I made this move myself many months ago & never looked back. There is basically nothing I miss about dropping chrome/ google search. My web experience is indiscernible using Firefox & DDG.

One of the only minor things I've had to adjust to is prefixing searches with my local city & state when I'm searching for things in my hometown (Imagine that! My search engine website isn't tracking my physical location!). A small price to pay for a HUGE gain in privacy & peace of mind, knowing I'm no longer being exploited and rolled up into a package, sold to advertisers.

I got so sick of seeing targeted ads in EVERY website I visit. Something I searched the day before. Maybe a website I visited a few days ago. Then I have to look at ads for those things for the next week straight!? No thanks.

After making two super easy changes, Chrome -> Firefox & Google search -> DDG, I almost NEVER see creepy, annoying targeted ads anymore. It's amazing!

The trade-off, like you said, is well worth it.

(Upon typing this, I realize I'm just echoing your comment. Either way, leaving this up to provide one more voice in support.)

In short, if you last tried DDG a long time ago try again, it is much better.

I used to be one of those people who when I couldn't find something on the duck would repeat the search with Google. But more and more, especially in the last six months, if I can't find it on Duck, it's not on Google, either.

Duck gives me irrelevant results to those queries. Google gives me irrelevant pop-culture results to those queries.

Very much true. Even moreso as of the last 6 months DDG has been even better for some things, especially if they are political in any way. You'll find some crap sites on DDG but you'll also find what you're looking for. Sometimes I want to find crap sites or non-mainstream stuff, and only DDG surfaces that. I do fear a bit tho once DDG gains more popularity, the SEO games may not be kind to DDG.

I tried DDG when it first came out and found it unacceptable. Currently though, it's totally usable and sometimes better than Google.

The whole web is organized and optimized more and more for clicks and watch time. It would only make sense that the results seem to be correspondingly worse.

PS: oh, and in a certain way skewed search results even help Google, it increases ranking mysticism. When one site is consistently high, their competitors cannot know wether that is because of artful SEO or because heavy ad-spending is invisibly tipping the scales. So they will fearfully carry their own advertising budget to the altar of search ranking instead of running ads on a competing network like Facebook. Who knows wether The Algorithm considers ad-spend or not, better not provoke an angry god!

There's a lot else on the web, it just isn't surfaced by Google as much as in the search engine's early years.

Google may have gotten worse, duckduckgo may have gotten better (I use DDG for most searches, so not sure) but the case for duckduckgo doesn't involve them having a great search team, since they don't have their own index.

One thing that I keep in mind is that Bing is not blocking DDG searches like google would, I find this commendable and, morally, a point in their favor.

I'm pretty sure DuckDuckGo has a contract with Bing.

This, but more so. Starting a couple of years ago, Google search quality has fallen enough, combined with DDG's search quality rising enough, that I generally get better results from DDG than Google now.

I sometimes end up browsing fora with poor search tools, and that is commonly when I use a search engine (that or if I'm fact checking stuff, but that's a different usecase). Duck Duck Go always ended up failing to get the results whereas Google managed to get the correct results.

I also have had similar negative experiences with DDG for searching stackoverflow. Google isn't ideal, but at least they do always end up getting me what I'm looking for. With DDG I oftentimes get completely unrelated results which just happen to match the keywords I was using.

Finally the image search would always invariably return porn on DuckDuckGo instead of things relating to the query I was looking for.

However, the value of actual ad-blocking and increased privacy far outweigh the minor frustration of this UI issue.

It absolutely does, and it drives me up the wall some times. In fact, try visiting this site on Firefox Android and try upvoting something. It's nearly impossible.

Also make sure to check "settings => accessibilty => always enable zoom"

Could you say if the number of ads you've clicked changed (went up or down) when not seeing targeted ads compared to when seeing targeted ads?

I do not use Chrome, but I don't think Firefox is awesome. While I use FF, partly for moral reasons, my experience is average and I saw many flaws and bugs. I prefer the features of Vivaldi, which is based on Chromium, but does not phone home to Google.

> STOP USING google SEARCH!

