This should be the first argument of this post. Listing that at the end is like apologizing for the rest of the post, like “no no, don’t be afraid!”. Using Firefox is not hardcore activism, there’s no big tradeoff here. Actually most users should feel no difference after switching, except they won’t have their Google avatar constantly reminding them their personal data is being sucked up. Once it’s settled that Firefox is as good as its competitors, the privacy and free-software arguments would be even stronger IMO, because it would seem crazy not to give credit to the awesome piece of free software Firefox is.
Firefox address bar works worse than Chrome’s for instance – Chrome tries to autocomplete entire URLs that are used often, Firefox does that one path segment at a time, which is not what most people want, I assume. Password autofill on Android often doesn’t work. On the desktop, some UI elements are disproportionately large to how often they’re used. Chrome’s are more optimized. Firefox is a wonderful project which I’m thankful for it but lacks some polish.
Chrome tries to autocomplete entire URLs that are used often, Firefox does that one path segment at a time, which is not what most people want, I assume
Oh, that is actually a feature that might make me switch to Firefox! Safari has the same behaviour as Chrome here and it’s really annoying. If I want to go to github.com/org/project, I don’t want it to autocomplete the four GitHub pages I’ve visited most recently, I want it to autocomplete github.com/ and then let me type the character of the org, tab, first characters of the project, tab, and get to the right place. I end up either typing the full URL or bouncing via a search engine in Safari because of this.
Password autofill on Android often doesn’t work
Last time I checked, on macOS it also didn’t use the Keychain (Chrome now can, including for Passkeys). I trust the macOS keychain a lot more than I trust Firefox to be secure. It has some very fine-grained ACLs for which applications can access which passwords.
I trust the macOS keychain a lot more than I trust Firefox to be secure.
Your trust (or distrust) is well placed. Firefox passwords are encrypted with a key derived from a master password, but if the user doesn’t explicitly set one, it’s the empty string. More to the point, it’s a known constant, so anyone with knowledge of the format can reconstruct the key and decrypt the credentials.
There are several open source tools that do this, and I managed to write one myself.
I thought they were going to make the default randomly generated at profile creation time. Have they not done that yet?
I have no idea; my focus was on recovering my own credentials from years ago.
But it wouldn’t matter. You already have a randomly generated salt. If you’re not asking the user to provide the master key, then you have to store it on disk in cleartext. Randomizing the key is just adding more salt.
I don’t recall the randomized salt being used for the key. I thought my program worked without using it, on any nss databases that weren’t password protected…
It’s been a while though. And the thrust of your original comment is obviously correct. I was just surprised because I thought I remembered that this was going to be changed in a way that would make it very modestly better.
The feature I still miss from Firefox since I stoped used it 15 years ago is to able to type “git proj” and it would show the beat match on the completion list. I find the multi step workflow you mention too slow.
Chrome never matched this fuzzy matching behaviour.
Firefox does support this, some settings may influence this. I just tried ’git and the first URL suggested is the proper one.
Maybe some “special” settings I have done related to search, I have only enabled “Provide search suggestions” but have disabled all 3 options below in about:preferences#search and in about:preferences#privacy I have disabled “Search engines”. So when I type something into the URL bar I only get URLs from open tabs, history and bookmarks.
To also narrow down your search to e.g. bookmarks only, type a * first and then your search term. There is also % for open tabs or ^ for history. Settings including additional installed search engines are in about:preferences#search below at “Search Shortcuts”.
I spent a little while puzzling over this, then I guessed: “best match”?
What does “best” mean in this context? I don’t care much about this but several people are comparing Chrome autocomplete and Firefox autocomplete, and I never even noticed a difference in something like 28 years on Mozilla browsers. Can you explain what “the best match” means?
This was a huge deal when it was launched. Firefox awesome bar, they used to call it.
I didn’t explain well… But, you could type words separated by spaces and it would show results that matched those words on both the URL and the title of previously visited pages. I have just checked, they removed matching in the title and don’t even show it anymore…. They are pretty much a chrome copycat at this point.
Here is video showing it. Notive that the tittle doesn’t show up anymore nowadays. Which is ironic, given google is trying hard to push users into no being able to interact with urls directly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7stmWKvk64
You can configure Firefox Password Autofill to use a third-party app (at least on mobile: I use my Nextcloud Password app, which is probably less secure than macOS keychain but is probably secure enough, and it works like a charm).
Right, I’ll eventually have to set up a VaultWarden instance. What’s stopping me is I haven’t fully figured out how to do LetsEncrypt TLS on my private server without a DNS domain. It is possible but requires some tinkering.
They have full autocomplete: browser.urlbar.autoFill.adaptiveHistory.enabled. Not sure why they’re holding back making it a default, or even adding it in the settings.
It was on by default on Nightly initially, but there were a lot of complaints (including mine) so it was disabled, I don’t know if it was ever re-enabled by default. It looks like there were several cycles of bug fixing.
Does Chrome still do the thing where URL bar autocompletion includes ads for companies? I remember a couple years ago back when I was using Chrome I typed “j” to go to a bookmark I had created that was literally named “j” and that I visit multiple times a day, but this high-relevance, exact match got ranked lower than “JC Penny”, which I have never once searched for or visited.
It wasn’t even an ad for a product, just a “hey, we thought you might like to search for this corporation?” Utterly baffling.
This is something I have never thought about, so I don’t have a strong opinion on whether Firefox’s or Chrome’s behaviour here is better… but come on. That so incredibly minor. Surely nobody is choosing Chrome over Firefox because the URL bar autocomplete functions ever so slightly different on Firefox. It’s not like Firefox doesn’t suggest entire URLs, you just may need to hit the down arrow to select it slightly more frequently than with Chrome. And when you’re viewing an actual web page, the only two things taking up vertical space is the tab bar and the URL/search/plug-ins/navigation bar, just as with Chrome.
I know folks who have gone back to chrome because of slight differences in the omnibar behaviour. I think they liked that they could easily search a site from the omnibar or something?
I have about:config on Android. I’ve got two Firefox based browsers installed on Android, both from the F-droid app store. They are Fennec and Mull, both have about:config.
Unfortunately, neither one has that specific config key.
I haven’t noticed the segment behavior. However, I am required to use chrome for work and its address bar works SO MUCH worse than firefox’s, especially in terms of autocompleting from browser history - chrome can never find things that I was browsing even a few history entries ago.
Really actually I think Firefox is not actually really worse than the competitor, but the phrase “actually really good” indicates that if I’m not already actually skeptical, I really actually should be before considering Firefox to be good.
most users should feel no difference after switching
I have tried to switch to Firefox many times over the years, but running on Ubuntu, the Firefox UI feels noticably clunkier and less polished than Chrome. Too much unused whitespace and padding everywhere (the URL box, for example, doesn’t stretch to fill the horizontal space). An inconsistent mix of different font sizes and line heights. It very much has that awkward GTK / Java Swing feel to it, and I find it distracting. I would love to see them address some of these design issues, as it’s the main reason I haven’t switched yet.
Have you not removed those “horizontal flexible spaces” on both sides of the URL box? Customize toolbars to drag & drop the things you want there and not. I always remove those spaces and add two icons for plugins I actively use (Multi-Account Containers and Undo Close Tab). Result: I can type a 3400 pixel long URL – 89% the width of my 4K screen.
This keeps getting to the top of HN, Reddit, and now lobsters.
It is such a short, low quality post. It says almost nothing. It makes two main points:
That Firefox isn’t paid for by ads. But… it kiiinda is. Firefox has no business model that exists without ads.
Browser engine monopolies are bad because of… incompatibility? Except browser engine monopolies solve compatibility, in that if there’s one engine obviously everything is compatible.
In general this article is so short, so light on arguments, and seems like it’s just going to resonate with Firefox users who are already sold on Firefox. It’s so low quality.
This isn’t the argument made by the post, and I’m criticizing the post, not the idea of Firefox as a good alternative. The post argues that compatibility suffers and that’s why it’s bad to have a browser monopoly.
I’m so tired of being scolded about ethics for what, in the end, is a simple choice of a software tool.
These decisions and a thousand others like them about the food we buy, the clothes we buy, the tools we use, are the ethical choices we make. Don’t fool yourself that this is some sort of orthogonal consideration, quite the opposite.
Yes, the choices we make have ethics. I focus my attention on important things where the ethical and practical consequences really matter. My choice of web browser is not one of those. I’m not insensitive to the argument: I used Firefox for years largely for ideological reasons.
I’m finding myself sympathetic to this line of thought.
Using Firefox might be the slightly more ethical browser choice, but if somebody is out of energy from donating their money, walking or taking public transit, calling their representative, and going vegan – you know, actions that might actually make a meaningful difference – then it seems a bit ludicrous to criticise them for using whichever browser their device came bundled with.
I’m not saying the linked post exaggerates the importance of using Firefox; it doesn’t really. I just think it’s a good thing to have a sense of scale.
With the internet in its current state, I’m not allowed to grab a copy of Windows from Microsoft’s site. I can’t buy vinyls from the most popular maker of vinyl soundtracks (iam8bit), I can’t access several other stores because my browser is “misconfigured” (even with a clean browser install! (because if you use custom DNS, that’s the same as a full-blown adblocker I suppose)), even though I have a legitimate credit card to give them, even if I contact support (was told to stop having browser activity that a scammer would have, I don’t know how to do that because they didn’t even know how their blocking system worked!).
