The post briefly mentions multi-account containers[1]. I have loved using them and regard them as a killer feature for Firefox. Very few websites support account switching. Google is probably the best example, and even then, I don't really want to log in to both my personal and work Gmail within the same session. But containers effectively and cleanly enable multiple sessions for all websites.
Like tabs so many years ago, it's the kind of feature that seems obvious in retrospect. I can't think of a hard technical reason why we couldn't have had container tabs a long time ago. I hope mobile and desktop OSes will one day implement the same feature for apps/programs.
Whoever was involved in coming up with the idea and with implementing it, thank you!
I love containers, and use them heavily, but am disappointed they don't sync to all your computers like bookmarks and extensions. Every new machine, I get to start over on the 'always open this site in work container'
Containers still have quite a bad UX though. It’s OK to open a tab in the desired container and load Facebook, but whenever you leave Facebook via a link, it will stay in the same container. If you eventually end up on a website you want to be logged in to, you’ll have to manually switch to the right container again.
It seems like containers are a powerful concept with multiple different uses, but the UX for each of those uses would need to be different and at the moment it’s not optimised for any of them. Maybe there are extensions that can fix this for specific use cases but when I looked it seemed hard to work out which ones I’d want.
I work remotely and use separate browsers for work and personal stuff. I was hoping Firefox would allow me to use one browser, but it didn't quite work out like I had hoped. There's no keyboard shortcuts, so you're forced to use mouse/menus (I did find an extension to open a new window in a container using shortcuts). I'm pretty sure history/cookies are global--I couldn't delete all cookies from a container (I think there's a ticket to better support this). I was hoping to close everything from a container when I'm not working and reopen it later...this seems to only work for the tabs in the current window.
It seems like a great feature. It's definitely a differentiator. Perhaps I had too specific of an approach going in. In general, for me tabs in a window are all related so flipping windows or closing windows are the context I switch between.
I think the best way to do that is to keep the browser data directories completely separate by using the --user-data-dir option in chrome (--profile in firefox)
It doesn't protect from fingerprinting your machine using WebGL (whose main purpose is to extract data about video card), canvas (main purpose of canvas is to check what fonts you have and how they are rendered), screen size, OS and IP address and TTL of IP packets.
Then you carelessly enter your non-temporary email address or phone number to get an order from a shop and the shop links your fingerprint to your offline identifiers. Now you cannot escape from tracking anymore.
Fingerprinting is real. For example, a site of government services for Moscow has fingerprinting code and users log into it with their real name.
You can use containers or private mode but your fingerprint stays the same and uniquely identifies you. Disable WebGL, canvas, accessing non-default fonts from browser, reading OS name and screen size right now and vote for disabling it by default if you don't want to be tracked.
I switched back to Firefox (after using Chrome for a long time) back when Quantum launched and have stuck with it since. Initially I fell back to Chrome every now and then for the devtools, but I haven't felt the need to do that for a good while now. Works really well for my use cases at least.
The only drawback I have with FF nowadays is history management.
I have enabled 'infinite history' (do not delete old history, ever) so I can keep a journal of what I've visited when. The history, as large as it might turn out, is just a few MB of an sqlite3 database (places.sql) -- problematic is the management of it using the Firefox UI. Searching is laggy and deletion of swaths of entries is impossible as it makes the history manager UI hang for many minutes or even hours (=essentially I always kill Firefox when I do this by mistake). I suspect the GUI constructs a view of the sqlite db using single GUI objects tied to single DB entries and therefore has maximum overhead.
Editing the places.sql file directly via the sqlite3 CLI (with Firefox shut down) is a matter of (milli)seconds at best.
If I had the resources to compile FF in reasonable time I would give developing the patch a shot myself, but browser development is not an option with my current hardware, and I do not have a build server set up.
PS. The fact that Chrome does not support tagged bookmarks is another nail for its coffin. Makes it impossible to organize 10000s of bookmarks, and search on them.
