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

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

50 pointsevolve2k91 comments

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]

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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).

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.

We use eval because we have around 60k LOC now and they were just too slow. The hanging occurs if you reload the page, it hangs a few seconds, then a message concerning websockets pops up in the dev tools and then the page reloads.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ireland being the small country it is, I generally found the results to be mediocre last time I tried. Still I'll give it a few days and see how I go.

If you're not already doing it--my fingers got used to ! commands really fast.

DDG isn't very good at searching, and isn't linked in any way to my Google account, so it's a severe convenience downgrade, with no visible benefit to my life.

> DDG isn't very good at searching

You can use the !g bang to search on google.

> with no visible benefit to my life.

The main advantage I personally see in using DDG is to be able to directly search on sites. For instance:

  * I need to lookup foo on wikipedia: !w foo
  * I need to search for foo on amazon: !a foo
  * I need to lookup a video on foo: !yt foo

All things you can do directly from your browser url bar.

My Opinion:

> DDG isn't [...] linked in any way to my Google account

That right there is a visible benefit to my life.

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.

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 ...

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Thanks! I tried a Chrome tool that was in a separate window and found it to be very difficult to use (window focus was a big issue). I'll check out Tabs Outliner, for sure!

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I still don't know how to enable e10s. That trick works on Developer version, not stable.

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.

touch on Linux is also the reason I keep using chrome

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.

> 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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

> For me it's a simple feature in Chrome "tab to search"

Firefox has 'Add a keyword for this search', which you set up by right-clicking in a search box.

My keywords are all single letters. 'a sean carroll' does an Amazon search for that author, for example.

I switched to Chrome recently because some websites I use frequently were taking 5 to 10s to open in Firefox, but open in about 2s in Chrome.

I use FF Nightly as my primary browser at work. Sometimes a site doesn't work and I'll try it in Chrome instead. 40% of the time, the site doesn't work there, either, so I try Internet Explorer. By the time I get this far, 75% of the time, it doesn't work there either and I decide that the website is broken. Note that some sites I always open in MSIE or Chrome due to prior experience.

It is worth noting that aside from a few web-based developers' demos, my browsing on the work PC is notably undemanding: documentation, blogs, email, messaging, etc. Among the actual web applications I interact with, many require MSIE... (Intranet!)

At home, I use FF stable on Linux and nothing works, ever. I don't have enough RAM or CPU power... I also use qupzilla, which performs well enough, but some rendering fails and I don't feel comfortable using it on wild URLs because ... well that's off topic.

Speed. It takes twice as long as Chrome to start, and it's noticeably slower when using it to browse web pages.

This summer I had huge stability issues with FF, hard to say if it was related with my macOS configuration or if it was FF's fault, but matter of the fact is I couldn't practically use FF anymore, so reluctantly I switched to Chrome for the first time ever as my primary browser. I used ungoogled-chromium for 6 months, call me old-school but I'm pretty unfazed by the so called advantages of Chrome, nothing convinced me of its superiority. So, now with this new version of FF I decided to give it back a shot as my primary browsers to see if things have improved, so far I don't have any of the previous issues but only time will tell as I keep the browser open and I add new tabs. Fingers crossed.

I switched to Firefox for a week and wanted to kill myself. Basically, extensions still aren't forced to behave. As soon as you install a non-e10s extension, it disables e10s entirely, and then you're in the bad old days of single-process train wreck.

LastPass specifically seems like it has a bug where it locks the UI (beachball) while it populates login fields, and if you've got a lot of passwords (which we do), it'll take several seconds to unlock. Basically unusable.

I know these sound like LastPass problems, but the browser needs to sandbox these sketchy things better. I believe that getting from here to there is a really tough ecosystem problem, and while I appreciate Mozilla's philosophy on the open web, Chrome is simply better.

There is a lot of work underway in this area. The Webextensions project is the big long-term effort. But regarding e10s, it is true that e10s is an all-or-nothing proposition. However, as of Firefox 51, extensions do not disable e10s unless they are explicitly marked as incompatible with e10s. The rollout was deliberately done slowly in this area to favor stability over getting e10s enabled quickly, I think that was pretty clearly the right decision.

