
Give Firefox a chance - dtroode
https://dev.to/dtroode/why-you-need-to-give-firefox-a-chance-5g5a
======
Lazare
I switched to Chrome from Firefox years ago because Chrome has a better UX
(faster, snappier, cleaner UI). A couple years ago I tried to switch back to
Firefox (right after the Quantum project landed, and Firefox was meant to be a
lot faster), but found FF to _still_ be bloated, slow, and painful to use.

A couple weeks ago I made _another_ try to switch back to FF, and I have found
the experience to be very pleasant this time; desktop FF on both Windows and
MacOS are, for me, better than Chrome. I recommend others give Firefox a try.

(There are a few reasons why you might want to: Privacy, fighting mono-
culture, recent decisions by Google to neuter ad blocking addons, a general
aversion to the power of the largest tech companies, just chasing the latest
and fastest browser, a fondness for novelty or contrarianism. Some of those
reasons may resonate; others may not, but if any of them do, give it a shot!)

~~~
edraferi
I had the same experience. Switched to Chrome from Firefox years ago, tried
and was disappointed by the initial Quantum release, tried Firefox again with
the “Chrome is killing uBlock Origin” announcement, very pleased this time.

My main gripe with Firefox at the moment is Sync. It just doesn’t sync
everything you need. My Firefox profile is highly customized, with a lot of
extensions that all have their own complex config. Sync will keep the actual
extensions synced, but not their settings. You have to rely on manual
import/export features provided by the extensions themselves. Some first party
extensions (eg Containers) don’t even give you that option.

You can get some of that by syncing your profile folder directly, but it’s
very fragile. It hasn’t played nice with the generic folder syncing tools I’ve
tried.

I think this is painful because Firefox really encourages customization, and
it’s really useful! I just don’t want to have to keep track of that
customization on every device. I trust Firefox Sync’s security model and want
to do more with it.

~~~
TheArcane
Oh I absolutely detested this as well.

Containers is one of my favourite add-ons, and I have it highly customized.
But I have to set it up everytime from scratch on a different computer -
there's no sync even though Containers is from Mozilla themselves!

~~~
edraferi
Edit: replied to wrong comment

Yeah this is exactly the problem.

~~~
TheArcane
I think you meant to reply to a different comment.

I was lamenting the lack of sync support for the Multi-account Containers add-
on.

------
orpheline
I'm apparently one of those rare people who never switched off Firefox - it's
been my default browser on Mac and Linux for years. Open source, good plugin
ecosystem, and does everything I need (not a web developer, so the dev tools
were never a strong selling point for me).

I've used Chrome here and there through the years, but the more invasive
Google became about data collection, the less inclined I've been to use their
tools. The latest moves to block ad blockers, coupled with nearly every other
browser using their engine, had only reinforced my decision to stay with
Firefox.

Diversity makes for a healthier ecosystem.

~~~
dontbenebby
I'm the same way. I tried Chrome when it was new but at the time it didn't
have a NoScript equivalent so I went back to FF.

~~~
vntok
Chrome has had NoScript equivalents for a while, you should try it again!

~~~
frenchy
I suspect for most people who hadn't switched already, that ship has already
sailed.

Chrome had something of an edge over Firefox for a while with a more
responsive UI, but since Firefox Quantum it hasn't really had anything besides
some creepy Google integrations.

Edit: Chromium is also easier to embed, but that doesn't really matter for the
purposes of chosing a browser.

~~~
Qub3d
Its strange, for me. I remember getting super pumped about Chromium when it
went live in '09\. Then, somewhere along the line, I felt like a boiled frog.

Honestly, a big change for me was symbolically realized by The logo change:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome#/media/File:Chro...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome#/media/File:Chrome_Logo.svg)

It went from this space-age, nerdy little project to a cleaned up design that
signified its shift to a position as a core Google product.

~~~
epiphanitus
Does Chromium have the same privacy issues as Chrome does?

~~~
aasasd
Some of them, see [https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-
chromium](https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium) for a patched
version.

For me, Google's hold also manifested as complete absence of support for H.264
on Mac, because calling the Cisco's freely available openh264 is ‘too slow.’
In Linux, distro maintainers patch in the support for openh264.

------
petepete
I switched back to Firefox from Chrome earlier this year, and the experience
has been very positive.

It performs well, feels snappy, the dev tools are on par with Chrome's and
everything feels right.

The only negatives are that container tabs are still taking a bit of getting
used to (why can't I have a 'Work' window in which all the new tabs are 'Work'
tabs by default?) and the initial migration of passwords was a bit of a pain.

However, I'm glad to be back.

~~~
bad_user
For passwords the browser's built in management is inferior to password
managers.

I use 1Password (most polished) and there's also Bitwarden (hosted, but open
source) and others. And I use my password manager every day, so if there's a
cost associated, it's worth it.

~~~
nkozyra
> For passwords the browser's built in management is inferior to password
> managers.

Can you expound? After years of using various pw managers I found it being
embedded in the browser very useful.

~~~
jjoonathan
Having your passwords quickly available on every computer, every phone, every
OS, and every browser is great. Browser-plugin + app password managers do all
4, while password managers provided by the OS or browser typically fail at one
of those. They fail hard, too, by making it difficult to manually extract
passwords when you need to. They also tend to lack features like password
generation, note storage, etc. It's a completely different experience, really.

~~~
arianvanp
Euhm the firefox password manager syncs between devices and even has a
standalone app [https://lockwise.firefox.com/](https://lockwise.firefox.com/)

Edit: Though Lockwise is relatively new, and currently opt in. And misses
features like importing passwords bulk from other password managers

~~~
Tomte
And — at least on iOS — is glacially slow. Startup times of twenty seconds
weren't the rule, but not uncommon, when I tried Lockwise last week. Even at
the best of times startup took five seconds at least.

------
signal11
If anyone from the Firefox team is reading this: containers are a great idea
(I love them), it’s just that currently they’re too much work. Even on AMO,
there’s now a bunch of site-specific container addons (Facebook container,
Twitter container, Google container, etc) which clearly isn’t scalable.

A little bit of UX work is clearly needed to make them more mainstream and a
first-class feature in Firefox.

~~~
edraferi
Have you tried the Temporary Containers[0] add-on? It has an “Automatic Mode”
that makes links open into fresh containers by default. Then you can create
rules to dial that back as needed for usability.

I use this in concert with the Multi-Account Containers[1] Add-on. I create
names containers for things where I need persistence (“work” “personal”
“LinkedIn”) and then everything else is isolated by default.

The main challenges are:

1) I have complex rules defining a whitelist on Temporary Containers. I have
to sync this manually with setting import/export because Firefox Sync doesn’t
handle this for you

2) Multi-Account Containers doesn’t expose its settings AT ALL, so I’m
constantly hitting unnecessary “always open site.com in Personal container?”
modals.

[0] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-
con...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-containers/)

[1] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-
account...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-
containers/)

~~~
darkpuma
Temporary Containers is almost perfect, except when you create a new tab it
takes a split second for that tab to be assigned a new temporary container.
For that split moment, if you're typing in an address whatever you've typed in
so far will be erased when the new tab is switched to the temporary container.
On my underpowered machine, this usually means one or two keys are dropped,
such that if i was typing in "google" _immediately_ after creating a new tab,
the effect is as if I typed "ogle".

Perhaps on faster hardware, the switch to the temporary container happens
faster than you can begin typing.

~~~
edraferi
Interesting. I haven’t noticed any performance impact. I’m using it on fairly
beefy general-purpose machines though.

