5 ms·

Color me shocked. Why does anyone use Chrome anymore? Firefox is better in every way, and it isn’t tied to the biggest data harvester the world has ever known.

jlarocco 5y ago
Firefox is better in every way for you. I personally find the Firefox UI very annoying and slow. Every time I try it, I end up back at Chromium within a week. That said, I'll take an annoying UI over broken ad-blocking...
mcny 5y ago
I think people just don't know what they don't know. Firefox containers is awesome. I can type amazon.com and it will automatically open in my shopping container (after some configuration). I can type messenger.com and it opens in Facebook container out of the box. We even have container sync now so you can sync these settings across browsers. Mozilla isn't perfect though. I don't understand the decision to get rid of lockwise, my default password manager on iPhone and Android. » https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29321796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29321796 I don't get why they removed FTP browsing either » https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27896541 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27896541 Oh and is the source code for Pocket's server infrastructure available publicly as was promised when pocket was integrated into Firefox? Don't get me wrong. I love Firefox. I just think we have a lot of room for improvement.
- blackearl 5y ago
  My understanding is their password manager is now fully part of the browser and you can enable it to act as a password manager for other apps as well. I just tested adding an email account and got the option to "unlock firefox" and input credentials
illTellu 5y ago
Because Firefox on PC has significantly worse performance. It's slower and it's buggier. "But it's not slower and buggier for me" That's nice ancedote. I also have an ancedote, Firefox is buggy/slow on 2 of my computers. 1 of my computers is fine. I already reinstalled and reformated. At some point I can't be blamed.
xxpor 5y ago
FF gpu acceleration doesn't work with nvidia and xorg.
- yissp 5y ago
  As of version 59, WebRender is enabled by default on NVIDIA. I've been using it for a while and haven't noticed any major issues.
  - xxpor 5y ago
    It's still denylisted for me, maybe because I'm using PRIME?
MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
People at my job still associate internet with internet explorer. I've even had people question me, a developer, for using chrome.
bigyellow 5y ago
Pretty much the only reason for me is security. I use Chrome when I need to access email, banking or other sensitive site, and I don't trust Firefox sandboxing or other security features nearly as much as Google.
celsoazevedo 5y ago
I've been using Firefox for more than 15 years, so I'm not a hater or anything like that. Maybe it's just a MacOS thing, but parts of Firefox are a mess and it has downsides compared to Chromium or Safari. - Javascript-heavy sites are often slower on Firefox for me. - On the security side of things (sandboxing, etc), Firefox often lags behind Chromium. - There's a site or two that don't work well. Sometimes it's the site's fault, sometimes it's Firefox that is lagging behind on something. - It would use way more power than Chrome until last year. It has improved and I think they're more or less the same now, but both are still worse than Safari. - Profile management is there, but nothing compared to Chromium. And no, containers are not the same thing (although they are nice). - The UI is all over the place. You have windows that still look like Firefox 3... and they've been through 2 or 3 major UI redesigns. The margins on the bookmarks bar doesn't even fit the new design. There are amateur projects out there that do a better job at this. - Talking of bookmarks, why the heck the cmd/ctrl+click behaviour is different on bookmark links and links on web pages? - It doesn't handle different languages well. No in-page translation, no automatic language detection for text correction, etc. Firefox works. If Chromium disappeared tomorrow, it would be good enough for many... but is it the best browser? For uBlock Origin? Sure! But is it the best browser overall? Nope. At least not on Macs. If Mozilla wants people to use Firefox, they need to create a better product because the "help the open web!", "google bad!", etc, only works with people that use HN.
- Gareth321 5y ago
  >- It doesn't handle different languages well. No in-page translation, no automatic language detection for text correction, etc. This is what keeps me away. There are extension options on desktop but no solution for mobile.
- pseudalopex 5y ago