While my default search engine is Duck Duck Go, I don't recommend it to friends and relatives. My experience is that searching in any language but English gives very poor results. Other patterns also need to be redirected to another search engine, so it's not a a smooth migration.

My estimates are that 50% of my searches are for DDG, 25% for Google, and 25% for others (Bing, Qwant), not counting specialized searches like Wikipedia. That is enough to prevent being profiled.

Can you tell us about (or link us to) some of the many bugs you found in Firefox?

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210727 - 4 years old

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1010527 - 6 years old

Not to mention the weird random full-blown crashes that occur when I try to use it that I can't reproduce, no point in opening an issue for those.

The only explanation is that they don't give a crap. Very frustrating.

Reading the bug thread cited above, it may even be a case of, "I was able to get Chrome to crash under similar circumstances, therefore it is conforming behavior. WONTFIX."

What platform are you using? I have used FF exclusively for 10+ years on Linux. Ubuntu and OpenSUSE every day. Nouveau and i915 every day. If I said I get 3 crashes per year in the last 3-5 years that would probably be exaggerating.

The only time FF 'crashes' is when I update while it's running, and even then it gracefully degrades and lets me know I have to restart it. With the 'restore previous session' menu option (an option that only exists in piecemeal and implemented much worse in Chrome), this is a mild inconvenience.

Chromium crashes much more frequently for me on Linux.

1. When switching tabs (ctrl + tab), instead of simply moving there, it showed a menu. This means I need to use that tiny menu to decipher which tab I’m on, instead of the entire background.

2. When closing a full screen video playback using ctrl + w, it takes a few seconds of a black screen on Firefox vs instantaneous on chrome

3. When installing extensions, they don’t always have an icon on the top bar, this makes discovarability a pain

Now this is wonderful in my opinion because it can be configured to cycle in the order in which you visited the tab last. I currently have over 100 tabs open and it helps immensely.

I still use it on principle. But let's not get complacent with regards to performance. That's why Chrome won in the first place.

There are still times DDG completely misinterprets my query and I have to clarify it or resort to !g but these times are becoming less frequent.

I agree on both counts. If newbies ask me what browser they should use, I say Firefox. But I don't use the modern Firefox myself because I simply don't like it.

Same deal with the browser I use. My preferred UI + Chromium is better for me than FF. There are three common cross-platform browser approaches: Chrome, FF, and Chromium-based. Only one of those three offers extreme visual and feature flexibility. I sound like a broken record saying it, but FF should really invest in embeddability so we can take their engine and run.

I can't believe I just called Google the cancer, but would anyone disagree?

For me, easy consumability. I use Chromium Embedded Framework, I don't actually put the hard work into building and maintaining an API myself. I'd love a similar effort for Gecko (there was effort at one time, but nothing of late IIRC).

I want to stop using Google, but please realize that DuckDuckGo is only competitive with Google if English is your only language (maybe even only if you're American?). There are loads and loads of people on HN for whom DDG is a poor experience.

In my experience DDG is extremely poor for localized results, especially those in other languages than English. Previously I recommended StartPage.com for my fellow Europeans, but StartPage has been bought by a shady company [1] and should not be used anymore either. I have no recommendation anymore.

[1]: https://reclaimthenet.org/startpage-buyout-ad-tech-company/

Works fine in UK English too, although the "r:uk" modifier is often needed.

I have no recommendation anymore

____

Maybe searx.me is an option. Although, you’re out of luck for Safari on iOS.

Are they though? Or is AMP just a storm-in-a-teacup? There a handful of people on Earth that will stop using Google search (in particular) and Chrome as a protest against AMP.

> ... and yet a MAJOR investment in all of our future.

[citation needed]

Personalized search is not inherently bad. Use Google search without being logged in if you really care. Harder to do with Chrome but Chrome is actually a great user experience. It still blows my mind that FF prompts me to restart to install an update when I start it up.

No I don't want to install an update. I want to use the browser. That's why I opened it. How many years has it been since Chrome added auto-update on restart with silent updates?

Beyond Search, GMail, Maps and Chrome though I just won't use another Google service and take the risk that some automated system will decide my account is in violation of some ToS no one has ever read and shut down access to every single Google service I use.

