• Firefox offers better privacy and security than Chrome, with upcoming support for 200 new add-ons.
• While Chrome dominates, Firefox gains ground with user-friendly browsing experience and open-source model.
• Mozilla's focus on user privacy and transparency challenges Google's ad-centric approach, making Firefox a viable alternative.
Same here. I left for about 10 years but started coming back gradually a few years ago. After everything that happened this year, I made the full switch to Mozilla on all my devices. I'm very happy to be back though!
Why is it such a big deal? I don't regret anything. Back in the days when Google was a cool company and Chrome appeared, it totally made sense to use Chrome. After they gradually started to get more and more hostile, I switched to Firefox. It was just a matter of exporting and importing bookmarks and setting up some plugins. And changing the search engine.
Same, I deeply regret leaving. Mostly happened due to peer pressure in uni, where everybody was thinking google is cool, and you had to use a lot of google products for classwork. Now google has their tentacles attached all over my online life, and switching feels like preparing for a divorce. Though at least I’m not using Android anymore
you could've just degoogled your phone, if it's comatible with any custom ROMs. android itself is open source, but the preinstalled apps and services are not. that's where the spyware is. (we will never even know how much spyware is embedded in IOS, because it's closed source)
When Chrome came out it was fairly light on resource usage and speedy because of that. Firefox was a resource hog at this time. Chrome now is a show resource hog and Firefox is much peppier overall in my opinion.
Growing up, I used Firefox on PC, but switched to Chrome early 2010s due to using a lot of google products for university work, and the general “google is cool” vibe that surrounded me from peers (tech/business student).
Now after a decade, I’m deeply entrenched in Google with bookmarks, passwords and habits. Only progress I made is switching to iOS from Android. Installed Ff on mobile, but didn’t really like the experience, so not really using it.
Will probably try to make a stronger push to invest some time and switch completely during Xmas break, as it does bother me to be part of the problem, though I hate how convenient not doing anything about it is.
I finally decided a couple months back to start de-googling and did the following so far:
switched Google Password Manager to VaultWarden
switched Google Search Engine to searxng
switched Google Keep to Obsidian/memos
switched Google Drive/Office to Cryptpad
switched Google Chrome desktop to LibreWolf
switched Google Chrome Mobile to Fennec F-droid
Only progress I made is switching to iOS from Android. Installed Ff on mobile, but didn’t really like the experience, so not really using it.
Well if you switched to iOS then there's not really much point as the browser backend is still the same as Safari there. Apple doesn't allow other browser engines so on iOS Firefox/Chrome/etc are all just wrappers on Apple's browser engine.
Apple is worse than Google in many ways and if you wanted to maintain control over your privacy (and even just de-google) you ironically would be better off staying on Android.
There are many great custom firmwares available for Android devices such as GrapheneOS which can truly de-google your device.
I was in the exact same boat as you. Except I also switched because Bitdefender, the anti-virus I used at the time, was not playing nice with Firefox.
Earlier this year, like a few months ago, I decided to try and switch back. It was seamless. In like half an hour I had every bookmark, most passwords, and even some new extensions that have saved me a lot of work since. I recommend you try it and keep Chrome installed on the side in case you run into some problems, but I think after a few days you'll realize you don't need it for much.
(in my case it's still installed for when I inevitably remember that I forgot to transfer a random password that didn't automatically migrate)
Was always really surprised everyone thought it was a great idea to jump ship to a browser made by the largest dataminer and internet ad company in the world. What's happening right now with Chrome and YouTube is entirely unsurprising. It was just a matter of time.
Tree Style Tab also lets you bookmark whole trees. I'm often jumping between different coding languages, or different areas of DevOps on a weekly basis, and tree bookmarks help. I can "file away" a bunch of research and load it all back later, and still have the tree! Very useful for context switching.
I'm not a fan of hoarding tabs, so with them being short lived I don't see benefits in having a tree. But I do use sidebery + custom userChrome.css to have exclusively vertical tabs, which save quite some space when collapsed.
