> Firefox is very usable and increasing its market share starts with you. Or to use another cliche - be the change you wish to see.

I use Firefox despite long standing bugs. Somehow a browser that aggressively throttles background tabs is still able to leak memory to background tabs. For the longest time Firefox messed with my wireless headset, they finally added proper support for web audio APIs and things are better now.

CPU usage is still all over the place. Some inactive tab will cause FF to spin CPU usage up to 100%.

Firefox still leaks resources, I can shut down all tabs and still have the media playback process using up tons of CPU and RAM.

WebGL performance is worse than Chrome.

TBF it has been getting steadily better over the last year, I have noticed a marked improvement. I'd say a year or so ago it was noticeably bad on a regular basis, now it is an occasional annoyance. But it should never have gotten that bad.

More to the point of the question, Google spent a LONG time pushing Chrome, hard. They paid lots of # to bundle it with app updates years ago. Visiting Google properties causes banner ads "Download Chrome!" to appear. A few years back YouTube videos would occasionally just stop working in Firefox.

And now days with Node development, well, Node developer tools are built into Chrome. React developer tools run in Chrome.

A while back I spent a few weeks figuring out how to configure Firefox to work exactly how I want a browser to work, then months happily using it. Then a big update was released and everything broke. I never bothered to get it working again. And despite claims of performance improvements that came with the release, it still chugged slower than Chrome. I would love to use a browser that I can actually configure how I want without things breaking every week, even if it's slower in general. But if I can't configure reliably and it's slower -- what's the point?

From this perspective, the RPM from one of RedHat's derivatives would be the ideal answer - a long term support release.

As far as I know, such lengthy support terms do not exist for any Windows releases.

Firefox on RedHat 8 will stay as it is until 2029.

Actually there is a fairly secret long term version of windows 10 that also does without all the bullshit. No store, no constant massive feature updates, etc. Windows 10 LTSB / LTSC. They try to make it seem like its only for embedded machines but its basically just stripped down windows 10 with a lot more similarities (feature wise) to what windows 7 was.

This claim is totally fiction.

RedHat has no magic Mozilla sauce, they simply ship Firefox ESR and upgrade it every year. You'll have the same breakage in the end, just yearly instead of monthly.

Yes, because "big updates" regularly trash Firefox in Red Hat.

This happens all the time.

What a fiction indeed.

They trash just as much as the ESR release you'd download from mozilla.org would.

In other words, you don't need to switch to RHEL to use Firefox ESR. It's the same version you can install on any other distro or Windows.

They offer nothing I cannot get elsewhere and thus I have no reason to switch.

When it first came out, Firefox was faster, lighter and offered way better function than the alternatives at the time. Since then, competition has been fierce in the browser market and they’ve done little to distinguish themselves in any major way from their competitive set.

Until they do something so vastly incomparable in the market, they gonna continue to falter.

For an average person, I think this argument is fine. But we're on HN where we can discuss something with a bit more nuance. There's two major things that I see that FF offers that Chrome doesn't, including chromium alternatives. 1) More privacy. Chrome tracks you substantially more than alternative browsers. In addition to that, is simply the chrome ecosystem, see next point. 2) Chrome's dominance defines the web. A decentralized service doesn't become centralized once one player takes 100% of the users. It happens long before because a big player can throw their weight around and force others to do what they want. Chrome already acts this way. We talk about this extensively several times a year here, so I'll let others state this argument better. But the short is that Google can define protocols, more tracking analytics, etc.

It really comes down to two things.

- Do you want to encourage more privacy across the web?

- Do you want the web to be more decentralized?

If you want more privacy and less centralization, you should use FF. I don't think it is just about the services that they offer. I think we can go deeper and talk about the future of the web in general and how our choices affect that.

Firefox promises all these things, but I think that by and large the problem is that it just doesn't deliver on them for the average person. And average person is how we get the market share and safety in numbers.

FF definitely offers more privacy for the average person when compared to Chrome. I'm not sure what you're talking about. That normal people don't care? Well that's why I said the conversation about "products" was fine for the average person but not here on HN where we're experts and there's more nuance.

Right, I've never walked by my computer at midnight to discover its awake and hammering the disk scanning everything that's installed on my machines like chrome does.

Legislation is the answer for privacy. The tech ship has long sailed to the point that invasive stalking is 'too cheap to meter'.

You're right, but neither can we wait for legislation to be passed. So attack this problem from multiple fronts. And even after legislation is passed that doesn't solve the second problem of centralization.