Whoever signed off on doing this through the Google Plus boondoggle needs to be fired (although, to be fair, I think ad accounts getting suspended arbitrarily and in some cases incorrectly was already a thing by then).

AFAIK, the search is still tailored to some degree. Log out and search for "plumber" and I bet you get local results.

So the only issue is how much contextual information you want to give Google when you search for something.

Maybe, maybe not -- but Google's implementation of it is very much not great. It seems to ensure that I won't get the results that I'm looking for.

Firefox has 50% worse performance for me in WebGL applications. Media isn't also accelerated still on Linux. Where is the "awesomeness" in that? I really wish those caveats didn't exist for what I use daily.

For Firefox, I don't see how these things matter in my use case. Admittedly I have no clue if any of the sites I use make use of webgl, but the overall speed and snappiness doesn't feel any different between the two browsers, and I use both on Linux.

I think plenty of people have found Mozilla to have made some poor decisions over the years. It feels as though you have to choose between two options that aren't great, so is there a point in switching? Take the add ons situation. At least on Chrome I can run my own add ons.

Candidate A: Multiple accusations of bribery, frequently posts racist/sexist/Anti-Semitic/Islamophobic memes on his Twitter account, and sponsored multiple pieces of reprehensible legislation during his tenure in office.

Candidate B: Refuses to tip more than 10%, ever.

One seems objectively worse than the other, and yet the average voter gets to say, "Oh, well since they're both bad in some way, I can vote for Candidate A with a clear conscience because I like his views on X."

The idea that American's issues with the Democratic canidates can be compared as "Refused to tip more on 10%", is moronic.

It is more like

Candidate A: Multiple accusations of bribery, frequently posts racist/sexist/Anti-Semitic/Islamophobic memes on his Twitter account, and sponsored multiple pieces of reprehensible legislation during his tenure in office.

Candidate B: Wants to Steal my money and give it to other people, wants to force me in to government contolled substandard health care, wants to take my core freedoms (speech, guns, and propery rights), and was to trash the economy so finding a job is hard

Candidate A: A career criminal who has devoted his time in office to mass corruption, stealing hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars for personal benefit. Not satisfied with creating the most corrupt administration in history, Candidate A began extorting foreign countries to make contributions to him personally, in the form of bribes to assist his campaign or else. When not stealing hundreds of millions of dollars and extorting allies to the benefit of our enemies, he is known for partying with notorious pedophiles like Jeffrey Epstein and Prince Andrews, and has over 40 credible accounts of sexual abuse or rape.

Candidate B: Believes that taxation, not monetizing debt, is the proper way to budget. Understands that the broken, bankrupting and failing healthcare system needs evidence-based reform to cost less and do more, like in dozens of other nations worldwide. Finally, Candidate B is the only Candidate at all that understands the importance of the Constitution, Rule of Law, and the freedoms of the Bill of Rights, and doesn't require special interests donations to "manage" his views on the subject. And finally, as with every politician from Candidate B's party for two generations straight, they understand how to steward an economy towards great heights not fueled by a wealthy minority getting wealthier, but by the working class getting the money and wealth they deserve.

If you're going to support a lawless, hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars stealing, Constitution-destroying, child rapist, then have the guts to call a spade a spade.

>>Candidate A: ...

I am sure you have evidence based proof of all of this correct?

>>>Candidate B:

Don't make me laugh, Candidate B is just as corrupt, and has no concept of Freedoms. Candidate B believes the Constitution grants rights, instead of limiting government, they believe there are no limits at all to government Candidate B's party is also the source of a good chunk of the National Debt given they are the ones that create the Entitlement programs that are driving this nation to bankruptcy

All cable news is terrible, but obviously you disagree as your opinions have been written for you by Fox News opinion hosts ("Fake News"). Literally, you have expressed 0 opinions that were not written for you by Hannity or Tucker.

>I am sure you have evidence based proof of all of this correct?

