22 ms·

What is the excuse of all people reading this thread in agreement and still using Chrome? As I mentioned elsewhere, this is preaching to the choir. A choir of C

by sph 3y ago

What is the excuse of all people reading this thread in agreement and still using Chrome? As I mentioned elsewhere, this is preaching to the choir. A choir of Chrome users. Google wouldn't be so dominant if tech people like us would stop making lazy excuses to continue its hegemony. In Dante's Divina Commedia, there is a circle of hell for those too lazy to take a stance [1]. If it were written today, it would include a lot of tech workers running Chrome with uBlock enabled. It's 2023, Safari and Firefox have been very good for a while. -- 1: in fact, in the Divina Commedia the lazy ones that can't take a stance are kept just outside of Hell, as they are so detestable not even Satan itself would want them around.

tibanne 3y ago
[flagged]
- frameset 3y ago
  Because you're a frog boiling in a pot. The URL we're discussing has a list of coming changes to weaken uBlock and other privacy or content blocking features.
rcMgD2BwE72F 3y ago
Many of my work tools require a browser extension that's only compatible with Chrome. The publishers don't plan to support Firefox or any other browser. I can do without these tools (not an easy task) but not my coworkers.
- tomjen3 3y ago
  You can install adons from the Chrome store in Brave.
  - tvink 3y ago
    I assume most tech-savy people will want to stay far away from a browser that uses cryptonomics to confuse people into feeling better about blocking ads.
  - SanderSantema 3y ago
    I think the point isn’t necessarily to not use chrome but to use something not based on chromium in general, which brave is, e.g. Firefox or Safari.
    - sph 3y ago
      In the grand scale of thinks, Blink-based browsers are a little better than just using Chrome. Of course, browsers with an alternative engine like Gecko or Webkit are preferable to keep the web open.
    - mixedCase 3y ago
      That's not really the point. The point is to take away control from Google's user-hostile decision making, and that's a good chunk of the value proposition of Brave as a fork/patchset.
      - WorldMaker 3y ago
        Some of Google's user-hostile decision making is backed by marketshare data. "This is what users really want, they trust us," Google says pointing to how massive Blink marketshare is. That is a cudgel they use in the standards processes and in disagreements with Apple and Mozilla that they have the most users. Brave contributes to those user counts and Google's outsized voice in the market and in the standards processes. It's great that Brave tries its best to turn off the worst things Google is doing in their fork/patchset, but they are still complicit in Google doing some of that in the first place by contributing to the marketshare of "Google's browser".
- danskeren 3y ago
  If you use Mac then you can consider Orion by Kagi (natively built with WebKit) which supports both Chrome and Firefox extensions (experimental). (I personally use Firefox since I feel it's a much better browser (especially thanks to Firefox Multi-Account Containers), so can't comment on quality since I just tested it briefly.. but I do use Orion as my main browser on iOS where it's amazing.)
  - digging 3y ago
    I recently switched to Orion in my company Macbook (from firefox, which I use everywhere). It's good enough... but it's not great. I've had at least one site broken even in compatibility mode. I am very frustrated by poor mouse support: unable to drag-and-drop URLs to your bookmark bar, or bookmarks within your bookmark bar (and when I imported my bookmarks, for some reason they were scrambled inside their folders). Other than that, though - it's a browser.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
hgsgm 3y ago
Chrome renders websites as the site esigners designed. It's a game theory dilemma.
Kiro 3y ago
Why would I need an excuse? I'm free to use whatever I want.
- JulianWasTaken 3y ago
  No one is taking away your freedom. They're pointing out you're not helping by making the choice you've made. You're free to choose not to help.
  - Kiro 3y ago
    My games, which are not using any special Chrome features, work horribly on Firefox and not at all on Safari. Until that is fixed no amount of bullying will make me switch. Not that it's a successful tactic to begin with.
    - simon_o 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - Kiro 3y ago
        People clearly care since that's the whole point of this thread. Sounds like you are the one who should grow up.
    - fsflover 3y ago
      Did you try to fill bugs in Firefox's bug tracker?
      - Kiro 3y ago
        I have and actually gotten a couple of them fixed in a timely manner. One was even marked with highest severity so it's not like I'm hallucinating this or doing something wrong. The team clearly cares about fixing performance issues. With that said, it's not always easy to create a minimum working example reproducing some things (general low fps, stuttering, unstable rendering, sudden black screens, strange audio artifacts).
hliyan 3y ago
For a Mac M1 user who wants a lightweight browser, what would you recommend: 1. Safari (with this, I have trouble with some websites, particularly Google ones) 2. Firefox (good, but has been a memory hog in the past) 3. Brave (like that it's Chromium, but I worry about the odd features like crypto) 4. Edge (I just downloaded it. leaning toward this choice)
- VadimPR 3y ago
  Firefox is working great for me on the M1, have not noticed any issues worth complaining about.
- EGreg 3y ago
  3. seems irrelevant and not sure why you worry
- magicalhippo 3y ago
  > Firefox (good, but has been a memory hog in the past) I use Firefox for almost everything, and as much as I like it, it's sadly back to being a memory hog. The reason seems to be the process-per-origin-site thing that was introduced to protect against some attack, which causes my Firefox to have 20-50 processes, each with significant memory usage.
  - concordDance 3y ago
    Can't you have Firefox unload old tabs?
    - magicalhippo 3y ago
      I have not found a good way besides restarting FF. There is an extension but it wasn't reliable, as in unloaded active tabs and not unloading inactive tabs. IIRC the extension API didn't have sensible hooks so it was difficult.
