Ask HN: What's stopping you from using Firefox as your primary browser?

[evolve2k]

Being the Open Internet advocates that they are, you would imagine that most of us are generally big supporters of Firefox. So why then aren't more of us using it as our primary browser?

For me it's a simple feature in Chrome "tab to search" which frustratingly has never been ported into Firefox and every time I try to switch over the absense of this feature lures me back to Chrome as I'm just more effective with it.

Ref: http://www.danielfuterman.com/google-chrome-tab-to-search

What stopping you?

[edit: grammar fixes]

[cygned]

Frankly: speed. As a web developer it notice it all the time. Chrome (using Canary) is faster in every aspect; Firefox renders slowly, becomes unresponsive over time, hangs often when using web sockets (webpack); the developers tools seem to have problems with large files and so on.

I actually love Firefox' dev tools and I really would like to use it - and it's not a bad browser at all- but as a developer all the small things add up (same reason why I cannot use Safari as my daily browser).

[mythmon_]

I think the problem with webpack isn't the websockets, but that the devtools have a hard time dealing with large JS files, and especially large JS source maps. Changing the sourcemap option in webpack has helped avoiding hanging for me in the past. It would be nice if that wasn't the case though.

[no_protocol]

I use bookmark keywords to search various sites in Firefox.

For example, a bookmark to search Amazon:

  Name: Amazon Search
  Location: http://www.amazon.com/s/?field-keywords=%s
  Keyword: ams

So now if I enter the following in my address bar:

  ams keyboard

I am brought to an Amazon search results page for keyboards.

I don't like the tab-to-search version in Chrome very much by comparison. There is a service called Shortmarks that aims to emulate this behavior in Chrome, but I'm not sure how I feel about using it.

---

I switched to Chrome about 5 years ago because Firefox was getting slow for me. Recently I am strongly considering switching back. My biggest continual annoyance with Chrome is poor searching of previous visited pages when typing partial URLs into the address bar. The main thing holding me back right now is I am wondering how this will impact me when using a Chromebook.

[richardboegli]

If you use Duck Duck Go search engine you can replace your search query with

!a keyboard

If you need to search Google

!g keyboard

Cannot recall how long I've been using it, but it replaced the need for me to have bookmark searches.

[scandox]

Pure inertia. I'm going to change right now. Been meaning to do this for weeks. Just one change to one line in my i3 startup config and that will be that.

Update: I'm back in Firefox. Already been nagged twice by Google to use Chrome.

[kevlar1818]

Time to switch to DDG! It's come a long way in just a few years. It's my daily search engine and I have never looked back in reget.

[uncletaco]

1. I switched to Chrome after I got fed up with firefox's tabs not being sandboxed. I worked at a company that ran an app using silver light. It freezing would often lock up my browser (or at least that's what I thought was happening at the time). I switched to chrome and liked the overall "tighter" experience.

2. Now its security issues. I'm watching closely however to see how firefox evolves over the next year.

[VLM]

This may appear flippant but its insightful in that sometimes the reason is non-technical and not anyone's fault.

In the mega-corporate IT world you have supported locked down apps and best effort apps (and banned apps but thats not relevant to this discussion)

Officially FF is locked down to hell and back and I can't customize it in any way or install ad blockers or web development tools in any way. HOWEVER being locked down the IT support personnel can officially walk users thru using the corporate intranet or the medical insurance site or whatever without any weird "peoplesoft doesn't work, I didn't think it important to mention I installed an adblocker or javascript blocker and fifteen toolbars and ...". Support isn't happening without it being locked down to the point of uselessness.

Meanwhile chrome is on the tolerated but not locked down list and I can install ad blockers and development tools all I want but if it doesn't work then IT support has a written policy to not give a F. They're not actively blocking it, deleting it, or locking it down, but they are not actively supporting it at all. If some obscure IT supported something-as-a-service doesn't work with Chrome, they autoclose the ticket officially. Unofficially they're not total jerks, of course, so they'd fix it, just officially Chrome doesn't exist.

So take a wild guess which one I use at work... I can't imagine using the internet without an adblocker, can't install one, or anything, on FF, so ...

[chrisvalleybay]

I don't like the design of the user interface - at all. If Firefox looked and worked exactly like Chrome, I'd use it in a heartbeat. There's way too much clutter everywhere. At some point I'd like to redo the entire design for them.

