16 ms·

Interesting, I just moved back to Firefox after many years of using Chrome. I have to admit, it has gotten a lot faster recently, Firefox sync is working very

by azdv 7y ago

Interesting, I just moved back to Firefox after many years of using Chrome. I have to admit, it has gotten a lot faster recently, Firefox sync is working very well, and the Firefox Android app is a pleasure to use (being able to install uBlock origin is a huge plus). Anything else I missed on Chrome was easily solved by an addon, or a small tweak on userChrome.css (customizing the browser interface by overriding its CSS is amazing btw).

Braggadocious 7y ago
it's literally the same engine as chrome. the only reason i use chrome is for the dev tools.
- philliphaydon 7y ago
  FF just got web socket inspectors so I really don't know what chrome dev tools has now. Everything about ff dev tools is better. Especially looking at css layouts.
  - RoryH 7y ago
    As a web dev, I find the FF dev tools a good bit less performant, but I still try to use it always without reverting to Chrome.. The one feature I have not found in FF dev tools is Search, this is very handy for find random JavaScript on a JS heavy site. Edit: This post prompted me to Google for it: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Debugger/How_to/Search https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Debugger/How_... Move along, nothing to see.. :-\
    - digitarald 7y ago
      Also, Network full-test search is now in the Network panel
      - RonanTheGrey 7y ago
        Well, I need to try the FF dev tools again, it's been about a year since I did and they were missing some critical things. Looking good, will give it another go.
  - jessewmc 7y ago
    This has finally allowed me to switch. I’ve been trying to since quantum came out two years ago, but this was always a deal breaker. Firefox is generally still a little buggier and less performance in my experience, but not so much that I want to switch back. Hopefully they can stay relevant.
  - gherkinnn 7y ago
    CSS is better in Firefox. They also used to ship a web audio api debugger. The new scratchpad is nice too. Does 80% of what I need. But Chromes debugger and performance analysis still is a lot more capable.
- Ayesh 7y ago
  No it's not.
  - dobleboble 7y ago
    It's better to provide facts and references rather than just making opposing statements.
    - Majestic121 7y ago
      The burden of proof is for the original statement ("it's literally the same engine"), not the counter.
      - rusk 7y ago
        Yes but a blunt counterstatement doesnt make for good reading. Far better is to provide some substantiation so everyone can learn as your more highly voted siblings did!
- sparkywolf 7y ago
  The dev tools available in the Firefox developer edition are honestly way better than chrome's in every possible way (as far as I'm concerned) recently switched myself and couldn't be happier!
- jefftk 7y ago
  Firefox uses the Gecko engine, while Chrome uses Blink. The engines don't even have a shared ancestor.
  - rusk 7y ago
    “Originally” if I recall correctly, Chrome was a fork of firefox right? That is a long time ago though!
    - msla 7y ago
      Chrome was never a fork of Firefox. If anything, it was a fork of Konqueror.
    - jm4 7y ago
      Nope. It was a fork of WebKit which was a fork of KHTML, the engine powering Konqueror. KHTML was developed by the KDE team. Edit: It was widely speculated that Apple would use gecko for Safari and a shock when they announced they would use the relatively little known KHTML engine. The decision was based on KHTML having much cleaner code. I haven't looked at the Mozilla code in many years, but it was pretty gnarly back then. Lots of old cruft from the Netscape days. In comparison, KHTML was beautiful.
      - rusk 7y ago
        I went looking into this, and it appears that I was confused. Google was a big contributor to Firefox in the early naughties, which is the period I was thinking of. Chrome didn't come out until a good while later.
      - cpeterso 7y ago
        Ken Kocienda's book "Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs" has more details about the Safari team's evaluation of Mozilla code and KHTML. Ken was engineer #2 on the Safari team.
    - microtherion 7y ago
      Chrome started out as a fork of Safari, or at least WebKit.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- SamWhited 7y ago
  Have you tried Firefox's dev tools in Firefox 71? As far as I can tell they're way better than Chrome's.
oefrha 7y ago
I can’t solve highlighting search results in the scroll bar, and apparently I search a surprising amount and am absolutely crippled without scroll bar highlighting, so I’ll stick to Chrome until I can’t (e.g. when content blocking is crippled).
- observr9 7y ago
  >> ... highlighting search results in the scroll bar... This. I find any browser that doesn't do that to be unusable. The alternative, in long documents or source code, is to blindly hit NEXT and visit all locations where a search term is found rather than scrolling quickly to see the different context regions. I tried a plug-in or two but they were not nearly as functional as the native Chrome experience.
  - oefrha 7y ago
