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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

#241

Post by cdrini »

One unique Firefox feature I love that I don't see talked about often is how awesome Firefox's address bar suggestions are. I can type just a snippet of a URL or a web page title and it'll instantly show me all matching URLs I've visited, whether on my desktop or on my phone. It's become my primary second brain for finding Google docs, or articles I've read, or GitHub issues. It's usually only a few characters before it finds exactly what I want.

Eg I type in "Ed"? It shows the URL to my "editions in solr" GitHub issues I've been working on recently. I vaguely recall an article I read months ago on CSS grid? I type "grid guide" and bam it's the first suggestion. The spreadsheet I made about user languages? "sheets lang". That vague API I can never remember the parameters to? Just type "/query.json?" And I get all my previous requests as examples!

I find Chrome's address bar has been way less reliable and much more frequently just gives me Google autocomplete suggestions -- even when I know that I visited a URL recently that should match!

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#242

Post by cmg »

commoner wrote: post #104
zelphirkalt wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although Firefox had profiles for ages and you could start Firefox with the profile manager and "new instance allowed" to choose a profile at the start of each new instance. More hidden then in Chromium, but definitely possible. EDIT: Just for completeness sake, here is the command to open Firefox with profile manager and new instances: firefox --new-instance --ProfileManager %u

The Firefox Profile Switcher add-on provides an easy-to-use interface that looks just like Chrome's: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profile-switc... You'll need to install a connector for it to work. (The add-on gives instructions during the onboarding process.) Both the add-on and the connector are free and open source (GPLv3). I use profiles and containers together on Firefox. Each profile has its o…

I'm going to have to give this a try. I manage multiple Google Workspace accounts for clients and have stuck to Chrome for those as I have a profile set up for each account. Yes, you can log in to multiple Google accounts in any browser, but then it defaults to the first account for new windows.

The two final things that would get me off Chrome entirely:

* When I'm using my external USB microphone in a web-based conference system (mostly Cleanfeed but I've also seen it with Streamyard and Jitsi) my audio gets extremely robotic after a few minutes and it somehow impacts my entire system - I have to unplug the microphone to fix it.

* Dropbox, for some reason, hangs at 1 second left when uploading larger files (appx 60MB or so)

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#244

Post by lol768 »

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

> Our only hope is Mozilla takes their head out of their arse and start working on their browser

Are you reporting these to the webcompat project? Mozilla is absolutely funding QA testers and engineers to check what's broken and triage issues that affect specific browsers and not others.

They've handled 103k issues: https://github.com/webcompat/web-bugs/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is...

A great number of the issues that Mozilla contractors and employees investigate that are reported via the webcompat project actually turn out to be the site owner's fault. They're not using standardised web technologies, not testing their work in multiple browsers. Mozilla employees and contractors will try to perform outreach to these site owners, but they're often not interested.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#245

Post by _wcd2 »

barbacoa wrote: post #227
toma_caliente wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most VPN providers you typically see pushed are very suspect at best. Especially the ones you see commonly pushed by Youtubers like NordVPN, ExpressVPN etc. I think the only VPNs that have actually been externally audited are Mullvad and ProtonVPN.

What's is the concern about VPNs being "suspect" or "reliable"? I hear this a lot about VPN providers but not sure why. If the VPN is logging your activity/IP you'd have to be doing something super illegal for the police to want to get a search warrant for your data.

It's not just that they're suspect or unreliable. They're complete bullshit.

The actual use of VPN technology is to create virtual networks that are private (hence the name). It's a system level technology. There are several types of network topologies you can set up, when I was learning about this I found this article which is quite nice: https://www.procustodibus.com/blog/2020/10/wireguard-topolog.... You can proxy traffic through a VPN, but the only scenario I can think of in which it makes sense is if you are an OSINT researcher and you need a safe system on which to conduct your research.

If you need to proxy traffic and "hide" your IP, just use a flipping proxy. It's an application level technology (e.g. for torrenting, every torrent client under the sun supports a SOCKS5 proxy). If you don't have the patience to set up a VPS yourself, you can even use something like Outline (https://getoutline.org) which automates that (and it has a mobile client app as well).

If you need privacy (and to actually hide your IP), then use Tor.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#246

Post by splatcollision »

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 just discovered the "share" item in the tab contextual menu includes AirDrop (on mac naturally) and while this doesn't help you, I was always copying and pasting a site between firefox and safari in order to send it to my iPhone, and was previously frustrated that I couldn't hit the airdrop function from firefox directly Thanks, your comment made me look for it!

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#247

Post by jrootabega »

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 had two similar experiences recently. DOH turned itself on a few weeks ago for everyone, I think, out of band from a new release.

And when they released v100, the Ubuntu snap just updated itself automatically and killed a firefox process that I was actively using. (Not sure exactly whose fault that was, but I think we can give Mozilla some of it.) After restarting, I was greeted with that bullshit-purple-neon-themed "100 Thank You's" modal dialog, with no useful information, that had to be acknowledged before continuing.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#248

Post by lol768 »

neogodless wrote: post #179
kristiandupont wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

HomeDepot.com often won't let me add things to cart. The past couple months it has been working again, but there were a few months where I couldn't. This morning, I couldn't buy a key off cdkeys.com - tried two totally different methods, email addresses, credit cards. Didn't try a second browser yet but I'm not sure I am that persistent... A news site, I think the New Yorker, would only show the first two paragraphs…

> HomeDepot.com often won't let me add things to cart. The past couple months it has been working again, but there were a few months where I couldn't.

I checked for webcompat issues matching this description and couldn't find anyone reporting that adding items to the cart didn't work.

I attempted to reproduce the issue myself, but HomeDepot block visitors from my location.

> This morning, I couldn't buy a key off cdkeys.com - tried two totally different methods, email addresses, credit cards. Didn't try a second browser yet but I'm not sure I am that persistent...

Can't reproduce, I was able to buy a CD Key ("Garfield Kart - Furious Racing PC") at 28 May 2022, 16:51:52 BST using Firefox 100.0.2 and a debit card.

> A news site, I think the New Yorker, would only show the first two paragraphs of an article but in other browsers, would show the full article.

Can't reproduce. Visiting https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-baby-formul... in Firefox shows me the exact same content as when I use Chromium.

I'm not saying you've not experienced these issues, but they're definitely not widespread and your post doesn't give enough information to go on to diagnose if there's an issue with Firefox or not.

The best thing you can do is report issues to the webcompat project as and when you come across compatibility issues. It takes about 20 seconds, less time than you probably spent writing this comment.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#249

Post by Accacin »

detritus wrote: post #107
andinus wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multi-Accounts Container Version: 8.0.7 You can click on "Manage Containers", choose a container and then remove the site with "Manage Site List".

Oh Gosh, I feel so stupid - that's exactly what I was looking for.. please tell me they just added that this morning? I know they didn't..!

Not stupid, I also accidentally added something to the wrong container and it took me a while and some searching to find the answer. The feature is great, but the UX is still a little lacking.
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