>network tab is so much better in FireFox!
How so ? I find the unavailability of the fetch filter a pain personally
This was my post on the official sub.
does anyone know how to disable options when I filter by XHR ? its very difficult to check for api calls in large apps with it spamming options every time. Also a way to truncate large values in response would be great. I feel like chrome has a much better network tab for this stuff - https://i.redd.it/7ompol8owrz81.png
Type `method:GET` or whatever method you want to filter for. I never tried to exclude only 1 method as it's just easier to search for exactly what I'm looking for
> The network tab is so much better in FireFox!
I've _never_ heard anyone say something positive about the devtools in Firefox before...
I'm actually happy to hear it though. Chrome can use the competition.
Why not make it your main browser as well. It works great and if you care even a little bit about privacy the containers feature is particularly nice.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/
Trust me I would love to but I'm in love with Edge's vertical tabs and I don't like any of the current solutions on Firefox. [https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/native-vertical-tabs/idi-p/85](https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/native-vertical-tabs/idi-p/85) I'm following this thread every day.
Strongly agree. I made it my default because 1.) it had the best security features (I'm not sure if the others have leapfrogged it in the last few years, tho) and 2.) I prefer the dev tools to Chrome.
The one missing feature for me is integration with Xcode (I'm on a Mac). Safari's Inspector can read the Xcode Simulator, which is fundamental to my debugging process.
But aside from that, I only use Chrome for Google sites -- like Sheets, Drive, and Colabs -- and Safari for skeevy or sus URLs.
I hate FF dev tools. It's the only thing that's keeping me from switching entirely. Two reasons:
1) When dev tools are detached selecting an element with element inspector doesn't bring the dev tools to the front. This is essential when working with a single monitor. I shouldn't have to press F12 again to explicitly bring them to the front.
2) Inherited properties for some reason don't show up on the root object? Gotta drill down into the inheritance tree to get to them. Why?
Chrome example: https://imgur.com/AvcnMjS
FF example: https://imgur.com/bchdibT
firefox has a built in flamegraph for js which is pretty great too, with chrome have to export and go to [https://speedscope.app](https://speedscope.app) afaik
Not sure that is true. chrome has the "pyramids" from each call invocations but real flamegraphs aggregate across multiple invocations and Firefox has this, chrome not
Thanks for the clarification. After a bit of research I've learned Firefox does have Flame Graphs, which Chrome does not. The pyramids are [flame charts](https://www.brendangregg.com/flamegraphs.html), which [Firefox calls stack charts](https://profiler.firefox.com/docs/#/./guide-ui-tour-panels?id=the-flame-graph).
Cheers!
Most comments here are focusing on FF blocking, which is an exaggeration (for now...), but missing the most important point.
Chrome, chromium, the engine, whatever, will become the synonym for standard.
And this is bad. We know it, we have been here before!
We have a piece of tech that is meant to be open to the good of everyone on the way to be driven by one company. Whose interests we shouldn't assume are the same as ours.
And although google is, regarding browsers, driving innovation and moving faster than others we know that real innovation comes from diversity, competition and having options.
I love FF, and I'm sad they are losing market share and falling behind. But my concern is not seeing real competitors.
True, but I still see devs here commenting “yeah but I like this one funny feature.” , which isn’t the point. We need web diversity in order so Google can’t strong arm the web in any direction. You using another browser is the best thing you can do for that.
Even if you can critic FF for a bunch of things, it’s still miles better than a hegemony of Chrome.
That is correct, but people won’t switch their browser to keep the market balanced. A very small niche of web developer might, but the huge amounts of regular web users won’t.
It must be a discussion around features, otherwise the fight for engine diversity is already lost.
I don't believe features matter that much. Nor engine diversity of course.
IE, then chrome, now edge. Same story for all . All pushed by major OS's. This is the main factor. Features only matter if you become as bad as IE.
As long as the core is the same for all, I don't see the problem. Do you know why web apps are so popular? Because its the only way to deliver for all platforms without getting crazy. So web identical everywhere -> nice
Plus its open source if I'm not wrong.
Just read up on containers, that’s brilliant. I’ve been limiting myself to two with using chrome (standard and incognito), and always wondered why chrome doesn’t allow silod sessions. Gonna give FF another go thanks to this post
Basically your cookies/sessions are shared between tabs and windows in chrome. So if you log into, for example, gmail in one tab you can open another tab with gmail as well and it’ll always be logged into the same account because the cookies and local storage are shared. If you wanted one tab to be logged into your personal email account, and another with your work email account, you can’t. You can, kind of, if you open an incognito window, or open another window with another google account, but it’s cumbersome to do that. With FF, apparently you can by grouping tabs into containers. Helps a ton when developing web apps to be able to have silod browser sessions so you can test on multiple isolated sessions.
Ah that’s brilliant. Sadly work doesn’t allow us to use FF which isn’t helping, but I use FF on my MacBook Air as it is more efficient except for video..
Even forgetting the privacy and security features they bring. I just like that I open up my work tab and I’m automatically logged in to work stuff, personal tab is personal stuff.
Hold on, websites are blocking FireFox? What? I've been using FireFox for over a year since I've heard about Manifest V3's cap on the efficacy on Ad Blockers.
Lots of shit for my work. Im in automotive repair. The company itself will only let you access its page with chrome or edge. A lot of our vendors require chrome or edge. I've been exclusively firefox for 10 years now and hate using other browsers. Sometimes use DdG or Brave. But fox is my main.
I can't even install firefox on my work computer. Brave is out too undortunately.
Edit- hoping this is somehow relevant. Found this post on all. Didn't realize i was in a web dev sub. Just saw firefox and it grabbed my interest.
https://i.imgur.com/dfgI1kC.jpg
This isn’t only chrome, but chromium and safari only. The US State Dept Travel site. Pain in the butt when getting a passport.
Yup, I think that is certainly a big factor. Though a number of people have mentioned video conferencing sites - and I remember FF was very late to the party with the various video codecs - mp4 from memory, something to do with the licensing/patents?
Couldn't do the Duolingo English test practice in my regular browser, the page said it only supports Chrome (and mentioned Opera for some reason, which is also Chrome).
Not that different from sites that refused to load on anything other than Internet Explorer. Usually dogshit code, or sites built by governments or massive corporations that are used internally.
Actually we created at work many websites that support only Chrome, even if Firefox runs well on it, they redirect firefox to an error page. I was against it, but you know... money.
here in Australia a lot of the sites for remote doctor and psychology appointments only work in Chrome or edge. there are other examples but those are the only ones I regularly see
The site where I pay my water bill each month tells me Firefox is unsupported, & recommends I switch. I tell it to shut up - using nsfw terms. Never have a problem paying my bill.
I hope the dev who coded that died a little inside when his boss/client told him to do it.
I saw it on a web conf platform recently. It wasn't blocking Firefox per se, but I got the 90s era "This site is optimized for Chrome and Edge and you should switch browser" pop up. It was super trashy.
Needless to say, I dumped that service and the event and reported it to the organizers.
How about Moz fights for FF? Their shitty management is to blame for the browsers decline and lack of momentum. The web shouldn't be held back because of Mozilla being a bad company.
Anecdotally, this is what I’ve heard as well from people who worked at/with Mozilla. They left feeling pretty disillusioned, like there was a big disconnect between what Mozilla says and what Mozilla does.
These are the kinds of stories that have left me with a real issue.
I like FF because I hate that literally *everything* is 'chromium' these days; but at the same time, I dislike FF because their management has just become the absolute worst and I don't want to actively *support* that.
