[tinnyx]

A relevant article from July with information how to disable the "feature": https://www.privacyguides.org/articles/2024/07/14/mozilla-di...

Personally I've been using FF for the last 4 years even though I consider it a worse experience, but I'm becoming disilusioned with it and considering moving to LibreWolf. I'm also interested in trying Orion (by Kagi), but haven't had the time yet.

[aucisson_masque]

Orion is neat but you're going to loose a lot of extension support.

Librewolf on the other hand is 99% Firefox, for the better (extension) and for the worst (clunkiness).

I've been down this road, honestly just stick with Firefox and disable the relevant setting. It's not worth the time.

[wobfan]

Tbh. I don't get the negatives about Firefox. I have to use Chrome for App development and have been using it a little more in the last months. I cannot see why I should prefer it over Firefox. It works well, has (or soon used to have) good extension support and is smooth, but so is Firefox. Like, I could not say one single thing that I prefer in Chrome.

And all this while I have to ignore the single biggest negative about Chrome - that it's "run" by Google.

[aucisson_masque]

Personally it's more about the user interface. Searching history for instance is a mess on Firefox, you got it in collection tab and in history menu. Then if you click on yesterday, it won't sort by the hour at which I browsed it yesterday but at the most recent date so that the sort order is messed up with the stuff you browsed today, and so on, and so on.

You say you're a developer. I had to tweak my company website myself, not knowing anything about css, html, JavaScript, chrome developer tools were intuitive enough.

Firefox developer tools? even years later, now than I understand well website development, I often still can't figure out how to do stuff.

[wobfan]

Oh that’s weird! I have been using Firefox dev tools a lot, also for a lot of development, and it worked perfectly, and to me it made perfect sense! But maybe it would have been even easier on Chrome, haha

[aucisson_masque]

Maybe it depends what you are most used to. But personally I started completely fresh, tried both and chrome was more intuitive. At least as much as a développer tool can be to a non développer

[ddfs123]

Google Meet, Slack Web, for example, are notirious for being Firefox-hostile. Though I manage fine with User-Agent

[saratogacx]

Google meet on FF used to be almost a no-op but for the past year or so it has operated without any real issue. Screen sharing is sometimes off when iterating windows but that is pretty minor. (on Windows anyway)

[ddfs123]

I got some message like "XML error" and just denied out of meeting lots of time.

[wobfan]

Slack works fine afaik, have been using it for a few years, but I can imagine Meet not working. I remember having switch to chrome for that.

[ddfs123]

Slack's huddle just straight up block Firefox for me ( 130.0.1, Fedora ).

[wobfan]

Tried it for some days, on iOS and macOS. It still has bugs, and extensions don't work as good as they should. Sometimes they don't work at all. The UI is a a little buggy, but that's acceptable.

Worst thing for me is that it's closed source. They can claim whatever they want, if they can't prove it, I cannot really trust them.

[DidYaWipe]

I used Firefox long ago, before I switched to Mac.

Because of crippling defects in Safari (pages just not loading, hyperlinks not being recognized as such, clicks doing nothing), I decided to go back to Firefox. This was made feasible by the availability of a bookmark-syncing facility across devices.

But... wow it's painful. On mobile, the bookmarks are buried under layers of inexplicable and unneeded menus. It's infuriating to use.

On the desktop, the storage of log-in credentials is only half done. It'll remember what user ID you might have used for a site, but it then fails to select the password associated with that ID. It just presents a giant list of every password for every ID you might have used on the site. You have to scroll through them all, and sometimes there are duplicates. Why?

Then there's the inability to specify that new tabs should open on your home page. Instead, new tabs have to open on the Mozilla home page, which presents a search bar that's useless. When you start typing in it, a giant search panel erupts from the top of the screen and the cursor jumps into it. WTF? Who thought that was good design?

I will probably just go back to Safari, because I refuse to support Google's shit. But what's going on with Firefox? They're putting dev time into the garbage reported in this article, and ignoring glaring defects that are driving Firefox's already tiny market share away.

[pmontra]

That depends on the usage pattern. To give you a totally different way to use Firefox: I use it both on desktop (Linux) and on mobile (Android, multiple devices.) I don't ever close it. I close it to update or to reboot my computer. On desktop it's configured to restart with the previously opened tabs and windows (one per customer, each one on its virtual desktop, one for me.) I don't sync tabs because way more than half of the tabs on my desktop Firefox are related to work, some localhost, some reachable only on a VPN. Furthermore it's no business of Mozilla or anybody else to see my tabs go through their servers, E2E encryption or not. I never used any browser internal password manager because (any other considerations apart) what happens when I want to access a site from another browser? Maybe from Chrome, and I used Opera and Vivaldi as secondary browsers many years ago. I store my passwords in one of the various Keepass apps, sync from desktop to mobile with syncthing and I'm happy.

Firefox as browser-only browser is perfectly good for me. The surrounding UI is almost transparent to me, as if it did not exist.

The only point of contact between your and mine experiences are the bookmarks on mobile. I don't use them. I pin the sites I use most on the page that opens when pressing the new tab button and those are my bookmarks. Unfortunately there are only 16 possible pinned sites there but I'm not even using all of them. Most of the times I tap the URL bar, type one or two letters and Firefox autocompletes the sites I want to see. Example: I tap n and it suggests news.ycombinator.com. Faster than any bookmarks menu.

Anyway. If most users follow your workflow, Mozilla are not doing a good job. If most users follow my workflow, they are wasting a lot of engineering time in features we don't use. IMHO Firefox users are mostly power users so I think there are at least ten different workflows competing for the top spot and whatever Mozilla does people will be mostly upset. It's not an easy place to be.

[DidYaWipe]

Fair enough. Do the external password-managing apps integrate with the browser for auto-completion? I've never tried one.

I also don't sync tabs, so I'm not talking about that at all. Just bookmarks.

[InfamousRece]

That shitty search bar behavior is extremely annoying to me as well. Luckily it can still be disabled in about:config (the setting is called browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.improvesearch.handoffToAwesomebar or similar). “Awesome” bar is not that awesome.

[DidYaWipe]

Thanks, someone did point that out after I raised an issue. But one wonders why time was spent on such a misguided "feature."

[neobrain]

FTR the feature is also implicitly disabled if you have telemetry disabled.

I wish more privacy advocate websites mentioned this. Not sure what these one-sided stories achieve other than pushing "might as well use Chrome then" conspiracies.

[bugtodiffer]

I'd not use Orion. They can barely build a working search engine, I don't trust them one bit to code a secure browser