7 ms·

So, honest question, because I'm genuinely bewildered: why would you bother doing this, when Firefox exists, is perfectly functional, and isn't made by Google?

annilt 6y ago
I’m back to Firefox after many years, it’s quite good and I don’t miss anything from Chrome other than one click translate page button. Also looks like FF has caught up Chrome performance-wise. It’s fast, it respects your privacy, very nice!
- trwired 6y ago
  It actually feels faster than Chrome to me. I've been primarily on Firefox for the past few months and was really surprised to find Chrome not feeling as responsive when I tried to use it recently.
- input_sh 6y ago
  Just search for Google Translate in add-ons. You'll find some that provide you with that behaviour on right-click.
- lallysingh 6y ago
  Same here, faster. Especially on mobile. Part of that had to be the built in ad blockers.
- mattlondon 6y ago
  I've been using Firefox as my daily driver for perhaps a year or more now. As well as the translate page button, the other great feature chrome has that I miss dearly is the highlights chrome has in the scrollbar when doing a ctrl-f find-in-page. That is super-useful and a real pain in the arse that Firefox does not support it. I played around with prototyping an extension to replicate it (or as close as I could get) but it was hard to nicely override the ctrl-f hooks.
  - ffpip 6y ago
    > As well as the translate page button, the other great feature chrome has that I miss dearly is the highlights chrome has in the scrollbar ... FYI, you can press the enter button to go to the next highlighted word in Find-in page.
    - striking 6y ago
      Yeah, but it's nice to be able to identify high densities of matches at a glance.
      - mattlondon 6y ago
        Yep - I will often just scroll down to the "densist" area. Keyboard shortcuts are not the problem.
- guywhocodes 6y ago
  I've been using both FF and webkit based browsers for probably 10 years and I keep seeing this statements but they don't make sense to me. When was firefox actually significantly slower? That is x2 slower or worse.
m463 6y ago
I do not use chrome and use firefox but chrome has better support for accelerated video/codecs/videoconferencing. Also, I block firefox myself. It phones home a lot, even when you tell it not to.
- cdubzzz 6y ago
  > Also, I block firefox myself. It phones home a lot, even when you tell it not to. Do you have sources on this? I use Firefox on Mac OS with Little Snitch and have never had Firefox try to phone home with analytics disabled (a one click decision on first start of the app).
  - m463 6y ago
    Here is the stuff I couldn't shut off: firefox.settings.services.mozilla.com shavar.services.mozilla.com aus5.mozilla.org
    - cdubzzz 6y ago
      Settings one is interesting, it does appear that you cannot block it[0] and that is sad. The other two appear to be safe browsing and automatic update related. Those two services can be disabled form the regular settings UI, I think? Have you found that to not work? [0] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-stop-firefox-making-automatic-connections https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-stop-firefox-making...
      - m463 6y ago
        It did not work for a long time Then I blocked it and got this constant nag pane "Firefox cannot update to the latest version". all. the. time. I finally found out some magic on macos: sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/org.mozilla.firefox DisableAppUpdate -bool TRUE sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/org.mozilla.firefox EnterprisePoliciesEnabled -bool TRUE that got rid of the nag pane
        6y ago
danlugo92 6y ago
I really really really tried to give Firefox a chance, but gmail and some other sites are unusable, 40% are slower and admittedly the other 50% work just as fine as in Chrome.
- lallysingh 6y ago
  When did you last try? It's gotten very good in the last year for me.
- AlchemistCamp 6y ago
  Huh? I've been using Firefox almost exclusively for five years and have been a gmail user the entire time.
Tipewryter 6y ago
There are some convenience issues with Firefox that bother me: - It starts slower then Chromium. - Right click and "Open in new private window" actually opens in a new private window. I prefer how Chromium does it, grouping all sites opened like this as tabs in one window. - In Chromium, I can easily set any URL as a custom search engine with whatever parameters I like. In Firefox, I can't.
- singron 6y ago
  While I dont think you can set any url as a "search engine", you can set any url as a parameterized keyword bookmark. Create a bookmark, then edit its properties, put %s in the url, and assign it a keyword. This behavior is more straightforward to setup in chrome but it at least exists in firefox.
- smichel17 6y ago
  > It starts slower then Chromium. In my experience, Chromium renders and is interactive ~~faster~~ earlier, but they have about the same time between launch and browse. On Chromium, I launch, type in a site, hit enter, and wait and wait as it finishes actually starting up. FF takes longer to appear but is ready to browse as soon as it does. Or at least it did until some time in the last year or two, at which point it started taking a page out of Chromium's book. But honestly, I don't do cold starts that much so it doesn't bother me much one way or another.
- CarelessExpert 6y ago
  I can't remark on the first two (I don't start my browser that often, it just status open, and most of my private browsing use cases are covered by the temporary containers extension), but the search engine issue (which is super annoying) can be solved with an extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/add-custom-search-engine/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/add-custom-se... No, an extension shouldn't be necessary, but it works (I use it to search with searx).
cperrine 6y ago
