Ask HN: What's stopping you from using Firefox as your primary browser? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What's stopping you from using Firefox as your primary browser?

#61

Post by williamstein » Wed, Jan 25, 2017, 9:35 PM UTC

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

Re: Ask HN: What's stopping you from using Firefox as your primary browser?

#62

Post by richardboegli » Wed, Jan 25, 2017, 9:44 PM UTC

Pale Moon is a superior product.

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

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

Tree Style tabs is the ONLY way to browse ;)

Re: Ask HN: What's stopping you from using Firefox as your primary browser?

#63

Post by imartin2k » Wed, Jan 25, 2017, 9:47 PM UTC

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

Re: Ask HN: What's stopping you from using Firefox as your primary browser?

#64

Post by flavoie » Wed, Jan 25, 2017, 9:49 PM UTC

jacek wrote: post #17

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

touch on Linux is also the reason I keep using chrome

Re: Ask HN: What's stopping you from using Firefox as your primary browser?

#65

Post by richardboegli » Wed, Jan 25, 2017, 9:50 PM UTC

no_protocol wrote: post #19

I use bookmark keywords to search various sites in Firefox. For example, a bookmark to search Amazon: Name: Amazon Search Location: http://www.amazon.com/s/?field-keywords=%s Keyword: ams So now if I enter the following in my address bar: ams keyboard I am brought to an Amazon search results page for keyboards. I don't like the tab-to-search version in Chrome very much by comparison. There is a service called Shortma…

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

!a keyboard

If you need to search Google

!g keyboard

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

Re: Ask HN: What's stopping you from using Firefox as your primary browser?

#66

Post by richardboegli » Wed, Jan 25, 2017, 9:52 PM UTC

gnicholas wrote: post #53

I use it as my main browser, mainly because of Tree Style Tabs, but with the upcoming changes to their extension framework, I understand this won't be possible anymore. (I also understand they have their own experimental version of this feature, however). I have been drifting away, however, because it seems to get very slow. This is partly because of the number of tabs I keep open (thanks to TST, which makes it easy)…

Try Pale Moon. Tree Style Tabs will continue to work as they are keeping XUL.

Re: Ask HN: What's stopping you from using Firefox as your primary browser?

#67

Post by mgreenly » Wed, Jan 25, 2017, 9:54 PM UTC

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

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

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

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

Re: Ask HN: What's stopping you from using Firefox as your primary browser?

#68

Post by hs86 » Wed, Jan 25, 2017, 10:01 PM UTC

gnicholas wrote: post #53

I use it as my main browser, mainly because of Tree Style Tabs, but with the upcoming changes to their extension framework, I understand this won't be possible anymore. (I also understand they have their own experimental version of this feature, however). I have been drifting away, however, because it seems to get very slow. This is partly because of the number of tabs I keep open (thanks to TST, which makes it easy)…

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

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

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

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

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

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