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This article is, in my opinion, not very good. It documents areas where Firefox differs from Chrome, yes, but it fails to make the case why I should care. * I

• SeanDav 13y ago
  To this list you can add the deal breaker - Firefox is not mining your data and then passing it on to the NSA.
  • Estragon 13y ago
    Even if this were true (and there's no reason to believe that Google Chrome is being used in this way), there's still the open-source Chromium browser.
    • mehrzad 13y ago
      Which is a Nightly as well as being a pain to update. (though I hear it's different on GNU/Linux)
    • AJ007 13y ago
      Which Google has made intentionally hard to find. Could your mom or grandmother figure this one out? http://build.chromium.org/f/chromium/layout_test_results/ http://build.chromium.org/f/chromium/layout_test_results/
      • gcr 13y ago
        On the systems I work with, it's easy to walk your grandmother through "click on the black square, now type apt-get install chromium, now hit enter."
        • wutbrodo 13y ago
          Yea, my dad still hasn't _quite_ figured out copy and paste but was clicking around the Ubuntu Software Center one day and managed to install Chromium (he heard me talk about how I was planning to install Chrome on his computer and I guess the names were similar enough).
      • 616c 13y ago
        http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-snapshots/index.html?path=Win/ http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-sna...
    • takluyver 13y ago
      Chromium is inferior in certain respects, such as lacking an integrated PDF viewer.
  • mrweasel 13y ago
    I would really wish that Firefox provided a way of disabling all external services, including Googles. If you go to the about:config and search for "Google", I would like the ability to disable all these services.
    • asadotzler 13y ago
      Firefox button > Options > Options (or Tools > Options) > Security, un-check both "Block reported attack sites" and "Block reported web forgeries" That will turn off the Firefox Safe Browsing features that come from Google.
  • criley2 13y ago
    Seeing as it's extremely likely that the NSA is tapping into fiber at exchanges near major corporations, and almost everything you do online is tracked by someone, it seems like a moot point anyway. Who cares if Mozilla or Google is providing the NSA with access when the NSA is monitoring all the data heading to and from them without permission?
• mtgx 13y ago
  Why wouldn't you want a multi-process architecture? It's bad enough that so many apps can utilize the quad core CPU's we have in our PC's. At least the browser is one app that can fully take advantage of multiple cores, unlike most apps out there.
  • jevinskie 13y ago
    You can take advantage of multiple cores using a single process with threads.
    • antihero 13y ago
      But don't threads generally share memory? So therefore if a thread crashes, it can totally screw up all the other tabs still.
      • wolfgke 13y ago
        mtgox was talking about scalability, not stability.
        • glhaynes 13y ago
          Scalability just makes me want stability all the more because the stakes are that much higher.
        • samspenc 13y ago
          He's mtgx, not mtgox (the Bitcoin company).
  • wolfgke 13y ago
    Scaling (and taking advantage of multiple cores) can be done by using threads instead of processes, but processes (and IPC) have larger overhead than threads. Processes need more RAM than threads. Google (and Microsoft) argue that using processes make the browser more stable in the sense that if one tab crashes, not the entire browser crashes, too (correct, as long as no deadlock in IPC between the processes occur - which has happened in some past Chrome relases) and makes the browser more secure (but not everybody agrees here). Thus they argue that the overhead of processes over threads is worth it. But if you just want the scalability there are more easy solutions.
• jervisfm 13y ago
  > There are extensions I like which have no equivalent (that I know of) in Chrome Can you give an some examples of useful extensions you use that are available in Firefox but not yet in Chrome ?
  • q_revert 13y ago
    vimperator is probably the most useful web extension i've ever used.. and it doesn't have a good chrome equivalent http://www.vimperator.org/vimperator http://www.vimperator.org/vimperator
    • jcbrand 13y ago
      I've used Vimperator before but I now use Vimium on chromium and very much prefer it. When you navigate via keyboard (by pressing "f"), Vimperator marks links with numbers, Vimium marks them with letters, from ("a to "zz'). Letters are much nicer when you can touch type and your hands are already on the keys. Vimperator used to do silly things like hide the address bar and force you into doing everything in a kind of "command mode". It never felt very smoothly integrated with the browser and it was always a pain to try and open a new site via command mode instead of just using <Ctrl>-L and typing it in the address bar. Invariably I would try to type something in a textbox or use some keyboard shortcut, only to find that Vimperator hijacked it and I'm now typing in command mode. Vimium doesn't give me these problems because it doesn't have a command prompt/mode. Besides that, it's integrated very nicely with chrome, in such a way that I can use normal keyboard shortcuts as far as possible, but have vim-like shortcuts for the things that matter (e.g. "/" for searching, navigation via keyboard etc.)
      • gcr 13y ago
        Pentadactyl (Vimperator fork) annotates links with letters now, I think on the home row. The very first instructions that you saw when opening Vimium were "How do I unhide the address bar?" It takes two clicks or just a few keystrokes.
      • q_revert 13y ago
        to me vimperator isn't just about having a few vim bindings here and there, it completely redefines the browsing experience... also, when you "f" to find links, you can just enter a piece of the url string and vimperator opens it.. either way, it doesn't matter much.. vimium is a lightweight clone of vimperator, if that's what you want then of course you'll prefer it.. these "problems" you're talking about in vimperator are features once you actually embrace it and use it properly. it's a power user's tool.. and should be recognized as such.. http://i.imgur.com/vznzJMV.png http://i.imgur.com/vznzJMV.png
• auvrw 13y ago
  good reply. i use <strike>iceweasel</strike> firefox for the same reasons, specifically: * pentadactyl (formerly vimperator) * xul and xpcom took time to read about * i like that the entirety of the codebase is free, not just the big blocks of C++ oh, and might be worth noting that the mobile version of firefox is multiprocess, and there's always the -no-remote flag (if you want to debug something w/o potentially crashing the 20 tabs of docs, bug reports, mailing list archives, and stack overflow you had to dig through to find the thing that maybe, possibly created the bug in the first place), although i totally agree about this thing where solving the problem of stability has somehow been conflated with running more than one process. to each their own. having more browsers promotes a healthier "ecosystem" or something like this.
• zetafunction 13y ago
  Multiprocess is also important for security. It means that simply finding a renderer exploit isn't enough to pwn your system if the renderer processes have no privileges to write/execute arbitrary files.
  • nathanb 13y ago
    If you're running your browser as a privileged user then you deserve to have your system pwned.
    • zetafunction 13y ago
      A privileged user has nothing to do with it. Running as a non privileged user will not stop keyloggers, cookie theft, privilege escalation exploits, etc.
• Svip 13y ago
  He also mentions that there is no web suite anymore from Mozilla, but there is; it's called SeaMonkey and it's actively maintained. Although, a lot of it is upstream features from Thunderbird and Firefox.