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Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

I never gave up on Firefox. I always knew Google Chrome was sending back telemetry data or whatever and never looked back. Also with how many sites are "only working in Chrome" these days I still hold the claim that Chrome is working itself to being the next IE in terms of breaking the web for people using other browsers. I still hold respect for Chrome in other areas though.

Firefox was always complained about but honestly I never noticed any differences that mattered especially with how ad encrusted the web has become these days. In fact I could never enjoy Chrome the same way I enjoy Firefox it just behaves and feels the way I've grown to know and enjoy.

We have a major issue with websites poorly supporting mobile browsers and websites being cross-browser friendly overall. The web still feels a little immature in these respects.

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I switched back to Firefox a while ago (because I pledged to switch to whichever was the first browser to implement arrow-functions!) - but I doubled down on sticking with it after running Little Snitch for a while. Google is very aggressive on how ofter it pings its servers looking for updates: they're really keen to ensure my software isn't more than 30 minutes out of date, for some reason.

The reason being, perhaps, to have a version without known bugs or vulnerabilities. I wish everyone was that aggressive in patching.

I couldn't agree more. In addition, I am one of the (apparently) few who use FF almost exclusively on my mobile devices. No, FF isn't perfect on my phone but it works just the way I need it to 90% of the time. In fact, I've been quite satisfied with the mobile version of FF Nightly.

Indeed. Orfox for general browsing, Firefox Focus/Klar for sites that block Tor, standard Firefox for the few sites I want to save cookies (mostly web interfaces of local servers).

Unless you turn off telemetry, Firefox sends it back too. It’s just that Mozilla doesn’t have the incentive to sell your eyeballs, other than charging an arm and a leg for the search engine default. Or at least I don’t know of any such incentives.

Mozilla takes great care that any data collected isn't privacy sensitive (even getting stack traces involves contacting legal to make sure you don't accidentally reveal stuff about the user)

Viewing pdfs was a big difference some time ago. Nowadays Firefox seems to have catched up.

While I switched back to Firefox as well, I still miss Chrome's print dialog. It looks much simpler, yet does everything I need with a lot less clicks.

For printing, try the Print Edit add-on:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/print-edit/

EDIT: The Firefox Quantum version (thanks politelemon): https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/print-edit-we...

It's not simpler, but it's worth trying just to see and appreciate it; I've never this functionality elsewhere. You edit the document in Print Preview in an amazing number of ways, from removing sections to editing text to changing page breaks to much more. It's been completely reliable IME. It's hard to believe someone did it, maintains it, and is giving it away for free.

(Despite my enthusiasm, I have no connection with the software or developer.)

Print Edit WE (by the same dev) appears compatible with Firefox Quantum

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/print-edit-we...

Thanks - I'll give this a try

> I always knew Google Chrome was sending back telemetry data or whatever and never looked back. Then You may want to try Iridium which is privacy and security oriented Chrome fork.

Can Iridum do multi-user the way Chrome does? I have different Chrome users configured for different things. That, AFAIK, makes FF a no go for me.

Firefox has multi-container, it's pretty close.

I like multi-container better than chrome's solution. I can keep sites from seeing cookie from any other site. Or I can create a group of sites that can share login sessions. And all I have to do is click the links and it all happens automatically.

For one project I was working on I made containers for all the different types of roles users could login as, so if I need to check for missing functionality / too much access I just switch a tab to the appropriate role, vs logging out, logging back in, no wait wrong password, log back i-, ok who changed the password? ... eventually logging on and by then forgetting what I was testing for.

I also appreciate Firefox ESR which has allowed me to test some legacy silverlight app which we're still porting over to HTML5 (to make sure we didn't miss anything).

I'm not sure how that works in chrome, but profiles in firefox are completely separate, and you can run multiple at the same time. I have them configured for different things, too. If you're running linux, just do:

    firefox --new-instance --ProfileManager

> how many sites are "only working in Chrome" these days

Which sites? I've never encountered one that worked only in Chrome.

For a long time, Google Allo's web client didn't work on Firefox unless you sent a Chrome user-agent.

Found one the other day, https://athletigen.com/ can't login unless using Chrome

What sites only work with Chrome? Even though Safari has a minuscule desktop market share, I can't see most sites being incompatible with iOS.

BoA still claims I'm using an "unsupported browser" when I use Firefox.

Very annoying, because AFAICT everything works perfectly.

Microsoft Teams used to reject Firefox. Changing the UA to Chrome solved the issue.

It's not so much about "sites", as it is "apps". The most recent instance I recall is this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16467387

Open this page in a browser other than Chrome: https://pagedraw.io/tutorials/basics

That makes sense - no it's not right. A "web app" can get away with only being compatible with Chrome on the desktop because they would likely have a native app for mobile.

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