Maybe you could work around this by using separate search and address bars?
Then you can search before tab and container creation happens. Not gonna help
for standard direct navigation though.

~~~
darkpuma
It most often bites me when I'm in a new tab and I'm trying to complete a site
URL from history. AFAIK there is no other clean way to open a new tab of a
site you've been to before. Maybe if the history sidebar were useful, but
using that is a PITA for me because I'm already using the Tree Style Tabs
sidebar (which is really a feature that should be implemented in firefox
itself..)

------
idoubtit
Not much content in this article. A single benchmark which shows nothing of
real-life cases. Two minor technical features, one of them already in Chrome
beta. Lastly, an appeal to fight Chrome's monopole. Surprisingly, not a word
about privacy.

I do give Firefox a chance, but it gets tiring.

Many years ago, I dropped Firefox's ancestor for Opera 6. The UI and the
features were miles ahead (e.g. Mozilla had no tabs). Yet I wanted to support
free software so, once in a while, I tried to use Mozilla/Firefox again, but
so many features where lacking, and the reactivity was really bad. When Opera
dropped their engine and UI to become a new Chromium derivative, I switched to
Firefox. I tried to get used to it, but for the past year my main desktop
browser has been Vivaldi, a Chromium derivative.

I still use Firefox, but I'm getting more and more irritated against it. I had
to search the web in order to change the tile of empty tabs (no buttons, no
context menu, only drag-n-drop from bookmarks). Who designed such an
unguessable interface?

I can't stand horizontal tabs in my brower. The Tree Style Tab extension was a
strong point of pre-quantum FF, though its CPU usage was noticeable.
Unfortunately, it's been a pain since I upgraded to Quantum, with many bugs
and slowness.

Another example: my last FF ESR upgrade introduced a calamitous rewrite of the
download interface. It's inconsistent, error-prone and ridden with several
bugs. For weeks, I duplicated many downloads because the notification is
absurdly small and quick. Now I've learned to click on the FF icon to check if
the download started.

A last example: this morning, I selected 5 finished downloads and removed
them. No reaction for 2 seconds, so I pressed the key again, just as the
suppression begin, in slow motion. It took FF 3 seconds to remove 6 entries
from the log.

With uBlock against tracking, DDG+Qwant for search, and a custom cookie
handler (no third-party, white-list for those that persist after a tab
closes), I don't think FF has anything to offer me on privacy. So the only
reasons that keep me interested in Firefox are Free Software and Web
diversity. I'm afraid these moral incentives don't weight much against many
practical reasons.

~~~
lkbm
> I still use Firefox, but I'm getting more and more irritated against it. I
> had to search the web in order to change the tile of empty tabs (no buttons,
> no context menu, only drag-n-drop from bookmarks). Who designed such an
> unguessable interface?

Whenever I hear people complain about the settings being impossible to figure
out, I always open them up and try.

So I opened settings, which has a search input at the top, and search "new
tab".

It has an option to choose "Firefox Home (Default)" or "Blank page" for new
tabs, in the section titled "New Windows and Tabs". (With windows, you can
choose "Custom URLs" as well).

But you don't want blank. Hmmm. So I open a new tab. Every section has a
dropdown menu with a "Remove Section" option (it also has "Manage Settings"
links that takes me to the preference page I was on initially.)

Drag-and-drop from bookmarks, though, is stumping me. For what it's worth,
it's also stumping me in Chrome. I don't think I've ever tried Vivaldi.

For the most part, basic customization seems intuitive and straightforward. If
there is a way to customize by dragging your bookmarks onto the page, though,
it isn't intuitive and straightforward. Not sure if that should fall under
edge-case customizations (which I expect to be hidden).

It is annoying when things I consider obviously the correct design are treated
as obscure things few would want, but I recognize that some of them truly are.

EDIT: I will say, though, that it seems really strange that "New window" has a
custom URL option, but new tab doesn't. I guess they're concerned about people
setting slow new tab URLs and then being frustrated.

~~~
ken
I tried Firefox here just now to see if it's gotten any better since I last
tried.

I open the preferences window. Well, not quite. Instead of a preferences
_window_ like every other application I've ever used, it's some sort of
webpage which opens in a new tab in the same window as the webpage I'm
browsing. The controls are all completely custom, and the layout looks nothing
like any preferences window I've seen since Netscape.

Also, the Firefox _UI_ doesn't use the same language as the rest of the OS
(which is English), or even the webpage content displayed by Firefox (also
English). It's all displayed in the language I tried to learn last year, for
some reason.

In the search box at top, typing "language" finds nothing, and typing the word
for language in the language I'm seeing shows a fancy control with "English
(United States)" at the top. There's nothing I see which would indicate why
the UI is not English. I google for "how to change firefox ui language", and
all the pages I find say to set it here, and restart.

Thus ends another adventure in attempting to use Firefox, and it ends the same
way all my adventures do: nothing is standard, everything is custom, and so it
doesn't work right. This time, I didn't even get far enough along to complain
that all the keyboard shortcuts are broken.

Dear Mozilla: for Firefox to win me back, it has to be a good web browser.
Stop trying to be an operating system. I already have one of those. "Look/act
like every other application" is the correct answer in every case.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
> Well, not quite. Instead of a preferences window like every other
> application I've ever used, it's some sort of webpage which opens in a new
> tab in the same window as the webpage I'm browsing.

Well, I can think of one other program that puts its settings in a web page
and a tab: Chrome. Hope you're not using that...

------
ancientgallery
The adblock-related thing pushed me to Firefox, and I've been using it for
about a month.

The only problems I have are regarding PDF files:

1) Dark mode (via dark reader) won't work on PDFs.

2) The Print-to-file (Ctrl + P) save location defaults to "~/mozilla.pdf" and
there seems to be no option in preferences to change this default (titles
often are multi-word long and copy pasting is a huge pain. Chrome just picks
up the title of the webpage and the default downloads directory as the
location, which IMO is the sensible thing to do.)

In my experience, Chrome is really better at handling PDFs (even better than
the native reader, Okular, in terms of fine-grained zooming, dark
theming(again via the Dark Reader extension.)) and I'm mulling over switching
back, because I use pdfs a lot. (As for other stuff though, like lagginess, I
don't find any noticeable difference.)

~~~
nashashmi
I did the same. Pdfs are probably the easiest thing to switch. If you download
a pdf reader, you can switch PDF renderer easily. Firefox supports browser
plug in viewers where Chrome does not.

And Firefox was the first browser to use js to render PDF. A complete miracle
really.

~~~
tapland
We generated a few PDFs at work last week which break in Firefox default
viewwe, but that we can't reproduce anywhere else =/

~~~
rebelwebmaster
If it's not something sensitive, try filing a bug and attaching the PDF to it?

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Firefox&c...](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Firefox&component=PDF%20Viewer)

~~~
phonon
Better to go upstream

[https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/issues](https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/issues)

------
aduitsis
Even as we are headed for a monoculture where the only existing browser will
be for all intents and purposes controlled by one or more very big companies,
one can read various complaints on HN regarding Firefox battery usage, font
rendering, development facilities, etc.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, and of course people have the right to
complain about whatever they wish.

But, can we please all of us stop pretending that we care about freedom,
privacy, etc? Because if we did care, we'd put our proverbial money where our
mouths are and try to cope with these defects, just to make sure that a higher
purpose is served.

(Genuinely don't want to offend anyone nor do I dismiss anyone's problems with
Firefox, especially on macosx)

~~~
ben509
I think a person pursuing a privacy agenda would still want to raise those
other complaints, though. The reason is that while a technically inclined
person probably has the means to cope with them, the point of a privacy agenda
is broader: it wants to make privacy something everyone does and expects, to
hit a critical mass. And technical barriers to adoption of privacy-enhancing
technology are the obvious obstacles.

> Genuinely don't want to offend anyone

I think you worded it just fine. Since there's always room for improvement,
the "let's stop pretending we care" might be recast as, "what we're saying
doesn't line up with what we're doing," which is a bit more factual and avoids
claims on anyone's inner motivations.

~~~
aduitsis
That's what I mean, thank you. Phrasing it like "what we're saying doesn't
line up with what we're doing" is a better way to express it.

------
needle0
Vertical. Tabs. For my usecase, nuff said. Chrome developers WONTFIXed
requests for this a long time ago, so keep using Firefox I will (that and
doing my part to preserve web engine diversity).

Additionally, I've begun trying out Brave/Vivaldi/Opera to see if I can
uninstall Chrome from my system entirely; They all run Blink, so I assume I
can open the occasional compatibility-issue pages on those.

~~~
ramraj07
What plugin allows this feature in Firefox now?

~~~
paulryanrogers
Tree Style Tabs is a popular one. Though none can take away the Tabs in title
bar without manually installed CSS hacks.

~~~
dredmorbius

        $ cat userChrome.css 
        /* Mozilla chrome (UI) styling */
    
        /* Hide tabs bar
         *
         * Fri Nov 17 12:23:47 CST 2017
         * https://superuser.com/questions/1268732/how-to-hide-tab-bar-tabstrip-in-firefox-57-quantum
         * https://www.ghacks.net/2017/09/27/tree-style-tab-is-a-webextension-now/
         */
    
        #tabbrowser-tabs { visibility: collapse !important; }

~~~
Aelius
Rather than simply disabling the tabs, I find it useful to conditionally
disable them:

``` #main-window:not([customizing]):not([tabsintitlebar="true"]) #toolbar-
menubar[inactive="true"] + #TabsToolbar { visibility: collapse !important; }
```

This snippet shows tabs when in "customize" mode, so you can access elements
from addons placed on the tab bar by default. It also shows tabs when the
menubar is showing: tap alt to peek, enable menubar to have vanilla access to
tabs again. Finally, if you use the setting "tabs in titlebar", tabs are not
disabled.

Doing it this way enforces sensible behavior and gives you escape hatches that
don't require editing CSS and restarting the browser.

