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Comment by mbrubeck | Hacker News Reader

* Faster startup, more responsive, faster JavaScript with the new Jaegermonkey JIT.

* New, less cluttered UI.

* Built-in sync of bookmarks/tabs/history/passwords, fully encrypted on the client (unlike Chrome's sync which encrypts passwords only).

* Sync your bookmarks, tabs, history, passwords, and form data to Firefox for Android!

See also this thread for answers from various members of the Firefox team: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/g197r/iama_were_on_the...

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But aren't those all features of Chrome? Wouldn't a happy Chrome user want to know about something FF4 does that Chrome doesn't?

It's very clear that 4 > 3.6, the features you listed are awesome ... they just aren't very appealing to a current Chrome user.

The primary reason to use FF is that you like a particular addon, you like FF's expose over Chrome's, or you like how FF does the location bar (which is why I use FF). There's not a ton of differentiation between the two any more.

I was answering the question from above "what are the differences from the current version?"

As for the differences from Chrome, those are mostly the same as they've always been: Deeper extensibility, more customization points, and made by a non-profit organization dedicated to openness.

Most customization points is the big win for me. I REALLY like to alter my browsers to fit my preferred layout and FF has done quite well at maintaining that capability for me. I get into Chrome and I find myself constantly going "Oh, there's no option for that... Oh, there's no option for that... Oh, there's no option for that... " to the point I close it in frustration yet again.

Absolutely. You would never be able to do something like http://conkeror.org in Chrome. At one point I tried to change some key bindings in Chrome, and I had to spend 2 hours recompiling the whole thing; it was an absolute nightmare.

In fairness, isn't Conkeror more of a fork of Firefox than an extension (though I believe it started as an extension)?

Not quite. Mozilla is a platform with which you can build apps. Firefox is by far the most popular app running on the Mozilla platform, but there are many others, including SongBird, Thunderbird, etc. The bare executable for the Mozilla platform is Xulrunner, and that's what Conkeror uses.

Anyway, the one thing that keeps Firefox competitive is that they built a platform in a fast yet very awkward language, then they built an application on top of that using a much more pleasant, flexible language. None of the other browser vendors understand this; Chrome devs parrot the "but Javascript is too slow to build our UI in" even though they have the fastest JS engine in the world. It boggles the mind and cripples them in the long term for anything other than your standard point-n-grunt interfaces.

Exactly my experience so far, except there's _still_ no decent Firefox replacement for Chrome's Google Quick Scroll. I forget I even use that extension in Chrome until I end up constantly Ctrl + F'ing the hell out of search results pages in Firefox.

You know what this really makes me? A huge fan of lastpass/xmarks (and 1password, but that's because neither lastpass nor 1password has successfully covered everything I want from a password manager, but they seem to complement each other well enough in my use case).

Multi-row tabs. It's not built into FF, but it is available with an add-on. After using multi-row tabs for a while, I can't live without them.

What Firefox has:

1) the Awesomebar, which I love, although some people hate, plus more advanced functionality -- like in Chrome you can't search your history and delete items in the search results, which I think is retarded as your only option is to purge your entire history

It also seems pretty clear that Chrome is built to use the Google Search Engine whenever possible. For example if you search for something in the location bar, Firefox can redirect you to the very first result on Google for that search if it has a high degree of certainty. The Awesomebar is also designed such that you'll do less searching on Google.

However, the ties of Chrome to Google can be seen by the way the browser makes you search on Google, even in cases where a local search in your history would make much more sense.

2) Firefox plugins can do pretty much anything -- Chrome plugins are basically useless. I.e. Firebug can be a Firefox plugin, while on Chrome this had to be baked in. It means Firefox can have things like proper ad-blocking and Delicious integration on the push of a button

3) a non-profit organization behind it -- when dealing with companies and organizations the concept of "trust" applies heavily, and personally I trust that Mozilla looks after my interests much more than I trust Google

> like in Chrome you can't search your history and delete items in the search results, which I think is retarded as your only option is to purge your entire history

Sure you can. Control-H or Menu->History.

> Firefox plugins can do pretty much anything -- Chrome plugins are basically useless.

It's worth noting that Firefox is working on adding Chrome-like 'useless' extensions to their browser.

https://jetpack.mozillalabs.com/index.html

> a non-profit organization behind it

Sure, but remember that they don't run on rainbows and dreams. Mozilla is basically funded by Google affiliate payments.

I do agree about AwesomeBar (miss it) and extension support (though I don't miss any from FF, myself) though.

    Sure you can. Control-H or Menu->History

No you CANNOT.

     Mozilla is basically funded by Google affiliate 
     payments

That doesn't say much or anything at all. Mozilla wasn't founded by Google and could always find other sources of revenue.

Also, Mozilla isn't a public company with shareholders, it's also not a company masked as a non-profit to evade taxes, which means Mozilla's interest isn't profit, just survival. It's a totally different ball game.

EDIT: also about Jetpack, Chrome-like plugins have been available for Firefox for quite some time, you just need to install a plugin -- https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/greasemonkey/

> No you CANNOT.

Well, with elaborate replies like that ... I'm not sure whether I should bother, but: http://i.imgur.com/rxFgd.png

> Greasemonkey

Chrome plugins can do a lot more than Greasemonkey. Why do you think Jetpack exists?

    Well, with elaborate replies like that ...

Perhaps you should bother reading what I wrote first, instead of doing screenshots to prove me wrong?

Take a look at the phrase you yourself quoted ...

    you can't search your history and delete items 
    in the search results

Do I really need to elaborate more on it?

I can,

1) Search my history 2) Delete items in the search results

As shown in that screenshot.

EDIT: Since I can't reply to him (yet?), thank you mbrubeck for replying and explaining the comment instead of just typing "YOU CANNOT."

Once you do a search, the option to remove items disappears. You can delete items or you can search, but you cannot delete items in the search results.

Dude, I know natural language can be ambiguous, but I left no room for ambiguity.

So to summarize -- (1) misread what I said, (2) assumed I'm an idiot who can't find Chrome's History panel and (3) replied with "works on my machine" just to prove me wrong.

If you like Chrome, great, personally I love both browsers; but the issue here is that you should stay as far away as possible from real customers.

Maybe it's just me but every FF UI I've seen looks slightly clunky and this one while better is still the ugliest of the next generation browsers (though Safari gives it a run for it's money).

And the menu the Firefox button in the top left brings up is simply horrible.

It's like someone said "I like the fact that the Windows Start button looks and acts differently to every other menu or dialog anywhere, but wouldn't it be good if it looked a bit more like a menu to make it more confusing and was generally a bit uglier and more amateurish".

Does it finally store passwords in Keychain?

No, sadly, it does not, and the Keychain Integration add-on isn't compatible with FF 4 yet.

Since Fx3, there is that add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/keychain-serv...

The simple answer is no. But the more complicated answer (as a Firefox developer looked into doing this a while ago), is that Keychain is pretty limiting about what you can (easily) store. Our heuristics require that we store more information about logins (for example, the action url). It also restricts protocols, so we can't store password for chrome:// urls there.

Not to say it's never a possibility, but it's not just because we don't want to!

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