If these minor annoyances are what I get, as a part of the far isolated and tiny fifth world country known as Australia, I can’t imagine what the result would be if we all just let things happen a bunch more because there are bigger things to care about.
I think we’d find out that basic access is actually super important.
I mean I’m already in a situation where I’m not able to test my software on the most popular operating system, and no way to even begin to resolve that.
In short, I agree to a degree (I think software choices are ethical choices, but I think Firefox makes a terrible case for itself as an ethical project relative to Chrome) and I wrote a whole thing about the “ethical” marketing.
Anecdote but it works fine, I have my browser settings done via policies which is compatible with the Firefox flatpak even (as of 115)(policies worked before-hand but required more effort for flatpak usage)
edit: missed the spot where that’s addressed until just now, but isn’t GPO as mentioned, the interface you are asking for? Its a list of options with descriptions et al? Google and Microsoft make sense to go further, since both have full control in some cases (ChromeOS and Windows respectively), Firefox is just a program by comparison.
I think I’d kinda forgotten about Firefox Enterprise tbh, but thanks. I can edit that in. Mozilla really needs to market these things better tbh.
edit: missed the spot where that’s addressed until just now, but isn’t GPO as mentioned, the interface you are asking for? Its a list of options with descriptions et al? Google and Microsoft make sense to go further, since both have full control in some cases (ChromeOS and Windows respectively), Firefox is just a program by comparison.
I want to be able to ensure that when a user visits some page that their computer meets some policy. The browser is the program that manages those page accesses so it needs to be conveying that information to me. As an example, you can use the Device Policy extension to make arbitrary assertions about the OS (“is it running our endpoint agent? is the OS up to date? firewall configured? browser extensions up to date?”), and you can also even configure things like “these extensions can run on these pages”.
TBH I need to look into Firefox Enterprise more, I’m not really seeing anything comparable to what GSuite provides.
Outside of that, a browser can’t really attest itself and its higher levels, only levels below it, in turn, the best approach would be to make an extension with Native messaging to something at a higher level to then provide attestation to its level and levels below, including the browser.
MS and Google both avoid needing to consider such steps since they are-more-than-a-browser for enterprise management. But it should still be possible to do such for Firefox.
As a plus of the web extension approach: It ends up being fairly browser agnostic, preventing lock in in turn.
Thanks, all good info. I wonder why companies consistently choose Chrome then, because I always hear it’s the management. I think Chrome’s GSuite integration just really helps there.
Outside of that, a browser can’t really attest itself and its higher levels, only levels below it, in turn, the best approach would be to make an extension with Native messaging to something at a higher level to then provide attestation to its level and levels below, including the browser.
Maybe that’s how the device policy extension works? Dunno, but it can attest system state, not just browser state.
Outside of that, a browser can’t really attest itself and its higher levels, only levels below it
I think this is a typo. You can only ever provide (meaningful) attestations for things that are not part of your TCB, anything in your TCB is able to tamper with your attestations. This is why most of the tools in this space are both snake oil and actively lower security (they install things at insanely high privilege levels that are written by people with no understanding of how to write secure code).
But it is about ethical choices in the end. FF declined to a large extent because Google started pushing Chrome everywhere. Go to any Google property and you’d get a chrome ad. Go to any page with Adsense banners and you’d get chrome ad. The quality was actually ok at the time, so it was a valid choice, but they also spent lots of money to get the position they’re in.
Now that position allows Google to push through limits on how adblocking extensions work and try forcing web DRM. There’s no way around the fact that one product just doesn’t have an effectively unlimited amount of money backing it and your choice of a browser has ethical and long-term internet implications. It’s one of those cases that shows “everything is about politics”, there’s no way to skip that part.
Browser engine monopolies are bad because of… incompatibility?
Because they let a single entity with business incentives opposed to user rights, competition on core web properties, and privacy dictate the direction of the web.
Imagine, for a moment, that the way Google could maximize profit was by doing something that wasn’t in your best interests. If Google controlled the browser standards completely, what choices would you have?
I’m skeptical about Firefox being half-good at running a company, prioritizing what’s needed, but I’m even more skeptical about the benevolence of Google. How I wish that the web wasn’t an important trash fire.
You’re arguing to me that browser monopolies are bad. But I never argued that they’re good. I argued that the post makes a terrible case for them being bad, and yet it is the #1 on the major forums I visit. It is still the #1 post on lobsters. A post that is so short, so lacking in material, and so ill founded.
… monopolies being universally, knowingly and intrinsically less efficient than competition, which is known for pushing limits: Firefox wouldn’t be so good if Chrome wouldn’t be so good, and Chrome wouldn’t even exist if IE hadn’t been such a horrible monopoly 20 years ago.
This isn’t a browser monopoly, it’s a browser engine monopoly. There are many, many browser options.
I’m not advocating for monopolies, I’m saying the argument made in the post is very weak - and the overall post is very weak. If you want to tell me about how an engine monopoly is bad feel free to do so with good arguments, not compatibility.
As a very long time Firefox user (never switched to anything else since) I mostly posted it for the “In 2024, please switch to Firefox” part also because of the recent Firefox on the Brink? posting with the impact it may have in general for the browser world.
In the end it is the same as having multiple independent Operating Systems available so you could at least temporary switch to something else if e.g. anything security related does happen.
There are a lot of good reasons to use Firefox, I suspect, I’m just saying that this article has made the rounds in such a weird way given that it’s extremely short, extremely uncompelling, and the points it does make aren’t particularly well founded to begin with.
This was literally #1 on HN and r/all and now lobsters.
Firefox is actually really good. Get some uBlock Origin installed and you are good to go. It is also to my knowledge the only browser that lets you self-host a backend for the password manager (it is end-to-end encrypted anyways, but still).
Both Firefox and Safari are funded entirely by Google’s Ads.
Not sure how many people are aware, but Google pays Apple about 20 billion per year in their search deal. Compared to Firefox, Safari may survive if the Google search deal ends, but in the meantime Apple isn’t crazy enough to do anything to upset that particular cash cow, even with their deep and diversified pockets.
And Firefox is basically dead if Google stops paying, whereas Google wouldn’t feel any loss, as most users would switch back to Google’s search anyway, much like what they did when Firefox attempted a move to Yahoo.
Again, this is important when talking of how aligned is the browser with its users. Will Firefox or Safari ever block Google’s ads in search by default? Of course not, not as long as that search deal is still ongoing. Of course, there may be other reasons for not blocking ads, like legal matters or believing that ads are genuinely good.
But let’s pick an easier to win scenario – will Firefox ever do anything about the malware being occasionally distributed via Google’s search ads? Highly unlikely.
So the whole argument that Firefox is holier by not being funded by ads is factually not true.
I will say this about Firefox, an argument that’s often missed — to its credit, Firefox is not adversarial against users. Sure, they had some blunders, but whenever updates happen, you can trust the browser to not suddenly leak your data and generally still work like you configured it initially.
Google’s Chrome is essentially at war with its privacy conscious users. With each update you have to pay special attention to what they are introducing, in order to turn all the crap off. And with each new feature, you have to wonder how is it going to affect you.
For example, Chrome shares your browsing history, by default, with the purpose of improving search. They do so, even if you opt into encryption for your synchronized data. And the setting isn’t synchronized, so you have to toggle it off with each install of the browser. And I could swear I saw it turned on again between updates.
Google Chrome is actually a really good browser, it probably has the best security, and some of the best minds worked on it, and I even like the spirit in some of their ads-related proposals meant to replace cookies. Except that my trust in them was eroded, and now I can no longer trust this browser to not screw me over.
On the other hand, the engine monopoly argument isn’t as compelling. Chromium is open source. Google may have control over the repository, rejecting some valuable contributions, but open source can also be forked. And Google doesn’t have absolute control, because Chromium already gets contributions from big companies with deep pockets and resources for a fork. This isn’t an IExplorer situation, sorry.
The problem that Firefox has is that it also bleeds market share to Chromium-based alternatives, like Vivaldi or Brave, which are less adversarial. And the ideological argument against such alternatives is no longer compelling.
So Firefox would do well to compete on technical merits, alone. I can list several things I like about it, but also bugs or sluggish Android performance (e.g., scrolling on Twitter or Mastodon) that are known and unfixed.
Also, Mozilla fired many good people, including many working on next-gen Rust/Servo stuff, yet that CEO’s compensation is going through the roof, despite really poor performance in the market. Maybe Mozilla knows something we don’t, but it doesn’t look good.
For example, Chrome shares your browsing history, by default, with the purpose of improving search. They do so, even if you opt into encryption for your synchronized data. And the setting isn’t synchronized, so you have to toggle it off with each install of the browser.
I checked, and it’s being turned on once you login for synchronization.
Logging Chrome into your Google account only requires normal login on google.com, another user hostile feature. The synchronization may not be auto-turned on, requiring another confirmation (not sure).
But once synchronization is turned on, that option keeps being turned on, even if you opted-into encryption for your synchronized data.
To my surprise, chrome dev tools now feel clunky after having made the switch last year.
My reason for using chrome for so long was that I believed the dev tools were superior & there are certain things chrome does (like the box shadow generator), but there’s a lot that firefox does that’s unique too & there’s a lot of things you just get used to on both sides.
