I am surprised how many people have so many problems with Firefox.
I've never felt impeded by loading speeds, and my ADHD regularly has me forgetting to restart it, to the tune of 100+ tabs open across multiple desktops. My wimply little MacBook Pro doesn't seem to mind.
The only downside I've found is that, because so many people just default to "Chrome or nothing," there's occasionally sites that have bugs because, like was the case in the 90s with Internet Explorer, the site developers took the idiomatic Chrome way of building a feature instead of something universal.
Lots of Firefox hate here, but little discussion about the articles kicker, which is the exclusion of uBlock Origin from Chrome.
I hope this will mean that in the long run Firefox (and other secondary browsers) will gain more users again. For me, Firefox is a solid piece of software. Works well in strict privacy mode, with uBlock Origin and Multi-Account Containers.
I had no idea how many ads load the average page. I just forgot because I have been using uBlock for so long.
I have been hesitant to use Firefox, just because I am used to chrome. But after Google forcibly disabled software that I chose to run, I'm all in on Firefox.
> Here’s something the iPhone isn’t getting anytime soon: honest-to-god browser extensions that you use on your desktop, also on your phone.
This convinces me the author is not knowledgeable about current browser capabilities. They probably haven’t tried anything but Firefox in a long time.
Orion runs desktop (Firefox) extensions on iOS, and is in many ways a breath of fresh air. Instead of parroting “all iOS browsers are Safari” and throwing their hands in the air, they actually got hacking on it.
> With adopting the Web Extensions API, we show our support for creating a unified browser extensions experience across all three major web rendering engines. We ended up porting hundreds of APIs, one by one, that were never meant to work with WebKit. Took us a few years, but here we are!
> Orion currently supports about 70% of Web Extensions APIs, and we add more every day. On top of that, we built advanced security features that give our users granular control over extensions, beyond what Chrome and Firefox offer. For example, you can choose to allow an extension to run only on certain websites.
One of my main reasons for staying with Firefox is that in the long term, I think it's good to have a diversity in browser engines.
Back when I started web development, there were standards, but nearly everybody just coded to what Internet Explorer supported. Which I really hated :-)
In the past few years, I've seen the occasional "works best with Chrome" website, which worries me, but so far it hasn't been too bad.
But if we as a community leave the browser market to Chrome and browsers with engines of similar origin as Chrome's, we'll get back to the bad old days.
A tip I would add to this article is that Firefox natively supports sidebar tabs now without needing hacky extensions. Go to about:preferences under the Browser Layout section of the General tab, and select Vertical Tabs. The tab group functionality along with Multi-Account Containers are a lot more useful under this layout IMO.
I really struggled going back to Firefox after being a Chrome user for so long, it just feels so incredibly slow in comparison - I know it's probably just perception but I couldn't shake that feeling.
I ended up going with Brave. Once you turn off their crummy VPN and crypto advert it's effectively just google chrome with a built in ad blocker.
I know there were arguments/concerns about the crypto thing, but I did a bit of research before picking a new browser (as should you) and once I realised it was a simple thing to turn off and never see again I was fine with it, it's all opensource as well so you can see how things work.
Of course it's just a chrome fork, so is still somewhat influenced by Googles decisions but that really wasn't the issue here, I just wanted to keep ublock origin and that's been the outcome.
I still have syncing and such all running between my desktop and mobile, I still have all the same extensions I've used for over a decade, so it's been relatively pain free to switch.
This is pretty similar to my set up but I'm ready to quit Firefox because what feels like every few weeks they somehow manage to add new auto-enabled spyware.
I regularly have to turn stuff off in
"Firefox Data Collection and Use"
and
"Website Advertising Preferences"
Recently I also started seeing ads in my address bar when typing stuff and saw they've added:
"Suggestions from sponsors
Support Firefox with occasional sponsored suggestions."
of course, enabled by default.
Firefox is a great product but unfortunately slowly being milked/destroyed by its non-technical management team.
This is something that has been on my mind for years — I want to use Firefox, but for some strange reason, it just doesn’t feel as smooth as Chrome.
Here are the features of Firefox that I find particularly appealing:
- The Firefox Multi-Account Containers feature, in my opinion, is what puts this browser at the top.
- Additionally, the privacy extensions work incredibly well.
However, there are some drawbacks:
- Strangely, it doesn’t feel smooth — regardless of whether I'm on Windows or macOS.
- I experience video codec issues, which I hope I’m not the only one facing.
- I can't run the extensions I develop in dev mode. I haven’t been able to find a solution for this. That said, I don't encounter this issue in LibreWolf.
I don’t use Chrome; instead, I prefer Ungoogled-Chromium, as Google is not a trustworthy company in my view — both due to its policies and many other problematic actions.
I’m truly grateful to the developers of Ungoogled-Chromium for removing Google services and for keeping the browser consistently updated.
I’ve tried all sorts of browsers like Vivaldi, Brave, and Orion, but none of them feel smooth or stable to me — at least, that’s how I perceive it.
The article implies that tabs, bookmarks, passwords can only be synchronised between Firefox installations and not with Zen or Libre (I assume this refers to LibreWolf?), but at least Zen can be connected to the Mozilla account and synchronises everything with the other connected Firefox, Firefox for Android, ... installations.
> The other line you see there? That one-liner blocks all those “Sign in with Google?” pop-ups.
This is one of these tiny improvements that will save you a second or two per website, but when you multiply it, it becomes significant. Kudos to all the people who made it possible.
Everyone is going to talk about UBlock origin (a must) but I have a different take on what makes firefox great:
A thing you can do on firefox with some tweaks is no-search browsing (tm).
1. Remove search suggestions in (about:preferences#search)
2. Use the [History AutoDelete](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/history-autod...) addon to remove your searches from your History since they would clutter the result and it's unlikely you care about them
3. Go to (about:config) and set `browser.urlbar.resultMenu.keyboardAccessible` to `false` so you can tab through the results with just one tab press
Now when you Ctrl + L into the current tab, you will get results from your history, bookmarks and even open tabs. And the results are only a few Tab presses away, no need to move your hands off the keyboard. You can browse without the useless round trip to a search engine.
If you don't like the results and want to launch a search anyways, well just press Enter instead and it will launch a search with the default search engine.
