What is the excuse of all people reading this thread in agreement and still using Chrome? As I mentioned elsewhere, this is preaching to the choir. A choir of Chrome users.
Google wouldn't be so dominant if tech people like us would stop making lazy excuses to continue its hegemony. In Dante's Divina Commedia, there is a circle of hell for those too lazy to take a stance [1]. If it were written today, it would include a lot of tech workers running Chrome with uBlock enabled.
It's 2023, Safari and Firefox have been very good for a while.
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1: in fact, in the Divina Commedia the lazy ones that can't take a stance are kept just outside of Hell, as they are so detestable not even Satan itself would want them around.
For me it's the ecosystem. I like my desktop browser syncing with my Android browser, and I really like built in chromecast support in my browser.
I know that Firefox has a mobile version with sync, but last time I tried it, I didn't care for it. I know there have been some attempts to bring chromecast support to Firefox via extensions, but last I tried it it was very buggy. But it's been many years since I tried either of those, maybe I'll give it another shot.
I also just realized neither of these conveniences are relevant on my work laptop. Firefox is approved by my company IT and a lot of my coworkers use it. I'm going to switch today.
Honestly Firefox is the biggest thing I miss on Android since switching to iOS. It supports uBlock Origin which makes mobile browsing so much nicer. I haven't found a better mobile web experience on iOS yet.
> It supports uBlock Origin which makes mobile browsing so much nicer
This was the primary reason I switched from Chrome to Firefox (mobile only initially, then full-on switch due to my desire to sync between mobile and PC). The later manifest v3 push only further validate my choice.
I have chrome installed and just cast my screen, minimize it and keep using firefox. I also don’t own any chromecast devices anymore, so this only really comes up at Airbnbs, the odd meeting room, etc.
The biggest blocker for me has been the lack of convenient profile switching. It's an important part of my workflow to have a separate profile for home/work/other, with history, bookmarks, etc. Container tabs are not a good replacement. Worse, I get irritated with the fact that Firefox fully supports this under the hood, but seems to push back against actually implementing a convenient way to use it.
I'm currently doing my yearly attempt to switch, using the Profile Switcher extension [0]. It works well enough, but requires external software running and I fully expect it to break eventually. I also can't open external links in anything but the default profile (vs Chrome opening in the profile most recently active, a nice convenience).
My solution for managing profiles consists of keeping a pinned tab pointing to "about:profiles". From there, I can launch any other profile in parallel to the current browser instance by clicking on its "Launch profile in new browser" button.
> The biggest blocker for me has been the lack of convenient profile switching.
Switching profiles can be as easy as restarting the browser. For instance, you could create an icon on your desktop for each profile, or just a single icon to run :
firefox --ProfileManager
And you'll get a menu to choose which profile you want to use.
> I also can't open links in anything but the default profile
Interesting. Running on Linux here, and links open in whatever profile is currently in use.
> That is nothing like "convenient profile switching".
It takes a few seconds on my machine, and has the same result as switching profiles. But I accept your situation may be different, and would be interested to know what you see as its deficiencies.
I've not Firefox for a while, and never used multiple profiles, but in Chrome, I just click my face at the top right, choose work profile from the dropdown and I get a work profile window alongside my personal profile window that I still keep open. Or I can right click a link from my personal profile and choose "open link as -> work". Incognito windows are like a special profile that gets deleted when you close the window.
Are you saying that in Firefox you have to exit the entire browser to do the same thing?
> Are you saying that in Firefox you have to exit the entire browser to do the same thing?
If you look at the comment to which I was responding, the poster wanted his history and BOOKMARKS replaced when switching profiles. What you're talking about are containers, that do not replace your bookmarks (for example). For what you're talking about, there is no need to restart Firefox.
If what you want to do is have a completely different browser, with separate bookmarks and other settings, then you can start another instance, with a separate profile. It is very easy and takes a few seconds at most. And in fact, there is no need to shut down other profiles if you want more than one open at a time, so you can maintain all your current state when doing so.
That is interesting. Googling "firefox open links in active profile" provides plenty of results about the same issue.
