8 ms·

Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

179 points by abentspoon 13y ago

hillbillyjack 13y ago
One really nice thing about firefox is no more He's Dead Jim pages. Chrome (even stable) seems to crash tabs all the time, while in the past 6 months firefox nightly hasn't crashed more than a once or twice. Another annoying thing about chrome is I never got a reason for a crash it just was a crash page and if I tried to reload that page it was very likely to crash silently again, with chrome at least I get the stop script dialog once in a while. Chrome still starts faster (more noticable on windows than linux). There are also a plethora of webkit optimized experiments that don't work for shit on firefox.
- jlgaddis 13y ago
  > One really nice thing about firefox is no more He's Dead Jim pages. It took me a minute to figure out what you were referring to then I realized I haven't seen one of those in months -- since, I believe, I stopped using Flash.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- barista 13y ago
  Windows 8 does this across machines
  - Kelet 13y ago
    Argh, you replied just when I had deleted. Sorry. To anyone wondering my comment was saying that I couldn't find any service comparable to Google's sync last time I tried Firefox. Google's sync effortlessly syncs all machines tied to an account including bookmarks, extensions, and themes. I figured I'd try out the latest Firefox and see if I can get it working before I definitively make the comment. Thanks for the tip though. The machines I want to sync between are Windows 7 and Linux though, so no can do.
    - dignan 13y ago
      Firefox sync doesn't do the trick? https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-sync-take-your-bookmarks-and-tabs-with-you https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-sync-take-your-...
      - area51org 13y ago
        It does in theory, but there have been some service problems of late (for a few weeks). I turned it off after growing tired of the error messages.
    - jlgaddis 13y ago
      When I needed/wanted this feature, I found that Delicious (and their plug-in) was the best fit for me.
barista 13y ago
One question, Why?
- epmatsw 13y ago
  Firefox is comparable to Chrome in terms speed and features. However, Mozilla doesn't have the same incentive to collect and use data on their customers that is inherent to Google, an advertising company. In addition to that, Firefox is fully open source, unlike Chrome which contains closed source components from Google.
  - area51org 13y ago
    ... and, as I mention above, the Mac version has been pretty bad over the last few months, enough to drive users away (including me).
    - epmatsw 13y ago
      Really? I've been using Nightly exclusively on my laptop and haven't noticed any problems. Maybe just lucky. Edit: Oh, the mac version of Chrome. Gotcha.
      - area51org 13y ago
        Yeah, I'm still on Chrome on various Windows VMs and PCs with no problem.
- rschmitty 13y ago
  People are concerned about their privacy
- lurkinggrue 13y ago
  To me Firefox wins over Chrome for interface customization. Can't take that "One size fits all" mentality of Chrome.
  - 13y ago
Hilyin 13y ago
My biggest problems with Firefox after using Chrome for so long is stability. I find that web pages can lock up the entire browser rather than just a tab, and this isn't just a rare occurrence, when I tried to give it a chance a week ago, it happened several times. I am amazed they still haven't picked up the separate process per tab feature yet.
- fizz_and_buzz 13y ago
  Really? That seems odd. I have been using firefox on a 6 year old macbook pro for many years and mac is not exactly there best supported platform. I can't remember the last time this happened to me. Do you have a test case which can be replicated? What's your platform?
- lurkinggrue 13y ago
  I never could make the switch to Chrome due to the limited interface. That and the Proxy setup being the IE control panel.
- Wilya 13y ago
  The separate process per tabs feature has different drawbacks. Notably, it means Chrome uses more memory and can handle way less simultaneous open tabs than Firefox. I'm glad both approaches exist.
- mcpherrinm 13y ago
  The project to do this (Electrolysis) turned out to be a lot more effort than I think people anticipated, and was paused for a while last year to allow some other changes to happen. It resumed this year, and you can follow development from https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis which includes links to meeting notes and the experimental branch if you want to try it out.
binarymax 13y ago
I made the switch to DDG about 2 years ago and am pretty happy, though I do occasionally use the !g. Switched back to FF on my desktop a couple months ago when I got my keon and I love it. The only thing that's hard to get used to again is a search bar separate from an address bar. Chrome really had that figured out. A unified bar in FF would make it the perfect browser.
