Getting tired of Firefox
Am I the only one?
They've made some serious improvements and I generally enjoy using Firefox but I occasionally run into issues that just shows complete disregard for end users. Assuming, of course, my issues are not isolated.
Every month or so, when Firefox updates, it completely resets itself. This doesn't happen with every update, but Mozilla pushes an update that breaks the functionality of my browser. My browser settings, my userChrome profile, my extensions and their settings, and my bookmarks are all gone. Everything.
I do have sync but that doesn't work properly either. It only syncs some of my settings (which actually makes it harder for me to figure out what's enabled/disabled) and while I do get my bookmarks (none of which have their favicons), the extensions that manage to sync (meaning the ones that were installed from the store) don't sync their settings unless they have cloud support.
I do not understand this. Why do I, as an end user who care about Mozilla's mission, have to deal with this? I'd overlooked many of Firefox's shortcomings in the past, but when the browser works, it works well. I have some issues, but browsers are complicated and running into issues are to be expected. I understand that, but I simply cannot understand how eager they are to break the end user's workflow. Isn't it supposed to be a cardinal sin for every software company, especially the ones trying to survive, to not do this?
I just spent roughly half an hour of my day to get my browser back to its previous state. Adding the times I had had to deal with this issue before, I've spent hours on dealing with Firefox that I shouldn't have. I don't think I have another half an hour to spare for it and I don't want to anymore, but is there even an alternative for Windows that suck less?
(Apologies for the rant, but I needed to vent and perhaps get a discussion going about the current state of browsers.)
I know this isn't helpful, aside from adding a voice to the choir that says, "This isn't normal", but I don't have those issues.
Been using Firefox for 10+ years now, using it on Windows, Linux and Android, all signed in, all syncing across devices and I've never had it lose any of my data. I regularly use Sync to find a recipe on my phone and then open it up on my laptop browser instead or vice versa and regularly leave (entirely too many, for entirely too long) tabs open on my phone.
Here's an answer that may help, but you may want to continue research to see if you can resolve your issue, as again, it's not normal.
On the contrary, I think the fact that I seem to be alone, at least so far, in experiencing this issue is very helpful. I'm honestly glad this seems to be the case. I will certainly research this issue more than I already have. Hopefully I'll come across someone else who've managed to fix this issue. It's such a bugger though, as it happens few and far in between and it's not something I can intentionally reproduce.
(If I do happen to fix the issue, I'll update the post.)
Good luck, hopefully you can resolve the issue. It may be worth it to just Uninstall, then find every last shred of it on your HDD (WinDirStat might be helpful in that regard) and wipe it out, then reinstall and see what happens. You could probably install an old version and then update it to test and see what happens.
Thank you, I hope so too. I've done the whole wiping Firefox out of my system thing today after I encountered the issue. Cleared up
%appdataand registry and all the rest. That wasn't something I'd done before, so I hope it helped!I'm not sure if you are alone. My Firefox on Windows isn't customized at all, but it did happen several times for all the pinned tabs to be reset after an update.
But it hasn't happened to me again during the last couple of updates.
That's gotta be annoying, I'm sorry to hear it and I hope you don't deal with it again. Is it just the pinned tabs that reset?
The entire browser is vanilla, so the tabs are the only things that get reset. And yes, it's supremely annoying.
I used to have the very same problem on Chrome, so I switched to Mozilla and it stopped doing that. No idea what was causing it.
That also happened to me all the time, with each firefox update. I was using a flatpak version of Firefox, which I think was the culprit.
I've actually swapped to Fennec on my Android (well, GrapheneOS), but I have it synced with my desktop (Linux) FF. I do not link either to my work Windows 10 computer that also runs FF without issues.
I second this answer: I don't believe the OP's issue is normal, and it requires more looking into to figure what the root cause is.
Same. I have my account synced across some devices (not all devices) and I have had absolutely none of the issues that the poster describes.
I am curious what their workflow looks like. This seems like an uncommon occurrence.
I have also never had any of the issues described by OP. I use Firefox on multiple Linux and Windows machines (4-5 total) and have for years, and a couple of Macs in the past even
After probably what are hundreds of updates by now- I've never once had an update reset my browser state.
