11 ms·

Ask HN: Who's switched from Chrome to Firefox 57?

187 points by alistproducer2 9y ago

I haven't used FF in years but I've been so impressed with 57 that I've finally come home. I'm wondering if I'm alone. If you switched, please let us know why you decided to switch.

fooker 9y ago
The interface still feels less streamlined compared to Chromium. Also sync was hit and miss, the same as 3-4 years ago when I last used Firefox.
- Viper007Bond 9y ago
  Odd, sync works great for me. I keep a huge history (365 days) and it syncs perfectly between all of my many devices.
baggachipz 9y ago
I have, temporarily. Some bugs and occasional slowness, coupled with more memory hogging, have me reconsidering.
- derefr 9y ago
  FF57 still consumes more memory than Chrome? For the same tabs? Or are you maybe experiencing some https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation — opening more tabs because they mostly "feel" lighter-weight?
  - baggachipz 9y ago
    I opened the same exact tabs in both FF57 and Chrome (7 each) and sorted by memory usage in Activity Monitor. When adding up the main task and helpers, FF57 used significantly more.
    - seba_dos1 9y ago
      The pattern I noticed is that with small amount of tabs Firefox can consume more RAM, but the situation quickly changes in favor of Firefox when opening more of them.
gradyj 9y ago
I switched to test it, not sure yet whether or not I will stay using it all the time. I definitely notice the speed and the built in screenshot support is pretty nice.
dmlittle 9y ago
I really like container tabs (you have to enable them in about:config - privacy.userContext.enabled and privacy.userContext.ui.enabled). It allows me to have multiple AWS accounts open at the same time without having 2 different browsers or one account open in private mode. I have 2 main containers I use: production and staging.
- ryduh 9y ago
  Whoa. Didn't know about that. Definitely going to give FF a shot now. Thanks!
- jpdb 9y ago
  > It allows me to have multiple AWS accounts open at the same time I didn't think much about container tabs til I read this. This will be awesome for me. Thanks!
  - StavrosK 9y ago
    I use containers to log in to Google and Facebook so I don't leak cookies on other websites. Then again, I block those cookies/trackers anyway, so eh.
- jelder 9y ago
  Chrome has this as a first-class feature, "People." I have one window open for personal, and another for each of the AWS accounts I have access to. Sounds from your description like FF can do this at the tab level?
  - kogus 9y ago
    Yes, that's correct. The containers feature enables profiles on a per-tab basis. As someone who does a lot of account switching, it's a killer feature for me. I would imagine some users would not really find it necessary.
  - howoddalien 9y ago
    Yea, firefox has profiles as well. Containers are different and apply your browsing context based on the tab. Super useful, you can also configure sites to open in a certain container. I do wish I could just pin an entire window to a container, but overall the flexibility is worth it. (I abhor having more than one window open per app at a time.)
FlyingLawnmower 9y ago
I switched. I really like the performance boost, and it just generally feels "snappier". I also had a long seeded desire to support FireFox, so now felt like a great time to jump ship.
vinnymac 9y ago
I usually have around 100+ tabs open in Chrome at any given time on my 2014 macbook pro. I have been testing out Firefox 57 for about a month now. I am very impressed by the devtools UI and the customization features. The speed is something I don't have to worry about at all, and makes it easier to compare Chrome to Firefox. I am fortunately not in a situation where any of my addons/extensions are unsupported on either browser. It has been fun to compare them and I think I will be switching completely to Firefox.
alistproducer2 9y ago
I guess I'll start it off. I've done a apples-to-apples compare on memory usage of 7 tabs with the same content and FF57 came in at 514 MG to chrome's 512 so that's basically a wash. The speed has been the main factor along with being able to step away from Google, if only a little bit.
aylmao 9y ago
I use Chrome as my secondary browser only when I need to inspect/develop, but I'm using Firefox more often now.
chrisdavar 9y ago
I have couldn't be more happier. The ability for Firefox nightly to modify requests and resend is a bonus. Also less sluggish and quicker. Ublock origin and last pass both supported with nightly.
apetresc 9y ago
I switched a few weeks ago when 57 hit the Nightly channel. The main incentive towards Firefox for me has always been the Tree Style Tab extension[1]; it's just that Chrome's better performance used to be a stronger incentive. Now they're more-or-less equal on that front. [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
pitaj 9y ago
I've been running FF Nightly for weeks now, and I really like it. It feels snappier than Chrome, and I hope it can bring back a significant portion of developers as well.
ohazi 9y ago
I switched on my work laptop a few months ago, with the knowledge that 57 was the one to look out for. Got the update yesterday and was impressed enough to switch at home as well. I've also been using Firefox on my phone for a while now, specifically so that I can run ublock origin and video speed controller, since mobile chrome doesn't support extensions.
steven_pack 9y ago
Yep. Like to see some competition and I’m a huge fan of rust, so like to support it any way I can. I hit minor compatibility issues on some sites, but it’s rare. Main thing I miss is auto shrinking tabs. FF doesn’t support the bajillion tabs methodology so well right now.
- seba_dos1 9y ago
  What? I have hundreds, sometimes low thousands of tabs open constantly - auto shrinking tabs is exactly what makes me despise Chrome. It's completely unusable once you reach circa 50 and mouse wheel becomes the only way to navigate them. In contrast, Firefox, thanks to no auto shrinking, is somewhat usable out of the box, and works wonderfully with extensions like Tab Center Redux or Tree Style Tabs.
- Grumbledour 9y ago
  Ha! That's funny! I used to say the same thing about chrome because the tabs shrunk so much I found them unusable. Also, opening too many tabs always gave me out of memory errors. But maybe you can get it more to your liking by tweaking browser.tabs.tab in about:config?
  - steven_pack 9y ago
    Yes! This helps a lot actually. Thanks!
ojame 9y ago
I've given it a decent shot - but it still has very average profile support, which I use daily. In Chrome, it's easy to see what profile I'm using (top right corner of the window), and very easy to switch. In Firefox, you need to go to about:profiles to even see what profile you're currently using.
- spacehunt 9y ago
  Would containers work better for your use case?
- ccakes 9y ago
  Check out Containers - it goes a long way towards solving this problem. I also used to rely heavily on Chrome profiles https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Contextual_Identity_Project/Containers https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Contextual_Identity_Projec...
  - ojame 9y ago
    Containers seem like a compromise that I can live with to give FF57 a better shot. They share history/bookmarks, which I'm not a fan of. I prefer my work profiles not to have reddit/hacker news etc. in the auto fill address bar.
- jraph 9y ago
  Maybe you could use a different theme for each profile, or put different buttons or buttons in different order in the toolbar? Maybe there could be an extension that shows the name of the current profile and/or an image/text chosen by the user in the toolbar or the tab bar? The extension would have to be installed in each profile, but this is to be done only once. Please still my idea, whether you are a Firefox or an addon developer!
peyloride 9y ago
I did the switch. The only time I switch the Chrome back is using to debug some angular code. For an odd reason, Firefox shows stack traces too ugly.
Xcelerate 9y ago
I've used Chrome continuously ever since it was released, but today I switched to Firefox on both my work and personal laptops. Both machines are Macbook Pros, one 2012 and the other 2017, and Chrome feels laggy on both. Scrolling is not smooth, and certain web applications are just downright unpleasant to use (notably, Jupyter notebooks and Facebook). I gave Firefox Quantum a try, and it's an amazing improvement. This is more how I imagined computers to function in 2017 to be honest. There is no noticeable lag on either machine. So I'll be sticking with Firefox for the foreseeable future.
- ConnerFritz 9y ago
  This has just convinced me to try it.
bichiliad 9y ago
With the exception of casting things to my chromecast, I've switched to Firefox for everything. Performance isn't an issue, development tools are really good, I can be "that guy at work who catches firefox bugs," and I'd rather support Mozilla than Google at the end of the day.
skizm 9y ago
I want to uninstall chrome, but can't find a good replacement for chrome report desktop. It just works so seamlessly on all devices, including mobile. Any suggestions?
- sp332 9y ago
  Remote desktop?
- Viper007Bond 9y ago
  I use TeamViewer personally. I prefer it to Chrome Remote Desktop.
scotttrinh 9y ago
I've been using Nightly for about 2 months for personal browsing, and have recently switched to using it for my web development job using containers, and it's been great. Biggest feature I'd like to see is a keyboard shortcut for opening a new tab in a particular container, as opposed to Cmd+T opening an uncontained tab. The Developer Tools still have a ways to go before they beat the performance of Chrome (large source files lag), but it's perfectly usable and getting better all the time. All in all, I've been very happy with my switch, especially when Quantum landed in Nightly: a noticeable increase in speed and snappiness!
- edgartaor 9y ago
  >Biggest feature I'd like to see is a keyboard shortcut for opening a new tab in a particular container, as opposed to Cmd+T opening an uncontained tab. Exactly this. We need keyboard shortcuts for containers.
- smasty 9y ago
  When using the extension, you can use Ctrl+[dot] to open the container selector and then use arrows/tab and enter to select the container to open a new tab in. It's not as good as a dedicated shortcut, but it lets you open new container tabs without leaving your keyboard.
alehul 9y ago
Switched to Firefox on Macbook Pro. It feels faster, but my two main complaints: 1. While using the touchpad to go 'back', a page on Safari will show you the page you're going back to. Chrome will at least offer an arrow animation backwards. Firefox offers no such thing, often leaving me confused as to whether it's registered. A couple times so far it has instead scrolled me up the page a bit. 2. I have nothing else open, yet certain actions (i.e. scrolling through Zillow pictures earlier) will result in it sporadically using so much memory that my computer's fans are audibly loud and the computer gets quite hot. Nonetheless, I still would narrowly recommend it, though some of that is likely to do with wanting to support Mozilla.
dtf 9y ago
2010 macbook, Chrome user. Things are generally slow, but felt like they got a bit snappier after the High Sierra upgrade. I tried FF57 but for me it feels a bit slower than Chrome on this older device.
Humphrey 9y ago
I never stopped using Firefox, but for years was only using it for an isolated development environment. But I've been using Firefox 57 for a few month, and it's great. I still use Chrome, but I'm probably spending equal time in both now.
j45 9y ago
I switched to Firefox Nightly about a month ago and have made it back into Chromium less and less.
joejoebob 9y ago
I am. Really enjoying it!
Cyph0n 9y ago
