I wish it still worked well on modern sites. I used Opera from around 2000 until when they switched to Chromium in 2012ish. The first version I ever used predated the Presto engine. I used it for everything except web development (which I did using Firefox and Firebug) and sites that needed ActiveX (where I had to use IE).
These days I usually use Firefox, except I use Chrome for web development since its dev tools are a bit more responsive on complex sites compared to Firefox’s.
How about if I go away from the mobile app and then go back into it, then it doesn’t reload the page I was just on. I can still see where I was until I click it, why do you need to reload it? Fuckin’ bullshit.
I don’t see this behavior on android. Is it impossible that there is some kind of phone battery or memory usage process that’s causing the sessions to be discarded?
When the OS tells Android Firefox that the phone is running out of ram, it murders any tabs it thinks you might not be looking at, to avoid being murdered by Android for its ram.
My phone is literally never not using the full 8 GB it has, and it’s constantly juggling. Even when I have next to nothing open.
What’s eating it all? Fuck if I know. My phone also has a system memory leak that has eaten up 90% of the onboard storage with modem crash dumps I can’t delete without root, and this phone has no custom firmware to do that. Got what I paid for, I guess…
This person said XUL is insecure! Any Palemoon users here? Anyone wanting to tell them that Mozilla is totally taking away user Freedom and that Palemoon is a totally secure Browser? XD
Admittedly, yes, XUL was a complete shitfest. Though I remember that it was more due to security patches and poor memory management that caused the apparent poor performance, not so much for addons. I was on waterfox classic at the time of writing of this article and had like 30 addons enabled, including TST, CRT, and TileTabs. all non-e10s-blocking, and, I assure you, it was just as fast(and slow) as quantum.
But, that’s besides the point. Customization, especially via addon’s, was one of the defining features of Firefox. Before, you had opera, which you could customize it within certain limits, Firefox if you want full control, and IE if you’re a dummy. Now, you have Vivaldi if you want customization within certain limits, Chrome if you’re a dummy, and Firefox is… just… not chrome? I’d say the addons should’ve been kept at all costs, maybe in a different way, without amputating the whole browser. But they did and it lost it’s appeal to a major portion of people. Of course there are still exclusive features like container tabs and min vid, but those are not exclusive to quantum either. The whole ordeal sounds just like that time when Yandex, in order to solve a support ticket overflow, just removed the contact support button.
Tab groups, vertical tabs, synced Workspaces. I’ve hacked together most of it, but being able to have separated pages of tabs synced through my account would be a godsend. Only thing keeping me on MS Edge.
I don’t know why I never vibed with vertical tabs, but I’ve just never been able to make it work mentally. And I could see a double-edged sword with synced workspaces (I think having a button to click and see open tabs on other devices is a perfect middle ground). Personally, tab groups is the only thing I miss from Chromium. I used the feature for grouping, but also for labeling tabs: “Check back Tuesday,” or “Don’t forget to follow up,” or whatever. If they gave us tab groups and then never updated Firefox again, I think I would be pretty happy.
EDIT: well okay not happy, but I would be satisfied with the browser we ended up with.
Do you mean never updated, or never adding new features? Because Firefox would be unusuable within 6 months because of how the web works if it stopped being updated
My hyperbole also presumes that Gecko continues to be updated, though the browser would get no further updates.
This hyperbolic hypothetical is truly impossible, since Firefox is open-source. It would continue to be maintained by SOMEone.
Six months might be a bit pessimistic. It might start being less reliable within six months, but the pace of WHATWG RFCs has been dwindling gradually since the mid-2000s. Honestly, I think operating system changes would be more likely to render Firefox’s codebase obsolete before web standards do.
I want to view multiple tabs at once, in a split-page view where I can scroll on one tab, then mouse-over to another and start independently scrolling on that one. It’s probably the key feature I miss from Vivaldi. Is there some insurmountable obstacle in the engine that prevents implementation, or is it stubborn devs?
This is not even close to the worst thing they have ever done, but stuff like this is a waste of resources. People mostly want official vertical tabs and more than anything engine performance improvements. (and the ability to pretend to be Chrome in Youtube)
Absolutely. Firefox is so slow compared to Chrome. Switching tabs, scrolling, video calls, … sure. Sure, Chrome/Chromium is a memory hog, but come on Mozilla, just invest in Servo already and stop adding useless features.
Good morning, babe! Servo ended ages ago, and a lot of the performance improvements from it got absorbed into Quantum as l10n and Rust code. I was alpha testing Servo back in the day.
Firefox desktop performance is on par with Chromium. Also Servo is now a project under the Linux Foundation, and likely Mozilla Corp doesn’t have enough employees to contribute to external projects.
Firefox desktop performance is on par with Chromium.
Mate, I don’t know what kind of beast or toaster you have as a machine, but my experience tells me otherwise.
Also Servo is now a project under the Linux Foundation, and likely Mozilla Corp doesn’t have enough employees to contribute to external projects.
Yes, Mozilla fired the entire Servo team and gave their previous CEO a raise during the pandemic. They can still pivot and focus on Firefox instead of whatever other stuff they have been doing.
