I wish they rely more on OS features, like the built-in, system-wide spell check. I know it's a bigger task for them, since Firefox runs on multiple OSes, but maybe it's worth it. It dreads me how “un-macOS” Firefox feels, and I guess this feeling extends to Windows, Linux and elsewhere.
In Windows-land everything is so inconsistent that it doesn’t really stand out like it does on MacOS.
97% of Windows users wouldn’t notice if it followed OS conventions and the remaining 3% would complain that it was following the current conventions instead of copying Word 2003 :)
Is it really that big of a task? More so than maintaining custom spellcheck dictionaries in every supported language? Even if they only implemented OS spellcheck compatibility on MacOS and Windows and just used the existing custom spellcheck on other OSes, that'd still be a huge improvement and they'd only have to do the work for two OSes rather than every OS that Firefox supports.
They can add features that help with browsing. E.g. they can steal the workspaces idea from Vivaldi. Or the side by side split window idea which is great for comparisons. Or adding a light weight mode which is somewhere between full fledged and text reader modes.
There are so many improvements that can make the browsing experience significantly better. I wish they picked at least some of these things instead of stuffing AI in yet another sidebar.
Firefox has this ability to separate cookies etc into different partitions, and users can make use of this feature by opening tabs in different containers. Many times when I use profiles in other browsers what I really want is container tabs.
That combined with sideberry makes Firefox the superior one when I was checking if Vivaldi was worth switching to.
That was also my story and I abandoned containers that time. But it turns out to be more about bad default UI.
The game changer is Sideberry. It makes manually managed container tabs almost effortless. Instead of messing with auto rules, you would:
- Set default containers for each pane;
- Use shortcuts to open new sibling/child tab in the same container;
- Save/restore tabs as bookmarks keeping their containers.
It’s still not perfect UI, but in reality covers all the use cases where I’d reach for a container.
It’s just so much peaceful to know that I won’t accidentally tie anything to the google account, while still have gmail open in that cyan backgrounded tab just a ctrl-tab away.
Firefox IS a high performance browser that is nice to use. It has much more tab management features than chrome and the speed is indistinguishable!
I think, obviously, that is not enough. I think we all know that, and are in various stages of denial. I think that fixing spell check is going to do jack fucking shit.
Is there a spell check feature implemented anywhere that isn't garbage? I swear half the time the red squiggles are false positives. I have taken to copy and pasting words into search engines to find spelling corrections because spell checkers are so fucking unreliable.
Firefox instead desperately needs to focus on making it a high performance browser that people enjoy using for.....browsing.
They can start with fixing the spell check, which is hilariously awful for 2008. And we are in 2025.
Signed, a 20 year user.