Firefox on my laptop has a propensity for eating lots of RAM, and constant CPU usage, even if nothing is going on. Task manager is useless. Profiler just shows "GC collecting".
Mobile firefox is OK, it simply feels like it's designed for a different person. For example even Chrome has "force reader mode" button.. Firefox does not. And don't even get me started on the "new tab" [age - it gives me 6 choices and all of them are "AI" ones which never show what I want. The only way to show a manually curated link list is "collections" and those do not get synced, and occasionally disappear for no reason.
Probably due to my age, I religiously close every tab after I read it. If that gets more than a dozen, I literally quit the browser and declare bankruptcy because it’s not worth it to sort through the mess of tabs I clearly am not using.
Firefox is old too. I’m sure it could manage memory better, but couldn’t we all? If you have tabs in GC and using CPU when you aren’t using them, kill them maybe? What else is that tab doing all day when you aren’t looking?
I’ve never understood why people keep so many tabs open and why they’ll literally switch to an entirely different browser platform rather than change a bad habit
When it balloons into the low thousands and starts hurting performance, I dump Firefox's open-tabs store (file called recovery.jsonlz4) into a different file and start over. At some point I'll point an LLM at that junk pile and see if I missed anything important. (Probably not).
If a tab is important, you'll be using it more often than once a week. I have a similar rule with impulse purchases: anything I want needs to sit in the cart for 24-48 hours before purchasing. If I still need it, I buy it. Probably cut the crap I buy down by 75%. Steam? It goes on the wishlist (personally capped at ~50) until I can commit to playing and finishing it right then and there.
It’s not really a feasible alternative.
Can barely keep my eyes socketed from all this involuntary rolling that's overtaken them ...
I'm personally here for the non-bullshit stuff that isn't about getting clicks with hot ledes grounded on warmed over, barely modified well worn takes on well-understood stats so miss me with _that_ shit ...
My current main browser across desktop and mobile is Brave. Pretty happy with it. Overall more efficient and with a better UI than FF. I've used FF for many years, but I feel it's simply not as good as competitors anymore.
It's exactly because Firefox is so important that you'll see people here complaining when Firefox does things to push away users like Mozilla buying up an ad-tech company, collecting data on users, and using firefox to push personalized ads, or the addition of anti-features and questionable design choices that force us to hunt for and modify poorly documented settings about:config and make edits to userChrome.css
It isn't bots complaining about Firefox here, it's power users who are frustrated by what Firefox is turning into, users who are seriously concerned about what Mozilla is prioritizing, and users who are worried about what is at stake.
I hope people here never stop bitching about Firefox. Refusing to talk about Firefox's problems wont help make them go away. Keep discussing what you'd like to see in Firefox and what things you hope they'll focus on and prioritize. There are Firefox devs and mozilla employees around here. If we're lucky, a few of them might see and listen to some of what we say. It's the most tech savvy users who disable all the telemetry and data collection, so our feedback isn't really going to be seen any other way.
As long as the business world is going to continue centrallizing on the likes of Microsoft, Google, and Cloudflare, any existing or future alternative browsers will either have to kowtow on the alter of compatibility or make the deliberate decision not to support "advanced features" that enable the next generation of proprietary webmail, social media, banking webpages, etc - tending towards a total revocation of privacy in exchange for KYC via a glut of metadata.
This will get even crappier as mechanisms used to filter out "suspicious" traffic (read: competing products) become standard. I imagine using Firefox in 2030 will be akin to using Tor in 2019 - web requests will be blocked, denied, or deemed "insecure".
Lynx revolution when?
Why do people hate firefox? It's the only mainstream browser with an rcfile?
This isn't really true, and hasn't been for some time. It's just the only other browser engine with meaningful production users. Servo and Ladybird are both making great strides.
firefox is the only mainstream browser with an rcfile, that alone gives you incredible powers. I hope one day it also grows something like chrome's CDP. What is everyone so upset about?
I disagree with Mozilla about many things, but I agree with this article - I use Firefox because it’s the only browser out there that isn’t Chrome or WebKit, and that’s worth enough to me that I’m willing to disagree with them on other issues.
There's also a higher chance that things will slip through the cracks and be forgotten if I bookmark them, whereas with tabs they're staring me in the face any time I'm using my computer.
I also use Firefox on Android, I have less experience of using other browsers on mobile but what I've got is fine for me.
I'm not questioning your experience but I would like others, who might be considering using Firefox, to know that different people have different experiences.
I'm using Fennec from F-Droid, but I have a little document symbol on the URL bar I tap for reader mode. I guess the issue is it doesn't show on all sites then?
Interestingly on fingerprinting test websites, Brave also did significantly better than Firefox + PrivacyBadger + ublock Origin + one or two more which I forgot. When I ran some tests a couple months back.
Just look at how many people pump positive comments into influencer's posts that are nothing more then ads (sorry, collaborations). While some are bots, plenty seem real.
Or the new local takeaway that's just opened and all the reviews saying "I keep seeing this place appear so I had to check it out"
I got the Chrome extension that adds the "Open in Firefox" option to the hyperlink right-click menu. That's how I view all YouTube videos.
I'd switch completely to Firefox except for all my data being on Google. It's clear that eventually I will switch to Firefox completely.
Google is pure evil.
Also I swear YouTube runs much worse on FF. But that's secondary.
palata•2h ago
Once in a while someone talks about digital sovereignty, but much like climate change, nothing will be done (successfully) about it.
That's how it is, I've come to terms with it.
sssilver•45m ago
Do people care? What signs of this are there?
Does it matter to the average person that the society is marching further and further down the road of digital monopolies and surveillance capitalism? My impression certainly is that the percentage of people who care about this is so small that it might as well be a rounding error, while on the other side I see tremendous momentum, effort, and cunning.
bluebarbet•24m ago