Firefox for Android is a resource-hogging, battery-draining mess. It's the only browser I cannot switch to another app and come back to it without Firefox app semi resetting and reloading the website.

And yet, I keep using it. Because I refuse to let Google fully have me.

So here I am, watching my battery percentage drop, by this mini data center consumption in the background called Firefox.

The most frustrating part is that I actually want to like Firefox. I want them to succeed. I want a genuinely competitive browser. But it's hard to recommend something when using it sometimes feels like a punishment for having principles.

Edit: it seems like Firefox is just severly unoptimized for budget phones

Any reason this is not on firefox? Adblock or something?

Edit: This is on the beta creator dashboard to stream on twitch. Just popped up today as a option in the list.

https://imgur.com/1hgL8vi

A few days ago, I shared a YouTube customization extension I built for Chrome on Reddit. The post reached 50K views in 5 days, and the extension passed 700 users. I was genuinely surprised by how much positive feedback it received.

Several people asked for a Firefox version, so I decided to make one.

It's called LessTube. I originally built it because an extension I used to customize YouTube switched to a subscription model, and I wanted a free alternative.

It lets you hide Shorts and other unwanted elements, customize the video grid, blur thumbnails, disable hover autoplay, and more.

It's my first project I've taken from idea to release, so it's been really rewarding to see people use it and ask for new features.

Firefox Add-ons: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lesstube-youtube-cleaner/

I'd love to hear your feedback!

What's improved:

• Fixed address bar shifting and suggestion popup issues.
• Removed duplicate toolbar backgrounds and unwanted tab borders.
• Improved popup menu spacing, rounded corners, and hover effects.
• Refined search provider rows and account menu styling.

Note: Set browser.theme.dark-private-windows to false for light private windows, or true for Firefox's default dark mode.

Download: GitHub

I was just thinking about SSD wear a little while ago, and I started wondering how much disk writes Firefox actually generates. I came across this post from a few years ago where someone reported a significant reduction in disk writes after disabling Firefox's disk cache. I use Firefox, Firefox Nightly, Zen Browser, and Waterfox, and I've been wondering whether disabling the disk cache is still worthwhile across these browsers.

I currently use these settings in my Firefox-based browsers:

• browser.cache.disk.enable = false
• browser.cache.memory.enable = true
• browser.sessionstore.interval = 300000

I checked Resource Monitor and noticed Firefox writing at around 23,459 bytes/s at one point, even with disk caching disabled. I know some writes are normal, but it got me curious about what's actually being written.

So, I'm wondering:

1. Does disabling the disk cache still make a noticeable difference to SSD writes in modern Firefox-based browsers?
2. What are the main sources of disk writes that remain after disabling it?
3. Is changing additional preferences worth it, or is disabling the disk cache generally enough if the goal is simply to reduce unnecessary writes?

I'm not trying to eliminate every single write or obsess over SSD wear. I was just curious about how effective this tweak really is in practice.

I'd love to hear your thoughts or experiences. Thanks! 🙂

Comparisons are between Firefox 158.0 (64 bit) and Brave 1.97.59, on Windows 10, version 22H2. I use the 30MB video on this Test Video site, Firefox seems able to load the 1MB, 2MB version pretty smoothly, but higher than that, it starts to stutter, for some reasons I cannot understand.

(Most results I can find online tell me to "disable hardware acceleration", but I have been turning that thing on and off multiple times without seeing any changes)

Ironically, videos on Youtube can load normally without issues. It just seems any embedded video would behave oddly like this, which I encounter most often on Discord.

Please, I would appreciate any insights. I can provide additional information if needed. Thanks in advance

It’s called the "mini window" feature. A selected area is displayed separately in a small window—you can even do this for an entire webpage. Depending on how you use it, this could be quite versatile.

I used to hover around 1-2GB with my current windows, but directly after the newest update I hover around 5GB, sometimes the ram usage just climbs indefinitely while I'm not doing anything making firefox freeze till I restart it. How do I fix :'(
Edit: seems to be mostly data decoder randomly climbing in usage over time
I have Auto Tab Discard, Ublock Origin, Winger in terms of extensions

I've never had any problems with Firefox since I started using it an age ago.

