Currently the main attack facing Firefox is coming from advertising companies such as YouTube.
It’s crazy to think that some software engineers might actually intentionally degrade user experience on non-Google browsers or for people using adblockers. The mentality here is pretty disturbing: it’s almost like punishing users for making the choice to browse the web without ads, or without the surveillance mechanisms that come with them. Instead of building a better experience, these engineers seem to be focused on sabotaging alternatives in the name of profit or control. The kind of mindset behind this reeks of the same tactics we see in some ad networks or big tech companies - if we can’t convince you to opt in, we’ll make sure you’re inconvenienced or frustrated until you do.
It’s a dangerous precedent because it introduces a toxic game of cat-and-mouse, where the user is constantly playing defense, trying to protect themselves from deliberate misdirection. It’s not just an ethical concern, but also an issue of how we value user autonomy in the digital space.
For the hackers out there, this is a opportunity to dig into the JavaScript code responsible for this. There’s almost certainly some interesting obfuscation or odd behavior hiding in the code, and by pulling it apart, we can both understand how these tactics work and build tools or methods to counteract them. Let’s make sure the only thing that slows down the web is bad design or slow servers, not malicious code aimed at punishing the user for making their own choices.
It’s also laziness in software development practices. Developers (still) only develop and test with Chrome. My last job a bunch of us used Firefox as our main browser, which was hugely helpful.
As recently as yesterday I ran into an e-commerce site that didn’t work in Firefox (CPC Farnell, I’m looking at you), giving some obscure security error in multiple languages. I thought it might be caused by an extension at first (e.g., uBlock Origin) but, after trying various workarounds, I realised the site would only work in Chrome. It’s not OK.
To some extend this is also down to developer having to stop trying to be clever. I can understand having something look a little weird, maybe not align 100% correctly, but how to you actively go about building something like an e-commerce site that doesn't work in Firefox?
My guess is that the developers didn't actively try to do that, but used some framework that's all well an good for a SPA or something that needs to be more like a "real" application and applied that to something that just needs to be a bloody website. People need to stop doing that.
I randomly browsed the site with Firefox stable and I couldn't see any obvious malfunction. What exactly is not working? Is there a specific webpage where the malfunction can be seen?
maybe my rant is going to be a bit out of place here but here it goes anyways:
sometimes im glad im a technical person that can get away with a somewhat "healthy digital life" im basically immune to all the crap going on. i don't need to work too hard to meet my digital needs because im also a simple person.
but i really feel bad for the normies who have to deal with all the shit the tech industry throws at them. they don't even know what's wrong, they can't pinpoint what's giving them that extra stress, building up day by day when they use their devices, handle their info, or consume entertainment. like account exhaustion, confusing UI changes every day, or why they have to navigate a sea of crap just to unsubscribe. and why do they need a new computer for software that worked fine 15 years ago?
and don't even get me started on what they're doing to older people. cable companies for example are ripping them off with terrible TV boxes and nonsense plans. all their appliances need subscriptions or apps and have cryptic buttons. stores now feel like border control, straight out of a black mirror episode.
i can't imagine the frustration they must feel. it just feels backwards.
AFAICT, current tech industry culture is most like what I understood of the '80s stereotype of Wall Street bro culture: sociopathic unchecked-greed that will do whatever it can get away with.
I'm not saying this to complain, but to suggest a risk of what might come next.
So far, they've run wild, and taken over computers, the Internet, AI, and information technology in general.
What happens when there's a disruptive breakthrough in medical care, and the exploiters rush in with the same thinking?
Right now, one of the few firewalls against that might be that doctors generally have traditions of ethics, and some stature to hold their ground and influence things.
Earlier Internet didn't have the same formalized ethical traditions, but had a lot of very smart people people who had altruistic intentions, as well as suspicion of those who'd attempt to twist online potential. All those ethical people were pretty much swept away in a funding gold rush, suddenly with little to no influence over it.
(Google did grab some of those people, because Google said the right words, so the altruistic techies thought it was their people, but look what eventually happened even there.)
Just like virtually every IoT product and Web site violates every user, what happens if a medical gold rush (say, some kind of implant, or transformative process) means that what we thought was a bulwark of ethical practitioners, is easily bulldozed over, by investment money and culture. And then everyone's body is violated by the newly unchecked industry-wide socipathy, with no alternatives to even live?
The irony that Google, who made their bones on the "open web", is now attacking open web standards and trying to turn the internet into their own walled garden that they control every aspect of I hope is not lost on the people here.
The lesson here is that there's no such thing as Big Tech that is not hostile towards the people. They will say whatever people want to hear on their way to market dominance, but once there, they will mercilessly fuck those same people for every cent they can get.
(I would actually extend this to all large businesses in general, but we can start with tech.)
Once the love of "Microsoft Loves FOSS Again" fades away as they aim to enter the next phase, some other company (Cloudflare? Tailscale?) will receive all the developer love until yet again, people realize that for-profit companies don't actually have their best interest at heart.
> It’s crazy to think that some software engineers might actually intentionally degrade user experience on non-Google browsers or for people using adblockers.
Pretty sure that was happening back in a days when Opera was using own engine (Presto). They shipped browser with scripts to fix some popular sites. Actually Firefox also has some fixes for particular sites about:compat
Even market-dominant companies do this. Windows ships a bunch of backward compatibility patches. Graphics card drivers (especially Nvidia) wholesale replace shaders in popular games.
Also it boggles my mind that an advertising company (1) offers its own ad blocker to block competitors ads, and (2) circumscribes what ad blockers can do, and (3) nobody stops them... All when the FBI is saying you should run an ad blocker to avoid being the victim of a crime.
> Please don't use Chrome Mask on YouTube. It won't resolve any issues, and it will make your experience worse over time. If some issue got fixed after toggling Chrome Mask on, it most likely got fixed by the addon clearing the cache. But you can do that yourself, too, without the need for this addon.
Ehh. Youtube has been problematic for 3 or 4 Firefox versions now. If you leave a video open long enough memory usage skyrockets and the page becomes unresponsive.
Google isn't entitled to invade my privacy, harvest my data and waste my time with ads. Installing an adblocker isn't an act of entitlement, it's an act of self-defense.
Or we could just let you and other people like you subsidize it.
I've used Pocket Cast for a little over a year and a half. Just manually skipping through ads when I have my phone handy and they come on, the app reports I've apparently saved 14 hours of wasted time.
