Firefox is dead to me – and I'm not the only one who is fed up I know some people still love Firefox. But, folks, it's a bad relationship, and the problems have been going on for a while now. Let me count the ways. Back in February, Mozilla changed Firefox's Terms of Use and Privacy Notice for the worse. Mozilla removed a longstanding FAQ promise – "Nope. Never have, never will" – …
I agree. It’s bloody depressing.
I’m fed up of once-good software slowly turning to sewage until it gets to the point where it’s unusable and eventually dies. Usually because successive heads decide that it needs “improving”.
Wild horses wouldn’t drag me to use chrome. Problem is, as you point out, what else is there?
I hate this industry sometimes
Vivaldi is my browser of choice (yes, I know -but?). However, sometimes I don't have a choice. Vivaldi cannot sense some vital hotel login screens to get wifi access in. Firefox does so I can get in and able to revert to Vivaldi.
Similarly some poorly designed online systems will not work properly with Vivaldi. So FF is the solution. Bad news for FF is my use is very, very limited so monetising me is pointless. The bad news for Vivaldi is that if FF was not there I would probably have to swop to one of the poorer Chromium clones.
"Vivaldi cannot sense some vital hotel login screens to get wifi access in. Firefox does so I can get in and able to revert to Vivaldi."
I get much better performance just putting my phone in hotspot mode and using my data connection. I also skip the issues with using a wifi connection where I'm not sure of the security. Is the hotel logging customer usage? They have your phone number and credit card info so they've got you identified and would know what you were getting up to online while away from home. Did you read all of the fine print carefully on the hotel login page?
Yeah, Vivaldi is my main browser as well, but I'll be forced to change it to a Firefox based one because of Chrome's unacceptable Manifest v3. So I guess Floorp or something, which will suck, but at least it will have proper ad blocking. It all went downhill when Opera removed native gestures and other cool features.
I don't trust any venue's Wi-Fi so I do the same as you if possible, but sometimes there's no mobile signal. In those few cases I use ProtonVPN, which I have also helped lots of my friends install - and no, not through an affiliate link!
A common complaint I hear is that the venue is blocking a website they want to use (usually FetLife, a social network for kinksters). I am absolutely against censorship, per se, for adults.
It's time for a comprehensive review of browsers available to Linux.
Of particular interest to me are browsers capable of supporting powerful add-on software enabling an advertisement-free experience, cloaking, versatile viewing and saving of video content, means to civilise the likes of YouTube, control over cookies and scripts, easy organisation of bookmarks, flexible home page layout and choice of default search engines, and full control over linking among devices, with complete independence from Google, Microsoft, and similar entities. In essence, a browser like Firefox once aspired to be.
That’s the biggie for me. FF has a massive array of plugins. I actually don’’t care much about what the basic browser is (as long as it’s not chrome); it’s the plugins that are the real value and will be very difficult to replace. Especially the ones that make the web half useful by keeping the shite out
I'm curious why you want the VPN there? I run my one at OS level unless I can get it to run on the network device the computer is getting a connection through level*. I want as many, ideally all non-connection packets to go through the VPN if I have it turned on so I only have one network path to be worried about, so doing it through the browser means there are all sorts of other things that would bypass the VPN altogether.
* It's quite easy to implement the VPN on a little hardware device when it's a personal one, which is my primary VPN. It's much harder when it's a corporate one I'm buying because they all want to connect me through some large binary that does who knows what. I have broken the protections on one of those in the past in order to use it the way I wanted, but it wasn't easy to get the necessary information and it changed often enough that I had to script it. Also, that is probably against the terms of most services, though I looked and the one I was doing it with hadn't thought to forbid me yet. I still stopped doing that routinely, though.
I recently installed Pi-Hole which zaps ads by failing DNS queries for known advertising servers. It works well, with the added benefit that ad supression covers everything on my network: all browsers, phones, tablets. As the name implies, it was originally for the Raspberry Pi, but you can run it on other Linux machines.
Yeah, DNS based blocking only works on things that come from a domain you can block. When the ads come from the same domain as the content, you're stuffed.
Think of advertising as a security threat (which, really, you should), and you start thinking about attack surface. Then you realise, that to adequately defend an attack surface, it should have multiple layers, like an onion. A Pi-Hole is the outer layer of the onion; in the browser, there are layers from NoScript, and uBlock origin. I've given up on AdBlock Plus, because of the annoying nag screen it pops up every other day, but you can have that as a layer too.
Chrome, as far as I am concerned, is an attack vector on my privacy by Google. Prove me wrong.
> Pi Hole is pushed as the be all and end all
said in response to a comment that started
>> PiHole does ok at blocking ads, but...
So, hardly being pushed as "the be all and end all" - in fact, not "pushed" at all, most of the comments just say "I use it, get this result", and we're not even getting a voice-over by Stephen Fry, so not much of an ad budget there.
> various posters, saying very very similar things
Pi Hole really does one thing, does it the same way for everyone and works; it isn't some giant do-it-all-and-bake-a-cake-as-well bloated monstrosity, so everyone's experience of using it is going to be the same. Which is a Good Thing, btw. So, duh, everyone is going to say the same thing about it: it works, it is useful, you'll be better off if you get one, still use the other mechanisms as wel to forestall as much bad behaviour as you can.
> makes me wonder if there is a degree of sockpuppeting happening online...
I have better uses for my socks.
I am mildly surprised whenever I read FF is still going.
I used to use it and recommended it because I could do a search, trawl through the pages of responses highlighting important bits and moving on.
AT the end I could then use the browser to pull up the highlighted text and if necessary drill down to the original page again.
Saved me and colleagues hours on research time whenever we had to find the truth of something or other.
FF developers removed the facility stating that it was off no use, and when I pointed out I had been involved with networking etc since before "ethernet", I was told that it was time I realised that nothing from my time was relevant in this modern IT world.
As I was still laughing at the 30 year IT backlog caused by MS and IBM, I had to chuckle, but decided at the time that if that was the knowledge base of the FF developers, it would all be downhill from then and immediately switched default browsers.
Unfortunately OPERA has not lived up to its promise either!
Lucky I don't care anymore as I now use IT for fun.
Works for me.
I switched from Firefox a few months ago for some reason I don't recall (it wasn't performance) and am happy.
All the Firefox plugins/extensions/whatever work, including a couple I wrote for my own peculiar work flow, so I'm happy.
As I mentioned in a previous article here some time in the past, I don't see any substantive difference between browsers in terms of performance, including in some extremely Javascript heavy computational applications which I develop and maintain for one of my research collaborators.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but the limiting factor, even with a gigabit connection, seems to me to be network latency and the load on the server on the other end of the pipe, upon neither of which the browser will have much effect.
I regularly use Zen and Chromium for testing and development, as well as to connect to sites that don't like all the ad blocking and antitracking extensions I have regularly turned on in Waterfox, and keep Firefox around as well, just because.
Firefox has always been Open Source, and most other browsers are based on Chromium, which is also open source. So I'm not sure what you're asking for?
> So... What now?
Palemoon.
Safari.
No, they don't work the same as Chrome; many sites reject them for their user agent. Stop using broken sites. Oh, but you can't stop using a broken site? Let me put it to you this way: Yes, you can.
These browsers work for the vast majority of sites, and sites have to practically *try hard* to break themselves. It is a concious decision and coding to break on unknown browser agent, against any recommendation that you will see anywhere. You can un-break these sites, usually, by adding a user-agent override (either via an extension or about:config entry). Then, use one of these browsers, because they work - they work very well, and Palemoon (at least) supports any ad/script blocker that you'll want to use, and so much more.
I use Palemoon, and user agent string are not the main compatibility problem. Occasionally something does not work right or is too slow (including some of our silly internal systems – solved by using FF). Occasionally something complains but works acceptably nonetheless.
The biggest problem seems ‘feature canaries’. Websites check for some random feature X, which they may not use at all, and when the browser does not support it they conclude it does not support Y and Z they actually need, throw a tantrum and refuse to load at all.
But then, most of modern popular web is utter crap and I only touch it when necessary and with a burner browser profile. So what do I know…
I think we may need to focus on WEBKIT... for open source contributions, abandoning ANY TIE-IN to a particular toolkit or appearance (like GTK >3 and that HIDEOUS ADWAITA SHIT-LOOK) and focus INSTEAD on a basic standard that creates an in-process browser window (and most of the cool browser features WITH plugins) using a handful of lines of wrapper code, something LIKE PYTHON even. Less about housekeeping (bookmarks, history, cache+cookie storage, menus, toolbars) and MORE about COMPATIBILITY and STANDARDS COMPLIANCE in rendering web pages.
It CAN be done. Why is NOBODY DOING THIS??? If NOT for the FLAT-ASS-NESS and lack of plugins, Midori works. Or, did.
