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At that point why not use Firefox and help fight Chrome’s engine dominance?

est31 6y ago
I keep a copy of Chromium around to test stuff I develop or for the occasional website that doesn't work in Firefox. Ungoogled chromium importance will increase with the continued decline of Firefox's absolute and relative market shares.
- Orou 6y ago
  Had to check because I thought if anything Firefox's market share had been increasing the past couple of years, but you're absolutely right. I wonder why Firefox isn't performing better in the browser market - it's arguably better than it's ever been.
  - yoavmmn 6y ago
    I have two guesses: 1. Extensions - almost anyone have some kind of extension installed, and Chrome absolutely wins in that category. that prevents people from switching over to Firefox. Personally I know people that switched to Firefox only after I showed them the extensions they us or an alternative exists on Firefox. 2. Advertisement - Google have a lot more advertising resources than Mozilla. For example, every new Android phone with Google Play Services ships with Google products already installed including Chrome (sometimes as the only browser). It's not unfounded to think that most people will use the same browser they're using in their smartphone.
    - meitham 6y ago
      Google amplifies these security conferences where Chrome comes out as a more secure browser than the rest, this leads a lot of corporate IT to enforce Chrome as the default browser on work PC. Some people completely switched their home browser to Chrome just because they like to use one browser at home and work!
    - mgiampapa 6y ago
      This is where Google will shoot itself in the foot trying to kill ad blockers and 3rd party extensions like paywall removers. Firefox is more than good enough, and if you take away uBlock and others that have a loyal following users are going to bail. The fact that I can run extensions on Firefox for Android is a huge enough win that it's my default system browser.
      - julianlam 6y ago
        Keeping in mind that different users have different priorities, I still don't understand why Firefox doesn't make market this as their number one distinguishing feature.
        est31 6y ago
        Remember that Mozilla gets their revenue from Google, an ad company. They'd undercut their main revenue source. Another issue is he press. The press is usually very Firefox-positive and always covers it. They might turn on Firefox if it started blocking ads.
    - peteretep 6y ago
      > Extensions - almost anyone have some kind of extension installed, and Chrome absolutely wins in that category I have a bunch of extensions installed on Firefox and don’t use Chrome. What are the Chrome-only extensions I’m missing that means Chrome “absolutely wins”?
      - mdaniel 6y ago
        Plenty of corporate types target Chrome because of its market share (for the same reason, iOS apps are out for years before Android ones are) One specific circumstance which impacts me is the Capital One virtual credit card extension (https://www.capitalone.com/applications/eno/virtualnumbers https://www.capitalone.com/applications/eno/virtualnumbers ) which if one clicks on "Get It Now", from a copy of Firefox, one ends up on the webstore: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/eno%C2%AE-from-capital-one%C2%AE/clmkdohmabikagpnhjmgacbclihgmdje https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/eno%C2%AE-from-cap... Even consulting the page source (view-source:https://www.capitalone.com/applications/eno/virtualnumbers/ https://www.capitalone.com/applications/eno/virtualnumbers/) shows some mentions of Firefox but certainly no mozilla.org URL or .xpi that would imply they're serious about that claim.
    - qplex 6y ago
      Chrome on Android does not support extensions at all.
  - otabdeveloper4 6y ago
    People use whatever browser came bundled with their device. In 2020 that's Chrome.
  - ta17711771 6y ago
    Security is a big one. No per site process isolation, Firefox on X11/Linux is baaaad, and that's just the beginning.
    - minitech 6y ago
      What does Firefox do w.r.t. X11 that’s less secure than other browsers?
      - est31 6y ago
        https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1129492 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1129492 X11 is an old display protocol predating modern concepts of application sandboxing. It gives gives windows lots of control, like allowing them to move the mouse, enter keystrokes, etc. Basically, anyone who has an X11 handle has the same level of access as the user. In Firefox, the process that's supposed to be sanboxed (the content process) has precisely such a handle.
  - rado 6y ago
    In some scenarios, FF on Mac is much slower than Chrome and Safari: animating transforms, masks etc
  - literallycancer 6y ago
    The state of translation extensions in Firefox is catastrophic. The useful ones got deleted from the store. As far as I can tell the only reason was to flex some policy choices by the extension store(?) team. So you pretty much have to have Chromium as a backup if you ever need to research non-Anglo content. I can see people moving to Chromium because of this and other similar problems with extensions being broken (like the tridactyl thing).
    - bovine3dom 6y ago
