Firefox After a Month
Earlier this year, I switched to Firefox as my main browser on any machine which supports it. My workstation at school as well as my phone are my primary devices. I also have two Chromebooks, one for home and one for school, but those are not able to run Firefox at this time.
All else aside, knowing that my browsing is able to be protected by maintinaing manifestV2 has been worth it. There are some idiosyncrasies, but they're manageable. Here's a look at some of my browser settings and tools:
Extensions
I immediately installed uBlock Origin and Bitwarden. uBlock keeps everything readable, especially on mobile. Before switching to Firefox, I was using Vivaldi Mobile, which also blocked ads and trackers by default. The fact that Firefox on Android allows extensions is critical as I'm able to maintain that level of privacy and usability. Any time I use my wife's phone with stock Safari, I can barely wade through the number of popups and ads that I never have to deal with.
I switched my family to the free Bitwarden after the LastPass breach where they repeatedely said master passwords weren't leaked, but actually were. Whoops. Bitwarden also runs on our phones. Adding it to Firefox keeps everything in sync across the board.
The gamechanger for me was finding Tree Style Tab. I missed the vertical tab bar from Vivaldi and Tree Style fits the task. I had to get used to tabs being nested with one another, but I really like that feature now.
The last fix was to remove the native tab bar at the top of the window. I found a forum post talking about the userChrome.css file which took care of it. I followed the steps on this page to create a file and then added this single line:
#TabsToolbar-customization-target { visibility: collapse !important; }
Workflows
Years ago, I had set up a Mozilla account to play around with an extension idea. I found that password and immediately signed in on both my phone and desktop machine. I love being able to send tabs back and forth between devices to save for later. I am not interested in setting up a Pocket account, so that option is disabled and I'll manually do the tab share method for now.
I have my desktop machine to open four tabs on startup: Google Drive, Gmail, my gradebook, and a site to track student progress on assignments. Having that all ready to go right at the start saves me time and I can close things out that I don't need rather than remember what I need to open to do a thing.
I had to refresh my PWAs on my phone, but they work just as well as the Vivialdi PWAs I had set up originally.
Annoyances
I already had my first experience with, "our developers recommend you use Chrome or Edge," which isn't cool. Especially since it was for a state government office.
On mobile, page loads feel a little slower? I don't know if they actually are, but it feels like there's a little delay between hitting "go" and the page loading. I think it's because of DNS over HTTPS, but I haven't taken the time to play around with the settings more. I'm not usually in such a rush that it causes major issues, but it's something I've noticed.
I also noticed that some of my own applications (mainly toy apps for myself) act weird because of the default styles applied by Mozilla that I just never tested for. So, I'm annoyed that I haven't done a better job on my own sites, so those will get fixed sooner or later.
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