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Comment by azdv | Hacker News Reader

Interesting, I just moved back to Firefox after many years of using Chrome.

I have to admit, it has gotten a lot faster recently, Firefox sync is working very well, and the Firefox Android app is a pleasure to use (being able to install uBlock origin is a huge plus).

Anything else I missed on Chrome was easily solved by an addon, or a small tweak on userChrome.css (customizing the browser interface by overriding its CSS is amazing btw).

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I can’t solve highlighting search results in the scroll bar, and apparently I search a surprising amount and am absolutely crippled without scroll bar highlighting, so I’ll stick to Chrome until I can’t (e.g. when content blocking is crippled).

>> ... highlighting search results in the scroll bar...

This. I find any browser that doesn't do that to be unusable. The alternative, in long documents or source code, is to blindly hit NEXT and visit all locations where a search term is found rather than scrolling quickly to see the different context regions.

I tried a plug-in or two but they were not nearly as functional as the native Chrome experience.

Glad I’m not insane, or not the only one insane. Whenever I read one of these highly-voted “I switched to Firefox and nothing’s degraded” post I wonder if I’m the only one searching on web pages, or if I’m the only one whose productivity is massively boosted by knowing where search results are located and how they are clustered at a glance. But then, modern code editors do tend to have this feature, so apparently it is important to a non-negligible audience.

> modern code editors do tend to have this feature, so apparently it is important to a non-negligible audience

Sorry, but as far as the modern browsers are concerned, we coders are a negligible market to cater for. The number of non-coder browser-users is orders magnitude higher than the number of coders.

Not saying coders are a non-negligible audience (although I’d say coders are a non-negligible segment of Firefox user base). My assumption is that the percentage of coders who value scroll bar highlighting is comparable to the percentage of those among all web users who read and search web pages of nontrivial length, since there’s hardly anything about this feature that’s specifically beneficial to coding.

This and the fact that I heard all the “switched to Firefox and nothing’s degraded” comments from coders, and upvoted by coders.

One thing no browsers I'm aware of does right is re-highlighting matches after clicking a link. Firefox keeps the search bar open, but you still need to re-trigger it to update the match count and highlight. Chrome just closes it, sigh, although that is a more accurate UI for the behavior.

Strangely I've never had a single use for this, next and back have been fine. What use case do you have where this is critical?

On a super long page (like forum post or comment thread, etc.), highlighting keywords on the scroll bar shows clustering of the find target and help you jump to the relevant conversation.

Getting harder to do that with all the Infinite scroll going around, #NotAFan

There is an extension [0] that kinda (highlights are next to the scrollbar) fixes that. Just in case you didn’t know.

[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/highlightall/...

I’ve tried every tangentially related addon at least twice and they’re all pretty terrible.

TIL. So funny, I've been using Chrome since the beginning, and I've never noticed this feature, and I search all the time. I am now switching between Firefox and Chrome among various laptops, and I am impressed with Firefox. At some point, Firefox may become my dominant browser.

I afraid that day may never come

> Firefox may become `my` dominant browser.

I think you misread that

I use chrome strictly for work nowadays. Hard to beat its speed and search features, like you mentioned. I'm mostly just visiting stack overflow, git repos, the occasional random site from a google search.

I don't login anywhere (including the browser itself) I don't need to for work, I don't use any extensions, and I don't mix work with personal stuff.

For anything not work however, Firefox all the way. Keep the data off google's servers as much as I can.

This. I've tried using FF for work as well but given I work a lot with Google web properties, Firefox is just a drag there. Don't know if Google's deliberately slowing it down or what but there's a very solid performance difference there.

I literally just noticed Chrome did this after reading this post. lol

It is mind-boggling that people find their browser experience “crippling” without a feature like scroll bar highlighting. Is it hyperbole, or are you unable to cope in e.g., PDF readers as well? Is your line of work in visually investigating the appearance of words in 1000 page HTML documents?

Where did you get the idea that my PDF readers don’t have this feature? You might want to look into a better PDF reader... (Having a dedicated bar with results grouped by page is basically equivalent.)

Btw, I can code in TextEdit too, but I don’t because I have programmer’s text editors. Same goes for a web browser and its convenience features.

this is not the same. textedit isn’t a window into your personal life, chrome is. and because of some simple feature you’ve decided to throw away privacy. i agree with the parent here, this is ridiculous

Nah, I never managed to start using Chrome because of all the small stuff that is missing so I can clearly sympathize even if I personally dislike Chrome.

For me I cannot understand how people can choose to use a browser that doesn't support tree style tabs. I'll gladly sacrifice searcy result markers in the scrollbar as long as I have Firefox extensions.

There are such feature different people like.

A feature I cannot do without is the web developer console; much of the modern web pages are bad without it.

The older XPCOM-based extensions also are more powerful than the WebExtensions and can do many more things (I don't like the design of XPCOM, but nevertheless WebExtensions isn't very good either). Such as, I can alter the behaviour of the location bar; I don't like the default behaviour and I want it to treat my entry as a relative URL (rather than trying to add the scheme automatically or treat it as a search query), so I programmed it to do that.

there’s a difference between a dev console, which is required for web developers and something that draws a line in the scroll bar. You can easily live without the later and there are absolutely no workflows requiring it. grandparent is giving up privacy for a line in the scroll bar.

OK, although note that I am not a web developer. The dev console is not only useful for web developers, but for other users too.

> Firefox sync is working very well

Been using it for years and years, I never could adopt Chrome. First when it came out I tried it, but no adblocker, then when there was one, it was too crippled, my guess is that this was intentional since they're going back to crippling adblockers. Now we have network level adblockers which I think is the best approach.

