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Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

484 points by jonotime 10y ago

fuzzy2 10y ago
As much as I like Firefox, it’s not usable on my “eco” PC (Celeron N3150, 8 GB RAM). Chrome is. It’s really unfortunate that developers of many interesting products (or websites!) seem to be forgetting about CPU efficiency. The Atom editor is another example.
nanis 10y ago
You might want to point out this is from 2014.
- pisipisipisi 10y ago
  This shows that the story behind is still even more relevant today. Looking at what rubber-stamping is happening with "web standards" ....
bilbobeer 10y ago
What is most strange is that on linux, mint to be specific, on a recent install they advised to install 'chrome', even if you didn't plan to use it, the logic went "It's better to have a back-up browser" I say never have a GOOGLE PRODUCT of any kind near you, or on any electronic device in your control. What gives to tell people to put Chrome on their OS, note also that mint comes pre-installed video tools that are clearly paid promotional pre-bundle, not unlike what you find when you purchase an Acer, a ton of un-wanted malware almost impossible to remove completely from your system. Never use a google product ( software ) including a known google website ( google.com ) don't support the NSA/CIA and their plan of global domination and world slavery.
- gragas 10y ago
  It's already gg, man. Even if you don't use Google products, if the NSA or CIA want to know everything about you, they can. You have two choices: 1. Do unimportant things that don't intersect with the interests of the NSA/CIA/FBI 2. Do things that intersect with the interests of the NSA/CIA/FBI and expect to lose Or, you could seek protection from other governments (read Russia), but that's essentially useless from a privacy standpoint because the US still knows almost everything about almost all foreign actors anyways. Your best bet is to just do things deemed unimportant by the agencies that pull the strings.
- douche 10y ago
  Mint is a distribution for people who care more about actually using their computers than about ideological purity.
  - Sylos 10y ago
    I don't think that's a fair thing to say. To me, being able to trust that my distribution is giving me reasonable help by pre-selecting good applications, is a vital help for me using my computer. I don't have the time to go through all of the applications that I use, so I trust my distribution to do it for me. If my distribution were to make such a misstep as recommending me to send all my internet-data through a proprietary program made by the biggest data hoarder in the world, this trust would take a severe hit and I couldn't continue actually using my computer, as I'd have to check back with everything that their opinions don't continue to misalign so severely from mine. Yes, I might have a higher interest in privacy than some other people and yes, there's people out there who for whatever reason seem to think that Google is worth trusting, but that doesn't mean that I just sit in front of my computer all day to be ideologically pure. I just have a different opinion of what's malicious and what's not, and wanting my distribution to agree with me in this aspect, is entirely in interest of being able to use my computer as frictionlessly as possible.
    - douche 10y ago
      In that case, there are other distributions that align with your goals more closely. If you're really paranoid, you can use Gentoo or Slack and compile all your software from source. As I understand it, Mint is Ubuntu with a different window manager and all of the closed-source extensions to handle common media formats, that you would normally have to faff around apt-get'ing, pre-installed. It's a desktop Linux for people that either don't know much about Linux, or don't want to get down in the weeds messing and spending hours configuring to do the 95% use cases.
tbrock 10y ago
I wish Mozilla would refocus efforts on making Firefox best in class again. It's been at least 5 years since Firefox was truly relevant. Interest started to wane when Chrome's JavaScript execution blew it out of the water on release but continues to erode mindshare as the development tools languish.
- ryan-allen 10y ago
  My interest waned when Mozilla fired Brenand Eich over a political donation.
  - Sylos 10y ago
    He stepped down himself...
    - 6nf 10y ago
      At least that's the official story. Perhaps he was given a choice: resign or get fired.
      - jcranmer 10y ago
        Having had some (albeit very few) actual interactions with both Brendan Eich and a few members of the board, I do not think that the board was considering firing him, and I think that Brendan decided to resign entirely of his own volition.
      - Sylos 10y ago
        Do you really think that if he would have been fired by Mozilla and then Mozilla had claimed at every corner that he resigned voluntarily, that he would have just accepted that, instead of going to the next media outlet and selling the true story there?
  - jcranmer 10y ago
    Can we please just let this conspiracy theory die? Mozilla did not fire Brendan Eich, he resigned of his own volition. If you want further evidence, a very prominent Mozilla employee posted on his blog, syndicated on the Mozilla blog feed, an active solicitation for people to donate to a UK initiative to ban gay marriage. What followed was a massive shitstorm [1], including calls that said person be fired from the project. He remains employed to this day. I find it amusing that no one appears to have mentioned this incident during the entire Brendan Eich debacle [2], though. [1] I'd actually link to a relevant copy of the page on archive.org, but that updates too infrequently to capture pages that change daily. [2] Interestingly, when trying to find the page on archive.org, I did discover that the news of his donation first became public about the same time. Two years before he was appointed CEO.
viraptor 10y ago
Unfortunately Chrome/ium has the best security story at the moment. Mainly due to good separation/sandbox. Firefox is only now catching up, slowly. So while I'd like to use FF, it's simply not a reasonable choice for me.
- idobai 10y ago
  > Unfortunately Chrome/ium has the best security story at the moment. And the worst privacy story and resource handling.
- rvern 10y ago
  What makes you believe Chromium has better sandboxing than Firefox? That may have been true in the past, I doubt it has much truth to it today. Furthermore, if you use GNU/Linux it should be trivial to give your web browser better sandboxing than what it does by itself. (You can use AppArmor or SELinux, you can run it in a systemd-nspawn container, you can use Firejail…)
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    Not something that the average joe and jane can do.
    - idobai 10y ago
      The average joe and jane will click on large "DOWNLOAD ME!" buttons and download torrents without an antivirus.
    - rvern 10y ago
      Neither the article nor Hacker News are intended for the average Joe.
      - pjmlp 10y ago
        You right, average Joe only uses Chrome, Edge and Safari on their mobile phones and desktop computers.
anilgulecha 10y ago
The only reason chromium is my primary browser is the developer tools (it's a pain to use Firefox for normal browsing, but Chromium for debugging.) I can only hope for chrome's devtools to be ported to firefox. (firebug is close but slow).
- rvern 10y ago
  For every person who says Chromium's developer tools are better than Firefox's, you can find another person who will say exactly the reverse. It's possible one of the two positions is correct and the other is not, but I find it more likely that people are just used to particular developer tools and that there is no significant difference between the two. People get work done with Firefox and Chromium's developer tools equally, you just have to learn to use them.
  - apatters 10y ago
    No, he shouldn't have to learn to use them. When open source fails this type of thinking is often why. Firefox makes a product and therefore should improve that product so that more people want to use it. Vendors in a market are rarely in a position to tell the customers in that market what they should and shouldn't do. We don't want them to be in that position either, even Mozilla. They have to improve their offering. I for one also think that Chrome's dev tools are better and am 100% in the camp of wanting to see Firefox gain market share.
    - rvern 10y ago
      If the open source tools are worse than the other ones, then sure, they should be improved. But I have no reason to believe this is the case here.
    - vectorjohn 10y ago
      I think you missed the point. I for one can't stand the chrome dev tools. I use Firefox largely because i prefer the dev tools there. So, the point is, it's possible there is no real difference and it just comes down to personal preference or what you're used to. At least, that was the commenter's point which you didn't address.
gbog 10y ago
Keeping choices open for the future is one good reason to use Firefox. My main reason to use Firefox on all my devices is because it is much better than Chrome. It has more predictable behavior, it does not require to be connected to a major cloud, I can tweak it to my liking and I do, I can backup the configuration, and I can do advanced but necessary things such as "text reflow" on my phone. I have switched back to Firefox one year ago, and never looked back.
epse 10y ago
But Firefox is soo slow on Linux...
blencdr 10y ago
Even if I'm in web development I use Firefox on a day to day basis. When it comes to debug a large SPA Chrome has nicer features, but companies are not working for the commun benefit and Google is no exception.
mikekchar 10y ago
I'm genuinely curious what the perceived threat is. I'm not happy about having a handful of browsers being dominant, but Chromium is legitimately free software. I'm very slightly worried that most people choose the Chrome branded version (which is not free-as-in-freedom), but there is so little between the two that I'm not sure it matters. V8 is forked into Node now so it would be pretty difficult to do horrible things even though Google controls the parent project. The only thing that I can think of that seems like a risk is the amount of influence that Google has on things like whatever the replacement of CAs will be. But the situation is already so bad, it's hardly going to get worse.
- llukas 10y ago
  You must have missed recent HN news about google stripped build of Chromium - one that doesnt use binary blobs from Google.
  - mikekchar 10y ago
    I certainly did. Searching for it doesn't seem to bring anything up. Care to post a link? I even did a duckduckgo search for binary blobs in Chromium and only found the 18 month old discussion of Chromium installing hotwords (which has been resolved now). You're not, by any chance, thinking of the Chromium OS are you?
    - Jaruzel 10y ago
      You can't miss it - it's riding #1 on HN right, and has been for a few hours now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12577787 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12577787
      - mikekchar 10y ago
        Odd... That's not on my front page at all... Interesting. It must be different for each person.
- rtpg 10y ago
Perceptes 10y ago
