Hacker News Reader

Comment by ozfive | Hacker News Reader

This and many other changes over a course of a short period of time have caused me to go to Firefox exclusively now. I heard Firefox is going to stop third party cookie tracking altogether. Why not give Google the big finger and use a different browser? Vote with your cold hard actions if you feel so strongly about something.

View on HN

I switched to firefox a year ago. Its a little slower, but im a lot happier.

Ive been trying to degoogle as much as reasonable. I moved to fastmail as well. Still using an android, but would switch if a reasonable alternative that wasnt iphone came up. Im not paranoid or a privacy nut, just think google is too involved in my life.

Maybe try an Android derivative? One tailored for privacy? I've heard of LineageOS, it's marketed as privacy-friendly.

Same here. Have you found any viable alternative to the Google Calendar? I'm at the point where I'm thinking about hosting a calendar project from GitHub myself.

The calendar of Fastmail works. It's not great, but it does the job

Nextcloud, whether self-hosted or otherwise, works great! It's just WebDAV. You can get calendar, contacts, task, and note syncing, and it can even host your documents for reference management software like Zotero.

If you own a Samsung phone, the calendar app is good. I wonder if you can install those Samsung apps (which for some are just forks of unmaintained AOSP apps) on a regular Android if you somehow get the apk.

Are people still considering smaller, local ISPs for email? Or are there even enough of those to consider?

I was in exactly the same camp as you a year ago. Then I played with a hand-me-down iPhone 6s and couldn't believe how much more pleasant it was to use iOS than to use Android (Nougat at the time). Having owned an iPhone 3G and 5, my memories were of a restrictive OS and a dumb Siri but both have really has come along since. I made the switch and can't imagine going back to Android now.

Upvoted from Firefox. Only reason I use Chrome nowadays is when apps launch it directly (whereupon I strongly consider uninstalling them) or when work requires it (... which is utterly ridiculous, and very likely why our web rendering performance and consistency is utter trash).

Hangouts and GotoMeeting are the only things I open in Chrome. I'm also completely sold on Tree Style Tabs, and I don't think I could now live without...

I'm now the same way, and it pains me to see "optimized for Google Chrome"

https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/4/16805216/google-chrome-onl...

I would love to, but Firefox just feels more clunky. Not sure what it is, but the scrolling doesn't feel native to me (MacOS, Magic Trackpad and Logitech Mouse)

You can turn off that scroll behavior.

I wonder if it has anything to do with the HiDPI issue:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?format=default&id=...

(there's a couple of hits when I search for 'scrolling' in that thread)

Faster than Chrome for me on MacOS

Been using Firefox on my desktop and its amazing. For some reason the mobile version is incredibly slow to load pages though.

Firefox is a better browser due to tree style tabs. But it is noticeably slower.

Having to use both for supporting complex web apps, I can't really agree that FF is noticeably slower. Chrome does seem to have less silly bugs though, like quick searching doesn't find multi-select box text in FF. Works great in Chrome.

Regardless of FF's little quirks, I use it almost exclusively for personal stuff. I would rather deal with those types of things than the mentality Chrome brings to table.

I've been using Edge on Windows for at least a year now and I'm quite happy. Now that it supports plugins, I haven't fired up another browser for months now.

Because the battery drainage with Firefox is unacceptable.

I use Firefox as my "at home" / private browser. However for work i unfortunately feel forced to continue using chrome. First I just really prefer the chrome devtools and i just can't seem top find an equivalent replacement for the "manage people"/multi user built ion function that chrome offers. I really wish Firefox had something similar...

firefox has both profiles (for actual different users) and containers for isolating stuff (i.e. a sub-profile) for a single user.

The containers have a great UI/UX. I'm looking at the profile stuff now (after having not in years) and it seems counterintuitive and clunky

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers

Anyway, "forced" is a strong word when you simply mean "prefer". The firefox dev tools are in the same league as the chrome ones, imo.

the containers are great thanks for sharing, will definitely use those at home! You're right I should have emphasized the feel part of my comment since the dev tools especially are just a matter of preference. However I stand by my point that the profiles are definitely not on par with chrome, since there doesn't seem to be a way to have multiple profiles open at once.

I’m sure there are other ways to do this, including specifying a profile when you initially launch the browser, but you can enter about:profiles in the address bar to see a UI to manage the profile. One of the options is to launch that profile in a new browser.

If you just need a "personal" profile and a "work" profile, what I do as a workaround is to use normal firefox for personal and firefox developer edition for work. They are completely sandboxed from each other.

Multi-Account Containers do that part for me, and I find them much nicer than Chrome's similar functionality: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/multi-account...

For bonus fun, also install Temporary Containers: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/temporary-con...

Firefox does similar things though. They hide the URL scheme by default. And subdomain are displayed in a more subtle colour than the rest of the domain.

Firefox hides the scheme IFF it is `http://`. It doesn't hide `https://`. Also the subdomain AND the path is slightly toned down. The net effect is precisely what Google tries to do and Apple has been doing (namely, only showing the second level domain) without actually hiding any information.

You should really give the Brave browser from (www.)brave.com a try.

Yes. I've been using Brave exclusively for more than a year and I'm not going back.

I'm still undecided on which search engine to use though.

Have you tried Searx? Meta search engine, open source, multiple instances (domains) to choose from. Once configured to your particular needs, searx can prove very powerful.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com