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The Firefox Dilemma

blog.tawhidhannan.co.uk

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Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#181

Post by Vinnl »

Vinnl wrote: post #117
chrismorgan wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s possible to use search engines instead, but creating your own basically requires you to find or craft a search box that is equivalent to the desired action. It’s in no way easy to work with (not like making a bookmark with the %s placeholder), and isn’t quite as pleasant to use in the awesome bar either. I’m with you that removing bookmark keywords would be very annoying at present.

To alleviate the pain somewhat, I switched a while ago to setting DuckDuckGo as my default browser, and simply using their bangs. Saves a lot of configuration when setting up a new browser, and all the expected ones (!w, !yt, !g, etc.) work.

s/browser/search engine/

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#182

Post by BruceIV »

davidgrenier wrote: post #155
mouldysammich wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefoxs omnibar history search is significantly better than chromes; although i imagine that is down to them having no stake in sending google searches which google obviously does

Recently switched to firefox and am quite happy to see it has lots of feature I didn't think it had. Chrome allows me to do use the built-in search engine of any website supporting it by pressing tab and then typing my search query. In firefox, it seems what I have to do is type my search query than use my mouse to click on the wikipedia icon (or amazon/etc). This also requires me to setup said search engine in firef…

You can do this sort of search in Firefox as well. Right click on pretty much any search box, then click "Add a Keyword for this Search..." You'll get an add-bookmark dialog that you can put a keyword into (e.g. "w" for Wikipedia) -- I like to save the resulting bookmark in "Unsorted Bookmarks" so that it doesn't clutter up my menus. After that just typing "w Firefox" in your address bar will bring up the Wikipedia page for Firefox.

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#183

Post by bad_user »

For what is worth I think Firefox is the best browser for reasons already discussed here, but here’s the list of what I like ...

Sync, awesome bar, tab management, multi-account containers, trustworthiness in the add-ons I install (better reviews by humans) and resource usage especially with many tabs.

Firefox went through a very painful transition with Quantum due to invalidating many old extensions that people liked. However they managed to do the impossible imo, Firefox being better than ever and the ecosystem of add-ons is not in a bad shape either.

I also believe it was the right thing to do, because technically speaking it was inferior to Chrome’s multi-process architecture. The old add-ons system also had a big problem from the user's point of view ... Firefox had no permissions system in place and I like their review-based approach, but it doesn’t scale well.

So now after Quantum, I'm pretty sure Firefox will move on to innovate in its internals way past Chrome or Safari.

As a software developer I'm super psyched about what they are doing with Rust. Having a browser with components built in Rust, a super safe language, doesn't mean much for regular users, but it should translate in a more stable, safer and performant product.

And I don't know how many people appreciate this, but building a better language than C/C++ and then re-building components with it in an old and popular product, without breaking it, is super hard.

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#184

Post by zzo38computer »

rlv-dan wrote: post #10

A big problem is that the web standard is too complicated. Browsers are pretty much a virtual os that can do almost everything. For anyone to make a browser from scratch today is not feasible. We will move towards a monoculture, because there is no alternative unless we make a drastic shift in rethinking how the web should work.

That is true it is a problem. Also the problem is use of web pages for stuff where it isn't a good idea. And also, any browser seems pretty terrible to me, I have found (I wrote some ideas about how to make a better one, but also there is the use for other kind of programs, including telnet, plain text email (without HTML), IRC, NNTP, gopher, etc). Even HTTP is misused.

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#185

Post by josteink »

kiriakasis wrote: post #112
toyg wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, and Chrome did that in one simple way: marketing and monopoly power. They leveraged their position in search and webmail to push people to switch, and hammered the message in mainstream advertising (on buses and newspapers, even in Europe). If they had pushed FF instead of building their own browser, now FF would be in that position - regardless of technical merits (which were minor, and basically boiled dow…

> which meant the browser never crashed if a single website misbehaved I might have faulty memory, but this is not some minor detail. It is world changing. For young teenager me, Chrome had a vastly better UX than both IE and Firefox when it debuted. (now I prefer Firefox though)

> I might have faulty memory, but this is not some minor detail. It is world changing.

I never had Firefox crash on me, so I never saw it as a selling point.

I however saw tabs crash all the fucking time in Chrome, so to me it just seemed like a workaround for bad engineering.

If anything was world changing to me, it was that now we were being told that tabs crashing all the time was normal.

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#186

Post by calvinmorrison »

chrismorgan wrote: post #89
tarruda wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I currently have 165 tabs spread across three windows How do you manage this setup? I'm specifically interested in how you can assign tabs to different windows and have this information persist across restarts.