I do know there's a flag to launch the profile manager, but I find that to be a nuisance. I don't want to launch it every time, because I'm constantly launching and killing browser instances. Dedicated shortcuts cuts out that step, but in my case would require 5+ shortcuts via .desktop files on my Linux machine, and a matching set of icons on my Windows machine, with the mental overhead that comes from selecting and switching.
The extension is much closer to the behavior I want (Chrome's).
Conversely, I experience a frustrating Chrome bug on Linux, where after some amount of time, external links open a new instance of every profile, and an error window. I've had no luck troubleshooting that, and it helped motivate me to try Firefox again.
> It's 2023, Safari and Firefox have been very good for a while.
This has not been my experience. Every once in a while I try to make the switch (to Firefox because I'm not generally a mac user, but I use safari on iOS and I'm basically resigned to its limitations)
Slow rendering is for sure a problem.
Buggy rendering is very common -- maybe the site, or maybe the browser, who knows, but anecdotally I've had a lot of bad experiences, including lost work filling out multi-page forms.
And I hate to mention it, but aesthetically I find Firefox to be very clunky and ugly.
Yes, Chrome is terrible for even more reasons than the ones shown here -- the direct integration of Google sign-on into the browser is awful, and the in-page text highlighting through (#:~:text=) is a big anti-feature (that now is being copied by the others, oh well), and after I spent so much effort trying to prune down the stupid buttons on my address bar only to find that they keep adding new, useless ones that are un-removeable ("reading panel"? why are they doing this?). But even with those things it's still the most performant and capable browser.
I do a bunch of CSS work, and I've found more bugs in Chrome's rendering than in Firefox's, Lots of half-pixel errors. What kind of rendering issues are you seeing in Firefox?
If you do a lot of web development, I strongly recommend getting familiar with Firefox's containers. You can set up SOCKS proxies for each individual container so you can easily pretend your dev server is running on the production server's domain without disabling your own access to the production servers. It's so much nicer than working with multiple proxies in Chrome.
That said, you might enjoy ungoogled-chromium if you're annoyed by google-integration. I use it for testing (because cross-browser testing is still a must). Brave also exists and is open-source, to break up market share.
I'm sure that Chrome's rendering is buggy as hell, but people design websites to work with the bugs; so they design them to work with Chrome, and in Firefox they look wrong unless they make the effort to work with both browsers.
I'm not a web developer; when I have to do web development I use Chrome because that's what we target and anything else is an afterthought (or is work taken on by more specialized frontend developers).
I tried ungoogled-chromium, but on upgrades it would frequently crash or fail to start so I gave up.
Brave maybe is worth a try; the cryptocurrency tie-in was enough to make me reluctant even to give it a try. I want my user agent to be as agnostic as humanly possible with regards to presenting data from web pages -- that's why I hate the auto-login feature and the "view search results" feature; I want my browser to render content and do only the minimum possible work in reacting to that content.
The most recent data loss incident was when I was trying to use the New York DMV website to upgrade to a RealID driver's license at the same time that I was changing my address. Validation error on one page became unrecoverable (fixing the problem didn't fix it) and going back started me at ground zero.
I then tried the same flow on Chrome (including the validation error) and couldn't get it to repro; things just worked. Totally possible that the actual failure was unrelated to the browser -- I never tried to establish a consistent reproduction on Firefox.
The other one was using SAP Concur for an expense report in a corporate environment. This is a horrible experience regardless of browser, but I ended up closing out Firefox and finishing the report in Chrome because things kept giving me strange errors.
This is such a great example of the problem with Chrome dominance.
You've come to believe that Firefox is broken with respect to Chrome. When in reality you only know that websites work better in Chrome. But that's not because Chrome works better, it's because those web teams only test against Chrome, and when Chrome is broken, they break their own website to match, so it works in Chrome but not other browsers.
This is exactly the danger being highlighted in this thread. How long until the DMV site and Concur (and other sites) have little notes that say "Chrome required to use this website"? And then we're right back to the bad old IE days again.
Manifest v3 has been delayed and was/is pretty legitimate, I don't think most people really know wtf they're talking about when it comes to v3. JPEGXL doesn't exactly seem like that big of a deal and is now being developed again - sounds fine, Chrome went "seems like no one wants this" and then people said "we want this" and now it's being worked on. WEI isn't even properly proposed yet, it's so early.