It is the ONLY way, now, to DIVORCE OURSELVES from the CHROME-OPOLY! ZERO tracking, ZERO lock-ins, ZERO "[CR]App Store", and COMPLETE CONTROL to the USER!!!
And, something we should ALL miss: A nice 3D Skeuomorphic "eye candy" display the way Firefox USED to be!
Ladybird perhaps. There are other browser engines.
Also, someone could take-up the Firefox source code and improve on it. The Foundation is clearly dead, merely a shill to instill a warm-fuzzy feeling on users whilst the commercial entity runs the show and pilfers all the money.
someone could take-up the Firefox source code and improve on it
I'd love to but for the code-bloat. It would take YEARS to figure out how the damn thing works! This is the BIGGEST PROBLEM
And web sites seem to be DROPPING COMPATIBILITY - NOT EVEN MY BANK will accept a Firefox browser, at least NOT on their "new" *a year old) web site, for some reason (probably web-side ARROGANCE). Everything on that site fails to work with FF, starting at the logon page.
More and more web-side enshittification as well, it seems. DELIBERATE FF INCOMPATIBILITY???
I would think that Apple might have an interest in WebKit being at the cutting edge of compatibility though, and chances of "web developers" RESPECTING iPhone and Mac are a bit higher.
[I cannot believe I said "web developers" - now I need mouthwash to kill the bile taste]
NOTE: FF totally blows it with the CONSTANT need to "update". slack, github, others FREQUENTLY 'complain' at you if you';re NOT using "the latest bleeding edge" features on the scripting side, and often LOOK LIKE CRAP or just FAIL TO OPERATE without "up"grading your perfectly good setup. Updating FreeBSD [on a dedicated developer system like mine where I guild from source fo max stability] take DAYS and generally must "update EVERYTHING" then deal with WHAT BROKE **THIS** TIME. Stinks on ice! I'd rather fix it ALL then stay STABLE for YEARS.
WHY is this? Is it Google-monster's way of DRIVING EVERY OTHER POSSIBLE COMPETITOR AWAY????
This is why 'web kit' makes more sense, because as a separate entity, it can service more browser front-ends as long as they do NOT change the ABI/API in the process. And an 'Open' version could be SPY/ENCUMBERANCE-FREE, allowing as-block etc. to work as desired.
[Things Mozilla wasted effort on instead of polishing the rendering engine with minimal tweeks and efficiency improvements - the list must be ENDLESS!!!]
Besides all the concerns one can have about Chrome/ium, there is in addition the risk of having HTTP/HTML/JS standards be implemented by only one rendering engine. FF is not perfect and deserves to be run better, but it's still better than having just Safari serve as a standards check.
Epiphany is the gnome web browser. It is based on Apple's Webkit. The gnome help browser also appears to use Webkit.
https://apps.gnome.org/Epiphany/
I am no longer able to install Konqueror from any Yum repositories, but there are likely flatpacks available.
https://apps.kde.org/konqueror/
Konqueror's KHTML was (long ago) chosen by Apple for Safari, which also moved to Blink.
Firefox stopped caring about the quality of their software the moment they forced out Brendan Eich.
Ah, yes, 'the ousting Brendan Eich' - former Mozilla CEO, reportedly the inventor of Javascript. Reminds me of ANOTHER Project that forked away from one that might have shot their own feet recently... in a similar manner even!
How about a LibreFox project? Or LibreZilla??? Run, of course, by THAT GUY!! Rust-Free, focused on extendability and compatibility and PERFORMANCE! I can dream, can't I?
[I am deliberately leaving out ALL political commentary on this. You can read articles and look people up, then just imagine what I'd say, and that's good enough. Rent Free, you're welcome!]
What do you mean by that? Because I can still change the search engine, either the default one easily or to a different one on the fly for a search. Admittedly, they did annoy me by removing one of the methods to do that, but that's just a UI change and I can still do it, just not by the keyboard-friendly way I used to (typing the first few letters of the search source and pressing tab used to do it, but now it's less convenient).
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And, here we go again. All that I asked, really ALL that I asked, was that LibreWolf import my settings, passwords etc from Firefox. I'm running an absolute bog-standard Mint install, and yet LibreWolf couldn't find the files to import.
This, in a nutshell, is why dog+world runs Chrome. Because changing to anything beyond Firefox invariably runs into some stupid problem, and some of us are just far too tired of fixing stuff to be bothered.
I'm a couple of decades past hacking around with software. I like Mint, and LibreOffice because they Just Work, and more importantly they Just Work the same way year after year with no stupid surprises. I can buy a new laptop or desktop and have it set up and running in fifteen minutes.
Firefox is not as good as it used to be, but it's better than Chrome. Mozilla is not the company they used to be, but at least they're not Google.
And I'll carry on, and once year will try a replacement only to discover it doesn't work.
Most of their budget is currently coming from Google for having Google as default search engine. The way the antitrust lawsuit is going, Google will not be allowed anymore to pay them for that. Even assuming it's possible to maintain a fast browser with good features on a tiny budget, it's much harder when you have been used to a steady source of income. I don't know the internal details, but I wouldn't be surprised if they're desperate to find solutions.
I thought Mozilla Corp had 400 million sitting in the bank that they hadn't spent, from Google? Assuming the Google deal ends in the next few years, that should be enough to develop enhancements and features (or just bring the old ones back!) to make a browser good enough that she people will pay for it, surely?! Perhaps the EU will chip in wanting something properly open. Any sensible corporation or startup should see $20/year/user to avoid Google (or MS) knowing what all their employees are doing as money well spent.
Nowhere near enough people will pay for a browser app to cover the cost of keeping Mozilla Corp. afloat in it's current state, especially when there's no end of free alternatives out there. Look at their current market share - it would collapse further the moment they so much as hint at a freemium model. Donations wouldn't come close to addressing their financial needs either, and we've all seen just how well their other efforts to monetise the browser are going. The only viable future I can see for Firefox is for Mozilla Corp. to give up on their ambitions of becoming a major player in the tech industry, let most of their staff go, and transition to being a nonprofit conservancy that stewards the project as an open-source community-driven initiative. Otherwise, they'll at best continue to fade out into obscurity until they go bust, and likely get picked up by someone at a bargain rate. If that happens, I just hope whoever buys them is committed to the original vision of maintaining a viable alternative to the Google monopoly on standards and continuing to drive the development of an open web.
You're probably the only one, as the free alternatives (including Firefox as it is now, of course) aren't THAT bad. Mozilla used to be a "pay for use" browser, but Microsoft and Google doing it for free stops that from being viable.
I know of 0 current "pay-for-license to browse" browsers.
Only way to make it viable to charge for a web browser, is to somehow stop MS, Google, and random people with a github account, from providing free ones.
Firefox. It's awash with Mozilla developer stupidity
I think that the real Firefox developers have left the house. The only "developers" left are the resume-padding "look ma! imma firefox developer!!" losers. They remove features because it's beyond their ability to add new ones. How else do you explain things like removing working useful features like the tabs preferences for absolutely no reason?
They've removed:
* Ability to turn off javascript
* Ability to not use tabs
* Activity indicator
* User profile manager
* Tab groups
* The ability to disable cookies
* Fine-grained cookie management ("accept/deny this cookie" dialogs)
* Sound (now PulseAudio only, no ALSA)
* RSS reader
* "Save tabs and quit"
* Ability to export history
* FTP
They've removed:
* Ability to turn off javascript
Available in a plugin like Noscript
* Ability to not use tabs
??? Eh? Just don't use them if you don't want to
* User profile manager
Still there.
* Tab groups
Still there,
* The ability to disable cookies
Still there.
* Fine-grained cookie management ("accept/deny this cookie" dialogs)
That's pretty clumsy. You can choose in advance which sort of cookies to allow or deny.
* RSS reader
Plugins are available
* "Save tabs and quit"
Your tabs are saved when you quit.
* Ability to export history
Plugins to do this.
* FTP
It's 2025. No one should be using FTP. No one.
Because it is terminally insecure? And FTPS isn't really much of an improvement as now you get to maintain an SSL cert on top.
(At work we use the z/OS FTP client but traffic is transparently diverted to SFTP. Port 21 was nailed shut years ago.)
@Naich
"It's 2025. No one should be using FTP. No one."
.. FTP sites still used a lot commercially, you would be surprised how many legacy systems use FTP to transfer data when integrating across different products (with credentials obviously).
FileZilla (FTP client) gets used most weeks by me for work purposes (back in the day, when it was still supported I used the FireFTP FF plugin as it was convenient)
I don't know when it happened, but ALSA support is back. I previously used Chromium for streaming radio on my "music server" (a Pi 4) but after an update, sound was dropping out regularly. I installed Firefox ESR and it works perfectly.