If you work from home and you have go through a bunch of web resources, it's really nice. Most of the time you're opening new tabs, instead of being in the same tab. That way you still have the old web page for reference.
Specifically any job over the phone, it's almost mandatory. I love closing all the tabs at the end of the call, though.
The ability to drag them into specific trees to keep them organized, and the also Tab Renamer so the top tab is named sensibly and you can find other tabs
Most of my immediate team have switched to vertical tabs. It's frustrating seeing someone with a couple hundred horizontal tabs trying to figure where that important page was.
Edge does vertical tabs, but no nesting. Even that frees up a good amount of screen space.
Unfortunately no, but honestly I can't imagine how it would work on such small and horizontal vertical screen. Though I love that I can run uBO, Privacy Badger, TamperMonkey and CleanURLs.
I didn't notice they broke it. The website works on my Firefox as usual. Maybe you lack some plugins? (like ublock origin, sponsor block, age restriction bypass...)
For a few years there I was on the border, extensions used to make firefox extremely unstable, along with it being primarily multithreaded rather than multiprocess. Now it's much better. I know a lot of people don't like what the "quantum project" did, but I love it. Now a tab might crash because of some shitty plugin or something but the rest is fine.
When it was released, Chrome was revolutionary. Sandboxing individual tabs into their own processes was a stroke of genius. Until then, if a single site ate up all your memory and crashed your browser, all your tabs/sites died and you had to start again.
It really was the best browser for a hot minute before others copied the idea.
I never understood why so many people thought it was a good idea to hand Google the near monopoly power we had just prevented Microsoft in keeping. And that was AFTER we saw how bad it was that Microsoft had that power.
Too many people go for short term gain for way greater long term losses.
That's because 99% of people don't care, exactly the same as with Microsoft. Average person will understand why monopoly is bad when there's only a single company that sells them gas and suddenly he has to pay $100 per gallon. With tech stuff they simply have no idea. It's not like they were using IE and thinking 'It would be so much better if this could pass Acid test'. With Chrome they don't think 'it would be nice if this could block youtube ads' and don't understand what Google controlling the internet really means. Even governments don't care about it for the same reasons we do. We don't like monopoly because of technology and standards. They don't like it because it slows down economy.
Google took a novel approach of trying to give people a free product that had value to them and features they wanted in a way that was easy to use. Such a product gave a better experience and only at the cost of someone looking over their shoulder, something that people have grown accustomed from their governments.
People really bought into that "don't be evil" clause they used to have, and I'm actually astounded they bothered removing it. It's not exactly legally binding, so why not just leave it there and do evil shit anyway?
most people don't give af which browser they use. they trust the brand of google because the search engine was "the best" so they moved from firefox/edge over to chrome thanks to an advertising blitz and deals with vendors to put chrome on laptops, at the time was a better browser and much more stable since it silo'd tabs into processes (which is what almost all browser do now).
I use Chrome for development purposes only. Dev tools in Chrome are much better still. Firefox dev tools used to be a complete mess, they are better now, but still not a match to Chrome.
I've been using Firefox on desktop and mobile exclusively for a number of years now. I will say the experience isn't perfect but it's better than using a browser made by a company that is actively hostile to its users.
It is important to take note that you will experience issues with some websites. For example, https://astro.build/
Try scrolling quickly up and down on this page on Firefox vs Chrome (on mobile).
Scrolling was a little jittery on both ff and Chrome for me, but the page has a lot of content on it, so I wouldn't expect it run silky smooth on everything.
I honestly have no idea of the root cause. Different users are reporting different things. It seems to manifest differently for everyone. At a high level I would say it's due to the use of a JavaScript framework as a purely static HTML/CSS only site should not be doing this.
A lot of people have been saying this, some have been saying it lags in chrome, and some have been saying it lags in firefox. I'm interested to know what device you have and perhaps what refresh rate your display runs?
