I also gave Firefox another shot a couple months ago and I'm surprised at how much better it is nowadays. It's been such a good experience I'm also giving a go to the Firefox Preview[0] on my Android - even though it's still under heavy development, I like some of the changes to the mobile browser it makes and it'll make in a near future.

[0] https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2019/12/03/firefox-p...

Firefox is definitely an amazing experience, especially if you use Firefox Containers[1]. My only gripe is that the UX of containers isn't quite ready for prime time yet (e.g. your container setup doesn't sync by default).

And there really needs to be an easy way to switch profiles. Firefox has had profiles for basically forever, but it's much easier to switch profiles in Chrome.

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers

One thing that might make it easier for you that you might not know about: about:profiles

I currently go to about:profiles and click "open this profile in a new window", but this is very klutzy compared to Chrome's profile switcher next to the URL bar.

Of course you can also create launchers/shortcuts for Firefox with "firefox -P profilename" but again that's work you have to do on each machine you use.

A classic solution is just one shortcut of `firefox -no-remote -ProfileManager` which semi-replicates one of the old Netscape-feeling behaviors in that such a shortcut will always create a new instance of Firefox and first launch the select profile window.

Firefox preview is fantastic. I started using it expecting a very unstable experience and... it hasn't been.

For me its been fantastic.

Agree!

The only thing I missed from the ordinary Firefox on Android was that Firefox used to have a brilliant hack with the sharing option where they would show the two most frequently used options (+ a sharing button to access the rest) instead of just one or just the sharing button.

This saved me a few seconds again and again and again.

Wonder why no one else does that?

Yeah, the sharing button thing is something I miss from the ordinary Firefox too. I usually share links with my friends through Whatsapp and its icon is hidden far to the right.

> After the recent missteps by Chrome (mangling the display of URLs)

Me too! I'm not as bothered by software-politics as many of the commentators on here (I don't hate Facebook, and worked there for four years; I don't hate ads; I don't worry too much about trafficking and privacy...) but Chrome fucking with the URL was a bridge too far. I switched to Firefox and when Google walked back their hiding-the-URL business, I never bothered switching back, because I didn't trust them anymore.

Companies take note: users' trust that you won't arbitrarily change their workflow in annoying ways is hard to win back.

Yeah I'm still a little pissed about not getting the green bar for payments (and definitely about not being able to see 'https' to verify it).

Green bar for payments?

The EV (Extended Validation) certificate notification inn the address bar was removed in Firefox and Chrome:

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/chrome-and-fi...

Enterprise SSL certs, I think.

What's the story with Chrome messing up URLs? I missed that one...

They elide the protocol and www

E.g. "<lock icon> https://www.google.com/example/" would display as "<lock icon> google.com/example" until you interact with the URL.

The problem is it's impossible to separate "this changed it sucks" from "this is actually bad" since the messages are always the same. E.g. in this case you didn't even bother explaining why the new way works worse for you you just said "it changed, I left! Make note!" and I mean that's fine if that's what you actually wanted them to make note of but no company with competition is just going to keep every workflow the same for over a decade and wait for someone else to come out with a better product to replace them.

In general I prefer to use tools that show me real data rather than transforming it in “smart” ways that are poorly documented and not under my control.

If other people have different preferences, that’s fine! They can keep using Chrome.

Also, even if that weren’t true, change is a cost. It’s perfectly reasonable to complain about change as being intrinsically bad without giving any other reason.

The lesson is don't change for the sake of change.

If you think of a standard user:

- Do they really need to see* http:// or https:// if immediately to the left is the icon which indicates secure/insecure (which is more than just "protocol is https or not")?

- Do they really care to see* if they are at www.site.com or m.site.com or site.com or do they just want to know they are at site.com which they expect to be as they make their purchase or log in?

* noting that bookmarking, copying, or editing the URL operate on the full URL and this is just a visual change otherwise

And voila now the leftmost (first) text they read is not a bunch of jargon it's the thing people look at the URL for the most.

That you couldn't think of any reason tells me you didn't try not that you disagreed with the reasons and had an actual lesson to share about why. Again: "it changed, change bad" people impossible to distinguish from "it changed, actually bad".

While somewhat a bad form for general web browsing, its definitely possible for www.site.com and site.com to be entirely different hosts. In newer versions of Chrome, you would never know which one you were actually on unless you select in the address bar.

Maybe dropping the protocol definition in the URL is debatable, as probably 99.99% of the time in Chrome a user is going to be either http or https, but dropping a part of the hostname is unacceptable in my book.

Would dropping .com be acceptable? All a user wants to see is that they went to Google, to an average user the .com could be seen as redundant clutter as well. Might as well have the address bar show "google" or "cnn" or "facebook" in it, as clearly that's what a user cares about.