Of course, if you actually followed the multiple court cases exposing this corruption, you would see the court filings demonstrating the facts of his legendary multi-hundred-million emoluments violations, enriching himself by ordering our government to spend taxpayer money at his private businesses solely for his own benefit. Jimmy Carter sold his peanut farm!

https://www.theusconstitution.org/litigation/trump-and-forei...

Regarding Donald Trump raping children with Jeffrey Epstein, one of his victims gave a sworn affidavit to that effect.

http://thememoryhole2.org/blog/doe-v-trump

Regarding Donald Trumps extortion of our allies to help himself personally and our enemies, he admitted it publically, but https://intelligence.house.gov/report/ details his crimes along with https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf

The corruption of Trump is at all levels, from ordering the military to drive 100 miles out of their way to spend double the market rate at his personal facilities (rank, impeachable corruption) https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/07/us/politics/military-stop... to giving 400 million dollar sweetheart contracts to allies and donors rated "unfit" to handle the contract by our own military https://www.axios.com/trump-border-wall-fisher-industries-in...

The sad part is, all of this evidence is public and being blasted from the rooftops

Your statements here are a complete and total indictment of your fake news propaganda bubble, that you know none of them and have seen none of this evidence.

>Don't make me laugh, Candidate B is just as corrupt

This is called false equivalence. No politician in American history has been a fraction of corrupt as Donald Trump. Sorry if facts are triggering.

>Candidate B believes the Constitution grants rights, instead of limiting government,

This is hilarious nonsense. Not only is it false, but it's the kind of civically-illiterate nonsense that gets repeated on the right among folks who don't know better. The Constitution doesn't "limit" government when it creates a sovereign Congress which can pass any law including updating the Constitution. You're confusing the dual duties between the Constitution (defining government power) and Bill of Rights (limiting it).

>" they believe there are no limits at all to government"

Wrong! It's the GOP which is arguing for the "Unitary Executive" the King President who has no limits, who can "murder someone and get away with it". Wake up my man! Donald Trump views himself your King, not your President, and has waged a war against limited government and limited power unlike any war in our history! As Donald Trump ignores separation of powers, destroys the separation of powers, he has transformed the Presidency into a Dictatorship or Monarchy. The only party which believes there are "no limits at all" are currently trying to get away with crime based on the theory that the President is King!

Literally the GOP defense for Donald Trump's corruption and crimes isn't "he didn't do it" it's the famous Nixonian reply "When you're the President, it's not illegal". They literally spin his impeachable crime as being "OK" because when you're a Republican, you're allowed to be corrupt, to steal, to rape, as long as you remain loyal.

Stop fighting against limited government and start supporting our Constitution before it's too late!

> is also the source of a good chunk of the National Debt given they are the ones that create the Entitlement programs that are driving this nation to bankruptcy

Fact: The only President in the modern era to return a surplus to the treasury was a liberal. Reagan QUADRUPLED the debt. Bush left us with a $1.2 trillion dollar deficit, while Obama lowered it by 70% to $400B!

Your narrative is totally devoid of all facts. Every liberal President for the past 40 years has lowered spending by balancing the budgets, while every Republican has gone on a debt-financed spending spree.

I hope one day you can break away from your rancid, fact-less, evidence propaganda and learn how these little lies you are used to telling your buddies don't hold up to even ten seconds of fact gathering.

Literally, every statement you've made has been false, and you've not even attempted to provide any evidence to support it.

I see you confuse Accusation with evidence, a " sworn affidavit" is not evidence, it an an accusation of which our legal system demands we assume innocence until guilt is proven with actual evidence. Which is why those cases went no where because there is no evidence to support the accusations

>>>court filings demonstrating the facts of his legendary multi-hundred-million emoluments violations, enriching himself by ordering our government to spend taxpayer money at his private businesses solely for his own benefit.