I switched yesterday from Chrome to FF 57 on my MBP 2014. Chrome was faster, but now FF is the clear winner. On Windows, I have been using FF for the past 10 years. Also, Firefox Sync is just amazing.
corford 9y ago
I never left FF so picked 57 up as a normal update. Love everything about it so far except the new theme which is taking me longer than I'd like to adjust to (not a big fan of the dark blue/cobalt menubar).
- dochtman 9y ago
  You know there's a light theme you can switch to in Customize mode, right?
  - corford 9y ago
    I do now :) Thanks.
- zie 9y ago
  and there are a TON of themes available for FF here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/themes/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/themes/
alanbernstein 9y ago
Firefox was my first choice ever since it came out, but I stopped using it when it got unstable a few years ago (even on a brand new macbook!). I've been using nightly for about a month with no crashes, so I'm mostly happy with it. Sometimes it goes crazy with CPU and I have to close a few tabs. I'm still using Chrome as well, for now.
ccakes 9y ago
I've been on FF Nightly for the last couple of months but recently switched back to Safari. On a MacBook 12" (i5) Firefox did terrible things to the battery life and generated enough heat that I'd often find the CPU throttling. Neither Safari or Chrome have the same issues. I haven't really tried FF since the nightly jumped to 59 but I keep it updated and occasionally check to see whether this has been fixed.
danilocesar 9y ago
I rely on Chrome and Google's integration. I'm pretty sure I would catch on fire if I try to change... ps: I use both, chrome for personal stuff and FF for work.
trumpeta 9y ago
Me! I have been running nightly for the past couple of months and it is really good. I use uBlock, Res, Ghostery and Imagus. I use Compact and Dark UI mode and it seems more compact than chrome. Also I noticed it consumes a lot less memory, but CPU is 50/50 I'd say. One thing that I find a bit weird is that I find that some Google services work worse, like YouTube eats more CPU than on chrome when it is not maximized and sometimes my connections to google time out for seemingly no reason.
- fhood 9y ago
  Should I get out my tinfoil hat or is it more likely that Chrome is just taking advantage of optimizations that other browsers don't have access to or knowledge of.
  - bugmen0t 9y ago
    They optimize for Chrome, since this is where their users mostly are and where they want them to be. No tinfoil hat required.
    - trumpeta 9y ago
      yes, I don't think its intentional, just a consequence of Chrome having so much market share.
- jmisavage 9y ago
  YouTube defaults to serving WebM on Firefox, but on a Mac there is no hardware support for video decoding WebMs like there is for h.264. BUT there is an awesome plugin called h264ify that will force YouTube to use the h.264 codec. I've been running it a while and it stops my fan from kicking on when visiting YouTube.
girzel 9y ago
Switched yesterday, so far loving it! My objection to Chrome was mostly on principle (anti-Google), so it's nice that there's a performance-based reason to switch to Firefox as well. Though I just ran into a problem that reminded me of why I stopped using Firefox in the first place: I used xdg-open a lot (in Emacs), and Firefox tries to supplant that whole functionality. It advertises itself as being able to open pretty much every file under the sun, and then prompts you to choose an application to actually use to open the file. I wasn't asking you, Firefox, I was asking xdg-open.
- scrollaway 9y ago
  It's better than it used to -- until a couple of years ago, Firefox altogether had its own awful version of xdg-open; had all the logic to detect file associations, select apps etc. In any event, you can edit ~/.config/mimeapps.list to fix it up. Hope that helps.
  - girzel 9y ago
    I believe it's better! But it is still trying to handle application/octet-stream. Ie, it must have registered itself as a default fallback somewhere, and I can't find where...
    - scrollaway 9y ago
      Your DE may be at fault as some of them try to do "smart" defaults. xdg-open itself may also be at fault (it's an atrociously bad shell script -- you can take a look at it if you want to debug it).
kpwags 9y ago
I switched about a month or so ago once Nightly hit 57. I have to say I love the speed and performance of it.
submeta 9y ago
It's been years that I abandoned Chrome ;) Was using Safari mainly and Firefox for web dev purposes. But FF 57 impressed me so much that I switched a couple of days ago, moving all my bookmarks, history, plugins etc to FF. Goodbye Safari, hello FF. :)
scrollaway 9y ago
I really, really wanted to switch, but I saw that switching tabs with mousewheel (which can be done in Chrome and most other Linux apps) is still not possible, and the Tab Wheel Scroll extension, which I previously used to work around the issue, is no longer compatible. So Firefox is unfortunately an unusable web browser for me :/
Scarbutt 9y ago
I can't, relying heavily on google docs and google keep lately. I have been browsing with FF 57, Chrome still feels faster to me.
- sp332 9y ago
  What's different in Google Docs in Chrome, that Google Docs in FF is missing?
  - Scarbutt 9y ago
    It freezes in FF from time to time.
inetknght 9y ago
I switched from Opera to Firefox with Firefox 56. Firefox 57 is just amazing -- although I had to go and kill all of that pocket bullshit.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
jacek 9y ago
I have switched to Firefox a long time ago. The main reason is privacy. I just trust Mozilla much more than Google (I actually don't trust Google at all). From Google Chrome Privacy Notice [1]: [...] Chrome usage statistics include information about the web pages you visit and your usage of them. [...] We may share aggregated, non-personally identifiable information publicly and with partners — like publishers, advertisers or web developers. [1] https://www.google.com/chrome/browser/privacy/index.html https://www.google.com/chrome/browser/privacy/index.html
- on_and_off 9y ago
  >We may share aggregated, non-personally identifiable information publicly and with partners — like publishers, advertisers or web developers. I don't really understand the issue people have with aggregated information. All the companies I have worked for have been tracking how people use their product. It does not feel like I am invading somebody's privacy by tracking that 20% of our users clicked on the banner in order to see the screen 'xy' and among them, 67% clicked on 'ok' . To be clear, I am only talking about aggregated information
  - jacek 9y ago
    I believe that no information about user actions and behaviors should be recorded by a browser. It does not benefit the user in any way, only Google and advertisers. Also we should remember that data needs to be stored first before it is aggregated. What happens with information about each single event?
    - derefr 9y ago
      > It does not benefit the user in any way Really? The browser-maker learning what features people use vs. don't, or what features are fast vs. slow on actual user machines, doesn't benefit the user by getting them a better browser over time? I would like it if the statistics from Chrome in particular, were sent to Chromium-project servers rather than Google servers, though. Even if only Google's derivative of Chromium is collecting the stats, the Chromium-project staff are who will (theoretically) make the best use of the information so collected; and so it'd be much better for them (as a non-profit org) to steward that data, rather than it ending up owned by Google. (Yes, yes, a majority of the Chromium-project staff are Google employees; that doesn't change how changing the data's ownership would change what Google thinks it has a right to do with it.)
FabianBeiner 9y ago
I did, because it just felt good to be back again. I also switched to Firefox on my Android now, because I can't life without the bookmark sync and stuff.
- CoolGuySteve 9y ago
  Is it on the Play Store yet? Whenever I look it up, the non-beta version is still at 56 on my Nexus phone.
hosh 9y ago
I already use container tabs for my dev. (Usually have to test an app using multiple test accounts). I have not figured out how to run a second copy of Firefox that is fixed into a different workspace -- but if I ever do, I will switch on my work laptop. My personal laptop, an old 2011 Mac Air is definitely switching. Chrome just runs too poorly on that now, and container tabs is too useful. It's really interesting, feel like coming to full circle. 10 years ago, I switched to Chrome because of the multi-process isolation -- Firefox leaks pretty badly then.
- bugmen0t 9y ago
  What you call workspace is likely called profiles. Try running Firefox --new-instance -p
  - hosh 9y ago
    What I call workspaces are an OSX-specific feature. I already knew about the `-p` flag.
esaym 9y ago
I never could leave FF because only it supported the auto scrolling feature with the middle mouse click.
laurent123456 9y ago
I've switched to Firefox from Chrome a few months ago in order to reduce my reliance on Google's products (also switched to duckduckgo at that time). I can't say I've noticed a big difference with version 57 as it was already fast enough for my use previously.
s17n 9y ago
I switched for one reason and one reason only: you can disable autocomplete in the address bar.
dominotw 9y ago
i use chromecast a lot and it doesn't work in firefox :\
- Viper007Bond 9y ago
  That's the only real reason I have Chrome installed, and really the only thing I use it for.
kbd 9y ago
Was considering switching, but didn't see a way to select multiple tabs at once to drag into a new window like you can in Chrome.
- Etheryte 9y ago
  Didn't even know you could do this, neat! Very convenient, I used to do it manually.
- guilhas 9y ago
  With this add-on you can select multiple tabs. Since before chrome existed. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/multiple-tab-handler/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/multiple-tab-...
fenwick67 9y ago
I switched when the 57 Beta came out, it was impressive enough to push me back over to FF again.
tmikaeld 9y ago
Switched after 9 years on chrome, three reasons. Speed, privacy and sync.
potta_coffee 9y ago
I'm proudly using Firefox, for several months now. When they initially launched FF Developer edition I tried it out, but it was just too slow. Now Firefox is very fast, the developer tools are great. I love it and I'll never willingly use Chrome again (maybe for testing/ QA).
hetspookjee 9y ago
I switched long ago from chrome to Edge because chrome can't scroll smoothly, it just can't. Firefox also wasnt able untill I think about 2 months ago? Not sure. Either way, I switched from Edge to Firefox 2 months ago because 1) Edge is a really poor browser aside from 4k video and the scrolling experience and 2) Mozilla is a great comany with a great product with such an insane amount of fearures. I just like smooth scrolling so much that I wasn't able to use it till it finally offered that feature. Couldn't be happier with Firefox ATM. Thanks Mozilla
exlurker 9y ago
I switched recently because someone here said they switched due to privacy concerns AND that it was really good. It struck a chord with me, I'm tired of goog and all seeing corporations. And it really is good! I don't miss Chrome one bit. Well done, Mozilla! By the way, I also defaulted to DuckDuckGo as the search engine, and so far I'm a happy camper.
hprotagonist 9y ago
I never stopped using FF. I'm holding off on upgrading until I find a replacement for TabMixPlus. I need something that will ensure: 1. middle-click to open links in new tabs. 2. address bar, search bar, and bookmarks open in a new tab by default.
- scrollaway 9y ago
  Your #1 is already the case by default. Mid-clicking bookmarks and items in the URL/search bar should also just work to open in new tab. If you're talking about entering an url and having it open in a new tab, that I don't know. Still looking for scroll wheel to switch tabs though... :|
