I feel this article almost do more harm than good. It paints a picture that you need to "sacrifice" something to use Fx and lists various "problems".
For instance it mentions how troublesome it is to use profiles as a "problem". Don't. Use containers. Hundred times more smooth than profiles. Hence why no one cares about making profiles in Fx better, there is already a better solution to the problem profiles solve.
Never had problems with font rendering. The download manager being different isn't a "problem", and even Chrome is changing it to become more like Fx's [0]. So it's not like Fx's version is "bad", just different.
I'd rather have an article on "Switching from Chrome to Firefox? Here are some tips on great features in Firefox".
Like how to use the multi-account containers I mentioned. Or how the address bar ("awesome bar") in Firefox is so much greater than Chrome's in finding stuff (probably because Google wants you to do a google search, not find stuff from your own history or bookmarks). On how Sidebery or other tree-style tabs can make the experience so nice. etc.
(I'm replying to the original version of your comment.)
How can you have different bookmarks, extensions, and maybe even a different theme (so you know you're using the right window) with containers?
The answer is: you can't. Because containers and profiles are different things.
That's the "sacrifice" you're asking users to make. To change the way they use browsers, to adapt to something that is useful, but not a complete replacement for the features they want. You're asking them to mix stuff and to be careful not to type personal stuff on a work container (or something like that).
Yes, changing from Chrome to Firefox (and vice-versa) means that you need to make some sacrifices. I moved to Firefox and lost good profile support, have a higher battery drain, and have to deal with Firefox's inconsistencies (UI, ctrl+click behaving differently on links vs bookmarks, etc). I'm okay with the trade-off, but PR talk and positive outlooks don't make these annoyances and downsides go away.
> How can you have different bookmarks, extensions, and maybe even a different theme (so you know you're using the right window)
> The answer is: you can't. Because containers and profiles are different things.
If that's what you need then just use Firefox profiles then! The thing is, most people don't need that, and containers offert better ergonomics for the majority use-case (like the one described in the post). But if you still need the niche use-case, then go ahead and use a profile in Firefox too.
I'm not entirely certain this is true. Maybe at one point it was, but nowadays since signing into any Google site signs you into Chrome, a lot of folks have their work and personal email addresses as profiles in Chrome.
Also from what I've noted is that when you sign into a secondary account on the main profile's account, Chrome is prompting you if you don't want it to create a new profile for you.
Then again, they have the problem that they think that it's appropriate to open the last used profile if you start Chrome again, which can lock out inexperienced users out of the other profile since they don't know how to get that one started.
For me the normal solution of creating separate profiles in Firefox is to use Firefox Portable and have each profile live in their own directory / installation.
> For me the normal solution of creating separate profiles in Firefox is to use Firefox Portable and have each profile live in their own directory / installation.
That seems a bit overkill to me.
Creating profiles can be done at about:profiles and starting a profile with a shortcut to firefox --profile $PROFILENAME. Not sure how that could be simpler
Most people just don't troll on hn all day and don't do personnal stuff on their work computer. We are a different kind. I know a lot of people who are afraid of possibly be fired for logging on their webmail with their work computer.
Additionnaly virtually everybody owns a smartphone which is used for the personnal stuff.
Firefox has a really poor implementation of multi-profile compared to chrome though. There's no built in way to create shortcuts for each profile, no profile switcher icon on the toolbar, etc... Not to mention how much of a PIA it is to get windows to pin multiple firefox shortcuts for different profiles to your taskbar and get them to behave properly.
Edge's multi-profile support blows them both out of the water though, with the ability to right click tabs and move them between profiles, automatically open links for certain domains in certain profiles, being able to set a default profile for external links, etc...
What does “easier” mean in that context? You just need to enable it once, and then you get a prompt every time you start the browser, almost like in Chrome in fact…
Enabling it for the first time is less intuitive than it could/should be but since everybody just googles “how to use Chrome profiles” without trying to figure of out by themselves, it's not too big of a difference…
Not GP, but this extension seems to only allow switching profiles. Is there something that allows opening a new window using a different profile? People who use Chrome with multiple profiles may have multiple windows open at the same time, with some windows using (or possibly) sharing profiles.
You can directly launch a firefox profile with "firefox -p 'profile-name'"
This will create a separate firefox instance running with that profile. It's not as nice as having a button in firefox to accomplish this, but if you use different shortcuts or keyboard commands to launch things it works quite well.
Great, so why I can't just do this from within the Firefox UI in a nice way? I use terminal/CLI stuff all the time, but when it comes to my GUI desktop I would rather avoid this kind of messing around. Plus, it's definitely not going to get people to switch from Chrome.
> Plus, it's definitely not going to get people to switch from Chrome.
Given that it's only enabling multiple profiles that require such a step (afterward you get a GUI prompt at start-up), you just Google “how to Firefox profiles” once, follow the steps and call it a day. In fact, most people would need to do the same googling if they wanted to use multiple chrome profiles as well…
Eh... just from reading this comments section and the way people would want to use profiles (instead of containers), I'm ok with the feature being obfuscated.
No sharing, but I can easily open different profiles in a new window in about:profiles (I rarely use profiles, preferring containers, so I don’t care about other ways to open/switch profiles)
Yep, sadly Firefox requires external shims if you want to open binaries from the host machine (which in this case is the browser executable with a different profile).
Why are they not easy? You go to "about:profiles" and click the "launch profile in new browser." You don't have to install an extension or remember to start-up with a particular command line option.