I've been blocking ads in Firefox for nearly 20 years and have been helping friends and family do it for nearly as long. I'm not going back because I should feel bad for some company with billions of dollars in profits that doesn't care about me or any of my privacy. I go the extra step further and use the banned from Chrome store extension, Ad Nauseum, to click on nearly every single blocked ad.
It's not the engineers making these decisions. They write the code they are told to write. Some middle manager / VP gets a promotion if they 'increase engagement', 'increase ad-spend', or some other hollow metric they chase. They are the ones deciding to send any 1-3 star ratings to customer support, and 4-5 ratings recorded as an actual rating. It's not about the users at all. It's about gaming the system for some manager's benefit.
I am not a person who normally moralizes to others, but I can say I have quit jobs where I found the work to be unethical or that company policies required me to bend my ethics.
The engineers implement all of the "features" that these management types decide on. I understand there are infinite engineers so eventually the features will get implemented, but I do not blame the managers alone for tasks done by unethical engineers who do not consider the effect of their work in the long run.
Mozilla is an advertising company now, and by many accounts Mozilla has been the main attack on Firefox for the many years even before they explicitly shifted to advertising.
> It’s crazy to think that some software engineers might actually intentionally degrade user experience on non-Google browsers or for people using adblockers.
Why would I, as a developer whose income stream is based on advertising, intentionally cater to users who are costing me money? There is a web based on hobbyist platforms like PeerTube and Mastodon, and you can clearly see why they haven't captured the masses.
There is no reason I, a user, will intentionally use your product when you fill it with ads that are, at best annoying, and at worst malware vectors.
You have your right to develop things your way, I have a right to say no thank you. Google, though, is so big it is basically saying "you don't have a choice." That's the problem and one that Google spends billions to enforce. They use the weight of the uninformed to apply pressure to the rest of us.
It was no better when Microsoft did it with IE, nor is it any way proper, now.
Because you cannot even control your ads to users? No one of you devs gets punishment for tracking users' personal information, pushing scam, phishing and malware to users, and now users are not even allowed to protect themselves? Users don't drop trackers and malwares to your servers, why do you drop trackers and malwares to users' machines?
Because you are working for a corporation that joins in World Wide Web Consortium, who literally says this in the Ethical Web Principles?
> People must be able to change web pages according to their needs. For example, people should be able to install style sheets, assistive browser extensions, and blockers of unwanted content or scripts. We will build features and write specifications that respect people's agency, and will create user agents to represent those preferences on the web user's behalf.
If you cannot maintain your service, paywall your features, not forcing malwares and trackers to users. No one forced you to serve 1080p, 1440p or 4K videos to everyone for free. You were the one literally "advertised" yourself as a "free" service at beginning, in order to hoard how many users you could. And now when you cannot control your own costs, you push malwares and trackers to users? The mentality of hoarding users with "baits" like "free" are the real poisons for the internet, for both of you and your users, NOT users who are doing exactly what World Wide Web Consortium tells them.
Where are all your MBAs in your corporations? The ones bragging about themselves on LinkedIn and now the only resolutions you can think of is pushing malwares and trackers to users? All of the finance classes in your college should be simplified to advertisement classes I guess? That would save a lot of resources for everyone.
The performance is way worse (which Google engineers will explain by some browser API being slower in Firefox and they haven't yet had time to optimize it, N years later [they did the same with Inbox + Firefox before]) and you'll also see more ads if you're not a paying user and using Firefox compared to if you used Google Chrome.
A lot of the reported issues with YouTube on Firefox (especially when paired with adblockers) involve things like increased page load times, UI elements not functioning as smoothly, or even video playback glitches. Some of this is due to JavaScript that’s intentionally designed to slow things down if you’re blocking ads or using a non-Google browser, as we’ve been discussing.
I ended up switching back from Firefox to Chrome after a few weeks because I found that if I had more than about 6 YouTube tabs opened, the YouTube interface would become very laggy. I blamed it on Firefox at the time but maybe it was something intentional by Google.
Empirical, but I have noscript and ublock enabled on Mozilla and whenever I go to youtube, it reloads three times in a laggy manner before it will let me type into the search. I check to see that I am not logged into gmail before using youtube.
I am happy to do all that, because I like my videos uninterrupted and my web experience lean.
>it’s almost like punishing users for making the choice to browse the web without ads, or without the surveillance mechanisms that come with them.
I don't think its "almost like", I think it "actually is", and that its intentional.
There is a perspective that is now prevalent in tech and business that users are good only as far as you can monetize them. Any concepts of respect or value outside of that have been discarded.
There used to be a sense that you needed to continue improving a product to keep charging the same or more for it. Now companies expect you to pay more every year while products are stagnating or being enshittified to extract higher profit margins on top of the increased prices they are charging.
Tech is now run by Business/Sales people, and every user is a statistic in a spreadsheet they are trying to extract the most money from for the least amount of investment.
Data collection and behaviour tracking is one side of the coin, but we really don't talk about why companies are willing to pay so much for that data or what they do with it... that's a conversation I think needs to be focused on.
What irks me even a bit more is that user experience is degraded even for logged in premium users. They just really don't want us using other browsers.
FF has been my dailer driver for a long time. But google blocking ublock origin was a deal breaker. I now only use chrome when a site is otherwise unusable.
> It’s crazy to think that some software engineers might actually intentionally degrade user experience on non-Google browsers
Is this actually a thing? As far as I'm aware all degradations in non-Chromium browsers have been unintentional bugs, either caused by a YouTube bug or a non-YouTube bug (i.e. in the browser or an extension) (note I'm specifically not commenting on the last portion of your comment regarding "for people using adblockers").
I unintentionally burned down a dozen houses because I was too incompetent to properly test the propane systems I was hooking up to houses, but only the ones built by competing contractors that didn't quite fit my way of doing things. How can you call that anything but unintentional and how can you possibly hold me accountable?
If you have a lot of technical churn, and only test perf on Chromium, then you could certainly claim that the result is "unintentional", but it's almost guaranteed based on that circumstance.
Google has a habit of intentionally delivering degraded versions of their services to not Chromium based browsers, particularly non-Chrome versions of their browsers (determined by User Agent).
There's a pretty famous example of Google deploying a specific variations of Youtube to Microsoft Edge browsers (back when Edge had it's own engine) and that specific variation would cause Edge's hardware acceleration to break. If you overrode the user agent to present as google chrome, the problematic invisible parts of the page disappeared and everything worked as intended. And what the specific problem HTML was would change just as fast as the MS team could roll out fixes. In effect they were playing a game of "break the browser" against their competitors to force them to apply temporary fixes that would then later have to be removed resulting in unnecessary code churn in their competitors' code bases.