(I use Vivaldi on the desktop PC for everyday browsing, Librewolf in a virtual machine for banking, and Chromium with previous data wiped when a site won't work with ads and scripts blocked.)
ALSA support never left, mozilla just stopped enabling it in their distributed binaries. I always enable it in my builds, because I run them on multiple Linux systems (some are ALSA only)
Arch Linux enables ALSA in their builds, other distributors probably do too. It depends on where you got your binaries.
Not all the things you listed have actually been removed. Some of them are still there, so I must conclude that you didn't look for them.
The problem with adding features is that they'll often only appeal to a specific subset and anyone outside the subset tends to be a little annoyed that they spent effort on them. For example, they did add a new feature relatively recently, and it's one I quite like, namely translations a la Google Translate but using offline models. I use that feature a lot and get privacy benefits from it. But if you don't, then I could understand why that doesn't seem to matter much. The article author has a similar thing in Pocket, which I have never used and was rather unpopular when Mozilla spent money on it, but now it's unpopular when they stop. I don't think all the things Mozilla does are valuable, but I have to consider that maybe there are others who benefit more than I think from the things they've developed.
I've got plenty of complaints about Firefox, but I have always ended in the same place, which is that they are the best browser of the realistic choices available to me. Everyone else is either more limited (Safari or Chromium-based things), or they built their thing around what Mozilla made. If I use Librewolf, I'm still using most of Firefox, and the project would not exist or would not work well if Mozilla wasn't building the things they do. Of those who bother to do it, Mozilla is doing a better job than the rest of them in my opinion.
It is not, I repeat, NOT, the developers making the decisions. We just build/remove/whatever what management tells us to. Sure we can voice our opinions but if they wanna do X, then X is what gets done. I don't work for Mozilla but I've worked in a lot of dev jobs and it's the same everywhere I've been.
This.
FF has a whole raft of compatible ad and tracking blockers that can be used all at the same time. No other browser does this.
Is it tedious and takes lots of time to set up for your personal preferences? Yes, but that's the fault of websites having all that shite to begin with. Don't blame FF for shitastic website design.
> losing ad blockers will mean I laregly stop using the internet. You forget what a useless mess it is without blockers,
Wish I could upvote you more than once, I use metcheck weather site and over the weekend had to use it on mobile and ye gads it was hard going with ads obscuring large chunks of the phone screen, even my pi-hole stops that on wifi at home.
Sure, but if you need those sites, whatcha gonna do?I usually end up opening it in the Chrome that I end up keeping around for, and using only for, just such occasions. But what I won't do is go off on FF as though it's to blame for the situation, rather than the website. (Plenty else to complain about, I've gone back and forth on my usual browser, not a die-hard fanboi. But FF is my current default.)
I used to get that with Opera (the real one, not the Chrome reskin). It was never Opera's fault; those messages came from the web sites themselves. And it was never even sensible -- a bit of browser UA spoofing usually ended with a fully functioning experience. It's just lazy and/or stupid web coders. Opera coped by making spoofing/cloaking easy to do. Firefox, being a direct descendant of the granddaddy of commercial browsers, shouldn't have to.
-A.
Yeah.. Some of us are old enough to remember "This site works best in Internet Explorer 6".
I also remember the obnoxious "This site doesn't run in your old browser. You need to upgrade to IE6" - even though I was running a more modern and capable browser at the time.
Seeing that on sites I was planning on buying stuff from lost them a customer (and sometimes got a snotty complaint email/feedback - I was young and naive)
We need an "old fart" icon. I guess this is closest, but I'm not a windows user!
There are two approaches. You can build to web standards or you can cobble websites together and tweak them until the seem to work.
If you choose the latter, your wobbly pile of poo will only work on some browsers so ypu need to warn the others off.
If you codebit properly, it works. IE.2 is long gone.
@Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck
There are user agent switcher plugins.
I run FF identifying as Chrome via plugin when I get such issues - usually solves the problem as most sites are just lazy & reject on user agent (instead of doing what they should do & check if particular functionality* is supported)
* Though if they were any good at creating websites it would use no / minimal .js and definitely not rely on browser specific functionality.
Like others, for me it's the ONLY browser that still has addons that block everything I most revile about what the Internet has become.
And it can and is fully forked (I switched to Waterfox quite some time ago).
So far, the long list of addons still work. They probably slow down my browsing even more so than un-modded FF vs Chrome or Edge, but I don't care. From tracking and ad blockers to DDG mods that let me locally block entire domains from search results. Heck, a quick glance shows me that half of my addons are just to make Youtube tolerable! From filtering sponsor blocks to stopping autoplay to preventing those annoying "are you still there?" because I run binaural sound channels for hours on time while coding.
Those times when FF is now broken enough that I have to use Chrome or Edge, traffic is routed through Pi-Hole, but a DNS black hole is simply not the same thing. I just want to smash my monitor because of how bad the experience is then.
So, no, FF is not quite yet done. But they're trying their hardest, it seems.
> "Like others, for me it's the ONLY browser that still has addons that block everything I most revile about what the Internet has become."
On the rare occurrence that I browse the Web using a stock browser, I am horrified at how terrible the experience is. I honestly don't know how most folks can stand it.
Fellow developers always seem surprised when I tell them I don't use Firefox. It's not that I fell out of love with it sooner, I never really fell in love with it in the first place. I get fed up with Internet Explorer back in 2000 and jumped ship to Opera way before Firefox was even a thing. I did feel adrift in the final days of classic Opera when it failed to keep pace, and they then took a long time to deliver its rather lacklustre Chromium-based reincarnation on Linux. I did look elsewhere, briefly at Otter, but it was still in its infancy, and at Firefox, but it didn't appeal. If I remember correctly, it still didn't handle dark desktop themes well, which was the case for a very long time. If it had, I might have stayed. Fortunately, I was saved just in time by the arrival of Vivaldi. Yes, I'm sure many of you will be all too quick to point out that it is also Chromium-based, but it doesn't feel like it, and it doesn't come with the usual spyware baggage. The Vivaldi team, being a continuation of the original Opera team, have always been strong on this point and have earned my trust over these long years,
Vivaldi is also my choice.
It's reasonably private.
It's reasonably secure.
It's reasonably fast.
It's reasonably free of annoyances.
It's very customisable.
It's very stable.
That combination of reasonables and verys is good enough for me.
I used Firefox (and Waterfox) for years but as others are also pointing out, it's just got worse and worse as the version numbers have increased, and its forks are no better.
I may be a developer but I don't really care what engine my browser uses; I actually want to forget there's even a browser between me and the website I'm using, and Vivaldi gets me closer to that nirvana than other browsers.
It's reasonably free of annoyances.
Two things about Vivaldi really annoy me. Address bar auto completion. How is it possible that a site that I visit every-fucking-day is not only not the top option when I start typing, but sometimes isn't even in the list at all. I have tried a multitude of options in the settings, and even when I find something reasonably close, the next update for some reason resets my preferences.
The other thing is restoring the previous session when you accidentally exit a window with multiple browser windows open. On several occasions I have had other apps on top of my main Vivaldi window freeze, requiring multiple clicks on the X to shut them down. Only to have one fall through to Vivaldi underneath and close it too. Restoring the session (which is always 'yesterday') launches duplicates of all the other windows that were still open as well. Yet sync is just minutes old and knows all the windows and workspaces. I 'only' have 70 tabs open right now, so the mess is significant.
This is the perfect time fir Vivaldi to change horses and base on Firefox or one of the hardened derivatives like IronFox or Fennec.
The result would have the plugin array of Firefox with the bookmark handling and UI of Vivaldi.
I don't think it's right to blame the victim here, as Google has clearly embraced being as vile and evil as possible. I'm thinking that gmail has given them enough kompromat to fend the regulators off from the sleigh, but the damned wolves keep changing with elections.
I used Vivaldi for a while when it first came out, but lack of Tree-Style-Tabs (TST) reverted me back to Firefox.
I tried requesting that Vivaldi implement TST-style tab systems, but in threads about it a Vivaldi dev would always demand a detailed explanation of why we (TST users) use TST and prefer it over the tab-grouping features.
Vivaldi are free to implement or not implement any feature, but as TST is a personal preference, I can't give a clear explanation of why or why not I prefer it over other mechanisms. And that's exactly what a personal preference is, something usually logically unexplainable, and the frequent demands for such explanation from its users who have that preference - and the un-substantiated defences that tab-groups were superior and we should be using that instead - drove me away from Vivaldi.
It does exactly what it's name implies, presents the tab list as a nested tree of tabs (e.g. like a directory tree in a file browser).
