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I love firefox, but it's still leagues behind chrome -- even with the new engine. Especially when used with "enterprise" tools, like Jira. I keep hoping for th

I love firefox, but it's still leagues behind chrome -- even with the new engine. Especially when used with "enterprise" tools, like Jira. I keep hoping for the day I can switch and not lose productivity.

siddhant 7y ago
What exactly are you missing from Firefox?
- trufflepig 7y ago
  Probably chrome looks better and “feels smoother” .. haha
  - ubercow13 7y ago
    What's funny about that? Both vendors probably spend 10s or 100s of millions of development $s on improving "smoothness"
    - JohnFen 7y ago
      Personally, I find it amusing because "smoothness" is something that I consider completely unimportant. (I do understand that I am not representative of the average user.)
  - kingnothing 7y ago
    You can tweak FF's scrolling, etc. to behave more like Chrome.
- GuB-42 7y ago
  Speaking for myself, what brought me to Chrome from Firefox was a regression bug with my Logitech Revolution mouse: zoom out didn't work. It works in Chrome and in every other app. Here is the bug report https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=791429 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=791429 No one seems to care, basically a soft "won't fix". I even thought about fixing it myself but after seeing that the solution wasn't obvious, I gave up. I wanted to give Chrome a try anyways, so I did. And not only mouse zoom worked but pages also loaded faster. Time to completion was about the same but it took less time to actually see something. For the rest, I had no trouble finding extensions to match what I could do with Firefox. Clear win for Chrome. Now, I am using Firefox at work and Chrome at home so I can follow. What I noticed was: - Firefox performance more or less caught up with Chrome (or is it the other way around?) - Chrome seems a bit more stable - Generally, switching is super-easy, besides syncing (Firefox doesn't sync with Google and Chrome doesn't sync with Firefox sync, and I am not a fan of third party solutions) - I've yet to re-test mouse zoom, but according to the bug report, it still isn't fixed. Note that mouse zoom may seem trivial but it is not. Chrome and Firefox are practically the same, at least on the desktop, so small details like that are what make people switch. And to be honest, I am pretty pissed off with Firefox. They have really good core devs. Servo is awesome, and even though I dislike the community (seen from the outside), I also find Rust to be just as awesome for its application. Direction however is seriously lacking. The latest goof was the extension signing fiasco. Again, small thing, but enough to turn off some people. The most ironic part is that they fixed that using a telemetry-related backdoor. I don't really have a problem with that (otherwise I wouldn't use Chrome) but for a browser that advertise itself as privacy oriented, it is not good publicity.
trufflepig 7y ago
You might recoup more in productivity from less surfing of sites like hn than the minutiae of gains from chromium to Firefox. Hard to believe chrome in 2019 can give discernible amounts of productivity gain over Firefox, unless it were a very very specific extension exclusive to chrome.
- x0x0 7y ago
  Chrome gives enormous productivity gains over firefox * no battery nuking while jira is open Like listen, I really want to like firefox. But I use jira all day.
  - trufflepig 7y ago
    Jira all day? No browser can save you then
    - randycupertino 7y ago
      Love your username!!
Kudos 7y ago
I don't know why you're being downvoted. I use Firefox as my main browser and suffer through extremely slow performing Jira. It makes it seem like Atlassian only tests in Chrome. Gmail and Google Calendar are bad too, but tolerable given how infrequently I need to navigate between views.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- was_boring 7y ago
  I actually have the same problem with gmail. I once, as in the last 6 months, waited a good 3+ minutes (as recorded in firefox dev tools) for gmail to fully load. Switching to chrome was a dramatically better experience. I didn't mention it here thinking Google was sabotaging Firefox.
liminal 7y ago
Here is the Firefox bug that destroys Jira performance for me: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1141242 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1141242
- driverdan 7y ago
  I use JIRA and do not have this issue. It may be an extension you're using.
  - x0x0 7y ago
    I use jira and ff sucks with jira -- it slowly ramps up to tons of ram and cpu during the day. The symptom is I'm in a meeting / on battery and all of a sudden most of the battery is gone.
andrei_says_ 7y ago
My plan is to switch to Firefox for general browsing and continue using chrome for some web apps which do not require ad blocking. Best of both worlds.

