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Comment by raydev | Hacker News Reader

> Is there really a killer feature of Chrome that justifies its use over FF?

I log into Chrome with my Gmail account and my browsing history+passwords are carried across all the devices I use in a typical week, Windows, Mac, iPhone. This is huge, as I rely on history a lot.

My last 3 jobs also had Google-based accounts, which means I'm able to maintain two browser contexts where I don't dirty up my personal history with boring work stuff.

I assume Firefox probably offers account syncing, but there's no reason to switch at this point. They lost me more than a decade ago, I loved Chrome's out-of-the-box interface. It made Firefox seem ancient and cluttered with all the unnecessary buttons, and massive borders and tabs consuming precious screen space.

edit: And I'm now reading that Firefox supports multiple browser contexts but requires some effort. No thanks.

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Firefox also supports multiple browsers including the Android Password-Fill API. So you need to sign into your Sync account rather than your Google account but then you get a nearly identical feature set.

Plus it is all end-to-end encrypted unlike the Google one.

Yikes. What if they ban your Google account? They have no customer support to speak of.

Yell on them on Twitter and hope you start trending.

Ask for support on hn when a Google post trends.

You get account support with Google One or a Google Workspace subscription. There are other support avenues as well. Account bans do happen but for the most part it appears that when it does, that the person who got banned doesn't share the full story and people are more than happy to jump on the Google hate train. Google is a successful company and it annoys a lot of people that others don't have the same hate that they do.

If someone gets banned from google, they probably deserve it even though I have no idea why it happened.

This is such a bad attitude to take.

I had my paid GAFB account suspended years ago without explanation, could not get in touch with support, and as it took so long to get in touch with support, my data had been deleted by that point, meaning I lost many, many, many years of irreplaceable photographs from my Drive. Haven't touched cloud storage since.

Lesson learned: Drive is not a substitute for backups, nor is it a place to keep the only copy of important information. Now running Unraid.

What if they don't and I spent time micromanging my computer for nothing?

Then you would have only spent an hour over the year for the security of not possibly losing your livelihood.

The chance of losing your account is so low that the overall expected value is still not worth it for most people.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31782952

If you use the Multi Account Containers extension [1] built by Firefox and use the built-in Firefox account sync, then you'll get that same functionality in Firefox across Windows, Mac, iPhone. That doesn't seem like a whole lot of effort and you get more functionality.

The biggest improvement over the account-based Chrome experience is that you could even have contexts (containers) for several things if you like - a container group for social media, a different container group for banking, work, shopping, etc.

All in different tabs, color-coded / labeled by container group, each with isolated cookies, etc but shared bruiser history in the same window just like in Chrome (I'm assuming) but with better privacy.

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

I do the opposite. Always wipe all history whenever browser is closed, never sync anything, and never prompt to store passwords. I find it much more manageable.

Passwords go in the password manager.

Instead of history I use tagged bookmarks or a notes file (obsidian.md) with actual notes about why I wanted to save that link.

If I actually ever want to sync anything between work and home PC or to/from my phone (rare), it's an explicit choice to plug into USB and drag it over, or intentionally put it in dropbox. Not just something that just randomly implicitly happens or sometimes doesn't.

But different strokes for different folks.

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