I’ve heard this but it hasn’t happened to me.

I think youtube makes itself terrible if you don’t have premium. I have the problems you describe and others on both my desktop with FF or my chromebook with chrome.

Yes, but I’ve had it across multiple sites that play video, so I don’t think it’s youtube.

On my pc with a couple ad blockers youtube is SLOW.

If i turn them off it runs fine.

On my android using adaway I have zero youtube lag.

So yeah. Seems pretty intentional

Given Google and YouTube’s history of intentionally and maliciously disrupting other browsers that aren’t chrome, it’ll be a safe bet that it’s intentional.

I never got this whole “speed” argument.

I never had a lot of difference between both browsers (never got to use chrome much, admittedly), but even when it was supposedly “bad”, Firefox never struck me as being especially slow.

Was it a windows thing or what?

Just log out and log back in, and make sure you use the same account on both machines .

Sync works great over here. It even syncs history which is great because I use an extension on the laptop to limit history to 28 days and that becomes synced with Android without an additional extension.

What was the downgrade in usability you saw? I used to be an avid chrome user turned Firefox, but I would say the opposite.

It runs great now. Most importantly, it supports extensions like ublock.

with ublock origin plugin, it’s amazing

Works mostly great. Addons like uBlock Origin and Super Agent (auto reject all cookies) is great for your mobile experience.

I noticed Youtube site sometimes has weird framerates. But since Google removed premium lite subscription, I refuse to use the Youtube app and just view with uBlock in browser, even with the framerate issues.

Firefox on Android is great. I migrated that first before I actually migrated back to Firefox on desktop.

Its ok but I regularly have to swipe the app away and re open it when it displays a blano screen instead of the website.

Firefox on Android is fine, except they insist upon disabling about:config on the main branch of the browser for some damn stupid reason. You have to use a nightly or beta build to be trusted with your own config that much.

Personally, I ended up switching to the Fennec fork over this.

I recently made the switch. Make sure to install whatever add-ons you need, turn on the “open links in apps” setting, and turn on the “pull to refresh” setting. Import your bookmarks and you can still use the Android password manager. It’s not 100% as smooth, but it’s pretty close.

Using use daily. Only problem I sometimes have is the inability to upload images, so I just use duckduckgo’s browser

It is my default. I use ublock and Dark Background Light Text extensions. And the reader view is better than any chromium phone browser.

It’s great but they are two, reported, bugs that annoy me.

First, it sometimes gets stuck half way between dark and light mode.

Second, sometimes it gets stuck starting to load a page. The webciew gets stuck but not the chrome. If you switch tabs the same page will appear. If you enter a new page it will never load. A force close fixes it but it’s annoying.

Using beta is imperative since it enables add-ons . However the bugs are also in stable.

Yeah, it’s alright.

You can install an ad blocker in it, so it’s automatically better than Chrome.

With that and a few cookie popup removers, it’s almost like the web is usable again.

Yes. It used to suck, say, 10 years ago. My baseline was Youtube and Reddit (back then, okay?) Could I watch Youtube videos the same way as with Chrome or Android browser? No? Then, not ready. Did i.reddit.com open fine? No? Not ready.

Then it happened. And I switched and it has been wonderful ever since.

The only thing that I miss is the “pull down page to reload” gesture. Not sure why Firefox hasn’t implemented that yet. Patents? And also, when a video is in an iframe, it won’t respect the “block autoplay” feature. The rest is dandy.

For me it is great on a smartphone but pretty underwhelming on my android tablet. It doesn’t scale websites properly on the larger screen and doesn’t support a tab list on top anymore (like Firefox on desktops).

Years ago Firefox had a massive memory leak that would wind up crashing FX randomly or just crushing your system resources. The bug persisted for years. and I swirched to Chrome to get away from that poor experience. A few years back, a random community contributer, that was also fed up, dug in and fixed several issues responsible for the leaks. I remeber thinking that I should give FX a go again, but didn’t until relatively recently.

Been with the fox since before the quantum update. I never realized it was as obscure as it apparently is.

Switched away to Vivaldi and Opera on desktop years ago due to better design and ability to swap between workspaces. Trying to migrate back to Firefox for ethical reasons. Desktop design still lags behind but privacy is great.

A lot of the privacy aspects mentioned in the article would apply but the extra features(like facebook container) would not. The extension support is also an issue since the extensions themselves have their own privacy policies, so if you get any which are hosted on google owned chrome web store all your privacy cautiousness goes down the drain unless you’re using a vpn.

Firefox addons also have their own privacy policies but you can simply choose the ones with open source licenses so it should be rather simple to be more protected.

I would love tab groups

So I tried to find what tab groups are but most of the results are feature request threads so apologies if this isn’t what you want.

Waterfox will soon be adding some sort of tab grouping feature akin to what tree-style-tab extension does. Here’s the blogpost about it https://www.waterfox.net/blog/waterfox-x-treestyletab/

Again I’m not sure if that type of grouping is what you’re looking for but if it is consider watching out for the feature release. Longtime waterfox user and haven’t had many complaints, Alex has quickly responded to the two issues I made in the github including a feature request that got added within a week (ability to unload tabs with right click).

There’s a video service my therapist uses that refuses to run in Firefox. I expect it probably could, but it’s a lot less work to just launch chrome for that one use case.

I use Ungoogled Chromium exclusively for YouTube, cause my graphics card csn upscale videos and convert them to HDR, but not in Firefox. The moment I get those features in Firefox, I’m done with Chrome for good.

I’ll use edge for that, still chromium but it’s already installed anyway

Dunno if this helps you at all, but I’ve been using BitWarden to manage my passwords since I made the switch from Chrome to Firefox (both on PC and my Android phone). It doesn’t fill passwords automatically in either case, but it’s not much extra work to invoke BitWarden to fill those fields as-needed on either device, and it works very consistently. It’s also (I’m told) much more secure. Just thought I’d share that here!

I’ve had this happen with obscure government sites that look like they were made in the 90s, I manually add the login & password for these

The article mentions that “Chrome [has a] more restrictive Manifest 3 plugin API”, but doesn’t go into any examples, when this one is the main one (and why Google brought in manifest v3 at all).