Searchless browsing right there for you.
P.S : Cool trick is to type % + space in the awesome bar to move around opened tabs, awesome You can also specifically look into bookmarks with * and history with ^
P.P.S : Ctrl + L, Ctrl + T, Ctrl + W and Ctrl + Alt + T are your best friends.
Firefox is amazing, you just have to tweak it a tiny bit
Now you can also learn more about custom search engines :
Having tested uMatrix and uBlock Origin for years, and having tried many other Firefox extensions, IMO the best Firefox advantage is neither of those nor any other extension. It is a rarely discussed about:config option called
network.dns.forceResolve
Chrome desktop also has something like this, but it's a command-line option. Firefox OTOH allows one to select a global domain-to-IP mapping while the browser is running.
uMatrix and uBlock are IMHO designed for graphical browsers and the graphical www. For me, graphics are secondary, not a priority. I can get better (easier) control over HTTP requests and real-time transparency into TLS traffic through a forward proxy.
Firefox is still massive overkill for me. Ridiculously large and complicated. No doubt there are people who are comfortable and pleased with this sort of complexity. Glad they like it, but I am not one of those people.
Unlike Chromium or Firefox the relatively small and simple software I use to extract information from the web can be compiled in seconds on inexpensive hardware. The speeds of "no-browser" (HTTP generator plus TCP client) or the text-only browser I use easily beat any graphical, Javascript-running browser. Better control over HTTP headers, cookies and real-time, configurable logging. Not only that but I can process large, catenated HTML files that make the complex, popular browsers stall and choke.
If the goal is to achieve some customised graphical representation of a complex website, I think uBlock Origin and uMatrix are unmatched. But if the goal is "blocking", i.e., only making the HTTP requests that the user intends, and controlling the content of those requests, without regard for graphics, then I think I do better with the foward proxy.
Let's ignore problems with Mozilla's management or board for a minutes.
To most of the problems people describe on HN, have you file anything on bugzilla? Even if you dont file it on bugzilla you could at least describe your problem in full on HN, which you can always copy and paste back in the future when someone ask you once again. At least someone will have a record somewhere.
1. Are you on Linux? Or is the issue specific to Android?
2. Performance Issues? Where? How? At least describe it? Firefox since e10s and Quantum landed fully has been as fast if not even faster than Chrome. Chrome has since caught up again. Generally there shouldn't be noticeable performance difference in day to day usage other than some benchmarks or Gaming, WebGL / WebGPU scenario.
The main problem Firefox has really is Mozilla. And Orion is neat but too immature and the direction Kagi is taking in general seems to be moving further away from a indie company with a single purpose. I hope they manage to steer themselves back into what got people excited about them to begin with.
I tried transitioning to FF from Chrome several times, but it just feels so unresonsive and slow in comparison. I really wanted to, but ultimately couldn't.
On a side note: You can manually install uBlock and just continue using it:
- Enter chrome://flags in chrome’s URL input
- Search for ‘Allow legacy extension manifest versions’
- Under Assets, download the chromium zip and extract it
- Open the extension page in chrome, click the Load Unpacked button on top left side load (enable Developer Mode in the top right if it doesn't appear), then select the extracted folder.
Shameless self-plug related to this, my uBlock Origin Filters [1].
I want to add to this by saying I've been mainly using Firefox for more than a decade now, and I highly prefer it to Chrome, except for the Lighthouse feature to test page speed, accessibility and such.
And as the post says, it now allows for vertical tabs (without extensions) and you can even put vertical tabs on the right side. Or collapse it when you want to focus on what you are reading. Perfection.
The uBlock extra filters I use to avoid going down on doom scrolling feeds.
One thing that keeps me on Firefox, that I've never seen another browser implement, is per-tab profiles. Chrome and Safari also have profiles, but they require one profile per window.
This is a good list of why and how to get started with Firefox. I’ve been a Firefox user since the days of Phoenix (and before?). I use Firefox as my main browser at work, even though almost everybody else uses Chrome or Edge.
One irritant I’ve seen with Firefox over the last several years is that on Windows 10 it always crashes on quitting. I’ve submitted all the crash reports religiously and have briefly looked at some of the bugle bugs that they’re linked to. As per suggestions online I’ve even disabled history clearing on exit. But it doesn’t seem like there’s enough focus on reducing the crashes. Where I’m not doing enough is to run it in safe mode and figuring out what happens. I don’t have the time and energy to do that. So I’ll continue submitting the crash reports in the hopes that the different causes get addressed and make it more robust.
Maybe most people don't care, but the difference build times is insane... Chromium takes nearly 4x as long to compile as the entire rest of a modern Linux system and it's toolchain combined.
I completely stopped using chromium two years ago and haven't looked back.
There is one showstopper, why I can't recommend Firefox to friends:
Mozilla's refusal to support the File System Access API.
With the File System Access API, we can finally build local first web applications.
I already wrote my own todo-list app and text editor and some other more specialized apps that work nicely in Chrome (On desktop and mobile). And I am in the process of writing a photo gallery too.
One can build workarounds for Firefox with old-fashioned download and upload buttons, but the user experience is miserable. Directory based tools like a photo gallery (for local photos) are not possible at all.
With the File System Access API, web apps feel just like local productivity apps.
Unfortunately Firefox doesn't have the ability to save sites as an App. This is a showstopper for me. I'm not going to have GMail in some tab among my many tabs, in some browser window among my many browser windows.
The author recommends this add-on- “Auto Tab Discard”- apparently optimising tab memory management. Why wouldn’t the standard distribution adopt it?
I’m reminded of when I used to maintain an epic-sized vimrc, compiled my kernel for a different IO scheduler, etc. The plight of the “power-user” is walking a fine line between tool refinement and over-complication (which in my case can stem from procrastination).
There are many reasons to strive for a minimalist setup, main one being that setting everything up from scratch shouldn’t feel exhausting.
That said… Firefox, with just uBO and a few basic privacy settings tightened, is pretty great.
Another FF feature I love that I believe Chrome lacks: text replacement in bookmarks. Add a bookmark with url "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search/%s" and keyword "wp" and typing "wp Potato" in the url bar will take you to the wikipedia entry on Potato.
I switched to FF a few years back I really do like it better, but honestly even if it crashed every hour on the hour I'd still use it over chrome for uBO alone.
