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Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

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Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#121

Post by clicks »

epmatsw wrote: post #116
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.

Try typing 'n'... seeing as the url of this website is news.ycombinator.com. It doesn't start with y, as youtube or yahoo does.

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#122

Post by Watabou »

mayhew wrote: post #112
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.

It has all that in the latest Firefox Nightly.

Chrome only has the black back/forward animations. Firefox Nightly's animation is exactly like Safari, although you has to enable them specifically for now in about:config.

It also has ML-style scrollbars where they enlarge when you mouse over them.

So OS X integration has certainly improved.

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#123

Post by decryptthis_NSA »

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, too, do not like the omnibar and can speculate Google did it to drive traffic to its search engine, not to help you. They judge that this (highly profitable) annoyance is not enough to drive from Google.

I wonder if the recommendations are however slightly linked to CPC of the terms, wouldn't surprise me.

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#124

Post by jnbiche »

I also made this switch, and am slowly trying to find my way off of Google services (mostly gmail).

I really like Chrome, and might have stayed with Chromium if there had been an easy to install bookmark and password sync server I could run like Firefox has with Weave (for obvious reasons, I no longer want my sync data centralized with Google). Chromium apparently has a server you can run at home, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to do it. In addition, Chrome for Android has no support for self-hosted sync, so unlike with Firefox I couldn't sync my mobile devices even if I could set up a self-hosted server.

With Firefox, hosting your own sync server is trivial: there are even several different implementations of the Weave server besides Mozilla.

I miss Chrome, since I was very happy with the performance and dev tools, but I've made my decision and will live with it (except when I need to test web development stuff in Chrome).

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#125

Post by decryptthis_NSA »

steve918 wrote: post #119

I find it interesting that everyone suggests switching to Firefox and then changing the default search engine since a good deal of Mozilla's income comes from Google paying to be the default search engine.

Less data-points for Google /NSA the better it is. Firefox managed quite fine even without $300 million a year and the idea is not use Google for everything, not to ensure that FF has billions in their bank account

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#126

Post by dredmorbius »

gnosis wrote: post #47
jlgaddis wrote: post #31

> But the keyboard shortcuts mean I can ... without reaching for the mouse, and using a very limited set of shortcuts. This is why I love vimperator[0]. I actually preferred pentadactyl[1] but development apparently stalled so I switched back. [0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/vimperator/ [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/pentadactyl/

As a long-time user of Pentadactyl, Firefox, and vim, I'd like to make the heretical suggestion to try w3m in emacs. Having a web browser fully integrated in to a powerful editor like that is fantastic. It's far more powerful than what you'd get from the Pentadactyl/Firefox combination, with the disadvantage that w3m can't handle Javascript.[1] w3m's also far faster and a lot less bloated than Firefox. For sites that…

The most annoying thing about w3m for me these days is the fonts in my default terminal window. I've been shopping around for a better alternative (GNOME terminal or XFCE4's terminal seem to beat my trusty old rxvt). The ability to dynamically resize fonts is also kind of nice (yeah, I'm old school).

That and the fact that color settings for w3m are pretty hard to tweak just right for whatever terminal / foreground/background you're using.

The fact that so many pages render much more readably without CSS is .... sad, actually.

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#127

Post by dredmorbius »

gnosis wrote: post #48

I've been using DDG and Firefox for years now, and don't miss Google at all. The main thing I'm really annoyed with DDG about is that they don't (no longer?) treat double-quoted search terms as literal. I'll often get results that are close to but not exactly what I asked for. This is really frustrating, as my entire intention in double quoting search terms is to ask for exactly those search terms and nothing else. A…

I just got hit by that "search this exact mispelled phrase" bug earlier today, and yes, it's annoying.

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#128

Post by dredmorbius »

baby wrote: post #109

Things I advise you to install on Firefox : Tree Style Tab[1] Basically what it does is display the tabs on the left, thus occupying a space that is rarely used on websites (borders). It is so practical for managing many tabs, nesting tabs etc... that I can't understand why a power user who uses a lot of tabs would switch to chrome. Just try to use it for a day or a week and it will change your life. [1] https://addo…

Tree style tabs. All-in-one sidebar. Vimperator. Ghostery. Adblock Plus. Stylish (or Stylebot). I've come to rather love the latter under Chrome, which I've been using increasingly lately. Readability. Torbutton.

That's off the top of my head, there's a few others I typically add.

My main problem with FF lately is that with _both_ FF (well, Iceweasel) and Chromium installed, Chrome pigs out all available memory, while Firefox is single-processed. While the _active_ Chrome tab usually frees up fairly quickly if swapped, Firefox can literally take minutes to dig itself out of heavy swap.

Yeah, I still use spinning rust.

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#129

Post by mayanksinghal »

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…

Here are some of my Chrome autocompletes: n (news.ycombinator.com), mu (music.google.com), ma (mail.google.com), a (amazon.com), gi (github.com), q (quora.com), l (localhost), i (images.google.com), c (coursera.com). I don't think I even give it a second thought after pressing these characters. I just do 'n' and Return.

Your experience might be worse, probably because you haven't used chrome enough.

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#130

Post by dredmorbius »

k-mcgrady wrote: post #67
joeblau wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used DDG for two months and as a developer trying to find the latest bugs, code snippets, and help; It was a lot harder on DDG than in Google. I would always end up having to type google.com in my address bar to search for programming related items. That being said, people have pointed me to resources to help me improve my search results.

On DDG you can add !g to the start or end of a query and it will do the search on Google.

!sp will search on StartPage, which is a privacy-proxied Google search. That's my fallback if the default DDG search doesn't work.
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