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If you want a highly customizable browser, Firefox is it. Chrome is in its infancy when it comes to customization and they often make decisions that prevent pow

by hbt 12y ago

If you want a highly customizable browser, Firefox is it. Chrome is in its infancy when it comes to customization and they often make decisions that prevent power users from taking advantage of their browsing experience. For example, they've disabled custom stylesheets in recent releases despite a clear indication that people were sharing themes, they have very old bugs that don't get resolved (like the stupid white flashes on dark themes), major accessibility issues. Generally they try to appeal and prioritize regular users (which is fine) but go out of their way to make decisions that ignore power users and not even provide alternatives intentionally. Finally and the most frustrating part is they don't value feedback. https://code.google.com/p/chromium/ https://code.google.com/p/chromium/ is a joke and a waste of time. The most starred issues are often closed to the public when it reaches a certain level and users are asked to submit a new bug again if the old one is not fixed. This means that if there is still a bug, you have to wait months before other users experience it, find the time to search for the bug and star it, reach enough stars to get attention and then get a response. Bugs are often miscategorized and the wrong team has it in its backlog. It's a mess. There isn't a feature in Chromium or Google Chrome that Firefox doesn't deliver. Take it from a serious chrome user and extension developer for several years, switch to Firefox if you want to tweak anything that bothers you easily without having to change the damn source code.

