Orion > FF > Chrome
I’d like to try out ff but I’d have to use it for a few days. Is it possible to possible to sync passwords and bookmarks with my Google account like chrome? How’s the touchscreen support?
Afaik, all modern browsers can import/export passwords and bookmarks? FF lets you set up an account and sync across devices with a unique PW if you want (not your computer user PW, but it could be).
No idea on touchscreens outside the Android app.
Firefox mobile isn’t there yet. Passwords will conveniently autofill from your Google account thanks to the Android level implementation of password management, but more importantly it’s resource heavy and bad UI design. Ublock support is nice but some websites just don’t deal with it well. The nightly builds do fix my main problems with the UI but they crash all the time. So there’s hope for the future, but for now it’s not great unless you absolutely need proper browser level ad blocking rather than Blokada.
Tbh I switched to Firefox mobile from Chrome and have the opposite experience. While it is in someway less convenient for auto fill, as long as my Google account is logged in on another browser page I can always use it for that and they have password and credit card auto fill features should you want to take care of them.
Not with your Google account directly. You create a Firefox account that is client-side encrypted, and you’ll probably use your Gmail for that. Then, you can import your bookmarks/passwords from there. This might be a good time to move your passwords to an actual password manager like Bitwarden.
Functionality wise, chrome is better than Firefox but it’s bad when it comes to privacy and ads
By default, I doubt that Firefox is better at privacy than Chrome. Actually even worse than Chrome I’d say. But you can customize Firefox to be much more privacy friendlier than Chrome. That is the functionality Chrome lacks. The last time I tried out Ungoogled chromium, it sucked ass. Websites actually loaded slower than on Firefox for me. And both had uBlock Origin installed. I tried those fancy GPU stuff as well, almost nothing changed.
What is literally one thing Chrome can do that Firefox cannot? Cause I can tell you right now, after tomorrow, only one can block ads.
Skip the ssl error message. I log into IP addresses all day and that flag is sanity savimg.
WebGPU, WebHID and h.265 are all unsupported on firefox
that said, i still daily drive firefox with mostly no problems, but saying that it can do everything chrome can is just flat out wrong
this is by design mind you, chrome have a big enough market share that they can basically just add whatever they want to the web standards and all other browsers just have to try to keep up. i imagine that’s part of the reason that chromium skins are so widespread
To be fair, Chrome does generally render most websites faster and correctly. I have Chrome installed just in case of some webpages not working with Firefox. Now, that’s not Mozillas fault, but from user standpoint makes Chrome more attractive browser to use.
Don’t care. I use Brave.
You are definitely brave to admit that.
Ew.
Yay, another Chromium based web browser. That will show them…
Honestly, I’m less worried about the speed and moreso I just don’t like supporting Google’s de facto monopoly of the Web’s infrastructure.
and ads.
ads are awful.
They have ads in Chrome now? Yikes, it’s worse than I thought.
Im’ma be honest. I’ve been using FF for so long that if that’s the case I didn’t even know.
Firefox has ads. Very many ads. Out of the box, Firefox sends everything you type into the URL bar to a ‘search provider’. They also place traditional ads in the New Tab page, in the URL area chrome, and in your bookmarks. And probably other places I’m forgetting right now.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/sponsor-privacy
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/change-your-default-search-settings-firefoxi was talking more about how mobile chrome can’t adblock, so it has ads just not on the app itself, and desktop chrome will soon not be able to effectively
The thing is, using a Chromium-based browser isn’t contributing to their monopoly unless Google holds sway over the fork. Brave, Vivaldi, those two are generally fine and stand against what Google has been up to.
Sure it is. Everyone starts trying to be sure things render correctly on Chromium based browsers and nothing else. Next thing you know people say “Wow Chromium based browsers render pages more reliably than everything else” and then you end up somewhere not too differently from where we were heading. Everything that’s not based on Chromium starts getting tossed aside.
I dunno. Using chromium with a little editing, but 90% og chromium is basically the same monopoly.
De-googled chromium works for me.
You can’t truly degoogle chromium without a hard fork. Soft forks are still enabling them and their grip on the web, even if they’re not specifically spying on you in particular.
They are contributing to Google’s hold over web specs. If Google decides to implement a feature off spec, then website developers will optimise for that implementation because it will be the implementation used by all chromium based browsers. And that leads to worse performance for other browsers with a more correct implementation.
Maybe not the best image to use. Sheep bleating on about Firefox.
pretty sure thats a goat. rugged, contrary and independent. one might even say… the Greatest Of All Time.
chrome used to be good. Emphasis on the past tense.
