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Comment by maceurt | Hacker News Reader

I wish I could stomach firefox, but everything about it just absolutely infuriates me. Even with a bunch of addons it is bothersome to run. The issue is that most people spend majority of their time on a PC in a web browser, including myself. Even a 5% worse product is still going to add up to a sizable amount of wasted time/ unneeded frustration. I personally spend hours tinkering with my OS to make it better for me to use, I can't justify using an inferior product in regards to taking a moral stand.

Or at least if I was going to take a moral stand I would start by spending at least 50% more time & money for clothing/ other products not manufactured immorally.

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Out of curiosity, what is it that makes Firefox 5% worse than Chromium-based browsers in your eyes?

Not GP, but I decided to try Firefox again last week, and had to give up because I couldn't navigate to intranet URLs without explicitly typing http://

Strangely foo/ works (goes to http://foo/) while foo/bar does not (instead does a web search for foo/bar).

about:config → keyword.enabled → set to false

You'll have to prefix your searches with a key (in my case it's w for wikipedia, g for Google, and so on), but that's what I prefer personally anyway.

Also set browser.fixup.alternate.enabled to false to prevent Firefox from retrying whatever you have typed in with a .com suffix.

It's these sorts of things that make me realize that people just don't care about the health of the open web, or about protecting their privacy.

Ultimately this is a super minor issue (and turns out there's a way to fix it, per the sibling comment), but everyone just has their own pet excuse why they "can't" change to a browser that is objectively better for the web in every way.

Tragedy of the commons, I guess.

Just to be clear, I think having to prefix my web searches is not a fix, but rather an even greater inconvenience. I'll either have to type "http://" dozens of times per day, or "g " a hundred times per day, for no discernible reason.

Aside from that I don't think Firefox is particularly good for the web. Their license is no better than that of Chromium, and Chromium has proven time and again it's a good starting point for a fork.

Mozilla employees are paid with search ad revenue, to an even greater extent (95%) than the subset of Blink developers employed by Google -- so their incentives aren't even any better.

1. general UI

2. keyboard shortcuts

3. moving around tabs/ windows

4. crashes/ memory issues

That sounds like some of my complaints about Chrome. Different strokes.

When I use Firefox on my work laptop I get harassed by Microsoft. They keep signing me out of Outlook and saying they wouldn’t have to do that if I was on Edge. And they occasionally put up a message on Microsoft To-Do that they won’t sync my changes because I’m on an unsupported browser. This doesn’t happen with Chrome so unfortunately that’s what I use now. It’s not Firefox’s fault, it actually works better for me everywhere else, but I wanted to stop signing in 6 times a day.

A killer feature for me is opening the history & download list in a tab instead of a window. This way I don't have to alt+tab twice to switch to the next application. Opening the history in the same tab (ctrl+h) isn't good enough because I usually need the time of visit and there is no shortcut to open the download list in the same window.

Perhaps this is just muscle memory and I would think oppositely if I never switched to chrome.

    about:downloads

    chrome://browser/content/places/places.xhtml

Slightly slower page loads (5% times all day remember)

Less usable ctrl+tab behaviour for managing lots of tabs

20 second pause to start if not already running on many of my locked down systems over the years, seems to have been fixed in last year or so but perennial problem that was infuriating in the same way nag-ware delays are

F** with the extensions

Ongoing 'minor' user-unfriendly decisions to the actual users of the products to the point where it seems motivated to provide a not-quite-ideal result. In basketball there's a saying, watch the waist not the ball, which translates as watch what they are doing not what they are saying, and by doing this I've begun to realise the regular nature of these snafus is probably intentional (at a high level) and I theorise it's to keep Google's money flowing in by not being a serious competitor to average users who want the best usability.

etc etc

I had the pause problem about when you had it as well. For me the pause happened periodically, but it was for network requests IIRC, the rest of the browser worked fine, but pages wouldn't load a thing for quite a few seconds. I have not noticed the problem now for quite a few months at least. Since it looks like the pause went away at the same time, I think we had the same problem.

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