Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox | Hacker News Reader

Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

qwerjk.com

179 pointsabentspoon148 comments

I'm glad to see more and more people switching (back) to Firefox, as I admit I'm quite a Firefox fanboy.

I've never made the full switch to Chrome. First, as a long time linux user, Firefox was never so bad on it (startup time, random freeze for i/o...).

Second, when Chrome was (a lot) faster Firefox had way more addons. Now Chrome has kinda fixed that (I still miss some essential addons, like Tree Style Tab), but Firefox is again about as fast as Chrome.

Regarding Google, I've found that it's result are often better than DuckDuckGo. But I promised myself that sometime I'll make a week using only DuckDuckGo, and see if I can survive without Google.

I used DDG for two months and as a developer trying to find the latest bugs, code snippets, and help; It was a lot harder on DDG than in Google. I would always end up having to type google.com <tab> in my address bar to search for programming related items. That being said, people have pointed me to resources to help me improve my search results.

On DDG you can add !g to the start or end of a query and it will do the search on Google.

That's one of the best, and yet one of the worst feature of DuckDuckGo.

When I tried using it a while ago, I ended up always searching for "!g <query>", since I knew I would always get equal or better results.

I'm glad it's this easy to search on Google from DuckDuckGo, but it also makes the switch harder. Or, at least, it did for me.

I had the same problem. I switched to DDG and Firefox when the PRISM story broke but ended up using !g on so many queries I made Google my default again. I find Google much better when I'm searching for API docs, StackOverflow Q's etc.

Yeah I had the same problem. If I'm going to be in DDG but most of my searches are on Google, what's the point of me using DDG?

!sp will search on StartPage, which is a privacy-proxied Google search. That's my fallback if the default DDG search doesn't work.

The !Bang syntax is excellent for searching language/framework/library specific answers. Just append it to the end of a search if you need to.

[DuckDuckGo !Bang](https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html)

If you still need a Google result, try appending !sp which will give you a Startpage result (Google result with privacy)

You don't need DDG for that. Both Firefox and Chrome support adding shortcut keywords for search boxes.

For example, in Firefox all you have to do is to right click on a search box and select "Add Keyword for this Search".

It's much better than DDG because:

1) if you care about privacy, then this is obviously the right way, as you don't have to redirect through a third-party's server

2) you can add shortcuts for whatever you want, without being limited to a fixed set. For instance I type "dex someWord" for getting the definition of words in my native language. I type "word hello" for doing a search on wordnik.com. I type "w definition" for Wikipedia. I type "mvn package" for doing a maven package search. I type "gem library" for doing a RubyGems search.

And yeah, it's easier to add a shortcut that's relevant to you, then it is to read that DDG document you linked to.

I haven't played with Firefox keywords really but isn't the saved search still going through whatever the default search engine is (in Firefox, Google)?

[Update] I guess my point is that DDG has it ready to go and the syntax is usually easy enough to figure out without building up one's own keyword list.

Maybe I'm missing something, but it just seems that DDG offers a better solution.

Example: I use the letter 'd' for DDG searches in the address bar. In the "Show all bookmarks" window for the DDG bookmark, I've filled in "Location: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%s" and "Keyword: d" .

When I enter into the address bar: "d turkey trot [return]" Firefox turns that into "https://duckduckgo.com/?q=turkey trot" and initiates the DDG search.

But you can use the same FF keyword feature to auto-generate a URL for any site. If you go to BoingBoing a lot, you could just enter 'bb [return]'.

[Note: some of the DDG 'bangs' are out of date ... try !js]

No, it doesn't go through default search engine, only one http direct get request to the target search engine.

Got it. I made DDG my default in the awesome bar, but I understand the benefits of the saved keyword approach better now.

I switched to DDG some time ago, and I totally live happy with it. Besides, lately they improved the quality a lot, both on the results and on speed performances.

The bang syntax is just awesome, and I rarely need to !g my results.

same, everyone I know switched to Chrome, and always had said "why are you still using Firefox?". Because I've used it since 0.5 or whatever, I like the browser, I've stuck with it. It doesn't install a bunch of uninstallable tools into Windows either like any Google app does (Try and find where you uninstall the Google update binaries, it involves deleting folders, editing the registry, editing scheduled tasks)

Same thing here. I always used Firefox, and never got the hype about Chrome. I like Mozilla goals stated in their manifesto way more than Google's ambiguous "don't be evil" which doesn't even hold up to its promise.

