Interesting, I just moved back to Firefox after many years of using Chrome.
I have to admit, it has gotten a lot faster recently, Firefox sync is working very well, and the Firefox Android app is a pleasure to use (being able to install uBlock origin is a huge plus).
Anything else I missed on Chrome was easily solved by an addon, or a small tweak on userChrome.css (customizing the browser interface by overriding its CSS is amazing btw).
I can’t solve highlighting search results in the scroll bar, and apparently I search a surprising amount and am absolutely crippled without scroll bar highlighting, so I’ll stick to Chrome until I can’t (e.g. when content blocking is crippled).
>> ... highlighting search results in the scroll bar...
This. I find any browser that doesn't do that to be unusable. The alternative, in long documents or source code, is to blindly hit NEXT and visit all locations where a search term is found rather than scrolling quickly to see the different context regions.
I tried a plug-in or two but they were not nearly as functional as the native Chrome experience.
Glad I’m not insane, or not the only one insane. Whenever I read one of these highly-voted “I switched to Firefox and nothing’s degraded” post I wonder if I’m the only one searching on web pages, or if I’m the only one whose productivity is massively boosted by knowing where search results are located and how they are clustered at a glance. But then, modern code editors do tend to have this feature, so apparently it is important to a non-negligible audience.
One thing no browsers I'm aware of does right is re-highlighting matches after clicking a link. Firefox keeps the search bar open, but you still need to re-trigger it to update the match count and highlight. Chrome just closes it, sigh, although that is a more accurate UI for the behavior.
> modern code editors do tend to have this feature, so apparently it is important to a non-negligible audience
Sorry, but as far as the modern browsers are concerned, we coders are a negligible market to cater for. The number of non-coder browser-users is orders magnitude higher than the number of coders.
Not saying coders are a non-negligible audience (although I’d say coders are a non-negligible segment of Firefox user base). My assumption is that the percentage of coders who value scroll bar highlighting is comparable to the percentage of those among all web users who read and search web pages of nontrivial length, since there’s hardly anything about this feature that’s specifically beneficial to coding.
This and the fact that I heard all the “switched to Firefox and nothing’s degraded” comments from coders, and upvoted by coders.
On a super long page (like forum post or comment thread, etc.), highlighting keywords on the scroll bar shows clustering of the find target and help you jump to the relevant conversation.
It is mind-boggling that people find their browser experience “crippling” without a feature like scroll bar highlighting. Is it hyperbole, or are you unable to cope in e.g., PDF readers as well? Is your line of work in visually investigating the appearance of words in 1000 page HTML documents?
Nah, I never managed to start using Chrome because of all the small stuff that is missing so I can clearly sympathize even if I personally dislike Chrome.
For me I cannot understand how people can choose to use a browser that doesn't support tree style tabs. I'll gladly sacrifice searcy result markers in the scrollbar as long as I have Firefox extensions.
Where did you get the idea that my PDF readers don’t have this feature? You might want to look into a better PDF reader... (Having a dedicated bar with results grouped by page is basically equivalent.)
Btw, I can code in TextEdit too, but I don’t because I have programmer’s text editors. Same goes for a web browser and its convenience features.
this is not the same. textedit isn’t a window into your personal life, chrome is. and because of some simple feature you’ve decided to throw away privacy. i agree with the parent here, this is ridiculous
I use chrome strictly for work nowadays. Hard to beat its speed and search features, like you mentioned. I'm mostly just visiting stack overflow, git repos, the occasional random site from a google search.
I don't login anywhere (including the browser itself) I don't need to for work, I don't use any extensions, and I don't mix work with personal stuff.
For anything not work however, Firefox all the way. Keep the data off google's servers as much as I can.
This. I've tried using FF for work as well but given I work a lot with Google web properties, Firefox is just a drag there. Don't know if Google's deliberately slowing it down or what but there's a very solid performance difference there.
A feature I cannot do without is the web developer console; much of the modern web pages are bad without it.
The older XPCOM-based extensions also are more powerful than the WebExtensions and can do many more things (I don't like the design of XPCOM, but nevertheless WebExtensions isn't very good either). Such as, I can alter the behaviour of the location bar; I don't like the default behaviour and I want it to treat my entry as a relative URL (rather than trying to add the scheme automatically or treat it as a search query), so I programmed it to do that.
there’s a difference between a dev console, which is required for web developers and something that draws a line in the scroll bar. You can easily live without the later and there are absolutely no workflows requiring it. grandparent is giving up privacy for a line in the scroll bar.
TIL. So funny, I've been using Chrome since the beginning, and I've never noticed this feature, and I search all the time. I am now switching between Firefox and Chrome among various laptops, and I am impressed with Firefox. At some point, Firefox may become my dominant browser.
Been using it for years and years, I never could adopt Chrome. First when it came out I tried it, but no adblocker, then when there was one, it was too crippled, my guess is that this was intentional since they're going back to crippling adblockers. Now we have network level adblockers which I think is the best approach.
I only use Chrome cause some kiosk-like application I'm developing will ship through Chrome (not Electron) / WebKit. Also my boss prefers to see it, so I demo with Chrome mainly, but I do all my real browsing on Firefox. I'm a geek / developer so I have Firefox and Chrome on every system I have. Except on Android, unless it's preinstalled for me, I wont get it.
Also happy with my move to Firefox, it surpassed my expectations. Two (small) pain points have been:
- customizing userChrome.css .. It was a bit time consuming to figure out first (I wanted to remove the top bar and use vertical tabs). Happy to be able to do it, but it's not exactly user-friendly.
