I used to pray for times like this. For me it totally flew under the radar—apparently details about this go back as far as last November—but hopefully someone here learns about this for the first time :) doubt it works on mobile for obvious reasons

Apologies if this is a bit hard to understand.

Some sites have a background that fills the screen... until you scroll. There's one on my work's intranet, so obviously I can't use that as an example. But I see the same thing on my Lemmy instance, db0 (not mine mine, the one I use). They made this thing, I think it's meant to be a black hole, heavily blurred, but when I scroll, the image scrolls away.

Is there some way to lock the background in place and let the content just scroll past it? Maybe with a setting, or more likely with an extension?

Anytime I say anything against Firefox, I get called a lot of really bad things, including suggestion to kill myself, so don't worry, I dont expect anything else this time. Thats not the reason Im posting this. This is supposed to be a constructive UX review from one user, thats me. I usually use Brave, but every now and then go test other browsers. Im wondering what kind of experience anyone has with the same situation. They are mentioned in the order I noticed them.

1. Tabs slide. I dont like it. I want them to become small. It feels more robust. I never use hundreds of tabs and Im sure people who do that, need sliding tabs and tabs that group, but I dont. I found online to go specific setting to reduce the minimum size in settings, but they still slide. I have never needed to search online for such a specific setting for brave.
2. When I try to rearrange tabs, some movement may produce groups which I dont like. Its not as smooth as in chrome. Not as smooth, not as precise, sometimes instead of creating a new window it puts a link on the tool bar, sometimes when you move, you dont know where you are. Sometimes when i Detatch a tab it doesnt show it, but it opens the window that is below. Its feels flimsy, not as robust, a lot of times I dont get the result I want with engaging with tabs.
3. Some websites have issues. Modals in the wrong place or content out of place. Yes I know, probably the websites fault, but that doesnt help me.
4. In Brave when I go to youtube I can quickly select the transcript or a part of it with the mouse. Cant do it in Firefox. I have to got ctrl+a which selects also the parts that I dont want selected.
5. If an image is missing, I dont see an image missing icon, but empty space.
6. When i go into folders on my bookmark bar and open a link in another tab, it closes the menu. So when I want to open a few links from a folder, I have to open the folder each time.
7. Cant paste an image from the clipboard into a web app, nothing happens when I try.
8. Today (like a week ago) it didnt open youtube videos: The message "This content isn't available, try again later." Dont know why. but even if I tried to open again, refresh, in a new window, it didnt work. Worked normal on brave. At this point I went back to Brave.

Mobile specific

1. It asks me each time whether to open the app for youtube and I cant choose, no - dont ask me again. I had to go into settings.
2. Youtube audio stops when i close the phone. Still works on Brave.
3. It often shows me ads on youtube. I never seen an add on brave
4. A website (shop) where i shopped previously doesnt opne at all, youtube sometimes doesn't load until I refresh the page. Slow to load after

Firefox will redesign toobar for Android in version 148

When using the built-in translation functionality I get horribly bad results for my use case (translate to German). So bad in fact that some texts become nearly unreadable gibberish. It feels like how machine translations were 20 years ago.

I know that Firefox’s translation system works with offline data only and locally on my machine, and thus is very, very, very limited compared to specialized systems like DeepL – and even the common LLMs.

But I wonder: Is there a way to improve the system? Can I feed it more data to make it better? Can I do more than just download the translations in the settings?

I know I can always use extensions for sending pages or text to the common online translation services, but since Firefox has that built-in I’d love to use it – but it needs to return better results.

Any ideas are welcome!

Thank you and vielen Dank :)

I unfortunately need to use Google Meet for work meetings. It generally works in Firefox, but I get constant random disconnects. Sometimes, it'll only happen once in an hour long meeting, other times it'll happen every few minutes.

I have tried disabling all extensions, disabling my pihole, using a fresh profile with no additional hardening/restrictions, making sure I am signed in to Google, and so on, but cannot resolve the issue.

When using chromium, I have no issues at all (even with pihole on).

At my previous job, I wrote our webrtc product and it always worked great with firefox, so I assume this is something google meet specific.