I even use sync and don't run into much issues with it either. I understand that some extensions don't sync settings unless the extension supports it. I don't mind that that's the state of that functionality. The few extensions I do use that don't sync their settings provide ways of backing up / restoring those settings super easily anyway.
I'm not using Windows full time and when I do it's mostly not by choice.
I'm not against software updates, in fact, I like them quite a bit. I just don't like it when it breaks basic functionality. Not having my browser regularly update is some kind of a horror story for me, for obvious reasons.
I do, but I think you're missing the point of my post. There are technical solutions or workarounds to the problem(s) I'm having. I am aware of them and I know how to apply them, as much time as they'd take. The issue is, I only have so much time. I just want my browser to not break.
You're right. I should've done that before. I don't know how I can reproduce this, though. The only correlation I have is it happens, sometimes, after an update. I don't think that's much to go on.
Not OP but just to add: For LibreWolf on Windows, you can enable the option to add a tiny update checking utility (LibreWolf WinUpdater) during installation, which you can run manually at any time to check for updates, or schedule a task for automated update checks. It seems to work with the portable version as well. There's also the option of using package managers (Chocolatey, Scoop, WinGet). So if that was your only concern about LibreWolf (which I'd recommend too, btw), you might want to consider giving it a try (if your situation allows and you're willing to switch browsers over this issue, of course).
I never had something like this happen. I use Sync too and it works great except for the occasional tab being sent to the great
/dev/nullin the sky instead of across the room.This might sound silly but be sure to check
about:profilesand try "Restart with Addons disabled" when this happens. Also check that it is using your old profile and not some new one that it created.Also, try Firefox straight from Mozilla instead of through package managers or other distribution channels. I've found that the auto-update behavior is less annoying than going through Fedora DNF--I guess you are on Windows so maybe this doesn't apply
That sync issue happens to me as well, but as I said, browsers are complicated and so is sync. That doesn't bother me.
I will keep this in mind if I encounter this problem again. I've set things up already, waiting for it to break for the next time. Hopefully I'll have enough willpower to do it all over again and if I do, I'll give this one a go.
Yep, I don't use anything but the direct sources unless I'm on Fedora but that's good advice.
(Former Firefox/Gecko engineer here)
Yeah, the whole data loss thing you're seeing is definitely some kind of bug. It's unfortunate that these kinds of things go on as long as they do. In my experience, things like this are unfortunately the result of not having enough data to figure out what's going wrong. Back when I used to spend a lot of time on /r/firefox, I'd quite often see the same two or three issues go by, but most people don't want to provide a bunch of data to help fix the issue, they just want the issue to go away. (To be clear, this is a perfectly rational thought process on the part of user; it just unfortunately means that it's also very hard to get the right information about the root cause of the problem!) So instead we end up with users who just blow away all their data and reinstall, and move on with their lives. Meanwhile, the root cause lives on...
As for userChrome, there's not much to expect there; it's unsupported. The front-end devs are under no obligation to preserve the underlying structure of the UI from version to version, with good reason: Nobody's going to commit to freezing that because it would tie developer hands even when making important changes for security, performance, or ease of development.
Hey, thanks!
For what it's worth, I do enable telemetry on software if they're made by someone I trust and I trust Firefox, as much as one can.
I checked Bugzilla after it was rightly pointed out that I should but I couldn't see any other example of a similar bug. I haven't really dug into researching the issue as my time is constrained at the moment, but almost every thread I've encountered so far mention that Firefox, for various reasons, might be inclined to create a new profile even though the older profile remains intact, and you can load your previous profile from
about:profiles1. No mention of why this is happening and how one can prevent it. There are plenty of people suffering from this issue, however. At least much more so than on Tildes.As for userChrome, I mentioned in another comment that it's tiny and inconsequential for me. It was to make the context menu more compact and center the bookmarks toolbar. I think the total file had about 15 or so lines of CSS. I don't even use it now, for troubleshooting purposes, when I will have to eventually deal with this again.
1: While scrubbing Firefox out of my system for a completely fresh install, I did remember seeing three different profiles in the
%appdata%folder.When dealing with extension support we fairly often had to deal with people having very obscure firefox issues.