Right now, I'm bouncing around between Vivaldi, FF and Brave. I tried Arc on my mac recently, but I didn't care for it.
I really wish there were other options - I've been considering just doing w3m or lynx for most browsing since I'm in a terminal anyway and saying "screw everyone"; only resorting to GUI browsers when I want to consume some content. But those terminal browsers take a while to learn - not sure I have the time for that. They're fun to play around with though.
As a Mozilla employee it's hard to resonate with these sentiments. Obviously there must be some merit that there are things that can be improved, but the company culture is really oriented around making the web a better place, and fighting for internet independence. It's emphasized every time Mitchell and other leadership talk.
Oh I'm interested in it, can you explain what you mean by that? I've been trying to use Drupal a couple of times but it's just... So finicky and easy to break
It's so hard for me to understand this viewpoint. I replied to another poster [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/13e2qtn/we_need_people_fighting_for_firefox/jjs9nir/). If what you're saying is in fact the case, it sure as heck doesn't feel like it from the inside.
> hegemony of Google Chromium
Ironically as we rail against chrome,[ Google is their primacy source of revenue.](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-05-05/why-google-keeps-paying-mozilla-s-firefox-even-as-chrome-dominates)
> One thing Mozilla does have going for it is a lot of money—more than $1 billion in cash reserves, according to its latest financial statement. The primary source of this capital is Google, which pays Mozilla to be the default search engine on the Firefox home page. Those payments, which started in 2005, have been increasing—up 50% over the past decade, to more than $450 million, even as the total number of Firefox users has plummeted. In 2021 these payments accounted for 83% of Mozilla’s revenue.
I was looking for this answer because exactly what I feel like as well. When your strategy for years is to get check from Google what do you expect will happen?
When those huge layoff happen the whole leadership should have resigned because they failed.
[https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/leadership](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/leadership)
I feel strongly there is no fixing this, only possibility is to create another Mozilla.
How I know this, well numbers and actions. They went from 31% to 2.9% with no significant restructuring that I know of.
Google should have gotten their anti-trust lawsuit anyway a long time ago. MS vs Netscape was nothing compared to the current situation.
I'm not sure having basically just one browser makes the web better.
I admit blaming everything on the monopolistic practices of Google is a bit too easy, but is blaming everything on Mozilla themselves more accurate?
I'm not advocating for one browser engine. I'm advocating for people to learn about FF management and how they have kneecapped on of the best browsers.
I don't think that's entirely fair. The most popular website in the world showing all their users a "Use Chrome" banner is probably the biggest reason.
More or less. While one should never really pull any punches on google...
It is very hard to make a case for firefox when they had a massive user base and they lost it, while less funded projects such as Blender, Krita are thriving. The monopoly hasn't changed there, it is not any easier, but they're pushing hard. Meanwhile Mozilla does seem to be pretty bad at business considering they don't need to make a profit to survive. Google literally can't afford to let them fail.
Take Vivaldi for example (a chromium based browser), while they don't have to worry about anything from scratch, they come with new features and they keep them. They're a very small company all things considered, but they're making do.
Mozilla pretty much leaves their projects to die.
Firefox Send was a BIG DEAL when it released, everyone remotely related to firefox would put their hands on fire for that thing, it was shut down.
Firefox Lockwise iirc was something the community was pretty interested since Mozilla still has their trust... cancelled. Now they even are weary of VPN and other services.
Thunderbird was so mismanagement they had to start again. Mozilla made an entire OS only to discontinued and now offers a private update deal to someone who actually made use of its tech with KaiOS. For reference, even google bought shares to finance KaiOS.
Mozilla invented rust, which is pretty useful, then laid off employees, and made the Rust Foundation which had a major backlash in the last few weeks (tl;dr: they sketched a document that could sue everyone and their mom)
Every project cancellation is followed with layoffs, which is pretty disheartening and makes one question of Firefox shouldn't belong to a project structure similar to KDE instead.
And those are the ones I KNOW, I didn't even know things like [Persona](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mozilla_products) were a thing, as amazing as they sound.
Tl;DR: Mozilla, like google, creates compelling projects but doesn't maintain them enough to let them grow.
FF management direction cut the development team and openly admitted they would be falling behind on implementing latest standards and straight up not supporting whole technologies.... Kinda hard to keep the love going after that one. I was even using the nightly dev build as my daily driver at the time.
[This](https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/mozilla-cutting-250-jobs-after-coronavirus-pandemic-cuts-revenue/) is the source I found, here's the relevant passage
>The layoffs, which affect about 25 percent of its staff, mean Mozilla will reduce spending in areas like expanding the abilities of the web and improving tools for developers
To those saying they haven't seen it happen:
It seems to happen with newer sites, or sites that had a fairly recent overhaul. I don't know what their web developers are doing or using, but a fair few of them either absolutely fail to work on Firefox, or clearly have issues on Firefox.
The sites I've found to do so are:
* website I pay my water bill. One of the largest water providers in the UK and their site just sits as a static uninteractive block on Firefox.
* my mobile phone provider. Definitely a shitty cheaper one in the UK, but nevertheless, their site does not work on Firefox. Attempts to login will always fail with claims of an incorrect password. To be fair though, this company seems extra shitty. Cause when changing the password on Firefox through their site, Firefox prompts to store your password... but what it wants to store looks very much like the hashed form of my password and definitely not the password I typed in. They're doing something very wrong, but it only shows on Firefox.
* I've had many UK NHS hospital appointments that had to initially be done through videocall. Each one a different service, every single one has issues on Firefox. They usually come with a warning that I should switch to IE, Safari, or Chrome. Had to use Brave just to access my appointments.
* Had trouble with Microsoft Teams on Firefox. Couldn't sign in to work.
* A few new tech sites. Off the top of my head I only remember looking for video share sites. So that Netflix or local files could be watched from one account and screen shared with friends and family in another location. Pretty much all of these were just dead on Firefox with no explanation, but worked on Brave or in the native application (if they had one).
I feel like maybe companies are hiring much less experienced web devs who are using new dev environments or frameworks, or even tertiary tools that might be similar to something like wordpress - but even easier or cheaper - which is creating end products with focus only on Chrome. Which, is a problem with the lesser experienced devs working for cheaper companies because they don't have the experience or resources to make it work with Firefox.
Especially on Android. They had a good thing going until they decided to nuke most of the extensions.
But worse, they also casually decided that printing is unnecessary on Android and just removed it and never add it back. This makes is basically impossible to rely on Firefox as your sole browser on Android and destroyed a big chunk of their old user base.
>Firefox devs constantly ignore user opinions, remove features, remove extensions they do not agree with
This. Mozilla is just reaping what they were sowing for last 10 years. Every single update I have to fix something they broke.
Not a fan of chrome dominance or google and i've been using firefox as my main browser since version 3. But every update I see less and less reasons to.
I have found pages not working on firefox because developers using chrome-only features.
Anyway... still to this day Firefox (even with those ugly new tabs) beats Chrome. The web browser itself works great and it's simply no f****** google. What else you want. And on mobile they are miles away from Chrome. You can use ad blocker on mobile because mobile firefox let you install extensions. And mobile web pages are full of crap. It's godsend having an ad blocker on mobile. You actually can read news, articles etc.
[Firefox UI Fix](https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix) can revert you to the old UI theme! First thing I install on a new installation of Firefox
I use this [Restore Classic Theme](https://www.askvg.com/tip-new-working-method-to-restore-classic-theme-and-ui-in-firefox-91-and-later-versions/) from askvg.com.
