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Comment by manojlds | Hacker News Reader

If it as just as good as chrome, why should I switch? Especially given how good Chrome Dev tools are.

Aside from the privacy / philosophy / openness / counterweight-to-monopolization-of-the-Web angles which Yoric mentioned, you might find we're actually better than Chrome in some areas. Often small things, but I find I prefer the feel of Firefox to Chrome.

- If you do frontend work, our CSS grid inspector is unparalleled https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Page_Inspecto...

- Firefox has built-in tracking protection (https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2017/11/12/firefox-to-offer...)

- Powerful add-ons like Tree Style Tab make managing large numbers of tabs much easier (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/)

- Our WebAssembly performance tends to be better

- We should have better resource utilization when you have many tabs open

- You can mute audio on a page clicking the little speaker icon in the tab

If you want to contribute to the DevTools themselves, they're built using standard web technologies: HTML/JS, React/Redux, etc. https://github.com/devtools-html/

I tend to use Chrome for its devtools, but I'd add WebRTC support to the list of things Firefox excels at

> - You can mute audio on a page clicking the little speaker icon in the tab

Although I don't know if chrome has this on by default nowadays as I turned it on so long ago.

But mute audio on per tab via speaker icon is available in chrome as well.

in chrome://flags/

* Tab audio muting UI control

If enabled, you can mute/unmute per tab via doing same thing.

Yes, it's been enable as default for a while now. But again firefox is awesome and the 57 version is simple blazing fast

especially TreeStyleTab is considerably weakend with the new update (like all extensions that now have to fit into less powerful webextension). From my point it is so bad (I lose 4 out of 6 regularly used add-ons) I am actively considering of leaving firefox for the better.

What do you use? Some things are still a bit hacky, but it all comes together for me. I had everything packed, ready to move, but than came the ports :)

To be honest I have not switched yet, but the changes I have seen in TreeStyleTab make me question why I should stay at firefox with that because I can get the features of the new TST in Chrome as well. Also I won't work with Colorful tabs anymore. Further I think I will miss some of the decapriated features in the Zotero update.

(And I will have to find appropiate replacements for Leechblock and FireGesture)

Leechblock is updated. The developer made it into a separate add-on though.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/leechblock-ng...

What "TST in Chrome" are you referring to? Tree-Style Tabs are one of the main things that keeps me using Firefox over Chrome. All of the Chrome Tree-style extensions that I have tried are these hacky things that use an external window.

Front end dev here. The main issue I have for now is that whenever I hit CTRL Shift C to open the console, you can clearly see the thing draw itself for nearly one full second. It would be fine if it somehow cached, but if you close it and open again, same delay.

Short of being able to optimize it soon, perhaps you could try buffering and displaying it at once. It would look less clunky and flimsy.

That said I'm giving FF57 a run as my main browser, will keep using Chrome Dev Tools for now.

Tree-style tabs won't be around much longer.

Tree Style Tab is available on Firefox Quantum and will be with us for a long, long time. Piro, the author, wrote an excellent article about his experience porting TST to a WebExtension: http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/latest/blosxom/mozilla/extension/tr...

I got the new Tree Style tabs installed, but I'm still seeing the standard tabs at the top, is there a way to hide those?

I asked this exact question on Stack Overflow earlier today and found that someone else had already also asked it and got an answer.

https://superuser.com/questions/1261660/firefox-quantum-ver-...

(basically, hacking some CSS rules by creating a file in your AppData directory, so that the top bar is hidden)

Incidentally, I also discovered that Tree Style Tab's settings page under Firefox has a nice little box where you can configure the CSS it uses, which was nice because I prefer it with a smaller font and less padding.

What uglycoyote commented is the stopgap solution for now, but an API for doing that is in the works, so in a few versions from now, you shouldn't need that more-or-less hack anymore.

Nice extension, but no search for tab option. For now I use Firefox built-in option to search for tab: open new one and start typing the title of tab, I want to find. The drawback: that search is VERY dumb and you have to exactly type the proper name, no fuzzy logic or smth at all.

> - Firefox has built-in tracking protection (https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2017/11/12/firefox-to-offer...)

Is there a way to selectively unblock certain trackers on a specific page?

I currently have the Tracking Protection set to Always and the block list on Strict. No problems yet, but I know there will be a few sites which won't correctly. Previously I always used Ghostery and there was a nice option to view exactly how many and which trackers were being blocked on each page. When viewing the blocked trackers, they could be selectively unblocked one at a time if required. This was handy to make some embedded video work, without necessary enabling Facebook tracking, which would occur if the whole page was unblocked.

Take a look at the eff's privacy badger add on, which let's you control each script/source on a per-page level

Try umatrix.