I miss the days with Opera. Not only could it group tabs, but it had previews too. Mouse gestures. Keyword searches. Page link filters and batch operations. RSS-reader. Chrome didn’t even exist back then, and IE and Firefox are still playing catch up. Kinda amazing to think about it.
Vivaldi is the spiritual successor, but having to use chromium rendering engine, it’s so many concessions and steps back. Has the mouse gestures, tho.
Brave has configurable keybinds, you can set any key you want to do anything.
However I still need to use the vimium extension to have proper keyboard only web navigation, because with the exception of qutebrowser none of the “popular” web browsers have the select link mode with the f key.
I think many people in the comments suffer from some version of curse of knowledge.
Sure, this feature us quite irrelevant for a power user who is quick to navigate the browser and needs a split second to remember what tab it is simply by reading the header and seeing the icon.
However, many less proficient people can benefit from this feature. Not once I saw how someone who has 10 tabs open and needs to go to a different webpage, starts meticulously clicking through every single one of them because they have no idea how the page they are looking for is called, they are too overwhelmed by using web as a whole to take notice.
Power users love to bash accessibility features like this. Its a classic case of “I don’t need a wheelchair ramp so i dont know why the library added one!”
Accessibility is way more than screen readers. It’s more than specific disability-minded modes. The web needs to be friendly to everyone, including people who may not know they could benefit from accessibility features. Everyone benefits from this type of work.
There are definitely some legit feature concerns and priorities being called out here. Mozilla has left a lot to be desired of late on that front. But a power user is more than capable of jumping into settings or about:config to turn things like this off, or finding an extension to get by for now.
Also the firefox dev team isn’t tiny. This isn’t blocking other work or anything in a substantial way, it’s a fairly isolated piece of UI, and there’s no guarantee that skipping this would change the timeline on anything else.
I don’t understand how someone can have 10 or more tabs open. The times when I have “many” tabs open is when I’m looking for references while doing art, and that still hardly ever surpasses 5 tabs! XD
I often get myself into a position where I have 50+ tabs open, but then I get annoyed with all the damn tabs and go on a purge… furiously clicking X on tabs down the line until I have it down to something manageable. This happens every couple of days. I wish there was a setting where one had the option of limiting themselves to x amount of tabs and if you hit the limit you know it’s time for a purge. I’ve seen where chromium browsers also have tab groups… I’m not sure if that helps for tab hoarding, I guess it could be more organized that way, but also sounds like it just enables more tab hoarding.
I think it’s much easier to have more than to have less. Most people I encounter have such a mess of pages in their browser, makes my hair stand on end. If we continue to approach this as an accessibility feature, it starts to make even more sense since tons of users have so many tabs they only see icons, not page names
Again, in my opinion you approach the problem like a power user. Using a browser is not a speedrun where every millisecond matters. Here is why I think it provides more comfort to an average user:
No need to divert attention and look around the monitor. When you’re not well versed with a mouse, it’s easier to click and look at the same place
Nothing distracts you unlike when you click through pages. Imagine going from dark theme page to a light theme page, the entire screen suddenly lights up
Depending on the way it is implemented (perhaps by keeping compressed page screenshots?), it might be faster to show a preview than to render the page again on a weak machine
I’m not sure how clicking can be considered “power user”… Had I said “just install tree style tabs, it’s much better”, you might’ve had a point, but you’re arguing that clicking is worse than hovering. Really can’t agree with you.
But hey, I don’t give money to Mozilla and the chance is very low that I ever will, so they can do what they want. If they think this is how they want to spend the 500 million they get from Google, that’s their prerogative.
I didn’t say clicking is power user, I said that you assessing features in terms of speed (“Is hovering faster than clicking?”) is a power user approach. It’s deeper than just bare speed and accessibility features are not developed to provide physically faster experience, but one that is more comfortable for some group of users.
Hovering preview does not even take ability to click through tabs away, but could provide comfort for a user who is not as browser proficient, for the reasons I outlined above.
Agreed. As a Netscape/Phoenix stan since late 90s, I sometimes do like the peeking feature on Ungoogled Chromium. Yes, I am a power user, but often I have one trillion tabs open with just the webpage tab icon barely visible, and need to check roughly what the tab is showing.
I would even propose there should be a very faint 1-2 pixel thick scrollbar so you can see how far you scroll on your hundreds of tabs left/right, similar to vertical tabs having a scrollbar for Tree Style Tabs.
I find that Firefox manages tabs better. So eveb though i use side tabs on vivaldi, I prefer them on top in Firefox, and it’s just a keystroke away to see the list vertically, but not stay that way.
I don’t see the point personally but I enabled it just because and while it does work it’s currently very slow for me. It takes around 1 sec for the preview to appear so finding something by moving the cursor quickly across the tabs is impossible unless you slow way down.
To control how fast/slow tooltips appear modify browser.tabs.cardPreview.delayMs. This is set to 1000 (milliseconds) by default, meaning tooltips only appear once you’ve hovered over a tab for at least a second.
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