- Rejection of Windows local certificates store that requires fiddling with a setting to enable. If my certificate store is compromised Firefox is not going to save me. I don't recommend it over Chrome at work since we have one of these for a local server and I'd rather not generate support tickets.
Both of these are not part of Firefox Sync and require manual handling on each PC.
I just did a little googling, and it appears that Firefox supports group policy settings that can cause it to use system root certs[1], so if it's not working, it may be because the domain administrators haven't bothered to support it.
Well, I would counter that if you want to use a new application (Firefox) with the local server, there should probably be a support ticket to at least ask if they believe it should function correctly.
While you probably can assume Firefox will mostly work, there's decades of history saying you probably shouldn't, given the state of enterprise web apps. To be safe, I wouldn't assume Firefox would work any better than lynx for an internal app if neither are listed as supported (and the same goes for every browser).
Yes. That's one of the few annoyances I have with Firefox. I have to use a local app where the root domain URL results in an IIS error page. Annoying, this always appears in the "Awesome bar" auto-completion list before the URLs I want to go to.
OP may be confusing Edge/Brave/Opera with Firefox here, so I can't really blame them for having had the impression that Firefox and Chrome share the same engine.
And in at least one regard it's entirely true: on iOS, everything uses WebKit.
Nope. It was a fork of WebKit which was a fork of KHTML, the engine powering Konqueror. KHTML was developed by the KDE team.
Edit: It was widely speculated that Apple would use gecko for Safari and a shock when they announced they would use the relatively little known KHTML engine. The decision was based on KHTML having much cleaner code. I haven't looked at the Mozilla code in many years, but it was pretty gnarly back then. Lots of old cruft from the Netscape days. In comparison, KHTML was beautiful.
Ken Kocienda's book "Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs" has more details about the Safari team's evaluation of Mozilla code and KHTML. Ken was engineer #2 on the Safari team.
I went looking into this, and it appears that I was confused. Google was a big contributor to Firefox in the early naughties, which is the period I was thinking of. Chrome didn't come out until a good while later.
FF just got web socket inspectors so I really don't know what chrome dev tools has now. Everything about ff dev tools is better. Especially looking at css layouts.
As a web dev, I find the FF dev tools a good bit less performant, but I still try to use it always without reverting to Chrome.. The one feature I have not found in FF dev tools is Search, this is very handy for find random JavaScript on a JS heavy site.
This has finally allowed me to switch. I’ve been trying to since quantum came out two years ago, but this was always a deal breaker.
Firefox is generally still a little buggier and less performance in my experience, but not so much that I want to switch back. Hopefully they can stay relevant.
The dev tools available in the Firefox developer edition are honestly way better than chrome's in every possible way (as far as I'm concerned) recently switched myself and couldn't be happier!
Yes but a blunt counterstatement doesnt make for good reading. Far better is to provide some substantiation so everyone can learn as your more highly voted siblings did!
As in, it doesnt render the buttons at all. Just leaves a blank area where the button is supposed to be. I wasn't detailed because I assumed everyone knew about it based on the many comments I encountered online while searching for a fix. Anyway, I only bring it up because thats what is preventing me from going full firefox.
Even if you have no issue with Google, this is still a good idea to encourage competition. Honestly, Chrome is not as good as it used to be anyway.
For me, Google Maps and Waze are the hardest things to kick.
And YouTube...
In terms of browsers, I have moved back to Firefox from Google for my personal/professional browsing, but I have a product that is heavily reliant on Puppeteer and CDP. There are moves towards interoperability in Firefox, but that's my current blocker.
Firefox DevTools member here. We are looking into Puppeteer/CDP – what is the product you depend on? If you can't post it here, feel free to email me [nickname] at mozilla org
Not the OP but, I use puppeteer (and headless Chromium) as a PDF rendering service. I'd love to be able to try the same thing with a headless Gecko/Slimer.js type thing. My current build process is a major pain to keep updated (building an Alpine docker image with the right version of Chrome to match the right version of puppeteer with the right version of nodejs) And after all that, it's pretty slow.
Badly worded on my part, but it's my own product. I use Puppeteer to run headless Chrome instances in AWS Lambda to evaluate the network traffic associated with advertising data collection. I have a toolchain built around Puppeteer and CDP, which is in use by customers, so migration isn't a viable option for me.
(WebDriver standard contributor and member of the team working on this in Gecko)
There is a plan to update the WebDriver standard to encompass the automation features that are currently only available via devtools protocols. There's agreement it should be possible to open up a bidirectional channel to the browser from within devtools and use it for things like listening to events, streaming logs, etc. However as so often happens reality dictates that implementing something compatible with CDP is needed today in order to interop with the range of existing tooling that's either CDP-only (e.g. Puppeteer) or WebDriver-with-CDP-extensions (e.g. SauceLabs, various WebDriver clients).
In the long term we hope that we end up with a "WebDriver 2.0" that will satisfy all the common use cases in a standard way. That bidirectional protocol will probably end up looking a lot like CDP just to ease the migration for existing implementations, but the details depend on work that hasn't yet been done.
I live outside the US and struggle with a good mapping solution... I make a point to stick with Apple Maps on my phone but sometimes I am forced to resort to Google Maps to find some place I know exists but Apple Maps doesn't have it :/
So I just tried Mapquest and it had the same problem :(
Google's mapping dominance outside the US is really only challenged by Bing maps... which I can't get on iOS. Nearest is HERE maps but it's not quite the same product.