Youtube intentionally degrades the user experience if you use Firefox, at least if you are using a proper ad blocker. And there really isn't much reason to use Firefox if you aren't also using uBlock. So by targeting the users of uBlock+Firefox, YouTube is aggressively degrading the experience of Firefox users. Things I've noticed include:
1. Every video defaults to the absolute lowest resolution (240 or 320) until I manually switch it to a higher setting.
2. Occasional (but fairly frequent) 30-second delay before a page loads (loads enough to show a black page, then just freezes for a while. During this delay, refreshing the page gives the same result.
3. Rarely, interstitial notice pages threatening vague consequences if I continue to use an ad blocker.
A while back nobody would believe that Google's search dominance could be disturbed... and now many have either switched away or stopped using search altogether. It takes me two clicks to set a search to DDG, Kagi or other and Google has lost this customer (often a family) forever.
So let them be arrogant and loose their YouTube customers over time too.
YouTube is totally bricked for me on Firefox, and the quality of use of Gmail + anything Google Drive related has degraded severely over the past ~year. Feels concerted.
freetube is a superior experience for consuming youtube content in every way, including not running google’s javascript so they cannot mess with the users in the same way. it has adblock and sponsorblock built in.
that said, firefox has been my browser of choice as a web dev for most of my career. (im old enough to have used netscape before that).
i remember having super powers compared to other devs with the help of firebug :-)
about youtube being totally unusable on firefox: is it just youtube/google being evil as is customary or also firefox having loads of memory leaks, as its usual too? (plenty of mem leak bugs with video/audio reported over the years, many very recent and still open)
I was about to write that YouTube works flawlessly for me in Firefox on Mac, but I just upgraded to a monster of a M4 MBP, so it's probably just overcoming these issues (malicious or otherwise) via brute force.
Firefox+uBO on Fedora/W11 here, with Firefox being my primary browser for close to 8 years. I only run in to an issues maybe once a year, where I have to pop open Edge/Chrome for some random edge cases to work. I've used Firefox on dodgy, overly burdened and hacked together systems with no issues that were memorable.
The only problem I really remember is at one point Firefox having issues under linux when NVIDIA was swapping their main driver over to the "open-sourced" version, there was some performance issues with decoding, not unusable - but it was resolved within a week.
Firefox + ublock origin seems to be the combo allowing me the best user experience with youtube. I have no idea what the previous poster is talking about really.
YouTube works perfectly on Firefox if you pay for YouTube Premium. Haven't noticed any bugs, if it leaks memory or something it's not noticeable on my machine.
That's how Chrome started. I remember it showing a banner with itself on /. which froze a page on scrolling over it for a few seconds. In all browsers except Chrome. Never understood this Chrome-go-go mob mentality that everyone had back then. It was literally an ads-network prodived crappy browser with just tabs and urlbar. It was fast, because it did nothing and had no cpu pressure from the banners. I wouldn't be surprised if it was "fast" all this time only due to special treatment from google, youtube and the corresponding ads/tracking scripts.
> It’s crazy to think that some software engineers might actually intentionally degrade user experience on non-Google browsers or for people using adblockers.
It's also crazy that we've let ad companies tell us that using a non-Google browser is the same thing as using an adblocker. It is not the same and it never was.
I use Firefox with no adblocker installed. I don't mind ads to an extent. I do mind tracking and find micro-targeting disgusting and creepy and evil, so I use Firefox, and I use its Enhanced Tracking Protection, and I only log in to the major Ad Companies like Google/YouTube, Amazon, Meta, others in dedicated containers that only are for their sites themselves. It's sad and annoying how many ad networks accuse me of having an adblocker just for using Firefox (or Safari) with relatively cleaner than average cookies.
Show me the old school of ads, the "Superbowl" broadest audience ads, the stuff that advertising companies "knew" for centuries of their existence as "common sense" that was the most useful way to make and sell ads before tech companies got involved and decided that user privacy was up for auction to the highest bidder. The way I see it: If an ad network can't do that and sees this as "adblocking", it deserves to die and something better needs to step up and eat their lunch. That includes Google and Meta's ad networks. That includes "Admiral" and any other network that buys ads from creepy "Temu".
Using an ad blocker (and not paying for a subscription in the case of YouTube) isn't the "user making their own choices", it's stealing content.
If a creator puts up ads or a paywall, it's because they want to be compensated. You should either respect their wish or simply not view their content.
I understand this perspective, but I disagree with it.
If someone wants to use a public space (i.e., the Internet), then they have accept that technological solutions to annoyances are also part of that.
Block it with a subscription if you don't accept this reality. But getting the benefits of a free, global audience doesn't entitle the artist to any means of revenue they choose, including what annoys and harms people.
It's like saying you have to walk the long way around to your exhibit through the concessions hall before seeing my display, when someone can just take a shortcut and skip that, and blaming them for doing so.
using an ad blocker is the ONLY option to avoid adds. You can pay evilcorp for a subscription/premium account/whatever and they'll still try to force you to watch 10 minutes of adds for a 1 minute video. Fuck them. We own them nothing.
Banksy said it better:
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs.
> it’s almost like punishing users for making the choice to browse the web without ads
AKA depriving content creators of their revenue. If you're saying their content isn't good enough to pay for directly, and isn't good enough to endure ads in order to engage, then why are you trying to consume it? Look elsewhere.
> or without the surveillance mechanisms that come with them
I agree with this depending on what you mean by "surveillance." There's a minimum amount of "surveillance" required to measure ad penetration and effectiveness and essentially provide assurance to advertisers that they aren't getting scammed. There's a whole other level of "surveillance" where the ad network (usually Google) is building a dossier on all your interests and every site you've ever visited. Some of that information enables targeted advertising, but you should always retain the right to opt-out, and see all the data that's been collected on you and edit it. You should also be able to opt-in to that data being sold and getting a cut of the proceeds, should you so desire. I wouldn't, but I could imagine some people would.
Bottom line - people gotta make money to eat and oftentimes they're not giving away content for free. If you don't want to pay for it - that's your choice as a user: pay and consume or don't pay and move on. Calling on hackers to figure out a way to steal it may not have a future that works out to your liking.
It's the closest we have to a browser not controlled by the corporate giants.