I don't know why, but Firefox always takes so long to load for me. Personally I'm quite happy with Chrome.

Tree Style Tabs is cool! Have you got any other recommendations? Besides AdBlock+, NoScript, HTTPS Everywhere and Chatzilla?

I've been using DDG and Firefox for years now, and don't miss Google at all.

The main thing I'm really annoyed with DDG about is that they don't (no longer?) treat double-quoted search terms as literal. I'll often get results that are close to but not exactly what I asked for.

This is really frustrating, as my entire intention in double quoting search terms is to ask for exactly those search terms and nothing else.

As far as DDG's privacy boasts go, I'd love to see them confirmed by frequent audits from a trusted and respected entity like the EFF. For all we know, DDG might be lying (or being forced to lie) about not tracking or spying on its users and not handing over the data it collects on us to others.

My motto is: trust but verify. So far, there's no way to do that in the case of DDG. Still, I'd much rather use a service that at least pays (pretty convincing) lip service to respecting its users' privacy than services where there's clear evidence of abuse and contempt for its users' privacy, such as Google or Facebook.

DDG is Bing with some front end work, why not just use Bing and then you can use quotes searches without problem [1]

[1] http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/ff524480.aspx

I assume because he switched to DDG for privacy reasons, not because he thought the search was better. Also DDG has some search features that neither Google nor Bing have.

For people who still like Google search more, but want the privacy, I'd suggest startpage.com. I see even the Tor Browser Bundle uses it as the default search engine (you can still switch to DDG and others, too).

It's not just Bing.

"DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "about 50" sources, including Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wikipedia, Wolfram Alpha, Bing, its own Web crawler, the DuckDuckBot, and others."[1]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duckduckgo#Features

It is a meta search engine with lions share of queries answered by Yahoo! BOSS (which is backed by Bing).

I just got hit by that "search this exact mispelled phrase" bug earlier today, and yes, it's annoying.

I was surprised to see praise for Chrome's omnibar here. The meddlesome assumption that everything I type into the URL bar is or should be a Google search drives me crazy when I use Chrome. By comparison, Firefox's URL bar does an incredible job of matching fragments of URLs to my history and bookmarks.

My personal project has the word "taskforce" in the domain and title. In Firefox, I can type "task" and it's at the top of the options every single time. One down arrow, enter, and done. Chrome puts it as option five under a search for "task" and three predictive recommendations from Google's search engine that start with "task" (none of which I have ever visited in Chrome). "Taskstream log in"? I don't even know what that means.

Essentially everything I want to select in the omnibar is always several items down the list. Very frustrating and inevitably one of the chief reasons I close Chrome and switch back to Firefox.

HN is the most obvious example of this for me. It's one of my most visited sites in both browsers. In Firefox, I can type "y" into the url field, and it's the first result. In Chrome, the same "y" lists youtube, y, yahoo, and youtube (again) before HN.

Try typing 'n'... seeing as the url of this website is news.ycombinator.com. It doesn't start with y, as youtube or yahoo does.

Well, for me that's a fault. Why should the search have to begin with the starting letter of the site? Or why should that be favored? I'd rather point me to the most likely site containing that letter/group of letter.

Oh well, it's probably personal preference :)

I haven't had this problem since I turned off predictive search for the omnibar.

I, too, do not like the omnibar and can speculate Google did it to drive traffic to its search engine, not to help you. They judge that this (highly profitable) annoyance is not enough to drive from Google.

I wonder if the recommendations are however slightly linked to CPC of the terms, wouldn't surprise me.

Here are some of my Chrome autocompletes: n (news.ycombinator.com), mu (music.google.com), ma (mail.google.com), a (amazon.com), gi (github.com), q (quora.com), l (localhost), i (images.google.com), c (coursera.com). I don't think I even give it a second thought after pressing these characters. I just do 'n' and Return.

Your experience might be worse, probably because you haven't used chrome enough.

To be clear, if I start typing the beginning of the domain name, Chrome will correctly identify my intent. But if I type a fragment of the URL (or multiple fragments), it assumes I want to run a search.

In your example, you said "n" leads to news.ycombinator.com. In Firefox, "n" leads to me to news.cnet.com, which I also visit fairly regularly. Meanwhile, "yc", or "hac", or "nator" yield Hacker News. In Chrome, "yc" yields a suggestion of "yc.edu" (whatever that is) and "hac" yields "hacked games." Part of my distaste for this is that it reveals that everything I type into the omnibar is sent to Google for analysis. I have once accidentally pasted a password into the omnibar field and had a sudden panic. I know it's Google, and DBE, and all of that. But still.