I've used Here WeGo in several European countries and it didn't fail me yet. I would use OpenStreetMaps but I couldn't find any OSM app with public transport included as an option.
In the meantime you can use invidio.us, which scrapes youtube, and lets you 'subscribe' and create playlists without having an account directly on youtube. NewPipe is an app for getting youtube without the youtube. And PeerTube is still young, but a place to check out and get involved with, if you want to see an alternative succeed.
I think that's not really what people have issues with. The scariest thing about YouTube to me is that there's so much great content that's only on YouTube and there's not really an alternative. So if YouTube goes away for some reason, or Google decides to wipe all videos with < xxxx views, or Google decides to get rid of it for liability issues or other things there's nothing to archive this amount of content.
>I think that's not really what people have issues with.
It's tedious to even have to draw these distinctions at all, but I'm not saying it is the answer. A replacement is most preferable. In the meantime, here's something that accesses youtube without being associated with a youtube account or ads, which is one step better than being directly plugged in as we await a preferable alternative.
Well it took YT over a decade to become profitable —before that it was losing lots of money so it’s kinda understandable competitors would be few and far between
This. An ad-free, recommendations-free, comment-free, subscription-free YouTube. Just a search bar with an advanced search feature. That way I can just watch what I need to, not what I want to.
To avoid deep binges into youtube. First of all, youtube thumbnails are cancer anyway, so blocking them is one step towards a Lower Information Diet. And the first step to being able to quit any addictions to youtube.
YT pressures content creators into doing all sorts of stupid shit. They are made to think they don't really have a choice unless they want to risk their monetisation.
One memorable particularity was YT prompting the content creators to make thumbnail images with grimacing faces, which IMO is cancerous. yt/user/theCodyReeder talked about it, but I cannot find the video any more, this was about two years ago.
When YouTube (actively or not) incentivizes that style of thumbnails you cant really blame the creators. I've heard something like 20% more viewers based solely on having a more "creative" thumbnail.
It drastically reduces the occurence of me clicking another video.
If I want to see a video I have to read all titles and it gives me a chance to think if I want to stop watching.
An added bonus is that it takes me at least a couple seconds to find a video to watch when I open the front page and I don't end up subconsciously clicking the first interesting thumbnail.
PS: Also let me add that I'm using youtube signed off with no cookies in a browser that doesn't remember history so the front page is usually the same videos that I don't want to watch for a couple days or a week at a time.
Apple Maps meh. It doesn't work across devices. I look maps on my browser all the time. I need maps to appear everywhere and be sharable with the 80% of the planet not using iOS
I've been using Apple Maps for years now, but the new maps are practically unusable for one of my favorite use cases: scanning for roads in remote, wooded areas.
I was trying to show someone one of my favorite state highways through the Hoosier National Forest, but the road (remember, a state highway!) literally vanishes into the greenery until you zoom quite far in. Maddening.
Issues I have with Apple Maps: no cycling directions and, to a lesser degree, overall slightly-worse-quality and less intuitive visuals, like lacking first-person point-of-view or not updating starting point and estimates if I move when displaying directions.
Of course, there's an element of me having gotten too much used to Google Maps in some of this.
I mean displaying from the point of view of you walking or driving. It simply shows a birds-eye view (unless I'm somehow glossing over a toggle somewhere?).
I tried to kick Waze via Apple Maps but their routes are significantly worse. Sometimes the routes that Apple would give me were 10-20% longer than Waze's projection. Waze is the best, followed closely by Google Maps, and (unfortunately) Apple is a distance 3rd. Still hoping a viable alternative turns up!
That seems like an excellent mapper (and the isochrones are fun), but it doesn't look like it takes into account traffic conditions. I regularly you google maps just to see which of my commute options is faster that day, and if I have to drive in London any route finding system that doesn't take into account current traffic is next to useless.
Yeah, Google Maps is surprisingly good when you are on a foreign trip and need to find which bus you need to take to get somewhere. There are probably better country-specific apps to do the same, but GM works in all sorts of countries like Hungary or Japan.
It does have some cities from these countries, but the coverage is not total enough. I have used Google maps to catch buses in obscure places like Iwaki and Balatonfüred.
OSM-based apps are better for cycling and walking directions than Google. Citymapper is great for urban public transport. Google Maps has a compelling advantage in car directions, but not so much in other ways of getting round.
OpenStreetmaps is a good database with which to build navigation apps, but IMO it's very bad for actually getting directions and finding locations. It's kind of like saying you can use Wikipedia for subway navigation.
On OpenStreetMaps.org, zooming over my area (NYC) and searching for "pizza" brings up the first 3 results in Tuscany Italy.
People also only used to stay in their villages or neighbourhood and don't travel as much as they do these days.
It's a different world and just because we got by with sailing the oceans and using star navigation doesn't mean we can't use modern technology to improve our lives.
You've skipped a rather large period of time in which people would travel, and would bring a map with them or buy one when they got there. You think road trips only got to be a thing after Mapquest?
It was obviously an exaggeration but maps are just an iterative improvement until we landed (for now) GPS enabled devices, in the future we'll maybe have it embedded in our glasses, eyes or brain. I didn't say that we could only start traveling or doing road trips once we invented smartphones.
It's getting harder (though not fully impossible) to find maps.
Where you used to find a stand with local maps in most fueling stations, you don't.