Unfortunately, there is nothing in the developer console about why it is disconnecting and retrying.

many channels pretend to be human-made, but are just AI slop.

cross-posted from: https://lazysoci.al/post/42202678

Title

Let me start off by saying that I adore FF. I had a period in my life where I used Chromium, but moved back to Firefox a few years ago and love what it represents and what it contributes to the community and world.

But I am concerned about the number of blatant usability issues that I've been experiencing with FF that have pushed me to the breaking point where I will have to give Chromium another go. But please help me not have to do that.

• Unable to drag a tab — Dragging a tab often causes the tab and address bar (but not the content) to become unresponsive and no longer flow properly (gets stuck) in the tabs list. Requires new window or restart to clear it up. Has been happening for a while.
• text cursor disappears sporadically with css scale down .— Open for 22 years, still sees sporadic reports, and still no resolution. Happens to me semi-often. Sometimes the cursor even goes to a random spot in the text and moves backward as I type at the end of the textarea.
• Random tab switching — Switching to another app and coming back to the FF window causes a given tab to re-focus, regardless of which one I was last using. Happens semi-rarely, started occurring recently.
• *edit: remembered another: FF often gets confused about drag-and-drop. In multiple web apps (Miro and eBay come to mind), I have to drag something into the FF window two times for it to be recognized by the app. It also sometimes randomly gets stuck in "drop" mode, requiring a non-committal drop for it to correct.

I only found that one Bugzilla report. Has anybody else been experiencing these? Especially the non-reported ones? Granted, I haven't opened reports on the others but ... they're all so hard to reproduce. If I'm alone then I understand why they haven't been fixed. But am I?

I'm currently on v146.0.1 as a flatpak on Kubuntu (Ubuntu + KDE Plasma 5.27.12 / Wayland). I am multi-monitor, one with fractional scaling.

*edit: Wanted to add that I have only one Extension in use: uBlock Origin

(Edited) Context: https://social.coop/@eb/115902323900229756

https://github.com/drive4ik/simple-tab-groups

Chromium also have option to show/hide tab group names in bookmark bar, is it something similar ?

cross-posted from: https://lazysoci.al/post/41332347

On desktop-firefox, there are profiles in about:profiles and now there is a new entry in the menu with profiles but these profiles don't show up in about:profiles and the menu-profiles are like a sub profile of about:profiles-profile.

I can find this https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/profile-management/ but I can't find anything regarding the differentiation of them and are the old about:profiles-profiles going to be discontinued? what is the difference?

Hello I just noticed when I shared a link to a friend on WhatsApp from Fennec I got a little as message: "Shared with Fennec" and a link to Mozilla's website. Has anybody had this too? I would to disable if possible.

Does anyone know Mozilla's support email address? I'm locked out of my account and unable to sign in to support. Someone please help me. Thank you.

I have my default search engine set to noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=%s, but the search term in the address bar-function seems to be broken or unavailable. Is this a known issue or a bug?

I think I found that custom search engines do not work (yet) with this feature. Only god knows when this will be supported...

It's not yet perfect but it's a huge improvement for firefox. Firefox' ui development stalled for years.

There are even tabs now. It's not amazing but it is something.

I would like a simple way to download videos from the internet. For example, from YouTube, but also from social networks or, ideally, streams. Specific add-ons for YouTube exist, but I'm looking for something more general.

There are probably hundreds of Firefox plugins that promise to do this. However, many of them don't seem to be very good. Which plugin do you use for this?

So I regularly see issues in Firefox where pages from certain websites (Hello amazon.ca!) shoot to 100% CPU utilization and just never stop.

I'm wondering, is there a plugin that could periodically check the FF process list and identify tabs that are misbehaving like this (or in other ways, extreme memory consumption, perhaps?) and perform configurable actions like "Reload page (GET only of course) on tab" or "Kill tab" ?

It would be helpful because I see this issue on a daily basis, regularly to the point where these tabs are causing problems.

I already have "Auto tab discard" that discards unused tabs, but I'd like this as an extra feature, or a separate plugin.

Anyone who knows what could be useful?

It used to be https://mysearchengine.co/homepage, but that doesn't seem to work anymore. It now redirects to https://hmsrchrdr.com/.

What is going on?

