• Firefox offers better privacy and security than Chrome, with upcoming support for 200 new add-ons. • While Chrome dominates, Firefox gains ground with user-friendly browsing experience and open-source model. • Mozilla’s focus on user privacy and transparency challenges Google’s ad-centric approach, making Firefox a viable alternative.
I’d like to formally apologize. I should have never left.
It’s cool just come back and bring a friend with you.
i feel like firefox used to suck
or did chrome used to not suck so much?
or was i a sucker for bandwagon and marketing
When Chrome came out it was fairly light on resource usage and speedy because of that. Firefox was a resource hog at this time. Chrome now is a show resource hog and Firefox is much peppier overall in my opinion.
deleted by creator
Tree. Style. Tabs.
Best damned extension ever. It’s amazing to me that all browsers don’t have this style of tabs.
Thanks for the recommendation. I need to organize my 100+ tabs.
Tree Style Tab also lets you bookmark whole trees. I’m often jumping between different coding languages, or different areas of DevOps on a weekly basis, and tree bookmarks help. I can “file away” a bunch of research and load it all back later, and still have the tree! Very useful for context switching.
Have you tried tab session manager? I was planning on testing it to check if it provides additional value…
No I haven’t, but I’m intrigued!
Tree style tabs on it’s own just sounds like it would be enabling my tab-hoarding tendencies. But bookmarking entire trees of tabs is too good to pass up.
Right?
The ability to drag them into specific trees to keep them organized, and the also Tab Renamer so the top tab is named sensibly and you can find other tabs
Most of my immediate team have switched to vertical tabs. It’s frustrating seeing someone with a couple hundred horizontal tabs trying to figure where that important page was.
Edge does vertical tabs, but no nesting. Even that frees up a good amount of screen space.
It does one level of nesting with tab groups. Just drag one tab onto another to start.
internet explorer has a similar feature where tab background colors were different for each tree, though it doesn’t have the tree view :p
It’s this on Firefox Android?
Pretty sure, the whole sidebar concept doesn’t exist on Firefox Android, so very likely no…
Unfortunately no, but honestly I can’t imagine how it would work on such small and horizontal screen. Though I love that I can run uBO, Privacy Badger, TamperMonkey and CleanURLs.
I mostly just want a tab grouping system like android chrome had.
I’m looking for this too, we need a sane way to organize tabs on mobile.
Combine that with their multi-account containers and you got yourself a stew, honey!
I wish it was the default (or at least a built in option). It’s a bit annoying to still have to use workarounds to remove the default tab bar.
I’m not a fan of hoarding tabs, so with them being short lived I don’t see benefits in having a tree. But I do use sidebery + custom userChrome.css to have exclusively vertical tabs, which save quite some space when collapsed.
If you work from home and you have go through a bunch of web resources, it’s really nice. Most of the time you’re opening new tabs, instead of being in the same tab. That way you still have the old web page for reference.
Specifically any job over the phone, it’s almost mandatory. I love closing all the tabs at the end of the call, though.
Don’t get me wrong, I work mostly from home and open thousands of tabs every day. But most don’t last longer than a few minutes, and if the flat hierarchy is not able to handle them, that’s a sign they should be cleaned up.
On the other hand, trees encourage tab hoarding, which I personally loathe, but people have different preferences.
Switch? I never left!
-🗿
I deeply regret leaving.
Growing up, I used Firefox on PC, but switched to Chrome early 2010s due to using a lot of google products for university work, and the general “google is cool” vibe that surrounded me from peers (tech/business student).
Now after a decade, I’m deeply entrenched in Google with bookmarks, passwords and habits. Only progress I made is switching to iOS from Android. Installed Ff on mobile, but didn’t really like the experience, so not really using it.
Will probably try to make a stronger push to invest some time and switch completely during Xmas break, as it does bother me to be part of the problem, though I hate how convenient not doing anything about it is.
I had a similar history to you.
I finally decided a couple months back to start de-googling and did the following so far:
- switched Google Password Manager to VaultWarden
- switched Google Search Engine to searxng
- switched Google Keep to Obsidian/memos
- switched Google Drive/Office to Cryptpad
- switched Google Chrome desktop to LibreWolf
- switched Google Chrome Mobile to Fennec F-droid
Only progress I made is switching to iOS from Android. Installed Ff on mobile, but didn’t really like the experience, so not really using it.
Well if you switched to iOS then there’s not really much point as the browser backend is still the same as Safari there. Apple doesn’t allow other browser engines so on iOS Firefox/Chrome/etc are all just wrappers on Apple’s browser engine.
Apple is worse than Google in many ways and if you wanted to maintain control over your privacy (and even just de-google) you ironically would be better off staying on Android.