It's true. I have kept giving Firefox another chance over time but haven't been convinced.
Recently, I tried Firefox again on Windows. And the experience is amazing indeed - faster, smoother, and with trackers blocking, very pleasant. And with strict protection, that's sort-of a builtin ad blocker.
Something still feels off on MacOS even though the last version has been a massive improvement for MBP Retina.
Firefox really should take care of it's native interface, it feels like a cross-platform app, and while it does have some worthy features to consider, for me it's too non-mac (and in that aspect, it really doesn't look like an Window/Linux app either) for someone using Safari to migrate.
> it really doesn't look like an Window/Linux app either)
I guess this is a subjective matter because to my eye, it looks fantastic on Windows, matching the Windows 10 dark theme very well. The active tab highlight looks like the open app highlights in my top-docked Windows taskbar. And the Firefox Container color-bars look great below that. Its sharp edges are a match for the sharp look of Windows.
To me, Chrome is the browser that doesn't look right on Windows. Its over-use of curved lines looks anachronistic, as if it's from the 2000s.
I have always been a heavy user of Firefox, even in the pre-Quantum days.
My main reason was that Chrome would sync my bookmarks out of order and I am a heavy bookmarks sync user.
I gave Chrome multiple tries for bookmark syncing and yet they would sync them out of order (can't believe I am the only heavy bookmark user on Chrome who cares) so I just stuck with FF.
Then the privacy concerns happened and I stopped trying Chrome. Then Quantum happened and now FF is the lighter, faster browser. I had no real reason to use Chrome except browser compatibility and a few dev tools.
Then ublock origins is getting blocked and now I am recommending people to switch to Firefox.
I do like the seamless and easy to use multiple profiles that Chrome has. Makes it very nice to isolate your tasks. If I am not logged into reddit or HN I waste less time and less cognitive overhead. FF technically has them but I hate how I have to open a prelaunch dialog to use them.
I've been happy with everything about Firefox (on Xubuntu) from many years now. But when they released Quantum, the thing that bothered me a bit was not any feature or performance, but them removing curvy tabs for rectangular ones. Rather shallow of me, but we all have our UI quirks :). Luckily, Firefox UI is very customizable and somebody had already put in the effort [1] to provide curvy tabs. Just had to download it, change the RGB() values therein, and got back my preferred green curvy tabs. Just a silly thing, but might give somebody one more reason to switch to Firefox.
For those testing this, open Safari and Firefox to HN and compare the shade of orange in the header. In Safari it’ll be the correct dull sRGB orange as shown to PC users decades ago when HN picked that color. In Firefox it may be blindingly saturated and bright.
If it is, and you prefer Firefox to apply ICC color correction to match Safari, set gfx.color_management.mode to 1 in about:config and restart.
There is an upcoming color standard change that will allow web developers to specify wide gamut CSS colors. Right now, they cannot. The current draft of that spec declares that all #aabbcc web colors are not wide color by default, unless specified by the designer. If that is kept in the final release, Firefox will eventually comply and this option will no longer be required.
My biggest gripe with Firefox is that it doesn't support MIDIAccess. So any web app that works with an electronic piano, doesn't work. They've been saying they are working on it for years. Works in Chrome, Brave, Opera, Edge, etc.
It's actually pretty bizarre since the basic functionality (hit a note on the piano, send it to the web page that is listening for such events) is so trivial, compared to the vast majority of features.
I guess the reason is probably that it probably requires a developer with a midi device, and it affects too few users for Mozilla to want to prioritise it. The bug currently has priority P3. There are about 8300 existing P1 and P2 bugs, and over 10000 P3 bugs.
Saying that it works in chrome, brave, opera, edge etc sounds like “look at all these other vendors who put the effort in” but really they are all running the same code these days so you could instead write “chromium implements it”.
