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Comment by Lazare | Hacker News Reader

I switched to Chrome from Firefox years ago because Chrome has a better UX (faster, snappier, cleaner UI). A couple years ago I tried to switch back to Firefox (right after the Quantum project landed, and Firefox was meant to be a lot faster), but found FF to still be bloated, slow, and painful to use.

A couple weeks ago I made another try to switch back to FF, and I have found the experience to be very pleasant this time; desktop FF on both Windows and MacOS are, for me, better than Chrome. I recommend others give Firefox a try.

(There are a few reasons why you might want to: Privacy, fighting mono-culture, recent decisions by Google to neuter ad blocking addons, a general aversion to the power of the largest tech companies, just chasing the latest and fastest browser, a fondness for novelty or contrarianism. Some of those reasons may resonate; others may not, but if any of them do, give it a shot!)

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I had the same experience. Switched to Chrome from Firefox years ago, tried and was disappointed by the initial Quantum release, tried Firefox again with the “Chrome is killing uBlock Origin” announcement, very pleased this time.

My main gripe with Firefox at the moment is Sync. It just doesn’t sync everything you need. My Firefox profile is highly customized, with a lot of extensions that all have their own complex config. Sync will keep the actual extensions synced, but not their settings. You have to rely on manual import/export features provided by the extensions themselves. Some first party extensions (eg Containers) don’t even give you that option.

You can get some of that by syncing your profile folder directly, but it’s very fragile. It hasn’t played nice with the generic folder syncing tools I’ve tried.

I think this is painful because Firefox really encourages customization, and it’s really useful! I just don’t want to have to keep track of that customization on every device. I trust Firefox Sync’s security model and want to do more with it.

I believe extensions have to explicitly add support for synchronising settings. For example, uBlock Origin supports Firefox Sync: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Cloud-storage

Cool, I’ll dig into this.

Would be helpful if the Firefox store made it clear if extensions support this. Also, why do some first-party extensions ignore it??

Also: there are other things sync still misses, like config.

For about:config, I put all my rules in a user.js file. Make that file in a synced folder (Dropbox, Nextcloud, Syncthing, etc.), go to your FF profile folder, and in there make a symlink to the actual synced user.js.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/User.js_file

Alternatively every about:config option has a corresponding option that enables sync for it. But that gets messy with many options.

https://superuser.com/questions/466291/firefox-sync-aboutcon...

> For about:config, I put all my rules in a user.js file. Make that file in a synced folder (Dropbox, Nextcloud, Syncthing, etc.), go to your FF profile folder, and in there make a symlink to the actual synced user.js.

That's exactly what I did, except I just forked the ghacks-user.js user.js file with the changes I needed

I then made a desktop branch, and an android branch.

https://github.com/dngray/ghacks-user.js/tree/fx-desktop

https://github.com/dngray/ghacks-user.js/tree/fx-android

The main reason I'll never use Chrome is because on Android that means no extensions whatsoever, meaning I'd have to give up uBlock and uMatrix. It's also why I wouldn't buy an iPhone (Firefox on iOS isn't allowed to have extensions).

A user.js file can be deployed on Android https://github.com/ghacksuserjs/ghacks-user.js/wiki/1.6-Fire... (I use the non-rooted instructions).

On my desktop I have it hooked in with my bootstrap script. I use Yadm https://yadm.io/

    #!/usr/bin/env bash

    firefox() {
        local -n branches=$1
        local b p d="$XDG_CONFIG_HOME"/firefox/ghacks-user.js

        for p in "${!branches[@]}"
        do
            b=${branches["$p"]}
            printf 'Configuring "%s" on "%s"\n' "$p" "$b"
            ln -sf "$XDG_CONFIG_HOME"/firefox/chrome/userChrome.css ~/.mozilla/firefox/"$p"/chrome/userChrome.css
            git --git-dir="$d/.git" --work-tree="$d" checkout "$b" &&
            cp "$d/user.js" ~/.mozilla/firefox/"$p"/user.js
        done
    }

The function takes in an array:

    firefox_data_path="mozilla/firefox.json"
    declare -A fx_profiles

    while read -r profile; read -r branch; do
        fx_profiles[$profile]=$branch
    done < <(jq -r '.[] | .profile, .branch' "$template_data_path/$firefox_data_path")

    firefox fx_profiles

Which simply reads in a bunch of profiles and what branch they are supposed to be from a json file:

    [
      {
        "profile": "user.default",
        "branch": "fx-desktop"
      }
    ]

The storage is more limited for synced extension data than for unsynced data.

IMO this is quite unfortunate, and is mostly a consequence of the implementation of extension storage sync being done separately from the rest of sync (which in retrospect was a mistake, but at the time that wasn't clear). Also, the limits are copy-pasted directly from the limits chrome places on sync, so it's possible there are compatibility concerns as well.

For config (assuming you mean prefs in about:config), you can add your own prefs to be synced with about:config. If you add a new boolean pref with a value of true using the pattern `services.sync.prefs.sync.<pref you want to sync here>` it will be synced. e.g. to sync `browser.foo.bar` you'd create `services.sync.prefs.sync.browser.foo.bar`.

Disclaimer: I work on Firefox sync.

[0]: In the future this may be more complex, and you may need to flip an additional pref to get this behavior for non-default prefs.

> For config (assuming you mean prefs in about:config)

And userChrome/Content.css... looks like I’ll need to dropbox those.

Editing css was essential to make the switch from Vivaldi to FF - yesterday! Getting TreestyleTab et al. to feel like Vivaldi with vertical tabs required some fiddling: sidebar without menu, hidden top tabs, darker text color, etc.

In any case, it’s my new daily driver and I'm quite satisfied so far. Even set DDG as the default while at it.

