Introduction: The Browser Dilemma
As a developer, choosing the right browser can make all the difference in your workflow. Recently, I found myself revisiting Firefox after years of using alternatives like Chrome and Zen, and let me tell you—it was an eye-opening experience. While I had fond memories of Firefox from my middle school days, my recent usage has revealed a myriad of frustrations that make me question its viability for modern web development.
Key Takeaways
- Browser Compatibility Issues: Firefox struggles with certain web standards, making it frustrating for developers. For insights on this topic, you might find Understanding Headless, Boneless, and Skinless UI in Modern Development useful.
- Performance Concerns: Compared to other browsers, Firefox often lags in rendering and processing capabilities.
- Developer Tools: The dev tools in Firefox, once praised, now feel inadequate compared to competitors. For tips on improving your workflow, consider checking out Boosting Productivity: Essential Tools and Approaches for Efficiency.
- Community Response: There's a surprising disconnect between Firefox's loyal user base and the reality of its performance.
The Firefox Experience: A Reality Check
When I first installed Firefox again, I was hopeful. However, that hope quickly turned into disappointment. For instance, when making standard web requests, Chrome would return a readable stream body, while Firefox simply didn’t support this feature. This discrepancy created chaos in my workflow, forcing me to rethink my choice of browser.
Real World Example: When I was working on a project with streaming responses, the lack of HTTP streaming support in Firefox meant that I had to wait for the entire response to load before troubleshooting. In a fast-paced development environment, this is simply unacceptable.
Frustrations with Performance
One of the most glaring issues for me was Firefox's performance. I often found myself reaching for alternatives like Zen or Chrome simply because Firefox felt sluggish and unresponsive. The browser's inability to handle high-resolution video streams or maintain consistent frame rates was particularly frustrating, especially when collaborating on video projects.
Practical Example: During a project that required video conferencing, I encountered significant limitations with Firefox that led to crashes and performance lags. It became evident that Firefox was not equipped to handle the demands of modern web applications, especially those that rely heavily on video and real-time communication.
Developer Tools: A Disappointment
Once hailed as a strong suite for developers, Firefox's dev tools now seem to lag behind those of its competitors. The inability to view streamed responses in real-time hindered my debugging process. I found myself switching between browsers to perform basic tasks that should be seamless.
The Community Divide
Despite my frustrations, I noticed a segment of Firefox users who staunchly defended the browser. This was surprising given the overwhelming issues I encountered. It made me wonder if there was a disconnect between their experiences and the reality faced by developers like myself. Some users seemed to be in denial, insisting that Firefox was functioning perfectly fine when it clearly was not.
Conclusion: A Call for Improvement
After spending weeks using Firefox for development, I’m left feeling frustrated and disappointed. While I appreciate the open-source nature of the browser and the community behind it, the reality is that it doesn't meet the demands of modern web development. I sincerely hope that Firefox can address these issues, as it holds a special place in the hearts of many users. However, until significant improvements are made, I will continue to seek out alternatives that provide a more efficient and reliable experience. For those interested in modern development trends, exploring Unlocking Microservices in the Browser with Single-SPA may provide additional insights.
In the end, it’s about finding the right tools that enable us to do our best work. If you’re a developer, choose wisely!
