7 ms·

I'll use this as an opportunity to ask: What am I missing, having ditched Chrome ~3 years ago and switched to Firefox? I am very happy with Firefox, and it fulf

I'll use this as an opportunity to ask: What am I missing, having ditched Chrome ~3 years ago and switched to Firefox? I am very happy with Firefox, and it fulfills 100% of my requirements for a modern browser (must have sane browser dev panel, must perform with >50 tabs open, must be extensible with a huge extension ecosystem). On my Android phone, I'll just go ahead and claim I'm not missing anything and it's not even close - Firefox is so much better just for being able to run extensions like uBlock Origin. But on a workstation (macOS) - I'll keep an open mind.

jimbob45 6y ago
Dev Tools Even my most ardent anti-Google coworkers reluctantly switch back to Chrome when it comes time to debug.
- leeoniya 6y ago
  my primary is Firefox, but i definitely prefer Chrome's devtools - especially for performance profiling, which i do a lot of. chrome also renders UI interactions faster. maybe it's skia vs cairo? e.g. try mouse-dragging the ranging slider and compare the lag between chrome and ff: https://leeoniya.github.io/uPlot/demos/zoom-ranger-grips.html https://leeoniya.github.io/uPlot/demos/zoom-ranger-grips.htm...
josalhor 6y ago
In my experience on desktop Firefox has more compatbility issues than Chrome. On mobile, on top of that, it is way slower on most websites.
- marcan_42 6y ago
  I still use Chrome by default on mobile, but when Chrome has performance issues, I switch to Firefox and it works fine. I've been considering a switch to Firefox on mobile (I already switched on my main workstation). Try it with a long page, something thousands of lines long. Mobile Chrome on Android chokes badly, stops responding for seconds or minutes, and page search is hideously slow. Firefox handles it fine. It's really obvious on long lists or tables, e.g. this page: https://reitaisai.com/arts7/?p=165 https://reitaisai.com/arts7/?p=165
  - Larrikin 6y ago
    Why is Chrome your default on mobile? The web has become nearly unbrowseable on mobile without an AdBlocker and that's the single greatest advantage Firefox has over chrome on mobile.
  - kspacewalk2 6y ago
    In my experience, on many (most?) sites, ads are by far the biggest performance issue, dwarfing any differences in rendering. I can remove those with FF but not Chrome, so they made that decision quite easy for me.
bcosynot 6y ago
I switched to Firefox for regular browsing, but use Chrome for development because their devtools is so much better. I hope Firefox invests more in devtools development, honestly. More devs developing on FF could lead to higher adoption.
- lima 6y ago
  Mozilla recently got rid of the devtools team: https://twitter.com/flaviocopes/status/1293510322528100352 https://twitter.com/flaviocopes/status/1293510322528100352
  - floren 6y ago
    Ah, good timing, immediately after they broke the thing that lets you view the contents of websocket messages.
  - bcosynot 6y ago
    That's not great. I didn't know this, thanks for pointing it out.
- Ennea 6y ago
  That's very interesting. Personally, I much prefer the Firefox development tools. Mind if I ask what you like about the Chrome ones, compared to Firefox'?
  - bcosynot 6y ago
    Vue devtools only integrates with chrome devtools AFAIK, and I work with vue quite a bit. Other than that, I'll admit, a large part of it is familiarity.
- miohtama 6y ago
  I am doing the same. I have developer plugins installed on Chrome and productivity plugins installed on Firefox (Tree Style Tabs, Grammarly).
exlurker 6y ago
I also switched years ago and haven't looked back. FF is fast, solid. However, I too keep Chromium for development. But I use the Ungoogled version (I always plug it, but have no stakes in it): https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium Does anyone know a Webkit browser that runs on Win - preferably with some kind of debugger?
- rlaanemets 6y ago
  Recent versions of Edge are based on Blink (a fork of webkit) and V8. It should have debugger built-in. Have you tried a recent version of Edge?
  - exlurker 6y ago
    No, I haven't. Thanks for the tip! I'm hoping for something that would mimic Safari, as Apple has made things really difficult for non-mac devs.
karaterobot 6y ago
The only thing I notice about Firefox is that some sites don't seem to support it very well. For example, I can't log in to U.S. Bank with Firefox, or successfully place an order on Doordash, but both sites work fine in Chrome. Until recently, I had thought that browser compatibility issues were not much of a thing anymore. It's still not worth running Chrome all the time. I only use it to complete those discrete tasks, then it's back to Firefox.
- whywhywhywhy 6y ago
  Not sure anyone else's experience but every time I bring up supporting browsers other than Chrome I just get sarcasm at best and belligerence at worst from 90% of engineers. It's usually down to the remaining 10% to pick up the rest of the pieces. It's extremely frustrating to hear this attitude as someone who was doing front-end dev in the IE6 era.
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    > from 90% of engineers That's about the right ratio to expect, since less than 10% of browser sessions appear to be Firefox on average. The major difference between this era and the IE6 era is that Microsoft wasn't willing to play ball with standards. With few exceptions, Mozilla and Google are implementing to the same standards and specifications; problem is, Chrome's a better implementation, for speed and stability, in the average case and the corner case. They have both more resources to throw at the problem and more access to data to proactively discover issues. It is, unfortunately, a situation where the playing field is "fair" (in the sense that there's a uniform standard) and one player is just trouncing the alternative.