I have an intermittent issue in FF across platforms/networks where I can watch in network console as I enter a URL, and I can see it not even trying to send the request. All I can find is a fixed issue from 2017 and I don't have the time nor inclination to try to figure out why this would be happening. Searching for a cool new browser for the Linux box but I might just install Chromium and be done with it.
- rexf 6y ago
  I'm having a similar issue with FF. When I open FF and go to gmail.com, it doesn't load. I filed a bugzilla some time ago and it's still not fixed yet. FF is not usable for me so I switched back to Chrome.
superasn 6y ago
For me sadly it's the WebSpeech API. A lot of sites that use speech-to-text and text-to-speech break on FF and also the voices FF aren't nearly as good as Chrome. This bug has been pending for many years now and I don't think it ever going to be on their priority list soon.
hackerfromthefu 6y ago
I have had some problem with Firefox for many years, maybe 5 years since I've tried to use it. The problem is whenever I start FF it hangs for 30 seconds before I can type the first url in. That duration and the fact that it's consistent means it's clearly a network timeout. I have a locked down computer, layers of security enhancements so I kind of understand something I've done is causing it. However, why should it lock up for 30 seconds if it can't do some background thing! On startup! It's an atrocious UI failure. And it's been this way for 5 years that I've been counting, through their Quantam speedup etc. Major flaw and unfixed for aeons of 6 week release cycles. Btw it's not updating as it still updates .. It's actually really bad design to have a lockup like that, and especially on the critical hot path of the first time you use it! It's a sign actually of bad user experience design, and it's one of a number of bad anti-user things I've found about it. Things that Chrome gets so right! I want to ditch Chrome because of the many Google anti-features, but UX is also very important to me I use the browser all day every day and I'm extremely fast at the UI with advanced shortcuts etc. Firefox locking up for 30 whole seconds before I can use it not only destroys my flow but is actually an eternity - I could have about 40 chrome tabs opened with urls types and autocompleted or pasted into the url bar in that time .. Sadly Firefox blows on a large number of design decisions. I get the impression that user experience is down the list at Mozilla, below either Google donations or SJW antics. Whatever, but they consistently fail on important points. I wish it wasn't so I truly do. I'm in the process of moving to Brave in anticipation of uBlock finally being sabotaged by Google.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- t0astbread 6y ago
  Have you actually tried looking for the issue (i.e. determining where the network request goes and if you can disable it in the settings)?
- matthewmacleod 6y ago
  This is absolute fucking nonsense, FYI. You’re complaining about UX in the context of a bug triggered by your configuration. You could probably have identified the request that causes it in the time it took to write this comment.
caymanjim 6y ago
I'm slowly cutting the cord with nearly all social media sites and other sites that track me for any reason, and as part of that, I'd like to get away from Chrome and use a truly open and privacy-focused browser. Every time I start Firefox, I'm turned off by how unpleasant it looks. The UI is just bad. Sharp corners, asymmetrical margins, crowded menus, lack of whitespace. The rendered colors don't match Chrome. Fonts aren't as smooth. It's like switching from MacOS to Linux. Things just don't look good, and that matters.
- bloodorange 6y ago
  I am not entirely confident in this but from my perspective, a simplistic reading of what you say appears to be "I want privacy but only if I don't have to endure even minor inconveniences for it." This may never happen unless privacy was as profitable as selling data on people's behaviour. My apologies if I have misunderstood you.
  - xeromal 6y ago
    You put a gram of sarcasm on your simplistic reading, but I think you need to realize that anything people use daily, even hourly, needs to make them feel comfortable. For whatever reason, the poster you're replying to is bothered by him but for something he has to deal with so often, it's hard to override that feeling. I guess what I'm really saying is that frequently used things probably involve human phycology and emotions just as much as someone's intelligence.
    - bloodorange 6y ago
      Please permit me to cast blame upon the medium we use. I intended no sarcasm.
      - xeromal 6y ago
        It's all good. Indeed, the medium we use sometimes comes across poorly.
- 6y ago
defnotashton2 6y ago
Because ff extension management is utter useless garbage and there are many missing but useful extensions.
tartoran 6y ago
Im back to FF for almost a year now. I am experiencing a lot of hiccups, freezes and crashes. I think FF should concentrate to improve the browser first and foremost. They’ve been adding a lot of useless (to me) features but the broswer is still buggy. It’s their time to claim their market back from chrome, or it will start happening soon and I think they should just concentrate on the browser.
- floatingatoll 6y ago
  Do the crashes occur without any addons enabled?
- rocho 6y ago
  Are you on Windows by any chance? I experience that with Firefox only when I use Windows (i.e. almost never, fortunately). I switched to Firefox on my main computer (Linux) a year ago and I could not be happier. It consumes much less memory than Chrome, it's way faster (that's my impression, I haven't measured that in any way) and it is a lot more customizable. I removed a lot of stuff from the context menu for example. As a bonus, it isn't made by Google. I was a hardcore Google fan a few years ago, but after seeing what they are doing with Chrome and the internet, I just could not keep using Chrome any longer.

