I switched back to firefox last year and haven't looked back. I still use chrome on another laptop sometimes, the performance difference from my human perspective is literally zero.
These days, it's much more common for me to encounter a website that works in firefox but not chrome than the other way around. I actually switched for good when I had to use firefox to file my taxes, because the IRS free self-file site was hopelessly broken on chrome.
Firefox out of the box indeed does not cause broken websites. However, the demographic of this forum probably will use Firefox with "Multi-Account Containers", "Temporary Containers", "uBlock Origin", and a few more. These are amazing for privacy and productivity, but will occasionally cause broken websites.
Source: I am a Firefox-first user who occasionally uses plugin-less Chrome because the aforementioned plugins (and "ClearURLs", "Consent-o-matic", and a few others) occasionally break websites.
Firefox doesn't. But publishers de-prioritizing or being hostile to Firefox does. I keep Chrome up for VirusTotal to scan PortableApps.com releases. In Firefox, it'll throw broken ReCaptcha prompts over and over and over after a certain number of scans per day (pick the thing, next, pick the thing, next x10, etc). And that's with all extensions disabled. Possibly related: VirusTotal and ReCaptcha are owned by Google.
It's not patronage if you don't pay. Google would rather not have you as a user if it costs them any amount of time to support you. The relationship here is adversarial on both sides and pretending otherwise doesn't help anyone.
if firefox users keep flooding their support line with problems then that means firefox users are costing them money. eventually it will be cheaper to build software that actually works.
> But publishers de-prioritizing or being hostile to Firefox does.
Honestly, we should take the same stand against them. Those who are hostile towards Firefox should be publicly named and shamed for sheer incompetence and/or malice.
> Firefox out of the box indeed does not cause broken websites.
There are definitely websites that don't work with Firefox out of the box. Just one example that annoys me is https://mtgarena-support.wizards.com. "Firefox users: Firefox's Enhanced Tracking Protection may interfere with Sign In. Temporarily disable it in Firefox Privacy Settings to load the sign in screen."
Alternatively read as: “We are actively hostile to user-chosen browser privacy settings such that we develop our application to coach our users to turn these settings off as a necessary means of accessing their account”. I guess that’s what they call a death spiral given that the behavior discourages me from attending any would-have-been-DCI events.
I have had sites that are definitely broken in Firefox even after a stock install with every last toggle/extension/script blocker turned off. It's fairly rare, but there are a slowly growing list of sites that don't behave properly under Firefox but work in Chromium.
I use a home video appliance called camect which is accessed through a web interface which explicitly only works in chromium browsers. Oddly, I often find that the bbc news page doesn't load images on the first attempt in Firefox, but always does in Chrome.
Multi-account-containers doesn't really break websites in my opinion. It's just like running a separate browser (in fact it's simply a firefox profile under the hood).
What can go wrong is if you've set a certain site to always open in a certain container and another site redirects you to this site. This can happen with Identity Providers like Okta, ADFS etc. They will then open in a different container (the assigned one) and lose context. Especially microsoft services have an annoying habit of redirecting through 25 different URLs on every sign-in. But if configured correctly it's a godsend, you can use this tool to sign into multiple MS tenants at the same time, something with chrome and not even Edge can do right now (switching teams between multiple tenants is a nightmare).
But I don't think it's the multi accounts containers at fault here, it's the user. Just don't do that :P
I have chrome installed. In the rare occasion that Firefox does not do a good job I just switch to chrome for that website and then go back.
This is usually the case if there might be forms or something like that. It's minor enough that it doesn't bother me.
Now, on the other hand, tab management is so much better with chrome and I've considered using Chrome for that reason alone. At work I do use chrome because I usually have 10-15 websites open at a time (for example I like to keep one tab group per ticket and every related item to it there).
I do use simple tab groups on Firefox but it's not good enough at least to replace my workflow at work.
Hey! So I finally felt inspire and made a demo of my Firefox userchrome.css and Tree Style Tabs customization and CSS on my Github here [1]. It makes it so that the Tree style tabs expand and contract over the page, showing just the favicon and number of sub-tabs when contracted, along with a few other things, like reducing border sizes and adding better indication for sound in a tab. It's pretty nifty I think; I hope someone finds it to their liking. :)
I wish tab groups to be implemented natively. Or that extensions can manage the tab bar instead of using a sidebar. That’s the best experience we can get so far, but it does not feel right to me.