This is where you may have a case, but do date no one has provided evidence of actual enrichment, given Trump claims to be hosting the events at cost, and often times it has been proven that comparable venues for events would be considerably higher in costs

Though it is not good from an optics stand point

>>>The corruption of Trump is at all levels, from ordering the military to drive 100 miles out of their way to spend double the market rate at his personal facilities

The story links does not claim double the costs, in fact is claims it was less than a comparable hotel, nor does it say Trump ordered the military to go there but rather the military personnel chose that on their own

Might want to read your own sources next time

>>>This is hilarious nonsense. Not only is it false,

Not it is not false at all, the entire purpose of the document was We the People were granted a limited number of powers to the government, that is why there are enumerated powers

>>>The Constitution doesn't "limit" government when it creates a sovereign Congress which can pass any law including updating the Constitution.

Congress has ZERO authority to update the Constitution, their authority only allows the Congress to submit to the States and the People Amendments to the Constitution. They have no power to amend it on their own. Zero, none, zilch

Congress is also not the only way to amend the constitution as the People, and the States have the ultimate power over the congress.

In your Federalist system the Congress is not, and should not be the most powerful branch. The States acting as a collective are, and should be.

>>>you're confusing the dual duties between the Constitution (defining government power) and Bill of Rights (limiting it).

No I am not, Article I Section 8 lays out the only powers granted to the government, James Madison predicted people would mis understand the Bill Of rights exactly as you have, stating

"I go further and affirm that bills of rights, in the sense and in the extent in which they are contended for, are not only unnecessary in the proposed constitution, but would even be dangerous. They would contain various exceptions to powers which are not granted; and on this very account, would afford a colorable pretext to claim more than were granted. For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do? Why for instance, should it be said, that the liberty of the press shall not be restrained, when no power is given by which restrictions may be imposed? I will not contend that such a provision would confer a regulating power; but it is evident that it would furnish, to men disposed to usurp, a plausible pretense for claiming that power. "

The constitution defines a limited form a government and limited powers in scope. The Bill Of Rights simply codifies a few of the most important rights, while it does limit government, the constitution it self is also a limiting document

>>>Wake up my man! Donald Trump views himself your King, not your President

You have confused me for a Trump Supporter, I am libertarian. In 2016 I voted for Gary Johnson.

However I will say Trump was the lesser of 2 evils over Hillary Clinton (talk about corrupt), and based on the Front runners for 2020 for the Dems he will also be the lesser of 2 evils as there is no way Biden, Sanders or Warren will win.

>>>Fact: The only President in the modern era to return a surplus to the treasury was a liberal. Reagan QUADRUPLED the debt. Bush left us with a $1.2 trillion dollar deficit, while Obama lowered it by 70% to $400B!

Not fact.. Obama did not lower the National Debt at all, in Sept 2009 (9 mos after talking office) the National Debt was 11.9 Trillion, in Sept 2016 (3mos before he left office) the National Debt was 21.5 Trillion, so he added 7.7 Trillion in 8 years or about 960 Million per year in deficits

For Bush in Sept 2001 the National Debt was 5.8 Trillion, in sept 2008 the national debt was 10.02 Trillion, adding 4.4 Trillion or about 550 Million per year even adjusting for Inflation that is about 700 billion in 2016 Dollars, Thus Obama added considerably more money annually to the national debt that Bush did.

Since 1941 5 Presidents droped the Debt as a Ratio of GDP, and 1 lowered the Debt in real dollars.

Of those Presidencies, 3 were Democrats, and 2 were Republicans.

However Given that the Far left now believes Obama is a Conservative, I have a feeling they do not believe Bill Clinton, Truman, or Johnson to be "Liberal" enough for their wokeness

you find me a Roosevelt/Truman Democrat and maybe I would get behind the Democratic party again, Biden, Warren, and Sanders are not Roosevelt/Truman Democrats

It's riddled with mistakes (confusing deficit for debt) and downright nonsense (excusing the worst corruption in American history, hundreds of millions of dollars worth, while robotically repeating low-iq conservative propaganda about the orders of magnitude less corrupt Clintons) and finally, it demonstrates a deep misunderstanding of how Donald Trump has betrayed America by working with our enemies, extorting our allies, destroying the bonds of the west, and working in service to hostile interests.

I especially like you how refuse to look at deficits and instead look at debts, so you can award Obama the brunt of Mr Bush's $1.4 trillion dollar deficits. It's a really unintellectual move that defies the reality of the data but it works wonders on a specific type of biased person. Obama took a $1.4 trillion dollar GOP deficit and reduced it to $400B.

