It is very cool! I'd go as far to say it's a great browser in fact. I simply want it to exist and be such in perpetuity and lead by example like it has in the past. I see it as a follower instead of a leader these days, largely to Google, but also Safari and to some degree Edge (by simply stealing the blink renderer)

The Mozilla org continues to produce a very capable browser, but it's now 3rd or fourth fiddle on a stage their misteps helped orchestrate in their demotion.

Edit: clarification

What are the other competing browsers? There's chrome(and the derivatives), safari, firefox? safari exists only because of ios lockin. Aren't most other browsers an increasingly smaller share? Genuine question.

It's a problem. I use Firefox as my daily driver -- it used to be I ran into incompatible sites once a month or less except for YouTube which intermittently punishes users for browsing with Firefox. Now I have a serious problem every week like an online vendor or bank or something that doesn't work with Firefox.

Firefox is a little slow for an internal application we have that loads 40,000 rows of data into a grid but otherwise all our stuff works with it because I develop Firefox first and I think a few of us are all that really stands between Firefox and oblivion and probably are doing more work than a lot of the people they have on the payroll.

(I work on Firefox Web Compatibility)

If you have specific sites that aren't working, please let us know and we can investigate and try to fix them.

The usual reporting channels are using https://webcompat.com or the "Report Broken Site" tool in the Firefox menu. Of course I"m also happy to take bug reports here if you (or anyone else) have them.

Here are a couple:

1. The inability to set a specific page for new tabs to open on. That is ridiculous.

2. The mobile version sucks, specifically because bookmarks are buried under an absurd number of menu levels. And they're also broken up (without user approval or any way to stop it) into "mobile" and "desktop" bookmarks. WHY? The entire point of syncing is to have them all the same.

I want to like Firefox. I went back to Firefox for the first time in decades last year and gave it up after a couple months because #2 was that annoying. So brain-dead.

Oh yeah, and another one was that "never remember history" does, in fact, remember history. What Firefox really does is "stop adding to history." And the bug report on it resulted in several YEARS of debate over how to "fix" it. The latest I saw is that they're actually NOT going to fix it, but rather add more text (somewhere) to say basically, "This doesn't do what you think it's going to do."

If fixing a defect like that requires years of committee back-and-forth, the product is finished.

> The inability to set a specific page for new tabs to open on. That is ridiculous.

I've been using the "New Tab Override" extension for almost a decade at this point. Sure, it would probably make sense to have as a baseline feature, but I installed it so long ago and it's continued working the whole time that it's not really something I think about anymore.

New Tab Homepage is another alternative

I use it daily, but Chromes dev tools are better. I always wind up back in Chrome to debug things.

One difference I've seen with FF vs Chrome is when finding the events to bind to each element. In FF, the event tag on the element is clickable and gives you the name and the line number in the JS file. It makes finding the code very easy. I have not seen that in Chrome. I rarely use Chrome, so this one thing leads me to saying FF's DevTools are better, at least for me and how I use them.

Funny, I have it exactly the other way around!

In contrast, the Multi-Account Containers system is the primary reason I avoid Firefox.

While it is meant to be an alternative to Chrome's profile switching, it is more a workaround than a complete replacement. I need entirely different sets of extensions for personal, work, and school environments, something containers can't do.

Firefox's actual profile support is beyond terrible. To launch a separate instance, Firefox requires many more clicks than Chrome, all within a Windows-2000-style UI. Not to mention that there are weird glitches in their implementation.

Firefox is not usable for me until they actually spend time improving their multiple profile support.

Firefox has a new Chrome-like profiles support as of v149.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-management

I definitely have not had that experience, although use FF for personal, various work, and various educational places.

None of those have required me to install a particular extension..

Of course thats not to deny your experience!

The only time profiles ever come into it, for me, is using web driver, playwright, or whatever.

I guess maybe the usage stats dont support making the profile selector better.

But also, maybe its a thing they would accept a change for?

Myself the profile support is the absolute worst thing about Chrome. I just want to log into some web site, I don't want to fight with the profiles to get things done.

For those few applications where I really would need profiles I will just open a different browser, so I still keep Edge/Chrome/Opera around for that rare situation. I don't need something that complicates my life every single click but it is the whole ideology of the Google Economy that they want you to spend 1% of attention on things that matter to you and 99% on things that don't.

This is not meant to be an alternative for Chrome's profile switching. It's a different use case entirely.

As you yourself mention, Firefox has actual profile support, which may not be as good as Chrome's, but at least compare like for like.

LMFAO. Containers are not for profiles-purpose. Everyone who needs profiles know this.

And Firefox now needs 2 click to switch profiles.