This is something that has been on my mind for years — I want to use Firefox, but for some strange reason, it just doesn’t feel as smooth as Chrome.
Here are the features of Firefox that I find particularly appealing:
- The Firefox Multi-Account Containers feature, in my opinion, is what puts this browser at the top.
- Additionally, the privacy extensions work incredibly well.
However, there are some drawbacks:
- Strangely, it doesn’t feel smooth — regardless of whether I'm on Windows or macOS.
- I experience video codec issues, which I hope I’m not the only one facing.
- I can't run the extensions I develop in dev mode. I haven’t been able to find a solution for this. That said, I don't encounter this issue in LibreWolf.
I don’t use Chrome; instead, I prefer Ungoogled-Chromium, as Google is not a trustworthy company in my view — both due to its policies and many other problematic actions.
I’m truly grateful to the developers of Ungoogled-Chromium for removing Google services and for keeping the browser consistently updated.
I’ve tried all sorts of browsers like Vivaldi, Brave, and Orion, but none of them feel smooth or stable to me — at least, that’s how I perceive it.
> The Firefox Multi-Account Containers feature, in my opinion, is what puts this browser at the top.
For a long time this was the reason I didn't move to Brave, but eventually I realized I don't need it so much because Brave already sandboxes cookies for each site so some social media or ad network won't be able to track me across different sites.
The remaining use for multi-account containers now is staying logged in with different accounts to the same site, which for my usecase I can do with Brave profiles.
Now Brave is my major browser and once in a while I'll bring up Librefox. Firefox lost me when they went all in with their strategy to feed user data into AI presumably for ad purposes.
I don't care about cookies at all — what matters to me is being able to log into multiple, separate accounts. Creating browser profiles feels like starting everything from scratch: settings, extensions, and more. It's just not practical.
With Firefox, you set your preferences and extensions once, and from then on, tab-based profiles work flawlessly.
I wish Chrome had a similar feature — a container system at the tab level.
> The remaining use for multi-account containers now is staying logged in with different accounts to the same site, which for my usecase I can do with Brave profiles.
Right-click → "Open Link in New Container Tab" is something I do too routinely for profile-switching to be a viable alternative.
> - I can't run the extensions I develop in dev mode. I haven’t been able to find a solution for this. That said, I don't encounter this issue in LibreWolf.
I don't have this problem. I was gonna type a long winded thing to descrbe how I do it but since you managed to make it work in LibreWolf it's likely not an issue with how you're doing it
>- I experience video codec issues, which I hope I’m not the only one facing.
I haven't had that either
My bane is trying to make microphones/cameras work in video calls on teams/slack/etc. When you open up the console they use chrome-only javascript all over. They give no shit supporting firefox.
- In Librewolf, when I set the `xpinstall.signatures.required` preference to `false` in the `about:config` section, I'm able to install my `.xpi` extension. However, this setting doesn't work in Firefox.
- The other issue was related to codecs. On Windows, I encountered an error message saying: "No video with supported format and MIME type found."
The issue was resolved after installing the following codecs on Windows:
If I recall signatures.required is disabled in main firefox for security reasons. You need Firefox Nightly or Firefox Dev edition to use it. Anyway I changed to chrome for my plugin.
Edit: found some info about it
> Setting xpinstall.signatures.required to false will not work on the Beta or Release versions of Firefox on Mac or Windows. Doing so has no effect. On Linux, depending on your distribution, the setting may be respected and does work on some distributions of the release version of Firefox.
> I don't have this problem. I was gonna type a long winded thing to descrbe how I do it but since you managed to make it work in LibreWolf it's likely not an issue with how you're doing it
You're probably lucky that it's working, as it should be disabled in the release version of firefox.
> I want to use Firefox, but for some strange reason, it just doesn’t feel as smooth as Chrome.
I think I know what you mean. I'm a Firefox user who occasionally uses Chrome, and I generally don't like the way Chromium feels. I feel similar differences between MacOS, Windows, and Gnome.
Both browsers have different performance characteristics, sites like Substack are much slower on Firefox than on Chrome. Other sites feel like wading through molasses on Chrome. It varies but it's 100% noticeable.
Gaza showed one more thing. No matter what platform, if it is the product of a bad system, you have no right to say and criticize there. You can see this in all of them, including the current platform.