Take a look at tree-style tabs. I started using them in FF and have looked several times at chromium-based add-ins and absolutely nothing comes close.

Edge vertical tabs is your best choice if you must use a chromium browser, however it is a weak imitation of TST.

Multi Account Containers is also good.

Multi Account Containers is the key reason I use Firefox. I have to juggle multiple accounts for the same services for work. Containers makes this trivial. The closest chrome has is profiles which require a separate window and are just generally far more painful to use.

Temporary Containers as well. An entire throwaway container by default. I can just accept all the cookies and closing the tab deletes them all. No management. Nothing else comes close.

I'm glad this exists (although it appears there are extensions in other browsers that do the same thing) but I never have more than 10 tabs open, so it's not something that would make me switch.

> I never have more than 10 tabs open

How is that possible? Do you never compare things? Or do you only compare things for which there are fewer than 10 alternatives?

I cannot tell if you're kidding or not.

I'm glad it exists too. If you ever have a need to juggle tabs this extension is a godsend. Believe me, I've tried finding similar functionality for Chrome/Edge and aside from Edge vertical tabs, the rest are a kludge at best.

I've been using Firefox straight for 10+ years and tried all major vertical tabs extensions and now I recommend Sidebery to everyone.

Sidebery is great, but I had to switch back to Tree Style Tab because I hate animations, and while Sidebery is impressively configurable, not all animations can be disabled (https://github.com/mbnuqw/sidebery/issues/517).

> Edge vertical tabs is your best choice if you must use a chromium browser, however it is a weak imitation of TST.

What makes it weak?

What are you talking about exactly? Is this an extension for FF?

It's this extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

> They offer nothing I cannot get elsewhere and thus I have no reason to switch.

I'm not going to tell anybody else what their reasons are or should be, but for me voting against the browser monoculture was a reason to switch.

Most people won't care enough, of course, but to me it's not that different than voting for a candidate in an election who might not be the absolute best fit for my personal interests but who seems better for an overall political culture, or some other similar compromise.

On Desktop, I can agree. But uBlock Origin on Android is only possible on Firefox afaik (and one of the major ways Google uses Android for Ad revenue leverage)

Recently switched to Linux and only installed Firefox. When you force yourself to use it, it's doable. I think only once in the last 6 months did a website not work (my dumb HOA website). Other than that, it's more than sufficient.

It crashes sometimes but if that's the price for not having coercive software controlling my life, so be it.

Not claiming, that your experience isn't true, but: Firefox hasn't crashed for me in years! And I am a real tab hoarder. 400 tabs and more are not so uncommon for me. Then again I don't allow arbitrary websites to run all sorts of shit scripts. It might or might not be your hardware, or it might be the websites you visit.

Not the OP, but I consider it a soft crash every time I update Firefox in my OS, and it won't allow me to spawn new tabs until I restart Firefox. Annoying behavior they've included a couple years back.

If I understand what you're reporting correctly, then that's something your OS "included a couple of years back".

If you install Firefox from Mozilla's site, it won't have these update problems. What's happening is that your package manager is swapping Firefox's bits out from under it while it's running. Firefox's built-in update system doesn't do that.

Which is not to say that I think you shouldn't be using a packaged version of Firefox. Personally I'm running Nightly so I don't have the option anyway. Generally speaking, I vastly prefer sticking to my package manager's stuff.

I just wish the package managers would fix their Firefox updates. (I don't know what the right fix would be, and I imagine it could be hard.)

Then someone at Redhat was probably bribed by some Googler, cause it only happens with Firefox updates /s

Joke aside, Firefox is aware that it's been updated and the new tab states that I have to restart my browser. I'm not familiar with the inner workings of Firefox, I just expect it to have everything it needs to function, in working memory. I've been using Fedora for close to 14 years now, Firefox always installed from system packages, and the updates always replaced the existing files on disk without it affecting my application experience. No other desktop app I use has this behavior after updates while they where running.

A big fuss? No, got used to it already. But I still consider it a soft crash state that I encounter with Firefox.

Er... just yesterday I had the crappy update experience that everyone is talking about. And that's using Firefox Nightly, with a downloaded build. So I'd need to look more into this to understand what the actual situation is.

Hm... though now I wonder... I also had a cron job that ran me out of disk space. I wonder if that contributed to make it more like the external file replacement situation?