Firefox was always good. Chrome was very briefly better. Firefox has not suffered enshittification like chrome did.
I mean, I clearly remember firefox being terrible back when Chrome was just beginning to take off.
It was a lumbering monolith that ate all your ram and loaded pages at a glacial pace. Chrome was a multi-process revolution from that.
Then, firefox got it’s shit together and chrome got overloaded with corpo bullshit.
It used to take firefox ages to open. I switched back after the big update in the mid 2010s that made it good again.
This. Firefox has always been just good. It wasn’t great or anything, it was just a good browser. Then chrome came around and it had more, better features. It was a bit more memory usage, but those were for the additional features Firefox didn’t have.
Firefox didn’t really change a whole lot, it added synching features across accounts, and didn’t get worse. It just stayed the same.
The people made Firefox better, because now they’re creating add-ons for Firefox, where chrome had more.
I feel like once chrome got the majority of browser users, it immediately started going to shit. I have no proof of this, just a memory of it being better until it was announced that chrome was the most used browser, and the near immediate heavier memory usage.
I don’t know what rock you’ve been living under where you think base Firefox wasn’t ever improved
It’s all telemetry so the advertising company that made Chrome can harvest your data for resale at bargain bin prices
Yes, but not neccesary other Chromium do it, that depends only on the corresponding devs. Chrome is a RAM and Data Hog, because use for every tab a own process, but Vivaldi Hibernate the background tabs and because of this use less RAM than other Chromium and even FF. But generally all US browsers send data to Alphabet, googleanalytics and googletagmanager, except Edge (also Chromium), but in change it sends data to other MS partners which are even worst (Towerdata). I use Vivaldi for this, because it’s the only existing EU browser (after the French UR browser died some years ago) maybe apart Konqueror from KDE (Linux only, KHTML or KDE WEBKit engine), no data for third parties, nor Google, despite the Chromium base. The Browser companies are the problem, not the engine which they use.
If you’re switching a couple extensions are uBlock origin and no script with Firefox, prevents most ads and lets you choose which hosts to accept JavaScript from temporarily or permanently.
I use ghostery to remove the obnoxious cookie popups here in the EU.
Vivaldi has in its inbuild ad/trackerblocker also filters to block cookie popups, no problem with this
Mouse gestures is the killer-app for me on Firefox. Hate surfing without it.
P.S. Do wish Firefox had tab groups tho.
Surely there is an add on for that
Firefox add-on for Tab Groups? I looked and couldn’t find one. At some point they appeared to try to support tab groups, but gave up? I dunno. I’ve only used Chrome a little. I don’t personally care for Chrome, but I found the tab groups useful.
I just searched “tab groups Firefox” and found results saying it has them. No idea as I wasn’t able to find relevant settings last time I tried on a PC. Mobile just now I tried adding tabs to a collection, but it doesn’t look like it did anything
Thanks, but I tried a few weeks back to get tab groups working for Firefox on MacOS. No joy.
Hope someone else chimes in on how to do this. I typically have hundreds of tabs open, groups were a godsend
On mobile chrome I have “:D” tabs open which I occasionally go through and cull
nonscript is your web condom. I will not touch a page without it.
Do you need noscript if you have ublock?
yes, noscript blocks all javascript from running unless allowed, while ublock just blocks ads and trackers to my knowledge.
Would noscript allow you to block things like when a site packs your history with their website making it impossible to back out to the page you came from? How does it work considering so many sites now are built with JavaScript libraries like React?
I dunno about the history but single page apps like react apps you can just accept the JS from the actual host in the address bar and leave all the rest turned off. Just tested on twitch. Accepting no JS loaded the home page and a spinner gif after selecting a stream. Accepted just twitch.tv and I could see the video stream and chat without having to accept any of the other hosts blocked.
Rad. Thank you. Working on my switch to Firefox today. Between this noscript stuff and learning about styling Firefox with CSS I’m absolutely sold on the switch and no longer dread the process of ditching Chrome (mostly due to familiarity than anything else).
Thanks for the info!
You can set uBlock to disable/enable JavaScript per site too, as per wiki page.
interesting, good to know!
You can use the advanced mode of ublock to replace noscript too
Everything enshitifies… Everything, problem that worries me that, Firefox will enshitify like this too one day
At that point it will be forked yet again, and that fork will take over. Mozilla is a very active open source member though.