    Glad I’m not insane, or not the only one insane. Whenever I read one of these highly-voted “I switched to Firefox and nothing’s degraded” post I wonder if I’m the only one searching on web pages, or if I’m the only one whose productivity is massively boosted by knowing where search results are located and how they are clustered at a glance. But then, modern code editors do tend to have this feature, so apparently it is important to a non-negligible audience.
    - oarsinsync 7y ago
      > modern code editors do tend to have this feature, so apparently it is important to a non-negligible audience Sorry, but as far as the modern browsers are concerned, we coders are a negligible market to cater for. The number of non-coder browser-users is orders magnitude higher than the number of coders.
      - oefrha 7y ago
        Not saying coders are a non-negligible audience (although I’d say coders are a non-negligible segment of Firefox user base). My assumption is that the percentage of coders who value scroll bar highlighting is comparable to the percentage of those among all web users who read and search web pages of nontrivial length, since there’s hardly anything about this feature that’s specifically beneficial to coding. This and the fact that I heard all the “switched to Firefox and nothing’s degraded” comments from coders, and upvoted by coders.
jeegsy 7y ago
Has firefox solved its long standing issue with the rendering of radio buttons?
- noselasd 7y ago
  Maybe. If you refer to a more specific issue, it's easier to give a definitive answer though.
  - jeegsy 7y ago
    As in, it doesnt render the buttons at all. Just leaves a blank area where the button is supposed to be. I wasn't detailed because I assumed everyone knew about it based on the many comments I encountered online while searching for a fix. Anyway, I only bring it up because thats what is preventing me from going full firefox.
giancarlostoro 7y ago
> Firefox sync is working very well Been using it for years and years, I never could adopt Chrome. First when it came out I tried it, but no adblocker, then when there was one, it was too crippled, my guess is that this was intentional since they're going back to crippling adblockers. Now we have network level adblockers which I think is the best approach. I only use Chrome cause some kiosk-like application I'm developing will ship through Chrome (not Electron) / WebKit. Also my boss prefers to see it, so I demo with Chrome mainly, but I do all my real browsing on Firefox. I'm a geek / developer so I have Firefox and Chrome on every system I have. Except on Android, unless it's preinstalled for me, I wont get it.
mtone 7y ago
Also happy with my move to Firefox, it surpassed my expectations. Two (small) pain points have been: - customizing userChrome.css .. It was a bit time consuming to figure out first (I wanted to remove the top bar and use vertical tabs). Happy to be able to do it, but it's not exactly user-friendly. - Rejection of Windows local certificates store that requires fiddling with a setting to enable. If my certificate store is compromised Firefox is not going to save me. I don't recommend it over Chrome at work since we have one of these for a local server and I'd rather not generate support tickets. Both of these are not part of Firefox Sync and require manual handling on each PC.
- kbenson 7y ago
  I just did a little googling, and it appears that Firefox supports group policy settings that can cause it to use system root certs[1], so if it's not working, it may be because the domain administrators haven't bothered to support it. 1: https://github.com/mozilla/policy-templates/blob/f972ec60de7f8a03e9846b3d4840cc01a8f1a8ec/README.md#certificates--importenterpriseroots https://github.com/mozilla/policy-templates/blob/f972ec60de7...
  - mtone 7y ago
    Indeed, but I also count that as a support ticket!
    - kbenson 7y ago
      Well, I would counter that if you want to use a new application (Firefox) with the local server, there should probably be a support ticket to at least ask if they believe it should function correctly. While you probably can assume Firefox will mostly work, there's decades of history saying you probably shouldn't, given the state of enterprise web apps. To be safe, I wouldn't assume Firefox would work any better than lynx for an internal app if neither are listed as supported (and the same goes for every browser).
atomi 7y ago
On Firefox, one thing that really bothers me still is that it's impossible to remove a root domain entry from the omnibox. Like if I type "re" it completes to reddit.com even though I've deleted that entry. Chrome will respect the deletion and complete to reddit.com/r/all.
- zzo38computer 7y ago
  I don't know how exactly it works, but I do not have that problem.
- Anthony-G 7y ago
  Yes. That's one of the few annoyances I have with Firefox. I have to use a local app where the root domain URL results in an IIS error page. Annoying, this always appears in the "Awesome bar" auto-completion list before the URLs I want to go to. On the other hand, I like the meta-characters that can be used to modify the search results: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-autocomplete-firefox#w_changing-results-on-the-fly https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-autocomplet... (though I wish they were easier to remember).