I generally agree with the sentiment here, but somewhat similar to using Linux over macOS, my experience has been that it's just a worse user experience in exchange for "doing the right thing." In the end, it's about how much you're willing to sacrifice convenience and user experience for an ethical ideal. For me, the last time I attempted to switch from Chrome to Firefox, it drove me nuts after a few days because of one behavior: When you click a web link in another application, it opens it in your non-incognito (or whatever that's called in Firefox) window, even if the incognito window is the one on top. Instead, you have to copy the link from the other app, tab over to Firefox, and manually paste it into the incognito window. This is a flow I use many times a day, and having to do this workaround was really annoying. I found a thread about it on Firefox's issue tracker, but it was closed with a response that basically amounted to the developer telling the user that reported it, "this isn't a valid use case." I may be able to switch back to Firefox when they implement that feature where each browser tab is essentially an isolated "incognito" context, which is really what I want. The distinction between "incognito" and "not incognito" windows has really just been a proving ground for the idea of concurrent browser sessions isolated from each other, which is a much overall solution to controlling your privacy on the web.
- chopin 10y ago
  A thousand times this. Ironically Firefox had this feature in the past ( I don't remember the exact version). My workaround is to start Firefox in anonymous mode always (Settings->Privacy->History->"Never remember history). But it's a workaround and I wish Firefox would be able to open links in an incognito window.
  - kleiba 10y ago
    It's so interesting to see how workflows differ between different people. You say "a thousand times this", but I for one never have this issue because I never (have to) click on an external link to be opened in my browser.
    - qplex 10y ago
      I find it scary when a browser window appears from nowhere.
rvern 10y ago
Chromium is free software too, but that does not justify any usage of Chrome. If you use Chrome, you can't justify it on Chromium being open source. As for Chromium itself, it is very obvious that it is not actually meant to be used by anyone: it has no stable releases, no binary downloads (except the nightlies published by the build system), and its website is hosted on nothing else than… Google Sites.
- Tharre 10y ago
  Chromium does have stable releases, they are the same as for chrome. And about every linux distribution out there ships chromium binaries, so what's your point?
  - ffggvv 10y ago
    His point is that nobady uses chromium, google never promotes it, and on windows you can't install a chromium binary. His point is that if chromium is that good why google is pushing chrome down peoples throat? (hint: its the ads-game). The only reason chromium is "open-source" is that google attracts lots of talent, saying users have a choice between chromium and chrome, when in reality this isn't true.
warcode 10y ago
Did Firefox fix their performance degradation over time yet? Every time I try to switch back its fine for 2 weeks and then starts to get slower, like the internal database breaks or something. This is two weeks with 2-3 windows, with 5-20 tabs each, without restarts. So far Vivaldi has been the best chrome replacement for me.
- gcb0 10y ago
  did you report it? for regular users i don't give this kind of assine reply, but here on hacker news, i expect everyone used Firefox for a good decade before switching to chrome now, so i expect you did the minimum to the project and have at least abugzilla account to say "me too" on some bug.
  - fixermark 10y ago
    For Firefox, that's really not sufficient. I've reported FF bugs in the past that sit unfixed in the queue for 13 years. It has disincentivized me from bothering to continue reporting them. Yes, it's open-source and I could in theory pop it out and fix it myself (ha, because I have a spare weekend to burn on setting up a Mozilla dev environment and dependency stack). No, there's no incentive to do so when Chrome simply doesn't have the bug. Chrome has bugs that languish too, but so far I can't name any that I've tripped over. I'm sure when I do, it'll be incentive to consider switching to Firefox.
    - gcb0 10y ago
      and when you trip on that chrome bug you will move to what? IE? btw, try to disable referrer on chrome ;) ... or even set it to only send to the same domain
      - fixermark 10y ago
        As I said, it'd be incentive to switch to Firefox (or actually set up that Mozilla devel dependency stack and fix the 13-yaer-old bug). For referrer in Chromium, I think there's a flag? https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/content/public/common/content_switches.cc?q=no-referrer+flag&sq=package:chromium&l=660&dr=C https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/content/public/common/c...
mrmondo 10y ago
Interesting that this blog post is hosted on googles 'blogger' domain. Not that it means much, just that it's slightly ironic.
apatters 10y ago
This article convinced me personally to switch back to Firefox, but I'm disheartened by seeing a number of comments here which amount to "Firefox is fine," "Firefox is just as good," "The Foundation is fine," and so on. That attitude is a recipe for shrinking market share. FF is competing against extremely well funded, extremely aggressive and competent competitors. You don't get to stop listening to the market in an environment like this. It will run you out.
- aorth 10y ago
  I maintain a copy of Firefox Developer Edition on my system and I make a concerted effort to open it every few days so it can update itself and so I can test any new sites or blog posts I'm working on. I've tried to switch back to Firefox cold turkey in the past and it never works for me, but I might introduce a personal policy of one week on, one week off, alternating between Firefox and Chrome.
  - ffggvv 10y ago
    This is the problem. You value your convenience more than your freedom, and the future of privacy.
    - marklgr 10y ago
      You can make people change their behavior by shifting the weights, but it is pointless to tell them what their value should be. Make FF more convenient, or show how bad competitors are regarding to privacy.
    - formula1 10y ago
      Do you honestly believe that switching to firefox will be the change? Its purely symbolic considering firefox has been heavilly funded by google in the past [0] and likely still influences their decisions. A few developers doesnt account for the millions of people that use chrome, widescale change requires influencers and those willing to stand up, not a bunch of upset introverts with a distaste for authority. Honestly, Im not sure what will help future and privacy considering your information is the number 1 comodity. But Im getting the impression that escape is impossible and we all should get used to being less "anti coorperation" and more "pro happiness" [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation
cdelsolar 10y ago
but i like Chrome
moxie 10y ago
What always strikes me about these pleas is how familiar they sound. They're reminiscent of all the things we "should" -- eat better, exercise more, lower our carbon footprint -- and I suspect they all see just about the same level of long term success. Firefox did well when their only real competitor (MS) was actively trying to make their own browser bad in order to preserve the relevance of the desktop OS and their dominance in that area. Now that they have a competitor (Google) which is actively trying to make their own browser good in order to increase the relevance of online services and their dominance in that area, Firefox hasn't fared so well. I don't necessarily disagree with the author of this post, but it doesn't seem like moral high ground alone is going to make Firefox any more successful than the other things we "should." What I wonder about is what larger systemic or structural shifts would have to occur for Firefox and the other "shoulds" of the world to have a chance.
- glogla 10y ago
  It's not quality of Firefox. On desktop it's google having (almost) monopoly on search and abusing it market its other products. On mobile, it's Google abusing its power over the platform to make OEMs use Chrome in the same way MS pushes OEMs to ship Windows and Secure Boot and various other shit. Firefox could be perfect (and it isn't, because what do you know, developing good software takes insane amount of money) and it wouldn't help.
  - moxie 10y ago
    Yes, Google has market leverage. However, when IE was Firefox's competitor, MS was in just as powerful of a position, and Firefox was a success. They were a success because they clearly had the better browser. These days, that's no longer the case. I know that I certainly did not switch from Firefox because of Google's marketing efforts or underhanded tactics. But what if you're right? In a world where, I agree, it takes an insane amount of money to develop good software, where Google has more of that money than Firefox does, and where Google has really effective market leverage, do the "shoulds" have a chance? Is the future we want even a possibility? I don't personally think that it is, which is why I wonder what larger changes we would need to see for that to become true.
gremlinsinc 10y ago
I can't take anyone serious who rants about google's marketplace dominion but can't seem to migrate from blogger to wordpress self-hosted. Sorry, it's just overly ironic, and it's also hard for me to take bloggers on blogger serious as there's a lot of crap blogs on there. Every dominant player eventually falls, Microsoft owned the browser, search, email, docs, and os back in 2000 -- now they're practically irrelevant.
the_duke 10y ago
I never understood why Mozilla has allowed their main product and their only money maker to fall so far behind. They have a lot of income. I don't mind them going of on various edgy projects. But FF has been inferior to Chrome for many years. They should really refocus their efforts to concentrate on delivering the best browser again, as it was before Chrome came along.
- reitanqild 10y ago
  > But FF has been inferior to Chrome for many years. Can we please stop fueling this myth? Maybe for some of you Firefox lacks something you actually need. For others, like me and a bunch of others it is completely the other way, -if I was forced to use any other browser it would annoy me to no end (not tree tabs, etc etc). So while I think it is totally fine to point out where other does better, telling everyone that Chrome is better isn't even true except for very specific cases. Edit: clarify need
  - sosborn 10y ago
    It is almost as though different people has tastes that stray from yours.
    - reitanqild 10y ago
      That is exactly what I point out. But unlike others I hope that I don't tell everyone that my taste is better.
  - the_duke 10y ago
    It's not a myth. FF was my main browser, and would be to this date if it provided the best experience. Chrome is faster, snappier, more fluid. Faster time to render, fastes JS engine. There's a reason most of the geeks switched to Chrome on their own, before Google began it's aggressive approach of converting everyone to it with ads and bundling.
    - reitanqild 10y ago
Steko 10y ago
I keep Gmail and a couple other permanent logins open in Chrome and do 99% of my other browsing in Firefox.
microcolonel 10y ago
