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Switch from Chrome to Firefox

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Re: Switch from Chrome to Firefox

#801

Post by mr_toad »

kinlan wrote: post #750
patrick5415 wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a rediculous justification. Websites should not be coded to a whitelist of browsers.

Biased reply - I work for Google. It depends on what you choose as your choice of technology, if you choose web components then you really can only really offer that same experience to users that have a browser that supports that API natively (without polyfills) which old Edge did not do. My understanding of this situation with yt was that our server side detection code was wrong based on an update in edge (or our UA…

> experience

Developers care a lot more about this ‘experience’ than users do.

Yes it’s fun to play with the new shiny, but users don’t care.

User experience is an excuse, it’s double-talk.

Re: Switch from Chrome to Firefox

#802

Post by jackconnor »

dictum wrote: post #31
jackconnor wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What opinion? It's just an ad by firefox to download firefox. Do you have an opinion why I should download this you want to share?

Short, flippant but hopefully concise answer: 1. Safari is only available for macOS and iOS. There's no widely available, up to date browser based on non-Blink WebKit, and it's unlikely there will be, as it's rather tied to Apple OS APIs. 2. Aside from Firefox, all browsers that are available for all major operating systems are based on Chromium/Blink, and consequently will inherit Google's architectural decisions, a…

I get why someone might want Safari, what I'm asking is why the download link is on the front page of HN when there's no opinion nor perspective. I keep hearing "it's not an ad" but then...what is it?

Re: Switch from Chrome to Firefox

#803

Post by kaffee »

bastih wrote: post #525
nine_k wrote: post #518

On top of uBlock Origin / uMatrix, some of the other Firefox's trump cards to me are: * Tree Style Tab: makes tabs much more manageable, no parallel in Chrome. If you open dozens of tabs, after using this, you can only pity the traditional tab management [1]. * Containers and container tabs: it's a bit like having separate Chrome profiles for separate contexts, but you can also have them as tabs in the same window. *…

Container tabs have made my life much easier, as I'm managing a number of Amazon accounts, and being able to do that side-by-side is a life-saver.

I really enjoy the Containers. The only problem is that you can only have a single container tied to an individual site. I'd rather like it to be tied to a subpath or url "root" so I could use it with GitHub.

Re: Switch from Chrome to Firefox

#804

Post by smacktoward »

kiplo wrote: post #699
_opc6 wrote: post #667

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would switch today if Mozilla added tab completed search in the address bar that Chrome pioneered. It's very intuitive and difficult to give up.

I'm not sure if this accomplishes what you're looking for, but when I switched to Firefox I had similar complaints and turned to custom keywords: https://www-archive.mozilla.org/docs/end-user/keywords.html Basically, Firefox allows you to set a keyword (which I often set to an abbreviation + question mark) which you can link to a site's search URL. For example to search Google Scholar I would type my keyword, "sch?"…

Alternately you can switch the default search engine to DuckDuckGo, which lets you use DDG's "bang" search shortcuts (see https://duckduckgo.com/bang) from the Awesomebar. So you just type a search query and then append "!g" to run that search query through Google, "!w" to search for it on Wikipedia, "!yt" to search for it on HN, etc.

Re: Switch from Chrome to Firefox

#805

Post by itwy »

chaghi wrote: post #354
nneonneo wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can definitely have two profiles open simultaneously - on MacOS, this is achieved with “open -n Firefox.app --args -P [profile name]”; on Windows, “firefox -no-remote -P [profile name]”. Admittedly, that should _really_ be exposed in the UI somehow, but at least it means you can wrap up the command in a handy desktop shortcut (e.g. one that says “my Firefox” and one that says “her Firefox”).

> Admittedly, that should _really_ be exposed in the UI somehow Go to about:profiles, click the "Launch profile in new browser" button under the profile you want. Yes, it's not obvious, and the UI has a lot to be desired if you want to explain the feature to some non-techie, but you no longer need to close the other Firefox instances in order to launch a different profile. I think this was added a couple releases ago…

Thank you. I didn't know FF had profiles to begin with.

Re: Switch from Chrome to Firefox

#806

Post by the_pwner224 »

chronogram wrote: post #677
xvf22 wrote: post #658

Already switched to Firefox and couldn't be happier.

