
Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014) - jakub_g
https://robert.ocallahan.org/2014/08/choose-firefox-now-or-later-you-wont.html
======
nindalf
Just so we can avoid rehashing the discussion whenever a post encouraging the
use of Firefox is posted.

\- Yes, Mozilla is still the better browser when it comes to privacy.

\- Yes, Mozilla has made missteps with Pocket and Mr. Robot.

\- Yes, it is slow/resource heavy on certain Macs with non-default
resolutions. Yes, Mozilla is working on a fix.

\- Yes, it has become really fast for most users after Quantum improvements
landed, and likely will continue to get better.

\- No, you can't just "fork Chromium" if you don't like the way Google is
running the project. Web developers will still make their website work well
with whatever Google releases, regardless of standards.

\- Yes, Firefox doesn't feel native on your platform of choice.

\- Yes, neither does Chrome (doesn't support dark mode on macOS)

\- Yes, Chrome has better security against malware.

\- Yes, Firefox removed the feature that was essential to _your_ workflow,
even though most users don't care.

edit, thought of one more

\- No, the argument "Chrome will be the new IE if you don't use Firefox"
doesn't matter to most users.

~~~
feanaro
\- Yes, Firefox does support Containers, which are a very innovative privacy
feature allowing you to maintain separate browser sessions (cookies, site
preferences, ...) towards different websites inside a single browser
instance.[1][2]

[1] [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers#w_what-
are-c...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers#w_what-are-
containers) [2]
[https://www.thechiefmeat.com/guides/containers.html](https://www.thechiefmeat.com/guides/containers.html)

~~~
vram22
Interesting. I guess it may be possible to use it to be logged into and use
different email accounts, e.g. foo@emailservice.com and bar@emailservice.com
from the same browser instance. That would be helpful.

~~~
nunodonato
this is what I am doing now.

Plus, opening facebook? BAM instant new container automagically open for me,
to keep facebook in its own walled garden :D

~~~
vram22
Ha. Reminds of a quote, vaguely:

In a world without Windows, something something doors (or Gates, or some other
permutations of those).

Though I don't remember the quote, I remember it being a good one.

~~~
vram22
Maybe: In a world without doors, we won't need Windows or Gates?

:)

------
sametmax
And it didn't work. Some people were aware of this. A few took the time to
read/discuss/think about it. A minuscule fraction of passionate people acted
on it.

And the rest of the world took the path of least resistance, as usual.

People don't shape society willingly. They mostly let life happen to them.
Even when you see them protesting, it's the consequence of an emotional
reaction and a group effect, not the reflect of their deep personnal vision of
life. They have none.

It's why people keep gaining weight, comming back to a violent spouse or
voting again for the politicians that just lied in their face.

I have no idea what to do about that. Education works a bit, but it's so slow
and easy to destroy. And meanwhile, it's very unfair for the minority trying
hard to make things better. They pay a high price, with no thanks, and little
benefits except the hope the others won't screw up things more.

~~~
shaki-dora
That’s hard to prove or disprove without having an alternate universe ready
for A/B testing.

Although, frankly, I can’t shake the feeling I’ve been living in the B-branch
for, say, the last two years. If so, let me just say: if your results are not
yet conclusive, please ask your statisticians for what “multi-armed bandit”
means to them, then shoot them if the quizzically look at you. You may even
skip the question.

Back on point: I know many people who use Firefox for “ideological” reasons.
In fact, anybody who still used FF as of 6 months ago arguably fell in that
group, save some extreme cases of inertia.

But, even more tittilating: Firefox seems to be once again be competitive wrt
performance. That may just be its salvation, and not a moment too early to
make it dramatic.

~~~
nchie
What are you even talking about? You're making it sound like Firefox has ever
been a lot worse than Chrome, but that's far from the truth.

I've used both quite a lot and I've always preferred Firefox, even _without_
considering the privacy aspects. I still use Chrome on my laptop as Firefox
doesn't support decent pinch zooming (that's more or less my only complaint),
but for desktop usage I definitely choose Firefox over Chrome.

~~~
RussianCow
Not the OP, but when Chrome came out, it was leaps and bounds ahead of Firefox
in terms of performance, and it took Firefox many years (until just recently,
with Quantum) to catch up. I personally endured it, but it was definitely hard
after having used Chrome for a short while, and I don't blame anyone for
making the switch back then.

