Firefox

Long-term owners

I've used Firefox as my primary browser for over twenty years and it's less than once a week that I come across something that needs Chrome.

Oct 2026 · comment

What hackers pick instead

• BraveA Chromium browser with strong built-in ad blocking, privacy hardening and Chrome extension support, though many distrust its crypto features and past donation and affiliate controversies.397recommend
• SafariApple's browser is praised for privacy protections, battery efficiency and Apple device integration, though critics cite aggressive tab reloading, sites that only work in Chrome, and iOS engine lock-in.307recommend
• Orion Browser by KagiA WebKit browser recommended for running Chrome and Firefox extensions like uBlock Origin on iPhone and Mac, with no telemetry, but critics cite bugs and its closed source.206recommend
• LibreWolfA Firefox fork with privacy-respecting defaults, uBlock Origin built in, and Mozilla's AI and telemetry stripped out; strict anti-fingerprinting can break some sites.113recommend
• WaterfoxFirefox-based browser people switch to for removing Mozilla extras, privacy-minded defaults and no AI features. Critics note it lags Firefox on security fixes.75recommend

Every quote

The 40 most detailed of 4449 comments. Each links to the original.

1. Practically compatibility with Firefox is pretty good. Maybe once a month I use an e-commerce site or other e-business site where I have to drop down to Chrome, Edge or Safari.

   Mixed · Dec 2025 · in “Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?”

2. The most annoying thing was when highlighting text a weird icon showed up. I clicked on it, and one of the most prominent buttons on it was "turn this shit off"

   Mixed · Dec 2025 · in “Mozilla's latest quagmire”

3. I also dislike the choices the product team of Firefox is doing. However, it is the only (afaik) major browser distro that has support for a proper adblocker

   Mixed · Sep 2026 · in “Firefox 155.0”

4. Container tabs, independent proxy config (chrome only respects system-wide proxy), vertical tabs, and functional adblockers are the four big features for me.

   Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Microsoft Hasn't Had a Coherent GUI Strategy Since Petzold”

5. So, you can have a separate profiles for something sensitive/invasive (linkedin, shops, etc.) and then you can have a separate profile for everything else.

   Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “LinkedIn Is Illegally Searching Your Computer”

6. One of the nice things about Firefox (other than the relative amount of these things) is the knobs to remove them usually exist somewhere for you to pull.

   Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Firefox 156 shows ads in the address bar (dubbed "Firefox Suggest")”

7. I really appreciate Firefox to have their own certificate DB because it allows to create separate profiles with different trusted certificate sets.

   Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “Go will reject certificate chains containing eight distrusted SPKIs”

8. Maybe Firefox would have a higher market share if they worked on features their users actually want instead of things that get widely criticized.

   Mixed · Nov 2025 · in “I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla”

9. Firefox is also the only browser that supports anything like userChrome.css for customizing tabs, toolbar, address bar, menus, spacing, etc.

   Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin”

10. I hate the awesome bar. What I do like about Firefox is I can make the awesome bar just a boring address bar and have a separate search bar.

    Mixed · Sep 2026 · in “Hang on to Your Firefox”

11. I just want there to be diversity in the market and not have every viable option be a way for a megacorp to have presence on my computers.

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “Apple's new 'Switch to Safari' campaign details why you should ditch Chrome”

12. It's a reason to encourage people to support Firefox on desktop, since just about everything else is based on the other browser engine.

    Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “HTML Can Do That”

13. Firefox, and Safari to a more limited extent, are the only web browsers keeping Google from having complete control over web standards

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “GrapheneOS – Break Free from Google and Apple”

14. well firefox+ublock is still an option for those wise enough not to let unknown javascript with new daily zero-days run on their PC

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “ChatGPT now knows what you do on other websites via ad collector”

15. Firefox runs on Gecko. Chrome runs on Blink. If you care about web monoculture, that matters more than marginal telemetry deltas.

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Firefox 148 Launches with AI Kill Switch Feature and More Enhancements”

16. Safari, Firefox, and hopefully soon Ladybird are the only alternative browser engines keeping them somewhat honest on that front.

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “Apple's new 'Switch to Safari' campaign details why you should ditch Chrome”

17. Firefox has more technical independence from Google than Chrome and can be quickly decoupled from the few Google defaults it has

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Chrome removes claim of On-device Al not sending data to Google Servers”

18. At this point in time, if they had taken all the money they spent on their various projects and put it in a trust they would probably be able to fund development without taking in any more money.

