does anyone recommend any Firefox alternatives? I genuinely hate Firefox’s UI and keybinds and the scrolling tabs
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.tabMinWidthin about:configFloorp, 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.
That we all need something like tab muting really shows that the internet has gone to shit.
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.
chrome used to be good. Emphasis on the past tense.
Firefox was always good. Chrome was very briefly better. Firefox has not suffered enshittification like chrome did.
I mean, I clearly remember firefox being terrible back when Chrome was just beginning to take off.
It was a lumbering monolith that ate all your ram and loaded pages at a glacial pace. Chrome was a multi-process revolution from that.
Then, firefox got it’s shit together and chrome got overloaded with corpo bullshit.
It used to take firefox ages to open. I switched back after the big update in the mid 2010s that made it good again.
This. Firefox has always been just good. It wasn’t great or anything, it was just a good browser. Then chrome came around and it had more, better features. It was a bit more memory usage, but those were for the additional features Firefox didn’t have.
Firefox didn’t really change a whole lot, it added synching features across accounts, and didn’t get worse. It just stayed the same.
The people made Firefox better, because now they’re creating add-ons for Firefox, where chrome had more.
I feel like once chrome got the majority of browser users, it immediately started going to shit. I have no proof of this, just a memory of it being better until it was announced that chrome was the most used browser, and the near immediate heavier memory usage.
I don’t know what rock you’ve been living under where you think base Firefox wasn’t ever improved
It’s all telemetry so the advertising company that made Chrome can harvest your data for resale at bargain bin prices
Yes, but not neccesary other Chromium do it, that depends only on the corresponding devs. Chrome is a RAM and Data Hog, because use for every tab a own process, but Vivaldi Hibernate the background tabs and because of this use less RAM than other Chromium and even FF. But generally all US browsers send data to Alphabet, googleanalytics and googletagmanager, except Edge (also Chromium), but in change it sends data to other MS partners which are even worst (Towerdata). I use Vivaldi for this, because it’s the only existing EU browser (after the French UR browser died some years ago) maybe apart Konqueror from KDE (Linux only, KHTML or KDE WEBKit engine), no data for third parties, nor Google, despite the Chromium base. The Browser companies are the problem, not the engine which they use.
I never really cared that a browser could load a page in 1.5 seconds instead of 1.9… I mean who cares?
I didn’t care until it consistently loaded faster.
That’s now my new baseline, and anything slower than ‘instant’ is annoying.
I would care if that was no longer the case, because I don’t like being constantly annoyed.That said, I don’t think the page loading speed is noticeably different between major browsers.
The addons, customisation, privacy and resource usage are where it’s at.I’m just hoping that some competition to chromium stays afloat.
Firefox will become good to me when it gets the extensions that I need for work.
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…
Over the years my customized Firefox looks like chrome ¯_(ツ)_/¯
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
Chrome is very good at running Google’s pages. Even before Google owned YouTube chrome was better at YouTube.
Google bought YouTube in 2006, Chrome was publicly released in 2008, so I believe you are misremembering the events…
Entirely possible, I was pretty busy in my early career back then
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.
Pretty much my same progression except I’ve come back to LibreWolf instead.
Greetings, fellow LibreWolf user! Hurrah!
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 remember being confused as to why everyone loved Chrome suddenly
Because they were still using Explorer before that
Fair, I can see that, I guess my question was more for the people who already had switched to Firefox
Maybe not the best image to use. Sheep bleating on about Firefox.
pretty sure thats a goat. rugged, contrary and independent. one might even say… the Greatest Of All Time.
FF is doing great. All the have to do now is the Steam strategy. Do nothing and wait for the competition to fuck themselves over.
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.
Yeah, it’s been a huge waste of resources trying to reinvent everything.
there are already forks in place if you’re dissatisfied with firefox like librewolf, floorp or the new one from mullvad
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.
My answer aged like milk
It seems Mozilla is not immune to the AI hype. I just hope their AI endeavour won’t kill them when the AI hype finally ends.
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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.
I’m more concerned with Mozilla spending its meager resources to chase some fads instead of focusing on improving firefox.
Steam’s strategy was to be first to market and essentially the only player in the game for a decade, making themselves the default.
Always gonna note too that Google Chrome (and chromium + derivatives to a lesser extent) kneecaps adblock plugins so that up to 50% fewer ad domains are blocked, blocklists are out of date, many in-page ads can’t be caught, it’s slower, and invisible trackers can bypass it.
If you’re switching a couple extensions are uBlock origin and no script with Firefox, prevents most ads and lets you choose which hosts to accept JavaScript from temporarily or permanently.
Mouse gestures is the killer-app for me on Firefox. Hate surfing without it.
P.S. Do wish Firefox had tab groups tho.
Surely there is an add on for that
Firefox add-on for Tab Groups? I looked and couldn’t find one. At some point they appeared to try to support tab groups, but gave up? I dunno. I’ve only used Chrome a little. I don’t personally care for Chrome, but I found the tab groups useful.
