Between this and the AI chatbot shit they’ve added to desktop I’m a bit annoyed with Firefox lately
You can turn it off. But yeah, it sucks.
The enshittification of the internet is depressing, hmm?
I thought I’d launched Chrome first, then was profoundly disappointed
The natural evolution of a free software owned by a for-profit organization
Are fennec and librewolf still good alternatives as non-chromium based browsers?
I had to uninstall fennec a year ago when f-droid said it was not safe because of a delay in updates or something like that.
Librewolf is great. No complaints whatsoever.
On Android Iceraven is the one I’m using since
FennecMull has been abandoned (I never used Fennec). On PC I do have Librewolf installed but I use Zen which is miles better than default Firefox.The latest version of Fennec in F-droid is less than two days old.
Yeah you’re right I mixed it up with Mull which was discontinued.
Zen has become my default as well
I’ll check out Ice Raven, but Fennec is not abandoned, it’s been being updated.
I just got an update like two days ago for the build on my phone
Oh you’re right I mixed it up with Mull which was discontinued. Sorry for that.
Those are what I use on mobile and desktop respectively
There’s also Ironfox which is a (spiritual?) successor to Mull and it gets consistent updates
Mull is discontinued?
It is, unfortunately, I was using it as my primary browser on my phone for a while.
This is their github page:
The CEO needs a raise, they spent a lot of time perfecting that.
What you think the Firefox maintainers need that money? How about we try to sell ads but ethically?
Make sure to hit the https://ffprofile.com/ or https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/ folks!
i hate that fucking ai popup that comes up when i accidentally click on something for 0.1 milliseconds too long. it just gets in the way. i haven’t even looked at whatever “info” the ai is trying to give me. i always just get annoyed as soon as i see it and go to close it.
fuck ai.
i turned the settings on the homepage you see in your post off and i turned the ai popup off but for some reason the popups wont actually turn off
Firefox has “Studies” to test features, which will turn some settings back on. You might be in a study. You can turn studies off in settings or leave specific studies in about:studies.
I use exclusively firefox and have for like a decade, and you just taught me something I’ve never encountered. How would you even stumble into this? You have to click and hold on something for like 2 full seconds
This appeared for me a day ago. You can opt out from the settings, but you have to go do it separately. It just showed up, was some flight comparison site for me, funny considering I never travel by plane.
for me its way less. its almost instant. maybe i need to do a fresh install or there’s some other setting for the click length i missed.
its a new ‘feature’ tho. you wouldn’t have noticed it in the last decade
Then Algo knows you need new running shoes
FireFox with default configs is kinda bad, but luckily you can change a lot relatively simply.
At this point the best thing is to use Firefox forks. I know a lot of people use Librewolf on Desktop, But I personally recommend Zen, it’s miles better than default Firefox in my opinion.
On Android Iceraven is one of the current forks that are still being developed.
But I personally recommend Zen, it’s miles better than default Firefox in my opinion
Zen seems to actually be not great as far as Firefox forks go. In particular, it seems to conflict with Sidebery, and also to take up a lot of resources.
Going to also suggest Floorp 11 (do not know much about whether or not the issues with Floorp 12 have been resolved) as a Firefox fork consideration. Out of its unique features, I only care about the (second) sidebar and the ability to start websites in that sort of split screen configuration.
Zen have a sidebar by default, so you shoudn’t need an extension like Sidebery on Zen unless there’s features in the extension that you prefer. From a very quick look, it looks to have the overall same features as the extension, but I might be wrong.
and also to take up a lot of resources.
That has not been my experience to be honest. For me it looks to use the same system resources as Firefox. The only difference I noticed somewhat related to that is that Zen closes immediately for me, while Firefox takes a while to close in the background, so when I close it by mistake, I can just click the icon and it opens back up almost immediately.
Out of its unique features, I only care about the (second) sidebar and the ability to start websites in that sort of split screen configuration.
Fair enough, I heard good things about Floorp, tho I never used it.
For me personally, I really enjoy the workspaces, the Essentials (workspace agnostic pins) and the overall design of Zen. It’s also the first good vertical tab browser I tested, none of the extensions I tested on Firefox were good for me, and I can’t go back to horizontal tabs.
Zen have a sidebar by default, so you shoudn’t need an extension like Sidebery on Zen unless there’s features in the extension that you prefer.
Zen’s default sidebar is much worse than Sidebery. It doesn’t support hierarchical organisation of tabs, it doesn’t support nearly as much non-css customisation, and, until recently, it also didn’t have tab folders.
For me personally, I really enjoy the workspaces, the Essentials (workspace agnostic pins) and the overall design of Zen.
I would like to note a couple of things on the matter:
Sidebery supports both workspaces (though, in this case they are called ‘panels’) and pins (though, I am not sure about global pins). The overall design of Zen seems to be replicable via css customisation of other forks. Considering things like Zen’s default sidebar seemingly being very thin (unless it simply bugged out in my case for some reason) without css customisation, one might as well just take another fork (preferably not Floor in this case, as Floorp has UI that differs from base Firefox in a significant way) and install an appropriate css theme and Sidebery, I would argue.
(For that matter, Floorp also supports workspaces by default, but Sidebery’s workspaces are much more performant and better implemented. This is particularly noticeable when working with thousands of tabs and trying to switch between workspaces.)none of the extensions I tested on Firefox were good for me, and I can’t go back to horizontal tabs.