So these 3 things aren't really that insane, WEI is easily the worst of them.
In the meantime,
a) Chrome does everything I need while providing the highest security value.
b) Mozilla won't earn me as a user until their CEO is removed
It's not laziness, I make the conscious choice to use Chrome because I think it's the best browser right now. I use Brave on Mobile and I haven't switched on my laptop yet because I haven't evaluated it.
I rely mostly on the discussion around the implications for ublock origin when looking at manifest v3, because gorhill seems to be engaging with it in good faith.
Browsing the issue about it (https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338), it seems that manifest v3 blocks quite a lot of stuff out of the box. The fundamental issue seems to be that by mv3 prevents you from running arbitrary code to do filtering. This is concerning because it means that if sites / ad networks start coming up with ways to serve ads which can't be blocked by DeclarativeNetRequest (the issue lists a few), then ublock origin won't be able to block those ads. The way it's framed in the issue is "DNR is an obstacle to innovation."
There is currently a workaround in "ublock origin lite" (the mv3-compliant version) which lets you opt into regular ublock-origin-style filtering on a per-site basis. Even if this workaround isn't removed, it still means ... opting in to full filtering on a per-site basis, and acknowledging a browser warning each time.
MV3 clearly puts control of how ad-blocking works back into the hands of the company who supplies the browser and makes its money by serving ads.
I think it's worth noting that MV3 also solves problems. Like, the fact that an extension can do arbitrary things is obviously very dangerous. The ability to intercept arbitrary API calls and scripts is very powerful.
So the goal is to remove that power, so that it can not be abused. Then the question is "and how do we solve the legitimate use cases?" - hence the years of working with people like Gorhill to help build a better API to serve the ad blocking use case.
MV3 was delayed because, despite the numerous changes made to MV3 to satisfy these use cases, it's clear that there needs to be more work to do so.
I don't see the point of that. I like Chrome, it solves all of my problems well and it has top notch security too. I like the integrations it has with gsuite, etc.
If I'm going to switch for ideological purposes I'm going to need to see a browser that can actually follow through on its ideology.
I feel like people are responding to my posts based on reading half a sentence or something. I don't really understand what's so hard to get about this. As I said elsewhere:
1. I use Chrome because Chrome works best for me
2. People are proposing I use Firefox because Firefox has a mission that people want to align with
3. Firefox has terrible leadership and can not execute on their mission, I am not switching browsers to one that's run by an utter failure unless they either build a much better browser or they fire the fool who has put them in this position
This is not complicated. If you're asking me to use a worse product (from my perspective) for ideological reasons, which I actually align with, then using that product had better actually advance that ideology - something I do not believe Mozilla is capable of doing while their current CEO is sitting. I have then expressed why I believe the CEO is incapable and a failure. Saying "But Google's CEO is bad" doesn't change that - I'm not using Chrome because of ideological reasons.
This seems insane to have to spell out repeatedly.
edit: I think Dang consolidated the posts - thanks, I realized that it was getting egregiously repetitive.
1. Under her leadership Mozilla has lost virtually all of its users. It has been reduced to less than 10% of what it had before, maybe worse - I haven't kept up.
2. At the beginning of Covid, a time when remote work was on the rise and tech valuations were through the roof, a time when the browser was more important than ever, she took her largest payout and fired hundreds of employees. She was compensated at over $5M dollars, enough money to pay a team of engineers for years.
3. Firefox has utterly failed to capture Enterprise market, where Chrome has managed to dominate. I doubt most people are even aware that a corp managed Firefox is an option, they have done such a poor job marketing it.
4. Every initiative Mozilla has come out with has completely failed to gain traction. Something like a VPN could have been a great fit for Mozilla but they did nothing with it. Mozilla has been incapable, organizationally, of capitalizing on technology - the thing they're kinda supposed to do exclusively.
She has failed in every conceivable way as a CEO. She has failed in terms of the mission, she has failed her employees, she has failed her users, she has failed to be an example as a leader.
I am not betting on Mozilla's future, I'm not going to assume that they're capable of competing at all let alone competing while maintaining a vision of the open web. They're dysfunctional and it starts right at the top.