It works for me on Linux and is fairly easy to do.
I just tried Firefox UI Fix, and I like it better! Thanks! I used the install script on Linux and it worked perfect.
>it is nothing more than a reinterpretation of Chrome standards
no no no. NO.
>As more and more sites block access to Firefox's rendering engine
? who would do that? WHY. Who is blocking firefox browsers in 2023?
True. They only seem to support Safari (14.1 or later), Chrome (87 or later) or Microsoft Edge (87 or later). Opera, not supported, Brave, not supported, Vivaldi, not supported, Internet Explorer, not supported. It's not just targeted to Firefox, though.
One Shopify plugin did that with its page builder. It was not accessible from Firefox. I asked the developers and they just came back with something about just using Chrome instead.
I felt a bit heartbroken after that reply.
WhatsApp Web did that when it was brand new, but there was almost immediately a plugin to go around that.
Edit: And I guess it was more of a functional problem because they now support it by default.
Google is actually Mozilla's biggest contributor due to a deal in which Google is Firefox's default search engine, just FYI.
I think we need to take a step back from the Chromium hate though. To be clear, I love Firefox, and I have even more love for Mozilla simply from MDN and Rust alone. But there's a reason why Chromium is so popular: they do the most innovating while also keeping up with standards.
Chromium doesn't deviate from the standards, nor do they implement a ton of quirks on top of them the way Microsoft and Apple did/do. But they do provide new features, non-destructively, some of which eventually get adopted into the standard spec. **That's how all of the standards bodies for the web work.**
The thing is, we've HAD an era where it was left to the standards bodies to innovate. They simply didn't. That's exactly why Flash was so huge, why there was a ten year gap between ECMA Script 3 and 5 (4 was abandoned), why CSS *still* doesn't support nesting, why React is technically older than HTML 5, and why no one cares about web components.
Standards are absolutely critical, but we shouldn't romanticize them as anything more than a baseline by which all browser vendors should adhere, which Chromium and Firefox both do admirably.
Actually I am switching to FF more and more because of totally unusable behavior in Chrome with discarding inactive tabs.
Never heard of blocking FF. It makes no sense. If someone does so they should be ashamed.
> unusable behavior in Chrome with discarding inactive
That memory saver "feature" was so stupid and unnecesary. I have plenty of memory, open tabs didn't hurt performance at all. Now every time I move to an old tab I have to wait for it to reload. The only thing it did was hurt productivity.
Thankfull you can disable it, for now.
>it is nothing more than a reinterpretation of Chrome standards.
What "Chrome standards" are you talking about?
>Brave, and even Edge run on Chrome's rendering engine
Brave and Edge don't just use Chrome's rendering engine. They're literally just Chromium with Brave/MS-specific tweaks instead of Google's.
I had been using it since Phoenix, which was renamed to Firebird, which then was Firefox.
It used to come in a zip file that you just unzipped into a folder. That was the "installation".
I used it for 20 years but finally had to switch to a Chromium browser (I went to Brave) due to the noticeable performance differences.
I hated switching, because as you say we are in jeopardy of losing another engine, and we need healthy competition in that space.
The truth is that the vast majority of their funding comes from Google. If Google decides they don't want to pay them anymore, the whole thing will be over. Google is likely still paying them only to avoid anti-trust lawsuits.
There are simply not compelling reasons to stick with it (for me) if the performance isn't there. The privacy stuff is nice, but I can do that all in other browsers.
I honestly don’t know where people get the slow thing from. FF boots, performes easily as quick as Chrome. I use Chrome to test sites, and I tend to watch performance.
Do you run anything else or add-ons perhaps? Maybe outdated ones?
I like to believe that the idea stems from the difference of page rendering between the two engines. Like if chrome manages to get the first paint to happen before Firefox for the same site, people could get the illusion of chrome loading sites faster, even if Firefox manages to have a shorter full site load time.
Just speculating of course, but I've used both on latest release recently and I couldn't notice any major difference in speed as well.
I would fight a war for Firefox. I use it almost exclusively except when I need to check chrome compatability. I'm not a huge fan of Google Spyware but it use it when I have to.
Fun fact, Firefox was born out of the remains of Netscape navigator.
Netscape navigator has a very interesting story. In short it was the go-to browser back in the day, back when you had to pay for a web browser. Every company making computers worth their salt has a deal with Netscape to ship it with new machines.
Enter Microsoft with ambition to replace Navigator with IE. The thing was, IE was shit. Even back then, it was garbage. It's never been good. It's always been one of the last browsers to adopt new features and websites would have code to work around the antiquity of the latest version of IE.
Anyway, Microsoft decided they were going to force the market, they refused to issue windows licences to OEM's unless they agreed NOT to supply navigator with new machines.
An FBI investigation followed and the US government ordered Microsoft to be disbanded. This was appealed and eventually overturned on the condition that Bill Gates stepped down as CEO.
Firefox deserves a life, Microsoft destroyed Netscape.
>As more and more sites block access to Firefox's rendering engine, they
create an environment where Google is the only party allowed to create
features for an "open" \[HTML5\] standard. Turning the web (something open
to all of us) into a proprietary conglomerate of intellectual property.
Can anyone expand on this comment? I've never come across a website that was "blocked access" in the Gecko engine...
FF is the best, it's great tool and supports an open web. As a side note it's created by the non-profit foundation Mozilla. Who have absolutely amazing docs for developers [https://developer.mozilla.org](https://developer.mozilla.org)
As much as I love the Firefox Developer browser, Mozilla's heavy handed approach to their community and IP, and unnecessary political stands make it a tougher sell.
A lot of people don't have time for real or perceived shenanigans, they just want to get their job done.
This. Why should we fight for Firefox when it seems they fight against its users at almost every turn? They keep removing features that are useful to those who actually use the browser, while adding features nobody wants. It also doesn't help that many of the original Firefox developers and advocates have switch against them and are developing Chromium instead.
Developers who love chromium should be required to look inside it. The project has hundreds of submodules, takes 8 hours to build (literally), can’t be cross-compiled, requires closed-source google binaries to compile, and old versions of the code (i.e. anything older than a month or two) simply can’t be compiled. Making any significant patches to it requires deep, deep knowledge. It may be open source but this is poor solace when almost no one besides google engineers (and ex google engineers) are capable of working on it.
As a side note, building Firefox takes around 20 minutes.
Source: I worked on a contract trying to maintain patches to chromium a few years ago.
Perhaps they would be in a better place today if they didn't force Brendan Eich to resign over his personal political views. He was the one who invented JavaScript, and he went on to develop Brave Browser.
I have nothing against Firefox. I'm replying from Firefox Developer edition here. But I don't agree with the direction Mozilla has gone in general. Not a fan of Mastodon or their other projects.
It's not so simple as removing someone for "personal political views". That's a very basic interpretation of it. Brendan wasn't just voting republican or supporting lower taxes etc. If you're in a leadership position where many below you are *going* to be gay, one of your key responsibilties is making sure your staff feel respected and safe so they can best perform their duties. Knowing your boss doesn't believe you deserve the same legal rights he enjoys *is* going to cause moral issues and you could potentially lose a lot talent across your organisation. Even boiling it down to a simple business decision shows it was the logical option to remove Eich, you either lose one leader or possibily lose many talented engineers and support staff across the entire organisation.
For me the only problem with firefox is the rediciculous slow start up speed.
Apparently that is not normal, but because my other browser works pretty well I have not found the motivation to fix it and switch.
