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

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

#1

Post by evolve2k »

Being the Open Internet advocates that they are, you would imagine that most of us are generally big supporters of Firefox. So why then aren't more of us using it as our primary browser?

For me it's a simple feature in Chrome "tab to search" which frustratingly has never been ported into Firefox and every time I try to switch over the absense of this feature lures me back to Chrome as I'm just more effective with it.

Ref: http://www.danielfuterman.com/google-chrome-tab-to-search

What stopping you?

[edit: grammar fixes]

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

#3

Post by schoen »

I use Firefox as my primary browser but I use Chromium for the Yubikey integration on GitHub, which either Firefox or GitHub does not support.

Edit: another advantage of Chromium is that Google has put so many resources into securing it; reportedly as a direct result of this, vulnerabilities in Firefox are easier to find (and cheaper in vulnerability markets).

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

#5

Post by rc_bhg »

I use FF as my primary. There are so many more really nice plugins for Chrome though that FF doesn't have. So, sometimes I just have to use Chrome.

I've installed "Chrome Store Foxified" and it's hit or miss on if a given Chrome Plugin will actually work in FF.

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

#6

Post by cygned »

Frankly: speed. As a web developer it notice it all the time. Chrome (using Canary) is faster in every aspect; Firefox renders slowly, becomes unresponsive over time, hangs often when using web sockets (webpack); the developers tools seem to have problems with large files and so on.

I actually love Firefox' dev tools and I really would like to use it - and it's not a bad browser at all- but as a developer all the small things add up (same reason why I cannot use Safari as my daily browser).

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

#7

Post by azdle »

schoen wrote: post #3

I use Firefox as my primary browser but I use Chromium for the Yubikey integration on GitHub, which either Firefox or GitHub does not support. Edit: another advantage of Chromium is that Google has put so many resources into securing it; reportedly as a direct result of this, vulnerabilities in Firefox are easier to find (and cheaper in vulnerability markets).

Firefox doesn't support U2F natively yet, but there's an addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/u2f-support-a...

Not sure if that will actually help you though, lots of sites are using user agent sniffing to only allow chrome instead of detecting it properly.

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

#9

Post by tashoecraft »

masterleep wrote: post #4

Occasionally Firefox has had terrible performance problems on macOS.

This, the debugger is so extremely slow compared to chrome that it's unusable for me. It chews through ram, even with all plugins disabled on a clean build.

I've tried multiple times to switch, but the performance problems were just so bad I had to stop.

This was on a 2015 mbp, 10.11.6, 16gb ram.

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