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Comment by zahma | Hacker News Reader

I don't see why I would want to use anything else. Even if Chrome is marginally faster in an arbitrary benchmark test, I doubt I'd notice. And so far, I have no interoperability issues between Firefox on my laptop (macOS) and my iPhone (iOS), which runs Safari + Firefox Focus (because it's all the same webkit underneath). The add-on and plug-in marketplace is quite healthy, too. At the end of the day, I care about open-source software that doesn't model its business around capturing and manufacturing my data for export -- just the opposite. Thank goodness for Mozilla and all its collaborators.

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> I don't see why I would want to use anything else

I use FF, too, but I can see why someone wouldn't want to: It's just not a very good Mac app. Weird windowing and focus bugs in fullscreen mode. Keyboard shortcuts that randomly stop working. Zero scripting capabilities (it used to have the bare minimum, but Mozilla bizarrely ripped it out), and just poor integration in general. My system-wide shortcuts — the ones that are so important I've added them to every context menu on the system? That's a big nope because FF devs apparently think showing poxy extension icons is more important.

Google had the good sense to copy Safari's keyboard shortcuts in Chrome. Mozilla didn't.

The bookmark manager is straight out of Windows 95. Awful UX.

I do like Firefox, but it's just not up to snuff on macOS.

To be fair, Apple is a bit hostile towards open source developers. I can write windows and linux software from both windows and linux, but to write apple software I need a mac and a developer account that costs money. If firefox depends on patches from the community, they will receive less patches for macos features because of this asymmetry.

Linux user with no care for Mac features.

Firefox may be open source, but Mozilla is a company with a paid development team. It is exactly these types of issues - UX, UI - on which the dev team should be working. I'm sure that a lot of features come from the open source community, but the polish and sound implementation is on the dev team.

For what it's worth, Firefox on KDE is fine.

I have never needed to pay for a developer account to run my own code on my own machine. What? How does this have anything to do with OP's point?

I use Firefox as my daily driver on my personal and work computers with no issues. I guess YMMV there. I haven’t used chrome for about 3 years now. I keep a chromium browser around o just for testing things across browsers, but I never really need it.

As a fervent long-time Firefox user I would add that currently there are lots of default settings of freshly installed Firefox that are (for me) utterly wrong. And it feels like a sad trend. Last time I tried to use freshly installed Firefox it felt like a completely different browser than my Firefox with more than a decade old profile. Tabbing was wrong, URL bar behaviour was scary. All can be set back to (subjectively) sane state, what is good, but I really grieved poor folks who just decided to try this browser for the first time and were immediately "welcomed" by such disputable UX.

And I don't mind dated UX of bookmarks manager, I even think that compared to other browsers it is the most usable one.

> The bookmark manager is straight out of Windows 95.

I wish it was! Unfortunately it's not.

Also - no way to remove third-party Pocket.

I think more recent benchmarks showed that Firefox became faster than Chrome, although I'm not keeping a close eye on it and I agree with you that it's arbitrary.

For the past 6+ years I only use Chrome rarely and as an Internet Explorer replacement.

> I don't see why I would want to use anything else.

I am back again to remind people that profiles suck on Firefox, container tabs are not a great solution, and there are tons of extensions that Chrome has that Firefox doesn't.

So just 3 very simple examples of why someone would use Chrome over Firefox.

I mean, sure, but I (and probably most people) only have a few extensions that actually matter regardless of the browser.

In my case it's Dark Reader and uBlock, and both work well in FF.

Funny enough on my machine, Chrome is the slowest on https://browserbench.org/Speedometer2.1/

401 - Chrome

446 - Firefox

546 - Safari

Probably subjective to your particular set up - I just got the opposite results on my mac:

202 ± 4.7 - Chrome

184 ± 5.0 - Firefox

171 ± 2.6 - Safari

fyi, if you're uncertain in the single-digits place, you have no precision in the tenths place. for experimental uncertainty, it's always one sigfig

I'm getting

  457 - Chrome
  444 - Safari
  348 - Firefox

M1 Mac

357 - Chrome with extensions

511 - Chrome without any extensions

433 - Clean firefox install

500 - Clean edge install

On an AMD Ryzen 7950X3D / 5600MHz RAM

Interestingly, I got substantially different results depending on whether I used chrome with my typical extensions or not. Looking at the flamegraph, I don't seem to see the full picture of why there's such a substantial difference. Bitwarden/React Developer tools (the 2 primary extensions I use) don't seem to make enough of an impact to account for the roughly 40% performance increase seen without them. The browserbench javascript accounted for ~38.6% of the overall time taken for the benchmark, but the sum of my extensions was only 6.5%. I'm not incredibly familiar with browser performance profiling, so there's probably more to the story.

