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Comment by wruza | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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