Hacker News Reader

Comment by agumonkey | Hacker News Reader

Few monthes ago I forced myself to fully drop Chromium. Painful. But I don't have chrome on any laptops (only my smartphone). I don't regret it.

Google is stringing bad news after bad news.

View on HN

I've switched to Firefox but I have to keep a chrome engine browser (Brave) because some websites just refuse to work.

FYI, you can report non-working sites to https://webcompat.com

what was painful?

Not the OP, but password management and syncing in Firefox is a bit clunky.

I use and love the send to device feature and password syncing (I use FF as my main drive for desktop and mobile), but they are quite slow compared to Chrome. I get it that Chrome is syncing aggressively, which would have been nice in Firefox too, even if it eats up my mobile data.

Chrome web view is also the default web view in Android.

They completely reworked password manager in version 70. Try FF Developer Edition or Beta?

https://i.imgur.com/o2nOB8h.png

I use and love Firefox, but password storage really shouldn't be handled by the browser. They've never done a good job at it. I use and recommend Bitwarden wholeheartedly.

syncing is alright, I admit I never liked it, but it works enough to do the basics stuff (automatic plugin install, shared bookmarks) without caring much more. Maybe it's amazing and I just never learned about it.

Google hangouts video uses about 50% of CPU. For many people hangouts is part of everyday work life.

That reminds me of this story: https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871238922776576

Hangouts / Meet is terrible in all browsers but you're right, it's less terrible in Chromium. I keep Brave installed just for Meet.

I, since day one, always felt chromium UI was slicker than any other web browser out there. Slighty less lag, slightly simpler overall. Something that I love about software in general.

Having switched to Firefox three months ago, the three things that I miss most are,

1. The integration with Google Translate, which I understand would be difficult for Firefox to replicate

2. The ability to right-click on an image to search by image, which is probably similarly difficult to add to Firefox. [Edit: Thanks, vatueil, I will give that a try.]

3. How Chrome is less picky about what text it identifies as a url. E.g. If you highlight wpc.ncep.noaa.gov/qpf/day1-2.shtml in Chrome and right-click, you can navigate to that address, but Firefox doesn't realize that it is a url.

However, I only miss these conveniences a couple times a month, so I can live without them.

Image Search Options is an add-on for Firefox that lets you right-click an image to search for it on Google as well as other image search sites. Also available as a Chrome extension.

- Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/image-search-option...

- Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/image-search-optio...

- Website: https://saucenao.com/tools/

You can drag and drop any text to the tab bar, it's the same as typing it into the address bar

For translation in Firefox check the im translator extension:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/imtranslator/

Especially the inline translation feature is very handy if you are learning a foreign language and want to see the texts side by side.

I'll also have to add for Mac

4. no Picture-In-Picture support, and 5. no native trackpad zoom support

Even simple stuff like finding text on a page... I use the highlighting of occurrences in the scrollbar WAY more than I ever realized.

The breaking point for me to go back to Chrome a few months back was Mapbox was chewing up SO MUCH MORE resources in FF. As someone who does a lot of GIS dev in Mapbox that was a no-go =/

So, if you had piece of software that worked fine on Windows and ran like crap on Linux, you would blame Linux?

I mean... in some ways yeah?

I have to run a dedicated Win10 box because native Office automation is a huge part of what I do. I've had to go to lengths to get the LTSB (and am working on the LTSC) license because it's the only version of Win10 that's controllable + secure. I also have a 2015 MBP for my Adobe Creative Suite workflow. All of my dev infra is Debian 10. Best tool for the job yo.

I'm not going to bury my head in the sand and use tools that are only 20% performant because "ideals". I'll do my best to switch over (which I did for over a month) and if it's not working out I'm gonna ditch. I have to use Chrome until FF gets on the same level. I'm a startup engineer - I can't afford to neuter my productivity, I have to use the best tool for the job.

Time is money. Period.

Different browsers for different tasks. 99% of surfing happens on firefox. Some sites like vimeo only work in chrome.

Vimeo works with youtube-dl. Probably VLC.

Video viewing (as opposed to previewing) really belongs outside the browser anyway.

I'm a heavy YouTube consumer and this just seems like a headache with extra steps/complication, while shooting features like live streaming + chat in the head. Also it's a normal use case to view videos in your browser.

I rarely view livestreams, nor use chats. I don't know if there are alternatives to either.

Using mps-youtube to search, curate, manage, and play lists of videos, without relying on YouTube's server-side management is a real bonus.

Hooking mpv into the stream more smoothly would be useful, and I don't have a good method yet. But given my primary use-case (listening, audio-only), the fact that in the case of video and audio you really can only watch/listen to a single performance at a time, and the fact that in general what's most useful for me is to have a queue of content that I'm going to watch/listen to, in sequence, non-browser tools turn out to be far more useful than browser-based ones.

Most especially when you throw auto-play and advertising into the mix, and find yourself with multiple auto-playing tabs amongst ... well, I'm embarassed to say just how many browser tabs I typically have open, but it's a lot.

WFM. YMMV.

Yep - tried going to a hybrid solution but the thing is 80% of my utilization of a browser is working on my startup, with the additional 20% being "general surfing" (ie: reddit, HN, blogs etc.)

If my split was different I'd feel quite different about it... I just need Hangouts, Mapbox, YouTube, etc to work 100% of the time without headache. Also running two browsers was difficult because it's like "where's that darn tab!!!" half the time ha.

My solution to this crap is to eventually do something like a pihole setup upstream from the browser and call it a day.

I think this is missing the point. Assigning blame doesn't really matter - one works for his use case and one doesn't. When you're trying to get work done the path of least resistance is more preferable than using software that performs poorly because of your ideals.

But to answer your question: If they are based on the same code, yes. I don't see why you wouldn't.

But they fundamentally cannot be based on the same code if you go deep enough. The system calls / API are different, so the implementations have to diverge at some point.

Historically that has been seen as a Linux issue- while I agree its frustrating that web developers don't always test with Firefox, games/software not working on Linux was something the Linux community tried to fix with projects like WINE. Even now, Valve is doing more work for Linux compatibility for games than most studios.

Report the Mapbox issue to Mozilla.

I personally use Session Buddy on Chromium to keep tabs (no pun intended) on what windows are open and what tabs are inside. I save and restore my sessions using this extension as well. I haven't found any suitable replacement extension for Firefox that works like this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com