So, honest question, because I'm genuinely bewildered: why would you bother doing this, when Firefox exists, is perfectly functional, and isn't made by Google?
I’m back to Firefox after many years, it’s quite good and I don’t miss anything from Chrome other than one click translate page button. Also looks like FF has caught up Chrome performance-wise. It’s fast, it respects your privacy, very nice!
I've been using Firefox as my daily driver for perhaps a year or more now.
As well as the translate page button, the other great feature chrome has that I miss dearly is the highlights chrome has in the scrollbar when doing a ctrl-f find-in-page. That is super-useful and a real pain in the arse that Firefox does not support it.
I played around with prototyping an extension to replicate it (or as close as I could get) but it was hard to nicely override the ctrl-f hooks.
It actually feels faster than Chrome to me. I've been primarily on Firefox for the past few months and was really surprised to find Chrome not feeling as responsive when I tried to use it recently.
I'm slowly cutting the cord with nearly all social media sites and other sites that track me for any reason, and as part of that, I'd like to get away from Chrome and use a truly open and privacy-focused browser. Every time I start Firefox, I'm turned off by how unpleasant it looks. The UI is just bad. Sharp corners, asymmetrical margins, crowded menus, lack of whitespace. The rendered colors don't match Chrome. Fonts aren't as smooth. It's like switching from MacOS to Linux. Things just don't look good, and that matters.
I am not entirely confident in this but from my perspective, a simplistic reading of what you say appears to be "I want privacy but only if I don't have to endure even minor inconveniences for it."
This may never happen unless privacy was as profitable as selling data on people's behaviour.
That’s awesome. I took that cord cutting one step further.
I completely stopped using all products and services from FAAMG and committed to a complete digital detox plan. Using my devices with a clear intention in mind, rather than getting sucked into a dopamine driven vortex of dark patterns, has changed my life for the better.
For email, I made a protonmail and I’m still in the slow process of changing my email over on all the critical websites I depend on. For my phone, I got a Light Phone II. For my desktop and laptop OSes, I use Linux distros (Solus and Manjaro are my favorites). For GPS, I use a Garmin, and for reading, I use a Kobo e-reader.
It’s ironic that devices that do everything for us, instead of specializing in one important thing, have negatively impacted our lives when they were supposed to improve them.
For me sadly it's the WebSpeech API. A lot of sites that use speech-to-text and text-to-speech break on FF and also the voices FF aren't nearly as good as Chrome.
This bug has been pending for many years now and I don't think it ever going to be on their priority list soon.
I have an intermittent issue in FF across platforms/networks where I can watch in network console as I enter a URL, and I can see it not even trying to send the request. All I can find is a fixed issue from 2017 and I don't have the time nor inclination to try to figure out why this would be happening. Searching for a cool new browser for the Linux box but I might just install Chromium and be done with it.
I'm having a similar issue with FF. When I open FF and go to gmail.com, it doesn't load. I filed a bugzilla some time ago and it's still not fixed yet. FF is not usable for me so I switched back to Chrome.
There are some convenience issues with Firefox that bother me:
- It starts slower then Chromium.
- Right click and "Open in new private window" actually opens in a new private window. I prefer how Chromium does it, grouping all sites opened like this as tabs in one window.
- In Chromium, I can easily set any URL as a custom search engine with whatever parameters I like. In Firefox, I can't.
In my experience, Chromium renders and is interactive ~~faster~~ earlier, but they have about the same time between launch and browse. On Chromium, I launch, type in a site, hit enter, and wait and wait as it finishes actually starting up. FF takes longer to appear but is ready to browse as soon as it does. Or at least it did until some time in the last year or two, at which point it started taking a page out of Chromium's book. But honestly, I don't do cold starts that much so it doesn't bother me much one way or another.
While I dont think you can set any url as a "search engine", you can set any url as a parameterized keyword bookmark. Create a bookmark, then edit its properties, put %s in the url, and assign it a keyword. This behavior is more straightforward to setup in chrome but it at least exists in firefox.