    - kspacewalk2 6y ago
      >problem is, Chrome's a better implementation, for speed and stability, in the average case and the corner case. Corner case maybe, but average case? No way. This is a historic perspective, maybe, but it's no longer valid in 2020.
pizza234 6y ago
Video acceleration, which can be a big deal if watching videos on a laptop. It recently got better support (as of v80), although it's not (fully) enabled by default. I'm also on the FF boat, though :-)
SilasX 6y ago
For me, the shortcomings are: Firefox (unless things have changed recently) still has limited addon capability -- no key remapping (or most other stuff) until the current tab has loaded. You also can't do unsigned addons (unless you do dev mode which is a separate install that doesn't update), while Chrome allows them by toggling "dev mode".
- kibwen 6y ago
  You can totally do unsigned add-ons in Firefox, I'm using an add-on right now that I developed and didn't feel like bothering to upload to AMO.
  - SilasX 6y ago
    Are you using the development build? FF currenly ignores your "allow unsigned addons" setting.
    - kibwen 6y ago
      I'm unsure what you're referring to. I use Firefox Nightly, but your prior comment implies the existence of a "dev mode which is a separate install that doesn't update"; Firefox Nightly updates just fine, and it's not a separate install, it's the only Firefox on my machine. It's perfectly stable, I haven't had a crash in years. And I didn't need to change any settings to install my add-on, I just clicked the "install from disk" option in the add-ons menu.
      - SilasX 6y ago
        I mean it’s a separate install from mainline, not something you can just toggle. Plus it requires you to use an unrecommended, bleeding edge version that’s mainly for testing.
godelmachine 6y ago
Does not FF get most of its revenue from Google?
- klodolph 6y ago
  Sure, and the reason Google pays is because people use Firefox.
shadowgovt 6y ago
Does Firefox work on all the sites you visit, or do you have to keep a "side-piece" browser to do things like log into your bank account or use Google Docs?
- kspacewalk2 6y ago
  Usually the culprit is an extension, and the fix is a private tab (where most of my extensions are disabled). But no, I use Google Docs and log in to several bank accounts in FF without issues. I keep the other browsers just for compatibility checks for front-end development.
bbarnett 6y ago
You're definitely gaining even more instability than with Chrome. And by that, I mean, insane random changes. Just look at, for example, the recent madness with Firefox on Android. They effectively pushed a beta about 6 weeks ago, removed tonnes of features, made many menu items difficult to navigate to, removed compatibility with almost all add-ons, it's slower, it crashes for many constantly, it's just a plain, simple mess. They had 4.5 stars at one point. They now have 3.9 stars: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.firefox&hl=en_CA&gl=US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fi... Do you know how hard you have to work, to drag something down from 4.5, to 3.9, in a month, with almost 4M users? I honestly don't think they could do worse, if it was intentional sabotage by some hostile insider. And it's endless garbage like this from Firefox. What firefox sees: "OMG! Chrome is gaining ground! Quick, turf everything that is unique on our platform, that is different from Chrome. We must be just like them" What outsiders see: "Great, everything I cared about, unique to firefox is now gone. Plus it's slower, buggier, and they keep changing everything around on every single release. Great. Time to move on." You don't compete with the giant, by being the giant. You etch out a unique market. Meanwhile, Firefox did the precise opposite, and removed their uniqueness. They aren't long for this world.
- kspacewalk2 6y ago
  I've had no issues with stability or usability with new Android FF. Certainly not slower or buggier in the least, so clearly YMMV. It's mildly annoying to re-learn the UI, but Chrome did the exact same thing to me years back when they, for example, dropped viewing every tab as a separate app in the running apps list. I refused to update for a year after that, very annoying. They all do this, I've resigned to it.
  - bbarnett 6y ago
    "All those car sales people haul off and give me a massive punch to the old happy sack, but hey, they all do it, so meh." Feel the burn, the passion, the hatred. Join the dark side. Hate. Hate with me. Maybe our collective hate will drive the madness away.
zamadatix 6y ago
They each have their ups and downs, I've uses both on many platforms for many years for now. Generally what's an up and down depends on the person as well e.g. some consider being on the browser with the tiny usage share and hitting compatibility issues a good thing ("it helps the web") and others consider it bad ("I just want it to work"). Same thing with performance, performs how well for which sites in which use case on which system. In general, with the exception of "the browser doesn't have hardware acceleration for the platform I use", performance is probably imperceptibly different for >95% of users but each tail will be very adamant that their tail is the better performing one (and it may be for their use case). For me personally the biggest current difference remains HDR support, which FF lacks and Safari/Chrome are continuing to grow. FF still has a big ways to go to achieve HDR so I think this one will be around for a while unfortunately. Now of course many are going to think "I don't give a shit about HDR" in which case refer to the first paragraph. The biggest difference that finally got fixed was for the longest time Chrome had much higher quality pitch correction on sped up content e.g. YouTube 2x. It was noticeably worse at 2x and I couldn't even understand the content at 3x on Firefox but it sounded great in Chrome. This forced a lot of my usage over to Chrome until it was fixed. On the Chrome side the biggest drawbacks are lack of extensions on mobile and lack of containers. I don't use containers as a privacy tool but more as a multiple profile tool without having to worry about which profile a window was launched in but I don't think that's the main real world use case happening. Lack of extensions on mobile is obvious.
