It's one of those things where I've been using chrome for so long that switching to anything else is infuriating. Trying to learn the layout and all the features. Trying to figure out how to do things that are intuitively design on Google.
If someone made pretty much a 1 to 1 copy of Google without all the bullshit I'd use it in a heartbeat.
This is certainly a hurdle to overcome. Google helped by changing the Chrome UI for the worse in some ways I care about, but migrating to a new browser and getting used to different UI is enough of a hassle that I'm still holding out until adblock actually stops working before I make the switch.
I have the same problem the other way around. When I use chrome it feels like I'm using a kids browser. Slightly cutesy with too many curvy bits. Sort of like the difference between Duplo (chrome) and Lego (Firefox). Basically the same thing, but also not.
UI in Vivaldi is unique, you can set it to simple as an old IE or to an dashboard of an Spaceshuttle and everything in between in the settings and more with CSS. Also using of more than 4000 themes, or made and share your own. You can install Chrome extensions, but most are redundant because of the own inbuild ones, or even install directly userscripts as extensions.
I usualy love it, but for some reason Firefox fails to retrieve web pages about 75% of the time when on the internet connection at my parent's house, and I don't know why.
It acts like a DNS failure, but the DNS settings are the same in Firefox, Chrome, and the router.
How close did we come to being a footnote in the history of a future species that would happen upon our ruins ten thousand years from now? Would they indulge in the fiction of their own immortality until the Shivans came for them? And how long had this gone on? Did the Ancients stumble upon the monoliths and the tombs of their predecessors in this distant corner of space, dismissing the warnings carved into the walls of the sepulchre? And when the destroyers came at last, what did the Ancients think as they sifted the cremation of dust and bones, staring into the mute remains for a key; some solution to their plight?
What if there had been countless races stretching back into infinity? And like the nine cities of Troy each civilization had been built on the rubble of one that came before. Each annihilated by the Shivans.
The Ancients died eight thousand years ago, as humanity emerged from its neolithic infancy. They believed their voyage across the sea of stars awoke the dragon that slept beneath the waves. That the Shivans were birthed from the flux of subspace and their destruction was the revenge of an angry cosmos.
How close did we come to being a footnote in the history of a future corporations that would happen upon our ruins ten years from now? Would they indulge in the fiction of their own immortality until the shareholders came for them? And how long had this gone on? Did the Ancients stumble upon the monoliths and the tombs of their predecessors in this distant corner of economy, dismissing the warnings carved into the walls of the sepulchre? And when the MBAs came at last, what did the Ancients think as they sifted the cremation of infrastructure, staring into the mute remains for a key; some solution to their plight?
What if there had been countless corporations stretching back into infinity? And like the nine cities of Troy each civilization had been built on the rubble of one that came before. Each annihilated by the shareholders.
The Ancients died many years ago, as humanity emerged from its naivety. They believed their voyage across the sea of capitalism awoke the dragon that slept beneath the waves. That the shareholders were birthed from the flux of money and their destruction was the revenge of an trickle down economy.
Mozilla has no traditional profit motive. The Mozilla Corporation, which develops Firefox, is a 100% subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, which is legally a non-profit organisation.
So, if the Mozilla Corporation makes a profit, they cannot pay out that profit to shareholders. Practically all they can do with that money, is to pay higher wages or set it aside for future invest in their products.
That does not mean that they cannot stagnate or use money badly. And it does not either mean that they never need to make money. But it does mean that there's no shareholders demanding short-term profit above all else.
Thank you for new info, i didn't know about that, but it's not what I'm worried, I'm worried about manifest v3 going forced by Google and other corpos and being adopted by Firefox, but we still have dns adblockers for now, like pihole and such
The browsers are all quite good at copying your links, tabs, and history. Don't worry, there will always be a good option, especially since open source has no strong path to enshittification
Are they? I watch YouTube on Firefox all the time, seems fine on my machine.
I think maybe 5+ years ago there were some performance issues caused by YT relying on features that were only implemented in Chrome, but I don't recall having any issues wrt that for years.
I wouldn't say "completely fucked", but for a few years I noticed YouTube on Firefox has this occasional quirk where videos will quit playing and infinitely buffer at the exact same timestamp. Like there's no way around it except skipping about 30 seconds ahead with the seek bar, or doing a Ctrl-F5 (hard refresh) and starting the whole video over. Opera GX doesn't seem to have this problem at all.
