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Give Firefox a chance

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Re: Give Firefox a chance

#41

Post by ancientgallery »

The adblock-related thing pushed me to Firefox, and I've been using it for about a month.

The only problems I have are regarding PDF files:

1) Dark mode (via dark reader) won't work on PDFs.

2) The Print-to-file (Ctrl + P) save location defaults to "~/mozilla.pdf" and there seems to be no option in preferences to change this default (titles often are multi-word long and copy pasting is a huge pain. Chrome just picks up the title of the webpage and the default downloads directory as the location, which IMO is the sensible thing to do.)

In my experience, Chrome is really better at handling PDFs (even better than the native reader, Okular, in terms of fine-grained zooming, dark theming(again via the Dark Reader extension.)) and I'm mulling over switching back, because I use pdfs a lot. (As for other stuff though, like lagginess, I don't find any noticeable difference.)

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#42

Post by nkozyra »

bad_user wrote: post #28
petepete wrote: post #10

I switched back to Firefox from Chrome earlier this year, and the experience has been very positive. It performs well, feels snappy, the dev tools are on par with Chrome's and everything feels right. The only negatives are that container tabs are still taking a bit of getting used to (why can't I have a 'Work' window in which all the new tabs are 'Work' tabs by default?) and the initial migration of passwords was a b…

For passwords the browser's built in management is inferior to password managers. I use 1Password (most polished) and there's also Bitwarden (hosted, but open source) and others. And I use my password manager every day, so if there's a cost associated, it's worth it.

> For passwords the browser's built in management is inferior to password managers.

Can you expound? After years of using various pw managers I found it being embedded in the browser very useful.

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#43

Post by mgkimsal »

I do give it a chance, regularly, but it's never enough to be 'default'.

Pins. Loved the idea. Unfortunately, they often go missing. Loading the browser, about 15% of the time, I get the "oh this is embarrassing" screen, with "restore your session". If I don't restore right then, all pins are gone. For good. Forever. I've lost way too much time recreating those over the last couple of years.

Have never had this happen ever in Chrome. I can't say it never happens in Chrome ever - maybe for someone it has - but not for me. However, I don't even know how to report this. "My pins get lost". If they're just special tabs, and tabs are known to get lost, is this even a 'bug'? Or just... "I'm doing it wrong" (as in, expecting pins to be more useful than they are?)

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#44

Post by hcal »

ZuLuuuuuu wrote: post #35

99% of "you should switch to Firefox" articles focus on the speed of the browser. I used Firefox since it was beta till Edge came out when everyone around me was asking "why are you not using Chrome?", and the thing is, I never had much problem with the speed or the crashes, so I never felt the need to switch to Chrome. Until WP died and I bought an Android phone. Then I switched to Chrome so that I get perfect synch…

Firefox Lockwise and firefox sync are really good synchronizing tools. Between the two services, they do a good job of keeping my desktop, laptop, iPad and Android phone in sync. Since lockwise integrates with Android and ios' built in password manager systems it works everywhere including in apps. I don't feel like I am missing anything over the first party options.

I've been a Firefox desktop user for years, but I just switched to the Firefox mobile apps. On the iPad it's fine. It's basically safari with Firefox sync. On Android it feels like someone finally made a full powerful browser for mobile. You can run standard browser extensions and that is a big win for me.

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#45

Post by tstrimple »

ZuLuuuuuu wrote: post #35

99% of "you should switch to Firefox" articles focus on the speed of the browser. I used Firefox since it was beta till Edge came out when everyone around me was asking "why are you not using Chrome?", and the thing is, I never had much problem with the speed or the crashes, so I never felt the need to switch to Chrome. Until WP died and I bought an Android phone. Then I switched to Chrome so that I get perfect synch…

> and Safari is not because of speed

The main reason I stick to Safari on my Macbook is that I still get significantly better battery life from it than either Chrome or Firefox. Chrome has also switched to a UX breaking requirement to hold cmd+q to quit instead of just tapping it. I'm sure I could configure it back to what literally every single other app on my Mac uses, but it's incredibly annoying that they think they are special enough to deviate from the OS design.

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#47

Post by signal11 »

If anyone from the Firefox team is reading this: containers are a great idea (I love them), it’s just that currently they’re too much work. Even on AMO, there’s now a bunch of site-specific container addons (Facebook container, Twitter container, Google container, etc) which clearly isn’t scalable.

A little bit of UX work is clearly needed to make them more mainstream and a first-class feature in Firefox.

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#49

Post by lkbm »

idoubtit wrote: post #29

Not much content in this article. A single benchmark which shows nothing of real-life cases. Two minor technical features, one of them already in Chrome beta. Lastly, an appeal to fight Chrome's monopole. Surprisingly, not a word about privacy. I do give Firefox a chance, but it gets tiring. Many years ago, I dropped Firefox's ancestor for Opera 6. The UI and the features were miles ahead (e.g. Mozilla had no tabs).…

> I still use Firefox, but I'm getting more and more irritated against it. I had to search the web in order to change the tile of empty tabs (no buttons, no context menu, only drag-n-drop from bookmarks). Who designed such an unguessable interface?

Whenever I hear people complain about the settings being impossible to figure out, I always open them up and try.

So I opened settings, which has a search input at the top, and search "new tab".

It has an option to choose "Firefox Home (Default)" or "Blank page" for new tabs, in the section titled "New Windows and Tabs". (With windows, you can choose "Custom URLs" as well).

But you don't want blank. Hmmm. So I open a new tab. Every section has a dropdown menu with a "Remove Section" option (it also has "Manage Settings" links that takes me to the preference page I was on initially.)

Drag-and-drop from bookmarks, though, is stumping me. For what it's worth, it's also stumping me in Chrome. I don't think I've ever tried Vivaldi.

For the most part, basic customization seems intuitive and straightforward. If there is a way to customize by dragging your bookmarks onto the page, though, it isn't intuitive and straightforward. Not sure if that should fall under edge-case customizations (which I expect to be hidden).

It is annoying when things I consider obviously the correct design are treated as obscure things few would want, but I recognize that some of them truly are.

EDIT: I will say, though, that it seems really strange that "New window" has a custom URL option, but new tab doesn't. I guess they're concerned about people setting slow new tab URLs and then being frustrated.

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#50

Post by lloeki »

bad_user wrote: post #33
ElKoji wrote: post #17

I left Chrome for personal usage a long time ago, however I am forced to use it at work. I use Safari all around for my personal usage, I find Safari with content blockers and DuckDuckGo as search engine to be a very good alternative.

Safari is a good browser due to it being the most battery efficient on MacOS. However its content blockers are inferior to what's available on Firefox. It's also not portable, so if you use various devices (Android, iOS, Windows, Linux, MacOS) it's pretty cool having your history synchronized. Firefox is really good for privacy. For example you can sandbox Facebook with Firefox's containers extension such that they c…

Safari has blocked third party cookies, as well as the largely unknown segregated cache and localstorage, and now some form of tracking protection. That should make it equivalent to Firefox containers, although it’s just automatic and kind of invisible to the user. As for blockers, I use 1blocker to great effect. I’d use uBlock Origin but the transition to MAS seemed to be rocky last time I checked.

I do give it a spin regularly but the two things that make Firefox a non starter is battery usage and inability to use Keychain (before quantum there was an extension but even then it was hit and miss)

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