I still fondly remember the days back when I was in Middle School and I would install Firefox on the school computers
because Internet Explorer was garbage Firefox changed the way we use the web fundamentally and I'm so thankful it
exists I've been using it a lot more recently in my quest to remove Arc from my life and as great as Zen has been as
a browser it has reinvigorated my hatred my deep disdain for the current state of Firefox and I don't know if you Firefox
users are delusional stupid or just what but to pretend browsers in an acceptable State makes no sense to me at all I I
feel like I'm going mad we have a lot to talk about here everything from fonts to gradients that just don't
work this is going to be a fun one before we can dive too deep quick word from today's sponsor T3 chat okay I'm
not technically sponsoring myself I mean I do pay myself not a lot but I wanted to show off the app that I've spent the
last couple weeks building cuz I'm really really proud of what we have this is the AI chat I use for everything
other than benchmarking how bad the other AI chats are we have access to pretty much every model you'd reasonably
want to use we also have deeps V3 R1 self-hosted R1 hyperbolic which actually works because the official deep seek
apis are down as well as the distilled model Which flies speaking of flying rui is by far the fastest of any of the
places you can do any of this stuff on the internet if I ask llama L we'll ask one of the reasoning models solve Advent
of code 2022 day 5 in Rust you can open the reasoning see how fast that reasoning is coming in it's
open up other things in the background let's ask llama 3 solve Advent of code 2021 day three in
Python basically instant even the official openi models run better on our platform than their platform because we
partnered with aure to make sure they can run as fast as possible if you want a stable reliable consistent and fast
experience prompting every model that costs way less we only eight bucks a month you should definitely check out T3
chat today anyways back to whatever I was just talking about people have been mad at me for my takes on Firefox for a
while and I'll be honest they had a reasonable point I wasn't using Firefox every day how the hell could I know well
I've been using Firefox every day so now I know it is bad it is atrocious it is so acceptable I don't actually
understand how people pretend otherwise it is I scroll down and read the comments there's a lot of people
pretending otherwise I know how this goes they're all wrong and stupid using Linux on an 8bit monitor pretending that
things are fine well not I have a lot of anger here and I am sorry but I just cannot believe people
have conned the world into thinking this browser functions it doesn't it's horrifying Zen is in a surprisingly good
State considering the rotting corpse it's built around and I keep reaching for Aldi when I try to do Dev work
because Firefox is driving me insane this wasn't the first problem I ran into but it was the one that made it hardest
for me to justify my time there is one other I want to showcase though this is a post from egoist if you don't know him
he's the creator of tsup which is an essential library for bundling typescript packages and code in general
he's one of my favorite devs I love him dearly we're kind of competing with T3 chat versus chat wise is his app check
it out if you want a good local purchased app that you hit API key with yourself is a really good chat probably
the best thing I would recommend on top of T3 chat he saw me and a bunch of others using Firefox started playing
with it again himself and immediately started running into chaotic things that make no sense at all if you make a web
standard request in Chrome body is a readable stream if you make a web standard request in Firefox body does
not exist if this is where the weird request response problems ended fine but it's not if I go in here into a random
chat on T3 chat we'll hop in we'll pick a slower model so I can really demo this uh the hyperbolic model will be nice and
slow I'm going to send a message write me 10 fun facts about seals and here we have the chat and it has nothing in it
it will never have anything in it here it's just not working cuz the that model is dying oh
hyperbolic here we have the response it shows you the whole thing when it completes but if I close out of that
right 20 more and now we click here nothing we cannot see the streamed response until the streamed response is
done there is no concept of HTTP streaming inside of firefox's Dev tools if I move over to a competent browser
right me 20 fun facts about seals and now we click chat and we get a streamed response immediately and you can scroll
the bottom and see it continuing to come in I know this seems dumb but when you're streaming responses that take
sometimes like 30 seconds to a minute having to wait for the whole response to come through before you can debug it
isn't an option it's not like oh I'd prefer no there is no preference here this is objectively good and this is
objectively useless if you're working on a real service you're not going to wait a minute Plus for your response to come
in to make sure the stream is formatted correctly you're just not this isn't good enough and because of this as much