9 out of 10 times it had to do with the fact that people were using a profile they had been using since the dawn of time often combined with a ton of modification in
about:config.I of course don't know how you have set up you firefox. But to me it sounds a lot like those issues.
So it might be worth to create a completely clean profile first and sync from there.
It's pretty vanilla. I think I only have a single flag edited on
about:configso I could add my Kagi key as custom search. My settings are a bit more complex, but I do all of them from the browser's settings menu,about:preferences, not via some obscure command.I do have extension settings that have accumulated over the years, namely uBlock and my custom filters and rules but I doubt that's the culprit.
I do back my profile occasionally, but I almost never restore it for the reasons you mentioned. I feel like that's using a duct tape over a crack that has already been duct taped. It makes troubleshooting hard, so I often opt out of doing it. I don't practice this just for Firefox but almost every other software I use. Leave it as default as possible, the way its developer intended to do. If I can't adapt to their flow, I look elsewhere. I'm just a boring person who don't ask for much, as long as things don't break.
I wonder why you've been experiencing this behavior. I haven't seen anything like this (so far at least). I have been using Firefox forever in Windows, and now in Linux (flatpak).
Unfortunately I have nothing to add except to commiserate: the state of the internet is dire these days. Chrome ruling the market is terrible for everyone. (I've had zero issues with Firefox, so I can't help you with your weird settings resets, but best of luck.)
I use Firefox as my main browser, and have it synced across all my devices. 2 PC instances, and a mobile one. I've almost never have issues with my extensions not working after updates. Only recently I've had some trouble with DarkReader on sites that have a darkmode already.
For reference I run the following
uBlock Origin
SponsorBlock
DarkReader
BitWarden
BetterTTV
WolframAlpha Search
I also have Firefox clear it's history and cache whenever I close the browser. There's no reason for me to save login info in Firefox since I already use BitWarden for password management.
My workflow is roughly the same. I essentially use the browser in private mode (but not exactly). My problem is not about extensions breaking, though. They work fine when they're installed. My issue is they're gone after an update, all together. I doubt this issue is extension related, but the ones I'm running are: uBlock Origin, 1Password, Privacy Badger, Vimium C, ClearURLs, Kagi, and Raindrop.
I've been using Firefox for years, also with some of those plugins and this has never happened to me before. I'm sorry to hear you're having such issues, but maybe those are caused by your specific system? Maybe it's one of your plugins? I'm using Firefox on Windows, Mac, Ubuntu Android, and iOS (quite the setup, I know... it's because of my job).
I wish I knew. I know I didn't have this problem on Fedora during my time of using it for about two years. I don't use Firefox on macOS so I wouldn't know. I use Firefox on Windows and iOS, but on iOS I only use it to send links to Windows. Funnily enough, on iOS, I sometimes have to deal with having to re-sign into my account as it signs out for no reason. That might be security related more than a bug in the case of the Windows version, though.
Another unhelpful comment, sorry – I've been using FF on Windows for, uhh... am I doxing myself? Let's just say many many years. And since I switched my personal to Linux about 7 years ago, been using FF on that.
Never experienced anything like this. Could it be malware, I wonder?
I'm with you on this. Been using Firefox for few years, but become tired of steady settings removing, GUI changes, Pocket extension, VPN ads and switched to Vivaldi. Vivaldi is Chromium based, but at least Vivaldi do not believe that "we know better than user what user wants". Vivaldi is not perfect, sometime bugs happens, performance not the best, but level of customization is gigantic and it feels like they really care about unique users workflow. In the end that what really matter to me.
I am with others not experiencing this issue. I moved to Firefox full time in the last few months when Chrome became an ad platform.
One more suggestion I have not seen elsewhere: have you considered exporting your bookmarks and extension settings to neutral format, then completely flushing the sync (maybe make a new account, or completely disabling sync) and restarting from scratch on all your devices? Given that your problem seems to be unusual (from the small sample of Tilde users, anyway), I can easily imagine that some bit of spurious data is gumming up the works. Even if this is a moderate amount of work, maybe it is a one-time thing if it fixes the problem.
