God I wish chrome didn't remove manifest v2 
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?
Your entire post sounds like something one of my developers would type out after spending a half hour trying to figure out how to install a new piece of technology. As I tell them, your issues are probably due to a misconfiguration issue.
I use Firefox personally day to day and have very little issues with it. I'm going to point by point rebuttal:
Slow, don't know what you mean, I use it every day. Do you perhaps have other add-ons or something running in it that's causing it to slow down or maybe sites that don't work appropriately?
Firefox uses less RAM on average than Chrome, but a lot of your any of the Blink browsers. It is true that it uses less RAM, but there are other builds that are even leaner. I use it to maximize the amount of RAM I have access to on my system so I can run virtual machines in my professional career.
What AI bullshit are they pushing on you? I didn't even know Firefox had AI features. That's how little it bothers me and how little it actually comes up.
If it's crashing constantly, there seems to be a problem with your setup and not necessarily the technology itself.
Yes, their ad model is annoying, and the fact that they have ads to support themselves suck, but they have to make money somehow, and nobody else is paying for it
I don't relaunch my Firefox and use it to the tune of 50 plus tabs for 30 plus days straight with little issue. The new integrated sidebar tabs make this really nice.
I've literally never had the restore previous feature never not work for me, but you could also just install a session manager extension of which there are many if that's not good enough.
I will fully admit, profile management is a total wreck on this browser, so I won't actually complain about that point.
I'm not sure you should use any alternatives. I'm not entirely sure you can handle a browser correctly. However, I think Vivaldi would probably fit many of your pain points along the company embracing anti-AI.
Careful though, I think they have ads somewhere on their site too to support their browser.
Link to blog:
https://vivaldi.com/blog/keep-exploring/
Vivaldi wouldn't be my first chromium-based browser choice. Still too many privacy issues vs other browsers:
https://privacytests.org/
That's fair. I consider the privacy issues, but I really, really hate the user interface of Google Chrome itself and Brave is basically a copy and paste of their UI.
I like Vivaldi for all of the additional features it offers users. I only use it for work-based stuff, so the privacy stuff doesn't really bother me since my company's already monitoring all of that or when I need a Google-based browser for whatever reason.
If privacy's a major concern, then I would probably just go to like, librewolf which is developed by the community to be as privacy forward as possible.
You can also just add a few add-ons to make it more privacy-focused like no script and no cookies and ublock light.
Yeah you seem like you know what the deal is. I basically posted that for anyone reading along in the thread. Quite a few people on this site have no clue about privacy and its kind of my hobby horse.
You know, it's kind of a bit sad that people don't understand the privacy aspect of the internet. I wish people did.
I understand, though, that people are busy and that privacy is just one of the many, many things we all have to worry about.
Just to second this. I use Chrome and Firefox daily for development work, and FF is my primary browser. It’s not noticeably slower than chrome, and I use TST with over 1000 discarded (hibernated) tabs organised in hierarchies for different projects. Usually 30–50 open at any one time.
I’ve not seen AI being pushed, or even ads, but maybe I’ve just configured something a long time ago. UBlockOrogin and a couple of TamperMonkey scripts to fix up some sites I use regularly that have irritating CSS.
Not had session restore issues that I can remember. And I don’t know what counts as ‘ludicrous’ amounts of RAM but on a 32GB machine running editors, google firebase emulators, various node servers and a bunch of other cruft, I’ve never run short because of FF.
Yeah, I don't know what this person's complaining about. Firefox can use a little bit of RAM initially, but if you're not going back and forth to the tabs constantly, it doesn't, it unloads them from RAM after like an hour, and it reduces its RAM footprint to a tiny fragmented amounts.
You block origin is really really tight and prevents practically any problems I have and then I use No script on top of that which just makes my setup super lightweight.
In the same boat with using 32 gigabytes of RAM, but I also have systems that have 4 gigs of RAM that I've never had issues with Firefox.
And what issue would that be? I simply installed firefox and then used it normally for the past month. I guess my "misconfiguration issue" was installing firefox.
I'm not sure how you can rebut my personal experience.
I mean youtube videos would stop responding to input for several seconds, pages would stutter randomly, pages would completely refuse to load etc. It gets worse the longer the browser is left running. I have a handful of simple extension installed - ad blocker, proxy client, basic dev tools. Here is the full list if you're curious:
spoiler
Adblock PlusCookie-Editor
Imagus
Proxy SwitchyOmega 3
Reddit Enhancement Suite
Return Youtube Dislike
Tempermonkey
Vue.js devtools
I mentioned it in another comment. There is an "AI chatbot" button on the left side of the screen. It would popup the panel randomly when I start the browser. Currently it's turned off but I have no confidence it won't come back in the future. Do you honestly think Mozilla Corp. is immune to "AI" slop?
I just don't care how Mozilla makes it's money. I wouldn't be complaining about ads if everything else worked properly
👍
I guess that's the problem. It's a very complicated piece of technology after all - a thing where you type in a website url and then it renders it for you
This is clearly a skill issue from somebody that's unable to use the event viewer in Windows.
I don't mind trash-talking software, but I think it should be deserved and not because of some poor kid's inability to run a computer correctly.
As far as AI, Mozilla is a complicated company that makes missteps and mistakes all the time, but they do make one of the best commercially viable privacy tested browsers.
Sorry, buddy, when Google Chrome is also pushing it, your point's invalid.
Edit:
Your list of extensions does not inspire confidence, especially when you're using Adblock Plus instead of a real adblocker like ublock origin. Did you even check to see if the extensions you were using were causing the problems by turning them off or using a private window?
Cookie editors can cause major problems with websites, and Adblock Plus seems to be a headache from what I've heard to use.