by azdv 7y ago

Braggadocious 7y ago

it's literally the same engine as chrome. the only reason i use chrome is for the dev tools.

philliphaydon 7y ago
FF just got web socket inspectors so I really don't know what chrome dev tools has now. Everything about ff dev tools is better. Especially looking at css layouts.
- RoryH 7y ago
  As a web dev, I find the FF dev tools a good bit less performant, but I still try to use it always without reverting to Chrome.. The one feature I have not found in FF dev tools is Search, this is very handy for find random JavaScript on a JS heavy site. Edit: This post prompted me to Google for it: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Debugger/How_to/Search https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Debugger/How_... Move along, nothing to see.. :-\
  - digitarald 7y ago
    Also, Network full-test search is now in the Network panel
    - RonanTheGrey 7y ago
      Well, I need to try the FF dev tools again, it's been about a year since I did and they were missing some critical things. Looking good, will give it another go.
- jessewmc 7y ago
  This has finally allowed me to switch. I’ve been trying to since quantum came out two years ago, but this was always a deal breaker. Firefox is generally still a little buggier and less performance in my experience, but not so much that I want to switch back. Hopefully they can stay relevant.
- gherkinnn 7y ago
  CSS is better in Firefox. They also used to ship a web audio api debugger. The new scratchpad is nice too. Does 80% of what I need. But Chromes debugger and performance analysis still is a lot more capable.
Ayesh 7y ago
No it's not.
- dobleboble 7y ago
  It's better to provide facts and references rather than just making opposing statements.
  - Majestic121 7y ago
    The burden of proof is for the original statement ("it's literally the same engine"), not the counter.
    - rusk 7y ago
      Yes but a blunt counterstatement doesnt make for good reading. Far better is to provide some substantiation so everyone can learn as your more highly voted siblings did!
sparkywolf 7y ago
The dev tools available in the Firefox developer edition are honestly way better than chrome's in every possible way (as far as I'm concerned) recently switched myself and couldn't be happier!
jefftk 7y ago
Firefox uses the Gecko engine, while Chrome uses Blink. The engines don't even have a shared ancestor.
- rusk 7y ago
  “Originally” if I recall correctly, Chrome was a fork of firefox right? That is a long time ago though!
  - msla 7y ago
    Chrome was never a fork of Firefox. If anything, it was a fork of Konqueror.
  - jm4 7y ago
    Nope. It was a fork of WebKit which was a fork of KHTML, the engine powering Konqueror. KHTML was developed by the KDE team. Edit: It was widely speculated that Apple would use gecko for Safari and a shock when they announced they would use the relatively little known KHTML engine. The decision was based on KHTML having much cleaner code. I haven't looked at the Mozilla code in many years, but it was pretty gnarly back then. Lots of old cruft from the Netscape days. In comparison, KHTML was beautiful.
    - rusk 7y ago
      I went looking into this, and it appears that I was confused. Google was a big contributor to Firefox in the early naughties, which is the period I was thinking of. Chrome didn't come out until a good while later.
    - cpeterso 7y ago
      Ken Kocienda's book "Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs" has more details about the Safari team's evaluation of Mozilla code and KHTML. Ken was engineer #2 on the Safari team.
  - microtherion 7y ago
    Chrome started out as a fork of Safari, or at least WebKit.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
SamWhited 7y ago
Have you tried Firefox's dev tools in Firefox 71? As far as I can tell they're way better than Chrome's.

oefrha 7y ago

I can’t solve highlighting search results in the scroll bar, and apparently I search a surprising amount and am absolutely crippled without scroll bar highlighting, so I’ll stick to Chrome until I can’t (e.g. when content blocking is crippled).

