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Firefox is so good. It's a continual source of amazement for me that a majority of HNers are using a browser made by the largest data gobbler in the world, ins
by beervirus 6y ago
Firefox is so good.
It's a continual source of amazement for me that a majority of HNers are using a browser made by the largest data gobbler in the world, instead of one that actually tries to prevent spying on users.
- goalieca 6y agoI used chrome from 2008 to about 2013. At the time Chrome was fast and their macOS experience was amazing. But you could tell that Google was focusing more and more on integrations and services and less on the browsing experience.
- paulpauper 6y agoI have not noticed Fiarefox to be faster
- ceejayoz 6y agoI haven't noticed it to be slower, but I'd accept slower for the privacy benefits.
- paulpauper 6y agoIt depends. For work related stuff I will always choose speed and responsiveness.
- rational_indian 6y agoI have noticed it to be slower, and with more broken websites. I still prefer it over chrome.
- BasicObject 6y agoI don't know about others but when I click youtube links on reddit the back button is disabled. Not sure if it's a bug or by design but I don't remember it always being that way.
- iscrewyou 6y agoGoogle websites work better on chrome. Not sure if it’s because google is doing something nefarious or if Firefox is just not keeping up with google website technologies. So, I’ve trained my brain to use chrome as an app only for google websites. When I need to check gmail or YouTube or google calendar, I use chrome. Otherwise I’m on Firefox or safari. It’s worked pretty well. I found I was only really unhappy with Firefox when using google websites. No longer a problem.
- kgwxd 6y agoI use Gmail, YouTube, Calendar and Sheets through Firefox and never noticed a difference. What's not as good?
- alangibson 6y agoWhat problems do you have? I use Firefox exclusively and I'm a heavy Google app user too (laziness...), but I can't remember ever having a significant issue
- SubiculumCode 6y agoGoogle refuses to let Firefox have their voice typing feature.
- SubiculumCode 6y agoFor those down-voting, I should have added this: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1456885 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1456885
- literallyWTF 6y agoLot of ‘Do as I say, not as I do’.
- sanxiyn 6y agoEh, I agree in general, but in this case, Chrome implemented network partitioning in Chrome 86, which became stable in October 2020, earlier than Firefox.
- zests 6y agoFirefox sends everything you type in the address bar to google by default. Would you be able to tell the difference between stock firefox and stock chrome if all you saw was the fiddler session? I don't know, I haven't tried. I did look at a firefox session in fiddler and I was not impressed. Pick your poison. If you configure all the settings in firefox properly it might be acceptable. But can you just do the same in chrome? If not, you can use the privacy friendly chromium browser of your choice. Most firefox users wont take the time to configure it properly and the data will still reach the data gobbler. Edit: an interesting comment from the other firefox thread https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=25916762 https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=25916762
- unethical_ban 6y agoYou're stretching really hard to make them equivalent. There are a number of reasons to use FF besides telemetry.
- zests 6y agoThis is whataboutism. You can talk about other reasons for using firefox if you'd like (although you'd have to mention what those reasons are.) We're talking about privacy right now and firefox does not fit the bill.
- splatcollision 6y agoEven if you've changed the search engine?
- mrweasel 6y agoNope, I believe it also stops if you disable search hints. They send keystrokes to the search engines because that’s how you get the search suggestion when typing in the URL bar.
- zests 6y agoWhat if you change the search engine in Chrome and disable all telemetry? This is the comparison we should be making.
- spijdar 6y agoIt's probably one of the most obscure reasons, but keep Chromium around because it's the only web browser with a JIT-backed javascript engine on ppc64le. Firefox has to run everything interpreted, which is actually fine for most sites, but bogs down on JS heavy web app type things. On a much less niche side of things, a lot of web apps like Teams, Zoom, and probably many others are only fully functional on Chromium, thanks to WebRTC specifics and some video encoding stuff that's only on Chromium. Don't know the details, but things like video and desktop streaming are limited to Chromium. That could very well be an artificially enforced restriction, but I don't think it is. I think firefox is moving towards feature parity with Chrome on this one, I hope so anyway.
- MegaDeKay 6y agoSlack calling doesn't work on FF as well. This + Teams + Zoom is a big gap, especially in these COVID times.
- sanxiyn 6y agoSomewhat ironically, Google Meet works very well for video streaming and desktop sharing on Firefox. So I think Firefox isn't missing anything.
- saagarjha 6y agoIt's kind of sad that WebKit doesn't support it…
- mschuster91 6y agoSpeed, especially with a large number of tabs opened, and the Dev tools. Chrome's are the most polished by far, and it's trivial to do remote debugging on Android devices.
- tannhaeuser 6y agoHow do you know user-agent strings of HNers? My guess would be that FF has above-average usage here, with FF topics getting upvotes regularly. Hmm, come to think of it, does anybody know an easy Chrome-blocking trick for displaying "this page is best viewed using FF"? Might be an effective deterrent for non-"hackers" and the start of forking the web for good.
- mschuetz 6y agoI've been switching to Firefox for private use a year ago, but overall I find it not good. Weird bugs, usability issues, dev tools not that great, etc. And privacy-wise, the defaults don't seem great either. There was something about containers that are supposed to prevent tracking between different domains, but if you actively have to create containers rather than them being automatically applied on each domain, then that's not much use since it makes things cumbersome to use.
- jedberg 6y agoYou need the temporary containers plug-in to manage it for you. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...
- mschuetz 6y agoThis is not something that should require a plugin. Each plugin is an additional source I need to trust.
- jedberg 6y agoThe reason it is a plugin is because it's really complicated and confusing. Even as someone who has a deep understanding of web protocols I get tripped up by temporary containers sometimes when things don't work quite right. Firefox built the core container technology, which drives their built in Facebook container (isolating Facebook from everything else). But isolating everything has a lot of weird edge cases, and I can't blame them for not supporting it out of the box.
- dang 6y ago> a majority of HNers are using a browser made by How do you know what browser the majority of HNers are using?
- saagarjha 6y agoI'm curious: what is the browser that the majority of Hacker News users are using?