Back to the fragments point, I might remember a site had something to do with "combi" in the name. Type that into Firefox and it knows what I want, even if I've only visited it once several months ago. Google thinks I want "combivent respimat." No joke. Apparently it's a drug.

In fact, as I experiment right now, I can't even get Chrome to suggest news.ycombinator.com by typing "combinator" into the omnibar. As a user of Chrome I am required to remember the domain started with 'y'. In Firefox, the browser tries to help me.

As an exercise, can you tell us what sites are suggested when you type "combinator", "host", "hub" (this one is an example of a plausible case--"It was something-hub", type "hub", "oh yeah, github!"), etc?

Different strokes, etc? The Chrome omnibar is my favorite navigational tool I've ever used and I wish it was in every program (maybe that's possible already, I don't know actually). It's the main reason I haven't switched to Firefox.

> But the keyboard shortcuts mean I can ... without reaching for the mouse, and using a very limited set of shortcuts.

This is why I love vimperator[0]. I actually preferred pentadactyl[1] but development apparently stalled so I switched back.

[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/vimperator/

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/pentadactyl/

As a long-time user of Pentadactyl, Firefox, and vim, I'd like to make the heretical suggestion to try w3m in emacs.

Having a web browser fully integrated in to a powerful editor like that is fantastic. It's far more powerful than what you'd get from the Pentadactyl/Firefox combination, with the disadvantage that w3m can't handle Javascript.[1]

w3m's also far faster and a lot less bloated than Firefox. For sites that work without Javascript and where I only care about getting information in text format (which is probalby 99% of the sites I use), it's just about perfect for me. For the rest, I have Firefox, Opera, and Chromium as backups.

[1] This is not a big loss on most sites, as they can usually be used just fine without it. In fact, it's often good to have Javascript turned off so as to avoid Javascript exploits, tracking and advertising.

The most annoying thing about w3m for me these days is the fonts in my default terminal window. I've been shopping around for a better alternative (GNOME terminal or XFCE4's terminal seem to beat my trusty old rxvt). The ability to dynamically resize fonts is also kind of nice (yeah, I'm old school).

That and the fact that color settings for w3m are pretty hard to tweak just right for whatever terminal / foreground/background you're using.

The fact that so many pages render much more readably without CSS is .... sad, actually.

I can't believe someone misses Chrome's "Tiny Tab" thing, I think it's the single most broken thing about the browser. In Firefox I used to use multi row tabs and then Tree style tabs when I had too many tabs. In Chrome all I can do is open a new window. I don't see what's useful at all about having 20 reddit icons.

(pretty much switched to Chrome entirely because of web development and Firefox taking too long to reload, but might switch back once I don't need to do web dev for a while).

One really nice thing about firefox is no more He's Dead Jim pages.

Chrome (even stable) seems to crash tabs all the time, while in the past 6 months firefox nightly hasn't crashed more than a once or twice. Another annoying thing about chrome is I never got a reason for a crash it just was a crash page and if I tried to reload that page it was very likely to crash silently again, with chrome at least I get the stop script dialog once in a while.

Chrome still starts faster (more noticable on windows than linux). There are also a plethora of webkit optimized experiments that don't work for shit on firefox.

> One really nice thing about firefox is no more He's Dead Jim pages.

It took me a minute to figure out what you were referring to then I realized I haven't seen one of those in months -- since, I believe, I stopped using Flash.

I made the switch to DDG about 2 years ago and am pretty happy, though I do occasionally use the !g.

Switched back to FF on my desktop a couple months ago when I got my keon and I love it. The only thing that's hard to get used to again is a search bar separate from an address bar. Chrome really had that figured out. A unified bar in FF would make it the perfect browser.

When I was using Firefox I used this extension to unify the address/search bars.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/omnibar/

Wow, thanks!

Is this not default behavior? I've never had an addon installed, but just typing in a query and pressing enter in the URL routes it to Google...

Edit: Ah, I suppose the auto-complete is different.

Also Sometimes for some non URL queries it defaults to what feels like an 'I'm feeling lucky' search.

I don't think it does that anymore. I haven't observed it for quite a while.

I can confirm that. I really miss that feature.

It doesn't do that anymore, since at least last fall when I switched to Firefox full time. I remember running into this previously -- maybe Fx 3.5 days? -- when I tried to do a unit conversion google search and it would send me to a horrible unit conversion site.

