me and mozilla go way back, to the days of netscape navigator. we're old friends.. even through the worst of times (aol ownership), i've stood by my best bud.
Lol, not me! I dropped that shit when it was the slowest, most bloated memory hog! Luckily, it's much improved now, and is easily the best browser out there...
I remember back then when people stop using FF because it used more PC resources than the OS itself and all started using Chrome because it was fast and lightweight.
Mental how it is genuinely the other way around now, but on the masses people might not even know that a computer has limited resources so that's probably a contributor to no mass exodus to FF.
The average person definitely doesn’t have a good understanding of computational resources, but they will use an application they find smoother and less clunky than another. Realistically the performance and resource usage of chrome is not going to be bad enough to drive most people to Firefox these days, and Firefox won’t be enough of an improvement for most people to notice. Chrome also had a huge marketing campaign when it launched… I suspect that was crucial for getting people to adopt chrome (otherwise how do you even get people to think about switching?), but I don’t think Mozilla has the resources for such a campaign. Time will tell, though. I hope we’ll see more people switching to Firefox in the future.
Not necessarily. Using more RAM doesn't increase energy usage, at least not significantly. And if you can use that to avoid making disk or network accesses, it'll save energy. Obviously keeping the CPU spinning at 100% isn't helping anybody, though.
If it forces you to buy more RAM, it does. I think most notebook laptops have had their RAM specified based on browser needs those past years as it became the main application by far.
I switched about 2 years ago when I turned on sync. It's just so reliable and fast, it's simple and does its job perfectly. Frequently send tabs between devices and it's instantaneous, bookmarks get synced immediately as well. Also they promise they don't sell our data to advertisers which is a plus, though I can't verify it and they could go rogue in the future idk. Also the fact that the browser is not intrusive at all is a huge plus. No annoying popups "try feature X" "login with your google account now" etc etc.
I do have some issues with it but that's mostly because some people/companies don't properly test their website on firefox. Also had an issue with its performance in the past, but now lately it feels as fast as chrome both on android and pc.
The open source community works in mysterious ways. This bug reminds me about the audio via HDMI bug for old radeon video cards. A simple flag in kernel configuration could have fixed it, yet the bug has been present in kernels from something like 4.1 to 6.0. It only recently has been fixed, after years of having to patch your kernel for a very simple bug.
When it comes to open-source software, usually it's absolutely critical bugs that get patched or necessary features that get worked on, since it's really just volunteer work.
Pay every contributor a salary to make the program "feel" nice instead of actually bloody work (hi every ms app), then we'll talk.
I really want to switch back but... honestly: Chromium Edge, despite a few annoying features being shoved in your face, is actually a really nice browser IMO. It's definitely going to take some time to get used to FF again.
I'm so used to things like vertical tabs, icon only bookmarks, etc... I know I can change a lot in FF myself, but having to add custom css and whatnot on every device I use FF on is just annoying.
There are tons of extensions for tab management for Firefox. If vertkcal tabs is just that they're arranged in lines instead of columns, I've used Tree Style Tab and Sidebery, and there are many others.
I do not know Vivaldi, but I live and die by Tree-Style Tabs. It puts the tabs on the side and arranged them in trees that can be managed as groups. It's the add-on that has kept me on Firefox.
You can just pry Vivaldi out of my cold, dead hands. No other browser comes close to its customisability. As long as it runs adblockers and sponsor block, I'm using it.
Switched last night and damn, Firefox has gotten so much better. Used to be the first browser I manually installed around 2004, until Chrome released around 2008 or something. I love that it has extensions on mobile and bookmark/history sync now.
Just so that I can keep track of the score, I actually moved from Firefox to DuckDuckGo, because Firefox was considered not respecting privacy. This was not so many years ago.
Are we now saying today that the tables are turned? Or just that both are bad, but one is less bad?
The reality is that to the average user all browsers are the same. A lot of technologies have sort of peaked for regular people and browsers are one of those. There was a time when you needed plugins to do basic things like view PDFs or videos, to play games (flash, java) and there would be a new major change to HTML or CSS every few months etc.
That's no longer a problem. All browsers are near equal in their ability to render pages. So people are naturally going to go with what feels familiar. We lost the battle for market share the minute Google decided to advertise Chrome on their search page.
I've moved back to Firefox but damn it keeps mangling my streaming audio in some cases and there doesn't seem to be a fix despite spending most of last night going through the limited solutions. Seems like this is a common problem for many Firefox users so Chrome will stay in play for some of these uses.
Been using Firefox on desktop since it was called Firebird. I've jumped to different browsers on mobile, but Firefox on mobile has gotten a lot better since the last time I've tried it years ago, so I switched back to it recently.
(An additional point I should have mentioned last time, I'm speaking about the mobile version, not the desktop version.)
Last time I checked you need to have one of their accounts to export/import bookmarks and stuff. I would be totally glad to be wrong about this though, if I can export all my stuff from DuckDuckGo and import it into Firefox mobile.
Edit: Five minutes after replying I found this article giving hope for the future of Firefox mobile.
For a reason I'm not yet sure about, the official website for provincial parks in my province refuse to establish a secure connection with Firefox. I've switched to FF a few months ago now and aside from that specific website not working correctly, the rest is fine to me.
Not yet. I just use a different browser for now. It's an intermittent issue where it just randomly fails the SSL handshake.
Secure Connection Failed
An error occurred during a connection to www.sepaq.com. SSL received an unexpected Server Hello handshake message.
Error code: SSL_ERROR_RX_UNEXPECTED_SERVER_HELLO
Apparently I can also try to change SSL and TLS options. I'll experiment a bit and see. I guess I should also let the website know. Maybe it's just a configuration issue on their end, and other Firefox users are facing the same error. I use this website to make camping reservations and as winter is coming where I am, I have a few months to try different options before it becomes a bit more annoying again.
It gives Google a huge amount of control over the internet, like recently when they thought about getting websites to add DRM so they could only be accessed from official Chrome browsers on authorized devices and such. They also added ad tracking directly into the browser, which might not be in ungoogled chromium but it'd be more work for them to remove it, and maybe later google makes it required to use chromium. And if they get their way with the website DRM they could try to force everyone to use specifically Google Chrome and then they can track everyone. It's important that we have other browsers such as Firefox so that Google can't just do whatever they want.