pkamb 6y ago
I love Chrome's tabs and have yet to find a browser that compares. > must perform with >50 tabs open Testing Firefox now, it has the same behavior as Safari: when I open 16 tabs it starts a horizontal scrolling list. Absolutely unusable. Chrome shrinks every tab down to Favicon size or smaller and shows you 50+ tabs at once. Chrome got tabs right a decade ago and has yet to mess them up, as they have with most of the rest of the browser. Very hard to switch until they do.
- kspacewalk2 6y ago
  I usually group tabs in multiple windows for that reason, but as usual (and equally with FF and Chrome), these kinds of annoyances can potentially be addressed with add-ons like Tree Style Tab.
- asddubs 6y ago
  i actually really hate the way chrome does tabs, it's the main reason I use FF. I don't care about tab size though or horizontal scrolling, for me the thing that bothers me about chrome is that it when middle clicking multiple tabs open, they just open somewhere in the tab list. and if I middle click to open another tab and then middle click a new link in that one, it gets pushed to a completely different spot entirely. on FF, tabs open next to the current tab, unless you previously opened a tab in this one, then it'll go to the end of the list of tabs you've opened from the current window. but as soon as you switch tabs once, it'll start placing them next to the new tab you're in again. chrome just does something entirely unpredictable, instead of "resetting your spot". but I've found that most people don't really seem to browse the way I do/don't care about that
  - pkamb 6y ago
    I remember caring about that as well back when Chrome was released, but since then have adapted to the Chrome style. For me it's a minor preference vs. the horizontal scrolling issue.
70jS8h5L 6y ago
I have also made the switch. I do notice a few irritations that I struggle to remember off the top of my head, but a big one recently with the Android app is the lack of support for password managers (at least LastPass)
- kspacewalk2 6y ago
  1Password works very well with FF, for what it's worth.
tzs 6y ago
The two things that make me periodically think of switching from Firefox to Chrome on MacOS are (1) spell checking and (2) handling of multiple profiles. Firefox uses the same open source spell checker, Hunspell, that Chrome, LibreOffice, MacOS, and many others use, but for some inexplicable reason have a terrible dictionary. I've ranted on this before [1] so won't do so again here. I get the impression that the poor handling of multiple profiles is because they expect you to use multi-account containers instead. Those are fine if you just want, say, to access multiple instances of the same site without using the same cookies for each, or want to make it harder for cross site cookie tracking, but for most of the times where I want to access multiple instances of the same site I also want separate bookmarks and add-ons and history for each instance. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24819714 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24819714
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  > for some inexplicable reason Google has a huge collection of data sources (search query correction, document translation engines, the Books project) to refine a spellchecker against. The open-source solutions have never had access to that volume of data, to my knowledge.
  - tzs 6y ago
    LibreOffice is open source, and uses Hunspell. Here is how the three word lists in the earlier comment I linked to do in that. 1. On the list of words Firefox gets wrong that I've reported but haven't yet been fixed, LibreOffice gets them all right. 2. On the list of words that I indirectly reported quite a bit earlier that Firefox now gets right, LibreOffice gets one wrong ("heliocentrism", which Chrome also gets wrong, and MacOS gets right). 3. On the list of words that Firefox gets wrong that I have not yet reported, LibreOffice gets them all right. I don't call Firefox's terrible spelling inexplicable because Google and Apple and Microsoft do much better. I call it inexplicable because LibreOffice does it much better (about as good as Google and Apple and Microsoft do it).
vaccinator 6y ago
Firefox mobile's current version is a lot worst the v68... They block most extension, for one... I rolled back to Fennec even if they could not import my history because I dont care about it anyways
cmrdsprklpny 6y ago
Chrome has web midi support, which Firefox lacks. I use firefox whenever possible, but switch to Chrome for web MIDI
shadowprofile77 6y ago
I would sincerely love to know how to make Firefox work this well for me. For reasons I still can't decipher, the browser tends to slow any computer I run it on terribly no matter what I do or which version I run. I've noticed this across multiple machines. Yes, I often leave dozens of tabs open but Chrome (combined with Great Suspender) never gives me trouble on this. If anyone can suggest any sort of fix, i'd love to leave the snooping, prying Google browser behind finally.