  Firefox's JavaScript engine isn't a mess. It does some things faster. The problem is some developers don't test performance in Firefox. Or someone decides it isn't worth fixing. Using Chrome because of it is short term rational of course. But it makes the problem worse. Sandboxing is a mix.[1] It seems like Safari gets new features last usually. And other browsers never won't lag Chrome when the only criterion is if Chrome supports something. What windows look like Firefox 3? What's wrong with the bookmarks toolbar margins? What amateur projects do a better job? Ctrl+click opens a menu for bookmarks and links. Cmd+click opens a new tab for bookmarks and links. The only difference is Cmd+click on a bookmark switches to the new tab. I guess you want to open bookmarks without switching? Best is subjective obviously. I wouldn't even say there's 1 best browser for me. [1] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/12/webassembly-and-back-again-fine-grained-sandboxing-in-firefox-95/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/12/webassembly-and-back-again...
jbluepolarbear 5y ago
Firefox burned me too bad to ever want to use it again, they too have deprecated extension frameworks (of which I maintained a couple and were subsequently broken). The Australis release was my last straw, it was so bad and ugly and took away most of the ui customizations. That release stated they didn’t care what there users felt, they’d change things so they could make money not preserve the web.
whimsicalism 5y ago
I used Firefox for months. It is noticeably slower than Chrome on macOS
laurent92 5y ago
Firefox show ads for Firefox all the time. The “WE CARE ABOUT YOUR PRIVACY” tab that opens every second time, is the most “big browser” warning to me. Anyone who says so much that they care (while asking me to create an account to upload my browser history, which is the best antipattern in our surveillance states) can’t possibly be honest. Plus they fire CEOs who are against at-will abortion, so they’re literally against my religion. And they’re not selecting on technical ability but on political opinions.
- mintplant 5y ago
  > Plus they fire CEOs who are against at-will abortion, so they’re literally against my religion. I think you've got a few wires crossed. The Brendan Eich controversy was over his donation to support Prop 8, which banned same-sex marriage in California.
- quesera 5y ago
  > Plus they fire CEOs who are against at-will abortion I find it really funny that your outrage cannon is locked and loaded, brandished and pointed...but you've completely forgotten your justification for bearing arms. Hey, any outrage will do, right? Fire away!
ur-whale 5y ago
> Firefox is better in every way That has been my experience as well
tzs 5y ago
> Firefox is better in every way I stopped using Firefox largely because I got tired of having to pause when commenting to deal with its spell checker. Firefox has worse spell checking by far than any other major browser. It's also worse that LibreOffice which is odd because it uses the same open source spell checker as LibreOffice (and as Chrome and MacOS). All the words mentioned below were handled correctly in the other browsers (and LibreOffice, Microsoft Office, and Apple TextEdit). Here are words I submitted to their spell checker error Bugzilla bug over a year ago that are still not fixed: manticore survivorship ferrite massless rotator dominator untraceably synchronizer. Here are words I reported about 11 months ago that are still not fixed: another's backlight coaxially hatchling impaction intercellular irrevocability licensor measurer meerkats mischaracterization misclassification misclassified partygoers passthrough plough retransmission seatbelt sensationalistic trichotomy underspecified untyped. Here are words that I reported that are now fixed, but took a year or more to be fixed: all-nighter auditable automata blacksmithing bubonic cantina commenter conferenced epicycle ethicist fineable initializer lifecycle micropayments mosquitos pre-programmed preprogrammed prosecutable responder solvability spectrogram splitter subparagraphs subtractive surveil tradable transactional tunable verifiability verifier ballistically chewable counterintuitive exonerations mistyped phosphine programmability recertification shapeshifting tradeoffs webmail. Chrome does have a spelling annoyance. It frequently flags "of". It seems to be flagging it for grammar, not spelling, since rewording the sentence after the "of" can make it go away. This is a bit annoying, but an order of magnitude or more less annoying than Firefox's false flagging because I can always immediately recognize that I have in fact spelled "of" correctly. With Firefox's false flagging of words like "manticore" or "survivorship" or "ferrite" I'd have to check a dictionary or the web.

