extensions which change how the user interacts with the browser (eg. Vimium or gesturify) work on browser internal pages such as settings, extensions or reader view. I know its not going to happen because "security".
Regarding tab groups, there's two things that I've found that seems to have solved my requirements:
- Workona (this is an extension for chrome)
- Arc (https://thebrowser.company/)
Both essentially have the idea of "spaces" for web browsers.
Native reader mode is fantastic! The underlying parser (readability) works great. Shameless plug: I use Readability to parse web articles and send it directly to Kindle: https://ktool.io
I'm typing this from a desktop Firefox on PostmarketOS in Poco F1 smartphone, I love it.
Especially since I have to rely upon the browser for most 3rd party services due to the lack of a proper Linux client.
But running Firefox on Linux mobile has largely been a community effort, I wish Mozilla realizes the need-gap and invests in official Linux smartphone version.
But I'm actively moving away from 3rd party extensions in FF as I found a recommended extension promoting anti-vaccine agenda[1], The only extensions I use now are ub & Multi-account containers. I would prefer if FF integrated them by default and thorough reviews for recommended extensions.
No. Tab groups are great, they allow you to bundle context but persist it front and center. On a given day I might be working on five different things, I context switch between tab groups, make some progress within a group, and move along. Bookmarks absolutely do not solve this issue. Bookmarks are not ephemeral, and take considerably more time to organize than simply using tabs naturally.
I don't use groups (I liked them when tab groups were a feature of Firefox). I search for tabs by typing stuff in the awesome bar, that works.
I always have a lot of tabs and kill everything from times to times. But it's nice to reach a tab that's already loaded when you need it, instead of reloading the page every time, making a network access, using resources and having to wait. A page being already open is also a hint that it's something I accessed recently and that it's most likely the thing I need.
I don't want to waste my time managing bookmarks (actually the sibling comment from lamacase captures my view very well on this). That's not how I use a browser. But it's good they are there for people like you who find a use for it.
The former don't preserve login state (and site state in general) or scroll position, navigating between them requires an internet connection and often uses significant data (important when working from a metered and/or unreliable connection like on a train or plane), just to name a few differences.
Ok, great idea. Now we just need an extension that auto-bookmarks every newly opened page until I unbookmark it, and a category of "super-bookmarks" to curate the pages I would manually bookmark now.
I've never understood how people get into a workflow where they expect to have lots of persistent tabs. I rely on the fact that I can reset my browser by quitting it - everything goes away and I can start fresh, ahhh! The idea of browser state as something valuable is foreign, and it kind of makes me feel uncomfortable.
I usually work on about 5 projects at a time. During a given day I will switch between those projects at least once an hour. With Panorama Tab Groups, I only see about 10-20 tabs at a time and they are all specific to the current project. when i switch, it does it all at once and the pages don’t reload. They retain their state. I can be editing something in one tab group, switch to another tab group to check on a dependency, and then switch back to the firs group to finish editing.
I do use bookmarks for longer term organization but my workspace is all handled in tab groups.
Wow, I should have read this before cadence-per-cadence making the exact same comment!
I have no idea why nobody uses bookmarks and everybody keeps hundreds of tabs open. When did that start? Who even has the RAM for that? How do you even click on them when they’re that tiny? So many things just don’t make sense.
> Coworkers look at me like I’m a freak because I usually keep fewer than 10 tabs open :)
Haha! That's me. My maximum is 15 and then my cleanliness ghost kicks in. I said tab groups because I like organization even if it's just 10 tabs. I honestly don't know why I said tab search.
Having coworkers looking at you like you are freak while keeping your job because the company sees you as a bringer of value is the best compliment you can get from your workplace :)
You'll have to pry Firefox from my cold, dead hands!
At the outset, yes, chromium based browsers feel snappier..
But, stuff that Chrome will not have and are absolutely essential
1. Containers... I use another unverified extension to match urls and automatically assign containers...
2. Ublock origin
3. Tree style tabs
4. Developer console... Edit and resend any request
That said, i still end up using chromium for teams and outlook 365 (pwa install feature is nice)... But that's only because i don't have any other options with those two
I am confused about the "I don't have any other choice" comment. I assume you mean because Firefox doesn't support whatever teams uses for meeting audio/video, or maybe it's the install feature you mentioned, but I use Firefox for both and use my phone for meetings.
There are times when I've noticed Teams to fail if I try to open it from one of my Container tabs. It complains about supported browser and stuff. But it opens perfectly on the default tab always.
On linux, just create a separate login and use Chrome there. In fact, what I do is create a separate user, start Chrome once, do any configuration I want and then create a tarball of the separate user's home directory. Then to start a fresh it's just a wipe of the whole directory and unpack the tarball again.
It's fast enough to just run Chrome in a loop, and on each exit wipe and unpack the original state again.
The way Firefox style containers work they need to be "built into" not "built around". It's not as much about creating a profile and running it separately (that's just standard profiles in Chrome/Firefox, or normal OS level sandboxing) as it is auto-launching webpage requests into that profile based on matches and integrating the profiles into the app UI so the tabs stand out, can co-exist in the same window, and can be managed via built in tab creation UI.
