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

Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

qwerjk.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 151 posts

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#141

Post by oblio »

clicks wrote: post #121
epmatsw wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, for me that's a fault. Why should the search have to begin with the starting letter of the site? Or why should that be favored? I'd rather point me to the most likely site containing that letter/group of letter.

Oh well, it's probably personal preference :)

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#142

Post by amenod »

Two suggestions:

1) if you are concerned about privacy you should also turn off malware protection in FF because it sends pages that you visit to Google (yes, I know their privacy policy - do you trust them?). For additional points you can open about:config, search for "google" and remove all occurences. Point being: even FF doesn't completely protect your privacy by default.

2) DDG is great and I use it, but if I were really concerned about privacy I would use a non-US provider (StartPage is based in Netherlands, not sure where they host their servers though). Point being: DDG claims they don't store user data, but that doesn't mean NSA doesn't either. If they are USA based, they must obey USA laws.

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#143

Post by baby »

dredmorbius wrote: post #128
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, whil…

There's Adblock Plus Pop-up which is a must have as well.

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#144

Post by lttlrck »

Watabou wrote: post #62
cupcake-unicorn wrote: post #20

I actually never ended up switching to Chrome from Firefox in the first place, but those are still good tips. I guess I did the right thing :) Yes, it has a terrible memory leak issue, but all of my computers have enough ram as to not notice. I'm still not ready to make the switch to DuckDuckGo. I figure that if I'm going to stick with Gmail no matter what, if Google already has that information, collecting a few sea…

There aren't any memory leak issues in Firefox. I have been using Firefox since Firefox 10 and it has made huge strides in memory performance so much so that it beats every browser out there on memory benchmarks. In fact, on the mac, with the same number (34) of tabs, the same content, no add-ons or extensions, Firefox takes 600MB - 800MB, Safari takes around 900MB-1GB and Chrome takes around 900-1.2GB. I use these b…

None of that points to the absence of memory leaks.

(I'm not saying Firefox has memory leaks. Though it's extremely unlikely it has none, same goes for Chrome and Safari)

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#146

Post by boomlinde »

lttlrck wrote: post #145
lurkinggrue wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me Firefox wins over Chrome for interface customization. Can't take that "One size fits all" mentality of Chrome.

Why is that an issue? Its just a window to web content.

How is it "just" a window to web content? You never mind things like tabs, bookmarks, the developer console, browsing history or, say, the "Back" button, I guess.

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#148

Post by bhauer »

mayanksinghal wrote: post #129
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.

To be clear, if I start typing the beginning of the domain name, Chrome will correctly identify my intent. But if I type a fragment of the URL (or multiple fragments), it assumes I want to run a search.

In your example, you said "n" leads to news.ycombinator.com. In Firefox, "n" leads to me to news.cnet.com, which I also visit fairly regularly. Meanwhile, "yc", or "hac", or "nator" yield Hacker News. In Chrome, "yc" yields a suggestion of "yc.edu" (whatever that is) and "hac" yields "hacked games." Part of my distaste for this is that it reveals that everything I type into the omnibar is sent to Google for analysis. I have once accidentally pasted a password into the omnibar field and had a sudden panic. I know it's Google, and DBE, and all of that. But still.

Back to the fragments point, I might remember a site had something to do with "combi" in the name. Type that into Firefox and it knows what I want, even if I've only visited it once several months ago. Google thinks I want "combivent respimat." No joke. Apparently it's a drug.

In fact, as I experiment right now, I can't even get Chrome to suggest news.ycombinator.com by typing "combinator" into the omnibar. As a user of Chrome I am required to remember the domain started with 'y'. In Firefox, the browser tries to help me.

As an exercise, can you tell us what sites are suggested when you type "combinator", "host", "hub" (this one is an example of a plausible case--"It was something-hub", type "hub", "oh yeah, github!"), etc?

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#150

Post by tbe »

dewarrn1 wrote: post #95

Searching the current page for links in Firefox (using ') is a great feature and one of the things I miss most when I have to use Chrome.

I wish there was a way to do this search only on the currently visible part of the page. Installing a hit-a-hint type of addon would then be less of a prerequisite for me to use the browser.
Post reply on HN