7 ms·

I'd like to use Firefox. I've tried it out several times the last year. It's okay. Unfortunately, I always end up going back to Safari. Despite the performance

I'd like to use Firefox. I've tried it out several times the last year. It's okay. Unfortunately, I always end up going back to Safari. Despite the performance improvements, Safari still feels like a faster, smoother browser. Firefox is still pretty ugly, too. On macOS, it feels chunkier and less natively integrated. Safari's "omnibar" is superior to Firefox's. Safari actually suggests web sites, which I use all the time. Wikipedia is a major one. Start typing "Richard Fey", for example, and the first hit will be the Wikipedia page for Richard Feynman, complete with a short summary and photo. Firefox forces me through a Google search. I also tried out Firefox on iOS some time ago, and it wasn't as nice as Safari. For there to be a point to this, I'd need the same browser in both places, with perfect syncing of bookmarks, cookies, tabs, etc., just like Safari. Lastly, migrating is a pain. There's apparently no way to import my current Safari session (I have probably 60-70 tabs) or history (I keep everything I visit, going back years), which means I'd lose stuff by migrating and would have to migrate tabs over incrementally. Hard to try out a browser in any significant way this way.

kovrik 8y ago
I really want to use Safari, but for me the deal breaker is the fact that Safari doesn't seem to block pop-ups properly. Yes, they've changed it in the latest version. I have Block and Notify option selected in Privacy tab. But many popups still go through -- sometimes they open in a new tab, sometimes in a new window. Is there a way to fix that? Also, is there a Tree Style Tab alternative for Safari?
- saagarjha 8y ago
  What websites are you getting these on?
  - Ibethewalrus 8y ago
    Any tech site has this annoying feature. Also: Some parts of NYTimes, and Slack.
  - kitsunesoba 8y ago
    I consistently see it on random blogs.
- Reason077 8y ago
  The worst thing about Safari is the “Do you want to receive notifications from this website?” pop-up that appears every time you hit some random notification-supporting website for the first time. There has got to be a better way to implement notification subscriptions than this annoying pop-up.
  - atombender 8y ago
    You can turn this off. Go to Preferences, then Websites, then Notifications, then at the bottom of the window there's a checkbox: "Allow websites to ask for permission to send push notifications".
    - Wowfunhappy 8y ago
      I have this turned off and yet somehow websites still ask for push notifications. I legitimately don't understand what's happening there.
  - ianai 8y ago
    Website push notifications shouldn’t be a thing. Way too ripe for exploitation.
    - saagarjha 8y ago
      It's nice for webapps, though.
    - Reason077 8y ago
      I actually find notifications very useful and definitely don’t want to turn them off. But the way the subscription mechanism is implemented with a pop up is annoying and archaic. There must be a better way to let users know that notifications are enabled than sticking a pop-up in their face.
  - jiveturkey 8y ago
    chrome and FF also do this. all 3 have an option to disable the prompt (and not accept notifications).
- atombender 8y ago
  Agreed, popups are annoying. But Firefox doesn't seem to block them all properly, either. For example, try this [1] site. It's notorious for hijacking its own clicks; about 50% of the time you load that site, the search field will open a popup when you click on it to type. Same goes for real links. Unfortunately, I don't think there's a fix for Safari. I don't know of a tree-style tab extension for Safari, sorry. [1] http://rarbg.to/torrents.php http://rarbg.to/torrents.php
clumsysmurf 8y ago
I agree about the performance on OS X. I still find myself trying to figure out which tab is pegging the CPU and about:performance is not helpful. Another nice feature Safari has that I rely on is "show all tabs". Yes there are various "works in progress" trying to replicate the old tab groups / panorama functionality but I find them lacking or incomplete. Mozilla really hasn't done anything to improve the many tabs UX. Even Chrome might get something like tab groups: https://www.chromestory.com/2018/11/how-to-enable-tab-groups-in-chrome/ https://www.chromestory.com/2018/11/how-to-enable-tab-groups...
- SyneRyder 8y ago
  What specs are your device? On a mid-2012 non-Retina MBP with a regular HDD, Firefox Quantum made my laptop feel like an entirely new machine. It was significantly faster than Safari, nevermind Chrome.
seandavidfisher 8y ago
