Comment by fucking_tragedy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fucking_tragedy | Hacker News Reader

fucking_tragedy

Awesome. I love the direction Firefox is heading now that Chrome is a pain to use.

I was perfectly fine with Chrome's usability until I started getting a `Hold Command + Q` to quit` prompt on my Mac. Before then, I hadn't even considered the possibility that an application could block me from quickly and easily quitting out of it. Now I have to hold the key combo or double tap it to quit Chrome, and it is the only application I have to do that for. It's so annoying.

This bugs me big time, I wonder what was the decision behind such inconvenient UX.

I'm guessing Google apps like Hangouts and notifications. To keep you from accidentally completely closing.

On Windows it silently keeps running in the background most of the time if you have apps or notifications running.

How is it inconvenient? It prevent accidental quits!

I use ctrl-q as my shortcut key in tmux. I can't count how many times I accidentally sent that into the wrong window :) I consider showQuitWarning in Firefox a necessity.

IMO, no application ever should quit from one key combination without confirmation.

I'm surprised that functionality isn't possible to disable, but tbh I really like it. Too many times a finger slip turns Cmd+W into Cmd+Q and suddenly I'm lost a whole pile of tab state, possibly even half-submitted forms. Yuck.

Surely that can be restored? In firefox, if you accidentally close a window, there’s a “Recently closed windows” thing in the history menu you can use that brings back all the tabs.

That is true, however this results in all your tabs getting refreshed. For e.g. ProtonMail, this means you have to login (get out your 2FA device etc) all over again.

It can, and things are better than ever as far as preserving (most) form state, sessions, and scroll positions, but it's not perfect. Just as one example, pages opened on one network (eg at work) won't be able to reload elsewhere unless I take the extra step of connecting to the VPN. This is not the end of the world, but it's an annoying detour when I really just wanted to close that one tab.

And it's so rare that I shut down the whole browser anyway, so it makes sense to me to make it hard to do accidentally.

It's possible to disable as mentioned in another comment.

I worked around the accidental-Command-Q problem in Firefox by setting up a custom keyboard shortcut using the paid app Keyboard Maestro (https://www.keyboardmaestro.com/). I have a macro “Confirm Command-Q to Quit” that intercepts the ⌘Q keystroke, only in Firefox, and instead shows a floating dialog titled “Really quit Firefox?”. The Cancel button in the dialog stops the macro, and the Quit button continues the macro to the next step, which is a Quit Firefox instruction.

Another possible workaround is to go to System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > App Shortcuts and create a new shortcut. You can specify that in the app Firefox, the menu item “Quit Firefox” should have the shortcut ⌥⌘Q. Then a normal ⌘Q should do nothing.

To Disable: Uncheck "Warn Before Quitting" on the "Chrome" menu - in between the Apple menu and "File" menu.

it doesn't help when you're testing via automated software - test runners will open up chromes, then often fail and leave them open, and the 'warn before quitting' is always defaulted to on.

Pretty sure you can choose a profile with specific settings if launching from selenium or cli.

This is extra weird because browsers have become really good at preserving state between closing and restarting.

The real answer to potentially destructive moves is not to ask the user twice, but to let the user easily undo.

It's also to keep chrome apps and notifications working. I use Hangouts a lot. Though I generally deny notifications for anything else. For most anything that I would use persistent I tend to use an external app anyway (even if it's just an electron wrapper).

I actually love this and was waiting for this feature for a long time. I can't count the times I quit chrome by mistake.

You can disable it though.

FWIW, this behavior is trivial to disable (though I agree it should not be on by default: I actually had remembered it not being on by default). It was really important for me, as once a month I would accidentally hit cmd-Q and then sigh the sigh of the damned as I wait for what is effectively a reboot of my entire computer (as the only two things I tend to have open are a terminal and a browser).

Ironically, I love that feature and wish I could have it on my other apps, especially on Firefox.

I've fat fingered Cmd-W and Cmd-Q too many times, and while it's easy to restore, it takes a couple minutes, a lot of bandwidth, and spins the CPU to 100% for a while. Which really sucks when you're on battery.

I use the add-on "Disable Ctrl-Q and Cmd-Q" because of this. To actually quit with the add-on enabled, you must click the Quit Firefox menu item.

Easy to do with Hammerspoon: https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/349766

Firefox: about:config, set browser.showQuitWarning to true

Honestly as much as I dislike chrome the “hold cmd q” behavior has saved me many times and I kind of wish safari did it: cmd-q and cmd-w are very close to each other :)

In what way is Chrome currently "a pain to use"?

It's at least "100% more evil" than other browsers.

Google doesn't need to plaster the world with Google Analytics if it can get most people to use a browser that phones home.

From around the time of the Windows 8 transition I used Microsoft Edge as much as possible. Firefox was at a low ebb then.

I switched back to Firefox when Microsoft announced it would use the Chromium rendering engine for Edge. At that point Firefox had improved performance a lot and I've mostly been happy with it.

The minus of it however is that many developers are choosing to only support Chrome. For instance I worked at a company that had developed a data analysis tool with a React front end and it didn't work with either Firefox or Edge (or Safari) so I had to install Chrome for work. I don't think there was a deep technical reason why that was, but rather they did not want to go through the effort to test on other browsers. Our customers weren't clamoring for wider browser compatibility so that was OK for the business.

From time to time I find public web pages that have problems w/ Firefox, although more frequently I find pages that don't like it that I block ads at the "hosts" level. Some sites now use trackers as part of the authentication/anti-fraud process and that can be a problem.

Believe it or not I hardly ever log into Google. I have a gmail account that I barely use, but when i do I IMAP into it with em client. I am really done with Adsense, Adwords, Analytics, and all that. If I am working for somebody that is using Google services I will use it, but otherwise I can go a month or two w/o logging into Google.

> It's at least "100% more evil" than other browsers.

oh god, it's like identity politics but "vim vs emacs!" flavored

Chrome regularly tries to trick me into logging into my Google account via Chrome. If you try to disable this functionality, updates will include new dark patterns to trick you into logging in anyway. Now if I log into any Google service, Chrome will magically log into my Google account, too. When I open Chrome, I'm greeted with a new tab with a login screen for my Google account.

I don't want to have mess with a bunch of settings just to turn off anti-user features and tracking. I am willing to mess with a bunch of settings if it enhances the functionality of the application I'm using.

Open 'about:config' in Firefox and look at all of the ways Firefox's behavior can be configured. I run my own Firefox Sync instance, because Firefox is just that customizable. Google regularly removes customization options from Chrome. I used to be able to Cast non-HTTPS resources from Chrome, then I had to enable a setting buried in its experimental features to do so. Now the feature is "enabled" in the settings, but after Chrome auto-updated a few times, the feature doesn't work at all.

I can no longer install Chrome extensions from GitHub, even though I could a few weeks ago. Google decides to take extensions off of their Chrome Web Store, and then make it difficult to use extensions they don't approve of.

Firefox uses less memory and CPU than Chrome does, I'm on a MacBook, so anything that unnecessarily drains my battery is a pain to use.

V8 did this a while ago.

As far as I know V8 has a generated interpreter and an optimizing JIT (Turbofan).

In Firefox we now have a generated interpreter + a Baseline JIT on top of a mostly shared code base. I think that's a pretty nice design/advantage.

Fair point!

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