Most users don't care about features; they just want a browser that works
well.

------
jeswin
Taking users away from Google is still a big ask. Google has been thoroughly
anti-competitive in this space - they deliberately downgrade the experience in
non-Chrome browsers across many properties. For example, typing "GOOG stock"
in Chrome/Android brings up a whole lot of details not found with
Firefox/Android. There's no technical reason to do this, and they should be
pulled up for abuse of monopoly power. Google search itself was better on
Chrome till recently, though it's caught up now on Firefox/Android.

Add: I've been a Firefox/Android user for a while now - and with ad-blocking
the UX experience and battery life is much better than with Chrome. I
encourage everyone to try it (with ad-blocking) for at least a week.
Personally for me, Firefox on Android is a bigger deal than on the desktop.

~~~
antoineMoPa
Just downloaded Firefox on Android following your advice. I'm a heavy firefox
user on the destkop, but I rarely think about installing firefox on my
cellphones since 1. Firefox in Firefox OS was slow and it gave me a feeling
that firefox was not for mobile (but I guess it's not true anymore) 2. The
fact that Chrome is the default browser and I generally don't install many
apps.

The fact that it is the default on Android makes the game very unfair.

~~~
oAlbe
> Firefox in Firefox OS was slow and it gave me a feeling that firefox was not
> for mobile (but I guess it's not true anymore)

I genuinely don't understand how Firefox on mobile is slow. I hear this
complaint often (along with the complaint of Firefox on desktop not being able
to run certain websites, which also never occurs to me), but for how much I
try, I never managed to make Firefox on mobile (android) slow. There were a
couple of days not long ago (we are talking weeks) were after an update the
browser did get indeed a little slow, but it was still usable, and it got
fixed very quickly.

I use the hell out of my Firefox, both on desktop and mobile. I abuse it in
all sorts of ways, and I am extremely demanding of it, yet it never breaks a
sweat. Right now I have more than 100 tabs open in my Firefox on android -
can't tell the exact number because when the 100th tab is opened, the number
just becomes an infinity symbol - which is nothing more than average for me, I
can easily get to 350, and it still opens and loads up instantly (at the time
of the performance problem mentioned above I had ~260 tabs open).

Am I just lucky? Do the performances/usability change so vastly from phone to
phone and person to person?

~~~
notSupplied
Firefox on Android has a notable scrolling delay which drives me nuts. iOS
guarantees that the point where your finger first makes contact remains under
that finger as you scroll. Most good Android apps can deliver on this promise
99%, but for some reason, Firefox on Android does not.

~~~
antoineMoPa
Firefox on Android here; Can't reproduce the delay, everything seems fine.

------
jf-
I think I’m now at the point of jumping aboard this movement away from google.
Not because their services are bad (they objectively are excellent) nor even
because of privacy concerns (though they are legitimate), but because of the
argument put forward in the OP: google are taking over everything. There is
far too much power concentrated into the hands of a single company.

As an individual there is not much that I can do about this, but what I can do
is to use google products and services as little as possible, and to support
smaller, independent alternatives.

I think this has been posted on hn in the recent past, seems like a reasonable
jumping-off point: [https://medium.com/@ricst/de-google-your-life-
now-82fad3ec0f...](https://medium.com/@ricst/de-google-your-life-
now-82fad3ec0f35)

------
bad_user
Note this advice is true for email services as well. Pay for and use an
alternative now, or later you won't get the choice.

Google is hellbent on locking people into their ecosystem. One such move is
the promotion of AMP: [https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/13/amp-for-email-is-a-
terribl...](https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/13/amp-for-email-is-a-terrible-
idea/)

Speaking of email and browsers, the Gmail app on top of iOS presents the user
with a choice between two browsers:

1\. Safari

2\. Chrome, which on iOS is a reskinned Safari, but with Sync and controlled
by Google obviously

But when Safari is selected they actually open links in an app Web View. Which
does not share sessions and cookies with Safari. And their reskinned Chrome
doesn't do Safari's content blocking either. Firefox on iOS doesn't do that
either, but at least Firefox has its own tracking protection.

Speaking of Chrome on iOS, they give the user the choice to switch search
engines, supposedly, however they only list Yahoo and Bing as alternatives. No
DuckDuckGo or Qwant or the ability to add your own.