      - filchermcurr 3y ago
ccity88 3y ago
I would love to use Firefox, Brave, even Safari, but I'm quite literally locked into the Google eco-system. My work emails are G-Suite, so having chrome means I can sync data from sheets, slides, docs etc. I stupidly moved everything personal to a Gmail address too back in 2016 when things weren't looking so grim, and cloud only was a hype so I'm kind of locked into using chrome for personal use too as I can't get away from not having Google account sync functionality. De-googling is incredibly hard. I've used my Gmail address for everything from government voting registration, to companies house, to services I can't even remember signing up for. At this stage, I'm kind of stuck. Bonus: I own an android phone and Google services are essential. Please don't preach to me about grapheneOS or whatever, they suck without the play store.
- bjord 3y ago
  I, too, use a lot of Google services (plus Android), and Firefox works fine for me. Is it offline sync that you need?
- abecedarius 3y ago
  Can you clarify why being locked into the Google ecosystem locks you into Chrome? Brave is a Chrome fork which seems to stay up to date afaict.
- toastal 3y ago
  No one said you had to ungoogle your life all at once. Take steps. Switch your browser to Fx or something else. Pick up a new email address with low fees with calendar & contact sync over CalDAV/CardDAV & keep both emails in use while slowly converting some over to the new address. Use LiberOffice or Etherpad on new documents. Use UnifiedPush on Android to handle notifications without send everything through Google. Install F-Droid & migrate to open alternatives. Eventually, you’d find Aurora store is just used for a handful of apps like your bank & everything else is in your browser or uses an open protocol so F-Droid apps work fine.
Gareth321 3y ago
I need translate on iOS. Chrome and Edge are the only browsers which offer that, and Chrome is much better than Edge. I hope Firefox brings native translation to iOS soon. I'll be making the jump when they do.
- halifaxbeard 3y ago
  Safari has translate webpage for me
  - Gareth321 3y ago
    Sadly Apple doesn't offer many translation languages such as Danish.
0x008 3y ago
my excuse is that my company VPN is tied to chrome.
- tatersolid 3y ago
  What VPN product does this? Typically even “SSL VPNs” work at the OS/network interface level.
insanitybit 3y ago
Manifest v3 has been delayed and was/is pretty legitimate, I don't think most people really know wtf they're talking about when it comes to v3. JPEGXL doesn't exactly seem like that big of a deal and is now being developed again - sounds fine, Chrome went "seems like no one wants this" and then people said "we want this" and now it's being worked on. WEI isn't even properly proposed yet, it's so early. So these 3 things aren't really that insane, WEI is easily the worst of them. In the meantime, a) Chrome does everything I need while providing the highest security value. b) Mozilla won't earn me as a user until their CEO is removed It's not laziness, I make the conscious choice to use Chrome because I think it's the best browser right now. I use Brave on Mobile and I haven't switched on my laptop yet because I haven't evaluated it.
- another_bear 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - insanitybit 3y ago
    (I'll just copy/paste from a previous comment) 1. Under her leadership Mozilla has lost virtually all of its users. It has been reduced to less than 10% of what it had before, maybe worse - I haven't kept up. 2. At the beginning of Covid, a time when remote work was on the rise and tech valuations were through the roof, a time when the browser was more important than ever, she took her largest payout and fired hundreds of employees. She was compensated at over $5M dollars, enough money to pay a team of engineers for years. 3. Firefox has utterly failed to capture Enterprise market, where Chrome has managed to dominate. I doubt most people are even aware that a corp managed Firefox is an option, they have done such a poor job marketing it. 4. Every initiative Mozilla has come out with has completely failed to gain traction. Something like a VPN could have been a great fit for Mozilla but they did nothing with it. Mozilla has been incapable, organizationally, of capitalizing on technology - the thing they're kinda supposed to do exclusively. She has failed in every conceivable way as a CEO. She has failed in terms of the mission, she has failed her employees, she has failed her users, she has failed to be an example as a leader. I am not betting on Mozilla's future, I'm not going to assume that they're capable of competing at all let alone competing while maintaining a vision of the open web. They're dysfunctional and it starts right at the top.
foobarbecue 3y ago
I'm afraid to switch because: - Chrome dev tools is consistently amazing and I use several extensions on it - I use google password manager which is also amazing and it works seamlessly on all my android devices, even filling passwords into android apps (although most people don't seem to know it exists) Sooner or later, I will get around to switching back to FF, but it's daunting. I used FF before Chrome came out.
- djaychela 3y ago
  FTR Bitwarden fills android app passwords.
- kybernetikos 3y ago
  One of the main places I use FF is on mobile. Turns out that putting the browser chrome at the bottom of the screen is correct and I can't go back now.
- Vinnl 3y ago
  Just a note that Firefox's password manager can also fill passwords into Android apps. (I also think that its devtools are really good too, but I imagine habit is a large part of that. Of course, it's also an option to open Chrome only when you need the devtools.)
profmonocle 3y ago
For me it's the ecosystem. I like my desktop browser syncing with my Android browser, and I really like built in chromecast support in my browser. I know that Firefox has a mobile version with sync, but last time I tried it, I didn't care for it. I know there have been some attempts to bring chromecast support to Firefox via extensions, but last I tried it it was very buggy. But it's been many years since I tried either of those, maybe I'll give it another shot. I also just realized neither of these conveniences are relevant on my work laptop. Firefox is approved by my company IT and a lot of my coworkers use it. I'm going to switch today.