But it's still not a big enough deal to make me give up Firefox completely.
I've got uBlock and Privacy Badger but turning them off or going incognito doesn't help at all. The most common issue I get with YouTube is the video keeps freezing. Apparently this is because Google deliberately fuck it so that other browsers have to play catch up constantly. I have heard this is why Microsoft gave up and adopted Chromium.
The other issue is that if I open more than one YouTube tab my laptop sounds like it is about to take off into space. I can have an unlimited number of tabs from any other website open though.
Sounds to me like some hardware issue, I've literally never experienced any of this in the last 5 years on Firefox. My guess is considering it works fine with other browsers the graphics drivers are a bit wonky, or maybe Firefox is falling back to software rendering for some reason. Are you using Linux or Windows?
Strange, usually things just work there considering the limited hardware variety. Is it an older Mac? I'm typing this on an M2 macbook and it works perfectly.
People saying FF is slower: like how much slower? are we taking like 14 millisecond slower? Cause everything seems pretty instantaneous here. Maybe its because i'm old enough to remember DSL and 56k internet, but I think FF os crazy fast and even if Chrome would be 25% faster I wouldn't switch to evil google for that.
It used to be a lot slower, which is why when Chrome showed up with its shiny new V8 engine (and other features) people switched from Firefox en masse. Now the performance difference is no longer noticeable.
61 Firefox windows and 427 tabs (don't judge, I know I have a problem) and I have no performance complaints - admittedly, not all of them are active/rendering simultaniously, but still...
Firefox (and its forks) have been my go-to for 15 years.
indeed! had I not posted this, I would be asking the same question!
so, its quite a bit more mundane than you might have hoped for.
a mix of...
~40% locally served internal pages (mostly zabbix, mail/web server monitoring, some development pages, etc).
~60% non-local pages - currently lots of retro computing stuff, debian stuff, github (sigh)
the most recent page I opened was an archive.org page on TI-84 firmware disassembly.
I make heavy use of Firefox containers for separation. honestly, Firefox is an absolute workhorse for me. if the Firefox ecosystem were to fall into the void, I would be dead in the water.
Last time I tried it? Like freeze and be unresponsive on my phone for seconds at a time slow. (My phone doesn't lock up though, I can still go to the home screen, swipe to see notifications so it's not the phone locking up completely)
Yes, this. Many pages have a 5-15 second blank delay for reasons I can't figure out when using Firefox. I still use Firefox, but that delay is rough on my blood pressure some days.
I wish firefox was faster but benchmarks are pretty common, it's not hard to test. It's kind of an unfair fight at this point honestly, large swaths of the web are just built for chrome. There are other benchmark options out there, but even using Mozilla's own kraken benchmarking solution, it loses tremendously more than it wins. I honestly really respect them for not building their benchmarking system to make their solutions come out on top.
In some benchmarks the lag from firefox is very significant and then on the other hand, when firefox does win, chrome is usually right behind it. It's not ideal.
It's clear, slower is relative. FF is slower in the startup and rendering some heavy loading webs, but the difference certainly isn't sooo dramatic. It's not a reason to avoid it, the only reason depends of the use of a browser, if it fits your needs or not.
Firefox is slower, not because it's worse, but Gecko is a minority engine in the web (~3-4%) and because of this the most webs are optimized for Blink. That is the only reason and because most current Browsers are using it, a devils circle.
The result of leaving Google hands-free for too long and that for 20 years the number of available engines has remained stagnant (3 and some testimonial exotic forks) because it is the most complicated part of a browser. Little can be done now.
Well, Apples WebKit is even worse than Gecko, as a small consolation for FF users.
Thats the problem tho, the new mozilla leadership is on the "do anything but nothing" ship. I really hope they either dont do anything too horrible or someone forks it if they do.
You mean hope that they too don't become subject to enshittification? I don't have a lot of faith in that.
Besides that, Google is controlling as fuck. They might keep fucking themselves over but there's no way they won't start attempting to ruin things for the rest of us.
Thankfully the AI use is very tame so far, used for stuff like offline alt text generation and offline translation. I'm personally still concerned about copyrights and ethics of the models used, but at least it's directed towards providing specific features, not a magic cure-all.
