Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tell HN: Firefox Is an awesome browser right now

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 619 posts

Re: Tell HN: Firefox Is an awesome browser right now

#431

Post by rft »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #134

I use Firefox sort of begrudgingly. It's marginally less bad than the other options, but it's still an awful browser. I vehemently disagree with almost all of its design decisions, and with every new release they seem to stray even farther from sane UX. It has hamburger menus on desktop and a lot of weird space-saving design that makes no sense on a modern high resolution display. Buttons are small, have cryptic flat…

As a long time FF user my opinion of it took quite a hit recently. I wanted to hack together a small personal extension, likely outside the scope of what Tampermonkey can do easily. I was really shocked by the mandatory signature enforcement. You need to get your extension signed by Mozilla with no way to disable it in the standard FF, the about:config setting does nothing (see [1]). Your temporary extension will also be deleted on browser restart. Sure, I can use the developer edition, but why? I am not a web developer. I get Mozilla's arguments about user security, but isn't an about:config tweak obscure enough? It already shows you plenty warning when you open it.

Looking at the mentioned LibreWolf, the changes reminded me of my time using ungoogled Chromium. I left that path, because it seemed like an uphill battle to keep up with upstream changes in the long term. Also you potentially risk using a somewhat outdated browser until all changes are ported to the new version. I was also not a fan of giving Chromium browsers additional market share.

For me switching to FF was primarily about using a browser supporting user choice and privacy, not for its UX or anything else. However Mozilla is losing my trust in this regard. Opt-out telemetry/tracking/whatever you want to call it and user experiments as well as reducing user choice with forced signatures by a central party, this sounds counter to why I switched in the first place. I hate that I have to go into settings after installing it to disable "features", it is not Windows...

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-on-signing-in-firef... (I am also a bit surprised I had to strip an utm key from this URL...)

Re: Tell HN: Firefox Is an awesome browser right now

#433

Post by rrishi »

tzs wrote: post #202

Firefox was my main browser on Mac for years, but a year or two ago it got demoted to secondary primarily because of one issue: spelling. I just found myself spending too much time when writing anything in Firefox dealing with false positives in its spell checker [1]. I still have no idea why it has so many false positives. They use the same open source spell checker that LibreOffice, Chrome, and MacOS use, and none…

Interesting, I'll keep an eye out if I encounter this issue

Re: Tell HN: Firefox Is an awesome browser right now

#434

Post by Izkata »

kps wrote: post #308
alhirzel wrote: post #121

The Tree Style Tab extension[1] is wonderful for "keeping tabs" on our modern "to forget" lists (unclosed tabs). Putting tabs on the left is also a good screen real estate trade for wide aspect ratio screens. [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

As someone who uses wide screens to hold multiple page-shaped windows, sidebars are a no-go. I really like Chrome's recent addition of what they call tab groups; anyone know of equivalent functionality for Firefox?

Dunno how similar it is, but there is Simple Tab Groups: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-gr...

Also there's a bunch of userChrome css people have shared for Tree Style Tabs that makes the sidebar collapse and auto-expand on mouseover so it doesn't take much space. It's not part of the extension itself because they lost access back with the Firefox Quantum release and I guess no new API was ever made.

Re: Tell HN: Firefox Is an awesome browser right now

#436

Post by rrishi »

shafyy wrote: post #95

I also use Firefox as my main daily driver and have been for 5 years or so. Recently I started trialing Arc ( https://arc.net/ ) and it's interesting. They try to be quirky and have a bit of a different approach. What I like is that they also have the idea of different profiles (like Firefox Multi-account Containers) built in. I'm not 100% convinced of Arc yet, but it's good enough for my secondary browser (also for…

I am definitely interested in giving Arc a try after reading about it in different parts of the interwebz.

However, I haven't received an invite despite being on the list for close to a month.

Re: Tell HN: Firefox Is an awesome browser right now

#437

Post by rrishi »

kevincox wrote: post #321

> it seemed quite interesting to send links from phone to desktop This is a killer feature for me. Last time I used chrome it supported "pulling" tabs between devices but not "pushing". It seems like a minor difference but it really improves the UX for me. Often I am reading something on my phone but get interrupted so just fire it to my desktop. This is much better for me than remembering that I wanted to finish som…

Yea definitely a use case a lot of people would run into.

Re: Tell HN: Firefox Is an awesome browser right now

#438

Post by rrishi »

countrymile wrote: post #82

I love firefox and have been using it for nearly 20 years now, but my latest employer doesn't support it so they recommended I switch to Edge on my work machine... Don't get a job in academia

Hahaha ... that's a pretty odd thing to not support. I don't understand the rationale.

Re: Tell HN: Firefox Is an awesome browser right now

#440

Post by rrishi »

archontes wrote: post #267

I want to begin typing a website's name, have firefox recognize it and indicate it to me, and press 'tab' to begin searching. The lack of that single feature makes firefox unpleasant to use for me.

This feature is present in my install. You should try updating perhaps.
Post reply on HN