I'd like to see better stability. My biggest issue with Firefox on Windows right now is that it hangs if I leave it open for several days. Mozilla does have a suggestion on their support site: don't do that[1]:
> Firefox hangs after using it for a long time
> Firefox may hang if left open for long periods of time. To fix the issue, restart Firefox.
So I can choose between closing all of my open tabs at the end of each workday or randomly losing them during the workday. Since having my tabs open when I start work helps me jump back in, I've settled on randomly losing my tabs.
They also suggest using their session restore feature after a hang, but with this type of crash, Firefox is never able to restore your tabs. It also doesn't record the crash report in about:crashes. Overall, not great and it has me thinking of trying Brave.
You can get Firefox to open all the tabs you last had open when it starts up, this way you can close and open Firefox whenever you want, and you'll always be right back where you started.
This doesn't save the page state, so if you were filling in a form, you'll lose that information, but it does mean that wherever you reopen Firefox, you end up pretty much exactly where you were when you closed it.
I guess you'd still need to regularly close and reopen the browser as a whole (I do that at end of the day anyway when I turn my machine off), but it may be more convenient than losing state.
Firefox has had this feature for over a decade, and it has never worked reliably. It's slightly better now, but still one time in five or ten, it starts up in a blank session or with an error page prompting you to press a button to restore state.
I lived through the days where force closing Firefox was the only way to preserve sessions. Things honestly aren't that much better. I'd take a zero percent chance of success over 80. At least then failure is known and predictable instead of just reliable enough to get you to trust it.
Very weird to hear this. I've used Firefox as my primary browser for the last 8 or so years and it has never once failed to restore my tabs on Linux, MacOS, or Windows. I'm usually cruising with about a dozen tabs on Windows and Linux, and shamefully had up to 2,400 on MacOS last year. Works great every time. Reboots, Firefox updates, OS updates, you name it.
Works for me, but i ended up disabling it because of an extremely annoying issue, not sure where it comes from:
Opening a second window with CMD+N (mac user just like the sibling) often brings up some random page from my history. This has been so annoying that I disabled the restore feature. Since then I think it hasn't happened again.
Do you use an extension to manage your tabs? I haven't experienced this on stock Firefox, but a few years ago I had Tree Style Tab installed and it would occasionally do this.
You know that this makes it only worse unless you go through all tabs manually after starting to make sure they are actually loaded when you need them?
Having to wait half a minute on every tab switch to wait for that gigantic mess of enterprise grade websites served from an ancient box on the other side of the solar system to load is not conductive towards concentrated work.
When I lose firefox (usually when power outage) I just cycle through all the tabs with ctrl+tab, by the time I get back to the first one it has reloaded (and the others do so in the background). It's not a big deal.
Thanks for the advice - hopefully it helps others. For me, it happens infrequently enough that I am unlikely to remember anything specific for the situation. I never select multiple tabs otherwise.
Jira takes 10s for certain pages to load for me on a gigabit connection with an M1 Mac. I doubt a dial-up connection could even load a Jira backlog page in under an hour.
As someone who used to have hundreds if not thousands of Tabs, Firefox is the only browser that is stable enough and has the best Tab Session restore. So my guess is that something went wrong if you have to constantly restart Firefox.
Firefox has a sessionrestore.js and also a sessionrestore.bak. ( And also sesstionrestore.bak2 if I remember correctly )[1] It is the only browser that took session restore seriously because around ~16 years ago an idiot constantly went on Mozillazine and Bugzilla to file crash report of lost sessions that could have thousands of tabs.
If your sesstionrestore crashed or get wiped, i.e you restart your browser and those tabs were not there, you could also copy and past the .bak files and rename it as .js. It wont be everything you had since the bak file may have been a few hours old. But at least you got something back.
As to crashing. In the old days it was some tabs in the background doing JS with memory leakage. But if I remember correctly Firefox now pause Tabs that is unused for long period of time. If it isn't background Tabs that is causing problem. I would suggest similar to what I wrote to Animats, make a new Firefox profile and migrate all your History, Cookies etc to the new profile and see if it improve things. This used to be a manual process but I believe recent Firefox has made this easier with Firefox Retune or Refresh ( Sorry all of this are on top of my head you will have to do some Google search for the actual name)
If I were to rate Browser stability, it would be Firefox > Chrome > Safari. On both MacOS and Windows. The same ranking for session restore function where I have lost multiple sessions on Safari over the years. And in case anyone wondering why Safari is not stable and that may not be their experience, it is that something on MacOS ( the OS itself ) sometimes triggers Safari to reload all the Tabs even if they were originally sitting idle. This create huge I/O spike and generally leads to crashing or halt for a long period of time. Other than that it is pretty much on par with others.
[1] Those file and extensions names were something on top of my head so you have to google it to double check
This might be a Windows issue rather than a Firefox issue. I have a lot of tabs open in Firefox on Linux, for days to weeks on end, with no issues. The only time I restart it is to upgrade to a new version of Firefox or after installing a system update that requires a reboot to fully take effect.
> This might be a Windows issue rather than a Firefox issue
I leave multiple tabs open for weeks+ on Windows (and android), I have never experienced any issue (except when windows decides to update - but firefox always restores itself without issue, or I can press ctrl+shift+t to reopen previous tab/session). There must be something specific to the other commenter's setup, whether it be specific addons or specific pages that are causing the crash.
It could be you are using different apps from them so they never noticed. I've noticed some web "apps" have leaks that over time can bloat out memory usage leading to swap thrashes. gmail.com for example.
