Switch from Chrome to Firefox • Hacker News Board

Re: Switch from Chrome to Firefox

#271

Post by rocqua » Thu, May 30, 2019, 5:39 PM UTC

nostalgk wrote: post #263

jrochkind1 wrote: post #243

If you forked Chrome, how hard would it be to change it do DRM'd video however Firefox does? I'm not saying forking Chrome would be easy, it's complicated software, I think it would require a lot of labor to keep it competitive over the long term, which is the real barrier. But I'm not sure if the DRM is an insurmountable barrier, Firefox plays that same video somehow , it should be at least theoretically possible to…

Mozilla uses Google Widevine as well, I believe. The path forward is to license Widevine from Google, and they've already shut down other FOSS projects by refusing to give them licenses.

How far does the DMCA reach in europe? It feels like we need some reverse engineering of widevine.

Re: Switch from Chrome to Firefox

#272

Post by jrochkind1 » Thu, May 30, 2019, 5:39 PM UTC

soulofmischief wrote: post #69

Hamuko wrote: post #17

Too bad it takes a lot more than "a few minutes" to get used to Firefox and all of its quirks. Like the fact that I can have like 20 tabs open at the same time before they start hiding themselves from me.

Yeah, nothing like 60 tabs you can't tell apart all squeezed into view.

Much like my physical desktop full of papers you can't see which is which just glancing from above, and my overall laptop desktop full of dozens of different windows... it's cluttered, but I know what's what enough to find it, usually!

Sure, I could put all those papers on my desk into a drawer, or even file them, but who's got time for that? (Answer: those who are succesfully less cluttered than the cluttered among us).

Re: Switch from Chrome to Firefox

#273

Post by behringer » Thu, May 30, 2019, 5:39 PM UTC

javagram wrote: post #188

badamp wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can’t you restore all the settings from a TimeMachine backup or similar? They’re just stored in files in the profile directory.

I upvoted you (because your suggestion is a good solution) but let’s be real, most people don’t have backups, even developers. In my experience as a developer companies don’t even issue me a USB backup drive to run time machine on my work issued MacBook Pro unless I specifically request it.

And that's firefox' problem how exactly?

Re: Switch from Chrome to Firefox

#274

Post by Mistri » Thu, May 30, 2019, 5:39 PM UTC

I have 6 profiles that I like to keep separate, and the only browser that supports seamless switching in the toolbar is Chrome. That's the only reason I continue to use it. If Firefox were to implement this, I'd immediately switch. I know there's addons that try to simluate what Chrome does, but they just aren't as easy to use and don't do exactly what I want.

Re: Switch from Chrome to Firefox

#275

Post by rudolph9 » Thu, May 30, 2019, 5:40 PM UTC

Already made the switch. My workflow has hardly changed at all.

Re: Switch from Chrome to Firefox

#276

Post by opencl » Thu, May 30, 2019, 5:40 PM UTC

mh-cx wrote: post #152

What some probably consider a privacy nightmare is a Chrome feature I like very much: It syncs all my history, bookmarks and passwords across devices via my Google account. That's especially convenient whenever I get a new device. Is there something comparable for Firefox?

Firefox's sync feature is comparable except that it's not a privacy nightmare because it's end to end encrypted and you can also run your own sync server if you want to.

Re: Switch from Chrome to Firefox

#277

Post by asdff » Thu, May 30, 2019, 5:40 PM UTC

intothev01d wrote: post #20

I switched a couple of months ago because Chrome is just a bloated piece of garbage. One of my favorite features in Firefox is containers, which I used to have different users for in Chrome. Maybe Chrome has something similar now but it's one of the things I liked when I switched over. Haven't had any issues so far, glad I did

Does anyone know an extension or option in containers to preserve your browsing trajectory between containers?

I had a google container for a while, but opening links opens a new tab and closes the google container, so therefore you cant it back or forward without reopening that container tab. Same thing if I click a container link or something and it pushes it into a new tab, I loose that ability to go backward.

It's just a minor gripe but I'm so into the habit of hitting the back button on my mouse while browsing rather than cmd shift tab.

Re: Switch from Chrome to Firefox

#278

Post by Yoric » Thu, May 30, 2019, 5:40 PM UTC

mook wrote: post #265

fencepost wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really wish that if Microsoft was going to abandon having their own engine that they'd gone to Mozilla instead.

They really can't, though. There's a pile of corpses of people who tried to embed Gecko, because it turns out Netscape/Mozilla is really bad at keeping a stable ABI. I doubt anybody remembers K-meleon anymore, for example. As far as I know Servo was supposed to be the new, embeddable engine, but that's mostly cancelled now and the Rust bits are just being rolled into Gecko (via Project Quantum). I believe that's why…

For what it's worth, Mozilla now has GeckoView, which has a stable embedding API. But yeah, it took about 15 too many years to get there...

Re: Switch from Chrome to Firefox

#279

Post by everetm » Thu, May 30, 2019, 5:41 PM UTC

reilly3000 wrote: post #264

That page is just missing one critical thing: 4. Migrate my extensions. It would be great if they developed a graph mapping Chrome extensions to Mozilla equivalents. Then the user could confirm installation of the ones with 1:1 parity, like LastPass, allow users to select similar extensions, or skip installing an equivalent. There are some Chrome-Exclusive extensions that keep me hooked. That and Firefox’s Storage in…

To be honest all 11 of the extensions I used day on chrome are available and working on Firefox in 2019 compared to a few years back.

Re: Switch from Chrome to Firefox

#280

Post by numbers » Thu, May 30, 2019, 5:41 PM UTC

I've been happily using Firefox for about 2-3 months now.

The main difference I've noticed is how easy it is to get the same experience and in some cases a better experience on Firefox just but taking 15-30 minutes to set it up.

Chrome was my browser for almost all of the 2010s and now I'm happy to say I'm not stuck with it.