Chromium hasn't been interested in this feature but nothing would stop someone from making a Chromium derivative that does this.
Why not use the native user profile function? E.g. set up a “user profile” dedicated to access only Meta/Facebook properties (and therefore only be able to track you within that container)
"4. Developer console... Edit and resend any request" - there have been extensions for that in Chrome for a long time, though I don't know if they integrate with the developer tools/network tab itself. Agree it would be handy - I use the "replay" command in Chrome DevTools quite a bit, and if I need to modify it usually end up importing it into Postman (via the copy as cURL command, which I believe Firefox also supports).
I’m a Firefox user but I’m not sure that I can agree that it’s lighter than Google Chrome. I think Chrome is generally faster at everything.
Chrome is also more stable. For some reason my Firefox randomly freezes once or twice a month and gets stuck in a crashing loop where only a reboot will fix it.
But on principle I use Firefox whenever possible. I appreciate the effort that went into it. Still have to use Chrome daily for one or two business web apps that block FF.
Chrome is possibly faster for 10 tabs or less. When you go upwards of 100 like I do... It's not even in the competition. Its UI becomes terrible and its unresponsive. FF keeps chugging along without missing a beat.
This is what keeps me away from Firefox. I gave it a try for 3 months a little while back but it was so much slower than Chrome for general browsing. Maybe I'm due another try.
I've been using firefox for the last 2-3 years, and I've had it 'crash' 2 times, both on youtube, but that might be because of all the privacy related addons I have. Ublock origin reports more than 2k blocked scripts on youtube.
Chrome also would crash occasionally and force me to reload tabs. I don't think chrome is significantly faster in practice.
I'd consider faster as a different thing than lighter. I think benchmarks show that the JS engine in Chrome is faster, but you pay a price in memory and processor to get that.
Personally, I have found FF really stable lately on both Windows and Linux and use it whenever possible as you do. And like you, I also need to fire up Chrome for the odd thing now and then.
> For some reason my Firefox randomly freezes once or twice a month and gets stuck in a crashing loop where only a reboot will fix it.
My Chrome does that every other day on Linux. It has been that way for the last year or two. I can get around a full restart and loss of tabs by killing some GPU renderer processes.
Within the past couple years I've went from Chrome to Edge, then to Firefox, and on to LibreWolf. Edge is probably my favourite of the bunch, and I think the CSS devtools are a lot nicer in it, but I just want to keep my stuff as independent as possible etc.
Is there really a killer feature of Chrome that justifies its use over FF? I've been using Firefox and have never been disappointed with it. I always just assumed that if you wanted privacy, it's better to use Firefox over Chrome, Safari, or Brave.
Its only killer feature to me is that websites are designed and tested with a Chromium-first attitude. As a regular FF user I might stumble upon a website that’s quite buggy or straight up doesn’t work, which forces me to use Chrome for that specific website. Other than that I don’t really feel like there’s anything, and Edge is currently a better Chrome than Chrome anyway.
EDIT: and for the record, I’m still upset Microsoft didn’t choose FF and willingly increased Google’s grasp
I've been an FF user and developer of many frontends for years and the amount of times I run into serious differences between browsers is somewhere near zero.
I've been on team FF since the switch from IE like 20 years ago- I agree sometimes there is additional jank, but I also want to add that it is rare enough that it's been a non-issue 99.9% of the time.
Even then, I expect some of it is the fact I use an obscene number of plug-ins to break most social media sites (to prevent overuse).
I built an extension[1] so that I could choose which sites are opened in Chrome... so that whenever I need to use Google Meet, it automatically opens it on Chrome.
> Is there really a killer feature of Chrome that justifies its use over FF?
I log into Chrome with my Gmail account and my browsing history+passwords are carried across all the devices I use in a typical week, Windows, Mac, iPhone. This is huge, as I rely on history a lot.
My last 3 jobs also had Google-based accounts, which means I'm able to maintain two browser contexts where I don't dirty up my personal history with boring work stuff.
I assume Firefox probably offers account syncing, but there's no reason to switch at this point. They lost me more than a decade ago, I loved Chrome's out-of-the-box interface. It made Firefox seem ancient and cluttered with all the unnecessary buttons, and massive borders and tabs consuming precious screen space.
edit: And I'm now reading that Firefox supports multiple browser contexts but requires some effort. No thanks.
Firefox also supports multiple browsers including the Android Password-Fill API. So you need to sign into your Sync account rather than your Google account but then you get a nearly identical feature set.
Plus it is all end-to-end encrypted unlike the Google one.
If you use the Multi Account Containers extension [1] built by Firefox and use the built-in Firefox account sync, then you'll get that same functionality in Firefox across Windows, Mac, iPhone. That doesn't seem like a whole lot of effort and you get more functionality.
The biggest improvement over the account-based Chrome experience is that you could even have contexts (containers) for several things if you like - a container group for social media, a different container group for banking, work, shopping, etc.