      You can use userscripts (e.g. with Violentmonkey [1]) for Google Translate, e.g. [2]. Since you mentioned Tridactyl you might be interested to know that I wrote my own command to inject Google Translate on demand [3]. The extensions you mentioned were removed because they execute remote code. Mozilla are trying to tighten these restrictions [4]. I think Chrome is moving in a similar direction. I don't think that will affect the user script work-around as they execute in the page context, but I could be wrong. [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/violentmonkey/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/violentmonkey... [2]: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/9285-translate-google-tooltip https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/9285-translate-google-tool... [3]: https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl/blob/c776f722944714eef77a8dc3dd82d0e813befdab/.tridactylrc#L140 https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl/blob/c776f722944714ee... [4]: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2019/12/12/test-the-new-csp-for-content-scripts/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2019/12/12/test-the-new-csp-...
      - cmeacham98 6y ago
        I've never heard of violentmonkey, how does it compare to grease/tampermonkey?
        bovine3dom 6y ago
        Violentmonkey is very actively developed [1]. Greasemonkey isn't [2]. Tampermonkey is closed source so I view it with some suspicion. Otherwise they're all pretty much the same, as far as I know (I don't use them extensively). [1]: https://github.com/violentmonkey/violentmonkey/graphs/contributors https://github.com/violentmonkey/violentmonkey/graphs/contri... [2]: https://github.com/greasemonkey/greasemonkey/graphs/contributors https://github.com/greasemonkey/greasemonkey/graphs/contribu...
- wp381640 6y ago
  You should use stock Chrome for user testing to get as close to user environments as possible. Little things like a missing http -> https redirect on a subdomain won't be caught in Ungoogled Chromium or Brave.
  - est31 6y ago
    If I made my money from web development, I would. But it's not my main occupation and I mainly do smaller things as a hobby. There I think it's okay to do this basic kind of testing.
    - edoceo 6y ago
      And you can use test tools like Browserstack (et al) to test on platforms/vroseers you don't have -
CGamesPlay 6y ago
Safari is my daily driver, but I switch to Chrome when doing web development because the development tools were vastly superior (10 years ago I was in love with Firebug, but I don't think it's kept up with Chromium's dev tools).
- hutattedonmyarm 6y ago
  I too use Safari and switch to Vivaldi and Firefox for webdev. I think FFs dev tools have mostly caught on (especially anything CSS related is better in FF) with Chromium, but it's still a bit behind for JS debugging
- drevil-v2 6y ago
  Same here. Safari day to day and Edge/Firefox for dev tools Safari ticks all the boxes for me: - Power consumption - Minimal UI that is elegant and easy on the eyes - Font rendering is much nicer (especially when compared to Firefox) - Enter a word in the search bar and usually Siri will show you the exact website and just select it to go there. Other browsers will take you to search page first then you select the first result to go there - SMS integration for 2FA - Bookmarks UI is so much cleaner than any other browser. Speaking of bookmarks, why the fuck does Edge and Firefox store any bookmarks created on your phone or tablet under a separate top level section "Mobile Bookmarks"? It is just so unnecessary and adds needless UI interaction just to get to it.
  - bredren 6y ago
    Do you use content filtering / ad blocking technology in conjunction with Safari? Last I tried to use Safari, it seemed some of the most common tools could not be plugged in / added on to the browser.
    - arafsheikh 6y ago
      AdGuard works fine with Safari. I also use NextDNS on top.
    - vladvasiliu 6y ago
pier25 6y ago
For me its mainly the lack of proper multilingual spellcheck but there are other annoyances with ff. I’ll elaborate when I get to my desktop.
cleansy 6y ago
I asked myself this question a lot of times. The reason is: memories attached to FF. I used FF for ca. 7 years until Chrome came out. Every time I install FireFox (to give it a try again) all the bad memories come back using it. The whacky design, The Big Slowdown when you had more than 5 tabs open, the accumulation of dead memory, needing me to restart the damn thing every couple of hours or so. The slow Javascript. When Chrome came out I was amazed, like, I didn't even know how pleasant a browser experience can be until I tried Chrome. It felt revolutionary. Now Firefox might have caught up but 7 years with all of these problems are still glued to that red/orange logo. A project like ungoogled-chrome is a welcomed effort, as I cannot imagine going back to FF permanently. They just missed the train, IMHO.
- hnaccy 6y ago
  That seems fairly irrational. In my experience current FF handles many tabs much better than Chrome.
  - cleansy 6y ago
    Of course it is irrational. It's fairly well studied that humans make a lot of their decisions out of emotions and rationalize it later. It doesn't make rational sense to buy a coffee from Starbucks. It doesn't make sense to shout in an argument. The fact that people make purchase decisions based on branding doesn't make sense on a rational level. It's irrational to disregard the influence of emotions on the decision making progress.
    - dao- 6y ago
      What's weird is that you reflect on your emotions, understand that decisions you made are irrational, and still can't see yourself make a different decision going forward. Why did you reflect in the first place? Are you not interested in making rational decisions?