- tedivm 3y ago
  Firefox mobile sync has gotten really, really good. If that's what's holding you back you should check it out again.
  - sandinmyjoints 3y ago
    Agreed. I use it multiple times daily.
- hackmiester 3y ago
  I have chrome installed and just cast my screen, minimize it and keep using firefox. I also don’t own any chromecast devices anymore, so this only really comes up at Airbnbs, the odd meeting room, etc. I’ve heard you can do the same with Brave.
- gtk40 3y ago
  Honestly Firefox is the biggest thing I miss on Android since switching to iOS. It supports uBlock Origin which makes mobile browsing so much nicer. I haven't found a better mobile web experience on iOS yet.
  - bpye 3y ago
    Agreed - I ended up switching to Safari. If Apple ends up allowing other browser engines (as rumoured) then I’d happily switch back to Firefox.
consentreality 3y ago
The biggest blocker for me has been the lack of convenient profile switching. It's an important part of my workflow to have a separate profile for home/work/other, with history, bookmarks, etc. Container tabs are not a good replacement. Worse, I get irritated with the fact that Firefox fully supports this under the hood, but seems to push back against actually implementing a convenient way to use it. I'm currently doing my yearly attempt to switch, using the Profile Switcher extension [0]. It works well enough, but requires external software running and I fully expect it to break eventually. I also can't open external links in anything but the default profile (vs Chrome opening in the profile most recently active, a nice convenience). [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/profile-switcher/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/profile-switc...
- gen220 3y ago
  You might want to try out Arc if you're a Mac user – this was top on my wishlist from Firefox, too, and they're hitting it out of the park.
- stiray 3y ago
  Run firefox binary with -P switch. This might also interest you: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-use-firefox-containers https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-use-firefox-contain...
- tux1968 3y ago
  > The biggest blocker for me has been the lack of convenient profile switching. Switching profiles can be as easy as restarting the browser. For instance, you could create an icon on your desktop for each profile, or just a single icon to run : firefox --ProfileManager And you'll get a menu to choose which profile you want to use. > I also can't open links in anything but the default profile Interesting. Running on Linux here, and links open in whatever profile is currently in use.
  - rjmunro 3y ago
    "can be as easy as restarting the browser" That is nothing like "convenient profile switching".
croisillon 3y ago
the city i work for has 100k employees, admittedly not everybody office based, but still: they only allow chrome and edge (except on iphone) because it would be too much work to maintain features for other browsers
- JyrkiAlakuijala 3y ago
  US official asked me to use Internet Explorer in 2021 when I called them that their obviously broken website didn't work with Chrome or Firefox. Browser divergence and incomplete or faulty support of standards is irritating.
_ea1k 3y ago
Tech people are their own worst enemey. Switch to Chrome, GMail, and Google Drive, they are so powerful! Next frame... "Why is Google so powerful and doing evil things?"
andrewla 3y ago
> It's 2023, Safari and Firefox have been very good for a while. This has not been my experience. Every once in a while I try to make the switch (to Firefox because I'm not generally a mac user, but I use safari on iOS and I'm basically resigned to its limitations) Slow rendering is for sure a problem. Buggy rendering is very common -- maybe the site, or maybe the browser, who knows, but anecdotally I've had a lot of bad experiences, including lost work filling out multi-page forms. And I hate to mention it, but aesthetically I find Firefox to be very clunky and ugly. Yes, Chrome is terrible for even more reasons than the ones shown here -- the direct integration of Google sign-on into the browser is awful, and the in-page text highlighting through (#:~:text=) is a big anti-feature (that now is being copied by the others, oh well), and after I spent so much effort trying to prune down the stupid buttons on my address bar only to find that they keep adding new, useless ones that are un-removeable ("reading panel"? why are they doing this?). But even with those things it's still the most performant and capable browser.
- webstrand 3y ago
  I do a bunch of CSS work, and I've found more bugs in Chrome's rendering than in Firefox's, Lots of half-pixel errors. What kind of rendering issues are you seeing in Firefox? If you do a lot of web development, I strongly recommend getting familiar with Firefox's containers. You can set up SOCKS proxies for each individual container so you can easily pretend your dev server is running on the production server's domain without disabling your own access to the production servers. It's so much nicer than working with multiple proxies in Chrome. That said, you might enjoy ungoogled-chromium if you're annoyed by google-integration. I use it for testing (because cross-browser testing is still a must). Brave also exists and is open-source, to break up market share.
  - andrewla 3y ago
    I'm sure that Chrome's rendering is buggy as hell, but people design websites to work with the bugs; so they design them to work with Chrome, and in Firefox they look wrong unless they make the effort to work with both browsers. I'm not a web developer; when I have to do web development I use Chrome because that's what we target and anything else is an afterthought (or is work taken on by more specialized frontend developers). I tried ungoogled-chromium, but on upgrades it would frequently crash or fail to start so I gave up. Brave maybe is worth a try; the cryptocurrency tie-in was enough to make me reluctant even to give it a try. I want my user agent to be as agnostic as humanly possible with regards to presenting data from web pages -- that's why I hate the auto-login feature and the "view search results" feature; I want my browser to render content and do only the minimum possible work in reacting to that content.
AtNightWeCode 3y ago