Android still allows users to switch their web browser or to use an
alternative app store, but I wonder for how long. I mean they disallow users
to uninstall their apps. My guess is that they are afraid of locking Android
down more due to fines from the EU.

Sadly what made Google great several years back was openness. But times are
changing.

~~~
saagarjha
> Firefox on iOS doesn't do that either, but at least Firefox has its own
> tracking protection.

Firefox on iOS _can 't_ do this, unfortunately :(

~~~
diafygi
I'm curious about this. I get that firefox for ios has to use a webview, but
why can't it allow extensions that can manipulate what's in the webview? The
main reason I'm currently sticking with Android is that I can install firefox
and use ublock origin and https everywhere.

~~~
saagarjha
You can run your own JavaScript in WKWebView, which is what Firefox uses, so
you _can_ run "extensions" to the extent of what the App Store will allow you
to do. What you cannot do in this case is load content blockers, which a newer
API that uses a list of selectors to block elements without JavaScript at all.
Currently this API is limited to Safari itself and SFSafariViewController,
which is untenable for Firefox because it is essentially "Safari in a box" in
that the component provides its own UI and you essentially cannot interact
with it at all.

------
jillesvangurp
Easy path to success for Firefox is to continue to beef up security and
privacy tooling for their users and have sane defaults. They've been winning a
lot of users who feel abandoned by the big companies in this space.

A problem and conflict of interest for them regarding this is that they are
funded mainly by Google. Firefox has a conflict of interest here because they
are not doing all they can here because that would cut off their main source
of revenue.

So, for example, they have sort of a mute option for sound (just like other
browsers) but they don't allow you to mute video by default (without blanket
turning it off for all websites). I don't know anyone who loves being
bombarded with video content when they want to read an article. I find the
moving stuff to be distracting; even if the sound is off. Also the bandwidth
is kind of not nice, especially on mobile. The BBC has started putting
multiple video previews in their articles. This kind of attention whoring is
highly annoying. This is not news to anyone of course.

The obvious fix allow people to whitelist sites to allow autoplaying video
(youtube, netflix, and other websites where people go specifically to enjoy
video content) and switch that off for everything else. All the extenions for
that claim to do this are basically a combination of broken or simply setting
the config property that blanket bans all autoplay video for every website
(just preempting the inevitable comment to try extension X here).

Similarly, the containers extension is great. This should be baked into the
browser and improved to the point where the default container is a private
container unless you whitelist the domain. Right now private browsing happens
in a separate window. It's an obvious thing to do: every site by default is
private until you say otherwise.

Both kind of are in direct conflict with how Google, and by extension, how
Mozilla monetizes. This is the main reason this is made hard to do. I'm sure
if this was easier, there'd be countless extensions doing exactly that.
Instead people sort of emulate private browsing with stuff like noscript and
other extensions that throw away cookies. Also nice but not user friendly.

Doing all this in fool proof, user friendly way would be a great way for
Firefox to differentiate. It would unfortunately cut them off from Google
funding probably.

~~~
gambler
Most people don't care.

Firefox became popular by being fast and offering tabbed browsing when IE
didn't. I think being fast and offering radical quality of life feature is a
good strategy to follow even now.

~~~
amyjess
> tabbed browsing

And popup blocking. I remember how much of the Internet was utterly _infested_
with popups in the early-to-mid-00s. Firefox was the only way to not get
inundated, unless you were a _really_ hardcore geek and ran a proxy server
like Junkbuster (the ancestor of Privoxy), and most of the population wasn't
going to do that.

Popup blocking changed how the Internet works, and you can thank Firefox and
Opera for that.

------
mcherm
Back in 2014 I was using g Firefox, for precisely this reason. I am still
using it today, for the same reason.

Please stop creating web applications that only work with Chrome (or Chrome
and Safari).

~~~
fernandotakai
not only that but stop testing your frontend code only on chrome. i'm the only
one on my team that uses a non-chrome browser and every once in a while i find
a bug or a css issue that is non-chrome only because nobody tests outside
chrome.

------
Springtime
Unfortunately the choice isn't as easy now, personally. I'm stuck having to
use an older, non-Quantum version for my daily browsing following Mozilla's
decision to obsolete their previous addons as of v57 (and having since deleted
them from their servers).