The profile UX on Chrome is almost as horrible as it is on Firefox from a user's perspective, namely you need to reinstall all your addons and have no shared history so you need to check twice every time you're looking for something. The only difference is that on Chrome, it's the only way to have two different accounts on the same site, whereas on Firefox you generally don't need it unless you need the highest level of separation.
If more people understood this, we would be asking for better profile support on Firefox and for container support on Chromium, not suggesting containers to people who need profiles or trying to use profiles as if they were tab containers.
I want profiles because they provide exactly what you mentioned: separation. I need different extensions, bookmarks, history, etc. And inside each profile I can use containers if I want to.
If you want profiles and not containers, you can use profiles too in Firefox, it works well (I do it on the shared family computer). It's just not what most people use profiles for in Chrome, which lacks the separation between profiles and container.
> you can use profiles too in Firefox, it works well
So explain me:
1. How do I set up a new profile in Firefox. In Chrome creating a new Profile takes 3 clicks and entering a name.
2. How I open two instances/windows of Firefox at the same time each with a different profile. In Chrome opening a second profile is two clicks (when Chrome is already running)
Yes, containers on Firefox are better for that use case. Now imagine Firefox with containers and user friendly profile support. The best of both worlds in one browser.
Okay, so what's the logical conclusion here? That the person is lying?
The font rendering is very much off, some people just don't notice or don't care. Denying something others see with their own eyes doesn't help anybody.
As a 15+ years Firefox user: What is "very much off" about Firefox' font rendering? For me it's the opposite, Chrome's rendering looks completely off to me - thin and it looks like the ClearType effect is set to 11. On the other hand, Firefox' font rendering in that screenshot looks like native Windows font rendering to me.
The problem with "very much off" for font rendering is that it is relative to what you are used to, not relative to any actual standard font rendering. If you've been using Firefox a while, Chrome will look off. If you've been using Chrome, Firefox will look off.
Maybe I am reading too much into the sentence but to me, "some people just don't notice or don't care" implies that there is something objectively broken about it that can be quantified.
No, "off" in this case merely implies different from what you're used to.
This is aesthetic preference, there's no such thing as "correct". It goes back to the old debate on Mac vs. Windows font rendering -- do you like pixel alignment or do you like letterform accuracy? There's no right answer.
See e.g. the boldness on e.g. the first "l"? Firefox's clearly has two very dark vertical strokes in adjacent pixels -- one black, one dark blue right next to it. Its rendering is substantially bolder than Windows's. I can understand if you personally prefer that, but how can you claim they look the same?!
I see exactly what you're talking about (quite noticable on the 'a' characters) and I wish somebody could explain why Firefox is rendering like that, and if it's a Windows platform specific issue.
Thanks. I've found it futile to argue with people about font rendering over the years. It's always like people are just in denial of reality. Which I feel is emblematic of how Firefox (and Linux, and lots of other libre software) lose desktop market share, IMO - by denying the reality everyone else sees.
I had a work companion that was using Chrome rendering the text in a really ugly way on Windows. We never discovered why it was doing that. It only got fixed when the sys admin updated to Windows 10.
Last time I tried it was impossible to get Chrome on linux to use the system font rendering settings. There's no way to tell Chrome to:
a) Don't hint/grid fit.
b) Don't use cleartype color fringing.
That's reason enough to avoid Chrome for me. Compound that with Chrome's low quality image rescaling algorithms (and the absolute boneheadedness of their bug triaging, where any reports about it will invariably get filed under the wrong component and be closed before anyone who can actually understand the problem will look at it) and oh so many SVG rendering quality issues. I really hope Firefox can survive the current leadership and remain a strong alternative for decades more to come.
Are you using macOS, Windows or Linux? There are (mostly subtle) differences between these platforms which may expose more differences between fonts. I get it that it doesn't look different on your system, but I'm not discounting the possibility that the OS platform can also affect rendering.
Chrome's font rendering is the outlier among browsers. The author of the article is seeing that difference and they want Firefox to look like Chrome.
I think the commentary is taking an issue with the suggestion that there's something "wrong" with Firefox's font rendering, when it's really Chrome who is the outlier.
Maybe we need a screenshot from Safari to compare and break the tie.
As of right now there's substantially more browsers that use Blink (and comprise over half of the market share) though so Firefox and Safari will always be outliers.
On macOS, it looks like Firefox uses native defaults. It’s very nearly identical to Chrome (same fonts, same weight, same spacing; Chrome might more aggressively aligning verticals to pixel boundaries, but that’s hard to tell on a Retina screen).
Safari for some reason is rendering everything at different sizes than Chrome or Firefox, I don’t know why.
They aren't lying, the screenshots are clearly different, but it's strange to describe it as a problem with Firefox. It's a completely subjective difference, to me that Chrome screenshot looks blurry and faint compared to the Firefox one. It's also confusing that they say "fonts are smaller on Firefox" - in those two screenshots the Chrome font is clearly smaller.
Let's say I have an extension that I use for work, that has a work-specific login or API key. I want to keep that plugin separate from the rest of my stuff because it's for work. You can't do that with tab containers.
The profile interface for FF is archaic and hard to manage.
Separate profiles was always a better solution than contained tabs.
And what are those? I have yet to encounter anyone using a extension that contains some sort of work secrets/api. I'm not doubting it exists, but I think it's a use case which is maybe in the 0.00001% (if even that).