It was quite visible in top or about:memory or about:processes
It's not computing or swapping. Plenty of memory and CPU time available. It's just Firefox doing its own disk I/O. I cleared history, and that didn't help.
Ah.. No idea then. Windows debugging not my thing. I do know from a discussion w/ a Windows user that loading the same app (Microsoft Teams) took over a minute to load on his windows machine on an HD (and locked up most of the machine while doing so) - I did exact same comparison on my Linux machine and MS Teams loaded with all caches flushed in < 10 seconds, almost instantly with caching. I've encountered similar with Hedgewars and Minecraft.
So maybe there's a real issue but us linux users simply aren't noticing it..
Another thought. Perhaps it is the sqlite db? Maybe a large one that somehow isn't getting vacuumed on shutdown?
I now routinely reboot my Mac once in a while after I discovered a “helper” daemon from Zoom desperately pinging its mothership one year after uninstallation.
Same for me. I discovered it was Slack that had some live leak, one time it had eaten 33GB of RAM. An auto-reload extesion did the trick to prevent it from going too far, but I'd really wish Firefox would handle it more gracefully.
Unless I say so, a normal web page shouldn't eat gigs of RAM or tons of CPU.
Given how well web pages are coded, I'm curious whether a Firefox that's browsed to 50 static pages fares. At some point the pages themselves should get some blame (and yes, they can be offloaded, but we're back to balancing responsiveness & long term resource usage, and people are complaining about the pages being reloaded after exit as a delay)
Chrome recently added a setting so you can display a tab’s memory usage when you mouse over the tab. In Firefox, you can check the memory usage of each tab in Firefox’s Task Manager (about:processes).
I can't remember ever having a Firefox crash in the last few years. Running it on one machine with Win 10 and another with Win 11. Only extension is uBlock Origin. I often will leave it open for many days.
> So I can choose between closing all of my open tabs at the end of each workday or randomly losing them during the workday. Since having my tabs open when I start work helps me jump back in, I've settled on randomly losing my tabs.
I know it's just paper over the real problem, but couldn't you restart at the end of the day rather than at the beginning?
I must add a data point to the contrary: I'm a longtime Firefox user, and ever since they switched to the new Quantum core [1], issues like hanging or crashing (especially with a lot of tabs open) have practically disappeared. Over the last few years, I've consistently had hundreds of tabs open (with up to 100 active) with no problems whatsoever (three different laptops, all running Windows).
I rarely reboot my workstation; it's often in hibernation for days or even weeks until a security update is waiting for a cycle. Despite this, my Firefox on both Windows/macOS consistently maintains my tabs, each running smoothly in their own containers without any issues.
Good chances are Firefox is not at fault here as many people run it without issues for months in a row.
Maybe you should check it for suspicious DLLs using Process Exporer or outright attach a debugger and see what the UI thread is blocked on when it stops responding.
Session manager plugins solve this in my experience. It's a little annoying that FF doesn't already have this and you have to use a plugin for it, but only a little.
> They also suggest using their session restore feature after a hang, but with this type of crash, Firefox is never able to restore your tabs. It also doesn't record the crash report in about:crashes
Also the setting you suggested doesn't work if you have multiple windows that close. It only saves one window session.
Yes but OP is saying that built-in ability doesn't work for him for whatever reason.
In my case I like to be able startup the browser without opening all the prior tabs, but then be able to selectively reopen the prior tabs by window or by individual tab. That's what session managers do.
Why would you need to have your PC you browse the web on for days? Why would you be bothered with restarting a browsers at least once every 24 hours. I also call this dubious at best, I NEVER had any stability issues with FX and I pretty much used it since day 1.
You probably one of those people who confuse tabs with bookmarks and think you should have 500 tabs open with only 4 gigs ram and having not shutting your PC or Browser down for weeks. It that causes issues I think Mozilla should have that on low priority.
I use Brave on Linux mainly because I cant justify testing my webdev stuff not con Chromium and I tend to use the same Browser for everything, its also faster.
Mozilla like so brag about speed but I think the lost objectively measured to Blink a looooong time ago. Servo was given to the Linux Foundation and is far from ready. When its ready it will probably be pretty fast.
See ARC browser. It's developed by a minuscule team but what they do is turn the experience of browsing the web into pure smooth pleasure. They will never in a million years gather enough talent to outcompete the V8 engine, but what they can do is develop better user workflows to empower them.
Firefox could be such a workhorse of a browser. They could add so many features to make the lives of academics, researchers, journalists and professionals in general better. Who cares if it's a bit slower than Chrome if it allows to efficently write my article or keep together the sources for my thesis?
I don’t have a need to efficiently write an article in a browser - or code within a browser which is more my thing. I have a dedicated IDE for that, and leave browsing to browsing.
Browsers imo should just be browsers and leave the end user applications to the web app developers, plugin developers, etc. So in that sense I’m happy with where they are, and very happy they are doing their own stuff rather than being another Chrome-based browser.
Plugins are terrible though. If I truly want vertical tabs Edge allows me to use them. Firefox? Need a third party plugin that adds the vertical tabs but cannot remove the horizontal ones on top, creating an ugly and wasteful freak.
Also I didn't say I should write in the browser, I said the browser should let me collect information from the internet in such a way to make my job easier
Just in case you do not know, or you are interested, the Firefox's UI is mere CSS, one can customize it through "chrome/userChrome.css" in the profile folder of the user. I put for example my tabs under the bookmarks, just above the page content (As FF used to be at past), with the template from the CustomCSSforFx[1] project, and modified some colors and icons.