observr9 7y ago
>> ... highlighting search results in the scroll bar... This. I find any browser that doesn't do that to be unusable. The alternative, in long documents or source code, is to blindly hit NEXT and visit all locations where a search term is found rather than scrolling quickly to see the different context regions. I tried a plug-in or two but they were not nearly as functional as the native Chrome experience.
- oefrha 7y ago
  Glad I’m not insane, or not the only one insane. Whenever I read one of these highly-voted “I switched to Firefox and nothing’s degraded” post I wonder if I’m the only one searching on web pages, or if I’m the only one whose productivity is massively boosted by knowing where search results are located and how they are clustered at a glance. But then, modern code editors do tend to have this feature, so apparently it is important to a non-negligible audience.
  - oarsinsync 7y ago
    > modern code editors do tend to have this feature, so apparently it is important to a non-negligible audience Sorry, but as far as the modern browsers are concerned, we coders are a negligible market to cater for. The number of non-coder browser-users is orders magnitude higher than the number of coders.
    - oefrha 7y ago
      Not saying coders are a non-negligible audience (although I’d say coders are a non-negligible segment of Firefox user base). My assumption is that the percentage of coders who value scroll bar highlighting is comparable to the percentage of those among all web users who read and search web pages of nontrivial length, since there’s hardly anything about this feature that’s specifically beneficial to coding. This and the fact that I heard all the “switched to Firefox and nothing’s degraded” comments from coders, and upvoted by coders.

jeegsy 7y ago

Has firefox solved its long standing issue with the rendering of radio buttons?

noselasd 7y ago
Maybe. If you refer to a more specific issue, it's easier to give a definitive answer though.
- jeegsy 7y ago
  As in, it doesnt render the buttons at all. Just leaves a blank area where the button is supposed to be. I wasn't detailed because I assumed everyone knew about it based on the many comments I encountered online while searching for a fix. Anyway, I only bring it up because thats what is preventing me from going full firefox.

giancarlostoro 7y ago

> Firefox sync is working very well Been using it for years and years, I never could adopt Chrome. First when it came out I tried it, but no adblocker, then when there was one, it was too crippled, my guess is that this was intentional since they're going back to crippling adblockers. Now we have network level adblockers which I think is the best approach. I only use Chrome cause some kiosk-like application I'm developing will ship through Chrome (not Electron) / WebKit. Also my boss prefers to see it, so I demo with Chrome mainly, but I do all my real browsing on Firefox. I'm a geek / developer so I have Firefox and Chrome on every system I have. Except on Android, unless it's preinstalled for me, I wont get it.

mtone 7y ago

Also happy with my move to Firefox, it surpassed my expectations. Two (small) pain points have been: - customizing userChrome.css .. It was a bit time consuming to figure out first (I wanted to remove the top bar and use vertical tabs). Happy to be able to do it, but it's not exactly user-friendly. - Rejection of Windows local certificates store that requires fiddling with a setting to enable. If my certificate store is compromised Firefox is not going to save me. I don't recommend it over Chrome at work since we have one of these for a local server and I'd rather not generate support tickets. Both of these are not part of Firefox Sync and require manual handling on each PC.

kbenson 7y ago
I just did a little googling, and it appears that Firefox supports group policy settings that can cause it to use system root certs[1], so if it's not working, it may be because the domain administrators haven't bothered to support it. 1: https://github.com/mozilla/policy-templates/blob/f972ec60de7f8a03e9846b3d4840cc01a8f1a8ec/README.md#certificates--importenterpriseroots https://github.com/mozilla/policy-templates/blob/f972ec60de7...
- mtone 7y ago
  Indeed, but I also count that as a support ticket!
  - kbenson 7y ago
    Well, I would counter that if you want to use a new application (Firefox) with the local server, there should probably be a support ticket to at least ask if they believe it should function correctly. While you probably can assume Firefox will mostly work, there's decades of history saying you probably shouldn't, given the state of enterprise web apps. To be safe, I wouldn't assume Firefox would work any better than lynx for an internal app if neither are listed as supported (and the same goes for every browser).

atomi 7y ago

On Firefox, one thing that really bothers me still is that it's impossible to remove a root domain entry from the omnibox. Like if I type "re" it completes to reddit.com even though I've deleted that entry. Chrome will respect the deletion and complete to reddit.com/r/all.

zzo38computer 7y ago
I don't know how exactly it works, but I do not have that problem.
Anthony-G 7y ago
Yes. That's one of the few annoyances I have with Firefox. I have to use a local app where the root domain URL results in an IIS error page. Annoying, this always appears in the "Awesome bar" auto-completion list before the URLs I want to go to. On the other hand, I like the meta-characters that can be used to modify the search results: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-autocomplete-firefox#w_changing-results-on-the-fly https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-autocomplet... (though I wish they were easier to remember).