- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
• Firefox offers better privacy and security than Chrome, with upcoming support for 200 new add-ons.
• While Chrome dominates, Firefox gains ground with user-friendly browsing experience and open-source model.
• Mozilla’s focus on user privacy and transparency challenges Google’s ad-centric approach, making Firefox a viable alternative.
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PWAs ?
Firefox offers better privacy and security than Chrome, with upcoming support for 200 new add-ons.
Also built in spyware and a LOT of snitching to a 3rd party analytics company that can be disable in flags.
If you’re serious about privacy use LibreWolf or Ungoogled Chromium if you’re reasons that required the Chromium dev tools.
Had pentadactyl survived the infamous extension API change (or something like that, don’t remember anymore) I would’ve never left FF. However, I finally made it back, thanks to tridactyl.
No home button is absolutely pathetic. I never stopped using FF on desktop, but until FF mobile gets a home button it’s not going to be installed on my phones.
In the meantime Kiwi has been the better browser on mobile by far in my opinion. It has access to more extensions and it was the first browser to do things like the bottom address bar among other things. Oh, and it has a fucking home button like every other browser except for FF mobile for some dumbass reason.
It’s still there, it’s just off by default since people rarely use it these days.
Go to Customize Firefox controls, buttons and toolbars. Pick the Home button or whatever else you want on the toolbar, and just drag it up there. Some items might be in the overflow menu on the right.
What’s the use case for a home button? Why not just set the default url for new tabs?
I guess, it’s so you can make your current tab navigate to the home-page rather than closing the tab and opening a new one…
You can’t set it to a custom URL… I have a selfhosted dashboard that I want to load by pressing the home button. Having a “home” button that forces you to use their dumb start page isn’t really a home button. That isn’t how any home buttons on any other browsers work including FF desktop.
You realize that there is difference between FF mobile and FF desktop, right? This has been a known issue for a long time now. I’m not mistaken and I’m not mentioning it because I just glanced over some settings.
Damn, you sure are mad for being correct
And you’re annoying… it would have taken you 5 seconds to open FF on your phone if you use it to see that you were wrong instead of trying to incorrectly correct me.
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Doesn’t let you set the homepage to a custom URL in FF mobile…
I can’t comprehend how someone can be able to self host something but not able to find literally the first configurable option on the “home” settings page.
Tell you what, you show me how to set a custom URL to the homepage button on Firefox Mobile in the current build and I’ll send you $2000… let me know when you’re ready to admit you’re wrong.
This is one of the reasons I still use Chromium primarily. Firefox fanatics are just too much like cult members. You can point out real issues to them, like that Firefox was slow to implement hardware-accelerated video decoding on Linux, or that Firefox also enables a bunch of telemetry by default… but half of their identity is based on using Firefox, so they take it personally. I’d love to have a technical discussion with some of these Firefox cultists, but to be honest most of them will just resort to ad-hominem attacks because that is the only argument they have.
For real… I got downvoted into oblivion for a valid criticism.
And listen, I’m a huge FOSS nerd… I only use linux on my computers. I selfhost a shitload of FOSS services to maintain control and privacy. I run LineageOS on my phones and 90% of my apps are from f-droid. I say all that because obviously I would love to use Firefox mobile instead of another chromium based browser, but it’s a turd… it doesn’t have a functioning home button for fucks sake, it’s been a known issue for over 5 years, and they haven’t fixed it.
And why is something so seemingly simple not been fixed? Is it spaghetti code? Is it on purpose to force you to use their start page? I don’t know, but I know there is no way around it. There are no extensions that fix it and none of the forks have added the functionality… despite plenty of people wanting it.
I can’t comprehend how you fail to understand that on FF mobile you do not get an option to set a custom URL for the home button. But yes, please open your FF mobile right now and show me how you can set the home button to something like dashboard.home.lan or a local IP address, I can’t wait!
It’s time to go to bed grandpa.
Nah, it’s time for you to wake up son. I would rather have software that is customizable instead of the turd that is firefox mobile right now.
You can literally customise it to show the home button. I know because I have done this.
You can’t set the home button to a custom URL in Firefox mobile… that “home” button forces you to use the Firefox start page. That’s not really a home button. I need the home button to take me to my selfhosted dashboard because that’s where everything I ever want to get to is and it’s something I can control and customize to my liking. I shouldn’t be forced to use Firefox’s shitty start page… that’s a start page button, not a home button despite what they call it.
Ah I see what you mean. Yeah I even had a quick look at the beta version where you are able to access the about:config and I couldn’t find an obvious config setting for this either. Firefox on mobile definitely isn’t perfect and especially if you have a specific use case. Just a suggestion that may be an alternative for you: if you press settings then add to home screen, does that hone screen shortcut work for you?
Yeah, but that’s still an extra step to have to click home and then click on my dashboard shortcut that I don’t want to do. I want to press home and be instantly on my dashboard which I spent a lot of time customizing for myself. I don’t want to see Firefox’s shitty dashboard/start page before I get to mine. Also because I do it all the time, dozens of times a day.