> Do you have any concerns about Google's CEO's salary ($226 million) or failed products (https://killedbygoogle.com/)?
The question here isn't "is Google's CEO bad?" it's "Should I be using Firefox on the assumption that it will help create a 'free' web?". I don't care about anyone else's salary.
And no I don't care about their other failed products, it's totally irrelevant.
2. People are proposing I use Firefox because Firefox has a mission that people want to align with
3. Firefox has terrible leadership and can not execute on their mission, I am not switching browsers to one that's run by an utter failure unless they either build a much better browser or they fire the fool who has put them in this position
Ok, but your points have nothing to do with that question. I agree, salary and unrelated products are irrelevant to this discussion.
And nobody is asking you to "bet on" Firefox. If you start using it and the company somehow collapses, you could switch to another browser in less than 10 minutes. You don't need to buy stock in Mozilla or something.
Are you essentially saying that you refuse to use Firefox because most people don’t use Firefox?
What do Firefox’s enterprise market share and Mozilla’s initiatives that are unrelated to Firefox have to do with whether Firefox would work for you as a browser?
3 out of your 4 points were about the low market share of Mozilla's products. The remaining one was about Mozilla's CEO firing employees and taking in 2.2 percent of the compensation of Google's CEO.
If this is your argument for not using Firefox, then it does read like the reason you're not using it is that it isn't popular with others.
> 2.2 percent of the compensation of Google's CEO.
lol another way of framing that is that her compensation makes up something like 30-40% of all user donations made to Mozilla. I think that's far more relevant than whatever Google's CEO makes.
> If this is your argument for not using Firefox, then it does read like the reason you're not using it is that it isn't popular with others.
All of my points are supporting my overall issue - that Mozilla can not execute on its mission effectively while their current CEO is in place.
The absolute failure to maintain market share is obviously quite relevant. If market share didn't matter in order to advance an ideology then we wouldn't be in this situation right now and there would be no reason for me to switch anyway.
So no, I'm not going to make a decision to support a browser that has one benefit to me - its ideology - when their leader is obviously incapable of executing effectively on that ideology. If they remove her as CEO then maybe someone who is effective can take place, at which point my support puts ideology back on the table and I'll consider switching.
Many of my work tools require a browser extension that's only compatible with Chrome. The publishers don't plan to support Firefox or any other browser.
I can do without these tools (not an easy task) but not my coworkers.
If you use Mac then you can consider Orion by Kagi (natively built with WebKit) which supports both Chrome and Firefox extensions (experimental).
(I personally use Firefox since I feel it's a much better browser (especially thanks to Firefox Multi-Account Containers), so can't comment on quality since I just tested it briefly.. but I do use Orion as my main browser on iOS where it's amazing.)
I recently switched to Orion in my company Macbook (from firefox, which I use everywhere). It's good enough... but it's not great. I've had at least one site broken even in compatibility mode. I am very frustrated by poor mouse support: unable to drag-and-drop URLs to your bookmark bar, or bookmarks within your bookmark bar (and when I imported my bookmarks, for some reason they were scrambled inside their folders). Other than that, though - it's a browser.
That's not really the point. The point is to take away control from Google's user-hostile decision making, and that's a good chunk of the value proposition of Brave as a fork/patchset.
Some of Google's user-hostile decision making is backed by marketshare data. "This is what users really want, they trust us," Google says pointing to how massive Blink marketshare is. That is a cudgel they use in the standards processes and in disagreements with Apple and Mozilla that they have the most users. Brave contributes to those user counts and Google's outsized voice in the market and in the standards processes. It's great that Brave tries its best to turn off the worst things Google is doing in their fork/patchset, but they are still complicit in Google doing some of that in the first place by contributing to the marketshare of "Google's browser".
I assume most tech-savy people will want to stay far away from a browser that uses cryptonomics to confuse people into feeling better about blocking ads.
- Chrome dev tools is consistently amazing and I use several extensions on it
- I use google password manager which is also amazing and it works seamlessly on all my android devices, even filling passwords into android apps (although most people don't seem to know it exists)
Sooner or later, I will get around to switching back to FF, but it's daunting. I used FF before Chrome came out.