Back in the day, Firefox was a ground breaking browser. Like many in tech, I became an early adopter and evangelist to those around me. After Firefox version 3.6+, t seems to me users began to enter into an abusive relationship with Mozilla. Then, after too many years of living with Mozilla's constant bad decisions, the last straw for me was about five years ago when Mozilla's cert for addons went bad. It was on that day I switched to a Chromium clone.
Our company has spent the last 15 years developing an independent HTML+CSS rendering engine (for print), and as part of this we've run tens of thousands of different tests on different browsers - the web-platform-tests, and our own.
For CSS, in general, our assessment is that where the browsers differ, Firefox is usually correct.
CSS is only a small part of the web browsing experience, and for bells and whistls and UI there will be other thiings to look for. But recently I was helping someone debug a website which was failing in firefox, and the fault was they had done something invalid that Chrome should have been rejecting, but wasn't. Specifically: element.style.height = "10" is invalid, Firefox rejects it but Chrome accepts it as "10px".
So be very, very careful with your "this site fails on Firefox" complaints, because we've been down this road before: 25 years ago it was Microsoft playing fast and loose with the rules, not Google.
Unfortunately Windows has such a hold on the market that "correct" essentially means "works with Edge". Something may not technically comply with a CSS standard, but given a choice between "works with Edge" and "follows the standard" most people will take the former.
I have a lot of time for Taylor Swift. Very hard working woman, smart, decent, not afraid to own her mistakes. Better than Mozilla has been for years now.
With AI, the author isn't objecting to its mere existence, but to trying to develop it in ways that will sacrifice functionality and soak up resources that Mozilla can't afford, in a doomed attempt to compete with companies that *can* afford it.
It's reasonable to ditch your favourite Indy band if they start playing nothing but covers of Taylor Swift.
I've often wondered how much Firefox actually costs to maintain. It clearly costs millions to keep a useful development team, but hundreds of millions like they claim? How much of that is just being pissed away on some flight of fancy that management comes up with when the CEO gets rotated out?
I would be willing to bet that if they fired the entire top tier of management and spent those salaries on hiring some decent developers to address long standing bugs and user feature requests both Mozilla and Firefox would be in a far better state. Those at the top of all these big corporations are nothing more than leeches, parasites contributing nothing of value but draining away the valuable lifeblood.
Mozilla undoubtedly has more people than truly needed to accomplish the goal, but you can't make a comparison like that. Seven people have not yet built something, but you're implying that their 2026 alpha will arrive on time and work, neither of which is proven or provable. I've aimed for a release date before. It doesn't mean I achieved my goal each time.
Also, even if they do have a release by then, there are lots of things the alpha will probably break on, which is not a surprise, because it's an alpha, but how long do you think it will take to get from 2026's alpha to full, production-quality, tested release. Also, it's often quite a bit easier to build something from scratch than it is to build the same thing among a bunch of older code which you have to avoid breaking, to make sure everything works on all the platforms that run the same code, or at least subsets of the same code. They also develop more things. Does the Ladybird project intend to develop desktop and mobile browsers? From a quick read of their website, I'm not convinced they are writing anything other than the engine, but Mozilla does build all those other things. Having another browser engine would be great and I hope they do hit their targets, but I'm not going to jump from "I want it" to "it will definitely happen and be perfect".
When Ladybird has a functioning release, we can compare their team size to Mozilla's browser engine people. Until then, the comparison has insufficient information. Even when we have that information, comparisons from a team building one piece to an organization building many will be invalid.
"I've often wondered how much Firefox actually costs to maintain. It clearly costs millions to keep a useful development team, but hundreds of millions like they claim?"
Vivaldi technologies has about 60 employees to maintain and develop their entirely competent browser. Let's assume Firefox is ten times as complex as Vivaldi due to historic cruft and it's open source roots. So that assumption would suggest Mozilla need about 600 employees to maintain Firefox. Using a fully loaded average labour cost of $100k, that's $60m a year.
How much of that is just being pissed away on some flight of fancy that management comes up with when the CEO gets rotated out?"
Mozilla Foundation accounts for 2023 show that they spent $300m on "program" costs, and $192m on "management and general", so there's a gap of about $432m a year. Somebody must be enjoying spending that much money with zero transparency or accountability.
I'm surprised, to say the least... which OS is this on? How many tabs? I'm no fan of Mozilla Corp but use Firefox on numerous machines and can't recall the last time it didn't automatically restore all tabs on startup. In fact on the PC I'm typing on now I have a cron job to kill Firefox each evening (hardly necessary but saves memory bloat etc) and it starts up again each morning perfectly. I appear to have 48 tabs open at the moment, in case that's relevant.
According to All Tabs Helper, I have over 6000 tabs currently open in the Firefox instance I am typing this in. I routinely kill Firefox and it happily restores all the tabs when I restart it. Many of these tabs have been around for years. This is 115.15.0esr - from Debian.
I am guessing you don't have enough memory (maybe virtual memory size?) - or aren't using Linux.
"over 6000 tabs currently open" and "Many of these tabs have been around for years."
I've asked this before, and never received an answer. WHY? What's the point? What good does it do you? Never heard of bookmarks?
How long does it take to navigate to any random one of those open tabs vs picking it out of a logically laid-out set of bookmarks with subdirectories? More to the point, how much of that clutter do you actually use day-in and day-out? Or even week to week? How much time does it save vs just re-opening it, should you actually need it for five minutes today[0]? I can honestly say that I've never had more than a couple dozen (maybe!) tabs open at once, and rarely as many as a dozen.
Not trying to take the mick, I'm curious as to what kind of work-flow would benefit from even a few hundred tabs being open all the time, much less several thousand. Is this common enough to warrant a new type of web browser (or setting in an existing browser) to make this smoother/faster/easier?
[0] To say nothing of the fact that the Web should always be treated as ephemeral ...
Can't speak for Graham and am a mere 500-odd tab case myself, but:
1. There is arguably some pathology in hoarding so many, I'll allow. Maybe nothing worse than laziness in not getting around to spring-cleaning a few of them more often though.
2. They can be very much like bookmarks, but with less effort to maintain: Ctrl+D or more painstakingly select which subfolder to file it in, vs it's already right there; Navigate to bookmark, right-click, delete, vs Ctrl+W bye-bye forever. (Although Recently Closed Tabs means it needn't be forever if you made a booboo, unlike deleting a bookmark.)
3. I like the chronology of recent (and yes not-so-recent) events the linear accumulation of tabs presents.
4. The scroll position on the page (and some other bits of "live" state) persist even after a reboot. That can be very handy.
I actually do save the whole lot as a folder of bookmarks once in a while, but only out of paranoia in case I come a cropper like our poor OP here, and touch wood I have not had any such issue in quite some time.
> I actually do save the whole lot as a folder of bookmarks once in a while, but only out of paranoia in case I come a cropper like our poor OP here, and touch wood I have not had any such issue in quite some time.
I have a load of tabs in FF too. How do you save them as a folder, please?
"Save as Folder" - As a german with the german Firefox I'm sorry for not knowing the correct english names of the functions/steps, but I answer non the less because nobody else did: right click on a tab, select "select all tabs", right klick again and select "add tabs as bookmark" (or something like that), then a window appears where you can enter the folder name and the location to save them.
I use FF because of the following:
1. Ublock Origin (uses the original manifest v2, not the crippled manifest v3 in chrome)
2. UserChrome.css where I install a patch to allow 6 rows of tabs. I can't use another browser where a single row of tabs limits you to 20 or so. (A vertical tab bar just wastes more space without allowing more tabs)
3. A tab sleep plugin (can't remember what it's called) that makes 200+ tabs in a window manageable on a 16GB machine.
Yes, I know, I'm weird.
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It seems like you're in upper management. Have you actually tried AI?
The new WhatsApp chatbot that Meta forced into it, you can ask it how to disable itself. It replies, very helpfully, that you can go into settings > chats > etc > etc and disable it that way. Except those options don't exist.
AI is very good at generating things that look realistic but aren't possible, why do you think it would be any good at being able to create a browser?
I've used Firefox for a long time. Something different back in my Amiga days, but I think that's about it. I'm not a heavy browser user, although it is open for a good percent of the day. The one significant plugin I use is "NoScript". I block things like tags.google.com, and anything from a social media site. Google searching works fine, as does YouTube - I even have a little-used channel there. I normally have only one tab open (two now - one for the comments, one for main El Reg) - speed has never been a problem for me.
I hit the website incompatibility issue with the government's healthcare portal which I needed to use. That caused me to buy a Win-11 laptop so I could access it. Also need the dam Teams viewer tool occasionally.
I'm staggered to meet someone who doesn't have their browser open permanently. Me and my 2000+ tabs are amazed.
Firefox copes fine with everything. The only bug is that "restore previous session" has to be hit ASAP after Windows force closes things for it's monthly panic attack, otherwise you lose stuff.
