Firefox on iOS still doesn't support extensions or adblocking - something Safari (and other browsers as well) do.

Firefox on iOS isn't really a Firefox because Apple doesn't allow alternative browsers. It's a Safari skin.

Orion on iOS is also a Safari skin and supports extensions

And Brave on iOS has blocking built in to the browser itself instead of like Firefox on Android where you have to trust a 3rd party dev.

LMFAO. Brave uses uBO's lists and filters, including trusted filters which have much more capabilities with much more risks to your sites' data and they allow that on all other lists too (even uBO only allows their own lists as trusted by default, other lists need to have permissions from users manually). That's how they can block youtube ads, and no they don't code their own filters for youtube ads either. And be assure that they can't check 100% all commits from uBO and other lists either.

If you want to play "no trust to a 3rd party dev", you should not use Brave's adblocker either. Or at least turn off all the lists inside it, and use your own lists. Your security risk is in those stock lists.

To be quite clear, I trust gorhill more than I trust mozilla.

> What's wrong with Firefox?

It seems like every thread talking about Firefox always has someone asking that question, so if you search back you should find plenty of reasons. Unfortunately, it’s been my observation that valid and polite criticisms always get downvoted. I don’t understand why. It’s not like downvotes are going to make the problems disappear.

Most of us would like Firefox to succeed, and it’s none of our faults that Mozilla is constantly neglecting it and going off on wild goose projects which get promptly abandoned.

I use Firefox on both Linux and Android for 99% of my web browsing needs. At least for me it's the best browser out there, and doesn't seem neglegted at all.

Good for you. I’m genuinely glad, you should use whatever you like, I don’t care for flame-wars. For me, it lacks several must-haves (I’m not going to waste my time repeating them, history has shown that’s a stupid waste of time and the downvotes on the original comment only prove my point). That’s why we have so many apps, everyone has different needs.

Upvotes are not going to make problems actually relevant to solve.

The question keeps getting asked because people say they have problems. Answers (if any come) tells everyone what the problem is for this one user that raised it.

In aggregate we can all see that the problems are not very real for the vast majority of users.

The biggest problem users actually face with using Firefox is that web devs don’t want to support more than one browser and they have picked Chrome now. Or IT departments have blessed one and only one browser on corporate machines and it is the one most corpoware developers build extensions for.

Chasing web standards is a second order problem and will not make the user experience better in a relevant manner for end users. If web developers want an open web, they have to work to support open browsers.

Yeah the criticism is not invalid, but it is also often half-relevant soapboxing and I would wager that is why it tends to get downvoted.

LMFAO. You web devs just want more tools to fingerprint and track users. When Firefox raises privacy concerns for your spyware tools, you play like victims and say that "Firefox doesn't want better for users". F that.

I'm building a fairly complicated browser extension [0].

Debugging the extension on Chrome, it works great. On Firefox, it is nearly impossible. There are a litany of compatibility issues that make it "different" than Chrome, despite the extension being very much standards based. It is really frustrating and makes me dread getting bug reports.

To be fair, Safari is even worse and I haven't even touched Edge yet.

As much as I'd love to have options in the marketplace, standards based compatibility between offerings should be a top line requirement.

[0] https://oj-hn.com

The standards used to be there. Chrome decided they made ad blocking too easy and unilaterally changed the standard. Firefox is still on the standard. Chrome is what deviated, and while performance was improved, that was definitely not the motive.

Nope.

https://github.com/OrangeJuiceExtension/OrangeJuice/blob/5be...

Web usb and serial are not just missing, last I checked Mozilla is opting to not implement based on their moral stance. It just puts them behind for some stuff.

WebSerial just landed in Firefox nightly! https://bsky.app/profile/paulusschoutsen.nl/post/3mjfdx3ujta...

> It just puts them behind for some stuff.

Yeah, it really undermines their ability to compromise user security and privacy.

Essentially all of Firefox' incompatibilities with a website reduce to Firefox not allowing the users to be tracked or fingerprinted by default. Webapps that rely on fingerprinting as a replacement for device tokens will likely not work. Because fingerprinting is bad and I don't want it to work. The people your bank pays to implement that are the same companies used for cross site tracking. It only works because tracking works. ReCaptcha can break for similar reasons, but there are better options for captcha and the need for captcha itself is possible to eliminate with various strategies depending on what it is being used to mitigate.

There's a lot of good use-cases of Web usb, you can't just cut everything which might have privacy aspects otherwise the browsers wouldn't have canvas or even gpu rendering.

There's a reason that https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/canvasblocker... exists, though; a reasonable person could argue that firefox should be restricting canvas/gpu more than it does.

What are those use cases? It seems like a giant hole punched all the way from a tab's sandbox through the process boundary and out to the kernel... Yes, gpu rendering is a great example of the same problem. Canvas at least has some intervening layers depending on implementation.

Almost all of the gui software for programming keyboards with QMK uses webusb or webhid, so you either have to use a chromium based browser or an electron app that is basically just a wrapper for chromium.

Yeah, it's a shame Qt/C++ doesn't have any way of interacting with USB devices and there's no libraries for that, otherwise there could be a native GUI app for QMK. Or failing that, because Qt is simply too difficult for programmers to figure out, maybe some day there will be a way to deal with USB devices from Java, then at least we could have an AWT app (or I guess Swing is the new hotness now?).