Chromium is actually a good browser. Until Servo picks up the technical slack, Mozilla will not have a browser I can afford to waste my time running. Firefox is completely unusable for me. The UI is slow, ugly, clunky, and complex. The rendering performance is abysmal. The extensions ecosystem has collapsed from a decade of API breakage, and now total deprecation. The organization is hostile and political because Mozilla lets people push their personal ideological agendas on foundation dollar. Compared to Chromium, Firefox is a slow, confusing, incompatible security liability with no consistent wins. Even when they do uniquely good things (like the WebGL live shader editor) they are held back by the general inadequacy of the product. No amount of pleading will change any of this.
- hubert123 10y ago
  Yep, Firefox cannot play the moral superiority card when it pushes good people like Brendan Eich out for political reasons.
indlebe 10y ago
As someone who manages a 450-user IT department (academic), supporting roughly 50/50 BYOD/supplied computers, and staring at my stats, Firefox is the most reliable browser. We see %300 more problems with Chrome than Firefox. Reading the comments my suspicion is that what shortcomings it does have affects the hacker news crowd a disproportionate amount more than usual, or affects the academic crowd disproportionately less
- newscracker 10y ago
  I prefer Firefox over Chrome for several reasons, including usability, flexibility and freedom. Could you list down a few things that are problematic, in your experience, with Chrome but are not so in Firefox? Although it could be construed as purely anecdotal, it may provide some insight and understanding into the strengths and weaknesses of the two browsers.
  - indlebe 10y ago
    Printing and PDF viewing are the most common issues we see with Chrome, doing either often crashes the whole browser. Windows 10 seems to be the most problematic OS for Chrome, we see quite a few unresolved cases where Chrome crashes before it can print on this platform. Fillable PDFs with Chrome, fuhgeddaboudit! Those are the top 2 issues by far, with legacy web app issues as a semi-distant third. This is our fault for using legacy php 3/4 apps that still work, but firefox doesn't produce any issues and is reliable for this purpose.
starky 10y ago
I was a long time user of Firefox, mostly because I despise how Chrome is so inflexible and has terrible interface design. Unfortunately, Firefox has continually gotten worse and worse over the last few years. I was tired of the browser slowing down over time, and extensions constantly breaking for no other reason but the fast release cycle. I ended up switching to Vivaldi. Not only does it fix the majority of things I hate about Chrome, but it supports Chrome extensions which are good enough (but not as good as Firefox).
free2rhyme214 10y ago
I think the most effective way to get people to change browser habits, is through something compelling over a period of time. So far I don't find Firefox compelling enough nor this post. (Keep trying please, we really do need competition here)
goalo 10y ago
Most people I know that use iOS stay with Safari itself. They dont even install chrome.
_Codemonkeyism 10y ago
Switched to FF back some time ago (from Chrome). Still a CPU and power hog on Windows 10. But still love Tab Tree.
b4xt3em4n 10y ago
I stop use Firefox due to Brendan Eich story.
- vacri 10y ago
  Did you stop using javascript as well?
  - b4xt3em4n 10y ago
    I started using FF since 0.7 version guy, I switch to chrome after the internal Mozilla stupid polemics for Brendan marriage position. Open web? please, do me the favour..
    - vacri 10y ago
      So even though Eich stepped down over the issue, and gay developers said that the work culture at Mozilla did not represent Eich's position at all, you switched browsers? The LGBT folks won that battle. If you don't switch back, then you've hurt their cause. OkCupid did this - they made a big song and dance about boycotting FireFox, intruding their political message into all their users' lives... and when the LGBT side won, not a peep out of OkCupid to repair the damage they'd done. Some others did similar things - appearing righteous was more important to them than actually being mature. If you don't stop the boycott after you've won, then the problem is with you. (note: I am actually very pro-gay rights, but the actions of some around the Eich debacle were as deplorable as he was)
      - b4xt3em4n 10y ago
        LGBT folks won that battle yes, but FF lose the browser war. bye
      - BrendanEich 10y ago
        Are you seriously contending that collective punishment (I mean punishing a group based on judgments against one of its members; and the corollary collective reward) is moral, efficacious, or both? So all the lemmings who dropped (or just said they would drop) Firefox while I was CEO were obligated to rush back on board once I left? What about the various right-wingers who #nozilla'ed and otherwise boycotted after I left? How about using the best browser in the market, built by people of diverse opinions and high ability who come together to do excellent work? There's a good idea that seems to appeal to many people, of whatever various and diverse beliefs. Try https://brave.com/ https://brave.com/.
robbrown451 10y ago
I will switch back when it has what I need. Currently my biggest need that Firefox doesn't support is MIDI access (i.e. hook a digital "piano" to it and Javascript in a page can talk to it). It's been in development for who knows how long in Firefox, I'm not holding my breath.
robbrown451 10y ago
I will switch when it has what I need. Currently my biggest need that Firefox doesn't support is MIDI access (i.e. hook a digital "piano" to it and Javascript in a page can talk to it). It's been in devlopment for who knows how long in Firefox, I'm not holding my breath.
fpoling 10y ago
My primary browser is Brave with in-built ad-blocker because Mozilla does not want to ship ad-blocker with Firefox. As ads is the most likely vector of malware distribution channel, that means that safety of users stopped to be a priority for Mozilla unfortunately.
Noughmad 10y ago
After years of trying, it still looks very bad on KDE, and even worse with a custom color scheme. Fix that, and I'll switch immediately.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Sylos 10y ago
  How does it look bad for you? Or rather to say how does it look worse than Chrome, as both browsers do differ completely from the native toolkit... Well, unless you're using something like QupZilla or Konqueror, but then this blog post doesn't really apply to you anyways. What I personally do to make Firefox fit in more into KDE is to use the Developer Edition Theme [0], which has a Light and Dark variant, so looks reasonably not-out-of-place for Breeze and Breeze Dark. [0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/devedition-theme-enabler/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/devedition-th... There's also this user-style to fix theming issues, which is what I guess you're saying when you refer to a custom color scheme making it look even worse: https://userstyles.org/styles/96657/fix-kde-theming-issues https://userstyles.org/styles/96657/fix-kde-theming-issues
raverbashing 10y ago
Android is winning but the percentage that still use Apple is significant. Thank "the sheep" I guess... The winners mentioned are the ones that require the most resources, so I guess they'll keep being that even with Bing, etc I do use Firefox, sometimes it seems Chrome has more issues, sometimes it's FF, but I'd say they're pretty comparable (though FF has better dev tools builtin and it is easier to configure a proxy, because Chrome depends on a system config, which is not what I want to change usually)
- phs318u 10y ago
  Not offended, but I don't consider myself a sheep. While some see no difference between mega-corps, there are a few key things that I value Apple for over Google. 1. The seamlessness of the ecosystem. 2. The low rate at which products are introduced only to be unceremoniously knifed when you least expect it. 3. The fact that I'm the customer not the product. 4. The public stance they've taken on their customers' security & privacy, backed by concrete design decisions. I still remember switching to Google from Altavista. I'm currently midway through disentangling my online presence from Google.
  - raverbashing 10y ago
    Yes, I like Apple products as well My point is that while there are a lot of people that buy it for aesthetic reasons only, they do a lot of things right and a lot of tech savvy people use their products as well (Hence the usage of "the sheep" was a jab at those who consider Apple customers sheep, it was not a critique of the users themselves)
  - CyberShadow 10y ago
    That's a false dichotomy. You can use Android together with any degree of Google integration that you find comfortable, with one extreme being the stock Nexus ROM, and the other being AOSP or derivative ROM, with no Google apps (such as Play Store / Gmail / Maps). There are open-source / self-hosted alternatives to many of those.
    - 10y ago
leksak 10y ago
What does Chrome offer that FF cannot match currently? What kind of convenience improvements would you need to start using FF? Developer tools not withstanding.
- sammularczyk 10y ago
  I find the design of Chrome to be nicer in general. Feels like there's less going on.
s9w 10y ago
My neutral (?) view on firefox/chrome: - Firefox uses way less RAM - Chrome is usually faster/smoother, even if not by much. For very odd or intensive sites. And for things like dragging a tab into another window and how long it takes until inspect element loaded. - Firefox has Tree Style Tab, Chrome doesn't and will never have. This alone makes FF the only usable browser for me - I find the non-optional non-native and childish look of chrome silly - Some google sites like the play store and youtube just work better on chrome For me, I use FF because of the memory, the styling and Tree Style Tabs. And I hope they keep on fighting. I understand the chrome users though.
- cygned 10y ago
  Also using Firefox (Developer Edition) as my primary browser. But my observations are quite different: - On my machine, Firefox uses more RAM than Chrome (Canary) for the same workloads and is slower - Chrome is way faster. As a web application developer I notice that all the time. Chrome renders faster and the JavaScript engine also processes faster. Firefox likes to crash when reloading a page that uses WebSockets. - I don't know your platform, but on OS X the default UI of Firefox is awful. That's the primary reason why I use the Developer Edition.
  - NTripleOne 10y ago
    Another thing people don't seem to understand is that Chrome uses as much memory as it sanely can for the task provided. There are situations where it will use more, or less than Firefox, but I guarantee you in 99% of those situations, Chrome will be the one performing faster.
    - seba_dos1 10y ago
      Not true in my case. Chromium often makes the system start feeling unresponsive by causing a lot of swapping, while Firefox deals well with way more tabs open and still keeps some RAM free for other apps to use. When Firefox catches some memory leak and also starts to swap, restarting it fixes the issue (but I have to say that it has become very rare nowadays), but when I restart Chromium, I have to quickly clean up unused tabs to prevent them from eating whole RAM again. On my 8GB RAM machines, Chromium performs faster when there are up to 10 tabs open, but otherwise Firefox easily beats it.
cyberpunk 10y ago
