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Comment by Puer | Hacker News Reader

Just my personal $0.02:

1. The biggest thing keeping me tied to Chrome over any other browser is the extension support. Extensions are second class citizens in any other browser. This is partly because other browsers keep overhauling their systems and deprecating old software which discourages extension developers, and mainly because (as an extension developer) why would you code for browser X when you can get more users on browser Y?

2. Anecdotal evidence, but every time an update of Firefox (and most notably Quantum) is released people laud how fast it is. On my 2015 Macbook running Mac OS Firefox has never been faster. Maybe there are things behind the scenes such as caching playing a role, but web pages load slower, scrolling feels sluggish, videos drop frames and freeze or get out of sync. It isn't an enjoyable experience compared to Chrome or Safari.

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> 1. The biggest thing keeping me tied to Chrome over any other browser is the extension support. Extensions are second class citizens in any other browser.

You say this, but on mobile, the only major browser that supports extensions is Firefox. Not Chrome. Not Safari.

I'm a heavy Firefox+addon user, but I just don't use phone browser enough to even bother using addons. (And Firefox for Android is pretty bad otherwise, unfortunately.)

Since I refuse to install apps on my phone for services I use that have websites, I'm a fairly heavy phone browser user.. so being able to adblock, block arbitrary JS (noscript), and kill tracking cookies is wonderful.

> And Firefox for Android is pretty bad otherwise, unfortunately

I disagree. Why do you think it is "pretty bad"?

Sync, bookmark handling, performance.

Sync is the worst by a mile. You can NEVER expect a tab you opened (or history) on computer to show up reliably on mobile device in timely fashion.

It was working really slow for me 6 months ago but it seems to be totally solved in recent versions.

One problem I have with Firefox on Android is that it doesn't support the Samsung DeX desktop environment, while all the other browsers do (Chrome, Edge, Bing, Samsung Internet). Presumably that means it doesn't run well on ChromeOS laptops either. It's also noticeably slower than the other browsers.

That said, I keep going back to Firefox as my preferred phone browser, I still like it more than the others. And Firefox is definitely my favorite desktop browser, ever since Quantum. It was an enormous speed improvement over Safari on Mac for me when it came out, and I'm enjoying Firefox on my new PC laptop too.

Scrolling feels really off (non-native) to me, at least on Android - e.g. it coasts at a noticeably lower velocity than other apps after a sharp flick.

> so being able to adblock

Firefox Focus is my go to browser on Android, and it has ad blocking built in (as well as cookie / history erasure).

That said, have you tried installing Blokada from FDroid? It sets up a local VPN on your phone and routes all network traffic through it, blocking all ads in all apps. It's astonishing how many ads and trackers your phone would otherwise download in a week.

Thanks for this!

Having a VPN for ad blocking is unfortunately a really bad option, as you should already have a VPN to prevent your "open WiFi" and LTE provider spying on you.

The only thing I care about w.r.t mobile extensions is an adblocker, and the Safari iOS content blocking API works wonderfully for that.

Wipr is the one I use, and I basically never see ads anymore on iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wipr/id1030595027?mt=8

yeah and yet there it's single add-on for pull down to refresh which barely works and Firefox was constantly crashing on pretty ordinary sites i was visiting until i gave up after few weeks and returned to Brave where i don't need to be afraid to open porn website or pharmacy website without crashing whole browser

using Firefox on desktop though, can't complain much over there, but it's useless on android if it crash even on ordinary sites

> other browsers keep overhauling their systems and deprecating old software which discourages extension developers

Note that this is why Firefox underwent the extensionpocalypse last year; the prior extensions model made it impossible not to regularly break the ecosystem. The next bit about "why code for browser X?" is also why they based their new APIs on Chrome's, to make it easy for existing Chrome extensions to support both browsers.

> Extensions are second class citizens in any other browser.

I'd say Firefox's support for extensions is better than Chrome's, even after the change to WebExtensions. The author of NoScript, for example, thinks Firefox has the best environment for add-ons:

https://hackademix.net/2017/11/21/noscript-1011-quantum-powe...

I just deleted Chrome, and switched to Brave as my full-time personal browser: faster, more secure, and based on Chromium so full extension support[1].

I still use and support Firefox for development purposes, and am wedded to containers, but apart from that it's Brave all the way (especially on mobile, which has been my default browser for over a year now).