Kiwi works, I realize it’s based on chromium. But it works perfectly and is far more customizable with far more extensions. But if Firefox ever adds a real home button, I’d likely switch to it.
There are also no extensions that allow for this customization of the home button. It’s honestly fucked. I looked and looked for a way around it. There is no way to do it, it’s a known problem.
Yeah I understand. For something you use so actively you want it to be as seamless as possible. Maybe have another look at the “install to home screen” option though! I think you can do it on Chrome too btw. But I believe it should actually open as a seperate “app” on your phone.
So instead of having 1 browser app that contains whatever you’re browsing + your dashboard, you could have 1 app for browsing + 1 “app” for your dashboard. It would allow you to even close down your browsing while always having an open dashboard. Maybe it doesn’t fit your flow but it seems like an option worth considering if you haven’t already.
Librewolf is better
The only issue with Librewolf is that it fails at rendering some websites. For example windy.tv
Brave is good too, for the moment.
Also, report the issue so that the devs know about it
Brave is good
It’s actually much better. At least, it isn’t from corrupt Mozilla Corp.
Also, be prepared for an heavy downvote rain.
Librewolf is better than Firefox
Brave seems extremely shady. Every time I read something new about that company, it just paints a worse picture of them.
Most recently, this: https://stackdiary.com/brave-selling-copyrighted-data-for-ai-training/
I read the article. That’s literally what every AI does. It scrapes data from every publicly accessible source it can get in to and it makes what it can out of all that.
I only had an issue with Twitch.
Container tabs are hands down the best add-on I have ever used. Being able to use multiple accounts across tabs is fantastic. Alot of my colleagues have switched due to this alone
They are fantastic! Way better than having 6 seperate “browser profiles” open. 🙄
For sure, Aws sso containers is a bloody game changer
I have this extension and I always thought it’s duty was to contain Amazon services from interacting with my other sites i.e., stop Amazon trackers. Can you explain to me more how to use container tabs?
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which add on do you use?
I use Facebook Container which isolates any webpage that connects with facebook from the rest of my tabs. It also has separate containers for things like work, shopping, etc you can optionally use for whatever.
It’s very convenient to just open a “shopping” container tab to check my spam email address instead of opening a private window and needing to sign in each time.
That’s one reason I like Librewolf so much, it has containers by default
Earlier, I tried Google Chrome’s “profiles” but damn, how inconvenient they are. I ended up opening multiple windows.
Firefox, on the other hand, only uses a single window for multiple tab containers and accounts.
image.unrelated
That’s just us with our super fun kbin shenans! It’s a Firefox logo everywhere else.
Edit: It’s a pic of some food for us on kbin.
@RiikkaTheIcePrincess how’d ya do that
Do what? O.o
The thing with the image
I didn’t do anything. It’s just something that happens on kbin. Unless you mean seeing the intended image, in which case I use the “open original url” thing under “more” on the original post.
For people asking, add-ons work fine on Nightly.
I switched to Nightly because standard FF doesn’t have the add-ons I want. I can confirm they work great.
I love firefox so much, but at times, I also am ready to ditch it. Some default configurations are just nothing but stupid. E.g.: all ports above 1024 are by default blocked, even with local domains in your LAN. Or, just happened today: ftp is generally blocked. I then had to switch to Chromium to get a file. Or: if on Linux, many video codecs are not by default bundled. Reasons like that make me hate Firefox. But I hate everything else a bit more.
So is there a browser based on Firefox but without strict configs?
That’s really strange, I haven’t encountered either of those problems. The latter you can blame your distro for. If Firefox was bundled with all of the codecs it would be really big for no reason, and it would be redundant on nearly every system.
Kinda agree, sure it is also a distro issue. Chromium-like browsers worked out of the box, though. In the end, the user should not really experience easy-to-fix problems like „I can‘t watch any Twitch streams“, and I‘m not really on a uncommon distro (OpenSUSE Tumbleweed).
Edit: About the blocked ports, check the following variable in your about:config
network.security.ports.banned.override
This one needs to be set, if you would like to use ports, such as 8080.
Neither
network.security.ports.bannednornetwork.security.ports.banned.overrideare defined by default in Firefox so I suspect the distro set them for you. Same for FTP. And I’ve never had any issues playing Twitch streams.Generally curious how that would work. So how/why should a distro do that?
The port issue is a common one if you google it and I even had it in windows. The variable is empty because you set the exceptions there. No value = all ports are blocked.
I don’t know why distro maintainers do what they do, but they can use policies or autoconfig to set non-standard default values. It’s commonly used to set the distro homepage as the default page when you open Firefox but I guess some distros take that a bit further.
As you can see from some of the other replies many of us don’t have those config options by default, and according to the Mozilla Knowledge Base these options are not set by default in Firefox: “This preference does not exist by default.”
I don’t know why distro maintainers do what they do, but they can use policies or autoconfig to set non-standard default values. It’s commonly used to set the distro homepage as the default page when you open Firefox but I guess some distros take that a bit further.
As you can see from some of the other replies many of us don’t have those config options by default, and according to the Mozilla Knowledge Base these options are not set by default in Firefox: “This preference does not exist by default.”
Thanks for elaborating, this is really much appreciated.