I'm looking at AAA's Map Gallery page trying to figure out if they offer paper maps any more. What's on offer are PDFs for online viewing or printing.
I'm someone who's got several atlases, globes, and piles of paper maps, as well as highway atlases and other paper-based navigational aids. I know how to use them. I prefer them.
They're simply not availabe as they were a decade ago (and for decades before that). And may well not exist in another ten years, except through extraordinary effort.
The "it's just an option" argument works until it doesn't. At which point it's not only not helpful, but not true.
Interesting perspective. This could relate to other nuances on centralization of navigation services. If Google Maps is the sole provider , this means they have authority on what streets are most viable, which shops get prioritized, and even where borders get drawn.
I have been using Firefox for several years now. Energy management is still an unsolved problem on MacOS (Firefox 71 on 10.14.6). They have been making improvements in the last several releases, but "Avg Energy Impact" remains around 40 for me (when browsing web pages, higher when streaming video).
I also noticed how different colors are between Chrome and Firefox. That becomes more obvious in the dark mode.
The comments from noel@chromium.org in this bug report are scary.
"We're not doing as the spec tells us to, BUT that probably gives us performance gains, most users don't care about it anyway, I prefer it that way, webdevs should fix it, we should fix the JPEG standard instead (!?)..."
Our designer was pissed off when we discovered this bug, which explained why Chrome was the only program that displayed RGB values differently from all the others (not just browsers). She'd been careful about standardizing and tweaking colors we already used to work better for people with colorblindness, much of which was thrown out the window on Chrome. Not to mention issues matching the PNGs and SVGs she created for the site.
Quick edit:
> Why so much resistance?
Comment 34:
> Chromium developers have previously stated this won't be supported for reasons mentioned in this old post.
> The big hurdle that we ran into, though, was with the drawing we did not control, namely the Flash plug-in. The problem is that designers specify colors in Flash and colors in CSS in the Web page, and they expect those colors to match. Because Flash’s drawing isn’t correcting to sRGB, if we did it in Safari, there would be color mismatches all over the place. These mismatches look far worse than if we just don’t correct at all.
> I prefer it that way, webdevs should fix it, we should fix the JPEG standard instead
Wow. Just wow. I have rarely seen so much ignorance. And this exactly why Chrome is cancer for the whole internet. I mean, seriously, why should the web developers fix something that is standardized just to make it work in Chrome? And fixing the JPEG standard...?
that bug is closed as dupe of [1] which is marked fixed, though it's not clear to me whether the fix was to implement a flag that enables proper rendering or to do it properly by default.
I was using Safari up until they have yanked support for extensions. The web is unusable, outright hostile place without a proper script blocker. I can tolerate a lot of things, but browsing the web without uBlockOrigin isn't one of them.
But Safari still supports extensions, surely? I’m using it with extensions, there are not stories I can see about them removing support, and their Développement pages are still up.
Their apis only support declarative static blocking lists. No heuristics, right click to block, IAB ad size detection, etc. Similar to what chrome plans to do with manifest v3.
Advertisers are already figuring out how to get around that. CNAME cloacking, proxying with same domain, etc.
Privacy is half the point of an ad blocker. I don’t think it’s ridiculous to enforce privacy constraints on something that ostensibly protects your privacy.
More specifically, they blocked extensions that work a certain way. The deal breaker for me was when uBlock origin was no longer able to run. I immediately switched to Firefox and Brave.
In July 2018, uBlock.org was acquired by AdBlock,[19] and began allowing "Acceptable Ads",[20] a program run by Adblock Plus that allows some ads which are deemed "acceptable", and the publisher pays Adblock Plus.[21]
uBlock was the original tool but was handed over to another maintainer some time ago. The original developer of uBlock, being unhappy with the direction of the tool, forked the repo and made uBlock Origin which he maintains and is often considered the better product by people here
Literally the day Firefox finds the way to be able to use all my passwords in keychain/suggest and generate new ones, I'm switching to it full time. I loved safari, but killing extensions is crossing a line.
Plus,[0]Brave is going to block [1]CNAME Cloaking first-party trackers, AFAIK no other browser, not[2]add-on, has or plan to have such blocking capabilities.
I use Vivaldi alongside Chrome for dev, and from that perspective (for the other devs here on HN) they seem like clones of each other. Both running the same JS engine and dev tools.
the [2] link states that ublock origin in firefox already supports this. did you even read it or just copy paste from someone elses brave fanboy comment.
I use it because I've written many filters for my favourite websites. Also you can use lists which can block even more things. In my case I've blocked all social network bullshit, including icons, share buttons, widgets, etc
I don't think it makes much sense to mix it all up.
You don't like google?
Well don't use it. And yes, adblocking makes sense to avoid googleads.
But the browser is something different. And to avoid the googleintegration of chrome but like the browser like me (mostly for dev tools) just use chromium.
Also, some remarks on the site makes it less trustworthy
"Midori includes private browsing which is said to be “totally anonymous” and fast."
No it is not.
Neither totally anonymous nor very fast. Quite sluggish for me.
There's a "why" link on the upper right-hand side, but even if you click on it, you'll see they don't really make a compelling case to distrust google. Because they scanned books and digitized them?
They don't say Chrome itself is bad, and therefore do not seek to explain it. The page is less a technical break down and more a call to action ala activism. Chrome itself isn't an issue, it's one of many tentacles, and one of the bigger ones, leading back to Google.
> If you're arguing for something you need the full argument.
No you don't. In fact, for many rhetorically primed things, such as opposition to Google, and especially in the realm of activism, explaining over and over why you're doing a thing is often not done because it's not necessary.