On the other hand containers allow me to specify which ones to open on automatically and so I can use lots of different containers for different uses that I want to separate, e.g. Facebook, Gmail, HN... Something lots of people want to do, but you can't really do with profiles (well you could but it would be super annoying). Moreover I can use temporary containers so I have isolated tabs for all the general browsing (all websites where I haven't specified a specific container) with all the tracking information being deleted as soon as I close the tab.
> but I think it's a use case which is maybe in the 0.00001% (if even that).
Actually password managers are very common, and immediately relevant to this conversation. I have a password manager for work, and one for personal. That puts us a bit higher than your pretty dismissive 0.00001% estimate.
Literally the first thing that came to mind and there are many more examples.
I use a tool called Junction which allows me to choose which browser opens up a link, which solves for your second issue.
Isolated browsers are much better than isolated tabs.
>For instance it mentions how troublesome it is to use profiles as a "problem". Don't. Use containers. Hundred times more smooth than profiles. Hence why no one cares about making profiles in Fx better, there is already a better solution to the problem profiles solve.
I would do that if I could get separate history for a different containers.
I will say the process for creating a new container per website is bad.
* Create new container "target"
* Open new Target container
* Go to target.com
* Click the container menu and choose "Always open in..." and if you have a lot of containers, scroll down to "Target"
And then, you still get asked "Hey, you told us to open this in the target container, is that correct?" even though I have *explicitly* said that's exactly what I want.
---
I would like a shortcut button for any site that isn't assigned to a container, where I could click the container menu and say "Create new container and assign this site to it" where it all happens at once. Boom, site isolated.
That's what I'm using. And I like its capability. But as I said, the first-time process for getting a site isolated (if you tend to isolate sites often) is cumbersome and I feel there could be a shortcut button for [create new container -> assign site to new container].
Ah, I see; I tend to isolate all sites I trust in the same container and everything else goes in a temporary container so I mostly have one trusted container (along with one for each of Facebook, LinkedIn and Google).
To add a new site to a new container, I manually edit the file (accessed through the pencil button) and add the line with the proper syntax:
!*.sketchy-website.tld , My Isolation Container
It allows me to define that I want that for all subdomains in the same workflow. But I have to admit it is far from easy for someone who is not already used to this.
Click the multi-container tab. Click "open in new tab". Then pick the container. This will give you a blank page in container. Type the url. Boom! The site url will now be attached to that container.
> [containers are a] better solution to the problem profiles solve
If this problem is persona/identity/account isolation, then yes.
If you want multiple parallel settings and add-on combinations, then no. I use profiles in firefox for this specific reason.
I've no idea about chrome because I don't use it, but I haven't found any problem with firefox profiles for this purpose anyhow - I just configure the desktop to start firefox with -new-instance -ProfileManager and choose the profile at startup.
If I want multiple profiles simultaneously, I just start them up on different virtual desktops.
The Firefox documentation says to Enable Containers through General Settings -> Tabs [1] but there is no such checkbox [2]. Going into about:config and changing privacy.userContext.enabled and privacy.userContext.ui.enabled to true [3] enables the checkbox in the settings page [4]. This is Firefox Version 116.0.3 under Ubuntu.
I use Chrome and Firefox interchangeably so I don't have a dog in this fight. Containers aka Personalities needs to be made a first class feature in Firefox and not require the above steps to make it useful to the less tech savy end user.
I disagree here as an avid user of containers. Profiles are still a better separation between personas I have my "home" profile and "work" profile in FF and they are trivially launched with `firefox -P "name"` and keep all data completely separated.
I agree with OP that the tone is needlessly negative, but while some people are super into TST, most of us don't care about it at all. I wouldn't say that any given article on Firefox "should" mention TST, because odds are the author won't be in the group that cares.
In an article talking about the pros and cons of Chrome and FF, it would make sense to mention cult favorites like TST. I'm not sure where you get the notion that "most of us don't care about it at all" — perhaps you have more inside info than the rest of us?
Regardless, I don't care about profiles or any of this other stuff, but I don't begrudge the author for mentioning things that aren't up my alley. In my mind, when I read a list-based article, I don't expect everything to be relevant to me.
I'm not saying I would begrudge the author for mentioning TST, I'm saying that they're not obliged to mention things that they don't personally care about. I don't mind if a list of someone's favorite features has features I don't care about, nor do I mind if they neglect to mention features that I do care about.
As for my information, I'm comparing the install base for TST with that of uBlock Origin (both only counting Firefox). It's not a perfect measurement, since not all Firefox users have uBO either, but it should if anything overestimate TST's relative popularity.
Tree-style tabs [0] has 163,716 users.
uBlock Origin [1] has 6,175,439 users (only counting Firefox).
That places TST at about 2% of the install base of uBO, which is plenty small to justify my saying that most Firefox users (and prospective users) don't care about TST.
The thing that keeps me from using Firefox is that it doesn't use certain standard macOS interface methods.
That keeps me from using macOS's built-in keybinding system to change tabs with the touch of a function key.
Every other program I use from Finder to my database manager allows me to switch tabs with one button. Firefox has no way to accomplish this, which would make it an interruption to my muscle memory and therefore my productivity.
Duck allows it, so that's what I use instead of Chrome.
There's a way to rebind keys in Firefox, but it's extremely convoluted: something about editing omni.ja. I feel like Firefox goes out of its way to make it impossible for you to do so. Not to mention that they also go out of their way to be hostile to extension developers (unlike Chrome where you can just load an unpacked extension, with Firefox they impose the arbitrary limit that it gets removed after a restart).
