Why Firefox is falling behind

I’ve been using Firefox a lot more-lately, but compared to my usual Edge on Windows, or Opera, Brave or Vivaldi on Android, I have noted a number of issues or missing-features that are rather-irritating, and to me show examples of the lack-of-attention to the basics Mozilla are often accused-of having thesedays.

No “Paste as Plain Text” option. So useful in Edge; whereas with Firefox I have to dump rich-text into Notepad first, then copy-and-paste from that.

Slow video-playback on some sites. Some videos can take 10-15 seconds to either first start playing, or to play after seeking to a new point. No issues in any other browser on the same sites, and makes no-difference if I have the “use hardware acceleration” setting on or off. (The videos are not AV1 format, before anyone asks.)

Slow page-load on some sites, or broken page features. While yes, I can hear people already typing “lazy developers only optimising for Chromium-derived browsers” it’s still going to turn users away if sites are slow to load or have parts of the page that don’t work — a common one I find are websites that let you enter a postcode to check stock-levels, or comment-sections on some news sites. (I do use the “send report” feature to report such pages to Mozilla, but not-sure if anyone ever does anything with such reports.)

“Only show on New Tab” option for Bookmarks Bar still broken. The Bookmarks Bar doesn’t appear with the “blank page” setting, only with “Firefox home”. Still not fixed, despite many users reporting this on their bug-tracker site.

Tracking Protection can only be fully ON or OFF. Brave, Opera and Vivaldi let you disable certain protections, such as third-party cookies or trackers, on a per-site basis while leaving everything else on. In Firefox you can only disable all protections for a site, or not, but nothing more-granular.

Cannot edit URL while bookmarking. Click the star icon to bookmark a site and you can edit the name, location and set some tags (I wonder how-many users actually bother with the tags feature?) at that time, but you cannot edit the URL, such as to delete referrer information. Most other browsers let you edit the URL at the time of bookmarking. Firefox requires you to bookmark a site first, then locate the bookmark, right-click it and do “Edit”, wasting time.

Favicon not stored during bookmarking. Firefox only gains a favicon for a site the first time you visit it after bookmarking it, not during the bookmark process. As such, if you edit the URL after, and the site does a redirect while loading, that bookmark will never gain a favicon.

Bookmarks appear at the bottom of the Address Bar. If you type a name of a bookmark, by-default it appears at the bottom of the Address Bar, after the search-results. While you can turn search-results off, logically I’d expect bookmarks to appear first.

Confusing duplicate settings. Cookies and cache can be cleared under both “Delete cookies and site data when Firefox is closed” and “Clear history when Firefox closes…”. Not sure why only the latter can’t just be offered?

No “cookies to keep” option. Edge has a really-useful feature where you can choose to keep cookies when you close it from particular sites or domains, while deleting all others, with wildcard syntax, such as [*.]youtube.com supported. I think Firefox has a similar feature (“Manage exceptions…”), though if so it doesn’t seem to work, and doesn’t support per-domain syntax, only specific URLs (e.g. consent.youtube.com or cookiecontrol.youtube.com but not *.youtube.com).

Spell-checking doesn’t work by-default. Even if “Check your spelling as you type” is on, it doesn’t work… until you go to the Add-Ons page and install a dictionary extension for your language! You’d think underneath this setting they might tell users they have to manually install a dictionary, but no!

No “translate” or “Read Aloud” equivalents. Not being able to right-click a page and choose “Translate to English” sure becomes irritating, and Firefox also has no equivalent to the useful “Read Aloud” feature in Edge, allowing you to listen to an article in the background while doing other things. I’m sure there are extensions that could do both, but I’d expect at-least the former to be built-in functionality by now.

Low-marketshare on Android is likely down to lack of extensions. If you go to the menu in the Firefox Android app, then to Add Ons (which browses to addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/android) there are just 17 total! Given many users still cite extensions as a major reason they choose Firefox, it’s hardly surprising the Android version is barely-used! (Not sure how-many are offered on iOS, but I’d expect less, given the forced-use of Webkit there and so Apple being in-control of the APIs and rendering-engine.)

But, for balance, some things I think Firefox does better:

The right-click menu and hamburger menus are cleaner, whereas the ones in Edge are over-stuffed with pointless options.

Doesn’t include bloated features, such as “Edge bar”, “Shopping in Edge”, “Collections”, “Pinterest in Collections”, “Pay in installments”, “Cite this” or “Math(s) Solver” (though many of these can be disabled, and don’t apply to Brave, Chrome, Opera or Vivaldi, of course).

The “take screenshot” feature exports as PNG format, whereas “Web Capture” in Edge offers only JPG.

Firefox lets users customise more of the interface, though the amount to which you can do this is constantly diminishing over-time.

Built-in support for blocking cryptominers and fingerprinters. Edge doesn’t do either, and I don’t think Chrome does either.

The printing experience is more-consistent in Firefox, whereas Edge sometimes doesn’t offer some options on some sites.

The issue of trust. If you don’t like a browser made by either Google or Microsoft then sure, Mozilla might suit you better. But then-again, on Windows you could also use Brave, Opera or Vivaldi. If you’ve specifically bought a Mac, iPhone or iPad then this would imply you trust Apple, so why not use Safari there? And on Linux, you could either use the stock Chromium, or one of a number of distro-specific or desktop-environment specific browsers instead.