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Comment by jhasse | Hacker News Reader

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jhasse

It shows just how much better Chrome is on every other aspect.

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There are really very few things Chrome is better at than Firefox these days.

There are a number of things were Chrome is worse, actually.

I do wish Web USB would be more supported in Firefox/safari etc. not sure why Chrome is so far in front there.

This is considered insecure. Firefox devs think that prompting the user for permission does not inform the user enough about the risk. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=674718.

That bug is talking about a custom USB API for Firefox OS.

> Closing as WONTFIX since FxOS is no more

The Web USB API didn't even exist when that bug was first created.

I was thinking more in terms of replacing traditional desktop apps that work with USB like sensors, single-board comp dev, and hardware diagnostic tools (protocol analyzers etc) it’s nice to be able to quickly update a webapp and have native access to usb as needed.

Isn't one of these debugging?

These days I prefer the Firefox network inspector to Chrome's. FF's debugger initialises rather slowly IMO, but is otherwise functionally similar.

Displaying colors properly on wide gamut displays is one. Can't use Firefox because of it — I can't design in the browser if it renders everything wrong on my iMac.

I tried to switch to Firefox lately after this new speedy version had been released. I really underestimated how good Chromium is. Basic stuff, like in page search(Ctrl+F) is awful after Chromium experience. Resistance to copying omni-bar is silly. Crashes every day. The UX is bad compared to Chromium. Spent month dealing with it and just abandoned this endeavor. Really sad, i want Firefox to be better.

I haven't had Firefox crash in years, and I use nightly for all of my day-to-day browsing. Chrome crashes or locks whenever I iterate on a canvas based game after some amount of refreshes.

"Resistance to copying omni-bar"? It seems to work OK for me. What are you trying to do and how does Firefox resist it?

"Crashes every day"? I can't remember the last time I had a Firefox crash; maybe this is OS-dependent. (I use it on Windows and on FreeBSD; how about you?)

"The UX is bad compared to Chromium" -- obviously if you're used to one program's UX then another's may seem obtuse. What about the Firefox UX is actually bad as opposed to different? (For what it's worth, to me FF and Chrome seem very similar to use.)

(I think I agree about ctrl-F, which on some particular pages seems to misbehave on Firefox in ways I don't understand.)

If whoever downvoted the above would care to tell me what they find unsatisfactory about it, I'm all ears. (For the avoidance of doubt, I mean that; I'm not just being snarky.)

I'm one of those people who can't use Firefox thanks to the frequent crashing. It happens for me at least once a day, particularly when I have the same site open in multiple tabs. I get a yellow bar saying a script is slowing down this website, and ALL the tabs lock up thanks to it. If you're lucky enough to kill all the impacted tabs (you're rarely that lucky, it's that unresponsive) your browsing experience from then on will be bad, and the whole browser will need restarting.

I haven't seen a Chrome crash in years, yet the Firefox ones are very frequent. Not that I want to switch, I might be the only one here who is happy with Chromium on all my PCs!

Interesting! I occasionally get the "a script is slowing down this website" message, but not nearly so often and killing the affected tabs seems to work OK. I guess some pages are super-extra-bad for Firefox. Or perhaps some extension you have is causing grief? (Though that should be much less able to happen in the era of WebExtensions.)

>Resistance to copying omni-bar

I think he was referring to the fact that Mozilla is still unsure about unifying the address and search bars. They only show an unified bar on fresh profiles, IIRC. What he thinks is wrong with keeping distinct bars, besides being different from Chrome, I don't know.

Firefox doesn't even have default zoom (last I checked).

Do you mean Firefox doesn't have a way to return the zoom level to its default? (It has two; you can do ctrl-0 or you can click on the zoom-level indicator in the URL bar.)

Or do you mean you can't tell it to default to a zoom level that isn't 100%? (That seems to be true.) I confess that's never a thing it's occurred to me to want; it feels like if I wanted every website's text to look larger or smaller, I'd probably want everything to look larger or smaller and would adjust my OS's scaling level. But I know some OSes handle that better than others, and maybe there are good reasons for wanting different scalings for websites than for everything else. Still, it's not clear to me that this is so obviously important a thing that "doesn't even have" is fair.

This has been a sticking point for me too when trying to transition to FF from Chrome. My main monitor is a 4k 24-inch, and at that pixel density, the Windows HiDPI scaling isn't always enough to get the text the correct size for comfortable viewing. For text-heavy sites like HN, Reddit, and Wikipedia, being able to set a default 125% zoom in the browser is very nice, while still being able to keep the default zoom for sites like Youtube where video player size is more important than text size.

Considering the cost to implement would probably be pretty low, I think it is a fair complaint against the browser. Still, privacy concerns may supersede convenience in this particular case, and I think I might try again to switch.

Works for me. I have Hacker News permanently zoomed-in with Firefox (nightly).

I assume they're talking about setting a default zoom for unvisited websites, instead of having to set it manually for every visited website.

Why not increase the minimum font size instead?

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