I came back to Firefox a while back - maybe a year or two? - and have never regretted it. It's a fast, modern, respectful browser. Maintained by a non-profit. I do all my front-end dev work in Firefox, and also test in Chrome. Never had a problem. Come on back folks!
The only thing I miss is the ease which you can create and use different profiles in Chrome. Facilitates testing web apps. Firefox's support of multiple profiles is kludgy.
This is funny - because I actually resisted switching to Chrome initially because it didn’t support multiple profiles at all.
FWIW, I find Firefox’s support for multiple profiles fine - it just requires the -P argument, which you can wrap up in a shortcut or launcher script. (On Windows, add -no-remote to force a new instance to launch). -P takes an optional profile name, so you can add it to your scripts to auto-launch a Firefox with a particular profile preloaded.
Sure, it could use a proper UI, but if enough people clamour for it I’m sure that can get added. The fundamental support for multiple profiles is quite good.
No, this suggestion is wrong. I looked into using FF containers as a chrome profiles replacement and they’re not the same thing at all. I can dig up my notes if you like, I think they’re posted on HN in fact. FF has true profiles and those are what you’d use.
I agree with GP. Chrome profiles are what’s stopped me switching to FF.
It does depend on exactly why you want profiles -- for my use cases, Multi-Account Containers (and Temporary Containers) do a much better job of helping me achieve what I want to do than either browser's implementation of profiles.
I maintain that it is a widely-propagated misconception that Firefox containers can be used to replace Chrome profiles. Here are my notes from when I investigated:
I went deeply into trying to use containers as a profile replacement, replacing Chrome with the new Firefox beta for one month, and I can report that it is not the right direction to go in:
- New tabs do not inherit current container
- No way to make Ctrl-T do this by customization (I investigated extensions (can't remap Ctrl-T) and even system-wide Ctrl-T remapping with Karibiner; neither gives you what you want)
- History is shared across containers. So e.g. work URLs mixed up with personal. That's contra to one of the main purposes of Profiles.
- External applications do not open a tab in the current container. So e.g. clicking in a link in work slack will fail because it will not open in a tab which has work cookies / google account etc.
Evidently Containers are not designed as a Profile replacement. I'm not sure what they are for but I don't think it's a need that I have.
As I understand it using the long-standing Firefox profiles feature is the way to go, but personally I switched back to Chrome after a month of the new Firefox Beta because of the convenience of Chrome profiles. I should try Firefox profiles, but I exhausted my experimentation energy on Containers.
You're right about the limits of containers. When I'm browsing normally, the default is not to be logged into Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Things like my "Gmail this" bookmark fail because I set up Gmail in its own container.
However, I find it very useful to have specific containers for Facebook, banking, other social networks, most of my gmail accounts, etc. So I can be doing stuff for my son's soccer club's email without it affecting my own gmail.
I think of containers as a user tool. It seems like profiles are more of a developer tool.
> So I can be doing stuff for my son's soccer club's email without it affecting my own gmail.
In Chrome you could click on the profile icon in the top right and add a profile "Son's soccer club", and I believe that would also prevent it affecting your Gmail, etc.
> I think of containers as a user tool. It seems like profiles are more of a developer tool.
In Firefox, yes it seems like it. But not in Chrome. The point I'm trying to make (if by any chance there are Firefox people listening!) is that Firefox would benefit from making their hidden profile feature easily available to users, as Chrome does. But then they'd have the confusion of containers vs profiles, so it seems that they should just make containers behave like Chrome's profiles. But Firefox has Profiles! So why did they introduce Containers? IOW it honestly seems like they've made a mess there and the Firefox would be improved by fixing that mess.
I suppose a corollary of that is that Profiles are a poor substitute for Containers. And Containers largely match what I actually want to do, which is to have a shared history while being able to split out certain login (or cache) contexts, without needing a separate window.
The “workspace” and “blackbox script” features in Chrome devTools are real paradigm shifters and a huge productivity boost for me when developing/debugging in JS/TS or SCSS/CSS. With Workspaces, most changes to source files are reflected immediately without reloading (no LiveReload-type tooling is needed).
Firefox has yet to release either of those features, as far as I know. I’ll switch dev browsers as soon as they do.
Something I miss in Firefox, is that the webextensions `management` api does not allow to toggle off/on extensions other than themes. It's no secret that some of the most popular browser extensions require a wide range of permissions to work, while being useful only occasionally. This restriction prevents to have on Firefox a quick toggler without leaving the page like (author here) https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/extension-manager/...
I switched to Chrome the same day the beta was released mostly because of the speed. Nowadays I stay because I keep my passwords synced over my Google Account and I'm not sure if Firefox works with that.
Regarding speed: Firefox will soon switch to a new rendering engine, WebRender. It's at least as fast as Chrome's. Then Chrome's speed advantage should disappear.
Did that years ago when I switched back when Quantum came back; Firefox still has the good old venerable "import passwords from another browser" functionality. You just need to have your passwords sync'd to a local install of Chrome and Firefox can read them all and sync them with FF Sync (which does not force you to use Mozilla servers, btw; you may host your own server for max privacy).
It's not just their service. You can run self-hosted service for sync [0] and fully control it. From privacy point of view that's far more interesting than any other solutions I've seen.
I've been doing this for a while but the part I haven't managed to solve is that using your own sync server on Firefox for ios seems to require you to also run your own Firefox accounts server - which is much more painful to set up. Is there a similar easy guide for setting that up?
The way I have switched password managers is to run both for awhile. Overtime you move the ones you need. Eventually if you leave a couple behind you can always reset them in the new browser/manager. It's not as big of a pain as it looks going in.
Sure it does. I keep my passwords synchronized with a Firefox account through my Windows, Linux and Android devices. Works like a charm. I won't trust google to keep them.
That is the second most important thing why I'm using Firefox, I sync my passwords via my own instance of the sync server https://jeena.net/firefox-sync-15. I don't even trust Mozilla not to do something stupid with my passwords (by accident) and Firefox was always the only browser which allowed to use your own sync solution.