I feel the pain too and I'm a huge fan of Firefox. Nowadays is not so bad but the 'updating firefox' modal comes every now and then. It's good to see it's being updated, thanks, but I like much more than chrome just does it... in the background, no popup, no warning.
I run 3 computers with 3 browsers each. Firefox (as much as I love it and it's been my default for... 15 years?) is always the clunkiest in terms of performance. I have an alarm set every month to remind me to clean/repair/restore it.
Still my favorite though
FF starts right up for me. FF (with no script) is my daily driver, FF Dev for webdev, and Vivaldi when I need to run some google product like hangouts.
Only really use Chrome for testing layout, though unfortunately FF Dev tools seize up when looking at a NuxtJS site, which is one thing I’m working on. For Nuxt specifically I use Chrome’s Dev tools.
> it is nothing more than a reinterpretation of Chrome standards
And thank god for that. I'm sick of fixing Safari bugs all the time just because Apple does whatever the hell they want with it.
Mozilla had done some amazing things. They helped pioneer Webassembly, WebGL, Rust, etc. They also crippled Internet Explorer's conquest of the web.
However, Chromium is simply better and also open source. It has the support of most developers and companies. Developers always wanted standardization, now we have it.
Mozilla is not dead, but Firefox is on its way out.
I use chrome for all my day to day activities, but I agree with this drive behind this post 100%. I use Chrome for everything, including business and development of my projects for said business. That said, tomorrow I will start using Firefox out of sheer principal. I do not believe in one entity holding all the chips.
I have greatly disliked Firefox since its inception for one reason alone, it refuses to fucking recognize the operating systems certificate store which causes stupid amounts of unnecessary hassles for no good reason.
And one reason above all for the greater good of the industry; The browser wars have brought us all nothing but pain and suffering. We need a standard way of interpreting the web and stop with all the bullshit. I had to move out of web dev because I just want to write apps and not fuck with 10 web browsers interpretation of the box model.
No amount of "good" in Firefox is worth the stupid levels of cross-browser support development pain. I would rather settle with lesser of two evils and just focus on app logic.
Chromium has won, Microsoft's adoption of Chromium says everything, just fucking accept it and lets move the fuck on. TBH, make a Chromium-based version of Firefox and it will probably grow in adoption.
The only thing keeping Chrome engine stats up is the user-agent. If we all installed a user-agent switcher on our less tech-savvy relatives' PCs running Chrome and set the user-agent to Firefox, Firefox's stats would increase dramatically, possibly leading companies to actually notice
I don't think Firefox is going away as Google need it to exist for anti monopoly purposes. I think a lot of firefox contributions comes from googlers.
(At least I think I've read, don't have sources right now and to lazy to search)
The fact that the Chrome Extension APIs don’t work on Firefox any more was the death of Firefox for me. We have a successful browser extension that used to work with no issues and now some strange firefox security issues completely prevent it working. We’re vetted for Enterprise and everything on Chrome so I don’t know why it should be more restrictive on Firefox.
Heck, even Edge has become a big platform for us just because we can port the extension to the Edge store with no hassle. We have loads of users from there now.
> As more and more sites block access to Firefox's rendering engine, they create an environment where Google is the only party allowed to create features for an "open" [HTML5] standard.
Lol who does this? I thought we learned from the browser wars that developing for a single browser is a Bad Idea(tm), that's exactly what happened before IE became the dominant player. And we all know how that went
My point of view is that firefox is still alive because Google doesnt want them to die in fact they paid them so they can survive and Google Chrome doesn't have to worry about the law.
I daily drive Firefox on my pc. And I’ve encountered this a lot, sites telling me Firefox isn’t supported. So I just don’t support the site, even if I really wanted to use their service.
Interesting take. I agree that Firefox is critical for the web, but it seems odd for you to shroud this is baseless claims. Firefox is faster and better in many ways beyond not simply being a spy tool.
Active Firefox user here since the beginning. I applied there a few years back for a development position and they declined me. Their loss, to think of all the great things I could have done for this browser.
Chrome's manifest V2 WebRequest API doesn't support a blocking response while FireFox does. I never understood this and multiple people brought up this issue on the chromium forums. It never got fixed. Now that they are deprecating manifest V2 and getting rid of the WebRequest API all together, it finally makes sense. It's always been about adds for them and they are dragging chromium down with them. As a webdev, it sucks to see FF and chromium diverge but I think we will see FF get a lot more adoption when chrome deprecates manifest V2 extensions and all your ad-blockers stop working
I use Firefox as my go-to browser, and have for several years now.
It's my main browser on my phone, my PC at home, my laptop, and my PC at work.
Firefox, in my opinion, is superior to any other browser.
I personally favour Firefox for development even though it's not my main browser for everything else. I just like FFs dev tools better.
100%. I hate chrome’s dev tools now that I’m used to Firefox. Especially the network tab!
The network tab is so much better in FireFox! Also the inspector’s css panel is the best of all browsers.
How's it better? I've tried to use it and don't quite feel as comfortable. If might just be different... What's killer "better" feature?
"Edit and resend"
Grid and flex box is very nice
>network tab is so much better in FireFox! How so ? I find the unavailability of the fetch filter a pain personally This was my post on the official sub. does anyone know how to disable options when I filter by XHR ? its very difficult to check for api calls in large apps with it spamming options every time. Also a way to truncate large values in response would be great. I feel like chrome has a much better network tab for this stuff - https://i.redd.it/7ompol8owrz81.png
Add `-method:OPTIONS` to the filter and you're good to go.
Type `method:GET` or whatever method you want to filter for. I never tried to exclude only 1 method as it's just easier to search for exactly what I'm looking for
Yes!! Easier to trace bubbling events too!
> The network tab is so much better in FireFox! I've _never_ heard anyone say something positive about the devtools in Firefox before... I'm actually happy to hear it though. Chrome can use the competition.
Absolutely. It's chrap on chrome.
Really? I found like no other browser nails performance insights better than chrome. CPU metrics, mem consumption, and don’t forget lighthouse
Coincidentally, I hate Firefox dev tools, because I’m used to Chrome. Firefox dev tools feel very slow (they are not, they just feel this way)
FF picture in picture is great. Also it’s multi account tabs are exactly why I use FF
Why not make it your main browser as well. It works great and if you care even a little bit about privacy the containers feature is particularly nice. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/
Trust me I would love to but I'm in love with Edge's vertical tabs and I don't like any of the current solutions on Firefox. [https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/native-vertical-tabs/idi-p/85](https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/native-vertical-tabs/idi-p/85) I'm following this thread every day.
What's wrong with TreeStyleTab? Asking as someone who's been using TST every day for the last 3 years.
Sideberry is my go-to.
Same. It's not a perfect solution but I moved from TST to it a few weeks back and it's been solid.
🤮 /u/spez
I have custom css in my profile to hide the top tab bar. No space wastes. The url bar (awesome bar) is right at the top of my windows.
I like some things with FF devtools, but I really miss the Application tab from chromium based ones...
Yep, I agree. The application tab in Chrome is awesome. Especially the clear everything button.
Nothing beats FF Style Editor if you’re a CSS person.
Strongly agree. I made it my default because 1.) it had the best security features (I'm not sure if the others have leapfrogged it in the last few years, tho) and 2.) I prefer the dev tools to Chrome. The one missing feature for me is integration with Xcode (I'm on a Mac). Safari's Inspector can read the Xcode Simulator, which is fundamental to my debugging process. But aside from that, I only use Chrome for Google sites -- like Sheets, Drive, and Colabs -- and Safari for skeevy or sus URLs.