- k-mcgrady 13y ago
  When I was using Firefox I used this extension to unify the address/search bars. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/omnibar/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/omnibar/
  - binarymax 13y ago
    Wow, thanks!
  - epmatsw 13y ago
    Is this not default behavior? I've never had an addon installed, but just typing in a query and pressing enter in the URL routes it to Google... Edit: Ah, I suppose the auto-complete is different.
    - binarymax 13y ago
      Also Sometimes for some non URL queries it defaults to what feels like an 'I'm feeling lucky' search.
      - FreeFull 13y ago
        I don't think it does that anymore. I haven't observed it for quite a while.
        wukkuan 13y ago
        I can confirm that. I really miss that feature.
daturkel 13y ago
Is there any substitute in firefox for Chrome's keyword searching? That's the only chrome feature I really care about.
- wcunning 13y ago
  If you mean going to the address bar, typing wiki [tab] and getting a search of wikipedia for whatever you type next, then yes. See this article on how to do it: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from-address-bar https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from-address....
- cpeterso 13y ago
  Firefox has built-in support for Keyword Search bookmarks. You don't need to install an add-on to create aliases. If you bookmark any website's search results page, you can add a keyword and edit the bookmarked URL to include a printf-style %s placeholder. When you enter the keyword plus some string, Firefox opens the bookmarked URL, substituting your string for %s. For example, I have a "w" keyword search for Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/index.php?search=%s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/index.php?search=%s and a "yt" keyword search for YouTube https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s&search=Search https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s&search=Searc...
  - daturkel 13y ago
    Awesome, that's exactly what I was looking for.
dotmanish 13y ago
fwiw, FireFox on MacOS shrinks the tabs to favicon before scrolling, without using an add-on. The article screenshots indicate it spoke of Linux.
dendory 13y ago
I've never used Chrome, always been on Firefox so that part is really not a big deal for me, but I did try DDG in the past and there always comes a point where results aren't quite up to par.
cupcake-unicorn 13y ago
I actually never ended up switching to Chrome from Firefox in the first place, but those are still good tips. I guess I did the right thing :) Yes, it has a terrible memory leak issue, but all of my computers have enough ram as to not notice. I'm still not ready to make the switch to DuckDuckGo. I figure that if I'm going to stick with Gmail no matter what, if Google already has that information, collecting a few search queries is nothing. Also, perhaps I'm missing something, but as far as I can tell Chrome is at least partially open source, no? http://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/get-the-code http://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/get-the-code Why aren't people forking it to create a more privacy friendly version?
- jmillikin 13y ago
  > Also, perhaps I'm missing something, but as far as I > can tell Chrome is at least partially open source, no? > http://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/get-the-code > > Why aren't people forking it to create a more privacy > friendly version? People citing privacy as a reason to move away from Chrome are doing so on moral rather than technical grounds. Chromium itself doesn't have anything harmful in it, so there's no point in forking. Chrome is just Chromium plus some third-party proprietary plugins (Flash, the PDF renderer).
  - kryten 13y ago
    Well you hope it is. All sorts can happen between source and binary.
    - jmillikin 13y ago
      There's enough security researchers (of any hat color) crawling over the Chrome binaries that I'm fairly confident there are no backdoors being introduced. To verify, you could disassemble the Chrome binary and compare it against a disassembled Chromium binary that you built. You could also use a packet sniffer and/or MITM proxy to verify that no unexpected data transmissions are occurring.