Sometimes Mozilla makes unpopular choices and people raise a stink about it, but we do that because we hold them to a higher standard. With Microsoft and Google, we just expect them to Do More Evil, with Mozilla we expect Good and will complain loudly when they fail to uphold our principles, and we recommend Firefox because we feel like it is possible to expect Good from them.
More like "we'll complain all the time regardless of what they do by repeating the same talking points over and over again".
> How much do they pay the CEO? Why aren't they exploring other funding options? At the same time, why are they "wasting resoures" working on other things!? They should exclusively work on Firefox!
> ...and that's why I stick to this Chromium fork with its own digital advertising service and its own cryptocurrency, but you can easily switch it off!
Of all the ways to critique Brave, consider Mozilla's exploration of "other funding options" has recently been digital advertising. They purchased two advertising companies - Anonym[0] and FakeSpot - and have integrated FakeSpot directly into Firefox. Mozilla has an ad sales division [1]. Mozilla even added extra telemetry just for advertisers[2].
"Talking points" is from the same land as "gotcha questions." "Talking points" are the points that people are talking about that you'd prefer not to talk about because you don't have good answers for. So you pretend like repeating an unanswered question is an dirty underhanded plot.
> How much do they pay the CEO? Why aren't they exploring other funding options? At the same time, why are they "wasting resoures" working on other things!? They should exclusively work on Firefox!
This isn't a quote. Don't make up quotes. This is you putting words in people's mouths, and choosing the ones that allow you to reply with something about Brave. At the same time, you're excusing Firefox for doing things because Brave does similar things. The people switching to for-profit Brave from Firefox would have prefer a non-profit, user-focused Firefox, but have been pushed to the point where they don't see any moral difference between the two, so they might as well experiment. When Firefox was innovating, it was the founder of Brave that was running it.
Most Firefox haters use Firefox. They just wish that it wasn't so bad, that it wasn't so much torture to put it into a usable state, and that the developers weren't actively fighting the users to keep them from putting it in that state, rather than centering on the users. They largely blame this on the company, Google, who subsidizes Firefox while competing with it. And on the company, Mozilla, that sucks all of that subsidy up in salaries, while seemingly neglecting the browser.
I almost never use Chrome-based browsers, but recently was forced because debug points were simply not working on Firefox. You can strawman all you want, there are unfortunately technical points where Google is abusing its position to force its standards, but the primary architects of Firefox downfall is Mozilla.
For the record, I used a Firefox phone for many years (and yes it did cause me a lot of problems), and remember vividly when they announced a luxury Firefox phone about one week before killing the project.
Mozilla does plenty of really useful things! Super happy with Firefox as my primary browser. Shout-out to MDN as well for being an excellent reference on all things web: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/
Yes, pretty much. While I don't concur with Mozilla 100% of the time, it is still the only major browser that I can have control (e.g.: by still having Manifest V2 extensions available). Also most of controversial choices in Firefox can be disabled or changed in `about:config`.
I tried switching to Safari 2-3 years back after getting a new M1 Air . After using it for a few hours, websites would just stop working and only fix was to restart the browser. After a few times, I gave up and went back to Firefox.
I find Safari on iOS to be nice, and Safari on macOS to be horrifically slow and inadequate, even on the newest M-series processors. It's like two different worlds, you can really tell that all of the engineering time is going into iOS because that's where all the money is at.
I find the UI atrocious and primitive. The extensions are ManifestV3 alike and worse yet, pollute /Applications (why?!). I don't particular find Safari fast, it uses just as much memory as any other browser, and all the claims about power efficiency are never backed by any numbers, just like /r/macos parroting "macOS good cus UNIX" while not understanding there have been plenty of shit UNIX distributions.
Plus the incompatibility with various sites... Just sticking with FF. I can certainly appreciate an OS-integrated browser, though. It makes life simpler for users and if you have the full Apple ecosystem, the tab sync is useful.
I have been using mozilla for _years_ it got shit, then better, then shit, and now its close enough.
The thing I _Love_ is container tabs. I can isolate empires by using container tabs to sandbox cookies and other web state. This means that ebay doesn't change my adverts to the last thing I searched on every site, and autoplay embedded youtube doesn't fuck up my video recommendations.
It means I can hide my work gmail from my home, and separate search histories (although thats less relevant now with AI.)
lastly, being able to scroll left and right on my tabs, rather than new ones being unaccesable is great.
Finally, it only took them 10 years to get around to updating that decades old UI. Wonder which other decade old UI parts are they gonna tackle next? ooh, will they finally do something about Library and the whole bookmarks/history menu/sidebar/window mess? It's a little insane how so much time has passed and so many versions were released, and some interface stuff still remains unpolished and disparate. Firefox simply can't get it together on that front.
For tab containers, maybe there's a "good reason" that no other browser has that feature, cause it is confusing both as a concept and in use, and doesn't separate the rest of the stuff (or even the stuff in intends to separate when it's cumbersome and peculiar to use). Like, shared history, or inability to have separate extensions, defeats many of the purposes people use profiles for - which is an actual complete separation of things.
OTOH Vivaldi guys said that much as they'd like to implement this, they're unable to due to some architectural issues with Blink. So basically no Blink browser will have that unless and until Google decides to do it in Chrome - which seems unlikely given their incentives.
I'd been using Firefox for my work device for years but I only discovered containers and how awesome they are. My company was acquired and we still use microsoft accounts for different purposes. Jira works with this account, but sharepoint works with that account. Can't be logged in with the same azure account at the same time, but with containers, I can. It's great.
I have 4 Microsoft accounts I use regularly for work. I also do some consulting and often end up with credentials provisioned at a client (don't get me started on this).
It is so convenient to have container tabs. All my extensions are available in new containers, unlike multiple Chromium profiles (or Firefox profiles).
Container tabs also pair very well with Simple Tab Groups, which allow you to pin a container to a group, so that everything for one account ends up in one place.
I live in the AWS console for work and am constantly switching between accounts. The "AWS SSO Containers" extension has been a godsend for me. I used to use Chrome profiles for this but it was very clunky and only allowed access to a limited number of accounts at a time. Firefox container tabs allow me to access simultaneously all of my AWS accounts, in one window, automatically. It literally made my work life better.
That said, it's telling that it's so difficult to disable auto-playing video entirely in Firefox. I'm not convinced that a profit motive is NOT the reason behind that (it is possible but requires a bunch of about:config changes; it's not exposed in the settings UI and that smells sinister)
Unfortunately at work I must use Chrome without an adblocker. It's pretty terrible.