Previously Firefox was a no-brainer choice for its deep customizibility and
functionality it afforded addons, which primarily distinguished it from
Chromium, however since the move to Quantum I have too many addons without an
equivalent to switch, with a couple favorites that did migrate to
WebExtensions offering an inferior experience.

Vivaldi would be my second choice should I be forced to switch since its
integrated features more closely match Opera's original features, albeit less
extensive.

Mozilla felt the need to do what they did in that regard and I understand the
various reasoning for the decision however the way it panned out didn't make
for a browser I'm currently interested in upgrading to, sadly.

------
new_here
Okay, I'll switch to Firefox now and give this a try.

~~~
lmedinas
Just fyi this article is from 2014 and it was mentioned here in HN several
times. But yes you are not too late :)

------
jdofaz
The future is here for at least one K-12 school district that I work with. The
majority of the organizations computing devices are iPad, Chromebook or
Windows S. None of those devices can run Firefox.

~~~
CWuestefeld
Recentish Chromebooks can trivially run Firefox Mobile.

I actually spent last night getting a full-blown desktop FF running on my
chromebook (by way of Crostini, their Linux virtualization). It's not
something my mom or even my wife would ever be able to do, but it is possible.
And if Mozilla really cared, they could package it in a way that would make it
a whole lot easier to install.

~~~
jdofaz
I hadn't considered the android version of Firefox on a CB, good point

------
Engineering-MD
It’s great to see people swapping to Firefox from chrome, but if you really
want to support them, consider donating to Mozilla. As others have said, there
is a conflict of interest as they getting funding from google. I donate
£30/$40 a year to Mozilla for this reason, and put my money where my mouth is.

------
izacus
How will avid Apple users on this website choose Firefox as a browser on their
iPhones and iPad computers?

EDIT: To clarify, mean the rendering engine (so we keep the ecosystem
diversity), not the reskinned Safari. Reskinning Safari with Firefox branding
does nothing for WebKit web monoculture.

~~~
welly
We can, just not the Firefox rendering engine. As frustrating as that is,
perhaps if more iOS users picked firefox as their "browser" then maybe Apple
would take a hint and open up allowing other rendering engines. Although I'm
not holding my breath.

I'm an Apple user in as far as I have an iPad Pro and a Macbook Pro, I
certainly don't hold Apple in as high regard as I used to do but those two
products are superb even with the limitations of the iPad/iOS.

~~~
izacus
Not using the Firefox rendering engine means you're effectively using Safari
for rendering sites and not helping ecosystem diversity. The renderer is still
WebKit controlled by Apple, not a Firefox browser controlled and built by
Mozilla.

~~~
takluyver
I don't have an iOS device, but presumably Firefox on iOS still integrates
with Firefox Sync, so it may reinforce using 'real' Firefox on a laptop or
desktop.

~~~
welly
It does, although doesn't support Firefox extensions as the Android version
does. Again due to browser engine restrictions.

Damn you, Apple.

~~~
saagarjha
Actually, since Firefox uses WKWebView, it should be able to support
extensions to some extent. Whether this would fly on the App Store, with the
rules against alternative marketplaces for software and all, is indeterminate,
but I don't think there is a technical reason why this couldn't work.

------
amyjess
Honestly, the only thing the use of FUD like this headline has done is to
continue to put me off of the FOSS community.

Back in the '90s, it used to be big companies like MS that used FUD against
FOSS. Now the FOSS community uses FUD against everyone else. FUD is bad no
matter who spreads it.

Hint: If your argument is "don't use our competitor, or else", you are
engaging in abusive monopolistic behavior, and it gives me reason to believe
that if you actually manage to destroy your competition, you will not hesitate
to abuse your newfound monopoly.

------
holtalanm
What if I chose Opera? Personally, I've never liked Firefox; it has always
felt clunky.

~~~
leavjenn
Opera Software is acquired by a group of Chinese companies,[1] and one of them
is Qihoo 360, which has a lot of negative history.[2]

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Software](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Software)

2\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qihoo_360#Controversies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qihoo_360#Controversies)

------
craigsmansion
Well, maybe if Mozilla hadn't alienated their early Freedom/Open web oriented
users with their web hostile actions (or inaction). You know, the kind of
users that would stick with "inferior" software because of values.

That mountain ahead, Mozilla, is the accumulation of all the "hills not to die
on". You got the clout you wanted by selling out, but now those users are
flocking to technically better solutions as you're doomed to eternally play
catch-up. Who would have thought?

EDIT: Apparently people still believe in the "steward of the Open Web" image
they present, and I have no right to be disenfranchised. We'll see. They made
their bed...