Every environmental protest doesn't need to include explanations of the Exxon Valdez and BP's Deepwater Horizon. Once things reach a certain level of cultural "it is known" explaining over and over is not required. If you're attending a protest, you know about these things. If you don't, others at the protest will tell you. If you do and aren't convinced, they aren't interested in reaching you.
Even the WHY page is bad. It only states that "google is bad" "they are not your friends". Okay, proof, cases, overwhelming evidence that would force people to stop?
I’m quite satisfied with my move away from google products. Moved from gmail to protonmail. Chrome to firefox and search to ddg. Ddg isn’t perfect though and I find myself using !g tag more often than I’d like.
Try !s instead -- same results as google (apparently) but via startpage which supposedly doesn't track..
I don't really understand how startpage is able to operate such a service, I assume it's maybe because if google started trying to stop them it would be rather hypocritical?
I have also hopped to Qwant / DDG for their proxied Bing search.
Keeping that in mind, doing a !s bang is probably better privacy-wise (bonus - you get the same results) vs a !g bang, even if it is no longer as good as it was.
Thank you kind soul, I was investigating email solutions to replace gmail, had fastmail in my list of open tabs and lost all of them due to a crash and couldn't remember what it was called.
How do you search through mail in protonmail? Due to the nature of end-to-end encryption, online search features are very limited. You can't build an index if you can't read the data.
Do you download everything and search offline? Or maybe, unlike me, you don't rely on search so much?
I recently switched to qwant, seems to be a decent search engine, owned by a European company (as far as I know ddg is american, so pretty weak legal protection of user data). Though I also occasionally have to search on google.
Does the "pretty weak legal protection of user data" matter in this case though? There are no accounts or cookies (by default at least), and DDG's privacy policy states they don't log or store any user data.
For me, that's enough, but I understand if others don't want to take DDG at their word on not storing any logs - but at that point, you'd probably want to be using Tor or a VPN anyway.
I've been a Google engineer for ~ 10 years. Reading things like their reasoning are always so painful to me as an employee:
> Google will do everything it can to ensure its ability to extract information about you [...] even without your consent and sometimes in direct opposition to existing national and international laws.
... and...
> Google is an information colonialist who want to seize all information both online and in real life – irrespective of who should have the right to access it"
Then I have to turn around and try to justify that I need obfuscated aggregated data about how our users use my product to determine what feature to work on.
Or I have to spend half a day going through user data sensitivity training about fictional consumer footwear. Again. Because I have to do it quarterly, even though the content doesn't change.
Or I write up a design doc where more than half of it is explaining how collecting what users could actually see on a page isn't PII, and it's being aggregated anyway, and we don't capture, target, or in any way interact with users under 13, and that the content team really does need this data because they use it to decide what to serve to the user next time so that the user feels like the experience is new and fresh and more interesting, and that if we see fewer then {x} unique users over a given period of time we'll literally delete the data to make sure that nobody can combine it to build any sort of PII profile, despite the fact that the entire table's data retention is {y} months anyway.
I get that it feels like Google sucks all this data in. And this data could be put together in various ways. And it's big and scary and opaque. And nobody outside knows what is really happening with this data, regardless of what the TOS says. But I can't imagine any level of transparency that would satisfy people. Either it's too detailed and we get accused of burying the data in legalese, or it's too thin and we get accused of being purposefully vague.
While I agree with the rhetoric of this site, this site really is just empty rhetoric.
The "why" on this site is, in my opinion, a terrible, ineffective, dogmatic argument. I agree with the dogma, but I'm not the one that needs convincing.
Their browsers website (https://notochrome.org/find-a-new-browser/) makes it somewhat difficult to understand that Firefox is also available as an option on macOS and iOS. Plus it has a link to Midori that looks like it's been taken over by scam.
The midori thing is weird... the page appears to be unfinished, checking wayback archive shows that the whole project went through a rough patch and is likely on life support if even alive anymore. for a while the homepage was regular wordpress blog feed. sometime at the start of this year they updated it to its current state. They also claim to have merged with the Astian Foundation, but that website also appears unfinished, with lorem ipsum throughout and a gmail email address.
If the only reason to not use Chrome is Google, then you are in luck because Chromium is open source software with a permissive license. There are several libre forks of it, the best-maintained one being Brave. Nightly builds of plain Chromium are available from googlesource. You could also get community builds of Chromium from many package managers. You would only have to rely on Google for the extensions store, but that's not any worse than Firefox's case because there is only one source for Mozilla addons as well.
So for me to switch from Chromium to Firefox would require an argument on technical or UX merits, and so far Firefox is currently worse across the board.
> Also means if it works in Firefox it will most likely work in chrome.
Can’t relate at all. In my limited frontend experience, I’ve run into a lot of rendering deferences between WebKit and Blink, and even more between Gecko and Blink. Sometimes the differences are subtle yet break pixel perfection; sometimes the whole layout is broken.
No op, but for me I use Chrome's "Replay XHR" constantly. Literally 100s of times/day. So I appreciate that it's simple as right-click->open menu->left-click "Replay XHR". AND that it takes me right back to where I was before: namely either the "Response" "tab" (not sure what to call that menu tab/option) or "Preview" "tab". AND that the "Preview" "tab" automatically detects and renders the JSON returned from my server.
FF requires several clicks to re-run XHR. And doesn't return me to where I was before. And doesn't render my JSON.