I only use Chrome for web dev things. Been living for decades and I still don't understand how people can be so fking stupid.
throwaway290 3y ago
I do not use Chrome, but I recommend it to my tech illiterate friends or relatives because it's sadly probably the most secure browser among user friendly ones. In large part to Google Zero. (Ofc I try to also remember to warn against installing random extensions)
dclowd9901 3y ago
Dev experience in chrome is a lot better. But for personal browsing I use safari and mainly only because of how it uses keychain.
kesildur 3y ago
Firefox dropped support for PWAs. :(
- sph 3y ago
  Check out the FirefoxPWA project on Github
dangerwill 3y ago
I use Firefox at home, but my work (large company) has standardized on everyone using Chrome to the point of writing custom Chrome extensions. So at work I use Chrome because it is essentially required. I wonder how many enterprise workers are in the same boat, even just due to security folks wanting to focus on a single browser and thus getting the company to mandate the use of Chrome.
- skydhash 3y ago
  Company can mandate whatever software they want. It’s their computer, their data, and their workflow. You’re not IT, so if they’re ok with sending data to Google, your hands are tied. I avoid doing any personal stuff on my work laptop. Even quick searches.
hammycheesy 3y ago
I've been wanting to switch to Firefox for a while, but there is a single bug I filed ~6 years ago [1] that has prevented me from making the leap. I've always wanted to investigate and see if I can pull a fix together but haven't been able to find the activation energy to get a dev environment set up to do so. The bug is that Firefox on Windows doesn't play nice with virtual desktops. Clicking on a link in one virtual desktop may focus a Firefox window several VDs away. I'm a heavy user of virtual desktops, so this is a dealbreaker for me. Chromium browsers don't have this issue, so I'm stuck in Chromium land. [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1423768 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1423768
Symmetry 3y ago
I tried to switch a few times but I can't replicate my custom search experience on Firefox and I really miss browsing without it. On a new tab 'a product' and I've got an Amazon search for the product. 'w topic' and I've searched Wikipedia for the topic. 'wt place' and I've searched for the weather at a place. 'm place' and I've searched Google maps for the place. 'd topic' and I've searched DuckDuckGo for the topic. etc.
- filchermcurr 3y ago
  Those are search shortcuts in Firefox. Pretty easy to add any that you want: Go to settings, Search, Search Shortcuts. Set the keyword to what you want for the search engine of your choice. Then you can use that directly from the address bar.
  - Symmetry 3y ago
    Yes, adding search shortcuts is easy but IIRC involved more keystrokes and didn't support search suggestions from history. I also tried some extensions but had my own troubles with those.
lern_too_spel 3y ago
As many others have mentioned, Safari is worse. It restricted content blocking to not support uBlock Origin many years ago, and it has already deployed remote attestation. On top of that, it is behind on support for APIs that people want, and those that it has implemented are often riddled with bugs, which are fixed slowly if ever. Firefox is a reasonable alternative.
moomoo11 3y ago
I wouldn’t mind being in that circle. At least I’d be with people who are smart and practical. Not extremists or complete ignoramuses. Whatever chrome doesn’t or does doesn’t matter to me. I just use it to do my job and occasionally shop on Amazon or watch Netflix. Or come here on HN. I visit maybe ten unique websites.. If chrome starts to suck big like IE back in the day then I’ll use some other browser that works best for all the sites I visit. As long as it works best for most sites I visit, that’s fine by me. I have a life outside the computer, which is funded by the computer. I can just turn it off after work and do an infinite number of other things.
Liskni_si 3y ago
Chrome lets me install extensions using "git clone". Firefox doesn't, they need to come from AMO, or I need to reinstall them every time I relaunch Firefox.
collinmanderson 3y ago
I've been trying out Firefox on MacOS this week. Been using Chrome since ~2009, Firefox before that. Here are some annoyances so far: - No download bar to show actual downloads (downloaded files are hidden under a menu icon) - No built-in page translate - Search: is in bottom left rather than top-right which is pretty standard in most UIs. - Search: would be nice if "Highlight All" were on by default (though it's caused me problems on Chrome with large documents so I can see off by default having some advantage.) - Search: most of those options should probably be hidden under "advanced" or some expandable menu. - I don't like the scrolling tab view where I can only see less than 10 tabs at once. I'd rather they get really tiny like on Chrome rather than totally hidden. Otherwise it's unclear to me at a glance how many tabs I have open. - Youtube seems to have higher CPU usage compared to chrome (at least on MacOS x86, non-fullscreen) - Tabs are too easy to mute and seem less intuitive which ones are playing. - Dev tools doesn't have the “lighthouse” audit tool. - Would be nice if cmd+shift+n shortcut matched webkit/blink behavior. I'm slowly learning to use cmd+shift+p instead, but being consistent with all the other browsers would be nice.
- dralley 3y ago
  >- No built-in page translate It's an extension, look up Firefox Translate. It's even local-only. Or Google Translate for better results but less privacy. This is the sort of thing that other people might consider "bloat"
juniperplant 3y ago
Some points on why I switched from Firefox to Chrome: - It "failed" while trying to use Google Meet for work. I don't remember the details of the incident, but it was embarrassing enough that it made me switch, at least for work stuff - No Chromecast support - Buggier than Chrome in general: last I remember was an issue with page scaling when printing - No desktop integration of PWAs (i.e. launcher icon, standalone window). This is what I missed the most as a Linux desktop user. - Worse performance than Chrome, at least on Android. Firefox was freezing often and even causing my phone to... restart randomly. This is unacceptable.