~~~
Jonnax
Okay. So they sold out and the alternative is a browser from an advert
company.

How do you think Mozilla should fund the development of Firefox?

~~~
craigsmansion
An alternative is an open source version of a browser from an advert company,
with anti-features hopefully being kept in check by diligent maintainers.

As much as I dislike that, from the advert company I know they're on the side
of the advertisers. They're not presenting a "we're on the side of you, the
users" face, whilst behaving more or less the same.

A better alternative would be a fork of Firefox, kept up to date by a handful
of overworked but dedicated-to-their-users volunteers. These exist, and maybe
they would get some more recognition and funding if Mozilla were to cease to
exist.

I don't think Mozilla can change. They're too comfortably corporate. Having
lost sight of their mission, I think it would be better if it disappeared and
was replaced by something else.

~~~
AsyncAwait
> An alternative is an open source version of a browser from an advert
> company, with anti-features hopefully being kept in check by diligent
> maintainers.

To which nobody will listen and who'd have zero power in the standards
committees, as unfortunate as it may be.

~~~
craigsmansion
What's the difference between having zero power and having some power but
always caving when it's important for the open web with the excuse that if you
hadn't you would lose users and have no say the standards committees?

~~~
AsyncAwait
I get your frustration, I felt the same particularly after the DRM fiasco, but
at least in Firefox it's not enabled by default. I'd say that is an important
difference.

More importantly, I think what's important is that there exist multiple
browser engines because that forces Google to at least compromise somewhat,
(agree to WebAssembly instead of just DartVM for example), not run completely
unchecked, even if I agree with your core premise and I think Mozilla should
fight a lot harder than it often does.

------
thegreatpeter
Firefox is awesome. As a dev, switched from Chrome a few months ago and never
looked back

------
gambler
Some reasons I like using Firefox over Chrome right now:

\- Tags for bookmarks.

\- Bult-in reader view that makes pages readable again and has hassle-free
test-to-speech.

\- I can customize toolbars to much higher extent.

What I would really like to see is more tools for managing large numbers of
tabs.

------
neilsimp1
I've seen the comment here on HN and a few other sites in the past few days -
are there sites out there that _don 't_ work in Firefox, but do work in
Chrome?

Like, I'm aware of a few CSS properties that work in Chrome but not FF, but I
don't think I've ever come across a site that doesn't look or work completely
fine in FF.

The only exception to this that I can think of is Google Earth, which I'm
pretty sure you can open inside of Chrome. I've always used the desktop app
for that though so I'm not sure.

~~~
astura
I was looking at this page yesterday in Firefox:
[https://www.digitalarchives.wa.gov/Collections/TitleInfo/512](https://www.digitalarchives.wa.gov/Collections/TitleInfo/512)

When I enter a name and click "search" I get a page with some JSON
({"Result":true,"Status":"success","Redirect":1}) rather than the results
page. Worked in chrome, however.

~~~
bzbarsky
I just tried this in Firefox, and it seems to be working ok for me. Are you
still seeing the problem? If so, and if you have some time to help diagnose
what's going on here, I would really appreciate it...

~~~
astura
When I tried it yesterday from my work computer, I got the incorrect behavior.

I tried it on mobile Firefox this morning when I typed this comment and it did
the same (just displayed json text). Mobile chrome was fine.

I put in only a last name and clicked search.

Just tried it on Firefox from my work computer and it's working now!!!

I didn't make it up, that json above is copied/pasted!

~~~
bzbarsky
I totally believe you that you saw what you saw! Just trying to pin it down.

------
jdlyga
I wasn't a huge fan of the first Firefox Quantum release, but the latest one
is amazing. I switched over on my Windows computer at work, and it runs
amazingly.

------
Const-me
I never started to use Chrome.

If/when MS Edge will switch to Blink, I'll indeed switch to FF. Until then I
prefer MS Edge: performance, font rendering, OS integration (e.g. video
codecs) are IMO better in MS Edge.

Couple months ago I had to downgrade one of my PCs to Win7 (a client wanted me
to develop for it), I used Firefox on that PC. Worked great.