At this point I’ve forgotten what the differences are, but this morning I opened chrome to see if some styling issue might be a browser bug & it felt so slow & clunky in comparison.
I’ve also mostly found this to be the case. The built-in JSON tooling in particular is very nice. (To Chromium users who don’t know what I’m talking about, navigate directly to a JSON URL in Firefox. You’re in for a pleasant surprise.) The only thing I go back to Chrome for now is the performance tooling. Seeing CPU time per line of code is pretty crucial in doing performance analysis.
You can pretty print JSON in Chrome in the Network pane, including for the main document (if it’s JSON). Firefox actually renders it in the web view as a filterable tree, which is what differs.
The Firefox html inspector and related tools are best in class, but the JS debugger is still lagging behind Chrome, both feature wise and in polish.
You can just tell Mozilla’s focus isn’t there. I’ve tried to do serious debugging in Firefox and always switch back to Chrome, not for huge reasons but small ones. I occasionally file bugs like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1656591 but the response times don’t motivate me to keep doing it. (That’s not a criticism of the Firefox developers, just an acknowledgement of priorities).
I use Safari as my personal browser, and there’s very little chance I’ll switch anytime soon, it’s just too good at what it does (integrate with all my Apple stuff). However, I did switch from Chrome to Firefox for work a couple months ago, and really haven’t looked back.
I’ve used it as my full time browser for years and never had problems with it in personal use that I can remember.
I’ve used it full time at work as well, since the start of my career, and I rarely ran into issues caused by my testing on Safari or others not testing on Safari. I’ve gotten comments about my use of it at work, even, IIRC, from one or two developers who preferred Safari for personal use, but used Chrome for the devtools.
I also have Firefox installed and occasionally use it, but never because something doesn’t work on Safari, unless it’s some web experiment or something. If basic functionality doesn’t work in Safari, despite having Firefox installed (or even if it were open), I’d rather just leave the site (I don’t remember ever having to do that, though I’m not 100% sure it hasn’t happened).
Firefox is the only major browser not built by a company that makes money from advertising and/or selling your personal data
This is technically true, but as far as I am aware Apple sells ad space in their products but does not do so by tracking users. They shut down iAd in 2016 because the leadership felt that owning a data-mining platform and providing privacy technologies were incompatible businesses.
Currenty, Chrome, Safari and Edge all use variations of the closely related Webkit and Blink engines.
Blink has diverged quite a bit from WebKit. Google ripped out a load of the abstractions for portable code, for example. In addition, Chromium-based browsers use a totally different JavaScript engine.
Firefox is actually really good
Is there an up-to-date doc somewhere on Firefox’s security model? It took them ages to move to a multi-process model, but I’m not sure how they then sandbox the processes. The rlbox stuff is really nice, but I don’t know how widely used it is (last I checked, it couldn’t be used for libraries that weren’t pure computation).
if you add cross-platform (which firefox truely is) the statement is true again. You can not run Safari on anything but apple hardware and that is too expensive for many people around the world.
Those people are irrelevant. If you can’t afford Apple hardware then you don’t need persuading not to use Safari. You may need persuading not to use Chrome / Edge. Persuading not to use Edge may need more effort because it has a better thing by default for finding cheap places to buy things (automatically finding discount codes) than Chrome, though I’m not sure how well this works across different locales.
It also indirectly relies on advertising. Most of the revenue for Moz Corp comes from companies paying to be the default search engine and these companies make their money from… advertising. And value being the default search engine specifically so that they can get more user data to sell.
It does rely on advertising though, right? Like with the sponsored links you get in a few places.
I have not seen any sponsored links in Firefox in years, but maybe because I do like to have the new tab empty, so I have changed things in prefs.js (or through about:config) a long time ago:
I agree with you about Apple and Safari, as I see it they do not have to track the user, as for them Ad business is only a (probably small) side thing and not their main business.
Regarding the Firefox’s security model the best I could find is the posting Introducing Firefox’s new Site Isolation Security Architecture. As I see it, the most of the technical Firefox (and Mozilla) content is on [Mozilla Hacks}(https://hacks.mozilla.org/).
Is there an up-to-date doc somewhere on Firefox’s security model?
It hasn’t been updated recently, but I think the process model doc on the wiki remains mostly accurate. Notably it doesn’t talk about (and I think predates) the fact that each origin operates in its own process; but I think that’s more about what work is allocated to each process than the process sandboxing itself.
I will say, Firefox’s documentation is… not always the easiest to find or follow. I’m not involved with Mozilla or Firefox, but it reminds me a lot of most large company documentation in my experience: there’s lots of it, but it’s hard to rely on any of it as absolute truth.
This December, if there’s one tech New Year’s resolution I’d encourage you to have, it’s switching to the only remaining ethical web browser, Firefox.
This line had the opposite effect of its intended purpose on me. Unironically passing judgement on a software product as ethical or not just seems really bizarre and out of place. How far does this type of reasoning go? Does not using Firefox make me an unethical person? The whole premise of the article makes me nauseous.
Frankly I don’t care if the Mozilla Foundation goes bankrupt and shuts down. They take a ton of money from a company that sponsors the development of a so called unethical browser, so I think they don’t really have much ethical ground on which to stand. It gets better, their CEO’s compensation continues to grow to astronomical heights, despite revenues declining. Not to mention all the money wasted on PR nonsense that has nothing to do with making Firefox better. Just look at their blog. They are just as phony as Google.
My main blocker is lack of Profiles, the way Chrome does it. Firefox’s containers and instances don’t quite cut it:
I have several profiles on Chrome: My personal profile, my work profile (sometimes several per-project), a shopping profile, an ethereum profile, etc. Each profile has different extensions, different settings, a different theme so I can tell them apart. They’re all sufficiently sandboxed from each other, especially the extensions. Some extensions are very sensitive and I want them isolated (I don’t want to mix a rando shopping extension with the same profile that has some sensitive private key stuff like crypto things). Some profiles I have various invasive developer tools which interact with the DOM of every page.
Firefox pushes containers aggressively, but I can’t have separate sets of extensions sandboxed in each container.
I’ve tried using instances (basically different profile paths per firefox instance) but it seems much more resource intensive than Chrome which has some shared memory/processing across profiles while Firefox instances are complete isolated monoliths. Also switching between them is very painful and slow (launching an instance takes way longer than opening a profile which takes as long as opening a new tab).
Anyone else have a workable strategy for this in Firefox?
I’m not sure if I understand your problem. Firefox has profiles, you can run firefox -p and a dialog will pop-up where you can manage your existing profiles or create a new one. I have a pro and a perso profiles, for instance, completely separate from each others with different themes, addons, settings, etc. To launch the first one I run firefox -p pro and to launch the second one I run firefox -p perso. I then put each of them in a separate workspace (I’m using Ubuntu withe GNOME), et voilà.
Er, sorry for the confusion, I mean what Chrome calls profiles, not what Firefox calls profiles. Firefox’s profiles are completely separate instances of the browser, if I have 5 profiles open that’s like having 5 instances of Firefox open. Chrome’s profiles are somewhere in between a tab and an instance, they’re still sandboxed but I can have many profiles open and they only use slightly more memory/resources than a single instance of Chrome with the same number of tabs.
Last time I tried to reproduce my Chrome profile workflow with Firefox’s version of profiles, it used way more memory and was way harder on my laptop’s battery life. :(
Though the firefox -p shortcut is handy, thanks for sharing that!
I would agree with you that Chrome/ium’s profile management is the best there is (and I frankly find it a headscratcher why other browser makers don’t imitate it). Despite my opinion on that, I still switched to Firefox, and, honestly, I don’t miss this feature. My current approach is distinct Linux-level users, and that’s been working just fine for me.
I see you’ve written elsewhere that your concern is high resource usage. I’ll admit that maybe that’s something to watch out for, but I usually just close instances that I haven’t used in a while. I also have fairly beefy hardware, so I don’t run into issues that much.
Another argument. The developer tools are a thousand times better. I usually develop in the backend but I constantly end up helping out a front end developer by simply opening it up. It’s bizarre that Chrome simply doesn’t show so many useful things. I don’t really understand how any serious web dev can use Chrome, when it doesn’t even show really basic stuff, but here we are.
One thing is that in the network tab, if the response is JSON it will allow you to filter the response interactively. It uses a regular string match instead of something like JQ but it still is useful.
I wouldn’t call it a thousand times better, but certainly better. It is one of the things I noticed after dropping Chrome.
I am not using Chrome, and I don’t remember each one on the details and I am not sure if that changed, is an option (if so I/we haven’t found them yet), etc., but some stuff I can pick from the top of my head that I can remember people coming over were things like HTTP Protocol versions, events on HTML elements, certain Network related things where Chrome was showing a very generic on the error. Another thing is that JSON isn’t just formatted. So many times you just wanna take a quick look on a response or quickly search for a string, which is an absolute nightmare in Chrome. There are some more things, but classical not remembering the details other than people being like “that’s odd” and two or three people trying to figure something out only to them ending up at my place, me opening the dev tools only to see the issue straight away. Or sometimes also me coming over to someone being like “yeah, just open the dev tools” and us spending five minutes to look for some really basic info we can’t figure out how to show, and me moving back to my laptop or desktop just to check it really quick.
And that happens at too many places with too many people to be just an experience thing. Like I said, I am not even a front end dev, so I feel a bit like a novice regarding dev tools.
