It just feels like an ad. No mention of that other article, and it&#x27;s a REAL stretch to say that these are related. No more ad spam on Hacker News, it&#x27;s one of the few good sites left.

Because <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20044430&amp;p=2" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20044430&amp;p=2</a>

The content is:&gt; Switching to Firefox is fast, easy and risk-free. Firefox imports your bookmarks, autofills, passwords and preferences from Chrome.<pre><code> 1. Select what to take from Chrome.
 2. Let Firefox do the rest.
 3. Enjoy the web faster, all set up for you.
</code></pre>
Pretty brief article, but that&#x27;s the point isn&#x27;t it? Firefox makes it easy to switch, hence the article is brief.Edit: This page (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;download&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;download&#x2F;</a>) is the firefox download page. The article linked (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;switch&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;switch&#x2F;</a>) is not that page, it&#x27;s a page specifically explaining the [trivial] process of switching from Chrome. It also happens to have a download link.

It&#x27;s a response to Chrome&#x27;s decision to neuter ad blocking in the base product.Maybe we can get the black bar up too ;)

Poking around for a few minutes, looks like search engines can only be added via addons? This feature is too much of a time save to switch.

In Firefox you can find the search field on a page, right click, and &#x27;add a keyword for this search&#x27;. Then you can just type that keyword in the address bar, for instance &#x27;wp searchtermhere&#x27; for wikipedia.

I switched back from Chrome to Firefox 5 years ago. This is the only feature that I miss.I&#x27;ve switched to DuckDuckGo, and using their ! operators (!w for Wikipedia, !map for Google Maps) picks up most of the slack.

Huh, I could swear back when I used FF many years ago, it had this feature. Did it disappear?

Chrome&#x27;s &quot;Press Tab To Search&quot; is way too useful for me to switch...

Am I missing something here? There is no article just a download link correct?I use Firefox exclusively because of the sidebar tab extension and will probably use it until Firefox dies a slow death.

The built-in ad-blocker in Opera will go away too? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.opera.com&#x2F;computer&#x2F;features&#x2F;ad-blocker" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.opera.com&#x2F;computer&#x2F;features&#x2F;ad-blocker</a>

One of the points brought up about the changes being made to content blocking in Chrome is that it was an engine change. So no, switching to Edge or Opera or whatever might not do anything to help. I&#x27;m guessing Brave is the one Blink-powered browser that is likely to become an exception.

... or install Edge Dev in seconds and keep most of your Chrome extensions<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.microsoftedgeinsider.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;welcome?channel=dev" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.microsoftedgeinsider.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;welcome?channel=d...</a>

Please stop using AdBlock&#x2F;AdBlockPlus. Use uBlock Origin instead.

You should only use one blocker at a time. Like antivirus apps, more is not better.

I strongly recommend uBlock Origin in favor of AdBlock. AdBlock is a commercial endevour that makes deals with advertising companies to let their ads through.

I use Adblock Plus (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;adblock-plus&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;adblock-plus&#x2F;</a>), and I also have AdBlock installed (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;adblock-for-firefox" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;adblock-for-f...</a>), just in case the first one doesn&#x27;t work. They are two of the most popular adblock plugins on Firefox.Or you could just use uBlock Origin on Firefox (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;ublock-origin" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;ublock-origin</a>)!

It would be nice if there was also something in place which allowed Firefox to detect when an addon like uBlock Origin is also available on Firefox, then suggest installing the Firefox version during the upgrade.

I&#x27;m sure it could, but who would implement it?

You have to license it from Google. And they don&#x27;t always say yes: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.co.uk&#x2F;2019&#x2F;04&#x2F;03&#x2F;googles_widevine_drm&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.co.uk&#x2F;2019&#x2F;04&#x2F;03&#x2F;googles_widevine_dr...</a>

Widevine works with chromium just fine - by which I mean that like with everything chromium it gets broken without apparent reason every now and then, but after some time they fix it.

Because you would need to get a widevine license from google. Mozilla was able to do that, but I know at least one chromium fork had it&#x27;s application for a license rejected. It technically is possible to copy the widevine library from a chrome install to use with chromium, but non technical people won&#x27;t know how to do that.

Widevine works with Firefox.  Why couldn&#x27;t it with Chromium?

I’ve quit chrome for a while now but... I’m pretty sure they have your real name as long as you signed in once from the same hw and browser footprint. Is real name that important for them? I think everyone’s digital signature is already out there

I remember of projects that failed because Widevine explicitly didn&#x27;t work in their Chromium. I assume that Widevine builds nicely but requires a Google-issued key to work.

«To those who say just fork Chrome adfm had a good article explaining why that doesn’t work: [Chromium, Widevine...]»To my knowledge Widevine DRM works with Chromium. You can watch DRM&#x27;d videos: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forum.manjaro.org&#x2F;t&#x2F;how-to-install-widevine-on-chromium-to-wacth-netflix&#x2F;4176" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forum.manjaro.org&#x2F;t&#x2F;how-to-install-widevine-on-chrom...</a>

Amazon Prime, Hulu, and YouTube&#x27;s paid content use Widevine DRM.

It&#x27;s usually going to be around any studio produced content Broadcast or Movie.  YouTube TV uses it for live broadcasts.  The Studios require DRM as part of their content licensing. PlayReady is the other primary DRM competitor.

I&#x27;ve only come across widevine for Netflix content. Are there others that require widevine?

&gt; I miss Netscape days...internet wasn&#x27;t a megacorp business playground :( !You mean &quot;this website is optimized for Internet Explorer 6&quot; days? Or the earlier &quot;this website is optimized for Netscape 2.0&quot; days?I think the nearest the web ever came to not being any megacorp&#x27;s playground was when Firefox was at around 30% market share, and IE6 which had 60%+ market share had stopped moving. IOW, when MS still had the playground mostly to themselves, but chose to ignore it. And even then, the web &#x2F; Firefox couldn&#x27;t really innovate without breaking IE6 compatibility, so everyone was stuck.

I looked up Vivaldi Speed Dial. It looks like the same sort of thing Firefox, Chrome, and Safari have where a new tab has a pinned list of favorite or most visited sites. What does Vivaldi do that I&#x27;m not seeing?

Add-ons are a solution, though. Have you tried the FVD Speed Dial extension?

I used to have Firefox and Vivaldi ...but honestly I used Vivaldi mainly...when I heard that even Microsoft was going to use chromium I realized...Firefox is literally the last front ! I installed Firefox and started using it as my main browser! What I miss the most is Vivaldi speed dial and bookmarks. Add-ons aren&#x27;t always a solution ! I miss Netscape days...internet wasn&#x27;t a megacorp business playground :( !