      - cleansy 6y ago
        The question is: is FF the "better" browser over Chrome/-ium? From a technical perspective: the differences are IMHO negligible. Last time I tried FF I couldn't tell any difference. The reaction time of the brain for visual input is something like 180ms(?) and Chrome and FF are faster than that for locally bound functions. From a moral perspective: sure, Firefox might be the better choice, although the Mozilla Org has a fair share of controversies. Usability wise: from my last evaluation: minimal. There are functionalities that I liked in FF more, and others in Chrome. So again: from my personal view negligible. Then there is what I stated above: the memory of cursing about Firefox because it simply "sucked" and Chrome was the best solution for it, you can argue that without Chrome FF would still suck. The first time I seriously considered switching was when Chrome announced that they would change their API to make uBlock origin's life harder. So far, I cannot see a strong reason why I should put effort into switching. I run several businesses and projects, all of them are on Gmail and using other Google Services, I have one profile for each business in Chrome, including Chrome's password manager that is storing locally the passwords for all the accounts. It's a lot of effort to switch to Firefox and as stated above at the time of this writing I don't see why I should bother. I rather put in time to run my projects than switching to a different browser, because a lot of HN people are into rust, anti google or whatever. Chrome is integrated with a lot of Google Products and this makes my work overall more efficient than whatever the switch to FF would gain me as of now. That might change in the future, and, of course, YMMV. Edit: > Why did you reflect in the first place? Are you not interested in making rational decisions? Actually, I didn't reflect about it until I read the comment of the original parent. I saw a lot of times the comment about "why not FF" on HN, whenever there was anything submitted about "fixing chrome". To answer your last question: I also don't always force myself to make rational decisions. I DO get a Starbucks coffee once every couple months, I DO like to buy branded products sometimes even though it's not rational (running shoes for example). I DO engage in arguments online once in a while even though it adds not much to my life. So generally I am interested in rationality but I pick my battles and am ok with it when I just give in to my primal instincts. :-)
robbrown451 6y ago
A lot of things don't work on Firefox, or work worse. If you are against Google pushing their "evil" stuff on people -- not just you, but all people -- well, Google thinks they can get away with that because people consider their browser better (or those people are just more comfortable with Chrome). Stuff like this, i.e. more options for people, is actually very helpful in reigning Google in a bit. Other Chromium based browsers such as Edge or Brave help as well. BTW, my personal pet peeve with Firefox is lack of MIDI support, but there are lots of other things. I like that I can search Google by voice in Chrome, and my 6 year old loves that especially. (I don't know if ungoogled-chromium can do that though) I like the way you can grab tabs and drag them around and you know where they will go with Chrome before you drop them. (I have several monitors so this is a many-times-a-day thing for me and it feels awful in Firefox, comparatively). And I hate the ads and recommended sites on the "new tab" page.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- sixothree 6y ago
  It's not clear what does not work for you. Firefox has robust tab dragging. You can drag tabs all around. You can select multiple tabs and drag all of those.
  - ShorsHammer 6y ago
    Some google products have a worse experience with FF. Some websites straight up tell you to use chrome instead. Not saying it's right, just saying there's certainly a tradeoff. Firefox has made claims before about changes that specifically affect firefox performance: https://www.techradar.com/sg/news/mozilla-claims-google-has-made-youtube-perform-worse-on-edge-and-firefox https://www.techradar.com/sg/news/mozilla-claims-google-has-...
  - robbrown451 6y ago
    Yes but it doesn't work the same, you don't know what it is going to do until it does it. Try it on Chrome. It's a way more polished UI that gives you a dynamic preview. Makes a big difference especially on multiple monitors. As for the other things (MIDI etc), is there any confusion?
pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
That's hardly fighting Chrome's dominance. The people who Google hired to write Chrome came from Mozilla. Also Mozilla pays its own developers with money that comes from a deal with Google. The online advertising industry, Google's customer base, is supporting and indirectly controlling both of these browsers. Those "evil" things that Googles does are done to offer services to that customer base. Whatever "fight" you might imagine between browsers is, with respect to end users, illusory. Neither browser can pull the plug on the online ad business, they both depend on it. That is the source of the "evil".
- oarsinsync 6y ago
  The GP was talking about browser engines, and the hegemony that is Chromium. A third major browser engine is valuable.
  - jay_kyburz 6y ago
    What is the second one?
    - 0xdeadb00f 6y ago
      The one Safari uses (WebKit?)
    - ntp85 6y ago