annilt 6y ago

I’m back to Firefox after many years, it’s quite good and I don’t miss anything from Chrome other than one click translate page button. Also looks like FF has caught up Chrome performance-wise. It’s fast, it respects your privacy, very nice!

trwired 6y ago
It actually feels faster than Chrome to me. I've been primarily on Firefox for the past few months and was really surprised to find Chrome not feeling as responsive when I tried to use it recently.
input_sh 6y ago
Just search for Google Translate in add-ons. You'll find some that provide you with that behaviour on right-click.
lallysingh 6y ago
Same here, faster. Especially on mobile. Part of that had to be the built in ad blockers.
mattlondon 6y ago
I've been using Firefox as my daily driver for perhaps a year or more now. As well as the translate page button, the other great feature chrome has that I miss dearly is the highlights chrome has in the scrollbar when doing a ctrl-f find-in-page. That is super-useful and a real pain in the arse that Firefox does not support it. I played around with prototyping an extension to replicate it (or as close as I could get) but it was hard to nicely override the ctrl-f hooks.
- ffpip 6y ago
  > As well as the translate page button, the other great feature chrome has that I miss dearly is the highlights chrome has in the scrollbar ... FYI, you can press the enter button to go to the next highlighted word in Find-in page.
  - striking 6y ago
    Yeah, but it's nice to be able to identify high densities of matches at a glance.
    - mattlondon 6y ago
      Yep - I will often just scroll down to the "densist" area. Keyboard shortcuts are not the problem.
guywhocodes 6y ago
I've been using both FF and webkit based browsers for probably 10 years and I keep seeing this statements but they don't make sense to me. When was firefox actually significantly slower? That is x2 slower or worse.

m463 6y ago

I do not use chrome and use firefox but chrome has better support for accelerated video/codecs/videoconferencing. Also, I block firefox myself. It phones home a lot, even when you tell it not to.