This allows you to use the native CTRL+f and / search basically like the ' search.
The ' search let's you "click" on links by pressing enter.
The snippet let's you do the same for the other searches too so you can navigate the modern web where often navigations and actions are behind buttons and sometimes even divs (not just links). Unfortunately you can't activate those without this little hack.
The "customizability" argument took a huge hit years ago when Firefox broke a vast number of extensions not long after promising they would not do so.
These days I use Waterfox with a collection of a dozen or so extensions, update it as infrequently as possible, and pray when I do. I also have Vivaldi for those sites that have issues with Waterfox, and out of habit I also use it for some sites that used to have issues with Waterfox.
The problem with Firefox is the same as the problem with Chrome that is leading people to move to Firefox: browsers keep breaking things. I find it sadly ironic how everyone talks about the web being this platform with unshakable backward compatibility, when in fact from a user perspective it's become quite precarious. If you're a site author and you put something up in an HTML file they'll bend over backwards to support it until kingdom come, but if you're a person using a program on your own computer, be ready to have your workflow come crashing down at any moment when Google or Mozilla decides it's time for a refactor.
With that rant aside, I will say I've overall been quite happy with Waterfox for many years now. The key feature for me in a browser is the ability to support thousands of open tabs. (I know I'm insane, but I gotta be me.) This is achievable in Waterfox with Tab Mix Plus and Auto Tab Discard. Another ace feature is built into (Fire|Water)fox: the box you can uncheck for "let pages override my fonts". This way I see every page in my chosen font. The nearest alternative in Chromium-based browsers is Stylus, which is far less effective.
Overall for me the Waterfox experience is much better than Vivaldi. I just have to cross my fingers and cast myself on the mercy of the cosmos when it comes time to upgrade.
It's like de-Googled Chrome, as it's based on the same Open Source Chromium browser, has all of the ad-blocking and anti-fingerprint tools built in, and all of the Google taken out.
You can also run popular browser extensions published for Chrome, but you don't need to worry about ad blocking, as Brave has you covered by default.
It also blocks YouTube ads effectively, by default. There's nothing you have to do to make this work.
I would just like to add that in my experience, "How to Firefox" is just:
- Download Firefox
- Install uBlock Origin
- Use Firebox
Somehow this blog post makes it seem like adopting Firefox is hard, or overwhelming, or some multi step process, and if you don't do those steps you're effectively downgrading. But really it isn't. It's a browser. Its UX is great. It just... works.
The suggestion that to use it properly you need to customize it to the max is simply flat out wrong.
On Android, although a built-in isolatedProcess API [1] is available for them to use, there is no sandboxing. No sandboxing on the web in 2025 (!!!). This has been an issue for so many years, yet Mozilla refuses to address it [2]. Chromium does do proper sandboxing on Android, and additionally restricts what syscalls a process can access. Other alternatives, such as Vanadium have even stronger sandbox implementations [3]
On desktop, it's a similar story. Site isolation has had numerous bad issues that haven't been fixed for many years [4][5][6], and especially the Linux builds have had bad sandbox escape vulnerabilities that Chromium is not susceptible to. This is mostly due to architectural differences, like [7] and [8].
The idea of someone being able to take over your computer by just visiting a site is scary. It's beyond me why Mozilla does not prioritise security over yet another sidequest that will slowly bankrupt them.
> I want to do my part to convince you to switch to Firefox and show you how I use it.
Last time I checked, the tab closed button was still on the right side of the tab. On the macOS version. This is a deal breaker. Therefore FF is useless to me as a Mac user.
Other browsers on the Mac have this correct. Safari, Opera, Vivaldi at least.
Vivaldi is the other contender, who is at least on par if not better with FF in terms of privacy.
Problematic privacy is of course the reason why Chrome wasn't even installed on my machines ever. Opera and (arguably so) Brave are the others with privacy endangering issues.
There are other Mac only options, but they have even worse problems, being cloud dependent and whatnot.
I do like the concepts of what they are trying to do in most of the cases, but for now I prefer the clarity of Safari.
Now, some of you might not be Mac developers, so let me say something about app development on the Mac. There is a manual with guidelines of how to do it. It is called the Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) and that stuff is very important. It would be a very interesting process to develop something like this for a desktop Linux, btw.
When I have to work with apps that don't adhere to the HIG, that's bad for productivity and enjoyment. So I don't.
In the case of FF I was willing to hack the UI CSS to correct the button issue. Hey, it's FF after all. Two upgrades later, the thing wasn't working any more. Ok, bye bye FF!
For a while FF was the most microsoftian app on my Mac, because it always announced it's updates without me being able to silent those notifications.
I am still watching, it's FF after all, but if Mozilla can't correct these (actually minor) issues of keeping the UI clean, I can't have it.
Switched to Firefox as soon as Chrome disabled UBO. Unfortunately I found that after a day or so of Firefox being open, if I have more than a few YouTube tabs open, the YouTube interface begins to lag. I had read that the issue had been fixed but apparently not. Switched to Brave and things are going well so far.
Does anyone know how to reliably use Firefox from command line to take screenshots? It used to work well a few years ago but now it does not. For one, it asks that Firefox is already running and I need to kill it. This is surprising -- why can't two Firefox processes run at the same time?
I use Firefox, Chrome, and Edge on a Windows 10 machine.
I use Chrome 90% of the time because Firefox is slow and has many bugs on video sites like 9gag. The screen goes black, the video loses vertical sync, etc. The same happens with Edge.
In my experience, the problem with Firefox's popularity is technical. I'll use Firefox more often if it improves. Before Firefox 3.6 (probably that version), Firefox was my most used browser, but after that version, Firefox started getting slower and more buggy. I switched to Chrome because IE was unusable on some sites.
I've never used Firefox much on Android, but when I did, it was slower than Chrome.
It's likely that if Firefox fixes the issues, they'll gain traction again, but right now, I don't see that happening. Mozilla's goals are different.
> Here’s something the iPhone isn’t getting anytime soon: honest-to-god browser extensions that you use on your desktop, also on your phone. Which means… you can run uBlock Origin on Android, completely unnerfed.
Orion supports both Firefox and Chrome extensions on iOS.
