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Comment by arealaccount | Hacker News Reader

Love all the work arounds - right click the button and inspect to undisable it, etc.

You can just install Firefox

But im scared of their bad privacy policy

But you’re logged into reddit, and you’re… using Chrome?

Why is FF the one app that you’re a privacy policy enthusiast when you couldn’t care less on every other app you’re using

Your mission is not to have invasive and possibly malicious ads then, like, Firefox does that. Its so weird to me why people make all these reasons to stay on Google Chrome when they allegedly hate it and its incredibly trivial to just use firefox

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You can just install Firefox

You can just install Firefox.

Others have workflows that may take weeks to migrate from chrom{e,ium-based} and something will be lost in transition anyway. I spent at least a few days, preemptively in 2024, to fully migrate to Firefox from Vivaldi. I haven’t had lower blood sugar levels in a decade. And when the dust over new privacy statement settles, maybe I’ll need to figure out ways to LibreWolf now.

It’s not as easy as “just install” if you are at advanced user/developer level.

If you are at an advanced user/developer level then it's pretty trivial to migrate and export whatever settings you need and import them into your new browser.

My experience disagrees. You may believe so, I won’t protest. But if you wanted to know why people don’t just migrate, this is the answer.

Ignore my other reply, for some reason I was sure you were commenting in a different thread and couldn't see context.

Your experience disagrees, that's fine, but could you give some examples? What exactly would take weeks to migrate? Certainly not extensions and settings or bookmarks, so what would? It's not a question of belief when we have empirical evidence to work with.

As I said below, I had to find a new way to manage my bookmarks due to the difference in how it works in Vivaldi. Also after some search I decided to write a custom search-with extension, which surprised me with learning web-ext signing. Another issue was with download location that works very strangely until you mess with about:config. Firefox also has scrolling tabbar, which I had to disable and restyle so I can actually see where tab buttons are. Spent time on finding a non-malbloat gestures ext. Still have to rewrite some ahk scripts for new bookmarklets placement. Failed to have custom shortcuts (ff has none). I remember having a few more issues but can’t tell now. Things like last tab standing, deciding which one of the history/recently closed lists to use, etc.

It took a few days to investigate, google, try and fail, take rest, try again. Sure, I can do this faster now due to experience, but you start with none.

That's fair, it took a bit of time for me to convert everything from Brave back to Firefox when I switched, but once you have everything you need in both formats, you never really have to do anything like it again, not until a third browser that's worth something comes along at least.

It's hard to believe you when I take ad blocking more seriously than most and would be more likely to notice a difference than most. You might not believe me about that, which is fine.

However, the claim in question seems like an objective claim for which empirical evidence would be very possible to provide, so until someone shows some clear examples I remain unconvinced.

What "workflow" exists in a browser?

Managing bookmarks, custom searches, tab deduplication/management, download path settings. I think I could name a few more but these are most important to me. Also just numerous pseudo-small things like “find a gestures extension that doesn’t suck or spy”. It’s not workflow, but is part of migration.

I believe "FoxyGestures" is the best solution for that piece on FF at least. (As a fellow gesture enjoyer it was one of the reasons I moved to Vivaldi from Chrome.)

I ended up using gesturefy. It’s tiny but fully configurable and has rockers. Covered my needs, ymmw.

Last time I checked, some of the Google Docs/Sheets functionality wasn't fully-baked in anything but Chrome/Chromium... Maybe this has improved though? I have a nice Chrome extension that automatically checks my various GMail/Workspace accounts and gives me an icon and popout thing so I can see previews without having to fire up multiple different tabs just for a quick glance.

This was part of why I moved to Vivaldi from Chrome about a year ago. But the fact that Vivaldi can only do so much (with the Chromium base) to stave off deprecation of the best ad-blocker has me considering a move back to Firefox now.

The rhetoric and weirdness about staying with Chrome are reminiscent to the rhetoric and weirdness justifying staying on Windows when Ubuntu (or...) and MacOS are right there.

There is no functional difference between chrome and Firefox. If you are at all dissatisfied with google it's trivial to switch. I don't think the analogy holds

Firefox's keyboard shortcuts are worse

- Cmd+Shift+P instead of Cmd+Shift+N for new incognito window is objectively wrong and can't be fixed

- Having separate Cmd+Shift+N and Cmd+Shift+T shortcuts for open last closed window/last closed tab instead of Cmd+Shift+T doing both is also objectively worse

- I can't rebind Previous/Next tab, at least on macOS

There's less extensions because Firefox failed on the last 1% of copying Chrome's extension API. Doing it correctly would've meant it's possible to install extensions on Firefox directly from the Chrome Web Store, like you can with the Orion browser.

Mouse scroll physics are too slow on macOS. One "tick" of my scroll wheel scrolls a bit more than half of how much Chrome and Safari scroll

There is no full screen mode that hides the URL bar

Every single time you're searching something, Firefox includes a list of ads for search engines I will never use for as long as I live (Bing and DDG) under a "This time search with..." guise instead of just showing me search results. There are tons of these minor design flaws which add up to making Firefox feel like a worse browser.

Chrome is a faster browser according to every bench mark I've seen and I can feel it.

Switching would log me out of all my websites and clear all localStorage data

> Cmd+Shift+P instead of Cmd+Shift+N for new incognito window is objectively wrong and can't be fixed

Lol this is just a habit/preference, not an objective truth.

Most of your excuses are equally bad, and most are addressable.

Sure, you can prefer chrome - but if you had to switch it wouldn't be a huge imposition (Certainly less for 99% of people than it seems to be for you)

It's not comparable to switching from Windows to Linux.

There are plenty of crappy but important websites that don't work with Firefox and there's hardly ever a way of knowing that's the issue without opening Chrome and seeing that it works there. I'm not putting Firefox on my dad's PC just so he complains about not being able to access his bank, etc. Maybe Mozilla should focus on that issue instead of an AI website builder, ad server, etc.

Not sure about plenty; I've been using Firefox for years now and not encountered any real issues like that.

Each to their own, I just disagree that Firefox isn't a real alternative in the same way Linux is to windows.

The simple truth is that Chrome is convenient and people are lazy, and so they'd rather make excuses than switch to one of the dozens of privacy focused alternatives out there.

> inspect to undisable it

To be clear, this is to reinstall it if you accidentally uninstalled it. Keeping it enabled is easier but still follows a dark pattern.

Well, reddit is a website, firefox knows everything within it that's a very clear difference.

>Why is FF the one app that you’re a privacy policy enthusiast

because their favorite Youtube influencer told them so. That sadly is the reality of it, we're living in an age where people get their information off social media and clickbait, so some random legalese changes by Mozilla that don't mean anything get more attention than Google's pervasively bad privacy practices for the last 20 years.

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