How to Firefox

So many of the things I start looking into starts with a search in a single tab and then every link I ctrl-click during the process ends up in a tree underneath it (yes, I use Tree Style Tabs).

This has a few benefits:

- I can easily see things in context

- when I end up on a particularly useful (or useless) page I can easily see what page linked me there

- I can read the root pages and follow links from every one of them without losing track (the root page is usually a kagi search)

- when I am finished I can either export the whole tree as a nested markdown list (yes, there is a nice TST extension that allows me that, and yes, you read that correctly, it is an extension to an extension) or just close it.

I switched (back) to firefox a while ago after Chrome was simply super sluggish and slow on a MacStudio (!). Not having UBlock Origin is the final killer. Firefox was always super snappy to me and just does everything I want, in a very data-protective way.

Only downside (not Firefox'es fault) is that it can't use Safari's private relay feature.

I hear that a lot, but when I tried Firefox for a couple of months I only found that in a single case[1]. It's really not something that happened to me at all. I did encounter issues with ad blockers breaking sites. Disabling uBO helps quite often on misbehaving sites, but it does so on Chrome as well.

> I am surprised how many people have so many problems with Firefox.

I'm not really. Nor am I surprised it works for you and others. It has been this way with Firefox for all of its 20+ years of existence. In its history it made one big leap in that, somewhat ironically given current affairs, when they removed XUL extensions.

But Firefox has always had weird, unexplainable and unreproducible failure scenarios. Some of that is because of its customizability, but also nobody really cares about it.[2] The standard advice of "throw away your profile and try again" is a huge fuck you to users. 1) People have spend time customizing their browser and throwing that away hurts. 2) It doesn't help anybody. If it's still broken you know nothing, and if it isn't you still don't know what caused it.

I guess that was okay in 2004. Lots of software had weird bugs. Nowadays the competition is much more stable.

For me, I dropped Firefox again after a couple of months fighting to get a stable sync working.[3] It just kept failing on Android. The only resolution was to log out and log back in again. Only for it to break in the next couple of hours. I did the "commit profile suicide and rebirth" thing without a solution.

Chrome's sync at least is very stable. Sometimes it falls an hour or so behind. Not good, but so much better than Firefox.

[1] And that was intentional. Typical Google assholery. Google Photos added (adds?) extra HTML to block right-click on photos when a Firefox User-Agent was used. Using a UA switcher extension "solved" it.

[2] Makers of software for power users so often forget to give power users the tools to investigate issues themselves. It's great you allow me to add so many extensions, how about a detailed log to see which is misbehaving?

[3] Firefox's sync also has fewer features. Bookmarks don't get synced, nor do extension settings.

*Search engines. Bookmark sync works fine.