The browsers are all quite good at copying your links, tabs, and history. Don’t worry, there will always be a good option, especially since open source has no strong path to enshittification
Then it will be forked and the cycle continues.
boss i’m tired of those cycles
How close did we come to being a footnote in the history of a future species that would happen upon our ruins ten thousand years from now? Would they indulge in the fiction of their own immortality until the Shivans came for them? And how long had this gone on? Did the Ancients stumble upon the monoliths and the tombs of their predecessors in this distant corner of space, dismissing the warnings carved into the walls of the sepulchre? And when the destroyers came at last, what did the Ancients think as they sifted the cremation of dust and bones, staring into the mute remains for a key; some solution to their plight?
What if there had been countless races stretching back into infinity? And like the nine cities of Troy each civilization had been built on the rubble of one that came before. Each annihilated by the Shivans.
The Ancients died eight thousand years ago, as humanity emerged from its neolithic infancy. They believed their voyage across the sea of stars awoke the dragon that slept beneath the waves. That the Shivans were birthed from the flux of subspace and their destruction was the revenge of an angry cosmos.
Mozilla has no traditional profit motive. The Mozilla Corporation, which develops Firefox, is a 100% subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, which is legally a non-profit organisation.
So, if the Mozilla Corporation makes a profit, they cannot pay out that profit to shareholders. Practically all they can do with that money, is to pay higher wages or set it aside for future invest in their products.
That does not mean that they cannot stagnate or use money badly. And it does not either mean that they never need to make money. But it does mean that there’s no shareholders demanding short-term profit above all else.
Thank you for new info, i didn’t know about that, but it’s not what I’m worried, I’m worried about manifest v3 going forced by Google and other corpos and being adopted by Firefox, but we still have dns adblockers for now, like pihole and such
Firefox already supports Manifest V3. Crucially, though:
- Firefox continues to support Manifest V2 for the foreseeable future.
- Firefox will not adopt the arbitrary limitation of content/ad blocking rules in Manifest V3, which is what’s bad about it.
- Firefox offers APIs in addition to Manifest V2 and V3, with which more powerful extensions can be built. This is why uBlock Origin has been better on Firefox for quite a while already.
Source for the first two points: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2024/03/13/manifest-v3-manifest-v2-march-2024-update/
Firefox will become good to me when it gets the extensions that I need for work.
I’m gonna be honest.
The main reason I don’t like Firefox is the ui.
It’s one of those things where I’ve been using chrome for so long that switching to anything else is infuriating. Trying to learn the layout and all the features. Trying to figure out how to do things that are intuitively design on Google.
If someone made pretty much a 1 to 1 copy of Google without all the bullshit I’d use it in a heartbeat.
This is certainly a hurdle to overcome. Google helped by changing the Chrome UI for the worse in some ways I care about, but migrating to a new browser and getting used to different UI is enough of a hassle that I’m still holding out until adblock actually stops working before I make the switch.
Well bud, you can literally customize Firefox with css. So get to learning
That’s the worst part about all of this.
I don’t even know what css is 😭
It’s what makes HTML look fancy. You can also find something you already like https://www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/
How did I never know about this? This might make me switch to Firefox sooner than planned. Thanks for sharing!
fuck it, where do i start? if spending a little bit of my time writing a css sheet results in Google losing market share i’m 1000% down.
https://www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/ Don’t flame me for a Reddit link lol
frantic ignoring reddit sounds
dishing out the tools to help users take back control of their lIves. hero quality.
not at all, thank you!
shots fired! Shots fired!
You can drag and drop your toolbar, extensions, and layout.
I have the same problem the other way around. When I use chrome it feels like I’m using a kids browser. Slightly cutesy with too many curvy bits. Sort of like the difference between Duplo (chrome) and Lego (Firefox). Basically the same thing, but also not.
Firefox is slower, not because it’s worse, but Gecko is a minority engine in the web (~3-4%) and because of this the most webs are optimized for Blink. That is the only reason and because most current Browsers are using it, a devils circle. The result of leaving Google hands-free for too long and that for 20 years the number of available engines has remained stagnant (3 and some testimonial exotic forks) because it is the most complicated part of a browser. Little can be done now.
Well, Apples WebKit is even worse than Gecko, as a small consolation for FF users.
I usualy love it, but for some reason Firefox fails to retrieve web pages about 75% of the time when on the internet connection at my parent’s house, and I don’t know why.
It acts like a DNS failure, but the DNS settings are the same in Firefox, Chrome, and the router.
Meanwhile Chrome and Edge work great.
