I completely switched whenever FF quantum was released to stable. The experience is amazing. I will say I think chrome dev tools are better though.

I tend to reach for Firefox's dev tools (or a node REPL) more often these days. Firefox has a much better CSS editor. I will run some dev tools in Chromium but avoid it for browsing.

Once I saw that my account was linked to Chrome/Chromium without my permission, I cleared everything out of Chrome and stopped using it as a secondary browser. My secondary browser is now a separate Firefox profile:

    alias ff='firefox -ProfileManager -no-remote &'

The big feature I'm waiting on in Firefox is live reloading/editing for scripts.

It's a huge advantage to be able to pause a script in Chrome, edit the source code, and have those changes injected back into the script. Chrome will even rewind the stack if I edit a line behind where the script currently is.

I use Firefox for all of my personal browsing and for some of my development. But I really miss that feature.

Edit: that and making it easier to debug Node from Firefox. It's still kind of a pain in that area.

Which Node REPL would you recommend?

I use the standard one.[1] Open a terminal and type `node` to start it or run a script with Node's debugger[2] and drop into a REPL from there. I sometimes use Slimux[3] to send code snippets from Vim to a REPL in another tmux[4] pane.

[1] https://nodejs.org/api/repl.html

[2] https://nodejs.org/api/debugger.html

[3] https://github.com/epeli/slimux

[4] https://medium.com/actualize-network/a-minimalist-guide-to-t...

To be honest, I've come to much prefer FF's devtools. You might want to take a look at [Firefox Developer Edition](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/), it adds quite a few nice features that are helpful for development. [This article](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/05/new-in-firefox-61-develope...) is a bit old, but a good look at the type of stuff that it adds.

I keep hearing how awesome FF quantum is. I always have a copy of FirefoxDeveloperEdition for the occasional compatibility testing, and I keep coming back to it over the last few months, the last time being yesterday, but it just feels as sluggish as ever, whereas Chrome just feels snappier until there are hundreds of open tabs. Am I using it wrong?

Also, Firefox tabs are as ugly as ever (lots of thick lines), and the search bar drop down is cluttered as hell. I thought I’d hate the Chrome 69 tab style, but I got over it in a couple of hours; whereas for Firefox I simply can’t.

To add a little bit to my UI complaints: I recall that one of the original designs goals of Chrome was to reduce the chrome (ref: 2008 Chrome comic book). Over the years I’ve had a number of UI complaints with Chrome too and actually switched to Opera multiple times, but overall I think they did a good job at hiding the chrome and presenting what really matters. On the other hand, Firefox UI elements and cues stand out and intrude even after disabling everything I can find. Maybe some people prefer that for “usability”, but I personally prefer minimal UIs (hint: Apple user) and find them perfectly usable.

Try using a large blocklist[1] in your hosts file and installing umatrix[2] and/or ublock origin[3] to block garbage scripts from loading. I don't know if that will help, but that's what I'm doing and Firefox is as fast or faster than Chrome.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=hosts+blocklists

[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/umatrix/

[3] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...

I confess that I have uMatrix in Chrome but not FF, but I do use pihole, and it’s not really a third party scripts problem, FF feels slower on perfectly clean sites.

Maybe it has something to do with the combination of your OS and Firefox versions. I've just tested a few sites (without umatrix, but with Firefox's built-in privacy protection) and they are about the same speed according to the network console. Sometimes Firefox is slightly faster, other times Chrome is slightly faster. (Ubuntu 16.04)

I have performance issues with heavy sites because I use many extensions. Sometimes, I disable all extensions and it stills sluggish on Facebook for example, but the issue goes away when I use a new profile. Maybe you can try it.

This is my experience as well.

I really wanted Firefox to be a replacement for Chrome but it’s so much more sluggish that it’s not even a comparison.

Chrome does seem faster and better to me too. Nevertheless I switched to Firefox some years ago (and I’m quite a Google fan). It is good enough for heavy use.

I've found the dev tools to be equivalent for most things but each has a couple features the other doesn't. I'm often switching between the two when debugging complex issues.

In general I find the UI for manipulating CSS and the DOM easier in Firefox. The Javascript Debugger in Chrome tends to work a little better when jumping in and out of 3rd party libraries, Firefox will just give up trying to break in your code and just dump errors in the console.

Meh... as long as it's not Safari Dev Tools I'm happy.

Also, last time I checked the Firefox UI uses more screen real estate, leaving a little less space for the content. The difference with chrome is small, but clearly noticeable. If Mozilla fixes this, then they have an additional user ;)

Perhaps setting the UI density to “compact” will help? I like minimal UI, but Chrome’s feels a bit too minimal. I think Firefox on compact is a perfect balance.

For everyone looking: Hamburger menu -> Customise -> at the bottom Density -> Compact.

Thanks!

I also completely overlooked that setting, even though I had changed many others away from the defaults. Thanks for pointing it out!

Thank you very much, learned something new. I removed the Title bar too, makes ff more compact than chromium.

I've got an instance of both Chrome and Firefox open on MacOS right now, and the UI's use exactly the same amount of space. The navigation bar on Firefox is a little thicker than Chrome, but it's made up for with a slightly thinner tab bar (since FF tabs don't have the blank space above to make them look like physical folder tabs).

Not sure if this holds in Linux or Windows.

EDIT: In fact I just noticed that Chrome was outdated. After upgrading it to the latest build, it uses more screen real estate for the UI than FF Quantum's latest build. The difference is even more pronounced if you have bookbar bars turned on.

If you haven't seen it, you can put dev tools in its own window.

The biggest feature holding me back from using Firefox is the inability to drag multiple tabs at once. I often "split" a chrome browser window into two this way, or combine two chrome windows into one.