Same! Had Developer edition installed for testing, but switched fully today (Uninstalled Developer, installed Nightly). The fonts look nice, it's got wayland support on my Linux partition (on Fedora), and it's just really pleasant!

> The fonts look nice

I noticed this too in FF on Linux, I inspect elemented and for some reason a huge number of websites were using Nimbus Sans as the font... Later when I eventually used someone's Windows install I realized that Nimbus was only being used on my computer... Wtf?

It's a font developed long ago by some famous font foundry, and a subset covering common characters was made free and included in Linux printer drivers. It is visually very similar to Helvetica/San Francisco. I installed GNU FreeFont (probably available in your distro's repos) which looks the exact same but covers many more characters than Nimbus. In Firefox I went to the font config settings, set FreeSans/FreeSerif as the default fonts, and unchecked the option to allow websites to specify custom fonts. Just don't disable the checkbox to download web fonts, or icon fonts with various icons/glyphs will show as boxes.

It's truly beautiful - every once in a while I see some text and just stop reading and stare at it for a few seconds. On the rare occasion when I go to a website about fonts I use another browser to be able to see their CSS-specified fonts.

Re: Switch from Chrome to Firefox

#807

Post by the_pwner224 »

orhmeh09 wrote: post #759
chronogram wrote: post #677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same! Had Developer edition installed for testing, but switched fully today (Uninstalled Developer, installed Nightly). The fonts look nice, it's got wayland support on my Linux partition (on Fedora), and it's just really pleasant!

If you’re switching to full time use or Firefox, I cannot recommend going with Nightly; developer edition is a good choice.

I've been using Nightly as my normal browser for two years with absolutely no issues.

Re: Switch from Chrome to Firefox

#808

Post by opencl »

ColanR wrote: post #795
opencl wrote: post #772

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From reading a lot of mailing list and bugzilla posts I get the impression that they do care about Macs but the current (very old) renderer is just never going to play nicely with MacOS without a major overhaul, and that major overhaul is Webrender which has been in development for several years but has yet to land in stable because writing a new renderer is just a really large undertaking. Webrender and planeshift s…

How close do you think webrender is to landing in stable? I've not heard much about it before.

Hard to say. It's actually already in stable but currently limited to a very specific set of OS/hardware combinations and they're working on gradually adding more. FF67 enabled it in stable for desktop NVIDIA hardware on Windows. AMD and Intel GPUs on Windows and Linux are currently enabled in the nightly channel, presumably MacOS is next on the list once those are stable. Webrender is mostly done and at the stage where there are mostly just lots of little bugs left to fix so it's naturally kind of hard to estimate how long things will take.

They have a webrender newsletter with progress updates usually every couple of weeks, one of the recent posts talks about the release timeline but it's all kind of vague at this point: https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/2019/05/21/graphics-team-sh...

Re: Switch from Chrome to Firefox

#809

Post by depressedpanda »

tomjen3 wrote: post #637
dgellow wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a developer and power user, I switched to Firefox months ago. What is making difficult to switch? I found equivalent for all my plugins so far.

What is the equivalent for one tab? It is technically simple enough that I could develop one one my own, except I remember firefox extensions to be an unbelievable pain to install back in the day.

You don't need an equivalent, One Tab is available for Firefox also.

Re: Switch from Chrome to Firefox

#810

Post by Aeolun »

RussianCow wrote: post #645
JadeNB wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > The only service with DRM I'm aware of is Netflix and it's terrible anyway. > Ha! Tell that to their 150 million subscribers. :) I'm not sure that a large number of subscribers is a convincing argument of the non-terribleness of a service. A quick Google search suggests that Comcast, excuse me, Xfinity, has somewhere in the neighbourhood of 30 million subscribers. I don't think that you will find any argument tel…

Sure, but many of those Xfinity customers don't have any reasonable alternatives, whereas there are now a handful of players in the video streaming space. If someone doesn't like Netflix, they can easily cancel their subscription and switch to another service. So even though you're partially right, the subscriber count in this case is a pretty good proxy of how good the service is.

I don’t think it works like that any more.

The services used to have more or less the same catalog, but it’s become more and more broken up.

To get everything you need to subscribe to 4+ services, and if you drop Netflix, you lose a hefty part of their catalog because it’s on none of the others.

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