The only thing stopping on mobile for last 4-5 years is Translations. Project Bergamot is incredibly successful, thanks again to Mozilla for investing in this! Open Translation is such an important thing, it's a game changer.
It went from beta to addon to bring built into desktop Firefox since the latest release. No words can express the amount of gratitude for this. Now, just waiting for it to be enabled in android builds.
Edit: Another not so highlighted feature of Firefox is: Mac always shows Chrome as "significantly consuming energy". But never for Firefox. I don't know what magic they did here.
Edit 2: Don't get me started on the benefits of containers, profiles and temporary containers as a default.
I struggled so long with having to use Chrome for translations on Android until I found out that my favourite translating extension works with mobile Firefox just perfectly. See [3] on how to install it in Firefox Beta (maybe this method or even the extension itself is already available in Firefox Release).
I wish Firefox mobile put tabs on the bottom of the screen so it's more accessible to switch back and forth. Also the two-column layout of tab viewer is a subpar experience IMO.
edit: Thanks to the replies, I figured 1) You can put the address bar at the bottom of screen 2) You can swipe on address bar to traverse through the tabs and 3) You can change the tab viewer layout to list view.
(Still, I wished there was an option to list tabs on the bottom like the way Chrome does in on Android.)
Hmmm. This wasn't happening to me on airplane mode last week. I opened a bunch of tabs on Wikipedia with a connection, and I was able to read them on the plane. It didn't destroy the data.
Is Firefox getting low memory killed on your device?
Hi, macOS user here. I know Firefox is great, and I'd love to use it (again), but Mozilla's decision to remove all user-facing, OS-level scripting capabilities from it (i.e., AppleScript) made me drop it a few years ago.
Getting anything out of FF on macOS, locally, is a major pain in the ass, actually. Try to grab the current URL from the active tab…
I think it's a super-solid browser that unfortunately doesn't give a shit about the platform it's running on. Irritatingly, it's fine with being a black box, so much more than the Chromiums are (for all their various faults).
+1 everything about firefox on macos just screams non-native. And I'm not just talking about minor things like context menus not behaving natively (maybe this was fixed recently, don't remember). There's major stuff that would seem to be trivial to implement that they just haven't bothered doing, like making sure the computer doesn't go to sleep when downloading files [1].
I have. (Web dev here.) I know it works but I don't want to set up all the things just to get some basic scripting capability.
My point is that there is zero local API surface for interacting with the application. That's the reason why tools like Keyboard Maestro support Chromium-based browsers but not Firefox. Which, in return, doesn't help Firefox's popularity, because it's nigh impossible to work with it from other apps.
Disclaimer: I am in a weird spot here, for I am serious about automation both as a consumer and as a software maker -- I write macOS automation tools myself, e.g. https://actions.work/browser-actions
I'd switch if they would support the File System Access API. It's a really convenient API and IMO as someone who has worked with it extensively, is very secure. It supposedly has privacy concerns, but I think it would primarily be used for FOSS and hobby projects since Bigco likes to store all the data on their servers anyways, that's a feature and not a bug for them. In fact, I think it would be a security/privacy improvement since it would encourage storing data locally (privacy) and is way more secure than asking users to install a native app (which has access to pretty much everything on the device and not just the directory/file a user gives it access to).
This! It is frustrating that web apps like draw.io can't save to file directly using Firefox. It gets old having to save a new file every time you make a change.
Beyond that, the File System API would also allow for streamed downloads directly from the web-app. This would allow for web-apps to generate large download files without having to store a copy on a database (external server or IndexedDB), which is a privacy improvement. The only way to do this now is by using convoluted techniques to essentially do a MITM to a fake endpoint [1].
> It supposedly has privacy concerns, but I think it would primarily be used for FOSS and hobby projects since Bigco likes to store all the data on their servers anyways
Privacy concerns don't only apply for entities of a particular size
I have Firefox 120 on Android, but I'm unable to search for my extension (IPvFoo) on the addons page. It works on Firefox Nightly 122, and previously worked when Nightly was at 120.
Maybe the launch still requires a server-side change?
I use Firefox at home and Chrome at work, and I can't imagine going back to Chrome or Chromium at home. Firefox in 2023 is in great shape as a piece of software.
Firefox could do some relatively small things to push it ahead of Chrome in some areas.
Bookmarks sorely need an overhaul. For instance, it'd be really nice if bookmarks could appear in a side-pane instead of a popup window, and allow the user to sort by chronological order. That would discourage me from keeping so many tabs open, which would be a good thing. Just having a dumping ground for interseting pages that I can easily access and search through would be a good thing. It would also be amazing if bookmarks, or something like bookmarks, could optionally capture and store the body text on the page for searching purposes or even personal archiving.
Searching tabs through the URL bar is pretty much broken and has been for years. Actually, I'm not sure that ever really worked. If I begin typing something that matches the title of a tab I have open, it rarely ever shows up as a URL bar suggestion. WTF? Is it really that hard to traverse a small array of tab titles and do a regex? I don't get it. What about full-text search across all the pages I have open? Can't do that either, apparently. Then again, who would actually want to do that? /s Ok, sorry for the sarcasm. Sort of. I mean this in the most constructive way possible. If I get time again, maybe I'll eventually fix these things in Firefox, but for now I hope someone at Mozilla reads this and decides it's worth fixing.
