
Ask HN: What's stopping you from using Firefox as your primary browser? - evolve2k
Being the Open Internet advocates that they are, you would imagine that most of us are generally big supporters of Firefox. So why then aren&#x27;t more of us using it as our primary browser?<p>For me it&#x27;s a simple feature in Chrome &quot;tab to search&quot; which frustratingly has never been ported into Firefox and every time I try to switch over the absense of this feature lures me back to Chrome as I&#x27;m just more effective with it.<p>Ref: http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.danielfuterman.com&#x2F;google-chrome-tab-to-search<p>What stopping you?<p>[edit: grammar fixes]
======
cygned
Frankly: speed. As a web developer it notice it all the time. Chrome (using
Canary) is faster in every aspect; Firefox renders slowly, becomes
unresponsive over time, hangs often when using web sockets (webpack); the
developers tools seem to have problems with large files and so on.

I actually love Firefox' dev tools and I really would like to use it - and
it's not a bad browser at all- but as a developer all the small things add up
(same reason why I cannot use Safari as my daily browser).

~~~
mythmon_
I think the problem with webpack isn't the websockets, but that the devtools
have a hard time dealing with large JS files, and especially large JS source
maps. Changing the sourcemap option in webpack has helped avoiding hanging for
me in the past. It would be nice if that wasn't the case though.

~~~
cygned
We use eval because we have around 60k LOC now and they were just too slow.
The hanging occurs if you reload the page, it hangs a few seconds, then a
message concerning websockets pops up in the dev tools and then the page
reloads.

------
no_protocol
I use bookmark keywords to search various sites in Firefox.

For example, a bookmark to search Amazon:

    
    
      Name: Amazon Search
      Location: http://www.amazon.com/s/?field-keywords=%s
      Keyword: ams
    

So now if I enter the following in my address bar:

    
    
      ams keyboard
    

I am brought to an Amazon search results page for keyboards.

I don't like the tab-to-search version in Chrome very much by comparison.
There is a service called Shortmarks that aims to emulate this behavior in
Chrome, but I'm not sure how I feel about using it.

\---

I switched to Chrome about 5 years ago because Firefox was getting slow for
me. Recently I am strongly considering switching back. My biggest continual
annoyance with Chrome is poor searching of previous visited pages when typing
partial URLs into the address bar. The main thing holding me back right now is
I am wondering how this will impact me when using a Chromebook.

~~~
richardboegli
If you use Duck Duck Go search engine you can replace your search query with

!a keyboard

If you need to search Google

!g keyboard

Cannot recall how long I've been using it, but it replaced the need for me to
have bookmark searches.

------
scandox
Pure inertia. I'm going to change right now. Been meaning to do this for
weeks. Just one change to one line in my i3 startup config and that will be
that.

Update: I'm back in Firefox. Already been nagged twice by Google to use
Chrome.

~~~
kevlar1818
Time to switch to DDG! It's come a long way in just a few years. It's my daily
search engine and I have never looked back in reget.

~~~
diminoten
DDG isn't very good at searching, and isn't linked in any way to my Google
account, so it's a severe convenience downgrade, with no visible benefit to my
life.

~~~
x0137294744532
> DDG isn't very good at searching

You can use the !g bang to search on google.

> with no visible benefit to my life.

The main advantage I personally see in using DDG is to be able to directly
search on sites. For instance:

    
    