I don&#x27;t think it would be hard to make an Electron Netflix app if one doesn&#x27;t already exist.

I&#x27;d honestly be okay with using Vivaldi 99% of the time and then switching over to Chrome only to watch Netflix and the like.And honestly, when I watch Netflix, it&#x27;s usually in my Surface, in which case I&#x27;ll use the app.

Now&#x27;s the perfect time, it will even import all your stuff (see the link in OP).Make the switch.

I wonder if that might backfire. I&#x27;ve been using Chromium for a while now, but whenever I need to see video, I copy paste the url over to Firefox. At some point, I&#x27;m going to be bothered enough to just switch permanently to Firefox.

&gt; The only service with DRM I&#x27;m aware of is Netflix and it&#x27;s terrible anyway.Ha! Tell that to their 150 million subscribers. :)More seriously, using a browser without DRM would be a deal-breaker to many users like myself solely because of Netflix, unfortunately. That said, if you&#x27;re serious about using a DRM-free browser, there are other ways to watch Netflix (iOS&#x2F;Android, smart TVs, etc).

&gt; I&#x27;m watching youtube, pornhub and twitch and I don&#x27;t think that it requires any DRM.Depends on the content, If you are watching paid for content on YT it is most likely DRM&#x27;ed. [0] An &quot;stats for nerds&quot; example from such a piece of content (Notice the protected line, this line isn&#x27;t present on DRM free YT Content.). But the vast majority of content on YT is DRM free.Twitch has some DRM&#x27;ed content, things like when they streamed Thursday Night Football. But that was played via the Amazon Video player not twitches normal video player. I remember because the player threw a fit if you didn&#x27;t have HDCP configured correctly, which most streamers don&#x27;t. Not that they were trying to re-stream the game, but have it playing on another one of their monitors to see how it was doing. Personally I liked the idea of having a chat alongside the game :-)Dunno about PornHub.[0] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cejack.tk&#x2F;2019-05-30_19-57-03-280.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cejack.tk&#x2F;2019-05-30_19-57-03-280.png</a>

&quot;Most internet videos&quot; probably is overstatement. I&#x27;m watching youtube, pornhub and twitch and I don&#x27;t think that it requires any DRM. The only service with DRM I&#x27;m aware of is Netflix and it&#x27;s terrible anyway.

&gt;And genuinely, most people are choosing between privacy and convenience.And with Firefox you don&#x27;t need to choose.

&gt;And while you can use or adapt Chromium to your heart&#x27;s content, your new browser won&#x27;t work with most internet videoAnd genuinely, most people are choosing between privacy and convenience.

| Can we define &quot;most internet video&quot; as Amazon Video, BBC, Hulu, Netflix and Spotify?Maybe you could in terms of unique videos, but in terms of the volume of watched video, not at all. Netflix itself is responsible for something in the range of 15% of the worlds bandwidth usage.Either way, it not going to win an end users to have something like that.

Probably depends how you define most: by number of videos or bandwidth.

There was a time when browsers did not have built-in media players.Seems like ffmpeg libraries, developed outside of the web browser, support nearly all video formats a user could encounter on the internet.Also, the part of the statement that reads &quot;your new browser won&#x27;t work with most internet video&quot; is intriguing.Can we define &quot;most internet video&quot; as Amazon Video, BBC, Hulu, Netflix and Spotify? (Widevine users listed on its Wikipedia page)Seems like there is much, much more video on the internet that does not come from those sources.

Not with extensions, with plug-ins, and they were already doing it. Flash and Silverlight came with DRM for any publisher that wanted to use it. Many did.

TBL? Can you extrapolate? I google it and its &quot;The Basketball League&quot;. I just think your comment had the opportunity to continue to educate me on something I have never heard of or about and to throw in an acronym without having used the the 3 words before is confusing.

The day the Web sold its soul. Such a disappointment when TBL came out in support of that. People who knew better tried to warn us, but they all got shouted down and told there &quot;was no other choice&quot; b&#x2F;c content creators were going to try an lock down with extensions and it would somehow be worse.

If I fail to watch a video I want to watch once a day is already too much

If you build a true libre browser, who needs DRM video anyway?I guess you could call it a feature at that.

&gt;your new browser won&#x27;t work with most internet video&quot;most internet video&quot;... by what metric? Hours watched? Catalog size? I find it unlikely that DRM videos outnumber non-DRM videos by any reasonable metric.

This is already happening. Web version of Skype refuses to work in Firefox, but if you change user-agent to Edge, it works.

All the more reason to stop using those &quot;prime&quot; properties...

&gt; Just look at YouTube denying Chromium-based Edge the new redesigned experience for absolutely zero reason.The reason is almost certainly a new user agent (compared to non-Chromium Edge) that YouTube didn&#x27;t expect. Chromium-based Edge is still not stable, and therefore, not properly supported by YouTube.I don&#x27;t have time to test this, but I&#x27;m willing to bet that you&#x27;d get the same result by using any indie browser that happens to send a user agent that YouTube doesn&#x27;t recognize.

First of all, we have no evidence that your Edge example was intentional. In fact, we have evidence to the contrary as they fixed it within hours of it being reported [1]Now as far as your hypothetical, sure they can, but I use all of those services, YouTube, Gmail, Maps, ... on Chromium every day and they do not block nor have they ever blocked any of them.[1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;addyosmani&#x2F;status&#x2F;1133782407419613184" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;addyosmani&#x2F;status&#x2F;1133782407419613184</a>

And by making captchas harder or insoluble for Firefox users they block access to lots of other sites

You know what&#x27;s horrifying about the idea of &quot;just fork Chrome&quot;? Google can still hurt you by blocking your browser&#x27;s access to their prime properties (YouTube, Gmail, Maps, etc). Just look at YouTube denying Chromium-based Edge the new redesigned experience for absolutely zero reason.

Yes. And on top of the video codec issue, there is also the issue of getting Chrome to build, and integrating code changes from every upstream Chromium release, which is quite frequent. The build setup process is very manual for an outsider, and changes often.

I’m a developer and power user, I switched to Firefox months ago. What is making difficult to switch? I found equivalent for all my plugins so far.

As a developer and—I think—power user, I use Firefox without issue.What developer tools available in chrome but not firefox?

I consider myself the same. I quit using Chrome &amp; started using Brave about a year ago. I haven&#x27;t looked back or missed Chrome. What would you be missing?Edge &amp; Firefox have also been useful in the same way I once used Opera (special tasks where their features really shine). I really liked Edge&#x27;s reading mode &amp; for just browsing websites it was great.

