I switched to Firefox after having been a Chrome user for the longest time and I have not looked back since.
I typically have a minimum of 30 tabs open at any given time. Undoubtedly, it made Chrome go crazy and consume insane amounts of RAM. Chrome had company, though. I was going crazy too thanks to horizontally arranged tabs. Horizontally arranged tabs are the dumbest thing ever but I will save my rant on this topic for later. Nonetheless, this was one of the primary reasons that drove me to Firefox and holy hell, Firefox is awesome! Read on to find out why.
There are 4 aspects that I will be covering in this article to drive home my point — Customizability, Add-Ons, Security and Privacy, Utility.
Disclaimer: The configurations and add-ons I am mentioning in this article are the ones I use and they are optimized for security and productivity, NOT sheer speed. Some of these extensions do slow down your browser a bit. These are the ones that work best for me and may not be what you need.
Note: The links to all the features, add-ons and themes that I mention in this section are at the end of the article
Security & Privacy
It goes without saying that Google and privacy are poles apart. Google does everything in its power to extract as much data about you as possible. Chrome is just another medium for Google to do this. Chrome collects an enormous amount of data in the name of ‘improving suggestions and services’ such as your location, search history and site visits. All of this is collected for a reason — Google runs the world’s biggest digital advertising network. The users and their data is what fuels this advertising behemoth. Google sells and buys user data to keep this machine chugging. No doubt, all of this data collection does improve services and suggestions but not everyone would be comfortable with it.
Firefox on the other hand is open source and is a privacy-centric browser. It collects limited data and has no need for buying or selling your data.
Firefox ensures better privacy and security with the help of it’s Enhanced Tracking Protection (ETP) feature. It has the ability to block cryptomining scripts and social trackers. This is in addition to the basic privacy features that Chrome provides.
ETP is simple. You can choose between 3 ETP profiles: Standard, Strict and Custom. The custom mode gives you the ability to tweak the privacy settings to suit your own needs. I have been using the ‘Strict’ mode for quite a while without any issues.
Customizability
There is literally no limit to how much you can customize Firefox. With the provision for custom CSS modifications and Add-ons that can accomplish some pretty insane things, you can make Firefox your own.
Themes
You are not limited by the themes available in the Mozilla store. Since the UI elements are based on CSS, you can add custom CSS modifications to make it look like however you want — from the way the icons look to the padding around different elements. The way you do this is by modifying a file called ‘userChrome.css’. You add whatever modifications you want to this file and Firefox will pick them up. Take a look at these 2 themes and you will get an idea on just how customizable things are.
Horizontal Tabs vs Vertical Tabs
I am going to go off on a tangent here because I really want to get this out of my system. Ready for the rant? Okay, here it goes.
Let me start by saying it again — horizontally stacked tabs is the stupidest thing ever.
Humans are used to lists where items are placed one below the other. Personally, I have never made a “horizontal list” where I wrote down the things I want to buy or do in a horizontal fashion. Having multiple tabs open is essentially a list too — a list of webpages you want to visit.
Even if you discount the psychological aspect mentioned above, there are glaring practical aspects that make for a solid case against horizontal tabs:
Vertical real-estate > horizontal real-estate. You read webpages from top to bottom, in a vertical fashion. Naturally, the more vertical space you have on the screen, the more content you can fit in it and the lesser you have to scroll. Horizontal tabs take up this precious vertical real-estate.
In Chrome, the more tabs you open, the smaller the tab becomes until you see just the favicon of the webpage. It is unfathomable to me why anyone would shrink tabs to the point where one cannot make out what the webpage is. Not to mention that this also leads to accidental closing of tabs because the tabs are too damn small. Firefox does this better — it retains the size of the tabs and makes the tabs scroll-able instead of shrinking them to non-existence. Still, not ideal.
Width of a tab is much smaller than the length of a tab — the width is only 1/7th (approx) the length of a tab. This means that more tabs can fit vertically than horizontally within a given screen space (unless you are using a monitor with an ultra-wide aspect ratio). Consequently, the user can see more tabs at any given time thereby making navigation between tabs easier and quicker.
Thankfully, the industry seems to be moving in the right direction. The VP of Microsoft Edge is also a fan of vertical tabs and in a blog post, he announced that Edge will soon be making the switch from horizontal to vertical tabs.
If you are like me when you research online, you find yourself with dozens of tabs open at any given time. When that happens, there’s less space for me to see which tab is which. I find myself losing track or I’ll accidentally close a tab as a result. Utterly frustrating as that is usually exactly the one page I needed.
Today we announced vertical tabs, a feature that helps you easily find and manage many open tabs at once. Microsoft Edge is the only browser that allows you to manage your tabs on the side with a single click. Vertical tabs is expected in the Insider channels in the next few months.
Vertical tabs isn’t a new thing in Firefox, thanks to Firefox’s customizability. Firefox has already made vertical tabs available with the help of extensions that modify the CSS elements of the browser UI to display them in a vertical fashion. One such extension called ‘Tree Style Tabs’ is covered in the next section.
Add-Ons/Extensions
Though Chrome’s web store has significantly more extensions compared to Firefox’s store, the extensions in Firefox let you do some amazing things that you can never even think of in Chrome. The most popular Add-Ons that I found to be very helpful and use regularly are listed below.
Tree Style Tab
This is my favorite extension of all. The description from the GitHub page describes this perfectly:
This is a Firefox add-on which provides the ability to operate tabs as “tree”.
New tabs opened from the current tab are automatically organized as “children” of the current. Such “branches” are easily folded (collapsed) by clicking on down on the arrow shown in the “parent” tab, so you don’t need to suffer from too many visible tabs anymore. If you want, you can restructure the tree via drag and drop.
Such a tree of tabs will behave like a visual browsing history for you. For example, if you see a list of search results for a topic, you’ll open each search result link in new “child” tab. For more details you’ll also open more descendant tabs from them. You’ll easily dig and dig deeply, without losing your browsing trail — if you want to go back to the original search result, you just have to switch to the “root” tab.
Moreover, you’ll treat a tree of tabs just as “grouped tabs” for similar topics.
Pair this together with a custom CSS code which makes the tabs-bar disappear and voila, you have made the switch from horizontal tabs to vertical tabs!
uBlock Origin
This is an ad-blocker that is better than the more common Adblock Plus. It is faster, lighter (consumes less RAM) and blocks all the ads. ABP on the other hand, allows some ‘acceptable ads’. It has some powerful tools in its arsenal too: element zapper, javascript disabler, reliable pop-up blocker to name a few.
Simple Tab Groups
This is another excellent extension that makes tab management easier. It lets you bundle tabs into different buckets. For example, your work tabs can be on a separate group and your social media tab in a separate group. Keep in mind that this is only a cosmetic change — the way the tabs are displayed to you. By no means is this similar to the ‘Containers’ functionality of Firefox.
The ‘manage groups’ option lets you view all your groups in a single page. You can drag and drop tabs to move them between groups. It is a simple yet powerful tool to de-clutter your browser. Plus, it is always satisfying to organize and put some order to the mess.
AutoTab Discard
This extension suspends the tabs after a set period of inactivity. That way, even if you have numerous tabs open, your RAM is not running out of juice.
You also have the ability to whitelist websites so that tabs running those websites are never suspended.
Dark Reader
Who doesn’t like some slick dark mode goodness, eh? I love having dark mode whenever and wherever possible and this extension does exactly that. It basically applies a ‘dark mode’ on any webpage you visit.
You can see some examples below:
Tridactyl
Okay, this one is for the true power user. It has a steep learning curve and it takes some time to get used to. But once you get a hang of it, there is nothing like it. It provides keyboard shortcuts for any action that you would want to perform in your browser — scrolling, zoom in and out, search, copy link to clipboard — you name it, Tridactyl has a keyboard shortcut for it. Below picture is a tutorial page that walks you through some of the shortcuts.
Utility
Firefox has some seemingly small features that made my internet surfing experience significantly better.
Firefox Send
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Firefox has discontinued this feature(unfortunately). You can read the official announcement here.
Send Tab to Device
Like I mentioned, I am a heavy tabs guy and I have a lot of tabs open both on my desktop and my smartphone. I use my phone for reading articles on current affairs. For reading about everything else, I use my desktop. However, on my phone, I come across a lot of websites/blogs that I prefer reading on my desktop. This is where this feature comes in super handy. All the Firefox instances in your mobiles and desktops are synced and connected. And this feature lets me send a tab from one device to another, irrespective of the OS. So, I simply send these tabs from my smartphone to my desktop. This makes tab management easier and unclogs my mobile browser.
There are a couple of other features that both the browsers have but to enable these in Chrome you need to do a little bit of work. In Firefox, they are readily available.
Reader Mode
It lets you read articles by removing all the clutter surrounding it. Pro tip: You can use this to bypass some (not all) paywalls in websites. But only do this when you are broke :) If you can afford it, pay for what you are getting.
The reader mode in Firefox is a bit more robust in terms of the options it provides. You can change the font, line spacing, paragraph width, font size and background color.
For auditory learners, you have an audio reader mode that will read out the article to you. You can control the pace and the gender of the person reading it out to you.
Below is Chrome’s reading mode options. To enable this, you need to go to “chrome://flags/#enable-reader-mode” and toggle the feature on.
Picture in Picture
Any video that you are watching can be snapped out of it’s video player into a floating window that can be moved around and resized as per your convenience. You can switch windows as well and the floating player will still be on the top. This is great for anyone who wants to take notes while watching a video/browsing a webpage.
To enable this feature in Chrome, you will need to add this extension from the Chrome web store.
Other things I have setup on my Firefox
Note: The below are not exclusive to Firefox. I am mentioning them here so that this article is comprehensive enough for those who want to switch.
Enable DNS over HTTPs — improves security and lets you visit webpages that your ISP has blocked
Block new requests asking to allow notifications — almost any website you visit asks your permission to send notifications. This is a nuisance and you can turn this off in the notification settings.
Setup keywords for searching different websites — For example, you can bind the keyword ‘yt’ for YouTube search. Once you do that, you can simply search YouTube without going to YouTube.com or going to google by typing ‘yt topic I want a video on’ in the URL bar of Firefox and it will directly give you the search results from YouTube.
LastPass browser extension for password management — Though Firefox has its own password manager, I prefer using a dedicated password manager. If you want to know why, (shameless plug incoming) you can read my other article on password managers here.
Conclusion
Firefox is awesome. Switch to Firefox and enjoy a better surfing experience.
Links to Everything Mentioned in this Article
Themes
Add-Ons
Utility
Firefox Send (Mozilla has suspended this feature temporarily)
Security
Edit 1: Firefox send has been decommissioned.