You understand that when you reduce the deficit, you are balancing the budget right? That President Obama balanced 70% of the budget after Bush's spending spree? And that Trump, the so called Conservative, immediately busted the deficit wide open back over a trillion during a boom year mainly to reward major corporations with legendary tax breaks? The economics here are stupid simple and you're breaking your back bending over backwards to deny the truth that every liberal in modern era has worked to balance the budget, and every conservative has gone on a debt-financed spending spree increasing deficits.

The way you reject the sources I gave you, the same sources which will grace American history textbooks for centuries to come, is breathtaking. It's always impressive how fast real sources and real evidence can get dismissed by someone parroting conspiracy theories and propaganda.

And for what purpose? Why reject hard sourcing while providing none if not to defend the most corrupt Constitution-shredding president in American history?

Call yourself a libertarian if it makes you feel better, but you don't support America.

Quote Madison if it makes you feel smart, but you'll have to skip over the Federalist Papers that speak at length about foreign influence in our elections as you reward Trump by repeating his lies and justifying his crimes.

"You find me a Roosevelt/Truman Democrat and maybe I would get behind the Democratic party again, Biden, Warren, and Sanders are not Roosevelt/Truman Democrats"

We both know you're going to do whatever it takes to help the most corrupt president in history, one who is violating the very bonds that hold this nation together, get re-elected.

It is what it is, but patriots stand up for our constitution, stand up for the sanctity of our elections, stand up for the rule of law, stand up for the office of the presidency and separation of powers. In contrast, libertarians parrot pitiful fake news Fox News talking points about "muh guns" and "corrupt Clintons" while fancying themselves some how above the average Trump supporter.

Find me a Republican or Libertarian who doesn't bow before Emperor Trump and his war against American democracy, who doesn't excuse the worst corruption in American history, who believes that the Rule of Law matters, and I'll be able to label you a liar.

The two-party system is a symptom of a problem, not the problem itself.

The real problem is the first-past-the-post voting system. A FTFP voting system will always devolve into a two-party system. If we switched to some sort of ranked choice or approval voting, we'd see more options.

Candidate A: Openly racist and homophobic. Annoyingly pious. Secretly gay. Claimed to no longer have any association with the Klan after the investigative journalist published that one article. Inherited money; pretends to be a farmer/rancher. Leaves teaser religious tracts that look like money in lieu of tips.

Candidate B: Policy proposals completely divorced from reality. No primary-sponsored legislation has ever passed. Secretly a roofie-rapist. Does insider trading on privileged information. Incumbent in the safest district in the state. Habitual drunk driver, though never convicted.

That's just what you get (eventually) with winner-take-all, first-past-the-post elections. Even in states where the minority party essentially never wins, the party leadership can still be corrupt as Hell, and no decent person can hold their breath long enough to avoid the stench of it.

It kills me that someone would be pissed at Mozilla for adding pocket, Chrome comes with so many damn Google centric plugins, and one little useful utility you can remove is what makes you lose it over Firefox? Come on.

To be fair to Google, I think it is important to acknowledge the good things Chrome did in the beginning. I remember when it came out, and most (non - Mac users) were still using IE, it was fantastic! I remember jumping on board immediately. But for me at this point, it has become too much to bear.

At this point they are making so much money from tracking users and selling to advertisers.. who could blame them for continuing to do so? I sure can't, haha.

But after a while, I started realizing all the intrusive & creepy advertisements I was seeing were simply a result of the browser software I chose, and the website I chose do do my searches on, so I started looking for alternatives.

Why do I need to change my workflow because Firefox got worse at what I've used it for for years? If I have to change the way I work, why not change browsers too? If there's a tab limit beyond which Firefox can't effectively control itself, why is that not a hard coded limit?

How come this is brought up in the argument at all? Mozilla is very imperfect, but they're the only major browser vendor that doesn't have their own ad networks. Safari and Firefox are the only two options that 1) are not owned by a company working against browser user's interests or 2) inadvertently end up helping the dominance of a browser in category 1. And most people can't use Safari.

