Hacker News Reader

Comment by mitchdoogle | Hacker News Reader

Do people think Firefox doesn't work? I've noticed zero difference between using Firefox and Chrome and I've used both daily for five years or so.

View on HN

For me, there are only subtle differences. I use Chrome for work (golden browser for our web apps) and FF personally.

Google maps has never worked well for me on FF. The "old"/basic interface for Gmail works fine, but the new one was noticeably slower.

It doesn't seem exclusive to Google, however. Many PWA sites (including bank websites!) have, from time to time, inexplicably failed to load certain elements on FF, while loading them without fail on GC.

I don't really fault FF for this, but it is what it is.

The good news is it seems to be getting better. Every month or so, I try these trouble sites in FF, and every month I have fewer "trouble sites".

I’ve personally found that the new gmail interface is simply awful on every browser, just a little less awful on Chrome.

Gmail IMAP interface is fine

Google has an incredible walled garden of apps and things that 'just' work together seamlessly. I remember switching from FF to Chrome years ago as Chrome was measurably faster. The staying power was using Google's entire suite of apps with Chrome. Things like copying and pasting without formatting or searching for strings all contribute to stickiness.

I have to frequently open Google Meet in Chrome because other users can't see my screen while screen sharing using Firefox.

It works fine in Edge as well if you don't want to support that sort of neglectful behavior by Google.

Interestingly, when we had lockdown in my country I tried using Google Meets in Chrome and it just shat itself. Switched to Firefox and Meets worked so much better in Firefox. Very strange...

Chrome opens up files and slows everything down windows 7.

Using chrome once it loads with everything else shutdown seems fast.

Firefox is overall faster because of those issues. But firefox will use too much memory and kill itself in time. But has gotten better at killing itself without killing everything else.

I use Google apps in Edge, and nothing else in Edge. I use Firefox for all other web browsing, and avoid doing anything Google related in Firefox. I won't install Chrome on my machine at all and don't need to - Edge is good enough, now that it's Chromium-based.

I use Edge similarly. I'm glad it's here and it's good because Firefox keeps losing share and I'm glad I have a second browser now from a major vendor that I could live with if developers stop testing with FF or if too many sites are broken using it for any reason.

They didn't manage to fix developer tools for like last 5-7 releases (despite multiple reports of it being broken). Network tab still messes up/merges unrelated requests together, and style editor shows completely garbage content every other reload, like this (probably related issue to the request confusion):

https://megous.com/dl/tmp/33d9622c7e53e3bc.png

https://megous.com/dl/tmp/8b3e50856a913236.png

I still use it as a primary browser even for development, but with issues like this being unresolved for almost a year, it's really hard.

Ever since the rewrite in React, it's really bad. First a massive performance regression (which improved over time, thankfully), but it still has major issues like the above.

One wonders if it's just devtools or if the whole browser is leaking random data everywhere. It certainly doesn't inspire confidence.

I suspect the problem is that firefox sometimes performs poorly. But most power users don't see this problem because they either have firefox when it performs well or because they have a powerful computer.

For reasons I cannot understand, firefox on my 8GB RAM windows surface eats up huge amounts of memory. But it uses very little RAM with the same profile on my much more powerful desktop.

Some extensions have memory leaks. There might be a discrepancy between the extensions you have installed or their versions.

Im unable to book flights with local airlines via firefox because the payment popup gets blocked with no warning. Sure, I can figure out whats going on and use a different browser, but it's terrible UX.

Not even the tiny little box in the right side of the address bar that says a popup was blocked? I've seen blocked pop-ups there before, but never heard of or seen Firefox block a pop-up with absolutely no feedback.

Might be a dhtml (Div) popup, dynamically generated. Those are harder to block.

Chrome offers this quiet magical feature called ‘tab to search’, Firefox allows you to make custom search key shortcuts but you need to make each of them. It’s just not as easy to use and is a killer feature that’s very fast/useful and missed for anyone who uses it and tries to switch away to Firefox.

It’s the only thing that keeps pulling me back to Chrome, as well as many others I’ve seen discuss it in forums over the years.

There’s no Firefox extension to add it and as Firefox users don’t have it they don’t miss it.

Really, sort this, you’ll quietly unlock a bunch more switches.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1177556

I just have duckduckgo as my default search engine, that way I can use the bangs to search almost any site that's even remotely mainstream by starting my search with !w (wikipedia), !y (youtube) !hn (hacker news), !g (google), etc.

There is related functionality built-in to Firefox (since basically forever) you can assign keywords to any installed search provider and then search that specific search engine by prefixing your search with the keyword you assigned. So you could assign !g directly in Firefox options and Firefox will take you directly to Google for that search (no need for the intermediate duckduckgo).

You can add things like YouTube etc as well so long as they have "OpenSearch" metadata. (Presumably what Chrome is using for "tab to search"?) [1]

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-or-remove-search-en...

Firefox is getting rid of, or has already got rid off, OpenSearch integrations[1].

What you're describing is a bookmark substitution search feature that's independent of OpenSearch, and Mozilla calls the feature keyword searches[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSearch#Support

[2] http://kb.mozillazine.org/Using_keyword_searches

My understanding is that Firefox still uses the OpenSearch metadata shallowly as the easiest way to create the "keyword search bookmarks" rather than writing a bookmark by hand (though your second link was what I was looking for on how to do that and it seems quite easy/convenient to do yourself if you had to). I don't believe that shallow auto-bookmark discovery is/will be dropped, they dropped a more complicated add-on/extension-based approach that supported more OpenSearch features.

Thanks for taking the time to explain the change, it looks like you're correct.

NetflixParty is the only extension that I actually use that isn't on Firefox. I wish someone made a clone. I wonder if there's something technical preventing that from happening.

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

how the hell didnt i find this before...

There is Metastream (https://getmetastream.com/), but it doesn't seem as easy to use.

Last year, I was on a Zoom call where I shared my screen, and several web developers asked if I "seriously still use Firefox" as if I was stuck in 2005.

I've had issues with audio on Apple TV glitching out on Firefox. Only thing I use Chrome for

Reply on news.ycombinator.com