      WebKit, I suppose.
      - frabcus 6y ago
        How different are Blink and WebKit these days? My impression is they share patches enough, that they can't really be counted as different browser engines. But perhaps that has changed?
        SahAssar 6y ago
        They are very different, it's been seven years of heavy development since forking. For comparison that's longer than the time between apple forking kHTML to make webkit and the the first release of chrome.
xeromal 6y ago
Firefox's sync is dogshit
nabaraz 6y ago
If I could get Chrome's developer tools on Firefox. I would never touch Chrome again. I need device emulator (with editable user string), request blocking and remote device (for webview debugging).
ta17711771 6y ago
No per site process isolation, X11 exploit on Linux, and more telemetry to Google than Chrome would be a good place to start.
ojosilva 6y ago
As a happy FF user on Mac, Android and Windows, I'm badly missing FF add-ons for iOS (iPadOS actually) - this is due to Apple's policies on iOS prohibiting apps from downloading plugins outside of the App Store. The web without an ad-blocker and proper cookie cleanup (not to talk about FF containers) is impractical to me right now. Maybe I (or someone) inspired by custom browser project like the OPs, will someday bundle FF with crucial add-ons for iOS and ship that through Github. It would probably need a dev account to install it in iOS/iPadOS, but it sure would be worth it. What I don't know is if regular FF add-ons (uBlock, cookie autodelete, etc.) will work on iOS FF since it runs with a bundled Safari webkit renderer, another Apple iPhone v1 2008-era-restriction for such delicate piece of hardware (weak battery, mem and cpu) that makes no sense now with powerful 2020 devices.
- messe 6y ago
  It's proprietary (and the full version is 9.99 a year IIRC), but I've found 1Blocker[1] to be very good on iOS/iPadOS. Admittedly I'd prefer a proper port of Firefox (with JIT), but I can't see that happening for a few years at least. iPadOS 14 is rumoured to include Xcode, so I'm hopeful that might herald a reduction in Apple's restrictions on third party applications. > Maybe I (or someone) inspired by custom browser project like the OPs, will someday bundle FF with crucial add-ons for iOS and ship that through Github. It would probably need a dev account to install it in iOS/iPadOS, but it sure would be worth it. If you're going to distribute it outside of the App Store, then the restrictions on JIT and third party addons wouldn't apply. You could conceivably have a full port of Firefox installed via AltStore (for non-jailbroken devices) or Cydia (for jailbroken ones). [1]: https://1blocker.com/ https://1blocker.com/
  - wincy 6y ago
    I bought 1blocker like a week before 1blocker X came out and I’m still mad about it. I guess I should just bite the bullet and pay for the new one, 1blocker legacy has worked pretty well but it’s stopped blocking most ads.
  - mkskm 6y ago
    How does this compare to AdGuard?
sneak 6y ago
Chrome has better security guarantees, and Firefox is also spyware, transmitting user activity to Mozilla without consent. You could make an un-Mozilla’d Firefox, but at that point you’re better off running this, because once you remove the spyware, Chrome is actually a better browser.
nailer 6y ago
Because Firefox is mainly funded by Google and an organisation reliant upon funding from a giant advertising company won't have my best interests in mind
- ta17711771 6y ago
  For anyone wondering the scale of this, it's hundreds of millions of USD.
- fomine3 6y ago
  Mozilla is still precious organization even they received money from Google because they developing original browser engine. Other "privacy-oriented" browser company mostly just uses Chromium. We should against domination of Chromium.
  - nailer 6y ago
    > Mozilla is still precious organization even they received money from Google because they developing original browser engine. Mozilla using a unique rendering engine doesn't alleviate bring funded for hundreds of millions of dollars by the world's biggest advertising company.
einpoklum 6y ago
1. Chromium as a second browser to try things out without my extensions, cookies, etc. 2. Some websites are developed targeting Chrome(ium) and even check for either that or a Microsoft browser. Yes, that still happens.
snidane 6y ago
Fullscreen in Firefox doesn't integrate well in i3 window manager and that's why I use Chromium instead.
rattray 6y ago
Maybe you don't care about open source browser engine monopoly as much as ubiquitous monitoring? Without this project, there wouldn't be a way to really make use of the fact that chromium is open source. It frees the world's best browser engine, which IMO is awesome.
- rattray 6y ago
  Now that I think about it, I bet Chrome has way less or a monopoly than Google's general reach in tracking. Strictly less I suppose since it contributes.
- hhsuey 6y ago
  ...which Google leverages to their advantage.
PascLeRasc 6y ago
I love Firefox and I'm really thankful for it, but the power consumption is just too high on Mac. Firefox instantly heats up my laptop even with just a single tab open. I like it better than Chrome, but I just can't take the battery/CPU hit for now.
- Doingmything123 6y ago
  That's weird. I'm working on a MacBook on FireFox 77 with >50 tabs and it's slightly warm at best. I usually am plugged in when doing something like this so I can't comment on battery drain compared to Chrome
stillbourne 6y ago
I like FF for daily browsing but chrome dev tools are my heroin.