  - hprotagonist 9y ago
    yeah, i want whacking the enter key to basically be guaranteed to give me a new tab.
Tomte 9y ago
I have. Now websites only need to support U2F with Firefox.
matt4077 9y ago
I thought network speed was the limiting factor for web browsing. But then I tried Firefox Quantum. I really don't have very many requirements for a browser except correctly rendering content, having bookmarks, and auto-filling as many forms and logins as possible. Since every browser more or less does these, I prefer Firefox for the speed, and because I want to support both Mozilla the organisation, as well as choice in the browser market.
mud_dauber 9y ago
I did a few weeks ago. (Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.) Chrome developed a weird habit of trying to render a semi-random URL as the default home page. Google's customer service folks asked for a couple of screen shots, then went radio silent. I've switched & love the improvement - it's quite impressive. Unfortunately Chrome is on its way to being the iTunes of browsers.
gtklocker 9y ago
This is making me really curious because while Chrome is buttery smooth on my Macbook Pro, Firefox 57 is really sluggish, especially when creating/closing tabs. You can literally see the animation stuttering. Other times when a page loads it won't paint for some seconds even if it appears that it has completed loading. Is anyone else having these issues?
- rene_bg 9y ago
  I have some similar issues. Sometimes Firefox lags after loading the page (around 1 sec), but eventually works fluently afterwards. It feels like it needs to warm up the engine. I noticed that disabling "smooth scrolling" in the settings helps with initial scrolling issues. However, in general I have the feeling that FF57 is faster than before. Could also be that I now focus on the loading times more than usual. A restart of Firefox helped yesterday after the upgrade to 57. I have a MacBook Pro 2015 and am Firefox user since 1.0 ;-)
jnevelson 9y ago
I tried (again) to switch to FF yesterday when 57 was released, and unfortunately still ran into a known bug that makes it practically unusable for me: FF treats underscores as punctuation that breaks up a word, so given text "foo_bar", if you double click on "foo" or "bar", it doesn't select the entire word. This goes against all conventions of Chrome, other text editors, etc. It seems trivial, but as developers we deal with underscores a lot, and copy text out of our browsers frequently. There's been a bug open about this for 15 years now: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=196175 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=196175
- Mandatum 9y ago
  That's possibly one of their strangest edge-cases I've seen for someone to dismiss a product. Or is this a case of HN-level trolling?
  - cannonedhamster 9y ago
    I don't know, if you develop and are used to being able to click a word or field of text, having to go through and highlight the word is more time consuming and potentially a flow breaker especially when you're talking about variables in some languages.
  - jnevelson 9y ago
    Haha. I can see how someone would think I'm trolling, but I assure you I'm not. It's a pretty deeply-ingrained behavior that I perform quite often, so yes, it does make a difference. FF57 is still not so much better than Chrome (to me, anyways) that it's worth dealing with re-learning this for me.
- cannonedhamster 9y ago
  I think the worst part of this was that there was a patch to bring this into line with other software and it just got ignored.
- Manishearth 9y ago
  double click, hold, flick/drag will select the next word. (if you drag-select after double clicking it goes by word not character).
joshka 9y ago
I switched about a week ago to FF57-beta (and now stable). The biggest thing I miss that doesn't seem possible to automatically add search urls to the tab completion like chrome does. E.g. if I go to e.g some-service.example.com/search?q=foo, in future, Chrome allows me to search that service again by typing `some<TAB>my-search-terms`. No massive setup needed. Firefox seems to only allow these from the extensions on the dev store.
- rene_bg 9y ago
  Probably an alternative: you can configure a keyword to a stored search engine. Then you can search like `a lean startup`, where `a` is a keyword followed by a blank for amazon.com. I found this to be very fast. It's also handy for translations, etc..
  - joshka 9y ago
    Thanks. This was exactly what I was looking for.
- forapurpose 9y ago
  You could use bookmark keywords in Firefox, which provide a similar function: 1. Create a bookmark for some-service.example.com/search?q=foo 2. Open the properties for the bookmark. Replace "foo" with "%s" (the universal string for bookmark keyword variables). In the keyword field, type some letter or string you'll remember; I'll use "q". Close the properties dialog. 3. In the URL field, type "q my-search-terms". (At least that worked in older versions of FF.) It requires more setup, but works permanently.
  - joshka 9y ago
    Thanks
  - ospfer 9y ago
    It appears that this process has been streamlined a bit. If you right-click in a search field on any site, the context menu has an option to "Add a keyword for this search." The new bookmark will then be created with the "%s" string in the appropriate position in the URL to make this work. I've set it up for a number of sites since converting over to Firefox yesterday and have yet to find a site that this method doesn't work for.
on_and_off 9y ago
I tried to yesterday. Gave up after two minutes when I did not see any performance change. I have a recent machine where Chrome is already pretty fast, I am not sure in which conditions it slows down, but it looks like they don't apply to me. Also, I would need a plugin in order to allow me to access my chrome tab history in Firefox. That way I would keep the same multi device experience while switching to FF on desktop. Otherwise, I lose a big feature I use extensively.
- yoklov 9y ago
  You should be able to import your history from chrome, and then use firefox sync. Or am I misunderstanding what you're looking for?
  - on_and_off 9y ago
    I mean being able to : - use chrome on Android (with chrome tabs and autofill it is a pretty nice experience) - firefox on the desktop And from any of these two, access a common list of opened tabs on all my devices. Actually, since Chrome on Android does not support extensions, no way to do this both ways, bummer.
    - neurostimulant 9y ago
      You can use firefox mobile instead of chrome on your mobile device to get the bookmark/history syncing with desktop firefox.
      - on_and_off 9y ago
        yeah but that means moving all my usage (desktop and mobile) to firefox. I feel it is harder for FF to compete on mobile. How does it integrate/compete with Chrome tabs on Android ?
bad_user 9y ago
I switched to Firefox about 3 years ago (can't remember exactly), because it's a better browser for me. Chrome was built for web apps, the other browsers were slow to adapt, so my initial use-case for Chrome was keeping stuff like Gmail and Slack active. But this slowly faded away. Slack has a desktop app and continues to be a piece of shit and for email I use MailMate (https://freron.com/ https://freron.com/) which is awesome btw. This meant that keeping persistent tabs with apps around wasn't such a priority. And in terms of usability, Firefox has had the better browsing experience for quite some time. Of course Firefox is now multi-process, stability and speed improved, I see it using less resources than Chrome and it's now good for web apps as well. I love Firefox's Awesome Bar, I love its new "Multi-Account Containers" add-on [1]. I also used an add-on for vertical tabs which was cool, but now due to the migration the community has to rebuild those. But seeing what they delivered with Quantum, I don't mind. From a technological, under the hood perspective, Chrome used to be the cool one. But now Firefox is slowly getting powered by Rust, which gets integrating for multi-core rendering algorithms. How freaking cool is that? Mozilla invented their own programming language in order to make Firefox better. Firefox is the best browser right now, but even if it weren't, I would still use it because I've learned to trust it and Mozilla that they are protecting my interests — I don't want another Internet Explorer, which Chrome is becoming due to its huge market share. Oh and I also use Pocket, now that Mozilla bought them. Could use some improvements, I'm still waiting on them to deliver the source code as promised, but it's a cool service and I'm happy to pay them some money. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
jitix 9y ago
Not switched default browser yet but I'm using FF57 as my main browser on my home PC and mac. On chromebook I'm stuck with chrome lol. So far browsing websites seem to be faster in general but when I use complex webapps like Spotify, JIRA, Netflix, etc. chrome still seems faster. I'll probably use for 2 weeks before I commit on a full switch (and import my bookmarks and switch over my work PC).
tbirrell 9y ago
I tried to switch, but FF does not allow local files to be loaded. Since I use a bunch of Tampermonkey scripts (which I save and edit locally), it was a non-starter for me. Perhaps if they ever fix this issue, I might try again.
giomasce 9y ago
I have been wanting to switch to FF for a lot of time, but insufficient performance used to hold me back. With FF 57 there are no excuses anymore, it's fantastic!
laci27 9y ago
- It feels a lot faster than Chrome - It uses less memory (especially with many tabs open) - multi-account containers are a game changer - I think it also looks better than Chrome
gressquel 9y ago
I just switched. Long time chome user aswell. The new FF has adopted the same design as Chrome and that is what brought me over. I think Chrome will lose some market share soon. I am actually a loyal person but Google started abusing its power to dictate how developers should write code. Aswell as putting unecessary constraints on things. Pissed me off
Master_of_Lemon 9y ago
Been using SeaMonkey since 2009. Never switched to anything else, and have no intentions to do so.
sparrish 9y ago
I just tried to switch again. Felt slower than chrome for the sites I use and my computer fans were spinning faster.
hokkos 9y ago
Yes, for 3 words : Tree, Style, Tab.
eecks 9y ago
I have mainly because I am trying to use less Google stuff.
submeta 9y ago
Can any Firefox pro here help me with the bookmark manager of FF? I can assign keywords to bookmarks (shortcuts), and I like that a lot. So if I assign the keyword `hn` to `https://news.ycombinator.com` https://news.ycombinator.com` I just need to enter `hn` in the URL bar. But assigning a keyword to a bookmark is too many clicks away: I need to open the bookmarks manager (`show all bookmarks`), select a bookmark, look at the bookmark properties in the bottom, expand two more fields: keyword and description. Now is there a shorter way to get this? Or an add on that works with FF 57? Also: Is there a way to filter all bookmarks with keywords assigned to them? This question has been asked in [1] several years ago, and back then it was possible to add a `keyword` column to the existing columns in `manage bookmarks`. [1] https://superuser.com/questions/479059/in-firefox-how-can-filter-bookmarks-with-non-empty-keywords https://superuser.com/questions/479059/in-firefox-how-can-fi... Edit: Added an explanation for the `keyword` feature.
- Mandatum 9y ago