I recommend that you can play to the OpenSUSE forums.
all ports above 1024 are by default blocked
Not on localhost at least no it isn’t.
And why the hell would you be using ftp in currentyear. Newsflash: They also ditched gopher.
Never came across a video on the modern web that firefox couldn’t play. Everything post-flash should really be fine.
What actually annoys me about all browsers are the policies around loading certain stuff from
file://. Try getting something wasm to run without serving the thing from a web server or, *shudder*, base64-encoding bitcode into html. I understand there’s some valid gripes around …/ and softlinks and whatnot but, wait, hear me out: What about zipping everything up and calling it a webapp, treat the file as a domain.Oh it was never my intention to use it, but I was playing a bit with OpenAL and HRTF and ended up on a webpage that actually was using FTP to provide some audio files. So I kinda had no other choice.
The video thing is actually a known issue, but might be due to OpenSUSE not providing codecs by default. I still wonder why Chromium was working, though.
I use it on desktop and phone and honestly been pretty good no complaints.
Mull for Android is also a really good alternative to Firefox on Android.
how does duckduckgo compare to mull for android?
It’s getting more and more like chrome.
I’ve been using Firefox on desktop and mobile exclusively for a number of years now. I will say the experience isn’t perfect but it’s better than using a browser made by a company that is actively hostile to its users.
It is important to take note that you will experience issues with some websites. For example, https://astro.build/ Try scrolling quickly up and down on this page on Firefox vs Chrome (on mobile).
That’s jittery. What’s causing that?
I honestly have no idea of the root cause. Different users are reporting different things. It seems to manifest differently for everyone. At a high level I would say it’s due to the use of a JavaScript framework as a purely static HTML/CSS only site should not be doing this.
I see no difference between mobile chrome/Firefox?
A lot of people have been saying this, some have been saying it lags in chrome, and some have been saying it lags in firefox. I’m interested to know what device you have and perhaps what refresh rate your display runs?
60hz Android 11 Xiaomi
What were the main pain points?
Not OP but one thing I am missing, especially in mobile, is grouping tabs.
Chrome auto groups your tabs, so if I open 5 Amazon links looking for something they are already sorted.
For some reason Firefox doesn’t seem to get this feature
How do you turn that on? I can manually create tab groups but chrome never auto-groups tabs on my Mac at work
To be honest, I have not used this on desktop, but it’s the default on mobile.
I agree, although I forgot that feature ecists in Chromium based ones
Menu doesn’t open in landscape mode
Tab overview page not working consistently - this one is hard to capture right now but what happens is when you have a large amount of tabs open (say over 30), when you hit the tab overview button it doesn’t take you to the currently open tab in the list, instead it takes you to the very top. This is not the normal behaviour. If you open and close it a few times it will randomly work properly 1/10 times.
Oh on Android I thought mostly for Desktop.
Thank you for sharing. I experience more issues with mobile equivalent apps than their desktop counterparts
Sorry for not clarifying. I tried to on other comments but this is also a post about Firefox Android specifically so I sometimes left that part out.
exactly this…
i started out in firefox back in early 2000s… then made the switch to chrome and never looked back…
im not the biggest google-groupie but for me to make the switch, google really had to f up in my eyes… and they did
What’s wrong with that page? I’m not seeing anything in particular.
Massive lag on scrolling. Are you not seeing this? I’ll record the screen in a minute.
It was a tiny bit jittery on the first scroll through the page but not very noticeable and it happened in both browsers anyway. That’s about it. I’m on an Xperia 10 III.
sorry I wasn’t sure where to upload the video running a pixel 7 pro it’s hard to come across on video but it is there. hitching/jittery/lag on ff, perfectly smooth on chrome
i’m surprised by the comments, everyone has been having mixed results
I wonder if they aren’t using the “stop and look at image” - trick with css/js. So when you scroll you’re supposed to center on the next image. Also stops the scrolling to center
Could be but I don’t think so in this case. It seems (based on no evidence - purely feel) that there’s some kind of event listener being triggered every time the page scrolls (whether this be touch/scroll event, visible contents, etc idk) and this event listener has different optimisation or performance characteristics depending on the device and rendering engine.
It’s completely fine for me on FF mobile.
Very strange! Everyone who has replied has had a different experience on this website. It’s probably an issue with the website, not Firefox per se. It simply manifests on Firefox for me personally.
Video link doesn’t work - have you tried testing with extensions disabled?
Same
Scrolling was a little jittery on both ff and Chrome for me, but the page has a lot of content on it, so I wouldn’t expect it run silky smooth on everything.
I think because of the JS framework it’s using is causing performance issues. Ironic because the website claims 98/100 performance score - the highest of all those that they tested. It works perfectly smoothly on Chrome for me. A simple page like that should not lag/hitch at all.
I’m scrolling an have absolutely no issues. Android 12 and Firefox 120.0b9 (Build #2015985090),
What refresh rate is your display running?
Wow!
For some reason I can’t get my Firefox app to actually activate dark mode on my phone. I switch it in the settings and refresh it but it just won’t work so I keep using chrome. Any ideas?
The best time was 15 years ago