The source you linked to has the spec created by a Google engineer and in working draft. All the browsers you mention are based on Chromium so will automatically inherit this functionality.
I’m not saying it’s not something useful to implement, but it usually takes some time and a stable specification before other browse manufacturers want to implement non-mainstream functionality.
Since these threads always wind up with lots of top-level comments from people providing anecdotal complaints about how [browser under discussion] crashes all the time on their computer, or eats up all the RAM, or whatever, I just wanted to add a similarly anecdotal top-level comment with my own, positive experience.
I have been using FF Nightly and FF Dev Edition on both my work and home machines (MacOS and Arch Linux) for years, using the former for personal browsing and the latter for work.
I generally only restart the browser when there are updates, and I’ve maybe had two or three restarts in all that time where I lost my tabs. Even rebooting the computer, I usually get a window asking if I want to restore my tabs, which works with no fuss. On the rare occasions that doesn’t happen, I’ve been able to “restore previous session” from the history menu.
I have generally beefy machines, but I’ve never had personally noticeable issues with performance since Quantum was released. I usually have somewhere between five and fifty tabs open in each browser.
The only crashes I’ve seen that I remember have been when I was playing with WebRender settings in about:config, and happened whenever I was scrolling in a particularly large Confluence document. Also, occasionally my strict third party settings will make a login or other functionality break, in which case it’s easy to relax the settings just for that page.
FF integrates very well with 1Password, which is my password manager of choice.
I use FF Mobile on iOS, and while it is a bit rougher on battery life than safari, having all my history and bookmarks synced is worth it.
Anyway, my experience is definitely not everyone’s, and I don’t doubt that some people have strange and frustrating issues with the browser. That being said, I suspect experiences like mine are more common than comments on threads like this suggest.
I installed Manjaro on my Surface Pro and Firefox was included (? or I happened to install it instead of Chrome, I'm fuzzy on that)
The next day, a few minutes before a job interview I opened Firefox to find a curious error
Using an older version of Firefox can corrupt bookmarks and browsing history already saved to an existing Firefox profile. To protect your information, create a new profile for this installation of Firefox
I click through it and... everything's gone. Including my plugins, which I need for... 1Password. To log into my Google account, to access the link I need to join.
Cue me frantically googling how to fix it, before I end up having to type in a 70 character password off my phone screen.
In the end I did manage to fix it by manually editing the profile. But obviously off to a terrible start, joining the meeting almost 5 minutes late.
Enter the interview and we're screen sharing my IDE. But it's a complete slideshow on my end. My computer is running like it's throttling itself, I can barely create a new project.
Cue me fumbling through the activity monitor when it becomes clear that there's no way I'll be able to complete the interview like this.
Firefox is going haywire and using all my resources.
"Hey sorry, do you mind if I take a second and install Chrome"
Install Chrome in the middle of the interview and it handles screen sharing just fine without killing the laptop.
Keep in mind, this is all WebRTC screen sharing, no custom plugin or anything, so the implementation is 100% on the browser.
You could watch my interviewers enthusiasm fade, and my confidence drop off a cliff as I went through all this. I was pretty much told I didn't perform terribly, but they weren't sure about my knowledge based on the final output (half the interview being wasted on FF issues)
So yeah, stuck with FF for 24hrs, figuring what's the worst that could happen, HN is always hyping it up.
Indirectly cost me a job opportunity in those 24hrs.
The only thing that keeps me from moving back to Firefox is the lack of support for precision touchpads---a feature present in Chromium-based browsers, Edge UWP, and even Internet Explorer!
Several issues have been opened on Bugzilla in this regard [1][2], none of which have been resolved to date.
There's nothing 'calm' or 'distraction-free' about the obnoxious toolbar animations: https://i.imgur.com/N6v30Sa.gif . Which just happen over and over and over and over again as you navigate from page to page. Do you really need a blue animated progress bar flash signifying the page has loaded? Does the refresh and stop icon need to have a half second long animation every single time it switches between the two? Does the throbber need to oscillate back and forth like a pendulum used to induce hypnosis? Worst part is it requires some userchrome.css patch to fix that awful throbber animation, not easily in the normal settings area.
