Hacker News Reader

Comment by TheSOB88 | Hacker News Reader

So, I don't notice much bad with FF, so I don't know what I'm missing. What am I missing? What makes FF terrible and Chrome goodly?

View on HN

Just to chip in with why I personally refuse to use Chrome:

-A window begins to be unwieldy at 15 tabs, and is impossible to navigate at 20

-Occasional Flash problems render the browser utterly useless for several minutes before it asks whether I am interested in continuing what I was doing

-Not visiting a tab for a while results in a ridiculous wait for it to load

My screen size makes having multiple rows of tabs simply take up too much screen space.

Honestly, I just haven't had any complaints with firefox (beta channel) apart from the recent interesting decision to change dragging tabs to bookmarks to require hitting ctrl - https://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.apps.firefox/bro...

> -A window begins to be unwieldy at 15 tabs, and is impossible to navigate at 20

Interesting. This is actually one of the big reasons why I prefer Chrome over FF. FF does the whole "make my tab bar scroll" while Chrome resizes the tabs to fit.

What about Chrome's implementation do you find more unwieldy than Firefox's?

I don't know about socillion, but Tree Style Tabs is one of the reasons I won't stop using Firefox. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

Agreed, and I believe the Chromium guys have been asked for this feature and said they won't do it.

I don't think it is possible with chrome extensions either.

You can, however, get tabs in a sidebar, which works well for n <= 30 or so.

about:flags -> Enable Side Tabs

Tab Groups. For those of us who do lots of research and like to keep it organized it's a godsend.

Right now I have 159 tabs open -- I was curious so I decided to count. If I tried that in Chrome I'm pretty sure it would crash and burn hard, not to mention there would be no ability to keep it organized.

I know there are some research workflows that would allow me to do that as well, but I haven't really taken the time to dive into them after I found tab groups.

I'd like to take a moment to recognize how awful the tab groups UI is.

Hmm, new "Tab Groups" button. Wonder what it does!

http://i.imgur.com/x36TA.png

The only way to figure out that UI, including how to exit back to the browser, is through trial and error or Google. At least tabs/tab groups closed in there (seriously, who adds an "x" to an undo changes button that permanently deletes it instead?) go in "recently closed tabs" now!

http://i.imgur.com/WwnW8.png - a screenshot of Chrome with 20 tabs open. As you can see, determining what each tab contains is rather hard. I agree that scrolling the tab bar (using mousewheel, the UI buttons for that purpose are utterly useless) in Firefox is extremely unwieldy, so the only time I use it is to get to tabs I have at either end. "List all tabs" is an amazing feature, IMO.

"FF does the whole "make my tab bar scroll""

FYI, you can use the mousewheel to scroll the tabs.. without, it would be horrible

You might like Opera. It handles dozens of tabs beautifully, and you can group tabs into collapsible groups so you can both (a) navigate them and (b) see them all on the screen at once without having to scroll.

And put the tab bar on the left, making keeping an overview of 30+ ungrouped tabs no problemo!

Or hide tabs and the tab bar altogether and use CTRL-TAB to toggle through them, like ALT-TAB does windows. Screen real-estate galore:

http://i.imgur.com/XuMkx.png

Hm. That's pretty cool.

You don't turn your status bar off? ;)

Haha, that was actually my first thought too when I looked at my pic, which I took months ago. I do now :)

It's not so much that Chrome is great, as that it doesn't seem to have the faults that Firefox does.

- The "hanging" issue: I literally just replaced a laptop because of this one. On my older laptop, Firefox became unusable, and got worse with each version, not better. I didn't have very many tabs open (~10?), and after about 6 hours or so, hovering the pointer over a link would give me the rainbow pinwheel, clicking a link would give me a rainbow pinwheel, opening a tab would give me a rainbow pinwheel, etc. This stalling issue has been widely reported by a huge number of people, and Firefox has been doing a lot of work on their memory management to fix it, but it doesn't seem to be helping. My girlfriend's newer Windows workstation had the same problem, but to a slightly lesser degree. In her case, Firefox became unusable after a day or two. People often point to extensions, but the only extension she had installed was AB+.

- Crashing. Just yesterday we had a client complaint where, according to them, about half the time they would go to launch Firefox, they would get the message that it was already running but not responding. We've had similar complaints from other clients, including a business client.

What makes this frustrating for me is that, like the OP, I'm pretty sure I remember when Firefox didn't have these problems. It smells like at some point they introduced some kind of terrible architectural change in the browser, and rather than address that directly, they keep trying to patch around it.

It's possible that the very newest version fixes all of these things. We made the decision to start switching off of it almost a month ago, after Mozilla firmly decided to go the frequent background updates route (and without also supporting older versions). If we have to choose to recommend one of two browsers, both of which do frequent updates, then we'll go with the one that seems to give people fewer headaches.

Not to ignore your other points, but there is now a proposal being worked on for having an extended support edition for business deployments:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Enterprise/Firefox/ExtendedSupport:...

hitting on mozilla is trendy. thats all there is to it. its funny to read how the horrible firefox is faster than chrome and more efficient in many ares too. like type inference. like memory usage. like 2d acceleration.

in fact 99% judge ff on startup time. its mostly due to the ui toolkit xul.

This is Hacker News, where everything anointed by Larry and Sergei is to be revered and worshiped by all, forever and ever, amen.

> Account created after prior account( haploid )was inexplicably silent-banned.

A bit more civility might help you avoid a repeat of that.

My understanding of the "civility" standard is whether I would say it in person. My comments do pass this test.

That's more of a guideline aimed at people who aren't assholes in person.

Brilliant judgement you've made of someone you don't know. I'm sure this particular instance of incivility will garner you plenty of upvotes, however.

Because people disagree with whether your approach is acceptable in any case. It's not that hard to understand.

I'm just taking what you said at face value. If you come on HN, act like an asshole, and go on to say you'd behave the same in person, then the inference is pretty obvious, isn't it?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com