All in different tabs, color-coded / labeled by container group, each with isolated cookies, etc but shared bruiser history in the same window just like in Chrome (I'm assuming) but with better privacy.
I do the opposite. Always wipe all history whenever browser is closed, never sync anything, and never prompt to store passwords. I find it much more manageable.
Passwords go in the password manager.
Instead of history I use tagged bookmarks or a notes file (obsidian.md) with actual notes about why I wanted to save that link.
If I actually ever want to sync anything between work and home PC or to/from my phone (rare), it's an explicit choice to plug into USB and drag it over, or intentionally put it in dropbox. Not just something that just randomly implicitly happens or sometimes doesn't.
Those experienced with web dev around here will tell you Chrome is the main (or only) browser tested with most websites these days. Some things might be slow or broken in Firefox. One example situation that comes to mind is you can't scroll to the bottom of the page on some sites in Firefox due to terrible spaghetti layout design, so the submit button is not normally reachable. Or it loads under a banner and becomes unclickable.
There's also some sites that seem to actively make things worse on purpose or refuse to load even if they otherwise do work. I think YouTube was noted for doing this a few years ago.
In other areas, small company sites may claim Firefox just doesn't work on their site. Sometimes prompted because an ancient version once was broken and the browser entry list was never updated, or they simply forgot to account for it in the grouping of "Internet Explorer or Other." I see this more often than I would like.
The profiles is what gets me. I have a personal bad professional profile on my device and whenever clicking on a link, it will open the page in the latest chrome window (re: profile) that was last accessed and it works wonderfully. Firefox profiles are a completely different process/app/structure and it just really does not work gracefully in any scenario I’ve tried.
Chrome has support for casting to Chromecasts. While not enough reason to daily drive Chrome, it does come in handy for the random video player that doesn't natively support it.
There are a couple of features in Chrome that I use every day for web dev.
1) when the console is open, you can right-click on the reload page button and choose hard reload.
2) when inspecting CSS properties, you can change many of them by dragging them with the mouse left and right. That makes positioning elements so much easier than guessing and adjusting a dozen times.
There's a potentially a killer feature of Firefox that justifies its use over Chrome: it seems to be impossible to prevent youtube ads from playing on Chrome while in Firefox just having ABP installed does the trick.
(this claim is based on rather limited testing so please correct me if I'm wrong)
The killer features is the developer tools panel. It's so packed with features it might as well be an IDE. I use Firefox on all my devices for personal browsing, but I still use Chrome for webdev works.
Multiple profiles, so that I can keep personal and work related stuff separately. Firefox has containers, but it’s not really a first class support baked into the browser. For example, I use OneTab extension which lets you suspend tabs to save memory. This doesn’t work well unless you have profiles support.
Even with containers, when I suspend a tab, when I unsuspend I would want it in the same tab group
Firefox had the chance to remain relevant when it still had some significant market share and if they had gone all in on ad blocking (basically something like merge ublock origin directly into Firefox). Unfortunately, since most of their revenue is from Google, it could never happen due to conflict of interest.
Really? There are extensions for that sort of thing. Your extension list can even be synchronized across devices.
Tree Style Tab, for example, allows control over how new tabs are opened in relation to existing tabs if you don't like FF defaults. Even if you don't like the tree view, you get a UI that adds settings for how your tabs should open and stay grouped.
Firefox supports multiple profiles, though the UI is not as streamlined as Chrome’s. In Firefox, open about:profiles to create and open new profile windows.
Video playback is janky for me in Firefox on Linux on some sites (like IGN), but not on Brave. Actually, now that I mention it, I bet I haven’t installed a codec or something.
Some of us find Firefox incredibly useful for this reason. When my company's intranet site is down you can't open a new tab on Edge without it crashing trying to get there.
I happen to really like the UI of Chrome over Firefox. To me the add bookmark dialog is very clunky in Firefox. Also, I prefer in the in-tab bookmark manager of Chrome over the 'Library' Window Firefox opens.
Also as far as making extensions go I like how in chrome you can use dev-tools-protocol within extensions as you can you cool things like intercept the body of a response with it.
That being said I'm really wanting a better browser but for me Firefox is not it.
I have an older Surface tablet (that I recovered from a recycle bin, TBH) and I've been using Chrome on it, but I was annoyed by some of the latency and tried Firefox the other day. It had all the problems of Chrome, plus jittery scrolling and some extra random lags thrown in, so I noped right out of it. I've got nothing against Firefox as a concept, but it's apparently too hardware intensive for that scenario.
I use FF, but I have at times had to switch to Chrome for extended periods of time when performance of FF was bad after a particular release - maybe about 9-10 years ago? I think a lot of people experienced the same thing at the time, moved off and never moved back.
Anecdotally, I know several folks who got retina MacBooks when that was new (2012 or so?) and had to switch off of Firefox. For a while it didn't render correctly, and then once it did the performance made it unusable for daily driving.
Interesting..I can't even say I notice the update time..it happens but never stand in my way that I'd notice it..under 1 minute may be? Not sure to be honest.
What's your experience here?
