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I recently tried to move to Firefox (again). I try to to this every couple years. I run into the same three blockers every time. 1. The omnibar completion isn'

by snide 6y ago

I recently tried to move to Firefox (again). I try to to this every couple years. I run into the same three blockers every time. 1. The omnibar completion isn't as good. Chrome figures out where I go pretty regularly, and autocompletes extremely well based upon habits. 2. The dev tools aren't as good. I mostly work in the frontend, and simple things like how you write css overwrites with tab completion is just not as good in Firefox. 3. I often run with lots of tabs. Although firefox lets you make tabs smaller, it's default method of "scrolling" tabs isn't as nice as chrome infinite method. It doesn't help that I pair this yearly experiment with DDG as my search. With that pairing I often run into autocompletion / omnibar issues and find myself just banging !g to get myself out of it. I really would like to switch, but the gap is too much for my daily tooling. I say this as someone who recently switched to Linux from OSX and really ran into no issues outside of having to spend a week setting thing up how I liked.

lewiscollard 6y ago
> 1. The omnibar completion isn't as good. Chrome figures out where I go pretty regularly, and autocompletes extremely well based upon habits. That's interesting, because I have found rather the opposite, for how I use it. Chrome doesn't seem to remember anything but my most frequented sites; with Firefox I find it much easier to find that thing I was reading a few weeks back that I did not bookmark by searching a word from the title. Chrome doesn't seem to remember anything but my most frequent and/or very most recently visited sites.
- snide 6y ago
  This might be true. I need to the two things out of my bar at the moment: (a) going to those 10 sites i always go to very quickly (b) to run a search on some linux/css/react thing. Chrome does really well there, no matter what config settings I change in Firefox. For the deep history I'm a pinboard user and bookmark at least a dozen things daily with tags.
- s9w 6y ago
  Yeah the FF bar completion is lightyears ahead of chromes. Chrome massively favors searches over history matches. I revisit every couple of months but it always is comically unusable for me. To the point where I visit only about 3 sites with my chrome, and even when I write the first 3 letters of a 4 word domain the default action is still a google search (with the correct site listed beneath but not default selected). edit: So I just opened my very secondary chrome. I use it for Youtube listening mostly. When I enter "hand co" to find my often listened "hand covers bruise" song, I get 7 (!) google searches, and the 8th and last entry is the Youtube link.
- jiripospisil 6y ago
  You can even type the exact parts of a URL and Chrome doesn't offer any autocompletion [0], just an option to search. But then once you do search, the result page shows the URL as visited... [1] I refuse to believe this behavior is anything but Google's attempt to show you ads on the result page. [0] https://i.imgur.com/3bp63K9.png https://i.imgur.com/3bp63K9.png [1] https://i.imgur.com/UPZvHEt.png https://i.imgur.com/UPZvHEt.png
whereistimbo 6y ago
> Although firefox lets you make tabs smaller, it's default method of "scrolling" tabs isn't as nice as chrome infinite method. Tree style tabs works better in Firefox than Chrome. Just saying
- wyoh 6y ago
  There also an extension called Sidebery [1][2] which is a lighter alternative to TST. I've found that TST was making my Firefox hang several seconds before loading all my tabs. [1]: https://github.com/mbnuqw/sidebery https://github.com/mbnuqw/sidebery [2]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/
  - regularfry 6y ago
    There's also an extension whose name I forget (but should be easy enough to find for the sufficiently motivated) which unloads background tabs so they're not taking up resources unless you switch to them. Made a huge difference when I installed it.
    - wyoh 6y ago
      Dormancy https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dormancy/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dormancy/
    - nausher81 6y ago
      There is also the auto-tab discard Extension. Which reportedly uses Native API better. I've seen that compared to other tab suspenders it does keep tabs sticky between sessions. However, I'm not a fan of it's auto-foreground on clicking a tab behavior. I think, The Great Suspender Extension on Chrome handles this better. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-discard/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
chrismorgan 6y ago
