[nu5500]

From my experience, the reasons why people switched to Chrome have been because it renders pages much smoother and everything generally looks better. These were the original reasons that they moved over to Firefox from IE as well. I personally helped a number of relatives and friends make these switches.

Late last year, after many years on Chrome, I gave Firefox another serious look and I have switched back. Firefox has improved tremendously and I would prefer to give my support to Mozilla from a philosophical standpoint (the Chrome team does a lot of good work with regards to pushing forward the features of the web and its security but at the end of the day, Chrome is still a strategic piece of Google's business machine and not a philanthropic effort)

While I have my reasons for using Firefox, I don't see a compelling reason for most users already happy with Chrome to switch back. The average web user that I know doesn't really understand where web browsers come from and isn't very interested in learning about it. They just care whether the browser runs better or worse for the tasks that they do. (Except many still hate IE and will not even try Edge because the logo looks similar enough - that's a branding issue that Microsoft has)

What irritates me now are more and more sites that only work with Chrome (where they literally throw up a page that blocks access and says go download Chrome). These are sites that are not Google properties so I'm not blaming Google for this bad behavior, but again, I would like to support the diverse browser landscape that has existed to this point. I guess my main complaint to Google is to please stop popping up dialogs about Chrome across all of your properties. The browser I'm using works perfectly fine thank you, and you should be supporting the open web with your products anyway.

[snthd]

For me the compelling features of Firefox over chrome are

* better search/address bar behaviour (particularly in finding relevant bookmarks. Chrome wants to turn everything into a Google search)

* Integration with Firefox on android (which I need because it supports ad-blocking extensions)

[problems]

Definitely agree with the address bar, I'll add a few:

* Being able to disable unnecessary features and phoning home using about:config is great

* Extensions look and feel more native (this will probably change because Mozilla has decided that cloning Chrome is the way to go)

* Extensions are more capable, still no decent side tabs in Chrome

* They're not an ad agency, so they don't ban extensions they don't like or nag you when you install something unapproved

* Font rendering manages to not look terrible

I'll admit though, Chrome still kills Firefox on UI speed and in many security technology ways. My biggest worry is that Mozilla will fail to achieve Chrome UI speed while ditching the things that make Firefox unique today.

[bigbugbag]

It's quite hard to find any relevant setting in about:config.

Extensions used to be more capable, this is about to end. Decent side tabs in chrome is called vivaldi, (actually a decent chrome is vivaldi).

Mozilla effectively bans extensions they don't like since the made signed extensions mandatory.

I disagrre on the speed and performance difference, with 150+ tabs opened at all times firefox works while chrome struggle to deal with 50 tabs. All this on a core i5 16GB RAM SSD laptop. I guess YMMV here.

[problems]

Vivaldi seems like more of the same, sends statistics information with no way to disable it. On Firefox, all of that is in about:config and easily copied around as user.js.

[bugmen0t]

> Mozilla effectively bans extensions they don't like since the made signed extensions mandatory.

Not true. They sign very liberally and you can even host signed extensions for your own users exclusively without listing them on addons.mozilla.org at all.

[vetinari]

That doesn't help, when you really needed an unsigned extension, or at least signed with your own key (and enroll your own key to firefox installation).

For example, FreeIPA used to have an extension, that configured Firefox to your own domain (enrolled an root signing certificate, configured trusted domains for GSSAPI, etc. - all the dangerous things). But because the extension was customized for your own domain, obviously, it could not be signed.

So, it was killed instead. Nowadays, you get a list of steps, you have to do by hand. On every desktop.

[singron]

Getting an extension reviewed can take months. They periodically publish how many have been in the queue for over 10 days, but they otherwise dont say how long the tail is. It's long.

[djsumdog]

I started using Vivaldi after struggling with slowdowns in Firefox. Even with the new multi-processor window support enabled, my browser still frequently slowed to a crawl.

I miss some of the extensions of Firefox and Vivaldi does have some interesting bugs, however development on Vivaldi seems rapid. Recently they finally combined the web page inspector into the browser (it use to open a separate window).

I've loved Firefox for years and would honestly rather use it, but the performance problems turned me away.

[bloaf]

I switched away from firefox once they announced they were moving to the Chrome extension model (and thereby sank their "better extensions" selling point.)

[johnny22]

they expanded the API so it's way less limited than chrome extensions. I don't understand how that's not known by folks who read HN at this point.

