Both Chrome and Edge are just hostile towards my browsing experience.
Chrome keeps on rolling out new settings to pilfer my browsing data.
Edge will just kill all of my settings to anything Microsoft wants.
Arc and Firefox are working reliably at the moment but Firefox remains a stable option to come back to everytime.
> Firefox remains a stable option to come back to everytime
Don't get me wrong, I've been using Firefox for the last decade and I don't intend on using anything else for the foreseeable future, but Mozilla has no idea what they're doing with Firefox nowadays. Firefox View is the most useless thing I've ever seen, that expiring "independent voices" theme picker was some weird hippie stunt[1], the latest UI redesign which split the tab from the window looks hideous, and it's not like Firefox doesn't have things you can tweak for a more private experience[2]. I miss Firefox Test Pilot where they tried out different new features, I found a lot of them to be very useful but sadly lots of them didn't make it. I don't know what's going on at Mozilla but they seem to lack any vision, they're just existing as an option without trying to be the best option.
I don't get this Firefox hate. I use Firefox and I'm pretty happy with it and the product's direction. I'm also fine igoring products and features that I'm not interested in.
Just because I'm criticizing something doesn't mean I hate it. I want it to be better, and that's something Firefox needs if it wants to get out of the bottom in terms of usage.
Firefox being at the bottom has nothing to do with what mozilla does. Its because they are going against google that pesters you to download chrome. The network effects of everyone downloading chrome for 15 years. The idea that google is one of the largest companies on earth and mozilla is a rag tag team. Firefox is better. You objectively have a worse experience on chrome or edge or safari. Most users otoh just don’t care about vetting software. They stick to what they know. Go to a library or cafe and be disappointed how many people browse the web with zero ad blocking because they simply don’t know any better.
I think we can recognize at this late date that most 'hate' on the Internet is about a form of fun, one kind of social interaction and self-expression and not about the object of abuse. People express hate about everything under the sun (and on HN).
Most of it is a performative rant, sort of like a stand-up comedy routine. The target is just material for the routine; nobody takes the comedian too seriously. Every HN thread has it.
Firefox is perfectly customizable. You can make the tabs look however you want with a config. Want them out of the way and appear when you mouse over on the left edge? You can have it like that. You also don’t need to use any features you don’t want to use. You can even hide them entirely with a config file.
Earlier today there where an article regarding Microsofts user hostile approach to Edge, and it kinda made me wonder why the reactions towards Chrome seems less extreme. Only reason I can think of it that Chrome is something you inflict upon yourself, and Edge is something Microsoft is attempting to force upon it's users. Still I fail to see that Chrome isn't every bit as awful as Edge.
Sure their sales team is extremely aggressive in corporations and bribe/take out to expensive concerts/sportsball games to sell Power Automate/Office crap.
But from a consumer level, there is almost no reason to use Microsoft services in 2023. Maybe if you are a hardcore gamer and need 60kfpsUltra the day a game is released.
And I was a big fan of Edge when it came out as an alternative to Chrome.
There's always an arc (pun intended) where the product goes the profit-at-all-costs direction and chooses to exploit it's users (looking at Chrome/Edge). I will move away from Arc the moment it chooses to do so without allowing me an alternative way to support them.
You won't regret it and you won't miss anything. Who cares if Chrome is 2% faster on some obscure CSS parsing test? At least you aren't participating in your own psychological manipulation and are resisting WEI.
I would very much miss AppleScript support. It’s the number one reason I (and many users of my tools) don’t touch Firefox. Fortunately, Webkit browsers (Safari, Orion) have got that covered. Unfortunately, Chromium browsers are a more common choice.
Isn't AppleScript effectively dead ? Apple disbanded the Mac Automation team back in 2016 and even fired the product manager AFAIK. At some point in time, it will be removed from the macOS stack and very few people will even notice.
I used to think so too, but I have a ton of experience with AppleScript and its JavaScript counterpart and they’re still solid. JXA’s Objective-C bridge is a convenient way to access macOS APIs in a scripting language.
One might think the introduction of Shortcuts would be the best time to retire AppleScript, yet Apple made it possible to run shortcuts via AppleScript and one of the standard tasks allows you to run AppleScript from within.
Super curious what you're doing with AppleScript + the browser. I definitely prefer Safari over Firefox. Haven't tried Orion yet but I'm super stoked there's another webkit browser.
One example is a script to quickly grab the URL of the current tab and send it to mpv¹ for playing or yt-dlp² for downloading. Or send some JavaScript to that same tab. Or grab the URLs and titles of all tabs in all windows that match a specific domain, close them, and then reopen them together in a brand new window (or save it to clipboard to send someone). Alfred³ has a ton of automations that allow you to do that without having to code it yourself.
Shaving a few microseconds off of internal loading is absolutely meaningless when there are hundreds of milliseconds of third party JavaScript being downloaded, and your browser is actively removong the features that allow you to not do that.
You'd be surprised. I had to chase down a rendering bug that made an infinite scrolling widget unusable on Firefox because it did recursive layout when flexboxes were within a scrollable div. A 2% performance hit can matter in the modern context of hundreds to thousands of layout elements.
That having been said... This is an ecosystem thing and if everybody were to switch to Firefox it would be Chrome that had the weird rendering bugs because people would be testing on Firefox first and wouldn't be using layouts that Firefox didn't handle cleanly.
I don’t know how people find firefox slow. In a straight a to b test maybe, but its never a straight test. Its the test of chrome loading ads or using a crummy ad blocker, vs firefox with ublock origin. The latter will blow the doors off anything on the market.
I am aware. but the browser engine itself is not the issue. The UI is.
I use firefox on my iPad quite a lot and it has the issue of randomly going fully blank when opening a link in a new tab. Or the UI being stuck for a few seconds.
Neither Chrome or Safari ever have these issues for me on iOS.
Same here - quick, much more customizable, with good-quality extensions, great ad-blocking... Haven't looked back in years.
On Android, they also do things right (ok, subjectively) and keep the address/navigation bar on the bottom, so I don't have to stretch to reach the most-commonly used UI elements.