I keep a copy of Chromium around to test stuff I develop or for the occasional website that doesn't work in Firefox. Ungoogled chromium importance will increase with the continued decline of Firefox's absolute and relative market shares.

Orou 6y ago
Had to check because I thought if anything Firefox's market share had been increasing the past couple of years, but you're absolutely right. I wonder why Firefox isn't performing better in the browser market - it's arguably better than it's ever been.
- yoavmmn 6y ago
  I have two guesses: 1. Extensions - almost anyone have some kind of extension installed, and Chrome absolutely wins in that category. that prevents people from switching over to Firefox. Personally I know people that switched to Firefox only after I showed them the extensions they us or an alternative exists on Firefox. 2. Advertisement - Google have a lot more advertising resources than Mozilla. For example, every new Android phone with Google Play Services ships with Google products already installed including Chrome (sometimes as the only browser). It's not unfounded to think that most people will use the same browser they're using in their smartphone.
  - meitham 6y ago
    Google amplifies these security conferences where Chrome comes out as a more secure browser than the rest, this leads a lot of corporate IT to enforce Chrome as the default browser on work PC. Some people completely switched their home browser to Chrome just because they like to use one browser at home and work!
  - mgiampapa 6y ago
    This is where Google will shoot itself in the foot trying to kill ad blockers and 3rd party extensions like paywall removers. Firefox is more than good enough, and if you take away uBlock and others that have a loyal following users are going to bail. The fact that I can run extensions on Firefox for Android is a huge enough win that it's my default system browser.
    - julianlam 6y ago
      Keeping in mind that different users have different priorities, I still don't understand why Firefox doesn't make market this as their number one distinguishing feature.
      - est31 6y ago
        Remember that Mozilla gets their revenue from Google, an ad company. They'd undercut their main revenue source. Another issue is he press. The press is usually very Firefox-positive and always covers it. They might turn on Firefox if it started blocking ads.
  - peteretep 6y ago
    > Extensions - almost anyone have some kind of extension installed, and Chrome absolutely wins in that category I have a bunch of extensions installed on Firefox and don’t use Chrome. What are the Chrome-only extensions I’m missing that means Chrome “absolutely wins”?
    - mdaniel 6y ago
      Plenty of corporate types target Chrome because of its market share (for the same reason, iOS apps are out for years before Android ones are) One specific circumstance which impacts me is the Capital One virtual credit card extension (https://www.capitalone.com/applications/eno/virtualnumbers https://www.capitalone.com/applications/eno/virtualnumbers ) which if one clicks on "Get It Now", from a copy of Firefox, one ends up on the webstore: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/eno%C2%AE-from-capital-one%C2%AE/clmkdohmabikagpnhjmgacbclihgmdje https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/eno%C2%AE-from-cap... Even consulting the page source (view-source:https://www.capitalone.com/applications/eno/virtualnumbers/ https://www.capitalone.com/applications/eno/virtualnumbers/) shows some mentions of Firefox but certainly no mozilla.org URL or .xpi that would imply they're serious about that claim.
  - qplex 6y ago
    Chrome on Android does not support extensions at all.
- otabdeveloper4 6y ago
  People use whatever browser came bundled with their device. In 2020 that's Chrome.
- ta17711771 6y ago
  Security is a big one. No per site process isolation, Firefox on X11/Linux is baaaad, and that's just the beginning.
  - minitech 6y ago
    What does Firefox do w.r.t. X11 that’s less secure than other browsers?
    - est31 6y ago
      https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1129492 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1129492 X11 is an old display protocol predating modern concepts of application sandboxing. It gives gives windows lots of control, like allowing them to move the mouse, enter keystrokes, etc. Basically, anyone who has an X11 handle has the same level of access as the user. In Firefox, the process that's supposed to be sanboxed (the content process) has precisely such a handle.
- rado 6y ago
  In some scenarios, FF on Mac is much slower than Chrome and Safari: animating transforms, masks etc
- literallycancer 6y ago
  The state of translation extensions in Firefox is catastrophic. The useful ones got deleted from the store. As far as I can tell the only reason was to flex some policy choices by the extension store(?) team. So you pretty much have to have Chromium as a backup if you ever need to research non-Anglo content. I can see people moving to Chromium because of this and other similar problems with extensions being broken (like the tridactyl thing).
  - bovine3dom 6y ago
    You can use userscripts (e.g. with Violentmonkey [1]) for Google Translate, e.g. [2]. Since you mentioned Tridactyl you might be interested to know that I wrote my own command to inject Google Translate on demand [3]. The extensions you mentioned were removed because they execute remote code. Mozilla are trying to tighten these restrictions [4]. I think Chrome is moving in a similar direction. I don't think that will affect the user script work-around as they execute in the page context, but I could be wrong. [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/violentmonkey/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/violentmonkey... [2]: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/9285-translate-google-tooltip https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/9285-translate-google-tool... [3]: https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl/blob/c776f722944714eef77a8dc3dd82d0e813befdab/.tridactylrc#L140 https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl/blob/c776f722944714ee... [4]: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2019/12/12/test-the-new-csp-for-content-scripts/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2019/12/12/test-the-new-csp-...
    - cmeacham98 6y ago
      I've never heard of violentmonkey, how does it compare to grease/tampermonkey?
      - bovine3dom 6y ago
        Violentmonkey is very actively developed [1]. Greasemonkey isn't [2]. Tampermonkey is closed source so I view it with some suspicion. Otherwise they're all pretty much the same, as far as I know (I don't use them extensively). [1]: https://github.com/violentmonkey/violentmonkey/graphs/contributors https://github.com/violentmonkey/violentmonkey/graphs/contri... [2]: https://github.com/greasemonkey/greasemonkey/graphs/contributors https://github.com/greasemonkey/greasemonkey/graphs/contribu...
wp381640 6y ago
You should use stock Chrome for user testing to get as close to user environments as possible. Little things like a missing http -> https redirect on a subdomain won't be caught in Ungoogled Chromium or Brave.
- est31 6y ago
  If I made my money from web development, I would. But it's not my main occupation and I mainly do smaller things as a hobby. There I think it's okay to do this basic kind of testing.
  - edoceo 6y ago
    And you can use test tools like Browserstack (et al) to test on platforms/vroseers you don't have -