Also they don't seem to care one bit about user experience (in the genuine sense). There's a long-standing bug open for > 10yrs that Firefox does not disable sleep when uploading or downloading files. The day that I started a long-running downloaded and came back to find that my laptop had gone to sleep before it even hit 5% was when I uninstalled Firefox in a rage.
I'm not sure if this fits what you want with "allows me to switch tabs with one button", but in macOS Firefox keys ⌘1 to ⌘9 (cmd-1 to cmd-9) switch to tabs 1 to 9 respectively in the current window. ⌥⌘← and ⌥⌘→ (alt-cmd-left and alt-cmd-right) switch to tabs left/right.
As a happy, longtime Firefox user, have to hard disagree here.
> It paints a picture that you need to "sacrifice" something to use Fx and lists various "problems".
Well yes, that was apparently the OP's feeling, along with the belief that overall, the "sacrifices" are worth it. So whether or not the issues felt important (or real) to you, they evidently were for the OP - and possibly other people who are considering switching but as of now are used to Chrome's way of doing things.
> For instance it mentions how troublesome it is to use profiles as a "problem". Don't. Use containers.
If some issue arises because a user hasn't adapted their workflow to the new software and there is in fact a different way of doing things that will result in the same features, that's a legitimate thing to point out. But as the sibling comments make clear, that doesn't seem to be the case here, as containers are missing lots of features that profiles have.
> Never had problems with font rendering.
That's just "works on my machine". OP did have problems, they posted screenshots.
> The download manager being different isn't a "problem", and even Chrome is changing it to become more like Fx's [0]. So it's not like Fx's version is "bad", just different.
FF's download manager is missing a feature that OP actively used, which is drag and drop of downloaded files. So from that point of view, it's clearly a downgrade.
> I'd rather have an article on "Switching from Chrome to Firefox? Here are some tips on great features in Firefox".
Like how to use the multi-account containers I mentioned. Or how the address bar ("awesome bar") in Firefox is so much greater than Chrome's in finding stuff (probably because Google wants you to do a google search, not find stuff from your own history or bookmarks). On how Sidebery or other tree-style tabs can make the experience so nice. etc.
If users have issues with a software, I think it makes a better impression to pick them up from where they are than to do some "there are no problems, move along, citizen" approach.
It's the users who decide what the important issues of a software are, not the developers.
> That's just "works on my machine". OP did have problems, they posted screenshots.
Well, it worked on their machine as well without their fixes. Chrome's font rendering is the one that's the most off from my system behavior, but the article makes it sound like Fx has broken fonts. While it's just a preference from the author.
> FF's download manager is missing a feature that OP actively used, which is drag and drop of downloaded files. So from that point of view, it's clearly a downgrade.
No, it supports that. I use it all the time.
> If users have issues with a software, I think it makes a better impression to pick them up from where they are than to do some "there are no problems, move along, citizen" approach.
My point was that this isn't issues so much as things just being slightly different. When framed as "problems" it however paints them negatively, as if Fx way of doing things are somehow "wrong". That's my issue with the article, not that it points these things out.
> I feel this article almost do more harm than good. It paints a picture that you need to "sacrifice" something to use Fx and lists various "problems".
Your comment is roughly of the form “that detailed article lists poor solutions to the problems you’ll likely encounter when switching to Firefox, so please instead follow my detailed instructions about alternate ways to fix the problems you’ll likely encounter when switching to Firefox.” It hardly makes anything feel simpler or more enticing!
> Or how the address bar ("awesome bar") in Firefox is so much greater than Chrome's in finding stuff (probably because Google wants you to do a google search, not find stuff from your own history or bookmarks).
What exactly does Firefox do differently? I find that the Chrome bar learns very quickly which results to prioritize, based on my input.
Yes. You need to sacrifice. Almost zero of my banking and credit card websites work flawlessly on Firefox which does so on Chrome. So that’s a huge enough sacrifice for me — the end user.
Something I didn't find mentioning is increasing the number of parallel connections in Firefox. When I inspect the network and responses of FF, I often find connections were "blocked" (for several hundreds ms). Thus, increasing the number of persistent connections to a server will unblock those connections and allow the website to render much faster.
Go to about:config and change:
This setting is a classic in the "tweak Firefox" blog posts.
Increasing connection count will make HTTP 1.1 websites faster, but they'll also cause random rate limiting errors if you increase the value too much. How high you should set this value is up to you, but it's one of the first things you should reset when websites start acting weird in Firefox but not in other browsers.
This is good to know -- I primarily use FF and couldn't narrow down why my site was bugging out but running fine on other browsers. Glad its not a compatibility issue.
I love Firefox. The only time I struggle it's because it is the only browser today that correctly implements CORS. This is a good thing. But it means broken middle boxes and MiTM enterprise tech (like Zscaler) should fix their stuff rather than pointing their smelly fingers at Firefox.
Mozilla should up its game in educating the public that Edge and Chrome aren't following the standards correctly. This seems IMHO pretty important in a world where everything relies on the browser to sandbox things.
Huh? If I have a resource I serve without Access-Control-Allow-Origin headers, all three browser engines won't make it available in cross-origin contexts. [1]
For example, here are a pair of pages which make a cross-origin fetch for a resource that either does (yes-cors) or does not (no-cors) opt into cross-origin resource sharing. In all three browsers yes-cors displays the contents of the resource, and no-cors (correctly) displays "error".
> Mozilla should up its game in educating the public that Edge and Chrome aren't following the standards correctly.
I don’t think most people care about this. What they may care about is whether something works on their default browser, which is likely to be Edge or Safari or Chrome. Mozilla should instead target Microsoft and Google on the standards tracks and in forums where discussions on standards (and on security) happen.