~~~
dngray
HN doesn't do markdown, to get code text indent by 4 spaces.

My userChrome.css looks like this [https://github.com/dngray/ghacks-
user.js/tree/fx-desktop#use...](https://github.com/dngray/ghacks-
user.js/tree/fx-desktop#userchrome-options)

    
    
        @namespace url("http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul");
    
        /* Remove default items from the urlbar-container */
        #back-button,
        #forward-button,
        #stop-reload-button,
        #reload-button,
        #customizableui-special-spring1,
        #home-button,
        #customizableui-special-spring2,
        #library-button,
        #sidebar-button {
            display:none;
        }
    
        /* Disable Tab toolbar for Tree Style Tab */
        #tabbrowser-tabs {
            visibility: collapse !important;
        }
    
        #sidebar-header {
            display: none;
        }
    

I use the hotkeys or buttons on my mouse so I removed all the buttons from the
toolbar [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/keyboard-shortcuts-
perf...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/keyboard-shortcuts-perform-
firefox-tasks-quickly#w_navigation)

------
vehemenz
I've given Firefox multiple chances, but we've had no progress with the MacOS
performance issues for years. Also, no pinch-to-zoom? 2007 called, and it
wants its browser back.

~~~
BozeWolf
Energy usage on MacOS is another problem, especially compared to safari.

I am using safari for a while now, but every now and then you just have to
admit chrome does some things much better, like tab management and the dev
tools are more user friendly. Which, i realize, is the case for firefox btw.
Ff tab management and dev tools are quite nice.

~~~
n1000
Yes, all those Macbook Pros that operate at the limits of their thermal system
start venting like crazy when using Firefox. I prefer it so much more over all
other browsers, but this drove me to using Safari almost all the time.

------
bin0
Proud firefox convert. I used chrome for quite a number of years, but their
quantum update convinced me to move (though I've seen other posts mentioning
it was seriously buggy at first, I didn't switch right away). As others have
mentioned, containers are a bit of a killer app. Plus, firefox is going to
keep ad-blocker support. It's not perfect, and chrome is probably more stable.
I've gotten memory leaks, crashes (mostly on mobile), and one weird resize
issue on i3. However, none of them are critical, and I'm willing to put up
with them to avoid google's cancerous garbage.

Also, I never thought I'd say this, but good on Apple for maintaining webkit.
It's a darn good engine, and I'm happy to have a third player. Plus, it's
easier to wrap it with your own custom browser (see surf).

There's one piece of feedback; I wish people could do with firefox what they
do with chrome. Maybe then the next cool browser could be based on firefox.

~~~
godelski
I'm in that boat. I use FF but I do face weird bugs. I also realize I'm on
Linux. Weird bugs: things that use Google fonts sometimes make the text white
on a white search or form box. Anytime I get a Google survey this happens or
like when using tends. But not in the Google search bar. Send tabs I love but
for some reason I can't send to my Pixel 2. Though I can send from it. Another
is that I work in graphics and if I hit my GPU hard then FF will crash. It
also won't recovery after the program releases GPU allocation.

These are super minor problems though. I don't need to see what I'm typing so
I don't need it and it happens only a few times a month. I would like to send
stuff to my phone but more often I'm sending the other direction. Battery
life? Who isn't almost always plugged into their charger.

------
iamdamian
I want to move on from Chrome, and Firefox's Containers have made Firefox an
easy decision for me. But I am a huge fan of Chrome's aesthetic and don't want
to give that up for the sake of privacy.

I am not one to do extensive tweaking to my machine, but this is important to
me, so I spent an hour experimenting. And I have to say, I am pretty
satisfied. Even though it isn't straightforward, Firefox actually can look
nice and uncluttered.

If you're like me and want both privacy and aesthetics, here are some
pointers:

    
    
      - Switch to the light theme.
      - Hide everything you can in the address/nav bar by clicking through the UI. Some settings are obscure, but you can get rid of a lot.
      - Hide even more using userChrome.css [0], including the outdated blue bar at the top of an active tab.
    

My userChrome.css looks like this and works like a charm:
[https://gist.github.com/iamdamian/9efc271208bfb5ca52dc51572b...](https://gist.github.com/iamdamian/9efc271208bfb5ca52dc51572b57ec4f)

Now we just need Mozilla to come up with a more modern-looking logo.

[0]: [https://www.userchrome.org/](https://www.userchrome.org/)

~~~
mevile
I tried your changes. Your userChrome.css breaks containers though, as it
hides the container color from the tabs. Your changes also breaks all the
privacy controls you can get from Firefox on a per site basis. I think if
someone tried your css and chose very strict privacy options they're not going
to have any way to see that privacy control options may have broken a page.
Those things in the address bar are vital.

I highly recommend people to not use this css unless they feel comfortable
editing it to unbreak things and don't want any of the per site options. This
UI change reduces the usability of Firefox to the point I would consider it
broken.

If you don't like the container colors in the tabs, you can edit them to be
colors you prefer.

~~~
iamdamian
You’re right that it removes the color bars, so I’ve commented out that line
as optional. But as far as I know, this CSS doesn't hide any site-specific
privacy-related controls. Which ones are you referring to?

Note on the color bars: I'd rather not have extra noise in the tabs because I
determine which container I’m in through the address bar and automated domain
containers. Of course, for someone who wants an overview of how many tabs are
in each container, the color bars might be useful. It's a good point that this
might be unexpected, even though it's noted in the CSS. So I've commented out
that line and will let people enable it themselves.

~~~
mevile
I'm sorry I was mistaken on the per-site privacy controls being removed. I
can't edit the comment to fix my mistake. The controls didn't appear on a page
that I thought it would, but I found another and with your css it was still
there. My mistake.

------
ZuLuuuuuu
99% of "you should switch to Firefox" articles focus on the speed of the
browser. I used Firefox since it was beta till Edge came out when everyone
around me was asking "why are you not using Chrome?", and the thing is, I
never had much problem with the speed or the crashes, so I never felt the need
to switch to Chrome. Until WP died and I bought an Android phone. Then I
switched to Chrome so that I get perfect synchronization of my passwords,
contacts, locations etc.

I think the reason why majority of people are using Chrome and Safari is not
because of speed, it is because of synchronization, because of integration of
ecosystem. IMO, if Mozilla provided a suit of paid services with built-in
privacy like mail, contacts, maps, they might have a better chance that people
would also use Firefox as their browser. Nowadays, Microsoft follows that
approach; they provide Android launcher, Edge browser, mail, and pretty much
every other service you need. I am actually considering to give Microsoft
ecosystem on Android a try, at least their main income is not selling your
data. But it would be even better if Mozilla launched a similar suite of
services.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
> I think the reason why majority of people are using Chrome and Safari is not
> because of speed, it is because of synchronization,

I think most people use Chrome simply because they switched once and never
looked back, especially when “lol other browsers use Chrome” is pretty much a
meme.

Firefox Sync is great and I don't think it's lacking some key feature Google
offers.

~~~
ZuLuuuuuu
Firefox Sync does not have synchronization of contacts, calendar or map
locations.

~~~
yoasif_
There is a contact manager and calendar in Chrome? When did Chrome become a
PIM?

~~~
ZuLuuuuuu
My original post is about Mozilla creating a suite of services so that people
switch to Mozilla ecosystem which would, IMO, increase the usage of Firefox as
well. Chrome itself does not have contact manager or calendar but Google
ecosystem has.

------
nottorp
Interesting that the adblock thing is finally nudging people away from Chrome.
I've found it disrespectful of its users long ago.

The last straw for me was when it started to prevent my computer from sleeping
because some unspecified page had active WebRTC connections. There is no
option to disable WebRTC in Chrome.

I don't understand: why do they _dare_ prevent _my_ system from sleeping just
because some page is doing some p2p stuff in the background? Why would a page
even be allowed to do p2p stuff in the background?

Anyway, these days i use Safari (with its nice battery related optimizations)
as my main browser with Firefox as a backup. Not missing Chrome in the least.

Edit: I just noticed i had a Chrome instance (with no pages) open and pressed
cmd+Q to close it... and it told me "hold cmd q to quit. What the hell Google?
Why do you think you're so special?