I’ve grown tired of chromium after giving up on Mozilla years ago and am taking Zen browser for a spin.
I’m really liking it.
Moved to raindrop.io to replace pocket and, well, time will tell.
I still use chromium as I’m a web dev.
I also use different browsers for other different reasons.
But I don’t use Firefox and haven’t for a long time. Every time I try to switch back to it, I’m left dissatisfied.
I have such fond memories of the old days when Firefox rose from pheonix and took back the web.
Back when the internet was truly fun and open and not swamped with social media and AI slop.
Hard fork (developed with new code that is not dependent on mozilla, although some(only what remains compatible and exploitable with their code) security patches are still taken from Mozilla when they pop up): Palemoon.(Features the updated and maintained XUL UI, is a single process application, lots of new defense in depth code, a custom JavaScript engine, has a fork of Ublock available, Goanna rendering engine, uses the VLC media codec for playing videos.)
Soft fork (completely dependent on mozilla for core code): Waterfox(uses Extend Security Release build of Firefox, has a custom UI, an independent search engine, rips out Mozilla telemetry.), Zen (Custom UI, rips out telemetry.), Librewolf (Uses ESR build, rips out telemetry, enables better security features by default, has ublock origin by default.)
Independent(not based on or forked off of Gecko/Firefox and Chromium): Ladybird. First expected release by 2028.
Independent Webkit based browsers(Code is not always maintained frequently or well) best are probably Falkon and Dooble, and Netsurf (Independent but not meant for security),
While I am doing pretty much fine with Firefox ESR for 99% of the stuff I need, I can't help but be curious (and I have low expectations) how well the sites that are problematic with Firefox, how well they work on those(and any other) forks.
I did use Palemoon for a while(maybe a year or two?) before going back to regular firefox, when Palemoon intentionally broke all older extensions(before later reversing course I think). The extensions I was using weren't super critical in the long run and i had decided to just accept to leave them behind as they hadn't been maintained in years. Didn't have a need for Palemoon (as regular daily driver anyway) at that point. Also tried Waterfox too at around that point (before choosing Palemoon) but Waterfox was in a state that none of my old extensions would work either.
I do miss the Firefox 3.x days for sure and am sad at so many things that Firefox has lost over the years but at the end of the day it's the least bad of the bunch for me anyway. If they end up going away then of course will have to find the next least bad of the bunch as my daily driver browser, until then trying not to dwell on that situation.
I used Palemoon for a couple of years, after FF lost its mind and was just mucking up everything. (2013ish?) It was great, very configurable and I could run it on Window (work) and Linux (home). But cracks started appearing, and lots of issues cropping up. Most I could fix. For one that I couldn't, I went onto the PM forum and was berated by one of the developers for being a "f*cking moron" like the rest of their users. I quickly learned that was quite common with their developers. Complaints and questions alike were met with hostility.
So I quit using their cobbled-together browser and went back to FF-esr and haven't been happier. FF-esr runs like a champ on my Linux machine. At work, it's now either Chrome or Edge, so Chrome it is.
My kids were using FF on Windows, and there it was excruciatingly slow for my daughter at university. She had 5 tabs open with school stuff, and it would hardly function (1 year old laptop w/16GB RAM). I had her try Chrome, and it works perfectly. She swore to never use FF again.
That's all it takes, and I can't say I blame her. Usable but gets ads, vs unusable and no ads is an easy choice I guess.
@gosand
I would think about giving Pale Moon another go. The arse-hole-est developer (who wasn't really a developer) picked up his toys and left ages ago, and the push lately has been trying to keep up with Chrome's buggering about with web standards.
I've been using it daily for years and only revert to Vivaldi for a couple of sites..
Oh, you mean it wasn't just me? I too used PaleMoon for a while. But the developers -- basically, Mark Straver and his ego -- were rather hard to deal with on the forums. I still keep it around for specific stuff, though I don't really need it. I use Windows and its Firefox is pretty solid. Maybe Chrome is faster in a race, but FF is fast enough, provided I occasionally restart it to get rid of its memory bloat. With over 100 tabs open it gets to hog memory badly, and their attitude is that it's the OSs job to reclaim memory when they've claimed it, not theirs to release it. I don't agree. Still, FF handles the job okay with the most important extensions, BitWarden and DuckDuckGo (to block trackers). Now and then I run into an embedded device that demands Chrome and I usually can use Edge for that.
Most forks of Firefox are basically one or two man shows and depend on mozilla code. Pale Moon has a few more devs but also relies on mozilla code most of the time.
SeaMonkey is still in the corrent mozilla/MZLA codebase but only compiles there and does releases from a fork with backports. Uphill battle with code changes mozilla does.
The biggest problem is that open source is basically dead when it comes to browsers. Too few contributors and the spec is changing rapidly with new features added in Chrome frequently if needed or not. As long as it suits google it goes in. See manifest V3 limitations.
Mozilla is totally dependent on Google money and tries to find new ways to generate some cash it seems. So imho projects like pocket are created and dropped later when they don't make enough money which is usually the case. Doing AI is a money sink so I really question if the current management knows what it does. Personally also dislike moving stuff to guthub and loosing more of its own identity. Probably done to reduce costs and kick infra people out later but still...
I am using Vivaldi as a second browser becuase it is the most suite like and configurable out of them all tut with manifest V3 coming don't know what to do later.
FRG
I used Palemoon more. My issue with it with the plugins, in deed the devs specifically blocked NoScript so that it is disabled; at that point you could still use older Firefox add-ons. (Ok, I haven't checked that in a while.) You can try to block scripts with the ublock Origin equivalent but I liked it better when I could select which scripts to allow.
I use Firefox as my primary browser, Chrome is used as a secondary browser, but really only for two tabs that I leave open: FB Messenger and another chat interface. Librefox very occasionally. TOR browser for crap I think is sus. I'm experimenting with Xen. And I used Vivaldi heavily guy as long time side-by-side with my primary browser, Firefox.
I love Firefox.
Is it a dog sometimes? Yes, particularly in the consumed memory department, but the others don't seem to be much better.
User info privacy? That's something to watch, but … we'll see.
Bookmarks and tabs. I have yet to run into a browser that does tabs remarkably better. At most, they do something that seems interesting at first, then just gets in the way. (I'm looking at you, Vivaldi, but it's true for all of the others.) Bookmark management seems total chaos with all browsers.
Firefox's container feature is the bomb.
Perfect? No. But I can't find anywhere in any another browser that does it better. (Disclaimer: I have not looked for this feature in other browsers recently though.) Xen brings this feature over from Firefox. Yay! That's a good thing. I like Xen, mostly, but since it's based on Firefox. So if Firefox's quality actually begins to degrade (I don't think it has yet), what is Xen to do?
Anyway. Just throwing a counter observation in here.
hadn't heard of this container feature myself but it sounds neat. For probably a decade now (in Linux) I run many different browsers(the number has increased over time) under different user accounts with sudo/X11 for better isolation, none of which run under my regular user account(has a slight annoying side effect for managing downloads and permissions and stuff).
- Main firefox runs as one user account
- Firefox dedicated to mostly OWA and one Atlassian instance runs as a different account
- Firefox dedicated to YouTube and Google runs as yet another account
- Then I have MS Edge running as another user account for Teams PWA and a different Atlassian instance
- I think it is browser based, but I have yet another user account running Slack.
I use virtual desktops and browsers are pinned to specific desktops along with using different color themes so it's easy to tell which is which.
Had to configure Pulse Audio to do network sound which was kind of annoying to figure out but has worked mostly fine in the years since.
Then in a Win10 VM I run Firefox and MS edge mostly for internal work stuff(connecting over VPN). My main linux host OS has no direct access to my internal work stuff, to SSH to things I SSH to the Win10 VM first then SSH again to whatever I need on the other end. I have plenty of memory so that isn't a concern. Any MS teams actions beyond simple chat I use the Windows VM for and route my USB headset to that.
The FF container tabs thing works very well and is probably FF's best feature in my opinion. So convenient when your job(s) involves wearing multiple hats or you have to regularly log in to the same website as several different people. Or even just limiting the amount of data mining certain websites do.
firefox out of my cold dead PC.
Well when FF+ uBlock stops blocking 99% of ads.. especially on youtube
Oh and if by any chance a youtube exec is reading this (fooking unlikely I know)... put your 30 second unskippable ad at the start of the video, rather than randomly somewhere in the middle of "dark side of the moon".... although an unskippable ad for a slots gambling business set at max volume in the middle of 'money' is rather ironic..
This is another exemplary failure of the FOSS model.
Without another business bringing cash - like the the unfettered collection of user data, and their use to sell ads - there is no way such applications can be developed.
It's no surprise that most of the funds came from Google which feared an anti-trus suit.