  It appears they've removed the "Import" button, or hidden it away somewhere. In the meantime, if you're looking to make the switch and can't find it - it looks like you can drag and drop from Chrome bookmarks one at a time. EDIT: It appears to be completely removed from 57. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.places.importBookmarksHTML http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.places.importBookmarksHTML no longer exists. It makes sense given they've heavily moved away from the HTML storage. It was nice however, being able to quickly and easily share my workstation setup with new hires.
dorgo 9y ago
Nobody else has a problem with new tab? Really? I used to have a (local) html page as new tab. Guess what? They disabled this option a year ago. Ok, a nice person created an addon to recreate this option. It's called "new tab override". There is a version of this addon for firefox 57. But firefox doesn't allow addons to access file: urls for security reasons. So the recomendation of "new tab override" is to install a local web server. Wait a moment. I need an addon + a local web server to run a html file in new tab? Seriously? By the way: mouse gestures don't work in new tab (nor on mozilla.org) because its a chrome-url and addons are not allowed to access chrome-urls. Firefox 57 is really nice. But somehow it is a little pain.
asidiali 9y ago
Switched to Nightly about a month ago and haven’t looked back. Orders of magnitude better since I ditched FF a few years back.
Mandatum 9y ago
I'm switching over today. Performance was my only gripe with Firefox previously, and I really dislike the idea of feeding Google my usage information.
taf2 9y ago
I tried it out and found lots of edge cases with super high cpu. Also lots of janky scrolling...
cannonedhamster 9y ago
I just switched back on the latest release. * Sadly I'm missing a single really important Add-on and there are some annoying and apparently long-standing bugs that have been ignored and I've had to work around, but otherwise it's a major improvement and it's good enough to work with. * I'm glad that they've ditched the rounded tabs and cleaned up the interface. * I'm still annoyed that Pocket is integrated into everything without an option to disable it. * It is dramatically improved in speed and stability. * The browser animations are very pleasant. I'm giving it a chance to shine for the next week or so, if there are no blockers I'll probably end up sticking with it.
- quesera 9y ago
  You can disable pocket. Nav to about:config then search for extensions.pocket.enabled and do the obvious thing. :)
  - cannonedhamster 9y ago
    Nice, thanks for the heads up on that. A small thing makes a surprisingly big deal. I'm unsure as to why that isn't available in options other than the monetary reasons. Nothing against pocket personally, I just clutter it up enough on my own. :) Cheers.
vatotemking 9y ago
Me, far too many times. Everytime there's a "Why you should use Firefox" or" Using FF is the right thing to do" post on hackernews, I gave FF a chance, only to be disappointed and go back to Chrome. However, a few weeks ago, I decided to try out FF Quantum (aka FF 57, vanilla, non dev edition) after hearing it repeatedly in /r/rust and hackernews. I was immediately hooked with how fast it is at rendering pages. Now, the reason I always switch back to Chrome was because of the dev tools. With FF Quantum, the dev tools have vastly improved and is on par with Chrome. Its a bit wonky in some parts, but I can see that their UI are already in place, getting ready to be fully implemented in future releases. I've been using it as my main browser, wrote an add-on using their new API. For those considering to switch, I suggest you give it a few days to be familiar with the dev tools' UI/UX as it is not a direct copy of the Chrome UI/UX. Other than privacy, its a really great product. Its worth the switch.
- Balgair 9y ago
  > only to be disappointed and go back to Chrome. Me too. Unfortunately, it seems like Chrome is still wining for me over the new FF. For example, this comments section page takes about 3.5 seconds to load in Chrome and about 7.25 seconds in FF. I run a fair few privacy add-ons in each, so that may not be helping things, but still, a 2x increase in loading for a mostly text comments page is not cool (at least for me). Don't get me started on the YT main page ...
  - AndrewDucker 9y ago
    Took less than a second to load. (Running Adblock, but that's about it.)
    - Balgair 9y ago
      Different computers and networks have an effect. Still, for me, FF is ~2x longer.
- Manishearth 9y ago
  Please let us know if you'd like to see the devtools improved! Also, the devtools are actually a React app (https://github.com/devtools-html/debugger.html https://github.com/devtools-html/debugger.html), and this means that you can hack on them using ... your devtools (and any other HTML/JS/React tooling you like)! And you can hack on them in any browser, and use them to debug any browser (however some browsers may not support the same debugger protocol features the Firefox devtools support). They're super easy to work on and it's really fun. (Of course, there's also a devtools "server" on the firefox side that responds to the queries of the React devtools client, and hacking on that is harder, but a lot of the stuff can be done without needing to touch this)
jpeeler 9y ago
Yes! I wanted to switch back once Electrolysis [1] was turned on, but didn't believe the speed was comparable enough. Now, it is though. I stayed on Chrome for a while because Google Chrome became the best supported way to run flash for Linux users. Fortunately, these days I see flash less and less. So I'm not even going to bother installing it in Firefox (though I did think this plugin to run Google's flash plugin was interesting [2]). There are a few things I'll miss from Chrome. I'm currently a Project Fi subscriber, so I get my texts over hangouts (despite it looking like the writing is on the wall for that service) and used the hangouts extension heavily. I'd like to have the ability to cast a tab to my Chromecast. I'll also miss the fact that Chrome has a setting that allows relaxed localhost SSL verification (via chrome://flags/#allow-insecure-localhost - am I missing a Firefox setting?) Lastly, this has been mentioned in a few other comments, but for some reason I really like to be able to scroll through my tabs via mousewheel. Changing browsers has caused me to reevaluate my workflow. I never really looked into changing this in Chrome, but the tree style tab add-on really is a better way to handle lots of tabs. And I very much welcome the multi account containers add-on as well [3]. I'm repeating the blog of Mozilla when I say, this is just the beginning. I do believe that as more and more Rust is utilized, things will become even better. Super glad I'm able to enjoy using Firefox again! [1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis [2] https://github.com/i-rinat/freshplayerplugin https://github.com/i-rinat/freshplayerplugin [3] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
aewens 9y ago
Back when Firefox originally came out I was one of the first few adopters of it (primarily to escape Internet Explorer), but left it back in 2008 when Google Chrome came out because of it's speed. However, almost a decade later after having issues with Chrome on my new Linux rig and hearing all the fuss about Quantum I tried the Firefox Beta about a week ago (I'm not a patient man) and immediately fell in love with it. Not only was it faster, but it used half of the system resources that Chrome was using! I know some people are not thrilled with the loss of extensions, but having come to it at this time of transition I found all the extensions I had on Chrome and a few others that made my web browsing experience better than ever. I'm very excited about the new changes in Firefox and can't wait to see where they go from here.
x25519 9y ago
Is there any way to disable alphabetical sorting of network monitor's HTTP response headers? From 53.x (IIRC) to 56.x, Firefox keeps the original order set by the server (like the one you see in the raw headers section or `curl -I`), and I like it that way.
muzani 9y ago
I switched to a few weeks ago but it seems really laggy recently whenever I'm running Youtube in the background while on the private mode. I don't trust Chrome at all, and I'd much rather use Firefox, but it's unusable for me.
- muzani 9y ago
  Why are there downvotes for this?
ethhics 9y ago
I switched a few weeks ago, and this week I've switched to Nightly. I haven't used FF in around 5 years, and it's much, much nicer now. Containers are great, the customizability is awesome too: I wanted the bookmarks toolbar to only show up on the new tab page, and it took a single CSS rule to make that happen. Not to mention I feel it's more privacy-friendly.
bowlich 9y ago
Switched back when Rust went alpha. It encouraged me to really look into some of the side projects that Mozilla had going on and it made me really want to support them and see those projects succeed.
svardhan 9y ago
Hadn't opened FF for a while now, but started using it as my second browser along with chrome since yesterday and am pretty impressed.
grahamgooch 9y ago
I downloaded FF today, it's zippy. But I rely on dozens of Chrome extensions. That's one of the things I like about Chrome -- its extensibility. HOwever, Chrome is a memory hog, it routinely destroys the 16gb of memory and the battery of my MBPro. When FF has sn equivalent set of extensions, I will happily dump Chrome. Until then, it appears I'm stuck with Chrome
- Manishearth 9y ago
  Chrome extensions are now compatible with Firefox. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-store-foxified/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-store-... may help converting the format. Extensions which are incompatible can usually be ported with minor changes; IIRC at this point Firefox has all the APIs chrome does (and more), however certain things slightly differ (e.g. the chrome.foo API is browser.foo in firefox).
jvzr 9y ago
I had switched to Chrome a few years back, and had more recently switched to Opera (Blink) before it was bought up by the Chinese. I switched to Firefox when Nightly 57 was released, and haven't looked back since. Couldn't be happier. It's a pity so many long-time users of Firefox feel distraught about the Extensions kerfuffle, but fwiw if that allowed Firefox to get fast, then I was all for it. For my use cases, the available Web Extensions are enough. And I have even started to use Tree Style Tabs, while I was more than fine with regular horizontal tabs before.
tym0 9y ago
I switched on a trial basis, I am definitely liking the smooth UI, I can't stand the way it handles many tabs though, I find it even worse than chrome hiding the fav icons, for me Opera is doing it better.
YouKnowBetter 9y ago
I try / use FF every once in a while again. Always for specific test cases. But switching? NO. Why? Since currently only Google takes security serious and has the resources to actually do that. I understand and accept that "google knows thing via chrome" but they are not (a significant) part of my threatmodel.
pllbnk 9y ago
I have been always using Firefox and also Chrome (and more recently Opera) as a side browser for various less important activities. 57 didn't surprise me at all. It was good before and is still good now, nothing dramatically changed from the user's perspective since the 56 or other versions before that.
omosubi 9y ago
does anyone know how to disable those annoying requests to send notifications? in chrome you can disable them but I have not found a way to do it firefox
elrodeo 9y ago
I switched already 2 months ago on mobile because I got tired by non blockable ads in Chrome and absence of any reading mode. To be in sync with the desktop I switched on the desktop too. Never looked back. And now with the new UI it even looks nicer than Safari imo. Looking forward to 57 on mobile.
dinoop_p1 9y ago
I switched to firefox yesterday. it is lag free and fast. great
sridvijay 9y ago
I just switched too, seems very snappy, and honestly I just wanted a change in browsers (not sure why!)