Not to mention the inability to integrate with iCloud Keychain. I have over 500 passwords that work across every app on my phone, my computer, and tablet. That’s a big switching cost for me. Add to that the performance/stuttering that I still seem to get even with Quantum’s improvement, and I can’t see myself switching from Safari anytime soon.
- Mister_Snuggles 8y ago
  While switching will still be a pain, have you considered a 3rd-party password manager? I'm using Enpass which works with the three major browsers, has apps for iOS and Android, and has desktop apps for Mac, Windows, and Linux. The best part about it, in my opinion, is that their syncing backend lets you choose which cloud provider you want to sync with (they support six or seven different ones), including a generic WebDAV/ownCloud one if you want to host your own. It's not perfect, but having something cross-platform and cross-browser has a lot of appeal.
- Wowfunhappy 8y ago
  What do you do when you have to use a Windows machine? Does that never happen?
kmundnic 8y ago
I completely agree with you. However, I tried containers in Firefox and miss them so much when using Safari.
- futurix 8y ago
  I use Safari and Safari Technical Preview as 2 semi-containers (TP uses it's own storage for everything, but still syncs with iCloud).
kodablah 8y ago
We all have wants, but I can't blame FF for not pursuing them if the numbers in the link can be believed. Safari has a much smaller adoption rate than even FF, so it could be argued FF are doing more things right. On a link about desktop browser adoption, I don't see the value of complaining about FF issues compared to a lesser adopted browser or comparing to a mobile browser on an OS that doesn't allow real browser competition anyways.
- hartator 8y ago
  Not sure it’s the way to go if you want to make Firefox better. The concerns about OP matches my experience coming from Chrome.
bhauer 8y ago
> Safari's "omnibar" is superior to Firefox's. Safari actually suggests web sites, which I use all the time. Wikipedia is a major one. Start typing "Richard Fey", for example, and the first hit will be the Wikipedia page for Richard Feynman, complete with a short summary and photo. Firefox forces me through a Google search. I don't use a Mac, so I am not sure if there are other features of the Safari omnibar which are appealing. But the example you provided is especially concerning to me since it suggests that Safari is sending user input in the location bar to some external service for analysis. This is what allows the browser to find and render a snippet of a Wikipedia article that best matches what you've typed in the location bar. If I were using Safari, I would definitely be looking for a way to turn that off. I can't tell you how many times I've (accidentally) pasted something into the location bar that I would never voluntarily send to any third parties. On Firefox, I have a Wikipedia bookmark that uses the 'w' keyword and uses the URL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s So I would type "w Richard Feynman" to reach the same destination. Maybe not quite as elegant, but I have another that does a Wikipedia search if I don't feel like typing the whole name of an article. For whatever it's worth, I find the Firefox omnibar superb for many reasons, one being that it prioritizes my bookmarks and my history higher than directing me to a third-party search engine.
- atombender 8y ago
  Here's an album of examples showing some "magical" Safari suggestions: https://imgur.com/a/dY2SWKB https://imgur.com/a/dY2SWKB Yes, I use also an extension that lets me type "w richard feynman". I also use DuckDuckGo, which has a lot of these shortcuts. But Safari will still offer the first "best hit", when I'm not sure where to look something up. As for privacy, I'm already deep in Apple. They take care of my stuff: My entire Safari history (synced with iCloud), backup of my iPhone, my iMessage chat history, and a lot of other things. Given their stance on privacy, I choose to trust them. I've never accidentally pasted anything in the search bar.
- yorwba 8y ago
  > but I have another that does a Wikipedia search if I don't feel like typing the whole name of an article. You don't really need two bookmarks for that. Wikipedia will redirect to the article if the search string happens to be exactly the same.
vmchale 8y ago
Safari is fine. The real problem is Chrome, which is just plain user-hostile.
- mda 8y ago
  How is Chrome user hostile?
  - vmchale 8y ago
    It stores your browsing history on Google's servers.
    - pas 8y ago
      Safari stores that on Apple's servers. And some people are okay with storing their history somewhere in the cloud.
dbot 8y ago
Safari's autosuggest of the numeric code from 2FA text messages is outstanding. I don't hear anyone talk about this feature, but I could never live without it. I use 2FA for every website possible and this makes it easy.