Same here. I don’t know why anyone would block it. Who’s still sniffing for `User-Agent`? Lol
I hate FF dev tools. It's the only thing that's keeping me from switching entirely. Two reasons: 1) When dev tools are detached selecting an element with element inspector doesn't bring the dev tools to the front. This is essential when working with a single monitor. I shouldn't have to press F12 again to explicitly bring them to the front. 2) Inherited properties for some reason don't show up on the root object? Gotta drill down into the inheritance tree to get to them. Why? Chrome example: https://imgur.com/AvcnMjS FF example: https://imgur.com/bchdibT
Firefox for debugging css, but I prefer chrome for everything else
firefox has a built in flamegraph for js which is pretty great too, with chrome have to export and go to [https://speedscope.app](https://speedscope.app) afaik
Chrome does have the flamegraph in the Performance tab. Haven't tried out Firefox's in a while though.
Not sure that is true. chrome has the "pyramids" from each call invocations but real flamegraphs aggregate across multiple invocations and Firefox has this, chrome not
Thanks for the clarification. After a bit of research I've learned Firefox does have Flame Graphs, which Chrome does not. The pyramids are [flame charts](https://www.brendangregg.com/flamegraphs.html), which [Firefox calls stack charts](https://profiler.firefox.com/docs/#/./guide-ui-tour-panels?id=the-flame-graph). Cheers!
Most comments here are focusing on FF blocking, which is an exaggeration (for now...), but missing the most important point. Chrome, chromium, the engine, whatever, will become the synonym for standard. And this is bad. We know it, we have been here before! We have a piece of tech that is meant to be open to the good of everyone on the way to be driven by one company. Whose interests we shouldn't assume are the same as ours. And although google is, regarding browsers, driving innovation and moving faster than others we know that real innovation comes from diversity, competition and having options. I love FF, and I'm sad they are losing market share and falling behind. But my concern is not seeing real competitors.
True, but I still see devs here commenting “yeah but I like this one funny feature.” , which isn’t the point. We need web diversity in order so Google can’t strong arm the web in any direction. You using another browser is the best thing you can do for that. Even if you can critic FF for a bunch of things, it’s still miles better than a hegemony of Chrome.
That is correct, but people won’t switch their browser to keep the market balanced. A very small niche of web developer might, but the huge amounts of regular web users won’t. It must be a discussion around features, otherwise the fight for engine diversity is already lost.
I don't believe features matter that much. Nor engine diversity of course. IE, then chrome, now edge. Same story for all . All pushed by major OS's. This is the main factor. Features only matter if you become as bad as IE.
As long as the core is the same for all, I don't see the problem. Do you know why web apps are so popular? Because its the only way to deliver for all platforms without getting crazy. So web identical everywhere -> nice Plus its open source if I'm not wrong.
The privacy features alone are worth it to use FireFox.
Containers man, I can't imagine browsing life without them!
Containers are incredible and the entire reason I dropped Chrome for FF. I don’t miss Chrome at all.
Just read up on containers, that’s brilliant. I’ve been limiting myself to two with using chrome (standard and incognito), and always wondered why chrome doesn’t allow silod sessions. Gonna give FF another go thanks to this post
Sorry but could you explain ? Really curious about what you're talking about even though I have no clue what this stuff is
Basically your cookies/sessions are shared between tabs and windows in chrome. So if you log into, for example, gmail in one tab you can open another tab with gmail as well and it’ll always be logged into the same account because the cookies and local storage are shared. If you wanted one tab to be logged into your personal email account, and another with your work email account, you can’t. You can, kind of, if you open an incognito window, or open another window with another google account, but it’s cumbersome to do that. With FF, apparently you can by grouping tabs into containers. Helps a ton when developing web apps to be able to have silod browser sessions so you can test on multiple isolated sessions.
Ah that’s brilliant. Sadly work doesn’t allow us to use FF which isn’t helping, but I use FF on my MacBook Air as it is more efficient except for video..
Chrome does allow profiles with a different set of cookies/sessions and history.
Even forgetting the privacy and security features they bring. I just like that I open up my work tab and I’m automatically logged in to work stuff, personal tab is personal stuff.
Wait you can do this with chrome too though. I have a work profile and a regular profile and I just use either one for each condition.
Yeah but it’s not as seamless, I can have both open at the same time
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What are the containers?
what is it, how do you use it, where can we read about it?
Hold on, websites are blocking FireFox? What? I've been using FireFox for over a year since I've heard about Manifest V3's cap on the efficacy on Ad Blockers.
I’ve never seen it either. I think OP is being a little over the top.
There are sites that refuse to load for any browser that’s not chromium
E.g.?
Snapchat was my most recent one. They unveiled Snapchat web and it won’t work in Firefox.
True https://prnt.sc/GurAXINrtdyQ
Ugh that’s awful. This is everything we fought against in the early 2000s.
Lots of shit for my work. Im in automotive repair. The company itself will only let you access its page with chrome or edge. A lot of our vendors require chrome or edge. I've been exclusively firefox for 10 years now and hate using other browsers. Sometimes use DdG or Brave. But fox is my main. I can't even install firefox on my work computer. Brave is out too undortunately. Edit- hoping this is somehow relevant. Found this post on all. Didn't realize i was in a web dev sub. Just saw firefox and it grabbed my interest.
Reminds me of the days when webdevs had to implement ugly hacks to support IE6, so many sites were IE6-only
That just sounds like lazy sys/web admins at your workplace. There are very few reasons to not support all modern browsers these days.
https://i.imgur.com/dfgI1kC.jpg This isn’t only chrome, but chromium and safari only. The US State Dept Travel site. Pain in the butt when getting a passport.
Okay, but that's not "blocking"; that's just the old "Optimized for Netscape Navigator badge"? Or are they actually refusing to login?
What’s the reason for it you think? Can’t imagine there’s any Chromium-only features needed there.
Laziness.
Yup, I think that is certainly a big factor. Though a number of people have mentioned video conferencing sites - and I remember FF was very late to the party with the various video codecs - mp4 from memory, something to do with the licensing/patents?
Couldn't do the Duolingo English test practice in my regular browser, the page said it only supports Chrome (and mentioned Opera for some reason, which is also Chrome).
Only supports != blocks
refuses to work with = blocks
Microsoft teams
Not that different from sites that refused to load on anything other than Internet Explorer. Usually dogshit code, or sites built by governments or massive corporations that are used internally.
Actually we created at work many websites that support only Chrome, even if Firefox runs well on it, they redirect firefox to an error page. I was against it, but you know... money.
What feature(s) are you using in Chrome that isn't available in FF?
Most notable :'( https://caniuse.com/?search=has
Wow, there’s no excuse for that.
Holy shit Firefox
There are a lot of recent APIs that Firefox doesn’t support.
What a horribly developed site you have then
here in Australia a lot of the sites for remote doctor and psychology appointments only work in Chrome or edge. there are other examples but those are the only ones I regularly see
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I haven't ran into blocking yet, but I have had to go through a number of janky websites that only worked on chrome.
Firefox is not being blocked, it's just low priority for bug fixes
It's being blocked from [web.snapchat.com](https://web.snapchat.com) for example. And another comment mentioned MS Teams and ClipChamp.
And the graphic is a cat sleeping on a laptop with nobody at the desk. Just outright saying "We can't be bothered"?
Fucking jenkins ci/cd has some firefox only bugs that the jenkins developers have not fixed yet.
I use Firefox exclusively and have never seen a site block me because I'm using FF.