At least three reasons why I prefer (reason I can think of right now) that prefer Safari on macOS is the SMS/Messages integrations for sites still using SMS for 2FA, pinch to show all tabs (useful if you have a lot of tabs open for some reason), and private browsing is exactly that, if I open Facebook in a private window and login, open a new tab and go to Facebook, it doesn't recognize that I am logged.
Other than that, I love Firefox. I switched an automation we had using Chrome/Chromium to login to the site to Firefox because every time the Chrome browser binary updated I had to download a new version of the webdriver.
I wonder how much posts like these do to push people away from Firefox and towards other alternatives like Brave, Orion, etc.
Surely, given the HN audience, virtually nobody in here is seriously discovering that Firefox exists. However, once the HN reader's mind is set to move away from Chrome, the comments here always push various alternatives to Firefox (mostly forks) that might be unknown and interesting to try.
Another way to reason about it is such posts in such communities probably don't pull a lot of "normies" to Firefox... however they probably also push a lot of "nerds" to Firefox alternatives, not to Firefox itself.
I switched after Manifest v3. I won’t go back to Chrome as long as it limits ad-blocking, but I do miss its speed.
Firefox takes a long time to open (especially when you have a lot of extensions). Even with the same number of extensions, Chrome opens in a jiffy. There are other areas of slowdown as well. Sometimes I hit Control+D to bookmark a page and nothing happens. At first I thought maybe I was doing something wrong, but now I know to just wait, and sure enough five to ten seconds after I hit the shortcut it works. A delay that long (especially one with no notification of any kind) is really bad UX.
When it comes to situations like this, either trying to get access to someone whatsApp message , account recovery or better still protect your account from getting hacked then you should consider requiring an expert that also helped me with my account retrieval. ; Remotespyhacker (AT) Gm ail . ĆØм can help you out
One thing which is great are the built-in VPN containers. I always have SSH tunnels with SOCKS proxies running and so I can use for certain sites always a VPN. Or just open a new tab which tunnels everything in THIS tab through the VPN. Great feature!
I switched (back) to firefox a while ago after Chrome was simply super sluggish and slow on a MacStudio (!). Not having UBlock Origin is the final killer. Firefox was always super snappy to me and just does everything I want, in a very data-protective way.
Only downside (not Firefox'es fault) is that it can't use Safari's private relay feature.
>> Let’s face it, Safari between Mac and iPhone is a sublime experience.
I daily drive safari and firefox has a far better sync experience. Safari will randomly delay syncing, i've never had that with firefox. I regularly quickly search something on a tab on phone to be picked up later at my desk. It's not a reliable sync process.
Bookmark management? Firefox wins as soon as you want to do something a bit custom because you have so many bookmarks.
I had been using FireFox for 10+ years, but I find myself more and more using Edge. The Workspaces(0) feature is a killer feature that I have not been able to recreate with any FF extensions. If anyone knows of any it would be much appreciated.
I tried Multi-Account Containers to try isolate my work from my personal but it just wasn't good enough. History, bookmarks, passwords and plugins were all shared.
Do I really need twitch emotes and every personal password on my work environment? No.
What I found as a solution was `about:profiles` and creating a separate profile with a distinct theme to tell the envs apart, and to sync I had to add a different Firefox account but it all works quite well.
If you’re having performance issues with firefox and thunderbird, I recommend vacuuming the sqlite files under your profile. Compacting mailbox helps TB as well.
I didn't see the author or anyone else mention TouchID yet. That was such a quality of life improvement for me that I switched from Firefox to Chrome on my work MacBook just for that. With SSO+MFA everywhere, TouchID saved me so much hassle.
Also, I must've been using UBO wrong all these years cause I switched to UBOL and didn't notice a difference. So, thanks to the author, I've got a bunch of new settings to try!
I just installed Firefox on iPhone hoping to install ublock, only to realize that you can’t and the reason you can’t is because Firefox on iOS is just WebKit with a different UI. This made me wonder, given the recent rulings around the App Store, how has Apple gotten away with basically banning every other browser engine on their mobile platform but their own? Is there any current court cases - or are iPhone users basically stuck?
A lot of hate and bashing of Firefox here. On my Linux machine (relatively modern desktop) there's no difference in speed between Chrome(Chromium) and Firefox. A lot of people talk about goodies and extensions. I get it, life is easier with some of those but I just don't care. I use it barebones with enhanced tracking protection and it works flawlessly. Don't see many ads, the ones I see are not intrusive.
With native vertical tabs, Firefox is now perfect for me. I use it on PC and phone with Ublock Origin and some others. Not slow for me and actually feels like it handles many tabs better than Chrome or Edge.
I have tried Vivaldi also, but the UI was too slow still, even though it's very nice and custom. Brave is too weird with all the crypto stuff. So FF it is for the foreseeable future.
I use Firefox and uBlock Origin, but I'm also routing everything through AdGuard Home on an RPi5 (my router points to the RPi for DNS), and it's been an eye-opening experience.
Just checked AGH, and it's blocking 49.56% of my DNS queries for everything that's connected. I cannot recommend AGH on an RPi highly enough. It's amazing.
I still remember one bug I filed to Firefox, about issues with roaming profiles on Windows. I then forgot about it, as nothing was going on with it, except few times a year someone new commented that they run a few thousand seats org, and this bug prevents them from deployong Firefox. It was finally fixed like 12 years later.
Firefox was my main browser after Chrome MV3 stuff, but now I'm moving to Orion by Kagi. I found, on my Macbook M1, Firefox hog the battery a lot seen from the energy impact on Mac's activity monitor (average 12hr power >1000 compared to Orion ~350). Don't expect extensions to work well on Orion, though, but I can live with it for now.
I tried Firefox just a few days ago, but it didn't work out. I just missed too many things out of the box. My main browser is Vivaldi (so all the chromium goodies + privacy + made in EU). Safari comes in as a close second, I tend to use it on the go because it syncs well with my Mac and Apple throttles any other browser on iOS.
To this day Firefox refuses to let me use credit card autofill on Android. I know this feature exists and I suspect it's locked to some geographical regions. It pisses me off to be a second class citizen on the same software as my American counsins. The feature is present on desktop, just not mobile.
