Hacker News Reader

Comment by chris_wot | Hacker News Reader

Yep, I'm about to ditch Chrome altogether now. I gritted my teeth and just handled a few of the more bone-headed changes the Chrome team made, but this latest change is a deal breaker.

The truth is, I actually don't need Chrome for anything. Firefox is faster now, gives me more freedom and has less corporate affiliations. I'll stick with Mozilla.

View on HN

> Yep, I'm about to ditch Chrome altogether now.

I keep seeing people write stuff like this, and I just don’t get it.

What’s keeping you? Why haven’t you switched already? I mean... it takes minutes at most.

I tend to have to use it at work. The reason I haven't shifted at work is a ridiculous one really - it's the way you can tear off tabs and move them to another screen - it doesn't tear the same way as Chrome. Like I say, ridiculous.

I've used this exact feature on firefox for years

How do you get it to tear off and show the whole window while you are moving it? I would love that, then I'd literally switch in no time flat.

Drag the tab away from the title bar and to a different screen, it should just birth a new window and live in that. You can also drag tabs from one window to another, or drag a window with only one tab to merge it with another window

from personal experience, it's the performance and bugs of firefox that keeps me away. for this reason i will not switch.

Firefox keeps improving. Since I switched back, I've noticed it has less bugs than Chrome had.

oh, for sure. it's just that at this point in time, on my macos firefox is simply inferior to macos chrome. fyi i'm a power user (tens/hundreds of tabs, lots of web development etc), so this might not apply to everybody.

Out of curiosity, what would you say was the thing that still kept you on Chrome even though all of the things you said apply? Inertia due to habit?

For me, it was Chrome's peerless DevTools (although Firefox has been catching up recently) and the fact that entering full screen on Firefox freezes up the entire UI for me (it's probably some bad interaction with BSPWM).

Definitely inertia, but also the company I work for uses it extensively. But lately on my own personal devices I've been sticking to Firefox.

On my low-end mac (Macbook) Chrome is still noticeable faster than Firefox. I ran Firefox the last year, but then I tried the new Opera and it was so much faster. Trying out others I realized it's the blink engine. So now I am using Vivaldi...

This is much less apparent on faster machines or on Linux/Windows though, but for me it is more efficient to use the same browser on all my machines.

profiles

You can try Firefox containers. They even work within the same window.

No. This is a misconception that is being spread around. I don't know what FF containers are useful for, but they certainly do not function to replace Chrome's profiles:

Here are my notes from when I investigated:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15688651

I went deeply into trying to use containers as a profile replacement, replacing Chrome with the new Firefox beta for one month, and I can report that it is not the right direction to go in:

- New tabs do not inherit current container

- No way to make Ctrl-T do this by customization (I investigated extensions (can't remap Ctrl-T) and even system-wide Ctrl-T remapping with Karibiner; neither gives you what you want)

- History is shared across containers. So e.g. work URLs mixed up with personal. That's contra to one of the main purposes of Profiles.

- External applications do not open a tab in the current container. So e.g. clicking in a link in work slack will fail because it will not open in a tab which has work cookies / google account etc.

Evidently Containers are not designed as a Profile replacement. I'm not sure what they are for but I don't think it's a need that I have.

As I understand it using the long-standing Firefox profiles feature is the way to go, but personally I switched back to Chrome after a month of the new Firefox Beta because of the convenience of Chrome profiles. I should try Firefox profiles, but I exhausted my experimentation energy on Containers.

I don’t know about profiles, so I can’t speak to that. All I can do is say that I use containers to open multiple tabs of the same site with different users.

For example, I have multiple AWS accounts. To login to two different ones at the same time, I use different containers. Way better than opening one is FF, one in Chrome, etc. When I open a link from a container in a new tab it opens in the same container.

Containers are great to "containerize" cookies but that's about it.

If you have multiple "personas", like a personal account with bookmarks and a work account with another set of bookmarks and settings, you'll want a separate profile.

Yes, that use case sounds very much like what Profiles are for. You'll find that Profiles are an improvement over Containers for tasks like that (logging into the same URL as different identities) for all the reasons I list above.

> Way better than opening one is FF, one in Chrome, etc

Agreed!

> Yes, that use case sounds very much like what Profiles are for.

I'm not quite sure how profiles work in Chrome, but from a Firefox point-of-view this is only true if you also want to keep your history/bookmarks/settings/add-ons completely separate, too.

Yes, history, bookmarks and extensions are separate. I have one profile for "me in my personal life" and "me at work", and a few for testing logins to different interfaces at work. So this degree of separation is mostly what I want, although it can be a little annoying to maintain the extensions you want under both profiles.

Keeping history separate in particular is very valuable since nowadays the fastest / least hassle way to bring up a site is to start typing the beginning of the URL in the navigation bar, so you wouldn't want work URLs mixed in with non-work URLs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com