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This is Firefox's best kept secret. To this day I cannot fathom anyone willingly switching from Firefox to Chrome/Edge/any other Chromium-based browser. There
by atomlib 3y ago
This is Firefox's best kept secret.
To this day I cannot fathom anyone willingly switching from Firefox to Chrome/Edge/any other Chromium-based browser. There are so many tiny features that are useful at least to myself, while a minor JavaScript performance advantage isn't something that important in the grand scale of things.
- matheusmoreira 3y agoFirefox is increasingly unfriendly to power users. Wouldn't surprise me if they got rid of this feature someday because they have statistics showing few people use it.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- marcosdumay 3y agoFirefox is trending into the unfriendliness of Chrome and the other mainstream browsers. That irritating and horrible; but until they follow that trend to conclusion, it's not a reason to switch at all.
- HumblyTossed 3y agoSwitching will accelerate this.
- sbjs 3y agoAnd rightfully so. Why maintain a feature for a small minority? Let them fork and maintain it themselves.
- WastingMyTime89 3y agoThe danger of this is obvious. Everyone is there for a different minority used feature. By caring only about the feature used by the majority, you are actually satisfying no one. That’s why product managers use persona on top of metrics. Nice products have niche features and some kind of personality. You don’t want to overfocus on them but stripping them all is a losing move.
- IIsi50MHz 3y agoWordPerfect and Quattro Pro (now WordPerfect Suite, I think) seem to persist due catering to special needs of law firms. Catering to some niche users can keep you afloat despite an otherwise market-dominant competitor.
- zo1 3y ago"WTF" is there to maintain in the feature anyways? If it's such a bloated mess that this kind of small feature causes maintenance issues and a lot of effort to include in subsequent releases, then maybe it is time for Firefox to fail. Sigh, I've been using Firefox for almost 2 decades, and this is the first I've heard of this feature.
- mcpackieh 3y agoFirefox would have no users at all if Mozilla abandon us nerds and power users who all rely a slightly different set of Firefox's obscure features. If Mozilla were smart, they would embrace us instead of wishing we were more like normal users (if we were, we'd be using chrome already!)
- ehnto 3y agoYou risk driving away your evangelists for one. If you only focus on the most popular features you eventually narrow your product to one feature, so obviously there is a balance in there somewhere between focus and utility as well. Identifying why people use your product is as important as knowing what they use. Chrome does all the things I actually use from Firefox, but I use Firefox because when I ever need slightly more hackability it is there for me. That is at best, a once a year occurance.
- chaxor 3y agoPower users are firefox's main demographic. I see this so much so, it's to the point that If I see you're using something else, I assume you're not a developer, and you're likely not a power user.
- chii 3y agoi do feel chrome devtools is just edges out firefox's
- wartijn_ 3y agoYou can do this in Chromium as well. So it might be Chromium's best kept secret too.
- ghostpepper 3y agoHow does one search open tabs in Chrome?
- cubefox 3y agoI think he meant the custom website keyword search.
- wartijn_ 3y agoI did mean that, but it is possible to search for tabs, history, or bookmarks by starting your search with an @. E.g. `@tabs ycombinator`
- cpleppert 3y agoThis bookmarklet will work: (function () { let sel = window.getSelection(); let Qr; if (sel && sel.toString().length > 0) {Qr=sel.toString()} else {Qr=prompt('Search Site for','');} let hna=window.location.hostname; if(Qr) { location.href='http://www.google.com/search?&q=site:'+encodeURIComponent(hna)+'+'+escape(Qr) }})(); You can attach to a keyboard shortcut with a launcher or applescript.
- wartijn_ 3y agoBy starting your search with "@tabs" You can change that behavior in the settings
- myfonj 3y agoInterestingly, in Microsoft Edge, entering `%` does the same as typing `@tabs <tab>`. And `^` as `@history`.
- WXLCKNO 3y ago
- Neff 3y agoFunny enough, I just posted on Mastodon looking for recommendations of other browsers to try. While I love the flexibility and openness that Firefox brings, there is a resource issue for me on my macbook pro. I have to spend a lot of time in Google Meets for work, and video conferencing via Firefox seems to redline the computer... It sounds like a jet engine and I wind up thermal throttling to the point that my machine becomes completely unresponsive. I'd love to stay with Firefox - especially for the cross-device tab sharing and search - but the need for something stable is superseding my want to use a non-Google browser.
- thesuitonym 3y agoI wonder if Google would have any vested interest in making Meets a bad experience in Firefox... No, it must be Firefox that's wrong!
- Neff 3y agoI have no doubt that Google is hamstringing performance on Firefox. But that is far outside of my sphere of control so I am focusing on the things I can effect. Another member recommended disabling hardware acceleration so that is the first thing I'll try. If you have any other recommendations on how I can reduce the impact of the issue I'd love to hear them.
- paintballboi07 3y agoHave you tried disabling hardware acceleration?
- Neff 3y agoI haven't. That was recommended to me by someone else and something I am going to look into. I would have assumed that offloading the video processing to the dedicated GPU would be a good thing, but hopefully that helps with the problem.