I stopped using Firefox when they removed support for ALSA. I think it is possible to compile with it, but the bin is just PulseAudio. I don't want to compile it every week. That is my only issue, and while I liked Firefox, but they are losing users in a stupid way.
.. and then there are panorama extensions, which ease handling a lot of tabs immensely. No other browser seems to have anything alike. No, the grouping of tabs into tabs does nothing compared to this.
It should be "mobile users rejoice". I get the same sync'ing benefits from Firefox on iOS. And it lets apps use desktop passwords that I've saved in firefox and sync'ed.
Been using Firefox since release. It's not as good as it once was, but then, nothing is anymore, on the internet. Still recommend it for every reason in this article. Honestly just UBo is enough of a reason.
I prefer stylebot to stylus, as it doesn't require an unnecessary dance to make a specific theme and then mark it as only for the current site, before you can plop some css into the sidebar for that specific site.
Currently, Firefox has a system RAM leak for the GPU process. You need to periodically go to about:processes, scroll down to the GPU process, and close the GPU process with the X button on the right column.
Surprised Sidebery isn't mentioned even more. It's the main reason I switched, being the tab hoarding organizer I am, though I love all the other features he mentioned.
The issue with firefox is sites don't develop or test on firefox and will outright just say use chrome/edge. e.g. on air india can't buy tickets (must use chrome, actually a _lot_ of india sites require chrome to just work), one of my work's agency website literal says on login to use chrome or edge.
I mostly blame mozilla "leadership" for going off on ridiculous directions and identity politics. They've reaped what they've sown. It's only because of short term corporate profits that chrome now has to claw back some ad revenue and by blocking ublock, now firefox gets some users back. The problem is that it's not new users.
A browser won’t survive off the user share of HN Raspberry Pi Guys.
Let’s be practical, the average user isn’t concerned about browser monopolization. Firefox isn’t going to catch up because its users made some philanthropic choice to use it. This isn’t Linux, the web is far too complex to write a modern browser for without corporate backing.
Instead of arguing about tab management and rendering performance, we should be asking what does a healthy browser ecosystem look like in five years? Do we want 95% of users on browsers controlled by advertising companies (Google), hardware manufacturers optimizing for their own services (Apple), or cloud providers with obvious conflicts of interest (Microsoft)?
Firefox's technical quirks are fixable. The uncomfortable reality is that true browser independence might require something Mozilla has consistently failed to achieve: sustainable revenue that doesn't depend on surveillance capitalism. Until that happens, we're choosing between degrees of corporate control, not between freedom and captivity.
I am now ready to migrate back, since Orion has UX problems that aren't being addressed fast enough that are non-issues in Firefox. And because I haven't found a replacement for Firefox Sync that works as nicely (Vaultwarden is super nice, but the Bitwarden browser plugins suck ass.) I still use Orion for iOS because Firefox for iOS has such a broken memory consumption it kills my phone if I open the app.
In those six months of not primarily using Firefox on Desktop, it's been blocked by Cloudflare.
This is what happens when you lose market share below a certain threshold.
I really hate Mozilla Corporation.
But Firefox is not theirs to enshittify.
I'm back on Firefox on desktop, and am still using Firefox as a password store on iOS, since it doesn't start the app. So I can still have one source of password sync.
I'd rather not visit websites that block off browsers for not allowing them to track me. Sorry, guys, that's a shitty thing to do. I get it, Cloudflare is addressing a bot problem.
Had been using Arc for some time with several qualms about the UX and after trying Dia and finding it's just yet another Chrome, decided to see what Zen is like. I expected the same - but it wasn't. All qualms were solved and I had no rendering problems.
It was only when I noticed the Mozilla login flow I realized I had switched to Firefox - I had an assumption that all alternative browsers are on Chromium now. Really lucky since if I knew, I may not have given a fair chance given the rendering problems I remember from giving it a try 3-4 years ago.
Sorry. This article smells like a sales pitch. I used to use Firefox but changed to Duckduckgo. Firefox had started to feel enshittified. Learned most of Firefox funding comes from .. g**gle.
Firefox has no profiles. It has a bunch of hacks, such as containers, which are cumbersome to use. Chromium provides separate windows with different profiles, and Firefox should follow Chromium here. Firefox's "solution" forces you to switch Github tabs between personal and work containers constantly.
How to Firefox
(kau.sh)790 points by Vinnl 22 July 2025 | 472 comments
Comments
I've never felt impeded by loading speeds, and my ADHD regularly has me forgetting to restart it, to the tune of 100+ tabs open across multiple desktops. My wimply little MacBook Pro doesn't seem to mind.
The only downside I've found is that, because so many people just default to "Chrome or nothing," there's occasionally sites that have bugs because, like was the case in the 90s with Internet Explorer, the site developers took the idiomatic Chrome way of building a feature instead of something universal.
I hope this will mean that in the long run Firefox (and other secondary browsers) will gain more users again. For me, Firefox is a solid piece of software. Works well in strict privacy mode, with uBlock Origin and Multi-Account Containers.
I have been hesitant to use Firefox, just because I am used to chrome. But after Google forcibly disabled software that I chose to run, I'm all in on Firefox.
This convinces me the author is not knowledgeable about current browser capabilities. They probably haven’t tried anything but Firefox in a long time.
Orion runs desktop (Firefox) extensions on iOS, and is in many ways a breath of fresh air. Instead of parroting “all iOS browsers are Safari” and throwing their hands in the air, they actually got hacking on it.
https://kagi.com/orion/
Edit:
> With adopting the Web Extensions API, we show our support for creating a unified browser extensions experience across all three major web rendering engines. We ended up porting hundreds of APIs, one by one, that were never meant to work with WebKit. Took us a few years, but here we are!
> Orion currently supports about 70% of Web Extensions APIs, and we add more every day. On top of that, we built advanced security features that give our users granular control over extensions, beyond what Chrome and Firefox offer. For example, you can choose to allow an extension to run only on certain websites.
Back when I started web development, there were standards, but nearly everybody just coded to what Internet Explorer supported. Which I really hated :-)
In the past few years, I've seen the occasional "works best with Chrome" website, which worries me, but so far it hasn't been too bad.
But if we as a community leave the browser market to Chrome and browsers with engines of similar origin as Chrome's, we'll get back to the bad old days.
Don't know if this is standard for any browser now, FF is my main browser since I left Opera...
