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Comment by ybbond | Hacker News Reader

Chromium:

  + support Handoff macOS -> iOS
  + text fragment support! [1]
  + nice plugins and (Brave Browser) nice built-in Ad Blocker
  + good performance, but
  - memory & cpu heavy (this counts as 2 minus)
  - pinned tab can still be closed with `⌘+W`

Firefox:

  + feels smoother and more battery friendly than Chromium based browsers
  + built-in Picture in Picture
  - no macOS menu bar function for "Pin Tab", thus making a lot of stuff hard for me
  - doesn't support Handoff macOS -> iOS

Safari:

  + The most battery friendly and lightweight
  + iCloud tabs & Handoff
  + built-in Picture in Picture, but
  - activating Picture in Picture is not as easy as Firefox
  - No good Vim keybindings emulation
  - cannot view rss raw text
  - automatically opens related macOS app if any link contains redirect to app

[1]: https://web.dev/text-fragments/

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Regarding Firefox, I'm unsure what you mean by "no macOS menu bar function for Pin Tab", is this something different from right clicking on a tab and selecting Pin Tab?

And handoff took its sweet time but it has been supported for a while now between iOS and Firefox on Mac.

in macOS, you can do (1)what you said with a mouse,

or you can use keyboard. Either you (2)press `⌘⇧?` and search for any functionality, or you (3)assign your own customized shortcut from System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Shortcuts.

Ah, I understand, and assigning custom shortcuts is an awesome macOS feature that I don't use nearly enough.

Adding a menu item for "Pin current tab" seems like a pretty straightforward bugzilla request too.

> And handoff took its sweet time but it has been supported for a while now between iOS and Firefox on Mac.

Only from iOS to macOS, not the other way around - at least not with Safari on iOS (I don't use Firefox on iOS).

> - automatically opens related macOS app if any link contains redirect to app

I hate this on iOS. Quite surprised there appears to be no way to disable it globally or per-app as it's such an annoying feature. The only way I know of is to press-and-hold a link to get the context menu, then open it from there... or more usually, uninstall the app in question!

Yes! I hate this feature on android. Sometimes I need to login to a Gmail account that I don't have on device, and it takes me to app instead of opening the website I need.

Hope they'll make it optional.

Mozilla provided feedback on the text fragments spec: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/194#is...

I think it is a good list, and it really shows how close browsers are today, that decisions are made on minor inconveniences like "How does it pin tabs?"

My biggest gripe with FF on MacOS is that they don't include "look up "x"" in the right-click menu.

The PiP in Firefox is a lot better than in Safari. I do wish FF came with better tools for opening PiP for videos that on purpose or on accident hides the PiP-button.

I also think that Safari's back-gesture is a huge plus.

Firefox has search in the right click menu. Select anything, right click and 'search with Google/ddg'

“Look up” is a macOS feature that can look up a word in the system Dictionary or Wikipedia. It can be activated by force-clicking or tapping with three fingers on a trackpad Mac, and by a right-click menu options in some apps (Firefox isn’t one of them) on all Macs. It is distinct from search.

The problem with force clicking is that the user doesn’t get to decide the string that is passed to the dictionary, instead a word boundary algorithm decides the word.

This algorithm doesn’t work very well on CJK-languages.

Oh I didn't know about these features on MacOS. Have never used it too much..

> My biggest gripe with FF on MacOS is that they don't include "look up "x"" in the right-click menu.

yes, I also miss that feature in Firefox. A sacrifice they choose over their own custom popup with Pocket and "Take a Screenshot"(great feature!), I guess.

Oh great, text fragments; more ways for other people to highlight what’s valuable to me.

You say this as if sarcastically. I love this feature.

Safari 14.0.1 on MacOS "Big Sur" has text fragment support, based on my quick test just now.

Edit: apparently still has failure points; when I added a sample to this post, it failed. Perhaps it's the URL parameter?

But when I linked to a page without a URL parameter, it did work. Ex: https://web.dev/text-fragments/#creating-text-fragment-urls-...

There's an addon for Text Fragment support in Safari and Firefox: https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/link-to-text-fragment

If someone sends this link to you, it will open just fine. If you send a link to someone else there's a very high probability they use Chrome. Otherwise, you can recommend them this extension.

It's the first time I heard about this new potentially standard feature, and it's very very useful. Thank you!

Safari:

- Lacking extension support - Difficult to manage tabs compared to FF and Chrome [0]

[0] FF and Chrome allows you to select tabs the same way you select files. Click on individual tabs while holding command to select them or click on one, hold shift, and click on another tab to select all tabs in between. This makes it much easier to move groups of tabs between windows or break a group of tabs out into a new window.

I think FF has hand-off from iOS Safari to FF Mac now?

I get the little FF with a phone icon if I open my mac after using iOS Safari sometimes.

Or do you mean iOS FF and MacOS FF?

For the Safari vim keybinding problem: I am using Vimari, I'm pretty happy with it. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vimari/id1480933944

Previously, I don't want to use Vimari because I think it only emulate C-n C-p as their j k bindings respectively. The effect of this is, it won't work great on sites that already have their own key handler, such as GitHub.

Today, I tried reinstall Vimari. It is a lot better now! Thank you for indirectly making me reinstall Vimari!

Safari picture-in-picture is better integrated with macOS: it can be used with multiple virtual desktops, it can be pushed to the side, it both snaps to predefined positions and it can be moved wherever. Firefox is stuck to one virtual display, unfortunately. Or has this changed?

There's a vimium plugin for safari, I use it. Called "vimari"

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vimari/id1480933944

I wish safari allowed extensions to rearrange tabs like FF and Chrome. One of the biggest missing features from Vimari imo.

Today, I tried reinstall Vimari. It is a lot better now! Thank you for indirectly making me reinstall Vimari!

Chromium:

- pinned tabs don't transfer to a new window

The entire 'pinned' premise is out of the window with this

Picture-in-picture is for me one of those features that manifests as an annoying banner over all videos that I don't want.

Then turn it off.

about:config

set

media.videocontrols.picture-in-picture.enabled = false

no need for about:config, it's in the normal settings dialog...

Then turn it off in settings once and be happy?

ah ya, I forgot

Firefox:

  + exposed about:config
  - cannot "highlight all occurrences in scroll bar" for search result

Safari

  + simulate safari iOS perfectly, for webdev (duh)
  - idem, cannot highlight all occurrences in scroll bar for search result
  - devtools is lacking

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