I made the switch from Chrome to Firefox about 3 weeks ago. It's a little bizarre at first but you get used to it. No autoplay is really nice. Being unable to use two dictionaries at once for spell checking is super annoying, but it's a detail. All in all it works quite well, and if uBlock Origin has to leave Chrome, the switch is a no-brainer.
They removed GA from the startup pages, and you can go straight from those to the telemetry settings (it even prompts you to do so on first launch iirc).
I've used Firefox as my main browser on my Mac for quite a while. I use Chrome when working on my company's web stuff, because I like its developer tools better and its handling of multiple profiles is a lot better [1].
There is one thing that threatens now and then to move me to Chrome.
Here is a sample of that thing: prosecutable subtractive tunable epicycle inductor subparagraphs transactional micropayments blacksmithing inductor solvability verifier ethicist tradable tradeable auditable splitter surveil responder commenter.
Firefox tells me that all of those words are spelled wrong. Chrome, Safari, and on Windows Edge all know that most or all of them are spelled right.
It just gets tiring to regularly be commenting somewhere and get distracted by Firefox falsely claiming some word is misspelled, disrupting my train of thought as I have to go look it up to verify that I am in fact spelling it right.
Everything else I type text into manages to spell check orders of magnitude better than Firefox.
[1] Yes, I know about Firefox's multi-account containers. Great if all you are trying to do is keep yourself logged in to a couple different accounts at the same site. If you want to have separate bookmarks, extensions, and history too, you need to use profiles. Firefox has them, but Chrome does them better.
I like the idea of not concentrating yet more power with Google, but, on OpenBSD, I use Iridium (Chrome derivative), so I see these benefits, and am wondering what Firefox would add for me, privacy- and security-wise:
1) Iridium doesn't send info to Google like Chrome does (or that is the idea);
2) It is easier (last I checked) than with Firefox to leave some config tabs open so I can quickly turn on/off javascript, images, and/or cookies for those sites where I need them (by exception list or temporary exception, and easy to manage it without a mouse once the tab is open; separately, I do change the search engine also, and create search keywords), and
3) OpenBSD adds pledge/unveil system calls from the browser, to prevent it from reading/writing files where it should not (plus I browse under a different user than I do other things with high confidence there will not be a privilege escalation; also they say the pledge/unveil support is easier to implement in Chrome/Iridium than in Firefox because of the cleaner separations of concerns in the code organization (my wording; though they have probably also put pledge/unveil in FF also for all I know),
4) Maybe the security of Chrome/Iridium benefits from Google's bug bounties, more than what Firefox has done (ie, the security track record of each, frequency of major holes over, say, the last 1-3 years). I don't really know but I'm glad they try.
Given those things, what are the remaining biggest reasons I might prefer Firefox? (I am aware of OBSD removing DNS-over-HTTP from Firefox, indicating that is a choice that should be made by the user at the system level instead).
Nit: This article recommends StartPage as a search engine "without all that tracking and profiling", but quite recently StartPage was acquired by System1, an advertising company[0]
[+] [-] dguo|6 years ago|reply
Like tabs so many years ago, it's the kind of feature that seems obvious in retrospect. I can't think of a hard technical reason why we couldn't have had container tabs a long time ago. I hope mobile and desktop OSes will one day implement the same feature for apps/programs.
Whoever was involved in coming up with the idea and with implementing it, thank you!
[1]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers
[+] [-] briffle|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ubercow13|6 years ago|reply
It seems like containers are a powerful concept with multiple different uses, but the UX for each of those uses would need to be different and at the moment it’s not optimised for any of them. Maybe there are extensions that can fix this for specific use cases but when I looked it seemed hard to work out which ones I’d want.