~~~
hombre_fatal
Safari is so good performance-wise on OSX that Firefox/Chrome feel like a
mess. One way to perceive this is if you use something like iStat Menus to
show your CPU usage in the global status bar. Safari barely affects the meter
yet Firefox/Chrome put up some impressive numbers just idling.

~~~
tssva
I noticed that my password vault app now has a Safari plugin available, so I
conducted my annual attempt to switch from Safari to Chrome. It lasted 3 days.
I switched back an hour ago. The major reason was poor performance.
Specifically my browsing habits have me moving forward and back between pages
often. Whenever I went back to a previous page Safari would pause for a few
seconds before allowing me to interact with the page. Don't know if this was
caused by Safari itself, the ad blocker plugin I installed or the password
vault plugin but it was there and annoying.

------
UglyToad
I've long regarded the calls to switch to Firefox as tinfoil-hatted crankery
but Chrome's behaviour with respect to ad-blocking caused me to finally make
the switch. At the time I didn't use ad-blocking at all and didn't have any
plans on it but I think this represented unacceptable overreach by Google so I
switched to Firefox (and DDG for search).

I still miss bits of Chrome, the Chrome UX is still better, especially
suggestions for sites you've already visited in the omni-bar and FF's 'Top
Sites' logic seems a bit screwy, it includes pages I've visited once and
leaves out pages I use every couple of hours but I think it's incumbent upon
people to send a message to Google that their behaviour as a virtual monopoly
is unacceptable by switching to a non-Chrome browser.

(I also started using an ad-blocker once I switched to Firefox, wow the web is
a lot better without adverts!)

~~~
tssva
What Chrome behaviour regarding ad-blocking caused you to make the switch?
Installing an ad-blocker with Chrome is just as easy as installing one with
FF.

~~~
UglyToad
I believe they've u-turned on it now but I was thinking of this
[https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2019/...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2019/01/22/google_chrome_browser_ad_content_block_change/)

(from Google AMP because I'm on mobile and haven't made the switch on mobile
yet)

As I say I'm not particularly concerned personally about not being able to use
ad-blocking but it points to an abuse of monopoly power.

~~~
tssva
It points to news sources trying to get clicks using inflammatory headlines.
Google has never blocked ad-blockers or announced that they were going to.
They announced API changes which will require ad-blockers to change the manner
in which they are implemented. What they recently announced is an increase in
the number of blocking rules allowed under the new api which some want to call
a u-turn by Google. Except Google announced earlier that the preliminary
limits were likely to be increased later after performance testing, so what
Google has actually recently announced is just in line with their earlier
announcement. Of course that take on it doesn't follow the pitchfork mentality
on HN regarding Google nor make for clickbait headlines.

------
igetspam
I use FF as my daily driver. I am forcing myself to do it because I value
privacy. Unfortunately FF doesn't make it easy. Chrome may be a memory hog but
FF gets OOM killed multiple times a day and every night. I'm not a light user
but I'm also not a tab junky. The big consumers are the 3-5 gmail tabs and the
3+ slack tabs. Other than that, it's normal browsing. Chrome ate all my memory
but FF just dies.

~~~
krzyk
Are you using any addons that might cause that mem usage?

I am a tab junky (regularly > 200+ tabs, sometimes 1000+) and Firefox never
died, and it is used on a laptop that has also IntelliJ + java apps which use
quite a big chunk of memory.

You might consider reducing number of processes used by Firefox, I set it to 3
even when I have 4 cores available, it helps reduce memory usage.

Linux with 16GB of RAM.

~~~
blueberry_47
What's the use case for 1000+ tabs? Just curious.

~~~
krzyk
It's like temporary bookmark really - something that I want to read today.

I just don't close tabs that often as I should, I forget I wanted to read or I
get distracted etc.

And I don't force close tabs when closing the browser.

------
hailhash
I am one of those developers who never switched from Firefox. Early days IE
was the market leader and now it’s Chrome. Firefox seems to always the
underdog. If you haven’t tried Firefox in the last year, give it a try and see
for yourself.

To me Chrome is IE+Flash+PC Bloatware+Spyware.

Just check your Task Scheduler on windows and see for yourself.

------
CryptoBanker
I switched back to Chrome from Firefox. FF was slow, bloated, used all my
RAM,no add on support (even for those add-ons who had an an FF product)

Mobile sites, especially HN just don't work properly on HF. The simple act of
collapsing posts often seems to overwhelm the browser on my Pixel.

Not to mention there's this bug where videos create notifications on FF
Android, and these notifications keep your phone alive from the background,
burning through an entire battery in 30 minutes.

OH, there's also the issue where mobile videos don't play in window, instead
opening a new window to play... Highly annoying

Oh, and that thing where FF videos often don't show a bar for your time if the
video is playing vertically

And maybe this is just my brain, but FF doesn't seem to detect the back button
too well, necessitating many double clicks

Oh and the fact that it can't open Google maps links straight from the
browser, yuu have to right click

So yeah, I've tried it and it's just not as good, not even close TBH

~~~
snazz
I can see most of your points as anecdotal (of course someone will come around
with a contrasting anecdote, but neither means anything), except for

> no add on support (even for those add-ons who had an an FF product)

Assuming we’re talking about Android here, what do you mean by this? Mobile
Chrome has no extensions, whereas Firefox supports the full suite of desktop
addons. I can use uMatrix and even developer extensions on my phone with
Firefox.

Also, I think the point of the “videos creating notifications” thing is so
that you can continue listening to the audio after turning off your phone,
like on iOS and iPadOS. Apple got the battery thing better in general. Maybe
Firefox should stop playing videos in the background after a certain period
without user intervention?

Some of the other things can be chalked up to bugs (it would be nice of you to
submit something to their Bugzilla!), while some I have never seen myself
(especially the videos thing... for me they’ve always played in window, with
the bottom UI, correctly; it could be a problem with your favorite video
site?)

~~~
CryptoBanker
The video notification thing is for the purpose you mention, however, it
doesn't seem to detect the tab closing and there is no way to force it to
other than restarting the phone

~~~
snazz
That does sound like a bug then. I’m sorry I doubted its validity, but I’m
still impressed that one person can run into so many deal-breakers and others
have never had any trouble at all.

------
coffekaesque
If only they could help us, Firefox supporters, by stopping with the stupid
market campaigns that only damages the brand. And the amount of nagging
features are becoming too much. Even with my huge user.js it's like every
couple of updates I have to disable something. Last week was the extensions
recommendations inside about:addons, and I already had disabled "Recommend
extensions when I'm browsing". The other was an icon (Firefox Sync?) added to
every single browser install I manage and a tab asking me to login. How about
a do-not-nag-me flag?

------
bradleyjg
I switched several months ago from Chrome to Firefox (don't remember exactly
when, think it was when the articles about logging into gmail would turn on
sync came out).

Unlike many here I'm not a browser power user--few to no plugins, no sync, and
no customization. I'm not a web developer, so I rarely use the dev tools.

It's fine. The only annoying thing is that there are a few webpages here and
there that just don't work. Reminds me of when IE was dominant and sometimes
you had to use it to got to a bank's website.

~~~
derefr
I wonder if Firefox (or a living fork thereof) could be built with a “Chromium
compatibility mode” where it boots up a Chromium-based renderer for a known
blacklist of pages. Sort of like Edge with its IE compatibility mode.

There’s no technical problem with the idea; but I would worry that smoothing
over the problems some pages have when rendered with anything other than the
Chromium renderer, would just cement Chrome’s hegemony, since nobody would
have any incentive to fix Chromium-renderer-only pages any more.

Perhaps it would still make sense specifically for enterprise use-cases: if
the whitelisting (blacklisting?) of sites to trigger the compatibility mode on
was only ever manual, or due to GPOs/MDM profiles, but never by predefined
compatibility lists or extensions or auto-detected, then it would only get
used in practice by enterprises who needed it for their legacy Intranet sites.
Corporate Intranets are certainly where most IE-only websites reside these
days—but is the same true of Chromium-renderer-only websites?

~~~
bradleyjg
At least for me, I'd rather the other way around. When I'm on my work machine
and using one of my company's assets I want to know if it breaks on firefox so
I can go file a bug report. If my bank's website breaks on firefox I both have
less interest in filing a bug report and less confidence it will do any good.