Since the post was about privacy I'd like to point out that unifying the address and search bar means that you can't search through your history/bookmarks (or do keywords searches) without sending the information to your search engine (so that it can show result propositions) which is kind of a privacy leak IMO. Also when nothing from your history/bookmarks/keywords searches have matched in the awesome bar, it does act like a search bar. You just don't have result propositions as you type.

I don't use Omnibar, because by typing words into the address bar directly, Firefox does do a search.

Also Firefox's address bar is much better at searching your history, saving you from doing Google searches. For example you can type the words in the titles of articles you've read and Firefox's AwesomeBar does a good job at suggesting past entries.

This is awesome when you no longer remember the domain or url, but you remember a word or two. In such instances searching on Google doesn't help either.

This feature to me has been an epiphany actually. Google has no interest in developing something like the AwesomeBar, because they'd rather see you doing searches on Google instead.

> Google has no interest in developing something like the AwesomeBar

As far as I can tell, chrome's address-bar behavior is trying to do something like the FF "awesome bar", i.e., combine searches of past urls and titles of pages you've visited, plus google search results, etc., into a single DWIM-like result.

Chrome's results aren't as good as FF's (I typically have to type more to get what what I'm looking for, and the ordering is often not ideal), but it does appear to have similar goals. Chrome used to be much worse at this, but seems to have improved somewhat over time.

As to why exactly FF's results are better, my guess is that it weights the results differently, emphasizing pages you've visited often even if the match is in the middle somewhere, whereas chrome seems to give prefix matches more weight....

[I normally use FF, but use chrome occasionally too...]

You can search in the address bar just fine and change it to DDG: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/search-web-address-bar

Could your (or someone) tell me whether you considered startpage.com at all? I tried both and I liked sp better.

> A unified bar in FF would make it the perfect browser.

Did you RTFA?

"Firefox separates the address and search bars. Coming from Chrome, that sounds insane. Use Omnibar to combine the two."

Huh, I guess I'm old-school (though I think of Firefox as relatively "new school")? Command-K and Command-L are burned into my hands, and I find it jarring to have the address bar acting like a search box. That, the lack of an "Awesome Bar", and no multiple shortcuts for refresh made switching to Chrome nigh impossible back when it was compellingly faster than Firefox.

The first thing I do when setting up Firefox is configure some keyword searches. Second, I remove the search box from the toolbar. I guess I miss search suggestions, but I'm more of a quickly-type-a-query-and-then-hit-enter person so I don't gain much from suggestions when I use Chrome.

What I miss, however, is a way to configure search engines and keyboard search without re-enabling the search box. I wish it was somewhere in settings or an about: page.

> A unified bar in FF would make it the perfect browser.

The thing is there are people like me who prefer a separate search bar. I don't want google search results showing up when I'm just trying to look through my history or bookmarks.

It also is a privacy issue -- if the URL bar tries to autocomplete search results, then it necessarily sends every URL you type to google/etc.

There's an omnibar FF plugin that I install immediately on every FF installation.

I miss the functionality from browser in Mozilla Suite.

Basically, when you type something in the address bar it would show your history and add "Search for ..." as the last option. So, even if you had large history, it was enough to press the UP arrow and switch from address to searching.

AFAIK, this is still the way it works on SeaMonkey.

This is exactly how Firefox currently works, but you just press enter instead of up and then enter. If what you've got in the address bar doesn't look like an address, it'll google it for you.

It'll actually use whatever you have the search bar set to.

Fair enough. I figured that was the case, but I've never bothered to change it.

> A unified bar in FF

you need Foobar [1].

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/foobar/

Things I advise you to install on Firefox : Tree Style Tab[1]

Basically what it does is display the tabs on the left, thus occupying a space that is rarely used on websites (borders). It is so practical for managing many tabs, nesting tabs etc... that I can't understand why a power user who uses a lot of tabs would switch to chrome.

Just try to use it for a day or a week and it will change your life.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

Tree style tabs. All-in-one sidebar. Vimperator. Ghostery. Adblock Plus. Stylish (or Stylebot). I've come to rather love the latter under Chrome, which I've been using increasingly lately. Readability. Torbutton.

That's off the top of my head, there's a few others I typically add.

My main problem with FF lately is that with _both_ FF (well, Iceweasel) and Chromium installed, Chrome pigs out all available memory, while Firefox is single-processed. While the _active_ Chrome tab usually frees up fairly quickly if swapped, Firefox can literally take minutes to dig itself out of heavy swap.