I can't remark on the first two (I don't start my browser that often, it just status open, and most of my private browsing use cases are covered by the temporary containers extension), but the search engine issue (which is super annoying) can be solved with an extension:
Im back to FF for almost a year now. I am experiencing a lot of hiccups, freezes and crashes. I think FF should concentrate to improve the browser first and foremost. They’ve been adding a lot of useless (to me) features but the broswer is still buggy. It’s their time to claim their market back from chrome, or it will start happening soon and I think they should just concentrate on the browser.
Are you on Windows by any chance? I experience that with Firefox only when I use Windows (i.e. almost never, fortunately). I switched to Firefox on my main computer (Linux) a year ago and I could not be happier. It consumes much less memory than Chrome, it's way faster (that's my impression, I haven't measured that in any way) and it is a lot more customizable. I removed a lot of stuff from the context menu for example.
As a bonus, it isn't made by Google. I was a hardcore Google fan a few years ago, but after seeing what they are doing with Chrome and the internet, I just could not keep using Chrome any longer.
> Also, I block firefox myself. It phones home a lot, even when you tell it not to.
Do you have sources on this? I use Firefox on Mac OS with Little Snitch and have never had Firefox try to phone home with analytics disabled (a one click decision on first start of the app).
I really really really tried to give Firefox a chance, but gmail and some other sites are unusable, 40% are slower and admittedly the other 50% work just as fine as in Chrome.
I have had some problem with Firefox for many years, maybe 5 years since I've tried to use it.
The problem is whenever I start FF it hangs for 30 seconds before I can type the first url in. That duration and the fact that it's consistent means it's clearly a network timeout.
I have a locked down computer, layers of security enhancements so I kind of understand something I've done is causing it.
However, why should it lock up for 30 seconds if it can't do some background thing! On startup! It's an atrocious UI failure. And it's been this way for 5 years that I've been counting, through their Quantam speedup etc. Major flaw and unfixed for aeons of 6 week release cycles.
Btw it's not updating as it still updates ..
It's actually really bad design to have a lockup like that, and especially on the critical hot path of the first time you use it! It's a sign actually of bad user experience design, and it's one of a number of bad anti-user things I've found about it. Things that Chrome gets so right!
I want to ditch Chrome because of the many Google anti-features, but UX is also very important to me I use the browser all day every day and I'm extremely fast at the UI with advanced shortcuts etc. Firefox locking up for 30 whole seconds before I can use it not only destroys my flow but is actually an eternity - I could have about 40 chrome tabs opened with urls types and autocompleted or pasted into the url bar in that time ..
Sadly Firefox blows on a large number of design decisions. I get the impression that user experience is down the list at Mozilla, below either Google donations or SJW antics. Whatever, but they consistently fail on important points. I wish it wasn't so I truly do. I'm in the process of moving to Brave in anticipation of uBlock finally being sabotaged by Google.
I have the opposite problem, strangely: Firefox always starts instantly, but at some point in the last two months the autoupdate feature stopped working. A minute or two after starting FF, I get an in-browser popup that the autoupdater couldn't download the latest version automatically (even if I am on the latest version as I now update it manually).
annilt|5 years ago
mattlondon|5 years ago
As well as the translate page button, the other great feature chrome has that I miss dearly is the highlights chrome has in the scrollbar when doing a ctrl-f find-in-page. That is super-useful and a real pain in the arse that Firefox does not support it.
I played around with prototyping an extension to replicate it (or as close as I could get) but it was hard to nicely override the ctrl-f hooks.
trwired|5 years ago
guywhocodes|5 years ago
When was firefox actually significantly slower? That is x2 slower or worse.
input_sh|5 years ago
lallysingh|5 years ago
caymanjim|5 years ago
bloodorange|5 years ago
This may never happen unless privacy was as profitable as selling data on people's behaviour.
