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Comment by theelous3 | Hacker News Reader

The question is, why haven't you quit already? The only things it offers others don't, are anti consumer vendor lock in nonsense like hangouts and google earth. (Not sure about hangouts and meet these days, mozilla likely made it work, but not for lack of scumbag google trying otherwise).

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Because it has bugs that make it unusable for some people (e.g developers) - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1628162

The difference being that when Chrome is unusable for developers (such as hiding the URL!), it's always a feature not a bug?

If I need the whole URL visible at all times as a developer, that's an hour of chrome extension writing to make it always viewable.

Can I pull that off in FF?

I'm not sure I understand. Are you asking whether Firefox supports browser extensions? If so, the answer is yes. Firefox has always had extensions including epic breakthroughs such as Adblock (Plus) from 2002 and Firebug from 2006. (Google Chrome has had extensions since 2010.)

> If I need the whole URL visible at all times as a developer, that's an hour of chrome extension writing to make it always viewable.

Interesting. Other comments in this thread indicate that the only extension that can do this has its ID hard-coded in the url parsing code to be whitelisted.

An extension can get window.location and can then paint it anywhere on the page the developer chooses, or put it in a drop down, or send it to an external service via an HTTP request and beam it to the moon, if the developer wishes.

I would also add that, to personal use, Firefox has some features that seem half-baked. Like:

1 - Selecting multiple tabs and saving to bookmarks: you can't add to an existing folder without creating a subfolder.

2 - Add keywords to bookmarks: no way to filter bookmarks that have keywords. Also, when typing on the address bar, the keyword doesn't get highlighted or anything

3 - can't add a custom search engine. You have to add its extension, if available. Or add as a bookmark with a keyword, but then you won't be able to see a list of all search engines...

> 3 - can't add a custom search engine. You have to add its extension, if available. Or add as a bookmark with a keyword, but then you won't be able to see a list of all search engines...

As a full time, happy Firefox user, this annoys me to no end, increasingly so as there are more and more competing search engines that I want to try.

I’m pretty sure that you used to be able to add arbitrary search engines too (by specifying the search URL with %q for the search query). It’s amazing to me that they would remove this.

> more and more competing search engines that I want to try

Not only that, but on Chrome I have Amazon, Youtube, Reddit, all setup as search engines. For reddit, besides 'rdt' for general search, I also added keywords for searching inside /r/anime, /books, /ps4, and a few other subs I occasionally search.

I also think they used to have this, as Chrome still has. But no idea why they changed it.

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