by sph 3y ago

tibanne 3y ago

[flagged]

frameset 3y ago
Because you're a frog boiling in a pot. The URL we're discussing has a list of coming changes to weaken uBlock and other privacy or content blocking features.

rcMgD2BwE72F 3y ago

Many of my work tools require a browser extension that's only compatible with Chrome. The publishers don't plan to support Firefox or any other browser. I can do without these tools (not an easy task) but not my coworkers.

tomjen3 3y ago
You can install adons from the Chrome store in Brave.
- tvink 3y ago
  I assume most tech-savy people will want to stay far away from a browser that uses cryptonomics to confuse people into feeling better about blocking ads.
- SanderSantema 3y ago
  I think the point isn’t necessarily to not use chrome but to use something not based on chromium in general, which brave is, e.g. Firefox or Safari.
  - sph 3y ago
    In the grand scale of thinks, Blink-based browsers are a little better than just using Chrome. Of course, browsers with an alternative engine like Gecko or Webkit are preferable to keep the web open.
  - mixedCase 3y ago
    That's not really the point. The point is to take away control from Google's user-hostile decision making, and that's a good chunk of the value proposition of Brave as a fork/patchset.
    - WorldMaker 3y ago
      Some of Google's user-hostile decision making is backed by marketshare data. "This is what users really want, they trust us," Google says pointing to how massive Blink marketshare is. That is a cudgel they use in the standards processes and in disagreements with Apple and Mozilla that they have the most users. Brave contributes to those user counts and Google's outsized voice in the market and in the standards processes. It's great that Brave tries its best to turn off the worst things Google is doing in their fork/patchset, but they are still complicit in Google doing some of that in the first place by contributing to the marketshare of "Google's browser".
danskeren 3y ago
If you use Mac then you can consider Orion by Kagi (natively built with WebKit) which supports both Chrome and Firefox extensions (experimental). (I personally use Firefox since I feel it's a much better browser (especially thanks to Firefox Multi-Account Containers), so can't comment on quality since I just tested it briefly.. but I do use Orion as my main browser on iOS where it's amazing.)
- digging 3y ago
  I recently switched to Orion in my company Macbook (from firefox, which I use everywhere). It's good enough... but it's not great. I've had at least one site broken even in compatibility mode. I am very frustrated by poor mouse support: unable to drag-and-drop URLs to your bookmark bar, or bookmarks within your bookmark bar (and when I imported my bookmarks, for some reason they were scrambled inside their folders). Other than that, though - it's a browser.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

hgsgm 3y ago

Chrome renders websites as the site esigners designed. It's a game theory dilemma.

Kiro 3y ago

Why would I need an excuse? I'm free to use whatever I want.

JulianWasTaken 3y ago
No one is taking away your freedom. They're pointing out you're not helping by making the choice you've made. You're free to choose not to help.
- Kiro 3y ago
  My games, which are not using any special Chrome features, work horribly on Firefox and not at all on Safari. Until that is fixed no amount of bullying will make me switch. Not that it's a successful tactic to begin with.
  - simon_o 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - Kiro 3y ago
      People clearly care since that's the whole point of this thread. Sounds like you are the one who should grow up.
  - fsflover 3y ago
    Did you try to fill bugs in Firefox's bug tracker?
    - Kiro 3y ago
      I have and actually gotten a couple of them fixed in a timely manner. One was even marked with highest severity so it's not like I'm hallucinating this or doing something wrong. The team clearly cares about fixing performance issues. With that said, it's not always easy to create a minimum working example reproducing some things (general low fps, stuttering, unstable rendering, sudden black screens, strange audio artifacts).

hliyan 3y ago

For a Mac M1 user who wants a lightweight browser, what would you recommend: 1. Safari (with this, I have trouble with some websites, particularly Google ones) 2. Firefox (good, but has been a memory hog in the past) 3. Brave (like that it's Chromium, but I worry about the odd features like crypto) 4. Edge (I just downloaded it. leaning toward this choice)

VadimPR 3y ago
Firefox is working great for me on the M1, have not noticed any issues worth complaining about.
EGreg 3y ago
3. seems irrelevant and not sure why you worry
magicalhippo 3y ago
> Firefox (good, but has been a memory hog in the past) I use Firefox for almost everything, and as much as I like it, it's sadly back to being a memory hog. The reason seems to be the process-per-origin-site thing that was introduced to protect against some attack, which causes my Firefox to have 20-50 processes, each with significant memory usage.
- concordDance 3y ago
  Can't you have Firefox unload old tabs?
  - magicalhippo 3y ago
    I have not found a good way besides restarting FF. There is an extension but it wasn't reliable, as in unloaded active tabs and not unloading inactive tabs. IIRC the extension API didn't have sensible hooks so it was difficult.
    - filchermcurr 3y ago

ccity88 3y ago

I would love to use Firefox, Brave, even Safari, but I'm quite literally locked into the Google eco-system. My work emails are G-Suite, so having chrome means I can sync data from sheets, slides, docs etc. I stupidly moved everything personal to a Gmail address too back in 2016 when things weren't looking so grim, and cloud only was a hype so I'm kind of locked into using chrome for personal use too as I can't get away from not having Google account sync functionality. De-googling is incredibly hard. I've used my Gmail address for everything from government voting registration, to companies house, to services I can't even remember signing up for. At this stage, I'm kind of stuck. Bonus: I own an android phone and Google services are essential. Please don't preach to me about grapheneOS or whatever, they suck without the play store.

