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Comment by cooljacob204 | Hacker News Reader

I'm finding more and more that it might finally be time to switch back to Firefox.

Is Google still planning to destroy adblock with Manifest V3?

The time to switch back to Firefox was years ago. But better late than never.

The only asterisk to that statement would be if OP was a Mac user. Using Firefox for reddit and youtube nets me 4 hours of battery life on a 2020 13 inch MacBook Pro, while safari will get my 6.5-8 hours with the same usage.

Some years ago Firefox was near-unusable on MacBooks because it started spinning fans like crazy after a few minutes, eating battery in 30 minutes. But it had improved immensely since that time.

Speaking of Safari, maybe it's a matter of preference or habit, but for me it's has a very weird UX

It's because mac doesn't support vp8 hardware decoding. use this extension to force youtube to use h264 https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/h264ify/

Blame apple

> Blame apple

and Google, for not doing the minimum thing they could have done and served you the best encoding for the platform.

It is almost if the companies you actually give you money to (or eyeballs) do not care at all for your interests.

Encrypted SNI is another feature which is completely absent in chrome but available in firefox.

That and the containers are why I'm back on Firefox!

Work on Encrypted Client Hello (the current iteration of encrypted SNI) continues and you should anticipate that Chrome will deploy it as the draft approaches Last Call perhaps next year.

Because of the Don't Stand Out principle one of the most important factors for success of ECH is the deployment of ECH GREASE, which is to say, willing clients just claiming they want to do ECH even when talking to servers that don't really have any hidden services at all. Chrome's participation in that probably makes a real difference to whether anybody actually tries to block it.

Worth noting that it's currently disabled by default. You can enable it by going to about:config and setting network.security.esni.enabled to true.

I'm finding more and more that i want to move to a Chrome fork (Brave) but TreeStyleTabs (Sidebery) keeps me with FF.

What advantages does brave have other than their weird ad replacement thing? I’ve weirdly moved to Microsoft edge from Firefox for something’s recently. Unfortunately the chrome developer tools are awful.

Chromium browser which still generally has a performance edge, but without some types of Google's tracking like the browser level sign in or the recent example of Google exempting themselves from clear cookies.

I use both quite a bit and do not notice any difference in performance. You may be able to tell via benchmarks, but real-world performance is very similar.

But is that performance difference actually important? I can accept a minor impact as a tradeoff to support a more diverse ecosystem and weaken the Google monolith just a little.

> Unfortunately the chrome developer tools are awful

You are literally the first person I've ever heard say this. I've heard a ton of people say they want to switch to Firefox, but can't leave the Chrome dev tools behind. Mind telling us why you find Firefox dev tools superior?

Is it possible to publish extension to Brave without Google authorizing it? As an extension builder I tried in the past and didn't manage to do that.

No, Brave still uses the Chrome Web Store.

I stay with Firefox for a lot of reasons, but the main one is this - I am so used to TreeStyleTabs I can't imagine going with anything else. Do any other browsers support something similar?

Opera has tree tabs extension (which I'm using for a long time, but only for really threaded sessions), chrome idk. Not sure how much different it is, but the basic functionality you'd expect from tree editor is there.

The TST repo actually has a number of similar projects for Chromium and specifically Vivaldi on it's repo: https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab#similar-projects

I love Brave and use the Sidewise extension to mimic TST. [1]

It isn't perfect though. My main issues are that it's a separate window so sometimes clicking on the side window or the main window draws focus instead of clicking the thing under my cursor. Also the search bar in the sidebar keeps getting accidentally activated when I hit command-T. So I ended up inspecting and deleting the element. It's not the most elegant solution, but it works well enough.

I've tried FF a couple times a year ever since Quantum came out, but on my MBP it's just much slower than Brave.

1: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sidewise-tree-styl...

I've given it a show but sadly it doesn't satisfy my needs. Firefox will have to stick for now.

Eventually I'll probably end up on Brave.

I switched to Vivaldi (Chrome fork) as a dedicated browser for Roam Research and associated chrome extensions, but I've been using it more and more.

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