------
catacombs
What are HN's thoughts on ungoogled-chrome? It's still a Chromium browser but
without the Google spying.

~~~
heuiop
It's not just spying. It's also unilateral actions like the recent 'trivial
subdomains' example:

[https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=881410](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=881410)

[https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=883038](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=883038)

------
collinmanderson
Imagine someone from 2006, or even 2012 seeing the headline: "Microsoft kills
closed-source IE successor, switches to open source codebase" and hearing that
people are mad that IE('s successor) is dead and an open source browser has
too much market share. :)

------
runeks
> I know it's not the greatest marketing pitch, but it's the truth.

It's about the worst marketing pitch I can think of.

Tell us reasons to choose Firefox over Chrome. If there are no reasons to
prefer Firefox, it doesn't matter whether we lose the ability to choose it.

------
mcemilg
I was very afraid about syncing my data with other devices on Firefox. But
today I switched to Firefox and passed all my chrome data (even stored
passwords) to Firefox. It can sync with all devices such as mobile. I hope I
will not get trouble about web apps :P

------
kahlonel
As a non-web-dev, I'm still looking for a reason to not use Safari on my
macbook. Perhaps I'm too dumb to see the difference, but I've never found
chrome/firefox to be better than safari.

~~~
z5h
As an exercise in trying to install the minimum amount of software on my
Machine, I'm using Safari as my default browser. However, there are cases I
have found where a website simply doesn't work with Safari but has been
developed and tested against Chrome.

------
mosselman
I really wanted to keep using Firefox, but it is just too slow on my Mac. It
makes itself and all other things I do very slow. Until this is resolved there
is no way I can use it. Instead I use Brave now.

------
mscasts
I used to donate to Mozilla, but ever since they fired Brendan I haven't been
able to look at them the same way.

I use Firefox daily, but actually don't really care if they die because it's
their own fault.

~~~
sgift
Brendan Eich wasn't fired, he stepped down.

~~~
mscasts
Yeah right, Mozilla didn't even fight for him one second.

> “We didn’t act like you’d expect Mozilla to act,” wrote Mozilla Executive
> Chairwoman Mitchell Baker in a blog post. “We didn’t move fast enough to
> engage with people once the controversy started. We’re sorry.”

------
harikb
Genuinely curious - how is it that people don’t trust the website they have an
account/email/bank with, but still trust plug-ins that now have access to all
your browser activity

~~~
yinyang_in
This is my only usecase for Chrome, just for incognito mode. Installed it for
that. No add-ons nothing.

------
Slashbot
Firefox ceased to be a best browser the day it released Quantum.. That day
sealed it's fate into irrelevancy.

I use Vivaldi.com now (chromium based backend, with alot more effort put in
than those who work at google or mozilla or any of the fking companies with
huge amounts of money doing fuck to improve the user experience with a web
browser).. all the other browsers pale in comparison to the features and
customization that is built into it. Sorry Mozilla not sorry you are are fking
idiots for the direction you took with Firefox, you killed it. You let
everyone done, you didn't care about the very user and developers who made
your browser popular in the first place.

------
cataphract
Is there any way to make Firefox use the passwords I have saved with Google
(available at passwords.google.com and loaded into gnome-keyring)?

~~~
zymhan
When you first install Firefox, it asks if you want to import that data from
other browsers that are installed.

[https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/import-bookmarks-
data-a...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/import-bookmarks-data-another-
browser)

Additionally, you can install a 3rd party password manager temporarily that
can sync between Firefox and Chrome (e.g. LastPass, etc)

[https://smallbusiness.chron.com/export-settings-chrome-
firef...](https://smallbusiness.chron.com/export-settings-chrome-
firefox-49457.html)

------
SpecialistEMT
I really want to use firefox but always getting weird js problems and freezes
on solus project os. No problems with chrome

------
bitwize
Ever since Firefox adopted its PulseAudio or gtfo policy for Linux builds,
I've been a pretty happy Pale Moon user.

------
codehalo
Used to use Firefox, primarily for the dev tools. Switched to Brave. Easily
the best browser out here right now.

~~~
gambler
What features Brave has that are missing in Firefox?

Brave is based on Chromium. It doesn't seem to have any radical UI features
that would put it ahead.

------
emiller88
Anyone have any thoughts on Firefox vs Brave?

------
akayoshi1
Just use both. End of comments.

------
notbeevil5
I think HN new should change its name to mozilla news or Wallstreet News for
IT.

------
barking
Well, this is embarrassing.

------
askaboutit
I chose Firefox then it made the CPU fan go nuts whilst it chewed all the
available power.