Firefox have also the "Browser Toolbox"[2], homologous to the web development tools, that one can use for to explore the css of the UI, select elements, etc, and modify them for to see how would look the modifications before to put them within the userChrome.css
The tabs I think that are under the id=TabsToolbar, so an #TabsToolbar{ display: none !important; } or similar should work, in addition to correct with other css params the space that it leaves.
Note: What happens is they change things from time to time, and after an update one have to correct the css again, I warn.
I’m not sure I follow? The clear improvement here is to add a checkbox representing a supported option to hide that header.
Hiding it in usercss isn’t supported and is liable to disappear at any point (say, the developers decide they’re tired of maintaining some part of the code that makes the custom usercss flag work). It serves the purpose for now, but cannot be relied upon in the long term and as such is a hack.
Not a Firefox user, but this feels like a culture gap. I use multiple applications where configurability through user-code is part of the SLA, and dropping support would be as utterly unacceptable as, say, dropping the toolbar. Considering the contrast Mozilla is trying to make with Chrome's more restrictive and non-user-conscious nature I see no reason they wouldn't share that same philosophy.
In the past they’ve not hesitated to reduce customizability when doing so was perceived to bring some benefit to ease of development.
Aside from that I just think it’s a good idea to push for implementation of basic functionality like hiding bars that don’t pair nicely with popular vertical tab extensions. I shouldn’t need to resort to usercss mods to do something that simple.
> Browsers imo should just be browsers and leave the end user applications to the web app developers, plugin developers, etc.
The problem here, though, is that the core browser becomes the lowest common denominator. When I set up a computer, I don't want to have to spend all day getting my browser into a usable state. I don't want to have to recommend Firefox with the asterisk that you need half a dozen plugins to make it good. I don't want to wake up and find that the tab management plugin I like has been bought out by a sketchy company that's now using my browser as a proxy server for scrapers.
And having a browser that's not minimalist is known to work. We have tabs today, for instance, because of the fine folks at Opera pushing the boundaries of what the browser can be. Not every browser needs every feature, but some things are just good quality of life improvements that plugins should be able to disable (versus requiring plugins to add all nonessential features).
> When I set up a computer, I don't want to have to spend all day getting my browser into a usable state. I don't want to have to recommend Firefox with the asterisk that you need half a dozen plugins to make it good.
You want a browser that can preload plugins on install with a config.
No, I don't. I don't want my browser to be cobbled together from plugins that may or may not work well together. I've played enough modded video games to know that this is hell. I want it to work because it was created and tested by a single person and not a dozen independent people stepping on each other's toes.
Well I guess you have to write your own browser then, because I'm quite certain that the configurations that you like are not the same as mine.
It's also funny how you bring up innovation. The thing is plugins enable much more innovation because a plugin can be made by a single person with a great idea and relatively little knowledge. Just imagine everyone who wanted to try out some innovative new feature would have to build their own browser first.
I think firefox focusing on performance, customization, and security/privacy is smart. Being the browser for tech savvy people is a great niche that sets it apart from others.
Performance has always been a metric that drove people to/away from browsers (at least for those of us who know what browsers are, know that alternatives exist, and are willing to try them). Add-ons can provide whatever weird workflow empowering gimmicks people want to set up for themselves rather than being limited to what the browser itself provides. Every OS I've used a browser on provides things like note/screenshot taking, and not everyone wants vertical tabs, ARC doesn't give you any choice. It's ARC's way or nothing. Firefox is still the browser that gives people the most control over how they work. Firefox truly empowers users.
First, FF is less secure than Chromium-based browsers so not sure what you meant there. Just have a look at the results of the various browser hacking competitions. This has been a consistent result for decades. FF security out of the box has also been inferior to Chrome’s. In some cases it’s been more readily exploited than Safari, which is saying something.
And as for customisation, that’s actually been eroded over the past 3-5 years in FF compared to, say, 10 or 15 years ago. For example, I can remember a time when the interface itself had the option (a checkbox) that miniaturised the icons of the entire search bar UI - this has been gone for years and there is now no way to change that without installing an entire theme. Now every user is stuck with the same general interface/UI spacing.
I’ve used FF since maybe 2008 and in my experience it’s never been worse than it is now in terms of performance, its interface customisability, and its benefits vs its largest competitor. If I end up using it as my primary browser it will be because of Google’s insanity with adblockers, not because FF itself is a good alternative (indeed it’s just that FF is the ONLY alternative).
> FF security out of the box has also been inferior to Chrome’s.
Privacy with Firefox out of the box isn't that much better than Chrome’s either, but what sets Firefox apart is that it can be very effectively hardened. At work I deal with all kinds of compromised and malicious websites and nothing beats Firefox once you've got it locked down.
> I’ve used FF since maybe 2008 and in my experience it’s never been worse than it is now in terms of performance, its interface customisability, and its benefits vs its largest competitor.
It's gotten more difficult to customize firefox over the years for sure, but what competitor offers better interface customizability? What can you customize in Chrome that you can't in firefox? What's chrome's equivalent to userChrome.css? Check out https://old.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/ for examples of what you can accomplish.
You are absolutely correct that Firefox is more customisable than Chrome, but my point wasn’t to compare the two on that front, but to make the point that the original comment - which spoke of FF’s ‘commitment’ to ‘customisability’ - is nonsensical. That commitment may have been a real thing a decade ago, but it hasn’t been around for awhile.
