You’re getting downvoted for an opinion, but I’m upvoting you because I actually want to know the downsides of switching, because I’m considering it myself. Is there any truth to what you’re saying, or do people just not like you saying something bad about firefox? I don’t mind downsides to switching, I’d just like to be aware of them first so I don’t get surprised and frustrated.
Firefox had multiple full rewrites because it was losing marketshare due to performance. They market this as quantum and they are very up front about it.
I mainly use Firefox (on both Linux and Android), but I also use Chrome regularly. I wouldn’t describe Firefox as buggy or clunky. On the whole, I find Firefox more pleasant to use than Chrome on its own merits—nothing at all to do with privacy or Google.
I do agree that Chrome is more performant on JS-heavy websites, but not so much so that I find Firefox sluggish by comparison. And both slow down significantly once you have lots of tabs open.
I prefer Firefox’s tab UI to Chrome’s, both on desktop and mobile:
Firefox on desktop will scroll the tab bar horizontally once you have enough tabs open, meaning you can still see the title of each. Chrome will keep on shrinking your tabs until each is just an icon, making it really hard to tell between different pages on the same site.
The “tab groups” feature of Chrome on Android confuses me and isn’t intuitive at all IMO. Firefox just has a traditional list of tabs, which I find much easier to use.
I also love Firefox’s screenshot tool. It’s so much nicer than taking a screenshot via the OS:
It lets you screenshot an entire page even if it’s too tall for the screen.
It lets you select specific elements on the page precisely.
If you invoke it through the developer console, you can take high-DPI screenshots even if you’re using a low-DPI monitor. It’ll re-render the page for you behind the scenes.
Firefox also has way better (read: any at all) hardware video decoding support on desktop Linux than Chrome does. Some distros patch Chrome to add that support, but Firefox has it in official builds out of the box.
I started using Firefox on Android because my old phone (Nexus 5X) was very RAM-constrained and Firefox seemed to kick fewer other apps out of RAM than Chrome did. I now have a newer phone where RAM isn’t an issue, but I still use Firefox, mainly for uBlock and because it can sync tabs, bookmarks, and history to Firefox on my desktop. It runs just as smoothly as Chrome does in my experience.
This is all my personal experience, though. I have experienced frustrating Firefox bugs in the past that make it crash or freeze, and it sounds like GP is currently experiencing one such bug. But I’ve used Firefox for over a decade and probably only encountered 3-4 such bugs. Each time, once I got frustrated enough to go digging, I found an existing upstream bug report describing the root cause and a workaround to use until a proper fix landed (usually within a couple releases). I’ve used Chrome a lot less regularly, so I don’t know if the experience there is comparable or if they do just have better QA for bugs like that. Either way, I think the benefits of Firefox for me outweigh the occasional bug that gets through for a few releases.
Thanks a lot for this detailed run down! You’ve done a good job filling in the blank spots for me, and convinced me to download the app. I forgot that there was a desktop version as well, I’ve only been thinking of mobile! I have noticed YouTube videos look worse when streaming from my PC vs on the TV apps …it’ll be interesting to check if Firefox does better because of what you said about the video.
Performance is worse in general. It’s something you’ll have to try for yourself, but websites generally load worse on Firefox.
Some Google websites will intentionally block you, or serve you older pages if you’re on Firefox. Using a plugin to modify your agent string is a work around, but also makes it seem like you’re using Chrome within their analytics which isn’t a good thing.
Like I said, firefox had a bug where printing shipping labels wasn’t working. Took me months of reporting before it was just recently fixed. No one ever acknowledged my issue, and still to this day the bug report was never marked as fixed. I had to run my company from a chromium based browser for months because of it.
The Android app is ass. It’s so clunky and runs like crap. At least it has ublock origin, which is nice. Only recently did firefox finally get pull to refresh, and it’s a buggy pile of crap lol.
I think it’s good to use Firefox. Chromium based future isn’t a good thing, and Chrome is evil trying to block ad blocking with manifest v3, and being literally the only Android browser without ad blocking. Even chromium based Edge has ad blocking on Android.
People on Lemmy are hard core enthusiasts at the moment. I think anyone that says anything negative about things enthusiasts are really passionate about, like Firefox, Linux, etc, will be downvoted.
I think it’s important to not be a fanboy and to be aware of shortcomings. I’m not against Firefox. It’s the only browser I use now, and I highly suggest everyone give it a try, but I’m also not going to pretend it’s some amazing experience. It’s clunky, but it’s run by a good foundation, has some neat features Chrome doesn’t, and it’s helping prevent an even larger chromium monopoly. Give it a go! Just be aware it’s not perfect, and I think you’ll be more likely to stick with it long term.
The way it’s seeming after reading some of these replies is I may end up just having both browsers installed and swapping depending on what I wanna do… Not ideal, but I think it’d be better than all Chrome all the time. Thanks so much for the info
Everytime Firefox updates I have to restart the entire browser or it won’t let me open a new tab. This has been going on for years. As a dev, I can’t dynamically edit source during runtime ever since the Quantum update. It’s noticeably slower these days, which is especialy bad on mobile/laptops due to battery life. If you’re on Windows, you don’t get video super sampling (NVIDIA) or HDR videos.
I wouldn’t call it a buggy mess that crashes frequently, but it’s certainly constantly getting on my nerves.
Shouldn’t you have to restart the browser when it updates? Isn’t that normal? That’s how Chrome works? Or do you mean it doesn’t save your browser tabs for whenever you opens, or?
The no-hdr videos might be a deal breaker for me on PC… I watch a lot of videos. Thanks for mentioning this.