My personal experience: I use Firefox because all its issues are fixable either via about:config or extensions. It's not slow or crashing.
- Embedded telemetry can be disabled via about:config
- Running ublock origin in advanced mode blocks all third party domains, websites are often broken but easily fixable
- Cookie Autodelete deletes a website cookie after the tab closes
- Decentraleyes as a local CDN to avoid external requests for common libraries
- Redirector to change request to alternative no tracking frontends for famous websites
- Simple tab groups keep tabs organized by "job"
- Bitwarden to manage passwords
I rarely encounter websites that are not working and I just switch to another website, and I use Vivaldi for things like meet where I want things to "just work".
I've been on Firefox Dev Edition for Mac for the last 4 years I think, and I can't remember more than 1 or 2 websites that didn't work correctly on it. It's been flawless, more battery and memory efficient than Chrome, less finicky and problematic than Safari, and with all the extensions that I need.
I seriously don't see any disadvantage in picking Firefox over Chrome. I still have Chrome around if any website requires it specifically, but I haven't launched it in ages.
There were a few Chrome extensions that weren't there on Firefox [1] [2] but I fixed that _easily_ by getting the crx file, unpacking it, then adding the https://github.com/mozilla/webextension-polyfill to the extension to make it cross-browser.
It's easy enough to make an extension work on both Firefox and Chrome, I've done it myself with SideHN (https://github.com/alin23/sidehn), but I guess Firefox is not really in the mind of Chrome extension devs.
It was true for me, specifically for my workflow, the websites I use and how I leave some specific tabs in the background.
I’ve used Chrome for many years before Firefox and it was always prioritizing JS responsiveness even when the app was in the background and not needed, so it consumed CPU cycles and battery power needlessly. I see now that Chrome enables a Low Power mode by default on battery and it’s unusable as scrolling gets janky. I don’t know if the overall experience has gotten better in the last year on Chrome.
Not sure what’s different about memory though, but Chrome always appeared like a memory hog when I tested both browser side by side on the same set of websites and same few extensions. Could be that it just caches more and that’s benefitting responsiveness
Some days ago I was wondering how it works and was kinda surprised just now that this is from mozilla itself. Reading the project Readme makes this even straight up sound like a privacy addon. I wonder why this is not natively supported.
Wow, so the music stops when I do something else because the site developer wants me to download their app, so they detect a switch and turn off the video? Diabolical.
I really want to switch to Firefox but cannot because it doesn't sync bookmark favicons.
My bookmarks bar is filled with bookmarks without names that I can recognize by the icons. I refuse to re-visit every bookmark when I login from a new PC, which is often.
Every other browser sync solution has this feature. Firefox insists on not implementing it because what, it's too much data to sync? I'd pay for it if it was a premium feature.
If anyone has a browser agnostic bookmark syncing solution that can sync the favicons, let me know.
I do this as well i.e delete the name of a bookmark using only it's favicon to identify it.
When you login to Firefox. Just right click your bookmarks and hit open all in new tabs. It will open all 500+ tabs. Leave it for a few minutes all all the favicons will be loaded.
The thing is that Firefox has SO MANY papercuts in this category. They all seem minor but they all represent a deal breaker for one user or another. For me it's the address bar on the bottom on mobile (ludicrous decision, whoever came up with that should leave the industry and I mean that) and their refusal to auto fill credit cards on mobile even though I know it works on desktop and I know it works in other regions.
Firefox badly needs someone who gives a shit about user experience.
In the settings on Firefox mobile, under Customize, you can choose between address bar on the top or on the bottom of the screen.
Personally I keep it at the bottom, as it's much closer to my thumbs and also the keyboard, so I don't have to adjust my hands to type in a url or search query.
I switched from Brave to Vivaldi as my second browser on Android because it's still stuck in the 2010's with it's address bar at the top with no ability to change it. The most sold phones for the last half decade have all been 5-6 inches, and unless you have gigantic hands you need to reposition your hand in order to go from typing on the keyboard to the bottom to tapping the URL bar, so I'm on the other side of the fence, very glad that they default to the bottom URL bar and actually have the option to change it to the top for those that want it.
> I refuse to re-visit every bookmark when I login from a new PC, which is often.
Why not? How often?
This should take literally 5s using the bookmark manager, right click on "Bookmarks Toolbar", "Open All Bookmarks". Then some more to load the websites I guess.
I have thousands of bookmarks that also have names but I would still like to see the icons before clicking the link. Sometimes the name doesn't hint at what kind of resource the bookmark was at a glance. Is it a youtube video, is it an article?
I already have access to that information at the time of bookmarking. I don't want to lose it and then have to get it again.
I delete the name on purpose so I can utilize the horizontal space the bookmarks bar provides more effectively.
I name the bookmarks that are not directly on the bar but live in other folders. However I would still not want to lose that bit of metadata. Icons hint at what site the resource is from at a glance.
It's extremely outdated now because the developer has abandoned it. I have the vague impression it's lying about the chromium version it's based on as well, or something related to that.
Readit News
It’s crazy to think that some software engineers might actually intentionally degrade user experience on non-Google browsers or for people using adblockers. The mentality here is pretty disturbing: it’s almost like punishing users for making the choice to browse the web without ads, or without the surveillance mechanisms that come with them. Instead of building a better experience, these engineers seem to be focused on sabotaging alternatives in the name of profit or control. The kind of mindset behind this reeks of the same tactics we see in some ad networks or big tech companies - if we can’t convince you to opt in, we’ll make sure you’re inconvenienced or frustrated until you do.
It’s a dangerous precedent because it introduces a toxic game of cat-and-mouse, where the user is constantly playing defense, trying to protect themselves from deliberate misdirection. It’s not just an ethical concern, but also an issue of how we value user autonomy in the digital space.
For the hackers out there, this is a opportunity to dig into the JavaScript code responsible for this. There’s almost certainly some interesting obfuscation or odd behavior hiding in the code, and by pulling it apart, we can both understand how these tactics work and build tools or methods to counteract them. Let’s make sure the only thing that slows down the web is bad design or slow servers, not malicious code aimed at punishing the user for making their own choices.
I would add to the list the Linux Foundation too.
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/linux-foundation-annou...
