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Comment by Peaker | Hacker News Reader

Last I tried Firefox, pretty recently, it still needed to address some serious issues, when compared to Chrome:

* Unresponsiveness due to one tab thrashing

* Bad use of screen-space (bookmarks always visible, cannot disappear titlebar like in Chrome [there's only a Windows extension for that], menu-bar takes up another bar of space by default)

* Launching firefox has stop-the-world behavior to check/update extensions -- interrupting your flow when you need your browser most

* Some extensions still require restarts

These are the ones I remember off the top of my mind, I'm sure there were more...

I really tried going back to Firefox, but the cumulative pain of all of these made me go back to Chrome.

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> bookmarks always visible,

View -> toolbars -> bookmarks toolbar (uncheck)

> menu-bar takes up another bar of space by default

View -> toolbars -> menu bar (uncheck)

But that means my bookmarks disappear completely, whereas in Chrome they are displayed in new tabs, which is far more useful behavior.

You can also move the bookmarks toolbar items to the address bar.

>Unresponsiveness due to one tab thrashing

Or even not trashing. When one tab asks for username/login with a pop-up ("Authentication Required" one) and you have it saved in some email opened in another tab you can't switch to email tab until you kill the login one. I call it "god window" (god tab in this case) pattern. Very typical for most old and some new Windows desktop apps.

Chrome handles it perfectly.

They are hugely fustrating, we did per tab modal dialogs in Firefox OS, I imagine they will be fixed in desktop shortly.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=613785 open bug for it

Ironically, the reverse is true for alert() popups.

Firefox's UI is the most customizable of any browser that I know of. You can really make it into almost anything you want. My example: http://i.imgur.com/aMgQBgW.png very clean and functional.

This is great. Mind sharing any extensions used?

Sorry I took a while, but here: App Button Remove the RSS reader in the top-right is Digest The rest is just moving stuff around/removing stuff with the built-in customization reachable by right-clicking blank space at the top. An even more vertical-space saving configuration I use is putting the URL bar up with the tabs - in that case I remove the extra stuff from it like that star with another extension I forget the name of, but it's easy to find.

If you close your tabs via mmb or Ctrl+W, you can remove all those close buttons, too.

browser.tabs.closeButtons;2

I couldn't find any customization that removed window decorations in Linux. I found ones for Windows only.

Also, I got the (subjective) feeling that Firefox was becoming sluggish as I had 6-7 addons. I might be wrong, but that would mean Firefox is sluggish in general.

If you can't do it through extensions, you may be able to remove window decorations using the window manager. The configuration is dependent on the specific window manager that you are using, but it should be possible.

In Chrome it Just Works...

Firefox has had years to catch up to Chrome with these issues, why haven't they?

As I understand it, windows are responsible for drawing their own window decorations on Windows and OS X, but on X they're drawn by the window manager. So it's harder to mess with the title bar because you're starting from nothing and don't even know which of a dozen decoration engines is actually being used. Upside is that decorations are remarkably consistent under X.

Wayland matches the Windows/OS X behavior (probably because it's easier to just accelerate one big rectangular canvas the process draws on), so who knows what will happen as that catches on.

Note: http://i.imgur.com/DVWCxty.png Tree style tab. and Nav on title bar. Lots of vertical pixels available.

Oh my fucking god, where can I get this?

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

You can move the nav buttons yourself: right click on a toolbar -> Customize.

I got the addon working, but I can't seem to make the nav and the title bar collapse. Does this only work in the unstable builds?

I wonder if this is not available on my platform (MacOS).

Even I got the same result. But this seem to do the job: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hide-caption-...

Edit: aah got it. The OP mentioned that you have to use 'Nav bar on title bar' extension along with tree style tabs.

Firefox's screen usage is easy to configure. Compare[1] my KDE-themed Firefox and Chrome, for example.

[1]: http://jelv.is/browser-screen-usage.png

Extensions require a restart to be installed, perhaps, but that doesn't seem to be a big issue: you only install any given extension once. If you want to install a bunch at the same time, you only need to restart once.

Are those window controls (close, etc) drawn by kwin or firefox/extension?

They're drawn by the extension. That said, it's almost impossible to tell.

Oh, looks fine to me. I use HTitle[1] on Gnome, but that only hides the titlebar in fullscreen...

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

Which extension are you using? I use Mate and found a Gnome extension that was known to be unreliable and indeed did not work...

I agree the restart is a minor issue, as is the menu bar showing by default, as is the bookmarks bar being always/never there (rather than the more sensible Chrome behavior), as is the interruption of my workflow when Firefox decides to check for updates when I start it, as is the relative laggy UI, ... But these issues add up to a worse experience. Worse by enough that despite wanting to avoid Chrome, I came back to it :(

Oxygen KDE[1]. Admittedly, it's not ideal and sometimes lags behind Firefox version changes, but I've been pretty happy with it.

[1]: http://oxygenkde.altervista.org/

There are also some Firefox-specific extensions I can't live without any more, the main one being KeySnail[2] which gives me Emacs-style keyboard shortcuts.

[2]: https://github.com/mooz/keysnail

I see fonts for web browsing in linux are still horrible.