I have two profiles for firefox dorkily called "hax0r mode" and "normie mode", each with different theming so I can tell the diff.
I try to do as much as I can in hax0r mode, which has uBlock O, NoScript, auto cookie delete and a few other privacy settings like no 3rd party cookies. Sites usually start pretty broken before I tweak NoScript for them, which I'm OK with.
Occasionally, sites are obstinate and I need to use Normie mode (e.g. for Maps)
Normie mode just has uBlock O, containers. I really have zero problems with sites breaking here.
Nah, there's plenty of examples of sites breaking on Firefox. For example, the recent degraded performance on Youtube linked to Firefox User Agent strings.
Yeah but that's not on Mozilla in any way. That's just Google's anti-competitive practices. Firefox refuses to jump on Google's attempts to ban adblockers with Manifest V3 so Google wants to punish them
I feel like it doesn't matter how many examples of Firefox not working properly you are faced with, you will simply respond "well that's not Mozilla's fault, that on the website developer" for each and every one. At the end of the day it's the Firefox user who is faced with the problem.
I do feel that there’s a difference in kind between: “a website was built with Chrome in mind, and has problems rendering in Firefox”, and “a website was built specifically to degrade in Firefox”.
If no engineering time was spent on Firefox, and it’s broken in Firefox, that’s a Firefox problem.
If active engineering time was spent on _deliberately breaking_ Firefox, then yes, I don’t think that’s a Firefox problem. I think it’s a website problem at that point.
which means other than a small handful of power users most people will continue using chrome, and websites will continue prefering to put it first, continuing the cycle
im curious to see what effect ublock not working as well on chrome as it will on firefox will have to the demographics, if there's no shift then that's a hurdle that has to be overcome by either firefox by some sort of engineering, google, or via legislation
Nowadays there's very few websites that work on Chrome but not Firefox. Hell I'd even throw modern Safari in that. Interop 2021-2023 has made a huge difference
Besides specific Google products, most everything works across all 3 major engines.
In addition, Mozilla adds specific code to Firefox to counteract anti-competitive practices on specific websites
What matters for the end user is the experience. If using FF will lead to a poor experience on certain websites, then why recommend it?
Do people honestly believe that if they keep recommending FF, people will magically switch to FF and Google will be forced to stop its anti-competitive practices?
> What matters for the end user is the experience. If using FF will lead to a poor experience on certain websites, then why recommend it?
Because holding that against Firefox is exactly what Google is counting on. And the more you recommend it the harder it is for Google to continue its anti-competitive practices.
The more you fall a fool for Google's (or Microsoft a decade ago) practices, the worse the experience for everyone is in the future.
Anyways, there's simple extensions that will sidestep Chrome's bs. In addition, you'll soon to be able to get an adblocked experience that you can only get on Firefox. That means less network traffic, faster loading websites, and better user privacy
Speaking of adblock experience with Firefox (and uBlock origin), Google has managed to slip ads into my Youtube experience. So far I can skip them after watching the first 5 seconds so it's not too bad.
Before that they had a popup that would timeout after 15s (?). At that point I tried disabling uBlock on Youtube but found the ads stacked up to much longer, so the 15s delay was more acceptable.
As expected, this will probably continue to be a cat and mouse game.
Yea - because Google is just outright acting evil in a number of ways. A good example is the fact that background blur isn't supported in google meet in FF and that audio translation is similarly blocked in FF. These are just arbitrary ways that Google is degrading the FF experience because of their commanding market share.
Well, there's also the fact that Google is currently being prosecuted for antitrust violations on both sides of the Atlantic...
Do you honestly believe that it's OK for Google to just keep being anti-competitive? Or that this is a completely inevitable and unfixable state of affairs?
We can, should, and will hold Google accountable for its monopolistic conduct, and this is absolutely part of that.
If you want an experience that includes privacy violations, knock yourself out. Personally, as an end user, that is exactly what I don’t want, which is why I use Firefox
What good does not recommending it achieve? Maintaining the status quo which as well discussed elsewhere in these threads is hardly generally desirable?
My move back to FF has been slow (as mentioned already too) but I've been recommending it to others, who don't have my self-inflicted blocker, for some time. Maybe some will stop listening if I keep mentioning it, but people online I'll never meet in person are hardly a great loss in my life. The sort of people who are going to take such issue in RealLife™ are likely those just paying me attention in exchange largely for free tech support (the matter isn't likely to come up in other contexts) and they can do one anyway too.