Possible and reasonable are different things. If www.google.com gave you gmail and google.com gave you search users were confused before www was hidden post load.

You can't really get rid of the TLD without breaking the security model of the web (e.g. a lock icon and google.com is different than a lock icon and google.gtld). Would it be nice to refactor that? Probably. Is it reasonably possible at this point? No.

> Do they really care to see* if they are at www.site.com or m.site.com or site.com or do they just want to know they are at site.com www.example.com == example.com is an assumption that has never been true and I have seen it screw over regular users countless times. Quietly rewriting the URL and hiding that fact will just make that worse. As for m.example.com, that is even further from standardized. Me and and at least one person I know have personal websites with short aliases like mike.lastname.tld == m.lastname.tld, not to mention the plethora of sites that don't have matching paths on mobile vs desktop. Even if copying the URL quietly switches it out for the real one (which is bad on its own), that break the surprisingly common workflow of writing down the URL you see on a piece of paper.

Thank you for talking about a real use case :). The m. causing a new workflow issue to be introduced is exactly why they decided "m." should not be treated as a trivial subdomain when they rolled it out, it was only that way during testing.

As you said www.example.com being functionally different from example.com was already a broken workflow, users weren't differentiating it. Continuing to display something users haven't understood for 20 years was not considered a strong enough reason to simplify the URL display now in a way that causes the same errors users were commonly making anyways.

I don’t care what “a standard user” needs, so what is your point?

I care what I need.

A standard user was probably fine with something like AOL keywords.

> If you think of a standard user

You mean the strawman repeatedly trotted out by people defending shitty changes as justifications for why their shitty change is necessary? Ever wonder why so many things suck nowadays?

Nope, just mean "not the guy that writes the webapp who needs to see if he is currently connected via HTTP or HTTPS".

Can "the larger group" be used as an excuse for a bad change? Sure! But so far the only reason mentioned as to WHY this change is bad is "www.site.com and site.com could technically be different sites" and I'm not sure how that is supposed to be clear regardless if www shows post load or not or how that's supposed to outweigh the advantages.

> Nope, just mean "not the guy that writes the webapp who needs to see if he is currently connected via HTTP or HTTPS".

HTTP currently shows "Not secure" to the left of the URL. It's still easy to differentiate.

(I do think hiding www is stupid, but hiding http vs https is reasonable so long as they're still marked differently. Ideally http should be a more noticeable error, like it is if there's any user input box, or better yet a massive error like it is for self-signed certs and HTTPS.)

Yes, it requires competency and there may not even be a right answer.

>While I still consider DuckDuckGo to be in the "not bad" category...

If you're into privacy-conscious search engines and want one that's not susceptible to blanket FISA warrants[0], check out either Qwant[1] or SwissCows[2].

[0] - DuckDuckGo's address is in Pennsylvania - 20 Paoli Pike, Paoli, PA 19301.

[1] - https://www.qwant.com

[2] - https://swisscows.ch/

Re:qwant

France has a more permissive surveillance regime than the US[0], and as a foreign (US) user I have no recourse if they spy on me.

Furthermore, here are some quotes from qwant:

>We do not use any cookies or other advertising tracers to create your profile for commercial purposes. This means that you can use Qwant with confidence, we will never try to establish your psychological or commercial profile to sell it to third parties, here or elsewhere. [1]

Note the "for commercial purposes" in the first sentence, and the "to sell it to third parties" in the second. These are weasel clauses.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/24/france-big-bro...

[1] https://betterweb.qwant.com/5-reasons-to-be-brave-and-choose...

> With Google you can be sure that they sell your data to _anybody_

This is not true. There is no documented case of Google selling any user's personal data to anyone.

Okay, fair point. Googles' business is literally selling access to all the data they have collected from you. So they are not selling your data, only the access to that data, that's right.

> more permissive

That should probably read 'more pervasive'.

Qwant doesn't work for me at all on Firefox. It displays an empty page. Does anyone else have that problem?

In the console I get a warning and an error:

> Content Security Policy: Couldn’t process unknown directive ‘script-src-elem’

> TypeError: browserLanguage is undefined

For some reason, your Firefox profile doesn't have a preferred language, but Qwant expects one. If you add one in the Preferences (option "Choose your preferred language for displaying pages"), it should work.

Seems like Firefox should fall back to the OS language of a preferred language had not been set in the browser. I wonder how that happened.

This is a Firefox bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1415146

All of these are using Bing results, right?