Neat site but it almost needs a flash/epilepsy warning =P

Isn't that pretty much irrelevant? Won't network speed etc make much more of a difference?

"At the end of the day, I care about open-source software that doesn't model its business around capturing and manufacturing my data for export -- just the opposite."

Of course, that is exactly the model used by Mozilla. It exports search query data to Google for capture, by default, in return for payment.

"Thank goodness for Mozilla and all its collaborators."

Indeed, thank goodness for long-time Mozilla collaborator Google, LLC. Mozilla employees left to join Google beginning in 2005. They wrote Chrome.

Without Google's payments to Mozilla, who knows what might happen.

Yes this is the reason Firefox can still survive. But it's easy to turn off, giving you easy and real privacy. On Chrome you don't have real privacy.

One can change settings but one cannot change the default unless edit source and compile. Almost no one does this.

What is "real" privacy.

There is no small amount of telemetry by default in Firefox, far more than Chrome. Unless one changes each of these settings, Mozilla collects data about Firefox users. Defaults can only be changed by editing the source and compiling Firefox. Almost no one does this.

Telemetry and Google as a default search engine are two different things. Also Telemetry doesn't collect any personal data, it's used for anonymous Firefox usage statistics to improve their product. And it's something Firefox asks you to opt in/out when you install Firefox.

And regarding:

"One can change settings but one cannot change the default unless edit source and compile. Almost no one does this."

There are some popular Firefox forks that have several improvements over security and privacy. Check LibreWolf and Waterfox for example.

What is telemetry. What is its function. Its function is to share information with Mozilla. Without telemetry, Mozilla does not have access to this information.

But what if the computer user does not care to share information with Mozilla.

Information such as:

(a) IP address

(b) the software is used/when the user is online

(d) how the software is used

(e) settings the user changes or does not change

and so on.

This is information sharing with Mozilla by default. It is not "opt-in". It is "op-out".

Note the difference between (a) the user making changes to Firefox and compiling her own customised version and (b) hoping that someone else compiles a custom version and makes all the user's preferred changes to the source and removes all the defaults that the user wants removed. Option (a) offers the computer user some control. Option (b) is completely outside the control of the computer user. The best one can do with option (b) is hope that someone managing a "fork" has addressed all their concerns.

Is having control useful for "real privacy". Is it useful for data collection and surveillance. Who should have control.

Firefox has over 37 million lines of code. The compiled program requires hundreds of megabytes of storage space. Based on LOC and binary size it is larger than the Linux kernel. Compiling Firefox on "average" computers will take hours and will require a powerful computer. It is not an easy process and can easily fail due to its numerous dependencies.

I use a text-only browser that compiles in less than a minute on an older, underpowered computer to a 1.2 MiB static binary. There are no mandatory dependencies. It is from this browser that I type and submit this reply.

I still need to use Chrome for YouTube when I'm on my Windows 11 desktop unfortunately. YouTube in FF causes weird issues with my monitor turning on and off after I've been watching YT for more than like 20 min. It gets into a state where any new windows I open or close cause the screen to turn off then on. I have no idea where to even begin diagnosing what's going on. This behavior seemingly goes away when I run YT in chrome and everything else in FF.

Same, I don't know what it is but firefox locks up whenever I try to watch youtube on my laptop. It's only my windows laptop too. My linux laptop, and windows desktop at work are fine.

Does that also happen for other video sites?

Weird. I would try changing the browser's hardware acceleration settings.

Yup, you also need Chrome if you are using Google Meet, otherwise our experience will be significantly degraded.

Now on FF you also have the webcam filters and stuff like that on Google Meet.

It was my only reason to launch Chrome on my job laptop and it's been six months that I use Google Meet daily on FF without issue.

I and my coworkers have recently switched from WebEx to Meet in the last month (thank goodness), and all found meet unbearable on ff. The most common issue is audio simply going out a few minutes in until you refresh. These issues, for whatever reason, don't happen on chrome, so we all keep both installed (except the regular chrome users).

