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Switching from Chrome to Firefox

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Re: Switching from Chrome to Firefox

#181

Post by zamadatix »

ghusto wrote: post #173
jrm4 wrote: post #8

Do people live in their browsers like that? I find it useful to keep both. 95% of the time I'm in Firefox, as one should be -- with all the good adblockers etc. And for the 5% unavoidable garbage of "things I must use/sign up for in life" that don't implement things properly, including Zoom, I keep Chrome around.

I hear this now and again, but haven't had Chrome installed for years now without issue. I'm made to use things like Zoom et al. too, but everything "just works" for me?

Teams was a classic hellhole for me when I was using Linux. Nowadays it lets you in but Firefox genuinely doesn't support all of the features the Teams site uses. This means certain features are made unavailable to Firefox users. Forcing the user agent makes some of these partially work but they are also still broken so Mozilla doesn't want to enable a user agent override by default and Microsoft doesn't want to enable a feature that only half works. This GitHub WebCompat issue serves as a good example history https://github.com/webcompat/web-bugs/issues/77892

Haven't used Zoom in browser much so can't say what one can find there. I just run the desktop app. It's definitely something where you can go a few years with everything working fine then suddenly hit like 4 sites where you're like "wtf, why is shit so broken?". Chipotle and similar joints' online order pages were another place that would spontaneously break.

Re: Switching from Chrome to Firefox

#182

Post by francocalvo »

asciimov wrote: post #98

My Profiles tips: 1. You can have multiple profile sessions running at the same time. 2. It is best to theme your alt profiles with a different color so you don't confuse them. For example, green one is for one profile and the red one another. 3. "firefox -p 'profile-name'" launches directly into a profile 4. "firefox -p 'profile-name' -private-window" launches a profile in a private window 5. I use keybindings on li…

Why do you not use containers?

Re: Switching from Chrome to Firefox

#183

Post by oxygen_crisis »

jraph wrote: post #32
luuurker wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox users don't use profiles because switching between them is a pain in the rear (at least on some platforms). Containers are nice, but you can't have different bookmarks, extensions, settings, etc. It's not a replacement for profiles.

We have about:profiles now, a convenient way to manage and launch profiles. No need for firefox -P anymore :-) (Though I still use it out of muscle memory. alt+F2 firefox -P is so quick to type.)

There's nothing convenient about about:profiles.

It's designed like their goal was to make the few buttons you want to use most the hardest to find.

I'm not going to the profiles page to restart Firefox, show my profile directory in Finder/Explorer, Rename a profile, or Remove a profile. For some reason all those buttons get first placement.

I have to scroll the page down to find the one and only button I want to click every single day.

Re: Switching from Chrome to Firefox

#184

Post by TonyTrapp »

rjmunro wrote: post #44
TonyTrapp wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a 15+ years Firefox user: What is "very much off" about Firefox' font rendering? For me it's the opposite, Chrome's rendering looks completely off to me - thin and it looks like the ClearType effect is set to 11. On the other hand, Firefox' font rendering in that screenshot looks like native Windows font rendering to me.

The problem with "very much off" for font rendering is that it is relative to what you are used to, not relative to any actual standard font rendering. If you've been using Firefox a while, Chrome will look off. If you've been using Chrome, Firefox will look off.

Maybe I am reading too much into the sentence but to me, "some people just don't notice or don't care" implies that there is something objectively broken about it that can be quantified.

Re: Switching from Chrome to Firefox

#185

Post by deadbunny »

retrocryptid wrote: post #166
deadbunny wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Firefox user I had to open Chrome to check this to see if I had just been living with bad font rendering for the last 20 years. Firefox uses my system defined default fonts (DejaVu Sans, DejaVu Serif, Hack) where Chrome completely ignores the system fonts. IMO using the system defaults is the correct action here. Anyway after manually configuring Chrome to use the system defaults they look identical to me: Firef…

Are you using macOS, Windows or Linux? There are (mostly subtle) differences between these platforms which may expose more differences between fonts. I get it that it doesn't look different on your system, but I'm not discounting the possibility that the OS platform can also affect rendering.

