Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox • Hacker News Board

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#281

Post by sp332 » Sat, May 28, 2022, 5:21 PM UTC

throw10920 wrote: post #263

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…

To add to this, my experience has been that Chrome's address bar does only matching on whole "fragments" of URLs - that is, if I visited a URL with /foobarbaz/ in the name, Firefox will match that with "bar" while Chrome won't - which is pretty terrible behavior. And then there's the bookmarks mess, lack of tree-style tabs, and crippled ad-blocker API. As an information management tool , Firefox is light-years ahead…

I've only been using Chrome for about a year, but if I want the find something in my history, I have to open the history window (ctrl-h). The address bar is very inconsistent about returning pages that I've been to recently or often.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#282

Post by sp332 » Sat, May 28, 2022, 5:23 PM UTC

slenk wrote: post #221

heresie-dabord wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Mozilla focus on privacy is the killer feature for me. DNS encrypted "Total Cookie Protection" uBlock Origin multi-account containers I also like built-in screen capture *various other extensions, such as Copy All Tab URLs I didn't find "Pocket" compelling when it was first introduced, but I have since found some of the recommendations interesting. Bravo Mozilla!

Pocket is the only reason I use LibreWolf - I don't trust its integration and what parts I can actually disable

What do you think Mozilla is doing with Pocket they couldn't do with... the rest of the browser?

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#283

Post by robonerd » Sat, May 28, 2022, 5:25 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'…

> Video heavy sites, especially YouTube.

Right-click -> Open With mpv

It's a pain in the ass, but the performance gap is immense. On a desktop I wouldn't bother, but on my laptop this has a real impact on battery life.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#284

Post by stsourlidakis » Sat, May 28, 2022, 5:29 PM UTC

robonerd wrote: post #273

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.

> 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.

I don't think I've ever seen a Mullvad ad or paid promotion (eg sponsored YT videos). I mostly see happy customers praising them (including myself).

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#285

Post by cyber_kinetist » Sat, May 28, 2022, 5:34 PM UTC

lawgimenez wrote: post #42

Funny, I've done the opposite. Firefox has always been my default as far as I can remember but for the past several releases it has been heavy in terms of macOS memory. The author is obviously using Windows, but on macOS it is the opposite. Every startup, Firefox seems to throttle my MBP fans and will get sluggish as I keep on using it.

Same for me too (I'm using Windows), I've moved on to Chrome because of annoying performance issues with Firefox. Much better in that area after switching , although I still miss Tree Style Tabs sometimes... (you can't find a replacement for that in Chrome)

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#286

Post by robonerd » Sat, May 28, 2022, 5:38 PM UTC

stsourlidakis wrote: post #284

robonerd wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I don't think I've ever seen a Mullvad ad or paid promotion (eg sponsored YT videos). I mostly see happy customers praising them (including myself).

Between sponsorblock and ublock origin, I never see ads or paid promotions on youtube or any other website like that. That mostly leaves [presumably] unpaid promotion of Mullvad on sites like HN.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#287

Post by copperx » Sat, May 28, 2022, 5:41 PM UTC

nerder92 wrote: post #274

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.

What OS, if I may ask?

I find browser choice heavily depends on the OS you're using.

For instance, I can't stand anything but Safari on macOS. There's nothing better than Firefox on Linux. But on Windows, Chrome is king.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#288

Post by xony » Sat, May 28, 2022, 5:42 PM UTC

No post body was provided.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#289

Post by cyber_kinetist » Sat, May 28, 2022, 5:43 PM UTC

Shadonototra wrote: post #243

Mozilla sells its users to Google, so no thanks I'll stick with Chromium

Ironically the reason why Google supports Firefox financially (mainly with web search deals) might be to make a competitor float (barely) alive so they don't need to get sued by antitrust/monopoly issues in the future.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#290

Post by GeoAtreides » Sat, May 28, 2022, 5:43 PM UTC

robonerd wrote: post #270

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…

Firefox's address bar always seems to show me example.com/xyz when I want example.com, but shows me example.com when I want example.com/xyz. Furthermore, sometimes the "switch to tab" suggestion is at the top, and other times it isn't. If they picked one and stuck to it, I'd get used to it either way and be a happy camper. But the inconsistency drives me up a wall. I don't know how this compares to Chrome, I haven't…

if you want example.com, type exam in the awesomebar and example.bar will show up in suggestions, if, of course, you visited it before or if it's bookmarked.

if you want example.com/xyz, type example xyz or example x or just xyz.