Firefox is fine, but this also doesn’t go into the many flavors of chromium that exist that are NOT google/microsoft. And Safari/Apple don’t sell ads afaik.
The browser monopoly isn’t the same as it was with IE6. IE6 was strictly controlled by Microsoft and was closed source. Chromium is not. It has dozens of companies (and individuals) who contribute, is open source, and has so many flavors that you can use with zero tracking/bloat. This argument holds no water to me and is a poor scare tactic for people who remember those days but don’t really remember much other than “IE6 sucked.” And to be fair to IE6, initially it was way better than competitors. They just let it get stale and did their own things instead of waiting for standards to happen. It all worked out in the end because standards DO get pushed quicker now and we don’t have to worry about some other browser core for Trident. It’s unreal to me that someone would argue for more fragmentation in this space rather than having one runtime for the web that everyone can contribute to / skin.
Chromium is not. It has dozens of companies (and individuals) who contribute, is open source, and has so many flavors that you can use with zero tracking/bloat
Maybe. If Chromium decided to push ahead with their cohort tracking thing, how many of the other downstreams have sufficient resources to be able to maintain a version that permits a cookie policy that Google disagrees with?
Google refuses to allow patches to support *BSD into Chromium, which has the knock-on effect of meaning that there’s no official Electron build for *BSD. This, in turn, means that there’s no official VS Code for *BSD. It doesn’t matter that these came with a commitment to support them, Google doesn’t sell things to *BSD users in sufficient quantity and so the patches don’t go in (the Fuchsia ones did, in spite of Fuchsia having an even smaller installed base, because Google did sell Fuchsia-based products).
As a result of their control over the Chromium project, Google gets to dictate which operating systems are viable on the desktop. I see that as quite a big problem.
how many of the other downstreams have sufficient resources to be able to maintain a version that permits a cookie policy that Google disagrees with?
Presumably, Mozilla would, since they have enough resources to manage a completely independent engine.
If Chromium decided to push ahead with their cohort tracking thing
I’m unaware of any cohort tracking thing. The only thing I know of that they’re working on is the ‘topics’ thing where your browser can convey (unless you opt out) generic topics you are interested in without revealing your browsing history.
On January 25, 2022, Google officially announced it had ended development of FLoC APIs and proposed a new Topics API to replace it.[10][11] However, Topics API still retains most of the design of FLoC. Chrome still uses the FLoC name internally, and Topics API bugs are tracked under the label “InterestCohort”.[26] Developers of the Brave web browser called Topics API a “rebranding [of] FLoC without addressing key privacy issues.[27] Despite this, designers of Topics API made an attempt to address some of the concerns about FLoC.[28]
So, yes, it’s ‘dead’, in that they put a new brand name on top of it. Yay?
However, Topics API still retains most of the design of FLoC. Chrome still uses the FLoC name internally, and Topics API bugs are tracked under the label “InterestCohort”.
Seems pretty clear that it’s a rebranding, irrespective of what Brave says.
You can decide for yourself, of course. The differences are pretty clear here.
That said, it is fair to say that Topics are a sort of cohort analysis, in that you are placed into ‘cohorts’ of a kind where each Topic corresponds to a cohort ie: “I am a user who cares about cars”. So I’ve got my answers.
Yeah but Safari and the Chromium-derivatives don’t solve the problem of the WebKit/Blink rendering engine duopoly (Blink is derivative of parts of old WebKit; all of it came down from KHTML long ago), which is probably a more-critical problem in the long term than the basic privacy concerns. Making Gecko popular is the most-promising solution to this issue.
I still use firefox a lot. Librewolf is my favorite variant. That said, Mozilla lost me a little bit when they dropped support for embedding their browser engine into other applications. I used to occasionally contribute to Camino, and it still feels like a big hole in the ecosystem that we don’t have something non-webkit-derived to build a browser around. It’s better than it was when everything tried to assume IE6, but it’d be nice if people who wanted to experiment with browser UX could choose gecko.
As for Firefox forks, I like and recommend Waterfox. One aspect I particularly value is that the traditional menu bar still works properly, and integrates with the global menu bar in Unity/Xfce/KDE etc.
I keep trying to make the switch stick, but on android, firefox just doesn’t work as awell as either of the chromium based browsers (chrome, brave). Especially when switching to/from full screen or when playing videos Firefox frequently falls over in one of various modalities which then has me switching back and forth between browsers.
I’ve genuinely had a completely opposite experience to you. Chrome on Android has always felt mega laggy, super weird (some of that was down to AMP I think), and doesn’t have extensions like Firefox on Android does. If I couldn’t use uBlock Origin on mobile I think I would become an ascetic monk.
I just tried something, was on this page, with many comments still having the red “(unread)” mark and then I pressed Cmd-w (on macOS, equivalent to Ctrl-w). Since a few versions Firefox has the Cmd-Shift-t (Ctrl-Shift-t) shortcut to reopen the closed tab (can also be done through the right-mouse-menu “Reopen Closed Tab” in the Tab Bar). This worked just fine and the comments still had the red “(unread)” mark.
But unfortunately it did not restore this comment I was just writing, so it may not solve the problem you see.
There is only an option to warn when closing multiple tabs, see How to configure Close Tab warnings in Firefox. In about:config there is browser.tabs.warnOnClose, but this is the equivalent of “Confirm before closing multiple tabs” in settings.
On macOS, command-W is one of the standard shortcuts that closes the current window. It does this on pretty much every application, so it’s not the kind of thing that a Mac users would have muscle memory for doing something else (control-W, on the other hand, they may). I found with Chromium-based browsers on Windows that some of the standard Mac commands worked, some of the common Windows ones worked. I suspect that a lot of browser developers use Macs and forget that these are Mac-specific conventions (Chrome on macOS has the annoying thing of forcing you to hold command-Q to exit).
On most *NIX DEs, these conventions are even more vague than Windows and there’s no good set of standards for an app to even try to comply with.
That all the classic Ctrl- shortcuts on macOS are with Command- is something I really like. I am a heavy user of the terminal and so I am used to all the Ctrl- shortcuts in there. For me this is a very huge plus of macOS.
Regarding Command-q in Chrome on macOS, just toggle the “Warn Before Quitting” option in the Chrome menu and it does work as it should. This was also something which had annoyed me. I am using Chrome only for the work related use of Google Workspaces.
It will restore your comment, but in the top-level textbox at the top of the page, not in the context you were writing it in. (Unless you were writing a top-level comment.)
It’s cool that Mozilla exists and that it’s much less dodgy than Google, but I think it’s sad that many of the more socially responsible options in tech are still essentially undemocratic for-profit companies (yeah I know about moz foundation), and almost always with their profit motive working at least a bit against their social interest.
This lack of democratic accountability to their workers, users or stakeholders shows in how they often prioritise profit or executives’ interests ahead of social good or their workers desires. I sometimes see it in:
executive pay / pay ratio
big staff layoffs and “restructurings”
ads and attention economy bullshit
greedy pricing or attempts at vendor lock-in (e.g. patreon)
buyouts and enshittification (e.g. bandcamp)
misleading advertising and “dark ux patterns”
I’d like to see much stronger unions and more worker co-ops in this area, more grassroots funding, and maybe broader social ownership models.
I’ve been using Firefox for a while now, but I’m still a bit unhappy with the missing support for XDG Base Directory Specification. Look at this: 20 years, wow! Other than that, I have absolutely nothing to complain about.
This should be the first argument of this post. Listing that at the end is like apologizing for the rest of the post, like “no no, don’t be afraid!”. Using Firefox is not hardcore activism, there’s no big tradeoff here. Actually most users should feel no difference after switching, except they won’t have their Google avatar constantly reminding them their personal data is being sucked up. Once it’s settled that Firefox is as good as its competitors, the privacy and free-software arguments would be even stronger IMO, because it would seem crazy not to give credit to the awesome piece of free software Firefox is.
Firefox address bar works worse than Chrome’s for instance – Chrome tries to autocomplete entire URLs that are used often, Firefox does that one path segment at a time, which is not what most people want, I assume. Password autofill on Android often doesn’t work. On the desktop, some UI elements are disproportionately large to how often they’re used. Chrome’s are more optimized. Firefox is a wonderful project which I’m thankful for it but lacks some polish.
Oh, that is actually a feature that might make me switch to Firefox! Safari has the same behaviour as Chrome here and it’s really annoying. If I want to go to github.com/org/project, I don’t want it to autocomplete the four GitHub pages I’ve visited most recently, I want it to autocomplete github.com/ and then let me type the character of the org, tab, first characters of the project, tab, and get to the right place. I end up either typing the full URL or bouncing via a search engine in Safari because of this.
Last time I checked, on macOS it also didn’t use the Keychain (Chrome now can, including for Passkeys). I trust the macOS keychain a lot more than I trust Firefox to be secure. It has some very fine-grained ACLs for which applications can access which passwords.
Amusingly, the famous Chrome comic specifically advertises not having this behavior!
Your trust (or distrust) is well placed. Firefox passwords are encrypted with a key derived from a master password, but if the user doesn’t explicitly set one, it’s the empty string. More to the point, it’s a known constant, so anyone with knowledge of the format can reconstruct the key and decrypt the credentials.
There are several open source tools that do this, and I managed to write one myself.
Oof. I wrote one too. I thought they were going to make the default randomly generated at profile creation time. Have they not done that yet?