bjord 3y ago
I, too, use a lot of Google services (plus Android), and Firefox works fine for me. Is it offline sync that you need?
abecedarius 3y ago
Can you clarify why being locked into the Google ecosystem locks you into Chrome? Brave is a Chrome fork which seems to stay up to date afaict.
toastal 3y ago
No one said you had to ungoogle your life all at once. Take steps. Switch your browser to Fx or something else. Pick up a new email address with low fees with calendar & contact sync over CalDAV/CardDAV & keep both emails in use while slowly converting some over to the new address. Use LiberOffice or Etherpad on new documents. Use UnifiedPush on Android to handle notifications without send everything through Google. Install F-Droid & migrate to open alternatives. Eventually, you’d find Aurora store is just used for a handful of apps like your bank & everything else is in your browser or uses an open protocol so F-Droid apps work fine.

Gareth321 3y ago

I need translate on iOS. Chrome and Edge are the only browsers which offer that, and Chrome is much better than Edge. I hope Firefox brings native translation to iOS soon. I'll be making the jump when they do.

halifaxbeard 3y ago
Safari has translate webpage for me
- Gareth321 3y ago
  Sadly Apple doesn't offer many translation languages such as Danish.

0x008 3y ago

my excuse is that my company VPN is tied to chrome.

tatersolid 3y ago
What VPN product does this? Typically even “SSL VPNs” work at the OS/network interface level.

insanitybit 3y ago

Manifest v3 has been delayed and was/is pretty legitimate, I don't think most people really know wtf they're talking about when it comes to v3. JPEGXL doesn't exactly seem like that big of a deal and is now being developed again - sounds fine, Chrome went "seems like no one wants this" and then people said "we want this" and now it's being worked on. WEI isn't even properly proposed yet, it's so early. So these 3 things aren't really that insane, WEI is easily the worst of them. In the meantime, a) Chrome does everything I need while providing the highest security value. b) Mozilla won't earn me as a user until their CEO is removed It's not laziness, I make the conscious choice to use Chrome because I think it's the best browser right now. I use Brave on Mobile and I haven't switched on my laptop yet because I haven't evaluated it.

another_bear 3y ago
[flagged]
- insanitybit 3y ago
  (I'll just copy/paste from a previous comment) 1. Under her leadership Mozilla has lost virtually all of its users. It has been reduced to less than 10% of what it had before, maybe worse - I haven't kept up. 2. At the beginning of Covid, a time when remote work was on the rise and tech valuations were through the roof, a time when the browser was more important than ever, she took her largest payout and fired hundreds of employees. She was compensated at over $5M dollars, enough money to pay a team of engineers for years. 3. Firefox has utterly failed to capture Enterprise market, where Chrome has managed to dominate. I doubt most people are even aware that a corp managed Firefox is an option, they have done such a poor job marketing it. 4. Every initiative Mozilla has come out with has completely failed to gain traction. Something like a VPN could have been a great fit for Mozilla but they did nothing with it. Mozilla has been incapable, organizationally, of capitalizing on technology - the thing they're kinda supposed to do exclusively. She has failed in every conceivable way as a CEO. She has failed in terms of the mission, she has failed her employees, she has failed her users, she has failed to be an example as a leader. I am not betting on Mozilla's future, I'm not going to assume that they're capable of competing at all let alone competing while maintaining a vision of the open web. They're dysfunctional and it starts right at the top.

foobarbecue 3y ago

I'm afraid to switch because: - Chrome dev tools is consistently amazing and I use several extensions on it - I use google password manager which is also amazing and it works seamlessly on all my android devices, even filling passwords into android apps (although most people don't seem to know it exists) Sooner or later, I will get around to switching back to FF, but it's daunting. I used FF before Chrome came out.

djaychela 3y ago
FTR Bitwarden fills android app passwords.
kybernetikos 3y ago
One of the main places I use FF is on mobile. Turns out that putting the browser chrome at the bottom of the screen is correct and I can't go back now.
Vinnl 3y ago
Just a note that Firefox's password manager can also fill passwords into Android apps. (I also think that its devtools are really good too, but I imagine habit is a large part of that. Of course, it's also an option to open Chrome only when you need the devtools.)

profmonocle 3y ago

For me it's the ecosystem. I like my desktop browser syncing with my Android browser, and I really like built in chromecast support in my browser. I know that Firefox has a mobile version with sync, but last time I tried it, I didn't care for it. I know there have been some attempts to bring chromecast support to Firefox via extensions, but last I tried it it was very buggy. But it's been many years since I tried either of those, maybe I'll give it another shot. I also just realized neither of these conveniences are relevant on my work laptop. Firefox is approved by my company IT and a lot of my coworkers use it. I'm going to switch today.