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clu...
I ended up going with Brave. Once you turn off their crummy VPN and crypto advert it's effectively just google chrome with a built in ad blocker.
I know there were arguments/concerns about the crypto thing, but I did a bit of research before picking a new browser (as should you) and once I realised it was a simple thing to turn off and never see again I was fine with it, it's all opensource as well so you can see how things work.
Of course it's just a chrome fork, so is still somewhat influenced by Googles decisions but that really wasn't the issue here, I just wanted to keep ublock origin and that's been the outcome.
I still have syncing and such all running between my desktop and mobile, I still have all the same extensions I've used for over a decade, so it's been relatively pain free to switch.
I regularly have to turn stuff off in
"Firefox Data Collection and Use"
and
"Website Advertising Preferences"
Recently I also started seeing ads in my address bar when typing stuff and saw they've added:
"Suggestions from sponsors Support Firefox with occasional sponsored suggestions."
of course, enabled by default.
Firefox is a great product but unfortunately slowly being milked/destroyed by its non-technical management team.
Here are the features of Firefox that I find particularly appealing:
- The Firefox Multi-Account Containers feature, in my opinion, is what puts this browser at the top.
- Additionally, the privacy extensions work incredibly well.
However, there are some drawbacks:
- Strangely, it doesn’t feel smooth — regardless of whether I'm on Windows or macOS.
- I experience video codec issues, which I hope I’m not the only one facing.
- I can't run the extensions I develop in dev mode. I haven’t been able to find a solution for this. That said, I don't encounter this issue in LibreWolf.
I don’t use Chrome; instead, I prefer Ungoogled-Chromium, as Google is not a trustworthy company in my view — both due to its policies and many other problematic actions.
I’m truly grateful to the developers of Ungoogled-Chromium for removing Google services and for keeping the browser consistently updated.
I’ve tried all sorts of browsers like Vivaldi, Brave, and Orion, but none of them feel smooth or stable to me — at least, that’s how I perceive it.
I hope you might have some better suggestions.
https://tarayici.ahmetcadirci.com/
This is one of these tiny improvements that will save you a second or two per website, but when you multiply it, it becomes significant. Kudos to all the people who made it possible.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
This is superior to most other vertical tab, tab groups, and the many other tab styles that have been cooked up over the years on other browsers.
- July 2024. Mozilla adds Privacy-Preserving Attribution (PPA), feature is enabled by default. Developed in cooperation with Meta (Facebook).
- Feb 2025. Mozilla updates its Privacy FAQ and TOS. "does not sell data about you." becomes "... in the way that most people think about it".
A thing you can do on firefox with some tweaks is no-search browsing (tm).
1. Remove search suggestions in (about:preferences#search) 2. Use the [History AutoDelete](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/history-autod...) addon to remove your searches from your History since they would clutter the result and it's unlikely you care about them 3. Go to (about:config) and set `browser.urlbar.resultMenu.keyboardAccessible` to `false` so you can tab through the results with just one tab press
Now when you Ctrl + L into the current tab, you will get results from your history, bookmarks and even open tabs. And the results are only a few Tab presses away, no need to move your hands off the keyboard. You can browse without the useless round trip to a search engine.
If you don't like the results and want to launch a search anyways, well just press Enter instead and it will launch a search with the default search engine.
Searchless browsing right there for you.
P.S : Cool trick is to type % + space in the awesome bar to move around opened tabs, awesome You can also specifically look into bookmarks with * and history with ^
P.P.S : Ctrl + L, Ctrl + T, Ctrl + W and Ctrl + Alt + T are your best friends.
Firefox is amazing, you just have to tweak it a tiny bit
Now you can also learn more about custom search engines :
https://askubuntu.com/a/1534489
They let you do things like "maps New York" directly from the navigation bar and get the result directly in Google maps
network.dns.forceResolve
Chrome desktop also has something like this, but it's a command-line option. Firefox OTOH allows one to select a global domain-to-IP mapping while the browser is running.
uMatrix and uBlock are IMHO designed for graphical browsers and the graphical www. For me, graphics are secondary, not a priority. I can get better (easier) control over HTTP requests and real-time transparency into TLS traffic through a forward proxy.
Firefox is still massive overkill for me. Ridiculously large and complicated. No doubt there are people who are comfortable and pleased with this sort of complexity. Glad they like it, but I am not one of those people.
Unlike Chromium or Firefox the relatively small and simple software I use to extract information from the web can be compiled in seconds on inexpensive hardware. The speeds of "no-browser" (HTTP generator plus TCP client) or the text-only browser I use easily beat any graphical, Javascript-running browser. Better control over HTTP headers, cookies and real-time, configurable logging. Not only that but I can process large, catenated HTML files that make the complex, popular browsers stall and choke.
If the goal is to achieve some customised graphical representation of a complex website, I think uBlock Origin and uMatrix are unmatched. But if the goal is "blocking", i.e., only making the HTTP requests that the user intends, and controlling the content of those requests, without regard for graphics, then I think I do better with the foward proxy.
To most of the problems people describe on HN, have you file anything on bugzilla? Even if you dont file it on bugzilla you could at least describe your problem in full on HN, which you can always copy and paste back in the future when someone ask you once again. At least someone will have a record somewhere.
1. Are you on Linux? Or is the issue specific to Android?
2. Performance Issues? Where? How? At least describe it? Firefox since e10s and Quantum landed fully has been as fast if not even faster than Chrome. Chrome has since caught up again. Generally there shouldn't be noticeable performance difference in day to day usage other than some benchmarks or Gaming, WebGL / WebGPU scenario.
3. Websites having issues? Which one?
But sure, anything but Chrome.
On a side note: You can manually install uBlock and just continue using it:
- Enter chrome://flags in chrome’s URL input
- Search for ‘Allow legacy extension manifest versions’
- Enable it and relaunch browser
- Download the latest zip file of uBlock version from github: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/releases
- Under Assets, download the chromium zip and extract it
- Open the extension page in chrome, click the Load Unpacked button on top left side load (enable Developer Mode in the top right if it doesn't appear), then select the extracted folder.
I want to add to this by saying I've been mainly using Firefox for more than a decade now, and I highly prefer it to Chrome, except for the Lighthouse feature to test page speed, accessibility and such.