      - 13y ago
ashmud 13y ago
As a long time Opera+FF user, I'm surprised I never came across the Custom Tab Width add-on, or even bothered to look for such an add-on. Made my day. :)
- eCa 13y ago
  Tab Mix Plus is another option, with plenty of settings for everything concerning tabs: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/tab-mix-plus/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/tab-mix-plus/
area51org 13y ago
As a Mac guy, I switched back to Firefox when Chrome became practically unusable (slow, crashy). Pleasant surprise: Firefox is snappier and much-evolved since I last used it. Haven't tried DuckDuckGo yet, but I know my day is coming.
- hnriot 13y ago
  This makes no sense. I, like many people here use a Mac and Chrome and can't remember the last time it crashed. I suspect this is something specific to your installation, possibly a rogue plugin you've installed. My experience is quite the opposite to yours. neither ff or chrome crash much, and chrome is significantly faster.
  - area51org 13y ago
    On my system -- and I've tried everything I could think of, including blowing away my profile -- it's slow, crashy, and hangs a lot. It's a newish Macbook Pro with plenty of disk and RAM. FF, on the other hand, is faster (!) and doesn't crash often.
- mayhew 13y ago
  I hope Firefox's OS X integration improves soon. Lion-style scrollbars, the bouncy effect when you hit the top and bottom of a page, and back/forward swipes have no animation. It's pretty terrible in terms of usability compared to Safari and Chrome.
  - Watabou 13y ago
    It has all that in the latest Firefox Nightly. Chrome only has the black back/forward animations. Firefox Nightly's animation is exactly like Safari, although you has to enable them specifically for now in about:config. It also has ML-style scrollbars where they enlarge when you mouse over them. So OS X integration has certainly improved.
jlgaddis 13y ago
> But the keyboard shortcuts mean I can ... without reaching for the mouse, and using a very limited set of shortcuts. This is why I love vimperator[0]. I actually preferred pentadactyl[1] but development apparently stalled so I switched back. [0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/vimperator/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/vimperator/ [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/pentadactyl/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/pentadactyl/
- gnosis 13y ago
  As a long-time user of Pentadactyl, Firefox, and vim, I'd like to make the heretical suggestion to try w3m in emacs. Having a web browser fully integrated in to a powerful editor like that is fantastic. It's far more powerful than what you'd get from the Pentadactyl/Firefox combination, with the disadvantage that w3m can't handle Javascript.[1] w3m's also far faster and a lot less bloated than Firefox. For sites that work without Javascript and where I only care about getting information in text format (which is probalby 99% of the sites I use), it's just about perfect for me. For the rest, I have Firefox, Opera, and Chromium as backups. [1] This is not a big loss on most sites, as they can usually be used just fine without it. In fact, it's often good to have Javascript turned off so as to avoid Javascript exploits, tracking and advertising.
  - dredmorbius 13y ago
    The most annoying thing about w3m for me these days is the fonts in my default terminal window. I've been shopping around for a better alternative (GNOME terminal or XFCE4's terminal seem to beat my trusty old rxvt). The ability to dynamically resize fonts is also kind of nice (yeah, I'm old school). That and the fact that color settings for w3m are pretty hard to tweak just right for whatever terminal / foreground/background you're using. The fact that so many pages render much more readably without CSS is .... sad, actually.
anthemcg 13y ago
"Chrome Inspector is nice and all, but Firebug is clearly superior. I no longer recall why I hold this opinion. I'm looking forward to finding out." For some reason, I also think this exact thing.I also know other people who share this sentiment. I wonder if it comes from Firebug just being the first to the scene?
