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Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

pcworld.com

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Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#181

Post by swfsql »

nyanpasu64 wrote: post #167
swfsql wrote: post #58

I use Libre Wolf, which is a pre-configured Firefox with enhanced privacy. They still support the FF Sync stuff. Similarly for vscode, there is vscodium.

I wish LibreWolf supported Firefox Sync. I appreciate how they removed Firefox's sell-out advertising, promotions for Mozilla Corporation products, and telemetry by default. But I couldn't get sync to work; it's my main blocker from using it as my daily driver. (Some smaller annoyances as a developer are not having about:crashes to examine, debug, and upload coredumps on an opt-in basis, and Firefox Profiler not havi…

My sync worked normally, except for the password autofill (but the passwords are still saved on the Settings)

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#182

Post by whoisthemachine »

nemetroid wrote: post #131
323 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox is my main browser for many years now, but there are two categories of sites that I only open in Chrome: Video heavy sites, especially YouTube. It loads extremely slowly compared to Chrome. And has much more video stuttering. Probably Google is sabotaging YouTube in Firefox. Complex interactive sites, like crypto exchanges. They are slow and with many rendering artefacts in Firefox. Probably because they don'…

> Video heavy sites, especially YouTube. It loads extremely slowly compared to Chrome. And has much more video stuttering. I recently had similar issues, and it turned out that Firefox’s cache was constantly nearly-full. Clearing the cache returned YouTube to normal.

Ah yes, cache eviction, one of two hard problems in computer science...

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#183

Post by pivo »

haunter wrote: post #21

>Automatic blocking of autoplay videos And then this very site has an automatic playing video in the article lmao Also a lot of these claims are so-so imo. "Lighter on system resources" "Speedier website browsing" I usually have 60-70 tabs open across 5-6 windows. Firefox absolutely shits itself all the time but Chromium doesn't. Anyways I use ungoogled-chromium https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium

I rarely have fewer than double that number of tabs open in Firefox and never have crashes. Maybe it’s crashed on me in the past, but if so I don’t remember it happening.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#184

Post by debacle »

The timing on this article is interesting. My Firefox just "refreshed" itself, turned Pocket back on, turned DNS over HTTPS back on, removed all of my plugins, and then somehow leaked itself up to 10gb of RAM (I'll blame Discord for that I guess).

The browser ecosystem under Google's benevolent dictatorship is languishing.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#185

Post by swfsql »

prox wrote: post #102
swfsql wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use an extension called autoTabDiscard (or something close) that unloads webpages that I didn't access the last 10 minutes, or that doesn't load any tab on startup, but the tabs keep existing in both cases. Then you can setup exceptions as well. That's an essential for me.

But why open so many tabs when you can just search history or bookmark (in FF you can also tag by double clicking the star icon) Usually I find everything I needed by time, data, keyword, tag, or bookmark in a few seconds at most by opening history or bookmark by keyboard shortcut.

In my case I think I got used to have specific ff windows for specific stuff, and having the tabs "opened" feels quicker for me. But I guess I could get used to and switch to tags and bookmarking as you said.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#186

Post by Kelm »

dhimes wrote: post #169
hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that. Every few weeks I come across a site that works better in Chrome than in FF or has some quirks (Google's spreadsheets are a good example - they feel slower in FF). Although I have no hope of changing the mindset of HNers working at Google, the rest of us could make a difference.

Yeah I hate that. I still have a problem seeing comments on youtube in firefox, even when I'm logged in. Not sure we're going to be able to fix if google targets their properties to only their browser, outside of a lawsuit or gov't action.

I daily drive Firefox for a few years now, including watching youtube - never faced your issue… Maybe a misbehaving extension?

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#187

Post by mark_l_watson »

nfbyte wrote: post #138
hnlmorg wrote: post #45

FireFox Containers are a killer feature for me. It allows you to run sandboxed sessions. So you can ostensibly make every site a private tab by default but have a small few sites persistent. Eg I’ll have a work group with GitHub, Okta, etc in it so I only need to log in once a day. But random websites cannot track me between sites. Couple that with DNS blocking of trackers and ads, and the web is actually a lot more…

You can also set a proxy per container (and assign specific websites to always use it), and when you combine that with an ultra-cheap VPS running e.g. a Shadowsocks server you have what I think is the real way to circumvent censorship and bypass regional restrictions (as opposed to using snake oil "VPN" providers or even the Tor Browser).

Are most VPN provides unreliable? I don’t know - never researched this.

I use Proton VPN because it is bundled with ProtonMail. I very much like preventing my national Internet service provider from selling my browsing history.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#188

Post by fuckcensorship »

debacle wrote: post #184

The timing on this article is interesting. My Firefox just "refreshed" itself, turned Pocket back on, turned DNS over HTTPS back on, removed all of my plugins, and then somehow leaked itself up to 10gb of RAM (I'll blame Discord for that I guess). The browser ecosystem under Google's benevolent dictatorship is languishing.

I recommend checking out LibreWolf as a possible alternative: https://librewolf.net/.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#189

Post by enragedcacti »

kristiandupont wrote: post #64
sph wrote: post #30

I honestly want to ditch Firefox and try a Chromium browser for a minute [1], but I'm stuck on Firefox because it's the only one with a killer feature: send a tab to/from iOS and my Linux desktop. I skip Chrome and Edge for privacy reasons, Brave have a crappy and buggy sync feature that I don't know what OSes it supports, but not my combination. Can't send tabs with them. Vivaldi doesn't have an iOS port. Impossible…

> I'm starting to see broken sites What are some examples of this? I keep seeing this complaint and I keep asking for examples but I always get "just various sites"-like answers. FF is my primary browser and I am not seeing it. I am genuinely curious as to whether it is starting to fall behind but I can recall maybe two or three instances the past couple of years where I opened a site in Brave to see if it worked the…

I most commonly find it during payment processing and other spots where devs are trying to do fancy input validation or styling in forms, especially on mobile. The most common issue is that the the cursor isn't moved correctly when accounting for automatically inserted spaces or hyphens and it can be pretty much impossible to enter the correct numbers without overwriting previous numbers. Autofill also generally fails in these scenarios.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#190

Post by pivo »

8organicbits wrote: post #32
formerly_proven wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I usually have 60-70 tabs open across 5-6 windows. Firefox absolutely shits itself all the time but Chromium doesn't. Last time I checked I had a few thousand tabs open with Firefox and it doesn't do anything except use memory.

I'm always curious about the use case of having so many open tabs. Is there some context you work in where so many tabs are needed? Are you able to find already open tabs, or do you just end up with 50 hacker news tabs because you just open new ones? Do you actually look at each tab, or do you open in the background and never load them? Are you using extensions to make tabs management easier, like tree style tabs? On…

> Are you able to find already open tabs

Yes https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/search-open-tabs-firefo...

This search also returns results for tabs open in Firefox on other devices.

Opening the tab again isn't hard if you can remember what that tab was to begin with.

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