It doesn't ban a blockers outright but does severely hamper them. It severely limits how many filters that can exist within the plugin, and also prevents plugins from updating block lists themselves and forces those updated lists to go through the plugin store.
Both of those will seriously hamper a more advanced adblock like UBlock Origin
>It severely limits how many filters that can exist within the plugin
The limits are 30,000 static rules and 30,000 dynamic rules. Running tens of thousands of regexs for each request can lead to a performance impact. Allowing for even higher limits may result in people having a worse experience from the browser becoming slower. The API was designed such that these limits can be increased in the future as available computation and user needs change over time. Getting extension developers to design their extensions in a way where they have to think about not slowing down the browser too much I think is a good thing and I would not call these current limits severe.
>also prevents plugins from updating block lists themselves
declarativeNetRequest lets rules be added and removed dynamically by the extension.
>forces those updated lists to go through the plugin store
The Chrome team has said that configuration can be updated outside of a store update. What the Chrome web store does not want are extensions that download and run code. This policy does not related to mv3.
It bans the ability for them to block or reroute network requests. Some adblockers might still work on some sites, but it'd mostly be an aesthetic feature. Your browser is still receiving the data, your network is still clogged, and websites are still slower.
There's some more you should do to increase privacy: Disable Firefox sending each keystroke into the address bar to all the numerous search engines (includes google). Best to just enable the separate bar for search and disable search suggestions entirely.
"Firefox out of the box indeed does not cause broken websites" .. for you.
I regulary ran across something that does not work or has a broken style. And I know how to turn UO off.
And why should that be a surprise? FF has way less manpower than Chrome. (And even fired lots of engineers, to raise the CEO bonus)
Chrome leads the way and probably the vast majority developes for chrome and with chrome dev tools. So most of the time FF works, but not always. And performance is just worse, but not noticable on a desktop and on mobile it is offset by the working adblock. Meaning perceived performance is usually better, because ads are blocked, unlike in chrome mobile.
Not the worst idea to avoid a website for breaking in FF (or take a chance to touch grass), but unfortunately when you can't pay your credit card bill or need something for your work and it only works in Chromium it can't be avoided.
And sadly it can be worse, with my quite complex app, that I absolutely did not tailor for chrome, but gone out of my way to also support FF - the result is that chrome is just 3x faster.
I also had problems recently with an online notary service... they forced me to use Chrome...
Not the same problem, but I wonder when faxes will disappear... For example, Progressive Insurance wanted me fax, mail pictures or bring them in person... email didn't work... Of course they didn't have a safe way to transfer them digitally but I would not care if everyone in the world saw those emails.
The useless requirements that they set just proves that they don't understand technology.
> Source: I am a Firefox-first user who occasionally uses plugin-less Chrome because the aforementioned plugins (and "ClearURLs", "Consent-o-matic", and a few others) occasionally break websites.
I have good luck just using a private window, since that has no extensions by default. Bonus: It's really fast; ctrl-l ctrl-c ctrl-shift-p ctrl-c enter
Zero broken websites here, and I use those and more extensions. I also use FF on Android and iPadOS (although that's a Safari reskin, it provides some niceties on top like send tab to device).
I use Firefox with uBlock Origin. I don't use containers but I do use profiles.
Yes some sites are "broken" with uBlock Origin. I don't find it to be many, however. I run into paywalls much more often than I do problems with my browser settings.
Yeah im still a bit surprised that Github doesnt work in firefox for me. It wont load a repository page, its just blank with nothing but the navigation on the page. This happens after turning off all plugins. dont know if github has made it so only chrome works but thats a pretty major site for firefox to not work with.
I've been using FireFox for about 4.5 years now, but I have to have Chrome installed for a few reasons unfortunately.
- Some websites still will just not work in FireFox. It's not super common anymore, but if I sense something is fishy, I pop open the console and see some strange error and swap over to Chrome. Things will just work then. All extensions disabled even. I even ran into this on Vanguard's website, albeit for some obscure forms.
- When I worked at a company that had a larger web app presence, I would have to test in Chrome. That's a given, but my Chrome counterparts did not do the same with FireFox. I would fairly regularly (few times a quarter) find things that were completely broked on FireFox.