- throwawaymath 8y ago
  Yeah that feature (along with iOS 12 native OS-level password manager integrations) was a major leap forward. I no longer dread enabling 2FA on websites when push/HOTP tokens aren’t supported - at least from a usability perspective. The security of SMS-based 2FA is still poor, though generally better than nothing.
  - dclusin 8y ago
    Almost nobody implements the API for password managers. It's either apples password store or bust. I use 1password and frequently have to switch to the app to grab a password. Although, with face ID enabled this is relatively painless.
    - lorenzhs 8y ago
      Firefox lockbox does. It’s still in beta afaik.
    - village-idiot 8y ago
      LastPass does.
- mgsk 8y ago
  Does that work on macos?
  - LonelyContext 8y ago
    Yes, it does. Assuming you have all the requisite stuff enabled.
- morpheuskafka 8y ago
kbd 8y ago
> I also tried out Firefox on iOS some time ago... I was in the process of switching to Firefox from Chrome, and a few days after installing Firefox on iOS it interrupted me with a notification advertising Pocket. I immediately uninstalled it and haven't looked back.
- atombender 8y ago
  I use Pocket, though not with Firefox. It is a very good and useful (and free!) service. I wouldn't disregard a browser just because it comes with built-in integration.
  - kbd 8y ago
    It wasn't about Pocket itself but that Firefox was rudely using notifications to advertise to me. So I went back to Chrome, which has never done anything like that.
    - kumarharsh 8y ago
      Lol, you mean apart from prodding you on every single Google site to "switch to a better browser" or the websites which misleadingly show the "Sign in" button with your name already filled in(!!)
      - jhasse 8y ago
        That isn't done by Chrome.
flukus 8y ago
> Firefox is still pretty ugly, too. On macOS, it feels chunkier and less natively integrated. Mozilla have put a tremendous amount of effort into the "ugly on every platform" cross platform tools over the years, from XUL to whatever the current one is. Developing a native UI for each platform would have been less effort and given much better results than continuing with this tried and failed approach. Their latest attempt at theme support is just laughable and was very obviously not QA'd. In text areas I get the dark background theme from my desktop and the dark text foreground from the website css and it's made firefox unusable for me. This is on top of things like their recent breakages to extensions so things that used to work (vertical tabs) still don't. And this only broke so they could go multi-threaded and then quickly had to add throttles so random sites couldn't hog every core. But it seems mozilla are more concerned with re-writing things in rust, tying users into various web services and god knows what other side projects while they continue to avoid improving their core product. I'd love to see firefox regain market share, we need an open source browser that's not controlled by a spyware company, but on their current trajectory firefox will dissapear into history and mozilla themselves will be the primary cause.
- pcwalton 8y ago
  Every single rewrite of a Gecko component in Rust has been accompanied with architectural improvements, most notably Stylo. Nobody is rewriting things just because Rust.
  - flukus 8y ago
    And those architectural improvements broke things that worked for me previously, from my point of view they aren't improvements at all. I'm a user, we should I care that they are making architectural improvements while they rewrite things in a different language when there are so many obvious issues preventing me from using it? At this rate they will be rewriting it for no one.
    - pcwalton 8y ago
      I'm sorry you had a bad experience. But architectural improvements are done to improve performance and stability. I can't think of a single Rust component that shipped without extensive performance measurement to demonstrate improvements in the important metrics that users care about.
bromuro 8y ago
I moved back to Safari exactly because the User Interface is much better and it does not feel like an electron app like firefox (and chrome) does. I love the native look and feel and it’s a pity Safari is the only browser on Mac OS working this way.
Shivetya 8y ago
on my iMac my issue with Safari is that if I tab away from streaming content or such it reduces the quality so when I switch back to that tab or the browser I have to wait a few seconds for the quality to go back up. this was very noticeable with twitch where I tend to have more than one stream up. I will pop up mail to reply to something and watch Safari drop the resolution behind mail yet firefox does not do this. I haven't found a solution to it yet