tedivm 3y ago
Firefox mobile sync has gotten really, really good. If that's what's holding you back you should check it out again.
- sandinmyjoints 3y ago
  Agreed. I use it multiple times daily.
hackmiester 3y ago
I have chrome installed and just cast my screen, minimize it and keep using firefox. I also don’t own any chromecast devices anymore, so this only really comes up at Airbnbs, the odd meeting room, etc. I’ve heard you can do the same with Brave.
gtk40 3y ago
Honestly Firefox is the biggest thing I miss on Android since switching to iOS. It supports uBlock Origin which makes mobile browsing so much nicer. I haven't found a better mobile web experience on iOS yet.
- bpye 3y ago
  Agreed - I ended up switching to Safari. If Apple ends up allowing other browser engines (as rumoured) then I’d happily switch back to Firefox.

consentreality 3y ago

The biggest blocker for me has been the lack of convenient profile switching. It's an important part of my workflow to have a separate profile for home/work/other, with history, bookmarks, etc. Container tabs are not a good replacement. Worse, I get irritated with the fact that Firefox fully supports this under the hood, but seems to push back against actually implementing a convenient way to use it. I'm currently doing my yearly attempt to switch, using the Profile Switcher extension [0]. It works well enough, but requires external software running and I fully expect it to break eventually. I also can't open external links in anything but the default profile (vs Chrome opening in the profile most recently active, a nice convenience). [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/profile-switcher/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/profile-switc...

gen220 3y ago
You might want to try out Arc if you're a Mac user – this was top on my wishlist from Firefox, too, and they're hitting it out of the park.
stiray 3y ago
Run firefox binary with -P switch. This might also interest you: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-use-firefox-containers https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-use-firefox-contain...
tux1968 3y ago
> The biggest blocker for me has been the lack of convenient profile switching. Switching profiles can be as easy as restarting the browser. For instance, you could create an icon on your desktop for each profile, or just a single icon to run : firefox --ProfileManager And you'll get a menu to choose which profile you want to use. > I also can't open links in anything but the default profile Interesting. Running on Linux here, and links open in whatever profile is currently in use.
- rjmunro 3y ago
  "can be as easy as restarting the browser" That is nothing like "convenient profile switching".

croisillon 3y ago

the city i work for has 100k employees, admittedly not everybody office based, but still: they only allow chrome and edge (except on iphone) because it would be too much work to maintain features for other browsers

JyrkiAlakuijala 3y ago
US official asked me to use Internet Explorer in 2021 when I called them that their obviously broken website didn't work with Chrome or Firefox. Browser divergence and incomplete or faulty support of standards is irritating.

_ea1k 3y ago

Tech people are their own worst enemey. Switch to Chrome, GMail, and Google Drive, they are so powerful! Next frame... "Why is Google so powerful and doing evil things?"

andrewla 3y ago

> It's 2023, Safari and Firefox have been very good for a while. This has not been my experience. Every once in a while I try to make the switch (to Firefox because I'm not generally a mac user, but I use safari on iOS and I'm basically resigned to its limitations) Slow rendering is for sure a problem. Buggy rendering is very common -- maybe the site, or maybe the browser, who knows, but anecdotally I've had a lot of bad experiences, including lost work filling out multi-page forms. And I hate to mention it, but aesthetically I find Firefox to be very clunky and ugly. Yes, Chrome is terrible for even more reasons than the ones shown here -- the direct integration of Google sign-on into the browser is awful, and the in-page text highlighting through (#:~:text=) is a big anti-feature (that now is being copied by the others, oh well), and after I spent so much effort trying to prune down the stupid buttons on my address bar only to find that they keep adding new, useless ones that are un-removeable ("reading panel"? why are they doing this?). But even with those things it's still the most performant and capable browser.

webstrand 3y ago
I do a bunch of CSS work, and I've found more bugs in Chrome's rendering than in Firefox's, Lots of half-pixel errors. What kind of rendering issues are you seeing in Firefox? If you do a lot of web development, I strongly recommend getting familiar with Firefox's containers. You can set up SOCKS proxies for each individual container so you can easily pretend your dev server is running on the production server's domain without disabling your own access to the production servers. It's so much nicer than working with multiple proxies in Chrome. That said, you might enjoy ungoogled-chromium if you're annoyed by google-integration. I use it for testing (because cross-browser testing is still a must). Brave also exists and is open-source, to break up market share.
- andrewla 3y ago
  I'm sure that Chrome's rendering is buggy as hell, but people design websites to work with the bugs; so they design them to work with Chrome, and in Firefox they look wrong unless they make the effort to work with both browsers. I'm not a web developer; when I have to do web development I use Chrome because that's what we target and anything else is an afterthought (or is work taken on by more specialized frontend developers). I tried ungoogled-chromium, but on upgrades it would frequently crash or fail to start so I gave up. Brave maybe is worth a try; the cryptocurrency tie-in was enough to make me reluctant even to give it a try. I want my user agent to be as agnostic as humanly possible with regards to presenting data from web pages -- that's why I hate the auto-login feature and the "view search results" feature; I want my browser to render content and do only the minimum possible work in reacting to that content.