Thats up to you to decide. Some think brave is the best browser out there with the best of both worlds, others think its a lying piece of shit with a shitty ceo.
I actually uninstalled Firefox a few months ago on my mobile devices because certain websites for my work were not displaying well now thankfully they have been fixed. Installed the Iceraven fork which is amazing.
On my phone Firefox is terrible. It closes the app when I try to watch video full screen. When I reopen Firefox after the video crash all but 1/4 of the screen is black, and it doesn't respond to clicks on the tabs button to close or open new tabs.
So if it's a YouTube video, I try to view it in the YouTube app. Firefox will open YouTube to the home page but leaves me to find the video again within the YouTube app.
Click the navigate with GPS button inside the browser, and it opens Google maps to the last destination instead of the address you were looking at in Firefox. That made me late to 2 appointments before I figured out what was happening.
The auto fill is terrible or non-existent. The password management feature got stuck in a loop the other day and I had to force close.
Fuck Firefox. Maybe it's better on a new phone, but my experience with Firefox has been absolutely dog shit.
Well… If you're okay with a unique browser ID for each installation or using a browser that contacts a 3rd party analytics company no matter your settings then Firefox is for you. Just fire Wireshark and see for yourself how much snitching Firefox does.
Also Mozilla isn't what people paint it to be, they've shady finances and are now hosting code at Github. Mozilla allegedly stands for a bunch of stuff that is be definition incompatible with hosting code on GitHub as it is
If you're serious about having a decent browser pick Ungoggled Chromium or LibreWolf.
The thing with Firefox is that while you're absolutely right on all your points, it's the only mainstream browser that at least tries to care for your privacy, much more so than the current big players, and something that has the best chance of having computer "normies" switch to. You won't get them onto LibreWolf, Ungoogled Chromium, IceCat, Mullvad Browser, not in mass. If you push everyone to one of those super privacy browsers where pages may not load correctly and they're generally more clunky, then that's just turning them further to stick with what they know, Chrome/Edge.
I don't like touting companies, but at least for the current time I still recommend Firefox for those wanting to switch, and later on if they really care about privacy then a switch to LibreWolf isn't as jarring.
Kiwi is Chromium based, doesn't really have any privacy/security features or protections, disables content blockers like uBlock Origin from working on certain domains, appears to make a Facebook connection on every launch that I can't seem to get rid of (Can be tested/verified yourself), etc. It really isn't a good option and I don't recommend it.
Oh really? I remember Mental Outlaw mentioned it in one vid that it was a good phone browser, tried it and was satisfied. Just shows I gotta do my research better lol. Might have to switch over to firefox on phone too
In my younger days I used Firefox as me default browser on Windows.
It was fun to tinker with.
The add-ons were especially interesting. Things like greasemonkey let you lay over a custom script over the websites you visited.
But when I started to concern myself about the security of all this tinkering, I stopped with running script that a very sympathetic Russian kid had created.
So at that time I switched to Google Chrome and now I'm using Edge Chromium.
Oh, luckily I've never experienced problems.
I just wanted to point out that the appeal of Firefox for me was the appeal of being able to tinker with it and create my own custom experience.
But not being able to, with confidence, verify the safety of plug-ins that I used or things that I tried out, I just stopped doing these things.
And because I stopped tinkering with the browser, I used Firefox less and less.
I had the same feeling with using custom ROMs for Android phones.
So definitely not anything wrong with Firefox. It's not Firefox that changed, I changed.
This makes sense for anyone with a real threat model (companies, server hosts, internet drug dealers), for those who just meme and scream I'd say FF is better just for the health of the internet.
Yeah. While these issues exist and are valid, they're not important at all for most users and threat models. Mozilla has made strides there and is continuing to improve.
while it's not relevant for my threat model or anything, I still do think that it's important to practice good hygiene and send the message to the people who design these browsers that security is important.
Oh 100%, I didn't intend to imply anything else. Mozilla definitely should improve in this aspect, my point was just that sometimes the issues are heavily exaggerated and people act like it makes Firefox some horribly insecure browser that should be avoided, which isn't the case at all. But Mozilla should absolutely improve the sandbox, I don't disagree there.
Imagine: "I probably won’t ever switch over to Firefox. Google Chrome has popup blocking which is a really great feature and I never heard anything about Firefox or any other web browser having that same capability like Google does"
At this point, there's no real clear winner. All browser companies have some sort of shit to them. It's really a matter of which bowl of shit you're willing to tolerate.
Mozilla is not a browser company, it's a browser non-profit organization (well, the structure is a bit more complicated, but it is ultimately governed by a non-profit organization).
I tried, nearly every system I tested it on (Physical and virtual, 16 GB RAM to 64, Windows, MacOS and Linux (Ubuntu and Arch)) it bogs down and crashes after 60-100 tabs. FF has performance issues and can't keep up with me, chrome might eat a lot of ram to do it, but at least it'll keep up at 300, 400, 600+ tabs.
Unfortunately, I can't switch until these performance problems have been fixed :(
Edit: lol at the downvotes for bringing up a legit potential issue
Edit2: lmao, c/Firefox: come over to Firefox and our community we're welcoming. (As long as you only talk about how perfect and infallible FF is)
If you have that many tabs open you are doing something seriously wrong. Consider a better book marking system, download what ever PDFs you are looking at or context switching way way less. I cannot even imagine a scenario that would warrant this many tabs
If you have that many tabs open you are doing something seriously wrong
No, not really. This is rather common. The line might be blurry with tabs unloading, but bookmarks and tabs are still different things. And don't just reject people's workflows - that's how you end up with chrome.
I cannot even imagine a scenario that would warrant this many tabs
One common scenario is shopping for parts for complex systems, like cars for example. One might have a dozen tabs open for parts themselves, a tab or two each for specifications, a dozen tabs per part for listings in different shops, each with a few tabs looking for ways to deliver the thing. It blows up to 100+ really quickly. And you really need them all open because you need to jump back and forth comparing and cross-checking all of them. And then if you haven't managed to get everything done in one session, bookmarking them and re-opening again later takes considerable amount time, so you're better off just opening a new window and keeping it all in the background until you return. At least that's how I've seen people do it.
