15+ years ago Firefox was focused on a fast, stable browser. It was the alternative to the Mozilla browser. They did an excellent job of keeping it both. At some point they decided to make it an experimental browser. As soon as they started having regular breaking changes to plugins was when I switched to Chrome.

I recently went back to Firefox on mobile, because I like the idea of not giving google all of my data. Also, they have ublock origin, privacy badger and noscript.

I have to look at fewer advertisements, but it still isn't as stable or fast as Chrome.

It would be great if they refocused on stable fast browsing or spun off a new browser for that purpose (and this time kept it that way when the stable/fast option becomes vastly more popular).

I haven't benchmarked it, but FF seems as fast as Chrome to me and in my case, tabs definitely crash less frequently.

And my overall memory usage is down.

I switched back about 6 months ago and am completely pleased with the change.

All that said, if they made it faster and more stable, I certainly wouldn't complain. :)

One thing I have noticed is that a handful of websites just don't work and I have to view them in Chrome. I think this is a consequence of our homogeneous environment now.

Strange. I use Firefox on Android daily on both my phone and tablet and haven't seen it crash in months.

Well, that's kind of the point. I haven't seen Chrome crash in years and I use those plugins and a lot more on desktop. On Android I had the same stable fast experience as on desktop (and it wasn't even using ublock to filter 90% of the internet on Android). Chrome just seems a lot more stable and no slowdowns where I have to just close it. Sometimes the keyboard stops working on data entry with firefox. I have none of those problems when I switch back to Chrome. Maybe it's plugin support issues or maybe it's older-phone issues, but there are definitely issues that I don't have on Chrome using the same hardware.

Use Kiwi for Android. It is based on Chrome and has support for extensions. Win Win Situation for you

This is what Mozilla does. They did it with Mozilla, then Phoenix(now Firefox) saved them. Did they learn anything from that and keep developing Firefox as the best browser? Of course not, they slowly turned Firefox back into Mozilla.

People complain about Google and Chrome/Chromium for turning the browser market back into a monoculture, but it's just as much Mozilla's own fault for failing to keep up. I want to use Firefox, I want to LIKE Firefox, but Mozilla has for years now decided not to prioritize making Firefox a great browser.

> Please FF is the only place still not under the Chromium dictates, please save Firefox Mozilla.

There is WebKit! The only other remaining browser-engine held by WebKitGtk and Apple. WebKitGtk is used by many applications which use Gtk and the official web browser of GNOME, Epiphany. And as built-in engine by Apple on iOS and MacOS. Despite rumors, there is still a Qt5-Port used by Otter-Browser.

I would be happy to see a full integration of WebRTC in Epiphany. Luckily we will see soon support for WebExtensions.

Unfortunately the WebKit implementation in iOS is a rehash, even worse, of the IE days. So I definitely wouldn't call it WebKit or an alternate choice(Except it's Apple so for some bizarre reason it gets a free pass on HN).

The original comment is still effectively correct in spirit, Firefox is the only browser not under "hostage".

I can only tell you about my personal impressions:

    * Google has a lot power. Many Web-developers seem to think that "Chrome is correct" and other engines must behave the same. I'm questioning this.
    * Apple locks-down their devices. This is not acceptable, because the customers are the owners of these devices. As a side-effect - this prevents a complete dominance of Google's Blink Engine.
    * Google is pressing on every user of their website "Install the Google Search App", "Install Google Chrome" and especially annoying on iOS is Google Maps which constantly tries open the App-Store (somewhat also Apples fault?)
    * Finally Microsoft Teams allows using their website only with Edge (Blink) or Chrome (the original UI for Blink). So we're back in 2001?]
    * Opera, Trident and KHTML no longer maintained.
    * Other than WebKit the Gecko-Engine seems not be used often as integratable  engine. There was Galeon but replaced by Epiphany.

Firefox had its chance 17 years ago when it was at its prime and was in a position to expand and get more users to become the dominant browser. Instead, they chose not to and Google overtook and sabotaged them whilst Mozilla was under the spell of Google's billions even thinking that they could do without Google's billions. [0] Mozilla did not care and did nothing about that.

It is now too late to stop Google. All roads lead to Chromium.

> I'd also love to donate money to help the FF browser development but I have no guarantee that money will actually go to FF instead of some other crazy thing I don't really care for/about.

Exactly. Everyone knows donating would be pointless, since we all know who is bankrolling the development.

Mozilla is the only one that can save itself and is already at the mercy of Google. No one else can do anything about it to help them unless Mozilla steps up and properly leads itself by example rather being lead by Google.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.compu...

There needs to be a new effort like how Firefox was created. I remember the headlines at the time were that a "rebrlious" young guy was going against big Mozilla and it's full fledged navigator/browser that was pretty beefy.

Fast forward to today, someone gotta grab Ff engine, strip as all the crap and create a privacy first lean, fast and secure alternative.

Something like what the Brave guys did, but for FF .

Do you see Brave as more private and secure? Or do you think it gives a false sense of security relative to Firefox?

I like that it blocks ads by default. Other than that I don't care too much about privacy .

The thing with Firefox for me has always been that it feels heavy. I've been trying to use it every now and then since 2005. I even used it exclusively at some point in Linux because of Treestyle tab. But for me it has always felt heavy, sluggish and sometimes unresponsive (at some point it was single threaded, do 1 tab crashing/hanging killed the whole thing).

I hated the most recent redesign with the jumbo user chrome.

So much so that I jumped ship. Went to Opera for a bit, no on Vivaldi.

Vivaldi: Has a pleasant looking UI, is easy to customize the color scheme, has a TON of options for various workflows, is fast.

While FF likes to show strong benchmarks for Gecko, Blink is noticeably smoother in practice.

Mozilla really needs to inject new life into Firefox. Fix the UI; fix the perf problems. The Servo team was making great progress in the perf department. So sad that Mozilla dropped that program.