As recently as yesterday I ran into an e-commerce site that didn’t work in Firefox (CPC Farnell, I’m looking at you), giving some obscure security error in multiple languages. I thought it might be caused by an extension at first (e.g., uBlock Origin) but, after trying various workarounds, I realised the site would only work in Chrome. It’s not OK.
Developers like myself are the thread that Firefox keeps hanging on by.
My guess is that the developers didn't actively try to do that, but used some framework that's all well an good for a SPA or something that needs to be more like a "real" application and applied that to something that just needs to be a bloody website. People need to stop doing that.
I've heard this before...
Oh yeah, replace Chrome with IE and you've got the same thing happening again.
sometimes im glad im a technical person that can get away with a somewhat "healthy digital life" im basically immune to all the crap going on. i don't need to work too hard to meet my digital needs because im also a simple person. but i really feel bad for the normies who have to deal with all the shit the tech industry throws at them. they don't even know what's wrong, they can't pinpoint what's giving them that extra stress, building up day by day when they use their devices, handle their info, or consume entertainment. like account exhaustion, confusing UI changes every day, or why they have to navigate a sea of crap just to unsubscribe. and why do they need a new computer for software that worked fine 15 years ago? and don't even get me started on what they're doing to older people. cable companies for example are ripping them off with terrible TV boxes and nonsense plans. all their appliances need subscriptions or apps and have cryptic buttons. stores now feel like border control, straight out of a black mirror episode. i can't imagine the frustration they must feel. it just feels backwards.
I'm not saying this to complain, but to suggest a risk of what might come next.
So far, they've run wild, and taken over computers, the Internet, AI, and information technology in general.
What happens when there's a disruptive breakthrough in medical care, and the exploiters rush in with the same thinking?
Right now, one of the few firewalls against that might be that doctors generally have traditions of ethics, and some stature to hold their ground and influence things.
Earlier Internet didn't have the same formalized ethical traditions, but had a lot of very smart people people who had altruistic intentions, as well as suspicion of those who'd attempt to twist online potential. All those ethical people were pretty much swept away in a funding gold rush, suddenly with little to no influence over it.
(Google did grab some of those people, because Google said the right words, so the altruistic techies thought it was their people, but look what eventually happened even there.)
Just like virtually every IoT product and Web site violates every user, what happens if a medical gold rush (say, some kind of implant, or transformative process) means that what we thought was a bulwark of ethical practitioners, is easily bulldozed over, by investment money and culture. And then everyone's body is violated by the newly unchecked industry-wide socipathy, with no alternatives to even live?
(I would actually extend this to all large businesses in general, but we can start with tech.)
Rinse and repeat forever...
Pretty sure that was happening back in a days when Opera was using own engine (Presto). They shipped browser with scripts to fix some popular sites. Actually Firefox also has some fixes for particular sites about:compat
While I agree; between an up-to-date uBlock Origin and https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/chrome-mask YT is quite usable.
Long term I'm more worried by Mozilla leadership than Google shenanigans.
> Please don't use Chrome Mask on YouTube. It won't resolve any issues, and it will make your experience worse over time. If some issue got fixed after toggling Chrome Mask on, it most likely got fixed by the addon clearing the cache. But you can do that yourself, too, without the need for this addon.
Supposedly it's just been fixed?
https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1i182q7/firefox_13...
I've used Pocket Cast for a little over a year and a half. Just manually skipping through ads when I have my phone handy and they come on, the app reports I've apparently saved 14 hours of wasted time.
I've been blocking ads in Firefox for nearly 20 years and have been helping friends and family do it for nearly as long. I'm not going back because I should feel bad for some company with billions of dollars in profits that doesn't care about me or any of my privacy. I go the extra step further and use the banned from Chrome store extension, Ad Nauseum, to click on nearly every single blocked ad.
Dead Comment
The engineers implement all of the "features" that these management types decide on. I understand there are infinite engineers so eventually the features will get implemented, but I do not blame the managers alone for tasks done by unethical engineers who do not consider the effect of their work in the long run.
Mozilla is an advertising company now, and by many accounts Mozilla has been the main attack on Firefox for the many years even before they explicitly shifted to advertising.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/advertising/
https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/1e0p62h/mozilla_i...
Why would I, as a developer whose income stream is based on advertising, intentionally cater to users who are costing me money? There is a web based on hobbyist platforms like PeerTube and Mastodon, and you can clearly see why they haven't captured the masses.
You have your right to develop things your way, I have a right to say no thank you. Google, though, is so big it is basically saying "you don't have a choice." That's the problem and one that Google spends billions to enforce. They use the weight of the uninformed to apply pressure to the rest of us.
It was no better when Microsoft did it with IE, nor is it any way proper, now.
Why would I, as a doctor whose income stream is based on people getting sick, intentionally support policies that make people healthier
Thank goodness you're not a doctor.
Because you are working for a corporation that joins in World Wide Web Consortium, who literally says this in the Ethical Web Principles?
> People must be able to change web pages according to their needs. For example, people should be able to install style sheets, assistive browser extensions, and blockers of unwanted content or scripts. We will build features and write specifications that respect people's agency, and will create user agents to represent those preferences on the web user's behalf.
https://www.w3.org/TR/ethical-web-principles/#render
If you cannot maintain your service, paywall your features, not forcing malwares and trackers to users. No one forced you to serve 1080p, 1440p or 4K videos to everyone for free. You were the one literally "advertised" yourself as a "free" service at beginning, in order to hoard how many users you could. And now when you cannot control your own costs, you push malwares and trackers to users? The mentality of hoarding users with "baits" like "free" are the real poisons for the internet, for both of you and your users, NOT users who are doing exactly what World Wide Web Consortium tells them.
Where are all your MBAs in your corporations? The ones bragging about themselves on LinkedIn and now the only resolutions you can think of is pushing malwares and trackers to users? All of the finance classes in your college should be simplified to advertisement classes I guess? That would save a lot of resources for everyone.
Dead Comment
Asked as on mobile I run as few apps as possible, so use the web version. Haven't seen any issues.
The performance is way worse (which Google engineers will explain by some browser API being slower in Firefox and they haven't yet had time to optimize it, N years later [they did the same with Inbox + Firefox before]) and you'll also see more ads if you're not a paying user and using Firefox compared to if you used Google Chrome.
I think what's actually happening is that they are targeting uBlock + Firefox on desktop for punishment.
On Android, Firefox has much more extensions, such adblockers.
FUD
I am happy to do all that, because I like my videos uninterrupted and my web experience lean.
I don't think its "almost like", I think it "actually is", and that its intentional.
