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Comment by madmax108 | Hacker News Reader

Every new release of Firefox makes the experience better and better. I'm glad Mozilla has started focusing on the browser again, not just as an "open alternative to chrome" but as the "best possible browser", which I truly believe Firefox today is :)

Every new release reminds me of this comic: http://www.stickycomics.com/computer-update/

As a tweet I read today[1] :

"Mozilla seems to be under the assumption that there are people out there who don't want them to win.

EVERYONE WANTS MOZILLA TO WIN!

Half the developers on the Chrome team want Mozilla to win.

We're all sort of terrified that Mozilla isn't going to win"

I'm glad there are more people embracing this attitude within Mozilla and the developer community.

[1] https://twitter.com/mikeal/status/1071134519976022017

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Is Mikeal Rogers with the chrome folks? Or are they with Mozilla? Because it's really not clear[0][1], and clarifying it seems necessary to legitimizing your post.

0. https://github.com/mikeal

1. https://mobile.twitter.com/mikeal?p=s

I "wanted" Mozilla to win, in the last two years we've had the Cliqz and Looking Glass controversies, and a number of security reports based on decade-old bugs.

Firefox is a great browser, but Looking Glass was enough for me to switch back to Chrome. I want Mozilla to do well, but like the author has said, their marketing team seems to have strange ideas of how to win, and it goes completely against the perception of what Mozilla is for.

So you switched to Chrome?! Where the analytics stuff is not just a single fuck-up (followed by an apology) but built-in? Where all of a sudden "delete cookies" means "delete cookies except for those by Google"?

I don't get it. Criticizing Mozilla for those things is fair, but switching to Chrome as a reaction to them doesn't make sense to me.

At least with Chrome you have a rough idea of who will be using your data - Google. I use Gmail at work, and I have an Android phone, so I'd be fooling myself if I were to say that Google weren't tracking me already.

With Firefox, it's a breach of trust. The analytics stuff was a major fuck-up, and I would've accepted that apology if they didn't then align themselves with a TV company to run a promotion in my browser.

I could understand all of it if the code base was amazing, but when your flagship product receives exploits from bugs raised over a decade ago, before Chrome even existed, it's hard to trust Mozilla to be able to compete with Google.

I want to believe firefox is the best but Chrome's user interface is simply too smooth and clean and firefox has not been able to match that.

There are some details that you will only notice if you have used FF and chrome in equal amounts for a long time, such as being able to easily merge two windows in Chrome (in one click vs two), or clumsy bookmarks and search history settings in FF, etc.

Also there's a significantly slower drop-down url menu in firefox?? How does no one notice this? I click on a result and a list of other results take its place and send me to the wrong page, before the change even appears in the url box.

There will be people who ask me to elaborate on my points here, but I'm so tired of doing that for Firefox supporters and curious chrome users. If you want to feel why Chrome is simply better, just use it and compare it to Firefox.

As long as both browsers are able to do everything, a good UI is the only deciding factor for me. So many people in this thread are echoing what I've said.

Firefox has tags for bookmarks, whereas Chrome doesn't. This can help in refining your searches.

Firefox's Awesome Bar (location bar) is superior to Chrome's Omnibar. And this matters too when it comes to bookmarks, which are automatically searched. But when typing in your location bar, you can also limit the searches just to your bookmarks by starting the search with a "*" char. You can also use "^" to limit your searches just to your history.

You don't usually need such refinement, the Awesome Bar simply does a good job by default, but given that it searches in multiple places, sometimes precision helps. See here for this trick: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-search-fire...

Speaking of bookmark management, Firefox also has this neat feature: "Bookmark All Tabs". You specify a folder and it saves all of your opened tabs.

Overall I feel that Firefox has the upperhand on bookmark management. Not sure why you feel it is clumsy.

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I've used Chrome for two years and still use it from time to time, for testing purposes and because I want to see how it evolves.

That said, as a Firefox supporter, I think Firefox is superior for my usage patterns. And about its UI, believe it or not, but it was its UI that made me stick with Firefox. And I'm a Mac OS and an iOS user.

In addition to the bookmarks and history searched, "%" searches open tabs.

Also, note that you need a space after the character (so "% search query", not "%search query").

