Hacker News Reader

Comment by alex_duf | Hacker News Reader

Although I agree it's not better, it's also not worse. So there's a case to use the web browser that will improve your safety and privacy.

View on HN

Maybe a little over a year ago, I switched from Chrome to Firefox (phone, desktop, etc...). I didn't really see much difference, and I liked using Pocket. Plus, I wanted to support Firefox.

Fast forward to last week and I'm considering switching back. It's not because of any sites that Firefox hasn't supported. It's because I recently needed to start using a webapp to access to email from $WORK. They locked up email and now my local Mail.app client won't connect to $WORK.

My preferred way of handling this is to wrap the webapp as a desktop shortcut, so the entire site is wrapped in it's own window, etc. I also have a couple of other work webapps that I like to treat as applications. Chrome makes this easy/possible. Firefox does not.

This used to be something I did with Firefox, but now, it's not possible (or at least easily, on a Mac). Firefox was something you could embed. And now, I have no idea.

Small little features like this are where Firefox starts to lose users. Right now I have both running, but I can't see that lasting long.

Firefox 86 removed SSB (site-specific browser) because people weren't using it; also it was behind a flag in about:config no one knew about.

I'm glad to know that I wasn't just imagining things. I could have sworn that I could do this a few years ago. But I wasn't sure that I wasn't just mis-remembering.

I learned about it because I happened across a post from Peppermint OS leveraging it heavily to get lightweight 'apps'. Unless you were following specific posts about the feature, you would never have known about it. SSB had bugs for sure (and sot much dev attention was given), but it could have been a great alternative to Electron in a PWA landscape.

I don't know about the details other than from your comment, but if true, that sounds like a scene from a satirical TV show. "We hid this flag in a place most people won't find it. Oh, you didn't find it and use it anyway? Fine, we're taking it away instead of making it more visible. There, that'll teach ya!"

I'm still bitter about that.

It performs significantly worse than Chrome for me on both desktop Linux and Android (although Chrome mobile not supporting extensions means I use Firefox anyway).

On privacy, I tentatively agree (but Mozilla's actions with Pocket etc. casts doubt), but Firefox is significantly behind Chrome when it comes to safety. Firefox's sandbox is substantially weaker (e.g. it's basically worthless on linux, because you can reach the X server from inside the "sandbox").

> It performs significantly worse than Chrome for me on both desktop Linux and Android

Not sure about Android, as I can’t remember how Chrome performs, but I regularly test things in Chrome on Desktop (or when sites are so third-party heavy, I can’t figure out a sensible way to enable sites), and on Windows the performance for both is indistinguishable, and that’s despite tons of extensions for FF and none for Chrome.

I find Firefox less resource hungry and don't see much performance difference on Linux. Any resources on the sandbox weaknesses? I know it was the case a while back but I thought those issues had been addressed since.

Firefox works really well on Wayland though, which addresses X's problems (and a few other regarding input and clipboard).

Edit: found out the issue you mentioned: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1129492

That's not great indeed. I guess that the only workaround for now is Wayland

It's better in terms of configurability. It's going to become even better when Manifest V3 comes around because ad blockers on Chrome will no longer be as effective.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com