Just a note that Firefox's password manager can also fill passwords into Android apps.
(I also think that its devtools are really good too, but I imagine habit is a large part of that. Of course, it's also an option to open Chrome only when you need the devtools.)
One of the main places I use FF is on mobile. Turns out that putting the browser chrome at the bottom of the screen is correct and I can't go back now.
I've been trying out Firefox on MacOS this week. Been using Chrome since ~2009, Firefox before that. Here are some annoyances so far:
- No download bar to show actual downloads (downloaded files are hidden under a menu icon)
- No built-in page translate
- Search: is in bottom left rather than top-right which is pretty standard in most UIs.
- Search: would be nice if "Highlight All" were on by default (though it's caused me problems on Chrome with large documents so I can see off by default having some advantage.)
- Search: most of those options should probably be hidden under "advanced" or some expandable menu.
- I don't like the scrolling tab view where I can only see less than 10 tabs at once. I'd rather they get really tiny like on Chrome rather than totally hidden. Otherwise it's unclear to me at a glance how many tabs I have open.
- Youtube seems to have higher CPU usage compared to chrome (at least on MacOS x86, non-fullscreen)
- Tabs are too easy to mute and seem less intuitive which ones are playing.
- Dev tools doesn't have the “lighthouse” audit tool.
- Would be nice if cmd+shift+n shortcut matched webkit/blink behavior. I'm slowly learning to use cmd+shift+p instead, but being consistent with all the other browsers would be nice.
I would love to use Firefox, Brave, even Safari, but I'm quite literally locked into the Google eco-system. My work emails are G-Suite, so having chrome means I can sync data from sheets, slides, docs etc. I stupidly moved everything personal to a Gmail address too back in 2016 when things weren't looking so grim, and cloud only was a hype so I'm kind of locked into using chrome for personal use too as I can't get away from not having Google account sync functionality.
De-googling is incredibly hard. I've used my Gmail address for everything from government voting registration, to companies house, to services I can't even remember signing up for. At this stage, I'm kind of stuck. Bonus: I own an android phone and Google services are essential. Please don't preach to me about grapheneOS or whatever, they suck without the play store.
No one said you had to ungoogle your life all at once. Take steps. Switch your browser to Fx or something else. Pick up a new email address with low fees with calendar & contact sync over CalDAV/CardDAV & keep both emails in use while slowly converting some over to the new address. Use LiberOffice or Etherpad on new documents. Use UnifiedPush on Android to handle notifications without send everything through Google. Install F-Droid & migrate to open alternatives. Eventually, you’d find Aurora store is just used for a handful of apps like your bank & everything else is in your browser or uses an open protocol so F-Droid apps work fine.
I've been wanting to switch to Firefox for a while, but there is a single bug I filed ~6 years ago [1] that has prevented me from making the leap. I've always wanted to investigate and see if I can pull a fix together but haven't been able to find the activation energy to get a dev environment set up to do so.
The bug is that Firefox on Windows doesn't play nice with virtual desktops. Clicking on a link in one virtual desktop may focus a Firefox window several VDs away. I'm a heavy user of virtual desktops, so this is a dealbreaker for me. Chromium browsers don't have this issue, so I'm stuck in Chromium land.
Edge is just marginally better than Chrome as they do not yet have the hegemony on the web. But that is the end goal of Microsoft.
I struggle to understand how you might skip Firefox because it was a hog in the past (it's free to try. It's been fine for years.), but are ready to jump in the loving embrace of another known bad, if not worse, actor.
To me "I'm being spied constantly and my data is being sold for profit" has much more weight than "once upon a time I had to restart the browser every other day"
I don't think Edge is looking for hegemony in the web at this point. Chromium-based Edge is marketed like Brave but with more "Corporate" friendliness. Edge is Microsoft barely holding to a legitimate toehold in web standards processes, with a skeleton crew as small as possible of developers. This Edge looks like the late stages of IE6: Microsoft has to ship a browser with Windows, because browsers are an important part of every OS, doesn't want to cede control to someone else's brand so needed to rebrand a "white label product" (and Chromium is now the largest "white label" for better and a lot worse), but overall got tired of paying for development staff on a money losing "product" and wants to focus on products that actually bring in revenue. (Which is also why Edge is the noisy home of coupon products and all of Microsoft consumer AI ambitions and so forth. You can see that's stuff making the company money, so that's why they are putting the most work into that kind of stuff.)