Anyway about of the issues cited, I never encountered them under Windows. Probably, like most desktop software, Firefox too works better on Windows that in that chaotic environment called "Linux desktop". Snap, Flatpack, ecc. ecc. - it's far simpler to write and to deploy on Windows.
Anyway if you like Linux, you should like Firefox too, it may not work well, but it's not Google or Microsoft.
I don't think so.
The main reason Mozilla the company is in trouble is because they've taken on too much cost, not because their flagship product is FOSS.
They had a period where they had a lot of income, and spent that on various flights of fancy and breaking a lot of what people loved about Firefox.
That caused a mass exodus, and their income dropped. So they're unable to afford their wage bill and have been losing developers for some time. The quality of their product falls as the team loses important people, and they enter the death spiral as quality falls and more users switch away..
It is a very common refrain throughout businesses in all fields of endeavour.
The only practical difference FOSS makes is that Firefox has multiple forks that are pretty healthy, so consumers do have somewhere else to go - at least in theory.
And where the income was from? Not from users, since they didn't pay for it.
I didn't like some changes in Firefox too - but they weren't enough to make me switch to Chrome and its data hoarding.
And are the forks able to survive if Mozilla quits developing Firefox?
Face it - the only successful FOSS software are those that are paid by other interests. And most of those interests are against the users, and are the very foundations of enshittification.
While most people were and are happy to use the worst data hoarding system because it's Google, and they heard Googlie is goooooood..... but they are happy because it's "free".... and made Chome the new IE. But IE was evil because it was from MS which makes "closed source" software , while of course Chrome is good because Google can open source whatever doesn't runs on its servers, because it lure into its servers the data that are processed by software which users won't ever see....
Keep on guys, your blindness is turning IT into a full enshittified environment, where money can only be made by exploiting users by compnaies in the hands of a few megarich who can control everything.
Yeha, that's freedom because you can peruse some code and don't have to pay for it.... oh my god how much naive freetards can be.
It doesn't matter. The only alternative worth considering for most is Chrome (or Edge which is basically Chrome except your personal data goes to Microsoft instead of Google)
You don't get to whine about privacy when the alternative is owned by the biggest (or second biggest if you think Meta is even worse) privacy violating company in the world! Do I like Mozilla's change in privacy statement? No, but on the privacy front they are still 10000% better than Google!
As for Pocket, that never should have been added. That's the sort of thing that should be an extension, not a built part of the browser that's designed to be super annoying to people who don't want to use it! Its like the Firefox version of Clippy!
Here's the thing: Apple's ban on third party browser engines, and to a lesser extent Firefox, are the only things standing in the way of Google completely owning the entire web and web designers designing and testing only in Chrome just like they did 20 years ago in the dark days of IE6.
This "Firefox is dead to me" argument kind of reminds me of the people who were angry at Biden/Harris for not taking a stronger stance against Israel's war in Gaza, and either sat out the election or protest voted for Trump. Congrats now the thing you said you care about is even worse. Are we going to cut off our noses to spite our face in browsers too?
I'll second that Pocket should never have been added - initially looked quite interesting, very quickly became apparent that this "curated" content was heavily dominated by lightweight West Coast group think, and few of the sources had any real credibility, or presented anything new, challenging or interesting.
I've had my own fair share of FF compatibility issues of late, but I'd argue that it is not Firefox's fault given that the vast majority of traffic comes from Chromium and so most sites are going to do most of their testing there. FF remains my browser of choice, I use Edge when I have to resort to a Chromium browser as nothing could make me use Chrome.
an essential root certificate that Firefox used to verify add-ons, DRM content, and browser features would expire shortly. Because Mozilla didn't deal with the issue, users had only two days to update their browsers
Untrue. I saw a notice about this many weeks in advance. Maybe there was a final warning two days before.
Firefox still works fine for me.
Quote from that very bug post ... "The operation of the WhatsApp Web application was just tested on another phone number, the same operator, in both browsers of the latest versions Mozilla and Google Chrome and it was established that this is an artificial barrier for this phone number, either from the mobile operator or from the special services of the country that can persecute me as a citizen fighting alone against corruption, repression of the unwanted, lawlessness, violation of human rights and freedoms and violations of democracy in the country."
Nothing to do with FF at all.
The guy in the post had the decency to explain the real problem, despite which, SJVN still quotes it as example of an FF problem.
But yeah, go ahead and blame Firefox because that suits your preconceived idea.
Listen to that posturing... really, he's got his shit in a knot over "pocket"? I've never cared much for this person's opinions. He's either preaching to the choir or full of shit.
I have many advantageous reasons for using Firefox. Not the least of which is a good build system that you don't have to be in the inner circle to use and understand (I get that most of you wouldn't think of things like that). Control over what sites get to stick in my face is another, the extension interface allows manipulation of streams etc. Also, they maintain it so they don't break the APIs and older extensions can still be updated if they break... while Google deliberately dumbed theirs down so people can't override sites and browser behaviour.
Why disparage Mozilla for adding some AI features to Firefox? What if they enhance its functionality? It can already take voice input, so why not extend that a little bit more? I would rather have Firefox handle my AI questions that Google.
I have used Firefox since its birth. Over the years it has had(Still Has) issues here and there with compatibility on certain websites . Memory usage has had problems along the way but as i am typing this comment i have 44 tabs open and its using 2.7gb of ram (not bad in my opinion) , there has been times(builds) where its been 10+gb on certain builds with less tabs open.
On more recent builds(within last year) , some heavily scripted sites (facebook , some gambling sites) cause crashes after a certain period of use.
The things they are dropping going forward are not things i use myself, but i understand this might be an issue for others.
I can't do without the plugins for Firefox that i use daily, and the layout is exactly the way i like it. Im just to old for change i guess and Firefox is kinda in my DNA now. The only thing that will make me stop using Firefox is they actually stop developing it.
2022 Mozilla Foundation Impact Report funding theme: The Mozilla Technology Fund's inaugural cohort focused on reducing the bias in and increasing the transparency of artificial intelligence (AI) systems
So, nothing to do with browsers. This is the real enshittification: zealots attracted to money like moths to a flame, happy to spend it on things the money was not meant for, and leaving the world worse for it.
The whole reason the privacy policy changed isn't because they were suddenly selling your data, or even planning to. The selling of anonymized/aggregate data -- which Mozilla has *always* done, has *always* been open about, and which most privacy advocates approved of -- was found to be counter to using that wording in certain jurisdictions. That's it. No change in behavior, just a change in wording to comply with a law.
A lot of it sucks, but when you have a bunch of people in tech pushing this crap, I don't know what we can really expect. We depend on goodwill to pay for critical software so much, and now that good will is hard to come by and people with more money than morals see fresh targets, this is going to keep happening.
Support the projects you use and like so they don't need to hunt down terrible ways to pay the bills.
Screw Firefox! We got something MUCH better as a Browser with Full HTML5+ compatibility AND a built-in Javascript interpreter that is MUCH MUCH FASTER than anything elseout there AND our HUUUUUUUUUGEST innovation is the world's FIRST sandboxxed fully-SHOR's Algorithm-resistant encrypted browser that sandboxxes EVERY browser tab in it's own memory space and keeps the display window there so no memory leaks occur PLUS it has Secure DNS ensuring your destination website browser code and any ads comes from KNOWN and VETTED sources! Anything else simply gets BLOCKED.
Since we control the entire display engine and wrote it entirely ourselves, we also offer our high-end Object Pascal-based just-in-time-compiled and fully-pre-compiled Object Pascal source code driver that can do 2D/3D graphics/video and high-end audio that DO NOT HAVE THE ridiculous memory leaks that all other browsers have when rendering or displaying still imagery and multimedia files! That code is also sooooo much easier to read and maintain because our graphics code has common-sense procedure/function names that allows distributed processing on a grid-based virtual display driver system
You can just write multi-platform Javascript and Object Pascal code just like you normally do in Lazarus or Delphi or our when using own built-in IDE system and you can get the FASTEST rendering times and most secure audio/video/metadata encryption period! Plus we wrote it to support ALL upcoming 128-bits and 256-bits wide microprocessors so one code-base works at 32-bits for constrained resource environments, 64 bits for modern gear and the upcoming 128/256-bits super-chips without any conversions needed!
We has used Mozilla FireFox exclusively for many years BUT we got so ticked off at all teh crashes and memory leaks that our company held a big board meeting and we were directed to write our own high performance browser that is CPU/GPU/DSP/Vector-grid-processing enabled and with much better sand-boxxes and much better DNS-secured Anti-Quantum Computer encrypted for best security and multimedia performance!
We now HATE FireFox with a passion and went over to our new system many years ago! That new Web Browser system is pretty much very-well-debugged now and quite ready for public release which will be happening this summer 2025!
