Switch browser while you can. Firefox might not be perfect (or even getting slightly worse), but at least it's an alternative and I can easily say it's better than Chromium in most. At least ad blocking worka as it should.
I ignored this advice for several years but ~6 months ago switched to Firefox cold turkey and don't miss Chrome one bit. Even when doing web development (I thought I'd miss chrome's CSS/HTML/JS inspector and devtools in general but Firefox's are the same if not better)
I find the dev tools of firefox even better. The ability to see XHR request content/header/responses directly in the Javascript console has been invaluable to me. It annoys me that chrome's console does not have this. You can only see when a request is made, but you have to hop on the network tab to see the actual content.
I've been a Tree Style Tab user for many years, but I have to confess I have a complicated relationship with this add-on. I've reached >600 tabs more than once. That's not only a feature.
I used to use Tab Mix Plus on Firefox. Having three rows of tabs and the ability to scroll them vertically for more tabs was the absolute killer feature for me. I loved Firefox for this.
Once Firefox moved to the per-process approach and removed the ability to hack the UI, I saw no more reason to stay on what was a terribly slow browser back then, compared to Chrome. Startup times of 10+ seconds and such shenanigans.
I have noticed a recent decline in the debugging features of FF -- downright buggy. View source shows a form I used 3 pages ago, not the form rendered. I now switch to chrome just for debugging.
You don't deserve the downvotes. We are using mainly Firefox at work and sometimes, not often but sometimes, Firefox refuses to load the current file in the debugger. The only solution is to restart Firefox. I get why some are annoyed by this when they are in a debugging session. Although the last time it happened to me was one or two Firefox releases ago. Maybe it got fixed.
I have a similar issue where very occasionally the debugger tab will just be empty, just absolutely no files in there at all. The fix is simple enough - just open the site in a new tab, although it's a little annoying.
I still do all my development in Firefox regardless, I'm sure if I switched to Chrome I'd quickly discover a set of equally annoying bugs and quirks there too. Better the devil you know.
That's interesting. I have somewhat recently encountered the same thing with Chrome. I don't know what causes it but when it happens, the debugger hits and doesn't show me the context at all. But if I re-trigger the debugger again, it shows me everything just fine. :shrug:
When struggling with a persistent issue like this in FF devtools it can still be worth filing an issue on the bugzilla tracker. Worst case, it gets closed as not reproducible. In practice many of these issues will eventually get caught if enough people complain about them and someone manages to dig through all the reports and come up with theories about the issue.
You may get a helpful reply from someone on the team with suggestions on how to troubleshoot it, like enabling specific logging flags or pulling some info out of the console.
I've filed lots of bug reports against Firefox in the past and just because you don't have an isolated reproduction case for a devtools issue, that doesn't mean it can't be fixed.
Yeah strong agree, apart from the mess up with Firefox on Android.
Both at home and work, Firefox desktop (with uBlock Origin) has been a pretty frictionless tool in terms of my browsing experience these past years, across Linux, Windows, and Mac machines.
From a quick glance, this seems to be even further down the "messy" side of the firefox-on-android mess. I.e. its capabilities are even more restricted.
Which is not to say it's not useful, and TIL - I didn't know they had released this, so thanks :) But I don't think it particularly applies to this thread.
What is the 'messy' problem with Firefox on Android? I have moved those I help with tech to Firefox. My mother for example. They don't know the difference between "the internet" and "Firefox" but so far they run Firefox with UBO with no problems (well not anything new that wasn't there with Chrome too but that is a old people Vs tech problem not unique to Firefox).
The messy problem is that you used to be able to run uBO with no problems on Firefox on Android. And most other extensions, with some obvious limitations (e.g. desktop-only UI extensions didn't work, some UIs weren't mobile-friendly, etc).
Then they released a preview of a re-design which also broke all extensions. That's arguably fine for a preview, though a bit concerning. Many were raising alarms at this point.
Then they released the re-design to the stable release, with still-broken extensions. This pretty unambiguously is "a mess", if not earlier.
Then they released built-in support for a couple dozen Mozilla-selected extensions (uBO included, I believe). This is still a mess, and rightfully raises a few eyebrows.
... and we're still there now, after over a year of "this will be fixed soon". I believe you can install nightly + manually tweak config and still install other extensions, but Firefox for Android does not support extensions right now. That's A Problem™, and not a good sign for extension-longevity that it was ever allowed out of preview. It broadly implies extensions are very low on their priority list, which is concerning, as extensions have been the clear leaders on preserving privacy and user control in general. Browsers overwhelmingly follow popular extension behaviors, not the other way around - cripple extensions and you also cripple advancement and experimentation.
To add to this they also blocked access to about:config on Android.
No access to extensions and blocking about:config was to me just heretic. Those two are the raison d'être of Firefox.
