Give Firefox a chance
Not much content in this article. A single benchmark which shows nothing of real-life cases. Two minor technical features, one of them already in Chrome beta. Lastly, an appeal to fight Chrome&#x27;s monopole. Surprisingly, not a word about privacy.<p>I do give Firefox a chance, but it gets tiring.<p>Many years ago, I dropped Firefox&#x27;s ancestor for Opera 6. The UI and the features were miles ahead (e.g. Mozilla had no tabs). Yet I wanted to support free software so, once in a while, I tried to use Mozilla&#x2F;Firefox again, but so many features where lacking, and the reactivity was really bad. When Opera dropped their engine and UI to become a new Chromium derivative, I switched to Firefox. I tried to get used to it, but for the past year my main desktop browser has been Vivaldi, a Chromium derivative.<p>I still use Firefox, but I&#x27;m getting more and more irritated against it. I had to search the web in order to change the tile of empty tabs (no buttons, no context menu, only drag-n-drop from bookmarks). Who designed such an unguessable interface?<p>I can&#x27;t stand horizontal tabs in my brower. The Tree Style Tab extension was a strong point of pre-quantum FF, though its CPU usage was noticeable. Unfortunately, it&#x27;s been a pain since I upgraded to Quantum, with many bugs and slowness.<p>Another example: my last FF ESR upgrade introduced a calamitous rewrite of the download interface. It&#x27;s inconsistent, error-prone and ridden with several bugs. For weeks, I duplicated many downloads because the notification is absurdly small and quick. Now I&#x27;ve learned to click on the FF icon to check if the download started.<p>A last example: this morning, I selected 5 finished downloads and removed them. No reaction for 2 seconds, so I pressed the key again, just as the suppression begin, in slow motion. It took FF 3 seconds to remove 6 entries from the log.<p>With uBlock against tracking, DDG+Qwant for search, and a custom cookie handler (no third-party, white-list for those that persist after a tab closes), I don&#x27;t think FF has anything to offer me on privacy. So the only reasons that keep me interested in Firefox are Free Software and Web diversity. I&#x27;m afraid these moral incentives don&#x27;t weight much against many practical reasons.