1: as you’ve said, the quality of such completion depends on habits; if you’re just shifting to the browser, it doesn’t have the full details with which to do good completion. 2: strongly disagree; I use Firefox, and on the odd occasion where I’m doing something in Chrome, it drives me insane with things like its CSS editing experience, because it does things in what I find to be a much less native-feeling way, whereas Firefox’s behave in a mostly native way, so that things tend to work the way I expect. There are glaring problems with it (mostly around “completing” a whole new word when I press Space when that makes an otherwise valid value nonsense; I really should file a bug about that if there isn’t one), but I find Chrome much more painful to interact with. And what do you know, a lot of it probably comes down to familiarity and what you’re used to. 3: Chrome is a disaster for large numbers of tabs. On most screen sizes it’s just about hopeless with even thirty tabs, maybe as few as twenty, both for reasons of performance and because of its infinite tab shrinking folly. Firefox, on the other hand, can handle hundreds of tabs in a session with perfect equanimity (though performance will definitely be affected by that point). On DuckDuckGo, I find it to yield good results most of the time, and it’s rare for me to reach for !g. In most of these sorts of things, it’s much more about what you’re used to and know how to interact with, than any inherent superiority of one over the other.
- xpe 6y ago
  Re: DuckDuckGo, I like to use !s to delegate to StartPage.com which relies on Google but provides a more private experience (according to StartPage themselves, which I have not investigated much). If you have comments on !s vs !g, I'll all ears. For example, I have wondered, to what degree does the "extra" hop: (a) help my privacy; (b) affect DDG's revenue stream; (c) affect the results.
- ferzul 6y ago
  > 1: as you’ve said, the quality of such completion depends on habits; if you’re just shifting to the browser, it doesn’t have the full details with which to do good completion. i've used firefox ever since galeon bit the dust (or maybe since epiphany switched to webkit). it knows my habits. but it still suggests urls i don't want instead of just offering to switch to an open tab. (frankly, i want open tabs to match enthusiatically. i would rather switch to an open tab than open a new tab to the same site, which is redundant.)
andai 6y ago
0. Performance I switch to Firefox about once a year (seasonal surveillance paranoia?). I mostly run older machines and there's a noticeable performance difference between FF and Chrome-based browsers. As a compromise I run Brave (chrome-based, un-googled, and kind of privacy oriented?) but not really happy about that. Fwiw I really want Firefox to succeed, I donate to Mozilla every month and I am learning Rust. I think it's partly sequencing, eg. opening a new window in FF, FF waits until the window is built before showing it (takes nearly a second on my machine), while Chrome will open it instantly and then paint in the UI. The actual time til usable URL bar is the same on both, but on FF the experience is "I gave a command and nothing is happening... oh there it is". There's just no indication that anything is happening until it's done, and that makes a big difference. It makes it feel slow: even if the total delay is exactly the same, the perceived delay is several orders of magnitude greater. There's also some difference in the time it takes to load a page, but once they're loaded JS perf is on par. I expect the difference would be less dramatic on a machine from this decade, but I haven't had the pleasure of finding out :)
atombender 6y ago
I moved to Firefox and struggle a bit with the omnibar, too. I'm glad they finally dropped the separate search box, but the main autocompletions aren't as good. My main peeve is that Firefox is so slow to learn. I have to visit a certain site many, many times before it becomes an autocomplete candidate. Firefox will suggest it in the dropdown, but becoming a "primary" autocompletion that gets filled out in the omnibar itself takes a long time. Maybe there's a setting somewhere? Safari is, as far as I'm concerned, the gold standard here. Its autocompletions are fantastic.
Jap2-0 6y ago
> 3. I often run with lots of tabs. Although Firefox lets you make tabs smaller, it's default method of "scrolling" tabs isn't as nice as chrome infinite method. At a certain point Chrome will just disappear your tabs. They'll be loaded in the browser - there's just no way to access them. Scrolling in Firefox (especially with a mousewheel) just feels so natural and makes dealing with large amounts of tabs so much easier almost all of the time (with a potential exception right after Firefox starts scrolling tabs, but they're all visible on Chrome - but that can still be hit or miss).
tandr 6y ago
3. https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomCSSforFx https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomCSSforFx has tweak to have multi-row tabs. I use pretty much switched to FF just because of this.
yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
> 3. I often run with lots of tabs. Although firefox lets you make tabs smaller, it's default method of "scrolling" tabs isn't as nice as chrome infinite method. That rather sounds like you run with a medium amount of tabs. I have one browser session that literally has >900 tabs in it (I started pruning when it hit 1000); if Chrome even let me have that many tabs, the interface would no longer be usable.