I have been using Zen-Browser as my main, but still use FF daily (both PC and Android). One thing that I have really liked with Zen is that I can move the window around by holding left-click just like the normal toolbar.

Does anyone know if there is a setting or about:config option that can enable this on FF? It has just been such a randomly nice thing to have, but not a big issue if not. Both browsers serve different folks and have their own goals.

That was complete bullshit, of course. Yes, I absolutely branded Mozilla.org that way for the subtext of "these free software people are all a bunch of commies." I was trolling.

Once upon a time, Mozilla was three commies in a trenchcoat.

Quote from Reddit (as it is not an open media anymore):

I genuinely love Firefox, both as a developer and as an everyday user, and I appreciate the work that goes into it. That being said, Firefox dropped the ball on the new profile management system in about as big a way as possible, and I'm curious if there are other users out there who have developed any workarounds for the issues I've been facing.

The core issue is that Firefox now effectively has two profile systems with overlapping goals and zero interoperability. Profiles created via the new toolbar-based manager don't integrate with about:profiles or the -P switcher. Profiles created via the old system do not appear in the new manager. They coexist but do not talk to each other. Most confusing of all is why Firefox removed the ability to use custom profile directories. As I explain below, this in particular significantly impacts developers.

For power users, this new manager is frustrating. The old profile manager allowed custom directories and could be controlled via profiles.ini and command-line flags. Instead of extending the existing system, Firefox introduced a parallel one with fewer configuration options and no supported way to reconcile the two.

Developers, however, are affected the most. A pretty normal dev workflow involves multiple isolated Firefox profiles, each with different extensions, preferences, and devtools settings, stored in predictable custom directories so they can be launched from VS Code or other editors. It is also very common to open dev profiles side by side with a normal browsing profile for instant comparison. The old system supports this. The new one does not.

What makes this especially frustrating is that I can almost make it work, but it feels like Firefox intentionally designed it not to. The new profile manager uses an SQLite database under the Profile Groups directory. By manually inserting rows into the Profiles table, I was able to import profiles created with the old system:

INSERT INTO "Profiles" VALUES (4,'Profiles\qnx7k4eh.test', 'profile',  'briefcase', 'firefox-compact-dark@mozilla.org', 'rgb(251, 251, 254)',  'rgb(43,42,51)');

At first glance, it works. Profiles created with the old system show up in the new manager, it bypasses the issues with profiles.ini, etc. However, it only works if the profile lives under Firefox’s default profile directory. As soon as the profile exists in a custom path, the new manager refuses to recognize it. Absolute paths and relative traversal paths fail. The database even stores external paths in traversal form like ..\..\..\..\custom\path\profile.default, which strongly suggests the path field is validated and constrained to remain inside a managed root.

This is where the design completely loses me. The new system appears to intentionally restrict all profiles to a single directory with no supported override. The single most important feature for many power users and developers, choosing where their data lives, was deliberately removed.

Developer Edition makes this even worse. The new profile manager forces Developer Edition and Stable to share the same default profile root unless you use the old profile manager. Users cannot cleanly separate everyday browsing profiles from development profiles unless they commit to using two different, incompatible profile management systems. Firefox developers, of all people, should have anticipated that users running Developer Edition do not want profiles mixed with daily browsing, expect separate or at least configurable roots, and are more likely to need automation and custom directory layouts.

The only partial workaround I have found in Windows is using a directory junction. This preserves compatibility with the new manager while allowing a custom directory layout, but it only works on NTFS. If you need cross-platform portability, for example a profile on an exFAT drive shared between Windows and Linux, you're still out of luck.

This is not a case where Firefox made a tradeoff to serve one portion of the user base at the expense of another. If there were a fundamental conflict between a simple system for casual users and a flexible system for developers, that would be understandable. But introducing a new profile management system that cannot see profiles created by the existing one, does not interoperate with -P or about:profiles, cannot support custom directories, and actively blocks common developer workflows makes no sense. Users are forced to choose between control and convenience, and developers get neither.

Wondering if anyone with more insight can explain the reasoning behind this design, and whether there are any plans to unify the legacy and new systems or support custom profile paths in the new manager.

Also curious if anyone has developed a good workaround for the issues?