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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?

#131

Post by rene_bg »

joshka wrote: post #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 `some my-search-terms`. No massive setup needed. Firefox seems to only allow these from the extensions on the…

Probably an alternative: you can configure a keyword to a stored search engine. Then you can search like `a lean startup`, where `a` is a keyword followed by a blank for amazon.com.

I found this to be very fast. It's also handy for translations, etc..

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

#132

Post by rosege »

dmlittle wrote: post #5

I really like container tabs (you have to enable them in about:config - privacy.userContext.enabled and privacy.userContext.ui.enabled). It allows me to have multiple AWS accounts open at the same time without having 2 different browsers or one account open in private mode. I have 2 main containers I use: production and staging.

pretty sure this will be the best thing I've learnt today!

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

#133

Post by rene_bg »

gtklocker wrote: post #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?

I have some similar issues. Sometimes Firefox lags after loading the page (around 1 sec), but eventually works fluently afterwards. It feels like it needs to warm up the engine.

I noticed that disabling "smooth scrolling" in the settings helps with initial scrolling issues.

However, in general I have the feeling that FF57 is faster than before. Could also be that I now focus on the loading times more than usual. A restart of Firefox helped yesterday after the upgrade to 57.

I have a MacBook Pro 2015 and am Firefox user since 1.0 ;-)

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

#134

Post by butno »

tsuujin wrote: post #108
jacek wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

As a web developer, this claim is patently false. Reviewing aggregated user behavior data is how good UIs get built. It helps us to identify pain points, confusing or misrepresented user paths, poor hierarchy or site structure, poorly indicated calls to action, and many other valuable metrics. Every positive user experience you've ever had online has been derived from countless hours of studying user behavior, and th…

Those things are much more appropriately addressed by targeted usability testing (eg in lab studies) where participants are aware of, accept, and are compensated for being monitored.

Not by mass surveillance.

The perspective expressed, basically that anything is acceptable as a means to optimise "user experience" (most likely so more money can be extracted) verges on unethical and immoral, if the bigger issues of group and individual privacy rights are considered.

Nevertheless, as a web developer you are most likely only gathering stats from your particular web site, which is a different kettle of fish to browsers gathering and aggregating data across many sites.

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

#135

Post by dorgo »

Nobody else has a problem with new tab? Really? I used to have a (local) html page as new tab. Guess what? They disabled this option a year ago. Ok, a nice person created an addon to recreate this option. It's called "new tab override". There is a version of this addon for firefox 57. But firefox doesn't allow addons to access file: urls for security reasons. So the recomendation of "new tab override" is to install a local web server. Wait a moment. I need an addon + a local web server to run a html file in new tab? Seriously? By the way: mouse gestures don't work in new tab (nor on mozilla.org) because its a chrome-url and addons are not allowed to access chrome-urls.

Firefox 57 is really nice. But somehow it is a little pain.

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

#138

Post by Mandatum »

submeta wrote: post #130

Can any Firefox pro here help me with the bookmark manager of FF? I can assign keywords to bookmarks (shortcuts), and I like that a lot. So if I assign the keyword `hn` to ` https://news.ycombinator.com` I just need to enter `hn` in the URL bar. But assigning a keyword to a bookmark is too many clicks away: I need to open the bookmarks manager (`show all bookmarks`), select a bookmark, look at the bookmark properties…

It appears they've removed the "Import" button, or hidden it away somewhere. In the meantime, if you're looking to make the switch and can't find it - it looks like you can drag and drop from Chrome bookmarks one at a time.

EDIT: It appears to be completely removed from 57. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.places.importBookmarksHTML no longer exists. It makes sense given they've heavily moved away from the HTML storage.

It was nice however, being able to quickly and easily share my workstation setup with new hires.

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

#139

Post by thomastjeffery »

on_and_off wrote: post #88
jacek wrote: 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…

Aggregated information about an application may be OK, but a web-browser is more like an OS than an application: it has a way to draw UI, a way to communicate over a network, a way to interact with the user's mouse and keyboard, and a way to run applications that are incompatible with other platforms.

While I still don't see it as ethically flawless, aggregating information about a website is certainly much more acceptable than aggregating information about a web browser.

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

#140

Post by Mandatum »

jnevelson wrote: post #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…

That's possibly one of their strangest edge-cases I've seen for someone to dismiss a product. Or is this a case of HN-level trolling?
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