I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back • Hacker News Board

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#531

Post by nevf1 » Mon, Jan 20, 2025, 11:54 AM UTC

markjgx wrote: post #501

alin23 wrote: post #259

I've been on Firefox Dev Edition for Mac for the last 4 years I think, and I can't remember more than 1 or 2 websites that didn't work correctly on it. It's been flawless, more battery and memory efficient than Chrome, less finicky and problematic than Safari, and with all the extensions that I need. I seriously don't see any disadvantage in picking Firefox over Chrome. I still have Chrome around if any website requi…

> It's been flawless, more battery and memory efficient than Chrome Is that actually true?

True for me too, much more memory efficient, especially with content heavy websites.

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#532

Post by rcMgD2BwE72F » Tue, Jan 21, 2025, 3:21 PM UTC

sexy_seedbox wrote: post #463

jampekka wrote: post #28

Firefox on Android is a no-brainer because of the extension support. It was a bit rough experience few years ago but has been solid for a long time.

Kiwi Browser for me on Android with full extensions support and developer tools. Any reason to switch to Firefox on Android?

Vanadium for GrapheneOS also supports ad-blocking (enabled by default IIRC).

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#533

Post by efreak » Tue, Jan 21, 2025, 9:06 PM UTC

int_19h wrote: post #466

password4321 wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome supports multiple profiles https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2364824

If I remember correctly, these are profiles in the same sense this term is used in Firefox - i.e. a global setting that can be switched, but applies to all active browser windows at the time. So you can't use it to (easily) browse different websites in different profiles side by side. In Safari, "profiles" are a per-window thing, and there are facilities to open a website in a different profile etc, so effectively th…

Chrome allows you to open multiple profiles simultaneously. I think Firefox can do that these days too, but for a while it's why I was using Chrome.

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#534

Post by efreak » Tue, Jan 21, 2025, 9:14 PM UTC

cbsks wrote: post #423

lucumo wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox's sync is broken in many ways. It doesn't sync search engines or extension settings either. It also frequently stops syncing from Android. I rely on sync a lot, so that was a dealbreaker for me.

Extension settings can be synced, but the extension must explicitly call the storage.sync api https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...

Unless you're on Android. Android doesn't give extensions access to sync. When I update ublock manually (usually to make things go away on my phone, hence the need) I have to manually export it.

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#535

Post by efreak » Tue, Jan 21, 2025, 9:16 PM UTC

sexy_seedbox wrote: post #463

jampekka wrote: post #28

Firefox on Android is a no-brainer because of the extension support. It was a bit rough experience few years ago but has been solid for a long time.

Kiwi Browser for me on Android with full extensions support and developer tools. Any reason to switch to Firefox on Android?

It's extremely outdated now because the developer has abandoned it. I have the vague impression it's lying about the chromium version it's based on as well, or something related to that.

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#536

Post by nasso_dev » Thu, Jan 23, 2025, 5:28 AM UTC

mrweasel wrote: post #126

dartos wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but we’re not in a simple web. Safari isn’t trying to make it simple for you, they just use it to keep you in their walled garden. PWAs are a great example of this. The general idea was even a product of the Jobs era of Apple, before the App Store. Safari and iOS’s poor support of PWAs is exactly a result of Apple wanting to prevent app distribution channels other than their App Store. Choosing safari is choosin…

I get that Apple shouldn't be allowed to dictate which features belong on the web, but you're just letting Google to it instead if you opt to use Chrome. Maybe I don't care about PWAs (which I don't), maybe I don't feel like the majority of APIs introduced lately belongs in the browser. There's very little of what you should be able to do on the web that you could not do 10 years ago. Yes, flexbox is awesome, let's h…

The browser doesn't need to support WebGL?! Together with Web Audio and Web Assembly, they are exactly the kind of technologies allowing desktop-class apps like Figma to run in the trustworthy browser sandbox.

I don't want to have to install more apps, and more web APIs means more things can be done inside of the browser shell without having to install software that could literally do anything on your computer (and is often hard to remove completely when you're done).