I had reversion episodes too – until I followed the protocol described by AdamKalisz on Superuser [1]. The "extra" steps made a big difference. [1] https://superuser.com/questions/1029400/how-to-enable-electr...

out of frustration about speed, I actually look to switch away from Fx about once a year, but I always end up sticking with it because the extension and customization ecosystem just isn't there for any other option.

Integration with the rest of Google's services. More specifically: when logged into my Google account Chrome will automatically sync my browser history and bookmarks between devices. Adding a device is as simple as logging into a Google Account. No extra plugins to download and install, it just works. And the browser experience is uniformly good across devices.

In Chrome developer tools I daily use the workspace tools to edit CSS and other files, and see the updates in real-time in-browser.

I honestly don't know if any of these features are available in Firefox. If they are I would try it out and consider switching.

I don't know about the developer tools, but Firefox does have a sync service integrated with Firefox, exactly like you describe.

Nothing to install, only requires a login (to a firefox account)

0. The Killer Feature: My bookmarks are always synced with my Google account. I've lost many-a-good set of bookmarks because I didn't think to export them. Bookmarks are typically: a few key ones, a lot of old archived links, and a few important new ones. Losing those new ones is rough. Never again.

1. Chrome Dev Tools >> Firebug

2. minimal interface, especially vertical pixels, which are a premium on laptop

3. 1 crashed tab = only 1 crashed tab

4. tab right-click actions: duplicate, close others, close to the right. I use these all very often.

I'm sure plugins can replicate each of these, but having these out of the box keep me on Chrome

Last time I've tried it (like 5versions ago) it was slow on PC, extremly slow on android, chrome extensions were still not present and it wasn't using more processes. When those features and performance improvements come I will consider it but atm chrome serves me well. On android I've whitelisted a few pages so they can run JS and that's it.

Might be more things that may change my decision but these are my blocker issues with it.

I use it but it's frustrating that it doesn't support multithreading which is why it's so slow. Fortunately that will be fixed soon though.

'I'm Feeling Lucky' is actually my default search in a Chrome tab. It's super fast to just type 'espn ncaab scores' in a new tab and get exactly what you want without any clicks.

For Google results, I preface with a 'g '.

If Firefox had this feature (it may and I haven't found it) I'd probably switch over. Chrome takes up so much memory on my Mac with its Google Chrome Helpers, it's a pain.

1) speed.

2) politics. I remembered them announcing that they'd block intrusive ads by default, then quietly backtracked after advertiser backlash.

I understand their balancing act but this demonstrated to me that they'll continue to be beholden to those with power and money in the internet world.

Also, there's clearly competing factions inside Mozilla the company and we have no transparency into their inner workings.

It's slow, and has very non-native UI on macOS.

I agree on the UI, it's a shame really, otherwise I don't find it to be slow.

As a web developer, Firefox is the new IE. Random little quirks that never get fixed.

Personal favorite: 8-year-old bug that causes select options to render incosistently if there's a transform anywhere in the DOM above it. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=455164

> Personal favorite: 8-year-old bug that causes select options to render incosistently if there's a transform anywhere in the DOM above it

How is it critical to apply a transform to a select option? I don't see how this comes even close to the absurd IE bugs.

The second part is the key. The transform can be ANYWHERE in the select's parent tree and it will still break.

I run Firefox when I can, both because of Reader View, and because I want to click an arrow to show my most frequently viewed sites. I've been using it since it was Firebird, and I think it may even have been called something else before that, so this is a matter of habit.

The reasons I don't use Firefox are because I'm using a Chromebook, an Android device, or an iPad.

I prefer Chrome's speed, minimal UI, and truly automatic updates (as in they're applied without ever even prompting me).

I use browser sync in a project. The site reloads in a few seconds in multi-process browsers, but takes about 40 seconds in Firefox (and shuts down the browser in the process). E10s hasn't helped much yet, so I don't think I can go back until perf improves. I did love everything else about it, and I still check it out every now and then.

I use it, it's just fine. Doesn't feel like there's a lot to choose between it and chrome. I actually struggle to believe that people can easily tell small benchmark level speed differences between browsers reliably in real world use. There's just too many factors and too little repeatability.

There is only 1 reason I stopped using Firefox completely. I cannot search with Google in the search bar. (This is in Linux Mint). I use search a lot and basically all the search engines on offer are sub-par. I use Chromium and Opera also, and have them all running, but I wont touch Firefox.