siddhant 7y ago

What exactly are you missing from Firefox?

trufflepig 7y ago
Probably chrome looks better and “feels smoother” .. haha
- ubercow13 7y ago
  What's funny about that? Both vendors probably spend 10s or 100s of millions of development $s on improving "smoothness"
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    Personally, I find it amusing because "smoothness" is something that I consider completely unimportant. (I do understand that I am not representative of the average user.)
- kingnothing 7y ago
  You can tweak FF's scrolling, etc. to behave more like Chrome.
GuB-42 7y ago
Speaking for myself, what brought me to Chrome from Firefox was a regression bug with my Logitech Revolution mouse: zoom out didn't work. It works in Chrome and in every other app. Here is the bug report https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=791429 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=791429 No one seems to care, basically a soft "won't fix". I even thought about fixing it myself but after seeing that the solution wasn't obvious, I gave up. I wanted to give Chrome a try anyways, so I did. And not only mouse zoom worked but pages also loaded faster. Time to completion was about the same but it took less time to actually see something. For the rest, I had no trouble finding extensions to match what I could do with Firefox. Clear win for Chrome. Now, I am using Firefox at work and Chrome at home so I can follow. What I noticed was: - Firefox performance more or less caught up with Chrome (or is it the other way around?) - Chrome seems a bit more stable - Generally, switching is super-easy, besides syncing (Firefox doesn't sync with Google and Chrome doesn't sync with Firefox sync, and I am not a fan of third party solutions) - I've yet to re-test mouse zoom, but according to the bug report, it still isn't fixed. Note that mouse zoom may seem trivial but it is not. Chrome and Firefox are practically the same, at least on the desktop, so small details like that are what make people switch. And to be honest, I am pretty pissed off with Firefox. They have really good core devs. Servo is awesome, and even though I dislike the community (seen from the outside), I also find Rust to be just as awesome for its application. Direction however is seriously lacking. The latest goof was the extension signing fiasco. Again, small thing, but enough to turn off some people. The most ironic part is that they fixed that using a telemetry-related backdoor. I don't really have a problem with that (otherwise I wouldn't use Chrome) but for a browser that advertise itself as privacy oriented, it is not good publicity.

trufflepig 7y ago

You might recoup more in productivity from less surfing of sites like hn than the minutiae of gains from chromium to Firefox. Hard to believe chrome in 2019 can give discernible amounts of productivity gain over Firefox, unless it were a very very specific extension exclusive to chrome.

x0x0 7y ago
Chrome gives enormous productivity gains over firefox * no battery nuking while jira is open Like listen, I really want to like firefox. But I use jira all day.
- trufflepig 7y ago
  Jira all day? No browser can save you then
  - randycupertino 7y ago
    Love your username!!

Kudos 7y ago

I don't know why you're being downvoted. I use Firefox as my main browser and suffer through extremely slow performing Jira. It makes it seem like Atlassian only tests in Chrome. Gmail and Google Calendar are bad too, but tolerable given how infrequently I need to navigate between views.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
was_boring 7y ago
I actually have the same problem with gmail. I once, as in the last 6 months, waited a good 3+ minutes (as recorded in firefox dev tools) for gmail to fully load. Switching to chrome was a dramatically better experience. I didn't mention it here thinking Google was sabotaging Firefox.

liminal 7y ago

Here is the Firefox bug that destroys Jira performance for me: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1141242 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1141242

driverdan 7y ago
I use JIRA and do not have this issue. It may be an extension you're using.
- x0x0 7y ago
  I use jira and ff sucks with jira -- it slowly ramps up to tons of ram and cpu during the day. The symptom is I'm in a meeting / on battery and all of a sudden most of the battery is gone.

andrei_says_ 7y ago

My plan is to switch to Firefox for general browsing and continue using chrome for some web apps which do not require ad blocking. Best of both worlds.