Startpage was good but I think they were recently bought out by a less than a good party

Yes, see HN's 'Startpage is now owned by an advertising company':

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21371577

wow, those seem quite fantastic at first glance. If I search for my real name I get every single profile I've ever created since the beginning of time - as opposed to google listing a bunch of random garbage. Names there are like John Doe returns famous people named John OR Doe above the person(s) with the actual name.

EDIT: I right click the search box and make qw and sw keywords for them.

EDIT2: I'm just looking for a functional google alternative.

I tried Swiss Cows just now, it appears effective at first glance but a little longer and realized I’ve never seen a more sanitized and curated search.

I don’t necessarily mean that good or bad. Just interesting how... different it is. Seems good if you know your thug exists already and someone approved it for their results.

"swiss cows"... .ch right

Qwant was proprietary last time I checked and didn't seem that privacy centered as they say

Also >France

Downvoters care to explain? I was born and lived in France for 20+ years, I think I've a pretty good idea about the government, freedom and privacy in that country. I've seen Qwant being shilled countless times, starting from the french government pushing a "privacy focused search engine" a lot of school use this search engine by default. Despite all of that I have yet to see code or any actual proof they respect user privacy.

Are you a devtools user? How do the Firefox ones compare? I speak as someone who originally switched to Chrome (having been a Firefox user since the Phoenix days!) specifically for the devtools — it's pretty much the biggest factor in my browser choice.

You get used to it - UI is slightly different in some areas, but it lacks for no major features and performance is good, like firefox in general.

I've found it's extremely valuable to be developing sites in Firefox using the dev tools simply to help catch issues that the rest of the team ignores as they're all stuck on Chrome. Fights monocultures by default!

I remember Firefox being seriously lacking in some WebSocket dev tools that I needed. But I checked again and they're there. So it seems like they are actively improving the dev tools.

Yep, I believe that was a relatively recent addition actually. They're making great progress on the dev tools side of things.

I think Firefox is better in some areas, especially their CSS grid viewer. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Page_Inspecto... I'm also keen to checkout the new Replay feature. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Projects/We...

Better in some aspects, worse in others, the interface is different enough to create a bit of a transition barrier.

You won't be worse off, it isn't a big effort to get used to FF devtools, but you must accept a learning curve if you want to switch.

DevTools member here. As this is something we are chipping away on, are there any specific places where the UI throws you off?

Sorry, I'm not that useful for your question. My experience is from the reverse switch. I'm used to Firefox (it's my daily driver) and had to get acquainted to Chrome.

I had to get used to Chrome devtools because javascript debugging is a lot better there. For completeness sake, CSS debugging is much better in Firefox. In time, I think both will converge.

Sadly, the performance inspector is still pretty useless compared to what Chromium is offering.

They're working on a new one that seems pretty cool, although you currently have to install it as an Add-on to use it: https://profiler.firefox.com/

this is the biggest blocker for me. i still use ff as my main browser, but i cannot develop with it, so i have to spend a lot of my time in chrome.

we had a recent dialog about it here:

https://old.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/ecyhmr/mozilla_...

there's some cool stuff in the works but it doesnt sound like there's a plan to internalize the work into devtools but to keep it as a web app and rely on a serviceworker for "localness" - not great, imo.

Thanks again for that discussion, it already spawned some follow up.

My impression as a web user is that if any devs actually use the performance inspector it's just to learn their site is slow and then not do anything about it.

Your devs might develop perfectly well behaving stuff just to see it get totally obliterated by loading 3 external tracking scripts through Tag Manager, three different pixels and 7 external contact form/chat bots/newsletter popover scripts from their CRM/ad platform/whatever crap marketing wants.

Sadly noone cares what the performance inspector says. Newspapers just get slower and slower. Our local newspaper takes 15 seconds to first visible paint and another 5-10 seconds to usefulness on my phone...

I’m a Firefox ddg user, and I would recommend Chrome for devtools still. As of last month, Firefox devtools didnt even recognize meta viewport tags which caused UI discrepancies between testing and production. Chrome devtools does have it.

That being said, I still switched back to Firefox and ddg after I close devtools.

Interesting then that this release enables meta viewport support in responsive design mode - from the link: "Firefox now supports simulation of meta viewport in Responsive Design Mode."

Me and my not reading things. Thanks for the link!

From the 72.0 changelog:

> Firefox now supports simulation of meta viewport in Responsive Design Mode.

In Chrome 79 they broke or removed hovering over variables. They say it will be fixed in Chrome 80. https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/22882968?hl=en

This has been a huge Pita, for my team. Good news is it has gotten some of them to switch to Firefox for debugging. It really is awful that bug slipped through.

