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by camone 2516 days ago
Can you elaborate on what you found most unconfortable or difficult to adapt to?

I switched to Firefox ~1.5 years ago and it does everything I need, actually never picked chrome up again. The android version is very good as well, but I just switched to iOS and it's not a very smooth experience there.

4 comments

I'm a long time Firefox user but unfortunately Firefox has bad issues with performance/battery usage on MacOS. Multiple long standing issues are open. (such as https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042 - open for 2 years)

I love Firefox but I had no choice and had to ditch it on MacOS. It seems Mozilla does not have the resources to fix these problems.

Chrome also has perennial problems with CPU/battery/RAM on Mac.
Not really
Firefox has performance and general software bloat issues on all plattforms. They sacrificed their original "tailor the browser exactly to your needs" approach on the altar of keeping up with Chrome on features.
To be fair, Firefox actually has a lot of good stuff and you can get its UI to match the Chrome experience quite easily. The Developer Tools are also quite good.

Biggest issue for me is not being able to import passwords from Chrome. I have to switch back to Chrome if I need to access some web services quickly, so building up saved passwords in a browser makes it more sticky. There's probably a reason for not being able to do this though.

It also starts to get a bit sluggish when you have a couple (6-7) heavy JS/DOM tabs open.

File download UI could be better. Skip the confirmation dialog, show file and progress at the bottom of the browser window.

Firefox developer tools are awesome and they get better with every release! Lots of cool stuff recently added for debugging CSS related issues.

JS sluggishness might be because of a recent Firefox Pioneer study. I've experienced it for the past week and in the end I uninstalled Firefox Pioneeer completely because of it.

imho, file downloads are actually great. When you have active or recent downloads - you'll get a nice litle icon on the right from the URL bar. For active downloads it'll show the total progress for all downloads. Once clicked, it will open a small menu with your downloads. When you don't have any recent/active downloads it just gets out of our way. Much better than that ugly bar at the bottom of the window.

I didn't know about that download icon. I must have removed it when customising the UI. Thanks!
You can browse to https://passwords.google.com from Firefox if you want to look up one of your Chrome saved passwords (provided they're synced with your Google account of course). Not quite as convenient as a bulk import I admit but it's how I slowly migrated my passwords across as and when I needed them.
I had never known about this password site, thanks for sharing!
Consider using a third party password manager - helps in not being locked into any particular browser. I find LastPass to be quite good for my purposes
Firefox has an 'import passwords from chrome' button on Windows but on other platforms you can do it with https://github.com/louisabraham/ffpass
Surely that's a problem with Chrome though? How do we know that's not their intention?
Agreed, I'm sure if Mozilla could do it they would.
They could just look at the Chromium source code to see how the passwords are encrypted. Perhaps it's just not high on the priority list.
Are you on macOS or Linux? Passwords can be imported from Chrome/IE/Edge on Windows.
macOS
Going fullscreen video on Mac OS. Chrome's fullscreen switch is almost instant, Firefox's is quite laggy.
I switched to Firefox at home about two months ago due googles plans to restrict ad blockers. It's mostly okay but there are some things that bother me. Like some pages will never get auto completed. I can visit those pages as often as I want, I always have to type in the full URL each and every time. This kind of sucks because auto completion is often far faster than looking for the respective bookmark within a hundred others. It also frequently crashes not just the tab, but the whole browser during WebVR development and debugging.