as I've been loving my experience with Zen when I'm working on T3 chat I do not use Zen I reach for a browser that is
based on something competent and we're just getting started here I wrote a whole list of the things that have been
pissing me off because there's a lot of them and this isn't a new thing for me this has been going on for a while some
of these things are new stuff like crazy fancy view transition things and new cool things going on in CSS that just
don't exist in Firefox yet some of them are just unacceptable and have been this way for a while we'll start with the web
RTC stuff because I have feelings in case you didn't know a lot of my initial like claim def Fame was a little service
I built called ping it's Zoom for streamers make it easy for live collaboration to happen at super high
quality we supported every browser initially because why wouldn't we well there is a reason why if you had Firefox
as your browser you were heavily restricted in which video things you could support on Apple silicon Max they
don't support h264 yeah this is the one that killed us Firefox doesn't support changing the
frame rate for some reason I don't know why I assume okay that's fine what that means is Firefox users will be locked to
30 whatever they're using a bad browser they can send 30 FPS the problem is if someone else in the call is at 60 FPS
every frame over 30 leaks memory and you end up with your browser crashing five to 15 minutes in if one other person in
the call is going higher than 30 FPS so if you have just one person who insists on using this broken browser everyone in
the call have to have their frame rate locked to 30 but there was an easier option for us we picked a slightly
Chrome Monopoly I don't think that we should only have one browser engine I thankful that we are able to have
standards that move forward and progress in meaningful ways It's just sad that the alternative browser follows
standards the worst provides the worst experience and forces me to do stuff like this that just gets me in trouble
constantly and I really hope all the people who constantly flame me for saying I'm too mean to Firefox is not
that bad you just don't know what you're talking about well watch this inflame me like they always do cuz they're not
going to be rational about this if they were rational people they wouldn't be defending Firefox the reason Google made
Chrome isn't because they hate Firefox and want to kill it is the web wasn't moving fast enough and they wanted their
apps to work well without needing to install something on your computer so you install one thing Chrome and now all
these things are more capable they also want to support the whole ecosystem so they pay Firefox a whole bunch of money
and they make things that are actual Open Standards for other browsers to implement which Firefox does like a
third of the time and it's kind of hilarious that a lot of the things shipped in Samsung internet before they
them more aggressively and I hope you would all join me but the fact that Samsung internet is further along on
implementing standards than Firefox is because they're too busy Reinventing the logo and branding for the fifth time
chart I remember seeing that I couldn't find anywhere you'll notice something here a lot of browsers don't seem to
support most resolutions Chrome seems to support literally everything you can throw at it but notice here the drop off
as soon as you get to high resolutions Firefox disappears as soon as you drop 60 FPS Firefox disappears as soon as you
I'm not saying for playing back videos in YouTube yes I'm sure you're watching this on Firefox super happy the% of my
audience that actually uses it click in that little settings button hitting 4K and smiling to yourself seeing that
resolution but if you're a professional creator of any form and you actually use your browser for your work and that work
involves ever creating a video track you cannot do it in Firefox it's not like oh you can but no no you cannot do it the
fact that you cannot create a 1080p video track in Firefox is a joke that required us to block them from our
service thankfully as Luke points out here people aren't actually using Firefox they say they are but they're
lying okay so we're looking at 45% saying they're using Firefox so I got information from AJ and yeah
everyone's lying oh about the browser thing yeah okay here can okay okay okay okay okay okay okay
there's your bottom three then you got silk Opera mobile Chrome mobile web view Samsung internet and Opera everything I
just said is about half of unknown which is a little less than Edge which is about the same as Safari which is about
on par with mobile Safari so so Safari in here uh actually outpacing chome people watching Mac address uh and in
total Firefox holds somewhere in the neighborhood of about 15% share which has improved it used to be lower yeah
but you guys it genuinely used to be lower I think it's loud minority it's not 70% yeah it's not it's not I think
we were seeing some loud minority nonsense there so 50% of people said they were using Firefox and about 15%
actually are if we go to plausible where we have analytics for something like T3 chat and remind you I just did a bunch
of Firefox propaganda with Zen despite that we're only at 16 and that's like post propaganda about it that's insane