I do wish they'd lean into it a bit more these days. Updates tend to break a lot things for people who have taken the time to set things up how they like them. I know that can't always be avoided, but it'd be good if they tried and kept the ability to make such customizations in mind as they add new features.
We've got a document that outlines easily over 100 changes in about:config that need to be changed and locked (new ones are being added all the time), Nearly everything with a URL gets pulled out of the settings. Pocket is disabled, default plugins and the extensions that get installed for you automatically like screenshots@mozilla.org.xpi and pictureinpicture@mozilla.org.xpi get deleted, and we add noscript/ublock origin
The idea is to reduce attack surface as much as possible, and disable features like searching/calculating from the address bar, service workers, wasm, prefetch, webgl, redirects, the PDF reader (no files ever just auto-download or open in anything by default), Firefox View, webrtc, network prediction, the social API, reader mode, there's some stuff about certificates, TLS and SSL etc.
There's also a section for preventing fingerprinting, disabling telemetry/reporting/safebrowsing, all the stuff here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-stop-firefox-making... and to keep changes from being made so no auto-updates, and experiments/normandy/shield studies are disabled.
There are a bunch of guides to harden firefox online, and ours seems to be some combination of several of them. The Tor browser guys do some great work keeping an eye on some of the changes that get made.
In the end basically no active content of any kind is allowed by default. Some sites don't work at all with this stuff turned off or removed and it's a bit too locked down for day to day use but I'm surprised and how often things work well enough to get what you need at least. For example, an article might load just fine, but site navigation will be broken which isn't really an issue if you just wanted to read the article.
Most of the sites that will get you infected just by visiting them require JS, so disabling that alone helps a ton. For something you know is really evil it's often best to just download and analyze the site offline, but for poking around even in highly questionable places it's pretty nice.
You just quoted 3 purely hypothetical exploitable features vs, say, Chrome consistently being the last browser standing at PWN2OWN over the past 10+ years (and Firefox is usually the first to fall). I’ll take real world practical protection over theoretical attack surfaces every time.
Advertising has nothing to do with security exploits.
Clearly we’re talking about browser exploits in this particular line of comments, not privacy, and with exploits so defined Chrome is far superior to FF.
Most people here who use a Chrome based browser would almost certainly use a Chromium derivative anyway, like Brave.
> Clearly we’re talking about browser exploits in this particular line of comments, not privacy
You could've re-read the thread before posting such an obviously false comment.
Here's the first mention of privacy and security in this thread:
> I think firefox focusing on performance, customization, and security/privacy is smart.
I also heavily disagree with your view that spyware has nothing to do with security, and your extremely narrow view of what counts as security exploits. The Chromium specific APIs are riddled with security issues as I mentioned in my other reply.
Hence why I said 'this particular line OF COMMENTS' and not 'this thread'.
Security and privacy are not the same thing, nor are they directly related. Lack of privacy can literally be designed into a secure system, which is one way of describing how Chrome works. It doesn't really matter how you choose to esoterically define the words if everybody else's meaning is different.
When people talk about Chrome being secure, they're talking about the browser's resistance to being compromised by a third party. It's that simple. Nobody cares that you have some esoteric view whereby Google's inherent lack of privacy protections, wherein Google is able to collect information about the user through their browsing habits, is also part of the browser. That is a matter of privacy, not security, and Google very clearly sets out all the ways it collects information about the user in its various policies. Security relates to whether third parties - using the browser architecture itself as a conduit - are able to compromise the browser in such a way as to obtain or manipulate user information, data, or elements of how the user interacts with the system, in a way that is not approved by the user and about which he is likely unaware. Every user of Chrome agrees to Google's collection and use of certain data, and ergo such data collection does not involve security issues whatsoever. That you might disagree with Google's privacy policies is not to the point. Note that if the aggregated user data were to be surreptitiously accessed by a third party, this WOULD be a security issue - but that isn't what we're talking about, is it?
If talking about security, Chromium has been the most secure browser for at least a decade. Safari and Firefox are significantly worse at security than Chromium browsers are. That's not really debatable - just go look at results of the various hacking contests, look at the number of active exploits and how long they are in the wild and unpatched, etc.
On privacy, Firefox is undoubtedly better, although Mozilla has had snafus over the years. Mozilla also literally makes something like 99% of its revenues through agreements it has with Google search, so go figure.
One final note - as has been the case for at least 15 years now, Firefox with uBlock Origin and NoScript and a few other addons are probably the most secure you can get, albeit at significant cost to usability and convenience. When discussing security I think it's inherent that people are discussing the vanilla, out of the box install of a browser. Having said that, I currently use Brave and find it to be the best mix of features of Chrome without the rest of the Google privacy problems; despite being a very long time Firefox user, it just isn't good enough these days, although if Google succeeds in killing adblockers in Chrome I'll have to move to Firefox regardless.
You're literally the only person in this thread trying limit the conversation to browser exploits. So your choice of wording doesn't make it any more true.
> Note that if the aggregated user data were to be surreptitiously accessed by a third party, this WOULD be a security issue - but that isn't what we're talking about, is it?
But we are talking about third parties gaining access? The mentioned Web APIs are intended for use by third parties. It's not even aggregated user data, but individual ones.
It's not "purely hypothetical." It's reckless and irresponsible of you to spread misinformation like that based on wishful thinking.