Yeah, never gonna happen. The same reason browsers support broken markup: users are much happier when their browser works in the face of noncompliant sites than if it were to throw its hands up and say “this site doesn't work, use <other browser>”
You don’t need to convince the general public on these points, just a large enough subset (like nerds). This situation has happened before with Internet Explorer, and can be fixed again.
One of the problems with promoting standards is that standards are made by imperfect committees. And they can solve a different problem than exists in the real world.
> One of the problems with promoting standards is that standards are made by imperfect committees. And they can solve a different problem than exists in the real world.
Which solution are you suggesting? Not having a standard?
The font rendering problem is very interesting to me because I have always found Firefox to use the same font rendering as the rest of my system, meanwhile Chrome has this universally thin and conspicuous font rendering across all systems I have attempted using it on.
I currently use Mac OS and I see no difference between text rendered on Firefox and text rendered in other Mac OS applications, but there is a world of difference between Chrome and anything else.
So if I had to make a bold claim without evidence, I would guess Firefox uses the OS default font rendering (i.e. it will be as bad the rest of your OS), meanwhile Chrome's font rendering is universally bad (i.e. it does not follow what your OS uses, on any platform, and if you don't like it, then there's not much you can do).
I agree. While Chrome's rendering may make the fonts more "elegant" and almost seem to be higher resolution/softer somehow, they are also harder to read and have less contrast.
Do people live in their browsers like that? I find it useful to keep both.
95% of the time I'm in Firefox, as one should be -- with all the good adblockers etc.
And for the 5% unavoidable garbage of "things I must use/sign up for in life" that don't implement things properly, including Zoom, I keep Chrome around.
If you or a random reader is on MacOS, try out Orion - a Safari fork that has support for both Chrome AND Firefox plug-ins. I can't stop using Safari... I know, I'm a dying breed, and people at work were (and still are) a bit weirded out by it, but if you're like me, Orion is a very nice alternative if you want "real" adblockers (and 10000s of other plugins) at your disposal!
I wish I could just use Safari, but uBlock Origin and 7TV are the two browser extensions that I'm way too used to. Too bad, there are some things in Orion that bother me (wonky desktop-mobile sync is the biggest one).
Chrome is now scanning every file on your computer and sending back metadata to google unless you opt-out in the name of "we made our browser an antivirus too!" but nobody sane believes that stuff.
At least use a different chromium based browser instead of chrome itself. Brave is a fine option.
I hear this now and again, but haven't had Chrome installed for years now without issue. I'm made to use things like Zoom et al. too, but everything "just works" for me?
Teams was a classic hellhole for me when I was using Linux. Nowadays it lets you in but Firefox genuinely doesn't support all of the features the Teams site uses. This means certain features are made unavailable to Firefox users. Forcing the user agent makes some of these partially work but they are also still broken so Mozilla doesn't want to enable a user agent override by default and Microsoft doesn't want to enable a feature that only half works. This GitHub WebCompat issue serves as a good example history https://github.com/webcompat/web-bugs/issues/77892
Haven't used Zoom in browser much so can't say what one can find there. I just run the desktop app. It's definitely something where you can go a few years with everything working fine then suddenly hit like 4 sites where you're like "wtf, why is shit so broken?". Chipotle and similar joints' online order pages were another place that would spontaneously break.
Yeah, it's pretty rare. Like now that I think about it, it isn't even that Zoom doesn't work -- it's that Zoom-in-Firefox-on-Linux doesn't seem to have the fake background thing and I need that because it's easier than cleaning my garage-office :)
And I'm guessing that's either deliberate or lazy on Zoom.
It would be interesting to see performance figures for Firefox + uBlock Origin vs Chrome and all the advertising/tracking junk it has to drag down to render some well known sites.
I'd bet the cost of all those network calls outweighs anything else in the rendering pipeline.
On Linux you may also want to consider an alternative browser for performance and battery saving. The recent addition (Firefox 115 I believe) of hardware accelerated video decoding should make things better, but I'm still regularly seeing 50-90% CPU for a tab just playing a Youtube video that my Intel GPU should be decoding. I can tolerate that on desktop, but on my laptop I want to preserve battery life.
I'm not sure why but Linux also seems slower in Firefox's benchmarks. My guess is that Mozilla is optimising for their most common users (and Linux users have a high probability of picking Firefox anyway). Hopefully more Windows features will make it into the Linux build soon.
FF is definitely my fave on Mac (containers/no history mode), but Safari isn't that much worse and I have almost zero problems with ads using Wipr content blocker.
> A growing uneasy feeling about Google’s approach to user privacy, […], their rejection of JPEG XL
The part about JPEG XL seems strange, given that the article linked in the blog post says Mozilla too is rejecting JPEG XL:
> Mozilla's Martin Thomson wrote that while JPEG XL "offers some potential advantages," it wasn't "performing enough better than its closest competitors (like AV1F) to justify addition on that basis alone."
They do half of what profiles do: they isolate cache, cookies, sessions, etc. But they do so in a very light manner and fast manner. The UI is better too. So for things that don't need getting different settings or extensions and so on, containers are the way to go.
We've had about:profiles for many years, but that UI is not for the average user.
On macOS opening a new profile through that also opens the window in the background and may also mess up your Firefox icons in the dock, not to mention that you'll break your profiles if you make the mistake of opening a profile from a different FF version on your current FF (eg: stable profile on FF Developer can't be opened again by FF stable). We can use profiles, but it's not a good experience.