      * I need to lookup foo on wikipedia: !w foo
      * I need to search for foo on amazon: !a foo
      * I need to lookup a video on foo: !yt foo

~~~
tym0
All things you can do directly from your browser url bar.

------
uncletaco
1\. I switched to Chrome after I got fed up with firefox's tabs not being
sandboxed. I worked at a company that ran an app using silver light. It
freezing would often lock up my browser (or at least that's what I thought was
happening at the time). I switched to chrome and liked the overall "tighter"
experience.

2\. Now its security issues. I'm watching closely however to see how firefox
evolves over the next year.

------
VLM
This may appear flippant but its insightful in that sometimes the reason is
non-technical and not anyone's fault.

In the mega-corporate IT world you have supported locked down apps and best
effort apps (and banned apps but thats not relevant to this discussion)

Officially FF is locked down to hell and back and I can't customize it in any
way or install ad blockers or web development tools in any way. HOWEVER being
locked down the IT support personnel can officially walk users thru using the
corporate intranet or the medical insurance site or whatever without any weird
"peoplesoft doesn't work, I didn't think it important to mention I installed
an adblocker or javascript blocker and fifteen toolbars and ...". Support
isn't happening without it being locked down to the point of uselessness.

Meanwhile chrome is on the tolerated but not locked down list and I can
install ad blockers and development tools all I want but if it doesn't work
then IT support has a written policy to not give a F. They're not actively
blocking it, deleting it, or locking it down, but they are not actively
supporting it at all. If some obscure IT supported something-as-a-service
doesn't work with Chrome, they autoclose the ticket officially. Unofficially
they're not total jerks, of course, so they'd fix it, just officially Chrome
doesn't exist.

So take a wild guess which one I use at work... I can't imagine using the
internet without an adblocker, can't install one, or anything, on FF, so ...

------
chrisvalleybay
I don't like the design of the user interface - at all. If Firefox looked and
worked exactly like Chrome, I'd use it in a heartbeat. There's way too much
clutter everywhere. At some point I'd like to redo the entire design for them.

------
gtf21
I keep trying to go back to Fx, and get held up on a few things (partly due to
my own laziness):

1) tab-to-search (you mention already) 2) Chrome is "cleaner" out of the box
(I'm sure I can have an omnibox in Fx I just haven't tried very hard) 3) I
prefer Chrome's developer tools by a _huge_ margin (especially the react/redux
ones) 4) easy profile switching in Chrome (I have a dev profile that I use a
lot) 5) Chrome better history plugin

------
williamstein
The flexbox bugs:
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=flexbox...](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=flexbox+slow)
E.g., "Firefox slow to the point of hanging when rendering nested flexbox
layout with overflow-y: scroll", which is trivial to reproduce, and which all
other modern browsers handle fine. In fact, anybody who visits our product's
site using Firefox is given a warning to use any other browser:
[https://github.com/sagemathinc/smc/issues/1314](https://github.com/sagemathinc/smc/issues/1314)

------
gnicholas
I use it as my main browser, mainly because of Tree Style Tabs, but with the
upcoming changes to their extension framework, I understand this won't be
possible anymore. (I also understand they have their own experimental version
of this feature, however).

I have been drifting away, however, because it seems to get very slow. This is
partly because of the number of tabs I keep open (thanks to TST, which makes
it easy), but that's not the only culprit. Even after re-starting it, when
most tabs are not loaded, it gets slow pretty fast. JS also runs much faster
in Chrome, I've discovered.

~~~
hs86
I was a TreeStyleTabs-diehard until I discovered Tabs Outliner [1] for Chrome.

It is a separate window with a tab tree for my entire browser session (= all
windows), has a much better keyboard support, supports the unloading of any
subtree (makes The Great Suspender obsolete) and you can sync your (sub)tree
from an other computer to the current computer's session just via drag and
drop.

In the linked screenshot [2] you can see my current session with collapsed
subtrees and the grey captioned subtree isn't even loaded. With (shift+)tab I
can (un)intend tabs to make them into childs or siblings and with ctrl+up/down
I can reorder them. This can be also done with the mouse and compared to TST
it actually feels deterministic.