WebUSB made it possible to work around Yubikey phishing protection [1]. WebMIDI allows websites to overwrite device firmware, which is a dangerous capability that could result in a sandbox escape [2]. Granting a website WebNFC permissions makes it possible to read TOTP tokens stored on Yubikeys at any point later on [3], which is worrying because ordinary users can't possibly deduce that from permission prompts. Battery Status API was heavily abused for fingerprinting by the time it was removed from Firefox [4]. I'm amazed that you dismissed that as a "hypothetical" concern, because if anything, it's the legitimate uses of the API that was hypothetical [5]. Uber used it to "inflate Uber prices for desperate users with low batteries." [5] [6].
But one don't even need theses examples to see how bad theses APIs are. Hardware are mostly designed to work with local applications. To expose them to websites is a fundamentally flawed idea. Google justifies them by adding permission prompts each time a problem emerges, but users can't possibly be expected to be fully aware of the consequences of allowing raw hardware access to websites with mere dialogs that they blindly click through.
And oh I wish there were only 3 bad APIs like you hinted. There are more than that. WebMIDI, WebNFC, WebSerial, WebHID, Generic Sensor API, File System Access, Low-level Sockets API, Network Information API, and the list goes on.
These aren't isolated examples. It's part of a broader pattern where Google ships an anti-feature, asks for "feedback" which means nothing because "devs already depend on it," and "standardizes" it despite opposition from the remaining browser vendors [7] [8].
I’ll judge browser security based on a broad set of examples rather than a cherry-picked one every time.
If a particular feature is controlled by a permissions prompt, saying that 'users can't be expected to be fully aware of' the consequences of a particular permission edit has, once again, nothing to do with security as everybody in the world besides yourself understands that term. Criticise their UI team, perhaps, but such a problem has nothing to do with security - indeed the 'feature' might be working exactly as intended, notwithstanding the (in your view) unclear wording obscuring it.
At this point I can only assume that your conflating of security and privacy is pathological, and I very much doubt that we can have a fruitful discussion about this.
Take WebMIDI, for example. A website using it would show the following permission prompt in Chrome:
example.com wants to
Control and reprogram your MIDI devices (SysEx)
[Block] [Allow]
According to you, everyone should understand that term to mean example.com can access their device to overwrite the firmware of a MIDI device, turn it into a keyboard, and take full control of the computer. It's feature working as intended and no security issues are involved.
I am so glad both Apple and Mozilla doesn't subscribe to you or Google's definition of "security." These gaping security holes can cause so much damage, and to see these as "features working as intended" shows how disconnected you are with actual users. Even the infamous ActiveX would not have security issues if we redefined security under your terms. A browser should never ever include capabilities for full system compromise as one of its features. No permission prompt should ever let that happen.
You also need to consider the inherent danger of exposing hardware to websites when considering whether permission prompts are adequate. Again, hardware aren't designed with the expectation that they'll be exposed to websites. Browser vendors can't possibly be aware of the security implications of doing so for every device out there either. That was one of the core arguments of my previous reply and I wish you hadn't omitted that. Unfortunately, my point about the permission prompt was taken out of context and spun into a "pathological" view that "everybody in the world besides myself" would laugh at.
Lastly, you might want to actually look at the examples I posted. Some of them don't or didn't involve permission prompts and enabled attack by third parties. Which I believe to be a security issue even under your terms.
Very insightful. I think people would, maybe, argue that a lot of the features in these niche browsers are actually plugins in disguise. Thoughts? I think the issue with plugins is people don't actually use them save ad blockers.
> They could add so many features to make the lives of academics, researchers, journalists and professionals in general better. Who cares if it's a bit slower than Chrome if it allows to efficently write my article or keep together the sources for my thesis?
They don't want to settle for a niche for academics, their mission is to be a popular mainstream browser (even if they're failing at that ATM).
Huge fan of the Arc browser. The UX is really smooth and intuitive. It also declutters UI and provides some nice hints.
I usually go to the url box to copy the url. one day, it suggested me to use a keyboard shortcut instead based on how often I did it. Little things like this that are built-in to the experience without having to install plugins and make sure they work together is a breath of fresh air.
My phone is a bit old (Pixel 4a) but it drives me crazy that so many times I type something into Firefox and it just shows a blank screen. Then I have to restart the app or open a new tap and type again. Feel it happens at least 20% of the time. No idea why and its not an internet issue. There is no loading. There is nothing.
I used to have this issue on nightly (not annoying enough to make me consider switching though), but it dissappeared several months ago, haven't seen it since. Are you sure it's still happening
I had the same problem on my 4a. I've since upgraded to a Pixel 8, and I still have the blank screen problem. Notably with a PWA, has to be killed and restarted. This is on Fennec (so FF dev basically). Annoys so much, chromium-based browsers don't have any issue.
Been getting that too. No idea why.
Interestingly, I've experienced it a handful of times on desktop too. 99% of the time it's the Android app doing it though.
I had this happen repeatedly but relatively rarely on a Galaxy A51, and now on a Galaxy A54. I don't browse on my phone much, but it felt like much less than 20% of the time. At least, it was rare enough that I'd always forget it happened until it smacked me in the face again.
I really wish Firefox were a better citizen on macOS. Its weird text treatment, basic stuff such ignoring snippets substitutions, text navigation conventions (Option + arrow, for instance), are deal breakers to me. I’d gladly use Firefox as main browser if all these little details worked as expected for any macOS app.
For now, I’m sticking to Safari, which is fine as well, and (not surprisingly) works like every app should word on macOS
My main peave using FF on macOS is full-screening it is a terrible experience - unlike Safari, etc, moving the mouse to the top of the screen causes all the chrome (tabs, URL bar, etc) to shift down (and reveal some useless gap). That's not normal behavior, and should have been fixed 5 years ago.