The only thing I miss after switching Safari->FF (moved away from OSX) for regular browsing is that all 'incognito' tabs in safari are completely isolated from each other and share no cache, cookies, bla. This seems like a small thing and I barely noticed it at the time I switched TO safari for all non-devtools related tasks (battery and perf was better on my lappy) but now, I do miss it. Otherwise, I've no probs with FF these days. 49 seems solid on BSD, at least.
anoplus 10y ago
If money can help Firefox, I think the community needs to rethink crowdfunding. A crowdfunding system should be implemented and taken to a new level. I imagine a system where features/issues are organized and funded case by case in a way a simple person can "vote with the wallet" for the desired FireFox. This is an idea for open source in generally. I know BountySource try to do it.
known 10y ago
I think it's an extreme pov; Since Chrome is Open source we need not worry :)
- robin_reala 10y ago
  Technically, Chromium is open source, but Chrome isn’t.
barpet 10y ago
I use Safari on Mac because it's good enough and I use Chrome anywhere else because I am used to it and it's also good enough. I need simple,stable and fast. I do not really care about features or security at this point.
yhylord 10y ago
China will become the last shelter against Google's evil domination.
sebouh00 10y ago
Chrome has a tab activated search feature for websites and custom search engines. This is super convenient and must for me. I honestly tried firefox for a month, but it wasn't as stable and I missed this feature.
BrendanEich 10y ago
Surprised to see this on HN again. BTW, Rob left in early March: http://robert.ocallahan.org/2016/03/leaving-mozilla.html http://robert.ocallahan.org/2016/03/leaving-mozilla.html
j-pb 10y ago
Firefox lost me when they conspired to kill WebSQL. They were the ones used the vast marked share they had to push the trendy thing of the day, namely nosql and IndexeDB, a technology which is bemoaned by web developers today. I think the fact that there is another post about SQLite on the front page right now, attests that it would have been better to just standardise that. But then all those greenfield "spec hackers" wouldn't have had the fun of building cloud castles. As a web developer and a browser user I'm tired of things not working. And if that means less options in terms of browsers I don't care as long as the browsers that are there give me a solid foundation to work with. I'd rather have less options with more freedom of choice because all the different options are compatible and interchangeable, than many options but little choice, because their features sets are all disjoint and nothing is compatible.
- robin_reala 10y ago
  WebSQL was never a spec. It was literally implemented as ‘be bug compatible with this specific version of SQLite’. There was no way that that was going to be accepted by Mozilla and Microsoft.
  - j-pb 10y ago
    There was actually an offer to turn SQlite3 into a spec under the condition that Firefox agreed to implement it. Firefox declined since they didn't want to "confuse" developers with too many options.
blubb-fish 10y ago
I absolutely believe that there is no way around the described future of Alphabet dominating the web sooner or later. But I also believe that this is not going to be the end but instead will make it desirable again to create something new - there will be a new breed of hackers and power users creating new and alternative web based on P2P- and blockchain-technologies, meshed-networks ... I think it's going to be cool :) (Though I'd be in favor of simply reducing Google's power - but that is simply not going to happen - no matter what browser I use and how many people I convince to use FireFox.)
dman 10y ago
This thread on reddit captures many of the reasons why I stopped using firefox - https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/3hugul/the_future_of_developing_firefox_addons/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/3hugul/the_future_... . Extensions are what made firefox great for me, with the constantly evolving story for extensions over the years the community around building extensions appears to have dissipated.
- Grangar 10y ago
  They're implementing WebExtensions though, which is 99% compatible with FF! There's a solution coming in that regard :)
  - dman 10y ago
    To quote Linus - "WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE!".
  - anotheryou 10y ago
    I'm really scared they might shut off the old extensions at some point.
oolongCat 10y ago
I remember I used to be a huge fan of Firefox until a large sum of the plug-ins I had installed stopped working becuase the browser upgraded, this was several year ago and it was then I first decided to use chrome. I used chrome for a long time, and I am now starting to slowly move back to firefox. One complain I now have about FF is it feels a bit sluggish compared to chrome when rendering web pages. The nightly build is however a lot better. (I am using ubuntu btw). ---------edit----------------- Another thing I wish ff works on is screen real-estate. http://imgur.com/OGWfgDo http://imgur.com/OGWfgDo
justinlardinois 10y ago
Question: In this future without Firefox, what becomes the default browser in Linux distributions? I won't claim that I know what every distro uses, but every one I've ever installed has had Firefox or some derivative of it included.
- anotheryou 10y ago
  Konqueror or something. But in Linux there is no shortage in sweet little browser projects. Interesting would be which engine and if it can profit from a big enough audience for a variety of extensions.
vamur 10y ago
Gnome Web works great on Linux+Wayland now, apart from lack of 1080p on youtube. Meanwhile Firefox still does not work on Wayland and is generally slow on Linux and one has to enable multi-process flags to speed it up. And even then its speed barely compares to speed of Chromium or Gnome Web. Given that this performance disadvantage is not new it is clearly caused by lack of focus and manpower. As a result Firefox usage continues to decline and they cannot compete with fast moving competitors like Chrome or Webkit. Mozilla should discontinue 32 bit, Windows XP+Vista, ESR releases, Flash/GTK2 support, other side projects like the HTML editor. That should free up enough focus/developer time for Mozilla to improve their core product.
andrewclunn 10y ago
To all the Firefox apologists. I'm a front end dev. I run linux. I also run chromium because it is a superior product to Firefox. The market agrees. Wake up. Want to win me back? Make Firefox better.
anotheryou 10y ago
I love the Firefox extensions! (I hope they will stay for a while, using tons of quite old extensions) Extensions that have no even chrome extension: - tree style tab: nested tabs on the side of the screen - Imagus: elaborate image preview on mouse-over - FF Rocker: click right+left for history back and the other way around for forward (there is a chrome extension, but it's no fun) - grab and drag: I hold right click to scroll as if I was dragging the scroll bar handle (only works for single-core FF :/) (there is a chrome extension, but it's no fun) - All-in-Sidebar: bookmarks, downloads etc in a sidebar - tab grenade: store all open tabs in a link list and close them (might have a chrome equivalent) - Link Alert: hover to see if you are going to an external page or pdf or image (might have a chrome equivalent) - Vimperator/Pentadactyl: vim style shortcuts for everything, no more clicking. Currently both projects struggle to stay compatible with recent FF versions, can't recommend to switch to it now :/
- clappski 10y ago
  What vi-mode extension would you recommend? Vimperator always seemed worse than Vimium (on Chrome), mainly because the scrolling is jittery.
  - anotheryou 10y ago
    I scroll full pages or with the mouse. But I'd really like to have a scroll marker. My not quite working attempt at one: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/20937-red-read-line https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/20937-red-read-line With that in working I wouldn't need smoothing much anymore and could scroll half pages without confusion. I'm currently stuck to pentadactyl, would try vimperator again, but don't want to set it up. Would have to see how to port my pocket script and such.
  - mih 10y ago
    Try giving VimFx a go. It's a Firefox port of Vimium. Has less features than Vimperator but doesn't alter the browser UI as much. It's also compatible with multiprocess Firefox.
jplayer01 10y ago
It's too bad Firefox becomes more terrible each year. Just today I was struggling with the god awful history sidebar.
inian 10y ago
The article is from 2014. Though I understand the sentiment, most of the facts are false now IIRC, Chrome was using the FileSystem API which was supported only in Chrome - hence the partial support for offline functionality in Google docs..Only recently have the specs behind Persistent Storage API and Service workers have matured. I would love to see Google docs to make use of these APIs to make the functionality available across browsers. Also, PNacl -> Web Assembly which Google has supported. Of course Android OSes are going to ship with Chrome as a default browser - at least you have the choice of installing a different browser if you want to. Unlike Apple, where all browsers are forced to use the same JS engine provided by Apple. Google has been pushing web standards for a long time now - instead of platform specific APIs and saying that the internet is going to be only accessible from Chrome is stretching it quite a bit..
jay_kyburz 10y ago
Anybody know if there is an Electron or NW.js for Firefox. Also, when is Firefox going to let me style scrollbars?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
super_mario 10y ago
Firefox was all about extensions and user control. But Mozilla has essentially decided to destroy their extensions eco system, and as a consequence lost me as their user and supporter. I really loved and used Pentadactyl, but it's now gone and dead and so is Firefox as far as I'm concerned.
- coldpie 10y ago
  Can you elaborate? I've used Firefox for well over a decade, and while I'm not a heavy extension user, I haven't noticed any change in extension support for the handful I use.
- distances 10y ago
  Can you expand a bit? I've no idea what you mean since my extensions are still working just fine.
lightedman 10y ago
We don't have a choice anyways - FireFox is now Chrome. Even if you don't have Chrome installed on your computer, the second you open FireFox, you'll see plenty of chrome processes spawning.
rachkovsky 10y ago
Firefox Reader View feature with audio narration is the best! And no other browser has it!
chiefalchemist 10y ago
I'd use FF a lot more if it has multiple users as Chrome does. Without the ability to easily switch personas (read: projects) FF is a no go.
- quesera 10y ago
  FF calls them "profiles" and they actually work better than Chrome's.
ccanassa 10y ago
Am I the only one who doesn't seem to care about how much Google knows about my life? I am personally okay with the idea of giving away some information about my life in exchange for using some of their products (Search, Gmail, Chrome, etc) without paying anything. Besides that, the more they know about me, the better their products get. I am personally thrilled when I open Google maps and it magically whos where I live, where I work, etc. It just makes my life easier. I think this might be a cultural thing though, people from some third-world countries (like me) may not take privacy and freedom for granted.