[bloaf]

Sure. But in practice everyone is just going to make extensions that are compatible with "all" the browsers, and there are developers who have simply decided not to rewrite their firefox extensions.

http://fasezero.com/lastnotice.html

[johnny22]

doubtful, otherwise folks woudldn't have spent so much time on stuff like sqlitebrowser and other bits.

[vetinari]

It is less limited than chrome extensions API, but still way more limited than the old API. Still no Tree Style Tabs or DownThemAll!.

[NoGravitas]

There's a Tree Style Tabs-like WebExtension. It has a few quirks, though. It runs in the sidebar. It doesn't hide the top tabs (though you can do this with Stylish). It has its own menu for tabs which does not include some options (like send tab to device).

There was a very good non-nested side-tabs extension in Firefox Test Pilot, but it has expired.

[richardboegli]

Try Pale Moon, it's great.

They are keeping the current Extension model.

[digi_owl]

However long that will last. They are already considering rebasing on a newer Firefox codebase for their UXP plans.

[richardboegli]

Quoted below is from Pale Moon roadmap [0]

Long-term plans

Our long-term plans for Pale Moon involve (potentially) moving our browser to the UXP (Unified XUL Platform) that is currently being worked on alongside the browser. This will at its earliest be somewhere in 2018.

Plug-ins

Pale Moon supports NPAPI plug-ins. Unlike Firefox, we will not be deprecating or removing support for these kinds of plug-ins. This means that you will be able to continue using your media, authentication, and other plug-ins in Pale Moon like Flash, Silverlight, bank-authenticators or networking plug-ins for specific purposes.

[0]: https://www.palemoon.org/roadmap.shtml

[fernandotakai]

the address bar behaviour on chrome is so obnoxious! i can never find stuff that is on my history -- with firefox, couple of keywords and i can find almost anything.

[bigbugbag]

Is this also the case with vivaldi ?

I miss opera where it would also search in page content from cache, not only URL or title.

[digi_owl]

Sadly it seems that Vivaldi, for now at least, only search the url and title.

[bigbugbag]

the address bar behavior is actually inferior to what opera offered back when it was a browser.

[unethical_ban]

>These aren't Google properties so I'm not blaming them for this bad behavior,

No, they should very much be blamed for it! Proper web design should follow cross-platform standards and implementations. They are part of the problem if they force users to choose one or the other.

[jff]

I think he means he's not blaming Google for the behavior of other website owners.

[nu5500]

Yep, sorry poor grammar there. I've edited so hopefully it's clearer now.

[Silhouette]

Proper web design should follow cross-platform standards and implementations.

To be blunt: says who?

A lot of people and most organisations aren't making websites as a charitable exercise. They're doing it with a goal in mind, such as bringing in money directly or indirectly, or raising awareness of a cause they care about.

Whatever that end goal is, they need to use the web to communicate effectively with their visitors. If those visitors are mostly using one particular browser and they can achieve better progress towards their end goal by optimising for that browser, that is what a lot of them are going to do.

I don't think this is necessarily healthy for the long term future of the World Wide Web, but I also don't think it's reasonable to blame people with a job to do for choosing the most effective tools available to do that job.

[thinkfurther]

> people with a job to do

No such thing. A job, like an order, is not something that actually exists outside of the actions of people. Both the people giving orders and the ones following them remain responsible. They can pretend to leave the court room by dozing off but they remain in it for those who haven't, and what you seem to see as "putting blame" is simply pointing out what is already present and cannot be removed.

[bigbugbag]

This is a very short sighted decision, apart from technical demo, designing a website to only work with a specific browser is actually costly, doesn't last and significantly limits your reach.

[Silhouette]

It's 2017, the era of evergreen browsers and living standards. As much as you or I may wish otherwise, anything built for the web today may not last and may have significantly limited reach within a matter of months. Every major browser developer has shown a willingness to cut off established functionality, even things that have worked for many years, if its suits their purposes. (Either that or they've abandoned older, non-evergreen browsers more or less completely.) The only standards that matter in web development today are the de facto standards of what the browsers actually do, just like the bad old days of IE vs. Netscape.

As I said before, this might well be bad for the long term future of the World Wide Web as a resource for society, but in this business you have to play the hand you're dealt, and the browser developers hold all the important cards.

[bigbugbag]

Somehow it seems you live in a quite different world than I do or maybe I didn't understand what you meant here.

Those still work in every browsers I've tried so the major browsers developer have to cut more established functionality: https://justinjackson.ca/words.html http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

[abandonliberty]

Firefox is the inferior product.

I use firefox because I want a browser to exist that isn't hellbent on knowing exactly who I am in order to maximize profits.