Multiple profiles in parallel? Sure, you can start multiple instances of Firefox in parallel from the command line and use them with different profiles. I do that (on a Mac) regularly. Works under Windows too, IIRC.
I personally dislike Firefox for its annoying "Looking for updates" pop-up whenever I open the browser. That 3 second stop generated more dislike from me for Firefox than bad privacy policies of Chrome ever could.
I've switched from Firefox to Safari for most of my browsing, and Chrome for anything that needs devtools.
Why? Battery. Efficiency. On the new M1 Macbooks I can run Safari and be unplugged all day long. The increased power consumption and battery drain is noticeable when using FF and I can't make it all the way through the day. As far as extensions go, I have 1Blocker and it works well, it does block YouTube ads. The only things I miss are Tree Style Tabs and Container Tabs.
I also find performance on FF to be a lot worse than both Chrome and Safari. Firefox gets sluggish with many tabs open. JS-heavy sites will be jittery and laggy in Firefox, but buttery smooth in Chrome. Having 100 tabs open is sluggish in Firefox, but smooth in Chrome/Safari. In FF some sites will occasionally crash their tab, but they don't crash in Chrome/Safari. Etc.
Then there's the attitude of Mozilla constantly changing the interface, shoving things like Pocket or Mozilla VPN in my face. Sorry Firefox, but I've left and not coming back.
My favorite part about Safari is how, because I don't own an Apple device, I have next to no options for testing and fixing the issues that get filed with regards to my web application not working in Safari.
Probably 2/3rds of the bugs I get are specifically related to Safari while the other 1/3rd are just general issues that affect every browser.
It's insane to me that they provide no way to possibly resolve this without going out and spending money to buy their hardware.
What exactly do you expect? That Apple brings back Safari to Windows and Linux? There's public demand for that every now and then (eg [1]), but that has it's own set of problems ie. that Safari-on-Win/Lin won't be representative of what's rendered on Mac OS due to font handling, antialiasing, power management, and other peculiarities on Mac OS (Mac OS would typically run on much higher resolution than Win/Lin).
I'm not even using Mac OS currently, but I don't think it's Apple's job to make your web app run like on Chrome when Google is calling the shots on so-called "web standards" with tens or hundreds of new features every quarter, with necessarily surprising results. Personally, I'd find it ok if you just label your app with "Best run on Chrome" because that's the reality the web has degraded to, and the actual problem of web apps. Or deploy as Electron app on Mac OS.
Maybe Apple could provide a Mac OS + Safari VM, like MS was doing (or still is doing?) when they were producing IE. But then the question is on which machine would you be able to run those VMs given Apple is heading towards ARM-only instruction set machines. Should Apple commit to produce x64 binaries for backward-compatible emulation on historic hardware? Personally, I do like Apple's innovation where the rest of the industry is lagging behind.
I started using Firefox ages ago because of firebug. I’ve been using it as my primary browser ever since. I’ve never had an issue with it (other than the occasional web site that is designed to only work with Chrome). Maybe I don’t know what I’m missing since I haven’t given Chrome a try (other than loading the occasional website that only works on Chrome). Maybe Chrome is better than Firefox, but I don’t have any complaints about Firefox (though I do have complaints about bad website developers).
I ran into an interesting situation where I was building a Conway implementation and getting 60fps in Firefox / 10fps in Chrome. Turned out that Chrome had absolutely horrible performance with attempts to access out-of-bounds array indexes, where Firefox had some early fail fasts in place.
So anecdata, but I wouldn’t rely on Chrome automatically working well if Firefox does.
I keep having to "forget about this site" for YouTube after watching (admittedly many) videos - every 2 months or so. The tell-tale sign is that videos stutter outrageously. It is surprisingly consistent - stutters / freezes happening, forget about site, problem solved.
I would be surprised if this is solely due to Firefox btw; I trust YT-owner Google about as far as I can toss the lot of them.
I'm a big fan of Firefox containers. I occasionally need different logins for the same sites and containers make that much easier than Google's profile feature.
Containers is the big thing imho. Having two bookmarks that go to different Gmail accounts, with each opening in a different container tab, and each container being logged into just that account. Same for AWS accounts.
Is the purpose of using two bookmarks to open the container and gmail simultaneously? I just use one bookmark, two containers, each is only logged on to one gmail account.
Are extensions and their settings shared across all containers?
One thing I love about Chrome/Edge profiles is being able to different extensions enabled/disabled and configured differently across them.
For example, I have a "private" profile that always runs windscribe vpn and other privacy-heavy extensions that I might not necessarily want running on my "base" profile.
I used Firefox in the early-mid 00s, switched to Chrome not long after launch, after my colleagues showed me how much slicker is was than a now fairly heavy Firefox (at the time.)
Then evil Google emerges, Chrome got fat, FF trimmed up and went privacy-as-a-default, and I'm back on FF again for the better part of the last decade.
Opera had a look-in around 2008 but it didn't last long, although some of the features were nicely done, it just had a clunky feeling and the rendering was ... Different.