484 points by jonotime 10y ago

As much as I like Firefox, it’s not usable on my “eco” PC (Celeron N3150, 8 GB RAM). Chrome is. It’s really unfortunate that developers of many interesting products (or websites!) seem to be forgetting about CPU efficiency. The Atom editor is another example.

nanis 10y ago

You might want to point out this is from 2014.

pisipisipisi 10y ago
This shows that the story behind is still even more relevant today. Looking at what rubber-stamping is happening with "web standards" ....

bilbobeer 10y ago

What is most strange is that on linux, mint to be specific, on a recent install they advised to install 'chrome', even if you didn't plan to use it, the logic went "It's better to have a back-up browser" I say never have a GOOGLE PRODUCT of any kind near you, or on any electronic device in your control. What gives to tell people to put Chrome on their OS, note also that mint comes pre-installed video tools that are clearly paid promotional pre-bundle, not unlike what you find when you purchase an Acer, a ton of un-wanted malware almost impossible to remove completely from your system. Never use a google product ( software ) including a known google website ( google.com ) don't support the NSA/CIA and their plan of global domination and world slavery.

gragas 10y ago
It's already gg, man. Even if you don't use Google products, if the NSA or CIA want to know everything about you, they can. You have two choices: 1. Do unimportant things that don't intersect with the interests of the NSA/CIA/FBI 2. Do things that intersect with the interests of the NSA/CIA/FBI and expect to lose Or, you could seek protection from other governments (read Russia), but that's essentially useless from a privacy standpoint because the US still knows almost everything about almost all foreign actors anyways. Your best bet is to just do things deemed unimportant by the agencies that pull the strings.
douche 10y ago
Mint is a distribution for people who care more about actually using their computers than about ideological purity.
- Sylos 10y ago
  I don't think that's a fair thing to say. To me, being able to trust that my distribution is giving me reasonable help by pre-selecting good applications, is a vital help for me using my computer. I don't have the time to go through all of the applications that I use, so I trust my distribution to do it for me. If my distribution were to make such a misstep as recommending me to send all my internet-data through a proprietary program made by the biggest data hoarder in the world, this trust would take a severe hit and I couldn't continue actually using my computer, as I'd have to check back with everything that their opinions don't continue to misalign so severely from mine. Yes, I might have a higher interest in privacy than some other people and yes, there's people out there who for whatever reason seem to think that Google is worth trusting, but that doesn't mean that I just sit in front of my computer all day to be ideologically pure. I just have a different opinion of what's malicious and what's not, and wanting my distribution to agree with me in this aspect, is entirely in interest of being able to use my computer as frictionlessly as possible.
  - douche 10y ago
    In that case, there are other distributions that align with your goals more closely. If you're really paranoid, you can use Gentoo or Slack and compile all your software from source. As I understand it, Mint is Ubuntu with a different window manager and all of the closed-source extensions to handle common media formats, that you would normally have to faff around apt-get'ing, pre-installed. It's a desktop Linux for people that either don't know much about Linux, or don't want to get down in the weeds messing and spending hours configuring to do the 95% use cases.

tbrock 10y ago

I wish Mozilla would refocus efforts on making Firefox best in class again. It's been at least 5 years since Firefox was truly relevant. Interest started to wane when Chrome's JavaScript execution blew it out of the water on release but continues to erode mindshare as the development tools languish.

ryan-allen 10y ago
My interest waned when Mozilla fired Brenand Eich over a political donation.
- Sylos 10y ago
  He stepped down himself...
  - 6nf 10y ago
    At least that's the official story. Perhaps he was given a choice: resign or get fired.
    - jcranmer 10y ago
      Having had some (albeit very few) actual interactions with both Brendan Eich and a few members of the board, I do not think that the board was considering firing him, and I think that Brendan decided to resign entirely of his own volition.
    - Sylos 10y ago
      Do you really think that if he would have been fired by Mozilla and then Mozilla had claimed at every corner that he resigned voluntarily, that he would have just accepted that, instead of going to the next media outlet and selling the true story there?
- jcranmer 10y ago
  Can we please just let this conspiracy theory die? Mozilla did not fire Brendan Eich, he resigned of his own volition. If you want further evidence, a very prominent Mozilla employee posted on his blog, syndicated on the Mozilla blog feed, an active solicitation for people to donate to a UK initiative to ban gay marriage. What followed was a massive shitstorm [1], including calls that said person be fired from the project. He remains employed to this day. I find it amusing that no one appears to have mentioned this incident during the entire Brendan Eich debacle [2], though. [1] I'd actually link to a relevant copy of the page on archive.org, but that updates too infrequently to capture pages that change daily. [2] Interestingly, when trying to find the page on archive.org, I did discover that the news of his donation first became public about the same time. Two years before he was appointed CEO.

viraptor 10y ago

Unfortunately Chrome/ium has the best security story at the moment. Mainly due to good separation/sandbox. Firefox is only now catching up, slowly. So while I'd like to use FF, it's simply not a reasonable choice for me.

idobai 10y ago
> Unfortunately Chrome/ium has the best security story at the moment. And the worst privacy story and resource handling.
rvern 10y ago
What makes you believe Chromium has better sandboxing than Firefox? That may have been true in the past, I doubt it has much truth to it today. Furthermore, if you use GNU/Linux it should be trivial to give your web browser better sandboxing than what it does by itself. (You can use AppArmor or SELinux, you can run it in a systemd-nspawn container, you can use Firejail…)
- pjmlp 10y ago
  Not something that the average joe and jane can do.
  - idobai 10y ago
    The average joe and jane will click on large "DOWNLOAD ME!" buttons and download torrents without an antivirus.
  - rvern 10y ago
    Neither the article nor Hacker News are intended for the average Joe.
    - pjmlp 10y ago
      You right, average Joe only uses Chrome, Edge and Safari on their mobile phones and desktop computers.

anilgulecha 10y ago

The only reason chromium is my primary browser is the developer tools (it's a pain to use Firefox for normal browsing, but Chromium for debugging.) I can only hope for chrome's devtools to be ported to firefox. (firebug is close but slow).

rvern 10y ago
For every person who says Chromium's developer tools are better than Firefox's, you can find another person who will say exactly the reverse. It's possible one of the two positions is correct and the other is not, but I find it more likely that people are just used to particular developer tools and that there is no significant difference between the two. People get work done with Firefox and Chromium's developer tools equally, you just have to learn to use them.
- apatters 10y ago
  No, he shouldn't have to learn to use them. When open source fails this type of thinking is often why. Firefox makes a product and therefore should improve that product so that more people want to use it. Vendors in a market are rarely in a position to tell the customers in that market what they should and shouldn't do. We don't want them to be in that position either, even Mozilla. They have to improve their offering. I for one also think that Chrome's dev tools are better and am 100% in the camp of wanting to see Firefox gain market share.
  - rvern 10y ago
    If the open source tools are worse than the other ones, then sure, they should be improved. But I have no reason to believe this is the case here.
  - vectorjohn 10y ago
    I think you missed the point. I for one can't stand the chrome dev tools. I use Firefox largely because i prefer the dev tools there. So, the point is, it's possible there is no real difference and it just comes down to personal preference or what you're used to. At least, that was the commenter's point which you didn't address.

gbog 10y ago

Keeping choices open for the future is one good reason to use Firefox. My main reason to use Firefox on all my devices is because it is much better than Chrome. It has more predictable behavior, it does not require to be connected to a major cloud, I can tweak it to my liking and I do, I can backup the configuration, and I can do advanced but necessary things such as "text reflow" on my phone. I have switched back to Firefox one year ago, and never looked back.

epse 10y ago

But Firefox is soo slow on Linux...

blencdr 10y ago

Even if I'm in web development I use Firefox on a day to day basis. When it comes to debug a large SPA Chrome has nicer features, but companies are not working for the commun benefit and Google is no exception.

mikekchar 10y ago

I'm genuinely curious what the perceived threat is. I'm not happy about having a handful of browsers being dominant, but Chromium is legitimately free software. I'm very slightly worried that most people choose the Chrome branded version (which is not free-as-in-freedom), but there is so little between the two that I'm not sure it matters. V8 is forked into Node now so it would be pretty difficult to do horrible things even though Google controls the parent project. The only thing that I can think of that seems like a risk is the amount of influence that Google has on things like whatever the replacement of CAs will be. But the situation is already so bad, it's hardly going to get worse.

llukas 10y ago
You must have missed recent HN news about google stripped build of Chromium - one that doesnt use binary blobs from Google.
- mikekchar 10y ago
  I certainly did. Searching for it doesn't seem to bring anything up. Care to post a link? I even did a duckduckgo search for binary blobs in Chromium and only found the 18 month old discussion of Chromium installing hotwords (which has been resolved now). You're not, by any chance, thinking of the Chromium OS are you?
  - Jaruzel 10y ago
    You can't miss it - it's riding #1 on HN right, and has been for a few hours now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12577787 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12577787
    - mikekchar 10y ago
      Odd... That's not on my front page at all... Interesting. It must be different for each person.
rtpg 10y ago