As a power user, I prefer Firefox to Chrome, due to its configurability and to the power of certain add-ons. One simple example: multi-row tab bar, thanks to custom CSS for the UI. It used to be even better before the mass murder of the now-called &quot;legacy&quot; extensions, but today we must settle for the less restricted offer.As a developer, I don&#x27;t typically use browsers as debuggers or programming environments, so I never experienced game-breaking differences.

As a developer and power user, it&#x27;s difficult for me to switch to Firefox.However for most average Joe&#x27;s it&#x27;s fine and won&#x27;t make a difference, so I always install and recommend Firefox when I play IT guy for family&#x2F;friends. Time to start doing this again like we did in 2005!! It worked then and it can now!

Luckily for us, there&#x27;s antitrust law. This isn&#x27;t really possible:Reproduction steps:1. Check that Google search is working by opening Chrome, navigating to www.google.com, and searching for any term (such as the name of a newspaper and clicking the link to verify that search works as expected.)2. Open firefox.com and navigate to www.google.comYou will receive a message:&quot;It looks like you have Chrome installed! For the most secure experience, please visit this page using the Chrome browser or wait and try again later..&quot;If you have not used Chrome in the past 1 hour from your same IP address, you receive the page as expected.The above repro steps should be pretty much impossible under antitrust law. (Due to search monopoly.) Which is a very good thing.

That would be declaring a full on browser war with Google. I expect MS don&#x27;t want to do that yet. It remains an option in the future I suppose.As I understand it Chromium is a lot easier to wrap your own GUI around than Gecko. XUL is still not completely decoupled, separating them completely is an ongoing effort I think.Maybe when the embedded Gecko&#x2F;Servo engine is production ready would be the time for MS to reconsider.

It&#x27;s a shame Microsoft didn&#x27;t want to use Firefox&#x27;s codebase instead of Chromium for its new Edge browser. I don&#x27;t know what Microsoft thinks it gained by doing this, but I&#x27;m almost certain they&#x27;ll regret it in the long run, because it&#x27;s a trap by Google.Google, Microsoft new &quot;bestie&quot; in this collaboration, will screw them over once it&#x27;s clear that Microsoft &quot;can&#x27;t turn back&quot; from using Chromium or even fork it.

If you are ever in the market for a bridge, let me know.

First, you are being overly critical. Automatic (forced) sign-in is actually useful. Second, why do you call leaving the &quot;only&quot; recourse? As if it&#x27;s something completely horrid that you would never ever do freely. Leaving is a completely fine path to take.With webRequest, Google is &quot;just&quot; testing the waters. Just like with the forced sign-in, they will back down when they see the backlash.Based only on Google&#x27;s description, they seem to have a valid reason to remove (even though they say &quot;deprecate&quot;, they mean remove) the offending API. However, there&#x27;s zero chance they can get away with this. For what reason I&#x27;m not sure, market share of Chrome is very important to them. So they&#x27;ll have to keep it or implement some new, acceptable method.

I tried this, it&#x27;s very painful and not worth the effort.

May I ask you to explain why you think that having to be signed in to Google in order not to gete fuxored in your Web experience is a good thing?

So you came up with 2 things, first one is actually a good feature and second one is meh and world is going down? HN is utter ridiculous nowadays.

Google will keep locking down Chrome and using corporate talk to hand wave it away, only recourse is to leave.First it’s “sign in” with obtuse ways to turn it off. Then block Adblocking, once again with obtuse ways to disable... the end goal is pretty obvious, get the majority of Chrome users to turn on ads and tie their real names to their Chrome browser.Of course let “power users” (who’ll turn that crap off anyways) have their switches to do so. It gives Google plausible deniability.——To those who say just fork Chrome adfm had a good article explaining why that doesn’t work:&gt; And while you can use or adapt Chromium to your heart&#x27;s content, your new browser won&#x27;t work with most internet video unless you license a proprietary DRM component called Widevine from Google. The API that connects to Widevine was standardized in 2017 by the World Wide Web Consortium, whose members narrowly voted down a proposal to change the membership rules for the W3C to require members not to abuse the DMCA to prevent DRM from becoming a tool to undermine competition.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;boingboing.net&#x2F;2019&#x2F;05&#x2F;29&#x2F;hoarding-software-freedom.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;boingboing.net&#x2F;2019&#x2F;05&#x2F;29&#x2F;hoarding-software-freedom....</a>

I try to mostly use firefox, but there are some legit sites that do not work in firefox, youtube is probably the biggest offender with the seek very often not working properly.I can&#x27;t help but wonder if it is because firefox is actually behind or if google is sabotaging them.

I don&#x27;t want to get &quot;more monitors&quot; just to use another browser.

What quirks? Sounds like you just need more monitors...

&gt;You&#x27;re always guaranteed to see the favicon and 3 or 4 letters of the tab&#x27;s title no matter how many tabs you have.But I can&#x27;t see the tab&#x27;s favicon or letters because they&#x27;re 100% hidden from me.I currently have 49 tabs open in Chrome. If I set Firefox to be the same exact width as Chrome, I can open 27 tabs at the same time. If I open up the 28th, it starts hiding tabs.I actually have no issue with how Chrome does it. Just seeing the favicon is enough when dealing with a large number of tabs.EDIT: Just tested opening 49 tabs. None of the tabs show anything more than just the favicon and about 90% of the first letter. Not really sure how this is better than what Chrome does, which is show 49 favicons without scrolling.

about:config &gt; browser.tabs.tabMinWidthChange to something smaller.

&gt; In Chrome, you&#x27;re eventually looking at triangles or lines with no way to differentiate them.Chrome finally fixed that a couple months ago. The favicon-hiding behavior was awful though.

&gt; Like the fact that I can have like 20 tabs open at the same time before they start hiding themselves from me.I didn&#x27;t like it either at first, but then I realized it was just because it was different than Chrome. In time, I liked how Firefox did it better. You&#x27;re always guaranteed to see the favicon and 3 or 4 letters of the tab&#x27;s title no matter how many tabs you have. In Chrome, you&#x27;re eventually looking at triangles or lines with no way to differentiate them.

They now have a dropdown menu with all your tabs. Pretty nifty.

Tree Style Tabs is a common Firefox add-on people use to manage large number of tabs. Or you can click on the down caret on the right side of the tabs bar to get the full list of your tabs.

