When ever you hear people trying to convince other people to switch to Firefox the reason is usually moral or ideological.
A usually toted reason, is that capitalist browsers like Chrome, Safari & Edge have too much market share. So we need to switch to the less pathologically operated Firefox — this post is not about that.
I recently switched to Firefox form Chrome. I felt like I was missing out on so much.
Chrome is simply no longer better than Firefox, features wise. Firefox is now the superior browser!
I recently felt like I should just “try out” Firefox.
So I installed it on my phone, this post is about features on Firefox Mobile that I suspect will never exist in chrome.
Firefox Extensions #
Chrome extensions are only limited to the desktop version.
Not with Firefox Mobile, with Firefox mobile you can install extensions on the mobile browser. So you can actually block all ads on all websites using uBlock Origin’s Firefox Extension.
You can also install many other browser extensions. As I have below. This will probably never exist in chrome on mobile.
View PDFs in browser #
I usually find my self following links that are not to web pages but PDF files.
Chrome on mobile has requires you to download the PDF file and is still not even capable of viewing them.
You will have to use a clunky third party app like Google Drive to view the contents of the PDF.
I expected this behavior on Firefox mobile. But everything just loaded nicely. I’m browser, without the need to download it or use third party clunky PDF reader apps.
PDFs on Firefox mobile were simply loaded fast, with panning, zooming capability and a download button incase you want it stored locally.
Everything with web hosted PDFs has become much more convenient with Firefox mobile.
Automatic History Deletion #
On chrome, there is “incognito” that doesn’t Keep any browsing history after exiting. A similar product on Firefox is “private tabs”.
However, Firefox has something more bespoke for “power users”.
Suppose you only want your browsing history wiped out, but don’t want to log in again after opening the browser?
For this, Firefox has “delete browsing data on quit”. You won’t need need to use “private tabs” for this (Chrome’s incognito equivalent) it just works in the default Firefox tabs.
Every time you hit the “quite” button, Firefox will automatically wipe out the browsing history according to your exact specifications.
A word to the Mozilla team #
Okay so given all this, Firefox still isn’t perfect.
Only one thing would make it perfect and better than Chrome in every possible way, feature wise.
The feature is about:config. In chrome the equivalent feature is called chrome://flags.
What funny is that it actually existed before and was simply turned off for about 4 years at the time of this writing.
It even still exists in Firefox Mobile Nightly (a buggy version of Firefox for testers).
The reasons for Firefox turning this off are very unsatisfactory. And many Firefox power users are begging for it to be returned
If anyone on the Firefox team can make that happen, please do 🙏🏿