I use Firefox as my default browser. But the dev tools is too slow, apparently someone thought it was a good idea to rewrite it in React, causing it to lag even on a few thousand console log messages on a fairly powerful workstation. And there is no search functionality, only filter. So I've started to prefix all my debug messages with whatever I'm working on just so that the logs can be found in the Firefox dev tools console. One good feature though is that you can filter on type of messages, like only show error messages, or warnings. Which is very annoying in Chrome dev tools where it will tell you there is an error, but you can't click on it, so there is no way to see the actual error.

DevTools member here. We have been working on performance over the past release – is there anything specific that you can point out as being slower for us to focus on?

I have not yet tested v72, I'm on v71. The Chrome dev tools Console feels (not measured) about 100x faster then the Console in Firefox. Even Chromium Console can be limiting though. Yeh, I probably should not use console.logs for debugging, but it's much faster forkflow then firing up the debugger. Even with the lag. With the Chromium Console the lag is not that bad, and it has a search function. Both console's have a bunch of cool features, like being able to inspect DOM nodes, explore objects, etc. Witch I think might be a reason for the lag. Most of the time I just want to search the logs to find out what happened. An idea is if you can just get the plain text from the console.logs somehow. In chromium all console.logs get sent to stdout, so I can pipe the logs to a file, then use any editor to search it. But I prefer using the dev tools.

Maybe make a perf switch in the console, which dumps the text without formatting or other features. Something that can handle one million lines of logs and search in it. Being able to search the logs is critical. Filtering doesn't work as I need to see the surrounding logs, what happened after. I don't need to see all one million lines at the same time though, it can be buffered to only show 100 lines above it and 100 lines below it. Chromium has such an optimization. But search is a bit slow.

I'm on v72 now and the Dev tools console feels even slower. It now freezes with just a few thousand log messages.

I also have to keep clicking the clear button to prevent the page from freezing if the dev tools console is open when loading the page.

I’ve always preferred Firefox’s dev tools compared to Chrome’s.

Really like the ability to outline flexbox and grid elements.

I am not OP but I'm a FF user. I haven't got around to learning FF's dev tools and still need Chrome(ium) to test that platform for compat anyway. So I just still use Chrome dev tools (which also work for NodeJS instances) but use FF for actual browsing.

I like Edit and resend in the Network tab. I don't know how to do that in Chromium.

Firefox has a great feature where live css changes are placed into a "diff" panel.

Rather than having to remember all the small changes you made, you can just copy and paste the script out (or even just view what you changed).

When I’m using the Chrome tools, I miss some FF features, when I use the FF tools, I miss some Chrome features.

I generally like the FF tools better nowadays, but Chrome’s are a bit faster.

I heard FF recently added WebSocket support to their dev tools (being able to see payloads). Been meaning to give it another try.

I use that feature regularly, and it works very well.

I finally switched to FF two months ago after the uBlock fiasco, and I find it ok. Is it as fast as Chrome? No. Does it never freeze? No.

But is it good enough? Hell yes.

What was the ublock fiasco?

Not OP, but probably referencing Chrome's v3 manifest: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338

HN discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20050173 (281 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20044430 (893 comments)

Yes.

How much better is it than Safari? I find the differences in browser performance so subtle nowadays that I lean towards whichever gives me the most seamless experience—-which, as a Mac/iPhone user, is safari.

As a Mac/iPhone user the only thing that sort of breaks seamless is that Apple doesn't allow you to define a custom default browser on iPhone.

I have Firefox in the dock on iPhone and it's really great but random links, e.g. via messaging, get opened by Safari first.

On iOS/iPadOS _all_ browsers are using Safari's webkit engine to render. That goes for FF on iOS, that goes for Chrome on iOS - it's all webkit.

For me it's mainly about synced history, open tabs on various devices (phone, tablet, computer), shared preferences, etc. The rendering engine is secondary to that in my list of priorities.

I stopped using Chrome about 2-months ago. It was difficult at first, simply because I was so used to it. But you are 100% right; I couldn't imagine going back to Chrome now that I've made the switch.

Any tips for transitioning? I've seen people recommend various stuff like containers and other stuff but I never saved their recommendation as I was happy with chrome at the time.

Try https://www.startpage.com/ . It's uses Google. DDG (mainly) uses Bing (and it sucks).

Changed ownership:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21371577

I know. They answered to some questions on Reddit and my conclusion was: seems OK.

Switched too ffx few monthes ago, good enough.

It's still not as quick as Chrome (my laptop is not recent, not helping) but I'd rather support Mozilla.

You can get some extra speed by forcing GPU rendering

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21945206

It is not 100% bug free yet, though

I agree Firefox is becoming awesome. If only they could also speed up mobile development and bring more features to it from desktop.