Also more extentions. Both do more or less have the essential ones though.
Google has more resources than Mozilla, and Chrome has long been the most popular browser so it’s not surprising others would want a piece of that pie.
Why would we need any Firefox-based browser that isn’t Firefox?
Customize it a bit, and it works perfectly fine.
For what it’s worth Brave and Opera do extend the base Chromium functionality quite a bit. No idea why they couldn’t have done it with FF/Gecko though.
Have you tried looking for “Mozilla” based browsers? Because that’s the engine or whatever Firefox uses and there are many of them.
I’m pretty sure geckodriver is the browser engine for Firefox, not Mozilla. I think Mozilla is the company that maintains Firefox, along with other projects.
They have forgotten the sacred scriptures!
“And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced. But all was not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird. The bird gazed down upon the unbelievers and cast fire and thunder upon them. For the beast had been reborn with its strength renewed, and the followers of Mammon cowered in horror.”
from The Book of Mozilla, 7:15
Another reason on top of what’s been mentioned already (although probably minor), is that out of the box, Firefox doesn’t let you run multiple instances.
I’ve been learning to write a web app and updating websites, so have been using PortableApps to launch a second instance of Chrome to double check how everything looks when I’m not logged in. I tried switching to Firefox, but it wouldn’t let me open the second instance, meaning that every time I wanted to check the site, I’d have to log out. I check them in Chrome, Firefox, and Opera.
I might be a niche case, but I’m already finding it really annoying. I can’t imagine how much more frustrating it would be to try to write a browser that can’t run at the same time as your preferred browser.
In the Firefox Portableapps folder you have to copy other/source/firefoxportable.ini into the top level folder with firefoxportable.exe, and then edit it to allowmultipleinstances=true.
Wouldn’t a private window allow exactly the specific thing you want to test?
If you just want a separate session, container tabs will do. No need to create a new profile.
For Chrome, you can also just create a new profile.
Would container tabs work for you to test the site in a clean environment?
They won’t keep your cookies or SessionStorage but extensions will stay on across all containers. If you wanna test websites in a clean environment you should probably create a new profile or download another Firefox modified for developers (can’t have enough foxes in your computer amirite) altogether
You can do this, actually. Just create new profiles. It’s not very user friendly, but can definitely be done, from what I understood from your usecase.
Thanks for the reply :)
The PortableApps version is a separate installation of the program, so Firefox in this case, that’s self contained so that it can be used on multiple computers from a removable device. The default profile should be completely unrelated to the fully installed Firefox’s profile.
I’ve tried it on Linux too with an AppImage, but get the same result.
