Sticking it to the man is a noble ideal. But if you use Firefox as your only (or even primary) browser, at this point, the only one you’re sticking it to is yourself. I wish it weren’t so, but it is.
As a counterpoint, I use Firefox as my primary browser (I prefer a bunch of little things about its UI), and this is a complete list of glitches I’ve noticed:
The Microsoft account login flow sometimes goes into a loop of asking me for my password
Microsoft Teams refuses to work (‘you must use Edge or Chrome’)
Google Meet didn’t used to support background blurring, but does now
A coworker reported that a certain server BMC web interface didn’t work in Firefox, but did in Chrome (on Mac) — I found (on Linux, idk if that was the relevant difference) it broke the same way in both, which I could get around by deleting a modal overlay in the inspector
Huh, clicked on a few of these. I haven’t experienced this level of problems—like I said, I have a backup browser, but I don’t need to break it out often (once or twice a week?) I mean, I believe these people, but I don’t think I’m having some kind of consistently janky web experience that makes it not worth using, so as far as I’m concerned people should still give it a go.
(I also haven’t run into problems using Claude on Firefox. Goes fine for me.)
Sure, people should give it a go (especially if the value of their time is low enough that spending some of it on trying to use Firefox is not problematic even if there is a substantial chance of encountering serious problems). It’s just that they should be keenly aware that of what they’re doing when they give Firefox a go, and they should have Chrome (or similar) ready to go, so that they can switch at a moment’s notice if their Firefox experience goes poorly.
An additional example: for the past several years, maybe 5+, you have been unable to copy-paste the list of authors on every Elsevier research paper’s HTML version in Firefox. Works fine in Chrome and Safari AFAIK (not to mention every other academic website I can think of). As I am frequently doing so, this is a problem on an almost literally daily basis.
After 6 months of back and forth and quite a lot of BS from the Elsevier end, they have finally fixed this today.
I must strongly disagree with the “use Firefox” recommendation.
Some links:
“Claude is totally broken in Firefox”
“Just as a follow-up, here is a brief, non-exhaustive list of Firefox-specific glitches I have encountered on the web, on major corporate and media sites, in the past three months”
“Update: just today, while writing my previous post, I learned that Mozilla has once again killed the new method I was using to apply Firefox-specific CSS fixes, so now I have to update a bunch of my websites to make parts of them not be broken in Firefox. Again.”
“I have to be honest, as often as I’ve said over the years that I don’t want Chrome to have a browser monopoly, I’m getting pretty fed up with Firefox myself, purely for annoying end user bugs. To take a few:”
“Some examples of Firefox-specific fixes currently in use in my websites:”
“Some people here are skeptical when I speak of “the spec” being a fiction. Well, here’s a case study for you.”
“And then we find that it doesn’t work, because Firefox has some weird bug. Some really dumb bug, that makes Firefox render a page in a different way than every other browser. Some bug that has existed for 20 years (!!!) and is still unsolved.”
“… I was testing a co-worker’s feature with Firefox and found that it was totally broken, resulting in a layout where large parts of the UI overlapped with each other. When I brought it up with the product manager, showing the different results in Firefox and Chrome, I was told to file a low-priority clean-up ticket and to allow the feature to ship in its broken-on-Firefox state, as our statistics showed that Firefox users were approximately 1% of the total user base, and this was a priority feature for our team’s quarterly goals.”
Sticking it to the man is a noble ideal. But if you use Firefox as your only (or even primary) browser, at this point, the only one you’re sticking it to is yourself. I wish it weren’t so, but it is.
As a counterpoint, I use Firefox as my primary browser (I prefer a bunch of little things about its UI), and this is a complete list of glitches I’ve noticed:
The Microsoft account login flow sometimes goes into a loop of asking me for my password
Microsoft Teams refuses to work (‘you must use Edge or Chrome’)
Google Meet didn’t used to support background blurring, but does now
A coworker reported that a certain server BMC web interface didn’t work in Firefox, but did in Chrome (on Mac) — I found (on Linux, idk if that was the relevant difference) it broke the same way in both, which I could get around by deleting a modal overlay in the inspector
Huh, clicked on a few of these. I haven’t experienced this level of problems—like I said, I have a backup browser, but I don’t need to break it out often (once or twice a week?) I mean, I believe these people, but I don’t think I’m having some kind of consistently janky web experience that makes it not worth using, so as far as I’m concerned people should still give it a go.
(I also haven’t run into problems using Claude on Firefox. Goes fine for me.)
The Firefox problem on Claude was fixed after I sent them an e-mail about it.
Sure, people should give it a go (especially if the value of their time is low enough that spending some of it on trying to use Firefox is not problematic even if there is a substantial chance of encountering serious problems). It’s just that they should be keenly aware that of what they’re doing when they give Firefox a go, and they should have Chrome (or similar) ready to go, so that they can switch at a moment’s notice if their Firefox experience goes poorly.
An additional example: for the past several years, maybe 5+, you have been unable to copy-paste the list of authors on every Elsevier research paper’s HTML version in Firefox. Works fine in Chrome and Safari AFAIK (not to mention every other academic website I can think of). As I am frequently doing so, this is a problem on an almost literally daily basis.
After 6 months of back and forth and quite a lot of BS from the Elsevier end, they have finally fixed this today.
I quite like Brave as the “firefox of chromiums”.
I also use Brave and it is fine. I am not sure what makes it “the Firefox of Chromiums”, but I don’t have any particular complaints about it, anyhow.