Much like my physical desktop full of papers you can&#x27;t see which is which just glancing from above, and my overall laptop desktop full of dozens of different windows... it&#x27;s cluttered, but I know what&#x27;s what enough to find it, usually!Sure, I could put all those papers on my desk into a drawer, or even file them, but who&#x27;s got time for that? (Answer: those who are succesfully less cluttered than the cluttered among us).

Yeah, nothing like 60 tabs you can&#x27;t tell apart all squeezed into view.

Firefox has the Tree Style Tabs add-on, makes having many open tabs much more manageable.

FWIW this is configurable. Edit `browser.tabs.tabMinWidth` in about:config

Chrome tabs get absolutely useless when they get to that razor thin mode. You can hover your mouse and scroll through firefox tabs if you have more than what fits in your window size.

Too bad it takes a lot more than &quot;a few minutes&quot; to get used to Firefox and all of its quirks. Like the fact that I can have like 20 tabs open at the same time before they start hiding themselves from me.

Not really, think of Chromium as a developer version of chrome. It may be open source but it still maintained by Google. Only alternative shift to Firefox.

Chromium is not Chrome. Switching from Chrome to Chromium is still leaving Chrome.Whether or not Chromium or Firefox are more to your liking is another matter, and whether or not switching to Chromium accomplishes what you want to accomplish by leaving Chrome is another matter.

Forking Chromium without Widevine is still entirely feasible. Not everyone cares about Netflix.Also, a Chromium fork could use the Widevine binary blob the same way Chrome does today; I am not sure I understand this argument.

Here&#x27;s a good explanation... <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;boingboing.net&#x2F;2019&#x2F;05&#x2F;29&#x2F;hoarding-software-freedom.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;boingboing.net&#x2F;2019&#x2F;05&#x2F;29&#x2F;hoarding-software-freedom....</a>

The most popular Chrome forks are Edge (new), Opera and Brave...  My hope is that they will keep the interfaces Google is phasing out.

That&#x27;s true, but I personally don&#x27;t have the time to create, or even work on, a Chromium fork. Is there one with any momentum?My preference would be to use <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;atlas-engineer&#x2F;next" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;atlas-engineer&#x2F;next</a>, because I&#x27;m a huge Common Lisp fan, but without uMatrix and uBlock Origin (or something equivalent) it&#x27;s not a viable alternative yet.I&#x27;ve been trying to switch to Firefox lately. I still prefer Chromium&#x27;s UI, but I won&#x27;t tolerate Google&#x27;s new anti-adblock stance.

Browsers have become so complicated that it&#x27;s essentially a miniature OS inside our OS, and even building it from source as an experienced developer is hard. On top of that, there is a sort of inherent monopoly with browsers, and all browser vendors have some agenda or another. This is a weird age for software developers and users.

If you&#x27;re using Archlinux, there&#x27;s an AUR package. That means you can build it like any other package with makepkg or a helper program like pacaur. If hardware resources are an issue, it&#x27;s probably not too hard to rent a powerful linode server for an hour or 2 to build the package and then transfer it to your local machine. I imagine it would only cost a couple of bucks max.

Some other thread yesterday linked to ungoogled chromium [1] which sounded like a good idea to me but in practise I&#x27;d have to build it myself which Im not really comfortable with.I&#x27;d probably get it to run but it would need more time than I&#x27;m willing to invest in this. Plus would I have to build it new everytime there&#x27;s an update‽It&#x27;s just to much hassle for me.[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ungoogled-software" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ungoogled-software</a>

Chrome’s security model is light-years beyond any other shipping browser.It’s almost not even a competition anymore.

There are forks such as ungoogled-chromium but why would you use them when you could just use Firefox?

The problem with all these browser forks is that, while they are certainly well intentioned, they&#x27;re a dime a dozen and eventually die hard.Over the years, I&#x27;ve seen countless forks of browsers that make these big promises but don&#x27;t have the developer resources and funding behind them that make the main browsers possible. I can&#x27;t imagine it&#x27;s easy to just backport every feature and bugfix from upstream while also making your own changes.Unless one plans on building a business or a foundation around a browser, the best that an OSS browser fork can hope for is to be a valiant effort that will quickly be superseded by another fork that promises to be even more private and ub3r l33t than the others.Firefox is in great shape right now, and if it&#x27;s not working well for some people(I&#x27;m honestly not having issues with it at this point), then we need to find ways to make Firefox more viable, whether it&#x27;s getting people to donate to the Mozilla Foundation or better promotion or what.

Why is leaving the only recourse? Chromium is free software. Forking always remains an option.

Wow thanks! I&#x27;ve been looking for something like Containerise, but for Chrome for a while. Didn&#x27;t know it already exists in FF.

&gt; One of my favorite features in Firefox is containersContainer tabs are great. Combined with Tree Style Tabs and Containerise addons, you have something unbeatable in both terms of security, privacy and user friendliness.

In my opinion, profiles are useful for separating &quot;who I am.&quot; Whether that&#x27;s my personal life and my professional life, or if it&#x27;s me or my spouse using the same computer.Containers are useful for separating &quot;who I am to my providers.&quot; As far as Facebook is concerned, I am a Facebook user, but I don&#x27;t use Amazon or Google. But Amazon thinks I&#x27;m an Amazon user that doesn&#x27;t use Facebook or Google. You can accomplish this with profiles, but in Chrome (last I checked) that meant multiple windows, rather than just sites being displayed in tabs that indicate the container in use. So for that purpose, I believe containers are more useful.(I also think Firefox should step up their profile game, because when my spouse and I alternate using a computer we share, it&#x27;s inconvenient for me to close all her Firefox windows so I can open my profile!)

LOL, I&#x27;ll sometimes just use different channel versions of browsers for different accounts when I have to access them regularly. The worst imho is when you have a google personal account and a google business (apps) account for work.It&#x27;s definitely something I&#x27;d like to see worked out better as a power user feature.

You log in with one account in one container and with the other account in another, and can mix them in the same browser session?

Containers helps keep things sandboxed and lets you use the same window with different tabs representing different sessions.So in your case you could have say a &quot;work&quot; container and a &quot;home&quot; container. Each of these could persist logins for all of the services you are using without having to switch between users and have different windows open you just have the 2 tabs.What I think people find more useful is the ability to make a container for say &quot;facebook&quot;. Anytime you open facebook it puts it in a new tab with a sandboxed browser session. It&#x27;s similar to having a separate profile but it&#x27;s just for facebook use and you don&#x27;t have to think about it so much. If you click a link to facebook it opens it in your new container already logged in meanwhile facebook does not see you as authed in any of your other tabs.