For whatever reason, the experience just isn't there. Maybe it's Mozillas fault, maybe it's Google's, maybe it's even Apple's.

I do use Edge for this, any hint of what I may be loosing by not using Chrome for Gmeet?

Unrelatedly, I use Chrome for websites where I need to be logged into a Google account (gmail, youtube, google docs, google maps, etc.) and Firefox for everything else. I like keeping the two activities separate.

I think this mpre could be a graphic driver problem. Test update to the latest from your pc manufacturer or your graphic card manufacturer (they could differ).

I have tried to switch quite a few times over the years to Firefox and I still to this day consistently run into websites that are unusably broken on Firefox, do you have the same experience? I realize this probably speaks volumes to the need for more people to use browsers other than Chrome but its unfortunately frequent enough that I always end up switching back to Chrome after a few months.

People always say this but almost never are they able to give examples.

Concrete examples:

The web interfaces for both Jitsi and Zoom fail to recognise my web camera. I've gone through the permissions settings a dozen times and Firefox says that it sees camera, but it only displays a black feed. Vivaldi correctly accesses the camera on both sites.

imascientist.org.uk makes it "impossible" to sign up for outreach sessions under Firefox. The div with the sessions has a `max-width` parameter, but the contents are significantly larger than this width, resulting in the buttons being outside the rendering area and inaccessible. I have to go into the dev tools and edit the CSS every time I open the page.

These are just the issues that I've dealt with today. Don't get me wrong - I'm literally typing this in Firefox at this moment. However, it doesn't help anyone to pretend that these issues never pop up. I simply feel that the benefits outweight these annoyances.

I just tested both sites from my default firefox profile.

zoom worked without problem.. both audio and video..

imascientist.org.uk i opened the registration page and it showed without problem buttons where in the end of the page as i would expect.

It look like it is something in your end and not with firefox..

Very strange. I run Zoom constantly in FF - my company does several events a week that I edit, so i’m thick in the weeds on zoom’s site doing admin/recording management stuff. Almost 3 years on zoom’s site almost every single day, never had to swap browsers. Mac Studio if that matters.

Never had problems with Zoom and Jitsi in Firefox. Should work fine. I don't think the problem is because Firefox renders sites differently.

On imascientist.org.uk I don't see a sign up button, only login.

If I record correctly, Mozilla has said that like 97% of all problems people has is with problems is due to extensions, not Firefox. '

When you have a site not working as expected, start Firefox in "Troubleshoot Mode" (alt-key then in the menu at the top Help > Troubleshot mode) that starts Firefox with addons turn off. If the site works, restart and turn of addons one by one to you see which one creates the problem.

I unfortunately do not have a running list. The one that made me drop Firefox last time was the mermaid.js docs site. None of the sidebar navigation was clickable but only on Firefox, the same issue did not appear on Safari or Chrome. It appears they have since fixed that issue as I retested and it appears fine.

The "give me examples" is sort of a moving target, anecdotally I have run into many more completely or partially broken sites when using Firefox as compared to Chrome and Safari. It is likely that some or all of those examples are now fixed but the pain in the moment is enough to keep me from using the browser long term.

Is it this site? https://mermaid.js.org/intro/

It works fine for me.

Often people forgot they have installed an obscure exstension in Firefox and that is breaking the site, trying another browser it works, concluding that Firefox must be the problem, while it was the extension. That is also why people usually cannot reproduce the problem later or give concrete examples.

I, similar to the parent, have very few issues on either my computers or phones. I run Firefox on several different OS's and I just don't have the issues you mention.

Do you have some examples of websites that really behave that differently depending on the browser you're using?

Having lived through the "best viewed with..." days I'd hoped we were past all that by now!

Google Images has problems with Firefox. If previewing several related pictures, the back button of the browser doesn't bring you back to the last image, but to somewhere else.

You know Google is known for deliberately making their sites underperform or break in Firefox? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38345858

The most recent ones that I ran into seem to have been fixed based on a quick check. mermaid.js docs site was one of them where nothing on the page was clickable (I think Firefox was rendering an invisible div over the entire page) but this issue wasn't present in Chrome or Safari. That appears to have been fixed. Examples are hard to provide since they almost always get fixed but in the moment its enough pain to always get me to drop Firefox.