[gtf21]

I keep trying to go back to Fx, and get held up on a few things (partly due to my own laziness):

1) tab-to-search (you mention already) 2) Chrome is "cleaner" out of the box (I'm sure I can have an omnibox in Fx I just haven't tried very hard) 3) I prefer Chrome's developer tools by a huge margin (especially the react/redux ones) 4) easy profile switching in Chrome (I have a dev profile that I use a lot) 5) Chrome better history plugin

[williamstein]

The flexbox bugs: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=flexbox... E.g., "Firefox slow to the point of hanging when rendering nested flexbox layout with overflow-y: scroll", which is trivial to reproduce, and which all other modern browsers handle fine. In fact, anybody who visits our product's site using Firefox is given a warning to use any other browser: https://github.com/sagemathinc/smc/issues/1314

[gnicholas]

I use it as my main browser, mainly because of Tree Style Tabs, but with the upcoming changes to their extension framework, I understand this won't be possible anymore. (I also understand they have their own experimental version of this feature, however).

I have been drifting away, however, because it seems to get very slow. This is partly because of the number of tabs I keep open (thanks to TST, which makes it easy), but that's not the only culprit. Even after re-starting it, when most tabs are not loaded, it gets slow pretty fast. JS also runs much faster in Chrome, I've discovered.

[hs86]

I was a TreeStyleTabs-diehard until I discovered Tabs Outliner [1] for Chrome.

It is a separate window with a tab tree for my entire browser session (= all windows), has a much better keyboard support, supports the unloading of any subtree (makes The Great Suspender obsolete) and you can sync your (sub)tree from an other computer to the current computer's session just via drag and drop.

In the linked screenshot [2] you can see my current session with collapsed subtrees and the grey captioned subtree isn't even loaded. With (shift+)tab I can (un)intend tabs to make them into childs or siblings and with ctrl+up/down I can reorder them. This can be also done with the mouse and compared to TST it actually feels deterministic.

Going back to Firefox with TST would be a downgrade. :(

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-outliner/eggk...

[2] http://imgur.com/a/1HZSi

[richardboegli]

Try Pale Moon. Tree Style Tabs will continue to work as they are keeping XUL.

[schoen]

I use Firefox as my primary browser but I use Chromium for the Yubikey integration on GitHub, which either Firefox or GitHub does not support.

Edit: another advantage of Chromium is that Google has put so many resources into securing it; reportedly as a direct result of this, vulnerabilities in Firefox are easier to find (and cheaper in vulnerability markets).

[azdle]

Firefox doesn't support U2F natively yet, but there's an addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/u2f-support-a...

Not sure if that will actually help you though, lots of sites are using user agent sniffing to only allow chrome instead of detecting it properly.

[comex]

1. Speed.

2. Lack of interest in macOS. I still remember when I got the first Mac with a Retina Display, shortly after release, and most third-party apps were pixelated and looked like crap. Among browsers, the timeline looked like this:

June 11, 2012: Hardware announced and released; Safari HiDPI support

July 31, 2012: Chrome HiDPI support (50 days after release)

January 8, 2013: Firefox HiDPI support (211 days after release)

Safari obviously had the advantage of prior knowledge, but that doesn't excuse Firefox taking so much longer than Chrome.

Maybe they've improved things since then, but... considering that they still don't support the pinch-to-zoom trackpad gesture, I'm not optimistic.

3. Security. Firefox has been the only browser to not feature sandboxing for quite a few years. Now that Electrolysis has been revived, this should be fixed eventually.

[sssilver]

Just installed a fresh FF Developers edition, no addons.

Comparing to Chrome's current beta, with about 15 installed/active addons including uBlock Origin.

Firefox has Gmail + https://www.nytimes.com/

Chrome has Gmail + 2 windows, each with 30+ tabs + https://www.nytimes.com/

Pressing <Space> in Chrome to page down in https://www.nytimes.com/ -- completely smooth pagedown

Same in Firefox -- significant lag, jitter, tearing. Pressing <Space> the second time -- don't even see animation, just see the page offset jump.

I'm on Sierra 10.12.2 (16C67)

This is what's stopping me.

[rc_bhg]

I use FF as my primary. There are so many more really nice plugins for Chrome though that FF doesn't have. So, sometimes I just have to use Chrome.