(I do use Firefox, but only allow Bitwarden to save passwords, not any of the firefox built-in stuff, for my personal browsing these days.)
I have no idea; my focus was on recovering my own credentials from years ago.
But it wouldn’t matter. You already have a randomly generated salt. If you’re not asking the user to provide the master key, then you have to store it on disk in cleartext. Randomizing the key is just adding more salt.
I don’t recall the randomized salt being used for the key. I thought my program worked without using it, on any nss databases that weren’t password protected…
It’s been a while though. And the thrust of your original comment is obviously correct. I was just surprised because I thought I remembered that this was going to be changed in a way that would make it very modestly better.
The feature I still miss from Firefox since I stoped used it 15 years ago is to able to type “git proj” and it would show the beat match on the completion list. I find the multi step workflow you mention too slow.
Chrome never matched this fuzzy matching behaviour.
Firefox does support this, some settings may influence this. I just tried ’git and the first URL suggested is the proper one.
Maybe some “special” settings I have done related to search, I have only enabled “Provide search suggestions” but have disabled all 3 options below in about:preferences#search and in about:preferences#privacy I have disabled “Search engines”. So when I type something into the URL bar I only get URLs from open tabs, history and bookmarks.
To also narrow down your search to e.g. bookmarks only, type a * first and then your search term. There is also % for open tabs or ^ for history. Settings including additional installed search engines are in about:preferences#search below at “Search Shortcuts”.
I spent a little while puzzling over this, then I guessed: “best match”?
What does “best” mean in this context? I don’t care much about this but several people are comparing Chrome autocomplete and Firefox autocomplete, and I never even noticed a difference in something like 28 years on Mozilla browsers. Can you explain what “the best match” means?
This was a huge deal when it was launched. Firefox awesome bar, they used to call it.
I didn’t explain well… But, you could type words separated by spaces and it would show results that matched those words on both the URL and the title of previously visited pages. I have just checked, they removed matching in the title and don’t even show it anymore…. They are pretty much a chrome copycat at this point.
Here is video showing it. Notive that the tittle doesn’t show up anymore nowadays. Which is ironic, given google is trying hard to push users into no being able to interact with urls directly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7stmWKvk64
You can configure Firefox Password Autofill to use a third-party app (at least on mobile: I use my Nextcloud Password app, which is probably less secure than macOS keychain but is probably secure enough, and it works like a charm).
Right, I’ll eventually have to set up a VaultWarden instance. What’s stopping me is I haven’t fully figured out how to do LetsEncrypt TLS on my private server without a DNS domain. It is possible but requires some tinkering.
They have full autocomplete: browser.urlbar.autoFill.adaptiveHistory.enabled. Not sure why they’re holding back making it a default, or even adding it in the settings.
It was on by default on Nightly initially, but there were a lot of complaints (including mine) so it was disabled, I don’t know if it was ever re-enabled by default. It looks like there were several cycles of bug fixing.
Nice! I’ll try that out, thanks!
Ah yeah, there’s no about:config on Firefox Android.
Does Chrome still do the thing where URL bar autocompletion includes ads for companies? I remember a couple years ago back when I was using Chrome I typed “j” to go to a bookmark I had created that was literally named “j” and that I visit multiple times a day, but this high-relevance, exact match got ranked lower than “JC Penny”, which I have never once searched for or visited.
It wasn’t even an ad for a product, just a “hey, we thought you might like to search for this corporation?” Utterly baffling.
Was your default search engine Google? I’ve never experienced this behavior but I’ve had it as DDG for ages.
My default search engine is Google and I don’t remember seeing this in Chrome either.
This is something I have never thought about, so I don’t have a strong opinion on whether Firefox’s or Chrome’s behaviour here is better… but come on. That so incredibly minor. Surely nobody is choosing Chrome over Firefox because the URL bar autocomplete functions ever so slightly different on Firefox. It’s not like Firefox doesn’t suggest entire URLs, you just may need to hit the down arrow to select it slightly more frequently than with Chrome. And when you’re viewing an actual web page, the only two things taking up vertical space is the tab bar and the URL/search/plug-ins/navigation bar, just as with Chrome.
I know folks who have gone back to chrome because of slight differences in the omnibar behaviour. I think they liked that they could easily search a site from the omnibar or something?
I use both regularly, and never paid much attention. After A/B testing, I slightly prefer Firefox. It turns out this is a Firefox config setting.
There’s no about:config on Firefox Android unfortunately.
I have about:config on Android. I’ve got two Firefox based browsers installed on Android, both from the F-droid app store. They are Fennec and Mull, both have about:config.
Unfortunately, neither one has that specific config key.
There is. Just press 5 times on the Firefox logo in the About dialog. This enables debug options including about:config
In the stable version? Not according to my testing and https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/firefox-for-android-about-config/idi-p/8071/page/4#comments
I haven’t noticed the segment behavior. However, I am required to use chrome for work and its address bar works SO MUCH worse than firefox’s, especially in terms of autocompleting from browser history - chrome can never find things that I was browsing even a few history entries ago.
Does chrome’s do unit conversion and calculations? Behind a flag in Firefox for some reason but I use it all the time.
Google does that. Local is better for simple things ofc but e.g. for currency conversion doing this online makes sense.
Is this going to be a meme for ’24?
Really actually I think Firefox is not actually really worse than the competitor, but the phrase “actually really good” indicates that if I’m not already actually skeptical, I really actually should be before considering Firefox to be good.
I have tried to switch to Firefox many times over the years, but running on Ubuntu, the Firefox UI feels noticably clunkier and less polished than Chrome. Too much unused whitespace and padding everywhere (the URL box, for example, doesn’t stretch to fill the horizontal space). An inconsistent mix of different font sizes and line heights. It very much has that awkward GTK / Java Swing feel to it, and I find it distracting. I would love to see them address some of these design issues, as it’s the main reason I haven’t switched yet.
is it really the most serious reason? If you align with the general article sentiment that “FF is the only remaining ethical web browser” and that you want to make-the-world-a-better-place©, then this seems like an easy enough personal drawback to live with. It’s not like you had to fight nazi groups in the streets.
Have you not removed those “horizontal flexible spaces” on both sides of the URL box? Customize toolbars to drag & drop the things you want there and not. I always remove those spaces and add two icons for plugins I actively use (Multi-Account Containers and Undo Close Tab). Result: I can type a 3400 pixel long URL – 89% the width of my 4K screen.
The creator of SponsorBlock also made DeArrow, a community-driven Clickbait remover.
On stock Gnome Shell (not Ubuntu), I find this theme and tweaks to match the desktop environment much better than Firefox’s default theme.
This keeps getting to the top of HN, Reddit, and now lobsters.
It is such a short, low quality post. It says almost nothing. It makes two main points:
That Firefox isn’t paid for by ads. But… it kiiinda is. Firefox has no business model that exists without ads.
Browser engine monopolies are bad because of… incompatibility? Except browser engine monopolies solve compatibility, in that if there’s one engine obviously everything is compatible.
In general this article is so short, so light on arguments, and seems like it’s just going to resonate with Firefox users who are already sold on Firefox. It’s so low quality.
… the risk of specific browser-company business-oriented implementations becoming de-facto standards compromising the very idea of an open web.
This isn’t the argument made by the post, and I’m criticizing the post, not the idea of Firefox as a good alternative. The post argues that compatibility suffers and that’s why it’s bad to have a browser monopoly.
I’m so tired of being scolded about ethics for what, in the end, is a simple choice of a software tool.
Would much rather see some focus on why Firefox’ market share keeps declining year after year. No amount of chiding people is going to fix that.
These decisions and a thousand others like them about the food we buy, the clothes we buy, the tools we use, are the ethical choices we make. Don’t fool yourself that this is some sort of orthogonal consideration, quite the opposite.
Yes, the choices we make have ethics. I focus my attention on important things where the ethical and practical consequences really matter. My choice of web browser is not one of those. I’m not insensitive to the argument: I used Firefox for years largely for ideological reasons.
I’m finding myself sympathetic to this line of thought.
Using Firefox might be the slightly more ethical browser choice, but if somebody is out of energy from donating their money, walking or taking public transit, calling their representative, and going vegan – you know, actions that might actually make a meaningful difference – then it seems a bit ludicrous to criticise them for using whichever browser their device came bundled with.
I’m not saying the linked post exaggerates the importance of using Firefox; it doesn’t really. I just think it’s a good thing to have a sense of scale.
You don’t know what you got ’til its gone.
With the internet in its current state, I’m not allowed to grab a copy of Windows from Microsoft’s site. I can’t buy vinyls from the most popular maker of vinyl soundtracks (iam8bit), I can’t access several other stores because my browser is “misconfigured” (even with a clean browser install! (because if you use custom DNS, that’s the same as a full-blown adblocker I suppose)), even though I have a legitimate credit card to give them, even if I contact support (was told to stop having browser activity that a scammer would have, I don’t know how to do that because they didn’t even know how their blocking system worked!).
If these minor annoyances are what I get, as a part of the far isolated and tiny fifth world country known as Australia, I can’t imagine what the result would be if we all just let things happen a bunch more because there are bigger things to care about.
I think we’d find out that basic access is actually super important.
I mean I’m already in a situation where I’m not able to test my software on the most popular operating system, and no way to even begin to resolve that.
You can’t?