Floorp, I use it and I love it. It's especially great for Opera refugees, it has workspaces and stuff. Soon Firefox will support tab groups natively, and then Floorp will be perfect. It's a Firefox fork though.
Tab groups and non-independent tab muting (seems like it was domain-specific rather than tab-specific last I tried) are the two main things that kept me from switching back to FF as my primary browser (still use it for DTA, for example, but DTA got a big nerf back during the major extension overhaul, so that was a letdown). Tried some extensions, but none really worked in a way I considered usable and didn't want to just keep trial and erroring through them given I already have a browser that functionally meets my needs, even if I'd rather not be using a chromium browser.
If native tab groups work well enough, I'll probably give it another chance.
I sometimes just need to mute something for a second that I'm otherwise listening to. Or I'm switching between multiple sources, and don't want like 3 or more playing at the same time.. usually all on the same domain. I don't want to have to actually go to the tab and mute it. I'm frequently muting and unmuting things that way to the point that even if its the only source of sound, I still mute by tab instead of just turning my computer volume off sometimes out of habit, so its a deal breaker.
I think this just says more about the perils of embracing untreated ADHD than the internet itself.
you may not even have to change to another browser or fork, please have a look at some designs in https://trickypr.github.io/FirefoxCSS-Store.github.io/
select a design and follow the page, and you shall find the instructions (usually just downloading/pasting userChrome/Content.css)
and for scrolling tabs, if your problem is very small tab size, then try changing browser.tabs.tabMinWidth in about:config
They used to also use the unreleased version 0 of shadow DOM for building the Polymer UI, which - being a Chrome-only prototype - understandably didn't work on Firefox, and therefore instead used a really slow Javascript polyfill to render its UI.
I haven't checked on it lately, but I imagine they must've changed at least that by now.
That's a really weird take. Like… what even is the difference supposed to be?
This sounds more like “everything should be as it was back when <insert arbitrary point in time here>! When there were still Webpages, and we were frolicking about the internet! Until the fire nation attacked Web apps took over!”
In general, browser benchmarks seem to often favor Firefox in terms of startup and first interaction timings, and often favor Chrome when it comes to crunching large amounts of data through JavaScript.
I.e. for pages which use small amounts of JavaScript, but call into it quickly after loading, Firefox tends to come out on top. But for pages which load lots of JavaScript and then run it constantly, Chrome tends to come out on top.
We're usually talking milliseconds-level of difference here though. So if you're using a mobile browser or a low-power laptop, then the difference is often not measurable at all, unless the page is specifically optimized for one or the other.
Ironically I use a chrome type browser for YouTube and mail checking only. This is also the only browser in which I am logged in with my Google account.
My main Firefox is for everything else including search.
One thing you can test is to apply a Chrome user-agent on Firefox when visiting YouTube. In my personal experience that actually noticeably improves the situation.
There's a bunch of extensions that allow you to switch user-agent easily, I personally use this one, it includes a list of known strings to choose between as well.
You haven't experienced slow until you try to take Firefox through Google Cloud Console or Search Tools. 15 seconds in Chrome, somehow turns into 3 minutes in Firefox, funny how it does that.
Google does that a lot with their own web properties. I remember Google Meet didn't support background replacement on Firefox, but switching Firefox's user agent to Chrome suddenly fixed it.
I remember when Chrome was released, all marketing was on how much faster it rendered webpages, I never saw that as an issue, Firefox was fast enough, I tried Chrome for a bit, and hated the UI, I remember being confused as to why everyone loved Chrome suddenly, and frankly, I still am a bit confused by both the sudden shift, and the absolute market dominance by Chrome...
I hated Chrome's UI so much that I switched from Firefox to Pale Moon when Firefox started the whole Australis design language, and only switched back when the current design was launched
I grew up with a 56k modem. Anything after adsl is warp speed for me. I never understood or observed the speed differences between browsers.
Maybe I'm just so slow myself that I dont notice the difference but come on.. how much can it be? A few seconds? Who is so busy that a few seconds is a worthy amount of time to try and save (not talking about F1 drivers here)?
I switched from FFX to Chrome back in the day because Chrome tabs were all independent processes in task manager, and one crappy website wouldn't kill my whole browser.
When Google started their war on addons, I switched back to Firefox.