"Blocking" is not the right verb, but this is representative of a whole category of bugs in dev-tools that makes using FF for dev work very frustrating: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1553836 (
Cmd/Ctrl+A selects the entire panel content so it's hard to copy just a response payload for example), open for 7 months
I was tracking some similar ones related to displaying JSON in the Network pane that were open for years.
In my specific case, Chrome also displays EventSource events just like it does with Websocket frames, but Firefox treats that as a normal XHR, waiting until the very end to display the content. That is a little closer to "blocking" but also very niche, I guess
Is Chrome a bad browser? I feel that unlike IE6 vs Firefox, Chrome is not inferior to the competition and in fact moves faster, not slower towards innovation.
Some times chrome is dictated by googles profit interests and likes to brute force implementations for their own interest and masking as making the web better when we have consortiums that they can contribute to. It’s not the speed of innovation it’s the why of speed (especially with things like PWA (3/4 years ago), AMP, and Houdini).
If by "internet" you mean the more traditional thought of internet with all of its decentralized goodness (and services and such), then YES 1000 times!!
Safari is my default browser and it works for me, along with DDG.
I may switch to Firefox at some point, but currently there's a long standing bug that breaks audio with multi-channel audio interfaces (FF does not adhere to the mac system output channel settings and instead defaults to channels 1-2)
The only site I need chrome to use is google meet, naturally. Which, if you've turned on automatic closed captioning and seen it perform speech-to-text with user attribution in real time, is horrifying by itself.
Jokes aside it's not perfect and there are different shades of "great" depending on what that means to you personally. But I do trust Apple over Google since their business model is not so aligned with mass scale data collection.
Losing Chrome doesn't necessarily stop you being tracked. If you make a vacuum it will be filled by someone else. I am not suggesting apathy but opting out just makes holes for someone else to fill. And as we have seen in the past competition is great but it quickly gets amalgamated behind the scenes, just look at the alcohol industry. All those brands look like healthy competition, but it's largely one parent company.
You can imagine that a young Instagram or What's App could have been on the safe list of alternate social platforms, but Facebook bought them both. Firefox isn't impervious to a change of management and ownership 5-10 years down the line.
So what you are left with is using esoteric applications and social spaces that no one really cares about. That's analogous to living off the grid. It just isn't really suitable to the majority of people and as such it isn't a solution at all.
The problem isn't Chrome or Google per se, it's technology. We should be pressuring the big guns to conform to our needs, not opting out and abandoning the people who benefit from large social platforms and convenient, well supported applications.
What I am hearing is it's not right/fair/moral for businesses to compete with personal data as their primary asset. The proposed solution is for a small subsect of the technical elite to walk away. That really, really does not solve anything except an individual's problem.
The solution is to put pressure on legislators to prevent companies like Google and Facebook trading your data to fund their business. This could result in Google/Facebook charging for their services, and maybe that's a really good thing. People would have to think about how much social media means to them and not ignore the hidden cost of their privacy.
If you give your data to them, it's legitimate for them to use the data. You literally signed away your rights when accepted their ToS.
I would go for clearer definitions of what personal data are, several most important kinds of it. Maybe a regulation should require that ToS clearly state how these data are going to be collected, accessed, and stored. Much like with medical or financial records.
Then most users would just make more informed decisions, and that might also inform their online behavior and expectations.
People are mostly not dumb, they just need clear information.
Another perspective: browsers will be like the BIOSes of the future, a sort of invisible thing in the background that no one ever thinks about, but just works perfectly all the time.
I take it as self-evident that the form that this takes will be the simplest, most generic one, and by definition will not have any associated "business goals." This era of business models wrapped up with browser design is ephemeral; certainly browsers (in some form) will outlast Google's business model.
It's easy to forget that all of this tech is still in its infancy, and the various players are fighting for market share and to make money. It is something out of a comedic dystopian novel to imagine that the browsers of the future will be tightly coupled with something so petty and vapid as advertisements.
> The problem isn't Chrome or Google per se, it's technology. We should be pressuring the big guns to conform to our needs, not opting out...
How do you propose to do that without boycotting? I'm all for regulating overly large corporations, but until that happens I can also vote with my feet.
Organize politically, at the state level, at the federal level, whatever you deem appropriate and achievable.
Push for privacy laws, push for laws around data ownership. Develop a theory of "what should people own" and "what kind of behaviors should be prohibited by companies" and "what kind of disclosures should be required."
Develop a message and start hammering your reps, and get like-minded techies and community members to do the same.
Spend a lot of time doing boring and tedious things like building a coalition, and make this an issue that can be fought for and that people will spend time advocating for.
California's privacy law didn't form in a vacuum, and neither did the EU's GDPR, and neither came into being because individuals were switching their personal browsing habits.
None of that's a technological solution so it's the sort of thing we techies overlook, but that's how you do it without merely voting with your feet and doing individual actions that, on their own, have zero impact.
When techies start organizing around issues like privacy, security disclosure, data ownership, and stuff like this, I think we'll stand to do some real good for the world.
Yes, I had the same thoughts, then I figured out that vast number of techies are earning from the fishy practices we should protest against. And barely anyone is prepared to protest against something that pays for his <insert your poison here> even if he knows it is wrong. We had a few people leaving google and facebook but vast majority stays or those companies would go out of job by only management left. And not only for tech, this is the same on all levels of life.
Just check the threads here when GDPR was introduced, oh all the rage.
Don't blame the companies, politics,...
They are the best what society can offer.