You should be putting parts and part stats into a spreadsheet in this instance. It will reduce jumping back and forth. Include the link as a hyper link in the ods or Excel file. Shouldn't need to referencing this many websites in any scenario
Have you tried using Firefox's auto tab discard extension? It automatically puts tabs which have been inactive for a while to sleep. When you click on a sleeping tab, it wakes up.
I am using it. I had to turn it off for some sites because it would discard a site that didn't properly save info, so I'd lose data.
Also had to turn it off for youtube because I'd have a stream that hadn't started yet (they can be setup hours before the stream starts), and it wouldn't auto-start because it would get discarded before the stream started so i'd miss some of the stream.
How can you even see the tabs you have open if you have 600+ tabs open that's insanity. Browsers while leaving that an option where never designed for even viewing that many tabs
While i'm not the person who claimed to have 600+, i'd assume that what they do is a mix of:
-Multiple Windows, so the tabs are spread out. Essentially like having different workspaces in an OS
-using the icons to determine what they are.
And lets never talk about what a browser is designed to do. Because I bet if we went into detail we'd find there's not a person in this thread using browsers exactly as how anyone intended them to be used, either because technology at the time never made them think it was possible, or because you know, people are different.
Use-cases is like design 101, designing for things you didn't expect the user to do.
Ofc that is a valid design philosophy but there is a range. At some point it's like asking your tax software to be a video editor too. Should still probably not be context switching that much mentally. Anyone I've ever met who uses lots of tabs is better off with lots of book marks or taking better notes. It's just silly to have that many tabs open no matter how you spin it
Who are you to judge my workflow? It's what works for me and a browser should be able to support my workflow, not the other way around and it's obviously not an impossible workflow for a browser to support if Chrome can do it.
Your work flow is ineffective it sounds like, you should consider adjusting your work flow to increase your productivity and decrease your CPU usage. Your browser should be using 16gb + of ram due to having 600+ tabs open
I really don't believe there is any browser that can manage that many tabs without using large amounts of ram, unless it starts caching them on disk or compressing then in ram or a browser that keeps "virtual" tabs that are just really book marks that re-query the website
60-100 tabs is a ridiculous amount of tabs. My husband makes fun of me for my "tab carcasses" pretty regularly, but I'm usually hitting the Onetab button around 40 open tabs. What this person is doing that they legitimately need hundreds of tabs open is beyond me.
i usually just hit onetab when i have just 10, but that depends on the size of my monitor.
having that many tabs makes finding ones i actually care about harder
I've got lots of open projects at any given time and jump between them a lot. My system is generally just a window is one project (sometimes multiple windows for one) + 1 or 2 "General" windows
-Pictures that lead to sites I want to keep up with
-2 manga sites
-A tracker for streams
-2 sites for looking up information for games i'm playing
And a second window with
-A series i'm keeping up with
-2 spreadsheet trackers for games
-a dozen or so youtube pages, most of which are music I want to alternate looping
I feel like it's just one of those things that once you get used to doing, you generally always have a lot of tabs open.
Bookmarks lack anything visual to make me think "Oh you know what I want to look at that again"
and in the case of waiting for an upcoming stream if I forget the upcoming stream 8-12 hours later, then i'm usually pretty upset I missed it.
Sure you could just say "Well if you forgot you probably didn't care that much"...but my memory sucks and a lot of it is also meant to destress from a stressful day, which can contribute to forgetting things.
I have like 10,000 bookmarks and I only look at like 5 of them
Up until the web API stuff I was using opera, and it had like...a collage view where you could put a bunch of sites on, with pictures to represent them. That was nice to have. I couldn't find anything similar in the firefox extensions.
Dude… you are the problem in this situation.
Get “tab sessions manager” for firefox or one of the many alternatives.
Nobody but your “workflow” uses over 300 tabs ACTIVELY. And that coming from someone who routinely gets told that I have too many tabs open. Break your tabs into groups and save those instances.
Also take the criticism like a champ instead of whining about how you’re being ganged up on by a community when you misuse the software.
Ah yes, blame the user when they can literally point to a product that is not just adequately but completely supporting their use case and tell them they're the problem here.
Lmao, sure even though a browser should be able to just work, let me go install more extensions and make changes to my usage patterns to fit a browser.
This is an optimization problem that needs to be fixed and I sought to bring attention to it, not to bandaid it with this and that extension and go through the pains to change a well established years old workflow that works well for me.
I'm a busy person (as evidenced by my unique tab count apparently), I don't have the time or energy to spend to change myself to fit FF, that's a whole new project to heap onto an already embarrassingly long backlog of other things I have to do.
Thanks but no thanks, I'll revisit FF in a year or 2 of updates and retest.
Please point me to the FF docs that recommend staying under a certain number of tabs, point me to anywhere in the docs that FF is only intended for less than a certain number of tabs.
At this point I don't even get to that 300 mark, it's getting unstable and crashing around 100.
I see it constantly "FF is rock solid!!" "FF can handle what you throw at it!" "FF can beat chrome hands down!!" But it didn't hold true in my testing.
What you're saying now is "FF is rock solid (Most of the time)" "FF can handle what you throw at it! (Unless you throw 200 tabs at it then you're using it wrong)" "FF can beat chrome hands down!! (Except in raw tab count)".
I tried it for months dealing with it's crashes, it wasn't even just a day thing and I gave up after its first crash or something.
This is an optimization problem, I can and have replicated it multiple times on all manner of hardware and OS configurations.
“Close tabs that use too many system resources
Some websites use scripts that use a lot of memory and/or CPU to keep them up to date, such as online mail client pages. If these scripts are not optimized, they can lead to the use of too many system resources. You can see which tabs are using the most system resources by opening the Firefox Task Manager (about:processes page). If you do not need these tabs open all the time, you can close them to reduce system resources usage.”
FF is rock solid and they do tell you to limit your tabs.
You are complaining about what is at best an edge case scenario causing an issue while being fine with sucking up the multitude of problems that chrome has because you are too stubborn to organize your browser.
That's a "if you're having problems" not a "This is the intended limit"
Hell it doesn't even say how many tabs they intended to support. This could very well fall into an optimization issue. Which you know, could improve things for everyone including potential users who may want to jump to firefox.
Yes because computers and their capabilities vary immensely. How could they know what your pc is capable of versus someone else’s?