Going back to Firefox with TST would be a downgrade. :(

[1] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-
outliner/eggk...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-
outliner/eggkanocgddhmamlbiijnphhppkpkmkl)

[2] [http://imgur.com/a/1HZSi](http://imgur.com/a/1HZSi)

~~~
gnicholas
Thanks! I tried a Chrome tool that was in a separate window and found it to be
very difficult to use (window focus was a big issue). I'll check out Tabs
Outliner, for sure!

------
schoen
I use Firefox as my primary browser but I use Chromium for the Yubikey
integration on GitHub, which either Firefox or GitHub does not support.

Edit: another advantage of Chromium is that Google has put so many resources
into securing it; reportedly as a direct result of this, vulnerabilities in
Firefox are easier to find (and cheaper in vulnerability markets).

~~~
azdle
Firefox doesn't support U2F natively yet, but there's an addon:
[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/u2f-support-a...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/u2f-support-add-on/)

Not sure if that will actually help you though, lots of sites are using user
agent sniffing to only allow chrome instead of detecting it properly.

------
comex
1\. Speed.

2\. Lack of interest in macOS. I still remember when I got the first Mac with
a Retina Display, shortly after release, and most third-party apps were
pixelated and looked like crap. Among browsers, the timeline looked like this:

June 11, 2012: Hardware announced and released; Safari HiDPI support

July 31, 2012: Chrome HiDPI support (50 days after release)

January 8, 2013: Firefox HiDPI support (211 days after release)

Safari obviously had the advantage of prior knowledge, but that doesn't excuse
Firefox taking so much longer than Chrome.

Maybe they've improved things since then, but... considering that they still
don't support the pinch-to-zoom trackpad gesture, I'm not optimistic.

3\. Security. Firefox has been the only browser to not feature sandboxing for
quite a few years. Now that Electrolysis has been revived, this should be
fixed eventually.

------
sssilver
Just installed a fresh FF Developers edition, no addons.

Comparing to Chrome's current beta, with about 15 installed/active addons
including uBlock Origin.

Firefox has Gmail + [https://www.nytimes.com/](https://www.nytimes.com/)

Chrome has Gmail + 2 windows, each with 30+ tabs +
[https://www.nytimes.com/](https://www.nytimes.com/)

Pressing <Space> in Chrome to page down in
[https://www.nytimes.com/](https://www.nytimes.com/) \-- completely smooth
pagedown

Same in Firefox -- significant lag, jitter, tearing. Pressing <Space> the
second time -- don't even see animation, just see the page offset jump.

I'm on Sierra 10.12.2 (16C67)

This is what's stopping me.

------
rc_bhg
I use FF as my primary. There are so many more really nice plugins for Chrome
though that FF doesn't have. So, sometimes I just have to use Chrome.

I've installed "Chrome Store Foxified" and it's hit or miss on if a given
Chrome Plugin will actually work in FF.

------
jacek
1) It is significantly slower. That's probably because multiprocess ("e10s")
is not enabled (and I don't even know why). 2) Stable version still does not
support touch scroll on Linux (only Developer version does). Also do not
understand why.

~~~
vanous
I use FF as primary. Enabled touch and love it. Debian unstable, FF stable.

Enable e10s

MOZ_USE_XINPUT2=1 firefox

dom.w3c_touch_events.enabled

~~~
jacek
I still don't know how to enable e10s. That trick works on Developer version,
not stable.

------
tombrossman
I have a follow-up question for Chrome users (plus any FF devs who may be
browsing HN).

Is Chrome really any safer than Firefox when Firefox is used with the "holy
trinity" of uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, and NoScript? I realize that
comparing a default Chrome install to Firefox with these three extensions
might be perceived as an unfair comparison, but this configuration with FF is
my daily driver for a long time now and I would like to know if there are any
real benefits to returning to a browser from an ad company.

Privacy and security are both important to me, with privacy slightly more so.
If I suffer a security breach, I wipe, restore from backups, and continue. Not
so for a privacy breach.

------
signal11
> For me it's a simple feature in Chrome "tab to search" which frustratingly
> has never been ported into Firefox

Firefox has a similar feature called 'Quick Searches' (look in Firefox's
Bookmarks menu). For example, I have one for Flickr - keyword 'fl', url
'[https://www.flickr.com/search/?q=%s&w=all'](https://www.flickr.com/search/?q=%s&w=all').

