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Comment by wongarsu | Hacker News Reader

All browsers have gotten kind of sameish. I don't feel much difference between Edge, Chrome and Firefox (on Windows). A couple minor differences like Edge having native vertical tabs, where I have to go to a more powerful but less performant and less stable extension in Firefox, or Firefox having the sync feature I trust more. But overall it feels hard to find good reasons to use one browser over another. Firefox's multi-account containers are the only major feature I could name that makes a major difference.

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For me, Firefox has a lot of subtle niceties that I miss if I'm using Chrome to test something out.

Firefox has much more efficient browsing keyboard shortcuts (although old Opera was comparably good), / allows you to jump to text where you're typing and you can use ' to search only texts of links, then you can just press return/enter to click links.

Tab management is better. Custom CSS allows multiple rows of tabs at the top and allows you to hide the close tab X's entirely, so you can close tabs only with middle click or double click without having to target (or avoid) a tiny close button. Also keyboard shortcuts CTRL Shift PgUp/PgDn to rearrange tabs which doesn't seem to be present in Chrome. CTRL+Tab as an option to browse tabs in recently used order (leaving CTRL pgup/pgdn for left/right order). Also for whatever reason Chrome doesn't let you mute individual tabs, only muting entire sites, while Firefox lets you mute individual tabs.

Extensions in general on Firefox are a bit more powerful, uBlock Origin on Firefox is a bit more effective at blocking ads than it is on Chrome. On Android Firefox supports uBlock Origin while Chrome has no extensions, but honestly I think every mobile browser is pretty shit (just Firefox slightly less so).

> multi-account containers are the only major feature I could name that makes a major difference.

And for me, that's a key difference. Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, all garbage --- staying logged into several AWS SSM sessions in different accounts at the same time w/ full features, logged into several paypal accounts at once etc etc etc. The containers fix so much of web dumbness that they've become indespensable in my workflow, both at work and at home. Unless the other browsers have feature parity regarding MAC, they are not even among the competition.

I agree on containers being Firefox's only headline feature. To potentially add to your comparison list, Brave is the only other fully open-source browser other than Firefox. I'm an ex-FF user after 19 years of dedication, and now use Edge, but Brave is my close 2nd choice due to its focus on OSS transparency and privacy. And Brave is the only browser that's Chromium-based, fully open-source, and focuses on privacy. If these things interest someone at least.

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