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Switch from Chrome to Firefox

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Re: Switch from Chrome to Firefox

#891

Post by saagarjha »

qubitcoder wrote: post #833
novok wrote: post #655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tab management is worse on safari vs chrome. Until recently, there were no favicons in tabs so it was hard to differentiate, and once you have a lot of tabs you have to scroll, while on chrome there is no scrolling and you can use favicons to see all of your tabs at a glance. FF has tab scrolling, but you also have tree style tabs which is better than chrome when you have a lot of tabs. Container tabs are also a big…

Pro-tip for Safari: Press Command+Shift+\. This will show an overview of all your tabs at once. Just start typing to find a particular tab by name. A two-finger pinch-in gesture will also trigger the Tab Overview. Another fun one: use Command-Option- and Command-Option- to make text larger or smaller (as opposed to zooming the entire page). To view other shortcuts, click the View menu in Safari, and then hold down th…

> Just start typing to find a particular tab by name.

Note that this is probably one of the least discoverable features I've ever seen.

Re: Switch from Chrome to Firefox

#892

Post by saagarjha »

Eleopteryx wrote: post #434
jwr wrote: post #161

I don't understand why Mac users use Chrome. Safari seems to be out of fashion: people just assume that it should not be used for some reason, even though it is actually a great browser. I use Safari for both my own browsing and for development (a fairly large ClojureScript application), and it is by far the best browser on the platform by all measures (speed first and foremost). The only place where Safari falls sho…

Can Safari play webm files in the browser? Never works for me.

No, and due to the removal NPAPI extension support you cannot add this feature to it.

Re: Switch from Chrome to Firefox

#893

Post by saagarjha »

chrisjc wrote: post #126
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

Same, but I was hesitant to switch. All I heard were comments like yours about containers and such. Finally after hearing about it so much, combined with all the talk about Quantum making things faster I gave FF a go. Haven't looked back. I still use Chrome for some tasks such as watching/listening to Youtube. (edit: not bc of performance, but bc I hate OSXs Cmd-Tab ordering)

> I hate OSXs Cmd-Tab ordering

What is this?

Re: Switch from Chrome to Firefox

#894

Post by chupasaurus »

wingworks wrote: post #794
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…

That's great to hear. I keep Firefox installed on MBP for dev testing and each time do the update and see if it's worth changing too. Hopefully, the answer will be yes once Webrender arrives and smooth Mac like scrolling. It has come a long way, and I want to like it, just really hard in its current form.

Just checked it (I have a recommended setup) - it's whooping fast.

Re: Switch from Chrome to Firefox

#895

Post by Evidlo »

jolmg wrote: post #723
nyjah wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TBL? Can you extrapolate? I google it and its "The Basketball League". I just think your comment had the opportunity to continue to educate me on something I have never heard of or about and to throw in an acronym without having used the the 3 words before is confusing.

dccoolgai was probably refering to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19363838

I think he's referring to EME (encrypted media extensions - W3C's standardized DRM for the web).

Re: Switch from Chrome to Firefox

#896

Post by MzHN »

ChikkaChiChi wrote: post #688
johnny22 wrote: post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

firefox has profiles too. Profiles aren't the same as containers tabs though. They are also built in, not addons.

Correct. Firefox's profiles are not the same as Chromium. What benefit do the Firefox containers have that Chromium profiles are missing?

First, I'd like to point out, that Containers are built-in with Firefox, even though you generally want at least the official add-on for ease of use.

Containers were actually the reason for me to switch over from Chrome about a year ago. The biggest benefit I see is that they're made easy to extend via add-ons.

In my set up I currently have a new container created every time I open a new tab, either blank or from a link, and automatically removed after I close them, which is made possible by Temporary Containers add-on in auto mode.

This creates automatic boundaries for all of my browsing. I then also have persistent containers for sites I want to be logged in to.

Re: Switch from Chrome to Firefox

#897

Post by JohnBooty »

clumsysmurf wrote: post #852
JohnBooty wrote: post #844

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On my machine, I can’t even launch Firefox in headless mode without the fans turning on, which never happened on Chrome. While I haven’t benchmarked it, for normal browsing it does feel slower than Crome. I believe you, but I'm always so confused by hearing this. I use my Mac (2015 MBP) 10+ hours a day, evenly split between FF and Chrome. Truly is close to an even 50/50 split -- FF is my personal browser and I use Ch…

I think one problem, especially if you have many tabs open, is that about:performance isn't very useful / accurate (at least for me) so I'm not sure which is the offending tab to close. With Chrome that is pretty easy.

When you find the culprits on FF, what do they tend to be? How many tabs do you typically have open? Do you run an ad blocker? Not saying you're doing anything wrong - just genuinely curious about which usage patterns trigger FF to be "slow."

I usually have perhaps 5-15 tabs open in FF and I've really never had a reason to even look at about:performance.

But, I do understand that different people have different usage patterns. I run an ad-blocker and I don't typically have any "heavy" resource-sucking tabs open. Hacker News, old Reddit, Twitter, Wikipedia, NYT, etc. That kind of thing. Not heavy video/streaming/interactive stuff.

Anecdotally my understanding is that really heavy tab users (like many dozens or even hundreds of tabs) feel/felt that Chrome handed that better than FF.

Re: Switch from Chrome to Firefox

#898

Post by mappu »

chx wrote: post #871
noisem4ker wrote: post #695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a power user, I prefer Firefox to Chrome, due to its configurability and to the power of certain add-ons. One simple example: multi-row tab bar, thanks to custom CSS for the UI. It used to be even better before the mass murder of the now-called "legacy" extensions, but today we must settle for the less restricted offer. As a developer, I don't typically use browsers as debuggers or programming environments, so I n…

> It used to be even better before the mass murder of the now-called "legacy" extensions, I can't even switch because one of the vital extensions for my workflow do not exist any more and the author of the Chrome equivalent doesn't want to port it. (I even offered a little money, I probably can't pay enough for an experienced developer to do the full port.)

> I can't even switch

Wait, you haven't had a security update for your browser since 2017?

Re: Switch from Chrome to Firefox

#899

Post by sfink »

sudhirkhanger wrote: post #862

Some of the current issues I face with Firefox. They are mostly UI/UX-choices that are personal to me. * No global zoom by default which also remembers per-page zoom changes. * Bookmarking is overly cluttered with with other other, toolbar, menu, etc. * Skype Web doesn't work on Firefox. * User profiles which are as easily accessible as in Chrome.

At least for the last, try container tabs. They seem to be generally regarded as superior (in convenience) to Chrome's profiles.

Re: Switch from Chrome to Firefox

#900

Post by dgellow »

TheKarateKid wrote: post #824
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 many others have already said - it's slower and many popular sites don't work properly on it. I don't feel like randomly having websites break when I am trying to get things done. Even on a newer computer Firefox feels jagged and hangs. Memory leaks still happening years later. It is so frustrating to see Firefox using 1.5GB of RAM when only 2 tabs remain. Quantum helped a lot, but it's still not enough for me a…

> many popular sites don't work properly on it

Really? Do you have examples? I haven’t faced this issue. Some websites breaks somehow if you block 3rd party tracking (by breaking I mean that some pictures or video embedded into the page won’t load), but that’s an opt-in feature so I don’t think that’s what you mean.

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