It’s all purely done manually. There’s almost no overlap between things that could go in my general personal and general work windows (exceptions: HN threads where FastMail comes up and I respond, or the very occasional article from HN or RSS feeds that is directly tied to something I’m doing for work). I store them on different virtual desktops, too, so when Firefox starts I just move the windows to the appropriate…

One thing we ran into while debugging a few weeks ago is lack of support in firefox for debugging open streams. That is a feature I would like to see implemented, because it works beautifully in chrome.

For me I am using firefox-esr with noscript, privacy badger, https-everywhere and vimium. I'm extremely happy with my web workflow.

Another thing for me is that firefox seems to be easier to lock up. Twice this week I had issues where firefox locked up. The first was trying to render a dropdown select with several thousand items (blame the prom explorer for that) and the second was rendering some graphs, which while not fast in chromium, certianly did not cause problems.

I shared this link earlier internally on slack because I think it makes a fair point that applies to many David-and-Goliath marketplaces, namely that "not" being Goliath isn't a compelling argument. Having a brand based around F.U.D. is an easy thing to slip into, but really Firefox and other small competitors should focus on beating the competition with features, not fud.

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#187

Post by unsignedint »

bugmen0t wrote: post #145
soniman wrote: post #125

The best thing about Firefox is that the browser is separate from your Google account so you don't have to worry about your bookmarks/extensions getting synced behind your back by Google and messing everything up. Google requiring browser/Google account to be the same is a nuisance that you don't have to worry about with Firefox.

What's also amazing, is that if you sign up for a Firefox Account you get privacy preserving sync: The data is encrypted & decrypted on your devices. Mozilla doesn't get to see your data.

It's only fair to say that Chrome also offers this feature. You can set optional (mandatory for passwords) sync passphrase so your sync data is encrypted.

In fact I liked way Firefox Sync did this same way (when it was called Weave) -- actually allowing to use a passphrase. They got rid of passphrase and they are now using username/password pair to handle encryption.

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#188

Post by joveian »

olejorgenb wrote: post #45

1. I like firefox's omnibar/awesomebar more than chrome's. It seems to read my mind better [1]. It also have some features [2] I think most people are unaware of. 2. Firefox have bookmark tags. 3. Firefox scroll the tabs instead of compressing the width until they're unusable. (It's also possible to set the minimum tab-width) 4. It's much simpler to get ctrl-tab MRU behavior [3] in Firefox last time I checked. 5. Fir…

1. I really dislike the firefox omnibar and that I can't set it to just be an address bar. I sometimes visit washingtonpost.com but not often enough that I have a bookmark, and every time firefox insists it should be wasingtonpost.com.co, which I must have visited at some point but it is not bookmarked and the suggestion never goes away (I have firefox set to clear history when exiting, but I tried to do a "clear now" and it still appears). This means I can't type washingtonpost.com and go to washingtonpost.com, which is all I really want from typing in an address bar.

3. userChrome.css is poorly documented but a nice option, not sure if Chrome has something similar. I have firefox set so that each tab is just a favicon and an extra pixel on each side. It mostly works well, except at some point the audio icon started appearing (it didn't when I first made the change) and it appears over the next tab, that makes it impossible or nearly impossible to directly select the next tab.

5. Reader mode is exellent if you use a more comprehensive javascript blocker, since many pages work in reader mode that wouldn't otherwise. Hopefully this isn't because it is actually running some javascript in reader mode or otherwise avoiding the usual blocking rules.

I think the reason there is a focus on "firefox is better than crome in some fundamental ways" is that once you get down to individual features they both change frequently and a feature that one person likes might really annoy someone else. The reasons to avoid chrome are not likely to change unless firefox gets as bad as chrome. If you convince someone to switch for some random feature then there is a much better chance they will switch back in a few releases when the random feature breaks in some way. Additionally, it isn't clear that firefox has an opportunity to convince all that many end users.

That being said, anyone who wants to do a feature comparison should go ahead and do it. The article seems to be saying "the real problem here is that other people are writing about the differences they care about".

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#189

Post by sudoaptget »

_coveredInBees wrote: post #174
olejorgenb wrote: post #45

1. I like firefox's omnibar/awesomebar more than chrome's. It seems to read my mind better [1]. It also have some features [2] I think most people are unaware of. 2. Firefox have bookmark tags. 3. Firefox scroll the tabs instead of compressing the width until they're unusable. (It's also possible to set the minimum tab-width) 4. It's much simpler to get ctrl-tab MRU behavior [3] in Firefox last time I checked. 5. Fir…

Firefox is never going to lose me as a user as long as the awesome Tree-style tabs extension - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta... is supported on it. It completely changed my browsing experience, and I cannot use any other browser except for quick, temporary browsing (like how one might use Notepad on Windows in a bind). I'd highly, highly recommend this extension to anyone who has never…

This is an amazing add-on. Thanks!
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