On Chromium (and Chrome, Brave, etc), there's an icon at the top right corner. You click it, then select the profile and that's it. Fast, simple, user friendly.
(Edit to add: I sometimes forget that the average HN user is different from the average computer user. They're used to click on things, not to type "firefox -P" :P )
I've used that before. Props to the developer, but on top of the extension, we also have to install software for it to work. It also doesn't fix new profiles opening in the background and the messing up of dock icons, although this might only affect Mac users.
The annoying thing for me is that Firefox already has a similar UI button that could easily be adapted to switch profiles. It even looks like Chrome's, but all it does it show you your Firefox/Mozilla account.
It's designed like their goal was to make the few buttons you want to use most the hardest to find.
I'm not going to the profiles page to restart Firefox, show my profile directory in Finder/Explorer, Rename a profile, or Remove a profile. For some reason all those buttons get first placement.
I have to scroll the page down to find the one and only button I want to click every single day.
When I used Chrome, I had to use profiles because that's all it had. I used it to switch between personas. It wasn't great, precisely _because_ you had to set up everything like bookmarks and extensions again.
Containers on the other hand, fit the use-case of personas perfectly. I can keep logins separate, keep a work / home session separation, etc. Best of all, I set up certain websites to always use a particular container, even when I'm currently browsing in a different container tab. I can't imagine going back to Chrome profiles.
I wish people would stop mentioning benchmarks, even when Firefox is wins one.
It is like evaluating bicycles based on their towing capacity. Any website that requires a high performance JavaScript implementation is already doing so much wrong that you should just leave.
Warning for people who use or install Firefox UI Fix on other people's computers:
Mozilla occasionally breaks everything with new Firefox releases, and you can end up with a non-functional tabs bar until you reinstall the newest version of Firefox UI Fix. Not so much a problem if you're a techie, but a big problem for the non-techies you install it for.
Firefox used to have a pretty Chrome-like tabs bar with curved trapezoid corners and a lighter highlight for the selected tab.Then one day they decided that's bad, made it all flat rectangles and inverted the color scheme. Someone on the UX team had to justify their existence I guess. So my muscle memory was telling me that the tab that is selected is not selected and I couldn't get anything done.
Okay not a problem, set up some flags that revert the old scheme, done. A few months later, Mozilla breaks that functionality because fuck you. Okay still not a problem, find and install a custom theme that makes the task bar look normal again.
Half a year later they release a new patch that breaks the custom theme by sliding the tabs bar roughly 50% up so it's being clipped by the fucking window. I no longer have any clue what file changes I made to mod in that custom theme so I'm stuck with a broken install of Firefox unless I nuke my profiles. Yaaaay.
sigh
In my probably decade+ of using it, Chrome has never been this annoying.
Firefox has actual browsing history! You can search your real browser history unlike chrome, which allows you to search your google web history, which does not contain all websites.
Nobody mentioned "Ctrl+Tab cycles through tabs in recently used order" Firefox option that is almost impossible to replicate on Chrome even with extensions. And there is huge user need for this option as there are bunch of Chrome extension for this, mostly using external executables to achieve this.
> I like Chrome’s download bar at the bottom of the screen, as I need to download and handle many files for work. The fact that it is always visible, in every tab, until you close it
Is there a way to re-enable this in chrome? It’s been replaced with the dreaded Firefox downloads butt Next to the address bar.
> The fact that it is always visible, in every tab, until you close it
You can also keep it visible in Firefox. Right click the menu bar, click Customize, right click the downloads button, then unclick the hide when empty button.
It seems like over the past few years Chrome has gotten more comfortable with shoving stuff into the top right section, with icons just popping in and out based on context. I used to have muscle memory for my extensions there, and now from right to left there's a kebab settings overflow button, a profile switcher icon (I don't even use profiles), a reading list button (again, not using that), an extensions overflow puzzle piece icon, and finally my extensions. I always have to think twice before clicking anything up there.
Now having the download button that's only sometimes there is one more thing to throw me off. I couldn't even figure out what would make it disappear. I'd clear the downloads list and it's still there.
> Firefox’ built-in profile switcher is far worse than Chrome’s. To open it, you need to start Firefox with the -p parameter.
You can also just go to `about:profiles` in the address bar, without having to launch Firefox with the -p switch. I even have `about:profiles` as my homepage so when I launch Firefox, I then decide which profile I will be using.
1. You can have multiple profile sessions running at the same time.
2. It is best to theme your alt profiles with a different color so you don't confuse them. For example, green one is for one profile and the red one another.
3. "firefox -p 'profile-name'" launches directly into a profile
4. "firefox -p 'profile-name' -private-window" launches a profile in a private window
5. I use keybindings on linux to auto launch different profiles.
As for why you should consider multiple profiles. It gives you the ability to separate concerns. I use a main account, one for work, one for testing stuff, another that has no extensions, and one for anything NSFW.
Too many of you don't keep NSFW stuff off your work profiles, I'm embarrassed for you during your zoom meetings when the url autocomplete briefly betrays your interests.
> Too many of you don't keep NSFW stuff off your work profiles, I'm embarrassed for you during your zoom meetings when the url autocomplete briefly betrays your interests.
Umm, I keep NSFW stuff off my work computer. I'm not really comfortable with less separation than this.
I use Mozilla's Container Tabs extension for most of this. Unless you specifically want to keep settings/extensions/etc in specific, separate profiles, they're a good in-between solution. In my case, having a single FF instance is desirable as I would juggle between too many profiles which would need similar extensions for completely switching profiles and windows to be a good experience.