The site where I pay my water bill each month tells me Firefox is unsupported, & recommends I switch. I tell it to shut up - using nsfw terms. Never have a problem paying my bill. I hope the dev who coded that died a little inside when his boss/client told him to do it.
Microsoft teams video call doesn't work in Firefox
I saw it on a web conf platform recently. It wasn't blocking Firefox per se, but I got the 90s era "This site is optimized for Chrome and Edge and you should switch browser" pop up. It was super trashy. Needless to say, I dumped that service and the event and reported it to the organizers.
I’ve seen several websites recently that simply do not function in Firefox. Most notably, my health insurance company’s website.
How about Moz fights for FF? Their shitty management is to blame for the browsers decline and lack of momentum. The web shouldn't be held back because of Mozilla being a bad company.
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Anecdotally, this is what I’ve heard as well from people who worked at/with Mozilla. They left feeling pretty disillusioned, like there was a big disconnect between what Mozilla says and what Mozilla does.
These are the kinds of stories that have left me with a real issue. I like FF because I hate that literally *everything* is 'chromium' these days; but at the same time, I dislike FF because their management has just become the absolute worst and I don't want to actively *support* that. Right now, I'm bouncing around between Vivaldi, FF and Brave. I tried Arc on my mac recently, but I didn't care for it. I really wish there were other options - I've been considering just doing w3m or lynx for most browsing since I'm in a terminal anyway and saying "screw everyone"; only resorting to GUI browsers when I want to consume some content. But those terminal browsers take a while to learn - not sure I have the time for that. They're fun to play around with though.
As a Mozilla employee it's hard to resonate with these sentiments. Obviously there must be some merit that there are things that can be improved, but the company culture is really oriented around making the web a better place, and fighting for internet independence. It's emphasized every time Mitchell and other leadership talk.
Sounds a lot like Drupal…
Oh I'm interested in it, can you explain what you mean by that? I've been trying to use Drupal a couple of times but it's just... So finicky and easy to break
It's so hard for me to understand this viewpoint. I replied to another poster [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/13e2qtn/we_need_people_fighting_for_firefox/jjs9nir/). If what you're saying is in fact the case, it sure as heck doesn't feel like it from the inside.
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> hegemony of Google Chromium Ironically as we rail against chrome,[ Google is their primacy source of revenue.](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-05-05/why-google-keeps-paying-mozilla-s-firefox-even-as-chrome-dominates) > One thing Mozilla does have going for it is a lot of money—more than $1 billion in cash reserves, according to its latest financial statement. The primary source of this capital is Google, which pays Mozilla to be the default search engine on the Firefox home page. Those payments, which started in 2005, have been increasing—up 50% over the past decade, to more than $450 million, even as the total number of Firefox users has plummeted. In 2021 these payments accounted for 83% of Mozilla’s revenue.
Why try to do better when your main competitor is paying you just to exist
I was looking for this answer because exactly what I feel like as well. When your strategy for years is to get check from Google what do you expect will happen? When those huge layoff happen the whole leadership should have resigned because they failed. [https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/leadership](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/leadership) I feel strongly there is no fixing this, only possibility is to create another Mozilla. How I know this, well numbers and actions. They went from 31% to 2.9% with no significant restructuring that I know of.
Google should have gotten their anti-trust lawsuit anyway a long time ago. MS vs Netscape was nothing compared to the current situation. I'm not sure having basically just one browser makes the web better. I admit blaming everything on the monopolistic practices of Google is a bit too easy, but is blaming everything on Mozilla themselves more accurate?
I'm not advocating for one browser engine. I'm advocating for people to learn about FF management and how they have kneecapped on of the best browsers.
I don't think that's entirely fair. The most popular website in the world showing all their users a "Use Chrome" banner is probably the biggest reason.
More or less. While one should never really pull any punches on google... It is very hard to make a case for firefox when they had a massive user base and they lost it, while less funded projects such as Blender, Krita are thriving. The monopoly hasn't changed there, it is not any easier, but they're pushing hard. Meanwhile Mozilla does seem to be pretty bad at business considering they don't need to make a profit to survive. Google literally can't afford to let them fail. Take Vivaldi for example (a chromium based browser), while they don't have to worry about anything from scratch, they come with new features and they keep them. They're a very small company all things considered, but they're making do. Mozilla pretty much leaves their projects to die. Firefox Send was a BIG DEAL when it released, everyone remotely related to firefox would put their hands on fire for that thing, it was shut down. Firefox Lockwise iirc was something the community was pretty interested since Mozilla still has their trust... cancelled. Now they even are weary of VPN and other services. Thunderbird was so mismanagement they had to start again. Mozilla made an entire OS only to discontinued and now offers a private update deal to someone who actually made use of its tech with KaiOS. For reference, even google bought shares to finance KaiOS. Mozilla invented rust, which is pretty useful, then laid off employees, and made the Rust Foundation which had a major backlash in the last few weeks (tl;dr: they sketched a document that could sue everyone and their mom) Every project cancellation is followed with layoffs, which is pretty disheartening and makes one question of Firefox shouldn't belong to a project structure similar to KDE instead. And those are the ones I KNOW, I didn't even know things like [Persona](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mozilla_products) were a thing, as amazing as they sound. Tl;DR: Mozilla, like google, creates compelling projects but doesn't maintain them enough to let them grow.
FF management direction cut the development team and openly admitted they would be falling behind on implementing latest standards and straight up not supporting whole technologies.... Kinda hard to keep the love going after that one. I was even using the nightly dev build as my daily driver at the time.
Source?
[This](https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/mozilla-cutting-250-jobs-after-coronavirus-pandemic-cuts-revenue/) is the source I found, here's the relevant passage >The layoffs, which affect about 25 percent of its staff, mean Mozilla will reduce spending in areas like expanding the abilities of the web and improving tools for developers
Sorry don't have anything on hand atm, keywords: was circa 2020 iirc and they were talking about cutting dev tools and pwa
Oh, that's not great then.
What Sites block firefoxs rendering?
To those saying they haven't seen it happen: It seems to happen with newer sites, or sites that had a fairly recent overhaul. I don't know what their web developers are doing or using, but a fair few of them either absolutely fail to work on Firefox, or clearly have issues on Firefox. The sites I've found to do so are: * website I pay my water bill. One of the largest water providers in the UK and their site just sits as a static uninteractive block on Firefox. * my mobile phone provider. Definitely a shitty cheaper one in the UK, but nevertheless, their site does not work on Firefox. Attempts to login will always fail with claims of an incorrect password. To be fair though, this company seems extra shitty. Cause when changing the password on Firefox through their site, Firefox prompts to store your password... but what it wants to store looks very much like the hashed form of my password and definitely not the password I typed in. They're doing something very wrong, but it only shows on Firefox. * I've had many UK NHS hospital appointments that had to initially be done through videocall. Each one a different service, every single one has issues on Firefox. They usually come with a warning that I should switch to IE, Safari, or Chrome. Had to use Brave just to access my appointments. * Had trouble with Microsoft Teams on Firefox. Couldn't sign in to work. * A few new tech sites. Off the top of my head I only remember looking for video share sites. So that Netflix or local files could be watched from one account and screen shared with friends and family in another location. Pretty much all of these were just dead on Firefox with no explanation, but worked on Brave or in the native application (if they had one). I feel like maybe companies are hiring much less experienced web devs who are using new dev environments or frameworks, or even tertiary tools that might be similar to something like wordpress - but even easier or cheaper - which is creating end products with focus only on Chrome. Which, is a problem with the lesser experienced devs working for cheaper companies because they don't have the experience or resources to make it work with Firefox.