> If you want to contribute to the DevTools themselves

I wish I had the time. So I'll have to wait for someone else to add the element DOM properties tab in thr panel that has the style rules and layout. Firebug had it, Chrome has it.

The right click and then Show DOM Properties with the results in the console pane is just painful to use.

You've switched to multiple processes model, but you don't have "task manager" as Chrome. Do you plan to implement it in the future?

about:performance is a somewhat similar substitute for now. You can see stats of the various processes and close or reload tabs.

Yes.. Somewhat. For example can't see how extensions are doing from there.

Working on it right now, but no ETA yet.

Please, that's one of the most useful troubleshooting tools in Chrome.

Ok, thanks. I hope you make it even more informative than the Chrome's one :)

It also has toolbar RSS feed support. I've been using this since when Firefox was in beta (Phoenix) and it's a killer feature for me. I may use Feedly on iOS but desktop/laptop I love having the same feeds right on the toolbar. Chrome doesn't support RSS feeds in this way because there's no way to advertise with them.

Always watch where the incentives run, Chrome is for Google's best interests, not the web's and not the user's. Always has been and always will be because it's a for-profit organization.

Better privacy? Non-profit? More open source? Cheerful community? Pick one or more :)

Privacy is about the same, Mozilla Corporation (who distribute the browser) aren't non-profit, both are open source. Correct on community maybe.

> Privacy is about the same, Mozilla Corporation (who distribute the browser) aren't non-profit, both are open source.

Chrome is not open-source. Chromium is, but Chrome is not.

> Mozilla Corporation (who distribute the browser) aren't non-profit

Mozilla Corporation is wholly owned by the non-profit.

> both are open source

Not to the same degree, as Chrome != Chromium

The privacy situation is absolutely different; Mozilla has no profit motive to monitor and monetize your activity on the Web. For example, Firefox Sync is specifically designed so that we have no knowledge of your browsing data.

In contrast, when you sign into Chrome, "Your experience in other Google products is personalized by including your Chrome history with your Web & App Activity."(https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/185277)

> Mozilla has no profit motive to monitor and monetize your activity on the Web.

But if a substantial portion of Mozilla's funding comes from an organisation that does have a profit motive to monitor and monetise my activity on the web, then surely that's almost as bad (for me as the end user)?

There's a world of difference. For Mozilla to sell out on user's privacy it would mean game over. They simply can't afford to do so, even if they wanted to (which I believe they don't). Google on the other hand? That's their main business, they are an advertising agency. Sure they make nice products too but make no mistake where their profit is coming from.

I donate to Mozilla because they claim to support privacy, and I want them to be less dependent on large donations.

I personally like how it handles hundreds of tabs. No matter how many tabs I have open they remain usable size, and the compact UI theme is even more compact than Chrome.

Tab containers are useful for having multiple accounts on the same site (Gmail/Github), or isolating work or most secure sites from regular browsing. The containers are more light-weight and more general than Chrome profiles (and they don't depend on having external accounts).

Pinned tabs don't close on Command+W. It's a small thing, but I kept accidentally closing my pinned tabs in Chrome.

Chrome Dev Tools are hard to beat, although Fx is slowly catching up there, too. I don't mind launching Chrome just for web dev.

> No matter how many tabs I have open they remain usable size

They were! I think they've shrunk, though that might be an optical illusion... And I can't see a simple way to make them bigger (simple as in: not editing the css file).

There is a pref that controls the minimum width now (browser.tabs.tabMinWidth). The default changed from 100px to 76px in Firefox 57. You should be able to tweak this to change the minimum width.

Fantastic. Many many thanks.

A lot of us in the dev community feel that some of the web standards that Chrome is pushing does not reflect the will of the community at large. Chrome is also tied to a company known to have a business interest in data collection, while Firefox is maintained by the community with some funding from a nonprofit.

To support a non-profit, so that they actually have the might to fight for us.

because Google has the worst biz model in the tech industry and is doing harm to the world.

I guess you were not around during the Halloween papers then.

Or the Sco Linux lawsuits.

i was not. def slimy stuff.

How so? That's a pretty bold claim...

I think Chrome and its DevTools has positive overall effect on the world.

Fortunately brave rebels fight against this harm in every way they can :)

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/11/14/firefox-features-go...

The real world is not Star Wars. For all the privacy considerations etc., this comment above reads extremely naive.

Honestly, I find it to be (subjectively, I didn't actually measure anything) much faster than Chrome. At least, it feels much snappier on my MacBook Air.

Yeah, if it's just for the good of the internet, openess, and society, who cares to jump to an equal (but better at those regards) engine?

Becasue Firefox Dev tools are better ? I feel the Chrome dev tools more hard to use.

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