I use container tabs in my main profile as well, as like you, I'd have too many profiles if I didn't.
My profile use is about big concerns and work modes. For example my work profile has some developer plugins, separate password managers, bookmarks, and snippets. Doing so keeps everything nice and removed from my home life.
Containers are for separating websites from one another, while profiles are for separating browser bits from one another. This includes settings, plugins, extensions, themes, bookmarks, snippets, password managers, etc.
I still find it very confusing that the active tab does not 'extend' to the content, but is separated by a shadow. I often mistake the inactive tab for the active one, because it's background is almost closer to the content.
I've always found the Firefox devtools be a little less 'quality of life' like. Just my opinion. Haven't used it in a few years. But for me, I just live in devtools, you know. As most of you here, probably. Opinions?
In my opinion this is one of those "use what you're used to" things. Firefox's dev tools are amazing for me and Chrome's seem difficult to use. They both have very similar features, but the UI of the dev tools is different enough that it is difficult to regularly switch between the two.
I still haven't figured out how to collect and view profiling information in when disconnected from the internet, ever since they integerated it with profiler.firefox.com.
Fair enough. I just started the latest version and must say, it has really improved. Quality of life probably means I have to look a bit more for where stuff is. And hey, they might have some stuff that Chrome doesn't have, right?
So my first one is 'Chrome devtools has a little button to instantly switch to mobile view, where you simulate (more or less) the viewport of various mobile devices'. I don't see this in Firefox.
> So my first one is 'Chrome devtools has a little button to instantly switch to mobile view, where you simulate (more or less) the viewport of various mobile devices'. I don't see this in Firefox.
The icon is slightly different and is in a different place (same vicinity though, somewhere on the top-right), but the "Responsive Design Mode" is equivalent to Chrome's "Device Toolbar". See https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/devtools-user/respon...
It's called Responsive Design Mode, and it's the third button from the the right on the top bar. Even better, use the shortcut Ctrl-Shift-M, which works even when devtools is closed.
...Really? It's the icon on the top-right of the Fx dev tools menu that looks like a mobile device. Also, both Chrome and Fx use the same keyboard shortcut to activate mobile view (Ctrl + Shift + M)
The debugger and the source map loading are noticably slower. The DOM browser is slower as well and I get things shifting a few pixels up/down randomly in there.
On the bright side, it keeps a running diff of the css changes you make. Super useful when you're trying to fix some stupid layout thing, get it working and then forget all the changes you made.
Because their examples are always "it's not exactly the same as Chrome devtools, it has all of the same features but they aren't a pixel perfect replication!".
I prefer the Firefox dev tools, except for one thing: Chrome's websocket debugger is better. Firefox seems to miss some websocket messages and sometimes they don't show up at all for me.
The CSS dev tools for things like grids and flex in the Firefox dev tools are much better than Chrome's. The debugger is a tad slower if you need to prettify obfuscated Javascript but both do a good enough job at it.
I also prefer the theme Firefox applies to the dev tools, they feel more native and less like something slapped onto the browser.
I havent been able to uninstall Chrome. Everyone makes sure they test their website for Chrome. Firefox/Safari just don't have devs testing on them.
I currently have Firefox for most things, but I seemingly always have chromium open to check to see if a website isnt behaving correctly.
What a terrible time for computing. Chrome is in total control of web. Nvidia + M$ have complete control of high performance computing, and M$ sucks. Apple captures tons of attention and time with their marketing but has low quality products.
What power does MS have over high performance computing? Perhaps some fields use Windows specific applications, but most high performance computing I see uses Linux by default, with WSL for the Windows equivalent.
I use Chrome as a fallback too when the measures I've taken to protect my privacy break websites I can't get around, but in most cases websites just work in my experience. Almost all of the issues I run into are caused by addons messing with websites, like content blockers.
CUDA and Linux work just fine together. Nvidia GPU drivers and Linux (especially mobile Linux) are a bigger problem, but on desktop Nvidia works fine (just don't enable Wayland) and on mobile it works fine as long as you have an integrated GPU to actually render to your screen.
I don't think I've ever had trouble getting CUDA to run. It seems to be the only thing Nvidia cares about making work reliably on Linux.
You install TST, and then you remove the strip of tabs across the top. Much cleaner look and basically you have all your bookmarks all there, forever. Mostly as unloaded tabs of course but they're one click away in the tree somewhere.
Unfortunately, as a tab hoarder myself, I had to remove Tree Style Tabs when I figured out it was the single reason Firefox was taking about 1 second after clicking to do actions like open a new tab or switch tab, and generally higher than ideal CPU usage. When I disabled it, everything got so much faster, it was like getting a new browser.
So I switched to Sidebery, which seemed much faster at first and I still have it enabled sometimes. But after a while and many tests to be sure, I found Sidebery was the single reason Firefox was taking an extra 10GB or more RAM. Just today, I opened about ten Hacker News tabs for an afternoon's read, and the RAM usage crept up from 18GB to 28GB. These are text-only sites as you know, and like most people I didn't read the articles only the HN comments :-) So that's a lot of unexplained RAM. I disabled Sidebery in that window and the memory usage crept back down to 18GB. (If I launch Telegam in a Firefox window with Sidebery enabled it goes up to 67GB then crashes as my SSD is too full for that much swap!). If Sidebery is disabled all along, the memory usage doesn't creep up like that.