cdubzzz 6y ago
> Also, I block firefox myself. It phones home a lot, even when you tell it not to. Do you have sources on this? I use Firefox on Mac OS with Little Snitch and have never had Firefox try to phone home with analytics disabled (a one click decision on first start of the app).
- m463 6y ago
  Here is the stuff I couldn't shut off: firefox.settings.services.mozilla.com shavar.services.mozilla.com aus5.mozilla.org
  - cdubzzz 6y ago
    Settings one is interesting, it does appear that you cannot block it[0] and that is sad. The other two appear to be safe browsing and automatic update related. Those two services can be disabled form the regular settings UI, I think? Have you found that to not work? [0] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-stop-firefox-making-automatic-connections https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-stop-firefox-making...
    - m463 6y ago
      It did not work for a long time Then I blocked it and got this constant nag pane "Firefox cannot update to the latest version". all. the. time. I finally found out some magic on macos: sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/org.mozilla.firefox DisableAppUpdate -bool TRUE sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/org.mozilla.firefox EnterprisePoliciesEnabled -bool TRUE that got rid of the nag pane
      - 6y ago

danlugo92 6y ago

I really really really tried to give Firefox a chance, but gmail and some other sites are unusable, 40% are slower and admittedly the other 50% work just as fine as in Chrome.

lallysingh 6y ago
When did you last try? It's gotten very good in the last year for me.
AlchemistCamp 6y ago
Huh? I've been using Firefox almost exclusively for five years and have been a gmail user the entire time.

Tipewryter 6y ago

There are some convenience issues with Firefox that bother me: - It starts slower then Chromium. - Right click and "Open in new private window" actually opens in a new private window. I prefer how Chromium does it, grouping all sites opened like this as tabs in one window. - In Chromium, I can easily set any URL as a custom search engine with whatever parameters I like. In Firefox, I can't.

singron 6y ago
While I dont think you can set any url as a "search engine", you can set any url as a parameterized keyword bookmark. Create a bookmark, then edit its properties, put %s in the url, and assign it a keyword. This behavior is more straightforward to setup in chrome but it at least exists in firefox.
smichel17 6y ago
> It starts slower then Chromium. In my experience, Chromium renders and is interactive ~~faster~~ earlier, but they have about the same time between launch and browse. On Chromium, I launch, type in a site, hit enter, and wait and wait as it finishes actually starting up. FF takes longer to appear but is ready to browse as soon as it does. Or at least it did until some time in the last year or two, at which point it started taking a page out of Chromium's book. But honestly, I don't do cold starts that much so it doesn't bother me much one way or another.
CarelessExpert 6y ago
I can't remark on the first two (I don't start my browser that often, it just status open, and most of my private browsing use cases are covered by the temporary containers extension), but the search engine issue (which is super annoying) can be solved with an extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/add-custom-search-engine/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/add-custom-se... No, an extension shouldn't be necessary, but it works (I use it to search with searx).

cperrine 6y ago

I have an intermittent issue in FF across platforms/networks where I can watch in network console as I enter a URL, and I can see it not even trying to send the request. All I can find is a fixed issue from 2017 and I don't have the time nor inclination to try to figure out why this would be happening. Searching for a cool new browser for the Linux box but I might just install Chromium and be done with it.

rexf 6y ago
I'm having a similar issue with FF. When I open FF and go to gmail.com, it doesn't load. I filed a bugzilla some time ago and it's still not fixed yet. FF is not usable for me so I switched back to Chrome.

superasn 6y ago

For me sadly it's the WebSpeech API. A lot of sites that use speech-to-text and text-to-speech break on FF and also the voices FF aren't nearly as good as Chrome. This bug has been pending for many years now and I don't think it ever going to be on their priority list soon.