Tab overview page not working consistently - this one is hard to capture right now but what happens is when you have a large amount of tabs open (say over 30), when you hit the tab overview button it doesn't take you to the currently open tab in the list, instead it takes you to the very top. This is not the normal behaviour. If you open and close it a few times it will randomly work properly 1/10 times.
okay but listen to how evil Google actually is, they have disabled my Firefox browser. It's simply doesn't work. It was my default for years and now only Chrome works on my phone 😡 Is anyone else experiencing this?
Personally I've never left Firefox. Used to develop on it when it was still called Mozilla, and I'm happy it's still around. Privacy is a major strength of it compared to other browsers.
there was a while there if you used more than a few extensions you'd have a lot of issues. Also there were tons of issues over the years where there were some massive memory leaks. It has gotten much better since then with quantum and electrolysis.
In the early days when it was first created from the Netscape baseit was definitely branded as Mozilla. Source: I’m old enough to have used it then. Check its wiki page. Covers its early days as an app suite which included the browser.
Erm yes it was But here is a more or less chronological ordering of getting to Firefox today.
Netscape Navigator
Netscape Communicator 4.x (a suite of email, browser, calendar, HTML composer)
Netscape Communicator 5.0 is abandoned as a commercial product because engine is getting old and Microsoft is being anti-competitive
Netscape open sources Netscape Communicator 5.0 as Mozilla with the proprietary bits & crypto stripped out. BTW Mozilla was the internal name of Netscape exposed in the user agent and easter eggs like about:mozilla
Netscape / Mozilla starts NGLayout which is a rewrite of the HTML engine
NGLayout becomes Gecko
Mozilla suite is based on Gecko using extensible XUL architecture
Netscape themed browser released based on Mozilla with proprietary AOL stuff like AIM client
A bunch of other things happening at this point like versions of AOL, Compuserve using Gecko
Microsoft pays AOL a huge amount of money to not use Gecko in AOL client and make a lawsuit go away
AOL lays off most of the Netscape staff & tosses some money to get Mozilla Foundation going
Mozilla foundation splits the browser into Firefox which doesn't use so much XUL in the browser but is still the Mozilla / Gecko code base. It proved popular because it was more focused and loaded a bit quicker.
Mozilla foundation also splits email into Thunderbird along similar lines
Firefox progresses to where it is today.
So yeah it's a continuation all the way back. I also worked at Netscape at the time so I got to see much of this transition.
Container tabs are hands down the best add-on I have ever used. Being able to use multiple accounts across tabs is fantastic. Alot of my colleagues have switched due to this alone
I use Facebook Container which isolates any webpage that connects with facebook from the rest of my tabs. It also has separate containers for things like work, shopping, etc you can optionally use for whatever.
It's very convenient to just open a "shopping" container tab to check my spam email address instead of opening a private window and needing to sign in each time.
The mobile experience of Firefox with ad block is so much better than Chrome. Using chrome on mobile makes the Internet feel broken to me. I can't go back.
Brave has the best mobile experience IMO. Built-in dark content (this is gamechanger, dark reader is broken on FF mobile, slow and breaks pages), background playback (though this has FF also), very fast, more than FF. Powerful rust-written adblocker (though UBO is better but is slow and broke some pages on mobile). The only thing that could improve more is extensions capacity.
Since version 120 is coming to mobile soon with about 200 extensions (as mentioned in the article), can anyone recommend some good extensions that are newly added? I have ublock origin, HD YouTube, Google search fixer, clear url fixer, dark reader, privacy badger, and ghostery
Try libredirect, it automatically redirects links from twitter, youtube, imgur and many other spying platforms to alternative privacy friendly frontends. It is also very customizable: you can turn only some redirects and configure what particular site to use for each platform.
You can also drop ClearURLs filter.
Better filters that are more up to date exists exists on uBlock like Adguard URL Tracking Protection and Actually Legitimate URL Shortener Tool.