This exactly explains that there are limits to the amount of tabs a system can handle. 300+ is not a normal amount for any system and definitely falls outside of normal use case testing.
The optimization issue is you and op not using your brains.
Runs 5 video games on a computer at the same time and complains about performance issues
I routinely run 5+ instances of a video game simultaneously. Am I forbidden from complaining about performance issues now? It's a f'ken computer, not an xbox, it should run as much stuff as you need, maybe slowly, but it should run. But the guy said it crashes - then it's definitely a problem. Especially if it's on a 64 gig system and he said it works fine on chrome.
And there are legit workflows that involve 3-digit tab numbers. 60 tabs is really nothing
It’s a fucking computer, doesn’t mean it’s a common practice by developers to test out their games running many times simultaneously. That’s fucking ridiculous to expect. Some things are just common practice that it would be ridiculous to test for such edge cases.
If you overload your system with enough it will crash regardless. Running merely slow is definitely not a sign of optimization.
Have you tried rendering out 3d models that are too big for your gpu/cpu? Definitely can crash not just the program but the whole system.
I routinely have 60+ tabs open. 300+ being actively worked on as op claims is nonsense.
Says crashes aren’t expected then states that you’ve experienced one and lost a drive. 🤦♂️
Those things happen all the time. You might think it’s normal use but then bam you’ve overloaded the system. Who would expect a system to run 100% of the time under max load without the potential for crashes. Come on.
Well, generally speaking, Firefox handles lots of tabs better than Chrome. It's hard to say what problem happens on your specific system, but you shouldn't assume that it's universal...
Not in my testing it doesn't, I don't have just one system to test with either.
Like I said, I've tested it across all manner of systems virtual and physical.
I've tested it from a system with an i5 7th gen w/16gb RAM on windows 10 all the way up to an i9 12th gen w/64 GB RAM on MacOS to Intel server e5 dual processors with 256 GB RAM on Win Server 2016 to ryzen 5 series 32 GB RAM on Ubuntu and a myriad of Win10/Ubuntu/Arch VMs in between.
The story is the same between them all, somewhere around 100 tabs it gets unstable and eventually crashes.
we have firefox on an old c2d era dual core, 8gb ram and now (had 7, and originally 4gb ram) win10. 170+ tabs currently, always restored on relaunches (which are infrequent). system never gets shut off--updates are 'managed', always left on, with firefox running, to sleep with that massive tab collection open. runs like a champ. only once in the last three years has that session been lost or any other issue been encountered (we've since added a session saver addon but haven't needed it).
Idk man, maybe you have the fluke, maybe it's a problem that arises on newer CPUs, maybe it's a conflict with another common piece of software I install. Either way, it's happened multiple times over multiple systems over multiple configurations and OSes. I really don't have time to fuck with my browser and diagnose it fully, I need it to just be ready to install a couple extensions and hit the ground running
At least you can get 60 tabs. Firefox brings my RAM to 98% just by starting it, and if I try to open more than 3 tabs it becomes the next victim of the OOM killer.
me and mozilla go way back, to the days of netscape navigator. we're old friends.. even through the worst of times (aol ownership), i've stood by my best bud.
Lol, not me! I dropped that shit when it was the slowest, most bloated memory hog! Luckily, it's much improved now, and is easily the best browser out there...
Firebird for me.
Same
I remember back then when people stop using FF because it used more PC resources than the OS itself and all started using Chrome because it was fast and lightweight.
Joke's on them, I never stopped using Firefox.
Mental how it is genuinely the other way around now, but on the masses people might not even know that a computer has limited resources so that's probably a contributor to no mass exodus to FF.
The average person definitely doesn’t have a good understanding of computational resources, but they will use an application they find smoother and less clunky than another. Realistically the performance and resource usage of chrome is not going to be bad enough to drive most people to Firefox these days, and Firefox won’t be enough of an improvement for most people to notice. Chrome also had a huge marketing campaign when it launched… I suspect that was crucial for getting people to adopt chrome (otherwise how do you even get people to think about switching?), but I don’t think Mozilla has the resources for such a campaign. Time will tell, though. I hope we’ll see more people switching to Firefox in the future.
They might have the resources
Excessive resources usage is wasted energy.
I paid for the whole CPU, I'll use the whole CPU. /s
Not necessarily. Using more RAM doesn't increase energy usage, at least not significantly. And if you can use that to avoid making disk or network accesses, it'll save energy. Obviously keeping the CPU spinning at 100% isn't helping anybody, though.
If it forces you to buy more RAM, it does. I think most notebook laptops have had their RAM specified based on browser needs those past years as it became the main application by far.
That's a good point.
Always has been.
As someone using Firefox for basically ever, Chrome has always seemed like bloated garbage to me. Deleted it a while back and never looked back.
I switched about 2 years ago when I turned on sync. It's just so reliable and fast, it's simple and does its job perfectly. Frequently send tabs between devices and it's instantaneous, bookmarks get synced immediately as well. Also they promise they don't sell our data to advertisers which is a plus, though I can't verify it and they could go rogue in the future idk. Also the fact that the browser is not intrusive at all is a huge plus. No annoying popups "try feature X" "login with your google account now" etc etc.
I do have some issues with it but that's mostly because some people/companies don't properly test their website on firefox. Also had an issue with its performance in the past, but now lately it feels as fast as chrome both on android and pc.
True debloaters use qutebrowser
browsh, that way you don't need one of those pesky desktop environments.
I used Vimprobable for a while. But I came to miss some of the gui features.
I had my first website tell me today that I can't access their domain on FF. It was Adobe. Fuck em
Please report the issue at https://webcompat.com/
You're better off without them, for sure!
Maybe changing the user agent will work
I’m not a fan of the inability to drag a tab into a snapping position, I have to drag it out, then drag the new window to the snap location.
And apparently this has been a documented issue for 15 years, and there’s been little to no progress in all that time.
The open source community works in mysterious ways. This bug reminds me about the audio via HDMI bug for old radeon video cards. A simple flag in kernel configuration could have fixed it, yet the bug has been present in kernels from something like 4.1 to 6.0. It only recently has been fixed, after years of having to patch your kernel for a very simple bug.
The secret is fixing it yourself and submitting a pull request for approval/further additions.
Unless its GNOME in which case the maintainers will tell you to screw off and you will promptly switch to a better alternative.