Yeah, I still use spinning rust.

There's Adblock Plus Pop-up which is a must have as well.

I actually never ended up switching to Chrome from Firefox in the first place, but those are still good tips. I guess I did the right thing :)

Yes, it has a terrible memory leak issue, but all of my computers have enough ram as to not notice.

I'm still not ready to make the switch to DuckDuckGo. I figure that if I'm going to stick with Gmail no matter what, if Google already has that information, collecting a few search queries is nothing.

Also, perhaps I'm missing something, but as far as I can tell Chrome is at least partially open source, no? http://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/get-the-code

Why aren't people forking it to create a more privacy friendly version?

  > Also, perhaps I'm missing something, but as far as I
  > can tell Chrome is at least partially open source, no?
  > http://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/get-the-code
  > 
  > Why aren't people forking it to create a more privacy
  > friendly version?

People citing privacy as a reason to move away from Chrome are doing so on moral rather than technical grounds. Chromium itself doesn't have anything harmful in it, so there's no point in forking. Chrome is just Chromium plus some third-party proprietary plugins (Flash, the PDF renderer).

Well you hope it is.

All sorts can happen between source and binary.

There's enough security researchers (of any hat color) crawling over the Chrome binaries that I'm fairly confident there are no backdoors being introduced. To verify, you could disassemble the Chrome binary and compare it against a disassembled Chromium binary that you built. You could also use a packet sniffer and/or MITM proxy to verify that no unexpected data transmissions are occurring.

That probably depends on your definition of ‘backdoors’. Some of the data Chrome sends to Google could easily be considered a breach of privacy (and the corresponding functionality hence supposedly doesn’t exist in Chromium).

I've never heard a claim that Chrome sends more data than Chromium. Do you have a link?

The Wikipedia page on Chromium[0] gives some differences, though my remark was admittedly mostly based on the description of the chromium package in Debian[1], which at least claims ‘usage tracking’ (and the generally useless and backdoor-like auto-updater).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_(web_browser)#Differe...

[1] http://packages.debian.org/wheezy/chromium

That assumption relies on two uncertainties:

1. The probability of discovering something in all that binary code, especially with the intricate and non-orthogonal nature of x86/x64 assembly and odd compiler optimisations. This isn't some 80's game.

A comparison:

    28500000 = Chrome binary size [1]
   750000000 = Human Genome size (converted to bytes - 1BP = 2bits so 4BP per byte) [2]

So we're only 26x more complicated than Chrome and we have absolutely no fucking idea what is going on with us most of the time.

2. The probability of a vulnerability being published to Google versus selling it on the private market.

[1] http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/bloat/

[2] http://www.biostars.org/p/5514/

The actual comparison would be between the Chrome binary size and the Chromium binary size, which is quite small if you exclude embedded graphical resources.

Actually that's a really bad comparison.

The binary size may be similar but that doesn't mean the content is. Consider the two cases below to back up my assertion:

   000000WE_COME_IN_PEACE000000000000000000
   000000WE_COME_IN_PEACE_SHOOT_TO_KILL0000

I don't understand your point. If there were such a difference between Chromium and Chrome, then it would surely show up in a diff of the binaries' disassemblies. The size of the binaries doesn't matter, because (assuming you trust the Chromium source and your local system) only the difference between the two is relevant.

My point is that it will show up in a diff of the binaries.

Isn't that what I said?

I said that the binaries could be diffed, then you responded that finding a difference is unlikely because the binary is very large. I don't understand what the absolute size of the binaries has to do with being able to compare them.

> All sorts can happen between source and binary.

True. But also true of firefox. But you can install chromium and firefox from source and be sure that apart from your compiler nobody planted anything in your browser.

> terrible memory leak issue

I don't think this is as terrible as you think anymore (or if it is really even an issue anymore). The MemShrink[0] project has made huge progress. See also: https://areweslimyet.com/

[0] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/MemShrink

There aren't any memory leak issues in Firefox. I have been using Firefox since Firefox 10 and it has made huge strides in memory performance so much so that it beats every browser out there on memory benchmarks.

In fact, on the mac, with the same number (34) of tabs, the same content, no add-ons or extensions, Firefox takes 600MB - 800MB, Safari takes around 900MB-1GB and Chrome takes around 900-1.2GB. I use these browsers every day and I have the same results every day.