V
I'm not on the browser project BUT we do have a 20 Devs team on it and they ran the source code on over 200 different microprocessors and like 50+ operating systems at 32, 64, 128 and 256 bits wide WITH and WITHOUT grid-processing-enabled and networked GPUs attached!
On our largest display system, we had 1,048,576 separate web browser tabs open using a single instance of the browser itself BUT having each tab be sand-boxxed and using a virtual thread system where we group individual tabs into hard-interrupt-based processing loops assigned to a specific CPU core to ensure graphics and multimedia files are scheduled properly with their specified frame rates and audio sample rates. RACE conditions simply CANNOT OCCUR and memory leaks due to garbage JAVA or HTML code from a website is automatically and seamlessly garbage-collected and kept within a virtualized jail cell. The memory accesses and allocations/de-allocations simply cannot escape the set-aside secured memory space. Think of it as DISK QUOTAS for browser tabs! Even the cookies are assigned their own memory/disk space area and data-size-quota and CANNOT access or use data from any other web browser tab so all browser tabs think they are the only browser instance and browser tab running! On an 8-core ARM system such as a Samsung tablet, we usually use 75% of available cores so we can consistently run 20 hard-interrupt-based thread loops (aka tabs) per core so that means 120 browser tabs open at the same time with no issues on the multimedia side of things and NO memory leaks!
Our largest processor (256 bits wide) gets 8 tabs per virtualized thread and since we used 8192 cores at 16 virtual threads per core on a test run that is 1,048,576 tabs open at once within a single web browser instance and ALL of those tabs have extensive incoming audio/video/metadata multimedia streams running at the same time! And YES we have multiple 400+ Gigabit lines coming in from Telus so our bandwidth is into the many Terabits per second so we can actually RUN this test in real-time.
Again, this is a culmination of 15+ years of tearing our hair out while using Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge, MS Internet Explorer, Opera, Pale Moon, Brave, etc, etc. We KNOW what works and we KNOW what features we want so we coded the entire HTML5 and JAVA engine ourselves using our custom in-house built and grid-processing-enabled Object Pascal Language and IDE to be massively parallel processing enabled and multi-core enabled for maximum rendering speed and best memory management processes! We have been eating our own web browser software dog food now for over 10 years, so I think the body public can now get in on the action!
... largely because Firefox has a better UI, and it can be highly customised using CSS.
Chrome on the other hand does not even allow you to have proper fixed side-bar menus for bookmarks or to fully customise your icon bar, resulting in those horrible letterbox-shaped screens and load of useless icons along the top. We have widescreen now, lets use side-bar menus.
Plus Firefox is better at handling plugins and adblockers (unsurprisingly since Chrome == Google == the biggest ad-slinger in the world).
After reading https://www.privacyguides.org/en/desktop-browsers/ I tried Mullvad browser which is very secure BUT there doesn't seem to be a way of syncing bookmarks. I'm lazy and firefox does everything I need, including a fully functional unlock origin. For me it's the least worse option. If I'm ever forced to use Chrome it might have reached the point where ensh*tification of the internet means there is nothing worth browsing.
Claiming "internet usage statistics" of (desktop) browser X/Y/Z = < 5% is logical, since the default web browsers on Android and IPhones dominate the numbers by a great margin.
Usage of MS Edge desktop is 4.6% of overall internet browser traffic, Chrome dominates since it is both on desktop and Android.
In this environment Firefox with 2.6% is not a bad number.
The claim to fame of Firefox is privacy, it offers the freedom to define ones own proxy, which is not possible in Chrome or edge.
In corporate environments, employers will face more issues to insert employee monitoring extensions, a.k.a. spyware, in Firefox, which is easy in Edge and Chrome.
@naive
And my FF with user agent spoofing will be picked up as Chrome most of the time* (as a workaround for dismal sites that do user agent sniffing & do "your browser is not supported" stuff, when it actually works fine)
.. So FF is likely under reported.
* may occasionally spoof something else but usually Chrome as that's the browser most of these crap coded sites will typically support
"...and loved the Kobo integration that allowed me to read saved articles distraction-free on my Kobo e-ink devices."
Man, if I knew it could do that I would have used it too. That sounds crazy useful and I have one of those. If they're discontinuing it I guess I won't bother trying it tho.
The key learning point here is that management are scum who are only in it to pilfer the company. And there's really nothing you can do about it since they're in charge and they decide which direction the company or foundation takes. It does make me wonder how Mozilla's management is picked. Is it based on their technical or management expertise or solely on their who-knows-who?
Mozilla's management time and time again illustrated their incompetence by picking the wrong projects to support (FirefoxOS) whilst culling the Rust and Servo team. Their support of A.I. shows that ALL management are mostly running after the next hype that comes up.
Mozilla earns a huge amount of money each year from Google's search placement yet only spends a tiny amount of it on Firefox's development. The rest is pocketed by management or spent on frivolous side-projects which never amount to anything.
I'm hoping Ladybird will pick-up the slack to fly the open-web banner.
P.S.: I still use Firefox and I don't agree with Vaughan-Nichols' assessment that Firefox is slow or buggy. It's still usable but it may be behind the curve on some things. However, note that Google has its own agenda in supporting Chrome and things aren't looking so great there either.
I first started making websites (or rather what we thought of websites back then; you wouldn't recognice them as such today) using HoTMetaL 1.0 and Mosaic on Windows 3.1. So I've been around the block a few times.
Two years later I was making corporate websites full-time, for an organization that had customers of all sorts all over the world, some of which used the latest kit, some of which were on low speed dial-up with obsolete software running on underpowered computers with low resolution screens. I was working on a Sparcstation with the biggest monitor I've ever used. I hand-coded HTML and CGI scripts (PHP was still in diapers) and the browser wars were in full swing. So as far as the principle is concerned that a good website should be client-agnostic, have no expectations on anything that goes on a the user side, and should work no matter what, I sort of get that.
Which is where my main gripe with this article and the various comments comes in.
This is not a case of a browser such as Firefox working badly. This is a case of website developers, after all these years, still being green kits straight out of school who think that because they can use a HTML editor or (gasp!) hand-code some HTML or PHP without breaking everything they are now qualified to make a public-facing production website. They are not.
Web 2.0 (to dredge up an old buzz-word) is a good thing; technologies such as Javascript and CSS reaching maturity to the point where interactive features became production-ready gave rise to anything from Facebook to Wordpress to the ChatGPT UI. But that does not mean that it is a good idea to load (and over-load) every website under the sun with tons of Javascript and simply expect that everyone will have the latest Wundermachinen with a water-cooled 16-core CPU and a GPU that can keep your coffee hot all day, and it also does not mean that you can simply expect their browser to excel at running and rendering al that crap.
In case you've missed it: Firefox is STILL a good browser. The fact that most website developers have become lazy and simply code for Chrome-based browsers is a different matter entirely. (And whoever makes a website that claims a certain browser is "unsupported" has always been instantly fired from my teams.)
Yes, Mozilla worries me. Management obviously is lagging behind in the race of keeping up with the neighbours and not responding well. And (as is so often the case) principles such as privacy get jettisoned pretty quickly in favour of better chances to make profits. But FF is still my standard for proper standards support, and infinitely better than using a Chrome based browser and handing all your privacy over to Google. Which also ditched their principles of "Don't be evil" when profits became more important, so if that's your argument then Crome and all its derivatives should also be ditched.
I know many here have sung Vivaldi's praises, but I do note that its add-ons (which for me make or break a browser, since I rely heavily on some of them) come from the Chrome Web Store. OK, maybe I'm paranoid or seeing ghosts here, but still. If Chrome comes with security concerns (and it SO does!) then I'm loathe to trust add-ons from the Chrome Web Store as well.
So, no. I'll stick with Firefox until it stops working or they pry it out of my cold, dead fingers. Declaring it "done" and suggesting that we all switch to something Chrome-based instead (which is pretty much the only alternative save for Vivaldi) seems a little daft to me. But then, the author of this "opinion" tells us all in great details what's wrong with FF but fails to point out what we should do instead.
If that's what passes for an opinion these days, mine should not be much worse.
I'm using W7 on an old low-spec desktop, with FF ESR which works quite well and Ublock Origin. I looked at Vivaldi but that will stop working in W7 at some time.
What are my options ? Not sure how long FF ESR will keep running ...
Should really move to Linux ...
<......."Not sure how long FF ESR will keep running ..."........>
Probably physically work for quite a while, although Moz have already said they will no longer provide critical security updates for 115ESR after August :(
I'm in the same boat that you are; but the simple truth is that FF 115 ESR is about the only browser still showing any support for W7 at all. I suppose I should face up to the fact that I have had my money's worth out of my current laptop (bought ex-display from PC World in Feb 2008!)
Have been faithful to FF since version 1, switching from Netscape.