But it increasingly got more config-involving to make FF do what I wanted and maybe I overdid some settings/plugins and websites started to show incorrectly. Also the imho (much) too high salary for the CEO annoyed me (Mozilla is supposed to be "Internet for people, not profit").
Tried Brave and it was a nice experience after some initial cost to e.g. disable crypto. Some weeks ago I uninstalled FF on all my computers...
Given that Brave is a for-profit business backed by VC money[1], sooner or later it'll become what you hate and you will find yourself wishing there was a browser ran by a strong non-profit like Mozilla.
That being said, perhaps they should just piggyback off WebKit/Blink and save themselves a ton of resources.
It is kind of a conundrum. The Mozilla situation seems clearly to be self serving and crippling the potential of the browser. The CEO's pay exemplary of that - and similar situations are there with brave. The founder was forced out of Mozilla for a reason, but setting that aside, the liberty they took with collecting crypto for businesses while those businesses were unaware put me off of them in a profound way. The niche the browser itself fills is obviously good but the methods seem... off, not malicious intent, just questionable. Changing the ad economy isn't bad for example, a great driving motivation.
The worst thing about using Firefox is that the longer you use it the more things you have done to un-fuck it and the more work it is to replicate all those things on a new system.
do you have any recommended extensions for auto-hibernating tabs? or how do you approach having many tabs? having no built-in way to do it is unfortunate but I'm really liking the other tab features
I never stopped using them. I never could stop using them, it feels so clumsy to work a PC without gestures. I am currently using StrokesPlus.net for this purpose, I am sure there are others.
Same path, the late xulrunner runtime was squeaking around all corners and chrome came out at Firefox weakest moment, it spread trough my friends circles like wildlife.
I went back to Firefox just because of Chrome api change against adblockers, and found it very usable and mature, but it's a tougher sell to my friends as the difference unnoticeable
Around 2012 my 6GB Ram laptop was struggling with Chrome, I switched to FF and got much better experience there. Then with FF Quantum release I adopted it definitely.
I'd switch to Firefox in a heartbeat if I could somehow focus the URL bar with Cmd+D instead of Cmd+L (years of muscle memory with Alt+D on Linux previously).
Other browsers have a menu entry for this (File -> Open Location... in Chrome) so keyboard shortcuts can be switched in the Keyboard settings but Firefox doesn't have this. :|
I've tried various methods without success. If anyone had a working solution I'd be very grateful.
I'm on Windows 10 with FF right now and Alt+D just worked for me, along with Cmd+L and F6 as other have said. I think your muscle memory should be just fine. Time to switch!
You can do this with karabiner-elements (https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/) by remapping cmd-l to cmd-d. I believe you can even add a condition to make the mapping only active in firefox, but I haven't tested that.
Readit News
- Native reader mode
- Native PiP mode for videos
Yes, you can get extensions for this in Chrom(e/ium) but having these as a native feature is really nice.
Things I want to see in Firefox:
- Good/extensible keybindings
- Tab groups
- Tab search
EDIT: How do I break sentences to newline in HN without really making a new paragraph? You know, for bullet points, etc.
Tab search exists: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/search-open-tabs-firefo..., also you type % into the address bar to start searching over tabs. Not sure if this covers your needs, though.
Someone in Chrome/Edge/Safari must be thinking about doing this, I don't know why it hasn't been cloned. Can't be too hard to do.
Privacy and ad-blocking are great, but I could see myself being lazy and switching to a browser with a better UX, if one existed. But you'll have to take Tree Style Tabs from my cold, dead hands
https://gist.github.com/ruanbekker/f800e098936b27c7cf956c560...
https://superuser.com/questions/1424478/can-i-hide-native-ta...
https://medium.com/@Aenon/firefox-hide-native-tabs-and-title...
/r/firefoxcss is great for asking questions regarding how to customize TST https://www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/search?q=tst&restrict_sr...
1. Go to `about:config` and set toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets true
2. Go to `about:support` and find your profile folder
3. Create subfolder `chrome` there
4. Create file `userChrome.css` in `chrome` folder
5. Put this text in it:
That's possible by editing userChrome.css. I don't remember the exact incantations, but I'm pretty sure it's mentioned in TST's docs and/or settings page.
Deleted Comment
*https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
This fixes most of the links on HN for me - I'm one of those people who doesn't like the browser to save anything, so every time I visit a site it's for the first time - so anyway reader mode just cuts right through all the shit in one click, no cookie banners, no subscribe banners, no interruption banners, it gets straight to the content if it's there (sometimes even cuts through shallow front end paywalls) - honestly if the site looks horrible and reader mode doesn't work, close tab - can't be arsed.
It also makes far better use of screen space than most site designs, e.g those common yet horrible headers with css position: sticky. Pretty much every big news site is made better by pulling any content into reader mode.
% - Tab search
^ - History search
* - Bookmark search
Blank line / new paragraph is really the only option. Short bullet points might look better with the "code" option of preceding with two spaces, like:
But long lines in that format force horizontal scrolling for some mobile users.https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/simple-tab-groups/
Blank lines separate paragraphs.