by snide 6y ago

lewiscollard 6y ago

> 1. The omnibar completion isn't as good. Chrome figures out where I go pretty regularly, and autocompletes extremely well based upon habits. That's interesting, because I have found rather the opposite, for how I use it. Chrome doesn't seem to remember anything but my most frequented sites; with Firefox I find it much easier to find that thing I was reading a few weeks back that I did not bookmark by searching a word from the title. Chrome doesn't seem to remember anything but my most frequent and/or very most recently visited sites.

snide 6y ago
This might be true. I need to the two things out of my bar at the moment: (a) going to those 10 sites i always go to very quickly (b) to run a search on some linux/css/react thing. Chrome does really well there, no matter what config settings I change in Firefox. For the deep history I'm a pinboard user and bookmark at least a dozen things daily with tags.
s9w 6y ago
Yeah the FF bar completion is lightyears ahead of chromes. Chrome massively favors searches over history matches. I revisit every couple of months but it always is comically unusable for me. To the point where I visit only about 3 sites with my chrome, and even when I write the first 3 letters of a 4 word domain the default action is still a google search (with the correct site listed beneath but not default selected). edit: So I just opened my very secondary chrome. I use it for Youtube listening mostly. When I enter "hand co" to find my often listened "hand covers bruise" song, I get 7 (!) google searches, and the 8th and last entry is the Youtube link.
jiripospisil 6y ago
You can even type the exact parts of a URL and Chrome doesn't offer any autocompletion [0], just an option to search. But then once you do search, the result page shows the URL as visited... [1] I refuse to believe this behavior is anything but Google's attempt to show you ads on the result page. [0] https://i.imgur.com/3bp63K9.png https://i.imgur.com/3bp63K9.png [1] https://i.imgur.com/UPZvHEt.png https://i.imgur.com/UPZvHEt.png

whereistimbo 6y ago

> Although firefox lets you make tabs smaller, it's default method of "scrolling" tabs isn't as nice as chrome infinite method. Tree style tabs works better in Firefox than Chrome. Just saying

wyoh 6y ago
There also an extension called Sidebery [1][2] which is a lighter alternative to TST. I've found that TST was making my Firefox hang several seconds before loading all my tabs. [1]: https://github.com/mbnuqw/sidebery https://github.com/mbnuqw/sidebery [2]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/
- regularfry 6y ago
  There's also an extension whose name I forget (but should be easy enough to find for the sufficiently motivated) which unloads background tabs so they're not taking up resources unless you switch to them. Made a huge difference when I installed it.
  - wyoh 6y ago
    Dormancy https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dormancy/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dormancy/
  - nausher81 6y ago
    There is also the auto-tab discard Extension. Which reportedly uses Native API better. I've seen that compared to other tab suspenders it does keep tabs sticky between sessions. However, I'm not a fan of it's auto-foreground on clicking a tab behavior. I think, The Great Suspender Extension on Chrome handles this better. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-discard/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

