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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?

#141

Post by smasty »

scotttrinh wrote: post #26

I've been using Nightly for about 2 months for personal browsing, and have recently switched to using it for my web development job using containers, and it's been great. Biggest feature I'd like to see is a keyboard shortcut for opening a new tab in a particular container, as opposed to Cmd+T opening an uncontained tab. The Developer Tools still have a ways to go before they beat the performance of Chrome (large sou…

When using the extension, you can use Ctrl+[dot] to open the container selector and then use arrows/tab and enter to select the container to open a new tab in. It's not as good as a dedicated shortcut, but it lets you open new container tabs without leaving your keyboard.

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

#142

Post by cannonedhamster »

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…

I think the worst part of this was that there was a patch to bring this into line with other software and it just got ignored.

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

#143

Post by cannonedhamster »

Mandatum wrote: post #140
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?

I don't know, if you develop and are used to being able to click a word or field of text, having to go through and highlight the word is more time consuming and potentially a flow breaker especially when you're talking about variables in some languages.

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

#145

Post by cannonedhamster »

I just switched back on the latest release.

* Sadly I'm missing a single really important Add-on and there are some annoying and apparently long-standing bugs that have been ignored and I've had to work around, but otherwise it's a major improvement and it's good enough to work with.

* I'm glad that they've ditched the rounded tabs and cleaned up the interface.

* I'm still annoyed that Pocket is integrated into everything without an option to disable it.

* It is dramatically improved in speed and stability.

* The browser animations are very pleasant.

I'm giving it a chance to shine for the next week or so, if there are no blockers I'll probably end up sticking with it.

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

#146

Post by forapurpose »

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…

You could use bookmark keywords in Firefox, which provide a similar function:

1. Create a bookmark for some-service.example.com/search?q=foo

2. Open the properties for the bookmark. Replace "foo" with "%s" (the universal string for bookmark keyword variables). In the keyword field, type some letter or string you'll remember; I'll use "q". Close the properties dialog.

3. In the URL field, type "q my-search-terms".

(At least that worked in older versions of FF.) It requires more setup, but works permanently.

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

#147

Post by jraph »

ojame wrote: post #16

I've given it a decent shot - but it still has very average profile support, which I use daily. In Chrome, it's easy to see what profile I'm using (top right corner of the window), and very easy to switch. In Firefox, you need to go to about:profiles to even see what profile you're currently using.

Maybe you could use a different theme for each profile, or put different buttons or buttons in different order in the toolbar?

Maybe there could be an extension that shows the name of the current profile and/or an image/text chosen by the user in the toolbar or the tab bar? The extension would have to be installed in each profile, but this is to be done only once.

Please still my idea, whether you are a Firefox or an addon developer!

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

#148

Post by vatotemking »

Me, far too many times.

Everytime there's a "Why you should use Firefox" or" Using FF is the right thing to do" post on hackernews, I gave FF a chance, only to be disappointed and go back to Chrome.

However, a few weeks ago, I decided to try out FF Quantum (aka FF 57, vanilla, non dev edition) after hearing it repeatedly in /r/rust and hackernews. I was immediately hooked with how fast it is at rendering pages.

Now, the reason I always switch back to Chrome was because of the dev tools. With FF Quantum, the dev tools have vastly improved and is on par with Chrome. Its a bit wonky in some parts, but I can see that their UI are already in place, getting ready to be fully implemented in future releases. I've been using it as my main browser, wrote an add-on using their new API.

For those considering to switch, I suggest you give it a few days to be familiar with the dev tools' UI/UX as it is not a direct copy of the Chrome UI/UX. Other than privacy, its a really great product. Its worth the switch.

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

#149

Post by jpeeler »

Yes! I wanted to switch back once Electrolysis [1] was turned on, but didn't believe the speed was comparable enough. Now, it is though.

I stayed on Chrome for a while because Google Chrome became the best supported way to run flash for Linux users. Fortunately, these days I see flash less and less. So I'm not even going to bother installing it in Firefox (though I did think this plugin to run Google's flash plugin was interesting [2]).

There are a few things I'll miss from Chrome. I'm currently a Project Fi subscriber, so I get my texts over hangouts (despite it looking like the writing is on the wall for that service) and used the hangouts extension heavily. I'd like to have the ability to cast a tab to my Chromecast. I'll also miss the fact that Chrome has a setting that allows relaxed localhost SSL verification (via chrome://flags/#allow-insecure-localhost - am I missing a Firefox setting?) Lastly, this has been mentioned in a few other comments, but for some reason I really like to be able to scroll through my tabs via mousewheel.

Changing browsers has caused me to reevaluate my workflow. I never really looked into changing this in Chrome, but the tree style tab add-on really is a better way to handle lots of tabs. And I very much welcome the multi account containers add-on as well [3].

I'm repeating the blog of Mozilla when I say, this is just the beginning. I do believe that as more and more Rust is utilized, things will become even better. Super glad I'm able to enjoy using Firefox again!

[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis [2] https://github.com/i-rinat/freshplayerplugin [3] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

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

#150

Post by quesera »

cannonedhamster wrote: post #145

I just switched back on the latest release. * Sadly I'm missing a single really important Add-on and there are some annoying and apparently long-standing bugs that have been ignored and I've had to work around, but otherwise it's a major improvement and it's good enough to work with. * I'm glad that they've ditched the rounded tabs and cleaned up the interface. * I'm still annoyed that Pocket is integrated into every…

You can disable pocket.

Nav to about:config then search for extensions.pocket.enabled and do the obvious thing. :)

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