I have the same tabs open now in Firefox, all 34 of them and it's only taking 740MB. You just can't beat that. It's really awesome.

None of that points to the absence of memory leaks.

(I'm not saying Firefox has memory leaks. Though it's extremely unlikely it has none, same goes for Chrome and Safari)

As a Mac guy, I switched back to Firefox when Chrome became practically unusable (slow, crashy). Pleasant surprise: Firefox is snappier and much-evolved since I last used it.

Haven't tried DuckDuckGo yet, but I know my day is coming.

This makes no sense. I, like many people here use a Mac and Chrome and can't remember the last time it crashed. I suspect this is something specific to your installation, possibly a rogue plugin you've installed.

My experience is quite the opposite to yours. neither ff or chrome crash much, and chrome is significantly faster.

On my system -- and I've tried everything I could think of, including blowing away my profile -- it's slow, crashy, and hangs a lot. It's a newish Macbook Pro with plenty of disk and RAM.

FF, on the other hand, is faster (!) and doesn't crash often.

I hope Firefox's OS X integration improves soon.

Lion-style scrollbars, the bouncy effect when you hit the top and bottom of a page, and back/forward swipes have no animation. It's pretty terrible in terms of usability compared to Safari and Chrome.

It has all that in the latest Firefox Nightly.

Chrome only has the black back/forward animations. Firefox Nightly's animation is exactly like Safari, although you has to enable them specifically for now in about:config.

It also has ML-style scrollbars where they enlarge when you mouse over them.

So OS X integration has certainly improved.

Are people switching to DuckDuckGo simply because of paranoia? I don't care if Google knows whatever I'm searching for, it helps them improve their search results. DuckDuckGo's search is nowhere near as good as Google.

I also made this switch, and am slowly trying to find my way off of Google services (mostly gmail).

I really like Chrome, and might have stayed with Chromium if there had been an easy to install bookmark and password sync server I could run like Firefox has with Weave (for obvious reasons, I no longer want my sync data centralized with Google). Chromium apparently has a server you can run at home, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to do it. In addition, Chrome for Android has no support for self-hosted sync, so unlike with Firefox I couldn't sync my mobile devices even if I could set up a self-hosted server.

With Firefox, hosting your own sync server is trivial: there are even several different implementations of the Weave server besides Mozilla.

I miss Chrome, since I was very happy with the performance and dev tools, but I've made my decision and will live with it (except when I need to test web development stuff in Chrome).

DDG's obviously gotten a massive boost from this whole issue: https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=duckduckgo

I was a bit surprised that Firefox hasn't: https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=firefox

but obviously it has a lot more inertia. (Or maybe everyone switches to DDG first, and THEN looks for Firefox, so Google Trends doesn't know about it...)

it is the #1 related term (duckduckgo firefox)

as of just now

also compare them: https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=firefox#q=firefox%2C...

firefox jumped about as much as ddg recently, but that's a blip on firefox as a whole

Ya, that's what I meant by the 'inertia' of Firefox. It takes a lot to move the needle on it. The comparison is definitely illustrative though.

(The part about everyone finding Firefox on DDG was a joke.)

I made this switch myself recently. The web dev tools in FF are still a bit weak in pseudo areas and media queries but I'm living with it for now. BTW, why doesn't Firefox have "paste & match style"?

DDG is also my go-to search engine.

Personally, I feel better supporting Mozilla and DDG more.

Two suggestions:

1) if you are concerned about privacy you should also turn off malware protection in FF because it sends pages that you visit to Google (yes, I know their privacy policy - do you trust them?). For additional points you can open about:config, search for "google" and remove all occurences. Point being: even FF doesn't completely protect your privacy by default.

2) DDG is great and I use it, but if I were really concerned about privacy I would use a non-US provider (StartPage is based in Netherlands, not sure where they host their servers though). Point being: DDG claims they don't store user data, but that doesn't mean NSA doesn't either. If they are USA based, they must obey USA laws.

Sentiment in the comments indicates how I feel: FirefoX is now the New Browser To use if you want privacy and security but wait there is more: the sole act of installing it is a charitable donation towards the free internet. Firefox problems aside (caugh no multiprocess execution model caugh) thats still a strong sales pitich. And that is one of the few (hip?) trends WE get to influence if not decide the choice wich Browser our close aquaintances use. And that is awesome and and i encurage everyone to excersise it. Bretheren lets turn the tide and make FF no 1 again by leading with a good example! As a long time DDG user and recently reformed ex chrome user I say: Hutzzah

PS please pardon my autocorrect

I tried Chrome last week, but I still think the FF has a better UX, so I switched back. My biggest problems was that, out of the box, Chrome's address bar is just plain bad. It only shows 5 possible targets, while in FF I can go through my whole history, and the most used page comes up first. I didn't really noticed that I used it that much, until I tried Chrome.