I'm running Linux atm but I've used Firefox in Windows recently and the fonts were fine.

Re: Switching from Chrome to Firefox

#186

Post by johnnyworker »

asciimov wrote: post #138
AnonC wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not GP, but this extension seems to only allow switching profiles. Is there something that allows opening a new window using a different profile? People who use Chrome with multiple profiles may have multiple windows open at the same time, with some windows using (or possibly) sharing profiles.

You can directly launch a firefox profile with "firefox -p 'profile-name'" This will create a separate firefox instance running with that profile. It's not as nice as having a button in firefox to accomplish this, but if you use different shortcuts or keyboard commands to launch things it works quite well.

Also, adding the option "-no-remote" allows you to open a new profile that way when Firefox is already running.

Re: Switching from Chrome to Firefox

#187

Post by luuurker »

ghusto wrote: post #177
luuurker wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different bookmarks, extensions, settings, themes, and ability to sync all those to other machines. We just have to look at what profiles and containers do to understand that while useful, containers can't replace profiles.

I've seen this pop up a few times in this post. What's the use case for different extensions etc.?

Personal vs work profiles, for example.

My work profile has uBlock Origin with stricter rules which would break some sites/tools I use for work. I also redirect Twitter to Nitter, use a different password manager, etc.

For bookmarks, it's more a question of not wanting to have personal stuff together with work stuff. Then there's some settings that works on one profile but would cause issues (or annoyances) on the other. I also have a different theme for each profile, which stops me from doing personal stuff on sites with my work login (eg: searching on Google).

I also have a profile that is just for the shittiest sites I sometimes find online. I'll have extensions to block the crap, archive pages, etc, which would slow down browsing or break most sites I use.

On Chromium, I had one browser and 3 profiles. Then I decided to move to Firefox and since using profiles (especially switching/opening them, at least on Mac) is a pain, I use 3 different browsers (Firefox, Firefox Dev/Beta, Waterfox) as they all have their own profiles.

Could I live with only one profile? Yes, but that would force me to compromise. Containers alone? I tried to use them, but stopped after searching for stuff on Google and YouTube on the container I had my work Google account logged in. Profiles + Containers are the best of both worlds in one plane.

Re: Switching from Chrome to Firefox

#189

Post by koito17 »

The font rendering problem is very interesting to me because I have always found Firefox to use the same font rendering as the rest of my system, meanwhile Chrome has this universally thin and conspicuous font rendering across all systems I have attempted using it on.

I currently use Mac OS and I see no difference between text rendered on Firefox and text rendered in other Mac OS applications, but there is a world of difference between Chrome and anything else.

So if I had to make a bold claim without evidence, I would guess Firefox uses the OS default font rendering (i.e. it will be as bad the rest of your OS), meanwhile Chrome's font rendering is universally bad (i.e. it does not follow what your OS uses, on any platform, and if you don't like it, then there's not much you can do).

Re: Switching from Chrome to Firefox

#190

Post by hospitalJail »

jeroenhd wrote: post #167
hospitalJail wrote: post #83

I havent been able to uninstall Chrome. Everyone makes sure they test their website for Chrome. Firefox/Safari just don't have devs testing on them. I currently have Firefox for most things, but I seemingly always have chromium open to check to see if a website isnt behaving correctly. What a terrible time for computing. Chrome is in total control of web. Nvidia + M$ have complete control of high performance computin…

What power does MS have over high performance computing? Perhaps some fields use Windows specific applications, but most high performance computing I see uses Linux by default, with WSL for the Windows equivalent. I use Chrome as a fallback too when the measures I've taken to protect my privacy break websites I can't get around, but in most cases websites just work in my experience. Almost all of the issues I run int…

Nvidia has CUDA. CUDA is basically all that matters right now.

Sure there is some half effort from Nvidia to support Linux, but you can do 1 google search to realize Nivida and Linux do not play together nicely.

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