I just searched “tab groups Firefox” and found results saying it has them. No idea as I wasn’t able to find relevant settings last time I tried on a PC. Mobile just now I tried adding tabs to a collection, but it doesn’t look like it did anything
Thanks, but I tried a few weeks back to get tab groups working for Firefox on MacOS. No joy.
Hope someone else chimes in on how to do this. I typically have hundreds of tabs open, groups were a godsend
On mobile chrome I have “:D” tabs open which I occasionally go through and cull
I use ghostery to remove the obnoxious cookie popups here in the EU.
Vivaldi has in its inbuild ad/trackerblocker also filters to block cookie popups, no problem with this
Do you need noscript if you have ublock?
You can use the advanced mode of ublock to replace noscript too
yes, noscript blocks all javascript from running unless allowed, while ublock just blocks ads and trackers to my knowledge.
You can set uBlock to disable/enable JavaScript per site too, as per wiki page.
interesting, good to know!
Would noscript allow you to block things like when a site packs your history with their website making it impossible to back out to the page you came from? How does it work considering so many sites now are built with JavaScript libraries like React?
I dunno about the history but single page apps like react apps you can just accept the JS from the actual host in the address bar and leave all the rest turned off. Just tested on twitch. Accepting no JS loaded the home page and a spinner gif after selecting a stream. Accepted just twitch.tv and I could see the video stream and chat without having to accept any of the other hosts blocked.
Rad. Thank you. Working on my switch to Firefox today. Between this noscript stuff and learning about styling Firefox with CSS I’m absolutely sold on the switch and no longer dread the process of ditching Chrome (mostly due to familiarity than anything else).
Thanks for the info!
nonscript is your web condom. I will not touch a page without it.
Orion > FF > Chrome
Firefox masterrace
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I haven’t experienced that. What is the use-case that makes this happen? I have one machine with only 8 gig and firefox is fine, and a 16 and 32 gig machine, firefox has never eaten 8 gigs
What they mean is “I use woefully malformed websites loaded up with all sorts of weird shit that eats ram on the regular, and somehow that’s my browser’s fault”
I have a VPS with 1 GB of RAM and Firefox with up to 3 tabs is fine. OK, it’s running Linux maybe FF on Windows is worse.
Mfw when plebs are still using GUI browsers while I use Lynx.
w3m with framebuffer image support, my man.
Pfhh images. Back in my dad we had ASCII art. And we liked it!
I love Firefox, but I can’t shake the feeling that it it’s slower on YouTube. My tinfoil hat theory is that Google somehow throttles YouTube on Firefox.
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.
That’s super interesting! I’m not versed enough though, do you have like a tutorial you recommend or should I just Google it?
And to check that it’s working, there are websites you can go to which will tell you what browser they have detected you are using.
It’s not tinfoil, they have been caught doing it and they continue to do it. It’s a scumbag company.
How the fuck they haven’t been slapped with an anticompetitive is beyon - oohh right. End stage capitalism
Same happens with Safari. The page loads in a weird funky way, video sorta first and then comments and suggestions many seconds later.
On Chrome on the exact same computer it’s instant.
They’re doing it on purpose.
Do you use YouTube so much that a small performance difference on a single Site has an influence on your browser choice?
Well, Google will probably optimize their shit for their own
privacy invasion sniffing toolbrowser twice as hard as for Firefox and suchI’m pretty sure someone discovered that is true recently, but can’t be assed to try to find it right now.
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.
Firefox is good for webpages not web apps
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 attackedWeb apps took over!”Basically I am saying Firefox is not as performant as chromium when loading JavaScript.
Don’t agree, nothing noticeable for me anyhow. Chrome has the ultimate drawback: being under the control of a monopolistic evil corporation
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.
What an oddly aggressive take on someone’s opinion
A web app is just a fancy name for a dynamic web page. Change my mind.
I tried both and the videos played at the same speed for me
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.
For YouTube on IOS, I use Brave. It does a decent (but not perfect) job of hiding ads on YT.
I’d like to try out ff but I’d have to use it for a few days. Is it possible to possible to sync passwords and bookmarks with my Google account like chrome? How’s the touchscreen support?
Firefox mobile isn’t there yet. Passwords will conveniently autofill from your Google account thanks to the Android level implementation of password management, but more importantly it’s resource heavy and bad UI design. Ublock support is nice but some websites just don’t deal with it well. The nightly builds do fix my main problems with the UI but they crash all the time. So there’s hope for the future, but for now it’s not great unless you absolutely need proper browser level ad blocking rather than Blokada.
Tbh I switched to Firefox mobile from Chrome and have the opposite experience. While it is in someway less convenient for auto fill, as long as my Google account is logged in on another browser page I can always use it for that and they have password and credit card auto fill features should you want to take care of them.
Not with your Google account directly. You create a Firefox account that is client-side encrypted, and you’ll probably use your Gmail for that. Then, you can import your bookmarks/passwords from there. This might be a good time to move your passwords to an actual password manager like Bitwarden.
Afaik, all modern browsers can import/export passwords and bookmarks? FF lets you set up an account and sync across devices with a unique PW if you want (not your computer user PW, but it could be).
No idea on touchscreens outside the Android app.