~~~
ginko
Even if Firefox were an objectively worse browser than Chrome(which I don't
think it is these days) there is still an argument to be made to use it
anyways to ensure the freedom of the web.

~~~
speedplane
> there is still an argument to be made to use [firefox] anyways to ensure the
> freedom of the web.

Definitely. Remember when Google wanted to buy Wikipedia but promised to keep
it a free resource? So happy that didn't happen, it would have been the end of
Wikipedia. Services like Firefox and Wikipedia are the last vestiges we have
of the original intent of the internet, an place to congregate with the user
in mind.

Most of everything else is walled gardens with the hope to create a monopoly
via network effects.

~~~
anticensor
Or fenced yards, which only acts as echo chamber with an extra chorus.

------
superkuh
Mozilla made their choice to become Chrome in spirit if not engine. I don't
see how picking Firefox is going to help. Maybe pick a browser that doesn't
target tech ignorants that need to be protected from themselves by violating
software freedoms. No browser that has a walled garden should be used.

------
hartator
I don’t fully get the cult-like altitude with Mozilla. Just pick the best web
browser. If it happens to be Firefox, great, if not pick, Chrome, Chromium,
Brave, Opera, Safari, or whatever you feel is best for you. Mozilla has been
losing marked shares since then and a moralist message is not the way to go.

~~~
RussianCow
Unless you actually care about the moral issues, like privacy?

~~~
hartator
What's wrong with privacy with unGoogled Chromium, Brave, Safari or Opera?

Mozilla has been careless with your privacy at least a couple of times: Mr
Robot injected ad, Google Analytics in extension panel, and Pocket aggressive
integration to name a few.

------
kanwisher
Brendan Eich has moved out to make BAT. Lets support that instead. Firefox can
die and new things can take its place

~~~
matt4077
"Brave" is a morally bankrupt hustle gnawing at the foundations of civil
society; it is a bro-wser spawned by a disgruntled has-been consumed by his
ego's unwillingness to accept that his bank account does not reflect his
former social standing. It is the rare "creative" endeavour motivated solely
by a drive to destroy, and to get rich & even in the process.

Also it's just another Chromium skin, so it wouldn't change anything.

~~~
FeralAlien
At least brave works, Firefox has been completely useless for me on anything
but Windows and Android since the quantum update. It drains battery like
nobody's business or screws with UI elements when no one asked it to.

------
hannasanarion
Frankly, I don't want to choose firefox. Their priorities are utterly
misplaced.

I can't believe people don't talk about the dark gtk theming bug more often.
It's one of the most common firefox questions on stackoverflow: If you have a
dark gtk theme, like Arc-dark or Adwaita-dark, then Firefox randomly colors
certain web page elements (usually text boxes) dark to match your desktop
theme.

Almost always resulting in black text on a black background. There are
examples of this misbehavior _on mozilla.org_

THIS BUG HAS BEEN OPEN FOR 18 YEARS
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=70315](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=70315)

If something so obvious and so easy (why not make white the default background
color, like _every other browser_ ) has gone unfixed for so long, despite its
manifestation on their own home page, then why wouldn't I expect that there
are tons of other common sense things that Mozilla has totally ignored,
waiting for me to stumble upon them like so many land mines?

~~~
bzbarsky
There were lots of requests to have form controls "look native", which is why
they were changed to use the desktop theme...

One problem with that, as you note, is web pages that are setting a color but
not a background color on elements, which is a web development 101 mistake.

But there's just no way to win here: either you can use the OS theme for
widgets and things fail when sites make this mistake, or the widgets don't
look "native".

~~~
hannasanarion
> One problem with that, as you note, is web pages that are setting a color
> but not a background color on elements, which is a web development 101
> mistake.

If it works correctly for 99.9% of users (those who aren't running linux, with
firefox, with a dark GTK theme), than it isn't a mistake on the part of the
website, it's a bug on the part of the browser.