You’re getting downvoted for an opinion, but I’m upvoting you because I actually want to know the downsides of switching, because I’m considering it myself. Is there any truth to what you’re saying, or do people just not like you saying something bad about firefox? I don’t mind downsides to switching, I’d just like to be aware of them first so I don’t get surprised and frustrated.
My guess would be that calling it a weird buggy mess that freezes all the time does not line up with most people’s experience.
I’ve been using Firefox since before it was Firefox and have no idea what he’s talking about.
Firefox had multiple full rewrites because it was losing marketshare due to performance. They market this as quantum and they are very up front about it.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/introducing-firefox-quantum/
I’m glad your experience with firefox has been perfect for decades. Doesn’t mean I’m wrong.
I never said it was perfect, I said your “weird, buggy, freezing mess” assessment didn’t align with most people’s experience.
I remember the quantum rewrite, that was 6 years ago, not terribly relevant today.
I also don’t blame Firefox for Google screwing with non-chrome browsers. We saw the same thing 20 years ago with IE.
I mainly use Firefox (on both Linux and Android), but I also use Chrome regularly. I wouldn’t describe Firefox as buggy or clunky. On the whole, I find Firefox more pleasant to use than Chrome on its own merits—nothing at all to do with privacy or Google.
I do agree that Chrome is more performant on JS-heavy websites, but not so much so that I find Firefox sluggish by comparison. And both slow down significantly once you have lots of tabs open.
I prefer Firefox’s tab UI to Chrome’s, both on desktop and mobile:
I also love Firefox’s screenshot tool. It’s so much nicer than taking a screenshot via the OS:
Firefox also has way better (read: any at all) hardware video decoding support on desktop Linux than Chrome does. Some distros patch Chrome to add that support, but Firefox has it in official builds out of the box.
I started using Firefox on Android because my old phone (Nexus 5X) was very RAM-constrained and Firefox seemed to kick fewer other apps out of RAM than Chrome did. I now have a newer phone where RAM isn’t an issue, but I still use Firefox, mainly for uBlock and because it can sync tabs, bookmarks, and history to Firefox on my desktop. It runs just as smoothly as Chrome does in my experience.
This is all my personal experience, though. I have experienced frustrating Firefox bugs in the past that make it crash or freeze, and it sounds like GP is currently experiencing one such bug. But I’ve used Firefox for over a decade and probably only encountered 3-4 such bugs. Each time, once I got frustrated enough to go digging, I found an existing upstream bug report describing the root cause and a workaround to use until a proper fix landed (usually within a couple releases). I’ve used Chrome a lot less regularly, so I don’t know if the experience there is comparable or if they do just have better QA for bugs like that. Either way, I think the benefits of Firefox for me outweigh the occasional bug that gets through for a few releases.
Thanks a lot for this detailed run down! You’ve done a good job filling in the blank spots for me, and convinced me to download the app. I forgot that there was a desktop version as well, I’ve only been thinking of mobile! I have noticed YouTube videos look worse when streaming from my PC vs on the TV apps …it’ll be interesting to check if Firefox does better because of what you said about the video.
Performance is worse in general. It’s something you’ll have to try for yourself, but websites generally load worse on Firefox.
Some Google websites will intentionally block you, or serve you older pages if you’re on Firefox. Using a plugin to modify your agent string is a work around, but also makes it seem like you’re using Chrome within their analytics which isn’t a good thing.
Like I said, firefox had a bug where printing shipping labels wasn’t working. Took me months of reporting before it was just recently fixed. No one ever acknowledged my issue, and still to this day the bug report was never marked as fixed. I had to run my company from a chromium based browser for months because of it.
The Android app is ass. It’s so clunky and runs like crap. At least it has ublock origin, which is nice. Only recently did firefox finally get pull to refresh, and it’s a buggy pile of crap lol.
I think it’s good to use Firefox. Chromium based future isn’t a good thing, and Chrome is evil trying to block ad blocking with manifest v3, and being literally the only Android browser without ad blocking. Even chromium based Edge has ad blocking on Android.
People on Lemmy are hard core enthusiasts at the moment. I think anyone that says anything negative about things enthusiasts are really passionate about, like Firefox, Linux, etc, will be downvoted.
I think it’s important to not be a fanboy and to be aware of shortcomings. I’m not against Firefox. It’s the only browser I use now, and I highly suggest everyone give it a try, but I’m also not going to pretend it’s some amazing experience. It’s clunky, but it’s run by a good foundation, has some neat features Chrome doesn’t, and it’s helping prevent an even larger chromium monopoly. Give it a go! Just be aware it’s not perfect, and I think you’ll be more likely to stick with it long term.
The way it’s seeming after reading some of these replies is I may end up just having both browsers installed and swapping depending on what I wanna do… Not ideal, but I think it’d be better than all Chrome all the time. Thanks so much for the info
Definitely the best approach. Use both, pick the one that works best for you. I use Firefox, but when I require a chromium browser, I load up Edge.
Everytime Firefox updates I have to restart the entire browser or it won’t let me open a new tab. This has been going on for years. As a dev, I can’t dynamically edit source during runtime ever since the Quantum update. It’s noticeably slower these days, which is especialy bad on mobile/laptops due to battery life. If you’re on Windows, you don’t get video super sampling (NVIDIA) or HDR videos.
I wouldn’t call it a buggy mess that crashes frequently, but it’s certainly constantly getting on my nerves.
Shouldn’t you have to restart the browser when it updates? Isn’t that normal? That’s how Chrome works? Or do you mean it doesn’t save your browser tabs for whenever you opens, or?
The no-hdr videos might be a deal breaker for me on PC… I watch a lot of videos. Thanks for mentioning this.