I suppose it would be different if my employer officially disavowed
compatibility.

------
Waterluvian
I switched to Firefox a few weeks ago after becoming totally sick of mobile
Chrome lagging out and sometimes crashing any time I tried to load a
sufficiently complex website. Like if I scroll liquipedia on chrome it just
dies. If I try to comment on a hacker news page with a ton of comments it
takes 3 seconds for each letter I type to appear.

Yet somehow mobile Firefox works just completely fine on these pages and more.

I have a Motorola G5 so yes a budget phone. But still. It shouldn't be this
terrible on chrome. I don't get what's failing so badly.

------
grecht
I recently tried Firefox on a Windows machine, and noticed that the font
rendering was much, much worse than in Chrome or Opera, it looked almost bold
and was hard to read. I guess it’s got something to do with subpixel hinting.
Has anybody else noticed that?

~~~
bgdnyxbjx
Yes. Font weights are all messed up, and colors too. I’ve seen fonts that are
barely readable on FF because the contrast ratio between the font color and
background color is tiny, however it looks correct on all other browsers.

------
blue_devil
It's not about giving a chance - it's about making a considered choice. Give
Mozilla feedback about Firefox, if you want to give them anything:
[https://support.mozilla.org/en-
US/questions/new/desktop](https://support.mozilla.org/en-
US/questions/new/desktop)

------
mgkimsal
I do give it a chance, regularly, but it's never enough to be 'default'.

Pins. Loved the idea. Unfortunately, they often go missing. Loading the
browser, about 15% of the time, I get the "oh this is embarrassing" screen,
with "restore your session". If I don't restore right then, all pins are gone.
For good. Forever. I've lost way too much time recreating those over the last
couple of years.

Have never had this happen ever in Chrome. I can't say it never happens in
Chrome ever - maybe for someone it has - but not for me. However, I don't even
know how to report this. "My pins get lost". If they're just special tabs, and
tabs are known to get lost, is this even a 'bug'? Or just... "I'm doing it
wrong" (as in, expecting pins to be more useful than they are?)

~~~
WaltPurvis
In Chrome, a pinned tab will close when you hit Cmd-W, which is _never_ what I
want to happen. E.g., I have Gmail pinned, I open several more tabs, then at
some point type Cmd-W several times to close those tabs, but if I type one
extra Cmd-W my Gmail tab goes away ( _and_ the window closes). Again, I
_never_ want pinned tabs to be closed that way. The whole idea of pinning
something is to make sure it stays in place. That's what pinning _means_.

It's really irritating (as you can probably tell).

~~~
mgkimsal
Yep. Agreed, annoying. Perhaps they'll offer some preventing of this at some
point? I've noticed the "ctrl-q" quit thing recently got a "long hold" default
option - which I now despise as its defaulted 'on'. :/

------
blunderkid
I am a web dev and react debug console matters a lot to me but on FF it does
this weird scroll to the top thing every time I switch file tabs. And it’s in
general buggy. Now it may have to do with the plugin dev but if you want to be
a viable platform, dudes need to be writing good software on top. I love the
promise of FF and would want to make it my dev browser but using Chrome out of
sheer necessity.

~~~
mch82
Could be worth documenting this issue in Bugzilla so the Firefox project team
can work in improving react debug support.

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/home](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/home)

------
allenleein
You need to give Brave a chance. I switched to Brave from Chrome and Firefox
months ago. No regret.

[https://brave.com/](https://brave.com/)

~~~
CondensedBrain
I'm going to pass on the browser part owned by the chairman and cofounder of
Palantir. I don't trust it for that and other reasons. I don't have the skills
or interest to audit and compile every release myself. I don't do it with the
browser I do use, but the threat model is different for its maintainers.

~~~
jonathankoren
Brave’s founder is Brenden Eichman, formerly a long time exec at Mozilla, so
it’s at least “complicated”

------
ctvo
These constant pleas to get me to use Firefox for some other motivation than
features and performance won't work. I'll switch back in a day.

\- Battery life on both iOS and macOS is poor compared to alternative (Safari)

\- Dev tooling is poor compared to alternative (Chromium)

~~~
floatboth
> Dev tooling is poor compared to alternative

Really? Other than the websocket thing everyone keeps bringing up, I find
Firefox devtools ahead of everything else. Especially for CSS layout.

~~~
deviantfero
I need a websocket inspector, what do you suggest?

------
torstenvl
Every once in a while, I decide to give Firefox a try, but I always find it
wanting.

\- UI responsiveness is poor. Scrolling through the about:config window feels
like I'm drunk. If they can't get the row highlighting to keep up with the
mouse cursor, they should just turn it off.

\- Setting up keyword search is tedious. Import from Chrome should allow
importing all the search engines, either into the Firefox search engine
functionality or into a bookmark folder with keywords.

\- Setting up security is tedious. The previous functionality of importing
certificates via "Open with..." leads to this:
[https://imgur.com/H2V2bUn](https://imgur.com/H2V2bUn)

\- The UI is ugly. Look at the drop-shadow in that same screenshot at
[https://imgur.com/H2V2bUn](https://imgur.com/H2V2bUn)

EDIT: Went through the tedious process of installing DoD certificates into
Firefox, and it hangs about half the time on Marine Corps websites... and 100%
of the time on OWA. It's completely unusable for me. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

------
Vektorweg
Most argue to switch, because of Google's webRequest API changes in Chromium.
Would like to remind you, that its not set in stone yet, especially whether
Opera, Vivaldi and Microsoft will follow Google's plan.

------
eb0la
I can't trust chrome. For me Firefox is not a choice but a necessity.

I have to login into too many systems with different credentials and I need
NOT to be remembered by the browser even if I happen to forget to put it into
private mode.

The only time I had to use chrome recently was because I had to login into
google cloud and my company just don't support Firefox as a browser option and
cannot install firefox.

~~~
mkl
You can turn off remembering of credentials in Chrome - I always have. It's
called "Offer to save passwords" in settings.

------
dsego
I miss being able to zoom in (coming from Safari). Ctrl + wheel causes a
layout reflow and while it makes the text bigger, images often get even
smaller.

Oh right, it's annoying when it auto updates in the background and shows some
generic error message that looks like a network error and it takes me a few
minutes to realize I need to restart it.

------
onetom
I switched about a year ago and I was also pleasantly surprised, UNITL I've
realized that it's eating up several GIGABYTES!!! of memory, even when I just
have a handful of tabs open. What's worst, it doesn't releases all the memory
when I just close the tabs! When I restart FF and cycle thru the tabs to make
sure they are loaded, it uses a lot less but still in the GB range.

I compared the same set of tabs in Chrome and it consumes about half or 2/3rd
of the memory. (Tested under macOS only) While I work on machines with 16GB &
32GB, I find it unreasonable to waste so much memory usage on the browser
windows. I'm looking into alternatives. I think most pages would be better
viewed by just extracting the text content and the links, like Reader View
mode...

I've checked out pretty much all active projects on
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_lightweight_web_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_lightweight_web_browsers)
and [https://qutebrowser.org/](https://qutebrowser.org/) seems to be the most
usable one which consumes even less memory than Chrome, while still supporting
JavaScript and video playback. Or maybe I shall switch back to
Opera/Brave/Chromium? I've tried so many...

I'm already used to keep closing tabs manually which I don't need, like
web.whatsapp or gmail and the like. I even came across the Tab Wrangler
extension, which automatically cleans my tabs up. I can highly recommend it to
conserve memory!

So other than the memory usage issue, I'm satisfied with the current FF. It's
web developer console is almost as good as Chrome's. It supports Ctrl-Tab
jumping to the MRU (Most Recently Used) tab. Has built-in reader view. The
Multi-touch Zoom add-on even brings "zooming by 2 finger pinching" capability
to FF, which is almost as good as the auto-zoom by 2 finger tap.

~~~
phaer
Do you have actual memory usage issues? Is a lack of memory causing problems
for other applications?

