Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by tdrdt | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

tdrdt

And help your parents, brothers and sisters, neighbors, uncles and aunts to do the same.

And set DDG as the default browser.

I can't imagine why anyone here on HN still would use Chrome.

View on HN

I do

Because when the tab bar is full Firefox will overflow them while chrome will resize every tab until only an icon is left and then start the overflow.

If there is an extension to fix this I’ll switch but last I looked I couldn’t find any

You can change when the overflow scrolling starts by setting browser.tabs.tabMinWidth to 50 (or any number you want, the unit is pixels) in about:config

> help your parents, brothers and sisters, neighbors, uncles and aunts to do the same.

One sec let me try to explain how to do this to my grandma who is currently x thousand miles away. Oh yea and if something breaks good thing I'm there for tech support amirite.

??? Why does you grandma care about when tabs start overflowing? I assure you, your Grandma isn't GGP and will happily accept what the browser does.

>Why does you grandma care about when tabs start overflowing?

Oh she doesn't. The issue Grandma, Uncle Fat, Cousin Lou all have is they used this thing and started getting used to it and then they got an update and someone changed everything and they don't know how to do anything anymore. Repeat this three or more times and when you tell them to use something they smile at you and nod then stick with Chrome because it's something they know how to use and doesn't change all the time.

>then they got an update and someone changed everything and they don't know how to do anything anymore.

Your claim is FF updated something and your Grandma couldn't figure out how to do anything? Which update was this?

Because grandmas are fictional personas so you can say whatever feature X of software Y is your pet peeve is broken, flawed and it's the most important feature ever.

I sincerely suggest using vertical tabs! There's two popular FF extensions for it, the original Tree Style Tab [1] and Sidebery [2]. Most widescreen displays are far wider than web content these days, so you don't lose any horizontal space by switching to vertical tabs, and you gain the ability to actually read the text + organize them by hierarchy.

1: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

2: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/

I switched to vertical tabs too, and honestly I'm never going back.

You also don't gain any vertical space, because Firefox decided that its built-in tabs shouldn't be hidden.

You can use userChrome.css to remove them - I main this setup everyday and haven't had horizontal tabs on at all.

Firefox's behavior here is massively better. Why in the world would anyone actually LIKE the tiny tiny icon-only tabs?!

Umm because your comment is actually just an opinion? And there are people on the other side as well.

It was also a reply to an opinion. And you're replying to a reply to an opinion, reiterating the original opinion.

The post you were replying to isn't replying to an "opinion" or punching down on one. Instead, it is answering the question "Why in the world would anyone actually LIKE the tiny tiny icon-only tabs?"

I personally don't, but I know a lot of people who deal with large amounts of tabs and prefer icons because they can quickly glance over the icons to get to the page they want. I know one guy who has probably 50+ tabs open at any given moment but can still get to whichever tab he wants to out of instinct by going "oh that was in the 5th google sheet tab". I deal with that by not having more than a dozen tabs and grouping in TST but I gotta admit, it's an impressive skill to have.

I find it odd that the “hacker mindset” answer to this is, accept surveillance.

Exceedingly odd.

Do people actually prefer to memorize website favicons and their placement instead of scrolling with some text still visible to let you know what the tab actually is?

This is a great question, and I think the trouble here is that there is a temptation to answer with one off anecdotes from the idiosyncratic example of a single use case. The more peculiar, individualized, unique, and unrepresentative, the more likely it is that we're going to hear that.

This temptation is very strong on HN. I honestly would be fascinated by a blog that gathered together all the extremely specialized use cases that people use as examples of why product XYZ wasn't good enough. That way of thinking leads to interesting to discussion but needs to be tempered by stepping back and looking at how representative those examples are, and I think that step is the point in the process where these conversations always break down.

This is what I was wondering also, and it makes me think other people look at a much larger range of sites with different icons than I do.

I use Chrome at work because I have to. I often get into the situation with icon-width tabs, and to me it's bad because a lot of my tabs are the same few sites. So the icon doesn't always help me, and I end up using the 'close all tabs to the right' feature a lot.

In addition, a lot of the sites I use at work have time-limited sessions, so going back to a tab from even a couple of hours ago isn't useful because I have to reauth anyway. I guess I could find an old tab and refresh, but I usually just 't' (with vimium) to open a new one and retype the address instead. Maybe for me this is more a preference for the keyboard vs. having to move a pointer around?

