I try switching from Chrome to Firefox at least once a year, but the UI design keeps me firmly entrenched as a Chrome user.
A lot of the reason so many people seem to like Chrome Dev Tools better seems to be exactly the sort of "Works best in IE6" mentality that so many devs only spend time testing in Chrome and customizing Chrome Dev Tools how they like and making sure Chrome Dev Tools work right that it just becomes inertia that that is what they like better.
Little tweaks to sourcemap generation options, for instance, can be all it takes to get Firefox Dev Tools working just as well as Chrome for code debugging, but so many devs work in Chrome only that the defaults in so many places are accidentally so Chrome-centric.
Similar goes for all the Chrome-only Dev Tools extensions. At this point even the Dev Tools Extension Models are close enough between Chrome and Firefox that it mostly just needs more people using Firefox for development to catch up on extensions.
https://gist.github.com/tjespe/aeb514aaff6f4ca4d97afe476e360...
Looks like somebody updated the Firefox Quantum UI to look more like Chrome.
Chrome also stopped doing this, AFAIK.
Fun fact: I was subscribed to a firefox ticket "Password manager should support OS X Keychain" which is 18 years old, it got closed some months ago. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=106400
Same experience for me on Chrome on macOS too, so... You sure you didn't change those defaults somehow?
I usually open new tabs with Command + t or Control + t on Linux / Windows.
Chrome does this.
> and if you click the + button to open a new tab the cursor ends up over the new tab, not over the + button so you can click again to open a new tab.
Chrome does this too.
> The whole UI looks and feels non-native.
Yep, that describes Chrome.
It sounds to me like you're a Safari user, since the things you're describing are things Safari does correctly. I'm a die-hard Safari user, and both Chrome and Firefox feel wrong to me. But Chrome feels even worse than Firefox does.
- The 'x' is on the right of every tab.
- When I press '+', the cursor ends up over the new tab - I cannot immediately click '+' again.
- Pressing esc does not do anything for full-screen mode.
In Firefox, using the Customize option from the menu, you can move the new tab button to the left side of the tabs, or even to the far right side so that it doesn't move.
What version are you using?
For me the most jarring thing is how Firefox’s omnibar works. It isn’t good at showing me the sites I’m looking for after typing just a few characters. Instead, it shows absolutely every page I’ve recently visited at one of those sites.
Another design thing is the amount of information on the default new page has a ton more info than I’m used to seeing (or really want to see). Hence a question I posted yesterday:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20167192
On iOS, I keep trying to pull to refresh pages, but in Firefox it’s a specific button. But this is something that I could get used to.
Interesting! I think this may be a case where, over time, as you use a search mechanism, you get used to the kinds of searches that work well with that mechanism. I've had similarly frustrating experiences with Chrome's address bar, which I'm not used to using.
Firefox has a concept of "frecency", a metric that combines frequency of visit and recency of visit to determine what you're most likely to want based on what you typed. (It also gives some preference to the starts of words/domains, and some other heuristics.) However, I can easily believe that before Firefox has enough information, typing at it would produce suboptimal results. That's something worth reporting as a bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Firefox&c... . Please feel free to use any of the text above to help describe the issue, if it helps.
> Another design thing is the amount of information on the default new page has a ton more info than I’m used to seeing (or really want to see).
Complete agreement. I disable the new tab page on desktop, as I really just want a blank page. (On mobile, I find the default new tab page more useful and usable.)
I’m not sure how the omnibar works, but I’m not extremely impressed.
I can see how this is going to be confusing for a new Firefox user, but it's easy to get used to.
(And I have Firefox sync setup)
(And on a general note: some people here might want to verify they haven't touched the settings;-)
The strange thing is, every nine months or so, FF will forget one of these urls. It doesn't do it for all of them at once, just one, and it's not related to upgrades. All I have to do is enter the full url and hit enter, and things are back to normal again for that particular url for many months.
I use macOS, so maybe it’s different on Windows. A few things bug me, it’s hard to really pin it down. It just doesn’t feel finished. The Save File dialog window feels like it’s from Mac OS 9, or at least its sentiment is. The behaviour is confusing, because if you press cancel, you still end up with a file in you Downloads. It would better if it just dealt with it the way Safari and Chrome do. A lot of the dropdowns and other inputs feel a little old too, everything ends up looking like 2003, which isn’t terrible, but I would imagine it puts people off when switching from Chrome.
The address bar is also very odd, it almost always suggests the wrong thing for me. I’ve adjusted the settings, but even for a site I just visited with the exact name in the page title, I still end up with the search as the default result.
For FF mobile the UI is less convenient than Brave. In Brave the icons for adding a new tab and switching tabs are at the bottom of the screen, while in FF they're in a menu at the top. Because I use my phone in portrait mode I have to reach my thumb up to the menu every time to create or switch tabs. It's really tiresome and I use Brave instead due to this. Also, the URL bar on mobile FF has the 'X', but its behavior is completely different from Brave. It closes the bar entirely rather than clearing it. I also get that it's a thing to get used to after switching, but why not just delegate cancellation to the Android back button? (Could it be due to iOS?)
1. It always "just works". I've run into problems with both Chrome and Firefox getting confused by a search term I entered into the URL bar.
2. The search string persists even after clicking on results. This is particularly helpful when I'm having trouble finding a good result and want to make a slight change to my previous search string, or I want to remember exactly which search term brought up a specific result.
Just curious, are you developing in Lua? That would be my guess from that string.
Chrome is dead simple, minimal, and predictable. When I want something, I look in the one menu. Firefox, on the other hand, has multiple bars, multiple menus, sidebars, icons plus text. It's too much.
FYI: I use Firefox for idealogical reasons.
1. Spacebar doesn't select items
2. Key equivalents don't work while it's open
3. Cut/Copy/Paste often does not work, depending on where the keyboard focus is
4. Inapplicable menu items don't disable properly
5. The caret continues blinking in text fields even though keyboard focus is in the menu
etc etc. This sort of basic bugginess is embarrassing and entirely avoidable by using the native platform controls, instead of re-inventing them poorly.
1. I'm pretty sure there is an issue for this in their tracker but they don't seem to think it's important enough to fix.
- restore pages from last time
- start page (input url)
- default new page chrome
By default, intranet authentication (spnego) is disabled in Firefox. There are numerous guides explaining how to turn it on, and it takes all of a couple of minutes to set up correctly after which point it just works.
FWIW IE has this problem too, in that by default it only enables negotiation for unqualified hostnames. If you want people to use an FQDN, you have to go add that FQDN to a list buried behind a couple of advanced dialogs.