I've installed "Chrome Store Foxified" and it's hit or miss on if a given Chrome Plugin will actually work in FF.

[jacek]

1) It is significantly slower. That's probably because multiprocess ("e10s") is not enabled (and I don't even know why). 2) Stable version still does not support touch scroll on Linux (only Developer version does). Also do not understand why.

[vanous]

I use FF as primary. Enabled touch and love it. Debian unstable, FF stable.

Enable e10s

MOZ_USE_XINPUT2=1 firefox

dom.w3c_touch_events.enabled

[mythmon_]

As for why e10s is not enabled: It is being slowly rolled out to many users, and each new version of Firefox enables it for more users. It is a huge change to the browser, so Mozilla is being very cautious with the transition.

[flavoie]

touch on Linux is also the reason I keep using chrome

[tombrossman]

I have a follow-up question for Chrome users (plus any FF devs who may be browsing HN).

Is Chrome really any safer than Firefox when Firefox is used with the "holy trinity" of uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, and NoScript? I realize that comparing a default Chrome install to Firefox with these three extensions might be perceived as an unfair comparison, but this configuration with FF is my daily driver for a long time now and I would like to know if there are any real benefits to returning to a browser from an ad company.

Privacy and security are both important to me, with privacy slightly more so. If I suffer a security breach, I wipe, restore from backups, and continue. Not so for a privacy breach.

[signal11]

> For me it's a simple feature in Chrome "tab to search" which frustratingly has never been ported into Firefox

Firefox has a similar feature called 'Quick Searches' (look in Firefox's Bookmarks menu). For example, I have one for Flickr - keyword 'fl', url 'https://www.flickr.com/search/?q=%s&w=all'.

So if I type 'fl bridges' in the address bar I go to https://www.flickr.com/search/?q=bridges&w=all

[paule89]

But it still doesn't work as great as in Chrome. Ok. Sometimes even in Chrome it doesn't work perfect, but the ease of use to just search for a youtube video ist great. Also the mobile browser worked better 2 years ago. Now i haven't tested it lately.

[webwanderings]

I've been saying this for a while, and I get downvoted for it (I don't care). Firefox has not been able to keep up with the speed of Chrome. As that joke goes, '6 minutes Abs' business is better than '7 minutes Abs'. I use a relatively old machine and I have specific needs to run multiple profiles. I don't run a whole lot of tabs on any given time, but I have consistently noticed a difference in the speed between Firefox and Chrome. Chrome just runs better and faster than Firefox. There's also a wide spread issue of fonts, look and feel of Firefox. Things just look better on Chrome.

[qhoc]

Few reasons:

1. Firefox crashes would take down the entire browser, not just specific tab

2. I often load a lot of tweets in Twitter.com tab (back 4 hours). This causes Firefox to freeze.

3. If I refresh the slow tab, I watch memory not being clean and still stay there for several minutes. Chrome clears memory very quickly.

4. Why is the space around address bar so large? They are like 15 px top and bottom. What a waste.

5. Postman is only Chrome

6. Chrome Dev Tools is 10x better

I have no complain about CSS rendering issues or anything like that. It's mainly just performance. Also I tend to use Firefox in the firewall because the Proxy feature works quite well to connect to my internal lab.

[AstralStorm]

1. Electrolysis has landed, not true anymore.

2. 3. Yes, memory leaks still exist.

4. To prevent GUI overlap attacks and fake popups.

5. I bet there is an equivalent.

6. Very much no, though they are faster for sure.

[hasanen]

Postman has a standalone desktop app nowadays, just so you know.

[saberworks]

It is my primary browser but there are things I dislike about it. The addition of things like pocket and the ads on the new tab page drive me crazy but not crazy enough to switch. The constant removal of features from the preference panes cause me to have to go looking for addons or about:config options. The fact that the URL bar changes when I switch tabs but the search box doesn't makes no sense. I wish wish wish it would allow me to sync everything, including all my addons and all my addons preferences and all my about:config changes.

[doggydog123]

1. Tab 2 search - productivity monster 2. Auto translate - productivy monster 3. FF slow rendering - proven by real tests, not useless benchmarks 4. Signal app and other apps

but getting these negatives: 1. super huge memory use and dozens of processes, easy to completely fill memory of a super workstation 2. every keypress and webpage action recorded by big firm 3. lack of plugins in mobile version 4. hated and blocked by companies