I do recommend you take a look at Sidebery. Echoing your sentiment, I can’t go back to other tab UI, including that of Zen (especially from before the tab folders) voluntarily.
I echo your general sentiment about Zen. Zen’s default sidetab is pretty bad (no hierarchical folders in 2025 is wtf), and it doesn’t play nice with Tree Style Tab to the point where I have to disable it.
I do recommend you take a look at Sidebery. Echoing your sentiment, I can’t go back to other tab UI, including that of Zen (especially from before the tab folders) voluntarily.
What is the difference between Sidebery and Tree Style Tab? Or for that matter, how does Floorp compare with the other forks like Zen and Librewolf?
What is the difference between Sidebery and Tree Style Tab?
I initially went from using TST (which is suggested in the settings of Floorp 11, and there is some supposed support for it there, though, probably not in 11 anymore) to Sidebery because TST was frequently ‘forgetting’ the tree structure upon reloading my browser. The TST issue is probably caused by a large amount of tabs open.
Sidebery also supports workspaces (‘panels’) and tab folders (basically, tabs that - when you view them - show their children in a way similar to how you would view items in a file folder).
Do not remember if TST supports snapshots.
IIRC, Sidebery also has much better in-built customisability (as well as css configurations that are already there, such as for making tab titles multi-line).Or for that matter, how does Floorp compare with the other forks like Zen and Librewolf?
Floorp is largely a basic fork of Firefox, with the only unique feature that I do not know how to reproduce in other (“standard”) forks being the second sidebar that allows for using websites and some other things in a split-screen configuration. The downside is that that sidebar makes complex Firefox css themes (such as ShyFox) not compatible with Floorp without fiddling.
Also, going to note that I am not familiar with the current state of Floorp 12, but I found it unusable for me when I did try it, so I am using Floorp 11. If one doesn’t care about this split-screen feature, I’d argue that one would be better served by Librewolf or another fork.I have tried Zen, but I could not make it work for me. Its sidebar lacks in basic configurability such as width, lacks in features of Sidebery (and Sidebery doesn’t seem to work in Zen as of currently). I have not found any features of Zen that aren’t reproducible in other forks (Glance was mentioned, but that, too, seems to be reproducible via existing Firefox extensions in other forks), so all it seems to have is beautiful UI, but that’s where css themes come in play in other forks.
hierarchical organisation of tabs
Is that the tree-like organization? I have a shit ton of tabs in one of my workspaces, so that’s something that would be very useful for me to organize related tabs, tho I should also close a lot of them that I simply have no use for but forgot to close lol.
Considering things like Zen’s default sidebar seemingly being very thin…
I think that by default it now uses full sidebar with compact mode enabled, which makes it hidden, tho I use it without the compact mode. But I don’t know CSS to theme stuff, tho there might be themes online I can download.
There is another feature I use a lot on Zen that I forgot to mention, which is Glance, so I’ll probably remain using Zen because of that,
but I’ll test Sidebery on Librewolf laterbut I’m testing Sidebery on Floorp now, thanks for the recommendation!
i pretty much only use duckduckgo on my phone, but have firefox just in case
why are people so allergic to the settings menu? in the time it took to post this, you could’ve gone to the settings menu and turned it off.
The thing I like most about FOSS is how, while not always being the most user friendly, it’s never user hostile. Showing ads is user hostile behavior.
If everyone was going to just turn it off, they wouldn’t have bothered putting it there in the first place. Clearly most or at least many users won’t turn it off, by mozilla’s estimation.
For the vast majority of users, the default option is the only option
I don’t think most users don’t care about ads. I’ve offered to install adblockers for my parents many times and they don’t care. I was helping a coworker pirate something the other day and offered and he didn’t care.
I don’t get it but I think we are much more bothered by ads then the typical user.But if they didn’t have ads there is no chance users would ask for them. Ads are only ever user hostile.
Of course I turned them off, but my flabber was still thoroughly gasted from having ads shoved in my face
If I wanted that I’d use Edge
you shouldn’t have to go to the settings to turn this shit off. you should have to go there to manually enable them if they absolutely must “improve our experience” by adding them
Let me fix it for you:
“Why are companies so allergic to having software that respects the user as a person rather than a product? They could have just kept it off by default!”
some workplaces disable access to settings and things like extensions for nanny or security reasons.
I made a post on hexbear dot net about a month ago expressing similar concerns and got dozens of comments assuring me that firefox is the best piece of software ever created, actually. So it’s fine, just don’t worry about it
Critical support for firefox against google hegemony. Because of their market position they literally can’t be as harmful as chrome, but that doesn’t mean these specific features don’t suck shit, its just incredibly important that an alternative to chromium continues to exist (one that isn’t just chrome with a skin over it)
As like every other comment says, we should probably all use a fork of FF.
Mozilla is controlled opposition and has been controlled opposition for a very long time. I think at this point it’s too late to break the Chrome and Chrome-like monopoly. We’re just stuck with a bunch of Firefox forks.
Is this your homepage? I’ve never experienced any of this on my desktop firefox. I’ve used it for years. My homepage is set as a blank screen.
On Android, yeah. I typically don’t touch the homepage at all
I don’t mind it as much considering I use forks. Mozilla needs other revenue streams because Google is still their major source.
