It's a browser owned by an advertising company. An advertising company that knows a lot about you, and constantly strives to learn more by whatever nefarious means they can think of. I can't see how anyone is okay with that.
The day I can open Firefox and it feels as snappy as Chrome I'll switch back to Firefox.
* Opinion of one blue-collar worker.
Its these little things and in general Video support that I keep my Chrome installed. Most of the times i end up using Chrome at home more than Firefox.
A similar thing can be said about Apple versus other hardware companies. It saddens me that especially people on dev forums don't want to see this.
I love Firefox extensions, I love the bookmark editor, I love the non-big-corp centric coupling. But I can only use it for long periods of time if chrome has a bug (I use canary). Or when they send a memory debugging build which are as sluggish as Firefox.
Every time I run Firefox I'm sad thinking about Firefox 2 with good old basic windows gui.
Also, since Chrome 56, maybe it's just an accounting trick, but memory usage dropped tremendously...
ps: refresh done, still lagging on tab open/close. That said, I use Nightly, and I'm not sure it's not instrumented and thus slower..
I went back and tried both the developer edition and the stable release after seeing this post because I want to move away from google as much as possible. But the fact of the matter is that in the hour I was attempting to use firefox I saw the OsX spinning wheel about 20 times. I have never once seen it while using chrome. This killed it for me immediately.
(Notes. I had GPU acceleration turned on, and nearly 6 gigs of free memory.)
Perhaps FF should include a "look-like-chromium" option to win over users (since chromium is open-source, I guess they will not run into copyright issues there).
The gesture, I believe, is under 'Advanced Gestures' and is called `[Popup] List All Tabs`. Honestly I wish this was a standalone add-on because it is bloody amazing and I don't really use anything else from FireGestures.
It gives me a context menu with all of my tabs. No need to move my mouse to some "tab area". Although it appears this functionality is broken in modern versions of FF, as it only lists the active tab instead of all tabs. :(
There are add-ons which claim to fix that, but they always change other stuff as well. I just want to get rid of the ellipses and make the tabs take up at most 50-60px. The current 100px-wide tabs have roughly 8px of horizontal padding, 16px favicon, another 8px of whitespace, 40px title, 15px ellipses, and then even more whitespace on the right.
As for the CSS-file, you have to create a folder called "chrome" in your profile folder and then in that folder create a file "userChrome.css".
In that file, you have to have the following line at the top of everything else: "@namespace url("http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xu...
From that point onwards, I'd just search on userstyles.org. In the advanced search, select "App" from the first dropdown, then it'll show you pretty much only Firefox-styles.
If you found something that suites your taste, you can click the "Show CSS"-link and copy-paste that into userChrome.css. Just make sure that you don't have the @namespace-line twice.
This for example sets the minimal tab-width rather low: https://userstyles.org/styles/53019/firefox-5-minimal-browse...
You can also find userstyles that for example hide the close-button until you hover over the tab or merge the close-button with the favicon.
Does userChrome.css work with e10s? I remember that there were some issues with that in the past.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fxchrome/
* Disclaimer: I use Cinnamon Desktop on Ubuntu with the Numix theme. Other themes/Window Managers might be different.
Unfortunately [and call it subjective, if you like] Firefox on Android is slow and gets noticeably slower as you use it. It needs regular 'fettling' by manually wiping its caches –more so than any other Android browser, in my experience.
After getting fed up with Firefox, I gave Opera a try and, for a while, that was my default browser across all devices. It has a brilliant text reflow on Android, which is a real 'killer feature' and, of course, the desktop version supports those 3 or 4 'must-have' plugins.
Unfortunately, Opera seem to be on a kamikaze mission to drive away their few remaining users –and contrive to make each release worse than the one before. The last straw for me was when they started pushing those trashy clickbait type junk articles on the homepage as a "News Feed" and adding spamvertising bookmarks to your 'speed dial' page. Opera on mobile also seemed to suffer the FF style slow-downs, after prolonged use.