[+] [-] crispinb|6 years ago|reply
Nevertheless once you've got used to it, it becomes an essential feature. Another reason to be thankful for Firefox's existence.
[+] [-] Abishek_Muthian|6 years ago|reply
[1]:https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=117222
[+] [-] diafygi|6 years ago|reply
Also, I really wish you would be able to specify which container you want in the Home button when using multiple urls for your default tabs.
So this:
Would become something like this:[+] [-] bitexploder|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pfranz|6 years ago|reply
It seems like a great feature. It's definitely a differentiator. Perhaps I had too specific of an approach going in. In general, for me tabs in a window are all related so flipping windows or closing windows are the context I switch between.
[+] [-] edcastro|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Hitton|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buboard|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bit_4l|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lima|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codedokode|6 years ago|reply
Then you carelessly enter your non-temporary email address or phone number to get an order from a shop and the shop links your fingerprint to your offline identifiers. Now you cannot escape from tracking anymore.
Fingerprinting is real. For example, a site of government services for Moscow has fingerprinting code and users log into it with their real name.
You can use containers or private mode but your fingerprint stays the same and uniquely identifies you. Disable WebGL, canvas, accessing non-default fonts from browser, reading OS name and screen size right now and vote for disabling it by default if you don't want to be tracked.
[+] [-] tyingq|6 years ago|reply
I imagine that would boost Firefox growth.
Edit: Answering my own question...yup, it's in canary as of November 1st. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/google-begins...
[+] [-] gbil|6 years ago|reply
https://gist.github.com/Lusito/dd6b76b93f83267903619103745cc...
[+] [-] vbezhenar|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] josteink|6 years ago|reply
I may have to rush an extension...
[+] [-] Dragory|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 2ion|6 years ago|reply
I have enabled 'infinite history' (do not delete old history, ever) so I can keep a journal of what I've visited when. The history, as large as it might turn out, is just a few MB of an sqlite3 database (places.sql) -- problematic is the management of it using the Firefox UI. Searching is laggy and deletion of swaths of entries is impossible as it makes the history manager UI hang for many minutes or even hours (=essentially I always kill Firefox when I do this by mistake). I suspect the GUI constructs a view of the sqlite db using single GUI objects tied to single DB entries and therefore has maximum overhead.
Editing the places.sql file directly via the sqlite3 CLI (with Firefox shut down) is a matter of (milli)seconds at best.
If I had the resources to compile FF in reasonable time I would give developing the patch a shot myself, but browser development is not an option with my current hardware, and I do not have a build server set up.
PS. The fact that Chrome does not support tagged bookmarks is another nail for its coffin. Makes it impossible to organize 10000s of bookmarks, and search on them.
[+] [-] asadkn|6 years ago|reply
Recently, I tried Firefox again on Windows. And the experience is amazing indeed - faster, smoother, and with trackers blocking, very pleasant. And with strict protection, that's sort-of a builtin ad blocker.
Something still feels off on MacOS even though the last version has been a massive improvement for MBP Retina.
[+] [-] pcr910303|6 years ago|reply
Firefox really should take care of it's native interface, it feels like a cross-platform app, and while it does have some worthy features to consider, for me it's too non-mac (and in that aspect, it really doesn't look like an Window/Linux app either) for someone using Safari to migrate.
[+] [-] bhauer|6 years ago|reply
I guess this is a subjective matter because to my eye, it looks fantastic on Windows, matching the Windows 10 dark theme very well. The active tab highlight looks like the open app highlights in my top-docked Windows taskbar. And the Firefox Container color-bars look great below that. Its sharp edges are a match for the sharp look of Windows.
To me, Chrome is the browser that doesn't look right on Windows. Its over-use of curved lines looks anachronistic, as if it's from the 2000s.
[+] [-] kodablah|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] csdreamer7|6 years ago|reply
My main reason was that Chrome would sync my bookmarks out of order and I am a heavy bookmarks sync user.
