I remember when Chrome was released, all marketing was on how much faster it rendered webpages, I never saw that as an issue, Firefox was fast enough, I tried Chrome for a bit, and hated the UI, I remember being confused as to why everyone loved Chrome suddenly, and frankly, I still am a bit confused by both the sudden shift, and the absolute market dominance by Chrome…
Over the years my customized Firefox looks like chrome ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I hated Chrome’s UI so much that I switched from Firefox to Pale Moon when Firefox started the whole Australis design language, and only switched back when the current design was launched
I switched from FFX to Chrome back in the day because Chrome tabs were all independent processes in task manager, and one crappy website wouldn’t kill my whole browser.
When Google started their war on addons, I switched back to Firefox.
Pretty much my same progression except I’ve come back to LibreWolf instead.
Greetings, fellow LibreWolf user! Hurrah!
Chrome is very good at running Google’s pages. Even before Google owned YouTube chrome was better at YouTube.
Google bought YouTube in 2006, Chrome was publicly released in 2008, so I believe you are misremembering the events…
Entirely possible, I was pretty busy in my early career back then
I remember being confused as to why everyone loved Chrome suddenly
Because they were still using Explorer before that
Fair, I can see that, I guess my question was more for the people who already had switched to Firefox
I grew up with a 56k modem. Anything after adsl is warp speed for me. I never understood or observed the speed differences between browsers.
Maybe I’m just so slow myself that I dont notice the difference but come on… how much can it be? A few seconds? Who is so busy that a few seconds is a worthy amount of time to try and save (not talking about F1 drivers here)?
Orion > FF > Chrome
Firefox is slower, not because it’s worse, but Gecko is a minority engine in the web (~3-4%) and because of this the most webs are optimized for Blink. That is the only reason and because most current Browsers are using it, a devils circle. The result of leaving Google hands-free for too long and that for 20 years the number of available engines has remained stagnant (3 and some testimonial exotic forks) because it is the most complicated part of a browser. Little can be done now.
Firefox will become good to me when it gets the extensions that I need for work.
I’m gonna be honest.
The main reason I don’t like Firefox is the ui.
It’s one of those things where I’ve been using chrome for so long that switching to anything else is infuriating. Trying to learn the layout and all the features. Trying to figure out how to do things that are intuitively design on Google.
If someone made pretty much a 1 to 1 copy of Google without all the bullshit I’d use it in a heartbeat.
This is certainly a hurdle to overcome. Google helped by changing the Chrome UI for the worse in some ways I care about, but migrating to a new browser and getting used to different UI is enough of a hassle that I’m still holding out until adblock actually stops working before I make the switch.
I have the same problem the other way around. When I use chrome it feels like I’m using a kids browser. Slightly cutesy with too many curvy bits. Sort of like the difference between Duplo (chrome) and Lego (Firefox). Basically the same thing, but also not.
You can drag and drop your toolbar, extensions, and layout.
Well bud, you can literally customize Firefox with css. So get to learning
That’s the worst part about all of this.
I don’t even know what css is 😭
It’s what makes HTML look fancy. You can also find something you already like https://www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/
How did I never know about this? This might make me switch to Firefox sooner than planned. Thanks for sharing!
shots fired! Shots fired!
fuck it, where do i start? if spending a little bit of my time writing a css sheet results in Google losing market share i’m 1000% down.
https://www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/ Don’t flame me for a Reddit link lol
not at all, thank you!
frantic ignoring reddit sounds
dishing out the tools to help users take back control of their lIves. hero quality.
does anyone recommend any Firefox alternatives? I genuinely hate Firefox’s UI and keybinds and the scrolling tabs
you may not even have to change to another browser or fork, please have a look at some designs in https://trickypr.github.io/FirefoxCSS-Store.github.io/ select a design and follow the page, and you shall find the instructions (usually just downloading/pasting userChrome/Content.css)
and for scrolling tabs, if your problem is very small tab size, then try changing
browser.tabs.tabMinWidthin about:configFloorp, I use it and I love it. It’s especially great for Opera refugees, it has workspaces and stuff. Soon Firefox will support tab groups natively, and then Floorp will be perfect. It’s a Firefox fork though.
Tab groups and non-independent tab muting (seems like it was domain-specific rather than tab-specific last I tried) are the two main things that kept me from switching back to FF as my primary browser (still use it for DTA, for example, but DTA got a big nerf back during the major extension overhaul, so that was a letdown). Tried some extensions, but none really worked in a way I considered usable and didn’t want to just keep trial and erroring through them given I already have a browser that functionally meets my needs, even if I’d rather not be using a chromium browser.
If native tab groups work well enough, I’ll probably give it another chance.
That we all need something like tab muting really shows that the internet has gone to shit.
I sometimes just need to mute something for a second that I’m otherwise listening to. Or I’m switching between multiple sources, and don’t want like 3 or more playing at the same time… usually all on the same domain. I don’t want to have to actually go to the tab and mute it. I’m frequently muting and unmuting things that way to the point that even if its the only source of sound, I still mute by tab instead of just turning my computer volume off sometimes out of habit, so its a deal breaker.