kovrik 8y ago

I really want to use Safari, but for me the deal breaker is the fact that Safari doesn't seem to block pop-ups properly. Yes, they've changed it in the latest version. I have Block and Notify option selected in Privacy tab. But many popups still go through -- sometimes they open in a new tab, sometimes in a new window. Is there a way to fix that? Also, is there a Tree Style Tab alternative for Safari?

saagarjha 8y ago
What websites are you getting these on?
- Ibethewalrus 8y ago
  Any tech site has this annoying feature. Also: Some parts of NYTimes, and Slack.
- kitsunesoba 8y ago
  I consistently see it on random blogs.
Reason077 8y ago
The worst thing about Safari is the “Do you want to receive notifications from this website?” pop-up that appears every time you hit some random notification-supporting website for the first time. There has got to be a better way to implement notification subscriptions than this annoying pop-up.
- atombender 8y ago
  You can turn this off. Go to Preferences, then Websites, then Notifications, then at the bottom of the window there's a checkbox: "Allow websites to ask for permission to send push notifications".
  - Wowfunhappy 8y ago
    I have this turned off and yet somehow websites still ask for push notifications. I legitimately don't understand what's happening there.
- ianai 8y ago
  Website push notifications shouldn’t be a thing. Way too ripe for exploitation.
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    It's nice for webapps, though.
  - Reason077 8y ago
    I actually find notifications very useful and definitely don’t want to turn them off. But the way the subscription mechanism is implemented with a pop up is annoying and archaic. There must be a better way to let users know that notifications are enabled than sticking a pop-up in their face.
- jiveturkey 8y ago
  chrome and FF also do this. all 3 have an option to disable the prompt (and not accept notifications).
atombender 8y ago
Agreed, popups are annoying. But Firefox doesn't seem to block them all properly, either. For example, try this [1] site. It's notorious for hijacking its own clicks; about 50% of the time you load that site, the search field will open a popup when you click on it to type. Same goes for real links. Unfortunately, I don't think there's a fix for Safari. I don't know of a tree-style tab extension for Safari, sorry. [1] http://rarbg.to/torrents.php http://rarbg.to/torrents.php

clumsysmurf 8y ago

I agree about the performance on OS X. I still find myself trying to figure out which tab is pegging the CPU and about:performance is not helpful. Another nice feature Safari has that I rely on is "show all tabs". Yes there are various "works in progress" trying to replicate the old tab groups / panorama functionality but I find them lacking or incomplete. Mozilla really hasn't done anything to improve the many tabs UX. Even Chrome might get something like tab groups: https://www.chromestory.com/2018/11/how-to-enable-tab-groups-in-chrome/ https://www.chromestory.com/2018/11/how-to-enable-tab-groups...

SyneRyder 8y ago
What specs are your device? On a mid-2012 non-Retina MBP with a regular HDD, Firefox Quantum made my laptop feel like an entirely new machine. It was significantly faster than Safari, nevermind Chrome.

seandavidfisher 8y ago

Not to mention the inability to integrate with iCloud Keychain. I have over 500 passwords that work across every app on my phone, my computer, and tablet. That’s a big switching cost for me. Add to that the performance/stuttering that I still seem to get even with Quantum’s improvement, and I can’t see myself switching from Safari anytime soon.