All that said, I don't really care about my choice in browser very much, but I'd rather support Mozilla over Google still. Especially since they're the only non-Chromium and v8 engine out there aside from Safari, which is also owned by a massive for profit company. I'd like to help support a more open web, even if it's just a little bit.
> Especially since they're the only non-Chromium and v8 engine out there aside from Safari, which is also owned by a massive for profit company.
You know, it's not necessarily a bad thing that another enormous company is competing with Chrome. It might be less than ideal than Firefox having Safari's share, but it still eats at Google's monopoly more effectively.
> Some websites still will just not work in FireFox
I run into this as well, but I just use Safari as my backup browser and that usually is good enough. The only thing I still need to use Chrome for is my Nest thermostat.
Same, but other way around. Don’t even have Chrome installed. I don’t know what websites people are using, but I’m glad to not need them. The idea that a site could fail to render on any reasonably common browser seems pretty absurd.
I unfortunately switched back to Chrome last week after having used Firefox for years due to not being able to use sites I frequent. I constantly ran into issues with Heroku, GCP (go figure), and a few financial sites I'd log into regularly.
I'm fully switching to FF at home now. I'd half done it but had a large collection of tabs open in Chrome which kept pulling me back as I couldn't be bothered with reassessing them all (a fair I should have closed) and recording the ones I still wanted to keep elsewhere. Chrome gave me the final push the other day by completely forgetting most of those open items during an update.
I'd not encountered anything broken in Chrome that was fixed by FF though.
I'll still be primarily Chrome in DayJob though, as most of our clients' users are (with some on Edge, a few using FF, and a couple of idiots still not off IE though we don't officially support that) so that makes sense even though I very rarely touch anything front-end these days.
SuperTabs is Chrom{e|ium} only which doesn't help as I'm moving to FF. OneTab looks partly useful, but often where I came from is important as well as the current tab location, if I've travelled through links “normally” rather than opening in a new tab every time, and I wouldn't expect it to keep that history.
Really, I need to get away from using tabs for long-term state rather than finding a better way to use tabs for that. It would make switching UA easier when I want to, and switching machine too for that matter.
Also, I've been burned by tab and/or session management extensions going stalky (TheGreatSuspender & friends), or stagnating and failing after a time.
I want to move as much state beyond active interactive use away from the browser. I've never kept passwords there or gone in for built-in sync options, but feel the need to take this further. The older I get, the more I see tight integration as a lock-in rather than a benefit.
What would be really cool is a Firefox plugin that allowed you to replace the entire browser tab with a Chromium renderer on a specific website if you so wish, and remember that setting. That way there would really be no need to install Chrome for a few one-off websites.
Considering both Firefox and Chromium are open-source it should be entirely possible.
I tried FF for a long time but finally switched to Brave. Yes, I'll be downvoted for saying this but it's objectively one of my top 3 favorite browsers rn.
1. Brave
2. Edge
3. Safari
I like each of them for different reasons. Brave (after disabling annoying features such as crypto and VPN) is awesome and its iOS app is the only one which can play videos in the background, has dark mode, and syncs really well with the desktop app.
Edge is so tempting esp. with recent Microsoft Copilot which makes it so useful (I can summarize pages right in the browser, organize my tabs by telling so to the Copilot, etc.)
Safari is not a good browser per se and lacks many features and plugins, but it's minimal and doesn't drain the battery like Brave and FF.
I really wanted to like FF but it's just not cutting it anymore.
Brave is really good and always surprising me with features while largely staying lean and out of my way.
They recently added a chatbot that runs locally they call Leo based on llama2. It's pretty impressive that you can perform LLM tasks on the current page without the use of any 3rd party service. And of course you can pay them for the souped up version. https://brave.com/leo-release/
Feels like I am alone in thinking the crypto features of Brave are cool. And not because I think that industry generally isn't full of slime. But micropayments for content has been a good, latent idea for a generation, and here they've simply built it as a default feature.
I still use FF and Brave equally because of my experience with the first browser wars and my mistrust of Chrome, having become the new IE.
This also where I landed with Brave as it seems to be working great for all of devices. Runs smoothly and I don’t really have a problem full with many sites on aggressive mode. I’ve had the sync’ing feature go flaky a few times, but over all good experience.
My big gripe with FF honestly is the lack for PWA ( progressive web apps) If they resurrect that effort I’d give it a shot. I’m not really interested in running another browser for that feature.
