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Comment by DavideNL | Hacker News Reader

The problem is, installing all these kinds of extensions breaks all kinds of things, some time in the future, when you've long forgotten everything you installed/configured;

In theory i'd rather use Firefox over Safari. However in practise, a lot of stuff doesn't work properly in Firefox - because of some extension or some about:config setting i set after reading posts like this.

When that happens, i always revert to the trustworthy Safari which just always works (...and has proper pinch-to-zoom, which in my opinion is a very basic feature Firefox is lacking.)

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> installing all these kinds of extensions breaks all kinds of things [...]

How odd, my experience is completely different.

I browse all the time in Firefox and Chrome with uBlock Origin and Pi-Hole. Not much is broken. In the rare case something is broken I flip DNSCrypt on and use Safari/Edge which don't have uBlock Origin installed. That happens like, what, once a year?

This is a valid point, perhaps more applicable to the parents or siblings we try to protect, but still valid.

It would be nice if Firefox had a page that listed every setting that is changed from a default value in one place. You'd still have to investigate extensions separately, but at least all those obscure hidden settings you've changed accessible and visible in one place.

> It would be nice if Firefox had a page that listed every setting that is changed from a default value in one place.

On about:config, sort after the "Status" column. That'll give you a list of all modified values.

I've definitely had my "let's switch browsers and see if this works in IE/Edge/etc." moments, but in general, things not working with Firefox with tracking protection enabled is rare.

And more importantly, when I need to bypass these safeties by using another browser, I'm doing so intentionally: I know this site is trying to move outside my security comforts, and can address it accordingly, rather than any given website abusing my privacy.

And of course, if I switch browsers just for sites that don't work in my Firefox setup, they're loading in a browser I use for little else... so they don't find much anyways.

IME, Safari lags horribly compared to Firefox WITH extensions. OSX just does not seem to provide intelligent ways to deal with memory management at the framework level. Not sure where the memory leaks are coming from, but on my 2013 iMac some process or processes hungrily eat up large chunks of memory. Forget about running Xcode, my system will just freeze because of swapping.

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