this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2025

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I switched from chrome to firefox and it's SHOCKINGLY bad (hexbear.net)

submitted 2 months ago by kleeon@hexbear.net to c/technology@hexbear.net

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God I wish chrome didn't remove manifest v2 meow-tableflip

Here is the list of things that piss me off about firefox:

It is dogshit slow
It eats up a ludicrous amounts of RAM, which I wasn't expecting since it's one of the main things people make fun of chrome for
It crashes constantly
It tries to push it's "AI" bullshit on me despite me turning it off on multiple occasions
It puts ads on my home page
It needs to be relaunched regularly because at some point it becomes too laggy to use. It even stops loading pages altogether
"Restore previous session" feature doesn't work half the time so restarting the browser is absolutely terrifying
Profile management is a mess

Are there any alternatives? Is Brave any good?

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[–] Tomorrow_Farewell@hexbear.net 7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Do Chromium browsers support Sidebery or some analogue of it?

Also, never encountered at least most of these issues, while working with several thousands of tabs.
In particular, previous session restoration hasn't failed me yet. Did you, by any chance, open several windows and close them one-by-one?

[–] SorosFootSoldier@hexbear.net 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I have an old laptop and ff ran really bad on it, especially with ublock installed. I'm forced to use chrome, so far I've been happy with it, but it sucks being saddled with more google slop.

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[–] bigpharmasutra@hexbear.net 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Base Firefox is pretty terrible but with the right addons you can turn it into whatever you want. I'm more privacy focused so all my stuff is aimed at that. Definitely look up something like arkenfox (https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js) to get a sense of all the bullshit options you need to turn off.

Someone else mentioned Librewolf but there's also Palemoon:

https://www.palemoon.org/

and Orion by the Kagi people:

https://kagi.com/orion/

Brave is dogshit for privacy. If you need recommendations on addons feel free to ask. Definitely start with uBlock Origin. Its legitimately the best thing on the internet.

[–] Enjoyer_of_Games@hexbear.net 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Librewolf is really the safest bet.

It's the least divergent from firefox such that you're not going to have issues with websites not working etc like Palemoon (whose developers are also pretty sus).

And if a browser made by Kagi isn't already pushing AI even harder than firefox then it's only a matter of time until it is.

[–] bigpharmasutra@hexbear.net 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Well, at this point EVERYTHING is pushing AI, so I honestly wouldn't use that as a barometer of whether or not the browser was any good.

[–] Enjoyer_of_Games@hexbear.net 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It is something the op specifically wanted to avoid and is not present in librewolf.

In general I would advise any community driven project over one by Kagi who are a petite google.

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[–] TerkErJerbs@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

If you weren't already using some type of local or remote blocking with chrome... You should with any browser. You can use DNS or a firewall to prevent any browser (and extensions therein) from phoning home and/or serving you bullshit.

[–] kleeon@hexbear.net 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I have adguard and technitium dns on my home server to block ads/bypass censorship. Is there anything else that's good to have?

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[–] git@hexbear.net 5 points 2 months ago

If you want minimal disruption from your existing workflow then use https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium. They are currently maintaining manifest v2 functionality.

[–] CountryBreakfast@lemmygrad.ml 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I just can't imagine caring about the idiosyncrasies of web browsers

[–] CloutAtlas@hexbear.net 4 points 2 months ago

Netscape Navigator gang

[–] bigpharmasutra@hexbear.net 5 points 2 months ago

Since I keep mentioning privacy this is probably a good guide to post:

https://www.privacytools.io/private-browser

[–] Robert_Kennedy_Jr@hexbear.net 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I've moved to Zen since Firefox started to enshitify

https://zen-browser.app/

[–] blobjim@hexbear.net 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

Zen is based on Firefox but I guess they enable or disable different features and change the UI.

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[–] alienzx@feddit.nl 4 points 2 months ago

I switched to Vivaldi after a similar thread a few months ago and I couldn't be happier.

[–] KnilAdlez@hexbear.net 4 points 2 months ago

I do have issues with it taking a while to start, but other than that, I have had no issues. I have turned off AI and ads and they have stayed off. On my 64gb system it uses 0.5 gb of memory. Profiles currently is bad, but there is an update that fixes it soon. In the meantime you can group tabs together and it will remember them in between restarts (Though not between updates, which is annoying).

[–] Guamer@hexbear.net 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Yeah, the default Firefox experience was pretty bad when I tried it out recently. I'm back on Chrome for now since ublock lite seems to work fine getting rid of youtube ads (The primary reason I tried switching in the first place, since chrome now blocks regular ublock origin). If I ever make a serious attempt to try again, I'll try some of the changes suggested here.

[–] pinguinu@lemmygrad.ml 4 points 2 months ago

As others users have commented, FF crashing is very strange. I've only had it crash when programming a WebGPU site on Nightly, and I've been using it for like 10 years. Though it is true that I don't like keeping many tabs open

[–] WellTheresYourCobbler@hexbear.net 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Valid tbh. I just installed Firefox on a friend’s pc and they were immediately blasted with ads and ai bullshit. I turned it all off but that would leave a gross taste in my mouth if I was new to it myself.

I will say (alongside everyone else it seems) that once you turn it off you forget about these things because in my experience they’re pretty good with respecting me leaving them off.

[–] gayspacemarxist@hexbear.net 3 points 2 months ago

I use Mullvad Browser, which i believe is based on Tor Browser which is based on Firefox ESR. The defaults aren't the most comfy, but I like that I'm mostly relaxing the default policy instead of patching holes.

I agree that base Firefox is not that good, I hope u find a good downstream that works for u.

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