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Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

qwerjk.com

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Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#81

I made the switch to DDG about 2 years ago and am pretty happy, though I do occasionally use the !g. Switched back to FF on my desktop a couple months ago when I got my keon and I love it. The only thing that's hard to get used to again is a search bar separate from an address bar. Chrome really had that figured out. A unified bar in FF would make it the perfect browser.

When I was using Firefox I used this extension to unify the address/search bars. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/omnibar/

I don't use Omnibar, because by typing words into the address bar directly, Firefox does do a search.

Also Firefox's address bar is much better at searching your history, saving you from doing Google searches. For example you can type the words in the titles of articles you've read and Firefox's AwesomeBar does a good job at suggesting past entries.

This is awesome when you no longer remember the domain or url, but you remember a word or two. In such instances searching on Google doesn't help either.

This feature to me has been an epiphany actually. Google has no interest in developing something like the AwesomeBar, because they'd rather see you doing searches on Google instead.

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#83

I made the switch to DDG about 2 years ago and am pretty happy, though I do occasionally use the !g. Switched back to FF on my desktop a couple months ago when I got my keon and I love it. The only thing that's hard to get used to again is a search bar separate from an address bar. Chrome really had that figured out. A unified bar in FF would make it the perfect browser.

I miss the functionality from browser in Mozilla Suite. Basically, when you type something in the address bar it would show your history and add "Search for ..." as the last option. So, even if you had large history, it was enough to press the UP arrow and switch from address to searching. AFAIK, this is still the way it works on SeaMonkey.

This is exactly how Firefox currently works, but you just press enter instead of up and then enter. If what you've got in the address bar doesn't look like an address, it'll google it for you.

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#84
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The actual comparison would be between the Chrome binary size and the Chromium binary size, which is quite small if you exclude embedded graphical resources.

Actually that's a really bad comparison. The binary size may be similar but that doesn't mean the content is. Consider the two cases below to back up my assertion: 000000WE_COME_IN_PEACE000000000000000000 000000WE_COME_IN_PEACE_SHOOT_TO_KILL0000

I don't understand your point. If there were such a difference between Chromium and Chrome, then it would surely show up in a diff of the binaries' disassemblies. The size of the binaries doesn't matter, because (assuming you trust the Chromium source and your local system) only the difference between the two is relevant.

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#85

"Chrome Inspector is nice and all, but Firebug is clearly superior. I no longer recall why I hold this opinion. I'm looking forward to finding out." For some reason, I also think this exact thing.I also know other people who share this sentiment. I wonder if it comes from Firebug just being the first to the scene?

In my experience, Chrome is way better than Firebug or Firefox's builtin tools for development. Firefox's debugger doesn't appear to have any way to debug webworkers for example. You can't reformat source. They only just got SourceMap support and it doesn't appear to work as good. No syntax coloring. Poor profiling tools, can't get a timeline which shows frames per second, breakdown of paint/style recalc/layout/composite, no memory/heap profiling UI, etc. No explorer for local storage or filesystem apis, no manager for app-cache. Nothing like chrome://net-internals for analyzing network issues, and on and on.

I'm sure they'll fix all that in time, they have a good development team, but to say Firebug is clearly superior is obviously based on not having used the Chrome tools to do anything significant.

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#86

I made the switch to DDG about 2 years ago and am pretty happy, though I do occasionally use the !g. Switched back to FF on my desktop a couple months ago when I got my keon and I love it. The only thing that's hard to get used to again is a search bar separate from an address bar. Chrome really had that figured out. A unified bar in FF would make it the perfect browser.

> A unified bar in FF

you need Foobar [1].

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/foobar/

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#87
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually that's a really bad comparison. The binary size may be similar but that doesn't mean the content is. Consider the two cases below to back up my assertion: 000000WE_COME_IN_PEACE000000000000000000 000000WE_COME_IN_PEACE_SHOOT_TO_KILL0000

I don't understand your point. If there were such a difference between Chromium and Chrome, then it would surely show up in a diff of the binaries' disassemblies. The size of the binaries doesn't matter, because (assuming you trust the Chromium source and your local system) only the difference between the two is relevant.

My point is that it will show up in a diff of the binaries.

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The !Bang syntax is excellent for searching language/framework/library specific answers. Just append it to the end of a search if you need to. [DuckDuckGo !Bang]( https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html ) If you still need a Google result, try appending !sp which will give you a Startpage result (Google result with privacy)

You don't need DDG for that. Both Firefox and Chrome support adding shortcut keywords for search boxes. For example, in Firefox all you have to do is to right click on a search box and select "Add Keyword for this Search". It's much better than DDG because: 1) if you care about privacy, then this is obviously the right way, as you don't have to redirect through a third-party's server 2) you can add shortcuts for what…

I haven't played with Firefox keywords really but isn't the saved search still going through whatever the default search engine is (in Firefox, Google)?

[Update] I guess my point is that DDG has it ready to go and the syntax is usually easy enough to figure out without building up one's own keyword list.

Maybe I'm missing something, but it just seems that DDG offers a better solution.

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#89
Are people switching to DuckDuckGo simply because of paranoia? I don't care if Google knows whatever I'm searching for, it helps them improve their search results. DuckDuckGo's search is nowhere near as good as Google.

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#90
post #9

Is there any substitute in firefox for Chrome's keyword searching? That's the only chrome feature I really care about.

Firefox has built-in support for Keyword Search bookmarks. You don't need to install an add-on to create aliases. If you bookmark any website's search results page, you can add a keyword and edit the bookmarked URL to include a printf-style %s placeholder. When you enter the keyword plus some string, Firefox opens the bookmarked URL, substituting your string for %s. For example, I have a "w" keyword search for Wikipe…

Awesome, that's exactly what I was looking for.
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