So if I type 'fl bridges' in the address bar I go to
[https://www.flickr.com/search/?q=bridges&w=all](https://www.flickr.com/search/?q=bridges&w=all)

~~~
paule89
But it still doesn't work as great as in Chrome. Ok. Sometimes even in Chrome
it doesn't work perfect, but the ease of use to just search for a youtube
video ist great. Also the mobile browser worked better 2 years ago. Now i
haven't tested it lately.

------
webwanderings
I've been saying this for a while, and I get downvoted for it (I don't care).
Firefox has not been able to keep up with the speed of Chrome. As that joke
goes, '6 minutes Abs' business is better than '7 minutes Abs'. I use a
relatively old machine and I have specific needs to run multiple profiles. I
don't run a whole lot of tabs on any given time, but I have consistently
noticed a difference in the speed between Firefox and Chrome. Chrome just runs
better and faster than Firefox. There's also a wide spread issue of fonts,
look and feel of Firefox. Things just look better on Chrome.

------
qhoc
Few reasons:

1\. Firefox crashes would take down the entire browser, not just specific tab

2\. I often load a lot of tweets in Twitter.com tab (back 4 hours). This
causes Firefox to freeze.

3\. If I refresh the slow tab, I watch memory not being clean and still stay
there for several minutes. Chrome clears memory very quickly.

4\. Why is the space around address bar so large? They are like 15 px top and
bottom. What a waste.

5\. Postman is only Chrome

6\. Chrome Dev Tools is 10x better

I have no complain about CSS rendering issues or anything like that. It's
mainly just performance. Also I tend to use Firefox in the firewall because
the Proxy feature works quite well to connect to my internal lab.

~~~
AstralStorm
1\. Electrolysis has landed, not true anymore.

2\. 3. Yes, memory leaks still exist.

4\. To prevent GUI overlap attacks and fake popups.

5\. I bet there is an equivalent.

6\. Very much no, though they are faster for sure.

------
saberworks
It is my primary browser but there are things I dislike about it. The addition
of things like pocket and the ads on the new tab page drive me crazy but not
crazy enough to switch. The constant removal of features from the preference
panes cause me to have to go looking for addons or about:config options. The
fact that the URL bar changes when I switch tabs but the search box doesn't
makes no sense. I wish wish wish it would allow me to sync everything,
including all my addons and all my addons preferences and all my about:config
changes.

------
doggydog123
1\. Tab 2 search - productivity monster 2\. Auto translate - productivy
monster 3\. FF slow rendering - proven by real tests, not useless benchmarks
4\. Signal app and other apps

but getting these negatives: 1\. super huge memory use and dozens of
processes, easy to completely fill memory of a super workstation 2\. every
keypress and webpage action recorded by big firm 3\. lack of plugins in mobile
version 4\. hated and blocked by companies

------
Luc
> For me it's a simple feature in Chrome "tab to search"

Firefox has 'Add a keyword for this search', which you set up by right-
clicking in a search box.

My keywords are all single letters. 'a sean carroll' does an Amazon search for
that author, for example.

I switched to Chrome recently because some websites I use frequently were
taking 5 to 10s to open in Firefox, but open in about 2s in Chrome.

------
daveloyall
I use FF Nightly as my primary browser at work. Sometimes a site doesn't work
and I'll try it in Chrome instead. 40% of the time, the site doesn't work
there, either, so I try Internet Explorer. By the time I get this far, 75% of
the time, it doesn't work there either and I decide that the website is
broken. Note that some sites I always open in MSIE or Chrome due to prior
experience.

It is worth noting that aside from a few web-based developers' demos, my
browsing on the work PC is notably undemanding: documentation, blogs, email,
messaging, etc. Among the actual web applications I interact with, many
require MSIE... (Intranet!)