I have used both extensively but i prefer Firefox for the following reasons: lower resource footprint, privacy reasons, better session recovery - to name serious few and these i believe are much more important reasons that to say the drop-down menu takes a bit of more ms.

I have stopped using chrome and now am using Opera as the secondary browser with tightened setting.

> Half the developers on the Chrome team want Mozilla to win.

Why aren't they working on Firefox then?

Money, I guess.

And anyways, I think by "win", they don't mean "make Chrome irrelevant". Competition drives innovation, and the Chrome team probably want to steal good ideas from Firefox, find the feature that will put them back on top, etc... They are likely to get more resources and a more interesting job than by staying alone on top.

The best part is that Mozilla and Google are not really competitors when it comes to browsers. Google doesn't make money from Chrome, it is just a gateway to their profitable services. But Firefox works too: and ad impression on Firefox is not worth less than an ad impression on Chrome.

> and ad impression on Firefox is not worth less than an ad impression on Chrome

True, but Firefox might add more aggressive ad blocking, whereas Chrome might want to disable/discourage that.

I don't want Mozilla to win. They broke backwards compatibility with the new Servo or whatever. That's a bug.

You wouldn't say that the new train carriage, which only works on the Bosnian gauge and not on the Standard gauge (EU, US) "makes the experience better and better" even if they have free wi-fi, air-conditioning, plenty of feet space, leather seats, panoramic sunroof etc. You can't even use it, so all the extras are useless.

I took Chromium, found the perfect plugins, and never looked back at Mozilla, after 10+ years of using it. If it's broken, you can't use it, even if it's fast.

I understood your post until the last line.

The new versions of Firefox have almost the same plugin interface as Chromium. If you're satisfied with it, then why aren't you satisfied with it?

I'm now using cVim[0] plugin on Chromium. When I've switched from Firefox a year ago there was no real alternative to keysnail[1]. Backwards compatibility between Firefox releases began to break beginning of 2017. mooz, the developer of keysnail, managed to do some heroics and bring back the usability of the plugin on the never versions. Finally, Firefox 57 put the nail in the coffin and keysnail was declared dead on the spot. I've tried some alternatives for a few weeks but none could deliver. I found cVim on Chromium, and that saved the day.

See what fellytone84 had to say about keysnail, here on HN, 4 years ago [2]: I consider Mooz's Keysnail Firefox add-on to be the most impressive keyboard oriented browsing tool. It's endlessly configurable, dotfiles in javascript--really nice to work with. For Chrome, the Vimium extension is very good, but recently I've been having a lot of fun with a similar, more configurable alternative called chromium-vim.

[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cvim/ihlenndgcmojh...

[1] https://github.com/mooz/keysnail

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8452635

It looks like someone got cVim mostly working on firefox in a day, but never had time/motivation to do a real port.

So while I do miss the old extensions, and disagree strongly with how they went about it, any particular thing that's available only on chrome isn't really because chrome is better. With a little push cVim could support both browsers.

Since Firefox has similar extension interface with Chromium, any Chromium extensions should be able to work with Firefox with (relatively) small amount of works. In fact, cVim seem to be mostly works in Firefox according to its author here: https://github.com/1995eaton/chromium-vim/issues/520

Mooz has made xkeysnail which can do some of the same things, anywhere in X.

There's also a menagerie of Vimperator alikes for Firefox: Tridactyl, Vim Vixen, Surfingkeys, Vimium-FF, VVVimpulation. Most of them have improved substantially since September 2017.

Disclaimer: lots of Tridactyl's jank is my fault.

Yes, I know. I'm using xkeysnail on Linux for C-n, C-p and C-m keybindings which I haven't seem to make it work in cVim. And for Windows, AHK for the same functionality.

You know that modifying the gauge for train carriages is really quite easy? Same with browser - it's really easy to modify Firefox to work as you want it to.

> it's really easy to modify Firefox to work as you want it to.

Apparently support for doing gestures correctly would "break the security model" and the code would be rejected, so I'm going to disagree there.

About gestures: firegesture seems to have just vanished, so Im using easystroke (linux). It works with any app, not just firefox.

But can it save the image under the cursor? I'm currently using foxy gestures despite the brokenness.

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