If world is filled with corrupt, egoistic, narcissistic, greedy (etc.) people, the companies that are made by exactly the same people, are also corrupt, greedy (,...).
Same goes for politics. And everything else.
The society needs to change. But. There is barely anyone left to push the change. There is barely anyone who understands that there is a need for change.
< scratching head under thousands of layers of tinfoil hats various people, who didn't listen, put there in last 20 years >
There are quite a few companies that aren't part of Luxottica. It just takes some research to find them. The two I've purchased from are American Optics / AO Eyeware and Tifosi. Their prices are better than Luxottica's brands and their quality is good.
Thanks I will check them out, I'm almost always willing to support a good competitor to any monopolizing company. It's ironic, but even buying from Walmart is an option for sticking it to Luxopoly.
The battle is already lost. There's really only two serious options today for browser engines, which is even fewer than there are for OSs! And the reason is the same: it is far too complicated to create new implementations of either.
Is there anyway to do multiple profiles on iOS firefox or any non-chrome browsers? That is one feature I will miss from Chrome on iOS.
And honestly, the profile manager on Firefox is annoying, since you have to start from command line to access and it can't run multiple instances/profiles in parallel.
The profile manager is annoying, but at least for me, Containers do about 95% of what I used profiles for, and they are much more manageable: you can right-click a link and use "Open in new container".
I guess I want to have an existing login session, like FFUser1 with its bookmarks cookies etc, and then another FFUser2 with seperate bookmarks, etc -- containers are transient correct, so I would have to login each time?
I still use Chromium (and Iridium, a derivative that hopefully doesn't send info to Google), specifically on OpenBSD, for reasons summarized here (lower chance of privilege escalation, limiting bad behavior): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21566041
Given which, I might switch to Firefox for some uses after the next OpenBSD release where it will have pledlge/unveil support (preventing it from accessing the computer beyond config-specified limits).
Edit: One thing I wish I knew about firefox is a way, without extensions/add-ons, to limit which sites can use javascript/images/etc., and/or to open multiple config tabs at once to quickly turn those on by exception for occasional specific sites, as I do with chrome. Exception lists, even better. This was discussed a little bit at those above links.
I love Firefox and moved back from Chrome in 2018. But, occasionally there are websites that just don't work in Firefox and work in Chrome/Safari. For example, go to https://my.t-mobile.com
And I will see:
502 Bad Gateway
The server returned an invalid or incomplete response.
Firefox Web Console reports an error: "The character encoding of the HTML document was not declared. The document will render with garbled text in some browser configurations if the document contains characters from outside the US-ASCII range. The character encoding of the page must be declared in the document or in the transfer protocol."
I'm not sure at this point what the issue could be, and why it works for Chrome/Safari. I don't have any extensions that could alter the requests or responses (i.e https everywhere, CORS, etc...)
I work with chromium using chromes debug protocol (CDP) to do automation. You'd be suprised how much of the browser your dealing with as a facade- they sell things like a headless browser that don't oblige by the most basic of requests given to the browser e.g hide all the scrollbars
that in addition to using double the resources and taking twice as long to preform any operations
I tell you that thing looks shiny on the surface but their is nothing their
I think the work should be done on building and making webkit, blink and gecko better as the referece implementations before we try and yet again make something shiny that can barely do the job it should be
also no support for plugins web interfaces on chrome headless meaning every time you want to test a plugin you have to bring up a virtual X11 server to deal with it
I only keep a Chrome browser around to access Google properties like Google Maps or Gmail which are painfully slow in Firefox. It feels like old IE days where there are sites that only really work in 1 browser.
Does anyone know the Firefox dev tools equivalent of Chrome dev tools "JavaScript contexts" drop down menu? I'm not sure how to describe it, but here are two screenshots from a tutorial where I saw it:
1. With mouse hovering over the drop down menu showing the displayed tool tip
DevTools member here: We have a more powerful target switching (hidden) in the toolbar but are also working to better expose JS context switching early next year.
Debugger's new threads panel also solves this partially when you pause in a thread.
Are your use cases extensions, workers or iframes?
Thanks for all of your team's work! It's a critical tool that I love and use often.
My use case is more of, I saw something in the chrome tools that I didn't recognize from FF. I don't do much js debugging beyond console logging. But I'm starting a PWA project and will be making a service worker, so sounds like this functionality might be relevant.
Oh, by "js contexts" do they mean "all the javascripts related to the page?" If so, then I guess this file tree-like explorer of js is the Firefox equivalent?
No, each context can contain multiple scripts. Each browser tab has a single top-level context called 'top', plus it will have extra contexts for any frames or iframes within the page, as well as for any browser extensions running on the page.
Only script elements in the HTML of the top-level page (i.e. in the HTML served directly from the URL you see in the location bar) get to be in the 'top' context.
> We can no longer pretend that Google is a positive force in the world.
It's amazing how Google has gone from a "do no evil", where everyone celebrated every new thing Google did to "it is the evil"
Hard to win that brand back once it's tainted. May be the whole alphabet move was so Google's brand wouldn't taint it's other brands. But by association, Waymo is Google-ish and they'll be seen as invading on privacy just like its sibling companies.
Switching to Brave has worked out great for me. All of my extensions work, browsing experience is almost exactly the same, etc. I love the built-in privacy features (Tor is a keyboard shortcut away!). The one issue that I've run into is that the built-in ad blocker is a little aggressive sometimes to the point where it breaks page functionality. At those times, I just deactivate it for that page and go about my business.