Very fast. Zero telemetry. Lightweight, natively built with WebKit, made for you and your Mac. Industry-leading battery life, privacy respecting by design and native support for web extensions.
+1 for Orion. Been using it on my work laptop pretty much exclusively (still need to do testing for my work in Chrome/Firefox), and it is hands down my favorite browser.
Now that 1Password natively supports Orion (they had a browser whitelist), I can probably switch back to it on my personal machines / iPhone, but Safari is still pretty sticky for my non-work life.
I'm giving Orion a try every couple months because the premise is great but unfortunately for me it's so buggy that it's unusable. But then again I rely on a lot of very modern web APIs like WebRTC. Hopefully one day it'll get there but it's a very long road ahead. Not sure where those bugs come from either because Safari doesn't suffer from the same issues.
I suggest not using Edge personally, unless you're big into the MS ecosystem. Edge has become a bloated mess, with MS adding all sorts of random crap (bing everywhere, telemetry, a buy-now-pay-later "feature", shopping, click bait news, etc). Yes you can disable most of it and pare it down, and you're sending your data to MS instead of Google, but it has left an extremely bad taste in my mouth. I'd rather just use Chrome in that case.
Microsoft also seems to have some real quality control issues too, shipping things to stable completely broken. I tried switching to Edge full time a couple years back, and in the few months I did I experienced some really glaring bugs that they would take forever to fix. I think there was a full few months where grabbing and dragging the scrollbar would cause the scrollbar to disappear and the entire web page to jut to the side, and the only way to fix it was to close the tab and reopen it.
Between that and all the constantly increasing push of their other products I eventually gave up and switched back to Chrome.
Firefox has been fine for me on a variety of macOS devices in the last 4 years, and it's currently on my M1 max macbook, and also my 2012 macbook Pro which is running OCLP and macOS 12. If it runs fine on that, can't see how you'd have an issue on any M1 device.
My attitude is that even if all the enthusiasts switched, its too small of a marketshare to matter, and its clear nobody wants to build on the Firefox platform - not even Brendan Eich.
Our best hope is for a fork of Chromium to be maintained by the Linux Foundation and for other vendors (and Electron) to use that fork instead. Just moving Electron over would provide significant momentum.
This exactly. I don't know why people are treating it as a binary choice - use Chrome when you have to, use something else everywhere else. People did the same with IE back in the day.
> Firefox (good, but has been a memory hog in the past)
I use Firefox for almost everything, and as much as I like it, it's sadly back to being a memory hog. The reason seems to be the process-per-origin-site thing that was introduced to protect against some attack, which causes my Firefox to have 20-50 processes, each with significant memory usage.
I use LibreWolf (a rebranded Firefox clone with less tracking) with TST and just recently I exported a few hundred tabs I didn't care for anymore so now I am down to 2-300 tabs.
I don't think it is as lean as some versions of old Firefox, but I have no problems with 500 - 1000 tabs (and I often run it next to a full IDE + VSCode + Firefox ++).
You can disable (almost) all of that. My FF only has 3 processes overall. Needed shittons of about:config tweaking to achieve it and it's probably not security best practices:tm: but hey, it works and my browser stops eating all the RAM.
I have not found a good way besides restarting FF. There is an extension but it wasn't reliable, as in unloaded active tabs and not unloading inactive tabs. IIRC the extension API didn't have sensible hooks so it was difficult.
I've been using Brave on an older Mac for nearly as long as it's been out, no complaints. I especially value getting adblock without need of an extension (which would introduce third-party vulnerability).
Some points on why I switched from Firefox to Chrome:
- It "failed" while trying to use Google Meet for work. I don't remember the details of the incident, but it was embarrassing enough that it made me switch, at least for work stuff
- No Chromecast support
- Buggier than Chrome in general: last I remember was an issue with page scaling when printing
- No desktop integration of PWAs (i.e. launcher icon, standalone window). This is what I missed the most as a Linux desktop user.
