Firefox has never not had it’s shit together. It’s worked fine. I never understood people having issues with it, unless they were running like 50 extensions and a bunch of grease monkey scripts along with a crusty old profile with a massive cache of old data.
Meanwhile everyone is complaining about Chrome eating up all their RAM
Funnily enough Chromium actually consumes less RAM and is safer due to better sandboxing.
But neither of these concern the average user. However, the main difference between the browsers user may notice is how pages that are still loading behave. Firefox has the correct behavior. Aka waiting for vast majority of the elements to finish loading versus Chromium just going “if it’s rendered it’s intractable.” This unfortunately means that Firefox feels slower even though it’s actually faster.
Also, on behalf of the dark mode enjoyers, flashing white for a moment while launching, loading web pages or updating contents of a webpage is incredibly annoying. None of the Chromium browsers flash white on dark mode.
I don’t think FF supports PWAs yet. I need to use Chromium to turn some sites like Discord into PWAs, as the desktop Linux version doesn’t screen share on Wayland. I also like having YTM as an app.
Does Firefox support multiple windows on iPad OS yet? That was the reason I stayed with Chrome for so long, and also is why I’ve more recently switched to Edge as the only other cross-platform browser I could find that had that.
I’m not sure, but Firefox on iOS isn’t true Firefox. To my knowledge, Apple doesn’t allow browsers to use anything but their Safari engine. As another user put it, “Firefox on iOS is barely more than a skin for Safari.”
I can speak to Firefox on desktop and Android, however: they’re fantastic!
Nope, not in this case. iPad OS has supported multiple windows of the same app for years now (since 2018 or 2019), and Safari naturally supported it out of the gate. Google supported it in Chrome very quickly, and Microsoft got around to it with Edge last year.
It turns out that while the rendering part of all browsers on iOS is Safari, the skin and UI elements (the “chrome” that Google’s browser was named after) are all custom to each app. And Firefox has been very poor at upgrading theirs.
Is it radically different? It’s a feature that iPad OS supports that the iPhone version of iOS doesn’t, and I don’t think Android does (though I’ve not used an Android tablet in nearly 10 years, so maybe tablets on Android can do it?). Obviously desktops all support multiple windows and have done forever. Technically, by not having implemented this feature it actually means it’s more similar to Android.
Firefox is rather under-resourced in terms of developer power, and they’ve been consistently prioritising other things rather than implementing this feature. I don’t think there’s much more to it than that. It’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for why they haven’t done it—any team needs to prioritise what they work on. But it’s also reasonable for a user who values that feature to choose a competitor that has delivered it over one that has not. That’s the natural trade-off.
I’m dumb, and had to reread what you wrote. I thought you meant tabs this whole time (doh). I haven’t even used an iPad before, so I didn’t know that feature existed. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen multiple windows of Firefox on Android (but you can have multiple apps open side-by-side).
I think it is unlikely Mozilla would support that feature, given the lack of resources and demand; iPad’s are niche.
Yeah and that’s fine. I’m not saying Firefox is evil for not having this feature or anything like that. I’m merely explaining why it is that I find it to be a sub-par option, and why I choose Edge instead, for the moment.
Umm, why? With all due respect, why would you expect me to stop using a device that does everything I want it to perfectly well? I use Edge and it syncs with my Windows desktop and Android phone perfectly well. Both Edge and Google Chrome have supported this feature. It’s only Firefox that is being a laggard.
Firefox is the only browser on Android which still doesn’t have tabs. Wrangling multiple tabs on a tablet or foldable is just a pain on Firefox. Chrome on standard screen sizes even has tab groups. Until then, Firefox is a no go for me.
For anyone who thinks they’re “stuck” with chrome, Firefox has gotten it’s shit together massively in the last few years.
Firefox has never not had it’s shit together. It’s worked fine. I never understood people having issues with it, unless they were running like 50 extensions and a bunch of grease monkey scripts along with a crusty old profile with a massive cache of old data.