Strictly, Fedora doesn't support doing updates while the system is running (or at least they don't recommend it).

An alternative that might be smoother in this regard: use a flatpak version of Firefox instead. (Firefox is in Fedora's flatpak repo, and on Flathub.) GNOME Software updates flatpak apps in the background, and you just get the new version the next time you open the app.

Not sure from which perspective your comment comes from. dnf update or dnfdragora updates (if you prefer a GUI) are all done while the system is running.

Sure, distribution upgrades nowadays are just like Windows update requiring a system reboot and a black screen with a useless progress bar to stare at (that's also a pretty annoying relatively recent addition).

GNOME is not my cup of tea. And until flatpak delivers tangible finegrained software sandboxing (at least Android level sandboxing), I'm not really interested in using it for software that's already packaged in the dnf repositories.

I use Fedora because it has newer software, pretty stable in my experience, and my knowledge is transferable to RedHat/Enterprise Linux. But I stopped buying into most of Redhat's desktop innovations a while ago.

> Not sure from which perspective your comment comes from. dnf update or dnfdragora updates (if you prefer a GUI) are all done while the system is running.

Fedora doesn't recommend doing updates that way :) See https://fedoramagazine.org/offline-updates-and-fedora-35/

> Sure, distribution upgrades nowadays are just like Windows update requiring a system reboot and a black screen with a useless progress bar to stare at (that's also a pretty annoying relatively recent addition).

Silverblue doesn't have a black screen with a progress bar — it just boots straight into the updated version. I assume Kinoite (like Silverblue but with Plasma instead of GNOME) is the same.

> And until flatpak delivers tangible finegrained software sandboxing (at least Android level sandboxing)

Flatseal may provide what you want here: https://github.com/tchx84/Flatseal

> I'm not really interested in using it for software that's already packaged in the dnf repositories.

Fair enough. I mentioned it because it removes this problem:

> every time I update Firefox in my OS, and it won't allow me to spawn new tabs until I restart Firefox.

It's cool, I get it. You find these adequate solutions to existing problems. But they are replacements of some issues for new issues. That's why I'm not onboard with Redhat vision for a Linux desktop, that's why I stay away from GNOME, Flatpak, rpm-ostree distro flavours. They are almost an 80% of something, then a coin toss away of being deprecated/ignored.

Those tools are not teaching me how to fish, but how to carve out and build a fish rod, fish anatomy, and anything in between. When all I want is the proverbial fish.

Things got dicier in the server space since the IBM acquisition, e.g. RedHat 8 experience was anything but good, and their entry into the container space with UBIs. A pile of things breaking, when switching the Dockerfile from CentOS to RedHat. Even more ridiculous things, like RedHat 8 offering a license that allows X install for free, but then the ISO wasn't even distributed by torrent file and the download speed for me in EU was under 100KBps.

But anyway, here I am ranting about RedHat, when I didn't want to. My main complaint is still with Firefox, it wants me to restart the browser but I can use the existing tabs just fine for any web browsing. Nothing is bricked by the update, just Firefox deciding when I should restart my browser, just like the very vague Windows experience I left so long ago.

You just probably use the web browser much more often to catch it after an update. And afaik, the reason for this is that they can only maintain a known good state this way, as well as making freshly patched security patches available as soon as possible.

I don't think the package managers are at fault here and this would be much more easily fixed in Firefox itself by not touching the filesystem after Firefox starts - resources are already bundled so you only need to keep a handle open (package managers don't change file contents but replace what the filename points to) and only fork instead of executing new processes (keep a pristine process running to fork from if you want).

Don't forget to disable all prefetching, landing pages visiting previous sites, studies and pings on each start and shutdown to improve privacy.

Another tab hoarder and for me the only times Firefox has crashed is when I have upgraded Firefox but not yet restarted it.

Yeah, I think there are measures I could take to help the situation but it's a little low on my priority queue at the moment. The crashes are rare and not really a big issue for me.

Hmm, interesting, because I don't force myself to use Firefox. I use it because it's just plain better than Chrome, in that I can configure it just the way I want.

I'm curious what OS you're running. For me, on macOS Firefox performs the best out of all browsers I've tried, but on Linux it feels a bit sluggish.

I use it almost exclusively on Linux. It was much worse just 9 months ago. I do close and reopen it every week or so, it reopens all my tabs per my config, and it never gets sluggish on me if I do that. I agree with commenter above. I prefer it, with its flaws, because of configurability. It's been 6 months since I ahve been forced to open a site in Chromium. It tends to be some bloated highly commercial (F500) site that requires that.