[1] Excluding anything that bakes in Google spyware, and I believe they'll do a bit more curating of extensions from a security perspective.

Thanks for suggesting Brave. Just downloaded it, and it seems very well put together. Interesting how that plan to pay you to view ads.

Even better is that it's optional, so those of us who don't want to see any ads but still want to support sites are in a position to tip / donate / potentially subscribe to sites across the web using a browser-native crypto wallet.

That also means I can financially support sites without handing over any PII data as well.

It's up to them to offer a deal to get subscriber data (marketers gonna market), but the bar is increasingly high as we see hacks like Quora.

I think we're moving to a world where publishers will see that an MVP business model is 'dollars without data', and BAT with ZKP anonymity enables that.

Waiting for them to implement sync until I switch full time but yeah, impressed so far.

I am an edge-case but my favourite extensions are AdNauseum [1], CookieAutoDelete and NoScript. The first isn't even available on the Chrome store (although you can install it via Dev Mode [2]), and that's before I weight concerns like Google's dragnet. Totally agree with the Network Effect point though, and I hear Chrome's dev tools are quicker than Firefox's in DOM rendering.

With regard to 2, I've not found it to be noticeably slow, nor experienced dropped frames or the other complaints (ran on a 2014 and a 2017), but that's more likely me being unobservant.

My recreational browsing is mostly on an iPad, and the user story there is pretty desperate. I'd prefer to mimic my Desktop setup, but the walled garden doesn't afford me that opportunity. I'm cautiously optimistic that situation will catch up before I move platforms though!

Anyway, thank you for helping me see the other side a little better.

[1] - https://adnauseam.io

[2] - I don't know if anyone else has noticed this, but there's a needless and incessant Chrome (and Chromium) prompt on each startup as follows:

""" Disable Developer Mode Extensions

Extensions running in developer mode [sic] can harm your computer. If you're not a developer, you should disable these extensions running in developer mode to stay safe """

I personally find it inherently hostile, but perhaps I'm just an old man disregarding the use-case of other people!

I used NoScript forever, but recently switched to uMatrix, and it's so much better in that it gives you much more fine-grained control over what to block/allow. I'd recommend giving it a try.

uBlock Origin is a great complement to it, for when I want to block specific page elements.

I use both in parallel and sometimes it's annoying to make a video player work (or captcha). I don't know how a video player can rely on 5000 injected dependencies from 5000 different domains.

Thank you for this - I'd never looked into uMatrix but I'm test driving it today.

> 2. Anecdotal evidence, but every time an update of Firefox (and most notably Quantum) is released people laud how fast it is. On my 2015 Macbook running Mac OS Firefox has never been faster. Maybe there are things behind the scenes such as caching playing a role, but web pages load slower, scrolling feels sluggish, videos drop frames and freeze or get out of sync. It isn't an enjoyable experience compared to Chrome or Safari.

This is my experience too, unfortunately. I keep using Firefox instead of Chrome now to support Mozilla and their positive attitude towards end-user privacy, but compared to when I use Chrome it is an annoying product to use with the endless waiting and lag. Using Linux, so maybe it is just really only optimised for Windows PCs (arguably their largest user base)?

Really? I'm on Linux and I saw immediate changes once Quantum hit. It runs better for me on Ubuntu{16,18} and Arch. I had some glitches at the beginning, but not anymore.

The only glitch I have now is that I can't use send tabs to push a tab to my phone (but the reverse works and it is fine to any other computer). So that's not that big of an issue.

I wish I had your experience. But I switched from Chrome when Quantum came out, and it felt like a big downgrade in performance. And I feel that is still the case these days when comparing Firefox and Chrome. Granted, I hadn't used Firefox prior to the Quantum release for a long time because of the performance so I likely didn't notice the improvement as you did.

I just wish it was better, because while it does get annoying at times, I do want to support Mozilla :-/

Are there specific WebExtension APIs you care about that Chrome supports and Firefox doesn't?

There are a few niche plugins I use for specific sites to enhance usability that I definitely don't expect to be ported to Firefox, but even the ones that are take an understandable backseat in terms of developer priority.

For example, for more than 10 years I've been using Chrome extensions that allow you to hover over image links to view them without clicking. There are dozens of these extensions in almost any browser, but they require constant updating to keep up with 1) new image/video hosts and 2) changes to existing image/video hosts.