Since this latest update though Youtube has been loading incredibly slowly, the page, the the video, and I think I've gotten grey hair in between the time I click to scroll the video and it actually starts again.

I've tried clearing caches, removing ad blocker, closing and reopening (I guess this is a classic?), but nothing seems to work.

It's making the browser unusable for me. I'll admit I'm not the most tech savvy, can anyone help me out on what has gone wrong?

Cheers guys.

I usually use TWP (Translate Web Pages) to translate websites, but I've been curious about Firefox's built-in translation feature and how much of a load it puts on a PC. I'm not really concerned about translation quality here. I'm more interested in the performance side of things, since Firefox's translation runs locally.

For example, what if I want to browse Reddit with pages translated all the time? Does the translation feature use a noticeable amount of CPU or RAM, or is it fairly lightweight once the language model is downloaded?

English isn't my first language, so translation tools are a big help when browsing the web. I'd love to hear from people who use Firefox's built-in translation regularly, especially if you've noticed any impact on performance compared to using an extension like TWP.

What's been your experience with it?

I'm testing Fedora 44 KDE since yesterday and Firefox already crashed 2 times.

Like I'm just browsing any website, and it freezes, for example using Reddit website.

Not sure what's causing this issue. Anyone experiencing bugs/crashes/freeze?

As of late, I've been struggling in regards to my storage on my computer, as it had it's storage consistently filled. Some friends helped me look through things, and found this folder with around 440k files, with the largest being 50 MB.

Does anyone know what this is? Is it essential or should I trash it? How do I debloat it if I do keep it?

A very hopeful thanks in advance

Hopefully this doesn't break any self promotion rules, but I wanted an Android app to access my Relay account and copy my email aliases so I made one. I have it working with my premium account but I haven't tested it with a non-premium account.

If you would like to try it out, you can find it here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.maskedinbox.app

To report a bug or view the source code, you can find the github link here: https://github.com/themattman18/MaskedInbox

Anyone else having problems with the Amazon Prime Video website using Firefox v.158 (Mac)? This just started yesterday. It's like the entire site freezes. Not happening in Chrome. I've added nothing to Firefox, it just started acting this way out of nowhere.

After the laptop wakes up from sleep and Proton VPN automatically reconnects, FireFox no longer opens new or refreshes previously open sites. I still can open new tabs, so FireFox isn't frozen by itself. If I close FireFox and try opening again, after several seconds I get a message that FireFox is already running but not responding. After force closing it, the new instance works fine. All other apps keep working when the VPN reconnects.

I tried various configuration tweaks, like changing HTTP timeouts, network state changes notifications, clearing cache and refreshing sockets, etc. All to no avail. Has anyone seen this and found a solution?

I just got Firefox and the transition is hard. So I thought this might help but I can't find anything

Image of what chrome looks like for me for reference (all I care about is the search bar location)

I'm a Kaiser Permanente member. KP uses Epic MyChart now for clinical documentation. When I go to print lab or test results, it prints the headers, but doesn't print the text itself. This is not an issue with Chrome. I was trying to save to PDF so I could keep record of it, but Firefox won't display the result when you go to print/print to PDF.

Since yesterday I had problems with sync and just now tried to log out and log in again to see if that fixes it and discovered that I cant access the site at all. I tried using PC and while the first time took a while to load after that I can access it with no problem

Hello! I don't have the 4K option on firefox. I opened the same video on chrome as a test, and I had the 4k options there.

Anyone got any idea what should I start investigating? (I will not switch to chrome. ive been using firefox for years and im dependent on it)

And please don't comment to this if you're going to say "What's the point? It looks the same" - I want it, because I notice better quality with it.

I have tried every guide I could find, every setting that has anything to do with text suggestions(all of which were to do with only the address bar, to be fair), even disabled suggestions/predictive text on my keyboard settings. This still won't go away. Anyone know the solution?