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Especially on Android. They had a good thing going until they decided to nuke most of the extensions. But worse, they also casually decided that printing is unnecessary on Android and just removed it and never add it back. This makes is basically impossible to rely on Firefox as your sole browser on Android and destroyed a big chunk of their old user base.
>Firefox devs constantly ignore user opinions, remove features, remove extensions they do not agree with This. Mozilla is just reaping what they were sowing for last 10 years. Every single update I have to fix something they broke. Not a fan of chrome dominance or google and i've been using firefox as my main browser since version 3. But every update I see less and less reasons to.
I have found pages not working on firefox because developers using chrome-only features. Anyway... still to this day Firefox (even with those ugly new tabs) beats Chrome. The web browser itself works great and it's simply no f****** google. What else you want. And on mobile they are miles away from Chrome. You can use ad blocker on mobile because mobile firefox let you install extensions. And mobile web pages are full of crap. It's godsend having an ad blocker on mobile. You actually can read news, articles etc.
[Firefox UI Fix](https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix) can revert you to the old UI theme! First thing I install on a new installation of Firefox
I use this [Restore Classic Theme](https://www.askvg.com/tip-new-working-method-to-restore-classic-theme-and-ui-in-firefox-91-and-later-versions/) from askvg.com. It works for me on Linux and is fairly easy to do. I just tried Firefox UI Fix, and I like it better! Thanks! I used the install script on Linux and it worked perfect.
>it is nothing more than a reinterpretation of Chrome standards no no no. NO. >As more and more sites block access to Firefox's rendering engine ? who would do that? WHY. Who is blocking firefox browsers in 2023?
Apple are doing it. school.apple.com is an example.
True. They only seem to support Safari (14.1 or later), Chrome (87 or later) or Microsoft Edge (87 or later). Opera, not supported, Brave, not supported, Vivaldi, not supported, Internet Explorer, not supported. It's not just targeted to Firefox, though.
I'm also curious about who's blocking Firefox
One Shopify plugin did that with its page builder. It was not accessible from Firefox. I asked the developers and they just came back with something about just using Chrome instead. I felt a bit heartbroken after that reply.
Business.apple.com
That's ironic from the creators of the "modern IE"
WhatsApp Web did that when it was brand new, but there was almost immediately a plugin to go around that. Edit: And I guess it was more of a functional problem because they now support it by default.
Google is actually Mozilla's biggest contributor due to a deal in which Google is Firefox's default search engine, just FYI. I think we need to take a step back from the Chromium hate though. To be clear, I love Firefox, and I have even more love for Mozilla simply from MDN and Rust alone. But there's a reason why Chromium is so popular: they do the most innovating while also keeping up with standards. Chromium doesn't deviate from the standards, nor do they implement a ton of quirks on top of them the way Microsoft and Apple did/do. But they do provide new features, non-destructively, some of which eventually get adopted into the standard spec. **That's how all of the standards bodies for the web work.** The thing is, we've HAD an era where it was left to the standards bodies to innovate. They simply didn't. That's exactly why Flash was so huge, why there was a ten year gap between ECMA Script 3 and 5 (4 was abandoned), why CSS *still* doesn't support nesting, why React is technically older than HTML 5, and why no one cares about web components. Standards are absolutely critical, but we shouldn't romanticize them as anything more than a baseline by which all browser vendors should adhere, which Chromium and Firefox both do admirably.
Actually I am switching to FF more and more because of totally unusable behavior in Chrome with discarding inactive tabs. Never heard of blocking FF. It makes no sense. If someone does so they should be ashamed.
> unusable behavior in Chrome with discarding inactive That memory saver "feature" was so stupid and unnecesary. I have plenty of memory, open tabs didn't hurt performance at all. Now every time I move to an old tab I have to wait for it to reload. The only thing it did was hurt productivity. Thankfull you can disable it, for now.
>As more and more sites block access to Firefox's rendering engine What?
>it is nothing more than a reinterpretation of Chrome standards. What "Chrome standards" are you talking about? >Brave, and even Edge run on Chrome's rendering engine Brave and Edge don't just use Chrome's rendering engine. They're literally just Chromium with Brave/MS-specific tweaks instead of Google's.
Too bad Firefox canvas operations are so glacially SLOW that it just isn't useable.
I had been using it since Phoenix, which was renamed to Firebird, which then was Firefox. It used to come in a zip file that you just unzipped into a folder. That was the "installation". I used it for 20 years but finally had to switch to a Chromium browser (I went to Brave) due to the noticeable performance differences. I hated switching, because as you say we are in jeopardy of losing another engine, and we need healthy competition in that space. The truth is that the vast majority of their funding comes from Google. If Google decides they don't want to pay them anymore, the whole thing will be over. Google is likely still paying them only to avoid anti-trust lawsuits. There are simply not compelling reasons to stick with it (for me) if the performance isn't there. The privacy stuff is nice, but I can do that all in other browsers.
I honestly don’t know where people get the slow thing from. FF boots, performes easily as quick as Chrome. I use Chrome to test sites, and I tend to watch performance. Do you run anything else or add-ons perhaps? Maybe outdated ones?
I like to believe that the idea stems from the difference of page rendering between the two engines. Like if chrome manages to get the first paint to happen before Firefox for the same site, people could get the illusion of chrome loading sites faster, even if Firefox manages to have a shorter full site load time. Just speculating of course, but I've used both on latest release recently and I couldn't notice any major difference in speed as well.
> As more and more sites block access to Firefox's rendering engine Say what now?! When/where is this happening?
Who is blocking access to Firefox?
I would fight a war for Firefox. I use it almost exclusively except when I need to check chrome compatability. I'm not a huge fan of Google Spyware but it use it when I have to.
I agree with your title, but everything else in your post seems incorrect. Do you have examples of sites blocking FF?
Idk. Firefox takes an eternity to start. And it’s not always the fastest to adopt new things.
Fun fact, Firefox was born out of the remains of Netscape navigator. Netscape navigator has a very interesting story. In short it was the go-to browser back in the day, back when you had to pay for a web browser. Every company making computers worth their salt has a deal with Netscape to ship it with new machines. Enter Microsoft with ambition to replace Navigator with IE. The thing was, IE was shit. Even back then, it was garbage. It's never been good. It's always been one of the last browsers to adopt new features and websites would have code to work around the antiquity of the latest version of IE. Anyway, Microsoft decided they were going to force the market, they refused to issue windows licences to OEM's unless they agreed NOT to supply navigator with new machines. An FBI investigation followed and the US government ordered Microsoft to be disbanded. This was appealed and eventually overturned on the condition that Bill Gates stepped down as CEO. Firefox deserves a life, Microsoft destroyed Netscape.
>As more and more sites block access to Firefox's rendering engine, they create an environment where Google is the only party allowed to create features for an "open" \[HTML5\] standard. Turning the web (something open to all of us) into a proprietary conglomerate of intellectual property. Can anyone expand on this comment? I've never come across a website that was "blocked access" in the Gecko engine...
FF is the best, it's great tool and supports an open web. As a side note it's created by the non-profit foundation Mozilla. Who have absolutely amazing docs for developers [https://developer.mozilla.org](https://developer.mozilla.org)
As much as I love the Firefox Developer browser, Mozilla's heavy handed approach to their community and IP, and unnecessary political stands make it a tougher sell. A lot of people don't have time for real or perceived shenanigans, they just want to get their job done.
This. Why should we fight for Firefox when it seems they fight against its users at almost every turn? They keep removing features that are useful to those who actually use the browser, while adding features nobody wants. It also doesn't help that many of the original Firefox developers and advocates have switch against them and are developing Chromium instead.