jimbob45 6y ago

Dev Tools Even my most ardent anti-Google coworkers reluctantly switch back to Chrome when it comes time to debug.

leeoniya 6y ago
my primary is Firefox, but i definitely prefer Chrome's devtools - especially for performance profiling, which i do a lot of. chrome also renders UI interactions faster. maybe it's skia vs cairo? e.g. try mouse-dragging the ranging slider and compare the lag between chrome and ff: https://leeoniya.github.io/uPlot/demos/zoom-ranger-grips.html https://leeoniya.github.io/uPlot/demos/zoom-ranger-grips.htm...

josalhor 6y ago

In my experience on desktop Firefox has more compatbility issues than Chrome. On mobile, on top of that, it is way slower on most websites.

marcan_42 6y ago
I still use Chrome by default on mobile, but when Chrome has performance issues, I switch to Firefox and it works fine. I've been considering a switch to Firefox on mobile (I already switched on my main workstation). Try it with a long page, something thousands of lines long. Mobile Chrome on Android chokes badly, stops responding for seconds or minutes, and page search is hideously slow. Firefox handles it fine. It's really obvious on long lists or tables, e.g. this page: https://reitaisai.com/arts7/?p=165 https://reitaisai.com/arts7/?p=165
- Larrikin 6y ago
  Why is Chrome your default on mobile? The web has become nearly unbrowseable on mobile without an AdBlocker and that's the single greatest advantage Firefox has over chrome on mobile.
- kspacewalk2 6y ago
  In my experience, on many (most?) sites, ads are by far the biggest performance issue, dwarfing any differences in rendering. I can remove those with FF but not Chrome, so they made that decision quite easy for me.

