Hacker News Reader

Comment by dartharva | Hacker News Reader

I don't know why but websites always feel downgraded with Firefox and its descendants. Long load times, incomplete/failed loads, bad font rendering, buffering.. It feels evident that webmasters only care for compatibility with Chrome et al.

It felt that it was subsiding in between, but sites have again started breaking on it nowadays.

View on HN

I use Firefox on Linux and in general it's fine. Only really dreadful stuff like Microsoft Teams will outright fail. I've found that using NextDNS or an adblocker is more harmful on certain sites. I've had situations where a website completely fails until I change my DNS provider to 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8 or wherever. But I tend to avoid sites like that if I have a choice.

I'm sticking with Firefox. I like the account features (sync, send tab to another device etc) but Firefox's killer feature is container tabs, especially with the add-on for regex URL matching for container selection, and the other add-on that automatically handles AWS SSO accounts.

I noticed Teams unexpectedly started working in Firefox for me, a few months ago.

That's terrible. Maybe if you downgrade?

> especially with the add-on for regex URL matching for container selection

Which add-on is that? It would be quite helpful.

That is a built-in Firefox container feature. Open a website in a container and then click on the container icon (right next to the search bar) to keep that site open in that container. Every other time, that site loads directly into that container

Thats per domain, not on any pattern of URL.

Yep, I think it's called "Containerise" with the British spelling. To make it work you need to remove your existing URL rules from the main container tabs add-on, or they'll fight like cat and dog if there's a conflict.

What's great about regex matching is that you can grab a regex for each of your Google accounts, and bookmark the URL that the regex matches. I've changed the Firefox search bar config to prioritise bookmarks in the results. I can now type 'gmail', and the top two results are:

Gmail (work)

Gmail (personal)

Each opens in opens in the correct container. The trick sometimes is finding a bookmarkable URL with a specific string that you can use in a regex.

To be honest it's one of the features I wish Firefox would add to their add-on because I don't like giving their party add-ons access to my data.

Well at this point for anybody who cares about adblocking Firefox is the only choice, unfortunately.

Have you seen the thing were Mozilla officially bought an advertising company recently then started adding advertising friendly features near silently?

Can you provide more info about this?

Yep:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40842808

Better link: https://archive.md/6Un3E

Also important note, but Firefox account settings/sync is End-to-End encrypted, a nice privacy feature compared to the much more invasive Google Account sync.

I use Firefox a lot (and occasionally Chrome), and I haven't had any issues with Firefox. I've been pretty happy with it.

While I agree that develops really only care for Chromium compatability, I've not really noticed any issues with Firefox, except with Google sites every now and then (YouTube in particular).

Yes, Youtube is the main irritant for me as well.

When it comes to the websites belonging to the competition, I feel like it's unjust to blame Firefox instead of, in this case, Google.

Google is ironically a key sponsor of Firefox.

Weirdly, I've had to install the full Google Chrome because the Chromium has been problematic. Can't remember details, but I think MS Teams was one example.

That might be dependent on use case and which sites you use. I haven't installed Chrome for more than 3 years. Firefox has been my primary browser ever since Opera switched from using Presto, but I kept Chrome as a backup for the longest time. Now I don't needed it anymore. I do have Safari available, but that's mostly for testing.

When your coming directly from Chrome, then maybe you see the problems more? I know I started really disliking Chrome, mostly do to the UI and the developer tools (which is worse that Firefox and much worse than the old Opera, in my opinion).

Font rendering does feel much worse on macOS, but on Windows you can tweak the cleartype parameters a bit and get it closer to Edge/Chrome.

https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/404408660a4d976e2a...

As web developers it is our moral and ethical duty to use Firefox / any non chromium browsers because we truly understand the problem of one company controlling the web.

Same problem, to the point that I started testing alternative browsers that are chromium based. Currently using Brave, I couldn't find better alternatives that worked on linux, windows and Android.

It's shocking that there isn't a decent chromium based browser that supports extensions on android.

There is an app called Kiwi Browser that does support extensions on Android. The issue becomes no sync, which I think is also a feature you are looking for.

It makes sense that Chrome has never built it, have to keep the users from using Adblock.

I'm aware of Kiwi, but it lags for months to a year behind chromium updates, which is very dangerous.

Chrome for sure, I was surprised that also any other browser (Via, Soul, Brave, vivaldi) don't support extensions.

I'm on Brave now because while it does not support ublock origin, the adblocker is stronger than the others I tried and works similarly. It also has some sort of builtin sponsorblock, so I use it on the phone over Firefox which is slow.

Fonts do always look way better on Chrome. I can't explain it.

It's just familiarity. I use Firefox on macOS and I always think the fonts look fuzzy on Chrome when I'm occasionally forced to use it. I spent a few weeks on Arc (Chrome-based) earlier this year, got used to the fonts, and then they looked a bit weird when I came back to Firefox.

I hate the Chrome fonts for this reason.

I'm surprised Mac users are noticing a difference though, I find the difference basically vanishes on really high res displays (like my QHD-ish panel on my Framework 13).

Pixels aren’t noticeable anymore in such resolutions but font rendering and anti aliasing may still impact perceived contrast and crispness.

Though, on such displays, disabling AA totally is a viable option but it will still feel different.

Interesting, font rendering is the number one thing that makes me hate Electron apps (I have so much more reasons to hate Chrome).

It’s to the point that I just can’t use, say, VS Code on a monitor that is not Hi-DPI.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that the font doesn’t look better. Maybe it’s aesthetically more pleasing but to me, it’s just harder to read.

I have multiple eye issues that may not help and which make me more demanding but since I don’t have this issue with OS rendered fonts, I consider this to be an issue.

When a site doesn't work properly, please use this form to notify Mozilla: https://webcompat.com/issues/new

Slack video chat works only in Chrome. As in, they explicitly check for non-Chrome browsers and say “Nope. We won’t even let you try”.

When I saw that, I thought, “Yep. We’ve come full-circle.” Chrome really is the new IE.

I had the most issues with sites like YouTube, where I‘m not surprised that Chrome based browsers run better. However, I recently also had issues with Sony, where the login page would error out every single time with Safari and Firefox. Chromium worked just fine.

I honestly do not understand why there’s this little testing being done. Yeah, Chrome is dominant, but that doesn’t mean that other browsers should not be used or don’t exist. It‘s actively harming users. In our software development projects (HPC software), we deliberately test with all compilers available on HPC systems, just to ensure that nothing breaks…

Reply on news.ycombinator.com