I only use Chrome cause some kiosk-like application I'm developing will ship through Chrome (not Electron) / WebKit. Also my boss prefers to see it, so I demo with Chrome mainly, but I do all my real browsing on Firefox. I'm a geek / developer so I have Firefox and Chrome on every system I have. Except on Android, unless it's preinstalled for me, I wont get it.

Also happy with my move to Firefox, it surpassed my expectations. Two (small) pain points have been:

- customizing userChrome.css .. It was a bit time consuming to figure out first (I wanted to remove the top bar and use vertical tabs). Happy to be able to do it, but it's not exactly user-friendly.

- Rejection of Windows local certificates store that requires fiddling with a setting to enable. If my certificate store is compromised Firefox is not going to save me. I don't recommend it over Chrome at work since we have one of these for a local server and I'd rather not generate support tickets.

Both of these are not part of Firefox Sync and require manual handling on each PC.

I just did a little googling, and it appears that Firefox supports group policy settings that can cause it to use system root certs[1], so if it's not working, it may be because the domain administrators haven't bothered to support it.

1: https://github.com/mozilla/policy-templates/blob/f972ec60de7...

Indeed, but I also count that as a support ticket!

Well, I would counter that if you want to use a new application (Firefox) with the local server, there should probably be a support ticket to at least ask if they believe it should function correctly.

While you probably can assume Firefox will mostly work, there's decades of history saying you probably shouldn't, given the state of enterprise web apps. To be safe, I wouldn't assume Firefox would work any better than lynx for an internal app if neither are listed as supported (and the same goes for every browser).

On Firefox, one thing that really bothers me still is that it's impossible to remove a root domain entry from the omnibox.

Like if I type "re" it completes to reddit.com even though I've deleted that entry. Chrome will respect the deletion and complete to reddit.com/r/all.

I don't know how exactly it works, but I do not have that problem.

Yes. That's one of the few annoyances I have with Firefox. I have to use a local app where the root domain URL results in an IIS error page. Annoying, this always appears in the "Awesome bar" auto-completion list before the URLs I want to go to.

On the other hand, I like the meta-characters that can be used to modify the search results: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-autocomplet... (though I wish they were easier to remember).

it's literally the same engine as chrome. the only reason i use chrome is for the dev tools.

FF just got web socket inspectors so I really don't know what chrome dev tools has now. Everything about ff dev tools is better. Especially looking at css layouts.

As a web dev, I find the FF dev tools a good bit less performant, but I still try to use it always without reverting to Chrome.. The one feature I have not found in FF dev tools is Search, this is very handy for find random JavaScript on a JS heavy site.

Edit: This post prompted me to Google for it: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Debugger/How_...

Move along, nothing to see.. :-\

Also, Network full-test search is now in the Network panel

Well, I need to try the FF dev tools again, it's been about a year since I did and they were missing some critical things.

Looking good, will give it another go.

This has finally allowed me to switch. I’ve been trying to since quantum came out two years ago, but this was always a deal breaker.

Firefox is generally still a little buggier and less performance in my experience, but not so much that I want to switch back. Hopefully they can stay relevant.

CSS is better in Firefox. They also used to ship a web audio api debugger. The new scratchpad is nice too. Does 80% of what I need.

But Chromes debugger and performance analysis still is a lot more capable.

No it's not.

It's better to provide facts and references rather than just making opposing statements.

The burden of proof is for the original statement ("it's literally the same engine"), not the counter.

Yes but a blunt counterstatement doesnt make for good reading. Far better is to provide some substantiation so everyone can learn as your more highly voted siblings did!

The dev tools available in the Firefox developer edition are honestly way better than chrome's in every possible way (as far as I'm concerned) recently switched myself and couldn't be happier!

Firefox uses the Gecko engine, while Chrome uses Blink. The engines don't even have a shared ancestor.

OP may be confusing Edge/Brave/Opera with Firefox here, so I can't really blame them for having had the impression that Firefox and Chrome share the same engine.

And in at least one regard it's entirely true: on iOS, everything uses WebKit.

“Originally” if I recall correctly, Chrome was a fork of firefox right? That is a long time ago though!

Chrome was never a fork of Firefox.

If anything, it was a fork of Konqueror.

Nope. It was a fork of WebKit which was a fork of KHTML, the engine powering Konqueror. KHTML was developed by the KDE team.

Edit: It was widely speculated that Apple would use gecko for Safari and a shock when they announced they would use the relatively little known KHTML engine. The decision was based on KHTML having much cleaner code. I haven't looked at the Mozilla code in many years, but it was pretty gnarly back then. Lots of old cruft from the Netscape days. In comparison, KHTML was beautiful.

I went looking into this, and it appears that I was confused. Google was a big contributor to Firefox in the early naughties, which is the period I was thinking of. Chrome didn't come out until a good while later.

Ken Kocienda's book "Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs" has more details about the Safari team's evaluation of Mozilla code and KHTML. Ken was engineer #2 on the Safari team.

Chrome started out as a fork of Safari, or at least WebKit.

Safari was never opensource

Yes, but WebKit was, and "Safari" might be more widely known as a name.

Have you tried Firefox's dev tools in Firefox 71? As far as I can tell they're way better than Chrome's.

Has firefox solved its long standing issue with the rendering of radio buttons?

Maybe. If you refer to a more specific issue, it's easier to give a definitive answer though.

As in, it doesnt render the buttons at all. Just leaves a blank area where the button is supposed to be. I wasn't detailed because I assumed everyone knew about it based on the many comments I encountered online while searching for a fix. Anyway, I only bring it up because thats what is preventing me from going full firefox.

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