Also, once you use Safari tab groups + tab preview its hard to go back to FF.
You're still using Safari when you use Firefox on Mac. Mozilla could perhaps give more attention to bugs in the chrome, but it's understandable they allocate fewer resources to a platform that will never see Firefox's rendering.
Firefox’s handling of fonts, both within the browser itself and with its rendering of webpages, is my biggest issues with it. In Windows the difference in font representation in the address bar between FF and Brave/any Chromium browser is enough to put me off using it.
They finally fixed the spacing issue with the default San Francisco font, which was left completely broken and disgusting looking for over two years. But it still renders differently than Safari and Chrome, which you'll notice if you open a Github page for example and quickly flip between the two windows.
For whatever reason Firefox likes to make everything a little bolder and more spaced out, and on top of that doesn't seem to support the most widely used anti-aliasing CSS properties.
I resorted to injecting -moz-osx-font-smoothing in userContent.css on websites I visit frequently that look particularly bad.
Maybe I'm the crazy one here, but I can't remember last time firefox speed was an issue.
You want your software to be really snappy, we all agree on that. But past some point, it's physically impossible for a human to tell the difference. I believe a human can't detect if a tab takes 10ms or 1ms to open.
Firefox has been past the point where "fast" matters for a very long time (and that's a great thing!)
Agreed -- however many people still remember Firefox from the days they switched to Chrome and have this perception that Firefox is slow. This blog post is probably for them, to let them know "hey we're not slow!".
No, it still matters at the margins. When you get into extreme situations like having too many tabs open or a website with really inefficient JavaScript, it’s really nice to have a fast browser that can deal with that. Sure, there are always ways to design software better in order to preserve responsiveness in extreme situations, but better performance never hurts!
I've noticed that performance of Firefox on Linux can vary quite a bit from distro to distro. Mozilla uses aggressive compile, link time, and profile guided optimizations in the default Firefox binary they distribute, whereas distributions like Debian compile with very safe options and little optimizations enabled. You can see these with about:buildconfig. It's such a big difference sometimes that it makes sense why they previously branded unofficial releases as Pale Moon.
Hi, macOS user here. I know Firefox is great, and I'd love to use it (again), but Mozilla's decision to remove all user-facing, OS-level scripting capabilities from it (i.e., AppleScript) made me drop it a few years ago. Getting anything out of FF on macOS, locally, is a major pain in the ass, actually. Try to grab the current URL from the active tab…
Add to that the non-macOS text handling, macOS-unlike font rendering, its insistence to not use the system-wide spell checker provided by the OS etc. It feels a bit rude at times.
I think it's a super-solid browser that unfortunately doesn't give a shit about the platform it's running on. Irritatingly, it's fine with being a black box, so much more than the Chromiums are (for all their various faults).
Firefox is great! It is my daily driver. However a lot of small things irritate me. For example, make Firefox fullscreen and open a long page. Move your mouse to the far right of the page and drag down. The page will not scroll. You need to carefully put your mouse on the tiny scrollbar to make it work. Chrome, Safari on the other hand work as expected.
Yeah, same here. Maximize the window, can scroll with mouse on far right. Though I've never tried to scroll that way before as I use three monitors and generally have the browser in the middle. (Which does make these trendy new thin scrollbars a bit irritating. But it seems everyone is doing that.)
With the exception of Linux, Firefox is not installed by default anywhere. You have Edge on Windows, which is based on Chromium, and Chrome pushing its installation when you visit any Google property. So no wonder Firefox has the market share that has.
Would always choose chrome for grandma's computer. Firefox is great but for a non technology person worse than chrome.
Most sites work as expected.
And I had more update issues with Firefox than chrome (chrome was never outdated, firefox sometimes was versions behind until I manually opened the about dialog)
The only thing that keeps getting faster is the abandonment of Firefox. It doesn't matter how fast Firefox is, or how private it is, or any of the other garbage the Mozilla foundation has been wasting their time on. If Firefox continues to slip in usage, and eventually into obscurity, it is all for nothing.
A technically superior, or safer, or more private, or whatever the current line of argumentation and marketing is, does not matter. Mozilla VPN does not matter.
I'm a firefox user on Ubuntu. They need to improve the cold start time badly. It currently takes me 4-5 minutes from launch to page load. Once loaded I have no issues with the performance but Chrome is vastly superior in this area.
EDIT: I rely highly on the Restore Previous Session feature. That might be why.
If you can install a Flatpak or .deb package of Firefox, you should regain that performance. Found a post recommending a "Mozilla Team" PPA at https://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2022/04/install-firefox..., but I last used Ubuntu 15 years ago, so I can't speak to the specific recommendations therein.
You can't possibly think that all Firefox and Ubuntu users sit around for 4 minutes waiting for their browser to open. It's clearly something specific to your setup.
If you want to report this issue I suggest first trying a fresh install of another OS on the same device just to ensure it's not hw. And of course the standard troubleshooting is to start Firefox in troubleshooting mode, that runs it without any plugins enabled.
That's a local issue for sure. Not sure how, might be Firefox's fault in some way. But it's not just a combination of Firefox and Ubuntu. (I use Firefox on Ubuntu 22.04 and it's a couple seconds, maybe.)
That's the default install method for Firefox on Ubuntu, last I checked. I think they only recently had an apt repo too. I don't think it's specifically an issue with Snap either, nor do I think Snap is a terrible tool besides it being a centralized package store that you can't create 3rd party repositories for, though I understand people also complain about the block devices Snap packages add to your system.