I think this just says more about the perils of embracing untreated ADHD than the internet itself.
Firefox masterrace
I usualy love it, but for some reason Firefox fails to retrieve web pages about 75% of the time when on the internet connection at my parent’s house, and I don’t know why.
It acts like a DNS failure, but the DNS settings are the same in Firefox, Chrome, and the router.
Meanwhile Chrome and Edge work great.
Probably secure DNS? Try disabling that in the privacy settings page.
I never really cared that a browser could load a page in 1.5 seconds instead of 1.9… I mean who cares?
I didn’t care until it consistently loaded faster.
That’s now my new baseline, and anything slower than ‘instant’ is annoying.
I would care if that was no longer the case, because I don’t like being constantly annoyed.That said, I don’t think the page loading speed is noticeably different between major browsers.
The addons, customisation, privacy and resource usage are where it’s at.I’m just hoping that some competition to chromium stays afloat.
chrome used to be good. Emphasis on the past tense.
Firefox was always good. Chrome was very briefly better. Firefox has not suffered enshittification like chrome did.
I mean, I clearly remember firefox being terrible back when Chrome was just beginning to take off.
It was a lumbering monolith that ate all your ram and loaded pages at a glacial pace. Chrome was a multi-process revolution from that.
Then, firefox got it’s shit together and chrome got overloaded with corpo bullshit.
It used to take firefox ages to open. I switched back after the big update in the mid 2010s that made it good again.
This. Firefox has always been just good. It wasn’t great or anything, it was just a good browser. Then chrome came around and it had more, better features. It was a bit more memory usage, but those were for the additional features Firefox didn’t have.
Firefox didn’t really change a whole lot, it added synching features across accounts, and didn’t get worse. It just stayed the same.
The people made Firefox better, because now they’re creating add-ons for Firefox, where chrome had more.
I feel like once chrome got the majority of browser users, it immediately started going to shit. I have no proof of this, just a memory of it being better until it was announced that chrome was the most used browser, and the near immediate heavier memory usage.
I don’t know what rock you’ve been living under where you think base Firefox wasn’t ever improved
It’s all telemetry so the advertising company that made Chrome can harvest your data for resale at bargain bin prices
Yes, but not neccesary other Chromium do it, that depends only on the corresponding devs. Chrome is a RAM and Data Hog, because use for every tab a own process, but Vivaldi Hibernate the background tabs and because of this use less RAM than other Chromium and even FF. But generally all US browsers send data to Alphabet, googleanalytics and googletagmanager, except Edge (also Chromium), but in change it sends data to other MS partners which are even worst (Towerdata). I use Vivaldi for this, because it’s the only existing EU browser (after the French UR browser died some years ago) maybe apart Konqueror from KDE (Linux only, KHTML or KDE WEBKit engine), no data for third parties, nor Google, despite the Chromium base. The Browser companies are the problem, not the engine which they use.
Everything enshitifies… Everything, problem that worries me that, Firefox will enshitify like this too one day
The browsers are all quite good at copying your links, tabs, and history. Don’t worry, there will always be a good option, especially since open source has no strong path to enshittification
Then it will be forked and the cycle continues.
boss i’m tired of those cyclesHow close did we come to being a footnote in the history of a future species that would happen upon our ruins ten thousand years from now? Would they indulge in the fiction of their own immortality until the Shivans came for them? And how long had this gone on? Did the Ancients stumble upon the monoliths and the tombs of their predecessors in this distant corner of space, dismissing the warnings carved into the walls of the sepulchre? And when the destroyers came at last, what did the Ancients think as they sifted the cremation of dust and bones, staring into the mute remains for a key; some solution to their plight?
What if there had been countless races stretching back into infinity? And like the nine cities of Troy each civilization had been built on the rubble of one that came before. Each annihilated by the Shivans.
The Ancients died eight thousand years ago, as humanity emerged from its neolithic infancy. They believed their voyage across the sea of stars awoke the dragon that slept beneath the waves. That the Shivans were birthed from the flux of subspace and their destruction was the revenge of an angry cosmos.
At that point it will be forked yet again, and that fork will take over. Mozilla is a very active open source member though.
Mozilla has no traditional profit motive. The Mozilla Corporation, which develops Firefox, is a 100% subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, which is legally a non-profit organisation.
So, if the Mozilla Corporation makes a profit, they cannot pay out that profit to shareholders. Practically all they can do with that money, is to pay higher wages or set it aside for future invest in their products.
That does not mean that they cannot stagnate or use money badly. And it does not either mean that they never need to make money. But it does mean that there’s no shareholders demanding short-term profit above all else.
Thank you for new info, i didn’t know about that, but it’s not what I’m worried, I’m worried about manifest v3 going forced by Google and other corpos and being adopted by Firefox, but we still have dns adblockers for now, like pihole and such
Firefox already supports Manifest V3. Crucially, though:
- Firefox continues to support Manifest V2 for the foreseeable future.
- Firefox will not adopt the arbitrary limitation of content/ad blocking rules in Manifest V3, which is what’s bad about it.