[bigbugbag]

Are you aware that mozilla actually ran on money from google out of using firefox to tell them exactly who you are in order to get a share of the maximized profits ?

[driverdan]

I downvoted you because what you said is extremely misleading. Mozilla had a contract with Google to use them as the default search engine. They didn't "tell them exactly who you are..."

[bigbugbag]

Are you trying to tell me that people at mozilla are not aware that google can tell who you are with an impressive degree of precision based on your usage of google search engine ?

Mozilla is not telling google obviously because they don't know who you are. But it's a technicality as they enable and empoyer google to do it by themselves, in exchange for millions of dollars. For a few years over 95% of mozilla revenue in millions of dollars came from google for exposing their user privacy while most users were not aware of this and mozilla boasting being a white knight for privacy.

Then when they finally decided to do something about it, the chose to help yahoo artificially inflate their usage stats to improve the value in the upcoming sale, but only in the US where they had lost the most marketshare, in Europe where firefox was still relevant and where there are alternatives that actually respect user privacy mozilla chose to keep google as the default search engine.

[duncan_bayne]

While technically true, using Google as your default search engine goes a long way to that goal.

[jhasse]

Chrome uses Google as default search too though.

[abandonliberty]

I wasn't aware that Mozilla shares every single web page you visit with Google. Do you have a source?

[bigbugbag]

AFAIK they don't. Firefox phones home to mozilla and according to this comment has about 20 default settings phoning home to google[1].

But my point was simply about directing users' searchs to google search engine, which is enough to expose yourself to google.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14809837

[yoasif_]

Of course they don't; it's not true.

[sandov]

>What irritates me now are more and more sites that only work with Chrome (where they literally throw up a page that blocks access and says go download Chrome).

Any example of this?. Because I've never visited such a site.

[kuschku]

Inbox during the Beta.

WhatsApp during the Beta.

Signal's desktop client.

Google Earth.

Google Translate works, but has 3 helpful dialogs telling you to install Chrome.

Google Search on Mobile Firefox is heavily restricted in functionality, and tells to install Chrome.

Under some situations, Google will replace the first 4 search results and replace them with a "your browser is outdated, install Chrome" while also adding a top bar saying the same, and a dialog at the top right.

[Fej]

Chrome font rendering on Windows is still broken. Fonts that look find everywhere else are different in Chrome and usually look worse. Why?!

[pcwalton]

I don't know the exact reason why, but it probably has to do with the fact that Edge and Firefox both use Direct2D for rendering and DirectWrite for text, while Chrome uses Skia (which can call into DirectWrite or GDI for text rendering I believe, but may not do so in the exact same way).

[StillBored]

Skia is now the default on firefox/windows when direct2d isn't available.

http://techdows.com/2016/10/firefox-52-skia-enabled-by-defau...

What does that actually means in practice? I'm guessing the only time you actually get skia is when running in a pretty old hypervisor environment or on a server/BMC without hardware acceleration.

Which IMHO, having your application _LOOK_ different depending on hardware acceleration capabilities is sorta stupid.

[pjmlp]

> Which IMHO, having your application _LOOK_ different depending on hardware acceleration capabilities is sorta stupid.

Which is one of the reasons I transitioned from liking Web back into loving native development (there are plenty of other reasons though).

Doing discussions with customers about pixel differences across browsers, specially if it is the same browser on different OSes, is anything but fun.

That and the request for features and behaviors only possible in native UIs.

[euyyn]

Should file a bug, though.

[bigbugbag]

direct2d ? is that a thing on linux ?

[vetinari]

No. Firefox uses skia on both Linux and macOS.

[ac29]

Linux is arguably worse. For whatever reason, Chrome absolutely refuses to display some unicode fonts (that are installed and render fine in Firefox). CJK and other Asian fonts seem to be worst in this regard.

[gorhill]

> more sites that only work with Chrome (where they literally throw up a page that blocks access and says go download Chrome).

Any specific examples of this? A URL, or a couple of them?

When making such an assertion, it would be nice to minimally provide a way for others to see for themselves.

[bigbugbag]

Only time I've encountered something like this was OK GO's All Is Not Lost music video released in 2011, it came with a warning that you could skip but then the performance were so bad you could not enjoy it.

it was available at http://www.allisnotlo.st/ but now features an error message about google dropping python 2.5

[pcurve]

For me, the deal breaker for Firefox was Youtube full-screen playback performance. On my old Core 2 Duo E6600 machine, Youtube stuttered playing 1080p videos while it didn't on Chrome.

[jhasse]

Linux? If so, see https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/662dxm/psa_hardware_...