Anyway, the intent of my original comment was just to say that they should do some more investigating on their issue because it's not as simple as Firefox in a Snap package on any Ubuntu installation.
Using Firefox on Fedora 39. It takes 1-2 seconds to start with lots of tabs reopening. I have had issues with videos not playing from time to time but other than that, I am really liking it (coming from MacOS and Chrome).
Not them, but tree tabs + auto tab discard is a great way to browse documentation when working on a project. That can easily use up dozens of tabs.
3000 seems excessive, but tabs are better than bookmarks since they save page state like scroll position, so many people use tabs instead of bookmarks. That's more a lack of useful functionality in existing bookmarks than an inherent advantage of tabs IMO.
Have you tried deleting your profile and starting fresh? Something is clearly messed up. Launching takes a fraction of a second for me on NixOS with a years-old profile.
Is the Firefox snap perhaps on a spinning rust drive?
(I boot from SSD but have spinning rust for /home - so I can hear when Firefox is hammering the drive. It seems that any time it updates or fails to quit cleanly it thrashes the HD for maybe 10 to 20 seconds the first time I visit something like facebook or youtube.)
> EDIT: I rely highly on the Restore Previous Session feature. That might be why.
As do I, and it doesn't take as long on my machine. Perhaps your hardware is unusually slow or you're using extensions that do something on every tab after startup, even the lazy-loaded ones.
Firefox restarts in seconds for me.
I had a similar issue on Arch Linux some time ago.
I debugged it by running it with strace, seeing what it was waiting for and googling it. Uninstalling some package solved it.
I've had this problem on an Arch machine after no use and no update for a long time. Thunderbird was affected as well, and both unfreezed at the exact same moment a few minutes after launching the first one.
I never had time to investigate this but this was obviously a system problem, Firefox and Thunderbird are fast on all the other machines I use.
I'm on the Ubuntu Firefox snap, and it definitely doesn't take 5 minutes to load. Create a new profile and see if that helps, but it shouldn't take that long.
4-5 minutes is clearly insane, but Firefox in Ubuntu taking 10s of seconds for a fairly simple profile to start is why I went back to Debian after a few months of Ubuntu.
What use is 1 millisecond improvement in page load time, if every second page on today's internet requires me to click on cookie consent form, or to solve a difficult captcha, or to pay to continue reading, or turns out to be a 30-screens AI chez d'oeuvre? Enshittification of the web is real and painful.
I use a lot of Linux, from Ubuntu to Arch (actually) via Debian, Rasbian and more.
That's not my experience. (edit) and why disconnect from the internet anyway and how do you actually do that? I think you are confused about internet and ethernet.
While Mozilla deserves some heat for abandoning official support of PWAs, for my use this add-on has filled the role just as well: https://github.com/filips123/PWAsForFirefox
Thanks for this. It is pretty surprising that this is one of the most requested Firefox features and they haven't done anything here; all the world is moving to web apps and Firefox is not helping.
I love firefox but i don't have as much faith in mozilla as an org. IMHO, they should consider firefox a loss leader (despite search engine deals) and focus on unrelated projects that make money and attract users due to the firefox brand.
Or...hear me out: Firefox gets into the adblocker business and lets the big boys paya fortune to be exempted by default. This includes using ML to block ads (i have ideas on how to implement unblockable ads using traditional means).
I really wish they would invest more in servo. Imagine a memory safe browser!
But beyond all that, EU and US govs mandating it as the only default browser would be huge for mozilla.
They're catching up now in some areas like GPOs but mozilla has nothing on chrome enterprise.
They don't realize that corporate types are eager to spend money or random shit so long as b2b marketing is done right (makes the buyer look good internally). And I cna sort of see the conflict because they are pro-privacy and chrome enterprise is very much about giving security/system admins control. For example, if a user clicks through a failing https warning or downloads a file despite safe browing (phishing/malware) warning you would know. So long as you make sure it is only sold to enterprise and gov customers, giving them such insights (and much more, even browsing history) can be a good money maker, help dominate the market share and maintain moral leadership (don't do personal stuff at work or shit where you eat).
> Or...hear me out: Firefox gets into the adblocker business and lets the big boys paya fortune to be exempted by default.
That will make Firefox a very attractive browser to people who want to block as many ads as possible, and they will then install an add-on which also blocks the ads that Firefox whitelists, perhaps using Firefox's own whitelist as a source if it's easily available. Then if Firefox tries to pull a Google and be evil and lock down their add-on API so that ad blocker add-ons can no longer be made, these people will just switch to a fork with no such limitations. And in the first place I don't think Firefox has enough usage for them to be able to charge a "fortune" for such an ad blocking exemption in the first place.
By "EU and US govs mandating it as the only default browser" I assume you mean for government employees and not for the entire populace (which would be straight up despotic), but either way it would probably be unenforceable.
> By "EU and US govs mandating it as the only default browser" I assume you mean for government employees and not for the entire populace
Yes, for their own gov pcs not the people in general.
> and they will then install an add-on which also blocks the ads that Firefox whitelists
You are the third commenter I had to explain this to, so maybe my fault in not making this clear but there is no need for that, the whitelist is just a default "moderare" adblock setting which you can change to "aggressive" to block everything. And exisiting adblockers will continue to work if you prefer them.
This is similar to how you can set your search engine to duckduckgo but google pays a fortune to be the default.
> but either way it would probably be unenforceable.