At home, I use FF stable on Linux and nothing works, ever. I don't have enough
RAM or CPU power... I also use qupzilla, which performs well enough, but some
rendering fails and I don't feel comfortable using it on wild URLs because ...
well that's off topic.

------
jdlyga
Speed. It takes twice as long as Chrome to start, and it's noticeably slower
when using it to browse web pages.

------
doe88
This summer I had huge stability issues with FF, hard to say if it was related
with my macOS configuration or if it was FF's fault, but matter of the fact is
I couldn't practically use FF anymore, so reluctantly I switched to Chrome for
the first time ever as my primary browser. I used ungoogled-chromium for 6
months, call me old-school but I'm pretty unfazed by the so called advantages
of Chrome, nothing convinced me of its superiority. So, now with this new
version of FF I decided to give it back a shot as my primary browsers to see
if things have improved, so far I don't have any of the previous issues but
only time will tell as I keep the browser open and I add new tabs. Fingers
crossed.

------
nfirvine
I switched to Firefox for a week and wanted to kill myself. Basically,
extensions still aren't forced to behave. As soon as you install a non-e10s
extension, it disables e10s entirely, and then you're in the bad old days of
single-process train wreck.

LastPass specifically seems like it has a bug where it locks the UI
(beachball) while it populates login fields, and if you've got a lot of
passwords (which we do), it'll take several seconds to unlock. Basically
unusable.

I know these sound like LastPass problems, but the browser needs to sandbox
these sketchy things better. I believe that getting from here to there is a
really tough ecosystem problem, and while I appreciate Mozilla's philosophy on
the open web, Chrome is simply better.

~~~
aswan
There is a lot of work underway in this area. The Webextensions project is the
big long-term effort. But regarding e10s, it is true that e10s is an all-or-
nothing proposition. However, as of Firefox 51, extensions do not disable e10s
unless they are explicitly marked as incompatible with e10s. The rollout was
deliberately done slowly in this area to favor stability over getting e10s
enabled quickly, I think that was pretty clearly the right decision.

------
ojiikun
out of frustration about speed, I actually look to switch _away_ from Fx about
once a year, but I always end up sticking with it because the extension and
customization ecosystem just isn't there for any other option.

------
leepowers
Integration with the rest of Google's services. More specifically: when logged
into my Google account Chrome will automatically sync my browser history and
bookmarks between devices. Adding a device is as simple as logging into a
Google Account. No extra plugins to download and install, it just works. And
the browser experience is uniformly good across devices.

In Chrome developer tools I daily use the workspace tools to edit CSS and
other files, and see the updates in real-time in-browser.

I honestly don't know if any of these features are available in Firefox. If
they are I would try it out and consider switching.

~~~
Majestic121
I don't know about the developer tools, but Firefox does have a sync service
integrated with Firefox, exactly like you describe.

Nothing to install, only requires a login (to a firefox account)

------
valbaca
0\. The Killer Feature: My bookmarks are always synced with my Google account.
I've lost many-a-good set of bookmarks because I didn't think to export them.
Bookmarks are typically: a few key ones, a lot of old archived links, and a
few important new ones. Losing those new ones is rough. Never again.

1\. Chrome Dev Tools >> Firebug

2\. minimal interface, especially vertical pixels, which are a premium on
laptop

3\. 1 crashed tab = only 1 crashed tab

4\. tab right-click actions: duplicate, close others, close to the right. I
use these all very often.

I'm sure plugins can replicate each of these, but having these out of the box
keep me on Chrome

------
lousken
Last time I've tried it (like 5versions ago) it was slow on PC, extremly slow
on android, chrome extensions were still not present and it wasn't using more
processes. When those features and performance improvements come I will
consider it but atm chrome serves me well. On android I've whitelisted a few
pages so they can run JS and that's it.

Might be more things that may change my decision but these are my blocker
issues with it.