And as the post says, it now allows for vertical tabs (without extensions) and you can even put vertical tabs on the right side. Or collapse it when you want to focus on what you are reading. Perfection.
The uBlock extra filters I use to avoid going down on doom scrolling feeds.
[1] - https://github.com/mig4ng/ublock-origin-filters
One irritant I’ve seen with Firefox over the last several years is that on Windows 10 it always crashes on quitting. I’ve submitted all the crash reports religiously and have briefly looked at some of the bugle bugs that they’re linked to. As per suggestions online I’ve even disabled history clearing on exit. But it doesn’t seem like there’s enough focus on reducing the crashes. Where I’m not doing enough is to run it in safe mode and figuring out what happens. I don’t have the time and energy to do that. So I’ll continue submitting the crash reports in the hopes that the different causes get addressed and make it more robust.
I completely stopped using chromium two years ago and haven't looked back.
Mozilla's refusal to support the File System Access API.
With the File System Access API, we can finally build local first web applications.
I already wrote my own todo-list app and text editor and some other more specialized apps that work nicely in Chrome (On desktop and mobile). And I am in the process of writing a photo gallery too.
One can build workarounds for Firefox with old-fashioned download and upload buttons, but the user experience is miserable. Directory based tools like a photo gallery (for local photos) are not possible at all.
With the File System Access API, web apps feel just like local productivity apps.
Until they have this, I've switched to Brave.
I’m reminded of when I used to maintain an epic-sized vimrc, compiled my kernel for a different IO scheduler, etc. The plight of the “power-user” is walking a fine line between tool refinement and over-complication (which in my case can stem from procrastination).
There are many reasons to strive for a minimalist setup, main one being that setting everything up from scratch shouldn’t feel exhausting.
That said… Firefox, with just uBO and a few basic privacy settings tightened, is pretty great.
I switched to FF a few years back I really do like it better, but honestly even if it crashed every hour on the hour I'd still use it over chrome for uBO alone.
The ' search let's you "click" on links by pressing enter.
The snippet let's you do the same for the other searches too so you can navigate the modern web where often navigations and actions are behind buttons and sometimes even divs (not just links). Unfortunately you can't activate those without this little hack.
The extension will be available at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/click-on-sele... soon (after mozilla approves).
I use this trick in a slightly bigger extension too https://github.com/h43z/jkscroll/blob/main/content-script.js...
These days I use Waterfox with a collection of a dozen or so extensions, update it as infrequently as possible, and pray when I do. I also have Vivaldi for those sites that have issues with Waterfox, and out of habit I also use it for some sites that used to have issues with Waterfox.
The problem with Firefox is the same as the problem with Chrome that is leading people to move to Firefox: browsers keep breaking things. I find it sadly ironic how everyone talks about the web being this platform with unshakable backward compatibility, when in fact from a user perspective it's become quite precarious. If you're a site author and you put something up in an HTML file they'll bend over backwards to support it until kingdom come, but if you're a person using a program on your own computer, be ready to have your workflow come crashing down at any moment when Google or Mozilla decides it's time for a refactor.
With that rant aside, I will say I've overall been quite happy with Waterfox for many years now. The key feature for me in a browser is the ability to support thousands of open tabs. (I know I'm insane, but I gotta be me.) This is achievable in Waterfox with Tab Mix Plus and Auto Tab Discard. Another ace feature is built into (Fire|Water)fox: the box you can uncheck for "let pages override my fonts". This way I see every page in my chosen font. The nearest alternative in Chromium-based browsers is Stylus, which is far less effective.
Overall for me the Waterfox experience is much better than Vivaldi. I just have to cross my fingers and cast myself on the mercy of the cosmos when it comes time to upgrade.
It's like de-Googled Chrome, as it's based on the same Open Source Chromium browser, has all of the ad-blocking and anti-fingerprint tools built in, and all of the Google taken out.
You can also run popular browser extensions published for Chrome, but you don't need to worry about ad blocking, as Brave has you covered by default.
It also blocks YouTube ads effectively, by default. There's nothing you have to do to make this work.
- Download Firefox
- Install uBlock Origin
- Use Firebox
Somehow this blog post makes it seem like adopting Firefox is hard, or overwhelming, or some multi step process, and if you don't do those steps you're effectively downgrading. But really it isn't. It's a browser. Its UX is great. It just... works.
The suggestion that to use it properly you need to customize it to the max is simply flat out wrong.
On Android, although a built-in isolatedProcess API [1] is available for them to use, there is no sandboxing. No sandboxing on the web in 2025 (!!!). This has been an issue for so many years, yet Mozilla refuses to address it [2]. Chromium does do proper sandboxing on Android, and additionally restricts what syscalls a process can access. Other alternatives, such as Vanadium have even stronger sandbox implementations [3]
On desktop, it's a similar story. Site isolation has had numerous bad issues that haven't been fixed for many years [4][5][6], and especially the Linux builds have had bad sandbox escape vulnerabilities that Chromium is not susceptible to. This is mostly due to architectural differences, like [7] and [8].
The idea of someone being able to take over your computer by just visiting a site is scary. It's beyond me why Mozilla does not prioritise security over yet another sidequest that will slowly bankrupt them.
[1] https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/manifest/service-...
[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1565196
[3] https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing
[4] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1505832
[5] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1484019
[6] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1707955
[7] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1653444
[8] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1322426
Last time I checked, the tab closed button was still on the right side of the tab. On the macOS version. This is a deal breaker. Therefore FF is useless to me as a Mac user.
Other browsers on the Mac have this correct. Safari, Opera, Vivaldi at least.
Vivaldi is the other contender, who is at least on par if not better with FF in terms of privacy.
Problematic privacy is of course the reason why Chrome wasn't even installed on my machines ever. Opera and (arguably so) Brave are the others with privacy endangering issues.
There are other Mac only options, but they have even worse problems, being cloud dependent and whatnot.
I do like the concepts of what they are trying to do in most of the cases, but for now I prefer the clarity of Safari.
Now, some of you might not be Mac developers, so let me say something about app development on the Mac. There is a manual with guidelines of how to do it. It is called the Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) and that stuff is very important. It would be a very interesting process to develop something like this for a desktop Linux, btw.