I haven't used FF in years but I've been so impressed with 57 that I've finally come home. I'm wondering if I'm alone. If you switched, please let us know why you decided to switch.

fooker 9y ago

The interface still feels less streamlined compared to Chromium. Also sync was hit and miss, the same as 3-4 years ago when I last used Firefox.

Viper007Bond 9y ago
Odd, sync works great for me. I keep a huge history (365 days) and it syncs perfectly between all of my many devices.

baggachipz 9y ago

I have, temporarily. Some bugs and occasional slowness, coupled with more memory hogging, have me reconsidering.

derefr 9y ago
FF57 still consumes more memory than Chrome? For the same tabs? Or are you maybe experiencing some https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation — opening more tabs because they mostly "feel" lighter-weight?
- baggachipz 9y ago
  I opened the same exact tabs in both FF57 and Chrome (7 each) and sorted by memory usage in Activity Monitor. When adding up the main task and helpers, FF57 used significantly more.
  - seba_dos1 9y ago
    The pattern I noticed is that with small amount of tabs Firefox can consume more RAM, but the situation quickly changes in favor of Firefox when opening more of them.

gradyj 9y ago

I switched to test it, not sure yet whether or not I will stay using it all the time. I definitely notice the speed and the built in screenshot support is pretty nice.

dmlittle 9y ago

I really like container tabs (you have to enable them in about:config - privacy.userContext.enabled and privacy.userContext.ui.enabled). It allows me to have multiple AWS accounts open at the same time without having 2 different browsers or one account open in private mode. I have 2 main containers I use: production and staging.

ryduh 9y ago
Whoa. Didn't know about that. Definitely going to give FF a shot now. Thanks!
jpdb 9y ago
> It allows me to have multiple AWS accounts open at the same time I didn't think much about container tabs til I read this. This will be awesome for me. Thanks!
- StavrosK 9y ago
  I use containers to log in to Google and Facebook so I don't leak cookies on other websites. Then again, I block those cookies/trackers anyway, so eh.
jelder 9y ago
Chrome has this as a first-class feature, "People." I have one window open for personal, and another for each of the AWS accounts I have access to. Sounds from your description like FF can do this at the tab level?
- kogus 9y ago
  Yes, that's correct. The containers feature enables profiles on a per-tab basis. As someone who does a lot of account switching, it's a killer feature for me. I would imagine some users would not really find it necessary.
- howoddalien 9y ago
  Yea, firefox has profiles as well. Containers are different and apply your browsing context based on the tab. Super useful, you can also configure sites to open in a certain container. I do wish I could just pin an entire window to a container, but overall the flexibility is worth it. (I abhor having more than one window open per app at a time.)

FlyingLawnmower 9y ago

I switched. I really like the performance boost, and it just generally feels "snappier". I also had a long seeded desire to support FireFox, so now felt like a great time to jump ship.

vinnymac 9y ago

I usually have around 100+ tabs open in Chrome at any given time on my 2014 macbook pro. I have been testing out Firefox 57 for about a month now. I am very impressed by the devtools UI and the customization features. The speed is something I don't have to worry about at all, and makes it easier to compare Chrome to Firefox. I am fortunately not in a situation where any of my addons/extensions are unsupported on either browser. It has been fun to compare them and I think I will be switching completely to Firefox.

alistproducer2 9y ago

I guess I'll start it off. I've done a apples-to-apples compare on memory usage of 7 tabs with the same content and FF57 came in at 514 MG to chrome's 512 so that's basically a wash. The speed has been the main factor along with being able to step away from Google, if only a little bit.

aylmao 9y ago

I use Chrome as my secondary browser only when I need to inspect/develop, but I'm using Firefox more often now.

chrisdavar 9y ago

I have couldn't be more happier. The ability for Firefox nightly to modify requests and resend is a bonus. Also less sluggish and quicker. Ublock origin and last pass both supported with nightly.

apetresc 9y ago

I switched a few weeks ago when 57 hit the Nightly channel. The main incentive towards Firefox for me has always been the Tree Style Tab extension[1]; it's just that Chrome's better performance used to be a stronger incentive. Now they're more-or-less equal on that front. [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

pitaj 9y ago

I've been running FF Nightly for weeks now, and I really like it. It feels snappier than Chrome, and I hope it can bring back a significant portion of developers as well.

ohazi 9y ago

I switched on my work laptop a few months ago, with the knowledge that 57 was the one to look out for. Got the update yesterday and was impressed enough to switch at home as well. I've also been using Firefox on my phone for a while now, specifically so that I can run ublock origin and video speed controller, since mobile chrome doesn't support extensions.

steven_pack 9y ago

Yep. Like to see some competition and I’m a huge fan of rust, so like to support it any way I can. I hit minor compatibility issues on some sites, but it’s rare. Main thing I miss is auto shrinking tabs. FF doesn’t support the bajillion tabs methodology so well right now.

seba_dos1 9y ago
What? I have hundreds, sometimes low thousands of tabs open constantly - auto shrinking tabs is exactly what makes me despise Chrome. It's completely unusable once you reach circa 50 and mouse wheel becomes the only way to navigate them. In contrast, Firefox, thanks to no auto shrinking, is somewhat usable out of the box, and works wonderfully with extensions like Tab Center Redux or Tree Style Tabs.
Grumbledour 9y ago
Ha! That's funny! I used to say the same thing about chrome because the tabs shrunk so much I found them unusable. Also, opening too many tabs always gave me out of memory errors. But maybe you can get it more to your liking by tweaking browser.tabs.tab in about:config?
- steven_pack 9y ago
  Yes! This helps a lot actually. Thanks!

ojame 9y ago

I've given it a decent shot - but it still has very average profile support, which I use daily. In Chrome, it's easy to see what profile I'm using (top right corner of the window), and very easy to switch. In Firefox, you need to go to about:profiles to even see what profile you're currently using.

spacehunt 9y ago
Would containers work better for your use case?
ccakes 9y ago
Check out Containers - it goes a long way towards solving this problem. I also used to rely heavily on Chrome profiles https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Contextual_Identity_Project/Containers https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Contextual_Identity_Projec...
- ojame 9y ago
  Containers seem like a compromise that I can live with to give FF57 a better shot. They share history/bookmarks, which I'm not a fan of. I prefer my work profiles not to have reddit/hacker news etc. in the auto fill address bar.
jraph 9y ago
Maybe you could use a different theme for each profile, or put different buttons or buttons in different order in the toolbar? Maybe there could be an extension that shows the name of the current profile and/or an image/text chosen by the user in the toolbar or the tab bar? The extension would have to be installed in each profile, but this is to be done only once. Please still my idea, whether you are a Firefox or an addon developer!

peyloride 9y ago

I did the switch. The only time I switch the Chrome back is using to debug some angular code. For an odd reason, Firefox shows stack traces too ugly.

Xcelerate 9y ago

I've used Chrome continuously ever since it was released, but today I switched to Firefox on both my work and personal laptops. Both machines are Macbook Pros, one 2012 and the other 2017, and Chrome feels laggy on both. Scrolling is not smooth, and certain web applications are just downright unpleasant to use (notably, Jupyter notebooks and Facebook). I gave Firefox Quantum a try, and it's an amazing improvement. This is more how I imagined computers to function in 2017 to be honest. There is no noticeable lag on either machine. So I'll be sticking with Firefox for the foreseeable future.

ConnerFritz 9y ago
This has just convinced me to try it.

bichiliad 9y ago

With the exception of casting things to my chromecast, I've switched to Firefox for everything. Performance isn't an issue, development tools are really good, I can be "that guy at work who catches firefox bugs," and I'd rather support Mozilla than Google at the end of the day.

skizm 9y ago

I want to uninstall chrome, but can't find a good replacement for chrome report desktop. It just works so seamlessly on all devices, including mobile. Any suggestions?

sp332 9y ago
Remote desktop?
Viper007Bond 9y ago
I use TeamViewer personally. I prefer it to Chrome Remote Desktop.

scotttrinh 9y ago

I've been using Nightly for about 2 months for personal browsing, and have recently switched to using it for my web development job using containers, and it's been great. Biggest feature I'd like to see is a keyboard shortcut for opening a new tab in a particular container, as opposed to Cmd+T opening an uncontained tab. The Developer Tools still have a ways to go before they beat the performance of Chrome (large source files lag), but it's perfectly usable and getting better all the time. All in all, I've been very happy with my switch, especially when Quantum landed in Nightly: a noticeable increase in speed and snappiness!

edgartaor 9y ago
>Biggest feature I'd like to see is a keyboard shortcut for opening a new tab in a particular container, as opposed to Cmd+T opening an uncontained tab. Exactly this. We need keyboard shortcuts for containers.
smasty 9y ago
When using the extension, you can use Ctrl+[dot] to open the container selector and then use arrows/tab and enter to select the container to open a new tab in. It's not as good as a dedicated shortcut, but it lets you open new container tabs without leaving your keyboard.

alehul 9y ago

Switched to Firefox on Macbook Pro. It feels faster, but my two main complaints: 1. While using the touchpad to go 'back', a page on Safari will show you the page you're going back to. Chrome will at least offer an arrow animation backwards. Firefox offers no such thing, often leaving me confused as to whether it's registered. A couple times so far it has instead scrolled me up the page a bit. 2. I have nothing else open, yet certain actions (i.e. scrolling through Zillow pictures earlier) will result in it sporadically using so much memory that my computer's fans are audibly loud and the computer gets quite hot. Nonetheless, I still would narrowly recommend it, though some of that is likely to do with wanting to support Mozilla.

dtf 9y ago

2010 macbook, Chrome user. Things are generally slow, but felt like they got a bit snappier after the High Sierra upgrade. I tried FF57 but for me it feels a bit slower than Chrome on this older device.

Humphrey 9y ago

I never stopped using Firefox, but for years was only using it for an isolated development environment. But I've been using Firefox 57 for a few month, and it's great. I still use Chrome, but I'm probably spending equal time in both now.

j45 9y ago

I switched to Firefox Nightly about a month ago and have made it back into Chromium less and less.

joejoebob 9y ago

I am. Really enjoying it!