If it always getting fixed shortly after, it probably means something is going on in your settings or in the background that is interfering at the time you are trying to access them. Just my two cents. I know when I run proton vpn, little snitch, my various extensions, etc. one of them is always the culprit no matter what browser I use.

If it gets fixed quickly, it was probably an issue with the particular website or a plugin of yours rather than Firefox's issue. People are fast to "conclude" it must be Firefox. You should also test in a private tab with no plugins enabled. That might very well also fix the issue.

There is the occasional site, but you can restrict your use of Chromium to that (and don’t need to use Chrome at all).

Honestly? No. If I do it's on the order of "once in a year", and usually only sites that are doing something specifically quirky, like particular types of webgpu demos or somesuch.

Oh interesting. I actually find custom docs sites (mermaid.js was the most recent one for me) seem to be the ones that break most commonly for me in Firefox but work in Chrome and Safari.

I've been using Firefox as a daily driver for four years and have not run into a single site that was truly "unusably" broken except perhaps some Google-published tech demo for a new webgpu feature.

I've occasionally run into relatively minor visual issues (I think from before the :has pseudo-class was made generally available in FF) but I cannot think of a single instance where a site was unusable and then worked when I tried it in Chrome.

The only reason websites break on Firefox for me is that I break them myself with uBlock Origin and NoScript. >:D I'd rather have them broken than put up with their repugnant bullshit. The rare time I need a site to work pristinely for some reason, I begrudgingly pull out my (mostly) vanilla Chrome though.

Often claimed, never backed up with links.

I use Firefox as my daily driver. There are in fact some websites that don't work on it, but it is rarely anything mainstream. My example is the website 3M provides for doing medical code grouping. Probably less than 0.01% of the internet uses it, but it only works on Chrome and then just barely.

* Recording in web client of Duolingo does not work on Firefox, only in chrome. * Webserial for flashing esp for example is not supported * Webauth took forever to be supported (still not sure it's fully supported)

But I still use of because of the cookie Mgmt mainly, and secondly because we need at least one alternative browser engine on desktop... Safari WebKit is a fork (or the original if you prefer), it's not really that different.

Just found another one that doesn’t work on FF, the list is now:

* duolingo.com (mic does not work) * mediatest.webex.com * webserial in general

I agree. I would also suggest occasionally checking out the other browsers like Opera and Vivaldi because they often have a surprising feel and feature set. Vivaldi in particular has a very nice RSS/Atom feed reader built into it, and Opera tends to be very fast.

(Mozilla and Goog were smart to start offering account-based sync because this creates a moat for regular adoption. But anyone can and should go window-shopping for browsers - it's cheap entertainment, at the very least.)

I wouldn’t touch opera with a 1000ft pole.

Any non OSS browser makes me feel weird. The amount of trust you place in a browser is insane.

That, and the predatory short-term loans part of their business. https://www.spacebar.news/stop-using-opera-browser/

Agreed. I find Vivaldi’s split pane ability incredibly useful. Surprised other browsers haven’t implemented this kind of this yet.

I think edge has it

I try Orion once in a while when my Firefox configuration breaks a website. I actually enjoy it and appreciate the zero telemetry and functionality with both Google and Firefox plugin marketplaces. It’s also great for my laptop’s battery life. Firefox can drain that quickly depending on which tabs I keep open.

I use chromium-browsers only for video conferencing because I have had some weird scenarios with choppy video on firefox.

In my opinion, Chrome is more polished (no pun intended). Just the little things that allow me to work faster, whether the browser itself is faster or not. I try FF about every 3 months or so, but keep coming back to Chrome.

> I try FF about every 3 months or so, but keep coming back to Chrome

I don't know your specific reasons. But commonly this is just familiarity bias.

That doesn't say that X is better than Y in general (it often isn't) just that you know X better than Y and therefore it's better for you.

It's why I've never been able to switch to emacs despite trying it out. It's why I'm forever stuck on Ubuntu, despite the fact that there are DEs/distros out there that suit my use case better, probably.

I use Firefox as a secondary browser on my Macs and primary browser on Windows and Linux, but I agree. It lacks polish, and its UI feels “off” in ways that are difficult to articulate.

It’s probably fixable, though. One of these days when I have some surplus time I’d like to grab a copy of the Firefox source, see how practical changing its UI is, and figure out if the root cause of lack of polish is technical or organizational. If it’s the latter a fork may be in order.

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