It is particularly annoying because it ONLY ever suggests THIS ONE THING that I typed bloody months ago.

im on version 158, in the uk but i dont have/ see anything kinda of vpn on firefox. should it just be on or do i need to add it from some where?

Hi everyone, I’ve having a very annoying issue on macOS and I’m hoping someone here has experienced the same and has a potential fix.

For some context, I read my news through a RSS reader that has a preference called “Open web pages in background in browser”. When you double-click an article, it opens in your default browser behind the RSS reader, so you can keep skimming headlines and read everything later. Firefox handled this perfectly up until now, i.e. the article opened in a new tab, Firefox stayed in the background, and when I switched over the new tab was already selected and waiting.

A few days ago I was trying a few custom themes, and I suspect some config on my profile got borked because since then, every double-click an item in my RSS reader it makes Firefox jump to the front and steal focus. I don't think the theme itself caused it, because this has already happened in the past with different ones, it’s just what I was doing when it started.

In the past I managed to sort it out by turning off sync for the "settings" in my profile, completely deleting Firefox and every related file I could find, and reinstall it. But this time after having done all of that it still stole focus, even on a clean profile.

The fix I found on most forums is setting browser.tabs.loadDivertedInBackground to true in about:config to stop the focus stealing. This still doesn't replicate the previous behaviour, because with this pref on true Firefox stays in the background but the new tab is not selected. When I switch to Firefox I’m still on whatever I was reading before, and the new tab is just sitting somewhere in the tab bar. Before, with the pref at its default (false), Firefox stayed behind the RSS reader and the new tab was already selected.

I found a couple threads related to this:

• Bugzilla 762374, which has been open since 2012
• This Mozilla Support thread from 2025 describes the same sudden change with an RSS reader and a mail app. A fresh Firefox worked until their old profile data was restored

Am I the only one having this issue (or caring about it?) It's one of the reasons I always preferred Firefox over Chrome, as Chrome always jumps into focus and doesn't have a way to change it.

So as this says I'm brand new to FireFox, and I had some questions about what's ideal and how to set it up. I switched over from DuckDuckGo (I've was using it for about 3 months), and before that I had used Chrome all my life so I'm relatively new to this whole process.

I'm currently using the Firefox browser, DuckDuckGo's search engine, Firefox's free VPN, and the basic settings on ublock Origin. But I was wondering if anyone has any other recommended add-ons, settings in ublock Origin, or extensions I should add in addition to what I have currently. Plus any input on bad extensions and/or settings would be appreciated.

I also used Cover Your Tracks per some other comments I saw and it said my device could be easily linked via fingerprinting. Would anyone have any easy fixes to that?

Last thing is that I was looking for an extension that helps to limit social media usage and disables features like infinite scroll, but in my past experience on google I've heard that they're often filled with trackers and data mining. Because of that I wanted to know if anyone had a good equivalent on Firefox that doesn't do that.

Sorry if any of these are really basic questions, but I've been going through previous posts and getting kind of mixed opinions. Anything is appreciated, thanks in advance : )

When I switch to another stream by clicking it in Twitch’s left sidebar, the new stream often sits on a loading/buffering state for 10-15 seconds before it suddenly starts. It doesn’t happen every time. If I manually pause and unpause during the stall, it starts right away.

I’ve already ruled some stuff out. It happens in a private window with all extensions disabled, so it isn’t an add-on. Turned on/off hardware acceleration, and i'm on the newest Firefox version. Also not an adblock issue as I have Twitch Turbo.

I'm having this supremely annoying error which I notice I'm only just now getting after the newest FireFox update. When I want to download pictures from an Instagram account, usually it's no problem and all I do is simply cut and paste the image URL into the site I use to download the images from and get the option what to save it as and such. Well this time apparently after trying multiple different downloaders, it automatically saves the image as a WebP and doesn't give me the option anymore to download/save it as a JPG, GIF, PNG, etc. and even the official FireFox extension for downloading Instagram pictures does the same thing. This is so frustrating and annoying, and I notice I only ever had this after my most recent FireFox updates. There must be a way to un-do this. I wonder if anyone else has experience this as well.