Text surrounded by asterisks is italicized. To get a literal asterisk, use * or *.
Text after a blank line that is indented by two or more spaces is reproduced verbatim. (This is intended for code.)
Urls become links, except in the text field of a submission.
If your url gets linked incorrectly, put it in <angle brackets> and it should work.
Alt-7 on the number pad give you a bullet "•", Alt-0151 an em dash "—"
There's been an open issue for 7 years asking for a shortcut key for the eyedropper[0]. The navigation between developer panels is also a bit tedious. The page focus key, F6, is not configurable.
These are some instances I was thinking when I said I wanted good keybinding support. I'll be really willing to try an extension that achieves these but it's really the browser's job.
With that said, I've tried a bunch of these extensions in the past! I'm not a vim guy so I settled with Link Hints[1] for in-page navigation. I cannot recommend it enough for non-vim guys. It's really underrated.
0: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1177108 1: https://lydell.github.io/LinkHints/
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/manage-extension-shortc... is a little hidden, but gives you at least some flexibility.
> Tab search
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/search-open-tabs-firefo..., I use % in the address bar very regularly.
I use * for bookmarks and ^ for history but have never known about this. :)
Thanks!
And yes, I do use extension shortcuts. Can't imagine my life without Bitwarden or Tab Stash keybindings.
See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1177108 to know what I actually meant.
Please no. I actually switched to Firefox on mobile just because I couldn't get tab groups to stay disabled in Chrome.
I think the current design is ugly. The way Edge handles them in the vertical tabs sidebar looks a lot better than the way other Chromium derivatives handle them in the tab strip, but still not the best. I like Vivaldi's implementation better, but the UI is relatively laggy. I miss old Opera.
But on the downside no translate tool (though I read it is coming).
Operates entirely offline.
Bonus points for it being offline.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firefox-trans...
I've been using Brave for a while and I'm considering going back to FF, partly to get out of Chromium.
However, this is a point I don't get. What do I care if these features are native or plug-ins? My Brave plugins are synced, so whenever I install Brave and set it up I immediately. If the plugin is well done, there is no difference, and for people who don't care about that particular feature it could be less bloat to have it on a feature.
Specifically for the Reader mode, the Chromium Addon I use comes from the Firefox code for the same functionality, so it's just as good. Kudos to FF, OSS is awesome.
Really wondering why this is so neglected in all browsers. I know quite a few users that like to accidentally press CTRL + T when trying to write a capital T after sitting 2h on a site to put in some info.
It is good that browsers grow more sceptical of sites capturing hotkeys, but some sites really benefit from the question if you really want to leave that page. As far as I know this is the only long-term supported solution. Restoring tab might work but not on all sites.
Tab search, keybinds, and many many other handy stuff, can be done in vimperator.
Deleted Comment
I went back to Windows after almost 2 years for work and MS has managed to bloat it too. Don't understand why I need a Math solver. Edge bar is annoying. Favorites and bookmarks are 2 separate things?
I turned them all off obviously but defaults matter.
Both essentially have the idea of "spaces" for web browsers.
https://knowtechie.com/how-to-enable-google-chrome-reader-mo...
The unremovable "floating" controls are visually distracting.
Especially since I have to rely upon the browser for most 3rd party services due to the lack of a proper Linux client.
But running Firefox on Linux mobile has largely been a community effort, I wish Mozilla realizes the need-gap and invests in official Linux smartphone version.
But I'm actively moving away from 3rd party extensions in FF as I found a recommended extension promoting anti-vaccine agenda[1], The only extensions I use now are ub & Multi-account containers. I would prefer if FF integrated them by default and thorough reviews for recommended extensions.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210924045611/https://github.co...
Deleted Comment
Coworkers look at me like I’m a freak because I usually keep fewer than 10 tabs open :)
I don't use groups (I liked them when tab groups were a feature of Firefox). I search for tabs by typing stuff in the awesome bar, that works.
I always have a lot of tabs and kill everything from times to times. But it's nice to reach a tab that's already loaded when you need it, instead of reloading the page every time, making a network access, using resources and having to wait. A page being already open is also a hint that it's something I accessed recently and that it's most likely the thing I need.
I don't want to waste my time managing bookmarks (actually the sibling comment from lamacase captures my view very well on this). That's not how I use a browser. But it's good they are there for people like you who find a use for it.
The former don't preserve login state (and site state in general) or scroll position, navigating between them requires an internet connection and often uses significant data (important when working from a metered and/or unreliable connection like on a train or plane), just to name a few differences.
I do use bookmarks for longer term organization but my workspace is all handled in tab groups.
I have no idea why nobody uses bookmarks and everybody keeps hundreds of tabs open. When did that start? Who even has the RAM for that? How do you even click on them when they’re that tiny? So many things just don’t make sense.
Haha! That's me. My maximum is 15 and then my cleanliness ghost kicks in. I said tab groups because I like organization even if it's just 10 tabs. I honestly don't know why I said tab search.
Same here, and I don’t even use bookmarks! History and custom search shortcuts are enough.
At the outset, yes, chromium based browsers feel snappier..