bcosynot 6y ago

I switched to Firefox for regular browsing, but use Chrome for development because their devtools is so much better. I hope Firefox invests more in devtools development, honestly. More devs developing on FF could lead to higher adoption.

lima 6y ago
Mozilla recently got rid of the devtools team: https://twitter.com/flaviocopes/status/1293510322528100352 https://twitter.com/flaviocopes/status/1293510322528100352
- floren 6y ago
  Ah, good timing, immediately after they broke the thing that lets you view the contents of websocket messages.
- bcosynot 6y ago
  That's not great. I didn't know this, thanks for pointing it out.
Ennea 6y ago
That's very interesting. Personally, I much prefer the Firefox development tools. Mind if I ask what you like about the Chrome ones, compared to Firefox'?
- bcosynot 6y ago
  Vue devtools only integrates with chrome devtools AFAIK, and I work with vue quite a bit. Other than that, I'll admit, a large part of it is familiarity.
miohtama 6y ago
I am doing the same. I have developer plugins installed on Chrome and productivity plugins installed on Firefox (Tree Style Tabs, Grammarly).

exlurker 6y ago

I also switched years ago and haven't looked back. FF is fast, solid. However, I too keep Chromium for development. But I use the Ungoogled version (I always plug it, but have no stakes in it): https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium Does anyone know a Webkit browser that runs on Win - preferably with some kind of debugger?

rlaanemets 6y ago
Recent versions of Edge are based on Blink (a fork of webkit) and V8. It should have debugger built-in. Have you tried a recent version of Edge?
- exlurker 6y ago
  No, I haven't. Thanks for the tip! I'm hoping for something that would mimic Safari, as Apple has made things really difficult for non-mac devs.

karaterobot 6y ago

The only thing I notice about Firefox is that some sites don't seem to support it very well. For example, I can't log in to U.S. Bank with Firefox, or successfully place an order on Doordash, but both sites work fine in Chrome. Until recently, I had thought that browser compatibility issues were not much of a thing anymore. It's still not worth running Chrome all the time. I only use it to complete those discrete tasks, then it's back to Firefox.

whywhywhywhy 6y ago
Not sure anyone else's experience but every time I bring up supporting browsers other than Chrome I just get sarcasm at best and belligerence at worst from 90% of engineers. It's usually down to the remaining 10% to pick up the rest of the pieces. It's extremely frustrating to hear this attitude as someone who was doing front-end dev in the IE6 era.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  > from 90% of engineers That's about the right ratio to expect, since less than 10% of browser sessions appear to be Firefox on average. The major difference between this era and the IE6 era is that Microsoft wasn't willing to play ball with standards. With few exceptions, Mozilla and Google are implementing to the same standards and specifications; problem is, Chrome's a better implementation, for speed and stability, in the average case and the corner case. They have both more resources to throw at the problem and more access to data to proactively discover issues. It is, unfortunately, a situation where the playing field is "fair" (in the sense that there's a uniform standard) and one player is just trouncing the alternative.
  - kspacewalk2 6y ago
    >problem is, Chrome's a better implementation, for speed and stability, in the average case and the corner case. Corner case maybe, but average case? No way. This is a historic perspective, maybe, but it's no longer valid in 2020.

pizza234 6y ago

Video acceleration, which can be a big deal if watching videos on a laptop. It recently got better support (as of v80), although it's not (fully) enabled by default. I'm also on the FF boat, though :-)

SilasX 6y ago

For me, the shortcomings are: Firefox (unless things have changed recently) still has limited addon capability -- no key remapping (or most other stuff) until the current tab has loaded. You also can't do unsigned addons (unless you do dev mode which is a separate install that doesn't update), while Chrome allows them by toggling "dev mode".

kibwen 6y ago
You can totally do unsigned add-ons in Firefox, I'm using an add-on right now that I developed and didn't feel like bothering to upload to AMO.
- SilasX 6y ago
  Are you using the development build? FF currenly ignores your "allow unsigned addons" setting.
  - kibwen 6y ago
    I'm unsure what you're referring to. I use Firefox Nightly, but your prior comment implies the existence of a "dev mode which is a separate install that doesn't update"; Firefox Nightly updates just fine, and it's not a separate install, it's the only Firefox on my machine. It's perfectly stable, I haven't had a crash in years. And I didn't need to change any settings to install my add-on, I just clicked the "install from disk" option in the add-ons menu.
    - SilasX 6y ago
      I mean it’s a separate install from mainline, not something you can just toggle. Plus it requires you to use an unrecommended, bleeding edge version that’s mainly for testing.

