To access many things like history and bookmarks, you need to use the dropdown menu on the right, which has like 30 different options in it, some of which seem similar but are actually different. Those options are sometimes also available from different locations, so it can be confusing how to access what you’re looking for.
Other browsers are a lot more polished in this area, like Brave, Chrome, and even the new MS Edge. None are perfect, but I find their UX and UK slightly easier to use and generally less clunky. If FF fixed that, I’d be completely sold on it. But as is, I keep going back to the drawing board.
The last time I noticed a UI change, it was for the worse. The made the url/navigation/search bar get bigger when it had focus. To me that is pretty dumb, and I wish you could turn it off. Knowing Firefox you probably can, but a few Google searches couldn't tell me how. If this was done on a product that already had a good UI, it wouldn't seem like a big deal. But given how much low hanging fruit there is in Firefox's UI, it makes you question their priorities.
This is all really weird, since what made Firefox take off in the first place was its better UI. A lot of websites had compatibility issues, and people wanted to use Firefox in spite of them. A lot of webdevs got to work fixing these issues because they wanted to be able to switch to Firefox themselves. It seems that Mozilla never really understood how much its UI advantage helped Firefox get popular. Instead they seem to attribute that period of success to things that I think most people consider nice to haves: extensions, privacy, about:config, etc.
Given those early reasons for favoring it, from my perspective it's mostly gotten worse since 2.0 came out.
It was nearly invisible for quite a long period.
But then I installed the Firefox iOS app, which must surely have an UI written from scratch, and it's just as weird. I'm starting to think that they just don't put enough effort into UX, or perhaps don't hire the right people.
Google maps has never worked well for me on FF. The "old"/basic interface for Gmail works fine, but the new one was noticeably slower.
It doesn't seem exclusive to Google, however. Many PWA sites (including bank websites!) have, from time to time, inexplicably failed to load certain elements on FF, while loading them without fail on GC.
I don't really fault FF for this, but it is what it is.
The good news is it seems to be getting better. Every month or so, I try these trouble sites in FF, and every month I have fewer "trouble sites".
Using chrome once it loads with everything else shutdown seems fast.
Firefox is overall faster because of those issues. But firefox will use too much memory and kill itself in time. But has gotten better at killing itself without killing everything else.
https://megous.com/dl/tmp/33d9622c7e53e3bc.png
https://megous.com/dl/tmp/8b3e50856a913236.png
I still use it as a primary browser even for development, but with issues like this being unresolved for almost a year, it's really hard.
Ever since the rewrite in React, it's really bad. First a massive performance regression (which improved over time, thankfully), but it still has major issues like the above.
For reasons I cannot understand, firefox on my 8GB RAM windows surface eats up huge amounts of memory. But it uses very little RAM with the same profile on my much more powerful desktop.
It’s the only thing that keeps pulling me back to Chrome, as well as many others I’ve seen discuss it in forums over the years.
There’s no Firefox extension to add it and as Firefox users don’t have it they don’t miss it.
Really, sort this, you’ll quietly unlock a bunch more switches.
You can add things like YouTube etc as well so long as they have "OpenSearch" metadata. (Presumably what Chrome is using for "tab to search"?) [1]
[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-or-remove-search-en...
What you're describing is a bookmark substitution search feature that's independent of OpenSearch, and Mozilla calls the feature keyword searches[2].
Some sites routinely load hundreds of items from dozens of third-party servers, so this shouldn't be surprising.
On the other hand, everyone keeps saying that it speeds up their browsing experience, but anecdotally, I'm not sure I experience the same thing.
I do have a couple of other addons that are likely clouding this judgment. Not to mention my specific machine, network connection, sites I typically browse, etc, etc.
But is it possible that processing the requests for things to strip, and then updating uMatrix's UI elements is causing more overhead than just letting the assets load (which may even be cached)?
Not to mention that if I do encounter a broken site and I decide to try to make it work, I end up refreshing it 5 or so times before getting it minimally functional. The time spent doing that surely outweighs the time of just letting it load.
But I'm not saying to abandon uMatrix. Just that I use it for privacy, not performance or convenience.
3 big problems (and many minor little things that i hit every day but haven't bothered to record)
- composing email in gmail is horrible. unexplained bursts of lag where it hangs for several seconds and may or may not lose anything I typed in that interval. This one is recent as of the past couple of months.
- outlook email just not updating or refreshing until I restart the browser.
- lagginess in most if not all input boxes (could be related to the first problem above).
- every few updates it will lose all my containers and I have to make them from scratch.
It may be something these sites are doing wrong, but I don't have the patience any more. Chrome works, Edgemium works, so I switched.
still use firefox for facebook container, but that's about it.
Font rendering looks non-native on most platforms.
Scrolling behavior seems non-native on most platforms.
The combined location/search bar seems slower, and gives less useful results, than the same feature in other browsers.
Inferior developer tools.
Mozilla's marketing portraying itself as the white knight of the open web is tiresome and contradicted by past behavior. Pocket is still installed by default, and remember the Mr. Robot scandal?
Tracking is easily defeated in other browsers. Besides, if you use Gmail and Google search, and watch videos on Youtube, you've already decided to give your data to Google and you might as well use Chrome too.
Very much an opinion, I prefer the Firefox dev tools, especially with the recent changes.
And while I can’t speak for other OS, scrolling and font rendering looks native on Windows and has for years.
Here, the perfect is the enemy of the good.
Firefox is the only Web browser that is not owned by a giant for-profit company with a vested interest in controlling your computing platform.
The developer console is also slower than Chrome's.