- cromwellian 13y ago
  In my experience, Chrome is way better than Firebug or Firefox's builtin tools for development. Firefox's debugger doesn't appear to have any way to debug webworkers for example. You can't reformat source. They only just got SourceMap support and it doesn't appear to work as good. No syntax coloring. Poor profiling tools, can't get a timeline which shows frames per second, breakdown of paint/style recalc/layout/composite, no memory/heap profiling UI, etc. No explorer for local storage or filesystem apis, no manager for app-cache. Nothing like chrome://net-internals for analyzing network issues, and on and on. I'm sure they'll fix all that in time, they have a good development team, but to say Firebug is clearly superior is obviously based on not having used the Chrome tools to do anything significant.
andrasokros 13y ago
I tried Chrome last week, but I still think the FF has a better UX, so I switched back. My biggest problems was that, out of the box, Chrome's address bar is just plain bad. It only shows 5 possible targets, while in FF I can go through my whole history, and the most used page comes up first. I didn't really noticed that I used it that much, until I tried Chrome. This goes for the Android versions as well. If I click the address bar there in Chrome, it will go to the edit mode, which I rarely use. In contrast FF goes into edit mode + it shows relevant possibles from history underneath.
rc4algorithm 13y ago
Another particular nagging problem with Firefox is that "full screen doesn't even hide the tabs or address bar (just the OS X bar, assuming you're using OS X). It would be nice if you can add a way to change Firefox's settings so that, in full screen, the only thing visible is the web page.
- Skalman 13y ago
  On my Linux fullscreen (F11) shows nothing but web content.
gnosis 13y ago
I've been using DDG and Firefox for years now, and don't miss Google at all. The main thing I'm really annoyed with DDG about is that they don't (no longer?) treat double-quoted search terms as literal. I'll often get results that are close to but not exactly what I asked for. This is really frustrating, as my entire intention in double quoting search terms is to ask for exactly those search terms and nothing else. As far as DDG's privacy boasts go, I'd love to see them confirmed by frequent audits from a trusted and respected entity like the EFF. For all we know, DDG might be lying (or being forced to lie) about not tracking or spying on its users and not handing over the data it collects on us to others. My motto is: trust but verify. So far, there's no way to do that in the case of DDG. Still, I'd much rather use a service that at least pays (pretty convincing) lip service to respecting its users' privacy than services where there's clear evidence of abuse and contempt for its users' privacy, such as Google or Facebook.
- hnriot 13y ago
  DDG is Bing with some front end work, why not just use Bing and then you can use quotes searches without problem [1] [1] http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/ff524480.aspx http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/ff524480.aspx
  - mtgx 13y ago
    I assume because he switched to DDG for privacy reasons, not because he thought the search was better. Also DDG has some search features that neither Google nor Bing have. For people who still like Google search more, but want the privacy, I'd suggest startpage.com. I see even the Tor Browser Bundle uses it as the default search engine (you can still switch to DDG and others, too).
  - gnosis 13y ago
    It's not just Bing. "DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "about 50" sources, including Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wikipedia, Wolfram Alpha, Bing, its own Web crawler, the DuckDuckBot, and others."[1] [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duckduckgo#Features https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duckduckgo#Features
ibrahima 13y ago
I can't believe someone misses Chrome's "Tiny Tab" thing, I think it's the single most broken thing about the browser. In Firefox I used to use multi row tabs and then Tree style tabs when I had too many tabs. In Chrome all I can do is open a new window. I don't see what's useful at all about having 20 reddit icons. (pretty much switched to Chrome entirely because of web development and Firefox taking too long to reload, but might switch back once I don't need to do web dev for a while).
teaneedz 13y ago
I made this switch myself recently. The web dev tools in FF are still a bit weak in pseudo areas and media queries but I'm living with it for now. BTW, why doesn't Firefox have "paste & match style"? DDG is also my go-to search engine. Personally, I feel better supporting Mozilla and DDG more.
Spittie 13y ago
I'm glad to see more and more people switching (back) to Firefox, as I admit I'm quite a Firefox fanboy. I've never made the full switch to Chrome. First, as a long time linux user, Firefox was never so bad on it (startup time, random freeze for i/o...). Second, when Chrome was (a lot) faster Firefox had way more addons. Now Chrome has kinda fixed that (I still miss some essential addons, like Tree Style Tab), but Firefox is again about as fast as Chrome. Regarding Google, I've found that it's result are often better than DuckDuckGo. But I promised myself that sometime I'll make a week using only DuckDuckGo, and see if I can survive without Google.