Check out an even better option (in my opinion): multi-row tabs

https://github.com/Izheil/Quantum-Nox-Firefox-Dark-Full-Them...

Brave Browser, based on Chrome, is another alternative that'll let you keep all your Chrome extensions. Makes the move away from Chrome painless.

If I'm trying to get away from Google, why should I switch to a Chromium derivative that also depends on the Chrome Web Store for add-on distribution?

Brave and Edge are better than Chrome if you care about privacy, but 99% of the code base is still controlled by Google and they don't really have a voice in standards committees. To support the open web it's much better to have engine diversity too.

In which way does Edge have better privacy than Chrome? The following articles rate Edge as worse than Chrome:

https://www.expressvpn.com/blog/best-browsers-for-privacy/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/a-professor-says-edge-is-the-w...

Microsoft and Brave both run ad networks. They are trapped in the same perverted incentives. Same thing for Apple.

Firefox is the only one that doesn't.

Then again, Mozilla only survives thanks to Google for sending search traffic their way.

Or the conspiracy take: Mozilla only survives because Google wants to make sure that an alternative exists so they cannot be considered a monopoly.

That would also explain Mozilla behavior for the last few years... But motivations from big corporations are rarely as singular and neatly defined as I just made it sound, so while that might factor into their actions, it probably cannot be considered to be THE reason for action.

I do. AMA.

Don't you care about an open internet?

Not the person you asked but I, too, still use Chrome[1] for personal stuff on desktop. Why do I get a black-and-white vibe in this question? Like, either I support an open internet (by not using Chrome) or I am a horrible person for being a BIGCORP shill and I'm no true hacker, shame, shame!

Can't I be simply tired of switching browsers, making even minor adjustments to my workflow, every damn time my current browser manufacturer does something the internet adjudges to be morally corrupt?

I don't disagree with the collective in this case either. For me it's just easier to reconfigure Chrome to not do auto login on every fresh install. Maybe the day Google removes this option is the day I finally switch to Firefox for good. Or maybe I'd wait for a fork/plugin that restores the ability to opt out.

[1] For work purposes I use Firefox but it's not for any hacktivist idealism. It just fits my workflow. In Android I use Firefox full time too because I got fed up of AMP but it's still all about the experience.

well in case of developer tools chrome beats firefox. that's the only reason me and some of my friends are still using chrome for development.

Shout out to Vivaldi browser. Great for customizability and features like vertical tabs and stuff. A browser designed for power users.

Vivaldi is webkit/blink based though.

> I can't imagine why anyone here on HN still would use Chrome.

I do. It's the only option for watching Netflix/Amazon Prime/Disney+ on Linux AND casting to a Chromecast.

No one's saying you can't have Chrome installed.

It's really no big deal to open it when you want to watch any of those. I've never heard anyone complaining about switching from your phone's browser to the Netflix app on your phone, so I don't see why opening another browser on your computer is a big deal.

So what's the use case for having Firefox installed at all if Chrome is installed? What can Firefox do that Chrome can't?

Container tabs. Good text rendering. Support for some niche css features, the WebExtension implementation can support more advanced extensions (sidebar, runtime theme modification, dns, etc). shift+right click to bypass websites that block context menus. if a website uses the background-image css property, the firefox context menu will have the correct image options and chrome won't. i can hold ctrl and properly select HTML tables to paste into spreadsheets.

Firefox can provide a browsing experience that isn't designed by Google.

Does anyone here only have a single browser installed on their computer? I always install Chrome, but do less than 0.1% of my browsing in it. What's the reason you couldn't have both? Storage?

What you gain from using something other than Chrome is privacy, and using something other than Chromium makes it harder for Google to gain more control of the internet.

That being said, I find both Firefox and Safari to be better experiences than Chrome.

Security. Whenever I push myself to go use Firefox I very rapidly run into obvious bugs and things like page display corruption that has the terrible bad code smell of shoddy insecure software.

I would really, really like to switch, but not for now.

Can you give an example? I've been using both Safari (personal laptop) and Firefox (work laptop) for years, and I've never noticed anything like that.

That's unfortunate, you should try updating your GPU drivers (if you're on linux there's some different things you need to change). Firefox uses the GPU for more stuff so bad drivers really heck it up.

This is on the iPhone.

That's extra strange. Because Firefox on iOS is just a thin wrapper over a WebKit Webview. It should basically be as stable as safari then.

That's even worse. Because the issue on iphone is regular encounters with pages being corrupted (as in, split in the middle).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com