Cyph0n 9y ago

I switched yesterday from Chrome to FF 57 on my MBP 2014. Chrome was faster, but now FF is the clear winner. On Windows, I have been using FF for the past 10 years. Also, Firefox Sync is just amazing.

corford 9y ago

I never left FF so picked 57 up as a normal update. Love everything about it so far except the new theme which is taking me longer than I'd like to adjust to (not a big fan of the dark blue/cobalt menubar).

dochtman 9y ago
You know there's a light theme you can switch to in Customize mode, right?
- corford 9y ago
  I do now :) Thanks.
zie 9y ago
and there are a TON of themes available for FF here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/themes/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/themes/

alanbernstein 9y ago

Firefox was my first choice ever since it came out, but I stopped using it when it got unstable a few years ago (even on a brand new macbook!). I've been using nightly for about a month with no crashes, so I'm mostly happy with it. Sometimes it goes crazy with CPU and I have to close a few tabs. I'm still using Chrome as well, for now.

ccakes 9y ago

I've been on FF Nightly for the last couple of months but recently switched back to Safari. On a MacBook 12" (i5) Firefox did terrible things to the battery life and generated enough heat that I'd often find the CPU throttling. Neither Safari or Chrome have the same issues. I haven't really tried FF since the nightly jumped to 59 but I keep it updated and occasionally check to see whether this has been fixed.

danilocesar 9y ago

I rely on Chrome and Google's integration. I'm pretty sure I would catch on fire if I try to change... ps: I use both, chrome for personal stuff and FF for work.

trumpeta 9y ago

Me! I have been running nightly for the past couple of months and it is really good. I use uBlock, Res, Ghostery and Imagus. I use Compact and Dark UI mode and it seems more compact than chrome. Also I noticed it consumes a lot less memory, but CPU is 50/50 I'd say. One thing that I find a bit weird is that I find that some Google services work worse, like YouTube eats more CPU than on chrome when it is not maximized and sometimes my connections to google time out for seemingly no reason.

fhood 9y ago
Should I get out my tinfoil hat or is it more likely that Chrome is just taking advantage of optimizations that other browsers don't have access to or knowledge of.
- bugmen0t 9y ago
  They optimize for Chrome, since this is where their users mostly are and where they want them to be. No tinfoil hat required.
  - trumpeta 9y ago
    yes, I don't think its intentional, just a consequence of Chrome having so much market share.
jmisavage 9y ago
YouTube defaults to serving WebM on Firefox, but on a Mac there is no hardware support for video decoding WebMs like there is for h.264. BUT there is an awesome plugin called h264ify that will force YouTube to use the h.264 codec. I've been running it a while and it stops my fan from kicking on when visiting YouTube.

girzel 9y ago

Switched yesterday, so far loving it! My objection to Chrome was mostly on principle (anti-Google), so it's nice that there's a performance-based reason to switch to Firefox as well. Though I just ran into a problem that reminded me of why I stopped using Firefox in the first place: I used xdg-open a lot (in Emacs), and Firefox tries to supplant that whole functionality. It advertises itself as being able to open pretty much every file under the sun, and then prompts you to choose an application to actually use to open the file. I wasn't asking you, Firefox, I was asking xdg-open.

scrollaway 9y ago
It's better than it used to -- until a couple of years ago, Firefox altogether had its own awful version of xdg-open; had all the logic to detect file associations, select apps etc. In any event, you can edit ~/.config/mimeapps.list to fix it up. Hope that helps.
- girzel 9y ago
  I believe it's better! But it is still trying to handle application/octet-stream. Ie, it must have registered itself as a default fallback somewhere, and I can't find where...
  - scrollaway 9y ago
    Your DE may be at fault as some of them try to do "smart" defaults. xdg-open itself may also be at fault (it's an atrociously bad shell script -- you can take a look at it if you want to debug it).

kpwags 9y ago

I switched about a month or so ago once Nightly hit 57. I have to say I love the speed and performance of it.

submeta 9y ago

It's been years that I abandoned Chrome ;) Was using Safari mainly and Firefox for web dev purposes. But FF 57 impressed me so much that I switched a couple of days ago, moving all my bookmarks, history, plugins etc to FF. Goodbye Safari, hello FF. :)

scrollaway 9y ago

I really, really wanted to switch, but I saw that switching tabs with mousewheel (which can be done in Chrome and most other Linux apps) is still not possible, and the Tab Wheel Scroll extension, which I previously used to work around the issue, is no longer compatible. So Firefox is unfortunately an unusable web browser for me :/

Scarbutt 9y ago

I can't, relying heavily on google docs and google keep lately. I have been browsing with FF 57, Chrome still feels faster to me.

sp332 9y ago
What's different in Google Docs in Chrome, that Google Docs in FF is missing?
- Scarbutt 9y ago
  It freezes in FF from time to time.

inetknght 9y ago

I switched from Opera to Firefox with Firefox 56. Firefox 57 is just amazing -- although I had to go and kill all of that pocket bullshit.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

jacek 9y ago

I have switched to Firefox a long time ago. The main reason is privacy. I just trust Mozilla much more than Google (I actually don't trust Google at all). From Google Chrome Privacy Notice [1]: [...] Chrome usage statistics include information about the web pages you visit and your usage of them. [...] We may share aggregated, non-personally identifiable information publicly and with partners — like publishers, advertisers or web developers. [1] https://www.google.com/chrome/browser/privacy/index.html https://www.google.com/chrome/browser/privacy/index.html

on_and_off 9y ago
>We may share aggregated, non-personally identifiable information publicly and with partners — like publishers, advertisers or web developers. I don't really understand the issue people have with aggregated information. All the companies I have worked for have been tracking how people use their product. It does not feel like I am invading somebody's privacy by tracking that 20% of our users clicked on the banner in order to see the screen 'xy' and among them, 67% clicked on 'ok' . To be clear, I am only talking about aggregated information
- jacek 9y ago
  I believe that no information about user actions and behaviors should be recorded by a browser. It does not benefit the user in any way, only Google and advertisers. Also we should remember that data needs to be stored first before it is aggregated. What happens with information about each single event?
  - derefr 9y ago
    > It does not benefit the user in any way Really? The browser-maker learning what features people use vs. don't, or what features are fast vs. slow on actual user machines, doesn't benefit the user by getting them a better browser over time? I would like it if the statistics from Chrome in particular, were sent to Chromium-project servers rather than Google servers, though. Even if only Google's derivative of Chromium is collecting the stats, the Chromium-project staff are who will (theoretically) make the best use of the information so collected; and so it'd be much better for them (as a non-profit org) to steward that data, rather than it ending up owned by Google. (Yes, yes, a majority of the Chromium-project staff are Google employees; that doesn't change how changing the data's ownership would change what Google thinks it has a right to do with it.)

FabianBeiner 9y ago

I did, because it just felt good to be back again. I also switched to Firefox on my Android now, because I can't life without the bookmark sync and stuff.

CoolGuySteve 9y ago
Is it on the Play Store yet? Whenever I look it up, the non-beta version is still at 56 on my Nexus phone.

hosh 9y ago

I already use container tabs for my dev. (Usually have to test an app using multiple test accounts). I have not figured out how to run a second copy of Firefox that is fixed into a different workspace -- but if I ever do, I will switch on my work laptop. My personal laptop, an old 2011 Mac Air is definitely switching. Chrome just runs too poorly on that now, and container tabs is too useful. It's really interesting, feel like coming to full circle. 10 years ago, I switched to Chrome because of the multi-process isolation -- Firefox leaks pretty badly then.

bugmen0t 9y ago
What you call workspace is likely called profiles. Try running Firefox --new-instance -p
- hosh 9y ago
  What I call workspaces are an OSX-specific feature. I already knew about the `-p` flag.

esaym 9y ago

I never could leave FF because only it supported the auto scrolling feature with the middle mouse click.

laurent123456 9y ago

I've switched to Firefox from Chrome a few months ago in order to reduce my reliance on Google's products (also switched to duckduckgo at that time). I can't say I've noticed a big difference with version 57 as it was already fast enough for my use previously.

s17n 9y ago

I switched for one reason and one reason only: you can disable autocomplete in the address bar.

dominotw 9y ago

i use chromecast a lot and it doesn't work in firefox :\

Viper007Bond 9y ago
That's the only real reason I have Chrome installed, and really the only thing I use it for.

kbd 9y ago

Was considering switching, but didn't see a way to select multiple tabs at once to drag into a new window like you can in Chrome.

Etheryte 9y ago
Didn't even know you could do this, neat! Very convenient, I used to do it manually.
guilhas 9y ago
With this add-on you can select multiple tabs. Since before chrome existed. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/multiple-tab-handler/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/multiple-tab-...

fenwick67 9y ago

I switched when the 57 Beta came out, it was impressive enough to push me back over to FF again.

tmikaeld 9y ago

Switched after 9 years on chrome, three reasons. Speed, privacy and sync.

potta_coffee 9y ago

I'm proudly using Firefox, for several months now. When they initially launched FF Developer edition I tried it out, but it was just too slow. Now Firefox is very fast, the developer tools are great. I love it and I'll never willingly use Chrome again (maybe for testing/ QA).

hetspookjee 9y ago

I switched long ago from chrome to Edge because chrome can't scroll smoothly, it just can't. Firefox also wasnt able untill I think about 2 months ago? Not sure. Either way, I switched from Edge to Firefox 2 months ago because 1) Edge is a really poor browser aside from 4k video and the scrolling experience and 2) Mozilla is a great comany with a great product with such an insane amount of fearures. I just like smooth scrolling so much that I wasn't able to use it till it finally offered that feature. Couldn't be happier with Firefox ATM. Thanks Mozilla

exlurker 9y ago

I switched recently because someone here said they switched due to privacy concerns AND that it was really good. It struck a chord with me, I'm tired of goog and all seeing corporations. And it really is good! I don't miss Chrome one bit. Well done, Mozilla! By the way, I also defaulted to DuckDuckGo as the search engine, and so far I'm a happy camper.

hprotagonist 9y ago

I never stopped using FF. I'm holding off on upgrading until I find a replacement for TabMixPlus. I need something that will ensure: 1. middle-click to open links in new tabs. 2. address bar, search bar, and bookmarks open in a new tab by default.

scrollaway 9y ago
Your #1 is already the case by default. Mid-clicking bookmarks and items in the URL/search bar should also just work to open in new tab. If you're talking about entering an url and having it open in a new tab, that I don't know. Still looking for scroll wheel to switch tabs though... :|
- hprotagonist 9y ago
  yeah, i want whacking the enter key to basically be guaranteed to give me a new tab.