Brave is still based on chromium/blink. You might get more privacy, but you're still supporting the one monopoly of the web, Google deciding over all the web standards going forward. That is the real bad thing
I want to try another browser too. I am not much comfortable with Safari. Can someone compare Brave browser with firefox? Are there any other better alternatives?
The one thing Chrome has which makes it 1000x better for me is the ability to search a site in the url bar itself by entering the url and pressing tab (?). For example I've used it on alternativeto.net a lot. I personally do use Firefox more anyway but it makes Chrome so easy when I do use it.
I would remove the light grey bars behind the logos.
Clicking on the images at the bottom should open the respective website instead of the image.
The "why" page should mention amp. Instead of ranking websites by user friendlyness, via boosting amp they rank them by affiliation with Google. I think that is the most evil thing Google did so far.
* "Google want to automate us" should be "Google wants to automate us"
* They should consider making the page about why not to use chrome in particular more discoverable from the main page
* "Google have been accused of ensuring other Google products don’t work on Chrome" should be "Google have been accused of ensuring other Google products only work on Chrome"
* They block Google search from indexing the page, but they also block all other crawlers. Why not let DuckDuckBot through?
One of the things I like about google chrome is the omnibar: i can search within a website directly from the bar. For example, I can type amazon.com<TAB> and then I can directly search. This also works for many of my company's internal websites. Can firefox do that?
Not sure what's built in, but you can definitely make it do that by right-clicking on a search box and making a shortcut. I have 'wp' for wikipedia, 'yt' for youtube, etc.
Firefox's keywords are really nice in general. If you bookmark a URL, replace a parameter in the URL with %s and assign the bookmark a keyword, you can use the keyword with an argument to replace the parameter.
Traffic/content blocking is better left to a third-party. Brave supports extensions but will be just as broken as Chrome when Chromium gets crippled. If site owners and ad networks want to make deals with each other, leave me an my machine out of it, like the rest of the advertising world does.
They scrape top results and show it directly in a box (think wikipedia, imdb, lyric engines etc.) thus discouraging users from actually clicking the link.
Personally, I think it’s nice to have the content instantly available and not having to go to a website for it but I can see how for content producers this means wrapping their websites and making money out of their content.
No. Google's OneBox, Ask’s Smart Answers, Microsoft’s Instant Answers, and Yahoo Shortcuts all existed at least two years before DDG was even founded in 2008.
Jumped from Chrome about six months ago and overall quite impressed with Firefox. My only complaint is that I can't seem to shake my preference for the rounded tabs and UI of Chrome...
Technically yes, but... In front of several german courts simple web blogs and other (definitely) non-commercial projects have lost their cases against "competitors" (usually trigger happy shyster lawyers that see a quick way to make easy money). The wording of the law states that every publication platfrom that operates "Geschäftsmäßig" (like a business) is liable to have an imprint. The courts have defined the word "Geschäftsmäßig" as meaning regularly -- so it is only important how regularly you post, not if you make money with it or not.
The internet in Germany is heavily policed and censored. There was a post a few days ago here on hackernews where someone from another country had their domain abusively confiscated by some german police entity.
Can anyone recommend a web-based, privacy respecting alternative to Google Docs/Sheets? It's the one part of Google products I haven't found a good replacement for.
I wish LibreOffice had a calendar with an API, accessible from Calc. The only thing keeping my Google account open is a sheets/calender script that does some financial forecasting based on my calendar entries.
You should definitely not be pushing anyone to Safari. Apple's monopoly on browser engines on iOS gives them veto power on all web standards since iOS uses have no alternate browser engines (like Firefox)
Part of the issue is that most browsers other than Firefox at this point use the Chromium engine [0]. Using a browser that uses a different engine from Firefox and Chromiums would be most ideal, since that would put even more value on the use of the real standards, and not what the market leader implements.
The project owner seems to be a Ltd. and the quote's source links to an external personal blog. For me, that makes the quote a kind of generally-speaking testimonial.
I'm sure you look you can find something which tells you that Microsoft is also privacy focused in their marketing material. Heck even google says they are focused on privacy:
> We know security and privacy are important to you – and they are important to us, too. We make it a priority to provide strong security and give you confidence that your information is safe and accessible when you need it.
It seems like they're avoiding any and every Chromium-based browser. I wonder what their reason behind this would be since it's open-source so any browser using Chromium can take Google out of the code.
You just reminded me of that one argument I've heard about two decades back. That if "you pirate Windows, you still kind of buy their product". The rationale of notochrome might be along these lines: If you use chromium, aren't you banking off of technology that is, in this sense, Google's?
But here's the thing, I think you have a point, as far as it's a useful browser technology and open source, I can see about as little a problem as you.
I've never installed chrome unless I had to to test and fix a bug in it. I always use ff except on my android phone. By the second out third click ff crashed on my android phone. It makes me so sad that I can't use it on my phone.
It makes me so happy that people are finally realizing how evil Google is and pushing to end them.
You know this is a very superficial understanding of what has happened right? And it doesn't capture how the design of the algorithms are actually shaping peoples views? The idea that it just gives you what you want is just not an accurate understanding of what is happening.
I have to admit, it has gotten a lot faster recently, Firefox sync is working very well, and the Firefox Android app is a pleasure to use (being able to install uBlock origin is a huge plus).
Anything else I missed on Chrome was easily solved by an addon, or a small tweak on userChrome.css (customizing the browser interface by overriding its CSS is amazing btw).