Comment by V-2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by V-2 | Hacker News Reader

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I switched quite recently, kind of out of principle. I'm trying to return from Chrome to Firefox every couple of years or so. I've been on Firefox for a few weeks now. And I've run into several issues that simply wouldn't affect Chrome, such as certain websites not working properly (eg. only today I had troubles downloading papers from academia.edu - works perfectly on Chrome). This really throws me back.

There's also plenty of little UX niceties you don't even notice on Chrome, but which are missing on Firefox. Eg. if you create a new bookmarks folder and you add a bookmark to it, this folder stays selected as the default option when you're adding another bookmark. This doesn't happen on Firefox for some reason.

Or, another example off the top of my head: I always customize my browsers so that the next tab gets open right next to the current one - not at the end. There are lightweight extensions for both browsers that accomplish just that. But only on Firefox the new tab jumps back and forth when you open it; opening at the end for a fraction of a second, then bouncing back where I want it. On Chrome it's instantaneous.

Or downloading files: Chrome automatically shows a download bar for an ongoing download, and you can open the freshly downloaded file right from there. Firefox doesn't do it. You have to manually tap a rather discreet arrow icon on the toolbar to open the downloads list. (Which you may even forget to, if we speak of a large download that takes several minutes). Maybe there's some extension for that, but Chrome has this by default.

Translating webpages is another one. There are several extensions available for Firefox, but not one of them comes close to the convenience Chrome offers by default in this regard.

I know a lot these are arguably petty things, but boy is there so many of them. And I think at least the majority of don't really fall into the "matter of taste" category. Chrome simply offers more polished user experience, and while these may be details, at the end of the day all these details add up.

I keep seeing reports of pages that work in Chrome but not in FF. What puzzles me is that people usually hold this against FF instead of holding it against Chrome.

The very few times I have experienced such a thing, a peek at the console tells me that FF is blocking the page from doing something insecure or otherwise harmful.

It reminds me of ActiveX stuff. Junky webcams still ship with an ActiveX control to embed video into their html page. When it doesn't work in FF or Chrome, some people think IE6 is a superior browser.

I don't know the reason behind your various broken pages. It could be something is wrong with FF. But it could also be that something is _right_ with FF. If you don't know which, why are you complaining about FF?

> I don't know the reason behind your various broken pages. It could be something is wrong with FF. But it could also be that something is _right_ with FF. If you don't know which, why are you complaining about FF?

I'm not complaining about FF. I'm complaining about my experience using FF. I'm not attributing blame, only stating facts.

Even if it's something wrong with the websites as you say, what matters to me is whether I can use them or not.

And by the way, quietly blocking the page without any sort of a message or warning to the user would be more evidence of bad UX in my book. I shouldn't have to go the console to find out how the browser decided to protect me, if that's the case.

I know where you're coming from. I never noticed how "close" you are to your browser until opera retired presto and switched to blink, butchering the whole thing basically. In comparison it seemed a hundred times easier when I switched from Windows to Linux.

Whenever I tried to share my woes with friends or colleagues who used Firefox or chrome, they just went like "well you can have feature x too by installing add-on y". But it was the little things, the way things worked in detail, were laid out etc. And it's very hard to explain this to someone who has always done it another way, or never got used to a certain feature in the first place.

I kept using opera 12 for almost two years after they retired it, until just too much stuff was inaccessible due to the browsers age. Then followed a confusing time of using Firefox, chromium and Vivaldi in parallel, eventually drifting to Firefox, in recent times driven by growing reluctance towards google and the building up of their browser (or engine) monopoly.

There are things missing in Chrome like their refusal to allow you to tab through the drop down list that appears when you type something, that was marked as will not fix like 10 years ago

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