- irae 3y agoI used Safari for years and it is so easy to open Chrome just for Google Meet. It is way less annoying than one would imagine
- baby 3y agoAnd then there’s tree style tabs. But actually I moved to Chrome due to how many issues I ran into with tree style tabs due to firefox not letting do its thing
- kenmacd 3y agoWell, in case you decide to move back, give Sidebery a try. I switched a while back haven't had any issues.
- Zecc 3y agoI second this. I've had the very rare message saying the tab tree has gotten out of sync (always as a consequence of me moving tabs between incognito windows), but the first time it happened clicking the message refreshed the tab tree successfully; the second time it didn't but toggling the sidebar off and on fixed it. I've had no problems with stability. And to me the context menu option to unload tabs is a killer feature.
- eitland 3y agoSo, if I understood you correct, you had issues with TST and instead of disabling TST, you went for Chrome?
- sucralose 3y agoCustom bookmark / search engine functionality is easy to replicate on Linux with a few shell scripts, though. I use Brave and yet use some complex search engines such as making POST requests to APIs based on the search input and telling the browser to open a URL provided in the API's HTTP response.
- drozycki 3y agoChrome would auto install site specific search in its initial beta release in September 2008. The ability to set your own keywords came soon after. https://lifehacker.com/enable-chromes-best-features-in-firefox-5044518 https://lifehacker.com/enable-chromes-best-features-in-firef...
- pbreit 3y agoChrome manages to do this without a command character. Much better UX.
- tzot 3y agoFirefox without a command character searches everywhere; you use a command character to restrict your search to a specific category (history, bookmarks, open tabs etc). Assumably Chromes does the same (ie without some prefix searches everywhere, with some prefix —or keypress— searches in a specific category). If Chrome doesn't do that, then Firefox's is the much better UX, otherwise they're equivalent.
- IceSentry 3y agoI use vivaldi because of the tab stack feature and until firefox gets support for something close to it I just can't switch. I tried to browse the web without it but I always come back to vivaldi. I have a tab hoarding problem and it's the only browser that actually makes helps me manage it.
- aldanor 3y agoI use Firefox mainly because of TreeStyleTab which lets me have 1k-2k tabs with no problem. Beats all other vertical tab options I've seen so far in other browsers
- asadotzler 3y agoI've been trying to tell people about this for over two decades, literally, https://www-archive.mozilla.org/docs/end-user/keywords.html https://www-archive.mozilla.org/docs/end-user/keywords.html
- pbhjpbhj 3y agoNot really, Chrome-based browsers have search keywords too. What I would like most on the Chrome-based browser I have to use at work is history (^ keywords) and bookmark searching (# tag keywords, or * bookmark keywords) using "awesomebar" operators that Firefox has. I'd really really like it if a form of search keywords could be used for forms that don't work as GET requests.
- nine_k 3y agoAnother great thing that only seem to exist for Firefox is Tree Style Tab [1] and a bunch of plugins around it. It completely changes the way I browse. There is an honest but much, much more limited attempt top bring a something similar to Chromium: [2]. [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta... [2]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tree-style-tab/oicakdoenlelpjnkoljnaakdofplkgnd https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tree-style-tab/oic...
- MetallicCloud 3y agoIs there a good way to hide the top tabs without getting into barely supported config files? I like TST, but I gave up on it because I could never get the top tabs hidden correctly, and all the information I could find on the internet was different levels of out of date.
- velut 3y agoI don't think so. I use Sidebery and their recommended approach is to edit userChrome.css. It's not too bad and works well. See https://github.com/mbnuqw/sidebery/wiki/Firefox-Styles-Snippets-(via-userChrome.css) https://github.com/mbnuqw/sidebery/wiki/Firefox-Styles-Snipp....
- wlesieutre 3y agoI see a sibling comment posted a link to some tab bar hiding CSS, but having gone though the same "different levels of out of date" problem myself I'll add my own solution that I'm currently using in Firefox 114 on Windows 11. Not perfectly space efficient, but avoids some issues with totally hiding the window titlebar, since I still wanted to keep the minimize/maximize/close controls up there. Some of this may be platform specific to Windows (can't speak to window management buttons on other platforms), but hopefully it helps if anyone in this thread needs it or lands here later from search results: /* Hide the tabs within TabsToolbar*/ .toolbar-items { display: none; } /* Make the min/max/close buttons align to the right*/ #TabsToolbar { display: flex; flex-direction: row-reverse; } /* Hide the titlebar spacers, which push the buttons away from the corner */ .titlebar-spacer { display: none; } /* Hide the sidebar header */ #sidebar-header { display: none; } Stupid that this sort of fiddling is required when other browsers (like Edge and Brave) are doing native sidebar tabs, but I do like how compact Firefox's can be, plus being a tree instead of a flat list. Enabling userChrome.css files and finding where to put it is left as an exercise to the reader.
- Dalewyn 3y ago>a minor JavaScript performance advantage Consider just how many layers of JavaShit webdevs want to slap down on their websites these days, that "minor" performance difference adds up. Death by a thousand cuts, basically.
- porridgeraisin 3y agoThis is there in chromium based browsers too, though. Settings -> search engine -> site search and then the exact same mechanism.