Mozilla has actively shown time and time again that they're there for the end user. You can be critical of the times when they made mistakes in that mission (plenty of times), but please realize who your real friends are.

That was quite a while ago, but that kind of thing does stick with you.

And Google hasn't?

This is not and has never been true. What is no longer possible is the ability to sideload extensions outside of the browser by copying files into a directory because that's how dirtbags have stuck extensions that could not be uninstalled into Firefox as part of a third-party app install.

Go to `about:addons`, install add-on from file, you're done.

Then I downloaded a working add-on. It worked fine when installing from file. I removed the signing information. It installs fine as a temporary add-on, but throws the same error as the hello world.

I'm pretty sure that the add-ons need to be signed by Mozilla to install from file.

https://extensionworkshop.com/documentation/publish/signing-...

You can then sideload unsigned add-ons by following these instructions:

https://extensionworkshop.com/documentation/publish/distribu...

They claim to be doing this for speed purposes, but it'll actually slow down the vast majority of Chrome profiles running ad blockers.

Google/Chrome/<all other services> simply do not have your interests first, so it's a choice between Google and <everyone else (who by default track you less)>.

I was going to switch to duckduckgo as you say, to realize that OH! I had switched to duckduckgo when switching to FF but had forgotten... that's... how easy and seamless it is now, I even just forgot I was not searching on google anymore.

DDG doesn't have anything like that and forces you to click into a financial website.

I had to switch back. If it added that widget, I'd probably make the switch full time.

The actual queries I entered were not wrapped in quotes. So for some stocks, it's actually there. But no charts.

[0] https://duckduckgo.com/html/?q=aapl+stock

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=aapl+stock&ia=stock

Along the same lines, the first time I heard a TV commercial for Bing (~10y ago) I had very little idea what it even was but they happily promoted it as a 'decision engine', IIRC.

I switched back about a year or so ago. There are some nice things in the FF dev tools compared to Chrome, but on the whole, even a year later I still find myself opening Chrome to do something specific here and there in dev tools.

That is a tough sell. Users do not really care (nor should they) what publishers want to do to make sites profitable. That space is so fraught with abuse that it's not going to get any sympathy from the user side, anyways.

Google is an advertising company.

* ADs are acceptable to me. I just don't want creepy ads that follow me around. And data about my browsing behavior being traded in Ad networks.

* Personalize Search Results drive society appart, and lead to radicalization. Not a fan.

I would modify this to unobtrusive ads.

Ads with audio (video without audio doesn't bother me that much unless I'm on mobile, in which case it's eating up my mobile data), ads that pop into the middle of the screen, ads that run any JavaScript, etc., are unacceptable. But a simple banner on the side, even if it's an animated GIF? I'm alright with.

Unfortunately, ad networks decided that their ads are more important than the content I'm trying to view and have brought ad blockers upon themselves. And don't get me started on malvertising...

That is not how it works for me. One of common things I might do is look up a place, like a bar or a restaurant or theater or whatever. When I do this in Google, I immediately get a link to the website, a link to the reviews, pictures of inside and outside and a link to the map. Right at the top of the page. With DDG, all I get is a link to the website if the place has one and possibly a link to a yelp page. I have to do multiple additional searches and then cut and paste the address into a separate tab to open the map to get the same result.

Not if you’re a macOS user, in particular one that cares for automation. The lack of AppleScript (the bug report that tracks it is old enough to vote) prevents people from considering it as a daily browser. And I’m not just talking about developers. I regularly steer non-technical people away from Firefox because when they ask why my tools—which they want to use—don’t work on Firefox, I have to tell them the truth: I’d like to support Firefox, but I can’t.

I have to use chrome for work cuz of a security rule of questionable legitimacy (to me).

in FF, you bookmark a page by dragging the tab into a folder.

in chrome afaik, you have to star it and then select what folder it goes into.

Ok.

Another thing, In chrome, if you context click inside of a bookmarks folder and create a new folder, it creates a nested new folder within the folder you clicked.