A healthy IT organization shouldn't allow the average user to install their own browser of choice. But government orgs tend to be underfunded to the point that Firefox mandates are nowhere near their top tech priority.
> If a way to serve unblockable ads existed, it would already be implemented and widely used
I don't think this is necessarily true. It's clear that any tech that literally forces users to look at something is coercive. Forcing your users to wear a Clockwork Orange style eye gadget is clearly not acceptable. Playing ads and asking your users not to switch to another channel is clearly acceptable. The game is largely about gaining or ceding ground between those extremes about what's socially acceptable rather than what's technologically possible.
Many users are okay with some level of ads. It's easier to ratchet up the ads those users are willing to watch than it is to get increasingly authoritarian with the small number of users who insist on not seeing any ads. For example, YouTube didn't attempt to fight ad blockers for years. They're only really starting now because it's trying to hit revenue targets.
I am surprised by your comment and the reaction to mine. Why would firefox's users be alienated? They get an adblocker by default that will be supported and maintained by mozilla. If you want to block all ads that would be changing a setting, what google and pals pay for is the default setting that benefits them, they will still get blocked if users want them blocked. This mindset of making an emotional ideologic reaction isn't helping anyone!
> If a way to serve unblockable ads existed, it would already be implemented and widely used
It would require a change in how ads are served and bids are made in realtime. The main reason it isn't happening already is that most people are not blocking ads, especially on mobile where engagement has most value.I'd say ad blocking users are not more than firefox users even.
You're right, it was an emotional reaction comment. I don't like ads, I think ads are a negative on the world, and I hate that nearly every corner of the internet is funded by them. I use Firefox because it's open source software made by a non-profit that I believe is trying to do good in the world. So, when I saw your idea to put even more ads into Firefox, I knee-jerk'd out a negative comment.
I just wish we all directly and willingly funded things that were good.
> when I saw your idea to put even more ads into Firefox, I knee-jerk'd out a negative comment.
That wasn't what I suggested though, it was the opposite. Now i have randos downvoting every comment i make lol. People in general these days need to be more open minded I think.
>This would completely alienate Firefox's core userbase.
How's that core userbase working out for them? Sub 2% very nearly. Time to shake things up and figure it out. What they've been doing don't work no more.
This would be an abysmal decision all around. Firefox doesn't have enough market share to command any sort of price for this, and selling ad-blocker access would immediately destroy all trust in Firefox as a product.
They already make hundreds of millions just for allowing google as default search engine, they can make more with this.
I re-read what I said and it is in plain english, why are you and others not understanding that I didn't say selling ad blocker access? Ad blocker default exempt list is what is sold which users can change. And you can still use ad blocking extensions.
Basically a ton of people get an adblocker by default and you people have your pitchforks out because mozilla sells the default setting of an adblocker? Your emotions and open source religion aside what exactly offends you about this?
Congrats Mozilla! You made improvements to a product you allow dwindle to 2-3% market share.
Forest and trees… who cares that you made it faster if continually less and less people use it. The extreme majority do not care about tiny improvements to speed.
If they were interested in growing market, they would be integrating ublockOrigin and other anti-ad software. They literally have nothing to lose anymore.
But it's such a small number of users that some web apps and sites aren't bothering to test on FF. Also, it seems like even "power users" are not using and recommending it like they used to do. Their mobile presence is ruby. It's alarming and they must move fast.
Apple used to have a 4% market share (and declining) of the PC industry before Jobs came back, and was seen as a joke and failure of a company because of it.
But, it’s okay for Firefox to own 2-3% market share?
Rudely stated yet true. I've used Firefox as my main browser for as long as it has existed (and Netscape before). It's very concerning to see it slip into irrelevance, putting more users every year under the control of big tech.
I feel one issue is that the people who are Firefox power users are also disabling telemetry, so the developers aren't getting any usage data from the people who care the most about Firefox. So the only usage data they receive is from the normal user, who want different things and use the browser differently.
It's not about telemetry, most people just use the data to support whatever they want.
For example, firefox users of all sorts customized things. People loved it. Themes, plug-ins, add-ons.
Firefox devs consistently fail to realize that "configurability" is a category, not "this tiny configurable thing".
So they've removed configurable after configurable option, each option only having .1% market share usage or what not, not considering that overall... they've now alienated 20% of their user base.
Telemetry shows them a tiny percentage for each feature, but it is the collective feature set which matters.
And that has a cumulative effect. 20% upset users, all saying "Don't use firefox!", doesn't help.
Then they add useless, in your face, obtrusive and annoying features, and people scramble to diaable them.
"Oh so sorry, disable that?!". Sometimes years go by, and all the instantly closed bug reports add up, and they finally relent, fix it. Of course, everyone who cared is now gone, and will never come back, and now campaigns against firefox.
Just like the infamous tab detach issue, which took half a decade to resolve, by finally adding an about:config option to turn that off.
And who cares for telemetry, when hundreds of users complain, and bugs are ignored, or just hostile closed?
> Firefox hangs after using it for a long time
> Firefox may hang if left open for long periods of time. To fix the issue, restart Firefox.
So I can choose between closing all of my open tabs at the end of each workday or randomly losing them during the workday. Since having my tabs open when I start work helps me jump back in, I've settled on randomly losing my tabs.
They also suggest using their session restore feature after a hang, but with this type of crash, Firefox is never able to restore your tabs. It also doesn't record the crash report in about:crashes. Overall, not great and it has me thinking of trying Brave.
1. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-hangs-or-not-re...