IE was never my friend, same for it's "modern" offspring Edge.
Chrome (and its variants) will never be my friend.
DDG is not yet ready for prime time (not sure of its progeny, but hell, you can't even see its version via CLI, or start in safe mode, or persist a chosen downloads path, or ... many other things a browser *should* be able to do. Guess I could poke around its Github repo and try to "mend" it, but if it wants to be a "big boy", I shouldn't have to.)
At least Mozilla's other main app - Thunderbird - still works.
I'd been pitching a little $ to them every month, a thanks for keeping the lights on. But about a year ago I moved that small amount over to double that to my other regular offering : The Document Foundation.
Thanks to CloudFu$!, can't even use FF anymore on many sites. And so far as those folks go, one can forget scripting. Have a legitimate need to automate report downloads from your CRM? Too bad; if you're automating - at all - you're apparently evil and need to be blocked. What a childish view of the 'tubes.
At least SeleniumBase seems to be able to break through their idiotic inter-moat, but ... yeah, Chrome again.
Ugh. Might just have to go back to Lynx, and give up on all that GUI stuff.
I started using Firefox in V1.
I quite liked the interface and user experience. Then it got to a point some years ago where the user experience was changed to ape Chrome. I promptly made good use of extensions etc to restore the original user experience but this got increasingly harder and harder with new versions until it became nigh on impossible and I was involuntarily forced into using a cheap copy of Chrome, at which point I gave up and switched to using some of the Firefox ports before giving up as everybody seemed to be trying to be Chrome and shifting to using the thing that everybody is trying to produce cheap copies of.
Firefox has been dead to me since.
I have been using Firefox on Mac and Windows and Linux. I may revert to Safari on Mac; I'm testing Brave and Vivaldi, both are acceptable on Windows and Linux, Brave has problems getting my (extensive) bookmarks, etc., from Firefox on Mac (there are a couple threads about this on Brave's 'communty' site, so I'm not alone, not that this helps) and Vivaldi is just too slow on Mac. Chrome and Edge are on the never use list.
It doesn't bode well and there's going to be a lot of pressure now on LadyBird to save us from the shit show that is playing out. For the time being I'm happy enough with LibreWolf but they're just patching out Mozilla's craziness, if Mozilla goes down the drain then LibreWolf development will also stall.
The reason the the Google Chrome APIs chnages have stopped most of my favourite plugins from working.
I can watch Youtube ad free on Firefox and read many paywalled news sites that I can't view on Chrome.
The only downside with Firefox is I need to periodically close the Youtube tab and re-open ist, otherwise it gets super slow.
Maybe it's just me missing something, but I <really> don't get the idea for keeping loads of tabs open all the time.
One very important security feature to me is setting the browser to expunge all cookies on closure - saves a lot of poking about to manually dispose of them otherwise. I routinely reject cookies via the pop-ups, and have all third party cookies automatically blocked, but if you always have open tabs, surely the browser will not remove any of the cookies that you do have to permit?
Those are the two features I've never used, and I've disliked Pocket ever since it kept insisting that I should save things to it to read later. I worked out how to turn it off, and haven't missed it at all.
Fakespot is just "let me read the reviews for you" AI summarizing junk, none of which have been useful to me, because they ALL make mistakes too often to be trustworthy. (See also Yahoo Mail's attempt to summarize email with AI, that once told me in summary that Amazon wanted me to delete a review in return for an Amazon gift card!)
These may be useful to someone, but it's not me.
Deciding to go back to being mostly a browser business, since funding may be getting cut off from Google, seems to be a very reasonable decision.
Between us, partner & myself have Apple, Linux & Windows machines with FF installed
It has it's flaws (I'm sure not helped by dubious management / development decisions)
However, compared to other browsers I have tried, the plugins on FF still give me better control over what happens when I browse a website than other browsers do
.. plus the plugins (at least the ones I use) generally play nicely together (so some nasties are dealt with in NoScript, others in uBlock Origin)
So the ability to give me more control of what a website can (& more importantly, cannot ) do is the key factor that keeps me using it.
I have been using Firefox as my main browser, al Windows, Linux and macOS, ever since Netscape went under.
The only thing that has bothered me is that at some point they came up with doing searches in the address bar. But there are fixes for that.
A bit more of an issue was when they changed the way extensions are handled/to be programmed. I had gotten used to a couple of add-ons which either didn't become available at all under the new system or simply weren't functionally equivalent, when they finally came out. That's when I also installed WaterFox, which allowed me nicely to use those older extensions.
There is no real alternative. Opera, which was for a while (25 years ago) my alternate browser has gone down the drain, and everything else that has come up in those last +25 years simply s.u.c.k.s.! IE, in any version or the even more intrusive Edge don't cut it, neither does Chrome. Nor any of the other wanna-be niche developments like Brave, Vivaldi, or what your new-web-browser-de-jour today is...
And I give a rodent's posterior about any "artificial stupidity" when there is enough of that around these days in natural form. Nor have I ever bothered with Pocket, that's just one of the things that always got in the way of getting work done..
To me FF is highly preferable to Chrome. His opinion is well structured but there's no real alternatives that have surfaced yet and Google is not to be trusted , particularly Chrome which is a data harvesting tool made to fuel their advertisement industry. IT's not about giving us a browser , it's about them distributing a tool that gives them free access to all our data on the web.
You complain about Firefox but don't present a better alternative. I have a lot of browsers--Firefox on Win and Mac OS; Safari and Chrome on Mac; Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Opera on Win; Silk on Kiundle; Safari and Firefox on iOS; and apart from having to use Chrome on Windows for two websites which have problems with Firefox (and Instagram if I want to upload photos from my PC), I greatly prefer Firefox for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it does a lot more for me than the others. I only use Safari on iOS, admittedly.
I like the idea of Firefox - in theory it's easier than Chrome to stop it broadcasting all your data to all and sundry, but since Mozilla merged with an AI/advertising company they now hate their users and try to grab as much as they can. I'm now using Firefox forks with some extensions on my computers and phones, but I'm worried that the maintainers might get bored/too busy/run out of money/might go on holiday when there's an important security update.
Just tried Floorp on MX Linux to replace waterfox ( no maintained debs available, just flatpak or binaries ) and it is looking good.
Floorp takes the FireFox/WaterFox profiles ok, so migration was easy.
I've tired other chrome base browsers but if you don't use google accounts sooner or later the keys that secure the browsers local information ( and passwords) get changed and you lose access if you don't back up the keys, I've seen this with Brave and Vivaldi so vowed never to use them again.
https://floorp.app/en-US
Mozilla has been sending the begging bowl around - several times recently - citing (among other things) the less-friendly aspects of US technology policy.
I am not from the USA, and I feel that it is inappropriate to intrude on the USA's (very public) private grief. I have therefore declined to contribute.
If Mozilla does not like the way the US administration is behaving, perhaps they should move their HQ to somewhere friendlier ... perhaps in Europe.
Firefox has been my choice from day one, for I was a Netscape user. Even in some difficult time when Chrome was shining brighter I kept my favorite browser the same. Recently, the issues that troubled me more were privacy, for g00gl3 Chrome is know for its "benign spying" on us. Opera is said to be nice but i had no good experiences with it (heavier, proprietary, etc,). Brave is an unknown to me. In the past it required some subscribing and had announcements and propaganda.
In the present machine with Debianm that has a very stupid 20th century mania of keeping a very old LTS Firefox version in its repo, I was compelled to install Chrome to use it in the sites I visit daily for working and studying. The internet is to blame for demanding the last minute extras in your browser to show the cr@p they show. it is sad, sad, sad (ming the Rolling Stones ;-) )
But in my other machines with the up-to-date PCLinuxOS Firefox still rulles my surfing the web.
Were do we go from here!?
All the sites that break under Firefox are because sites are now just targeting Chrome(ium) and not giving a s@#$ about anything else, exactly the way they used to target IE6 and etc. They might grudgingly target Safari as a redheaded stepchild just because they don't want to lose all the rich Apple users, but that's as far as they'll go.
I run FF + NoScript, UBlock Origin, and AutoTabDiscard, which makes it still faster than Chromium with lots of tabs. Unfortunately I know this because I also run Vivaldi as the last resort 'Well, it doesn't work in FF and I'm not sure if it's upset about FF, NoScript, UBlock Origin, the PiHole, or the VPN'.
At some point, given FF's downward trajectory, I can certainly see having to give it up, but... yeah, what's the alternative that isn't under Google's rapacious iron fist even if indirectly? I am kind of surprised there's no native Windows webkit browser. You can actually get Safari working on Windows with some jiggerypokery, but it's not something people are going to normally do. And yes, that's Apple, but I'd trust them a lot more than Google given the lack of alternatives.
The 2020s are sure proving the old 'Everything Turns To Shit' maxim.
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