If LibRedirect becomes available, then definitely that. Redirects links from at this point twenty different services to more privacy-friendly frontends
If it weren't for the dev tools in Chrome, I never would have switched in the first place. But they got me stuck on it. But I've had enough of their shenanigans.
This is the first I'm seeing it, and it looks interesting. I'm always up to try a new browser. And it works on Linux too. If the language can be toggled to English I'll definitely try it.
Google blocks access to it's services for Firefox altogether? Maybe even ban it from the Play Store? That would finally give me a real incentive to install some CFW.
I know this isn't a popular view, but as for me, if Google makes the user experience worse (or blocks services entirely) for Firefox, I'll just stop using those services. I'll find alternatives for the essentials, and those that aren't essential... well, hello, extra free time.
It was a thing of the past, when different browsers rendered websites differently, thus some services didn't work in certain browsers.
Nowadays all browsers are pretty advanced, they render websites more or less precisely according to standards, so it's really not hard to make a website work in all major browsers. So if a service doesn't work in the browser of my choice (whether it's intentional or not), then that service sucks and isn't worth my time messing with it.
Well yes but then it would be really really hard to not have an antitrust charge bought (we know that various governments have been trying to not pursue any antitrust so far)
In the US, without net neutrality I believe it's completely legal. I remember seeing a report on The Steven Colbert show about a year or so after we lost net neutrality about how Comcast deemed Netflix wasn't paying them enough money so they throttled Netflix into the ground. This gave the appearance that Netflix services were crap in comparison to their own services like Hulu. About a month later they came to an agreement and Netflix paid up then magically speeds were restored to about the same as Hulu services.
that's fine, we'll find a way. I mean they could start some kind of clumsy certification thing, but I'll just move on and open up brave when I absolutely have to, otherwise they get no attention from me. I bet ublock traffic is less than a half a percent of their traffic.
Honestly, the differences between browsers performance is almost nothing. I’ve been a long time Firefox user and only ever encountered a compatibility issue once, but that was on a 3rd world countries government webpage for a small neighborhood.
ive switched to firefox for desktop windows for about 1 year now. Firefox is really capable and as swift as chrome. You also get a sense of less intrusiveness. Firefox also has the multi containers widget, though for me it breaks down after a while. The big difference now between firefox and chrome are things like automatic subtitles for anything running in chrome. So if a youtube or other video has no english subs, Chrome can do it. And soon, Chrome i going to go AI too. I'm not sure how firefox will survive that onslaught. I suspect mozilla will have a firefox fork partnering with a major competitor of google (eg: MS).
FF is great for mobile with the exception of PWAs. They abandoned support for web apps - they work but performance is terrible. It's a massively requested feature so hopefully they'll add support soon. I use a chromium browser (Vanadium) for web apps but have links open in FF.
Moved from Netscape to Firefox and never used IE or Chrome. I never understood the obsession with anything made by Google, glad its going to finally all fall apart for them.
There was a tiny window of time back before like 2010 where Google was legitimately a good choice. At the time Chrome came out, Firefox was having some notorious performance/bloat issues, and conversely Chrome was light and fast. Lots of stuff that came out around 2000-2010 from Google was legit best in class, and they were still generally in their "don't be evil era." That's obviously gone way out the window and has for some time. I started switching away from Google stuff around the time they killed Reader, and I'm glad I did because they've only gotten increasingly awful.
Nothing is falling apart for them. Do you remember IE times? "Everyone" hated it, "everyone" used it just to install Chrome/Firefox/whatever on new devices. And yet - the vast majority never even thought of using anything else.
I use Firefox Focus as my default browser, and use that to "open in" Firefox if I want my session kept for any reason, or Chrome if it's a Google related thing, sometimes.
For almost everything I click through especially out of an app, Firefox Focus is fully appropriate.
That makes sense, I didn't notice that setting. I was running focus for a long time before installing normal Firefox, so that's how my habit started. Thanks for the tip
I use Firefox Focus as a plugin for Safari on iOS. This article threw up a full page ad begging me to turn off my content blocker before letting me view the article.
