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Comment by solardev | Hacker News Reader

That never stopped Phoenix in the early days, or Chrome itself in its early days. Firefox just offers nothing substantial over Chrome and breaks a lot of sites. And over the last decade it kept pushing crapware and spam on you, right in the browser.

Mozilla mismanaged it to hell. They don't even really care about the browser anymore.

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>Firefox just offers nothing substantial over Chrome

Hah! Let's see you try to use vertical tabs in Chrome. If you ever have more than 8 tabs open at once, Horizontal tabs are clearly inferior.

Brave and Edge can do vertical tabs natively, but chrome doesn't. The extensions I have tried in Chrome are as unusable as Safari's native vertical tabs implementation.

> Hah! Let's see you try to use vertical tabs in Chrome. If you ever have more than 8 tabs open at once, Horizontal tabs are clearly inferior.

That's it, though. If Firefox breaks that again, like they intentionally broke it before, that 3% usage will drop down to 2%.

Which sites don’t work with Firefox?

Safari is a huge simply due to iOS but it’s a shame that Apple stopped maintaining the windows port.

I didn't have websites outright breaking on FF like solardev, but I had other issues with it, like cloudflare getting me into an infinite loop of asking me if I'm human and not letting me browse the website. This happened even if I deleted my firefox profile and started fresh with no extension. Note that this behavior of Cloudflare is highly dependent on the settings of their anti-ddos stuff, some websites have it set on a higher level of defensive behavior than others, I didn't have this issue everywhere.

This wasn't due to my computer's IP, the problem went away the moment I browsed the same website with Chrome, and this time I wasn't even asked to click the checkbox to prove that I'm human.

Sadly I don't remember anymore. I ran into plenty of them 3 or 4 years ago (every week or so), then I stopped using Firefox altogether because of that. At work, some coworkers were using Firefox last year and it broke various third party libraries (especially graphics heavy ones). Rather than trying to fix the bugs, we just decided to deprecate Firefox support altogether because its usage was down to like 2 or 3 percent. Those resources were better spent on, say, improving mobile usability and performance for everyone.

Edit: I wish Mozilla would just fork Chromium and add/delete whatever privacy things they want, like Brave. There's no reason to maintain Gecko anymore.

>Firefox just offers nothing substantial over Chrome

Hah! Let's see you try to use vertical tabs in Chrome. If you ever have more than 8 tabs open at once, Horizontal tabs are clearly inferior.

Firefox is still hostile to vertical tabs, adding a useless sidebar header that can be hidden with css, but you have to know that and spend the possible hours it could take to figure out how. Then, since that's unsupported, you have to prepare for it to possibly be broken after every update.

Anecdote: I tried that back in the Netcaptor days but it didn't really stick (or something like it, anyway). Having to read a long list isn't particularly fast for me, personally, so I just use a combination of multiple windows (one per context, and easy to switch between on Mac) and the search engines feature (where you can make custom keyword lookups for Wikipedia, Stackoverflow, etc.) to quickly look things up. Chrome also has collapsible tab groups and pinnable tabs now, but it's not particularly great.

I never have more than 4 or 5 tabs open at a time, closing them as I'm done with them. If I need to recover them later they're always in the history.

I'm sure Firefox and other browsers offer some power user features that's good for some folks. I just don't care enough.

As a user I just want to see the information I need without tinkering with settings, and Chrome does that well. As a web dev I'd much rather focus on UX than cross browser compatibility, and the Blink/Webkit duopoly makes that possible in a way that standards never did (and still don't). So there's just no need for Firefox in my personal or work life. YMMV of course.

What Firefox definitely offers is uBlock Origin on Android. Augment it with anti-paywall blocklists and the experience is basically a killer feature for Android over iOS. I use Chrome on desktop (mostly for better sandboxing) but on mobile there is no real competition between Firefox and Chrome: Firefox just wins.

You can get the same experience (but across all apps) using Adguard, which acts as a fake VPN and MITM certificate. No more ads in any app, while still keeping your Chrome synced tabs and logins and such between devices.

Is the experience really equal? E.g. uBlock Origin operates at the DOM layer so it can and does block dynamically generated content using CSS selectors. Does Adguard simply inject the same DOM-aware JS in every page?

I dunno, but it's good enough. And way more useful to block in app ads than to be limited to the browser only. Of course you can use both if you want, but then you'd have to use Firefox or another browser.

VPN and MITM?! What a horrible horrible security nightmare!

It sure is. But what a great user experience afterward! Security and convenience are usually tradeoffs, and in this case it's totally worth it.

Except there's no way to export your bookmarks on android out of Firefox without using their sync service. I think this omission (a simple export!) speaks volumes about Mozilla's true goal of browser lock-in and another example of their chronic mismanagement.

Ah yes browser lock in, from the company that makes zero dollars selling their browser, compared to the company that wants to actively harm the open internet.

What's wrong with you guys? Could google stab you in the face and you still swear up and down that firefox is negligibly slower than chrome? What will it take? Google is pushing a "feature" to completely lock down the internet, take away all meaning from "user-agent", and make blocking ads functionally impossible! When will you stop aiding and abetting this behavior because you feel mozilla is "not perfect"

In truth I just don't really care? We've gone through this cycle so many times with various kinds of DRM, from DVD CSS to Denovo to WideVine to Adobe Cloud to various other schemes that at the end of the day just aren't big deals.

A lot of the tech echo chamber bandwagons and freaks out about things like this, but I bet in a few years it'll turn out either a non issue or else alternate browsers will naturally rise to popularity. No point fussing about it beforehand. In the meantime Chrome just works, Google is whatever, Firefox is annoying, and Mozilla just feels irrelevant.

Shrug. I feel way more annoyed by Firefox than anything Google's ever done. Whatever their ideology, their product just isn't great.

better extension environment

much better privacy

practically the same experience while surfing

keeps competition going

ublock origin actually works as it was meant to

mozilla didn't forget what "do no evil" and "open internet" means

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