> it'd be really nice if bookmarks could appear in a side-pane instead of a popup window
Ctrl+B on linux/windows or I guess Command+B does exactly this.
> and allow the user to sort by chronological order
This is possible in the main bookmarks window. There is a sort by last modified option which should do the trick. It would indeed be nice to have this option in the sidebar.
The other features you mention are more appropriate for an extension.
Edit: I just found out that you can open the bookmarks window in a tab by visiting chrome://browser/content/places/places.xhtml
Started using Firefox when it was still Phoenix, never stopped. Few years ago when they made Quantum, Firefox is awesome performance-wise: I can have hundreds of tabs open (with +- 50-90 always active), with no crashing (before Quantum, Firefox needed restarting once in a while). Chrome simply cannot handle that and consumes so much RAM.
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The only thing stopping on mobile for last 4-5 years is Translations. Project Bergamot is incredibly successful, thanks again to Mozilla for investing in this! Open Translation is such an important thing, it's a game changer.
It went from beta to addon to bring built into desktop Firefox since the latest release. No words can express the amount of gratitude for this. Now, just waiting for it to be enabled in android builds.
Edit: Another not so highlighted feature of Firefox is: Mac always shows Chrome as "significantly consuming energy". But never for Firefox. I don't know what magic they did here.
Edit 2: Don't get me started on the benefits of containers, profiles and temporary containers as a default.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/traduzir-pagi... [2] https://github.com/FilipePS/Traduzir-paginas-web [3] https://www.ghacks.net/2022/10/20/firefox-beta-for-android-n...
I stopped liking it some time around v2. Maybe late 1.x series, don’t remember.
I left over a decade ago.
The only downside so far: the way you manage/view downloads isn't so great/intuitive.
edit: Thanks to the replies, I figured 1) You can put the address bar at the bottom of screen 2) You can swipe on address bar to traverse through the tabs and 3) You can change the tab viewer layout to list view.
(Still, I wished there was an option to list tabs on the bottom like the way Chrome does in on Android.)
I have to go through and close each tab one by one first. It's driving me up the wall.
Deleted Comment
Is Firefox getting low memory killed on your device?
Getting anything out of FF on macOS, locally, is a major pain in the ass, actually. Try to grab the current URL from the active tab…
I think it's a super-solid browser that unfortunately doesn't give a shit about the platform it's running on. Irritatingly, it's fine with being a black box, so much more than the Chromiums are (for all their various faults).
For example, years later Firefox still doesn’t support macOS password autofill api. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1650212
[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=825914
Seems like launching a browser tab with:
and navigating to duckduckgo.com: works.My point is that there is zero local API surface for interacting with the application. That's the reason why tools like Keyboard Maestro support Chromium-based browsers but not Firefox. Which, in return, doesn't help Firefox's popularity, because it's nigh impossible to work with it from other apps.
Disclaimer: I am in a weird spot here, for I am serious about automation both as a consumer and as a software maker -- I write macOS automation tools myself, e.g. https://actions.work/browser-actions
Beyond that, the File System API would also allow for streamed downloads directly from the web-app. This would allow for web-apps to generate large download files without having to store a copy on a database (external server or IndexedDB), which is a privacy improvement. The only way to do this now is by using convoluted techniques to essentially do a MITM to a fake endpoint [1].
[1] https://github.com/jimmywarting/StreamSaver.js
Privacy concerns don't only apply for entities of a particular size
Maybe the launch still requires a server-side change?
Firefox could do some relatively small things to push it ahead of Chrome in some areas.
Bookmarks sorely need an overhaul. For instance, it'd be really nice if bookmarks could appear in a side-pane instead of a popup window, and allow the user to sort by chronological order. That would discourage me from keeping so many tabs open, which would be a good thing. Just having a dumping ground for interseting pages that I can easily access and search through would be a good thing. It would also be amazing if bookmarks, or something like bookmarks, could optionally capture and store the body text on the page for searching purposes or even personal archiving.
Searching tabs through the URL bar is pretty much broken and has been for years. Actually, I'm not sure that ever really worked. If I begin typing something that matches the title of a tab I have open, it rarely ever shows up as a URL bar suggestion. WTF? Is it really that hard to traverse a small array of tab titles and do a regex? I don't get it. What about full-text search across all the pages I have open? Can't do that either, apparently. Then again, who would actually want to do that? /s Ok, sorry for the sarcasm. Sort of. I mean this in the most constructive way possible. If I get time again, maybe I'll eventually fix these things in Firefox, but for now I hope someone at Mozilla reads this and decides it's worth fixing.
Ctrl+B on linux/windows or I guess Command+B does exactly this.
> and allow the user to sort by chronological order
This is possible in the main bookmarks window. There is a sort by last modified option which should do the trick. It would indeed be nice to have this option in the sidebar.
The other features you mention are more appropriate for an extension.
Edit: I just found out that you can open the bookmarks window in a tab by visiting chrome://browser/content/places/places.xhtml