Nightly build thankfully reverted this babysitting of users but indeed we are still stuck with 'vetted' add-ons downgrade in the official Firefox release for Android.
Even on Nightly, the procedure to install non-whitelisted-by-default add-ons is somewhat arcane though, and AFAIK even after following it you can only install the current version of add-ons that have been officially published on AMO, i.e. no installing a different add-on version or manually installing an XPI (not even a signed one).
Please educate me: I am a Chrome user and I do rely on browser syncing my tabs and some passwords.
I know that Firefox also has a syncing feature ("Sign into Firefox", "Continue to Firefox Sync").
My problem is that I don't trust Mozilla's ability to keep this data secure. I believe that sooner or later they are going to get hacked, and that data will leak. The same might happen to Google, but I also believe that no other company has the degree of expertise of Google to protect that data.
Am I wrong in this assumption? Does Firefox Sync end-to-end encrypt the data, without knowing the key, like Google's Sync Passphrase feature?
What are your experiences with Firefox Sync? Does it work just as good as Chrome's, or even better?
I've had a pretty good experience with Firefox Sync, although I don't use it for passwords. Firefox Sync has E2E encryption to ensure that Mozilla doesn't have the ability to view any of your data.
Tl;Dr: Extremely satisfied and using on three devices.
The sync server is open source and free, so you can host an instance yourself if you'd like.
Firefox accounts have 2FA support, and passwords are end to end synced anyway, so even if your Firefox account is compromised, nobody can recover data without the key.
For about a decade in the working, there were zero breaches in mozilla AFAIK.
I use Firefox sync in my Windows laptop, Firefox on Android beta. There is also an app called Lockwise that can work as a standalone app and a password fill feature for other apps as well.
The only thing that keeps me using Chrome from time time is the in-place translation feature.
If anything comparable was added to Firefox (which I mainly use), I would be more than happy to get rid of Chrome once and for all.
And yes, I'm aware of the extensions that offer similar functionality, but unfortunately they still have some way to go before they can reach parity with Chrome translator.
In-place translating is the feature that really missed on other browsers. Edge also works well with Bing translate. I wish DeepL provides translate extension.
What do I, as an end user, have to do to be protected? Is it sufficient to use Firefox with its default settings?
Honestly I don't know and I think I should. I have uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, ClearURLs installed on Firefox, I'm running pi-hole at home, it's just so much.
Don't sweat it. All you really need is Firefox + uBlock Origin. And even without uBo, Firefox blocks some trackers by default.
Privacy badger is largely useless ever since they got rid of heuristics. ClearURLs is useful, but you'd probably be fine without it. And pi-hole doesn't block anything that uBo doesn't in Firefox (but is still useful for applications outside of the browser).
On the other hand, maybe you're like me and want to squeeze as much privacy out of your browser as you can, even if it means breaking some websites. If that's the case, check this website out. Just remember that the tweaks listed here are nice, but not entirely necessary.
With uBO, I would also disable things like Third-Party Cookies. I also have No-Script, but that's mainly for making sites easier to load (Though it does block ad-tracking js-files, like uBO).
> I'm a huge proponent of Firefox on desktop, but the new Firefox on mobile is just awful awful awful.
I strongly disagree. There are certainly issues, many of which are a result of the recent redesign, but I still find it a much better experience than Chrome on mobile and I think calling it "awful" is hyperbolic. Here are some examples of why I think FF > Chrome on mobile:
Firefox mobile supports extensions which I consider necessary at this point, such as uBlock Origin.
I can put the address bar at the bottom, where my fingers are.
The reader features makes many websites much easier to read - particularly on mobile.
Chrome defaults to opening things in tab groups now, which I find to be much more finicky to use than normal tabs. Bookmarks are for saving pages long-term, not tabs.
I'm with you. I preferred the previous version of Firefox on Android. Since switching to the new version:
- I've noticed it crashes much more.
- It still doesn't support all the extensions I used to have, like uMatrix.
- All my bookmarks disappeared when it updated to the new version. I know syncing bookmarks would've let me recover, but I didn't realize it'd happen on the first place. And it seems like an easy problem to Amos even if a user didn't sync.
I've not noticed a crash in the several months I've been using the new version. Have you tried the usual things like clearing cache/data, reinstalling, etc? It took me a while to get used to it (especially the move of the address bar to the bottom) but I'm quite happy with it now. It also supports uBO which blocks pretty much all the ads. I agree it's disappointing what they have done with extensions though. Syncing to Firefox on my laptop is quite good though and very useful for looking up history e.g if I remember finding a good website I don't have to worry about recalling whether I was using my mobile or my laptop when I found it. All my history across all devices are there so I'll easily find whatever it is I was looking for.