For me, these extensions are an essential part of the browsing experience of many websites. I've found that the same extensions by the same developers often lag behind 6+ months on Firefox vs. Chrome which makes them really useless when gfycat, streamable, imgur, etc. all stop working.

You can use most WebExtensions from Chrome with Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-store-...

"This add-on has been discontinued"

It's kinda strange how bad mozilla is in doing the obvious good. Building in a direct support for chrome-store should be a priority. Solutions like this addon have such a bad experience..

I'm not sure I understand, there is no side-tab plugin like Tree Style Tab plugin on Chrome. How do you handle more than 10 tabs?

Not OP, but I currently have around 80 tabs open spread/organized over 6 different windows (and two different Chrome profiles). And a bunch more "snoozing" with OneTab.

You should probably give tree style tabs a try

I miss the old XUL extensions, way better tab extensions and stuff like DownThemAll was amazing.

Modernly Firefox can't be customized much more than chrome - extreme hacks are needed: https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-fo...

The XUL extension I miss most is Pentadactyl. Tridactyl is a pale imitation, and still immature. Qutebrowser has potential, but still lacks critical extensions like uMatrix and uBlock Origin.

Might want to subscribe to https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/28 and https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/29 if you haven't already ;-)

(To clarify: it does have an adblocker, but it's quite basic, only based on a blacklist of hosts. You can also selectively enable JavaScript for individual domains, but not yet based on both webpage and its origin like with uMatrix)

Tridactyl is pretty nice these days and getting improved continually. Which features are you missing?

I built a browser for this: https://cretz.github.io/doogie/. Granted I haven't uploaded the binaries for the current Chromium version (easy to do, just lazy) and I also don't support extensions and there's no macOS support yet. But the sheer productivity increase for me is substantial.

Lol, I usually organize tabs by location so pinning them (and minimizing their horizontal footprint) is good enough for me. Further, I personally found that when I had a million tabs open, at least 50% of them were duplicates so I just started using tab deduping extensions to cull them.

Session Buddy and The Great Suspender. I have ~800 tabs open in Chrome right now on this PC. I haven't used Tree Style Tab, but Chrome's tab-shrinking is actually better for lots of tabs (up to a point) than Firefox's tab-scrolling. I have yet to try tab suspension extensions in Firefox, so there may be a workflow that works for me there (Chrome is not ideal).

You should tree style tabs. It changes your life.

I am envious, Firefox 60.3.0 performs like a snail for me on Linux with just 20 tabs.

My experience is exactly the opposite. Each time I'm past 200 tabs or something (i.e. all the time), Chrome's UI starts occasionally lagging and glitching, and I'm not even talking about memory usage (overall or even just parent process alone) and how it's affecting the operating system. Even with pre-Quantum Firefox I was always pushing limits much, much further.

However I'm avoiding media- and script-heavy websites as much as possible, and block a couple of ad networks solely because of the stress that rich media ads (videos flying all over iframes and whatnot) causes for the hardware I'm running the browser on. (I don't mind ads if they don't take 8 CPU cores to render, but they seem to be disappearing from the internet.)

That's weird. I currently have ~100 tabs open in Firefox (yes, on the same computer as 800 in Chrome), and it's fine. Back in 2008, I had ~800 tabs in Firefox on Linux for a project (with TabMixPlus); it was pretty slow and unstable, but it worked.

Extensions get to modify the same about:config in FF as the firefox internal settings.

Some extensions dont work after a year of being undeveloped, because the API changes. Is this really a bad thing? Opensource software uses patching as a "heartbeat" to discern whether a project is still developed or not. Hackers find holes over time, and when devs no longer fill them, the project needs to be left for dead.

Why should browser addons be any different?

I guess its a different philosophy - if the devs leave a browser addon for dead, the users should too.

Once every couple of years, the API changes and cleans out dead addons. Im not sure this is often enough.

But the best addons stay. NoScript. Adblock Plus or uBlock Origin. httpsEverywhere. The best Canvas blockers. These stay up to date.

What is missing?

For #2, might be the same issue I posted about on HN a while back, particularly if you have a 13” MBP. I corresponded with Mozilla employees, but I still don’t think it has made much movement toward getting fixed.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18072091

What extensions in particular do you use that you can't find equivalents on Firefox?

Dirac Devtools for Clojurescript use the custom formatters api to render Clojure data structures and Firefox hasn’t implemented it.

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