That's actually Hacker News being terrible. Their font declaration is just "font-family: Verdana;" so if you don't have Verdana installed (which just about never is installed by default on Linux), it defaults back to the one mentioned in the browser settings (which tends to be a serif font).

Hacker News could've made their font declaration have a fallback (like "font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;") and things would look way better by default.

As for me, I solved it by editing userContent.css and adding a font-declaration for Hacker News myself. (or you could use something like the Stylish addon)

All in all, I'd say it's the fault of website creators.

I too wish it had split processes (although I haven't had a freeze in months), but other than that it beats Chrome in every single way. I am not affected by your UI problems, and I install extensions every other week so I'm not bothered.

So, yeah, I guess you didn't really try. Perhaps you're just attached to Chrome.

Maybe multi-process is the reason... I've recently started using Chrome more on my sub-notebook because Firefox gets really choppy even though it has lower memory usage. Perhaps the explanation is Chrome can be scheduled to all four of my 1GHz CPU cores, as compared to Firefox which will be on just one?

Nope. Threads can use multiple cores as well. No need to launch separate process for it.

Ah yes, of course. I should have remembered that. So Firefox is multi-threaded now?

As far as I know, it has always been. Unlike javascript which usually runs in a single thread, the browser itself is free to use as many background threads as it wants to load resources, render graphics etc. Only javascript is usually run as single thread per tab (unless the webpage uses web workers).

How do you get rid of Firefox's windows decorations in Linux? All I could find was for Windows, except one gnome-based extension which is known not to work reliably.

Also, checking for updates when I start my browser is the worst possible time UI-wise. I start my browser when the site I want to visit is at my fingertips, and my working memory is fading as I am waiting for my computer. How do you customize this away?

Sure, the bookmarks bar being always-visible or never-visible is a minor defect, but it is still worse than Chrome's show-in-new-tabs behavior. Showing menu bars and window decorations by default shows bad judgement, but indeed that wasn't the reason I couldn't stay with Firefox. It felt slower, had annoying wasteful window decorations, started with annoying extension version checks, and let bad web apps interfere with all my tabs.

Do you have actual responses for my actual points besides "you didn't really try"?

Bookmarks bar is hidden by default. Don't complain about your own customization.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/fx/?utm_source=firefox...

Correct, however:

1) Chrome's behavior where you get bookmarks bar in new tabs is far more useful.

2) Even without the bookmarks' bar, I have 4 bars (window decorations, menu bar, tab bar, URL bar), whereas Chrome has 2 (tab bar + window decorations, URL bar).

Screen-space is still wasted compared to Chrome, and you don't get bookmarks in new tabs.

Have you used Firefox's pinned tabs[1]?

I have just two bars[2] for either browser, enough real-estate for me (wish I had a high resolution though).

[1]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/pinned-tabs-keep-favori... [2]: http://i4.minus.com/i4lX5yMWuwoGi.png

Again, Firefox has no portable way to remove window decorations like Chromes does. There are Windows-only extensions, KDE-only extensions, and unreliable Gnome extensions.

May be you should go for speed dial extension. It lets you set bookmarks in a newly opened tab. Just open new tab and click on the required bookmark.

I switched to Firefox from Chrome a couple of months ago, and liked it so far. The UI is fine, and the speed is also fine. But the MacOS+Firefox+Gmail bug (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=341886) drives me nuts. Can't jump to the start or the end of line while editing the message (OK, it is possible with emacs shortcuts instead of standard Mac shortcuts). Can't select text from the current position to start/end of line with keyboard (emacs shortcuts don't help). I haven't appreciated how much I used these shortcuts for email editing before switching to Firefox. And the bug is open since 2006.

Woah. Been using that combo since 2006 and never once noticed this issue. You know alt/left+right moves between words? This is why I never noticed

> Bad use of screen-space

Slightly customized Firefox 24: 54 [1]

Chrome 31: 61

IE10: 55 [2]

Opera 12: 61

[1] http://i.imgur.com/eBiIZHc.png (Also, no close button on tabs and they shrink down to the size of pinned tabs. All other browsers do that shrinking stuff by default. There used to be a property for that, but one developer decided to remove it. Now you need a custom userChrome.css and other voodoo.)

[2] Sounds close, but 50% of that space are actually unused. There is a lot less room for tabs.

The customizations that allow disappearing the window decorations work only on Windows, as far as I could find.

Also, Firefox requires losing the bookmarks tab completely, whereas Chrome has a saner default of having it appear in new/empty tabs.

I don't really use bookmarks myself. Well, you could always just use Alt -> Bookmarks, right?

I am not sure what you are talking about. what does 'window decorations' mean?

Here is a screenshot of how my firefox23 window looks like under Ubuntu/KDE4.

http://i.imgur.com/KnLTDZJ.jpg

* to remove application title bar in KDE - Alt+F3 > More Actions > No border

* to disable addon auto-update check - about:addons > wrench: uncheck "update addons automatically"

With browsers I think it's easy to become entrenched; not that that's necessarily bad.

I'm not in KDE, I'm in Mate which has no such feature by default.

Thanks for the second tip, if I try Firefox again I'll do that. Is it possible to get auto-updates at browser shutdown or in the background, when it doesn't interrupt my flow? I would probably forget to ever update them if it's completely disabled...

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