I’m trying, I don’t know much about JS or the Firefox codebase, but I’ve been reading for hours and I’m getting a grasp of how it currently works.
Now I’m tryna see how chromium does it to either replicate, or inspire.
When it comes to open-source software, usually it's absolutely critical bugs that get patched or necessary features that get worked on, since it's really just volunteer work.
Pay every contributor a salary to make the program "feel" nice instead of actually bloody work (hi every ms app), then we'll talk.
They went from Chromium based, to just Based.
I really want to switch back but... honestly: Chromium Edge, despite a few annoying features being shoved in your face, is actually a really nice browser IMO. It's definitely going to take some time to get used to FF again.
I'm so used to things like vertical tabs, icon only bookmarks, etc... I know I can change a lot in FF myself, but having to add custom css and whatnot on every device I use FF on is just annoying.
Firefox Sync should keep all your settings and extensions synced for each install
I had custom css in FF and Firefox sync did not sync those manual edits.
Use the sidebery add-on, along with a vertical Firefox CSS theme = problem solved.
There are tons of extensions for tab management for Firefox. If vertkcal tabs is just that they're arranged in lines instead of columns, I've used Tree Style Tab and Sidebery, and there are many others.
you can pry the vivaldi tab management out of my cold dead hands
I do not know Vivaldi, but I live and die by Tree-Style Tabs. It puts the tabs on the side and arranged them in trees that can be managed as groups. It's the add-on that has kept me on Firefox.
Same. Treestyle Tabs and wide-screen are the perfect couple.
For me it's the killer app of Firefox. Chrome actually has a tree style tab but it functions different and sucks.
I just don't want to use the internet if I can't use tree style tab. It's so much better than default tabs.
You can just pry Vivaldi out of my cold, dead hands. No other browser comes close to its customisability. As long as it runs adblockers and sponsor block, I'm using it.
Amen brother.
Switched last night and damn, Firefox has gotten so much better. Used to be the first browser I manually installed around 2004, until Chrome released around 2008 or something. I love that it has extensions on mobile and bookmark/history sync now.
Yup, uBlock Origin makes the mobile web actually usable!
Oh wow thanks! I didn't know there were mobile add-ons. (I just didn't check)
Yeah after they got the sync up and running it's been so awesome. Welcome to the right side :D
One sneaky thing I love is the ability to put the bookmarks bar to the right of the search bar. Get a little extra real estate that way.
Should show edge and brave in the corners
Edge is chromium based
That's the joke
So is Brave, and more or less every popular browser aside from FF.
So actually, Salman is the other guy
/lore
Firefox is King 👑
Switched from Brave to LibreWolf few weeks ago and I love it.
LibreWolf is extra blessed
Just so that I can keep track of the score, I actually moved from Firefox to DuckDuckGo, because Firefox was considered not respecting privacy. This was not so many years ago.
Are we now saying today that the tables are turned? Or just that both are bad, but one is less bad?
Everything > Chrome/Chromium
The reality is that to the average user all browsers are the same. A lot of technologies have sort of peaked for regular people and browsers are one of those. There was a time when you needed plugins to do basic things like view PDFs or videos, to play games (flash, java) and there would be a new major change to HTML or CSS every few months etc.
That's no longer a problem. All browsers are near equal in their ability to render pages. So people are naturally going to go with what feels familiar. We lost the battle for market share the minute Google decided to advertise Chrome on their search page.
Today.
Previously, it was Firefox > Everything, so that's why I was asking.
ff forks like librewolf are based
Heard good things about Librewolf.
I've moved back to Firefox but damn it keeps mangling my streaming audio in some cases and there doesn't seem to be a fix despite spending most of last night going through the limited solutions. Seems like this is a common problem for many Firefox users so Chrome will stay in play for some of these uses.
Previously Chrome did it all...
try librewolf, maybe it works :)
I love this meme! Haha
https://youtu.be/-wmfpoq_Y0E
Friendship regain?! I cant believe!
Been using Firefox on desktop since it was called Firebird. I've jumped to different browsers on mobile, but Firefox on mobile has gotten a lot better since the last time I've tried it years ago, so I switched back to it recently.
This is 100% worth repeating. FF Mobile was borderline unusable ten years ago compared to Safari/Chrome mobile
Librewolf is pretty decent too
Please firefox just add the goddamn custom key bindings
I'm working on this...
Check Tridactyl, bindings, autocmd and a lot more
And the ability to be able to Import and Export your bookmarks freely without having to use their website to do so.
What? I just migrated all my Chrome stuff to Firefox without using any website.
(An additional point I should have mentioned last time, I'm speaking about the mobile version, not the desktop version.)
Last time I checked you need to have one of their accounts to export/import bookmarks and stuff. I would be totally glad to be wrong about this though, if I can export all my stuff from DuckDuckGo and import it into Firefox mobile.
Edit: Five minutes after replying I found this article giving hope for the future of Firefox mobile.
Firefox is fine rn
For a reason I'm not yet sure about, the official website for provincial parks in my province refuse to establish a secure connection with Firefox. I've switched to FF a few months ago now and aside from that specific website not working correctly, the rest is fine to me.
have you tried spoofing your user agent with the useragent switcher extension?
Not yet. I just use a different browser for now. It's an intermittent issue where it just randomly fails the SSL handshake.
Apparently I can also try to change SSL and TLS options. I'll experiment a bit and see. I guess I should also let the website know. Maybe it's just a configuration issue on their end, and other Firefox users are facing the same error. I use this website to make camping reservations and as winter is coming where I am, I have a few months to try different options before it becomes a bit more annoying again.
Am I out of the loop on what the issue with chromium is? Currently I mainly use ungoogled chromium on my desktop.
Chromium is google regardless of the search engine
That’s not what ungoogled chromium means.
It's still reinforcing their dominance of the browser market even if it doesn't have Google baked in.
It gives Google a huge amount of control over the internet, like recently when they thought about getting websites to add DRM so they could only be accessed from official Chrome browsers on authorized devices and such. They also added ad tracking directly into the browser, which might not be in ungoogled chromium but it'd be more work for them to remove it, and maybe later google makes it required to use chromium. And if they get their way with the website DRM they could try to force everyone to use specifically Google Chrome and then they can track everyone. It's important that we have other browsers such as Firefox so that Google can't just do whatever they want.