My experience is the opposite :)

I have to use macOS at work, and it makes Firefox much more janky than it is on this 10-year-old Linux laptop.

(Though I rarely use other browsers on macOS, so maybe they're even worse.)

I'm on Arch Linux.

Damning by faint praise shows how bad it is right now for FF. Back in the golden age of Firefox (arguably, before the versions started incrementing like Chrome), it was a pure pleasure to use, even if certain things like ActiveX refused to work. Now, if we "force ourselves" to use it, it's "maybe OK".

I can't remember Firefox crashing in recent years and that includes times I approached 2000 open tabs. Though after using the same profile for over 5 years now it has trouble remembering the color scheme for whatever reason.

"Soft" crashes where websites simply don't load or function properly in FF, but do in Chrome, are far more common.

I'd say that's usually a problem with websites and not the browser.

Many websites are just designed with the 80% of most frequent configurations. And when autoplay is disabled, the browser window is too narrow, a special font isn't loaded or a cookie is blocked all bets are off.

I never had Firefox crashes until Ubuntu 21.10 which I think made Firefox a snap, now I get crashes when it tries to load fonts. And I get that colour scheme thing now too.

You can still run firefox as normal app, and it's rock solid.

My data point, FF has worked fine for me on MacOS and Windows for years.

I use Firefox. Not exclusively, but most of the time, on principle.

I would call it usable, but not "very usable". For normal people, Chrome(ium) UX is better. For power users, Vivaldi is a far better choice despite the Chromium browser engine. And for both of these groups, Firefox UX worsens and improves seemingly at random.

Quite frankly, I'm conflicted whether I should recommend Firefox at all. If I say "look, here's Firefox! It's more private than Chrome, and almost as fast and error-free!", and then Mozilla goes on to ruin that perception 6 months later (as they are wont to do), then it's my reputation and credibility at stake. Not only is that an unnecessary ego hit, but also makes me look like a liar (or at best, like an ivory tower dweller divorced from reality).

> I would call it usable, but not "very usable". For normal people, Chrome(ium) UX is better.

I can't imagine why you would say this. Could you point out some concrete examples of better UX?

The hamburger menu, for one. It's extremely unintuitive. Not the fact that it uses a hamburger icon, but that even simple things like accessing the full list of my bookmarks involve multiple clicks. If you know the keyboard shortcuts then it's not a problem, but I want common UI items to be accessible from the UI.

Besides that, the UI is just sluggish a lot of the time. It feels that Chrome(ium) has a far better latency response.

But isn't accessing bookmarks exactly the same in Chrome(ium)?

Firefox: 1. Hamburger menu > 2. Bookmarks > 3. Manage bookmarks Chrome(ium): 1. Three-dot menu > 2. Bookmarks > 3. Bookmark manager

In both cases you get a list of bookmarks on step 2 and you get a full, searchable, editable view in step 3. The global shortcut for the third step is the same in both (ctrl + shift + o).

I want Firefox to succeed. But that doesn't mean I will use an inferior browser, especially when I feel the decision makers at Mozilla are out of sync.

> Firefox is very usable

Are you intentionally underselling it or is this what I can expect of Firefox? Because it's not a super awe-inspiring endorsement.

I don't understand what you need. Go and try Firefox. As a person that uses Firefox as a daily driver, both at work and at home usage, I can't recall when I had to switch to Chrome. In 2010, maybe. I don't know what other "awe-inspiring endorsement" you need.

Firefox did not save my marriage nor did it make me a million dollars, no.

Do you use Firefox because it’s a better browser or because of philosophical reasons? If it’s the former, then I want to know that somebody thinks it’s the best way to browse the web. If it’s the latter, then tell me it’s worse but the politics of supporting Google are distasteful to you.

Don’t tell me it’s “very usable” because I’m going to interpret it as the latter which may or may not be correct.

>I want to know that somebody thinks it’s the best way to browse the web

I think it's the best way to browse the web.

Chrome on Android, at least, doesn't allow ad blocking. Who the fuck in The Year of Our Lord 2022 doesn't use ad blocking?

I actually don't use ad blocking. If there are ads and I don't want to see them, then I don't visit that site again. The site has chosen their business model and I can choose which sites I want to visit.

I also like buying things that I might like, so seeing ads (and ads that are targeted to me) isn't necessarily a bad thing to me.