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Ask HN: Who's switched from Chrome to Firefox 57?

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Re: Ask HN: Who's switched from Chrome to Firefox 57?

#91

I did, because it just felt good to be back again. I also switched to Firefox on my Android now, because I can't life without the bookmark sync and stuff.

Is it on the Play Store yet? Whenever I look it up, the non-beta version is still at 56 on my Nexus phone.

Re: Ask HN: Who's switched from Chrome to Firefox 57?

#92
This is making me really curious because while Chrome is buttery smooth on my Macbook Pro, Firefox 57 is really sluggish, especially when creating/closing tabs. You can literally see the animation stuttering. Other times when a page loads it won't paint for some seconds even if it appears that it has completed loading. Is anyone else having these issues?

Re: Ask HN: Who's switched from Chrome to Firefox 57?

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you can install the multi-account containers add-on in FF57: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

Do you know what the difference is between this extension and the native support in FF57? It seems to me they are one and the same. Could it be this was an extension that is now natively part of FF Quantum?

With the add-on there's a useful button you can put in the navbar that lets you easily edit the containers and add sites to always open using them. I didn't know you could even do the later until I started using the add-on.

Re: Ask HN: Who's switched from Chrome to Firefox 57?

#94
I tried (again) to switch to FF yesterday when 57 was released, and unfortunately still ran into a known bug that makes it practically unusable for me: FF treats underscores as punctuation that breaks up a word, so given text "foo_bar", if you double click on "foo" or "bar", it doesn't select the entire word. This goes against all conventions of Chrome, other text editors, etc. It seems trivial, but as developers we deal with underscores a lot, and copy text out of our browsers frequently.

There's been a bug open about this for 15 years now: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=196175

Re: Ask HN: Who's switched from Chrome to Firefox 57?

#95
I switched about a week ago to FF57-beta (and now stable).

The biggest thing I miss that doesn't seem possible to automatically add search urls to the tab completion like chrome does. E.g. if I go to e.g some-service.example.com/search?q=foo, in future, Chrome allows me to search that service again by typing `somemy-search-terms`. No massive setup needed. Firefox seems to only allow these from the extensions on the dev store.

Re: Ask HN: Who's switched from Chrome to Firefox 57?

#96
I tried to yesterday.

Gave up after two minutes when I did not see any performance change. I have a recent machine where Chrome is already pretty fast, I am not sure in which conditions it slows down, but it looks like they don't apply to me.

Also, I would need a plugin in order to allow me to access my chrome tab history in Firefox.

That way I would keep the same multi device experience while switching to FF on desktop.

Otherwise, I lose a big feature I use extensively.

Re: Ask HN: Who's switched from Chrome to Firefox 57?

#97
I switched to Firefox about 3 years ago (can't remember exactly), because it's a better browser for me.

Chrome was built for web apps, the other browsers were slow to adapt, so my initial use-case for Chrome was keeping stuff like Gmail and Slack active. But this slowly faded away. Slack has a desktop app and continues to be a piece of shit and for email I use MailMate (https://freron.com/) which is awesome btw.

This meant that keeping persistent tabs with apps around wasn't such a priority. And in terms of usability, Firefox has had the better browsing experience for quite some time.

Of course Firefox is now multi-process, stability and speed improved, I see it using less resources than Chrome and it's now good for web apps as well.

I love Firefox's Awesome Bar, I love its new "Multi-Account Containers" add-on [1]. I also used an add-on for vertical tabs which was cool, but now due to the migration the community has to rebuild those. But seeing what they delivered with Quantum, I don't mind.

From a technological, under the hood perspective, Chrome used to be the cool one. But now Firefox is slowly getting powered by Rust, which gets integrating for multi-core rendering algorithms. How freaking cool is that? Mozilla invented their own programming language in order to make Firefox better.

Firefox is the best browser right now, but even if it weren't, I would still use it because I've learned to trust it and Mozilla that they are protecting my interests — I don't want another Internet Explorer, which Chrome is becoming due to its huge market share.

Oh and I also use Pocket, now that Mozilla bought them. Could use some improvements, I'm still waiting on them to deliver the source code as promised, but it's a cool service and I'm happy to pay them some money.

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

Re: Ask HN: Who's switched from Chrome to Firefox 57?

#98
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome has this as a first-class feature, "People." I have one window open for personal, and another for each of the AWS accounts I have access to. Sounds from your description like FF can do this at the tab level?

Correct me if I'm wrong but I think "People" also saves the browser session to a third party server so that you could resume the session from another machine. That's definitely not something I want.

Only if you log in and enable sync I think.

Re: Ask HN: Who's switched from Chrome to Firefox 57?

#99
Not switched default browser yet but I'm using FF57 as my main browser on my home PC and mac. On chromebook I'm stuck with chrome lol.

So far browsing websites seem to be faster in general but when I use complex webapps like Spotify, JIRA, Netflix, etc. chrome still seems faster. I'll probably use for 2 weeks before I commit on a full switch (and import my bookmarks and switch over my work PC).

Re: Ask HN: Who's switched from Chrome to Firefox 57?

#100
post #63

I have switched to Firefox a long time ago. The main reason is privacy. I just trust Mozilla much more than Google (I actually don't trust Google at all). From Google Chrome Privacy Notice [1]: [...] Chrome usage statistics include information about the web pages you visit and your usage of them. [...] We may share aggregated, non-personally identifiable information publicly and with partners — like publishers, adver…

>We may share aggregated, non-personally identifiable information publicly and with partners — like publishers, advertisers or web developers. I don't really understand the issue people have with aggregated information. All the companies I have worked for have been tracking how people use their product. It does not feel like I am invading somebody's privacy by tracking that 20% of our users clicked on the banner in o…

I believe that no information about user actions and behaviors should be recorded by a browser. It does not benefit the user in any way, only Google and advertisers.

Also we should remember that data needs to be stored first before it is aggregated. What happens with information about each single event?

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