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?

#11

Post by kevlar1818 » Wed, Jan 25, 2017, 8:51 PM UTC

scandox wrote: post #2

Pure inertia. I'm going to change right now. Been meaning to do this for weeks. Just one change to one line in my i3 startup config and that will be that. Update: I'm back in Firefox. Already been nagged twice by Google to use Chrome.

Time to switch to DDG! It's come a long way in just a few years. It's my daily search engine and I have never looked back in reget.

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

#12

Post by tscs37 » Wed, Jan 25, 2017, 8:52 PM UTC

1. UI (More UI overhead than Chrome) 2. Speed (Noticeably slow than Chrome) 3. UX (Moving tabs out of the window looks and is bad) 4. Extensions (Missing some essential stuff I use) 5. Breaks some Website (One of my regular websites doesn't work correctly in Firefox)

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

#13

Post by divbit » Wed, Jan 25, 2017, 8:52 PM UTC

Can't login to comment here. It may be one the following extensions 'pocket', 'ublock origin' or 'pushbullet'. That said, I do switch back and forth between firefox and edge as default browser, depending on activity.

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

#14

Post by EleventhSun » Wed, Jan 25, 2017, 8:52 PM UTC

I use it but it's frustrating that it doesn't support multithreading which is why it's so slow. Fortunately that will be fixed soon though.

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

#15

Post by redxblood » Wed, Jan 25, 2017, 8:53 PM UTC

dantiberian wrote: post #10

It's slow, and has very non-native UI on macOS.

I agree on the UI, it's a shame really, otherwise I don't find it to be slow.

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

#16

Post by corbinpage » Wed, Jan 25, 2017, 8:53 PM UTC

'I'm Feeling Lucky' is actually my default search in a Chrome tab. It's super fast to just type 'espn ncaab scores' in a new tab and get exactly what you want without any clicks.

For Google results, I preface with a 'g '.

If Firefox had this feature (it may and I haven't found it) I'd probably switch over. Chrome takes up so much memory on my Mac with its Google Chrome Helpers, it's a pain.

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

#17

Post by jacek » Wed, Jan 25, 2017, 8:53 PM UTC

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.

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

#18

Post by scandox » Wed, Jan 25, 2017, 8:53 PM UTC

kevlar1818 wrote: post #11

scandox wrote: post #2

Pure inertia. I'm going to change right now. Been meaning to do this for weeks. Just one change to one line in my i3 startup config and that will be that. Update: I'm back in Firefox. Already been nagged twice by Google to use Chrome.

Time to switch to DDG! It's come a long way in just a few years. It's my daily search engine and I have never looked back in reget.

Ireland being the small country it is, I generally found the results to be mediocre last time I tried. Still I'll give it a few days and see how I go.

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

#19

Post by no_protocol » Wed, Jan 25, 2017, 8:54 PM UTC

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 Shortmarks that aims to emulate this behavior in Chrome, but I'm not sure how I feel about using it.

---

I switched to Chrome about 5 years ago because Firefox was getting slow for me. Recently I am strongly considering switching back. My biggest continual annoyance with Chrome is poor searching of previous visited pages when typing partial URLs into the address bar. The main thing holding me back right now is I am wondering how this will impact me when using a Chromebook.

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

#20

Post by Neil44 » Wed, Jan 25, 2017, 8:54 PM UTC

I use it, it's just fine. Doesn't feel like there's a lot to choose between it and chrome. I actually struggle to believe that people can easily tell small benchmark level speed differences between browsers reliably in real world use. There's just too many factors and too little repeatability.