    Criticizes · Sep 2026 · in “Hang on to Your Firefox”

19. deliver features like the AI chatbot integration as first-party extensions that come pre-installed but can be easily managed by users with a much better UI than about:config

    Criticizes · Mar 2026 · in “Making Firefox's right-click not suck with about:config”

20. firefox routinely blows up any policies you set during upgrades, incompatibilities, and an endless about:config that is more opaque than a hunk of room temperature lard

    Criticizes · Dec 2025 · in “No AI* Here – A Response to Mozilla's Next Chapter”

21. I don't trust Mozilla enough. For one, not giving UI options and hiding all the settings in about:config where non-technical users can't access is a shitty thing to do.

    Criticizes · Dec 2025 · in “Firefox is becoming an AI browser and the internet is not at all happy about it”

22. it is about force-bundling whatever this-will-make-us-money-feature or we-think-its-a-great-feature idea into the browser without giving the user any real choice

    Criticizes · Jun 2026 · in “Leaving Mozilla”

23. when I look at the UI changes that have been made to Firefox over a period of years, I believe their value to me is closer to zero than their development cost is

    Criticizes · Nov 2025 · in “Firefox Forcing LLM Features”

24. Firefox has gone from something I could recommend unreservedly to something I can only suggest while cautioning about it's increasingly user-hostile practices

    Criticizes · Sep 2026 · in “Hang on to Your Firefox”

25. these attempts have all been poorly thought out, and in fact are following the corporate playbook that only works if the product is producing revenue.

    Criticizes · Nov 2025 · in “I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla”

26. For whatever reason they'd rather spend a fortune buying adtech from facebook employees and be a chrome clone that pushes ads and sells user data

    Criticizes · Feb 2026 · in “Zero-day CSS: CVE-2026-2441 exists in the wild”

27. Firefox has poor support for modern web features including video processing and encoding which makes it very bad at web conferencing/video calls

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “What You Need to Know Before Touching a Video File”

28. What got me installing it on any computer belonging to a person I would have to help support was the auto-pop-blocking and that it performed a ton better than IE/Netscape/Mozilla.

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?”

29. the Firefox version you can get there is lobotomised because the fruit factory is afraid a full-feature browser not under their control will eat into their app store margins

    Mixed · Jan 2026 · in “Web Browsers have stopped blocking pop-ups”

30. Picking Firefox gives power to a non profit (giving transparency into their financials) who's primary funding comes through donations and publicly takes a stance on privacy.

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla”

31. I just block "all cross-site cookies" in Firefox settings. This "may cause websites to break" but it hasn't affected anything I care about in years.

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Yann LeCun Raises $1B to Build AI That Understands the Physical World”

32. In my mind this is actually a feature of Firefox, because those overly fancy Javascripts or CSS frameworks tend to be used for obnoxious purposes.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Vivaldi 8.0: our biggest design overhaul”

33. I hate Mozilla for missing up so bad with their stewardship of Firefox time and again, but alas, it is the only reasonable option on the table.

    Mixed · Jun 2026 · in “window.showDirectoryPicker opens up a whole new world”

34. If Firefox becomes a browser that is harder to use then it will only ever be used by the extremely small niche of people that care about that.

    Mixed · Jan 2026 · in “Owners, not renters: Mozilla's open source AI strategy”

35. with Apple silicon, Firefox at least then wasn't sleeping that well, and the tab sync of FF between my devices was also less than I've desired

    Mixed · Nov 2025 · in “Orion 1.0”

36. They're developing 40 million lines of code, and a lot of the things you're comparing it to actually aren't as comparably large or cutthroat.

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Hang on to Your Firefox”

37. I've used Firefox as my primary browser for over twenty years and it's less than once a week that I come across something that needs Chrome.

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “Firefox Enterprise”

38. I've been using FF on Linux and on Windows since before the first day I found Youtube, and have not yet had a period where it doesn't work.

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “Google Chrome is killing all uBlock Origin bypasses, Edge, Opera to follow”

39. if you're using firefox, you can generally juts ctrl-click on the page. It'll draw outlines around every child element without reflowing.

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Ten lines of code that changed my world”

40. the only thing actually pissing me off about this is the selection popup, everything else is just yet another (useless) button in a menu

    Mixed · Nov 2025 · in “I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla”