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Firefox forks that actually work worth a damn?
10 years ago
So I'm just fucking done with Firefox. At this point it's more unstable and unusable than Internet Explorer has ever been even at its worst, and the crew have made it pretty plain that their approach is to stick their fingers in their ears and pretend there's nothing wrong. I should not have to restart the goddamn thing every few hours because it just straight-up stops responding after an arbitrary amount of time.
But Google is evil and wants to take over the world, and Chrome is still designed for people who only use their browser to go to Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and do so by typing "facebook" and "twitter" and "youtube" into the search bar because duh, what's a Web address? and is just generally missing a lot of things I'd consider to be basic functions of a Web browser in this day and age. Opera looks OK, but there seems to be no way to import my history and bookmarks into it, and I kind of rely on that stuff being available. Specifically, I'd want something I can literally just dump my profile into MozBackup from and load back up wholesale. So that means an actual Firefox fork.
The bad thing about open source software is that the sort of people who make it have a tendency to be arrogant toward their end users and basically be like, "If you want it to have such-and-such an improvement, code it yourself, whydon'tcha?" But the good thing is that there's almost always someone somewhere who'll take them up on that challenge, which is where we get forks. So what I'm asking here is, are there any forks of Firefox — preferably ones that are compatible with MozBackup and possibly even Firefox Sync — that are focused on maintaining the stability that Firefox has long since lost?
But Google is evil and wants to take over the world, and Chrome is still designed for people who only use their browser to go to Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and do so by typing "facebook" and "twitter" and "youtube" into the search bar because duh, what's a Web address? and is just generally missing a lot of things I'd consider to be basic functions of a Web browser in this day and age. Opera looks OK, but there seems to be no way to import my history and bookmarks into it, and I kind of rely on that stuff being available. Specifically, I'd want something I can literally just dump my profile into MozBackup from and load back up wholesale. So that means an actual Firefox fork.
The bad thing about open source software is that the sort of people who make it have a tendency to be arrogant toward their end users and basically be like, "If you want it to have such-and-such an improvement, code it yourself, whydon'tcha?" But the good thing is that there's almost always someone somewhere who'll take them up on that challenge, which is where we get forks. So what I'm asking here is, are there any forks of Firefox — preferably ones that are compatible with MozBackup and possibly even Firefox Sync — that are focused on maintaining the stability that Firefox has long since lost?
But yeah, also the damn memory leak, which has literally been there since, like, 2.0 or something but didn't get to be this unmanageable until about a year ago. Eventually it basically impossible to run anything else while I had Firefox open, until I gave up and just doubled my RAM.
Then again, I never run a browser from more than 9 hours straight (Not using it at home? Closed. Work day over? Closed.) or leave tabs open on sites I'm not actively checking (bookmarks suffice for that) so it never really gets out of hand... but I treat all browsers like that.
What add-ons do you have installed?
The forks maintain most of the technology, but extension compatibility is of course an issue. PaleMoon is probably your best bet for stability, as it keeps most of the old GUI but uses the new rendering engine. Waterfox can use more memory than Firefox and should run most extensions, but some 32-bit plugins may not work.
The responsiveness issues seem to be related to the rendering engine, though, as every fork I've tried has pretty much the same performance problems. Almost any page with JavaScript on it chokes modern browsers, and having AdBlock installed makes things MUCH worse.
One thing you can try is replacing AdBlock with uBlock, which will not only block more ads, but is (supposedly) much lighter on resources and memory usage.
Another thing to try is to empty your cache often. I think around version 34 they introduced a new HTTP cache, and since then, every time your cache fills up to the max, the browser will sometimes not use the cache anymore, slowing the browser to a crawl. I have my cache manually set to 500MB and clear it every couple of days. Clearing old history entries does not seem to make a difference, though.
Here's their "I'm not happy with Firefox" form, in case you want to go nuts there. And here's where those reports go in case you're curious.
As for the arrogance of people who write open-source software, yup, I've seen it!
I used to think it was great that I could file bug reports on free software, but now I just see it as either unpaid labour or unwelcome concerns. Usually.