CGamesPlay 6y ago

Safari is my daily driver, but I switch to Chrome when doing web development because the development tools were vastly superior (10 years ago I was in love with Firebug, but I don't think it's kept up with Chromium's dev tools).

hutattedonmyarm 6y ago
I too use Safari and switch to Vivaldi and Firefox for webdev. I think FFs dev tools have mostly caught on (especially anything CSS related is better in FF) with Chromium, but it's still a bit behind for JS debugging
drevil-v2 6y ago
Same here. Safari day to day and Edge/Firefox for dev tools Safari ticks all the boxes for me: - Power consumption - Minimal UI that is elegant and easy on the eyes - Font rendering is much nicer (especially when compared to Firefox) - Enter a word in the search bar and usually Siri will show you the exact website and just select it to go there. Other browsers will take you to search page first then you select the first result to go there - SMS integration for 2FA - Bookmarks UI is so much cleaner than any other browser. Speaking of bookmarks, why the fuck does Edge and Firefox store any bookmarks created on your phone or tablet under a separate top level section "Mobile Bookmarks"? It is just so unnecessary and adds needless UI interaction just to get to it.
- bredren 6y ago
  Do you use content filtering / ad blocking technology in conjunction with Safari? Last I tried to use Safari, it seemed some of the most common tools could not be plugged in / added on to the browser.
  - arafsheikh 6y ago
    AdGuard works fine with Safari. I also use NextDNS on top.
  - vladvasiliu 6y ago

pier25 6y ago

For me its mainly the lack of proper multilingual spellcheck but there are other annoyances with ff. I’ll elaborate when I get to my desktop.

cleansy 6y ago

I asked myself this question a lot of times. The reason is: memories attached to FF. I used FF for ca. 7 years until Chrome came out. Every time I install FireFox (to give it a try again) all the bad memories come back using it. The whacky design, The Big Slowdown when you had more than 5 tabs open, the accumulation of dead memory, needing me to restart the damn thing every couple of hours or so. The slow Javascript. When Chrome came out I was amazed, like, I didn't even know how pleasant a browser experience can be until I tried Chrome. It felt revolutionary. Now Firefox might have caught up but 7 years with all of these problems are still glued to that red/orange logo. A project like ungoogled-chrome is a welcomed effort, as I cannot imagine going back to FF permanently. They just missed the train, IMHO.