nandhp 12y ago
> There isn't a feature in Chromium or Google Chrome that Firefox doesn't deliver. Multi-process browsing. It is incredibly annoying when my entire browser locks up because one of the fifty tabs I have open is doing something stupid. That never happened in several years of using Chrome, and it happens several times a day in Firefox.
- hbt 12y ago
  Agreed. The multi-process vs single process is controversial. With cheap memory, multi-process would be better. However, I personally don't experience crashes several times a day. A crash usually boils down to Javascript taking too long and/or maybe rendering issues with CSS (hardware acceleration). However Chrome is not immune to bad JS and will also slow down your system until the single tab is killed/crashes. Overall, a crash is not really that dramatic. The browser restarts, all tabs are still there and only load if you click them, you can use Lazarus to auto-save all form inputs and not lose a single point of data and it resumes at the exact position in seconds (no need to scroll either). Just add NoScript and block the sites where developers can't write decent JS. >> it happens several times a day in Firefox If it happens frequently regardless of the sites you're visiting then it must be extensions or hardware acceleration or plugins. i.e a configuration problem and not a FF one
  - Amadiro 12y ago
    > Chrome is not immune to bad JS and will also slow down your system until the single tab is killed/crashes. That's true, but with like 8-or-so cores I don't really care or even notice that much (if I notice some tab is eating a lot of CPU power, I just go into the task-manager and kill it, until I need it, at which point I reload it.) No disruption to my browsing experience happens. In firefox, I'll have to close the tab, possibly restart the browser, et cetera. > The browser restarts, all tabs are still there and only load if you click them I haven't really used firefox for a while now, but it used to lose tabs occasionally for me. I hope that's fixed nowadays.
- CyberShadow 12y ago
  For the record, Mozilla is working on it: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis You can track the E10s team's progress through their weekly meeting notes: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/E10s-meeting-notes https://etherpad.mozilla.org/E10s-meeting-notes
  - azakai 12y ago
    You can also try it right now on Nightly builds. There's even a menu option ("open new e10s window").
    - rb12345 12y ago
      You can enable it in Firefox 29 if you like (about:config, browser.tabs.remote=true, restart). I noticed though that navigating to live bookmarks crashed the browser, so ended up disabling it.
- sentenza 12y ago
  So imagine you are a person that stopped browser hygiene during a few months while finishing their PhD and now _still_ carries around about 900 open tabs waiting to be sorted into bookmarks and junk. (Yeah, that's me.) I have to re-start Firefox every 48 hours or else its resource consumption starts affecting the overall system. This is my primary issue with current Firefox versions, although I am aware that I'm an n-sigma outlier. Intrestingly, however, the Firefox team has been greatly improving memory management, so that currently, even with my completely pathological browser session, Firefox remains usable for 48 hours with 900 tabs open.
  - mnemonik 12y ago
    You might like the unload tab addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/unloadtab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/unloadtab/
  - CyberShadow 12y ago
    Right-click the tab bar, select "Bookmark all tabs", save them all to a new folder (name it after the current date or whatnot).
    - lomnakkus 12y ago
      Or just close all those tabs. Realistically you're never actually going to get around to reading them and they're just there weighing you down. Seriously, close them. Forget they were ever there. If you haven't looked at them yet it means that they're not that important!
      - lelandbatey 12y ago
        Yeah, this is the only way I keep my browsing sane. Over the years, a kind of "tab garbage-collection" habit has emerged. I find it works really well, since if a tab hasn't been visited in the last 20 minutes, I probably won't open it again. Additionally, the history-tracking of the browser is good enough and my google-fu sufficient so I can find anything I need that I've previously visited. Keeping my tabs lean makes me much happier!
- andreastt 12y ago
  So Firefox does support multi-processed tabs through Electrolysis (its IPC layer). From what I understand this is used primarily on Firefox OS to sandbox app runtimes. Doing one process per tab, which is what Chrome does, comes at a very steep cost in increased memory usage. If you compare a Chrome and Firefox instance holding 20 or 30 tabs, the memory consumption is going to be dramatically different. Bill McCloskey did a nice writeup on this back in December: http://billmccloskey.wordpress.com/2013/12/05/multiprocess-firefox/ http://billmccloskey.wordpress.com/2013/12/05/multiprocess-f... His article explains how you can try out the experimental multi-process support in Firefox, but that it works differently to Chrome's. I think Chrome's way of doing it wastes a lot of system resources and that we need to be more clever about how we spend a user's system resources.
- mburns 12y ago
  You can turn it on in Firefox Nightly. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Enabling_Electrolysis https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Enabling_Electrolysis
djhworld 12y ago
> For example, they've disabled custom stylesheets in recent releases despite a clear indication that people were sharing themes, they have very old bugs that don't get resolved (like the stupid white flashes on dark themes), major accessibility issues. The Stylish extension works fine for me http://userstyles.org/ http://userstyles.org/
- hbt 12y ago
  Stylish is applied post-rendering in Chrome. It works fine in FF because of the browser API. In chrome, because of the limitations of the extensions API, it doesn't cover chrome pages, developer tools or source view. If you pick a dark background in Stylish and visit a site with a white background, you will see flashes of light because the extension takes over after the document was created and chrome stylesheet was applied. Check out http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1373 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1373 for more details
k2enemy 12y ago
> There isn't a feature in Chromium or Google Chrome that Firefox doesn't deliver. Applescript support. This prevents me from using Firefox.
- mblakele 12y ago
  That sounds interesting. What sort of things do you do with AppleScript and the browser?
  - k2enemy 12y ago
    Nothing too crazy. I have a keyboard shortcut that grabs the URL from chrome, then passes it off to a script that interfaces with pass [0] to have a rudimentary, but secure and cross platform password manager. [0]: http://www.zx2c4.com/projects/password-store/ http://www.zx2c4.com/projects/password-store/
    - 3rd3 12y ago
      Try this: tell application "Firefox" activate set pb to the clipboard tell application "System Events" keystroke "l" using command down keystroke "c" using command down end tell set page_url to the clipboard set the clipboard to pb end tell It’s kind of hacked together and I haven’t tested it with rigor but until now it did its job. If you use it, please let me know if you could enhance it or whether it breaks for certain pasteboard contents.
      - k2enemy 12y ago
        Thanks, that worked well. I needed to add a pause between cmd-l and cmd-c though.
- shabble 12y ago
  I'm using mozrepl[1] which exposes all sorts of FF guts over a simple localhost telnet connection to automate stuff that might otherwise be applescripted. It's a bit of a hassle, but for simple things like 'get url of current tab', 'open new tab', 'switch to tab x', etc, it's reasonably simple and can be scripted. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mozrepl/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mozrepl/
GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
"There isn't a feature in Chromium or Google Chrome that Firefox doesn't deliver." On this ubuntu machine, "the ability to have a bunch of tabs displaying pdfs open at once" is a really big selling point for chrome.
eikenberry 12y ago
Flash support. And no, supporting the old deprecated Adobe plugin doesn't count as many sites now require newer versions. This is to support flash games. My kids love the simple flash games on Kongregate and similar sites, so I have to use Chromium on their systems.
- krisdol 12y ago
  Flash is still being developed outside of Adobe? Who would be perpetuating Flash?
  - zobzu 12y ago
    google has the code for flash actually.
- kevingadd 12y ago
  Chromium ppapi flash is known inferior to npapi flash (sites like Crunchyroll tell you not to use it; ppapi has higher CPU usage) and npapi flash works fine in Firefox.
dubcanada 12y ago
I'm sorry but the developer tools in Firefox are a nightmare to use. Sure they have fancy things like 3d view and other awesome functions. But plain old jane stuff, is just easier to do in Chrome. At least in my experience.

