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Comment by lettergram | Hacker News Reader

Well, highly recommend Firefox. Works great after the updates last year and even use it on mobile.

It bothers me that iOS doesn’t support addons to Firefox mobile. But on Android you can even install ublock origin

Which is why I'm all the more disappointed that Mozilla is unable to resist the siren's call either, what with the Looking Glass decision and their tendency to deprecate UX functionality with no replacement (like custom keyboard shortcuts).

... Their totally transparent study system, and turning off hotkeys. You bring that up in a discussion about google crippling ad blockers.

Why does this always happen? Why is it when google commits murder, someone mentions that firefox was caught jaywalking?

"Randomly installing unauthorized addons with creepy messages because marketing told you" is the same kind of error, just different degree.

They also disabled user-provided unsigned addons, even when you authorize them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taGARf8K5J8

Super Metroid in 1992 had customizable keys. Mozilla gets $500 million a year and can't even keep a feature it had 3 years ago. I shouldn't be disappointed about failure to get basic things right, when they're suppose to be the great bulwark against those who wish to control your machine?

In Firefox I really miss the ability to tab-search from the address bar in site-specific search engines. I.e. in order to search for something on Amazon: type "amaz", tab, then type a search term. I didn't find any extensions for Firefox that would provide this feature.

You can create keywords afak, but it's a manual process

I use ddg's bash syntax for it. !g for Google !a for Amazon etc.

iOS might not support Firefox addons, but you can use a system wide ad block app with Firefox.

The "system wide adblock" on iOS has the same restrictions as this new Chrome extension system. It does not support the extension API that uBlock Origin uses.

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ge...

there are dns rule-based adblockers for ios

Not versed in the technical details but 1Blocker X for iOS Safari has prevented practically 99.9% of all ads I used to see in an unmodded Android Chrome before. I've only seen 2 websites have some form of ads in the last 14 months.

Then Chromium's Manifest v3 is for you. Most of the other people commenting here want something more powerful.

>I've only seen 2 websites have some form of ads in the last 14 months.

It doesn't work on reddit, which makes up a lot of page visits for most people. Also, they can't defuse/bypass anti-adblock scripts.

There's still a feature of Chrome that keeps me from switching - Chrome will show a lot more tabs open. I tend to leave a lot of inactive tabs to come back to later, but that means I need to see them all.

Install Tree Style Tab on Firefox. Moves tabs to a tree on the left. You can see a lot more, and better organized too. In the era of landscape screens, I think it's a must.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

I might have to try that. Looks like you still have the tabs at the top of the window too, not sure I'd like the visual clutter.

Not very user-friendly, but you can disable the horizontal tabs by editing userChrome.css in your profile directory: https://superuser.com/questions/1261660/firefox-quantum-ver-....

This is the up-to-date documentation for this:

https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-fo...

For native vertical tabs, you can also check Vivaldi.

I have a hard time understanding why, with widescreen so common nowadays, it isn't a standard native feature in all browsers.

Try adjusting browser.tabs.tabMinWidth in about:config.

You're a life saver, thank you!

Try out Brave. It's a faster, privacy-oriented browser with built-in ad-blocking.

The only problem with Firefox is the UI when they redesign a great slick Ui like chrome this browser game will change

agree completely, I started Firefox many times and each time left it because of the interface.

What about the UI don't you like? I've heard this complaint before, but the two appear pretty similar to me, at least to the point that I never considered one more appealing than the other.

icons, text, bookmarks bar, all seem unpolished, to the point it prevents me from using it.

I just opened both browsers and it's pretty hard to really see much of difference in UI. If anything, Chrome's UI is slightly more basic. But the icons, positions of menus, etc are almost identical.

How can superficial details like that be more important to you than your privacy?

I am curious, what do you not like about the Firefox UI? I honestly could go back to like Firefox 3.5 and still be fine with it. I prefer the UI of the debug tools in Firefox over Chrome as well.

That's an interesting comment considering how Chrome has recently changed its UI to look more like Firefox to the point I often mistake people for running Firefox when they are actually running Chrome.

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