So, after a brief trek through a couple more browsers [Vivaldi on desktop, Ghostery on Android], I arrived back [reluctantly, I thought at the time] at Chrome [or Chromium for the desktop version]. And you know what?... it runs great on Android. It doesn't slow down after a couple of weeks of use and have to be given a 'cache enema'. It's the only browser I've used on Android that can be relied on to communicate semi-reliably with LastPass's atrocious mobile version...
[OK. I'll admit. That's LastPass's fault for making their Android app so bad that it only [just about] works with Chrome]
...and, since I've got my Android devices rooted and have AdAway patching my hosts file, I actually find out that, in daily use, the lack of plugins for Chrome on Android isn't such a big deal after all.
I'd like to use Firefox for all the reasons you mentioned but, I've evaluated them all and switched between them all quite recently and have come to the conclusion that, while all browsers are flawed and all have their particular strengths and weaknesses across platforms and in terms of 'philosophy', Chrome/Chromium is currently the best of a bad bunch, for my use case.
I'll be happy to take Firefox for a spin again, if they make any measurable improvements to the browser [I've read that they're working on re-writing it in Rust, which may make it a leaner machine] but frankly, the whole 'Firefox experience' recently has been a complete turn off. Are they still carrying on that lunacy of what seems like a new release every couple of days which appears to do nothing other than annoy me with yet another hefty download?
Disclaimer: what follows only applies to Samsung Androids from 6.0 (Marshmallow) and above. I use Chrome on my Win10 main machine.
What works best for me on Android is Samsung's Internet browser. It supports content blocking (definitely saves my sanity when I browse on my S7 Edge) -- and the lack of bookmarks synced to Google wasn't something that proved to be a problem. In the very rare cases I miss it, I just open my Android Chrome, copy the URL from the bookmarks UI and open it in Samsung's Internet browser.
Plus it's very fast and has a pretty decent Reading Mode support (which also has a switch between a day and night mode and a config for font size; it works really well and helps a lot when I want to read the web while on the bed).
I was never a brand loyalist and I realize the problem with the standards and I dislike every dev team that doesn't take it seriously, please note that. But I still love Samsung and Apple for being one of the few that keep Google's browser monopoly at bay. Microsoft too, although their Edge browser is yet to get more audience.
Firefox take decision for me and I don't like it.
Could you give some examples? Let me make it easy for you. Check out [1] and tell me which API you found difficult to manage without.
> ban or isolate adobe flash
Firefox doesn't come bundled with Flash. Chrome does. Does that count as a decision taken on your behalf?
Just seeing the comments here exasperates me...
So for those who don't know, the Internet is heavily biased towards Chrome. Simple pages that should render no differently in FF than Chrome are often broken. This "Chrome is great, screw everything else" attitude is exactly how we ended up with IE and stagnation in standards/development in the late 90s/early 2000s. The biggest feature of IE was faster rendering and better performance versus Netscape.
It's seriously an issue that developers/engineers are only targeting Chrome and I think a large part of that is also due to V8 powering Node.js. I'm not trying to bash Node here... Developers are so hooked in its (chrome) ecosystem they don't even realize the bias. I'm beyond excited to see things like Chakra being able to replace V8 in node because I think it will be a huge boon to making a more free and open web.
Anymore I've started to protest by refusing to use sites that are flagrantly broken in FF. I block em in /etc/host and call it a day. What happened to standards? Why can't I use a browser you don't like?
Also FF for those that haven't used it in a while:
•) it uses less ram than chrome especially with a lot of tabs open
•) is quite performant and getting better
•) has vastly improved its Dev tools... the folks responsible for them are very receptive to ideas and happy to hear them.
•) multi-process Firefox is MUCH more responsive than its single process alternative but must be enabled currently (I think). Also make sure your extensions are compatible with it.
•) personally, I think, the developer edition Firefox I think is much more attractive than Chrome
I really hope the web doesn't just work in one browser and that things start to improve. Reading comments here gives me little assurance that will happen :(
Edit 1: formatting and note about folks making the FF Dev tools.
Edit 2: clarity in final paragraph and added sad face.