jlarocco 5y ago

Firefox is better in every way for you. I personally find the Firefox UI very annoying and slow. Every time I try it, I end up back at Chromium within a week. That said, I'll take an annoying UI over broken ad-blocking...

mcny 5y ago

I think people just don't know what they don't know. Firefox containers is awesome. I can type amazon.com and it will automatically open in my shopping container (after some configuration). I can type messenger.com and it opens in Facebook container out of the box. We even have container sync now so you can sync these settings across browsers. Mozilla isn't perfect though. I don't understand the decision to get rid of lockwise, my default password manager on iPhone and Android. » https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29321796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29321796 I don't get why they removed FTP browsing either » https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27896541 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27896541 Oh and is the source code for Pocket's server infrastructure available publicly as was promised when pocket was integrated into Firefox? Don't get me wrong. I love Firefox. I just think we have a lot of room for improvement.

blackearl 5y ago
My understanding is their password manager is now fully part of the browser and you can enable it to act as a password manager for other apps as well. I just tested adding an email account and got the option to "unlock firefox" and input credentials

illTellu 5y ago

Because Firefox on PC has significantly worse performance. It's slower and it's buggier. "But it's not slower and buggier for me" That's nice ancedote. I also have an ancedote, Firefox is buggy/slow on 2 of my computers. 1 of my computers is fine. I already reinstalled and reformated. At some point I can't be blamed.

xxpor 5y ago

FF gpu acceleration doesn't work with nvidia and xorg.

yissp 5y ago
As of version 59, WebRender is enabled by default on NVIDIA. I've been using it for a while and haven't noticed any major issues.
- xxpor 5y ago
  It's still denylisted for me, maybe because I'm using PRIME?

MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago

People at my job still associate internet with internet explorer. I've even had people question me, a developer, for using chrome.

bigyellow 5y ago

Pretty much the only reason for me is security. I use Chrome when I need to access email, banking or other sensitive site, and I don't trust Firefox sandboxing or other security features nearly as much as Google.

celsoazevedo 5y ago

I've been using Firefox for more than 15 years, so I'm not a hater or anything like that. Maybe it's just a MacOS thing, but parts of Firefox are a mess and it has downsides compared to Chromium or Safari. - Javascript-heavy sites are often slower on Firefox for me. - On the security side of things (sandboxing, etc), Firefox often lags behind Chromium. - There's a site or two that don't work well. Sometimes it's the site's fault, sometimes it's Firefox that is lagging behind on something. - It would use way more power than Chrome until last year. It has improved and I think they're more or less the same now, but both are still worse than Safari. - Profile management is there, but nothing compared to Chromium. And no, containers are not the same thing (although they are nice). - The UI is all over the place. You have windows that still look like Firefox 3... and they've been through 2 or 3 major UI redesigns. The margins on the bookmarks bar doesn't even fit the new design. There are amateur projects out there that do a better job at this. - Talking of bookmarks, why the heck the cmd/ctrl+click behaviour is different on bookmark links and links on web pages? - It doesn't handle different languages well. No in-page translation, no automatic language detection for text correction, etc. Firefox works. If Chromium disappeared tomorrow, it would be good enough for many... but is it the best browser? For uBlock Origin? Sure! But is it the best browser overall? Nope. At least not on Macs. If Mozilla wants people to use Firefox, they need to create a better product because the "help the open web!", "google bad!", etc, only works with people that use HN.