I am asking because RAM is meant to be used, high allocations to Firefox on a
(mostly) idle system isn't too interesting as a metric on its own and should
automatically decrease if others need it.

~~~
onetom
I had ~1GB swapped out on 32GB 3.4GHz quad i7 machine. 5GB was taken up by ~8
tabs in FF. I noticed it because IntelliJ and Android Studio started to be
suspiciously laggy. I mean laggier than usual :) After stopping FF, the IDEs
went back to normal. Processor usage was negligible when I was not touching
the system, so it wasn't caused by some runaway js code on some webpage.

------
boyadjian
I will never use Chrome, because I don't want to strengthen Google's monopoly,
it is as simple as that, even if Chrome is better. It is a matter of common
sense.

------
chadlavi
I use FF as my daily driver, and have for years.

But at work, I use Chrome. I bet most of you do, too. There's kind of just not
another option.

For one thing, if you work on a product that has to meet accessibility
standards (and if you don't: consider advocating for doing so anyway, it's
good for users), FF's accessibility testing tools are frustratingly hard to
use. Google's lighthouse is just way way more advanced.

And, my company (like most, if not all) _targets Chrome_, so I need to be
doing most of my work in the target browser.

Personal browser choice is one thing, but products actually being built with
non-Chrome browsers in mind is another. If people leave Chrome then discover
that websites don't work as well (probably because those sites were built with
Chrome in mind, and only ever tested in Chrome), they'll go back to Chrome.

------
epr
Chromium by itself is really great. I miss nothing.

I see lots of browsers mentioned here that are chromium derived, but add extra
features. I switched several years ago from chrome to chromium and have never
missed any features from chrome ever. If you have concerns about privacy, you
can read the source code.

[https://chromium.woolyss.com](https://chromium.woolyss.com)

I use the builds edited by "Nik", which include video codecs, widevine, and
auto-updating.

If you are considering switching from chrome but aren't sure you will like the
added features of another chromium-derived browser, I would suggest trying
this first to see if you would really miss anything.

------
ElKoji
I left Chrome for personal usage a long time ago, however I am forced to use
it at work. I use Safari all around for my personal usage, I find Safari with
content blockers and DuckDuckGo as search engine to be a very good
alternative.

~~~
bad_user
Safari is a good browser due to it being the most battery efficient on MacOS.

However its content blockers are inferior to what's available on Firefox. It's
also not portable, so if you use various devices (Android, iOS, Windows,
Linux, MacOS) it's pretty cool having your history synchronized.

Firefox is really good for privacy. For example you can sandbox Facebook with
Firefox's containers extension such that they can't follow you around the web.

Firefox is probably the best for power users. I usually use it with more than
100 tabs opened. Its tree-style tab extension and the Awesome Bar makes it
painless.

Firefox is also good as a development browser. It lags behind Chrome in some
areas but is ahead in others.

At work I only use Chrome for testing our web interface, but I use Firefox
most of the time, even on my iPhone (nice UI plus the sync).

~~~
lloeki
Safari has blocked third party cookies, as well as the largely unknown
segregated cache and localstorage, and now some form of tracking protection.
That should make it equivalent to Firefox containers, although it’s just
automatic and kind of invisible to the user. As for blockers, I use 1blocker
to great effect. I’d use uBlock Origin but the transition to MAS seemed to be
rocky last time I checked.

I do give it a spin regularly but the two things that make Firefox a non
starter is battery usage and inability to use Keychain (before quantum there
was an extension but even then it was hit and miss)

------
trpc
The thing is Google is punishing me for using Firefox with recaptchas
everywhere. Recaptchas with Firefox needs like 5 or even more attempts (the
slow ones) while Chrome is resolved automatically or just one attempt at
maximum.

------
darkhorn
In 2005 I have switched from Internet Explorer 6 to Firefox. At that time
unlike Firefox IE6 did not have tabs and could not prevent pop up windows.
Since then I'm on Firefox, and I have never been disappointed.

------
illumin8
Firefox has way better privacy controls than Chrome, however, their track
record on security is abysmal. In fact, a 0-day was just found last week
targeting Coinbase employees.

I wish I could switch to Firefox for privacy reasons, but good security is
table stakes and Firefox just doesn't have nearly the security credentials
that Chrome does at the moment.

This definitely could change in the future, and I hope it does, but for now,
I'm stuck in privacy hell because I can't compromise on security.

~~~
spappal
> Firefox just doesn't have nearly the security credentials that Chrome does
> at the moment

I think this claim deserves a justification. Not saying you're wrong but I'm
interested in how to compare browser security.

(Counteranecdote: the HN-popular article [0] which explained the Firefox zero-
day, mentioned in it's last paragraph a Chrome zero-day from March 2019.)

[0] [https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-patches-firefox-
zero-d...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-patches-firefox-zero-day-
abused-in-the-wild/)

~~~
mda
Firefox added proper sandboxing and process / site isolation a lot later than
Chrome. There are many examples in vulnerability database that is marked as
critical for Firefox but similar ones are ended up as only high for Chrome. My
take, Chrome security was much better in past, but Firefox is decent nowadays
(but not better than Chrome). Check last 6-7 years pwn2own records.

------
cityzen
Pro Tip: You can use most chrome extensions in Firefox. This is what got me to
switch.

I don't recall if I used this but I am running all of the chrome extensions I
had in firefox: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-
store-...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-store-
foxified/)

Not to mention, their new side view feature is great to have reference and
code on a single window.

------
sakopov
I'm on XPS/Windows and switched to Firefox a month ago and so far it's been
enjoyable. I think it is noticeably slower than Chrome but no more memory
usage issues with just a handful of tabs open and adblock running over a
period of several days. XPS also has a weird scrolling bug in Chrome when the
trackpad just stops scrolling until the window is resized. That's not an issue
anymore. I've not been disappointed in general.

------
katsura
When all the adblocking news came out I switched to Firefox. Used it for two
weeks exclusively, then I switched back. There are a lot of things that just
don't work, or work in a weird way. For example, I use Linux with the Arc Dark
theme, and Firefox shows the inputs, textareas and buttons dark background and
dark text, which results in an almost unusable experience on a lot of
websites. Of course, this can be fixed, if you add an extra config (so not
editing an existing one), and you set the "inner" styles to use the light Arc
style.

Next, my laptop has a touch screen, and I cannot use it to scroll. When I'm
listening to music on YouTube, even if it is in the background, it uses so
much CPU that my whole laptop becomes extremely hot. Also, I'm developing a
website where there is an element that has overflow:auto on it, and has some
inner paddings, Firefox doesn't render the bottom one. The buttons are
rendered with the text off center on all Bootstrap 3 websites, and for example
on Github a bunch of buttons, badges, labels, and pagination elements have
their text vertically off center too.

I know that all of these could be happenning, because we (developers) optimize
things for Chrome now, but when the CSS styling works as expected in Chrome,
and not in Firefox, then it certainly feels like Firefox has the bugs, because
Chrome does what I expect it to do.

Lastly, on my iPhone, the browsing experience was really bad. Frequent
freezes, slow page loads, when I closed a tab, the whole tab screen scrolled
to unexpected positions.

All in all, the small things are the ones that ruin the experience for me, and
Firefox has a lot of them (at least for me).

------
bredren
I've tried twice to switch back to Firefox since this chrome add-on code
change issue, including setting it my default browser. I had it beach ball on
me a few times and crash twice in just 8 days.

Chrome almost never beach balls, and very very rarely crashes. I painfully
gave up on firefox again for now. Its gotta be stable and fast and it just
wasn't for me.

~~~
lscotte
Beach ball? What does that mean?

~~~
bosie
On macosx that means your OS or at least the process is unresponsive. The
mouse cursor then becomes a 'beach ball':
[https://cdn.macpaw.com/uploads/images/spinning-
wheel.png](https://cdn.macpaw.com/uploads/images/spinning-wheel.png)

------
Improvotter
I've switched to Firefox over the last few weeks. It definitely feels faster
on my desktop PC which runs Linux, also no problem in Windows when dual-
booted.

Though there are two big issues imo:

\- When running Firefox on my late 2013 Macbook Pro, it doesn't feel as fast
as Chrome or Safari, it feels very sluggish. I am forced to use h264ify to
force YouTube to use h264 instead of VP8/9 as it makes my Macbook Pro turn
into a steam engine. Besides the fact that this is Google's fault and its
"monopoly?", it all around just feels slower elsewhere as well and it takes
more power compared to even Chrome it seems to me.

\- Lastly it does not sync all of my settings that I want. Why does it not do
that? I run Firefox on Linux, MacOS, and Windows and I have to change my
settings everywhere every time I make a change and it's a pita. Google Chrome
just syncs all of my settings across all of my devices except for extension
settings (which is a bummer).

~~~
stevenjohns
I just moved to a new OS and was somewhat surprised my Firefox configuration
didn’t come along with my extensions.

Out of all the data they can collect about me, what I’d be least worried about
is how wide I’d like the width of the address bar to be.