Probably secure DNS? Try disabling that in the privacy settings page.
People saying FF is slower: like how much slower, are we taking like 14 millisecond slower? Cause everything seems pretty instantaneous here. Maybe its because i’m old enough to remember DSL and 56k internet, but I think FF os crazy fast and even if Chrome would be 25% faster I wouldn’t swith to evil google for that.
It used to be a lot slower, which is why when Chrome showed up with its shiny new V8 engine (and other features) people switched from Firefox en masse. Now the performance difference is no longer noticeable.
Ye a few months ago I remember that the benchmarks showed firefox was just as fast as chrome again or minimally faster/slower in certain benchmarks
61 Firefox windows and 427 tabs (don’t judge, I know I have a problem) and I have no performance complaints - admittedly, not all of them are active/rendering simultaniously, but still…
Firefox (and its forks) have been my go-to for 15 years.
I’m actually interested what you have open with this many windows.
indeed! had I not posted this, I would be asking the same question!
so, its quite a bit more mundane than you might have hoped for.
a mix of…
- ~40% locally served internal pages (mostly zabbix, mail/web server monitoring, some development pages, etc).
- ~60% non-local pages - currently lots of retro computing stuff, debian stuff, github (sigh)
the most recent page I opened was an
archive.org
page on TI-84 firmware disassembly.I make heavy use of Firefox containers for separation. honestly, Firefox is an absolute workhorse for me. if the Firefox ecosystem were to fall into the void, I would be dead in the water.
That’s a really interesting set of pages!
I remember opening hundreds of random github repos and starring them for “further research”, and never looking at them again.
Also yes, life without Firefox would be miserable.
Last time I tried it? Like freeze and be unresponsive on my phone for seconds at a time slow. (My phone doesn’t lock up though, I can still go to the home screen, swipe to see notifications so it’s not the phone locking up completely)
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Firefox-Chrome-109-Benchmarks
I wish firefox was faster but benchmarks are pretty common, it’s not hard to test. It’s kind of an unfair fight at this point honestly, large swaths of the web are just built for chrome. There are other benchmark options out there, but even using Mozilla’s own kraken benchmarking solution, it loses tremendously more than it wins. I honestly really respect them for not building their benchmarking system to make their solutions come out on top.
In some benchmarks the lag from firefox is very significant and then on the other hand, when firefox does win, chrome is usually right behind it. It’s not ideal.
Shame YouTube and other sites are completely fucked on Firefox.
Are they? I watch YouTube on Firefox all the time, seems fine on my machine.
I think maybe 5+ years ago there were some performance issues caused by YT relying on features that were only implemented in Chrome, but I don’t recall having any issues wrt that for years.
I wouldn’t say “completely fucked”, but for a few years I noticed YouTube on Firefox has this occasional quirk where videos will quit playing and infinitely buffer at the exact same timestamp. Like there’s no way around it except skipping about 30 seconds ahead with the seek bar, or doing a Ctrl-F5 (hard refresh) and starting the whole video over. Opera GX doesn’t seem to have this problem at all.
But it’s still not a big enough deal to make me give up Firefox completely.
Yeah especially with user agent switcher google services run fine if needed
Wym? Youtube works just fine for me with uBlock Origin. Very rarely there’s some wonkiness but nothing unbearable.
I’ve got uBlock and Privacy Badger but turning them off or going incognito doesn’t help at all. The most common issue I get with YouTube is the video keeps freezing. Apparently this is because Google deliberately fuck it so that other browsers have to play catch up constantly. I have heard this is why Microsoft gave up and adopted Chromium.
The other issue is that if I open more than one YouTube tab my laptop sounds like it is about to take off into space. I can have an unlimited number of tabs from any other website open though.
Sounds to me like some hardware issue, I’ve literally never experienced any of this in the last 5 years on Firefox. My guess is considering it works fine with other browsers the graphics drivers are a bit wonky, or maybe Firefox is falling back to software rendering for some reason. Are you using Linux or Windows?
Are you using Linux or Windows?
Mac
Strange, usually things just work there considering the limited hardware variety. Is it an older Mac? I’m typing this on an M2 macbook and it works perfectly.
Anyway try to dig into the config and check if you’re using hardware rendering: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Firefox_Hardware_acceleration
If it turns out you’re using software rendering try forcing hardware rendering on: https://jamcity.helpshift.com/hc/en/6-genies-and-gems/faq/5737-how-do-i-enable-hardware-acceleration-on-my-browser/