In Nightly you can, using CTRL to select them. It's still a little buggy, though.

Oh cool. Thanks for the tip! Hopefully they polish it up and get it out.

This extension lets you split multiple tabs from a window to a new one: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multiple-tab-...

It's not as pretty or intuitive as Chrome's “shift-click and drag” approach, but it works well enough.

The only reason I use chrome is the easy debugger hookup for VSCode. If anyone has any tips on how to get that running with FF, I'm all ears!

This probably won't be a satisfying answer to you, but I've found VS Code and WebStorm to be roughly equivalent in terms of features (although I never have been able to leave WebStorm because of a few features that others would probably consider "bloat").

Debugging in Firefox works great!

https://www.jetbrains.com/help/webstorm/debugging-javascript...

I got it working together really fast (like 3 minutes) last time, but earlier this summer it took me 30 minutes or more and before that I couldn't get it working.

Of course now it just seems obvious and I cannot understand what I did earlier.

Use a separate Chromium installation for dev tools

Alternatively, Brave browser seems to Un-Google their Chromium based browser: https://brave.com/download-dev/

"Brave Core will arrive in beta form in late September and in major release form most of the way through October" https://www.cnet.com/news/brave-ad-blocking-browser-gets-chr...

I'm avoiding Chrome-based browsers as much as possible. I don't think monocultures are a good idea.

I tend not to install browsers and other important software from the internet. Is this packaged by any major distro ? What are the blockers ? Non-free bits, analytics etc. ? Honestly, I wouldn't pick a browswer unless it's packaged by fedora/debian.

To dump this privacy setting json https://gist.github.com/meets2tarun/2161e544f4c458c2f07641ca...

to your system. https://www.chromium.org/administrators All solved. It survives updates/reinstalls.

Intuitively, I use chrome only for non google pages and FF for google services. Is that a good approach?

Yup, it's quite old, likely two years or more. And notably, Chromium also has this feature, at least if you enabled the sync previously.

I agree, sadly its never that simple. I tried diligently (all in) to use Quantum when it came out, for over a month. It just wasn't stable/fast enough when running a larger number of tabs. I'm hopeful it will get there soon and I can ditch Chrome but its just not there for me, yet.

You might want to try it again. I have over 80 Firefox tabs open in multiple windows, multiple containers, and two Firefox profiles. It's still extremely fast.

Last time I tried Firefox, a few months ago, tab switching was painfully slow as compared to Chrome. I intend to give it another chance soon, though.

What about a hardware upgrade?

Lol - no. My computer isn't that old. Chrome switches tabs instantly. Firefox doesn't. I'm not going to buy a new computer to find out if Firefox will then switch tabs faster. Also, I've read similar complaints from others. Maybe it's faster now - I dunno. When Firefox's tab switching is faster, I'll give switching another go.

Are you using any plugins to achieve this number of open tabs and and still have good performance?

It appears to work fine even without extensions (Ubuntu 16.04, Firefox 62), but I have some garbage-blocking extensions installed.

In my main Firefox profile, I use umatrix[1] to browse the WWW with all CSS and JS turned off by default, enabling them only when needed. Reader mode makes most articles readable with a single click.

Firefox's built-in privacy protection is also enabled.

If a website doesn't work with my settings, it takes about the same time to override the CSS/JS settings than the difference between an unblocked page load and a blocked page load. Pages load much faster in general, so it's a net gain in free time.

I also use Stylus[2] to turn off all CSS animation and add custom styling to websites.

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

[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/styl-us/

Thanks. I'm also a fan of umatrix.

I'n curious why you disable CSS, obviously I understand why you would want to turn of JS. Is this part of the override for Stylus to work? It didn't look like it from the link.

It might depend on your system resources, but I have +300 tabs open right now and I don't experience any problems. The only thing that's a bit slow is if I restart the browser, it takes a bit long to start up.

Firefox for Mac has animation-related speed issues that don't occur in Windows, that may explain the discrepancy between your experience and the GP's.

Why would you want so many tabs open in the first place? Is this really a common way to use a browser?

> Why would you want so many tabs open in the first place?

Some reasons:

- Ctrl-clicking to open tabs since I can then load them in the background (because I'm impatient, and because I don't want to get distracted by clicking into all the references in the main tab while reading.

- using tab tree extension I can then easily see what path lead to some interesting page I found

- by default, if you type ab address you already have open in another tab, Firefox will jump to that tab.

> Is this really a common way to use a browser?

Yep. Bot extremely common but I do it and a number of other HN-ers as well. Mozilla seems to be aware of it and seems to have it in their performance tests or something.

My workflow is the same. I'll usually have 100 tabs open on a particular device, going up to nearly 1000 tabs across my phone, laptop, and desktop in rare instances.

I'm currently using FF 61, I've been using FF for a decade, with no special configuration. I currently have over one thousand tabs open, no sweat. Of all the reasons to prefer Chrome to FF, I don't understand how performance on larger numbers of tabs could possibly be it.

> Google fundamentally doesn't respect user privacy, and people should use Firefox.

This has been true for a many years now but I still see tech people ignoring it completely.

I no longer believe tech people are very intelligent. They are easily lured into whatever good looking tech comes along and will sacrifice their privacy at the drop of a hat.

Tech people were never very intelligent. By definition, they were (and are) informed/educated in one specific discipline, but that has no correlation whatsoever with being intelligent.

This is true regardless of the discipline. You can meet astoundingly stupid heart surgeons, astrophysics PhDs, etc.

"Yes, it's true: I am a rocket scientist" often quothe one of the stupidest persons I have had the opportunity to meet on this ball of dirt, because he had a PhD in aerospace engineering.

That said - he was good looking, had a reasonably good sense of humor and knew where the good parties were - so he could be forgiven this small vanity.