let's do a poll of our own browser Firefox I like it Firefox I hate it this is fire browser base so if you're using
Arc or Vivaldi you're on Chrome if you're using Zen you're on Firefox Chrome like it Chrome hate it other
other is if you're not using based on Firefox or Chrome so if you're one of those like three Safari people or a
ladybird person that isn't even watching stream because you can't actually watch it let's see what you say yeah and I
feel this too I want to like Safari but it does weird I totally agree now navigation API and Firefox yeah there's
so many of these like apis that I rely on all the time that just don't exist in Firefox at the moment and it drives me
mad constantly n AP is brand new same as you transition yes but then there's a lot of old things they also don't
support I got what I needed to out of this poll there's a surprising number of people who like Firefox and are using it
but this these numbers don't play out in reality from my experience at all and it seems like a lot more people use Firefox
and hate it than the same with chrome chrome wins here but in every poll every thing every service that I ship Firefox
oh that's a higher percentage than what I expected there interesting upload thing yeah a lot more what I would
expect 12 perish I'm not going to show ping because it's going to be biased as hell I will show this which is my actual
t3g site ignore the URL there 18% yeah so it is a real percentage and it's kind of crazy when you think about it that
18% of users can't see gradients they just get a bunch of bars that's kind of stupid 18% % of web users have fonts
that are rendering incorrectly half the time 18% of users are just not able to use a bunch of these things that have
been web standards forever now it's kind of crazy it's kind of absurd that a browser this broken is not only used
this much but is pitched as though it is totally fine works exactly how every browser works and I'm insane for
thinking otherwise I felt like I was going insane the whole time I was realizing all of these things obviously
Firefox is a bit slower to implement new features that's fine and acceptable but CSS container queries are awesome and
I'm super super excited for those to be implemented in more things Firefox is the only major browser that isn't even
trying to do it again even Samsung internet has managed to make it happen web share just missing out
right H there are so many of these there are so many of these view transitions only major browser do not support them
if you're not familiar view transitions are actually really cool if you go to my blog you can see him in action when I
A View transition that just now exists as a browser standard you now have the ability in the browser to set certain
elements and say this will be here and then if it moves when you go to a different page it'll actually move the
element for you it's so so cool Nan's the creator of Styx so he's going to be full oh did you see that transition
there this flies up to the top in a super cool way because the element is marked in the HTML as an element that is
going to be on multiple pages so when you switch Pages the browser will transition it view transition means when
the view changes a transition will happen and when I click this you see the title morph because it's still
identified as the same element and it does these super fancy animations without having to write almost any code
to do it it's all just part of the browser so I'm sure this will work great in Firefox right
page oh Luke we were just watching you guys talking about this yeah uh this is going to be an
features that are genuinely excited for and it's just sad that you can barely use half of them I still can't get over
the gradient thing so by the time you're watching this my tutorial should probably already be out you might notice
that this looks pretty boring if we hop over to Chrome it looks less boring oh so it just doesn't render the no it does
render the gradient but since it renders the gradient so poorly I intentionally marked this supports here to say it
cannot support Ma's experience and if it doesn't then we'll render the actual otherwise we just have a boring standard
is going to come off in the video compression because video compression just kind of sucks but if we go back
to my post this picture should hopefully emphasize the point here one of these is smooth one of these
compression sucks I'm sorry I'll leave a link to this tweet in the description so you can see it on your own device and
tell me if you think the difference is visible or not I'll tell you in reality it's quite visible to the point where it
drove me insane to have people saying it wasn't admittedly because of compression and there's a lot of websites that don't
handle the fact that Firefox can't render these properly and if you go to certain sites they just look terrible
people are saying Claude is one of them oh God oh God it's just bars for me I'll zoom in so you guys can see like bar bar
oh oh God that pan that I know the video compression is going to kill all of this but I insist
just go to claw. in a Firefox based browser and then go to it in a real browser and if you can't see the
difference I genuinely Envy you you're like one of those people that can't feel the difference between a hard drive and
SSD that must be nice I'm jealous you're one of those people that can't tell the difference between a 30 HZ display and