AtNightWeCode 3y ago

I only use Chrome for web dev things. Been living for decades and I still don't understand how people can be so fking stupid.

throwaway290 3y ago

I do not use Chrome, but I recommend it to my tech illiterate friends or relatives because it's sadly probably the most secure browser among user friendly ones. In large part to Google Zero. (Ofc I try to also remember to warn against installing random extensions)

dclowd9901 3y ago

Dev experience in chrome is a lot better. But for personal browsing I use safari and mainly only because of how it uses keychain.

kesildur 3y ago

Firefox dropped support for PWAs. :(

sph 3y ago
Check out the FirefoxPWA project on Github

dangerwill 3y ago

I use Firefox at home, but my work (large company) has standardized on everyone using Chrome to the point of writing custom Chrome extensions. So at work I use Chrome because it is essentially required. I wonder how many enterprise workers are in the same boat, even just due to security folks wanting to focus on a single browser and thus getting the company to mandate the use of Chrome.

skydhash 3y ago
Company can mandate whatever software they want. It’s their computer, their data, and their workflow. You’re not IT, so if they’re ok with sending data to Google, your hands are tied. I avoid doing any personal stuff on my work laptop. Even quick searches.

hammycheesy 3y ago

I've been wanting to switch to Firefox for a while, but there is a single bug I filed ~6 years ago [1] that has prevented me from making the leap. I've always wanted to investigate and see if I can pull a fix together but haven't been able to find the activation energy to get a dev environment set up to do so. The bug is that Firefox on Windows doesn't play nice with virtual desktops. Clicking on a link in one virtual desktop may focus a Firefox window several VDs away. I'm a heavy user of virtual desktops, so this is a dealbreaker for me. Chromium browsers don't have this issue, so I'm stuck in Chromium land. [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1423768 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1423768

Symmetry 3y ago

I tried to switch a few times but I can't replicate my custom search experience on Firefox and I really miss browsing without it. On a new tab 'a product' and I've got an Amazon search for the product. 'w topic' and I've searched Wikipedia for the topic. 'wt place' and I've searched for the weather at a place. 'm place' and I've searched Google maps for the place. 'd topic' and I've searched DuckDuckGo for the topic. etc.

filchermcurr 3y ago
Those are search shortcuts in Firefox. Pretty easy to add any that you want: Go to settings, Search, Search Shortcuts. Set the keyword to what you want for the search engine of your choice. Then you can use that directly from the address bar.
- Symmetry 3y ago
  Yes, adding search shortcuts is easy but IIRC involved more keystrokes and didn't support search suggestions from history. I also tried some extensions but had my own troubles with those.

lern_too_spel 3y ago

As many others have mentioned, Safari is worse. It restricted content blocking to not support uBlock Origin many years ago, and it has already deployed remote attestation. On top of that, it is behind on support for APIs that people want, and those that it has implemented are often riddled with bugs, which are fixed slowly if ever. Firefox is a reasonable alternative.

moomoo11 3y ago

I wouldn’t mind being in that circle. At least I’d be with people who are smart and practical. Not extremists or complete ignoramuses. Whatever chrome doesn’t or does doesn’t matter to me. I just use it to do my job and occasionally shop on Amazon or watch Netflix. Or come here on HN. I visit maybe ten unique websites.. If chrome starts to suck big like IE back in the day then I’ll use some other browser that works best for all the sites I visit. As long as it works best for most sites I visit, that’s fine by me. I have a life outside the computer, which is funded by the computer. I can just turn it off after work and do an infinite number of other things.

Liskni_si 3y ago

Chrome lets me install extensions using "git clone". Firefox doesn't, they need to come from AMO, or I need to reinstall them every time I relaunch Firefox.

collinmanderson 3y ago

I've been trying out Firefox on MacOS this week. Been using Chrome since ~2009, Firefox before that. Here are some annoyances so far: - No download bar to show actual downloads (downloaded files are hidden under a menu icon) - No built-in page translate - Search: is in bottom left rather than top-right which is pretty standard in most UIs. - Search: would be nice if "Highlight All" were on by default (though it's caused me problems on Chrome with large documents so I can see off by default having some advantage.) - Search: most of those options should probably be hidden under "advanced" or some expandable menu. - I don't like the scrolling tab view where I can only see less than 10 tabs at once. I'd rather they get really tiny like on Chrome rather than totally hidden. Otherwise it's unclear to me at a glance how many tabs I have open. - Youtube seems to have higher CPU usage compared to chrome (at least on MacOS x86, non-fullscreen) - Tabs are too easy to mute and seem less intuitive which ones are playing. - Dev tools doesn't have the “lighthouse” audit tool. - Would be nice if cmd+shift+n shortcut matched webkit/blink behavior. I'm slowly learning to use cmd+shift+p instead, but being consistent with all the other browsers would be nice.

dralley 3y ago
>- No built-in page translate It's an extension, look up Firefox Translate. It's even local-only. Or Google Translate for better results but less privacy. This is the sort of thing that other people might consider "bloat"

juniperplant 3y ago

Some points on why I switched from Firefox to Chrome: - It "failed" while trying to use Google Meet for work. I don't remember the details of the incident, but it was embarrassing enough that it made me switch, at least for work stuff - No Chromecast support - Buggier than Chrome in general: last I remember was an issue with page scaling when printing - No desktop integration of PWAs (i.e. launcher icon, standalone window). This is what I missed the most as a Linux desktop user. - Worse performance than Chrome, at least on Android. Firefox was freezing often and even causing my phone to... restart randomly. This is unacceptable.