chrismorgan 6y ago

1: as you’ve said, the quality of such completion depends on habits; if you’re just shifting to the browser, it doesn’t have the full details with which to do good completion. 2: strongly disagree; I use Firefox, and on the odd occasion where I’m doing something in Chrome, it drives me insane with things like its CSS editing experience, because it does things in what I find to be a much less native-feeling way, whereas Firefox’s behave in a mostly native way, so that things tend to work the way I expect. There are glaring problems with it (mostly around “completing” a whole new word when I press Space when that makes an otherwise valid value nonsense; I really should file a bug about that if there isn’t one), but I find Chrome much more painful to interact with. And what do you know, a lot of it probably comes down to familiarity and what you’re used to. 3: Chrome is a disaster for large numbers of tabs. On most screen sizes it’s just about hopeless with even thirty tabs, maybe as few as twenty, both for reasons of performance and because of its infinite tab shrinking folly. Firefox, on the other hand, can handle hundreds of tabs in a session with perfect equanimity (though performance will definitely be affected by that point). On DuckDuckGo, I find it to yield good results most of the time, and it’s rare for me to reach for !g. In most of these sorts of things, it’s much more about what you’re used to and know how to interact with, than any inherent superiority of one over the other.

xpe 6y ago
Re: DuckDuckGo, I like to use !s to delegate to StartPage.com which relies on Google but provides a more private experience (according to StartPage themselves, which I have not investigated much). If you have comments on !s vs !g, I'll all ears. For example, I have wondered, to what degree does the "extra" hop: (a) help my privacy; (b) affect DDG's revenue stream; (c) affect the results.
ferzul 6y ago
> 1: as you’ve said, the quality of such completion depends on habits; if you’re just shifting to the browser, it doesn’t have the full details with which to do good completion. i've used firefox ever since galeon bit the dust (or maybe since epiphany switched to webkit). it knows my habits. but it still suggests urls i don't want instead of just offering to switch to an open tab. (frankly, i want open tabs to match enthusiatically. i would rather switch to an open tab than open a new tab to the same site, which is redundant.)

andai 6y ago

0. Performance I switch to Firefox about once a year (seasonal surveillance paranoia?). I mostly run older machines and there's a noticeable performance difference between FF and Chrome-based browsers. As a compromise I run Brave (chrome-based, un-googled, and kind of privacy oriented?) but not really happy about that. Fwiw I really want Firefox to succeed, I donate to Mozilla every month and I am learning Rust. I think it's partly sequencing, eg. opening a new window in FF, FF waits until the window is built before showing it (takes nearly a second on my machine), while Chrome will open it instantly and then paint in the UI. The actual time til usable URL bar is the same on both, but on FF the experience is "I gave a command and nothing is happening... oh there it is". There's just no indication that anything is happening until it's done, and that makes a big difference. It makes it feel slow: even if the total delay is exactly the same, the perceived delay is several orders of magnitude greater. There's also some difference in the time it takes to load a page, but once they're loaded JS perf is on par. I expect the difference would be less dramatic on a machine from this decade, but I haven't had the pleasure of finding out :)

atombender 6y ago

I moved to Firefox and struggle a bit with the omnibar, too. I'm glad they finally dropped the separate search box, but the main autocompletions aren't as good. My main peeve is that Firefox is so slow to learn. I have to visit a certain site many, many times before it becomes an autocomplete candidate. Firefox will suggest it in the dropdown, but becoming a "primary" autocompletion that gets filled out in the omnibar itself takes a long time. Maybe there's a setting somewhere? Safari is, as far as I'm concerned, the gold standard here. Its autocompletions are fantastic.

Jap2-0 6y ago

> 3. I often run with lots of tabs. Although Firefox lets you make tabs smaller, it's default method of "scrolling" tabs isn't as nice as chrome infinite method. At a certain point Chrome will just disappear your tabs. They'll be loaded in the browser - there's just no way to access them. Scrolling in Firefox (especially with a mousewheel) just feels so natural and makes dealing with large amounts of tabs so much easier almost all of the time (with a potential exception right after Firefox starts scrolling tabs, but they're all visible on Chrome - but that can still be hit or miss).

tandr 6y ago

3. https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomCSSforFx https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomCSSforFx has tweak to have multi-row tabs. I use pretty much switched to FF just because of this.

yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago

> 3. I often run with lots of tabs. Although firefox lets you make tabs smaller, it's default method of "scrolling" tabs isn't as nice as chrome infinite method. That rather sounds like you run with a medium amount of tabs. I have one browser session that literally has >900 tabs in it (I started pruning when it hit 1000); if Chrome even let me have that many tabs, the interface would no longer be usable.