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

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

#51

Post by x0137294744532 »

diminoten wrote: post #35
kevlar1818 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

DDG isn't very good at searching, and isn't linked in any way to my Google account, so it's a severe convenience downgrade, with no visible benefit to my life.

> DDG isn't very good at searching

You can use the !g bang to search on google.

> with no visible benefit to my life.

The main advantage I personally see in using DDG is to be able to directly search on sites. For instance:

  * I need to lookup foo on wikipedia: !w foo
  * I need to search for foo on amazon: !a foo
  * I need to lookup a video on foo: !yt foo

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

#52

Post by webwanderings »

I've been saying this for a while, and I get downvoted for it (I don't care). Firefox has not been able to keep up with the speed of Chrome. As that joke goes, '6 minutes Abs' business is better than '7 minutes Abs'. I use a relatively old machine and I have specific needs to run multiple profiles. I don't run a whole lot of tabs on any given time, but I have consistently noticed a difference in the speed between Firefox and Chrome. Chrome just runs better and faster than Firefox. There's also a wide spread issue of fonts, look and feel of Firefox. Things just look better on Chrome.

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

#53

Post by gnicholas »

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), but that's not the only culprit. Even after re-starting it, when most tabs are not loaded, it gets slow pretty fast. JS also runs much faster in Chrome, I've discovered.

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

#54

Post by comex »

1. Speed.

2. Lack of interest in macOS. I still remember when I got the first Mac with a Retina Display, shortly after release, and most third-party apps were pixelated and looked like crap. Among browsers, the timeline looked like this:

June 11, 2012: Hardware announced and released; Safari HiDPI support

July 31, 2012: Chrome HiDPI support (50 days after release)

January 8, 2013: Firefox HiDPI support (211 days after release)

Safari obviously had the advantage of prior knowledge, but that doesn't excuse Firefox taking so much longer than Chrome.

Maybe they've improved things since then, but... considering that they still don't support the pinch-to-zoom trackpad gesture, I'm not optimistic.

3. Security. Firefox has been the only browser to not feature sandboxing for quite a few years. Now that Electrolysis has been revived, this should be fixed eventually.

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

#55

Post by saberworks »

It is my primary browser but there are things I dislike about it. The addition of things like pocket and the ads on the new tab page drive me crazy but not crazy enough to switch. The constant removal of features from the preference panes cause me to have to go looking for addons or about:config options. The fact that the URL bar changes when I switch tabs but the search box doesn't makes no sense. I wish wish wish it would allow me to sync everything, including all my addons and all my addons preferences and all my about:config changes.

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

#56

Post by nfirvine »

I switched to Firefox for a week and wanted to kill myself. Basically, extensions still aren't forced to behave. As soon as you install a non-e10s extension, it disables e10s entirely, and then you're in the bad old days of single-process train wreck.

LastPass specifically seems like it has a bug where it locks the UI (beachball) while it populates login fields, and if you've got a lot of passwords (which we do), it'll take several seconds to unlock. Basically unusable.

I know these sound like LastPass problems, but the browser needs to sandbox these sketchy things better. I believe that getting from here to there is a really tough ecosystem problem, and while I appreciate Mozilla's philosophy on the open web, Chrome is simply better.

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

#57

Post by Luc »

> For me it's a simple feature in Chrome "tab to search"

Firefox has 'Add a keyword for this search', which you set up by right-clicking in a search box.

My keywords are all single letters. 'a sean carroll' does an Amazon search for that author, for example.

I switched to Chrome recently because some websites I use frequently were taking 5 to 10s to open in Firefox, but open in about 2s in Chrome.

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

#58

Post by falcolas »

diminoten wrote: post #35
kevlar1818 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

DDG isn't very good at searching, and isn't linked in any way to my Google account, so it's a severe convenience downgrade, with no visible benefit to my life.

My Opinion:

> DDG isn't [...] linked in any way to my Google account

That right there is a visible benefit to my life.

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

#60

Post by ng12 »

x0137294744532 wrote: post #45
ng12 wrote: post #38

As a web developer, Firefox is the new IE. Random little quirks that never get fixed. Personal favorite: 8-year-old bug that causes select options to render incosistently if there's a transform anywhere in the DOM above it. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=455164

> Personal favorite: 8-year-old bug that causes select options to render incosistently if there's a transform anywhere in the DOM above it How is it critical to apply a transform to a select option? I don't see how this comes even close to the absurd IE bugs.

The second part is the key. The transform can be ANYWHERE in the select's parent tree and it will still break.
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