- Worse performance than Chrome, at least on Android. Firefox was freezing often and even causing my phone to... restart randomly. This is unacceptable.
I wouldn’t mind being in that circle. At least I’d be with people who are smart and practical. Not extremists or complete ignoramuses.
Whatever chrome doesn’t or does doesn’t matter to me. I just use it to do my job and occasionally shop on Amazon or watch Netflix. Or come here on HN. I visit maybe ten unique websites.. If chrome starts to suck big like IE back in the day then I’ll use some other browser that works best for all the sites I visit.
As long as it works best for most sites I visit, that’s fine by me.
I have a life outside the computer, which is funded by the computer. I can just turn it off after work and do an infinite number of other things.
Those are search shortcuts in Firefox. Pretty easy to add any that you want: Go to settings, Search, Search Shortcuts. Set the keyword to what you want for the search engine of your choice. Then you can use that directly from the address bar.
Yes, adding search shortcuts is easy but IIRC involved more keystrokes and didn't support search suggestions from history. I also tried some extensions but had my own troubles with those.
I use Firefox at home, but my work (large company) has standardized on everyone using Chrome to the point of writing custom Chrome extensions. So at work I use Chrome because it is essentially required. I wonder how many enterprise workers are in the same boat, even just due to security folks wanting to focus on a single browser and thus getting the company to mandate the use of Chrome.
Company can mandate whatever software they want. It’s their computer, their data, and their workflow. You’re not IT, so if they’re ok with sending data to Google, your hands are tied. I avoid doing any personal stuff on my work laptop. Even quick searches.
As many others have mentioned, Safari is worse. It restricted content blocking to not support uBlock Origin many years ago, and it has already deployed remote attestation. On top of that, it is behind on support for APIs that people want, and those that it has implemented are often riddled with bugs, which are fixed slowly if ever. Firefox is a reasonable alternative.
I do not use Chrome, but I recommend it to my tech illiterate friends or relatives because it's sadly probably the most secure browser among user friendly ones. In large part to Google Zero. (Ofc I try to also remember to warn against installing random extensions)
Chrome lets me install extensions using "git clone". Firefox doesn't, they need to come from AMO, or I need to reinstall them every time I relaunch Firefox.
the city i work for has 100k employees, admittedly not everybody office based, but still: they only allow chrome and edge (except on iphone) because it would be too much work to maintain features for other browsers
US official asked me to use Internet Explorer in 2021 when I called them that their obviously broken website didn't work with Chrome or Firefox. Browser divergence and incomplete or faulty support of standards is irritating.
Because you're a frog boiling in a pot. The URL we're discussing has a list of coming changes to weaken uBlock and other privacy or content blocking features.
My games, which are not using any special Chrome features, work horribly on Firefox and not at all on Safari. Until that is fixed no amount of bullying will make me switch. Not that it's a successful tactic to begin with.
I have and actually gotten a couple of them fixed in a timely manner. One was even marked with highest severity so it's not like I'm hallucinating this or doing something wrong. The team clearly cares about fixing performance issues. With that said, it's not always easy to create a minimum working example reproducing some things (general low fps, stuttering, unstable rendering, sudden black screens, strange audio artifacts).
You're free to use Chrome and work in ad tech. It's a free world.
But the intended audience of my comment is the vast majority of people that dislike the direction Google is taking Chrome and the web at large, and do absolutely no effort for, quite frankly, inane reasons.
I need translate on iOS. Chrome and Edge are the only browsers which offer that, and Chrome is much better than Edge. I hope Firefox brings native translation to iOS soon. I'll be making the jump when they do.
Google wouldn't be so dominant if tech people like us would stop making lazy excuses to continue its hegemony. In Dante's Divina Commedia, there is a circle of hell for those too lazy to take a stance [1]. If it were written today, it would include a lot of tech workers running Chrome with uBlock enabled.
It's 2023, Safari and Firefox have been very good for a while.
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1: in fact, in the Divina Commedia the lazy ones that can't take a stance are kept just outside of Hell, as they are so detestable not even Satan itself would want them around.