I don&#x27;t understand how it&#x27;s better than multiple profiles. I use multiple accounts for the same services (Asana, AWS, email, etc.) how can I manage that with containers?

It&#x27;s already fixed:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ghacks.net&#x2F;2019&#x2F;03&#x2F;01&#x2F;firefox-67-automatically-unload-unused-tabs-to-improve-memory&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ghacks.net&#x2F;2019&#x2F;03&#x2F;01&#x2F;firefox-67-automatically-u...</a>There&#x27;s also this:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ghacks.net&#x2F;2012&#x2F;05&#x2F;22&#x2F;make-firefox-more-responsive-with-suspend-background-tabs&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ghacks.net&#x2F;2012&#x2F;05&#x2F;22&#x2F;make-firefox-more-responsi...</a>

&gt;I switched a couple of months ago because Chrome is just a bloated piece of garbageI switched to Chrome a few years ago (and even to a Chromebox as my daily driver, on my second now because I wanted Android app support) because Firefox was a bloated piece of garbage, if I left 5-10 tabs open for a few weeks in Windows they&#x27;d be using several gigabytes of memory from a leak, memory use growing hourly.Edit: I don&#x27;t know why I&#x27;m being downvoted, this is even on Mozilla&#x27;s own site showing it hasn&#x27;t been fixed:&quot;Firefox&#x27;s memory usage may increase if it&#x27;s left open for long periods of time. A workaround for this is to periodically restart Firefox&quot;With an alternate solution being:&quot;Add RAM to your computer&quot; ... &quot;RAM is cheap&quot;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;kb&#x2F;firefox-uses-too-much-memory-ram" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;kb&#x2F;firefox-uses-too-much-m...</a>I have not had this issue at all with Chrome in Windows 7, Windows 10 or ChromeOS.

&gt;not bc of performance, but bc I hate OSXs Cmd-Tab orderingThat&#x27;s a trivial but surprisingly reasonable reason for using two browsers. OSX has some annoying quirks sometimes.

&gt; I hate OSXs Cmd-Tab orderingWhat is this?

Same, but I was hesitant to switch. All I heard were comments like yours about containers and such. Finally after hearing about it so much, combined with all the talk about Quantum making things faster I gave FF a go. Haven&#x27;t looked back.I still use Chrome for some tasks such as watching&#x2F;listening to Youtube. (edit: not bc of performance, but bc I hate OSXs Cmd-Tab ordering)

I love FF and use it daily.  But honestly, the &quot;some random tab has runaway javascript&quot; is as much of a problem on FF as it is on Chrome.  If you leave a JS-heavy site open long enough, sooner or later you&#x27;ll have some runaway JS come and bite you in the battery.  The only complete solution I&#x27;ve got is... to turn it off and back on again.  The entire browser, not just the offending tab.

&gt; One of my favorite features in Firefox is containersI switched a couple months ago from Chrome to Firefox as well but to tell you the truth, I just heard about containers and what you could do with it. I guess I must&#x27;ve been living under a rock, this is amazing!I was already glad I made the switch for the less resources being used on my aging Macbook Pro and better privacy features, but containers just took this experience to the next level for me!EDIT: What actually triggered my switch was at one point, a few tabs on Chrome(regular things like Youtube) started causing my CPU&#x2F;fan to go crazy on my MBP 2015(the last decent MBP). Instead of trying to figure out what extension or what setting was causing the problem, I thought I&#x27;d give FF a try and just couldn&#x27;t look back after.

History of opened URLs of the tab is accessible to sites via DOM, what you propose would be a leak.

Does anyone know an extension or option in containers to preserve your browsing trajectory between containers?I had a google container for a while, but opening links opens a new tab and closes the google container, so therefore you cant it back or forward without reopening that container tab. Same thing if I click a container link or something and it pushes it into a new tab, I loose that ability to go backward.It&#x27;s just a minor gripe but I&#x27;m so into the habit of hitting the back button on my mouse while browsing rather than cmd shift tab.

On the other hand Firefox actually lets you move your profile folder from one computer to another without throwing up a panic flag and resetting everything.

&quot;Currently, add-on sync leaves setting synchronization to the individual add-on. If an add-on has support for syncing settings, they will be synced. If not, they won&#x27;t. For now, if an add-on doesn&#x27;t preserve settings during Sync, you should contact the add-on&#x27;s author and request Sync support.&quot;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.mozilla.org&#x2F;Services&#x2F;Sync&#x2F;Addon_Sync" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.mozilla.org&#x2F;Services&#x2F;Sync&#x2F;Addon_Sync</a>

I love Firefox&#x27;s containers, but AFAIK you can&#x27;t sync your settings.  Makes reinstalling a major pain.

My favorite features of Firefox is bookmarks tags, which IMO is way better than directories to categorize them.I hope Mozilla won&#x27;t deprecate those..

I wouldn&#x27;t call Firefox bloat-free with things like Pocket integration. But yes, it&#x27;s an awesome browser anyways!

I switched a couple of months ago because Chrome is just a bloated piece of garbage. One of my favorite features in Firefox is containers, which I used to have different users for in Chrome. Maybe Chrome has something similar now but it&#x27;s one of the things I liked when I switched over. Haven&#x27;t had any issues so far, glad I did

Custom extensions are the easiest: Firefox loads the exact same unpacked extensions Chrome does.Both follow the WebExtensions-standard, so there’s not really much to “port”, if anything.

Same, the only thing stopping me from switching is the hassle of porting a custom chrome extension to firefox.

If you don&#x27;t take more than a few hours to get used to a completely different browser, editor, desktop&#x2F;mobile OS, etc., you probably just didn&#x27;t use all its features. I know that I still had Firefox reflexes after I had been using Chrome for a few weeks (this was a few years ago when Mozilla made some poor decisions, I tried voting with my feet).

I&#x27;d say &quot;weeks&quot; is somewhat quick. You may have biased expectations of interface size and&#x2F;or the ability of users to internalize it.

Does it really take you weeks to get used to a new environment? WEEKS? That kind of thing bugs me for a few hours, maybe a couple of days.

It took me a fortnight to move beyond other people&#x27;s examples and get my first bit of nicely working verilog code written to my own spec and running on an FPGA, having never touched a hardware description language before. If it is taking you weeks to get up to speed with Firefox, what on earth are you attempting to do with it?

Regarding shortcuts, this is where using Vim emulator extensions help a lot. I just install such an extension on any new browser, then the shorcuts are more or less the same (vim keybingdings).

