Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox • Hacker News Board

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#271

Post by selectodude » Sat, May 28, 2022, 5:02 PM UTC

_wcd2 wrote: post #245

barbacoa wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 prox…

Unfortunately that doesn’t fix the real reason most people use VPNs, which is torrenting. Nobody should be using NordVPN to hide from a nation state, but for torrenting they add one level of obfuscation.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#272

Post by newscracker » Sat, May 28, 2022, 5:04 PM UTC

cdrini wrote: post #241

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…

> One unique Firefox feature I love that I don't see talked about often is how awesome Firefox's address bar suggestions are.

That’s actually called the “Awesome Bar”, which was first introduced in Firefox 3 (which was 14 years ago). [1] It has been improved over time.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_3.0

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#273

Post by robonerd » Sat, May 28, 2022, 5:05 PM UTC

toma_caliente wrote: post #193

mark_l_watson wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

> Most VPN providers you typically see pushed are very suspect at best.

Ironically (I hope?), Mullvad is by far the one I see pushed the most.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#274

Post by nerder92 » Sat, May 28, 2022, 5:09 PM UTC

I tried to switch to Firefox, is almost one year that I've tried but it just does not work for me. I can't express what it might be in words, but the experience is just worse than Chrome.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#275

Post by cassepipe » Sat, May 28, 2022, 5:10 PM UTC

cdrini wrote: post #241

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 gets much better when you disable search suggestions then you only have results from your browsing history/bookmarks. And in the end if you get no results you just launch a search anyways.

There was a way to configure the relative weight of boomarks/history but I can't find it anymore.

Also worthy of notice, if you start with * in the search bar you only get bookmarks results and with ^ you get history results. Finally % is for tabs (on synced devices too) !

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#276

Post by cpeterso » Sat, May 28, 2022, 5:11 PM UTC

_dark_matter_ wrote: post #146

zelphirkalt wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google sites have long been suspected to do things intentionally in a way that is only optimizing for Chrom(e/ium), maybe even intentionally slow on other browsers, which is mostly Firefox. No surprise there at all. However I do not see this stuff about JS init to take that long on amazon. It might be a special thing in your case. Did you try things like a new profile, to test, whether it still happens?

It is not just suspected, all Firefox Android users are served a different Google search experience than Chrome. One that is much worse.

Firefox Android’s can install the “Google Search Fixer” add-on to request the full Google Search UI (by sending a Chrome User-Agent string to google.com):

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/google-search...

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#277

Post by nfbyte » Sat, May 28, 2022, 5:14 PM UTC

selectodude wrote: post #271

_wcd2 wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 prox…

Unfortunately that doesn’t fix the real reason most people use VPNs, which is torrenting. Nobody should be using NordVPN to hide from a nation state, but for torrenting they add one level of obfuscation.

I specifically mentioned torrenting, please re-read. There is no reason to have all the network I/O of your computer go through an extra hop just for one application (e.g. a torrent client) when that application can be configured to use a proxy instead. It increases the network latency, complexity and attack surface of your system.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#278

Post by arun6582 » Sat, May 28, 2022, 5:19 PM UTC

I have tried doing the several times in past because of chromes arrogant and monopoly like attitude on forcing feature addition or removal But browsing works better and faster in chrome and most consumer base blindly use chrome If you want to build a extension with a user base you will have to use chrome If you want your website to work properly it must satisfy chrome first

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#279

Post by cassepipe » Sat, May 28, 2022, 5:19 PM UTC

323 wrote: post #111

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…

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'…

I was wondering if it was still possible to stream a youtube video out in VLC of if it has been made impossible

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#280

Post by tomComb » Sat, May 28, 2022, 5:19 PM UTC

zerop wrote: post #264

I ditched chrome and switched to MS Edge (Not sure if many would have done that). Chrome would heat up my Mac a lot and slows eventually, it always shows up eating lots of power. MS Edge seems lighter so far. Main reason to choose MS Edge (and not firefox) was the outlook web. I don't use outlook client and I use outlook web. Outlook web is slow on chrome, I found it lighter on Edge. I also switched to Bing from Goog…

These points about edge vs. chrome seem questionable to me given that Microsoft just takes Google’s browser engine for edge . I guess they each do their own optimization, but it’s not like Google is inexperienced in this area.