Tomte 9y ago

I have. Now websites only need to support U2F with Firefox.

matt4077 9y ago

I thought network speed was the limiting factor for web browsing. But then I tried Firefox Quantum. I really don't have very many requirements for a browser except correctly rendering content, having bookmarks, and auto-filling as many forms and logins as possible. Since every browser more or less does these, I prefer Firefox for the speed, and because I want to support both Mozilla the organisation, as well as choice in the browser market.

mud_dauber 9y ago

I did a few weeks ago. (Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.) Chrome developed a weird habit of trying to render a semi-random URL as the default home page. Google's customer service folks asked for a couple of screen shots, then went radio silent. I've switched & love the improvement - it's quite impressive. Unfortunately Chrome is on its way to being the iTunes of browsers.

gtklocker 9y ago

This is making me really curious because while Chrome is buttery smooth on my Macbook Pro, Firefox 57 is really sluggish, especially when creating/closing tabs. You can literally see the animation stuttering. Other times when a page loads it won't paint for some seconds even if it appears that it has completed loading. Is anyone else having these issues?

rene_bg 9y ago
I have some similar issues. Sometimes Firefox lags after loading the page (around 1 sec), but eventually works fluently afterwards. It feels like it needs to warm up the engine. I noticed that disabling "smooth scrolling" in the settings helps with initial scrolling issues. However, in general I have the feeling that FF57 is faster than before. Could also be that I now focus on the loading times more than usual. A restart of Firefox helped yesterday after the upgrade to 57. I have a MacBook Pro 2015 and am Firefox user since 1.0 ;-)

jnevelson 9y ago

I tried (again) to switch to FF yesterday when 57 was released, and unfortunately still ran into a known bug that makes it practically unusable for me: FF treats underscores as punctuation that breaks up a word, so given text "foo_bar", if you double click on "foo" or "bar", it doesn't select the entire word. This goes against all conventions of Chrome, other text editors, etc. It seems trivial, but as developers we deal with underscores a lot, and copy text out of our browsers frequently. There's been a bug open about this for 15 years now: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=196175 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=196175

Mandatum 9y ago
That's possibly one of their strangest edge-cases I've seen for someone to dismiss a product. Or is this a case of HN-level trolling?
- cannonedhamster 9y ago
  I don't know, if you develop and are used to being able to click a word or field of text, having to go through and highlight the word is more time consuming and potentially a flow breaker especially when you're talking about variables in some languages.
- jnevelson 9y ago
  Haha. I can see how someone would think I'm trolling, but I assure you I'm not. It's a pretty deeply-ingrained behavior that I perform quite often, so yes, it does make a difference. FF57 is still not so much better than Chrome (to me, anyways) that it's worth dealing with re-learning this for me.
cannonedhamster 9y ago
I think the worst part of this was that there was a patch to bring this into line with other software and it just got ignored.
Manishearth 9y ago
double click, hold, flick/drag will select the next word. (if you drag-select after double clicking it goes by word not character).

joshka 9y ago

I switched about a week ago to FF57-beta (and now stable). The biggest thing I miss that doesn't seem possible to automatically add search urls to the tab completion like chrome does. E.g. if I go to e.g some-service.example.com/search?q=foo, in future, Chrome allows me to search that service again by typing `some<TAB>my-search-terms`. No massive setup needed. Firefox seems to only allow these from the extensions on the dev store.

rene_bg 9y ago
Probably an alternative: you can configure a keyword to a stored search engine. Then you can search like `a lean startup`, where `a` is a keyword followed by a blank for amazon.com. I found this to be very fast. It's also handy for translations, etc..
- joshka 9y ago
  Thanks. This was exactly what I was looking for.
forapurpose 9y ago
You could use bookmark keywords in Firefox, which provide a similar function: 1. Create a bookmark for some-service.example.com/search?q=foo 2. Open the properties for the bookmark. Replace "foo" with "%s" (the universal string for bookmark keyword variables). In the keyword field, type some letter or string you'll remember; I'll use "q". Close the properties dialog. 3. In the URL field, type "q my-search-terms". (At least that worked in older versions of FF.) It requires more setup, but works permanently.
- joshka 9y ago
  Thanks
- ospfer 9y ago
  It appears that this process has been streamlined a bit. If you right-click in a search field on any site, the context menu has an option to "Add a keyword for this search." The new bookmark will then be created with the "%s" string in the appropriate position in the URL to make this work. I've set it up for a number of sites since converting over to Firefox yesterday and have yet to find a site that this method doesn't work for.

on_and_off 9y ago

I tried to yesterday. Gave up after two minutes when I did not see any performance change. I have a recent machine where Chrome is already pretty fast, I am not sure in which conditions it slows down, but it looks like they don't apply to me. Also, I would need a plugin in order to allow me to access my chrome tab history in Firefox. That way I would keep the same multi device experience while switching to FF on desktop. Otherwise, I lose a big feature I use extensively.

yoklov 9y ago
You should be able to import your history from chrome, and then use firefox sync. Or am I misunderstanding what you're looking for?
- on_and_off 9y ago
  I mean being able to : - use chrome on Android (with chrome tabs and autofill it is a pretty nice experience) - firefox on the desktop And from any of these two, access a common list of opened tabs on all my devices. Actually, since Chrome on Android does not support extensions, no way to do this both ways, bummer.
  - neurostimulant 9y ago
    You can use firefox mobile instead of chrome on your mobile device to get the bookmark/history syncing with desktop firefox.
    - on_and_off 9y ago
      yeah but that means moving all my usage (desktop and mobile) to firefox. I feel it is harder for FF to compete on mobile. How does it integrate/compete with Chrome tabs on Android ?

bad_user 9y ago

I switched to Firefox about 3 years ago (can't remember exactly), because it's a better browser for me. Chrome was built for web apps, the other browsers were slow to adapt, so my initial use-case for Chrome was keeping stuff like Gmail and Slack active. But this slowly faded away. Slack has a desktop app and continues to be a piece of shit and for email I use MailMate (https://freron.com/ https://freron.com/) which is awesome btw. This meant that keeping persistent tabs with apps around wasn't such a priority. And in terms of usability, Firefox has had the better browsing experience for quite some time. Of course Firefox is now multi-process, stability and speed improved, I see it using less resources than Chrome and it's now good for web apps as well. I love Firefox's Awesome Bar, I love its new "Multi-Account Containers" add-on [1]. I also used an add-on for vertical tabs which was cool, but now due to the migration the community has to rebuild those. But seeing what they delivered with Quantum, I don't mind. From a technological, under the hood perspective, Chrome used to be the cool one. But now Firefox is slowly getting powered by Rust, which gets integrating for multi-core rendering algorithms. How freaking cool is that? Mozilla invented their own programming language in order to make Firefox better. Firefox is the best browser right now, but even if it weren't, I would still use it because I've learned to trust it and Mozilla that they are protecting my interests — I don't want another Internet Explorer, which Chrome is becoming due to its huge market share. Oh and I also use Pocket, now that Mozilla bought them. Could use some improvements, I'm still waiting on them to deliver the source code as promised, but it's a cool service and I'm happy to pay them some money. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

jitix 9y ago

Not switched default browser yet but I'm using FF57 as my main browser on my home PC and mac. On chromebook I'm stuck with chrome lol. So far browsing websites seem to be faster in general but when I use complex webapps like Spotify, JIRA, Netflix, etc. chrome still seems faster. I'll probably use for 2 weeks before I commit on a full switch (and import my bookmarks and switch over my work PC).

tbirrell 9y ago

I tried to switch, but FF does not allow local files to be loaded. Since I use a bunch of Tampermonkey scripts (which I save and edit locally), it was a non-starter for me. Perhaps if they ever fix this issue, I might try again.

giomasce 9y ago

I have been wanting to switch to FF for a lot of time, but insufficient performance used to hold me back. With FF 57 there are no excuses anymore, it's fantastic!

laci27 9y ago

- It feels a lot faster than Chrome - It uses less memory (especially with many tabs open) - multi-account containers are a game changer - I think it also looks better than Chrome

gressquel 9y ago

I just switched. Long time chome user aswell. The new FF has adopted the same design as Chrome and that is what brought me over. I think Chrome will lose some market share soon. I am actually a loyal person but Google started abusing its power to dictate how developers should write code. Aswell as putting unecessary constraints on things. Pissed me off

Master_of_Lemon 9y ago

Been using SeaMonkey since 2009. Never switched to anything else, and have no intentions to do so.

sparrish 9y ago

I just tried to switch again. Felt slower than chrome for the sites I use and my computer fans were spinning faster.

hokkos 9y ago

Yes, for 3 words : Tree, Style, Tab.

eecks 9y ago

I have mainly because I am trying to use less Google stuff.

submeta 9y ago

Can any Firefox pro here help me with the bookmark manager of FF? I can assign keywords to bookmarks (shortcuts), and I like that a lot. So if I assign the keyword `hn` to `https://news.ycombinator.com` https://news.ycombinator.com` I just need to enter `hn` in the URL bar. But assigning a keyword to a bookmark is too many clicks away: I need to open the bookmarks manager (`show all bookmarks`), select a bookmark, look at the bookmark properties in the bottom, expand two more fields: keyword and description. Now is there a shorter way to get this? Or an add on that works with FF 57? Also: Is there a way to filter all bookmarks with keywords assigned to them? This question has been asked in [1] several years ago, and back then it was possible to add a `keyword` column to the existing columns in `manage bookmarks`. [1] https://superuser.com/questions/479059/in-firefox-how-can-filter-bookmarks-with-non-empty-keywords https://superuser.com/questions/479059/in-firefox-how-can-fi... Edit: Added an explanation for the `keyword` feature.