hackerfromthefu 6y ago

I have had some problem with Firefox for many years, maybe 5 years since I've tried to use it. The problem is whenever I start FF it hangs for 30 seconds before I can type the first url in. That duration and the fact that it's consistent means it's clearly a network timeout. I have a locked down computer, layers of security enhancements so I kind of understand something I've done is causing it. However, why should it lock up for 30 seconds if it can't do some background thing! On startup! It's an atrocious UI failure. And it's been this way for 5 years that I've been counting, through their Quantam speedup etc. Major flaw and unfixed for aeons of 6 week release cycles. Btw it's not updating as it still updates .. It's actually really bad design to have a lockup like that, and especially on the critical hot path of the first time you use it! It's a sign actually of bad user experience design, and it's one of a number of bad anti-user things I've found about it. Things that Chrome gets so right! I want to ditch Chrome because of the many Google anti-features, but UX is also very important to me I use the browser all day every day and I'm extremely fast at the UI with advanced shortcuts etc. Firefox locking up for 30 whole seconds before I can use it not only destroys my flow but is actually an eternity - I could have about 40 chrome tabs opened with urls types and autocompleted or pasted into the url bar in that time .. Sadly Firefox blows on a large number of design decisions. I get the impression that user experience is down the list at Mozilla, below either Google donations or SJW antics. Whatever, but they consistently fail on important points. I wish it wasn't so I truly do. I'm in the process of moving to Brave in anticipation of uBlock finally being sabotaged by Google.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
t0astbread 6y ago
Have you actually tried looking for the issue (i.e. determining where the network request goes and if you can disable it in the settings)?
matthewmacleod 6y ago
This is absolute fucking nonsense, FYI. You’re complaining about UX in the context of a bug triggered by your configuration. You could probably have identified the request that causes it in the time it took to write this comment.

caymanjim 6y ago

I'm slowly cutting the cord with nearly all social media sites and other sites that track me for any reason, and as part of that, I'd like to get away from Chrome and use a truly open and privacy-focused browser. Every time I start Firefox, I'm turned off by how unpleasant it looks. The UI is just bad. Sharp corners, asymmetrical margins, crowded menus, lack of whitespace. The rendered colors don't match Chrome. Fonts aren't as smooth. It's like switching from MacOS to Linux. Things just don't look good, and that matters.

bloodorange 6y ago
I am not entirely confident in this but from my perspective, a simplistic reading of what you say appears to be "I want privacy but only if I don't have to endure even minor inconveniences for it." This may never happen unless privacy was as profitable as selling data on people's behaviour. My apologies if I have misunderstood you.
- xeromal 6y ago
  You put a gram of sarcasm on your simplistic reading, but I think you need to realize that anything people use daily, even hourly, needs to make them feel comfortable. For whatever reason, the poster you're replying to is bothered by him but for something he has to deal with so often, it's hard to override that feeling. I guess what I'm really saying is that frequently used things probably involve human phycology and emotions just as much as someone's intelligence.
  - bloodorange 6y ago
    Please permit me to cast blame upon the medium we use. I intended no sarcasm.
    - xeromal 6y ago
      It's all good. Indeed, the medium we use sometimes comes across poorly.
6y ago

defnotashton2 6y ago

Because ff extension management is utter useless garbage and there are many missing but useful extensions.

tartoran 6y ago

Im back to FF for almost a year now. I am experiencing a lot of hiccups, freezes and crashes. I think FF should concentrate to improve the browser first and foremost. They’ve been adding a lot of useless (to me) features but the broswer is still buggy. It’s their time to claim their market back from chrome, or it will start happening soon and I think they should just concentrate on the browser.

floatingatoll 6y ago
Do the crashes occur without any addons enabled?
rocho 6y ago
Are you on Windows by any chance? I experience that with Firefox only when I use Windows (i.e. almost never, fortunately). I switched to Firefox on my main computer (Linux) a year ago and I could not be happier. It consumes much less memory than Chrome, it's way faster (that's my impression, I haven't measured that in any way) and it is a lot more customizable. I removed a lot of stuff from the context menu for example. As a bonus, it isn't made by Google. I was a hardcore Google fan a few years ago, but after seeing what they are doing with Chrome and the internet, I just could not keep using Chrome any longer.