This goes for the Android versions as well. If I click the address bar there in Chrome, it will go to the edit mode, which I rarely use. In contrast FF goes into edit mode + it shows relevant possibles from history underneath.

In Firefox, typing /downl[return] will open a link titled "download" on the current page

Using ' (Quick Find within link-text only) instead of / (Quick Find ) is even faster/easier.

I made the exact same two switches over the past week and agree with the author. Honestly it's been great. I'm also slowly migrating away from my gmail and to a hosted email on my domain.

I'd like to switch back to Firefox, but it's such an unbearably slow hog that I cannot force myself doing it, and I'm not even using anything JS intensive.

I use Firefox mainly and Chrome/IE for testing sometimes. Firefox has been pretty solid; however, one really annoying change in v22 is that it blows up the default zoom level. That makes websites look very big. They said it's honoring the DDP setting on Windows and for HiRes monitor, but it looks like a bug or a misguided feature. I really hope they revert the change. I'm tired of hitting ctrl-- to zoom out on every site.

An easy fix for the DPI change in Firefox 22 is to set layout.css.devPixelsPerPx in about:config to 1.0. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/962945?page=2#an...

As a long time Opera+FF user, I'm surprised I never came across the Custom Tab Width add-on, or even bothered to look for such an add-on. Made my day. :)

Tab Mix Plus is another option, with plenty of settings for everything concerning tabs:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/tab-mix-plus/

You can still use the Googlesharing addon to proxy your searches through a concentrator.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/googlesharing...

As long as you trust the proxy to not be an adversary.

Sometimes[often times] the default proxy will go down. I've had luck using the following alternate:

googlesharing.riseup.net

Why does anyone trust DuckDuckGo more than Google?

I am really confused

The only sensible comment in the entire thread! There is no reason whatsoever to trust DDG more than Google. In fact you'd think it far more likely that DDG is a stooge of the NSA than is Google.

I do personally find this thread quite amusing because it's so irrational. Firefox + DDG is so slow for searching that you might as well erase 10 years of browser performance improvements and downgrade your DSL line. Chrome omnibar + prefetch + google instant makes for much faster searching vs. firefox which lacks all of those things (and DDG which lacks "instant"). Also I have to type the entire search into firefox's search bar because DDG doesn't have suggestions. And let's not even talk about the gulf in quality between DDG and Google.

Because at the very least it doesn't use tracking cookies, which we know Google does. Whether it tracks based on IP and/or browser fingerprint is impossible to tell - there we have to take their word for it.

My biggest problems with Firefox after using Chrome for so long is stability. I find that web pages can lock up the entire browser rather than just a tab, and this isn't just a rare occurrence, when I tried to give it a chance a week ago, it happened several times. I am amazed they still haven't picked up the separate process per tab feature yet.

Really? That seems odd. I have been using firefox on a 6 year old macbook pro for many years and mac is not exactly there best supported platform. I can't remember the last time this happened to me. Do you have a test case which can be replicated? What's your platform?

I never could make the switch to Chrome due to the limited interface. That and the Proxy setup being the IE control panel.

The separate process per tabs feature has different drawbacks. Notably, it means Chrome uses more memory and can handle way less simultaneous open tabs than Firefox.

I'm glad both approaches exist.

The project to do this (Electrolysis) turned out to be a lot more effort than I think people anticipated, and was paused for a while last year to allow some other changes to happen. It resumed this year, and you can follow development from https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis which includes links to meeting notes and the experimental branch if you want to try it out.

Over several years of comparing, I find DDG results are fine for reasonably common questions and recent stuff. Sometimes when doing deep searches for more arcane topics (especially farther back in history) Google will get to what I'm looking for sooner. But I usually use Google Books for that stuff (which is where they retain a -big- advantage).

"Chrome Inspector is nice and all, but Firebug is clearly superior. I no longer recall why I hold this opinion. I'm looking forward to finding out."

For some reason, I also think this exact thing.I also know other people who share this sentiment. I wonder if it comes from Firebug just being the first to the scene?