There is a perspective that is now prevalent in tech and business that users are good only as far as you can monetize them. Any concepts of respect or value outside of that have been discarded.
There used to be a sense that you needed to continue improving a product to keep charging the same or more for it. Now companies expect you to pay more every year while products are stagnating or being enshittified to extract higher profit margins on top of the increased prices they are charging.
Tech is now run by Business/Sales people, and every user is a statistic in a spreadsheet they are trying to extract the most money from for the least amount of investment.
Data collection and behaviour tracking is one side of the coin, but we really don't talk about why companies are willing to pay so much for that data or what they do with it... that's a conversation I think needs to be focused on.
FF has been my dailer driver for a long time. But google blocking ublock origin was a deal breaker. I now only use chrome when a site is otherwise unusable.
Is this actually a thing? As far as I'm aware all degradations in non-Chromium browsers have been unintentional bugs, either caused by a YouTube bug or a non-YouTube bug (i.e. in the browser or an extension) (note I'm specifically not commenting on the last portion of your comment regarding "for people using adblockers").
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Can you explain this more? I don't understand what this means.
There's a pretty famous example of Google deploying a specific variations of Youtube to Microsoft Edge browsers (back when Edge had it's own engine) and that specific variation would cause Edge's hardware acceleration to break. If you overrode the user agent to present as google chrome, the problematic invisible parts of the page disappeared and everything worked as intended. And what the specific problem HTML was would change just as fast as the MS team could roll out fixes. In effect they were playing a game of "break the browser" against their competitors to force them to apply temporary fixes that would then later have to be removed resulting in unnecessary code churn in their competitors' code bases.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697824
So let them be arrogant and loose their YouTube customers over time too.
https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/wo...
Edit:Wrong year - that was 2020 this is 2024
https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/wo...
It's such an unprecedented amount of money that it corrupts everything else and distorts the market.
that said, firefox has been my browser of choice as a web dev for most of my career. (im old enough to have used netscape before that).
i remember having super powers compared to other devs with the help of firebug :-)
The only problem I really remember is at one point Firefox having issues under linux when NVIDIA was swapping their main driver over to the "open-sourced" version, there was some performance issues with decoding, not unusable - but it was resolved within a week.
But, this is just my experience.
"Precedent", yeah.
Eventually competitors caught up.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/V8_(JavaScript_engine)
Managers.
It's also crazy that we've let ad companies tell us that using a non-Google browser is the same thing as using an adblocker. It is not the same and it never was.
I use Firefox with no adblocker installed. I don't mind ads to an extent. I do mind tracking and find micro-targeting disgusting and creepy and evil, so I use Firefox, and I use its Enhanced Tracking Protection, and I only log in to the major Ad Companies like Google/YouTube, Amazon, Meta, others in dedicated containers that only are for their sites themselves. It's sad and annoying how many ad networks accuse me of having an adblocker just for using Firefox (or Safari) with relatively cleaner than average cookies.
Show me the old school of ads, the "Superbowl" broadest audience ads, the stuff that advertising companies "knew" for centuries of their existence as "common sense" that was the most useful way to make and sell ads before tech companies got involved and decided that user privacy was up for auction to the highest bidder. The way I see it: If an ad network can't do that and sees this as "adblocking", it deserves to die and something better needs to step up and eat their lunch. That includes Google and Meta's ad networks. That includes "Admiral" and any other network that buys ads from creepy "Temu".
Dead Comment
If a creator puts up ads or a paywall, it's because they want to be compensated. You should either respect their wish or simply not view their content.
If someone wants to use a public space (i.e., the Internet), then they have accept that technological solutions to annoyances are also part of that.
Block it with a subscription if you don't accept this reality. But getting the benefits of a free, global audience doesn't entitle the artist to any means of revenue they choose, including what annoys and harms people.
It's like saying you have to walk the long way around to your exhibit through the concessions hall before seeing my display, when someone can just take a shortcut and skip that, and blaming them for doing so.
Banksy said it better:
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs.
YT might want me to do something else, but I am not bound by their wishes.
AKA depriving content creators of their revenue. If you're saying their content isn't good enough to pay for directly, and isn't good enough to endure ads in order to engage, then why are you trying to consume it? Look elsewhere.
> or without the surveillance mechanisms that come with them
I agree with this depending on what you mean by "surveillance." There's a minimum amount of "surveillance" required to measure ad penetration and effectiveness and essentially provide assurance to advertisers that they aren't getting scammed. There's a whole other level of "surveillance" where the ad network (usually Google) is building a dossier on all your interests and every site you've ever visited. Some of that information enables targeted advertising, but you should always retain the right to opt-out, and see all the data that's been collected on you and edit it. You should also be able to opt-in to that data being sold and getting a cut of the proceeds, should you so desire. I wouldn't, but I could imagine some people would.
Bottom line - people gotta make money to eat and oftentimes they're not giving away content for free. If you don't want to pay for it - that's your choice as a user: pay and consume or don't pay and move on. Calling on hackers to figure out a way to steal it may not have a future that works out to your liking.
> How much do they pay the CEO? Why aren't they exploring other funding options? At the same time, why are they "wasting resoures" working on other things!? They should exclusively work on Firefox!
> ...and that's why I stick to this Chromium fork with its own digital advertising service and its own cryptocurrency, but you can easily switch it off!
[0] https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/18/mozilla_buys_anonym_b...
[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/advertising/formats/
[2] https://www.privacyguides.org/articles/2024/07/14/mozilla-di...
"Talking points" is from the same land as "gotcha questions." "Talking points" are the points that people are talking about that you'd prefer not to talk about because you don't have good answers for. So you pretend like repeating an unanswered question is an dirty underhanded plot.
> How much do they pay the CEO? Why aren't they exploring other funding options? At the same time, why are they "wasting resoures" working on other things!? They should exclusively work on Firefox!
This isn't a quote. Don't make up quotes. This is you putting words in people's mouths, and choosing the ones that allow you to reply with something about Brave. At the same time, you're excusing Firefox for doing things because Brave does similar things. The people switching to for-profit Brave from Firefox would have prefer a non-profit, user-focused Firefox, but have been pushed to the point where they don't see any moral difference between the two, so they might as well experiment. When Firefox was innovating, it was the founder of Brave that was running it.