------
jmull
If you’re on MacOS, also consider Safari.

~~~
ur--whale
The reason I walked away from Chrome a couple of years ago is because of the
amount of information it sends to Google.

I'm curious to know where Safari stands in that regard: how much and how often
does it "call home"?

Oh, and also : how much of it is Open Source? In my experience, Apple is
particularly good at OpenSourcing lots of pieces while keeping the juicy bits
proprietary. Can Safari be 100% rebuilt from source?

~~~
latexr
Don’t hold me to this, but I think you may be able to build Webkit from
source, giving you a functional browser.

I think Chromium is to Chrome as Webkit is to Safari. The latter have
proprietary code on top of the open-source former.

~~~
bbernoulli
Blink is to Chromium/Chrome as Webkit is to Safari

Webkit and blink are browser engines and Chromium/Chrome are both browsers,
but Chromium doesn't include the closed source pieces that Chrome does.

~~~
latexr
> Webkit and blink are browser engines

Petty sure Webkit is also a browser you can build and run, like Chromium.

~~~
floatboth
No, WebKit is an engine. It ships with small demo browsers for some platforms
(minibrowser for gtk, at least) but that's it.

You might be confused by Apple calling its nightly Safari builds "WebKit
technical preview" or whatever. It (used to) show up as "WebKit.app", but it's
literally Apple Safari.

~~~
saagarjha
"Safari" is a proprietary browser that uses WebKit, which is open source.
Safari Technology Preview (purple Safari) and WebKit.app (black Safari) are
just Safari, but with the WebKit swapped out through various methods. Oh, and
MiniBrowser works on macOS as well.

~~~
floatboth
> WebKit.app (black Safari) are just Safari, but with the WebKit swapped out
> through various methods

yes, that's exactly what I said

~~~
saagarjha
You seemed to conflate Safari Technology Preview with the WebKit nightlies,
when they are in fact different things and structured differently and used for
different things (the former acts much more like a "standalone Safari" than
does the latter, which is essentially just the WebKit frameworks loaded in to
your existing Safari).

------
andai
Is there any way to select multiple tabs and drag them around in FF like you
can in Chrome?

Edit: Holy smokes, it works now! How long has that been a thing?

Shift will select the tabs between current and clicked, while Ctrl will select
/ deselect clicked tab.

~~~
lewiscollard
Ctrl + click the tabs you want to move and drag em around to your heart's
content :)

------
crispinb
I keep giving it a chance, and will continue to do so, for the reasons stated
in this article, along with the goodness that is multi-account containers. I
wish it wouldn't keep driving me away with its reliability problems.

------
wtmt
Not a lot of details compared to what many others have said before. The
developer tools enhancements in Firefox are interesting.

> Safari is on the second place just because of macOS popularity.

Shouldn’t this be “iOS” instead of “masOS”?

~~~
tsjq
yes. macOS, iOS, tabOS (or is it padOS now?) , etc everything.

~~~
saagarjha
iPadOS.

~~~
eddieh
Personally I think it is time for Apple to drop the "i". For lots of stuff
they already have stopped naming with the "i", Apple TV, Apple Watch, Apple
Music. Maybe they should also just start capitalizing properly too. PhoneOS,
TVOS, PadOS, WatchOS, MacOS, etc. For some products it just makes no sense
anyway iMac Pro?! That basically reads as "consumer model for professionals"
given what the original "i" and "Pro" modifiers were used for.

~~~
saagarjha
I think iMac Pro is pretty aptly named if that’s what it makes you think of.

------
JansjoFromIkea
Chrome on iPhone is so restricted by Apple's rules that I found switching from
it to be extremely easy.

Working on moving to Firefox on desktop, it's my default browser and
whathaveyou, but I must admit any time I get confused by something I
instinctively flip back to chrome. With that level of a struggle, I can only
imagine how hard it'd be to get more casual users to switch over.

Anyone able to tell me how much of a difference there is between Chrome and
Firefox on Android? Is it a swap I could get friends to do without it being
much of an adjustment?

~~~
Jonnax
Currently there's a rewrite in development for Firefox Android:

[https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix](https://github.com/mozilla-
mobile/fenix)

The difference between the nightlies of this and the current Firefox Android
is night and day.

Perhaps wait until it's out?

------
mrkeen
Every time the Firefox v Chrome debate comes up I feel a little crazy when
speed gets discussed.

They're the same speed, right?

Web pages on the other hand... 2 seconds to bring in the bulk of the content.
Another second spent firing ajax requests to all the trackers. 2 seconds for
me to click through all the Cookie notifications, GDPR violations, and bald-
faced lies that the site values my privacy. What's a ballpark figure for the
actual render bit? 10-50 ms?

What sites are you guys using which are fast enough to notice slowdown in the
browser?

~~~
weystrom
Just opening a new tab, when you have a lot of tabs open, is slow on Firefox.

Chrome is also much better for web video. Sites like Youtube and twitch.tv
perform better on Chrome. I don't have any benchmarks on hand, but that's how
I feel after switch between two browsers for a while. I think I'm sticking to
Chromium.

~~~
krzyk
Youtube slows down on non-Chromium browsers on purpose (Shadow DOM v0 and see
also problems Edge devs had with it).

Try non-Google websites to compare speed.

~~~
floatboth
YouTube feels very fast for me in Firefox. The v0 polyfill is not slow, you
shouldn't notice any slowdown from it unless your hardware is really really
bad.

------
microtheo
In the end, it seems that Microsoft adopting Chromium is pushing more and more
tech people toward Firefox, fearing a monopoly of the former. Isn't that
ironic?

------
tellme_throwa
Also on android phone, FF allows addons like uBlock, noscript & greasemonkey.
GM scripting is pain w/o external editor, but it's worth it...

------
stockkid
It is indeed sad to see the market share of Firefox declining. At the same
time, I understand why; even though I use Firefox, I constantly notice that
there are many useful areas in which Chrome works far better than Firefox.
Those areas include profiling, debugging service worker, etc. Although I want
to support Firefox by switching to it 100%, it is simply impossible when I
want to get jobs done.

~~~
st3fan
Regular users don’t use any of those features. Chrome is eating everyone’s
market share because they are literally spending billions of dollars on it.

------
aabbcc1241
I remmeber last time I ran a custom javascript benchmark on both desktop,
laptop and mobile. Firefox ran much faster than chrome.

My custom benchmark:
[https://speedtest.surge.sh/](https://speedtest.surge.sh/)

More benchmarks: [https://jsperf.com/](https://jsperf.com/)

------
funkjunky
It's a nitpick, but also a deal killer for me. The way Firefox behaves when
you click the address bar on Android absolutely infuriates me. The way chrome
immediately clears the address, and gives you buttons to either copy the
current address to clipboard, share, or edit, is brilliant and makes it a joy
to use. Therefore I use chrome.

------
lenkite
I wish firefox could use the locally installed certificate store of the OS.
This doesn't seem to be possible. You have to manually export and import
certificates into Firefox's store. And on IT controlled Windows and MacOS
desktop's, certificate+priv key export is disabled. So, one needs to stick to
Chrome.

------
ansgri
Well, since I've had some strange graphics issues with Chromium on my Linux
Mint that wouldn't fix with chromium reinstall, I've tried Firefox and it was
consistently more reliable, no reason to use anything Chrome. But I'm feeling
old and don't like complex things, so on Apple devices Safari it stays.

------
m463
I should mention the uMatrix add-on - it will speed up firefox more than
anything while blocking third-party nonsense.

I change the default rules to allow only first-party by default, then the
first time I load a page turn stuff on and save:

    
    
      * * * block
      * * frame block
      * 1st-party * allow
      * 1st-party frame allow

------
sys_64738
I am using Vivaldi nowadays. Used to use FF and always avoided Chrome as you
knew Google was stalking you.

------
nashashmi
I switched to Firefox after the adblock debacle. My biggest problem is with
cookie management on desktop. Chrome allows me to block certain cookies or
keep them just for sessions. In Firefox cookie management is hard. If I want
to list up all the cookies I can't do it.

~~~
xf86alsa
Perhaps Cookie AutoDelete could help? [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/cookie-autode...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/cookie-autodelete/)

I use it to set which site I'd like to keep cookies for multiple sessions for,
and which I'd like cookies to be forgotten for as soon as I've left. It
doesn't have per-cookie granularity however, if that's what you're looking
for.

~~~
nashashmi
Thank you. That works somewhat.

