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I've had Chrome, Safari, and Firefox open pretty much all day every day for the past decade+ and find them to be overwhelmingly alike. What is Firefox missing?

TheCleric 3y ago
This is a great question. A lot of it I can't quite put my finger on. It just felt off. Which makes it impossible for them to improve since it's not concrete. I know for a fact one of the things I hated was that I was hoping to get vertical tabs working, but the vertical tab extension I tried at the time felt clunky and only duplicated the tabs in both horizontal and vertical. To disable the horizontal I'd have to edit a custom css file. This all felt very amateur hour. And I think I even went through the effort of doing so and it broke something else in the process (possibly my fault). Admittedly I don't have a good solution for this even now in my daily driver (Ungoogled Chromium), so it's not a firm "They need to fix this." I think I was just turned off that a solution boiled down to "create a custom config file".
- TylerE 3y ago
  At least on Mac, the font rendering is different. Hard to exactly quanify, but I'd say Firefox seems less crisp and also less bold/lighter weight. It's not night and day, but with your comment visible side by side in both they're clearly different _somehow_.
  - macNchz 3y ago
    Perhaps something particular to your machine...out of curiosity I overlaid screenshots of HN on both on Mac and Linux and the text was nearly pixel identical, though Firefox seemingly has a taller default paragraph line height than Chrome. There were a handful tiny differences in individual character rendering and spacing, but so minor as to be basically impossible to identify without quickly flipping back and forth between the overlaid layers while zoomed in.
    - TylerE 3y ago
      I don’t entirely trust screenshots for this sort of thing, S don’t funding is going on at the sub-pixel level.
- derac 3y ago
  I use a heavily modified version of this for vertical tabs, which works very well. https://github.com/refact0r/sidefox https://github.com/refact0r/sidefox I'm not sure if Chrome is as customizable, but I don't believe so.
TillE 3y ago
Same, I use Firefox 90% of the time and I have no idea what all the complaining is about. My only real issue is that fullscreening videos on macOS sucks (ie, it takes forever). I certainly don't personally care about declining market share, that's not my problem. Mozilla makes a good product. Chrome has become the default browser thanks to Google's muscle (and also making a good product), and I dunno what grand strategy is supposed to compete with that.
- shaan7 3y ago
  > I dunno what grand strategy is supposed to compete with that. Agree 100%. In its current state I find Firefox simply _better_ than Chrome - mostly due to how well integrated Multi-Account Containers are. Like you I am puzzled by exactly what is Firefox missing that it is a deal breaker for people. Is it just the occasional hiccup when using a Google/MS service? Some people mention 4K videos not playing properly - that sounds like an acceptable reason. But surely that still isn't a good reason for not being able to have Firefox as one's daily driver. I have the same suspicion as you, Chrome's marketshare is simply because Google services are so popular and they direct you to Chrome, and that the most popular mobile OS (Android) runs Chrome by default.

TheCleric 3y ago

This is a great question. A lot of it I can't quite put my finger on. It just felt off. Which makes it impossible for them to improve since it's not concrete. I know for a fact one of the things I hated was that I was hoping to get vertical tabs working, but the vertical tab extension I tried at the time felt clunky and only duplicated the tabs in both horizontal and vertical. To disable the horizontal I'd have to edit a custom css file. This all felt very amateur hour. And I think I even went through the effort of doing so and it broke something else in the process (possibly my fault). Admittedly I don't have a good solution for this even now in my daily driver (Ungoogled Chromium), so it's not a firm "They need to fix this." I think I was just turned off that a solution boiled down to "create a custom config file".

TylerE 3y ago
At least on Mac, the font rendering is different. Hard to exactly quanify, but I'd say Firefox seems less crisp and also less bold/lighter weight. It's not night and day, but with your comment visible side by side in both they're clearly different _somehow_.
- macNchz 3y ago
  Perhaps something particular to your machine...out of curiosity I overlaid screenshots of HN on both on Mac and Linux and the text was nearly pixel identical, though Firefox seemingly has a taller default paragraph line height than Chrome. There were a handful tiny differences in individual character rendering and spacing, but so minor as to be basically impossible to identify without quickly flipping back and forth between the overlaid layers while zoomed in.
  - TylerE 3y ago
    I don’t entirely trust screenshots for this sort of thing, S don’t funding is going on at the sub-pixel level.
derac 3y ago
I use a heavily modified version of this for vertical tabs, which works very well. https://github.com/refact0r/sidefox https://github.com/refact0r/sidefox I'm not sure if Chrome is as customizable, but I don't believe so.

TillE 3y ago

Same, I use Firefox 90% of the time and I have no idea what all the complaining is about. My only real issue is that fullscreening videos on macOS sucks (ie, it takes forever). I certainly don't personally care about declining market share, that's not my problem. Mozilla makes a good product. Chrome has become the default browser thanks to Google's muscle (and also making a good product), and I dunno what grand strategy is supposed to compete with that.

shaan7 3y ago
> I dunno what grand strategy is supposed to compete with that. Agree 100%. In its current state I find Firefox simply _better_ than Chrome - mostly due to how well integrated Multi-Account Containers are. Like you I am puzzled by exactly what is Firefox missing that it is a deal breaker for people. Is it just the occasional hiccup when using a Google/MS service? Some people mention 4K videos not playing properly - that sounds like an acceptable reason. But surely that still isn't a good reason for not being able to have Firefox as one's daily driver. I have the same suspicion as you, Chrome's marketshare is simply because Google services are so popular and they direct you to Chrome, and that the most popular mobile OS (Android) runs Chrome by default.