I think link forgot to mention a step 4.Step 4: Spend weeks getting used to new shortcuts, finding equivalent extensions&#x2F;plugins and getting used to their dev tools.

This is probably a response to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20044430" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20044430</a>

&gt; I find it odd how there will be Google Hate, and unanimous Firefox support.You can choose to not pick a side on a two-candidate election. The most voted-for candidate will still be elected.(Even when you factor in indirect systems like an electoral college, someone will be elected.)

Google is an ad company that profits off of users&#x27; personal information. Mozilla has demonstrated itself to be privacy oriented. HN users are generally privacy oriented. It&#x27;s not surprising there is a big push to use Firefox, especially with the increasing Chromium usage.

Try !sp if you want to see Google results, no need to use !g directly even if you did prefer the results. Google Maps and Youtube are very difficult to replace, if you live in a big city using varied modes of transit (walking, bus&#x2F;train, driving), Google Maps is really tough to beat. I reduced my Google-coverage, but I don&#x27;t intend to eliminate it altogether.What did you move to for email? Fastmail with a custom domain? I&#x27;ve long considered ProtonMail but unlikely to go that route.I&#x27;m between paying for iCloud storage and using that, or Outlook.com The additional phone backup space with iCloud would be very nice anyway, so as a monthly payment, it&#x27;s a one-stop shop. At this point it&#x27;s extremely unlikely I&#x27;ll ever go back to Android so that works for me.
Or, just moving to Outlook.com. I&#x27;m leaning towards Outlook simply because of the better calendar system. Both Gmail and Outlook support email reminders for calendar items. I could get used to iOS-only notifications, but I really prefer notifications to come through email since I often include explicit instructions.

I starting switching away from Google over the last year. The biggest step was moving off my Gmail account, and the trigger for that was the UI terribleness of Gmail. That took a few hours of updating every account I have with my new address. Password manager really helped with this.I&#x27;ve never been much of a Chrome user. A few years ago, Chrome was unusable for me on my 2GB work machine, and was a battery-killer on my own laptop. So I stuck with Firefox at work, Safari at home.DDG is a great search engine. I can&#x27;t remember the last time I used the &quot;!g&quot; operator, and got any results better than the DDG ones.The one product I still use Google for is maps, and only when I want to see a good street view or areal photo. For mobile, Apple Maps does just fine. For simple directions on the desktop, OSM works great.I&#x27;m totally happy. 10 years ago, Google was putting things out there that weren&#x27;t possible with other services. Their mapping was tremendously better than MapQuest, their email was so much nicer than Hotmail, etc.But now they&#x27;re bloated and slow. Everything seems to lag as you watch the UI components slowly appear on the screen. And the alternatives today for each product (search, maps, email, browser) are all very much competent.

Is this a coordinated ad campaign for Firefox?I find it odd how there will be Google Hate, and unanimous Firefox support.I guess I&#x27;m looking to hear from users who actually removed Google from their life and are happy. Chrome is only 1 of the Google products I&#x27;ve used.

It&#x27;s in the &quot;Enterprise&quot; Chrome fork. I don&#x27;t think they charge money for it.

The changes which impede ad blocking are in Chromium, not in the commercial Chrome fork. And Google will continue to force anti-ad-blocking, pro-tracking changes into Chromium until they reach their ultimate Shrodinger&#x27;s Privacy-Friendly Browser which exists in a superposition of &quot;showing few ads&quot; and &quot;allowing all tracking.&quot;

At least Brave and Vivaldi both use the Chrome Web Store, which presumably will no longer allow such extensions. So either they&#x27;ll have to build their own alternative, or change the browser to allow out-of-store installation, and the extension author(s) will have to support that.So it&#x27;s possible, but not immediate.

Apparently there&#x27;s a way around the macOS limit:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;backstage.1blocker.com&#x2F;say-hello-to-1blocker-x-8b55efe1ae36" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;backstage.1blocker.com&#x2F;say-hello-to-1blocker-x-8b55e...</a>

Chrome didn&#x27;t remove ad-block entirely, they deprecated an API that allows direct control; extensions now have to load filters into the browser itself, which will do the blocking.Safari actually did the same recently[1], so it&#x27;s not an alternative if you dislike this move by Chrome. The only difference seems to be the limit of rules (30k for Chrome vs 50k for Safari, whereas some lists used by uBO have over 75k).[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;adguard.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;blog&#x2F;legacy-safari-extensions.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;adguard.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;blog&#x2F;legacy-safari-extensions.html</a>

Can someone remind me what will happen to all the chromium derivatives that support ad block? Will Google restrict their functionality? If Firefox and Safari are the last browsers to support ad block, then they totally stand a chance.

Safari’s is superior, definitely. No problem with using Safari if that’s your priority.

Safari is best (on macOS).Edge is also best (but on Windows).Usually the browser designed by the authors of the platform you run it on, will be best for power consumption, sometimes significantly so.

Does anyone have a good impression about how Firefox&#x27;s energy consumption compares to Safari&#x27;s?

I’ve been using Firefox (quantum) on my 2016 retina MBP for years and haven’t ever noticed any performance issues.

I tried switching to Firefox so many times but have to go back to Chrome for performance reasons.There is still an open problem on Retina Macbooks with scaled resolution where the performance drops like 10x over non-scaled versions.

I made my view compact as possible, removed bookmark toolbar, etc. Pretty native looking now aside from tabs on top.

I want to use Firefox on my Mac but it just feels so out of place. Are you using any extensions to get a more true macOS feel? While Chrome isn&#x27;t perfect it doesn&#x27;t feel anywhere near as &quot;multi-platform&quot; as Firefox does.

I&#x27;ve been using Safari on Mac for months, I only open Google Chrome when React Native debugger launches it.I&#x27;m not sure how hard it would be for the RN team to switch to another browser such as Firefox or the new Edge so I can uninstall Google Chrome from my computer.

Is there an Electron backing that doesn&#x27;t use Chromium?

At least Microsoft managed to open source the guts of Chakra before they shutdown Edge. V8 hegemony might be worse for the internet given Node and Electron than Chrome alone.

No thanks. Keep Embrace, Extend, Extinguish away from my user agent.

Without giving it much thought, I do too.Anyone know what MSs stance on Rust is?

What benefit does Microsoft have by using Mozilla instead? Earnest question.Electron, the software framework VSCode uses, runs on Chromium. Github maintained and developed the framework and they are currently owned by Microsoft. If Microsoft contributes to Chromium and improves performance they benefit in a lot of places: their new browser is improved(Edge Chromium), their own framework(Electron), and their own product (VSCode).