godelmachine 6y ago

Does not FF get most of its revenue from Google?

klodolph 6y ago
Sure, and the reason Google pays is because people use Firefox.

shadowgovt 6y ago

Does Firefox work on all the sites you visit, or do you have to keep a "side-piece" browser to do things like log into your bank account or use Google Docs?

kspacewalk2 6y ago
Usually the culprit is an extension, and the fix is a private tab (where most of my extensions are disabled). But no, I use Google Docs and log in to several bank accounts in FF without issues. I keep the other browsers just for compatibility checks for front-end development.

bbarnett 6y ago

You're definitely gaining even more instability than with Chrome. And by that, I mean, insane random changes. Just look at, for example, the recent madness with Firefox on Android. They effectively pushed a beta about 6 weeks ago, removed tonnes of features, made many menu items difficult to navigate to, removed compatibility with almost all add-ons, it's slower, it crashes for many constantly, it's just a plain, simple mess. They had 4.5 stars at one point. They now have 3.9 stars: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.firefox&hl=en_CA&gl=US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fi... Do you know how hard you have to work, to drag something down from 4.5, to 3.9, in a month, with almost 4M users? I honestly don't think they could do worse, if it was intentional sabotage by some hostile insider. And it's endless garbage like this from Firefox. What firefox sees: "OMG! Chrome is gaining ground! Quick, turf everything that is unique on our platform, that is different from Chrome. We must be just like them" What outsiders see: "Great, everything I cared about, unique to firefox is now gone. Plus it's slower, buggier, and they keep changing everything around on every single release. Great. Time to move on." You don't compete with the giant, by being the giant. You etch out a unique market. Meanwhile, Firefox did the precise opposite, and removed their uniqueness. They aren't long for this world.

kspacewalk2 6y ago
I've had no issues with stability or usability with new Android FF. Certainly not slower or buggier in the least, so clearly YMMV. It's mildly annoying to re-learn the UI, but Chrome did the exact same thing to me years back when they, for example, dropped viewing every tab as a separate app in the running apps list. I refused to update for a year after that, very annoying. They all do this, I've resigned to it.
- bbarnett 6y ago
  "All those car sales people haul off and give me a massive punch to the old happy sack, but hey, they all do it, so meh." Feel the burn, the passion, the hatred. Join the dark side. Hate. Hate with me. Maybe our collective hate will drive the madness away.

zamadatix 6y ago

They each have their ups and downs, I've uses both on many platforms for many years for now. Generally what's an up and down depends on the person as well e.g. some consider being on the browser with the tiny usage share and hitting compatibility issues a good thing ("it helps the web") and others consider it bad ("I just want it to work"). Same thing with performance, performs how well for which sites in which use case on which system. In general, with the exception of "the browser doesn't have hardware acceleration for the platform I use", performance is probably imperceptibly different for >95% of users but each tail will be very adamant that their tail is the better performing one (and it may be for their use case). For me personally the biggest current difference remains HDR support, which FF lacks and Safari/Chrome are continuing to grow. FF still has a big ways to go to achieve HDR so I think this one will be around for a while unfortunately. Now of course many are going to think "I don't give a shit about HDR" in which case refer to the first paragraph. The biggest difference that finally got fixed was for the longest time Chrome had much higher quality pitch correction on sped up content e.g. YouTube 2x. It was noticeably worse at 2x and I couldn't even understand the content at 3x on Firefox but it sounded great in Chrome. This forced a lot of my usage over to Chrome until it was fixed. On the Chrome side the biggest drawbacks are lack of extensions on mobile and lack of containers. I don't use containers as a privacy tool but more as a multiple profile tool without having to worry about which profile a window was launched in but I don't think that's the main real world use case happening. Lack of extensions on mobile is obvious.