Mister_Snuggles 8y ago
While switching will still be a pain, have you considered a 3rd-party password manager? I'm using Enpass which works with the three major browsers, has apps for iOS and Android, and has desktop apps for Mac, Windows, and Linux. The best part about it, in my opinion, is that their syncing backend lets you choose which cloud provider you want to sync with (they support six or seven different ones), including a generic WebDAV/ownCloud one if you want to host your own. It's not perfect, but having something cross-platform and cross-browser has a lot of appeal.
Wowfunhappy 8y ago
What do you do when you have to use a Windows machine? Does that never happen?

kmundnic 8y ago

I completely agree with you. However, I tried containers in Firefox and miss them so much when using Safari.

futurix 8y ago
I use Safari and Safari Technical Preview as 2 semi-containers (TP uses it's own storage for everything, but still syncs with iCloud).

kodablah 8y ago

We all have wants, but I can't blame FF for not pursuing them if the numbers in the link can be believed. Safari has a much smaller adoption rate than even FF, so it could be argued FF are doing more things right. On a link about desktop browser adoption, I don't see the value of complaining about FF issues compared to a lesser adopted browser or comparing to a mobile browser on an OS that doesn't allow real browser competition anyways.

hartator 8y ago
Not sure it’s the way to go if you want to make Firefox better. The concerns about OP matches my experience coming from Chrome.

bhauer 8y ago

> Safari's "omnibar" is superior to Firefox's. Safari actually suggests web sites, which I use all the time. Wikipedia is a major one. Start typing "Richard Fey", for example, and the first hit will be the Wikipedia page for Richard Feynman, complete with a short summary and photo. Firefox forces me through a Google search. I don't use a Mac, so I am not sure if there are other features of the Safari omnibar which are appealing. But the example you provided is especially concerning to me since it suggests that Safari is sending user input in the location bar to some external service for analysis. This is what allows the browser to find and render a snippet of a Wikipedia article that best matches what you've typed in the location bar. If I were using Safari, I would definitely be looking for a way to turn that off. I can't tell you how many times I've (accidentally) pasted something into the location bar that I would never voluntarily send to any third parties. On Firefox, I have a Wikipedia bookmark that uses the 'w' keyword and uses the URL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s So I would type "w Richard Feynman" to reach the same destination. Maybe not quite as elegant, but I have another that does a Wikipedia search if I don't feel like typing the whole name of an article. For whatever it's worth, I find the Firefox omnibar superb for many reasons, one being that it prioritizes my bookmarks and my history higher than directing me to a third-party search engine.

atombender 8y ago
Here's an album of examples showing some "magical" Safari suggestions: https://imgur.com/a/dY2SWKB https://imgur.com/a/dY2SWKB Yes, I use also an extension that lets me type "w richard feynman". I also use DuckDuckGo, which has a lot of these shortcuts. But Safari will still offer the first "best hit", when I'm not sure where to look something up. As for privacy, I'm already deep in Apple. They take care of my stuff: My entire Safari history (synced with iCloud), backup of my iPhone, my iMessage chat history, and a lot of other things. Given their stance on privacy, I choose to trust them. I've never accidentally pasted anything in the search bar.
yorwba 8y ago
> but I have another that does a Wikipedia search if I don't feel like typing the whole name of an article. You don't really need two bookmarks for that. Wikipedia will redirect to the article if the search string happens to be exactly the same.

vmchale 8y ago

Safari is fine. The real problem is Chrome, which is just plain user-hostile.

mda 8y ago
How is Chrome user hostile?
- vmchale 8y ago
  It stores your browsing history on Google's servers.
  - pas 8y ago
    Safari stores that on Apple's servers. And some people are okay with storing their history somewhere in the cloud.

dbot 8y ago

Safari's autosuggest of the numeric code from 2FA text messages is outstanding. I don't hear anyone talk about this feature, but I could never live without it. I use 2FA for every website possible and this makes it easy.