Meanwhile everyone is complaining about Chrome eating up all their RAM
Funnily enough Chromium actually consumes less RAM and is safer due to better sandboxing.
But neither of these concern the average user. However, the main difference between the browsers user may notice is how pages that are still loading behave. Firefox has the correct behavior. Aka waiting for vast majority of the elements to finish loading versus Chromium just going “if it’s rendered it’s intractable.” This unfortunately means that Firefox feels slower even though it’s actually faster.
Also, on behalf of the dark mode enjoyers, flashing white for a moment while launching, loading web pages or updating contents of a webpage is incredibly annoying. None of the Chromium browsers flash white on dark mode.
I don’t think FF supports PWAs yet. I need to use Chromium to turn some sites like Discord into PWAs, as the desktop Linux version doesn’t screen share on Wayland. I also like having YTM as an app.
I believe that there is an extension for Firefox pwa support, but the Android version definitely supports pwas natively.
Does Firefox support multiple windows on iPad OS yet? That was the reason I stayed with Chrome for so long, and also is why I’ve more recently switched to Edge as the only other cross-platform browser I could find that had that.
I’m not sure, but Firefox on iOS isn’t true Firefox. To my knowledge, Apple doesn’t allow browsers to use anything but their Safari engine. As another user put it, “Firefox on iOS is barely more than a skin for Safari.”
I can speak to Firefox on desktop and Android, however: they’re fantastic!
tl;dr: If FF sucks on iOS, it’s Apple’s fault.
Nope, not in this case. iPad OS has supported multiple windows of the same app for years now (since 2018 or 2019), and Safari naturally supported it out of the gate. Google supported it in Chrome very quickly, and Microsoft got around to it with Edge last year.
It turns out that while the rendering part of all browsers on iOS is Safari, the skin and UI elements (the “chrome” that Google’s browser was named after) are all custom to each app. And Firefox has been very poor at upgrading theirs.
That’s so weird, then, that it’d be so radically different than it is on Android. Why do you think that is?
Is it radically different? It’s a feature that iPad OS supports that the iPhone version of iOS doesn’t, and I don’t think Android does (though I’ve not used an Android tablet in nearly 10 years, so maybe tablets on Android can do it?). Obviously desktops all support multiple windows and have done forever. Technically, by not having implemented this feature it actually means it’s more similar to Android.
Firefox is rather under-resourced in terms of developer power, and they’ve been consistently prioritising other things rather than implementing this feature. I don’t think there’s much more to it than that. It’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for why they haven’t done it—any team needs to prioritise what they work on. But it’s also reasonable for a user who values that feature to choose a competitor that has delivered it over one that has not. That’s the natural trade-off.
I’m dumb, and had to reread what you wrote. I thought you meant tabs this whole time (doh). I haven’t even used an iPad before, so I didn’t know that feature existed. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen multiple windows of Firefox on Android (but you can have multiple apps open side-by-side).
I think it is unlikely Mozilla would support that feature, given the lack of resources and demand; iPad’s are niche.
Yeah and that’s fine. I’m not saying Firefox is evil for not having this feature or anything like that. I’m merely explaining why it is that I find it to be a sub-par option, and why I choose Edge instead, for the moment.
I mean this with no personal enmity: piss off with your iPad. (Don’t expect power user features to actually be good)
Umm, why? With all due respect, why would you expect me to stop using a device that does everything I want it to perfectly well? I use Edge and it syncs with my Windows desktop and Android phone perfectly well. Both Edge and Google Chrome have supported this feature. It’s only Firefox that is being a laggard.
This is not an iPad problem, it’s a Firefox one.
Firefox is the only browser on Android which still doesn’t have tabs. Wrangling multiple tabs on a tablet or foldable is just a pain on Firefox. Chrome on standard screen sizes even has tab groups. Until then, Firefox is a no go for me.
Enjoy your chromium experience with blank spaces and cookies popups then
Sure, I’m enjoying Vivaldi right now. 👍