My apologies if I have misunderstood you.
circularfoyers|5 years ago
mechnesium|5 years ago
I completely stopped using all products and services from FAAMG and committed to a complete digital detox plan. Using my devices with a clear intention in mind, rather than getting sucked into a dopamine driven vortex of dark patterns, has changed my life for the better.
For email, I made a protonmail and I’m still in the slow process of changing my email over on all the critical websites I depend on. For my phone, I got a Light Phone II. For my desktop and laptop OSes, I use Linux distros (Solus and Manjaro are my favorites). For GPS, I use a Garmin, and for reading, I use a Kobo e-reader.
It’s ironic that devices that do everything for us, instead of specializing in one important thing, have negatively impacted our lives when they were supposed to improve them.
superasn|5 years ago
This bug has been pending for many years now and I don't think it ever going to be on their priority list soon.
cperrine|5 years ago
rexf|5 years ago
Tipewryter|5 years ago
- It starts slower then Chromium.
- Right click and "Open in new private window" actually opens in a new private window. I prefer how Chromium does it, grouping all sites opened like this as tabs in one window.
- In Chromium, I can easily set any URL as a custom search engine with whatever parameters I like. In Firefox, I can't.
smichel17|5 years ago
In my experience, Chromium renders and is interactive ~~faster~~ earlier, but they have about the same time between launch and browse. On Chromium, I launch, type in a site, hit enter, and wait and wait as it finishes actually starting up. FF takes longer to appear but is ready to browse as soon as it does. Or at least it did until some time in the last year or two, at which point it started taking a page out of Chromium's book. But honestly, I don't do cold starts that much so it doesn't bother me much one way or another.
singron|5 years ago
CarelessExpert|5 years ago
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/add-custom-se...
No, an extension shouldn't be necessary, but it works (I use it to search with searx).
tartoran|5 years ago
rocho|5 years ago
As a bonus, it isn't made by Google. I was a hardcore Google fan a few years ago, but after seeing what they are doing with Chrome and the internet, I just could not keep using Chrome any longer.
floatingatoll|5 years ago
m463|5 years ago
Also, I block firefox myself. It phones home a lot, even when you tell it not to.
cdubzzz|5 years ago
Do you have sources on this? I use Firefox on Mac OS with Little Snitch and have never had Firefox try to phone home with analytics disabled (a one click decision on first start of the app).
defnotashton2|5 years ago
danlugo92|5 years ago
AlchemistCamp|5 years ago
lallysingh|5 years ago
hackerfromthefu|5 years ago
The problem is whenever I start FF it hangs for 30 seconds before I can type the first url in. That duration and the fact that it's consistent means it's clearly a network timeout.
I have a locked down computer, layers of security enhancements so I kind of understand something I've done is causing it.
However, why should it lock up for 30 seconds if it can't do some background thing! On startup! It's an atrocious UI failure. And it's been this way for 5 years that I've been counting, through their Quantam speedup etc. Major flaw and unfixed for aeons of 6 week release cycles.
Btw it's not updating as it still updates ..
It's actually really bad design to have a lockup like that, and especially on the critical hot path of the first time you use it! It's a sign actually of bad user experience design, and it's one of a number of bad anti-user things I've found about it. Things that Chrome gets so right!
I want to ditch Chrome because of the many Google anti-features, but UX is also very important to me I use the browser all day every day and I'm extremely fast at the UI with advanced shortcuts etc. Firefox locking up for 30 whole seconds before I can use it not only destroys my flow but is actually an eternity - I could have about 40 chrome tabs opened with urls types and autocompleted or pasted into the url bar in that time ..
Sadly Firefox blows on a large number of design decisions. I get the impression that user experience is down the list at Mozilla, below either Google donations or SJW antics. Whatever, but they consistently fail on important points. I wish it wasn't so I truly do. I'm in the process of moving to Brave in anticipation of uBlock finally being sabotaged by Google.
t0astbread|5 years ago
brobinson|5 years ago
unknown|5 years ago
[deleted]
matthewmacleod|5 years ago
[deleted]