So this (Australian English) site doesn’t work for you?
https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/software-download/windows10ISO
Works for me in Firefox, but I am in
.imnot.au.Correct. Multiple browsers, multiple computers, even tried on my phone on data instead of wifi.
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Some+users%2C+entities+and+locations+are+banned+from+using+this+service.%22
Others have contacted MS support, get told to go away. Frustrating.
I wonder if my best bet would be ReactOS and use the media creation tool? Very unreasonable.
FWIW I wrote about this here: https://insanitybit.github.io/2023/12/05/firefox
In short, I agree to a degree (I think software choices are ethical choices, but I think Firefox makes a terrible case for itself as an ethical project relative to Chrome) and I wrote a whole thing about the “ethical” marketing.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/products/firefox-enterprise, first result for
Firefox enterpriseAnecdote but it works fine, I have my browser settings done via policies which is compatible with the Firefox flatpak even (as of 115)(policies worked before-hand but required more effort for flatpak usage)
edit: missed the spot where that’s addressed until just now, but isn’t GPO as mentioned, the interface you are asking for? Its a list of options with descriptions et al? Google and Microsoft make sense to go further, since both have full control in some cases (ChromeOS and Windows respectively), Firefox is just a program by comparison.
I think I’d kinda forgotten about Firefox Enterprise tbh, but thanks. I can edit that in. Mozilla really needs to market these things better tbh.
I want to be able to ensure that when a user visits some page that their computer meets some policy. The browser is the program that manages those page accesses so it needs to be conveying that information to me. As an example, you can use the Device Policy extension to make arbitrary assertions about the OS (“is it running our endpoint agent? is the OS up to date? firewall configured? browser extensions up to date?”), and you can also even configure things like “these extensions can run on these pages”.
TBH I need to look into Firefox Enterprise more, I’m not really seeing anything comparable to what GSuite provides.
https://mozilla.github.io/policy-templates/ has google workspace and windows sso support out of the box.
Outside of that, a browser can’t really attest itself and its higher levels, only levels below it, in turn, the best approach would be to make an extension with Native messaging to something at a higher level to then provide attestation to its level and levels below, including the browser.
MS and Google both avoid needing to consider such steps since they are-more-than-a-browser for enterprise management. But it should still be possible to do such for Firefox.
As a plus of the web extension approach: It ends up being fairly browser agnostic, preventing lock in in turn.
Thanks, all good info. I wonder why companies consistently choose Chrome then, because I always hear it’s the management. I think Chrome’s GSuite integration just really helps there.
Maybe that’s how the device policy extension works? Dunno, but it can attest system state, not just browser state.
I think this is a typo. You can only ever provide (meaningful) attestations for things that are not part of your TCB, anything in your TCB is able to tamper with your attestations. This is why most of the tools in this space are both snake oil and actively lower security (they install things at insanely high privilege levels that are written by people with no understanding of how to write secure code).
But it is about ethical choices in the end. FF declined to a large extent because Google started pushing Chrome everywhere. Go to any Google property and you’d get a chrome ad. Go to any page with Adsense banners and you’d get chrome ad. The quality was actually ok at the time, so it was a valid choice, but they also spent lots of money to get the position they’re in.
Now that position allows Google to push through limits on how adblocking extensions work and try forcing web DRM. There’s no way around the fact that one product just doesn’t have an effectively unlimited amount of money backing it and your choice of a browser has ethical and long-term internet implications. It’s one of those cases that shows “everything is about politics”, there’s no way to skip that part.
Because they let a single entity with business incentives opposed to user rights, competition on core web properties, and privacy dictate the direction of the web.
Imagine, for a moment, that the way Google could maximize profit was by doing something that wasn’t in your best interests. If Google controlled the browser standards completely, what choices would you have?
I’m skeptical about Firefox being half-good at running a company, prioritizing what’s needed, but I’m even more skeptical about the benevolence of Google. How I wish that the web wasn’t an important trash fire.
You’re arguing to me that browser monopolies are bad. But I never argued that they’re good. I argued that the post makes a terrible case for them being bad, and yet it is the #1 on the major forums I visit. It is still the #1 post on lobsters. A post that is so short, so lacking in material, and so ill founded.
… monopolies being universally, knowingly and intrinsically less efficient than competition, which is known for pushing limits: Firefox wouldn’t be so good if Chrome wouldn’t be so good, and Chrome wouldn’t even exist if IE hadn’t been such a horrible monopoly 20 years ago.
This isn’t a browser monopoly, it’s a browser engine monopoly. There are many, many browser options.
I’m not advocating for monopolies, I’m saying the argument made in the post is very weak - and the overall post is very weak. If you want to tell me about how an engine monopoly is bad feel free to do so with good arguments, not compatibility.
As a very long time Firefox user (never switched to anything else since) I mostly posted it for the “In 2024, please switch to Firefox” part also because of the recent Firefox on the Brink? posting with the impact it may have in general for the browser world.
In the end it is the same as having multiple independent Operating Systems available so you could at least temporary switch to something else if e.g. anything security related does happen.
There are a lot of good reasons to use Firefox, I suspect, I’m just saying that this article has made the rounds in such a weird way given that it’s extremely short, extremely uncompelling, and the points it does make aren’t particularly well founded to begin with.
This was literally #1 on HN and r/all and now lobsters.
Firefox is actually really good. Get some uBlock Origin installed and you are good to go. It is also to my knowledge the only browser that lets you self-host a backend for the password manager (it is end-to-end encrypted anyways, but still).
uBlock Origin + SponsorBlock + Clickbait remover for Youtube is a whole other web experience from normal and it’s so, so much better.
Both Firefox and Safari are funded entirely by Google’s Ads.
Not sure how many people are aware, but Google pays Apple about 20 billion per year in their search deal. Compared to Firefox, Safari may survive if the Google search deal ends, but in the meantime Apple isn’t crazy enough to do anything to upset that particular cash cow, even with their deep and diversified pockets.
And Firefox is basically dead if Google stops paying, whereas Google wouldn’t feel any loss, as most users would switch back to Google’s search anyway, much like what they did when Firefox attempted a move to Yahoo.
Again, this is important when talking of how aligned is the browser with its users. Will Firefox or Safari ever block Google’s ads in search by default? Of course not, not as long as that search deal is still ongoing. Of course, there may be other reasons for not blocking ads, like legal matters or believing that ads are genuinely good.
But let’s pick an easier to win scenario – will Firefox ever do anything about the malware being occasionally distributed via Google’s search ads? Highly unlikely.
So the whole argument that Firefox is holier by not being funded by ads is factually not true.
I will say this about Firefox, an argument that’s often missed — to its credit, Firefox is not adversarial against users. Sure, they had some blunders, but whenever updates happen, you can trust the browser to not suddenly leak your data and generally still work like you configured it initially.
Google’s Chrome is essentially at war with its privacy conscious users. With each update you have to pay special attention to what they are introducing, in order to turn all the crap off. And with each new feature, you have to wonder how is it going to affect you.
For example, Chrome shares your browsing history, by default, with the purpose of improving search. They do so, even if you opt into encryption for your synchronized data. And the setting isn’t synchronized, so you have to toggle it off with each install of the browser. And I could swear I saw it turned on again between updates.
Google Chrome is actually a really good browser, it probably has the best security, and some of the best minds worked on it, and I even like the spirit in some of their ads-related proposals meant to replace cookies. Except that my trust in them was eroded, and now I can no longer trust this browser to not screw me over.
On the other hand, the engine monopoly argument isn’t as compelling. Chromium is open source. Google may have control over the repository, rejecting some valuable contributions, but open source can also be forked. And Google doesn’t have absolute control, because Chromium already gets contributions from big companies with deep pockets and resources for a fork. This isn’t an IExplorer situation, sorry.
The problem that Firefox has is that it also bleeds market share to Chromium-based alternatives, like Vivaldi or Brave, which are less adversarial. And the ideological argument against such alternatives is no longer compelling.
So Firefox would do well to compete on technical merits, alone. I can list several things I like about it, but also bugs or sluggish Android performance (e.g., scrolling on Twitter or Mastodon) that are known and unfixed.
Also, Mozilla fired many good people, including many working on next-gen Rust/Servo stuff, yet that CEO’s compensation is going through the roof, despite really poor performance in the market. Maybe Mozilla knows something we don’t, but it doesn’t look good.
So refreshing to see someone actually look at the issue on its merits. It is kind of insane how rare a post like this is. Thank you.
Wait, which setting is this?
Go to Settings -> You and Google -> Sync and Google services -> “Other Google services” section -> “Make searches and browsing better” option.
This option has the description: “Send URLs of pages that you visit to Google”.
If you don’t know about it, then you have it enabled. And it doesn’t matter if you’re in the EU.
What’s strange is I just set up a new local account a few days ago and the practically untouched Chrome profile has it disabled.
I checked, and it’s being turned on once you login for synchronization.
Logging Chrome into your Google account only requires normal login on google.com, another user hostile feature. The synchronization may not be auto-turned on, requiring another confirmation (not sure).
But once synchronization is turned on, that option keeps being turned on, even if you opted-into encryption for your synchronized data.
To my surprise, chrome dev tools now feel clunky after having made the switch last year.
My reason for using chrome for so long was that I believed the dev tools were superior & there are certain things chrome does (like the box shadow generator), but there’s a lot that firefox does that’s unique too & there’s a lot of things you just get used to on both sides.