by hbt 12y ago

nandhp 12y ago

> There isn't a feature in Chromium or Google Chrome that Firefox doesn't deliver. Multi-process browsing. It is incredibly annoying when my entire browser locks up because one of the fifty tabs I have open is doing something stupid. That never happened in several years of using Chrome, and it happens several times a day in Firefox.

hbt 12y ago
Agreed. The multi-process vs single process is controversial. With cheap memory, multi-process would be better. However, I personally don't experience crashes several times a day. A crash usually boils down to Javascript taking too long and/or maybe rendering issues with CSS (hardware acceleration). However Chrome is not immune to bad JS and will also slow down your system until the single tab is killed/crashes. Overall, a crash is not really that dramatic. The browser restarts, all tabs are still there and only load if you click them, you can use Lazarus to auto-save all form inputs and not lose a single point of data and it resumes at the exact position in seconds (no need to scroll either). Just add NoScript and block the sites where developers can't write decent JS. >> it happens several times a day in Firefox If it happens frequently regardless of the sites you're visiting then it must be extensions or hardware acceleration or plugins. i.e a configuration problem and not a FF one
- Amadiro 12y ago
  > Chrome is not immune to bad JS and will also slow down your system until the single tab is killed/crashes. That's true, but with like 8-or-so cores I don't really care or even notice that much (if I notice some tab is eating a lot of CPU power, I just go into the task-manager and kill it, until I need it, at which point I reload it.) No disruption to my browsing experience happens. In firefox, I'll have to close the tab, possibly restart the browser, et cetera. > The browser restarts, all tabs are still there and only load if you click them I haven't really used firefox for a while now, but it used to lose tabs occasionally for me. I hope that's fixed nowadays.
CyberShadow 12y ago
For the record, Mozilla is working on it: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis You can track the E10s team's progress through their weekly meeting notes: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/E10s-meeting-notes https://etherpad.mozilla.org/E10s-meeting-notes
- azakai 12y ago
  You can also try it right now on Nightly builds. There's even a menu option ("open new e10s window").
  - rb12345 12y ago
    You can enable it in Firefox 29 if you like (about:config, browser.tabs.remote=true, restart). I noticed though that navigating to live bookmarks crashed the browser, so ended up disabling it.
sentenza 12y ago
So imagine you are a person that stopped browser hygiene during a few months while finishing their PhD and now _still_ carries around about 900 open tabs waiting to be sorted into bookmarks and junk. (Yeah, that's me.) I have to re-start Firefox every 48 hours or else its resource consumption starts affecting the overall system. This is my primary issue with current Firefox versions, although I am aware that I'm an n-sigma outlier. Intrestingly, however, the Firefox team has been greatly improving memory management, so that currently, even with my completely pathological browser session, Firefox remains usable for 48 hours with 900 tabs open.
- mnemonik 12y ago
  You might like the unload tab addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/unloadtab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/unloadtab/
- CyberShadow 12y ago
  Right-click the tab bar, select "Bookmark all tabs", save them all to a new folder (name it after the current date or whatnot).
  - lomnakkus 12y ago
    Or just close all those tabs. Realistically you're never actually going to get around to reading them and they're just there weighing you down. Seriously, close them. Forget they were ever there. If you haven't looked at them yet it means that they're not that important!
    - lelandbatey 12y ago
      Yeah, this is the only way I keep my browsing sane. Over the years, a kind of "tab garbage-collection" habit has emerged. I find it works really well, since if a tab hasn't been visited in the last 20 minutes, I probably won't open it again. Additionally, the history-tracking of the browser is good enough and my google-fu sufficient so I can find anything I need that I've previously visited. Keeping my tabs lean makes me much happier!
andreastt 12y ago
So Firefox does support multi-processed tabs through Electrolysis (its IPC layer). From what I understand this is used primarily on Firefox OS to sandbox app runtimes. Doing one process per tab, which is what Chrome does, comes at a very steep cost in increased memory usage. If you compare a Chrome and Firefox instance holding 20 or 30 tabs, the memory consumption is going to be dramatically different. Bill McCloskey did a nice writeup on this back in December: http://billmccloskey.wordpress.com/2013/12/05/multiprocess-firefox/ http://billmccloskey.wordpress.com/2013/12/05/multiprocess-f... His article explains how you can try out the experimental multi-process support in Firefox, but that it works differently to Chrome's. I think Chrome's way of doing it wastes a lot of system resources and that we need to be more clever about how we spend a user's system resources.
mburns 12y ago
You can turn it on in Firefox Nightly. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Enabling_Electrolysis https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Enabling_Electrolysis