I only keep edge around so I can Chromecast to my TV from my PC. Otherwise Firefox all the way.
I did it on my phone and work PC. I'm still running Brave on this little linux laptop by my TV. Not sure if I have to change that.
Thats up to you to decide. Some think brave is the best browser out there with the best of both worlds, others think its a lying piece of shit with a shitty ceo.
I actually uninstalled Firefox a few months ago on my mobile devices because certain websites for my work were not displaying well now thankfully they have been fixed. Installed the Iceraven fork which is amazing.
I use edge for work and firefox for everything else.
What about internet explorer?
I mean the old school IE, yes in case it wasn't clear this was a joke, if your reply was too I'd like to apologize.
You mean all the trackers and telemetry that can be shut off with O&O Shutup?
It's a fantastic browser.
Unrelated, would you mind taking a few Facebook personality quizzes and do you have a lot in your bank account?
Nope, wish the second one was true lol
riyal
I wish Firefox had native tab grouping. That's the only thing I miss from chrome.
On my phone Firefox is terrible. It closes the app when I try to watch video full screen. When I reopen Firefox after the video crash all but 1/4 of the screen is black, and it doesn't respond to clicks on the tabs button to close or open new tabs.
So if it's a YouTube video, I try to view it in the YouTube app. Firefox will open YouTube to the home page but leaves me to find the video again within the YouTube app.
Click the navigate with GPS button inside the browser, and it opens Google maps to the last destination instead of the address you were looking at in Firefox. That made me late to 2 appointments before I figured out what was happening.
The auto fill is terrible or non-existent. The password management feature got stuck in a loop the other day and I had to force close.
Fuck Firefox. Maybe it's better on a new phone, but my experience with Firefox has been absolutely dog shit.
Isn't Firefox on android/iOS not using it's own engine but rather a modded version of chrome or something? I might be wrong
Only on iOS
On iOS every browser has to use the same engine. Not so on android.
You're wrong.
I use Firefox as a Main Browser and Thorium(Chromium) as Second for PWM feature.
Firefox webdev tools are worthless. My heart belongs to Vivaldi. Nothing else comes closer.
Then I hope you enjoy spyware.
Well… If you're okay with a unique browser ID for each installation or using a browser that contacts a 3rd party analytics company no matter your settings then Firefox is for you. Just fire Wireshark and see for yourself how much snitching Firefox does.
Also Mozilla isn't what people paint it to be, they've shady finances and are now hosting code at Github. Mozilla allegedly stands for a bunch of stuff that is be definition incompatible with hosting code on GitHub as it is
If you're serious about having a decent browser pick Ungoggled Chromium or LibreWolf.
Tor is also nice, even though it's part Firefox.
The thing with Firefox is that while you're absolutely right on all your points, it's the only mainstream browser that at least tries to care for your privacy, much more so than the current big players, and something that has the best chance of having computer "normies" switch to. You won't get them onto LibreWolf, Ungoogled Chromium, IceCat, Mullvad Browser, not in mass. If you push everyone to one of those super privacy browsers where pages may not load correctly and they're generally more clunky, then that's just turning them further to stick with what they know, Chrome/Edge.
I don't like touting companies, but at least for the current time I still recommend Firefox for those wanting to switch, and later on if they really care about privacy then a switch to LibreWolf isn't as jarring.
Try an alternative, like Fennec.
Download Kiwi browser is set up like firefox, think its Chromium, mut sure tho. It works really well tho
Kiwi is Chromium based, doesn't really have any privacy/security features or protections, disables content blockers like uBlock Origin from working on certain domains, appears to make a Facebook connection on every launch that I can't seem to get rid of (Can be tested/verified yourself), etc. It really isn't a good option and I don't recommend it.
Oh really? I remember Mental Outlaw mentioned it in one vid that it was a good phone browser, tried it and was satisfied. Just shows I gotta do my research better lol. Might have to switch over to firefox on phone too
Phone firefox is chrome based...
It isn't. On Android, it uses Gecko, and on iOS, due to Apple's restrictions, it uses WebKit.
In my younger days I used Firefox as me default browser on Windows. It was fun to tinker with. The add-ons were especially interesting. Things like greasemonkey let you lay over a custom script over the websites you visited. But when I started to concern myself about the security of all this tinkering, I stopped with running script that a very sympathetic Russian kid had created. So at that time I switched to Google Chrome and now I'm using Edge Chromium.
Oh, luckily I've never experienced problems. I just wanted to point out that the appeal of Firefox for me was the appeal of being able to tinker with it and create my own custom experience. But not being able to, with confidence, verify the safety of plug-ins that I used or things that I tried out, I just stopped doing these things. And because I stopped tinkering with the browser, I used Firefox less and less. I had the same feeling with using custom ROMs for Android phones. So definitely not anything wrong with Firefox. It's not Firefox that changed, I changed.
is that one xed out picture iron? because irons not bad.
No, that's the Chromium project, the engine that most other browsers have adopted, including Microsoft.
I use both for different personal uses.
Chrome for my convenient daily living life.
Firefox for things like anonymous accounts as well as email masking and for things like Spotify manipulation with xManager or ReVanced.
I used to use firefox but switched back after I read Madaidan's article on the security of web browsers
Is it this one? https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/
This makes sense for anyone with a real threat model (companies, server hosts, internet drug dealers), for those who just meme and scream I'd say FF is better just for the health of the internet.
Yeah. While these issues exist and are valid, they're not important at all for most users and threat models. Mozilla has made strides there and is continuing to improve.
while it's not relevant for my threat model or anything, I still do think that it's important to practice good hygiene and send the message to the people who design these browsers that security is important.
Oh 100%, I didn't intend to imply anything else. Mozilla definitely should improve in this aspect, my point was just that sometimes the issues are heavily exaggerated and people act like it makes Firefox some horribly insecure browser that should be avoided, which isn't the case at all. But Mozilla should absolutely improve the sandbox, I don't disagree there.
Firefox has that. The reason you don't hear people talking about it is because it's been a standard feature for the past 20 years.
Imagine: "I probably won’t ever switch over to Firefox. Google Chrome has popup blocking which is a really great feature and I never heard anything about Firefox or any other web browser having that same capability like Google does"
you don't seem to be friend with graphic design neither. :)
.... That's the meme.
