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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

#301

Post by saghm »

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…

> 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.

Sorry if this is a silly question, but is this maybe just the paywall? I'm not sure if you've been reading more articles on Firefox and then only opened on Chrome or something after this started happening, but it sounds like that could be what's going on.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#302

Post by GeoAtreides »

robonerd wrote: post #300
GeoAtreides wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> if you want example.com, type exam in the awesomebar and example.bar will show up in suggestions I just tried it. I have example.com in my history, and typed "exam". Example.com is the second thing firefox suggests. Before it, is a duckduckgo image search result page for the query "botanist", with an image titled "Young Botanist Examines The Plants In A Greenhouse Stock Photo" . Firefox is picking up the "exam" in…

Please go to: Settings(preferences) --> Search Then: Search Suggestions:

Disable: Show search suggestions in address bar results

That should be it.

Below, go to Change settings for other address bar suggestions it will navigate to: Address Bar / When using the address bar, suggest Disable or enable as you see fit. I think the Search engines under the "Address Bar" is about the custom search engines one can define (i have a custom search for youtube, for example: y ).

A better guide here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-autocomplet...

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#303

Post by garfieldnate »

I actively tried to switch to Firefox this year, but couldn't due to issues with saving tabs on sudden shutdown. Due to a separate issue, my apple laptop was crashing and restarting a couple times a week. Several times Firefox was not able to restore the browsing session, and I lost all of my tabs :(

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#304

Post by heresie-dabord »

dandellion wrote: post #262
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!

There are better browsers than Firefox if you care about privacy. Both Brave and Tor have better results in this comparison that was shared here recently: https://privacytests.org/ , same with this tool from the EFF https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ it gives better results for Brave than Firefox (even with blockers installed on my Firefox). Mozilla themselves give the same score in their very limited comparsion: https…

> comparison that was shared here recently: https://privacytests.org/

The Librewolf project appears to be the best of all! I will try it.

edit: Statement below is incorrect, Brave is a Chromium fork.

I do note that Brave, Tor, and Librewolf are forks of Firefox. This in my opinion is an additional reason to support Firefox. Everyone else appears to be plundering naive users' browser telemetry.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#305

Post by cptskippy »

The feature I use most is Firefox Sync and the ability to not only send browser tabs to instances of Firefox running on other machines but also to look at and load tabs from another machine, even when it is offline.

Routinely I'll be reading something on my laptop in the evening and want to reference it from my Dev VM the next day. With Sync I can just pull up the list of open tabs on my laptop that's asleep and retrieve the URL.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#306

Post by freebuju »

Most chromium hit pieces come across as evangelical and this one is no exception.

From my personal perspective, Firefox gets the job done but Chromium is undoubtedly the better browser. On desktop and mobile, the difference is felt even more on mobile.

Every time I found an obvious bug or got an unpolished experience on Firefox, I hated it even more.

Whatever data the author thinks they are hiding away from Google, they are (un)knowingly giving it to Mozilla. Even worse if they are using Google to search.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#307

Post by dralley »

swat535 wrote: post #195
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if the entire HN community would switch to Firefox, it would still be a drop in the ocean to curbing Chrome's market share. Also Firefox hasn't been doing itself any favors by alienating both the average Joe consumers and the professional devs over the years.

Well, on January 2023 when Chrome Manifest V3 is finally deployed and Ublock Origin is killed, I bet many HNers will finally switch: https://developer.chrome.com/blog/mv2-transition/ Firefox maker, Mozilla, is in the uneasy position of being financially dependent on its search deal with Google, which accounts for the majority of the organization's revenue. I wonder how Google will be able to twist its arms (and trust…

They've implemented V3. What they're not doing is removing support for V2, so plugins that want the full access can do so.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#308

Post by glowingly »

garfieldnate wrote: post #303

I actively tried to switch to Firefox this year, but couldn't due to issues with saving tabs on sudden shutdown. Due to a separate issue, my apple laptop was crashing and restarting a couple times a week. Several times Firefox was not able to restore the browsing session, and I lost all of my tabs :(

All of the browsers (including all of the Trident based ones) have had this issue for me. Most of my browser hopping in the past was driven by losing a session, being unable to recover it, and moving on to the next browser hoping it is more stable now.

Nowadays I aggressively save to bookmarks. Still a lot of tabs open, though.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#309

Post by dralley »

cpeterso wrote: post #276
_dark_matter_ wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

It shouldn't be necessary.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#310

Post by robonerd »

GeoAtreides wrote: post #302
robonerd wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you want example.com, type exam in the awesomebar and example.bar will show up in suggestions I just tried it. I have example.com in my history, and typed "exam". Example.com is the second thing firefox suggests. Before it, is a duckduckgo image search result page for the query "botanist", with an image titled "Young Botanist Examines The Plants In A Greenhouse Stock Photo" . Firefox is picking up the "exam" in…

Please go to: Settings(preferences) --> Search Then: Search Suggestions: Disable: Show search suggestions in address bar results That should be it. Below, go to Change settings for other address bar suggestions it will navigate to: Address Bar / When using the address bar, suggest Disable or enable as you see fit. I think the Search engines under the "Address Bar" is about the custom search engines one can define (i…

I already have "Provide search suggestions" turned off. It's pulling both of these suggestions out of my browser history. The order firefox uses for suggestions pulled from your history is inconsistent.

When searching your history from the address bar, firefox sometimes puts entries matched by domain name first, and sometimes puts entries matched by page contents first.

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