djhworld 12y ago

> For example, they've disabled custom stylesheets in recent releases despite a clear indication that people were sharing themes, they have very old bugs that don't get resolved (like the stupid white flashes on dark themes), major accessibility issues. The Stylish extension works fine for me http://userstyles.org/ http://userstyles.org/

hbt 12y ago
Stylish is applied post-rendering in Chrome. It works fine in FF because of the browser API. In chrome, because of the limitations of the extensions API, it doesn't cover chrome pages, developer tools or source view. If you pick a dark background in Stylish and visit a site with a white background, you will see flashes of light because the extension takes over after the document was created and chrome stylesheet was applied. Check out http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1373 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1373 for more details

k2enemy 12y ago

> There isn't a feature in Chromium or Google Chrome that Firefox doesn't deliver. Applescript support. This prevents me from using Firefox.

mblakele 12y ago
That sounds interesting. What sort of things do you do with AppleScript and the browser?
- k2enemy 12y ago
  Nothing too crazy. I have a keyboard shortcut that grabs the URL from chrome, then passes it off to a script that interfaces with pass [0] to have a rudimentary, but secure and cross platform password manager. [0]: http://www.zx2c4.com/projects/password-store/ http://www.zx2c4.com/projects/password-store/
  - 3rd3 12y ago
    Try this: tell application "Firefox" activate set pb to the clipboard tell application "System Events" keystroke "l" using command down keystroke "c" using command down end tell set page_url to the clipboard set the clipboard to pb end tell It’s kind of hacked together and I haven’t tested it with rigor but until now it did its job. If you use it, please let me know if you could enhance it or whether it breaks for certain pasteboard contents.
    - k2enemy 12y ago
      Thanks, that worked well. I needed to add a pause between cmd-l and cmd-c though.
shabble 12y ago
I'm using mozrepl[1] which exposes all sorts of FF guts over a simple localhost telnet connection to automate stuff that might otherwise be applescripted. It's a bit of a hassle, but for simple things like 'get url of current tab', 'open new tab', 'switch to tab x', etc, it's reasonably simple and can be scripted. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mozrepl/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mozrepl/

GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago

"There isn't a feature in Chromium or Google Chrome that Firefox doesn't deliver." On this ubuntu machine, "the ability to have a bunch of tabs displaying pdfs open at once" is a really big selling point for chrome.

eikenberry 12y ago

Flash support. And no, supporting the old deprecated Adobe plugin doesn't count as many sites now require newer versions. This is to support flash games. My kids love the simple flash games on Kongregate and similar sites, so I have to use Chromium on their systems.

krisdol 12y ago
Flash is still being developed outside of Adobe? Who would be perpetuating Flash?
- zobzu 12y ago
  google has the code for flash actually.
kevingadd 12y ago
Chromium ppapi flash is known inferior to npapi flash (sites like Crunchyroll tell you not to use it; ppapi has higher CPU usage) and npapi flash works fine in Firefox.

dubcanada 12y ago

I'm sorry but the developer tools in Firefox are a nightmare to use. Sure they have fancy things like 3d view and other awesome functions. But plain old jane stuff, is just easier to do in Chrome. At least in my experience.