pkamb 6y ago

I love Chrome's tabs and have yet to find a browser that compares. > must perform with >50 tabs open Testing Firefox now, it has the same behavior as Safari: when I open 16 tabs it starts a horizontal scrolling list. Absolutely unusable. Chrome shrinks every tab down to Favicon size or smaller and shows you 50+ tabs at once. Chrome got tabs right a decade ago and has yet to mess them up, as they have with most of the rest of the browser. Very hard to switch until they do.

kspacewalk2 6y ago
I usually group tabs in multiple windows for that reason, but as usual (and equally with FF and Chrome), these kinds of annoyances can potentially be addressed with add-ons like Tree Style Tab.
asddubs 6y ago
i actually really hate the way chrome does tabs, it's the main reason I use FF. I don't care about tab size though or horizontal scrolling, for me the thing that bothers me about chrome is that it when middle clicking multiple tabs open, they just open somewhere in the tab list. and if I middle click to open another tab and then middle click a new link in that one, it gets pushed to a completely different spot entirely. on FF, tabs open next to the current tab, unless you previously opened a tab in this one, then it'll go to the end of the list of tabs you've opened from the current window. but as soon as you switch tabs once, it'll start placing them next to the new tab you're in again. chrome just does something entirely unpredictable, instead of "resetting your spot". but I've found that most people don't really seem to browse the way I do/don't care about that
- pkamb 6y ago
  I remember caring about that as well back when Chrome was released, but since then have adapted to the Chrome style. For me it's a minor preference vs. the horizontal scrolling issue.

70jS8h5L 6y ago

I have also made the switch. I do notice a few irritations that I struggle to remember off the top of my head, but a big one recently with the Android app is the lack of support for password managers (at least LastPass)

kspacewalk2 6y ago
1Password works very well with FF, for what it's worth.

tzs 6y ago

The two things that make me periodically think of switching from Firefox to Chrome on MacOS are (1) spell checking and (2) handling of multiple profiles. Firefox uses the same open source spell checker, Hunspell, that Chrome, LibreOffice, MacOS, and many others use, but for some inexplicable reason have a terrible dictionary. I've ranted on this before [1] so won't do so again here. I get the impression that the poor handling of multiple profiles is because they expect you to use multi-account containers instead. Those are fine if you just want, say, to access multiple instances of the same site without using the same cookies for each, or want to make it harder for cross site cookie tracking, but for most of the times where I want to access multiple instances of the same site I also want separate bookmarks and add-ons and history for each instance. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24819714 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24819714

shadowgovt 6y ago
> for some inexplicable reason Google has a huge collection of data sources (search query correction, document translation engines, the Books project) to refine a spellchecker against. The open-source solutions have never had access to that volume of data, to my knowledge.
- tzs 6y ago
  LibreOffice is open source, and uses Hunspell. Here is how the three word lists in the earlier comment I linked to do in that. 1. On the list of words Firefox gets wrong that I've reported but haven't yet been fixed, LibreOffice gets them all right. 2. On the list of words that I indirectly reported quite a bit earlier that Firefox now gets right, LibreOffice gets one wrong ("heliocentrism", which Chrome also gets wrong, and MacOS gets right). 3. On the list of words that Firefox gets wrong that I have not yet reported, LibreOffice gets them all right. I don't call Firefox's terrible spelling inexplicable because Google and Apple and Microsoft do much better. I call it inexplicable because LibreOffice does it much better (about as good as Google and Apple and Microsoft do it).

vaccinator 6y ago

Firefox mobile's current version is a lot worst the v68... They block most extension, for one... I rolled back to Fennec even if they could not import my history because I dont care about it anyways

cmrdsprklpny 6y ago

Chrome has web midi support, which Firefox lacks. I use firefox whenever possible, but switch to Chrome for web MIDI

shadowprofile77 6y ago

I would sincerely love to know how to make Firefox work this well for me. For reasons I still can't decipher, the browser tends to slow any computer I run it on terribly no matter what I do or which version I run. I've noticed this across multiple machines. Yes, I often leave dozens of tabs open but Chrome (combined with Great Suspender) never gives me trouble on this. If anyone can suggest any sort of fix, i'd love to leave the snooping, prying Google browser behind finally.