Mandatum 9y ago
It appears they've removed the "Import" button, or hidden it away somewhere. In the meantime, if you're looking to make the switch and can't find it - it looks like you can drag and drop from Chrome bookmarks one at a time. EDIT: It appears to be completely removed from 57. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.places.importBookmarksHTML http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.places.importBookmarksHTML no longer exists. It makes sense given they've heavily moved away from the HTML storage. It was nice however, being able to quickly and easily share my workstation setup with new hires.

dorgo 9y ago

Nobody else has a problem with new tab? Really? I used to have a (local) html page as new tab. Guess what? They disabled this option a year ago. Ok, a nice person created an addon to recreate this option. It's called "new tab override". There is a version of this addon for firefox 57. But firefox doesn't allow addons to access file: urls for security reasons. So the recomendation of "new tab override" is to install a local web server. Wait a moment. I need an addon + a local web server to run a html file in new tab? Seriously? By the way: mouse gestures don't work in new tab (nor on mozilla.org) because its a chrome-url and addons are not allowed to access chrome-urls. Firefox 57 is really nice. But somehow it is a little pain.

asidiali 9y ago

Switched to Nightly about a month ago and haven’t looked back. Orders of magnitude better since I ditched FF a few years back.

Mandatum 9y ago

I'm switching over today. Performance was my only gripe with Firefox previously, and I really dislike the idea of feeding Google my usage information.

taf2 9y ago

I tried it out and found lots of edge cases with super high cpu. Also lots of janky scrolling...

cannonedhamster 9y ago

I just switched back on the latest release. * Sadly I'm missing a single really important Add-on and there are some annoying and apparently long-standing bugs that have been ignored and I've had to work around, but otherwise it's a major improvement and it's good enough to work with. * I'm glad that they've ditched the rounded tabs and cleaned up the interface. * I'm still annoyed that Pocket is integrated into everything without an option to disable it. * It is dramatically improved in speed and stability. * The browser animations are very pleasant. I'm giving it a chance to shine for the next week or so, if there are no blockers I'll probably end up sticking with it.

quesera 9y ago
You can disable pocket. Nav to about:config then search for extensions.pocket.enabled and do the obvious thing. :)
- cannonedhamster 9y ago
  Nice, thanks for the heads up on that. A small thing makes a surprisingly big deal. I'm unsure as to why that isn't available in options other than the monetary reasons. Nothing against pocket personally, I just clutter it up enough on my own. :) Cheers.

vatotemking 9y ago

Me, far too many times. Everytime there's a "Why you should use Firefox" or" Using FF is the right thing to do" post on hackernews, I gave FF a chance, only to be disappointed and go back to Chrome. However, a few weeks ago, I decided to try out FF Quantum (aka FF 57, vanilla, non dev edition) after hearing it repeatedly in /r/rust and hackernews. I was immediately hooked with how fast it is at rendering pages. Now, the reason I always switch back to Chrome was because of the dev tools. With FF Quantum, the dev tools have vastly improved and is on par with Chrome. Its a bit wonky in some parts, but I can see that their UI are already in place, getting ready to be fully implemented in future releases. I've been using it as my main browser, wrote an add-on using their new API. For those considering to switch, I suggest you give it a few days to be familiar with the dev tools' UI/UX as it is not a direct copy of the Chrome UI/UX. Other than privacy, its a really great product. Its worth the switch.

Balgair 9y ago
> only to be disappointed and go back to Chrome. Me too. Unfortunately, it seems like Chrome is still wining for me over the new FF. For example, this comments section page takes about 3.5 seconds to load in Chrome and about 7.25 seconds in FF. I run a fair few privacy add-ons in each, so that may not be helping things, but still, a 2x increase in loading for a mostly text comments page is not cool (at least for me). Don't get me started on the YT main page ...
- AndrewDucker 9y ago
  Took less than a second to load. (Running Adblock, but that's about it.)
  - Balgair 9y ago
    Different computers and networks have an effect. Still, for me, FF is ~2x longer.
Manishearth 9y ago
Please let us know if you'd like to see the devtools improved! Also, the devtools are actually a React app (https://github.com/devtools-html/debugger.html https://github.com/devtools-html/debugger.html), and this means that you can hack on them using ... your devtools (and any other HTML/JS/React tooling you like)! And you can hack on them in any browser, and use them to debug any browser (however some browsers may not support the same debugger protocol features the Firefox devtools support). They're super easy to work on and it's really fun. (Of course, there's also a devtools "server" on the firefox side that responds to the queries of the React devtools client, and hacking on that is harder, but a lot of the stuff can be done without needing to touch this)

jpeeler 9y ago

Yes! I wanted to switch back once Electrolysis [1] was turned on, but didn't believe the speed was comparable enough. Now, it is though. I stayed on Chrome for a while because Google Chrome became the best supported way to run flash for Linux users. Fortunately, these days I see flash less and less. So I'm not even going to bother installing it in Firefox (though I did think this plugin to run Google's flash plugin was interesting [2]). There are a few things I'll miss from Chrome. I'm currently a Project Fi subscriber, so I get my texts over hangouts (despite it looking like the writing is on the wall for that service) and used the hangouts extension heavily. I'd like to have the ability to cast a tab to my Chromecast. I'll also miss the fact that Chrome has a setting that allows relaxed localhost SSL verification (via chrome://flags/#allow-insecure-localhost - am I missing a Firefox setting?) Lastly, this has been mentioned in a few other comments, but for some reason I really like to be able to scroll through my tabs via mousewheel. Changing browsers has caused me to reevaluate my workflow. I never really looked into changing this in Chrome, but the tree style tab add-on really is a better way to handle lots of tabs. And I very much welcome the multi account containers add-on as well [3]. I'm repeating the blog of Mozilla when I say, this is just the beginning. I do believe that as more and more Rust is utilized, things will become even better. Super glad I'm able to enjoy using Firefox again! [1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis [2] https://github.com/i-rinat/freshplayerplugin https://github.com/i-rinat/freshplayerplugin [3] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

aewens 9y ago

Back when Firefox originally came out I was one of the first few adopters of it (primarily to escape Internet Explorer), but left it back in 2008 when Google Chrome came out because of it's speed. However, almost a decade later after having issues with Chrome on my new Linux rig and hearing all the fuss about Quantum I tried the Firefox Beta about a week ago (I'm not a patient man) and immediately fell in love with it. Not only was it faster, but it used half of the system resources that Chrome was using! I know some people are not thrilled with the loss of extensions, but having come to it at this time of transition I found all the extensions I had on Chrome and a few others that made my web browsing experience better than ever. I'm very excited about the new changes in Firefox and can't wait to see where they go from here.

x25519 9y ago

Is there any way to disable alphabetical sorting of network monitor's HTTP response headers? From 53.x (IIRC) to 56.x, Firefox keeps the original order set by the server (like the one you see in the raw headers section or `curl -I`), and I like it that way.

muzani 9y ago

I switched to a few weeks ago but it seems really laggy recently whenever I'm running Youtube in the background while on the private mode. I don't trust Chrome at all, and I'd much rather use Firefox, but it's unusable for me.

muzani 9y ago
Why are there downvotes for this?

ethhics 9y ago

I switched a few weeks ago, and this week I've switched to Nightly. I haven't used FF in around 5 years, and it's much, much nicer now. Containers are great, the customizability is awesome too: I wanted the bookmarks toolbar to only show up on the new tab page, and it took a single CSS rule to make that happen. Not to mention I feel it's more privacy-friendly.

bowlich 9y ago

Switched back when Rust went alpha. It encouraged me to really look into some of the side projects that Mozilla had going on and it made me really want to support them and see those projects succeed.

svardhan 9y ago

Hadn't opened FF for a while now, but started using it as my second browser along with chrome since yesterday and am pretty impressed.

grahamgooch 9y ago

I downloaded FF today, it's zippy. But I rely on dozens of Chrome extensions. That's one of the things I like about Chrome -- its extensibility. HOwever, Chrome is a memory hog, it routinely destroys the 16gb of memory and the battery of my MBPro. When FF has sn equivalent set of extensions, I will happily dump Chrome. Until then, it appears I'm stuck with Chrome

Manishearth 9y ago
Chrome extensions are now compatible with Firefox. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-store-foxified/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-store-... may help converting the format. Extensions which are incompatible can usually be ported with minor changes; IIRC at this point Firefox has all the APIs chrome does (and more), however certain things slightly differ (e.g. the chrome.foo API is browser.foo in firefox).

jvzr 9y ago

I had switched to Chrome a few years back, and had more recently switched to Opera (Blink) before it was bought up by the Chinese. I switched to Firefox when Nightly 57 was released, and haven't looked back since. Couldn't be happier. It's a pity so many long-time users of Firefox feel distraught about the Extensions kerfuffle, but fwiw if that allowed Firefox to get fast, then I was all for it. For my use cases, the available Web Extensions are enough. And I have even started to use Tree Style Tabs, while I was more than fine with regular horizontal tabs before.

tym0 9y ago

I switched on a trial basis, I am definitely liking the smooth UI, I can't stand the way it handles many tabs though, I find it even worse than chrome hiding the fav icons, for me Opera is doing it better.

YouKnowBetter 9y ago

I try / use FF every once in a while again. Always for specific test cases. But switching? NO. Why? Since currently only Google takes security serious and has the resources to actually do that. I understand and accept that "google knows thing via chrome" but they are not (a significant) part of my threatmodel.

pllbnk 9y ago

I have been always using Firefox and also Chrome (and more recently Opera) as a side browser for various less important activities. 57 didn't surprise me at all. It was good before and is still good now, nothing dramatically changed from the user's perspective since the 56 or other versions before that.

omosubi 9y ago

does anyone know how to disable those annoying requests to send notifications? in chrome you can disable them but I have not found a way to do it firefox

elrodeo 9y ago

I switched already 2 months ago on mobile because I got tired by non blockable ads in Chrome and absence of any reading mode. To be in sync with the desktop I switched on the desktop too. Never looked back. And now with the new UI it even looks nicer than Safari imo. Looking forward to 57 on mobile.

dinoop_p1 9y ago

I switched to firefox yesterday. it is lag free and fast. great

sridvijay 9y ago

I just switched too, seems very snappy, and honestly I just wanted a change in browsers (not sure why!)