Gareth321 5y ago
>- It doesn't handle different languages well. No in-page translation, no automatic language detection for text correction, etc. This is what keeps me away. There are extension options on desktop but no solution for mobile.
pseudalopex 5y ago
Firefox's JavaScript engine isn't a mess. It does some things faster. The problem is some developers don't test performance in Firefox. Or someone decides it isn't worth fixing. Using Chrome because of it is short term rational of course. But it makes the problem worse. Sandboxing is a mix.[1] It seems like Safari gets new features last usually. And other browsers never won't lag Chrome when the only criterion is if Chrome supports something. What windows look like Firefox 3? What's wrong with the bookmarks toolbar margins? What amateur projects do a better job? Ctrl+click opens a menu for bookmarks and links. Cmd+click opens a new tab for bookmarks and links. The only difference is Cmd+click on a bookmark switches to the new tab. I guess you want to open bookmarks without switching? Best is subjective obviously. I wouldn't even say there's 1 best browser for me. [1] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/12/webassembly-and-back-again-fine-grained-sandboxing-in-firefox-95/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/12/webassembly-and-back-again...

jbluepolarbear 5y ago

Firefox burned me too bad to ever want to use it again, they too have deprecated extension frameworks (of which I maintained a couple and were subsequently broken). The Australis release was my last straw, it was so bad and ugly and took away most of the ui customizations. That release stated they didn’t care what there users felt, they’d change things so they could make money not preserve the web.

whimsicalism 5y ago

I used Firefox for months. It is noticeably slower than Chrome on macOS

laurent92 5y ago

Firefox show ads for Firefox all the time. The “WE CARE ABOUT YOUR PRIVACY” tab that opens every second time, is the most “big browser” warning to me. Anyone who says so much that they care (while asking me to create an account to upload my browser history, which is the best antipattern in our surveillance states) can’t possibly be honest. Plus they fire CEOs who are against at-will abortion, so they’re literally against my religion. And they’re not selecting on technical ability but on political opinions.

mintplant 5y ago
> Plus they fire CEOs who are against at-will abortion, so they’re literally against my religion. I think you've got a few wires crossed. The Brendan Eich controversy was over his donation to support Prop 8, which banned same-sex marriage in California.
quesera 5y ago
> Plus they fire CEOs who are against at-will abortion I find it really funny that your outrage cannon is locked and loaded, brandished and pointed...but you've completely forgotten your justification for bearing arms. Hey, any outrage will do, right? Fire away!

ur-whale 5y ago

> Firefox is better in every way That has been my experience as well

tzs 5y ago

> Firefox is better in every way I stopped using Firefox largely because I got tired of having to pause when commenting to deal with its spell checker. Firefox has worse spell checking by far than any other major browser. It's also worse that LibreOffice which is odd because it uses the same open source spell checker as LibreOffice (and as Chrome and MacOS). All the words mentioned below were handled correctly in the other browsers (and LibreOffice, Microsoft Office, and Apple TextEdit). Here are words I submitted to their spell checker error Bugzilla bug over a year ago that are still not fixed: manticore survivorship ferrite massless rotator dominator untraceably synchronizer. Here are words I reported about 11 months ago that are still not fixed: another's backlight coaxially hatchling impaction intercellular irrevocability licensor measurer meerkats mischaracterization misclassification misclassified partygoers passthrough plough retransmission seatbelt sensationalistic trichotomy underspecified untyped. Here are words that I reported that are now fixed, but took a year or more to be fixed: all-nighter auditable automata blacksmithing bubonic cantina commenter conferenced epicycle ethicist fineable initializer lifecycle micropayments mosquitos pre-programmed preprogrammed prosecutable responder solvability spectrogram splitter subparagraphs subtractive surveil tradable transactional tunable verifiability verifier ballistically chewable counterintuitive exonerations mistyped phosphine programmability recertification shapeshifting tradeoffs webmail. Chrome does have a spelling annoyance. It frequently flags "of". It seems to be flagging it for grammar, not spelling, since rewording the sentence after the "of" can make it go away. This is a bit annoying, but an order of magnitude or more less annoying than Firefox's false flagging because I can always immediately recognize that I have in fact spelled "of" correctly. With Firefox's false flagging of words like "manticore" or "survivorship" or "ferrite" I'd have to check a dictionary or the web.