------
EleventhSun
I use it but it's frustrating that it doesn't support multithreading which is
why it's so slow. Fortunately that will be fixed soon though.

------
corbinpage
'I'm Feeling Lucky' is actually my default search in a Chrome tab. It's super
fast to just type 'espn ncaab scores' in a new tab and get exactly what you
want without any clicks.

For Google results, I preface with a 'g '.

If Firefox had this feature (it may and I haven't found it) I'd probably
switch over. Chrome takes up so much memory on my Mac with its Google Chrome
Helpers, it's a pain.

------
hkmurakami
1) speed.

2) politics. I remembered them announcing that they'd block intrusive ads by
default, then quietly backtracked after advertiser backlash.

I understand their balancing act but this demonstrated to me that they'll
continue to be beholden to those with power and money in the internet world.

Also, there's clearly competing factions inside Mozilla the company and we
have no transparency into their inner workings.

------
dantiberian
It's slow, and has very non-native UI on macOS.

~~~
redxblood
I agree on the UI, it's a shame really, otherwise I don't find it to be slow.

------
ng12
As a web developer, Firefox is the new IE. Random little quirks that never get
fixed.

Personal favorite: 8-year-old bug that causes select options to render
incosistently if there's a transform anywhere in the DOM above it.
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=455164](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=455164)

~~~
x0137294744532
> Personal favorite: 8-year-old bug that causes select options to render
> incosistently if there's a transform anywhere in the DOM above it

How is it critical to apply a transform to a select option? I don't see how
this comes even close to the absurd IE bugs.

~~~
ng12
The second part is the key. The transform can be ANYWHERE in the select's
parent tree and it will still break.

------
bachmeier
I run Firefox when I can, both because of Reader View, and because I want to
click an arrow to show my most frequently viewed sites. I've been using it
since it was Firebird, and I think it may even have been called something else
before that, so this is a matter of habit.

The reasons I don't use Firefox are because I'm using a Chromebook, an Android
device, or an iPad.

------
mherrmann
I prefer Chrome's speed, minimal UI, and truly automatic updates (as in
they're applied without ever even prompting me).

------
dlbucci
I use browser sync in a project. The site reloads in a few seconds in multi-
process browsers, but takes about 40 seconds in Firefox (and shuts down the
browser in the process). E10s hasn't helped much yet, so I don't think I can
go back until perf improves. I did love everything else about it, and I still
check it out every now and then.

------
Neil44
I use it, it's just fine. Doesn't feel like there's a lot to choose between it
and chrome. I actually struggle to believe that people can easily tell small
benchmark level speed differences between browsers reliably in real world use.
There's just too many factors and too little repeatability.

------
Rockvole
There is only 1 reason I stopped using Firefox completely. I cannot search
with Google in the search bar. (This is in Linux Mint). I use search a lot and
basically all the search engines on offer are sub-par. I use Chromium and
Opera also, and have them all running, but I wont touch Firefox.

~~~
jungletek
>I cannot search with Google in the search bar. (This is in Linux Mint)

It's certainly possible, it's one of the first tweaks I make on a fresh
install. You may have to add a search provider, or change the default, but
it's quite easy.

The only thing I can think of is that the bundled FF is old or is a fork that
for some reason is not including that ability to do so in your case... I tend
to use nightly whenever possible, so I don't remember what the default is or
how old it is.

------
mariusc23
I use Firefox for everything except DevTools. Mostly because they are slow.

Also I'm not a fan of how objects/arrays are handled in the console. It feels
unnatural to click on an object and move my eyes to the right side of the
console to drill down into properties.

I love the being able to find any website

------
charlieegan3
I find that the syncing of settings within addons is lacking. The sync of
firefox's own settings also seems to miss some things (menu layout for
example).

I'd also like some kind of profile implementation like Chrome has.

I use firefox as my main browser on my personal laptop, just not on my phone
or at work.