Had pentadactyl survived the infamous extension API change (or something like that, don't remember anymore) I would've never left FF. However, I finally made it back, thanks to tridactyl.
I know I can right click on a given search and "add Keyword for this search" but that doesn't allow me to do custom URLs (e.g. www.reddit.comm/r/%s to go directly to a subreddit, rather than search).
edit: thank you so much everyone for these responses. I'm gonna make the switch :)
Firefox doesn't explain how to do this at all, but it is possible. Make a bookmark with the URL you want, and set the keyword to whatever symbol you want ti start it with.
I did the same with Reddit and it worked on my end. If it doesn't work for you I'd be happy to help you figure it out.
It's also possible on mobile, and it's actually even easier: Settings>Search>Default Search Engine>Add Search Engine. Then you can type your search and choose the engine from a dropdown menu.
This is the way. The dude in the comment above the one I am replying to described a different way where you have to change the config, which would be neccesary to do on every new installation. Via the bookmarks/shortcuts method you will have the BANG Search on every new installation just by importing your bookmarks - or if you use an firefox account with synchronisation you will already have it with your login.
Be advised that duckduckgo has already some predefined BANG Searches, that you can use without having to change anything. Just type in the search bar:
!g for google searches
!ddg for duckduckgo searches
!yt for youtube searches
!mindfactory for searches on a german pc hardware shop "mindfactory.de"
Yes they have very broadly implemented websites. Even such nieche sites are already listed.
Lots of people are covering the actual answer, but this is one of the reasons I default to duck duck go on everything - the bang operator. For example:
cat videos !ytor!yt cat videos (or probably even cat !yt videos) will search YouTube for cat videos.
I have a bunch of these that I use all of the time:
!a, Amazon
!g and !gi, google and google images
!imdb, uh, imdb
!nf, Netflix
retired now but !r searches reddit
!so, stack overflow
!w, wikipedia.
I guess they're up to nearly 14k of these now so chances are the thing you want to search is in the list. Aside from that, Google's search results are increasingly garbage these days and filled with ads, so while I used to get a lot of use out of !g and !gi, I really don't any longer.
For some reason I can't get my Firefox app to actually activate dark mode on my phone. I switch it in the settings and refresh it but it just won't work so I keep using chrome. Any ideas?
I updated that setting and it turns out that the setting page for Firefox changes color from white to black but it isn't actually changing the background behind when I search things in the app and such
Switched back in the summer for good. Use Firefox in my android as the default browser with DuckDuckGo as search engine. The issue is still relying on the android digital hemisphere as the default OS for my phone.
Edit : The only thing lacking is tab management. I know there is an extension. But it doesn't satisfy.
Tab management is my main reason why I don't switch to Firefox. No, I don't want a whole new window with my tabs, I want them to be collapsible and grouped in the same window.
Mozilla Corporation is technically for-profit, but they are committed to investing all of their profits back into Mozilla Foundation. They have no shareholders. It exists so that Mozilla can make money off of their products and reinvest it, not to make money for its executives.
One big positive for me on Chrome is that I have an Android phone, so a lot of my activity on my phone and computer sync together. How is Firefox with this, if I were to use it both on my desktop and phone?
This is what I do as well. Fortunately, Apple doesn't really need to make money from the browser, so imo it's still the "cleanest" experience. Meaning, It's just a browser. It doesn't want to sell you a VPN or crypto or get you to upgrade to a paid tier reading service, and integration in the ecosystem is obviously better.
I still really like Firefox, and that's what I use as a backup on Macs, and primary on my PCs. There have been increasing number of rumors though that Apple is going to open up the App Store requirements in some way though that might allow Firefox to use it's own engine on iOS, and if they do that I'll probably switch over for a while and kick the tires.
If you have iOS devices, it doesn't make sense to use Firefox at all. Since the engine is still webkit. Firefox on iOS is also extremely buggy. All browsers on iOS are essentially the same but with different skins. So why not stick to Safari?