------
synthmeat
From developer point of view, isn't this a bit of a false dilemma? I have
open, at the moment:

\- Safari (general browsing)

\- Safari Technology Preview (studying, reference)

\- Chrome Canary (development, debugging)

\- Chrome (main QA)

\- Firefox (work account related stuff)

\- Brave (consuming video content)

This is all on MacBook Air from 2013, so performance concern is also a moot
point really.

------
deviantfero
I did, but I get beach balls of death now and then, I also need a websocket
frame inspector

------
baggy_trough
Firefox needs native support for Chrome's persona/people menu. A game changer
for home/business users.

Also, the Firefox UI for the main window / tabs looks terrible on macOS
compared to Chrome or Safari. Really non-native and ugly.

~~~
hiroshi3110
Agreed. Only reason why I’m using Chrome is the People menu.

------
latexr
I’m tired of seeing “change to Firefox” arguments that never address its
faults. Particularly on macOS, Firefox is unusable for many users — read this
thread and any others on HN where Firefox is the topic, and you’ll find the
same complaints:

* Lack of AppleScript support (my main complaint, every other was lifted from other comments).

* Lack of other basic features such as pinch-to-zoom.

* Poor Keychain support.

* Slow.

* Resource-hungry.

And this article comes out just after reports of a 0-day exploit of Firefox on
macOS[1].

If you want people to give Firefox a chance, make it good. For many of us it
isn’t, and shouting over and over that it’s good doesn’t make it so. Fine if
it works for you, but it doesn’t for many.

[1]: [https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2019/06/poten...](https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2019/06/potent-firefox-0day-used-to-install-undetected-backdoors-
on-macs/)

~~~
gavinpc
> make it good

Are you arguing that Firefox is not even "good," or just not perfect?

(I use Firefox on a Mac all day and the only kind of "resource hunger" I've
observed can be pinned to the web pages that it's running.)

~~~
RandomGuyDTB
In every test I've seen Firefox has beaten Chrome in terms of speed.

~~~
latexr
See
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20255943](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20255943).
Slowness is a point I’m lifting from other arguments, not my own complaint. I
could live with slowness, but that is not my deal breaker.

------
dallen33
If you’re on a Mac, just use Safari. Feels better than any other browser on
the Mac.

~~~
Scarbutt
No decent adblockers.

~~~
yinyang_in
It has unblock origin. It works well for me.

~~~
saagarjha
uBlock Origin will not work in Safari 13, just FYI.

------
weystrom
It doesn't perform well on my Mac. No hw accelerated video (and still kinda
slow) when I run Linux.

I've tried multiple times, and as much as I like what Mozilla is doing for
privacy on the web, I keep coming back to Chromium.

~~~
floatboth
It's not like upstream Chromium has accelerated video on Linux..

------
lovetocode
I left Firefox because of its memory consumption on MacOS. Have they fixed it?

~~~
timothevs
Memory, and CPU on a retina MBP in my case. The bug is still open, with no
signs of being fixed anytime soon. I really do want to switch back, but this
is a deal breaker.

------
AnIdiotOnTheNet
You know what? I did, and it sucks. I have a few Lubuntu laptops I use when
streaming on twitch to monitor the dashboard and they consistently become
unresponsive when performing this task. Sometimes it is "just" the browser and
I can still watch the mouse cursor jerk across the screen when I move it,
other times everything is frozen doing god-knows-what and I just have to hard
boot the thing. For my stream yesterday, I switched to Chromium and everything
went fine.

If you want me to use your product, make it actually work.

Edit: This is an article that literally says I should give FF a chance, and I
respond that I did and still don't like it, and you downvote me in your
fanboyism. Welcome to /r/svwebdev I guess.

------
y2kenny
Does anyone know of a way to migrate an active chrome session (with all the
tabs and windows) to firefox? (so kind of like restoring a session but
restoring a session from chrome.)

------
AlchemistCamp
I came back to Firefox in 2016 and have been happy with it. I just don't
understand why so many devs are happily running spyware and feeding it their
most personal information.

------
kbudaj
I want to use Firefox, but the performance on MacBook with retina is terrible.
The scrolling is just pure pain in comparison to Chrome/Safari.

------
ImGunter
I love firefox it's the best open source web browser out there along with
brave google just uses chrome for tracking and serving ads.

------
Causality1
>better extensions support

Better support for modern crippled extensions you mean. It's still impossible
to really theme or customize Firefox Quantum. Most of the good theme
developers just gave up and left. If I can't make Firefox work the way I want
why should I use it instead of other browsers I also can't customize and who
don't make kindergarten-level mistakes like forgetting to renew key security
certificates and disabling extensions for everyone on the planet for tens of
hours?

------
ggurgone
I switched to Brave, it was a painless migration

------
super_mario
When they killed pentadactyl, they killed Firefox for me. I will never look
back. I don’t use and never will use Chrome either.

------
iamleppert
The firefox devtools are painfully slow and clunky in the latest release.
Until those are fixed I won’t be switching.

~~~
hrktb
I always wondered how many devs don’t use multiple browsers, even just to
split work and personal accounts.

I guess it’s a pain for people who hate switching context, or don’t have a
hard line between the two.

Chrome dev tools are definitely great, I keep Chrome basically for that for
sites I dev. Everything else is in firefox, and anythting private in Safari
for synching.

The only issue is battery life, but as long as there’s Chrome there’s no way
out anyway.

------
tclover
I'm using Firefox, it's great.

------
app4soft

        why you need != we need
    

BTW, I will never give a chance for Firefox.

I could recommend only _links2_ [0] and _Pale Moon_ [1]

[0] [http://links.twibright.com](http://links.twibright.com)

[1] [https://linux.palemoon.org](https://linux.palemoon.org)

------
ilrwbwrkhv
i will switch once firefox can pitch correct sped up html 5 videos properly..
it is a crucial skill for me to learn fast and firefox's pitch correction is
garbage.

------
thrower123
Firefox needs to make the choice compelling. That is why I switched from
Firefox to Chrome almost a decade ago; Chrome was so much faster and better.
It's still faster and better.

------
k__
They iron out their macOS and Android story.

------
ReptileMan
The moment they allow mouse gestures addons to work on ALL pages. New and
system included.

------
techntoke
TLDR: We need to give Firefox 0days more chances to be exploited and let them
forget to renew certificates which disables all addons; and help run anti-
Chrome campaigns every day on HN.

------
stanislavb
If only it was a bit faster.

------
swixm
I switched to Vivaldi a few months ago. It's not as polished as Chrome or
Firefox but it was made by the people who made Opera, and it shows.

Just having tabs laid out vertically makes it worth it.

~~~
onetom
I don't think that's an excuse. As mentioned in other posts, there is an Add-
on for vertical tabs: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-
style-ta...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/)

It can't hide the horizontal tabs though because of the strict rules imposed
on FF extensions, so you have to hack around it yourself as described here:
[https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-
fo...](https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-for-custom-
style-rules#for-userchromecss)

~~~
swixm
An excuse? I don't need an excuse to use a browser I like. Also userChrome.css
doesn't sync does it?

------
archey1
Firefox is absolute garbage on any OS that isn't Windows. I think that's
probably the biggest thing for the power user crowd...but as a someone that
finds dual booting too inconvenient, so I virtualize instead, and will never
touch an Apple product..works great for me and most family members and friends
I set up with it are pretty satisfied.

The new built-in tracking protection is pretty great, and the only extension
most people really need is uBlock Origin.

~~~
JaggedJax
I recently switched to Firefox as my default on both Linux and Android. Things
work great and I have not noticed issues. On Linux it's working perfectly. On
Android it's also very nice, but I subjectively feel it may be slightly slower
than Chrome.

~~~
archey1
Every time I used FF on Linux, it had serious issues with hardware
acceleration.

------
tssva
I've given FF several chances and each has been awful.

Performance on my Macbook Pro is horrible. It will often peg the cpu so badly
that the laptop appears to be locked up. This is a known issue which Mozilla
has chosen not to address and instead seems to hope the switch to webrender
will fix. I say "seems to hope" because the bug for the issue doesn't give
confidence that the full cause is truly understood and specify exactly how a
switch to webrender will fix it. Maybe Mozilla knows and has done testing but
it certainly isn't reflected in the bug report.

Firefox on Android is bloated, slow and is a terrible UX experience. Mozilla
obviously recognizes this because they have already announced an effort to
completely replace it. There are other Mozilla provided browsers for Android
which do perform better but they have a limited feature set compared to
Firefox and don't meet my needs.