------
tscs37
1\. UI (More UI overhead than Chrome) 2\. Speed (Noticeably slow than Chrome)
3\. UX (Moving tabs out of the window looks and is bad) 4\. Extensions
(Missing some essential stuff I use) 5\. Breaks some Website (One of my
regular websites doesn't work correctly in Firefox)

------
theandrewbailey
I never stopped using Firefox since I started using it the first time (around
2004). It's quite fast and pleasant with NoScript.

Chrome is my primary browser "at work", and I use it at home for video
(Youtube, Twitch, etc.), and for any guests I have over.

------
jlmansilla
Nothing, in waterfox flavor, it is my default browser since a lot. Sync,
extensions, bookmarks and Saved for later, amazing restore session feature.
Usually I keep open about 600+ tabs in two Firefox Windows (core I3, win7, 8
GB RAM) and no problem.

------
divbit
Can't login to comment here. It may be one the following extensions 'pocket',
'ublock origin' or 'pushbullet'. That said, I do switch back and forth between
firefox and edge as default browser, depending on activity.

~~~
divbit
It was a bad cookie I think.

------
skykooler
While watching a Youtube video on OSX, when I hit the fullscreen button in
Firefox the video takes about ten seconds to go fullscreen. It only takes
three seconds in Chrome. (And <1s in Safari, but Safari is missing some of the
extensions I use.)

------
sudshekhar
I like the chrome debugging tools a lot. I do try to use firefox+DDG but
everytime I am doing some dev work, I switch to chrome.

Maybe someday I will try and understand the firefox development+debugging
system and then, FF will become my primary browser.

------
cauterized
I use it as a primary browser, but there are a few web apps on which it's so
uselessly slow or chews so much CPU (consistently 90-100%) that the only
viable option is to run them on another browser. Shame.

------
marak830
Auto translate. I live in Japan, but my reading ability isn't that good. So I
have to rely a lot on translating by the browser.

I use FF primarily on my smart phone, just chrome when I need to translate.

------
NoCanDo
How fast Chromium renders... I click a link and Chromium starts displaying
parts of the page and rendering, while FF shows me a blank page until
everything is rendered.

------
imartin2k
I do use it as primary browser, for ideological & moral reasons :)

------
masterleep
Occasionally Firefox has had terrible performance problems on macOS.

~~~
tashoecraft
This, the debugger is so extremely slow compared to chrome that it's unusable
for me. It chews through ram, even with all plugins disabled on a clean build.

I've tried multiple times to switch, but the performance problems were just so
bad I had to stop.

This was on a 2015 mbp, 10.11.6, 16gb ram.

------
tsuyoshicho
Old slow down with addons.

Current progressive process struct renewal.

# after renewal : retry primary browser planned :)

------
mgreenly
Before I can choose to use it I have to install it and that's significantly
less convenient than it is with Chrome.

If I go to Chrome's download page it offers up a 64 bit .deb file. Perfect and
I happen to know it keeps it's self up to date.

If I go to Firefox's download page it offers up *.tar.bz2 file. I have no idea
if that file is a source package that needs to be built or a binary blob for
what architecture?

So, since I'm too lazy to dig deeper Firefox lost out before I even tried it.

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fillskills
Security. Or the perception of it being less secure than Chrome. Not sure how
correct the perception is.

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topbanana
I like the flatter look and feel of Chrome, and appreciate its speed too.

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BusySkillFool
Personally, I find it a bit ugly - shallow I know, but the honest truth.

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richardboegli
Pale Moon is a superior product.

They've frozen the UI before Australis and had a 64 bit build on Windows long
before Firefox.

They will continue to keep XUL in the future once Firefox abandons it for
WebExtensions.

Tree Style tabs is the ONLY way to browse ;)

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brotherjerky
I use a Chromebook, can't run Firefox easily.

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jensnockert
Nothing, I use Firefox as my main browser.

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lavay
speed

