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Comment by bovermyer | Hacker News Reader

I do like the release schedule for Firefox.

However, I haven't used it in years, except for testing. Philosophically, I agree more with Mozilla than Google, but I just can't seem to get past three things:

1) Chrome gets out of my way. The UI is unobtrusive. Firefox is still bulkier here. 2) For whatever reason, more websites render oddly in Firefox/Gecko than in Chrome/Webkit. 3) Chrome, being a part of the Google ecosystem, plays very nicely with my Android phone.

This is not to say I'm not open to switching back to Firefox, but I'm going to need a compelling reason to uproot my workflow and abandon my apps and extensions.

Firefox 25 doesn't appear to give me that compelling reason.

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Funny how your first and last negative points are my positive points about Firefox.

1) I really want to like Chrome, but I find the UI pretty bad. Yes, it's fine when you have 5/10 tabs open, but try to open more and you'll see (Firefox without addons is just slightly better than Chrome here, but at least I can customize Firefox). That said, there's a planned restyling of the Firefox UI (which you might already know), called Australis, which might fit more your liking (but I'm not sure when it will land).

2) I'm going to admit that I've never had this problem with Firefox. Firefox is a pretty reliable browser (for what is worth, check the Tom's HW Browser GP), and should render pages just fine. The only time I see problems is when developers use webkit- specific features, without including the moz- too (some times it's something not supported by Firefox, but many times it's just lazy developers that test their sites only with Chrome/Safari)

3) I'm in love with the Firefox mobile UI, and I find mobile Chrome just terrible. I'm not sure what do you mean by "plays very nicely", you mean tab sync?

To be clear, I'm not trying to say that Firefox is better/worse/equal/similar to Chrome, and I'm not trying to convince you to switch back. I just wanted to reply to your points.

With the third point, I'm referring to the fact that I can use the Chrome web store to install apps for both my browser and my phone. If I switch to Firefox, I lose half of that equation. I'm not even talking about mobile Chrome here; I mean the actual Android apps.

Firefox's rendering issues have been largely, I imagine, the case of developers designing only for Chrome, or only for IE. It's not Firefox's fault, in that case, but it's still a reason for me to be wary of Firefox.

As for tabs in Chrome... I never have more than eight open at a time. I'm religious about closing tabs I haven't looked at in over five minutes. My own personal quirk, that!

> As for tabs in Chrome... I never have more than eight open at a time.

When you study a subject, do you compare sources of information to determine which sources are the best (e.g., authoritative, detailed, etc.) and should be referenced in your notes? If so, how do you compare multiple sources while never having more than eight tabs open?

When I study a deep subject, I almost always end up with hundreds of tabs, including articles, papers, reports, policy statements, discussions, etc. I use the wonderful Tree Style Tab and Session Manager extensions for Firefox to organize tabs and manage sessions. After I finish my research, I process the hundreds of open tabs and add references to the best sources in my personal wiki, which is powered by Org mode.

Try Tree Style Tab and you'll see how hard it is to leave Firefox.

Yes, this add-on is amazing. It's a critical part of my web browsing experience.

Tree Style Tab? Now I'm curious.

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

It puts tabs on the side, where they take up low-value horizontal screen space instead of high-value vertical screen space. And you can read the tab titles them even if you have lots of tabs open. And it groups them into trees -- links opened with a middle-click from one tab become children of that tab -- and you can collapse/expand trees.

Try it, you won't regret it.

Wow, just trying it now. So much better than existing tabs. I suspect it's going to take a lot to rewire my brain to use this, but it's clearly worth it.

Any tips on how best to use it?

I rarely collapse sub-trees; I rarely have enough tabs open for that to be needed. And I set the prefs so that if I close a parent, the first child takes over as the parent of the tree.

They work pretty much like normal tabs, meaning you can close them by middle clicking it, you can ctr+shift+T, ctr+tab, ctr+shift+tab, ctr+1, ctr+2...

you can close multiple tabs that are nested by closing the parent when its minimized.

Long time lurker but I had to comment on this.

Just yes. God yes.

It's absolutely must-try if you are the can't live without TabMixPlus type. Mission critical if you do any kind of ticket management/research at work. I frequently convert coworkers with the combo.

Bonus: https://addons.mozilla.org/EN-us/firefox/addon/context-searc...

context-search is also a must, combined with :

* adblock plus

* adblock plus popup

* multirow bookmark plus

* text link

Maybe sites would render correctly in Firefox if more web developers used it as a primary browser, rather than just for "testing". ;)

Haha, yes, that may well be true.

Using an older phone, Firefox is unusably slow and Chrome is not even available.

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