Perceptes 10y ago

I generally agree with the sentiment here, but somewhat similar to using Linux over macOS, my experience has been that it's just a worse user experience in exchange for "doing the right thing." In the end, it's about how much you're willing to sacrifice convenience and user experience for an ethical ideal. For me, the last time I attempted to switch from Chrome to Firefox, it drove me nuts after a few days because of one behavior: When you click a web link in another application, it opens it in your non-incognito (or whatever that's called in Firefox) window, even if the incognito window is the one on top. Instead, you have to copy the link from the other app, tab over to Firefox, and manually paste it into the incognito window. This is a flow I use many times a day, and having to do this workaround was really annoying. I found a thread about it on Firefox's issue tracker, but it was closed with a response that basically amounted to the developer telling the user that reported it, "this isn't a valid use case." I may be able to switch back to Firefox when they implement that feature where each browser tab is essentially an isolated "incognito" context, which is really what I want. The distinction between "incognito" and "not incognito" windows has really just been a proving ground for the idea of concurrent browser sessions isolated from each other, which is a much overall solution to controlling your privacy on the web.

chopin 10y ago
A thousand times this. Ironically Firefox had this feature in the past ( I don't remember the exact version). My workaround is to start Firefox in anonymous mode always (Settings->Privacy->History->"Never remember history). But it's a workaround and I wish Firefox would be able to open links in an incognito window.
- kleiba 10y ago
  It's so interesting to see how workflows differ between different people. You say "a thousand times this", but I for one never have this issue because I never (have to) click on an external link to be opened in my browser.
  - qplex 10y ago
    I find it scary when a browser window appears from nowhere.

rvern 10y ago

Chromium is free software too, but that does not justify any usage of Chrome. If you use Chrome, you can't justify it on Chromium being open source. As for Chromium itself, it is very obvious that it is not actually meant to be used by anyone: it has no stable releases, no binary downloads (except the nightlies published by the build system), and its website is hosted on nothing else than… Google Sites.

Tharre 10y ago
Chromium does have stable releases, they are the same as for chrome. And about every linux distribution out there ships chromium binaries, so what's your point?
- ffggvv 10y ago
  His point is that nobady uses chromium, google never promotes it, and on windows you can't install a chromium binary. His point is that if chromium is that good why google is pushing chrome down peoples throat? (hint: its the ads-game). The only reason chromium is "open-source" is that google attracts lots of talent, saying users have a choice between chromium and chrome, when in reality this isn't true.

warcode 10y ago

Did Firefox fix their performance degradation over time yet? Every time I try to switch back its fine for 2 weeks and then starts to get slower, like the internal database breaks or something. This is two weeks with 2-3 windows, with 5-20 tabs each, without restarts. So far Vivaldi has been the best chrome replacement for me.

gcb0 10y ago
did you report it? for regular users i don't give this kind of assine reply, but here on hacker news, i expect everyone used Firefox for a good decade before switching to chrome now, so i expect you did the minimum to the project and have at least abugzilla account to say "me too" on some bug.
- fixermark 10y ago
  For Firefox, that's really not sufficient. I've reported FF bugs in the past that sit unfixed in the queue for 13 years. It has disincentivized me from bothering to continue reporting them. Yes, it's open-source and I could in theory pop it out and fix it myself (ha, because I have a spare weekend to burn on setting up a Mozilla dev environment and dependency stack). No, there's no incentive to do so when Chrome simply doesn't have the bug. Chrome has bugs that languish too, but so far I can't name any that I've tripped over. I'm sure when I do, it'll be incentive to consider switching to Firefox.
  - gcb0 10y ago
    and when you trip on that chrome bug you will move to what? IE? btw, try to disable referrer on chrome ;) ... or even set it to only send to the same domain
    - fixermark 10y ago
      As I said, it'd be incentive to switch to Firefox (or actually set up that Mozilla devel dependency stack and fix the 13-yaer-old bug). For referrer in Chromium, I think there's a flag? https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/content/public/common/content_switches.cc?q=no-referrer+flag&sq=package:chromium&l=660&dr=C https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/content/public/common/c...

mrmondo 10y ago

Interesting that this blog post is hosted on googles 'blogger' domain. Not that it means much, just that it's slightly ironic.

apatters 10y ago

This article convinced me personally to switch back to Firefox, but I'm disheartened by seeing a number of comments here which amount to "Firefox is fine," "Firefox is just as good," "The Foundation is fine," and so on. That attitude is a recipe for shrinking market share. FF is competing against extremely well funded, extremely aggressive and competent competitors. You don't get to stop listening to the market in an environment like this. It will run you out.

aorth 10y ago
I maintain a copy of Firefox Developer Edition on my system and I make a concerted effort to open it every few days so it can update itself and so I can test any new sites or blog posts I'm working on. I've tried to switch back to Firefox cold turkey in the past and it never works for me, but I might introduce a personal policy of one week on, one week off, alternating between Firefox and Chrome.
- ffggvv 10y ago
  This is the problem. You value your convenience more than your freedom, and the future of privacy.
  - marklgr 10y ago
    You can make people change their behavior by shifting the weights, but it is pointless to tell them what their value should be. Make FF more convenient, or show how bad competitors are regarding to privacy.
  - formula1 10y ago
    Do you honestly believe that switching to firefox will be the change? Its purely symbolic considering firefox has been heavilly funded by google in the past [0] and likely still influences their decisions. A few developers doesnt account for the millions of people that use chrome, widescale change requires influencers and those willing to stand up, not a bunch of upset introverts with a distaste for authority. Honestly, Im not sure what will help future and privacy considering your information is the number 1 comodity. But Im getting the impression that escape is impossible and we all should get used to being less "anti coorperation" and more "pro happiness" [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation

cdelsolar 10y ago

but i like Chrome

moxie 10y ago

What always strikes me about these pleas is how familiar they sound. They're reminiscent of all the things we "should" -- eat better, exercise more, lower our carbon footprint -- and I suspect they all see just about the same level of long term success. Firefox did well when their only real competitor (MS) was actively trying to make their own browser bad in order to preserve the relevance of the desktop OS and their dominance in that area. Now that they have a competitor (Google) which is actively trying to make their own browser good in order to increase the relevance of online services and their dominance in that area, Firefox hasn't fared so well. I don't necessarily disagree with the author of this post, but it doesn't seem like moral high ground alone is going to make Firefox any more successful than the other things we "should." What I wonder about is what larger systemic or structural shifts would have to occur for Firefox and the other "shoulds" of the world to have a chance.

glogla 10y ago
It's not quality of Firefox. On desktop it's google having (almost) monopoly on search and abusing it market its other products. On mobile, it's Google abusing its power over the platform to make OEMs use Chrome in the same way MS pushes OEMs to ship Windows and Secure Boot and various other shit. Firefox could be perfect (and it isn't, because what do you know, developing good software takes insane amount of money) and it wouldn't help.
- moxie 10y ago
  Yes, Google has market leverage. However, when IE was Firefox's competitor, MS was in just as powerful of a position, and Firefox was a success. They were a success because they clearly had the better browser. These days, that's no longer the case. I know that I certainly did not switch from Firefox because of Google's marketing efforts or underhanded tactics. But what if you're right? In a world where, I agree, it takes an insane amount of money to develop good software, where Google has more of that money than Firefox does, and where Google has really effective market leverage, do the "shoulds" have a chance? Is the future we want even a possibility? I don't personally think that it is, which is why I wonder what larger changes we would need to see for that to become true.

gremlinsinc 10y ago

I can't take anyone serious who rants about google's marketplace dominion but can't seem to migrate from blogger to wordpress self-hosted. Sorry, it's just overly ironic, and it's also hard for me to take bloggers on blogger serious as there's a lot of crap blogs on there. Every dominant player eventually falls, Microsoft owned the browser, search, email, docs, and os back in 2000 -- now they're practically irrelevant.

the_duke 10y ago

I never understood why Mozilla has allowed their main product and their only money maker to fall so far behind. They have a lot of income. I don't mind them going of on various edgy projects. But FF has been inferior to Chrome for many years. They should really refocus their efforts to concentrate on delivering the best browser again, as it was before Chrome came along.

reitanqild 10y ago
> But FF has been inferior to Chrome for many years. Can we please stop fueling this myth? Maybe for some of you Firefox lacks something you actually need. For others, like me and a bunch of others it is completely the other way, -if I was forced to use any other browser it would annoy me to no end (not tree tabs, etc etc). So while I think it is totally fine to point out where other does better, telling everyone that Chrome is better isn't even true except for very specific cases. Edit: clarify need
- sosborn 10y ago
  It is almost as though different people has tastes that stray from yours.
  - reitanqild 10y ago
    That is exactly what I point out. But unlike others I hope that I don't tell everyone that my taste is better.
- the_duke 10y ago
  It's not a myth. FF was my main browser, and would be to this date if it provided the best experience. Chrome is faster, snappier, more fluid. Faster time to render, fastes JS engine. There's a reason most of the geeks switched to Chrome on their own, before Google began it's aggressive approach of converting everyone to it with ads and bundling.
  - reitanqild 10y ago

Steko 10y ago

I keep Gmail and a couple other permanent logins open in Chrome and do 99% of my other browsing in Firefox.

microcolonel 10y ago

Chromium is actually a good browser. Until Servo picks up the technical slack, Mozilla will not have a browser I can afford to waste my time running. Firefox is completely unusable for me. The UI is slow, ugly, clunky, and complex. The rendering performance is abysmal. The extensions ecosystem has collapsed from a decade of API breakage, and now total deprecation. The organization is hostile and political because Mozilla lets people push their personal ideological agendas on foundation dollar. Compared to Chromium, Firefox is a slow, confusing, incompatible security liability with no consistent wins. Even when they do uniquely good things (like the WebGL live shader editor) they are held back by the general inadequacy of the product. No amount of pleading will change any of this.

