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Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

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Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#111

Post by rlu »

Spittie wrote: post #59

I'm glad to see more and more people switching (back) to Firefox, as I admit I'm quite a Firefox fanboy. I've never made the full switch to Chrome. First, as a long time linux user, Firefox was never so bad on it (startup time, random freeze for i/o...). Second, when Chrome was (a lot) faster Firefox had way more addons. Now Chrome has kinda fixed that (I still miss some essential addons, like Tree Style Tab), but Fi…

I don't know why, but Firefox always takes so long to load for me. Personally I'm quite happy with Chrome.

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#112

Post by mayhew »

area51org wrote: post #23

As a Mac guy, I switched back to Firefox when Chrome became practically unusable (slow, crashy). Pleasant surprise: Firefox is snappier and much-evolved since I last used it. Haven't tried DuckDuckGo yet, but I know my day is coming.

I hope Firefox's OS X integration improves soon.

Lion-style scrollbars, the bouncy effect when you hit the top and bottom of a page, and back/forward swipes have no animation. It's pretty terrible in terms of usability compared to Safari and Chrome.

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#114

Post by bhauer »

I was surprised to see praise for Chrome's omnibar here. The meddlesome assumption that everything I type into the URL bar is or should be a Google search drives me crazy when I use Chrome. By comparison, Firefox's URL bar does an incredible job of matching fragments of URLs to my history and bookmarks.

My personal project has the word "taskforce" in the domain and title. In Firefox, I can type "task" and it's at the top of the options every single time. One down arrow, enter, and done. Chrome puts it as option five under a search for "task" and three predictive recommendations from Google's search engine that start with "task" (none of which I have ever visited in Chrome). "Taskstream log in"? I don't even know what that means.

Essentially everything I want to select in the omnibar is always several items down the list. Very frustrating and inevitably one of the chief reasons I close Chrome and switch back to Firefox.

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#115

Post by epmatsw »

shardling wrote: post #99
epmatsw wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly how Firefox currently works, but you just press enter instead of up and then enter. If what you've got in the address bar doesn't look like an address, it'll google it for you.

It'll actually use whatever you have the search bar set to.

Fair enough. I figured that was the case, but I've never bothered to change it.

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#116

Post by epmatsw »

bhauer wrote: post #114

I was surprised to see praise for Chrome's omnibar here. The meddlesome assumption that everything I type into the URL bar is or should be a Google search drives me crazy when I use Chrome. By comparison, Firefox's URL bar does an incredible job of matching fragments of URLs to my history and bookmarks. My personal project has the word "taskforce" in the domain and title. In Firefox, I can type "task" and it's at the…

HN is the most obvious example of this for me. It's one of my most visited sites in both browsers. In Firefox, I can type "y" into the url field, and it's the first result. In Chrome, the same "y" lists youtube, y, yahoo, and youtube (again) before HN.

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#117

Post by stephengillie »

bhauer wrote: post #114

I was surprised to see praise for Chrome's omnibar here. The meddlesome assumption that everything I type into the URL bar is or should be a Google search drives me crazy when I use Chrome. By comparison, Firefox's URL bar does an incredible job of matching fragments of URLs to my history and bookmarks. My personal project has the word "taskforce" in the domain and title. In Firefox, I can type "task" and it's at the…

I haven't had this problem since I turned off predictive search for the omnibar.

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#118

Post by iforapsy »

ww520 wrote: post #107

I use Firefox mainly and Chrome/IE for testing sometimes. Firefox has been pretty solid; however, one really annoying change in v22 is that it blows up the default zoom level. That makes websites look very big. They said it's honoring the DDP setting on Windows and for HiRes monitor, but it looks like a bug or a misguided feature. I really hope they revert the change. I'm tired of hitting ctrl-- to zoom out on every…

An easy fix for the DPI change in Firefox 22 is to set layout.css.devPixelsPerPx in about:config to 1.0. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/962945?page=2#an...

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#120

Post by thrownaway2424 »

ionwake wrote: post #110

Why does anyone trust DuckDuckGo more than Google? I am really confused

The only sensible comment in the entire thread! There is no reason whatsoever to trust DDG more than Google. In fact you'd think it far more likely that DDG is a stooge of the NSA than is Google.

I do personally find this thread quite amusing because it's so irrational. Firefox + DDG is so slow for searching that you might as well erase 10 years of browser performance improvements and downgrade your DSL line. Chrome omnibar + prefetch + google instant makes for much faster searching vs. firefox which lacks all of those things (and DDG which lacks "instant"). Also I have to type the entire search into firefox's search bar because DDG doesn't have suggestions. And let's not even talk about the gulf in quality between DDG and Google.

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