In my experience, Chrome is way better than Firebug or Firefox's builtin tools for development. Firefox's debugger doesn't appear to have any way to debug webworkers for example. You can't reformat source. They only just got SourceMap support and it doesn't appear to work as good. No syntax coloring. Poor profiling tools, can't get a timeline which shows frames per second, breakdown of paint/style recalc/layout/composite, no memory/heap profiling UI, etc. No explorer for local storage or filesystem apis, no manager for app-cache. Nothing like chrome://net-internals for analyzing network issues, and on and on.

I'm sure they'll fix all that in time, they have a good development team, but to say Firebug is clearly superior is obviously based on not having used the Chrome tools to do anything significant.

Another particular nagging problem with Firefox is that "full screen doesn't even hide the tabs or address bar (just the OS X bar, assuming you're using OS X). It would be nice if you can add a way to change Firefox's settings so that, in full screen, the only thing visible is the web page.

On my Linux fullscreen (F11) shows nothing but web content.

I'm currently using DDG + Safari with Glims. I would love to switch to Firefox, the only thing that's holding me back is the lack of a good replacement to ClickToPlugin killers.

Those are little js that will remove the flash/silverlight video and replace it with an mp4. This also effectively kills youtube ads.

Blog post about why DuckDuckGo cannot provide any real privacy assurances when it comes to the NSA... http://etherrag.blogspot.jp/2013/07/duck-duck-go-illusion-of...

Looks good! Omnibar instantly makes Firefox more familiar. I have decided to switch back to Mozilla, they seem far more ethical than any competing browser vendor. So I too am going to switch for a while. Firefox & DuckDuckGo.

Is there anyway to specify a time range on queries on DuckDuckGo? Such as "last year", "any time", "last week" etc. Works on StartPage but would be nice to have it on DDG too.

check out http://help.dukgo.com/customer/portal/articles/215622

Thanks

I've never used Chrome, always been on Firefox so that part is really not a big deal for me, but I did try DDG in the past and there always comes a point where results aren't quite up to par.

fwiw, FireFox on MacOS shrinks the tabs to favicon before scrolling, without using an add-on. The article screenshots indicate it spoke of Linux.

Searching the current page for links in Firefox (using ') is a great feature and one of the things I miss most when I have to use Chrome.

I wish there was a way to do this search only on the currently visible part of the page. Installing a hit-a-hint type of addon would then be less of a prerequisite for me to use the browser.

Is there any substitute in firefox for Chrome's keyword searching? That's the only chrome feature I really care about.

If you mean going to the address bar, typing wiki [tab] and getting a search of wikipedia for whatever you type next, then yes. See this article on how to do it: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from-address....

Firefox has built-in support for Keyword Search bookmarks. You don't need to install an add-on to create aliases.

If you bookmark any website's search results page, you can add a keyword and edit the bookmarked URL to include a printf-style %s placeholder. When you enter the keyword plus some string, Firefox opens the bookmarked URL, substituting your string for %s.

For example, I have a "w" keyword search for Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/index.php?search=%s and a "yt" keyword search for YouTube https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s&search=Searc...

Awesome, that's exactly what I was looking for.

I find it interesting that everyone suggests switching to Firefox and then changing the default search engine since a good deal of Mozilla's income comes from Google paying to be the default search engine.

Less data-points for Google /NSA the better it is. Firefox managed quite fine even without $300 million a year and the idea is not use Google for everything, not to ensure that FF has billions in their bank account

anyone else think that the bigger DuckDuckGo gets the more likely it will turn into something similar to Google in terms of less privacy?

One question, Why?

Firefox is comparable to Chrome in terms speed and features. However, Mozilla doesn't have the same incentive to collect and use data on their customers that is inherent to Google, an advertising company. In addition to that, Firefox is fully open source, unlike Chrome which contains closed source components from Google.

... and, as I mention above, the Mac version has been pretty bad over the last few months, enough to drive users away (including me).

Really? I've been using Nightly exclusively on my laptop and haven't noticed any problems. Maybe just lucky.

Edit: Oh, the mac version of Chrome. Gotcha.

Yeah, I'm still on Chrome on various Windows VMs and PCs with no problem.

People are concerned about their privacy

To me Firefox wins over Chrome for interface customization.

Can't take that "One size fits all" mentality of Chrome.

Why is that an issue? Its just a window to web content.

How is it "just" a window to web content? You never mind things like tabs, bookmarks, the developer console, browsing history or, say, the "Back" button, I guess.

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