When I have to work with apps that don't adhere to the HIG, that's bad for productivity and enjoyment. So I don't.
In the case of FF I was willing to hack the UI CSS to correct the button issue. Hey, it's FF after all. Two upgrades later, the thing wasn't working any more. Ok, bye bye FF!
For a while FF was the most microsoftian app on my Mac, because it always announced it's updates without me being able to silent those notifications.
I am still watching, it's FF after all, but if Mozilla can't correct these (actually minor) issues of keeping the UI clean, I can't have it.
The comment section on this page integrated nice.
I use Chrome 90% of the time because Firefox is slow and has many bugs on video sites like 9gag. The screen goes black, the video loses vertical sync, etc. The same happens with Edge.
In my experience, the problem with Firefox's popularity is technical. I'll use Firefox more often if it improves. Before Firefox 3.6 (probably that version), Firefox was my most used browser, but after that version, Firefox started getting slower and more buggy. I switched to Chrome because IE was unusable on some sites.
I've never used Firefox much on Android, but when I did, it was slower than Chrome.
It's likely that if Firefox fixes the issues, they'll gain traction again, but right now, I don't see that happening. Mozilla's goals are different.
Orion supports both Firefox and Chrome extensions on iOS.
Other than that, I love Firefox. I switched an automation we had using Chrome/Chromium to login to the site to Firefox because every time the Chrome browser binary updated I had to download a new version of the webdriver.
Surely, given the HN audience, virtually nobody in here is seriously discovering that Firefox exists. However, once the HN reader's mind is set to move away from Chrome, the comments here always push various alternatives to Firefox (mostly forks) that might be unknown and interesting to try.
Another way to reason about it is such posts in such communities probably don't pull a lot of "normies" to Firefox... however they probably also push a lot of "nerds" to Firefox alternatives, not to Firefox itself.
Firefox takes a long time to open (especially when you have a lot of extensions). Even with the same number of extensions, Chrome opens in a jiffy. There are other areas of slowdown as well. Sometimes I hit Control+D to bookmark a page and nothing happens. At first I thought maybe I was doing something wrong, but now I know to just wait, and sure enough five to ten seconds after I hit the shortcut it works. A delay that long (especially one with no notification of any kind) is really bad UX.
I switched (back) to firefox a while ago after Chrome was simply super sluggish and slow on a MacStudio (!). Not having UBlock Origin is the final killer. Firefox was always super snappy to me and just does everything I want, in a very data-protective way.
Only downside (not Firefox'es fault) is that it can't use Safari's private relay feature.
If only. In my experience this barely works in one direction and doesn't work at all in the other direction.
I daily drive safari and firefox has a far better sync experience. Safari will randomly delay syncing, i've never had that with firefox. I regularly quickly search something on a tab on phone to be picked up later at my desk. It's not a reliable sync process.
Bookmark management? Firefox wins as soon as you want to do something a bit custom because you have so many bookmarks.
Dev tools? You guessed it.
Safari is still better on battery life though.
0: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge/features/edge-workspace...
Also, I must've been using UBO wrong all these years cause I switched to UBOL and didn't notice a difference. So, thanks to the author, I've got a bunch of new settings to try!
I have tried Vivaldi also, but the UI was too slow still, even though it's very nice and custom. Brave is too weird with all the crypto stuff. So FF it is for the foreseeable future.
Just checked AGH, and it's blocking 49.56% of my DNS queries for everything that's connected. I cannot recommend AGH on an RPi highly enough. It's amazing.
* You can no longer enable manifest V2 extensions using chrome://flags switches (You still can for now)
* You can no longer download the extension from the Chrome Web Store on a version of Chrome/Chromium which supports MV2 extensions.
https://github.com/projectdelphai/panorama-tab-groups and https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/panorama-view...
It should be "mobile users rejoice". I get the same sync'ing benefits from Firefox on iOS. And it lets apps use desktop passwords that I've saved in firefox and sync'ed.
Also available on mobile
https://github.com/yokoffing/Betterfox/issues/240
Firefox shipped WebGPU support for Windows today.
Ok Sir https://ibb.co/fGx3Qf55
Except on my arm-based crhomebook. There it gets confused and do not resize properly thinking is in phone format.
Also cast to chromecast is a no-go.
If it wasn't by those 2 issues I would have ditched chrome long time ago.
I mostly blame mozilla "leadership" for going off on ridiculous directions and identity politics. They've reaped what they've sown. It's only because of short term corporate profits that chrome now has to claw back some ad revenue and by blocking ublock, now firefox gets some users back. The problem is that it's not new users.
Unfortunately due to Apple’s restrictions on ad blockers it’s become kind of unusable for me on iOS.
Is there a way to incorporate ad blocking on mobile Firefox on iOS?
Let’s be practical, the average user isn’t concerned about browser monopolization. Firefox isn’t going to catch up because its users made some philanthropic choice to use it. This isn’t Linux, the web is far too complex to write a modern browser for without corporate backing.
I am now ready to migrate back, since Orion has UX problems that aren't being addressed fast enough that are non-issues in Firefox. And because I haven't found a replacement for Firefox Sync that works as nicely (Vaultwarden is super nice, but the Bitwarden browser plugins suck ass.) I still use Orion for iOS because Firefox for iOS has such a broken memory consumption it kills my phone if I open the app.
In those six months of not primarily using Firefox on Desktop, it's been blocked by Cloudflare.
This is what happens when you lose market share below a certain threshold.
I really hate Mozilla Corporation.
But Firefox is not theirs to enshittify.
I'm back on Firefox on desktop, and am still using Firefox as a password store on iOS, since it doesn't start the app. So I can still have one source of password sync.
I'd rather not visit websites that block off browsers for not allowing them to track me. Sorry, guys, that's a shitty thing to do. I get it, Cloudflare is addressing a bot problem.
Had been using Arc for some time with several qualms about the UX and after trying Dia and finding it's just yet another Chrome, decided to see what Zen is like. I expected the same - but it wasn't. All qualms were solved and I had no rendering problems.
It was only when I noticed the Mozilla login flow I realized I had switched to Firefox - I had an assumption that all alternative browsers are on Chromium now. Really lucky since if I knew, I may not have given a fair chance given the rendering problems I remember from giving it a try 3-4 years ago.