They really can&#x27;t, though. There&#x27;s a pile of corpses of people who tried to embed Gecko, because it turns out Netscape&#x2F;Mozilla is really bad at keeping a stable ABI. I doubt anybody remembers K-meleon anymore, for example. As far as I know Servo was supposed to be the new, embeddable engine, but that&#x27;s mostly cancelled now and the Rust bits are just being rolled into Gecko (via Project Quantum).I believe that&#x27;s why Webkit was based on KHTML… the Mozilla developers Apple hired realized that had a better chance of working.Maybe Mozilla has changed since all that happened and they&#x27;re more friendly to embedders now? I&#x27;ve been out of the loop for a few years at this point. I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ve heard anything though, and they&#x27;ve built up a reputation…

I really wish that if Microsoft was going to abandon having their own engine that they&#x27;d gone to Mozilla instead.

Firefox is back where it was back in like 2005, but instead of fighting IE&#x2F;Microsoft, it&#x27;s fighting Chrome&#x2F;Google. Although now it has a bit more of a checkered record than it once did. Everything old is new again.I really wish Microsoft would open source the Edge&#x2F;Titan engine. There can&#x27;t possibly be any NSCA code in there they don&#x27;t own the rights too anymore.

Firefox&#x27;s sync is better, because it&#x27;s not tied to the Apple ecosystem :P

I wouldn&#x27;t call Firefox unsafe. But Safari&#x27;s sync for bookmarks, passwords, tabs, handoff... is really the killer feature.I use Firefox as my &quot;virgin&quot; broswser for testing or when I need to manually override proxy settings for my own MitM purposes. But that&#x27;s about it.

&gt; very unsafe[citation needed].Firefox has sync to all devices too.

Be warned though, ublock origin for safari is not official and hasn&#x27;t been updated since april 2018.

For Apple users (MacOS, iOS), I would suggest Safari over Firefox as FF is the most hacked browser and very unsafe. On the other hand, Safari syncs bookmarks, tabs on all your Apple devices very seamlessly.

One that&#x27;s particularly annoying to me a while ago was you cannot drag and drop elements from an iframe to another iframe from another domain. IIRC it was only an issue in Chrome.

I think GP means that Chrome deviates from some HTML&#x2F;CSS&#x2F;JS&#x2F;etc official standards, and that they don&#x27;t intend to fix a lot of these discrepancies. So when you write code how it&#x27;s supposed to work according to the standards, and it works well in Firefox, it might not work right in Chrome. (And GP suggests this is common.)

An example, a third party lib I used crashed because after an update Chrome changed an optional function parameter into a required one, I am referring to this function <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;docs&#x2F;Web&#x2F;API&#x2F;Element&#x2F;requestFullScreen" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;docs&#x2F;Web&#x2F;API&#x2F;Element&#x2F;req...</a>So in my case I go to work and get reports that X is no longer working, lucky for me in JS is easy to patch third party code and fix this issue but I could not find a ticket that explains why Chrome did this.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugs.chromium.org&#x2F;p&#x2F;chromium&#x2F;issues&#x2F;detail?id=158753" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugs.chromium.org&#x2F;p&#x2F;chromium&#x2F;issues&#x2F;detail?id=158753</a> meant PhotoStructure had to do user agent sniffing. If it&#x27;s Firefox, I can stream the original image directly, and the correct thing happens. With Chrome, I have to do the rotation server-side before I send it to the browser (or I&#x27;d have to send metadata about the image to rotate it client-side with CSS, either is irritating).There are several more #ifdefs I&#x27;ve had to add due to weird chrome glitches (like around the html5 video player, which just works seamlessly with Firefox).

Don&#x27;t get me wrong-- on the Firefox side of things, it&#x27;s been the user experience of the browser itself which has been suffering.Every single update since Quantum has made things worse. Three days ago I opened up Firefox to find out all of my settings had been nuked, 200+ tabs, themes and extensions lost, about:config reset, search settings reset (hello again Google) etc. I&#x27;m still fuming mad about this.I don&#x27;t feel like drudging up old history but my most recent bug was that Chrome doesn&#x27;t properly bubble mouse click events when some UI elements fire.WONTFIX of course, apparently I should just use event.preventDefault() even though every other browser handled this particular mouse event correctly. Chrome was the only outlier. So now I am writing code specifically for Chrome.Two years ago I had an SVG rendering bug that turned out to be so deep that I had to spend two weeks debugging and come up with an incredibly convoluted scheme for loading dynamic SVG icons because `&lt;use&#x2F;&gt;` is broken hot garbage on Chrome. Bug report dead in the water. More code just for Chrome.You get the picture. I now have to develop on Chrome as much as I hate it, even though FF has better debug messages and stability, just because it saves time testing every little thing out.

What the heck bugs are you running into that surface as a result of chrome being chrome? I’m no google fan but I find chrome to be far and away the most stable and enjoyable browser to debug with.

I hope so because almost every bug I run into during webdev is Chrome, and usually I&#x27;m told it&#x27;s intended behavior or a WONTFIX.With the way Google tries to strongarm standards and at the same time defy them, it&#x27;s the modern Internet Explorer and it&#x27;s a PITA to develop for.

For years I have been working with my mom to get her to be suspicious of any pop-ups in her browser. Many times she has texted me a photo asking if some pop-up update box was legit (almost always a shady ad). When she got her new computer, I set up Firefox in a fairly locked down state: uBlock Origin, third-party cookies disabled, and clear all cookies and history when firefox closes.It&#x27;s been amazing. With the ad-blocker she almost never texts me now with suspicious stuff. Also, it was super easy to teach her that if she ever gets into a situation that feels shady, just close the browser and open it up again. Starting from a clean slate every time in a well protected browser makes her feel a lot safer because she knows that if things get scary, she can just close the window and start over.Having to log in every time hasn&#x27;t turned out to be that much of an inconvenience either. See actually feels safer because of it. It makes perfect logical sense to her that the website ask her to login every time. &quot;My bank asks me for my ID every time I go in to deposit a check, so of course it makes sense to ask for my password every time I open my browser and visit the website.&quot;Anyway, my takeaway is that Firefox + uBlock Origin for parents is really a wonderful thing.

You can try it yourself:about:configgfx.webrender.all -&gt; truerestart browser

Fix for that is scheduled for june 2019 <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;orgs&#x2F;FirefoxGraphics&#x2F;projects&#x2F;1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;orgs&#x2F;FirefoxGraphics&#x2F;projects&#x2F;1</a> (I&#x27;m just waiting for this too, I don&#x27;t know anything more about it, I hope they will really ship this on time)

I saw a comment on a previous thread say that WebRender will fix the unacceptable performance on retina MBPs. FF 67 released webrender to stable, but only for Windows 10 per the release notes.Will WebRender fix the CPU taxing problem, and will that be released for macOS in a subsequent release?