Android however is a different story altogether as Firefox can run its own engine, its own add ons etc. And it's frankly the best mobile browser.
Anyone who tried it a year ago, this comment is to tell you that Firefox has improved by orders of magnitude in the past year/years. I recommend trying it again.
I use Firefox for personal use, but I exclusively use Chromium for work just because of the amazing Tab Groups feature. I can't work without it anymore
Have they addressed the security issues with sandboxing and site isolation and added a web view on android yet? I'd love to use Firefox on my phone too, but those issues were big enough for GrapheneOS to recommend against gecko-based browsers (though fortunately they provide their own de-googled chromium-based browser Vanadium):
Avoid Gecko-based browsers like Firefox as they're currently much more vulnerable to exploitation and inherently add a huge amount of attack surface. Gecko doesn't have a WebView implementation (GeckoView is not a WebView implementation), so it has to be used alongside the Chromium-based WebView rather than instead of Chromium, which means having the remote attack surface of two separate browser engines instead of only one. Firefox / Gecko also bypass or cripple a fair bit of the upstream and GrapheneOS hardening work for apps. Worst of all, Firefox does not have internal sandboxing on Android. This is despite the fact that Chromium semantic sandbox layer on Android is implemented via the OS isolatedProcess feature, which is a very easy to use boolean property for app service processes to provide strong isolation with only the ability to communicate with the app running them via the standard service API. Even in the desktop version, Firefox's sandbox is still substantially weaker (especially on Linux) and lacks full support for isolating sites from each other rather than only containing content as a whole. The sandbox has been gradually improving on the desktop but it isn't happening for their Android browser yet.
I'm using jerboa, and any links open in a firefox webview, with an option to (ninstantly, without reloading) opening the page in the firefox app directly
I love firefox so much, but at times, I also am ready to ditch it. Some default configurations are just nothing but stupid. E.g.: all ports above 1024 are by default blocked, even with local domains in your LAN. Or, just happened today: ftp is generally blocked. I then had to switch to Chromium to get a file. Or: if on Linux, many video codecs are not by default bundled.
Reasons like that make me hate Firefox. But I hate everything else a bit more.
So is there a browser based on Firefox but without strict configs?
That's really strange, I haven't encountered either of those problems. The latter you can blame your distro for. If Firefox was bundled with all of the codecs it would be really big for no reason, and it would be redundant on nearly every system.
Kinda agree, sure it is also a distro issue. Chromium-like browsers worked out of the box, though. In the end, the user should not really experience easy-to-fix problems like „I can‘t watch any Twitch streams“, and I‘m not really on a uncommon distro (OpenSUSE Tumbleweed).
Edit:
About the blocked ports, check the following variable in your about:config
network.security.ports.banned.override
This one needs to be set, if you would like to use ports, such as 8080.
And why the hell would you be using ftp in currentyear. Newsflash: They also ditched gopher.
Never came across a video on the modern web that firefox couldn't play. Everything post-flash should really be fine.
What actually annoys me about all browsers are the policies around loading certain stuff from file://. Try getting something wasm to run without serving the thing from a web server or, *shudder*, base64-encoding bitcode into html. I understand there's some valid gripes around ../ and softlinks and whatnot but, wait, hear me out: What about zipping everything up and calling it a webapp, treat the file as a domain.
Oh it was never my intention to use it, but I was playing a bit with OpenAL and HRTF and ended up on a webpage that actually was using FTP to provide some audio files. So I kinda had no other choice.
The video thing is actually a known issue, but might be due to OpenSUSE not providing codecs by default. I still wonder why Chromium was working, though.
I might be in the very minority crowd here, but I just can't get used to Firefox. I mean once upon a time I was clinging to Netscape screaming foul at Internet Explorer too, old habits die hard. But Chrome just clicks for me, whereas the multiple times I've tried Firefox, it just doesn't click for me. Can't put my finger on it.