I’m intrigued by the Sidebery extension but it only seems to run on Firefox. Is Firefox a good browser for the Mac today? I vaguely remember a recent rumor about Mozilla recently going all in on adware and sacrificing user privacy. True?
Technically, Firefox is good in a Mac. One unique capability is the ability to assign specific profiles (the usual, isolated cookies for Work, Personal…) on a tab by tab basis instead of on a browser window basis. Plus they’re adding vertical tabs and groups now which in my opinion puts them on par with modern browsers in an aspect that they neglected through many years.
The worse thing for me is that due to proprietary restrictions by Google or Chrome it is limited when doing videoconferencing in Meet or Teams, you can’t “share a tab” like in Edge or Chrome, you are forced to share the full window or the screen.
You can consider a supposedly more streamlined browser called Zen Browser that tries to mimic the Arc UI paradigm on top of the Firefox platform. Your extensions, passwords, and so on, will be the same as in Firefox. But Firefox itself is enough.
By the way, Sidebery extension is good, but Tab Stash is better because it uses Firefox’s native sync to sync the state of your tab trees across different devices which Sidebery didn’t last time I tried.
In terms of privacy, I have never seen them as “evil” per se. The full browser for all I know is open source so it’s difficult that they could release nefarious code.
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It runs uBlock origin.
That should answer your question (yes)
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You could try Sidebery in Orion, which is a Webkit browser that supports both Firefox and Chrome extensions.
Though it already does some of what this extension is trying to achieve.
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My default browser is Safari. I am using it almost exclusively. If I am using a different browser on the Mac, it is Firefox. Safari comes with MacOS, it is Apple’s default browser. They need a browser. That is their business model. All other “free” browsers have to pursue their own business models.
ZDnet is recommending Brave. As far as I am concerned, Firefox’ new Terms and Conditions for sure are bad in comparison to the past. But I am not so sure if they are worse in comparison to other browsers or if other “new kids on the block” treat data better now or in the future when they may or may not be sold. Follow the money. If you are not able to do so: be cautious, no matter where or what. That is how I am doing it. I still think that products like Firefox or Thunderbird are gems that hopefully will stay around. The internet needs choices outside of big tech companies or VC funded startups.
Would second/recommend Zen, been using a month or so now and little to no complaints! The clean UI is really nice and simple.
Works for me. I have it locked down tight with custom tracking protection settings (stricter than default) and uBlock Origin, Ghostery, Privacy Badger and FBP for Facebook. Have GreaseMokney install for those sites that can’t be managed any other way. (And by managaed I mean prevented from intrusive pop-ups.) Also have it set not to autoplay videos/audio except on specified sites.
Safari is, for me, the way to bootstrap Firefox onto a new Mac. Although there is one site that my language teacher uses that only works on Safari.
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The terms and conditions thing was a lawyer talk vs. perception of what is being said. Their lawyers drafted it in a way to CYB (Cover your butts) that it came off poorly.
I find that on the mac Firefox runs better than Chrome based browsers. I keep finding myself falling back to it. Especially with the inclusion of vertical tabs it runs great.
I podcast so I use Riverside so I have to have a Chrome based browser in the background though.
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I switched to Firefox as my main browser a couple months ago. No complaints except 1 bank that says it’s not a supported browser on my machine but the bank is still working and I’ve put in a request to their support to support it.
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Nothing would make me happier tech wise then for Firefox to actually go full on competitor to ChromeOS. I love that it has a full feature set, extensions and what not and it is not from a Big Tech Company. THey may not survive the Google Anti-Trust Trial but if only…
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So jump in and help make it that way 
It is open source after all.
Thanks for the tips, everyone.
I tried the Zen browser but found it confusing in a way that I did not find Arc confusing.
I’m going to fire up Firefox later this morning. HoldMyBeer.gif
I have like 0 programming skills unfortunately.
I am now using Firefox and I like it.
@pantulis Are you sure you mean TabSpace? When I search for that extension, this is what comes up:
I’m curious, does anyone have experience other Firefox-based browsers, mostly Waterfox or LibreWolf?
I think they also need folks to test stuff and to write documentation so you don’t have to be a programmer to be of use in most open source projects.
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Tab Stash is fantastic — a significant change for the better in how I use my browser. Thanks for suggesting it.
I have thought for some time that modern browser developers seem to have neglected bookmark managers, bending themselves into pretzels to make tabs do what bookmarks are better suited for. Tab Stash is a great counter-example.
I think Tab Stash is a little gem in the Firefox ecosystem: while the modern approach to tab management is to completely dismiss bookmarks (Arc being the greatest example) I think Tab Stash goes exactly the other way around: it uses your bookmarks to build your tab groups UI, and I believe that’s brilliant because you don’t have to think twice --if the tab is there, open or close, it’s bookmarked. You can archive it very easily by going to the bookmark manager and moving it away from the tab stash bookmarks folder.
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