I was surprised to see your comment, in Safari, directly below the uBlock Origin icon. It seems to be working fine for me. Do you have more details on what you mean?

I like Safari, but its extension system is even more restrictive. Something like uBlock Origin cannot be implemented anymore.It&#x27;s an Apple tradition — if you like what&#x27;s in the box, great, but you won&#x27;t be able to customize it much later.

And if you want more broken websites, sure.Safari is the new IE when it comes to bugs and standards compliance.Here&#x27;s an example that broke many many sites that use OAuth2 Auth Code Flow for login (including the main UI portal my company provides clients): 
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugs.webkit.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=194906" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugs.webkit.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=194906</a>This was also an issue in iOS, and since Apple doesn&#x27;t let any other browsers actually use their own rendering engine on that platform (they&#x27;re just wrappers around Safari&#x27;s guts) this was broken for all iPhone users no matter the browser.I avoid using iDevices for this reason alone.

Switch to Safari instead if you&#x27;re on Mac, if you care about privacy and security: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webkit.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;8943&#x2F;privacy-preserving-ad-click-attribution-for-the-web&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webkit.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;8943&#x2F;privacy-preserving-ad-click-att...</a>

Thanks for the explanation! 
So, any software running on my computer can access it without my permission?

Chrome MacOS used to store passwords in the MacOS keychain, but stopped. (Not sure if they are stored securely now, but they do not seem to be stored using OS functionality).Are you positive (not just assuming, cause it would amke sense) FF MacOS still uses the MacOS keychain? Cause that&#x27;s a plus if so.

Passwords are generally stored in the system keyring, or in some system-provided secure storage. I am 95% sure Firefox just reads this.(It&#x27;s also possible to CSV export from Chrome&#x27;s password manager. I used this to import everything into BitWarden.)

Does it mean that passwords are stored in clear? If not, how other browsers manage to import this data?Sorry if the question is silly

Sorry I was unclear, uMatrix still exists, and I used to use it on Firefox, but now I get a message:uMatrix could not be verified for use in Firefox and has been disabled.

There is an add-on called uMatrix for FF. I haven&#x27;t tried it so I cn&#x27;t tell you if it works or not.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;umatrix&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;umatrix&#x2F;</a>

I tried to switch just now, looks like uMatrix doesn&#x27;t work in Firefox? That&#x27;s a blocker for me... I&#x27;ve spent a lot of time creating a ruleset on uMatrix, not looking to try recreating that.

Surf is good at what it does. You might also consider uzbl.

&gt; slog through webkitIsn&#x27;t surf based on WebKit?

Random, only slightly-related question: has any one used suckless&#x27; surf?  I&#x27;ve seen it recommended by the hyper-minimalist nuts, but am more looking into it so I can tweak it easily.  I figure it would be a lot easier than trying to slog through webkit, gecko, servo, blink, etc. as it is so much simpler.

From a developer perspective, I&#x27;d say bit modern as well. For example, FF extension APIs use Promises, which are relatively pleasant to deal with than callbacks that Chrome uses.

Firefox supports nearly the same web-extensions API as Chrome. Often porting to firefox means a couple of tweaks are necessary on the part of the author, but try <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;chrome-store-foxified&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;chrome-store-...</a> and see if maybe the extension you want is already usable.

You can install Chrome extensions as-is and 99% of the time they just work. There was a helper addon for fetching from the chrome store: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Noitidart&#x2F;Chrome-Store-Foxified" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Noitidart&#x2F;Chrome-Store-Foxified</a> — temporarily needs an older firefox copy to work. But you can always repack manually.

That seems odd given that they use the same APIs. I switched about a month or two ago. That involved moving at least 10+ extensions with no issue, and all of them even have the same UI.What extensions in particular are you missing?

My issue is extensions. Firefox will never have all the extensions I use on Chrome. I want to switch. I use firefox on my mobile. But I cant do it on my desktops.

How strange, this is the first I&#x27;ve heard of this. I&#x27;ve never had to touch source maps config in my webpack and it&#x27;s always shown fine in Firefox. Is it just specific circumstances&#x2F;specific code patterns that have source map problems in Firefox? Or is it when it&#x27;s transpiling from TypeScript or JSX or something?

The &quot;magic&quot; is Source Maps. Firefox supports Source Maps just fine, it&#x27;s just pickier about their formats. It was supposed to be a standard and all the browsers supported it (Edge and Firefox have had support for as long as Chrome has). Chrome allowed some Source Map formats that didn&#x27;t exactly follow the standards&#x2F;specs, and a bunch of tools started using Chrome-only Source Maps by default accidentally because so many devs were using Chrome. If you use webpack or similar tools check the various format options for Source Maps until you find one that works in non-Chrome browsers.

lol why on earth would someone poo poo a debugger?

You&#x27;re talking about source mapping I believe. I&#x27;ve only used it in Chrome but I&#x27;ve heard only Chrome has it as good as it has it. Honestly, it&#x27;s a lifesaver if you&#x27;re doing frontend stuff (and you&#x27;re not one of those people who poo-poo&#x27;s debuggers).

You could always use Chrome for dev and Firefox for the rest. The lack of ad-blocking is presumably not a problem for your sites in development, and you&#x27;ll be supporting Firefox just the same!

I&#x27;m using latest stable FF release as my main dev browser. Sourcemaps are supported just fine. For my usecases, I can hardly tell the difference between Chrome devtools and FF devtools. YMMV

This feature (source maps) has been improving a lot over time. A year ago it was basically unusable, and today I rarely have problems jumping from console to debugger. We&#x27;re even working on a way to show the original variable names in the scope inspector when paused in the debugger now.On the other hand, Firefox&#x27;s layout dev tools, like the grid and flex box inspector, are way better than doing the same task in Chrome, in my experience.

I&#x27;m in the same boat - I much prefer Chrome web development toolkit - the feel and everything. The solution - I use Chrome _only_ for development.

I like to switch from Chrome to Firefox but only thing keeping me with Chrome is its superior web development tool. One my the dev here recommends us to use Chrome because of its better Javascript debugger - something to do with the output in the web console takes you to the corresponding Javascript line &amp; instance where it is invoked on the web page. I am not entirely sure what it is.Whatever it is, its not in Firefox.

Switch from Chrome to Firefox