• 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.
Tree. Style. Tabs.
Best damned extension ever. It’s amazing to me that all browsers don’t have this style of tabs.
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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.
Have you tried tab session manager? I was planning on testing it to check if it provides additional value…
I have and it’s great.
Also, unlike a lot of people I just delete vast swathes of my tabs from time to time.
Let’s be honest, you didn’t need it and I didn’t need it.
But I’m still gad I can go back to a random tab from a week ago from a session I had closed out of
No I haven’t, but I’m intrigued!
internet explorer has a similar feature where tab background colors were different for each tree, though it doesn’t have the tree view :p
Right?
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.
It does one level of nesting with tab groups. Just drag one tab onto another to start.
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.
Don’t get me wrong, I work mostly from home and open thousands of tabs every day. But most don’t last longer than a few minutes, and if the flat hierarchy is not able to handle them, that’s a sign they should be cleaned up.
On the other hand, trees encourage tab hoarding, which I personally loathe, but people have different preferences.
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.
your memory might not works very well since it was never called plain “mozilla”
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 XUL for the browser shell is 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.
I recall the switch from Mozilla to Firefox a being a huge improvement not just in loading time, but the user interface felt much less sluggish and keyboard navigation was better. To me it felt like they had ditched 80% of the code base to make a lean, mean browsing machine. They were both around for a couple of years so Firefox seemed more like a fork than a rebrand.
The way Mozilla worked and Firefox still works is there is a cross platform front-end implemented in XUL which is XHTML, CSS and Javascript. The engine underneath is the same (Gecko) but the frontend app over the top is what the user sees and controls buttons, menus, functionality.
Firefox was basically a fork of Mozilla stripped of the not-browser stuff and a cleaned up UI. It proved popular as a prototype so it grew into its own thing and Mozilla suite was abandoned. There is still a Seamonkey project that keeps Mozilla suite alive but it’s outside of the Mozilla foundation.
The reason it’s faster is that Mozilla was an entire suite expressed as a lot of XUL so it impacted loading times. XUL also had this neat trick that you could overlay XUL over the top of other XUL so the mail app was injecting buttons, menus and whatnot into the browser and vice versa. This was cached but it still had to be loaded. In addition and probably just as impactful, was that Mozilla shipped as dynamic libraries (DLLs) and a relatively small EXE, so it took time to start. In Firefox, the number of DLLs was reduced with static linking so it was more efficient to load.
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
I think ghostery is owned by an ad company. I wouldn’t trust it.
Seriously? I had no idea. That’s kind of ironic if it is
Yeah, privacy badger and ghostery are no longer recommended, unlock origin will do their job (better).
Do I need to adjust any settings?
What’s wrong with Privacy Badger? Isn’t that from EFF?
Google rewrites links in Google search (not that you use it but maybe you do sometimes). So, if you want the links you click in Google search to not go through a Google referral URL and instead go to the link advertised in the search result, then Privacy Badger is useful for this purpose.
You don’t need Privacy Badger and Ghostery anymore if you turn the Enhanced Tracking Protection up to “strict” in settings.
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.
I wasn’t aware. It really seems like uBlock origin can do everything I had all those extra extensions for! Pretty impressive
Just because Google broke the most trafficked site on the internet for Firefox doesn’t mean its a bad browser. Hell that’s a ringing endorsement.
I still don’t see that they broke FF specifically, they’re fighting back against adblockers, including the ones in browsers like brave.
Personally I’d rather stop using any Google services, than handing them a Chrome monopoly. Google is already way to dominant IMO.
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.
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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 id 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).
I’m scrolling an have absolutely no issues. Android 12 and Firefox 120.0b9 (Build #2015985090),
What refresh rate is your display running?
What’s wrong with that page? I’m not seeing anything in particular.
Massive lag on scrolling. Are you not seeing this? I’ll record the screen in a minute.
It was a tiny bit jittery on the first scroll through the page but not very noticeable and it happened in both browsers anyway. That’s about it. I’m on an Xperia 10 III.
sorry I wasn’t sure where to upload the video running a pixel 7 pro it’s hard to come across on video but it is there. hitching/jittery/lag on ff, perfectly smooth on chrome
i’m surprised by the comments, everyone has been having mixed results
It’s completely fine for me on FF mobile.
That’s jittery. What’s causing that?
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.
Switch? I never left!
I deeply regret leaving.
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 had a similar history to you.
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.
To be fair, Chrome was vastly superior to Firefox for ages in the early 2010’s
Apple might be the one company that is even worse than Google
I’d like to formally apologize. I should have never left.
i feel like firefox used to suck
or did chrome used to not suck so much?
or was i a sucker for bandwagon and marketing
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.
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The best time was 15 years ago
And the second best time is now.
The second best time was 14 years ago.
It was never a good time to switch to Chrome.
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.
Totally agree. I also knew this was Google’s modus operandi. The early versions of their software can be amazing and they slowly monetize over time.
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.Chrome was much faster and more stable than Firefox for a time, but they’re similar 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.
But for everyday browsing it’s Firefox for me.
PWAs ?
This extension does a decent job.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pwas-for-firefox/
But yeah it would be nice for Firefox to support PWAs natively.
Thanks. I must still try it in Zen Browser
Don’t forget about the Firefox forks like LibreWolf!
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Their website is in Japanese but everything in the browser itself was English by default when I started using it!
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Kind of stunned anyone would want to use regular firefox. The default settings are so… adfulll and googly…
Librewolf, waterfox, floorp, zen, falkon, mullvad browser, pale moon… A couple lf these aren’t fox based but like…
Firefox became chrome lite several years ago. But maybe it looks nice compared to actual chrome?
and waterfox!
+1 for Waterfox
Waterfox Elevator pitch?
For people asking, add-ons work fine on Nightly.
The best time to switch to Firefox was 19 years ago when it first came into existence. The 2nd best time is now.
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.