hubert123 10y ago
Yep, Firefox cannot play the moral superiority card when it pushes good people like Brendan Eich out for political reasons.

indlebe 10y ago

As someone who manages a 450-user IT department (academic), supporting roughly 50/50 BYOD/supplied computers, and staring at my stats, Firefox is the most reliable browser. We see %300 more problems with Chrome than Firefox. Reading the comments my suspicion is that what shortcomings it does have affects the hacker news crowd a disproportionate amount more than usual, or affects the academic crowd disproportionately less

newscracker 10y ago
I prefer Firefox over Chrome for several reasons, including usability, flexibility and freedom. Could you list down a few things that are problematic, in your experience, with Chrome but are not so in Firefox? Although it could be construed as purely anecdotal, it may provide some insight and understanding into the strengths and weaknesses of the two browsers.
- indlebe 10y ago
  Printing and PDF viewing are the most common issues we see with Chrome, doing either often crashes the whole browser. Windows 10 seems to be the most problematic OS for Chrome, we see quite a few unresolved cases where Chrome crashes before it can print on this platform. Fillable PDFs with Chrome, fuhgeddaboudit! Those are the top 2 issues by far, with legacy web app issues as a semi-distant third. This is our fault for using legacy php 3/4 apps that still work, but firefox doesn't produce any issues and is reliable for this purpose.

starky 10y ago

I was a long time user of Firefox, mostly because I despise how Chrome is so inflexible and has terrible interface design. Unfortunately, Firefox has continually gotten worse and worse over the last few years. I was tired of the browser slowing down over time, and extensions constantly breaking for no other reason but the fast release cycle. I ended up switching to Vivaldi. Not only does it fix the majority of things I hate about Chrome, but it supports Chrome extensions which are good enough (but not as good as Firefox).

free2rhyme214 10y ago

I think the most effective way to get people to change browser habits, is through something compelling over a period of time. So far I don't find Firefox compelling enough nor this post. (Keep trying please, we really do need competition here)

goalo 10y ago

Most people I know that use iOS stay with Safari itself. They dont even install chrome.

_Codemonkeyism 10y ago

Switched to FF back some time ago (from Chrome). Still a CPU and power hog on Windows 10. But still love Tab Tree.

b4xt3em4n 10y ago

I stop use Firefox due to Brendan Eich story.

vacri 10y ago
Did you stop using javascript as well?
- b4xt3em4n 10y ago
  I started using FF since 0.7 version guy, I switch to chrome after the internal Mozilla stupid polemics for Brendan marriage position. Open web? please, do me the favour..
  - vacri 10y ago
    So even though Eich stepped down over the issue, and gay developers said that the work culture at Mozilla did not represent Eich's position at all, you switched browsers? The LGBT folks won that battle. If you don't switch back, then you've hurt their cause. OkCupid did this - they made a big song and dance about boycotting FireFox, intruding their political message into all their users' lives... and when the LGBT side won, not a peep out of OkCupid to repair the damage they'd done. Some others did similar things - appearing righteous was more important to them than actually being mature. If you don't stop the boycott after you've won, then the problem is with you. (note: I am actually very pro-gay rights, but the actions of some around the Eich debacle were as deplorable as he was)
    - b4xt3em4n 10y ago
      LGBT folks won that battle yes, but FF lose the browser war. bye
    - BrendanEich 10y ago
      Are you seriously contending that collective punishment (I mean punishing a group based on judgments against one of its members; and the corollary collective reward) is moral, efficacious, or both? So all the lemmings who dropped (or just said they would drop) Firefox while I was CEO were obligated to rush back on board once I left? What about the various right-wingers who #nozilla'ed and otherwise boycotted after I left? How about using the best browser in the market, built by people of diverse opinions and high ability who come together to do excellent work? There's a good idea that seems to appeal to many people, of whatever various and diverse beliefs. Try https://brave.com/ https://brave.com/.

robbrown451 10y ago

I will switch back when it has what I need. Currently my biggest need that Firefox doesn't support is MIDI access (i.e. hook a digital "piano" to it and Javascript in a page can talk to it). It's been in development for who knows how long in Firefox, I'm not holding my breath.

robbrown451 10y ago

I will switch when it has what I need. Currently my biggest need that Firefox doesn't support is MIDI access (i.e. hook a digital "piano" to it and Javascript in a page can talk to it). It's been in devlopment for who knows how long in Firefox, I'm not holding my breath.

fpoling 10y ago

My primary browser is Brave with in-built ad-blocker because Mozilla does not want to ship ad-blocker with Firefox. As ads is the most likely vector of malware distribution channel, that means that safety of users stopped to be a priority for Mozilla unfortunately.

Noughmad 10y ago

After years of trying, it still looks very bad on KDE, and even worse with a custom color scheme. Fix that, and I'll switch immediately.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Sylos 10y ago
How does it look bad for you? Or rather to say how does it look worse than Chrome, as both browsers do differ completely from the native toolkit... Well, unless you're using something like QupZilla or Konqueror, but then this blog post doesn't really apply to you anyways. What I personally do to make Firefox fit in more into KDE is to use the Developer Edition Theme [0], which has a Light and Dark variant, so looks reasonably not-out-of-place for Breeze and Breeze Dark. [0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/devedition-theme-enabler/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/devedition-th... There's also this user-style to fix theming issues, which is what I guess you're saying when you refer to a custom color scheme making it look even worse: https://userstyles.org/styles/96657/fix-kde-theming-issues https://userstyles.org/styles/96657/fix-kde-theming-issues

raverbashing 10y ago

Android is winning but the percentage that still use Apple is significant. Thank "the sheep" I guess... The winners mentioned are the ones that require the most resources, so I guess they'll keep being that even with Bing, etc I do use Firefox, sometimes it seems Chrome has more issues, sometimes it's FF, but I'd say they're pretty comparable (though FF has better dev tools builtin and it is easier to configure a proxy, because Chrome depends on a system config, which is not what I want to change usually)

phs318u 10y ago
Not offended, but I don't consider myself a sheep. While some see no difference between mega-corps, there are a few key things that I value Apple for over Google. 1. The seamlessness of the ecosystem. 2. The low rate at which products are introduced only to be unceremoniously knifed when you least expect it. 3. The fact that I'm the customer not the product. 4. The public stance they've taken on their customers' security & privacy, backed by concrete design decisions. I still remember switching to Google from Altavista. I'm currently midway through disentangling my online presence from Google.
- raverbashing 10y ago
  Yes, I like Apple products as well My point is that while there are a lot of people that buy it for aesthetic reasons only, they do a lot of things right and a lot of tech savvy people use their products as well (Hence the usage of "the sheep" was a jab at those who consider Apple customers sheep, it was not a critique of the users themselves)
- CyberShadow 10y ago
  That's a false dichotomy. You can use Android together with any degree of Google integration that you find comfortable, with one extreme being the stock Nexus ROM, and the other being AOSP or derivative ROM, with no Google apps (such as Play Store / Gmail / Maps). There are open-source / self-hosted alternatives to many of those.
  - 10y ago

leksak 10y ago

What does Chrome offer that FF cannot match currently? What kind of convenience improvements would you need to start using FF? Developer tools not withstanding.

sammularczyk 10y ago
I find the design of Chrome to be nicer in general. Feels like there's less going on.

s9w 10y ago

My neutral (?) view on firefox/chrome: - Firefox uses way less RAM - Chrome is usually faster/smoother, even if not by much. For very odd or intensive sites. And for things like dragging a tab into another window and how long it takes until inspect element loaded. - Firefox has Tree Style Tab, Chrome doesn't and will never have. This alone makes FF the only usable browser for me - I find the non-optional non-native and childish look of chrome silly - Some google sites like the play store and youtube just work better on chrome For me, I use FF because of the memory, the styling and Tree Style Tabs. And I hope they keep on fighting. I understand the chrome users though.

cygned 10y ago
Also using Firefox (Developer Edition) as my primary browser. But my observations are quite different: - On my machine, Firefox uses more RAM than Chrome (Canary) for the same workloads and is slower - Chrome is way faster. As a web application developer I notice that all the time. Chrome renders faster and the JavaScript engine also processes faster. Firefox likes to crash when reloading a page that uses WebSockets. - I don't know your platform, but on OS X the default UI of Firefox is awful. That's the primary reason why I use the Developer Edition.
- NTripleOne 10y ago
  Another thing people don't seem to understand is that Chrome uses as much memory as it sanely can for the task provided. There are situations where it will use more, or less than Firefox, but I guarantee you in 99% of those situations, Chrome will be the one performing faster.
  - seba_dos1 10y ago
    Not true in my case. Chromium often makes the system start feeling unresponsive by causing a lot of swapping, while Firefox deals well with way more tabs open and still keeps some RAM free for other apps to use. When Firefox catches some memory leak and also starts to swap, restarting it fixes the issue (but I have to say that it has become very rare nowadays), but when I restart Chromium, I have to quickly clean up unused tabs to prevent them from eating whole RAM again. On my 8GB RAM machines, Chromium performs faster when there are up to 10 tabs open, but otherwise Firefox easily beats it.

cyberpunk 10y ago

The only thing I miss after switching Safari->FF (moved away from OSX) for regular browsing is that all 'incognito' tabs in safari are completely isolated from each other and share no cache, cookies, bla. This seems like a small thing and I barely noticed it at the time I switched TO safari for all non-devtools related tasks (battery and perf was better on my lappy) but now, I do miss it. Otherwise, I've no probs with FF these days. 49 seems solid on BSD, at least.

anoplus 10y ago

If money can help Firefox, I think the community needs to rethink crowdfunding. A crowdfunding system should be implemented and taken to a new level. I imagine a system where features/issues are organized and funded case by case in a way a simple person can "vote with the wallet" for the desired FireFox. This is an idea for open source in generally. I know BountySource try to do it.

known 10y ago

I think it's an extreme pov; Since Chrome is Open source we need not worry :)

robin_reala 10y ago
Technically, Chromium is open source, but Chrome isn’t.

barpet 10y ago

I use Safari on Mac because it's good enough and I use Chrome anywhere else because I am used to it and it's also good enough. I need simple,stable and fast. I do not really care about features or security at this point.

yhylord 10y ago

China will become the last shelter against Google's evil domination.

sebouh00 10y ago

Chrome has a tab activated search feature for websites and custom search engines. This is super convenient and must for me. I honestly tried firefox for a month, but it wasn't as stable and I missed this feature.