Also the brave privacy settings are remarkably better “by default” across all my devices. I’m sure Firefox can be configured to be hardened I just have other ways I’d like to spend my time. Heck I’d even pay for better option for all my devices.
I use FF on my desktop and Brave on mobile. I tried FF on mobile and it has too many issues, unlike its desktop counterpart. And there are no good maintained de-googled chromium alternatives on Android other than Brave.
That is true, but the Chrome/Chromium ecosystem is largely driven by Google. And Google makes use of this power position to push through web standards that benefit them, but not the users. Therefore I choose to use Firefox, to support a more open browser ecosystem.
It'll all render the same using Chrome/Blink, but forks might take out tracking by Google (and potentially add other tracking), add adblock outside of plugins, or re-add support for Manifest V2 to name a few. Chromium forks can actually be pretty different.
Chromium is over 20 million lines of code. No Chromium fork is meaningfully different. Come back with that BS when Blink has 25% of its contributions coming from one of these Chrome skins.
I've been using Firefox for regular browsing for years now, but I use Chrome for streaming videos (Firefox streaming quality is noticably worse) and LibreWolf for YouTube (blocks ads). It's annoying to have 3 browsers open basically all of the time.
I'm slowly migrating a lot of my browsing out of Safari and into LibreWolf, and using the opportunity to document accounts/passwords that i want to keep.
If i were willing to get an iPhone, then i'd be quite happy with Safari (i don't have Chrome installed on my Mac), but I want the ability to have my bookmarks available on multiple phones & computers... so firefox profiles (in LibreWolf) is the mechanism i've decided to use for that (for now)
The only site I've found behaves terribly in Firefox is LinkedIn. Weird pauses on page load that lock the whole browser (not just the tab) for like 5-10 seconds. No idea what they're doing to make this happen, but it's odd.
Which is, well, fine, because LinkedIn is mostly a dumpster anyways.
This prompted me to check LinkedIn after months of having it parked in a tab and it worked with no problems.
When I have problems with a site it's usually because I'm blocking most JavaScript with uMatrix and I have to find the correct combination of scripts to make the site work for me without having to give away my soul to the gods of tracking.
As a software developer, it's been years since a customer told me that the sites I develop on Firefox don't work on Chrome or Safari. I don't even bother to check anymore. I couldn't check with Safari anyway and they are OK with that. The point is that if it works in Firefox it works everywhere. Of course we're not using any Chrome-only API but we never had to use one of them as far as I can remember.
Any site that is on the edge of performance (often due to bad engineering, which you can blame on time constraints) will perform vastly better in Chromium.
I don't much care, TBH. Having worked in the Chromium codebase before, I know what an absolutely mammoth amount of engineering hours goes into that.
V8 on its own is a technological miracle.
But all funded by a firehose of crazy privacy invading ad revenue.
So. I'll live with the odd pause and a bit of battery drain. I gave Google 10 years of my life as an employee in exchange for $$, I'm not interested in giving them the rest of my life for free.
It's funny because I worked in that repository for a few years, and routinely built a custom "shell" (what Chromecast is) and when this guy suggested Brave my thought was... eh, yeah, sure, but I could also just roll my own or just run stock chromium :-)
I personally like that Firefox isn't based on webkit/blink.
Okay, well, they're using React and most React engineers aren't very good so it ends up being a clusterfuck that most people don't even notice given how well Chromium is optimized.
I'm a FF-first user but I definitely have had to keep Chrome around for a few things— my investment banking doesn't load in FF nor do some parts of Office 365.
If GP is anything like me, they used Firefox before Chrome was released. The Mozilla/Netscape suite that spawned Firefox is older than Google itself.
For a time, Firefox performed worse than a rabid dog. Chrome ate their lunch and gained market share fast. I and many of my colleagues switched around that time.
In my case: Because Opera stopped using Presto and switched to Chromium. That does says a bit about when I switched.
I used Firefox pretty extensively, then switch to Chrome when Firefox fell behind on speed, but the developer tools absolutely sucks in Chrome, so I tried Opera which had a great feature set, speed and wonderful developer tools. It was a pretty sad day when Opera dropped Presto, and more so when they where bought by some Chinese company.
These days, it's much more common for me to encounter a website that works in firefox but not chrome than the other way around. I actually switched for good when I had to use firefox to file my taxes, because the IRS free self-file site was hopelessly broken on chrome.