These are figures reported by iStat Menus on macOS on my laptop. The swapping induced by the higher RAM usage caused scrolling to be extremely janky, as well as editing in forms and text boxes.
So unfortunately for me, to have a reasonable browsing experience, I found I can't use either of the good tab-sidebar extensions Tree Style Tabs or Sidebery with Firefox at the moment, each for a different reason.
I haven't seen other people reporting these issues, and each one took me a while to recognise. Therefore I asume these issues are related in some way to the total numbe of tabs and/or windows I have and that most people aren't affected (enough to matter), or those affected haven't found the cause.
There are some tab group extensions, but I found Simple Tab Groups lost hundreds of my tabs several times, with no indication that it had lost them (they just weren't there when I went to find them later), so I stopped using it.
I have a considerable number of tweaks I apply to my Firefox installs, too and the process is a little cumbersome.
I wonder if it would be a reasonable task to set up an “opinionated” fork of Firefox with all the changes being UI/UX-related and keep it up to date with mainline… that would make fresh installs more effortless and allow improvements that aren’t practical with regular Firefox.
I'll throw this advice in as well, about Firefox' disk cache. Not related to Chrome but mainly as a generic way to make Firefox a bit snappier and less grindy/bloated:
My work profile has uBlock Origin with stricter rules which would break some sites/tools I use for work. I also redirect Twitter to Nitter, use a different password manager, etc.
For bookmarks, it's more a question of not wanting to have personal stuff together with work stuff. Then there's some settings that works on one profile but would cause issues (or annoyances) on the other. I also have a different theme for each profile, which stops me from doing personal stuff on sites with my work login (eg: searching on Google).
I also have a profile that is just for the shittiest sites I sometimes find online. I'll have extensions to block the crap, archive pages, etc, which would slow down browsing or break most sites I use.
On Chromium, I had one browser and 3 profiles. Then I decided to move to Firefox and since using profiles (especially switching/opening them, at least on Mac) is a pain, I use 3 different browsers (Firefox, Firefox Dev/Beta, Waterfox) as they all have their own profiles.
Could I live with only one profile? Yes, but that would force me to compromise. Containers alone? I tried to use them, but stopped after searching for stuff on Google and YouTube on the container I had my work Google account logged in. Profiles + Containers are the best of both worlds in one plane.
> but stopped after searching for stuff on Google and YouTube on the container I had my work Google account logged in
Thought I'd mention though, that this is one of the areas I find containers a life-saver. Google's handling of multiple accounts is so badly broken, that I only ever log into a single account on a single container. Easy to keep work and personal Google separate then.
It's a failing of the article that they didn't mention it, however it is not true that they do identical things, and some people need / live in those differences.
The Firefox UI for profile management is just awful. If it were as good as the MAC UI it wouldn't be a point of contention.
I use File > Quit to close my browser and all of my windows restore just fine.
If Firefox doesn't restore all your windows on startup, try hitting ctrl+shift+n, that should reopen the last (non-private) window you closed. In my experience this works across sessions, as long as you don't erase the browser history.
AltGr (the right alt key) essentially translates to ctrl+alt on Windows and some Linux configurations. It also acts as a compose key on some configurations, making it quite unreliable for navigation as the system IME may intercept the key before sending it through.
You can rebind it back to a normal alt key at the operating system level if you don't care about the AltGr functionality, that'll probably fix a whole bunch of unexpected problems you may be having in other programs. I think Firefox altering the ctrl+alt+left/right behaviour would break more workflows than it fixes, to be honest.
I forgot what exactly broke, but I do remember assigning something to my ctrl+alt+left/right keys and finding out that various applications (and I think maybe the rich text edit field?) got very confused.
Is this an AltGr thing? On my (US, in Linux) keyboard right-alt-left-arrow works fine, and I'm pretty sure I do the same thing in Windows (again, US keyboard layout).
Someone decided that websites need "hero images" and all the default themes now have it, and if you're asked to load an image, you load an image (many people don't bother changing default themes).
The settings provided do indicate that Firefox has picked a different default subpixel layout than what the monitor has.
This can be because of a bug in autodetection but it can also happen when you orient your monitor vertically, which many people do with secondary monitors.
Assuming the author has set up ClearType right on their computer, I believe this may be a Firefox bug. ClearType on Windows should take care of this stuff already.
"A growing uneasy feeling about Google’s approach to user privacy, Manifest v3, Googles’s WebDRM plans, their rejection of JPEG XL and the omnipresence of Chromium-based browsers nowadays – Chrome, Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, Opera and some others are basically the same programs in different clothes."
He hits the nail on the head. Why support the fascist empire when you can support those making it better. That said, if you really wanted a privacy focused browser then the Bromine, Waterfox, Opera, DuckDuckGo and Tempest browsers should all be investigated.
For instance it mentions how troublesome it is to use profiles as a "problem". Don't. Use containers. Hundred times more smooth than profiles. Hence why no one cares about making profiles in Fx better, there is already a better solution to the problem profiles solve.
Never had problems with font rendering. The download manager being different isn't a "problem", and even Chrome is changing it to become more like Fx's [0]. So it's not like Fx's version is "bad", just different.
I'd rather have an article on "Switching from Chrome to Firefox? Here are some tips on great features in Firefox".
Like how to use the multi-account containers I mentioned. Or how the address bar ("awesome bar") in Firefox is so much greater than Chrome's in finding stuff (probably because Google wants you to do a google search, not find stuff from your own history or bookmarks). On how Sidebery or other tree-style tabs can make the experience so nice. etc.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36996287