Most Firefox haters use Firefox. They just wish that it wasn't so bad, that it wasn't so much torture to put it into a usable state, and that the developers weren't actively fighting the users to keep them from putting it in that state, rather than centering on the users. They largely blame this on the company, Google, who subsidizes Firefox while competing with it. And on the company, Mozilla, that sucks all of that subsidy up in salaries, while seemingly neglecting the browser.
For the record, I used a Firefox phone for many years (and yes it did cause me a lot of problems), and remember vividly when they announced a luxury Firefox phone about one week before killing the project.
> With Microsoft and Google, we just expect them to Do More Evil, with Mozilla we expect Good
And with Safari, a loathsome browser that's intent on recreating the IE6 conditions of yore, we give it a free pass.
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Plus the incompatibility with various sites... Just sticking with FF. I can certainly appreciate an OS-integrated browser, though. It makes life simpler for users and if you have the full Apple ecosystem, the tab sync is useful.
Good job. Smart tactics.
Sometimes? They tend to hit the mark of bad decisions more often than not
Most good decisions don't get a full press cycle (because they are boring).
The thing I _Love_ is container tabs. I can isolate empires by using container tabs to sandbox cookies and other web state. This means that ebay doesn't change my adverts to the last thing I searched on every site, and autoplay embedded youtube doesn't fuck up my video recommendations.
It means I can hide my work gmail from my home, and separate search histories (although thats less relevant now with AI.)
lastly, being able to scroll left and right on my tabs, rather than new ones being unaccesable is great.
But yes, people should learn about Multi-Account Containers if they haven't, yet. It's a killer feature that no other browser has. This is the extension to enable the UI for it: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/multi-account-conta...
Oh wow! I totally missed this. Thank for sharing!
I've been using multiple browsers for as long as I can remember. But always liked Firefox ocer the others. Especially now with container tabs.
And the only thing I keep wishing for, has been a better experience with profile management, but also running the browser in different profiles.
I'm really looking forward for these updates
For tab containers, maybe there's a "good reason" that no other browser has that feature, cause it is confusing both as a concept and in use, and doesn't separate the rest of the stuff (or even the stuff in intends to separate when it's cumbersome and peculiar to use). Like, shared history, or inability to have separate extensions, defeats many of the purposes people use profiles for - which is an actual complete separation of things.
OTOH Vivaldi guys said that much as they'd like to implement this, they're unable to due to some architectural issues with Blink. So basically no Blink browser will have that unless and until Google decides to do it in Chrome - which seems unlikely given their incentives.
It is so convenient to have container tabs. All my extensions are available in new containers, unlike multiple Chromium profiles (or Firefox profiles).
Container tabs also pair very well with Simple Tab Groups, which allow you to pin a container to a group, so that everything for one account ends up in one place.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/aws-sso-conta...
Recently, many sites won't fix the viewport horizontally. Why such a major bug happens is baffling
That said, it's telling that it's so difficult to disable auto-playing video entirely in Firefox. I'm not convinced that a profit motive is NOT the reason behind that (it is possible but requires a bunch of about:config changes; it's not exposed in the settings UI and that smells sinister)
Unfortunately at work I must use Chrome without an adblocker. It's pretty terrible.
- Embedded telemetry can be disabled via about:config - Running ublock origin in advanced mode blocks all third party domains, websites are often broken but easily fixable - Cookie Autodelete deletes a website cookie after the tab closes - Decentraleyes as a local CDN to avoid external requests for common libraries - Redirector to change request to alternative no tracking frontends for famous websites - Simple tab groups keep tabs organized by "job" - Bitwarden to manage passwords
I rarely encounter websites that are not working and I just switch to another website, and I use Vivaldi for things like meet where I want things to "just work".
I seriously don't see any disadvantage in picking Firefox over Chrome. I still have Chrome around if any website requires it specifically, but I haven't launched it in ages.
There were a few Chrome extensions that weren't there on Firefox [1] [2] but I fixed that _easily_ by getting the crx file, unpacking it, then adding the https://github.com/mozilla/webextension-polyfill to the extension to make it cross-browser.
It's easy enough to make an extension work on both Firefox and Chrome, I've done it myself with SideHN (https://github.com/alin23/sidehn), but I guess Firefox is not really in the mind of Chrome extension devs.
[1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/anchor-headings/lgg...
[2] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/xpath-helper/hgimno...
Is that actually true?
I’ve used Chrome for many years before Firefox and it was always prioritizing JS responsiveness even when the app was in the background and not needed, so it consumed CPU cycles and battery power needlessly. I see now that Chrome enables a Low Power mode by default on battery and it’s unusable as scrolling gets janky. I don’t know if the overall experience has gotten better in the last year on Chrome.
Not sure what’s different about memory though, but Chrome always appeared like a memory hog when I tested both browser side by side on the same set of websites and same few extensions. Could be that it just caches more and that’s benefitting responsiveness
Some days ago I was wondering how it works and was kinda surprised just now that this is from mozilla itself. Reading the project Readme makes this even straight up sound like a privacy addon. I wonder why this is not natively supported.
I'll have to try out that extension.
My bookmarks bar is filled with bookmarks without names that I can recognize by the icons. I refuse to re-visit every bookmark when I login from a new PC, which is often.
This has been requested for 17 years: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=428378
Every other browser sync solution has this feature. Firefox insists on not implementing it because what, it's too much data to sync? I'd pay for it if it was a premium feature.
If anyone has a browser agnostic bookmark syncing solution that can sync the favicons, let me know.
When you login to Firefox. Just right click your bookmarks and hit open all in new tabs. It will open all 500+ tabs. Leave it for a few minutes all all the favicons will be loaded.
Firefox badly needs someone who gives a shit about user experience.
Personally I keep it at the bottom, as it's much closer to my thumbs and also the keyboard, so I don't have to adjust my hands to type in a url or search query.
Why not? How often?
This should take literally 5s using the bookmark manager, right click on "Bookmarks Toolbar", "Open All Bookmarks". Then some more to load the websites I guess.
I have thousands of bookmarks that also have names but I would still like to see the icons before clicking the link. Sometimes the name doesn't hint at what kind of resource the bookmark was at a glance. Is it a youtube video, is it an article?
I already have access to that information at the time of bookmarking. I don't want to lose it and then have to get it again.
I rely on sync a lot, so that was a dealbreaker for me.
It just opens every bookmark to load the favicon. Brute force, but it works!
I don't know how people use phones with ublock or leechblock. I guess "with less battery life" and "more".
I am always stunned when I have to use anything else at how unusable some pages are without my extensions.