144 HZ one I'm not like you I can see the difference it drives me insane yeah and when I was studing this up by the
way and I set up the gradient I was using Zen as my only browser and it just looked so bad I like am I doing
something wrong with my CSS here like what's up so I went into the Tailwind playground to play more and it had the
exact same problem so then I opened up Chrome and it didn't and I felt like my sanity was quickly dwindling I assumed
oh this must be because Zen isn't using Hardware acceleration or something so I went and turned on Hardware acceleration
it was already on didn't have to change anything okay I guess I'll try Firefox and I went and tried stock Firefox just
to be sure exact same problem I wanted to blame Zen for this I did because if it was Zen's fault they would fix it
because they're a super responsive kind thoughtful caring team that fixes things super quick they can't fix Firefox they
have managed to get a few PRS in and I'm really proud of them for that but the issue for this is 14 years old add
dithering to gradient color transitions opened 14 years ago updated two days ago I wonder if it's
aren't they aren't they yeah the problem is when you come at Firefox and explain how big these problems are you get a
bunch of people who don't know what they're talking about pretending that it's the right thing if you haven't
fetched the request doesn't have a body this is the right thing even though the browser standard says it works different
what are you trying to do here trying to get the body that I specified every like actual web standards person
in here is like yeah this sucks and all you have no idea what they're talking about are like yeah Firefox is just
doing things some way this is funny because egoist and I are on like the exact same side here and I'm the one
who's defending Zen and he's the one who's complaining about Firefox I'm just coming out to defend him right now
because he was entirely right and these comments made me think I was going insane and there's still more on the
terrible in Arc I'm not going to sit here and pretend that that wasn't atrocious it was Zen was a lot better I
went from about 2 hours of battery with Ark to about four with Zen but I'm using a very expensive high-end 14in MacBook
M2 from Apple that used to get like 10 hours I then tried Safari cuz oh Safari is one a great battery it was better but
not by a lot tried Firefox core and it was basically exactly the same as Zen tried Vivaldi and I was back at my
10hour mark so funny enough the browser that handled my battery life the best was the one based on Chrome I thought
Chrome was terrible for your computer but not from my experience Arc is arc's in a terrible atrocious state right now
I don't know how they defend it but from my experience Vivaldi which is Chrome based had pretty solid battery Safari
didn't admittedly Safari might have been bad because I was using T3 chat in it and it seems like doing anything with
index DB in Safari is just a begging for errors I will I'll defend one thing about Firefox quick I saw a lot of
people saying that there are weird indexdb edge cases hell my own AI chat app when I asked it about Firefox
problems called out indexdb as one of the things that might be different index DB transactions are more strict when
you're using them in Firefox than in other browsers I didn't have that problem T3 chats worked perfectly fine
in Firefox from all of my use and all the use that I've seen from many of our users Safari makes me want to do
terrible things to Apple employees the state of safari is actually inexcusable when it comes to some of these browser
like a hobby side project when I used it I kind of expected Zen to but Zen blew me away I expected Firefox to be a
somewhat stable core thing and it just isn't I've had so many of these random things happen from weird font rendering
behaviors to standard things in the browser not working I thought the dev tools were supposed to be good in
Firefox they have been in every single way significantly worse for me in my day-to-day use and I gave it a real shot
I've been using this browser exclusively for two weeks and when I say exclusively I mean a week in I was not able to
deliver for my company as well so I had vivali open in the background for Dev tools I'm going to keep powering through
with Zen I am so excited to see where this browser can go I just hope that Zen can pull Firefox forward with it and
that with a little bit of additional leverage from I I don't know what if there was a popular YouTuber that had a
lot of developers watching them that could maybe get some attention paid to these issues that have been sitting
around for 14 years theoretically we'll see where this goes I hope this has helped emphasize why I don't like
Firefox not cuz oh I hate open source it's because it doesn't work the way it's supposed to almost ever for a bunch
of random stuff I was mostly happy with my experience but as soon as I started doing Dev work and I was using Firefox
as my browser the cracks in the flooring started to show show very quick and while I'm going to do my best to power
sure you guys are going to love this one I'm excited for this comment section until next time peace nerds
Heads up!
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