User theming is not about to sweep over the web. It didn't happen in 2000 when
this bug was first opened. The web has changed a lot since then, we've seen
web 2.0 and the dawn of the social internet. But there are zero signs of a
user-defined theme revolution. AFAIK themes still don't exist in Windows and
OSX. It is absurd to continue to insist that the issue is about to fix itself,
as maintainers have done on the bug report I linked.

~~~
bzbarsky
> AFAIK themes still don't exist in Windows and OSX.

They exist just fine on Windows. See [https://support.microsoft.com/en-
us/help/13768/desktop-theme...](https://support.microsoft.com/en-
us/help/13768/desktop-themes-featured) for example, and there's a number of
themes that ship with Windows by default, including several "dark" themes.

On Mac I am not aware of themes per se, but there are accessibility options
that have similar effects.

Again, what is your specific proposed solution? Stop using the current theme
entirely when painting controls? You can sort of test what that looks like by
putting "-moz-appearance: none" on some controls; then tell me whether that's
what people using a non-dark GTK theme actually want. Or do you have some
other concrete proposal?

~~~
hannasanarion
> Again, what is your specific proposed solution?

Why do you need a proposal from me? What's wrong with this one?
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=70315#c8](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=70315#c8)

Or this one?
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=70315#c12](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=70315#c12)

Or this one?
[https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/22026...](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/220263/comments/8)

Or this one?
[https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/22026...](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/220263/comments/44)

Or this one?
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=70315#c36](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=70315#c36)

Or this one? [https://github.com/lightradius/firefox-dark-theme-
fix](https://github.com/lightradius/firefox-dark-theme-fix)

Or this one?
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=70315#c45](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=70315#c45)

Or this one?
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=70315#c46](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=70315#c46)

Or this one?
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1461538#c9](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1461538#c9)

And those are only the proposals that are linked from the original 18-year old
bug, there are probably dozens of others that were opened independently.

Granted, some of them are dumb (the patch that hard-codes "Adwaita-dark" as a
trigger seems particularly bad) but there is _no_ excuse for this to still be
around, 18 years later, despite all of the proposals and patches that have
been sent to fix it. There are multiple firefox extensions out there that fix
the bug, and they are very popular, with thousands of users each. In what
crazy world is it considered good design practice to force thousands of your
users to install 3rd party extensions to be able to read text on the internet?

~~~
bzbarsky
> What's wrong with this one?
> [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=70315#c8](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=70315#c8)

Like the comment says: it makes things better with some themes but worse with
others. Incidentally, the author of that patch is a senior engineer at Mozilla
now; if he actually thought this patch made things better, it would be in the
tree.

Note, by the way, that this bug report is about the Firefox UI itself, not
about web pages.

> Or this one?
> [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=70315#c12](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=70315#c12)

That comment comes down to "stop doing native theming", no?

> Or this one?
> [https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/22026...](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/220263/comments/8)

That's the same as your first link.

> Or this one?
> [https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/22026...](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/220263/comments/44)

Amusingly enough, that comment was written by me. There's nothing wrong with
it. It's from
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=437366](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=437366)
which was a superficially similar, but not at all the same issue, and which I
fixed back in 2009. (And yes, I have thought about this problem space quite a
bit in the past, though not necessarily the Linux-specific bits.)

> Or this one?
> [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=70315#c36](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=70315#c36)

That says "stop doing native theming".

> Or this one? [https://github.com/lightradius/firefox-dark-theme-
> fix](https://github.com/lightradius/firefox-dark-theme-fix)

That's a set of CSS rules that disables native theming.

> Or this one?
> [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=70315#c45](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=70315#c45)

This comment is about the Firefox UI, not web pages.

> Or this one?
> [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=70315#c46](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=70315#c46)

This one is actually useful, thank you. Following the links from there lands
me at
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1283086#c13](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1283086#c13)
from one of the RedHat folks who have been active in this stuff. Note that
this comment says that Firefox tries to avoid using dark themes for form
controls, but some dark themes fail to properly flag themselves as dark
themes. Which makes it hard to avoid them.

Also, can you stop pretending like no one has worked on this? Given
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1353147](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1353147)
and
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1158076](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1158076)
it sure looks like people have been active here.

> Or this one?
> [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1461538#c9](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1461538#c9)

Karl is an engineer on Firefox, working on GTK integration. If he felt that
his comment were the right fix, it would be in the tree.

> In what crazy world is it considered good design practice to force thousands
> of your users to install 3rd party extensions to be able to read text on the
> internet?

In a world where all the proposals for fixing that so far make millions of
users unhappy?