At this point I’ve forgotten what the differences are, but this morning I opened chrome to see if some styling issue might be a browser bug & it felt so slow & clunky in comparison.
I’ve also mostly found this to be the case. The built-in JSON tooling in particular is very nice. (To Chromium users who don’t know what I’m talking about, navigate directly to a JSON URL in Firefox. You’re in for a pleasant surprise.) The only thing I go back to Chrome for now is the performance tooling. Seeing CPU time per line of code is pretty crucial in doing performance analysis.
Chrome doesn’t pretty format JSON URLs!? That’s bonkers to me. In 2024?
This sounds super sarcastic but I’m being serious. I’m genuinely surprised because I’m a lifelong Firefox user.
You can pretty print JSON in Chrome in the Network pane, including for the main document (if it’s JSON). Firefox actually renders it in the web view as a filterable tree, which is what differs.
Yeah, I really appreciate Firefox’s interactive JSON view. That’s what I meant by “pretty format”… I was just being lazy.
The Firefox html inspector and related tools are best in class, but the JS debugger is still lagging behind Chrome, both feature wise and in polish.
You can just tell Mozilla’s focus isn’t there. I’ve tried to do serious debugging in Firefox and always switch back to Chrome, not for huge reasons but small ones. I occasionally file bugs like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1656591 but the response times don’t motivate me to keep doing it. (That’s not a criticism of the Firefox developers, just an acknowledgement of priorities).
Using Firefox lets you adblock on mobile.
mic drop
Mobile Safari content blocker apps exist, fwiw
I use Safari as my personal browser, and there’s very little chance I’ll switch anytime soon, it’s just too good at what it does (integrate with all my Apple stuff). However, I did switch from Chrome to Firefox for work a couple months ago, and really haven’t looked back.
Aren’t you seeing issues in every day usage? Safari is the new Internet Explorer according to many.
It’s only “the new IE” if you ignore facts, reality, and have a penchant for adopting Chrome-sponsored pre-release APIs.
i.e. the thing devs are annoyed by but they can’t afford to not support?
Yes. This is a web developer sentiment, not a user sentiment.
Not really. TinkerCAD doesn’t work, but that’s the only thing I can think of, at least that I use.
That’s enough for most people to switch browsers, so as to avoid fragmenting their browser experience.
I’ve used it as my full time browser for years and never had problems with it in personal use that I can remember.
I’ve used it full time at work as well, since the start of my career, and I rarely ran into issues caused by my testing on Safari or others not testing on Safari. I’ve gotten comments about my use of it at work, even, IIRC, from one or two developers who preferred Safari for personal use, but used Chrome for the devtools.
I also have Firefox installed and occasionally use it, but never because something doesn’t work on Safari, unless it’s some web experiment or something. If basic functionality doesn’t work in Safari, despite having Firefox installed (or even if it were open), I’d rather just leave the site (I don’t remember ever having to do that, though I’m not 100% sure it hasn’t happened).
It is a meme. Not reality.
Same here. I block Google et al in Safari and route them to either SSBs or Firefox via the excellent “Choosy” app on my Mac.
This is technically true, but as far as I am aware Apple sells ad space in their products but does not do so by tracking users. They shut down iAd in 2016 because the leadership felt that owning a data-mining platform and providing privacy technologies were incompatible businesses.
Blink has diverged quite a bit from WebKit. Google ripped out a load of the abstractions for portable code, for example. In addition, Chromium-based browsers use a totally different JavaScript engine.
Is there an up-to-date doc somewhere on Firefox’s security model? It took them ages to move to a multi-process model, but I’m not sure how they then sandbox the processes. The rlbox stuff is really nice, but I don’t know how widely used it is (last I checked, it couldn’t be used for libraries that weren’t pure computation).
if you add cross-platform (which firefox truely is) the statement is true again. You can not run Safari on anything but apple hardware and that is too expensive for many people around the world.
Those people are irrelevant. If you can’t afford Apple hardware then you don’t need persuading not to use Safari. You may need persuading not to use Chrome / Edge. Persuading not to use Edge may need more effort because it has a better thing by default for finding cheap places to buy things (automatically finding discount codes) than Chrome, though I’m not sure how well this works across different locales.
It does rely on advertising though, right? Like with the sponsored links you get in a few places.
It also indirectly relies on advertising. Most of the revenue for Moz Corp comes from companies paying to be the default search engine and these companies make their money from… advertising. And value being the default search engine specifically so that they can get more user data to sell.
I have not seen any sponsored links in Firefox in years, but maybe because I do like to have the new tab empty, so I have changed things in prefs.js (or through about:config) a long time ago:
Could now probably also work when properly set in about:preferences#home.
It’s definitely possible to disable sponsored links (I keep them mostly as an act of support, though I never click on them…)
I agree with you about Apple and Safari, as I see it they do not have to track the user, as for them Ad business is only a (probably small) side thing and not their main business.
Regarding the Firefox’s security model the best I could find is the posting Introducing Firefox’s new Site Isolation Security Architecture. As I see it, the most of the technical Firefox (and Mozilla) content is on [Mozilla Hacks}(https://hacks.mozilla.org/).
It hasn’t been updated recently, but I think the process model doc on the wiki remains mostly accurate. Notably it doesn’t talk about (and I think predates) the fact that each origin operates in its own process; but I think that’s more about what work is allocated to each process than the process sandboxing itself.
I will say, Firefox’s documentation is… not always the easiest to find or follow. I’m not involved with Mozilla or Firefox, but it reminds me a lot of most large company documentation in my experience: there’s lots of it, but it’s hard to rely on any of it as absolute truth.
This line had the opposite effect of its intended purpose on me. Unironically passing judgement on a software product as ethical or not just seems really bizarre and out of place. How far does this type of reasoning go? Does not using Firefox make me an unethical person? The whole premise of the article makes me nauseous.
Frankly I don’t care if the Mozilla Foundation goes bankrupt and shuts down. They take a ton of money from a company that sponsors the development of a so called unethical browser, so I think they don’t really have much ethical ground on which to stand. It gets better, their CEO’s compensation continues to grow to astronomical heights, despite revenues declining. Not to mention all the money wasted on PR nonsense that has nothing to do with making Firefox better. Just look at their blog. They are just as phony as Google.
[Comment removed by author]
My main blocker is lack of Profiles, the way Chrome does it. Firefox’s containers and instances don’t quite cut it:
I have several profiles on Chrome: My personal profile, my work profile (sometimes several per-project), a shopping profile, an ethereum profile, etc. Each profile has different extensions, different settings, a different theme so I can tell them apart. They’re all sufficiently sandboxed from each other, especially the extensions. Some extensions are very sensitive and I want them isolated (I don’t want to mix a rando shopping extension with the same profile that has some sensitive private key stuff like crypto things). Some profiles I have various invasive developer tools which interact with the DOM of every page.
Firefox pushes containers aggressively, but I can’t have separate sets of extensions sandboxed in each container.
I’ve tried using instances (basically different profile paths per firefox instance) but it seems much more resource intensive than Chrome which has some shared memory/processing across profiles while Firefox instances are complete isolated monoliths. Also switching between them is very painful and slow (launching an instance takes way longer than opening a profile which takes as long as opening a new tab).
Anyone else have a workable strategy for this in Firefox?
Firefox does have built-in profiles support. Go to about:profiles
I’m not sure if I understand your problem. Firefox has profiles, you can run
firefox -pand a dialog will pop-up where you can manage your existing profiles or create a new one. I have aproand apersoprofiles, for instance, completely separate from each others with different themes, addons, settings, etc. To launch the first one I runfirefox -p proand to launch the second one I runfirefox -p perso. I then put each of them in a separate workspace (I’m using Ubuntu withe GNOME), et voilà.More info on Firefox profiles, including how to manage them.
swapping between profiles is not a first class citizen.
Er, sorry for the confusion, I mean what Chrome calls profiles, not what Firefox calls profiles. Firefox’s profiles are completely separate instances of the browser, if I have 5 profiles open that’s like having 5 instances of Firefox open. Chrome’s profiles are somewhere in between a tab and an instance, they’re still sandboxed but I can have many profiles open and they only use slightly more memory/resources than a single instance of Chrome with the same number of tabs.
Last time I tried to reproduce my Chrome profile workflow with Firefox’s version of profiles, it used way more memory and was way harder on my laptop’s battery life. :(
Though the
firefox -pshortcut is handy, thanks for sharing that!I would agree with you that Chrome/ium’s profile management is the best there is (and I frankly find it a headscratcher why other browser makers don’t imitate it). Despite my opinion on that, I still switched to Firefox, and, honestly, I don’t miss this feature. My current approach is distinct Linux-level users, and that’s been working just fine for me.
I see you’ve written elsewhere that your concern is high resource usage. I’ll admit that maybe that’s something to watch out for, but I usually just close instances that I haven’t used in a while. I also have fairly beefy hardware, so I don’t run into issues that much.
Another argument. The developer tools are a thousand times better. I usually develop in the backend but I constantly end up helping out a front end developer by simply opening it up. It’s bizarre that Chrome simply doesn’t show so many useful things. I don’t really understand how any serious web dev can use Chrome, when it doesn’t even show really basic stuff, but here we are.
What does Chrome not show, that Firefox does?
One thing is that in the network tab, if the response is JSON it will allow you to filter the response interactively. It uses a regular string match instead of something like JQ but it still is useful.
