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.
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
nonscript is your web condom. I will not touch a page without it.
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
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
I love Firefox, but I can’t shake the feeling that it it’s slower on YouTube. My tinfoil hat theory is that Google somehow throttles YouTube on Firefox.
Google does that a lot with their own web properties. I remember Google Meet didn’t support background replacement on Firefox, but switching Firefox’s user agent to Chrome suddenly fixed it.
It’s not tinfoil, they have been caught doing it and they continue to do it. It’s a scumbag company.
How the fuck they haven’t been slapped with an anticompetitive is beyon - oohh right. End stage capitalism
Firefox is good for webpages not web apps
That’s a really weird take. Like… what even is the difference supposed to be?
This sounds more like “everything should be as it was back when <insert arbitrary point in time here>! When there were still Webpages, and we were frolicking about the internet! Until
the fire nation attackedWeb apps took over!”What an oddly aggressive take on someone’s opinion
Basically I am saying Firefox is not as performant as chromium when loading JavaScript.
In general, browser benchmarks seem to often favor Firefox in terms of startup and first interaction timings, and often favor Chrome when it comes to crunching large amounts of data through JavaScript.
I.e. for pages which use small amounts of JavaScript, but call into it quickly after loading, Firefox tends to come out on top. But for pages which load lots of JavaScript and then run it constantly, Chrome tends to come out on top.We’re usually talking milliseconds-level of difference here though. So if you’re using a mobile browser or a low-power laptop, then the difference is often not measurable at all, unless the page is specifically optimized for one or the other.
Don’t agree, nothing noticeable for me anyhow. Chrome has the ultimate drawback: being under the control of a monopolistic evil corporation
One thing you can test is to apply a Chrome user-agent on Firefox when visiting YouTube. In my personal experience that actually noticeably improves the situation.
That’s super interesting! I’m not versed enough though, do you have like a tutorial you recommend or should I just Google it?
There’s a bunch of extensions that allow you to switch user-agent easily, I personally use this one, it includes a list of known strings to choose between as well.
And to check that it’s working, there are websites you can go to which will tell you what browser they have detected you are using.
Well, Google will probably optimize their shit for their own
privacy invasion sniffing toolbrowser twice as hard as for Firefox and suchI tried both and the videos played at the same speed for me
You haven’t experienced slow until you try to take Firefox through Google Cloud Console or Search Tools. 15 seconds in Chrome, somehow turns into 3 minutes in Firefox, funny how it does that.
Do you use YouTube so much that a small performance difference on a single Site has an influence on your browser choice?
For YouTube on IOS, I use Brave. It does a decent (but not perfect) job of hiding ads on YT.
I’m pretty sure someone discovered that is true recently, but can’t be assed to try to find it right now.
They used to also use the unreleased version 0 of shadow DOM for building the Polymer UI, which - being a Chrome-only prototype - understandably didn’t work on Firefox, and therefore instead used a really slow Javascript polyfill to render its UI.
I haven’t checked on it lately, but I imagine they must’ve changed at least that by now.
Same happens with Safari. The page loads in a weird funky way, video sorta first and then comments and suggestions many seconds later.
On Chrome on the exact same computer it’s instant.
They’re doing it on purpose.
Always gonna note too that Google Chrome (and chromium + derivatives to a lesser extent) kneecaps adblock plugins so that up to 50% fewer ad domains are blocked, blocklists are out of date, many in-page ads can’t be caught, it’s slower, and invisible trackers can bypass it.
Firefox masterrace
I remember when Chrome was released, all marketing was on how much faster it rendered webpages, I never saw that as an issue, Firefox was fast enough, I tried Chrome for a bit, and hated the UI, I remember being confused as to why everyone loved Chrome suddenly, and frankly, I still am a bit confused by both the sudden shift, and the absolute market dominance by Chrome…
I switched from FFX to Chrome back in the day because Chrome tabs were all independent processes in task manager, and one crappy website wouldn’t kill my whole browser.
When Google started their war on addons, I switched back to Firefox.
Pretty much my same progression except I’ve come back to LibreWolf instead.
Greetings, fellow LibreWolf user! Hurrah!
I grew up with a 56k modem. Anything after adsl is warp speed for me. I never understood or observed the speed differences between browsers.
Maybe I’m just so slow myself that I dont notice the difference but come on… how much can it be? A few seconds? Who is so busy that a few seconds is a worthy amount of time to try and save (not talking about F1 drivers here)?