I gave Chrome multiple tries for bookmark syncing and yet they would sync them out of order (can't believe I am the only heavy bookmark user on Chrome who cares) so I just stuck with FF.
Then the privacy concerns happened and I stopped trying Chrome. Then Quantum happened and now FF is the lighter, faster browser. I had no real reason to use Chrome except browser compatibility and a few dev tools.
Then ublock origins is getting blocked and now I am recommending people to switch to Firefox.
I do like the seamless and easy to use multiple profiles that Chrome has. Makes it very nice to isolate your tasks. If I am not logged into reddit or HN I waste less time and less cognitive overhead. FF technically has them but I hate how I have to open a prelaunch dialog to use them.
[+] [-] lovelearning|6 years ago|reply
[1]: https://github.com/wilfredwee/photon-australis
[+] [-] jnet|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agumonkey|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bootlooped|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaredcwhite|6 years ago|reply
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1250461#c28
[+] [-] floatingatoll|6 years ago|reply
If it is, and you prefer Firefox to apply ICC color correction to match Safari, set gfx.color_management.mode to 1 in about:config and restart.
There is an upcoming color standard change that will allow web developers to specify wide gamut CSS colors. Right now, they cannot. The current draft of that spec declares that all #aabbcc web colors are not wide color by default, unless specified by the designer. If that is kept in the final release, Firefox will eventually comply and this option will no longer be required.
[+] [-] robbrown451|6 years ago|reply
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/MIDIAccess
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=836897
It's actually pretty bizarre since the basic functionality (hit a note on the piano, send it to the web page that is listening for such events) is so trivial, compared to the vast majority of features.
[+] [-] dan-robertson|6 years ago|reply
Saying that it works in chrome, brave, opera, edge etc sounds like “look at all these other vendors who put the effort in” but really they are all running the same code these days so you could instead write “chromium implements it”.
[+] [-] robin_reala|6 years ago|reply
I’m not saying it’s not something useful to implement, but it usually takes some time and a stable specification before other browse manufacturers want to implement non-mainstream functionality.
[+] [-] xen2xen1|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mplanchard|6 years ago|reply
I have been using FF Nightly and FF Dev Edition on both my work and home machines (MacOS and Arch Linux) for years, using the former for personal browsing and the latter for work.
I generally only restart the browser when there are updates, and I’ve maybe had two or three restarts in all that time where I lost my tabs. Even rebooting the computer, I usually get a window asking if I want to restore my tabs, which works with no fuss. On the rare occasions that doesn’t happen, I’ve been able to “restore previous session” from the history menu.
I have generally beefy machines, but I’ve never had personally noticeable issues with performance since Quantum was released. I usually have somewhere between five and fifty tabs open in each browser.
The only crashes I’ve seen that I remember have been when I was playing with WebRender settings in about:config, and happened whenever I was scrolling in a particularly large Confluence document. Also, occasionally my strict third party settings will make a login or other functionality break, in which case it’s easy to relax the settings just for that page.
FF integrates very well with 1Password, which is my password manager of choice.
I use FF Mobile on iOS, and while it is a bit rougher on battery life than safari, having all my history and bookmarks synced is worth it.
Anyway, my experience is definitely not everyone’s, and I don’t doubt that some people have strange and frustrating issues with the browser. That being said, I suspect experiences like mine are more common than comments on threads like this suggest.
[+] [-] BoorishBears|6 years ago|reply
I installed Manjaro on my Surface Pro and Firefox was included (? or I happened to install it instead of Chrome, I'm fuzzy on that)
The next day, a few minutes before a job interview I opened Firefox to find a curious error
Using an older version of Firefox can corrupt bookmarks and browsing history already saved to an existing Firefox profile. To protect your information, create a new profile for this installation of Firefox
I click through it and... everything's gone. Including my plugins, which I need for... 1Password. To log into my Google account, to access the link I need to join.