Hmm, I don't think many have requested we sync user{Chrome,Content}.css. It's possible we'd accept a patch to sync them (I'd be for it, at least), but it's not trivial since we don't already have file syncing code.

Syncing them with dropbox and symlinking does sound to me to be the most reasonable.

Glad you're satisfied other than that!

Oh that’s pretty cool. I’ll try that.

I just assumed that this behavior would apply to everything once I turned sync on, and then was disappointed when it didn’t work. I had no idea it was an optional feature.

I guess it doesn’t fit the key-value paradigm, but this feature would be a lot more discoverable if there was a “sync?” Attribute next to each about:config item.

Being a global persisted key value store, about:config has a lot of things stored in it that.... do not necessarily make sense syncing, hence it being opt-in. Sync is guilty of this too, and will store things like your last sync time in about config, for example. Clearly not meaningful to sync directly.

A checkbox like you describe was actually discussed in the past, but at this point it’s unlikely. The current design of letting any synced machine change any pref on any remote machine (effectively) has dubious security implications, and has gained an additional hoop you must jump through in nightly.

Oh I absolutely detested this as well.

Containers is one of my favourite add-ons, and I have it highly customized. But I have to set it up everytime from scratch on a different computer - there's no sync even though Containers is from Mozilla themselves!

Edit: replied to wrong comment

Yeah this is exactly the problem.

I think you meant to reply to a different comment.

I was lamenting the lack of sync support for the Multi-account Containers add-on.

There is a containers sync add on, not from Mozilla. Doesn't always work.

Yes. Sync isn't so good. Now I am going to create a list of FF minuses

I’d be interested to see an analysis of how it compares to Chrome sync. I don’t think Chrome necessarily has a better solution for extension preference syncing, but I only missed it once I went all-in on Firefox containers.

Don't have analytics. Just my experience with bookmarks and passwords is better with Chrome

Post it to /r/firefox when you're done!

You can sync your custom prefs, by creating a 'services.sync.prefs.sync.[pref name]' preference set to true for each pref you want to sync. Cumbersome, but probably automatable.

There is a container sync add on. I my opinion it should be built into the browser.

Firefox 67 is switchworthy. I've used nothing but Chrome since forever and I've never been a fan of FF until 67 came out, it's definitely worthy of trying it out for a week.

I haven't used Chrome since FF 67 and I'm not missing it.

Yes, FF 67 does seem to be a whole new beast.

I've used Firefox since practically forever. I haven't noticed any major changes in recent versions.

Except for when they briefly broke all the plugins.

I've been on FF since quantum (Windows and Android), and I've been mighty impressed by the continual improvements.

Some websites just don't work on FF, so I have a chrome installation. Even a bare-bones (only 1Password and uBlock O) Chrome feels much slower than FF. Page loads in FF are near-imperceptible, but Chrome has blatantly obvious page-blanks during loading.

It really has come a long way, and I'm really looking forward to servo.

Containers and privacy are the main reasons I'm hooked to Firefox now. Maybe chrome will get containers too, but there's no point if they are tracking users across containers. But as they are on par in terms of performance I see no reason to switch back to chrome.

Are container tabs reliably preserved across restarts and upgrades now? They're a great idea, but I tried them out a while ago and soon lost a bunch of stuff.

Yes, they are preserved and it works great.

This kind of post comes up every few weeks here on HN. I also revisit FF every once in a while, last time being when all the news went about Chrome possibly breaking ad-blockers. Chromes UX is still better than FF, IMO.

I think this is just what you are accustomed to. I use FF as my main browser. Anytime I use Chrome it drives me nuts because the UX sucks. But, the truth is that Chrome's UX probably doesn't really suck, I'm just not accustomed to it.

I can see that in a lot of cases. Accustomed, sure. I consider myself pretty adaptable, but still prefer Chromes UX over FF. If FF could be tuned easily to act "exactly" like Chrome, that might ease the transition for a lot of people. Honestly though, I also hate the way FF draws it's windows and widgets. It still feels like it has that just barely out of the 90's UI vibe to me. So aside from how it set's itself up by default for things, I also find it quite an eye sore. Opinions may vary.

The funny thing is a lot of what makes Chrome seem faster are subtle hacks. They show an empty window while it all loads so does Firefox now. Firefox used to only show the window once everything rendered. Firefox was a lot faster at rendering web pages from my experience before they changed this. I am sure theres other subtle changes out there.

I remember after Quantum pages would render HTML so fast and asynchronously the CSS hadnt loaded just yet. Then a split second would occur where the CSS would kick in and the page would be styled.

Is progressive rendering really a "hack" at this point? I mean everything you said is correct, just feels like at this point progressive rendering is the web-norm and lacking it is lacking a basic piece of functionality.

It's not entirely a hack, but it's a perception trick that makes Chrome seem faster despite it not rendering as quickly as FF.

Firefox is fast, not noticeably faster though as Chrome seems to be a bit more aggressive with caching, and Chrome has better UI. I also prefer Chrome's autocomplete and search bar. Firefox is good, maybe even technically better these days, but Chrome is still more pleasant to use.

> Chrome has better UI

if you are talking about buttons next to the address bar, like the home button, then you can customize that area and let it look nearly identical to Chrome.

With CSS you can even have tiny tabs like Chrome.

Firefox is great now, especially on mobile. Having all my desktop extensions on mobile is worth it alone. I've also done some rough measurements that Firefox uses about 1/3 the battery life of chrome at idle with my normal "work" tabs open. This is on both Android and MacOs.

On some sites FF is slower, but these tend to be Google properties or giant Enterprise shitshow behemoths (jira)

Edge Canary is line the best of both worlds. Nice speed and decent ui.

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