But, stuff that Chrome will not have and are absolutely essential
1. Containers... I use another unverified extension to match urls and automatically assign containers...
2. Ublock origin
3. Tree style tabs
4. Developer console... Edit and resend any request
That said, i still end up using chromium for teams and outlook 365 (pwa install feature is nice)... But that's only because i don't have any other options with those two
Teams web is crippled on FF with no video sharing & filters last I checked... Teams app is also crippled on linux - so the webapp is preferable.
Outlook's been broken the last week - just doesn't load and the service worker seems to get stuck in a loop.
It's a fork of kintesh/containerise which seems unmaintained and had case problems.
It's not on FF addons site - so please satisfy yourself that it isn't doing sinister stuff before installing.
It's fast enough to just run Chrome in a loop, and on each exit wipe and unpack the original state again.
I call it Groundhog Day Mode.
Chromium hasn't been interested in this feature but nothing would stop someone from making a Chromium derivative that does this.
Chrome is also more stable. For some reason my Firefox randomly freezes once or twice a month and gets stuck in a crashing loop where only a reboot will fix it.
But on principle I use Firefox whenever possible. I appreciate the effort that went into it. Still have to use Chrome daily for one or two business web apps that block FF.
Deleted Comment
Chrome also would crash occasionally and force me to reload tabs. I don't think chrome is significantly faster in practice.
Personally, I have found FF really stable lately on both Windows and Linux and use it whenever possible as you do. And like you, I also need to fire up Chrome for the odd thing now and then.
My Chrome does that every other day on Linux. It has been that way for the last year or two. I can get around a full restart and loss of tabs by killing some GPU renderer processes.
EDIT: and for the record, I’m still upset Microsoft didn’t choose FF and willingly increased Google’s grasp
Even then, I expect some of it is the fact I use an obscene number of plug-ins to break most social media sites (to prevent overuse).
[1]: https://onchrome.gervas.io
I log into Chrome with my Gmail account and my browsing history+passwords are carried across all the devices I use in a typical week, Windows, Mac, iPhone. This is huge, as I rely on history a lot.
My last 3 jobs also had Google-based accounts, which means I'm able to maintain two browser contexts where I don't dirty up my personal history with boring work stuff.
I assume Firefox probably offers account syncing, but there's no reason to switch at this point. They lost me more than a decade ago, I loved Chrome's out-of-the-box interface. It made Firefox seem ancient and cluttered with all the unnecessary buttons, and massive borders and tabs consuming precious screen space.
edit: And I'm now reading that Firefox supports multiple browser contexts but requires some effort. No thanks.
Plus it is all end-to-end encrypted unlike the Google one.
The biggest improvement over the account-based Chrome experience is that you could even have contexts (containers) for several things if you like - a container group for social media, a different container group for banking, work, shopping, etc.
All in different tabs, color-coded / labeled by container group, each with isolated cookies, etc but shared bruiser history in the same window just like in Chrome (I'm assuming) but with better privacy.
[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
Passwords go in the password manager.
Instead of history I use tagged bookmarks or a notes file (obsidian.md) with actual notes about why I wanted to save that link.
If I actually ever want to sync anything between work and home PC or to/from my phone (rare), it's an explicit choice to plug into USB and drag it over, or intentionally put it in dropbox. Not just something that just randomly implicitly happens or sometimes doesn't.
But different strokes for different folks.
Deleted Comment
Firefox provides essential functionalities that are altogether missing in Chrome:-
1. dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled - Enable copy paste
2. dom.event.contextmenu.enabled - Always enable context menu (right-click)
3. First party isolation.
There's also some sites that seem to actively make things worse on purpose or refuse to load even if they otherwise do work. I think YouTube was noted for doing this a few years ago.
In other areas, small company sites may claim Firefox just doesn't work on their site. Sometimes prompted because an ancient version once was broken and the browser entry list was never updated, or they simply forgot to account for it in the grouping of "Internet Explorer or Other." I see this more often than I would like.
Tbh this whole idea that the web is broken on ff is not true, tho it is true some web assembly apps fail to work properly in my experience.
I challenge anyone here to give an actual useful site that fails to work properly in ff.
- Easier to create and use multiple profiles (somewhat mitigated by Mozilla's multi-container add-on)
- Google Translate integration
Also, there’s an offline translate extension being worked on in open source: https://blog.mozilla.org/mozilla/local-translation-add-on-pr...
Deleted Comment
1) when the console is open, you can right-click on the reload page button and choose hard reload.
2) when inspecting CSS properties, you can change many of them by dragging them with the mouse left and right. That makes positioning elements so much easier than guessing and adjusting a dozen times.
(this claim is based on rather limited testing so please correct me if I'm wrong)
Even with containers, when I suspend a tab, when I unsuspend I would want it in the same tab group
I use Firefox. It works OK. Is that why I think the Google docs are not very good?
I am on a Mac (for work) so in reality I am using Safari it seems from what I have been reading!