I remember being confused as to why everyone loved Chrome suddenly
Because they were still using Explorer before that
Fair, I can see that, I guess my question was more for the people who already had switched to Firefox
Chrome is very good at running Google’s pages. Even before Google owned YouTube chrome was better at YouTube.
Google bought YouTube in 2006, Chrome was publicly released in 2008, so I believe you are misremembering the events…
Entirely possible, I was pretty busy in my early career back then
Over the years my customized Firefox looks like chrome ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I hated Chrome’s UI so much that I switched from Firefox to Pale Moon when Firefox started the whole Australis design language, and only switched back when the current design was launched
FF is doing great. All the have to do now is the Steam strategy. Do nothing and wait for the competition to fuck themselves over.
Steam’s strategy was to be first to market and essentially the only player in the game for a decade, making themselves the default.
You mean hope that they too don’t become subject to enshittification? I don’t have a lot of faith in that.
Besides that, Google is controlling as fuck. They might keep fucking themselves over but there’s no way they won’t start attempting to ruin things for the rest of us.
It seems Mozilla is not immune to the AI hype. I just hope their AI endeavour won’t kill them when the AI hype finally ends.
Thankfully the AI use is very tame so far, used for stuff like offline alt text generation and offline translation. I’m personally still concerned about copyrights and ethics of the models used, but at least it’s directed towards providing specific features, not a magic cure-all.
I’m more concerned with Mozilla spending its meager resources to chase some fads instead of focusing on improving firefox.
to be fair they are the only ones i know of putting it to actual good use.
ai itself is not the problem.
Thats the problem tho, the new mozilla leadership is on the “do anything but nothing” ship. I really hope they either dont do anything too horrible or someone forks it if they do.
Yeah, it’s been a huge waste of resources trying to reinvent everything.
there are already forks in place if you’re dissatisfied with firefox like librewolf, floorp or the new one from mullvad
does anyone recommend any Firefox alternatives? I genuinely hate Firefox’s UI and keybinds and the scrolling tabs
Floorp, I use it and I love it. It’s especially great for Opera refugees, it has workspaces and stuff. Soon Firefox will support tab groups natively, and then Floorp will be perfect. It’s a Firefox fork though.
Tab groups and non-independent tab muting (seems like it was domain-specific rather than tab-specific last I tried) are the two main things that kept me from switching back to FF as my primary browser (still use it for DTA, for example, but DTA got a big nerf back during the major extension overhaul, so that was a letdown). Tried some extensions, but none really worked in a way I considered usable and didn’t want to just keep trial and erroring through them given I already have a browser that functionally meets my needs, even if I’d rather not be using a chromium browser.
If native tab groups work well enough, I’ll probably give it another chance.
That we all need something like tab muting really shows that the internet has gone to shit.
I sometimes just need to mute something for a second that I’m otherwise listening to. Or I’m switching between multiple sources, and don’t want like 3 or more playing at the same time… usually all on the same domain. I don’t want to have to actually go to the tab and mute it. I’m frequently muting and unmuting things that way to the point that even if its the only source of sound, I still mute by tab instead of just turning my computer volume off sometimes out of habit, so its a deal breaker.
I think this just says more about the perils of embracing untreated ADHD than the internet itself.
you may not even have to change to another browser or fork, please have a look at some designs in https://trickypr.github.io/FirefoxCSS-Store.github.io/ select a design and follow the page, and you shall find the instructions (usually just downloading/pasting userChrome/Content.css)
and for scrolling tabs, if your problem is very small tab size, then try changing
browser.tabs.tabMinWidthin about:config
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.orgpage 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.
Shame YouTube and other sites are completely fucked on Firefox.
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/
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
Everything enshitifies… Everything, problem that worries me that, Firefox will enshitify like this too one day
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/
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 cyclesHow 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.
At that point it will be forked yet again, and that fork will take over. Mozilla is a very active open source member though.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Mfw when plebs are still using GUI browsers while I use Lynx.
w3m with framebuffer image support, my man.
Pfhh images. Back in my dad we had ASCII art. And we liked it!
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.
You can drag and drop your toolbar, extensions, and layout.
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!
shots fired! Shots fired!
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
not at all, thank you!
frantic ignoring reddit sounds
dishing out the tools to help users take back control of their lIves. hero quality.
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.
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.
