Questions like “Which browser should I use?” regularly come up on the r/browsers subreddit. I sometimes respond to these posts, but my quick replies usually only contain one or two points. To be honest, until recently I wasn’t even sure myself why I use Firefox. Of course it’s a pretty good browser, but that doesn’t explain why I’ve stubbornly stayed loyal to Firefox for more than a decade. After giving it a bit more thought, I came up with the following reasons.
↫ Šime Vidas
There’s really no viable alternative to Firefox for me. I wish we had more choice, more competition, and more vibrancy in the browser space, and I’m definitely anxious about the future of Firefox, but with every other browser being either Chrome, possibly with skin, or Safari, there’s really nowhere else to go.
I hope ladybird takes off, Andreas Kling is an awesome developer.
To say there is no other viable browser for you is a fine and dandy, i myself also use firefox dor much of my browsing, but i spend about equal time in links2 so for my own usage i consider links2 valid as well. It all depends on usecase scenario for example: If i want to watch youtube or rumble videos i can navigate to any video link on the sites and then launch it in mplayer2 with the framebufffer command so i do not have to log in to Xorg/wayland to watch or listen to the content.
Very few sites are troublesome in links2 -g -fb for me, but dailymail.co.uk is a constant problem since it is so utterly riddled with ads and coded very poorly so to read that one i have to use a separate new-reader that gets the articles through rss. I personally favour the new reader Canto nowadays, but there are plenty of good ones.
I also heavily use links2 in the way you’ve described. That’s a pretty good idea to use mplayer2 with framebuffer. I’ve been opening videos in vlc or mpv in a minimal window manager, but I’ll have to try your way. Another browser that will work in framebuffer mode is Netsurf. My rss feed reader is newsboat – you can configure file associations like in links2 to open some media in external programs.
Update: I just tried mpv and it works in framebuffer mode with ‘mpv –vo drm [video-url]’.
This comment is being written in Ladybird. It is now possible to browse OSnews, login, and leave comments in Ladybird! There is a long way to go before Ladybird can replace Firefox but I too am excited for it to get there.
There’s a bug in Firefox that annoys me to an extent where I cannot use it as main – on Mac with Czech keyboard layout, cmd-1 does NOT switch to the first tab (where I always keep Gmail) as expected, instead it zooms in. I first reported it 15 years ago, still unfixed. I can’t access the original bug report, here’s a duplicate:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1530458
That bug lists “ctrl 1” to change tabs, but that doesn’t work for me either even on the english version of FF on linux. However ALT 1 does work. Is this a mistake in the bug report? Is the behavior different for the windows version of FF?
That bug report is for Windows, so I guess it’s an issue there as well. That makes it even worse. so it seems both ctrl-1 on Win and cmd-1 on Mac with Czech layout do this, and have been since the beginning.
I gave up on Firefox long time ago. Submitted a few bug reports, they were closed after several years due to housekeeping, not fixing. The roadmap of Firefox is often outside of my interest (color themes to “express my inner self”? I’m too old for that). I use Vivaldi, I guess a “skin” of Chrome.
antonone,
In my experience, they lost interest in new features when they decided to play catch up.
Initially Firefox (before that Mozilla) was a test bed for new innovation. They brought XUL and add-ons. They introduced tabbed browsing. They had groundbreaking stuff like saving your session. Granted many of these existed elsewhere (Internet Explorer / ActiveX), but they did it “right”.
But at one point they decided to drop XUL (makes sense due to overhead), and that might have been the turning point. They then tried to follow in the Chrome steps closely, a bit too closely, giving up everything original about them.
And the second breaking milestone was probably their monetization attempts. First they wanted to sell cloud services (makes sense), and tried selling default search engine rights to Yahoo! (had to backtrack), and then tired a news / web recommendation service of their own (not large enough to do it).
Wish the history was a bit more different, though.
At home after Opera went off the rails I tried Vivaldi for a while, but started to run into weird issues with multimedia and some websites. Lately I’ve been running Floorp as my alternative, if nothing else it is performant.
> very other browser being either Chrome, possibly with skin
and the occasional modifications to the underlying engine. Up to and including some that block google’s profiling efforts.
I’m no longer sure whether Firefox’s “apologetics” are a matter of nostalgia or a specific kind of Stockholm syndrome given the current state of the browser.
The article says: “In Firefox, there is an internal about:config page with thousands (tens of thousands?) of individual configs that can be freely edited by the user. ”
It is true that you can modify almost every aspect of the Mozilla browser’s appearance and behavior in this way, *unless* Mozilla authoritatively decides otherwise. The most prominent example is the issue of the icon grouping extension icons. Ironically, in the Chromium-based Vivaldi browser, the equivalent of this icon can be hidden, making the Chromium-based browser more customizable to user needs than Firefox.
niebuszerwo,
You don’t have to like mozilla/firefox and I get that, but an ad hominem attack? Come on man.
Finding a single counter example doesn’t really prove the rule. I find FF much more customizable for me and I don’t like chrome as much, if anything I’m kind of annoyed when mozilla copy chrome UI traits. This is a valid opinion even if you don’t happen to agree with it.
We are all victims in this browser war, a once noble industry has now sold it’s soul, I suppose that is what happens when survival depends on freedom of choice.
I’d say for me Firefox magic bar has superior suggestion accuracy and I depend on it a lot (having 1000s of bookmarks).
I also like FF bookmark tagging which works better than clumsy folders.
On mobile I stuck to chrome due to superior performance but existence of uBlock leveled the playing field for me and I’m now more on FF too.
I try to use Firefox whenever I can. However, there are some sites I go to like either a healthcare provider or to make a payment or order, and I have to startup Chrome and use it because there is something in the website that only works with Chrome because that is the only engine people are testing their websites against (if they’re testing at all). Frustrating sometimes.
moronikos,
Same.
Not having enough marketshare often means companies drop support for alternatives like a rock. Obviously the alternatives suffer, but when this happens standards suffer too since the dominant browsers become the new defacto standard. I’m glad we managed to push back on some of the antifeatures google were planing for chrome, like web DRM. I worry that, once passed, antifeatures could become irreversible since even the alternatives would be forced to implement them in order to access major web sites.