- Firefox offers APIs in addition to Manifest V2 and V3, with which more powerful extensions can be built. This is why uBlock Origin has been better on Firefox for quite a while already.
Source for the first two points: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2024/03/13/manifest-v3-manifest-v2-march-2024-update/
Removed by mod
I haven’t experienced that. What is the use-case that makes this happen? I have one machine with only 8 gig and firefox is fine, and a 16 and 32 gig machine, firefox has never eaten 8 gigs
What they mean is “I use woefully malformed websites loaded up with all sorts of weird shit that eats ram on the regular, and somehow that’s my browser’s fault”
I have a VPS with 1 GB of RAM and Firefox with up to 3 tabs is fine. OK, it’s running Linux maybe FF on Windows is worse.
I love Firefox, but I can’t shake the feeling that it it’s slower on YouTube. My tinfoil hat theory is that Google somehow throttles YouTube on Firefox.
I tried both and the videos played at the same speed for me
Well, Google will probably optimize their shit for their own
privacy invasion sniffing toolbrowser twice as hard as for Firefox and suchFirefox is good for webpages not web apps
A web app is just a fancy name for a dynamic web page. Change my mind.
That’s a really weird take. Like… what even is the difference supposed to be?
This sounds more like “everything should be as it was back when <insert arbitrary point in time here>! When there were still Webpages, and we were frolicking about the internet! Until
the fire nation attackedWeb apps took over!”What an oddly aggressive take on someone’s opinion
Basically I am saying Firefox is not as performant as chromium when loading JavaScript.
Don’t agree, nothing noticeable for me anyhow. Chrome has the ultimate drawback: being under the control of a monopolistic evil corporation
In general, browser benchmarks seem to often favor Firefox in terms of startup and first interaction timings, and often favor Chrome when it comes to crunching large amounts of data through JavaScript.
I.e. for pages which use small amounts of JavaScript, but call into it quickly after loading, Firefox tends to come out on top. But for pages which load lots of JavaScript and then run it constantly, Chrome tends to come out on top.We’re usually talking milliseconds-level of difference here though. So if you’re using a mobile browser or a low-power laptop, then the difference is often not measurable at all, unless the page is specifically optimized for one or the other.
I’m pretty sure someone discovered that is true recently, but can’t be assed to try to find it right now.
They used to also use the unreleased version 0 of shadow DOM for building the Polymer UI, which - being a Chrome-only prototype - understandably didn’t work on Firefox, and therefore instead used a really slow Javascript polyfill to render its UI.
I haven’t checked on it lately, but I imagine they must’ve changed at least that by now.
One thing you can test is to apply a Chrome user-agent on Firefox when visiting YouTube. In my personal experience that actually noticeably improves the situation.
That’s super interesting! I’m not versed enough though, do you have like a tutorial you recommend or should I just Google it?
There’s a bunch of extensions that allow you to switch user-agent easily, I personally use this one, it includes a list of known strings to choose between as well.
And to check that it’s working, there are websites you can go to which will tell you what browser they have detected you are using.
For YouTube on IOS, I use Brave. It does a decent (but not perfect) job of hiding ads on YT.
Do you use YouTube so much that a small performance difference on a single Site has an influence on your browser choice?
It’s not tinfoil, they have been caught doing it and they continue to do it. It’s a scumbag company.
How the fuck they haven’t been slapped with an anticompetitive is beyon - oohh right. End stage capitalism
You haven’t experienced slow until you try to take Firefox through Google Cloud Console or Search Tools. 15 seconds in Chrome, somehow turns into 3 minutes in Firefox, funny how it does that.
Same happens with Safari. The page loads in a weird funky way, video sorta first and then comments and suggestions many seconds later.
On Chrome on the exact same computer it’s instant.
They’re doing it on purpose.
Google does that a lot with their own web properties. I remember Google Meet didn’t support background replacement on Firefox, but switching Firefox’s user agent to Chrome suddenly fixed it.
FF is doing great. All the have to do now is the Steam strategy. Do nothing and wait for the competition to fuck themselves over.
Steam’s strategy was to be first to market and essentially the only player in the game for a decade, making themselves the default.
Thats the problem tho, the new mozilla leadership is on the “do anything but nothing” ship. I really hope they either dont do anything too horrible or someone forks it if they do.
Yeah, it’s been a huge waste of resources trying to reinvent everything.
there are already forks in place if you’re dissatisfied with firefox like librewolf, floorp or the new one from mullvad
You mean hope that they too don’t become subject to enshittification? I don’t have a lot of faith in that.
Besides that, Google is controlling as fuck. They might keep fucking themselves over but there’s no way they won’t start attempting to ruin things for the rest of us.
It seems Mozilla is not immune to the AI hype. I just hope their AI endeavour won’t kill them when the AI hype finally ends.
Thankfully the AI use is very tame so far, used for stuff like offline alt text generation and offline translation. I’m personally still concerned about copyrights and ethics of the models used, but at least it’s directed towards providing specific features, not a magic cure-all.
I’m more concerned with Mozilla spending its meager resources to chase some fads instead of focusing on improving firefox.
to be fair they are tge only ones i know of putting it to actual good use
That kid is superior