>I cannot search with Google in the search bar. (This is in Linux Mint)

It's certainly possible, it's one of the first tweaks I make on a fresh install. You may have to add a search provider, or change the default, but it's quite easy.

The only thing I can think of is that the bundled FF is old or is a fork that for some reason is not including that ability to do so in your case... I tend to use nightly whenever possible, so I don't remember what the default is or how old it is.

I use Firefox for everything except DevTools. Mostly because they are slow.

Also I'm not a fan of how objects/arrays are handled in the console. It feels unnatural to click on an object and move my eyes to the right side of the console to drill down into properties.

I love the being able to find any website

I find that the syncing of settings within addons is lacking. The sync of firefox's own settings also seems to miss some things (menu layout for example).

I'd also like some kind of profile implementation like Chrome has.

I use firefox as my main browser on my personal laptop, just not on my phone or at work.

1. UI (More UI overhead than Chrome) 2. Speed (Noticeably slow than Chrome) 3. UX (Moving tabs out of the window looks and is bad) 4. Extensions (Missing some essential stuff I use) 5. Breaks some Website (One of my regular websites doesn't work correctly in Firefox)

I never stopped using Firefox since I started using it the first time (around 2004). It's quite fast and pleasant with NoScript.

Chrome is my primary browser "at work", and I use it at home for video (Youtube, Twitch, etc.), and for any guests I have over.

Nothing, in waterfox flavor, it is my default browser since a lot. Sync, extensions, bookmarks and Saved for later, amazing restore session feature. Usually I keep open about 600+ tabs in two Firefox Windows (core I3, win7, 8 GB RAM) and no problem.

Can't login to comment here. It may be one the following extensions 'pocket', 'ublock origin' or 'pushbullet'. That said, I do switch back and forth between firefox and edge as default browser, depending on activity.

It was a bad cookie I think.

While watching a Youtube video on OSX, when I hit the fullscreen button in Firefox the video takes about ten seconds to go fullscreen. It only takes three seconds in Chrome. (And <1s in Safari, but Safari is missing some of the extensions I use.)

I like the chrome debugging tools a lot. I do try to use firefox+DDG but everytime I am doing some dev work, I switch to chrome.

Maybe someday I will try and understand the firefox development+debugging system and then, FF will become my primary browser.

I use it as a primary browser, but there are a few web apps on which it's so uselessly slow or chews so much CPU (consistently 90-100%) that the only viable option is to run them on another browser. Shame.

Auto translate. I live in Japan, but my reading ability isn't that good. So I have to rely a lot on translating by the browser.

I use FF primarily on my smart phone, just chrome when I need to translate.

How fast Chromium renders... I click a link and Chromium starts displaying parts of the page and rendering, while FF shows me a blank page until everything is rendered.

I do use it as primary browser, for ideological & moral reasons :)

Occasionally Firefox has had terrible performance problems on macOS.

This, the debugger is so extremely slow compared to chrome that it's unusable for me. It chews through ram, even with all plugins disabled on a clean build.

I've tried multiple times to switch, but the performance problems were just so bad I had to stop.

This was on a 2015 mbp, 10.11.6, 16gb ram.

Old slow down with addons.

Current progressive process struct renewal.

# after renewal : retry primary browser planned :)

Before I can choose to use it I have to install it and that's significantly less convenient than it is with Chrome.

If I go to Chrome's download page it offers up a 64 bit .deb file. Perfect and I happen to know it keeps it's self up to date.

If I go to Firefox's download page it offers up *.tar.bz2 file. I have no idea if that file is a source package that needs to be built or a binary blob for what architecture?

So, since I'm too lazy to dig deeper Firefox lost out before I even tried it.

Security. Or the perception of it being less secure than Chrome. Not sure how correct the perception is.

I like the flatter look and feel of Chrome, and appreciate its speed too.

Personally, I find it a bit ugly - shallow I know, but the honest truth.

Pale Moon is a superior product.

They've frozen the UI before Australis and had a 64 bit build on Windows long before Firefox.

They will continue to keep XUL in the future once Firefox abandons it for WebExtensions.

Tree Style tabs is the ONLY way to browse ;)

I use a Chromebook, can't run Firefox easily.

Nothing, I use Firefox as my main browser.

speed

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