My Ad Limiter add-on is down to 19 users on Firefox. Used to be thousands.
It won't work on Chrome at all now. I'm shutting down SiteTruth, after almost 20 years.[1]
Fwiw, I've been using Firefox for 20+ years, I hate ads with passion and yet I never heard of your add-on until just now.
I don't remember what I've used before uBlock Origin, but since its appearance it's basically solved the ad blocking on Firefox and became the de-facto standard for the browser.
You probably lost all your users to it, rather that they all stopped using FF.
I hate to be the guy to say this, but uBlockOrigin outcompeted you half a decade ago. It's the first extension Install on a fresh install and I have never heard of your extension or site.
It was never intended to be a volume product. It was a demo of a system which fetched background info about companies. I'd hoped to license it to a search company. Then Google turned to the dark side and Yahoo gave up.
The classic 'those guys did something bad, so I am going to go with the guys who are absolute assholes doing several orders of magnitude more bad things now instead' response.
That usually means that whoever utters it was just looking for a sycophantic excuse to go with the bigger threat because it is more convenient to them (for now).
It's remarkable how often this happens, isn't it? One incident of someone not living up to standards is suddenly an opportunity to abandon standards and go with known bad actors. It's like people giving up on the MSM and immediately latching onto propaganda Youtubers instead.
People latch onto consistency and hypocrisy as their filters.
The problem is that anyone trying to actually be better is usually inconsistent and hypocritical at some level as in that "you criticize society, yet you participate in it" comic.
If you attempt to filter out all traces of hypocrisy from your trusted sources, you wind up listening to the absolute worst people.
The people trying to do better are usually the ones struggling with conflicts and inconsistencies.
Maybe "wicked problem" is the new tech buzzword, but browsers certainly are one, and Mozilla messed it up. I blame Mitchell Baker for a big chunk. We don't need a new browser though. We need a new web.
As a user at least I have an option to use ublock origin extension in Firefox. So I'm somewhat grateful I can still browse the net peacefully and safely.
Firefox and Firefox-derivative browsers have and continue to be seriously sluggish and memory and energy hogs. This should not be swept under the rug.
Even today it is difficult for me to use Firefox, Mullvad, etc. When I used to use them, almost every time my machine became slow the solution was to kill Firefox.
EDIT: It's true folks, I would love to be able to use Firefox as my primary browser. But all my experience with it (and I used it for more than a decade) has been dogged by its sluggishness.
I use Firefox mobile pretty much exclusively. I haven't noticed any meaningful performance difference between it & Chrome. It also seems to perform fine on my Fedora laptop.
Mobile is different. I rarely even use mobile. I do however use a lot of tabs on desktop, and Firefox is found very wanting in the performance department.
I don't even think its about number of tabs. Just yesterday and today, Mullvad browser takes minutes to load a set of about 7 pinned tabs (with no other tabs) on startup, whereas Helium (which is based on Chromium) loads in a second or two close to a hundred tabs.
I feel for people who have this issue--wish I could help you solve it, but I can't repro. My 10-year-old laptop with 16 GB runs it great with low memory usage.
I found that in general, Firefox works fast enough that I can't tell the difference in performance between it and Chromium-based browsers. I have 128 GB of RAM on my desktop, so even if it's a memory hog, I'd never notice.
However, occasionally I'd run into sites with terrible performance issues. Facebook [0] was often insanely slow on Firefox and would sometimes freeze up entirely.
I wanted a Chromium-based browser but didn't want Chrome, Edge, or Brave. I ended up landing on Vivaldi and have been happy with it so far.
[0] Yeah, yeah, ridicule me all you want for still using Facebook, but I enjoy it because I don't have shitty friends.
This does not make sense. Firefox would be taking minutes to open a page that Chrome opens within a second or two. And if Chrome was doing aggressive pre-fetching, then it should be using more memory, no? And yet the opposite is the case.
Not denying your experience but if it is taking "minutes" then that sounds like a highly specific glitch that you should try to debug.
Speaking personally I have used Firefox pretty much exclusively for 20+ years, always on low-end hardware. It's been years since I last had any performance issues.
This isn't the gotcha you think it is. Every time I try Vivaldi I am right back at Firefox and I am surely not alone. I have never understood the obsession with tree style tabs or vertical tabs. I don't need to customise my browser at all and I like supporting engine diversity.
The motivation for vertical tabs is pretty straightforward, screens are mostly wider than they are tall, browsers are often used in fullscreen mode, yet much of the web does not use much of the screen's width. So it's a better use of screen space to put tabs on the side than on top.
True. And when I first saw that Tor browser (i.e. Firefox) offered a vertical tabs mode without the tab title (and only the favicons), I thought it was the stupidest vertical tab UI design possible. But then I decided to try it for a week, and guess what - I appreciated the extra space, and it wasn't as hard identifying the tabs through their favicons as I thought it would be. And if needed you can always drag the vertical tab sidebar to reveal the tab title. (Note though that I am not one of these people who opens 100's of tabs and keeps it open. In fact, I find too many tabs cluttering and distracting and if I need to scroll to find my tabs I start closing the tabs).
went from Firefox to Vivaldi, never looked back for many years
on Android phone tried many, most recently was using Kiwi Browser, then for some time Firefox until they fucked up UI, so moved to Cromite, though my phone broke (never buy Google Pixel again, first broken phone after 15 years with smartphones and various brands including very low budget), so now I am on my old phone which for some reason doesn't support Cromite, so I am back at Firefox temporarily
thanks for the tip, I assumed some older version would work but anyway using it only temporarily until I switch to something more modern and can deal with that UI for few days/weeks at worst, anyway Cromite has its cons as well, it regularly exit UbO which need to be relaunched (plus also the UbO menu is cropped and not fully displayed), that's sort of deal breaker compared to UI, I am experiecing it quite frequently, I wish there would be Kiwi Browser successor which would have stable UbO support, Helium doesn't even support MV2 and Ultimatum also didn't work very good to me, so might as well return to FF even on new phone despite the horrible UI
Then again, our laptop battery only lasts 1/3 as much on MacOS.
I know, I know. The community keeps pretending this isn’t an issue for the last, hum, 15 years? But it is, and for people that are looking for a tool and not for a statement, it quickly drives them away from Firefox back to Chrome browsers.
I've used Firefox across devices, across the years. This just isn't my experience, at all, remotely. And I have had to use Chrome (now it is Edge) for many work functions, so I do have the A/B comparisons. I'm not doubting your experience, fine, but I also know I'm not "pretending" anything in my own experience.
doesn't happen in my case (OnePlus 15/Android 16, Firefox background usage allowed in some "smart" mode whatever that means, doesn't suck the battery in background although it's on most of the time).
I have better battery life on Furi FX1s than any of my Android devices (Pixel 6a, Fairphone 4). This is with closing applications when I no longer need them on all devices.
Anything to back those claims up? I use Firefox and didn't really notice this (although I am rarely on battery), and other than Google Meet making my machine throttle (and I blame that on Google not on Mozilla), I don't use Chrome for anything else for my browsing.
It's not a joke. The Pimpzilla theme stopped working due to changes that Mozilla made to Firefox's layout system, and I dropped Firefox for Safari. Never went back.
[1] https://www.sitetruth.com