A little young for the wu-tang username aren't you?
I think you are the youngest, being upset on a critic, while it was true, it was before all just a quip.
I'm hosted on lemmy.ninja, so you know, staying in the Asian folklore mixed with "pop" culture...
At this point, there's no real clear winner. All browser companies have some sort of shit to them. It's really a matter of which bowl of shit you're willing to tolerate.
Mozilla is not a browser company, it's a browser non-profit organization (well, the structure is a bit more complicated, but it is ultimately governed by a non-profit organization).
Also you can get a Firefox fork with no organization behind it, Librewolf, if you hate Mozilla.
I tried, nearly every system I tested it on (Physical and virtual, 16 GB RAM to 64, Windows, MacOS and Linux (Ubuntu and Arch)) it bogs down and crashes after 60-100 tabs. FF has performance issues and can't keep up with me, chrome might eat a lot of ram to do it, but at least it'll keep up at 300, 400, 600+ tabs.
Unfortunately, I can't switch until these performance problems have been fixed :(
Edit: lol at the downvotes for bringing up a legit potential issue
Edit2: lmao, c/Firefox: come over to Firefox and our community we're welcoming. (As long as you only talk about how perfect and infallible FF is)
If you have that many tabs open you are doing something seriously wrong. Consider a better book marking system, download what ever PDFs you are looking at or context switching way way less. I cannot even imagine a scenario that would warrant this many tabs
No, not really. This is rather common. The line might be blurry with tabs unloading, but bookmarks and tabs are still different things. And don't just reject people's workflows - that's how you end up with chrome.
One common scenario is shopping for parts for complex systems, like cars for example. One might have a dozen tabs open for parts themselves, a tab or two each for specifications, a dozen tabs per part for listings in different shops, each with a few tabs looking for ways to deliver the thing. It blows up to 100+ really quickly. And you really need them all open because you need to jump back and forth comparing and cross-checking all of them. And then if you haven't managed to get everything done in one session, bookmarking them and re-opening again later takes considerable amount time, so you're better off just opening a new window and keeping it all in the background until you return. At least that's how I've seen people do it.
You should be putting parts and part stats into a spreadsheet in this instance. It will reduce jumping back and forth. Include the link as a hyper link in the ods or Excel file. Shouldn't need to referencing this many websites in any scenario
Is it really "something wrong" if it works perfectly fine in other browsers?
It just seems like shunning an audience that might have a legitimate concern that could be looked into.
Have you tried using Firefox's auto tab discard extension? It automatically puts tabs which have been inactive for a while to sleep. When you click on a sleeping tab, it wakes up.
I am using it. I had to turn it off for some sites because it would discard a site that didn't properly save info, so I'd lose data.
Also had to turn it off for youtube because I'd have a stream that hadn't started yet (they can be setup hours before the stream starts), and it wouldn't auto-start because it would get discarded before the stream started so i'd miss some of the stream.
So yes, it helps, but it has it's issues too.
How can you even see the tabs you have open if you have 600+ tabs open that's insanity. Browsers while leaving that an option where never designed for even viewing that many tabs
While i'm not the person who claimed to have 600+, i'd assume that what they do is a mix of:
-Multiple Windows, so the tabs are spread out. Essentially like having different workspaces in an OS
-using the icons to determine what they are.
And lets never talk about what a browser is designed to do. Because I bet if we went into detail we'd find there's not a person in this thread using browsers exactly as how anyone intended them to be used, either because technology at the time never made them think it was possible, or because you know, people are different.
Use-cases is like design 101, designing for things you didn't expect the user to do.
Ofc that is a valid design philosophy but there is a range. At some point it's like asking your tax software to be a video editor too. Should still probably not be context switching that much mentally. Anyone I've ever met who uses lots of tabs is better off with lots of book marks or taking better notes. It's just silly to have that many tabs open no matter how you spin it
Who are you to judge my workflow? It's what works for me and a browser should be able to support my workflow, not the other way around and it's obviously not an impossible workflow for a browser to support if Chrome can do it.
Your work flow is ineffective it sounds like, you should consider adjusting your work flow to increase your productivity and decrease your CPU usage. Your browser should be using 16gb + of ram due to having 600+ tabs open
How can it be ineffective when it literally works just by changing browsers?
I really don't believe there is any browser that can manage that many tabs without using large amounts of ram, unless it starts caching them on disk or compressing then in ram or a browser that keeps "virtual" tabs that are just really book marks that re-query the website
I was thinking I haven't had this issue but
I'm finished way before I have that many tabs open
60-100 tabs is a ridiculous amount of tabs. My husband makes fun of me for my "tab carcasses" pretty regularly, but I'm usually hitting the Onetab button around 40 open tabs. What this person is doing that they legitimately need hundreds of tabs open is beyond me.
i usually just hit onetab when i have just 10, but that depends on the size of my monitor.
having that many tabs makes finding ones i actually care about harder
I've got lots of open projects at any given time and jump between them a lot. My system is generally just a window is one project (sometimes multiple windows for one) + 1 or 2 "General" windows
Personally, I have a window with
-Pictures that lead to sites I want to keep up with
-2 manga sites
-A tracker for streams
-2 sites for looking up information for games i'm playing
And a second window with
-A series i'm keeping up with
-2 spreadsheet trackers for games
-a dozen or so youtube pages, most of which are music I want to alternate looping
I feel like it's just one of those things that once you get used to doing, you generally always have a lot of tabs open.
maybe im misunderstanding here but cant you just set bookmarks
Bookmarks lack anything visual to make me think "Oh you know what I want to look at that again"
and in the case of waiting for an upcoming stream if I forget the upcoming stream 8-12 hours later, then i'm usually pretty upset I missed it.
Sure you could just say "Well if you forgot you probably didn't care that much"...but my memory sucks and a lot of it is also meant to destress from a stressful day, which can contribute to forgetting things.
I have like 10,000 bookmarks and I only look at like 5 of them
Up until the web API stuff I was using opera, and it had like...a collage view where you could put a bunch of sites on, with pictures to represent them. That was nice to have. I couldn't find anything similar in the firefox extensions.
Have you heard of bookmarks?