There are many great custom firmwares available for Android devices such as GrapheneOS which can truly de-google your device.
To be fair, Chrome was vastly superior to Firefox for ages in the early 2010’s
Don’t forget about the Firefox forks like LibreWolf!
and waterfox!
and mullvad browser!
and “bolexforsoup already said mullvad an hour ago” browser!
+1 for Waterfox
Waterfox Elevator pitch?
Water is like cooler than fire, duuude.
This is the first I’m seeing it, and it looks interesting. I’m always up to try a new browser. And it works on Linux too. If the language can be toggled to English I’ll definitely try it.
Their website is in Japanese but everything in the browser itself was English by default when I started using it!
Awesome, thank you for letting me know. That was really the sole concern I had, and it looks very promising. Thank you!
Since version 120 is coming to mobile soon with about 200 extensions (as mentioned in the article), can anyone recommend some good extensions that are newly added? I have ublock origin, HD YouTube, Google search fixer, clear url fixer, dark reader, privacy badger, and ghostery
You’ve hit all the great ones, most of which were already available.
Have you added the bypass paywall clean filter list to ublock? Here’s the url you can copy paste under “import” in the ublock addon settings: https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-clean-filters/-/raw/main/bpc-paywall-filter.txt
I haven’t done this. Thank you so much for this suggestion!
I think ghostery is owned by an ad company. I wouldn’t trust it.
Seriously? I had no idea. That’s kind of ironic if it is
Try libredirect, it automatically redirects links from twitter, youtube, imgur and many other spying platforms to alternative privacy friendly frontends. It is also very customizable: you can turn only some redirects and configure what particular site to use for each platform.
How is it for mobile though? All of my web interaction is through my android
UBlock Origin mobile. Enough said.
UBlock Origin mobile.
uBlock Origin mobile with the EasyList annoyance cookie notices filter enabled. Never see an annoying cookie notice again.
This article is actually specifically about mobile! Yes it’s great. :)
Excellent? It allows ublock origin so tjatsbautomaitxlsly a boost for performance.
I’ve used it very briefly and had no problems.
Honestly, the differences between browsers performance is almost nothing. I’ve been a long time Firefox user and only ever encountered a compatibility issue once, but that was on a 3rd world countries government webpage for a small neighborhood.
It was more likely that it was a bug.
ive switched to firefox for desktop windows for about 1 year now. Firefox is really capable and as swift as chrome. You also get a sense of less intrusiveness. Firefox also has the multi containers widget, though for me it breaks down after a while. The big difference now between firefox and chrome are things like automatic subtitles for anything running in chrome. So if a youtube or other video has no english subs, Chrome can do it. And soon, Chrome i going to go AI too. I’m not sure how firefox will survive that onslaught. I suspect mozilla will have a firefox fork partnering with a major competitor of google (eg: MS).
I’ll admit that those features are useful, but it’s not enough for me to switch to chrome and give Google more control over the web.
It’s like giving up the house to play with some toys.
Firefox and Firefox Focus. Try them. You’ll love them.
deleted by creator
FF is great for mobile with the exception of PWAs. They abandoned support for web apps - they work but performance is terrible. It’s a massively requested feature so hopefully they’ll add support soon. I use a chromium browser (Vanadium) for web apps but have links open in FF.
My biggest thing is all the news stories are msn web links. Maybe there’s a way to change that? It’s super annoying
image.unrelated
Anyone who tried it a year ago, this comment is to tell you that Firefox has improved by orders of magnitude in the past year/years. I recommend trying it again.
The mobile experience of Firefox with ad block is so much better than Chrome. Using chrome on mobile makes the Internet feel broken to me. I can’t go back.
Brave has the best mobile experience IMO. Built-in dark content (this is gamechanger, dark reader is broken on FF mobile, slow and breaks pages), background playback (though this has FF also), very fast, more than FF. Powerful rust-written adblocker (though UBO is better but is slow and broke some pages on mobile). The only thing that could improve more is extensions capacity.
Firefox kind of sucks in android though and there are no good forks imo, but this is also true for chromium so idk what to do.
It’s getting more and more like chrome.
I might be in the very minority crowd here, but I just can’t get used to Firefox. I mean once upon a time I was clinging to Netscape screaming foul at Internet Explorer too, old habits die hard. But Chrome just clicks for me, whereas the multiple times I’ve tried Firefox, it just doesn’t click for me. Can’t put my finger on it.
Just because Google broke the most trafficked site on the internet for Firefox doesn’t mean its a bad browser. Hell that’s a ringing endorsement.
Mozilla Foundation fronts Mozilla Corporation which is for-profit and brings in nearly a Billion in revenue.
Don’t donate, do harden it.