throwawaymath 8y ago
Yeah that feature (along with iOS 12 native OS-level password manager integrations) was a major leap forward. I no longer dread enabling 2FA on websites when push/HOTP tokens aren’t supported - at least from a usability perspective. The security of SMS-based 2FA is still poor, though generally better than nothing.
- dclusin 8y ago
  Almost nobody implements the API for password managers. It's either apples password store or bust. I use 1password and frequently have to switch to the app to grab a password. Although, with face ID enabled this is relatively painless.
  - lorenzhs 8y ago
    Firefox lockbox does. It’s still in beta afaik.
  - village-idiot 8y ago
    LastPass does.
mgsk 8y ago
Does that work on macos?
- LonelyContext 8y ago
  Yes, it does. Assuming you have all the requisite stuff enabled.
morpheuskafka 8y ago

kbd 8y ago

> I also tried out Firefox on iOS some time ago... I was in the process of switching to Firefox from Chrome, and a few days after installing Firefox on iOS it interrupted me with a notification advertising Pocket. I immediately uninstalled it and haven't looked back.

atombender 8y ago
I use Pocket, though not with Firefox. It is a very good and useful (and free!) service. I wouldn't disregard a browser just because it comes with built-in integration.
- kbd 8y ago
  It wasn't about Pocket itself but that Firefox was rudely using notifications to advertise to me. So I went back to Chrome, which has never done anything like that.
  - kumarharsh 8y ago
    Lol, you mean apart from prodding you on every single Google site to "switch to a better browser" or the websites which misleadingly show the "Sign in" button with your name already filled in(!!)
    - jhasse 8y ago
      That isn't done by Chrome.

flukus 8y ago

> Firefox is still pretty ugly, too. On macOS, it feels chunkier and less natively integrated. Mozilla have put a tremendous amount of effort into the "ugly on every platform" cross platform tools over the years, from XUL to whatever the current one is. Developing a native UI for each platform would have been less effort and given much better results than continuing with this tried and failed approach. Their latest attempt at theme support is just laughable and was very obviously not QA'd. In text areas I get the dark background theme from my desktop and the dark text foreground from the website css and it's made firefox unusable for me. This is on top of things like their recent breakages to extensions so things that used to work (vertical tabs) still don't. And this only broke so they could go multi-threaded and then quickly had to add throttles so random sites couldn't hog every core. But it seems mozilla are more concerned with re-writing things in rust, tying users into various web services and god knows what other side projects while they continue to avoid improving their core product. I'd love to see firefox regain market share, we need an open source browser that's not controlled by a spyware company, but on their current trajectory firefox will dissapear into history and mozilla themselves will be the primary cause.

pcwalton 8y ago
Every single rewrite of a Gecko component in Rust has been accompanied with architectural improvements, most notably Stylo. Nobody is rewriting things just because Rust.
- flukus 8y ago
  And those architectural improvements broke things that worked for me previously, from my point of view they aren't improvements at all. I'm a user, we should I care that they are making architectural improvements while they rewrite things in a different language when there are so many obvious issues preventing me from using it? At this rate they will be rewriting it for no one.
  - pcwalton 8y ago
    I'm sorry you had a bad experience. But architectural improvements are done to improve performance and stability. I can't think of a single Rust component that shipped without extensive performance measurement to demonstrate improvements in the important metrics that users care about.

bromuro 8y ago

I moved back to Safari exactly because the User Interface is much better and it does not feel like an electron app like firefox (and chrome) does. I love the native look and feel and it’s a pity Safari is the only browser on Mac OS working this way.

Shivetya 8y ago

on my iMac my issue with Safari is that if I tab away from streaming content or such it reduces the quality so when I switch back to that tab or the browser I have to wait a few seconds for the quality to go back up. this was very noticeable with twitch where I tend to have more than one stream up. I will pop up mail to reply to something and watch Safari drop the resolution behind mail yet firefox does not do this. I haven't found a solution to it yet