hnaccy 6y ago
That seems fairly irrational. In my experience current FF handles many tabs much better than Chrome.
- cleansy 6y ago
  Of course it is irrational. It's fairly well studied that humans make a lot of their decisions out of emotions and rationalize it later. It doesn't make rational sense to buy a coffee from Starbucks. It doesn't make sense to shout in an argument. The fact that people make purchase decisions based on branding doesn't make sense on a rational level. It's irrational to disregard the influence of emotions on the decision making progress.
  - dao- 6y ago
    What's weird is that you reflect on your emotions, understand that decisions you made are irrational, and still can't see yourself make a different decision going forward. Why did you reflect in the first place? Are you not interested in making rational decisions?
    - cleansy 6y ago
      The question is: is FF the "better" browser over Chrome/-ium? From a technical perspective: the differences are IMHO negligible. Last time I tried FF I couldn't tell any difference. The reaction time of the brain for visual input is something like 180ms(?) and Chrome and FF are faster than that for locally bound functions. From a moral perspective: sure, Firefox might be the better choice, although the Mozilla Org has a fair share of controversies. Usability wise: from my last evaluation: minimal. There are functionalities that I liked in FF more, and others in Chrome. So again: from my personal view negligible. Then there is what I stated above: the memory of cursing about Firefox because it simply "sucked" and Chrome was the best solution for it, you can argue that without Chrome FF would still suck. The first time I seriously considered switching was when Chrome announced that they would change their API to make uBlock origin's life harder. So far, I cannot see a strong reason why I should put effort into switching. I run several businesses and projects, all of them are on Gmail and using other Google Services, I have one profile for each business in Chrome, including Chrome's password manager that is storing locally the passwords for all the accounts. It's a lot of effort to switch to Firefox and as stated above at the time of this writing I don't see why I should bother. I rather put in time to run my projects than switching to a different browser, because a lot of HN people are into rust, anti google or whatever. Chrome is integrated with a lot of Google Products and this makes my work overall more efficient than whatever the switch to FF would gain me as of now. That might change in the future, and, of course, YMMV. Edit: > Why did you reflect in the first place? Are you not interested in making rational decisions? Actually, I didn't reflect about it until I read the comment of the original parent. I saw a lot of times the comment about "why not FF" on HN, whenever there was anything submitted about "fixing chrome". To answer your last question: I also don't always force myself to make rational decisions. I DO get a Starbucks coffee once every couple months, I DO like to buy branded products sometimes even though it's not rational (running shoes for example). I DO engage in arguments online once in a while even though it adds not much to my life. So generally I am interested in rationality but I pick my battles and am ok with it when I just give in to my primal instincts. :-)

robbrown451 6y ago

A lot of things don't work on Firefox, or work worse. If you are against Google pushing their "evil" stuff on people -- not just you, but all people -- well, Google thinks they can get away with that because people consider their browser better (or those people are just more comfortable with Chrome). Stuff like this, i.e. more options for people, is actually very helpful in reigning Google in a bit. Other Chromium based browsers such as Edge or Brave help as well. BTW, my personal pet peeve with Firefox is lack of MIDI support, but there are lots of other things. I like that I can search Google by voice in Chrome, and my 6 year old loves that especially. (I don't know if ungoogled-chromium can do that though) I like the way you can grab tabs and drag them around and you know where they will go with Chrome before you drop them. (I have several monitors so this is a many-times-a-day thing for me and it feels awful in Firefox, comparatively). And I hate the ads and recommended sites on the "new tab" page.

deleted 6y ago
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sixothree 6y ago
It's not clear what does not work for you. Firefox has robust tab dragging. You can drag tabs all around. You can select multiple tabs and drag all of those.
- ShorsHammer 6y ago
  Some google products have a worse experience with FF. Some websites straight up tell you to use chrome instead. Not saying it's right, just saying there's certainly a tradeoff. Firefox has made claims before about changes that specifically affect firefox performance: https://www.techradar.com/sg/news/mozilla-claims-google-has-made-youtube-perform-worse-on-edge-and-firefox https://www.techradar.com/sg/news/mozilla-claims-google-has-...
- robbrown451 6y ago
  Yes but it doesn't work the same, you don't know what it is going to do until it does it. Try it on Chrome. It's a way more polished UI that gives you a dynamic preview. Makes a big difference especially on multiple monitors. As for the other things (MIDI etc), is there any confusion?

pwdisswordfish2 6y ago

That's hardly fighting Chrome's dominance. The people who Google hired to write Chrome came from Mozilla. Also Mozilla pays its own developers with money that comes from a deal with Google. The online advertising industry, Google's customer base, is supporting and indirectly controlling both of these browsers. Those "evil" things that Googles does are done to offer services to that customer base. Whatever "fight" you might imagine between browsers is, with respect to end users, illusory. Neither browser can pull the plug on the online ad business, they both depend on it. That is the source of the "evil".

oarsinsync 6y ago
The GP was talking about browser engines, and the hegemony that is Chromium. A third major browser engine is valuable.
- jay_kyburz 6y ago
  What is the second one?
  - 0xdeadb00f 6y ago
    The one Safari uses (WebKit?)
  - ntp85 6y ago
    WebKit, I suppose.
    - frabcus 6y ago
      How different are Blink and WebKit these days? My impression is they share patches enough, that they can't really be counted as different browser engines. But perhaps that has changed?
      - SahAssar 6y ago
        They are very different, it's been seven years of heavy development since forking. For comparison that's longer than the time between apple forking kHTML to make webkit and the the first release of chrome.