I don't think this would help with the browser resetting itself, but it might help with the sync issues. Thank you for your advice. I will create a new account now and see if it helps for the long haul.
Ugh I was about to chime in and say "I have also been using Firefox for 10 years across devices and have had 0 sync issues".
But that's not true, because I realised 10 years ago is 2014 and I've been using Firefox a hell of a lot longer than that and I'm just old now :/
AnYwAy, the literal only complaint I've had about firefox in all these years is that their debug console looks a little cluttered and I prefer chrome's for that specific purpose only. That's seriously it.
I hope you find some answers OP!
Time does fly fast, that's why I don't want to spend time dealing with this anymore. 😊
Long shot, but : there's one case of data loss I can semi-reliably trigger, but I it's only tangentially related to your symptoms, and it' not as big of a loss. When my main disk is full of nearly full (in using Windows), me Gestutefy (a mouse gesture extension) configuration gets erased (it resets to default). Maybe your main volume gets filled by swap or something similar ?
Nope, that can't be it. I've got plenty of space available and as you implied, the issue has got to be browser based. While I don't have a technical proof of this, I can't imagine Firefox letting extensions reset the browser. Good guess, though!
Another happy Firefox user here, sorry. Been using since it's inception.
The only problem I sometimes had was when a tab was not sent to another device, but it does not happen anymore. Sometimes I need to hit "Sync now" and it appears.
Interesting. I'm guessing here, but based on a phrase about extensions installed "from the store", could it be that the problem lies in Firefox borking custom/3rd party extensions?
The only third party extension I was running was Bypass Paywalls. I don't think that's the issue, I even double checked it using its issues page but couldn't find anyone having a similar issue. To be on the safer side, I'm not running it this time around for troubleshooting purposes. I wasn't benefiting much from it anyway.
I encounter breakage of my userChrome modifications fairly frequently. I guess that’s to be expected since these modifications aren’t supported, but it’s frustrating nonetheless because the UI customizations I want aren’t available otherwise. Also, while I have no insight into the development process of Firefox, it feels like they twiddle with the hierarchy of the UI (which is what usually breaks userChrome mods) far more often than one would expect to be necessary given the infrequency of visible changes.
It’s enough of a frustration that I’ve debated looking into the feasibility of starting a fork that has my desired UI baked into the browser itself. The main question here is how difficult it is to keep security patches and the like from mainline merged into my fork.
Haven’t experienced the other issues, but I also don’t use sync.
My userChrome is tiny. I used to use cascade when my main OS was Fedora i3 Spin and given how much cascade changed things, I did encounter some breakage here and there but that came with the territory. On Windows, I use userChrome only to center my bookmarks toolbar and make the context menus more compact. It's something I can live without, but I do have it backed up and it doesn't take much time to get it restored. It's the extensions I'm having the most trouble with.
I don’t do anything too ambitious with my userChrome either. It’s mainly just hiding the sidebar header (which is weirdly huge and ugly with vertical tab extensions) and hiding the stock tabbar. What I see break most frequently are the margins at the ends of the toolbar for window controls (close, minimize, etc) which have to be manually added as a result of hiding the tabbar.
It would be so nice if these things were options in Firefox’s settings, but they’re not, hence userChrome mods.
That said, if I were already forking Firefox to make those smaller changes anyway there’s bunch of other stuff I’d change too. As shown by a lot of the fancier userChrome mods there’s a good deal of low-hanging fruit when it comes to polish in Firefox’s UI design.
Just today I had my Chrome Beta installation update itself to a zero-byte executable (??) and nuke my Chrome Stable installation. All lost. From extension settings, to extensions, to tabs, all of it.
So I shut it down and restored User Data from backup. Highly recommended.
Firefox on Desktop works perfectly but I have a lot of problems with Firefox for Android crashing repeatedly, making my phone get very hot, etc.
If you use some darkmode extensions in android FF it can cause these issues, it was annoying me for weeks before I found that out and getting rid of the extension stopped all that for me. Though I now use Mull because I like the privacy improvements. Still don't have a dark mode though.
I only use UBlock origin as an extension. I can't tell if the bug is entirely Firefox, it might also be a problem with the hardware or OS.
Yup, on Android, me too.