BrendanEich 10y ago

Surprised to see this on HN again. BTW, Rob left in early March: http://robert.ocallahan.org/2016/03/leaving-mozilla.html http://robert.ocallahan.org/2016/03/leaving-mozilla.html

j-pb 10y ago

Firefox lost me when they conspired to kill WebSQL. They were the ones used the vast marked share they had to push the trendy thing of the day, namely nosql and IndexeDB, a technology which is bemoaned by web developers today. I think the fact that there is another post about SQLite on the front page right now, attests that it would have been better to just standardise that. But then all those greenfield "spec hackers" wouldn't have had the fun of building cloud castles. As a web developer and a browser user I'm tired of things not working. And if that means less options in terms of browsers I don't care as long as the browsers that are there give me a solid foundation to work with. I'd rather have less options with more freedom of choice because all the different options are compatible and interchangeable, than many options but little choice, because their features sets are all disjoint and nothing is compatible.

robin_reala 10y ago
WebSQL was never a spec. It was literally implemented as ‘be bug compatible with this specific version of SQLite’. There was no way that that was going to be accepted by Mozilla and Microsoft.
- j-pb 10y ago
  There was actually an offer to turn SQlite3 into a spec under the condition that Firefox agreed to implement it. Firefox declined since they didn't want to "confuse" developers with too many options.

blubb-fish 10y ago

I absolutely believe that there is no way around the described future of Alphabet dominating the web sooner or later. But I also believe that this is not going to be the end but instead will make it desirable again to create something new - there will be a new breed of hackers and power users creating new and alternative web based on P2P- and blockchain-technologies, meshed-networks ... I think it's going to be cool :) (Though I'd be in favor of simply reducing Google's power - but that is simply not going to happen - no matter what browser I use and how many people I convince to use FireFox.)

dman 10y ago

This thread on reddit captures many of the reasons why I stopped using firefox - https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/3hugul/the_future_of_developing_firefox_addons/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/3hugul/the_future_... . Extensions are what made firefox great for me, with the constantly evolving story for extensions over the years the community around building extensions appears to have dissipated.

Grangar 10y ago
They're implementing WebExtensions though, which is 99% compatible with FF! There's a solution coming in that regard :)
- dman 10y ago
  To quote Linus - "WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE!".
- anotheryou 10y ago
  I'm really scared they might shut off the old extensions at some point.

oolongCat 10y ago

I remember I used to be a huge fan of Firefox until a large sum of the plug-ins I had installed stopped working becuase the browser upgraded, this was several year ago and it was then I first decided to use chrome. I used chrome for a long time, and I am now starting to slowly move back to firefox. One complain I now have about FF is it feels a bit sluggish compared to chrome when rendering web pages. The nightly build is however a lot better. (I am using ubuntu btw). ---------edit----------------- Another thing I wish ff works on is screen real-estate. http://imgur.com/OGWfgDo http://imgur.com/OGWfgDo

justinlardinois 10y ago

Question: In this future without Firefox, what becomes the default browser in Linux distributions? I won't claim that I know what every distro uses, but every one I've ever installed has had Firefox or some derivative of it included.

anotheryou 10y ago
Konqueror or something. But in Linux there is no shortage in sweet little browser projects. Interesting would be which engine and if it can profit from a big enough audience for a variety of extensions.

vamur 10y ago

Gnome Web works great on Linux+Wayland now, apart from lack of 1080p on youtube. Meanwhile Firefox still does not work on Wayland and is generally slow on Linux and one has to enable multi-process flags to speed it up. And even then its speed barely compares to speed of Chromium or Gnome Web. Given that this performance disadvantage is not new it is clearly caused by lack of focus and manpower. As a result Firefox usage continues to decline and they cannot compete with fast moving competitors like Chrome or Webkit. Mozilla should discontinue 32 bit, Windows XP+Vista, ESR releases, Flash/GTK2 support, other side projects like the HTML editor. That should free up enough focus/developer time for Mozilla to improve their core product.

andrewclunn 10y ago

To all the Firefox apologists. I'm a front end dev. I run linux. I also run chromium because it is a superior product to Firefox. The market agrees. Wake up. Want to win me back? Make Firefox better.

anotheryou 10y ago

I love the Firefox extensions! (I hope they will stay for a while, using tons of quite old extensions) Extensions that have no even chrome extension: - tree style tab: nested tabs on the side of the screen - Imagus: elaborate image preview on mouse-over - FF Rocker: click right+left for history back and the other way around for forward (there is a chrome extension, but it's no fun) - grab and drag: I hold right click to scroll as if I was dragging the scroll bar handle (only works for single-core FF :/) (there is a chrome extension, but it's no fun) - All-in-Sidebar: bookmarks, downloads etc in a sidebar - tab grenade: store all open tabs in a link list and close them (might have a chrome equivalent) - Link Alert: hover to see if you are going to an external page or pdf or image (might have a chrome equivalent) - Vimperator/Pentadactyl: vim style shortcuts for everything, no more clicking. Currently both projects struggle to stay compatible with recent FF versions, can't recommend to switch to it now :/

clappski 10y ago
What vi-mode extension would you recommend? Vimperator always seemed worse than Vimium (on Chrome), mainly because the scrolling is jittery.
- anotheryou 10y ago
  I scroll full pages or with the mouse. But I'd really like to have a scroll marker. My not quite working attempt at one: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/20937-red-read-line https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/20937-red-read-line With that in working I wouldn't need smoothing much anymore and could scroll half pages without confusion. I'm currently stuck to pentadactyl, would try vimperator again, but don't want to set it up. Would have to see how to port my pocket script and such.
- mih 10y ago
  Try giving VimFx a go. It's a Firefox port of Vimium. Has less features than Vimperator but doesn't alter the browser UI as much. It's also compatible with multiprocess Firefox.

jplayer01 10y ago

It's too bad Firefox becomes more terrible each year. Just today I was struggling with the god awful history sidebar.

inian 10y ago

The article is from 2014. Though I understand the sentiment, most of the facts are false now IIRC, Chrome was using the FileSystem API which was supported only in Chrome - hence the partial support for offline functionality in Google docs..Only recently have the specs behind Persistent Storage API and Service workers have matured. I would love to see Google docs to make use of these APIs to make the functionality available across browsers. Also, PNacl -> Web Assembly which Google has supported. Of course Android OSes are going to ship with Chrome as a default browser - at least you have the choice of installing a different browser if you want to. Unlike Apple, where all browsers are forced to use the same JS engine provided by Apple. Google has been pushing web standards for a long time now - instead of platform specific APIs and saying that the internet is going to be only accessible from Chrome is stretching it quite a bit..

jay_kyburz 10y ago

Anybody know if there is an Electron or NW.js for Firefox. Also, when is Firefox going to let me style scrollbars?

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

super_mario 10y ago

Firefox was all about extensions and user control. But Mozilla has essentially decided to destroy their extensions eco system, and as a consequence lost me as their user and supporter. I really loved and used Pentadactyl, but it's now gone and dead and so is Firefox as far as I'm concerned.

coldpie 10y ago
Can you elaborate? I've used Firefox for well over a decade, and while I'm not a heavy extension user, I haven't noticed any change in extension support for the handful I use.
distances 10y ago
Can you expand a bit? I've no idea what you mean since my extensions are still working just fine.

lightedman 10y ago

We don't have a choice anyways - FireFox is now Chrome. Even if you don't have Chrome installed on your computer, the second you open FireFox, you'll see plenty of chrome processes spawning.

rachkovsky 10y ago

Firefox Reader View feature with audio narration is the best! And no other browser has it!

chiefalchemist 10y ago

I'd use FF a lot more if it has multiple users as Chrome does. Without the ability to easily switch personas (read: projects) FF is a no go.

quesera 10y ago
FF calls them "profiles" and they actually work better than Chrome's.

ccanassa 10y ago

Am I the only one who doesn't seem to care about how much Google knows about my life? I am personally okay with the idea of giving away some information about my life in exchange for using some of their products (Search, Gmail, Chrome, etc) without paying anything. Besides that, the more they know about me, the better their products get. I am personally thrilled when I open Google maps and it magically whos where I live, where I work, etc. It just makes my life easier. I think this might be a cultural thing though, people from some third-world countries (like me) may not take privacy and freedom for granted.