Cue me frantically googling how to fix it, before I end up having to type in a 70 character password off my phone screen.
In the end I did manage to fix it by manually editing the profile. But obviously off to a terrible start, joining the meeting almost 5 minutes late.
Enter the interview and we're screen sharing my IDE. But it's a complete slideshow on my end. My computer is running like it's throttling itself, I can barely create a new project.
Cue me fumbling through the activity monitor when it becomes clear that there's no way I'll be able to complete the interview like this.
Firefox is going haywire and using all my resources.
"Hey sorry, do you mind if I take a second and install Chrome"
Install Chrome in the middle of the interview and it handles screen sharing just fine without killing the laptop.
Keep in mind, this is all WebRTC screen sharing, no custom plugin or anything, so the implementation is 100% on the browser.
You could watch my interviewers enthusiasm fade, and my confidence drop off a cliff as I went through all this. I was pretty much told I didn't perform terribly, but they weren't sure about my knowledge based on the final output (half the interview being wasted on FF issues)
So yeah, stuck with FF for 24hrs, figuring what's the worst that could happen, HN is always hyping it up.
Indirectly cost me a job opportunity in those 24hrs.
I won't be trying it again.
[+] [-] RavinduL|6 years ago|reply
Several issues have been opened on Bugzilla in this regard [1][2], none of which have been resolved to date.
[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1564022
[2]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=890878
[+] [-] garbagetier666|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bambax|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulcarroty|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jwalton|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thenewnewguy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Naac|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tzs|6 years ago|reply
There is one thing that threatens now and then to move me to Chrome.
Here is a sample of that thing: prosecutable subtractive tunable epicycle inductor subparagraphs transactional micropayments blacksmithing inductor solvability verifier ethicist tradable tradeable auditable splitter surveil responder commenter.
Firefox tells me that all of those words are spelled wrong. Chrome, Safari, and on Windows Edge all know that most or all of them are spelled right.
It just gets tiring to regularly be commenting somewhere and get distracted by Firefox falsely claiming some word is misspelled, disrupting my train of thought as I have to go look it up to verify that I am in fact spelling it right.
Everything else I type text into manages to spell check orders of magnitude better than Firefox.
[1] Yes, I know about Firefox's multi-account containers. Great if all you are trying to do is keep yourself logged in to a couple different accounts at the same site. If you want to have separate bookmarks, extensions, and history too, you need to use profiles. Firefox has them, but Chrome does them better.
[+] [-] yoasif_|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SubiculumCode|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Waterluvian|6 years ago|reply
For this reason I don't trust it when I'm doing meaningful work.
[+] [-] lcall|6 years ago|reply
1) Iridium doesn't send info to Google like Chrome does (or that is the idea);
2) It is easier (last I checked) than with Firefox to leave some config tabs open so I can quickly turn on/off javascript, images, and/or cookies for those sites where I need them (by exception list or temporary exception, and easy to manage it without a mouse once the tab is open; separately, I do change the search engine also, and create search keywords), and
3) OpenBSD adds pledge/unveil system calls from the browser, to prevent it from reading/writing files where it should not (plus I browse under a different user than I do other things with high confidence there will not be a privilege escalation; also they say the pledge/unveil support is easier to implement in Chrome/Iridium than in Firefox because of the cleaner separations of concerns in the code organization (my wording; though they have probably also put pledge/unveil in FF also for all I know),
4) Maybe the security of Chrome/Iridium benefits from Google's bug bounties, more than what Firefox has done (ie, the security track record of each, frequency of major holes over, say, the last 1-3 years). I don't really know but I'm glad they try.
Given those things, what are the remaining biggest reasons I might prefer Firefox? (I am aware of OBSD removing DNS-over-HTTP from Firefox, indicating that is a choice that should be made by the user at the system level instead).
[+] [-] thsowers|6 years ago|reply
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21371577