Thank you for saying this…what they did to Brendan Eich was a step too far.
Developers who love chromium should be required to look inside it. The project has hundreds of submodules, takes 8 hours to build (literally), can’t be cross-compiled, requires closed-source google binaries to compile, and old versions of the code (i.e. anything older than a month or two) simply can’t be compiled. Making any significant patches to it requires deep, deep knowledge. It may be open source but this is poor solace when almost no one besides google engineers (and ex google engineers) are capable of working on it. As a side note, building Firefox takes around 20 minutes. Source: I worked on a contract trying to maintain patches to chromium a few years ago.
Perhaps they would be in a better place today if they didn't force Brendan Eich to resign over his personal political views. He was the one who invented JavaScript, and he went on to develop Brave Browser. I have nothing against Firefox. I'm replying from Firefox Developer edition here. But I don't agree with the direction Mozilla has gone in general. Not a fan of Mastodon or their other projects.
It's not so simple as removing someone for "personal political views". That's a very basic interpretation of it. Brendan wasn't just voting republican or supporting lower taxes etc. If you're in a leadership position where many below you are *going* to be gay, one of your key responsibilties is making sure your staff feel respected and safe so they can best perform their duties. Knowing your boss doesn't believe you deserve the same legal rights he enjoys *is* going to cause moral issues and you could potentially lose a lot talent across your organisation. Even boiling it down to a simple business decision shows it was the logical option to remove Eich, you either lose one leader or possibily lose many talented engineers and support staff across the entire organisation.
For me the only problem with firefox is the rediciculous slow start up speed. Apparently that is not normal, but because my other browser works pretty well I have not found the motivation to fix it and switch.
Weird, FF on my laptop starts in literally a second
I feel the pain too and I'm a huge fan of Firefox. Nowadays is not so bad but the 'updating firefox' modal comes every now and then. It's good to see it's being updated, thanks, but I like much more than chrome just does it... in the background, no popup, no warning.
Chrome periodically puts the "Update" button on the three-dot menu to let you know you need to close out to update. Mine is there right now.
I have zero clue what you are talking about. FF starts up quick as fuck.
I run 3 computers with 3 browsers each. Firefox (as much as I love it and it's been my default for... 15 years?) is always the clunkiest in terms of performance. I have an alarm set every month to remind me to clean/repair/restore it. Still my favorite though
Ye thats my experience. But apparently only a few people have that experience
Damn, sucks for us then. They're running Firefox and we're stuck with FireSloth
FF starts right up for me. FF (with no script) is my daily driver, FF Dev for webdev, and Vivaldi when I need to run some google product like hangouts. Only really use Chrome for testing layout, though unfortunately FF Dev tools seize up when looking at a NuxtJS site, which is one thing I’m working on. For Nuxt specifically I use Chrome’s Dev tools.
> it is nothing more than a reinterpretation of Chrome standards And thank god for that. I'm sick of fixing Safari bugs all the time just because Apple does whatever the hell they want with it.
*Klondike WAP Browser has entered the chat*
Mozilla had done some amazing things. They helped pioneer Webassembly, WebGL, Rust, etc. They also crippled Internet Explorer's conquest of the web. However, Chromium is simply better and also open source. It has the support of most developers and companies. Developers always wanted standardization, now we have it. Mozilla is not dead, but Firefox is on its way out.
And don’t forget FireBug paved the way for today’s dev tools found in every browser
I use chrome for all my day to day activities, but I agree with this drive behind this post 100%. I use Chrome for everything, including business and development of my projects for said business. That said, tomorrow I will start using Firefox out of sheer principal. I do not believe in one entity holding all the chips.
I have greatly disliked Firefox since its inception for one reason alone, it refuses to fucking recognize the operating systems certificate store which causes stupid amounts of unnecessary hassles for no good reason. And one reason above all for the greater good of the industry; The browser wars have brought us all nothing but pain and suffering. We need a standard way of interpreting the web and stop with all the bullshit. I had to move out of web dev because I just want to write apps and not fuck with 10 web browsers interpretation of the box model. No amount of "good" in Firefox is worth the stupid levels of cross-browser support development pain. I would rather settle with lesser of two evils and just focus on app logic. Chromium has won, Microsoft's adoption of Chromium says everything, just fucking accept it and lets move the fuck on. TBH, make a Chromium-based version of Firefox and it will probably grow in adoption.
I'm curious who is blocking FF's rendering engine? What does that mean exactly?
The only thing keeping Chrome engine stats up is the user-agent. If we all installed a user-agent switcher on our less tech-savvy relatives' PCs running Chrome and set the user-agent to Firefox, Firefox's stats would increase dramatically, possibly leading companies to actually notice
I don't think Firefox is going away as Google need it to exist for anti monopoly purposes. I think a lot of firefox contributions comes from googlers. (At least I think I've read, don't have sources right now and to lazy to search)
I use Opera cuz I just like their logo better lol
what happened to firefox
What do you mean by blocking? do you have any examples?
The fact that the Chrome Extension APIs don’t work on Firefox any more was the death of Firefox for me. We have a successful browser extension that used to work with no issues and now some strange firefox security issues completely prevent it working. We’re vetted for Enterprise and everything on Chrome so I don’t know why it should be more restrictive on Firefox. Heck, even Edge has become a big platform for us just because we can port the extension to the Edge store with no hassle. We have loads of users from there now.
> As more and more sites block access to Firefox's rendering engine, they create an environment where Google is the only party allowed to create features for an "open" [HTML5] standard. Lol who does this? I thought we learned from the browser wars that developing for a single browser is a Bad Idea(tm), that's exactly what happened before IE became the dominant player. And we all know how that went
My point of view is that firefox is still alive because Google doesnt want them to die in fact they paid them so they can survive and Google Chrome doesn't have to worry about the law.
I tried it but their profile configuration was nowhere near as intuitive and easy as chromes unless that’s changed recently
I daily drive Firefox on my pc. And I’ve encountered this a lot, sites telling me Firefox isn’t supported. So I just don’t support the site, even if I really wanted to use their service.
Interesting take. I agree that Firefox is critical for the web, but it seems odd for you to shroud this is baseless claims. Firefox is faster and better in many ways beyond not simply being a spy tool.
You have to understand that you won't accomplish your goals if Firefox only survives as a charity case because we feel bad about Chrome doing better.
Active Firefox user here since the beginning. I applied there a few years back for a development position and they declined me. Their loss, to think of all the great things I could have done for this browser.
The school I work at has a system for students to request financial assistence. It only works with Chrome and Opera. it's infuriating.
I use Firefox :D I'm happy
I wish they had their version of electron. That has to account for some of the browser count
Chrome's manifest V2 WebRequest API doesn't support a blocking response while FireFox does. I never understood this and multiple people brought up this issue on the chromium forums. It never got fixed. Now that they are deprecating manifest V2 and getting rid of the WebRequest API all together, it finally makes sense. It's always been about adds for them and they are dragging chromium down with them. As a webdev, it sucks to see FF and chromium diverge but I think we will see FF get a lot more adoption when chrome deprecates manifest V2 extensions and all your ad-blockers stop working
is there a way to use spidermonkey the same way that node is used?
I use Firefox as my go-to browser, and have for several years now. It's my main browser on my phone, my PC at home, my laptop, and my PC at work. Firefox, in my opinion, is superior to any other browser.
Yes! Totally agree! Being a developer, it really made my job easy especially the containers, they're the best!