Yeah the fundamental problem is there isn't a good way to write cross platform applications that interface directly with a usb device

pianu.com used to be a website where you could learn piano by connecting your piano through usb with the browser. It seems defunct now but I found a video demonstrating it : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTBmRV02NgI

I used something similar in the past. It was a legitimate use case for web usb which changed my mind on it quite a bit.

https://www.charachorder.com/ sells ergo keyboards and allows you to update their firmware directly in the website, through web usb. No local apps at all. Also an improvement in overall security from having to download some .exe / .dmg and running it locally.

GrapheneOS for example can install with web usb, I think it makes it much easier for people who aren't too tech savvy to switch.

Somebody also recently shared an awesome project which let's you use an usb printer regardless of your OS driver.

It is so frustrating how every thread about Mozilla has people getting upset about contradictory things.

Half the thread impunes Mozilla for taking so much money from Google and imply that they are controlled opposition, and the other half gets upset when Mozilla doesn't implement every standard that Google tries to steamroll through the standards bodies because of objections to how they can be used for fingerprinting, or complains that the attempts at anti-fingerprinting break websites, etc.

Sometimes it's not even different people, it's the same people punching them for contradictory reasons.

Mozilla is not perfect but they get all the downsides of being methodical and privacy focused alongside none of the benefits. Everybody hates the "side projects" unless it's Rust, Servo, LetsEncrypt, Thunderbird, contributions to Opus/AVI, etc. and you can be sure they'll be criticized if they "focus" by touching investment in any of those by the same people.

> Half the thread impunes Mozilla for taking so much money from Google and imply that they are controlled opposition, and the other half gets upset when Mozilla doesn't implement every standard that Google tries to steamroll through the standards bodies because of objections to how they can be used for fingerprinting, or complains that the attempts at anti-fingerprinting break websites, etc.

> Half the thread impunes Mozilla for taking so much money from Google and imply that they are controlled opposition, and the other half gets upset when Mozilla doesn't implement every standard that Google tries to steamroll through the standards bodies because of objections to how they can be used for fingerprinting, or complains that the attempts at anti-fingerprinting break websites, etc.

Yeah, double standards at its max. Firefox inputs every privacy concerns for these APIs that Google puts 0 Vietnam Dong to care about users' privacy. And those people cry about why Firefox doesn't implement it.

Okay, I'll give you that. Granted, I've used webUSB exactly twice, once with a Flipper zero and once with a mechanical keyboard. If that's the worst of it, the parent comment calling it "painful and immediately apparent" seems a bit dramatic to me.

It's slow. It almost always trails Safari and Chrome on most benchmarks.

How many milliseconds do you think this page took to render? I usually click and it's already done.

HN is not the most complex website rendering wise by any imaginable metric. I presume HN renders equally as fast on lynx or Mosaic from 1994...

HN is a fast site (comparatively; most websites are unnecessarily slow). It’s a bad measurement.

HN is a good website. Ebay is another good example where JavaScript is optional but with good functionality. Marko was mocked, but now Astro is cool because they invented ssr...

I don't care about benchmarks.

Some folks have already discussed this in sister comments to the one you're responding to, but it's a common enough hn discussion topic that searching will answer beyond that (better than I can regurgitate here.)

reddit tab, firefox: 428mb. same tab, chrome: 78mb.

I get 80mb for reddit on firefox.

That number can be down to any number of different factors on reddit itself. Having an autoplay video running, etc.

Firefox often groups tabs from the same site into one process. With large numbers of the same tabs open in both, check the total memory for all firefox processes and all firefox processes. You will likely find firefox actually uses less memory than chrome.

The endless excuses and lies.

It was the same page, both on old.

I will eat the RAM penalty to resist the Chromium hegemon. Grateful to have any alternative!

Memory measurements reported in browsers come with substantial caveats, as measuring "how much memory is this tab using" is fairly nontrivial.

Not saying there isn't a difference, but you'd need to measure (e.g.) a fresh install viewing only one tab with no extensions, etc.

It doesn’t support a lot of video formats that Chrome and Safari have supported for years (h265 is one I think. I’m no expert)

h264 and h265 are patent-encumbered and therefore very expensive and/or dangerous. Patent trolls would rip Mozilla apart and eat all their money. The only reason H.264 works atm is that Cisco sponsors a plugin for that.

H264 patents are finally starting to expire, all the known patents have already expired in Europe.

As for HEVC, that particular licensing trash fire continues to burn bright. VVC had an opportunity to learn from the situation, and decided what they really wanted was a trash fire that burned even brighter.

So, we might be stuck with H264 for a little bit.

I don't event think h265 is widely supported. On Windows you have to pay separately for it

Firefox has had support for h265 for a few months by now, they finally relented.

Yes there are things that Firefox does better than others, and that is one reason I use Firefox. But there are definitely things I would like to see improved, like:

- PWA support on Linux

- better performance

- devtools should be able to handle sites with large amounts of js with sourcemaps

- fix a number of bugs that have been open for a long time

- don't lag behind standards as much (I'm not talking about things where they intentionally don't implement problematic "standards" pushed by google)

- make it feasible to embed gecko in other projects similar to how chromium is used by electron and webkit is used in "webviews"

It doesn't support WebNFC or WebUSB.