Dude… you are the problem in this situation. Get “tab sessions manager” for firefox or one of the many alternatives.
Nobody but your “workflow” uses over 300 tabs ACTIVELY. And that coming from someone who routinely gets told that I have too many tabs open. Break your tabs into groups and save those instances.
Also take the criticism like a champ instead of whining about how you’re being ganged up on by a community when you misuse the software.
Ah yes, blame the user when they can literally point to a product that is not just adequately but completely supporting their use case and tell them they're the problem here.
That always works.
Lmao, sure even though a browser should be able to just work, let me go install more extensions and make changes to my usage patterns to fit a browser.
This is an optimization problem that needs to be fixed and I sought to bring attention to it, not to bandaid it with this and that extension and go through the pains to change a well established years old workflow that works well for me.
I'm a busy person (as evidenced by my unique tab count apparently), I don't have the time or energy to spend to change myself to fit FF, that's a whole new project to heap onto an already embarrassingly long backlog of other things I have to do.
Thanks but no thanks, I'll revisit FF in a year or 2 of updates and retest.
Runs 5 video games on a computer at the same time and complains about performance issues.
It does work, when you use it correctly.
Being busy isn’t an excuse for your lack of organization skills. Backlogs shouldn’t be open when you are actively working on something else bruh.
Please point me to the FF docs that recommend staying under a certain number of tabs, point me to anywhere in the docs that FF is only intended for less than a certain number of tabs.
At this point I don't even get to that 300 mark, it's getting unstable and crashing around 100.
I see it constantly "FF is rock solid!!" "FF can handle what you throw at it!" "FF can beat chrome hands down!!" But it didn't hold true in my testing.
What you're saying now is "FF is rock solid (Most of the time)" "FF can handle what you throw at it! (Unless you throw 200 tabs at it then you're using it wrong)" "FF can beat chrome hands down!! (Except in raw tab count)".
I tried it for months dealing with it's crashes, it wasn't even just a day thing and I gave up after its first crash or something.
This is an optimization problem, I can and have replicated it multiple times on all manner of hardware and OS configurations.
Ok right here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-uses-too-much-memory-or-cpu-resources
“Close tabs that use too many system resources Some websites use scripts that use a lot of memory and/or CPU to keep them up to date, such as online mail client pages. If these scripts are not optimized, they can lead to the use of too many system resources. You can see which tabs are using the most system resources by opening the Firefox Task Manager (about:processes page). If you do not need these tabs open all the time, you can close them to reduce system resources usage.”
FF is rock solid and they do tell you to limit your tabs.
You are complaining about what is at best an edge case scenario causing an issue while being fine with sucking up the multitude of problems that chrome has because you are too stubborn to organize your browser.
That's a "if you're having problems" not a "This is the intended limit"
Hell it doesn't even say how many tabs they intended to support. This could very well fall into an optimization issue. Which you know, could improve things for everyone including potential users who may want to jump to firefox.
Yes because computers and their capabilities vary immensely. How could they know what your pc is capable of versus someone else’s?
This exactly explains that there are limits to the amount of tabs a system can handle. 300+ is not a normal amount for any system and definitely falls outside of normal use case testing.
The optimization issue is you and op not using your brains.
I routinely run 5+ instances of a video game simultaneously. Am I forbidden from complaining about performance issues now? It's a f'ken computer, not an xbox, it should run as much stuff as you need, maybe slowly, but it should run. But the guy said it crashes - then it's definitely a problem. Especially if it's on a 64 gig system and he said it works fine on chrome.
And there are legit workflows that involve 3-digit tab numbers. 60 tabs is really nothing
It’s a fucking computer, doesn’t mean it’s a common practice by developers to test out their games running many times simultaneously. That’s fucking ridiculous to expect. Some things are just common practice that it would be ridiculous to test for such edge cases.
If you overload your system with enough it will crash regardless. Running merely slow is definitely not a sign of optimization. Have you tried rendering out 3d models that are too big for your gpu/cpu? Definitely can crash not just the program but the whole system.
I routinely have 60+ tabs open. 300+ being actively worked on as op claims is nonsense.
In what world do you live where crashing the whole system is an expected and accepted behavior?
Yes. RIP my SSD that was swap'd to death.
Umm did you read what you just posted?
Says crashes aren’t expected then states that you’ve experienced one and lost a drive. 🤦♂️
Those things happen all the time. You might think it’s normal use but then bam you’ve overloaded the system. Who would expect a system to run 100% of the time under max load without the potential for crashes. Come on.
How do you navigate this many tabs? With an extension?
Well, generally speaking, Firefox handles lots of tabs better than Chrome. It's hard to say what problem happens on your specific system, but you shouldn't assume that it's universal...
Not in my testing it doesn't, I don't have just one system to test with either.
Like I said, I've tested it across all manner of systems virtual and physical.
I've tested it from a system with an i5 7th gen w/16gb RAM on windows 10 all the way up to an i9 12th gen w/64 GB RAM on MacOS to Intel server e5 dual processors with 256 GB RAM on Win Server 2016 to ryzen 5 series 32 GB RAM on Ubuntu and a myriad of Win10/Ubuntu/Arch VMs in between.
The story is the same between them all, somewhere around 100 tabs it gets unstable and eventually crashes.
If you're using that many tabs you may be interested in vivaldi, it's made for power users like you
we have firefox on an old c2d era dual core, 8gb ram and now (had 7, and originally 4gb ram) win10. 170+ tabs currently, always restored on relaunches (which are infrequent). system never gets shut off--updates are 'managed', always left on, with firefox running, to sleep with that massive tab collection open. runs like a champ. only once in the last three years has that session been lost or any other issue been encountered (we've since added a session saver addon but haven't needed it).
Idk man, maybe you have the fluke, maybe it's a problem that arises on newer CPUs, maybe it's a conflict with another common piece of software I install. Either way, it's happened multiple times over multiple systems over multiple configurations and OSes. I really don't have time to fuck with my browser and diagnose it fully, I need it to just be ready to install a couple extensions and hit the ground running
At least you can get 60 tabs. Firefox brings my RAM to 98% just by starting it, and if I try to open more than 3 tabs it becomes the next victim of the OOM killer.
Get more RAM?
Windows 11 (unfortunately) with about 8GB of RAM (iirc). I can't check specs right now but will tonight.