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Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

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Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#361
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…

Amazing. That is the one feature of Firefox I hate so much I had to write an extension that uses a regex-based whitelist to allow entries in my browser history.

Otherwise my history, and thus autocomplete suggestions, is full of URls from single-page applications (webmail etc) that differ only in the 1000-character-long hashes in the URL.

Whatever logic Chromium does to filter out this chaff from autocomplete works much better for me.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#362

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.

Try opening the site in incognito mode. It usually fixed these random issues.

> Most sites just have really obnoxious CAPTCHA, often requiring more than one "pick the things" but I don't know if my experience is specific to Firefox.

Installing the "Privacy Pass" extension can significantly reduce captcha challenges when visiting sites that use cloudflare.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not so much "intentionally broken on Firefox" as it is "between adding features and debugging Firefox performance issues, one gets you promoted and one doesn't." Because the former benefits all users and the latter benefits about 5% of users at most. The banal evil of neglect vs. intentional maliciousness.

That may be a small part of the truth but even a 12 year old me wouldn't believe such a fairy tale to be the whole reason. MS also used to optimize DOS in ways that clearly hurt their competitors. We've seen Intel aggressively optimize their compiler to slow down AMD... I am sure people have been "optimizing" in such ways for as long as there have been people.

Google doesn't have to do any of that. They can literally just keep implementing WHATWG features that are hard to get right because they're technically challenging and let Mozilla not have the resources to keep up. They don't control the operating system, but they have the resources to propose a protocol or API they can implement correctly and competitors might not (well, one competitor... Apple and Microsoft seem to keep up).

Name a feature that Firefox doesn't have that prevents people from using the web. I can't. But I can name several that I've seen work more correctly on Chrome because they have the resources to make it work in the context of very complicated and legacy-filled rendering engines (flexbox comes to mind) where Mozilla appears to not (ask me about my favorite Firefox-only flex performance issues... To their credit, they have all been fixed, but FF spent a lot of time behind the curve).

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#364
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can already do this on brave, with brave sync enabled.

No you can't. I have sync enabled everywhere, and there's no send tab option anywhere on iOS. Either that or I'm blind.

its on Android, maybe not on ios

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whoa. If you have low memory (like 2GB or 4) in your PC, then Edge is not your friend. Problem is Electron as the backend for Edge.

That is completely wrong, "electron as the back-end", LOL WTF.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/discussions/electron-...

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#366
post #330
post #45

FireFox Containers are a killer feature for me. It allows you to run sandboxed sessions. So you can ostensibly make every site a private tab by default but have a small few sites persistent. Eg I’ll have a work group with GitHub, Okta, etc in it so I only need to log in once a day. But random websites cannot track me between sites. Couple that with DNS blocking of trackers and ads, and the web is actually a lot more…

"FireFox Containers are a killer feature for me ..." They are a killer idea but their implementation is disappointing. In no particular order ... - You can't clear history for a particular container space [1] - Containers are only tabs - so you can't, for instance, create a window and have all future tabs created in that window inherit that container - No "private" (or "burner") container that saves nothing outside o…

Though I absolutely agree that the implementation is disappointing, most concerns about history pretty much disappear if you disable history globally. Having lived without history in my browser for years now, I ponder whether that should be the default because I haven't missed it one bit.

> Containers are only tabs - so you can't, for instance, create a window and have all future tabs created in that window inherit that container

True, but if that's something you want, you can do that without the multi-account container tabs. Just create a new profile that's separate from the default one. The drawback to that is you have to reinstall any extensions you use because they won't be shared.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#367
post #330
post #45

FireFox Containers are a killer feature for me. It allows you to run sandboxed sessions. So you can ostensibly make every site a private tab by default but have a small few sites persistent. Eg I’ll have a work group with GitHub, Okta, etc in it so I only need to log in once a day. But random websites cannot track me between sites. Couple that with DNS blocking of trackers and ads, and the web is actually a lot more…

"FireFox Containers are a killer feature for me ..." They are a killer idea but their implementation is disappointing. In no particular order ... - You can't clear history for a particular container space [1] - Containers are only tabs - so you can't, for instance, create a window and have all future tabs created in that window inherit that container - No "private" (or "burner") container that saves nothing outside o…

The "burner" container is 100% what I want. There are only a handful of sites for which I want to be able to maintain history.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#368
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you need a special addon to do so? Or does it show up if you have both apps installed?

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is completely wrong, "electron as the back-end", LOL WTF.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/discussions/electron-...

And? Electron can use chrome or edge components, the latter aren't based on electron, it is based (in part) on them.
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