Tree Style Tab, for example, allows control over how new tabs are opened in relation to existing tabs if you don't like FF defaults. Even if you don't like the tree view, you get a UI that adds settings for how your tabs should open and stay grouped.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32130168
I miss vimperator so much.
Maybe it’s changed but I wrote them off years ago as a result.
In Chrome it works reliably for me; in Firefox it works for a small subset of the sites that work in Chrome.
Also as far as making extensions go I like how in chrome you can use dev-tools-protocol within extensions as you can you cool things like intercept the body of a response with it.
That being said I'm really wanting a better browser but for me Firefox is not it.
Over the past few years it has gotten much better. Out of sight better.
Is it the Rust project? I do not know. But I no longer have to suffer nobly, FF is just better
Give it a try.
FF is sluggish to open first time and if there is an update, god help you.
Does Firefox support that yet??
- Add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profile-switc...
- Source: https://github.com/null-dev/firefox-profile-switcher
Why? Battery. Efficiency. On the new M1 Macbooks I can run Safari and be unplugged all day long. The increased power consumption and battery drain is noticeable when using FF and I can't make it all the way through the day. As far as extensions go, I have 1Blocker and it works well, it does block YouTube ads. The only things I miss are Tree Style Tabs and Container Tabs.
I also find performance on FF to be a lot worse than both Chrome and Safari. Firefox gets sluggish with many tabs open. JS-heavy sites will be jittery and laggy in Firefox, but buttery smooth in Chrome. Having 100 tabs open is sluggish in Firefox, but smooth in Chrome/Safari. In FF some sites will occasionally crash their tab, but they don't crash in Chrome/Safari. Etc.
Then there's the attitude of Mozilla constantly changing the interface, shoving things like Pocket or Mozilla VPN in my face. Sorry Firefox, but I've left and not coming back.
Probably 2/3rds of the bugs I get are specifically related to Safari while the other 1/3rd are just general issues that affect every browser.
It's insane to me that they provide no way to possibly resolve this without going out and spending money to buy their hardware.
=> https://WebKit.org/downloads
They’re not marketed as “Safari” because Safari is part of macOS, but it’s an official build of the same rendering engine.
I'm not even using Mac OS currently, but I don't think it's Apple's job to make your web app run like on Chrome when Google is calling the shots on so-called "web standards" with tens or hundreds of new features every quarter, with necessarily surprising results. Personally, I'd find it ok if you just label your app with "Best run on Chrome" because that's the reality the web has degraded to, and the actual problem of web apps. Or deploy as Electron app on Mac OS.
Maybe Apple could provide a Mac OS + Safari VM, like MS was doing (or still is doing?) when they were producing IE. But then the question is on which machine would you be able to run those VMs given Apple is heading towards ARM-only instruction set machines. Should Apple commit to produce x64 binaries for backward-compatible emulation on historic hardware? Personally, I do like Apple's innovation where the rest of the industry is lagging behind.
[1]: https://www.xda-developers.com/safari-for-windows-editorial/
It's funny to me how many people give one tiny reason and are like... Nope goodbye forever.
I use this to my advantage by using FF as my daily driver. I believe that if my site is fast on Firefox, then it's damn near fast enough for everyone.
So anecdata, but I wouldn’t rely on Chrome automatically working well if Firefox does.
I would be surprised if this is solely due to Firefox btw; I trust YT-owner Google about as far as I can toss the lot of them.
One thing I love about Chrome/Edge profiles is being able to different extensions enabled/disabled and configured differently across them.
For example, I have a "private" profile that always runs windscribe vpn and other privacy-heavy extensions that I might not necessarily want running on my "base" profile.
Though MS Teams often gets stuck in a reload loop inside a container, but Teams is a total trainwreck anyway.
Then evil Google emerges, Chrome got fat, FF trimmed up and went privacy-as-a-default, and I'm back on FF again for the better part of the last decade.
Opera had a look-in around 2008 but it didn't last long, although some of the features were nicely done, it just had a clunky feeling and the rendering was ... Different.
But it increasingly got more config-involving to make FF do what I wanted and maybe I overdid some settings/plugins and websites started to show incorrectly. Also the imho (much) too high salary for the CEO annoyed me (Mozilla is supposed to be "Internet for people, not profit").
Tried Brave and it was a nice experience after some initial cost to e.g. disable crypto. Some weeks ago I uninstalled FF on all my computers...
That being said, perhaps they should just piggyback off WebKit/Blink and save themselves a ton of resources.
[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/brave-software
I miss a few features, but nothing major.
Vivaldi works quite well as a thinner Chrome alternative IMO.
I went back to Firefox just because of Chrome api change against adblockers, and found it very usable and mature, but it's a tougher sell to my friends as the difference unnoticeable
Other browsers have a menu entry for this (File -> Open Location... in Chrome) so keyboard shortcuts can be switched in the Keyboard settings but Firefox doesn't have this. :|
I've tried various methods without success. If anyone had a working solution I'd be very grateful.
Here is a rule that does it (only for left command, but that's probably sufficient): https://genesy.github.io/karabiner-complex-rules-generator/#...
This might work: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/shortkeys/