In firefox, thats not the case, wherever you click, i believe it creates the new folder at the top level, and then you can drag it to a sub folder. Its a small problem but if you're like me with lots of bookmarks[1], it is a pain in the ass.

[1] for example, i have a folder for every year, with a subfolder for each month, and whenever i find non-specific cool stuff, i toss the bookmark in this month/year folder. at this point i have these going back to 2016, and its become a cool sort of journal or scrapbook type thing. highly recommend this practice to ppl, and its basically the use-case of many 3rd party browser adons for bookmark management, but built into the browser by default.

anyway, long like firefox!

I use DDG and "bang" myself to better results if DDG fails me. Love the amount of features.

My only complaint is it sucks at helping me spell words, especially in other languages than English.

Sadly we use Google mail at my work so probably can't avoid it completely.

I ditched Google for DuckDuckGo. Here's why you should too https://www.wired.co.uk/article/duckduckgo-google-alternativ...

FF is awesome, but have they fixed the battery issues on Macs yet? It's a non-starter for me to switch.

- https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/2019/10/22/dramatically-red...

- https://www.zdnet.com/article/upcoming-firefox-update-will-d...

Give it a go again!

And read this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism

It is just too late for fashion, no time for fanboyism, we blew it. We are on limit of destroying freedom of internet (I will post facebook, google and amazon ASN based ip ranges later when I come home, so you can try it on your own, it is really hilarious, from all search engines I know, only yandex was still operational. And those are RIPE records.).

But, to be fair: At least they don't exclude their resources from Lighthouse.

The rest of the time I stay away...

FF is great, but it's also worth pointing out that Edge has all the Google adware removed and better privacy. There was a post from Eric Lawrence detailing all the Google stuff they removed a little while back, it was about 25 separate components. There's telemetry though so make your own mind if you're cool with that.

I'm genuinely curious why you chose this route.

Sure, when's convenient?

https://www.microsoftedgeinsider.com/en-us/download/

> or Linux

We'll chat again in a few weeks when that's released.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-releases-first-chrom...

Mozilla's continued trend away from Openness and the foundation's original goals and more towards business objectives and corporate "morals" similar to those seen in google seems like we are just replacing one Corporate master for another with Modern Mozilla, inc

Long gone are the days of the Mozilla Foundation standing up for the users against the Corporate goliath Microsoft, today they simply adopt what ever Google wants them to provided Google calls them "standard" .

it is doing great now, but lost a great deal of marketshare precisely because it was a slow, bloated mess

> FF dev tools are awesome.

debatable. chrome hot code replace in debug is a great asset. mounting a local workspace to synchronize changes is situational, but when you can leverage it it's great. firefox code view's "find in files" only search linked javascript, chrome search everywhere so it can catches references in inlined javascript

I work with both regularly, for personal usage I prefer firefox, for the obvious implications, but I find a lot less friction in developing using chrome.

FF Quantum hit the stage two years ago. Performance is now a moot point; they've had plenty of time to recoup on any market share losses from that with the new Quantum branding.

And they've been releasing dope features for the dev tools with almost every release. Check out this especially feature-rich release: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/12/firefox-71-a-year-end-arri...

yeah, I even said it

>> it is doing great now

> they've had plenty of time to recoup on any market share losses from that with the new Quantum branding.

don't let fact get in the way of a feel good opinion, I guess

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/m...

Though I really doubt Firefox's drop in market-share is that tied to performance. The story is more likely to be Chrome/Chromium as the default on Android, the release of Chromebooks, etc. Of course, this is just me interpreting facts with my feel good opinion.

Back to the main point at hand, though, Firefox is obviously not doing well today either according to that chart. But its performance and dev tools are top-notch.

historically speaking, Chrome got the share it got because Firefox was a memory hog and was running a purely interpreted JavaScript engine on top of a single threaded rendering engine in a time where core numbers and web app were becoming mainstream.

I must admit that I've never used those missing dev tools in Chrome, as those issues are non-existent in a webpack environment (that's essentially what workspace mounting and hot code reloading is mirroring). And the search function works with all files, including inline code, as of Quantum as well.