I wouldn’t call it a thousand times better, but certainly better. It is one of the things I noticed after dropping Chrome.
“Instead of something like JQ” - wouldn’t that make it subjective then? some people prefer JQ syntax
By instead of I was referring to a possible improvement. Chrome doesnt let you filter JSON payloads .
I am not using Chrome, and I don’t remember each one on the details and I am not sure if that changed, is an option (if so I/we haven’t found them yet), etc., but some stuff I can pick from the top of my head that I can remember people coming over were things like HTTP Protocol versions, events on HTML elements, certain Network related things where Chrome was showing a very generic on the error. Another thing is that JSON isn’t just formatted. So many times you just wanna take a quick look on a response or quickly search for a string, which is an absolute nightmare in Chrome. There are some more things, but classical not remembering the details other than people being like “that’s odd” and two or three people trying to figure something out only to them ending up at my place, me opening the dev tools only to see the issue straight away. Or sometimes also me coming over to someone being like “yeah, just open the dev tools” and us spending five minutes to look for some really basic info we can’t figure out how to show, and me moving back to my laptop or desktop just to check it really quick.
And that happens at too many places with too many people to be just an experience thing. Like I said, I am not even a front end dev, so I feel a bit like a novice regarding dev tools.
Firefox is fine, but this also doesn’t go into the many flavors of chromium that exist that are NOT google/microsoft. And Safari/Apple don’t sell ads afaik.
The browser monopoly isn’t the same as it was with IE6. IE6 was strictly controlled by Microsoft and was closed source. Chromium is not. It has dozens of companies (and individuals) who contribute, is open source, and has so many flavors that you can use with zero tracking/bloat. This argument holds no water to me and is a poor scare tactic for people who remember those days but don’t really remember much other than “IE6 sucked.” And to be fair to IE6, initially it was way better than competitors. They just let it get stale and did their own things instead of waiting for standards to happen. It all worked out in the end because standards DO get pushed quicker now and we don’t have to worry about some other browser core for Trident. It’s unreal to me that someone would argue for more fragmentation in this space rather than having one runtime for the web that everyone can contribute to / skin.
Maybe. If Chromium decided to push ahead with their cohort tracking thing, how many of the other downstreams have sufficient resources to be able to maintain a version that permits a cookie policy that Google disagrees with?
Google refuses to allow patches to support *BSD into Chromium, which has the knock-on effect of meaning that there’s no official Electron build for *BSD. This, in turn, means that there’s no official VS Code for *BSD. It doesn’t matter that these came with a commitment to support them, Google doesn’t sell things to *BSD users in sufficient quantity and so the patches don’t go in (the Fuchsia ones did, in spite of Fuchsia having an even smaller installed base, because Google did sell Fuchsia-based products).
As a result of their control over the Chromium project, Google gets to dictate which operating systems are viable on the desktop. I see that as quite a big problem.
This is a perfect summary of the problem I have with Chromium.
Same problem with puppeteer, rollup, and a lot of JavaScript ecosystem.
Presumably, Mozilla would, since they have enough resources to manage a completely independent engine.
I’m unaware of any cohort tracking thing. The only thing I know of that they’re working on is the ‘topics’ thing where your browser can convey (unless you opt out) generic topics you are interested in without revealing your browsing history.
What’s the cohort thing?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federated_Learning_of_Cohorts
Oh, but that’s been dead for ages, it never even released, and clearly the ‘topics’ approach is what they are going for now.
From the Wikipedia article:
So, yes, it’s ‘dead’, in that they put a new brand name on top of it. Yay?
Brave can call it that, but it does not make it so. They work completely differently. But yes, Topics came from FLoC.
Seems pretty clear that it’s a rebranding, irrespective of what Brave says.
I suppose so. But Topics is a significant improvement over FLoC, whether it’s a rebranding or just an iteration on the same concept.
https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics#evolution-from-floc
You can decide for yourself, of course. The differences are pretty clear here.
That said, it is fair to say that Topics are a sort of cohort analysis, in that you are placed into ‘cohorts’ of a kind where each Topic corresponds to a cohort ie: “I am a user who cares about cars”. So I’ve got my answers.
[Comment removed by author]
Yeah but Safari and the Chromium-derivatives don’t solve the problem of the WebKit/Blink rendering engine duopoly (Blink is derivative of parts of old WebKit; all of it came down from KHTML long ago), which is probably a more-critical problem in the long term than the basic privacy concerns. Making Gecko popular is the most-promising solution to this issue.
With uBlock Origin and several other plugins - I definitely prefer to use Firefox instead anything else.
… well maybe Librewolf can be an alternative :]
I still use firefox a lot. Librewolf is my favorite variant. That said, Mozilla lost me a little bit when they dropped support for embedding their browser engine into other applications. I used to occasionally contribute to Camino, and it still feels like a big hole in the ecosystem that we don’t have something non-webkit-derived to build a browser around. It’s better than it was when everything tried to assume IE6, but it’d be nice if people who wanted to experiment with browser UX could choose gecko.
Servo is back in active development.
As for Firefox forks, I like and recommend Waterfox. One aspect I particularly value is that the traditional menu bar still works properly, and integrates with the global menu bar in Unity/Xfce/KDE etc.
I wish I could. I use qutebrowser, which is based on chromium, and a version that’s perpetually behind (112 right now).
But it works perfectly with keyboard-only, and it integrates nicely with my WM tabs. Just hide the tab bar, and set
tabs.tabs_are_windows = True.I don’t want a second tab system to deal with, and I never got it completely right with Firefox.
I never got keyboard-only to work 100% either, and if it works 99% of the time, it doesn’t work.
I keep trying to make the switch stick, but on android, firefox just doesn’t work as awell as either of the chromium based browsers (chrome, brave). Especially when switching to/from full screen or when playing videos Firefox frequently falls over in one of various modalities which then has me switching back and forth between browsers.
I’ve genuinely had a completely opposite experience to you. Chrome on Android has always felt mega laggy, super weird (some of that was down to AMP I think), and doesn’t have extensions like Firefox on Android does. If I couldn’t use uBlock Origin on mobile I think I would become an ascetic monk.
I have been using Firefox for years, but I’m close to switching away from it for the inability to customise/disable keyboard shortcuts.
I lose work all the time due to pressing
ctrl-w, thinking it will delete a word, but instead it closes the tab without warning.Other annoyances:
ctrl-n– I never want thisctrl-d– I don’t use bookmarksctrl-shift-i– for some reason I seem to accidentally press this combo fairly often. Weirdly it does the same thing as F12, which can be disabled.I just tried something, was on this page, with many comments still having the red “(unread)” mark and then I pressed Cmd-w (on macOS, equivalent to Ctrl-w). Since a few versions Firefox has the Cmd-Shift-t (Ctrl-Shift-t) shortcut to reopen the closed tab (can also be done through the right-mouse-menu “Reopen Closed Tab” in the Tab Bar). This worked just fine and the comments still had the red “(unread)” mark. But unfortunately it did not restore this comment I was just writing, so it may not solve the problem you see.
There is only an option to warn when closing multiple tabs, see How to configure Close Tab warnings in Firefox. In about:config there is
browser.tabs.warnOnClose, but this is the equivalent of “Confirm before closing multiple tabs” in settings.On macOS, command-W is one of the standard shortcuts that closes the current window. It does this on pretty much every application, so it’s not the kind of thing that a Mac users would have muscle memory for doing something else (control-W, on the other hand, they may). I found with Chromium-based browsers on Windows that some of the standard Mac commands worked, some of the common Windows ones worked. I suspect that a lot of browser developers use Macs and forget that these are Mac-specific conventions (Chrome on macOS has the annoying thing of forcing you to hold command-Q to exit).
On most *NIX DEs, these conventions are even more vague than Windows and there’s no good set of standards for an app to even try to comply with.
That all the classic Ctrl- shortcuts on macOS are with Command- is something I really like. I am a heavy user of the terminal and so I am used to all the Ctrl- shortcuts in there. For me this is a very huge plus of macOS.
Regarding Command-q in Chrome on macOS, just toggle the “Warn Before Quitting” option in the Chrome menu and it does work as it should. This was also something which had annoyed me. I am using Chrome only for the work related use of Google Workspaces.
It will restore your comment, but in the top-level textbox at the top of the page, not in the context you were writing it in. (Unless you were writing a top-level comment.)
It’s cool that Mozilla exists and that it’s much less dodgy than Google, but I think it’s sad that many of the more socially responsible options in tech are still essentially undemocratic for-profit companies (yeah I know about moz foundation), and almost always with their profit motive working at least a bit against their social interest.
This lack of democratic accountability to their workers, users or stakeholders shows in how they often prioritise profit or executives’ interests ahead of social good or their workers desires. I sometimes see it in:
I’d like to see much stronger unions and more worker co-ops in this area, more grassroots funding, and maybe broader social ownership models.
Okay, I’ve been meaning to already.
I’ve been using Firefox for a while now, but I’m still a bit unhappy with the missing support for XDG Base Directory Specification. Look at this: 20 years, wow! Other than that, I have absolutely nothing to complain about.
Firefox is bad as it supports DRM/EME.
There are EME free version available, don’t know if they are available through some proper link from mozilla.org, but see e.g. https://download.cdn.mozilla.net/pub/firefox/releases/121.0/