xeromal 6y ago

Firefox's sync is dogshit

nabaraz 6y ago

If I could get Chrome's developer tools on Firefox. I would never touch Chrome again. I need device emulator (with editable user string), request blocking and remote device (for webview debugging).

ta17711771 6y ago

No per site process isolation, X11 exploit on Linux, and more telemetry to Google than Chrome would be a good place to start.

ojosilva 6y ago

As a happy FF user on Mac, Android and Windows, I'm badly missing FF add-ons for iOS (iPadOS actually) - this is due to Apple's policies on iOS prohibiting apps from downloading plugins outside of the App Store. The web without an ad-blocker and proper cookie cleanup (not to talk about FF containers) is impractical to me right now. Maybe I (or someone) inspired by custom browser project like the OPs, will someday bundle FF with crucial add-ons for iOS and ship that through Github. It would probably need a dev account to install it in iOS/iPadOS, but it sure would be worth it. What I don't know is if regular FF add-ons (uBlock, cookie autodelete, etc.) will work on iOS FF since it runs with a bundled Safari webkit renderer, another Apple iPhone v1 2008-era-restriction for such delicate piece of hardware (weak battery, mem and cpu) that makes no sense now with powerful 2020 devices.

messe 6y ago
It's proprietary (and the full version is 9.99 a year IIRC), but I've found 1Blocker[1] to be very good on iOS/iPadOS. Admittedly I'd prefer a proper port of Firefox (with JIT), but I can't see that happening for a few years at least. iPadOS 14 is rumoured to include Xcode, so I'm hopeful that might herald a reduction in Apple's restrictions on third party applications. > Maybe I (or someone) inspired by custom browser project like the OPs, will someday bundle FF with crucial add-ons for iOS and ship that through Github. It would probably need a dev account to install it in iOS/iPadOS, but it sure would be worth it. If you're going to distribute it outside of the App Store, then the restrictions on JIT and third party addons wouldn't apply. You could conceivably have a full port of Firefox installed via AltStore (for non-jailbroken devices) or Cydia (for jailbroken ones). [1]: https://1blocker.com/ https://1blocker.com/
- wincy 6y ago
  I bought 1blocker like a week before 1blocker X came out and I’m still mad about it. I guess I should just bite the bullet and pay for the new one, 1blocker legacy has worked pretty well but it’s stopped blocking most ads.
- mkskm 6y ago
  How does this compare to AdGuard?

sneak 6y ago

Chrome has better security guarantees, and Firefox is also spyware, transmitting user activity to Mozilla without consent. You could make an un-Mozilla’d Firefox, but at that point you’re better off running this, because once you remove the spyware, Chrome is actually a better browser.

nailer 6y ago

Because Firefox is mainly funded by Google and an organisation reliant upon funding from a giant advertising company won't have my best interests in mind

ta17711771 6y ago
For anyone wondering the scale of this, it's hundreds of millions of USD.
fomine3 6y ago
Mozilla is still precious organization even they received money from Google because they developing original browser engine. Other "privacy-oriented" browser company mostly just uses Chromium. We should against domination of Chromium.
- nailer 6y ago
  > Mozilla is still precious organization even they received money from Google because they developing original browser engine. Mozilla using a unique rendering engine doesn't alleviate bring funded for hundreds of millions of dollars by the world's biggest advertising company.

einpoklum 6y ago

1. Chromium as a second browser to try things out without my extensions, cookies, etc. 2. Some websites are developed targeting Chrome(ium) and even check for either that or a Microsoft browser. Yes, that still happens.

snidane 6y ago

Fullscreen in Firefox doesn't integrate well in i3 window manager and that's why I use Chromium instead.

rattray 6y ago

Maybe you don't care about open source browser engine monopoly as much as ubiquitous monitoring? Without this project, there wouldn't be a way to really make use of the fact that chromium is open source. It frees the world's best browser engine, which IMO is awesome.

rattray 6y ago
Now that I think about it, I bet Chrome has way less or a monopoly than Google's general reach in tracking. Strictly less I suppose since it contributes.
hhsuey 6y ago
...which Google leverages to their advantage.

PascLeRasc 6y ago

I love Firefox and I'm really thankful for it, but the power consumption is just too high on Mac. Firefox instantly heats up my laptop even with just a single tab open. I like it better than Chrome, but I just can't take the battery/CPU hit for now.

Doingmything123 6y ago
That's weird. I'm working on a MacBook on FireFox 77 with >50 tabs and it's slightly warm at best. I usually am plugged in when doing something like this so I can't comment on battery drain compared to Chrome

stillbourne 6y ago

I like FF for daily browsing but chrome dev tools are my heroin.