- joeblau 13y ago
  I used DDG for two months and as a developer trying to find the latest bugs, code snippets, and help; It was a lot harder on DDG than in Google. I would always end up having to type google.com <tab> in my address bar to search for programming related items. That being said, people have pointed me to resources to help me improve my search results.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - k-mcgrady 13y ago
    On DDG you can add !g to the start or end of a query and it will do the search on Google.
    - Spittie 13y ago
      That's one of the best, and yet one of the worst feature of DuckDuckGo. When I tried using it a while ago, I ended up always searching for "!g <query>", since I knew I would always get equal or better results. I'm glad it's this easy to search on Google from DuckDuckGo, but it also makes the switch harder. Or, at least, it did for me.
      - k-mcgrady 13y ago
1O0101ll100O 13y ago
You can still use the Googlesharing addon to proxy your searches through a concentrator. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/googlesharing/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/googlesharing... As long as you trust the proxy to not be an adversary. Sometimes[often times] the default proxy will go down. I've had luck using the following alternate: googlesharing.riseup.net
cenhyperion 13y ago
I made the exact same two switches over the past week and agree with the author. Honestly it's been great. I'm also slowly migrating away from my gmail and to a hosted email on my domain.
JefWin 13y ago
Are people switching to DuckDuckGo simply because of paranoia? I don't care if Google knows whatever I'm searching for, it helps them improve their search results. DuckDuckGo's search is nowhere near as good as Google.
teeja 13y ago
Over several years of comparing, I find DDG results are fine for reasonably common questions and recent stuff. Sometimes when doing deep searches for more arcane topics (especially farther back in history) Google will get to what I'm looking for sooner. But I usually use Google Books for that stuff (which is where they retain a -big- advantage).
dewarrn1 13y ago
Searching the current page for links in Firefox (using ') is a great feature and one of the things I miss most when I have to use Chrome.
- tbe 13y ago
  I wish there was a way to do this search only on the currently visible part of the page. Installing a hit-a-hint type of addon would then be less of a prerequisite for me to use the browser.
prettyfly 13y ago
Is there anyway to specify a time range on queries on DuckDuckGo? Such as "last year", "any time", "last week" etc. Works on StartPage but would be nice to have it on DDG too.
- hunterjlang 13y ago
  check out http://help.dukgo.com/customer/portal/articles/215622 http://help.dukgo.com/customer/portal/articles/215622
  - prettyfly 13y ago
    Thanks
carlob 13y ago
I'm currently using DDG + Safari with Glims. I would love to switch to Firefox, the only thing that's holding me back is the lack of a good replacement to ClickToPlugin killers. Those are little js that will remove the flash/silverlight video and replace it with an mp4. This also effectively kills youtube ads.
tempestn 13y ago
DDG's obviously gotten a massive boost from this whole issue: https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=duckduckgo https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=duckduckgo I was a bit surprised that Firefox hasn't: https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=firefox https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=firefox but obviously it has a lot more inertia. (Or maybe everyone switches to DDG first, and THEN looks for Firefox, so Google Trends doesn't know about it...)
- hayksaakian 13y ago
  it is the #1 related term (duckduckgo firefox) as of just now also compare them: https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=firefox#q=firefox%2C%20duckduckgo&cmpt=q https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=firefox#q=firefox%2C... firefox jumped about as much as ddg recently, but that's a blip on firefox as a whole
  - tempestn 13y ago
    Ya, that's what I meant by the 'inertia' of Firefox. It takes a lot to move the needle on it. The comparison is definitely illustrative though. (The part about everyone finding Firefox on DDG was a joke.)
ww520 13y ago
I use Firefox mainly and Chrome/IE for testing sometimes. Firefox has been pretty solid; however, one really annoying change in v22 is that it blows up the default zoom level. That makes websites look very big. They said it's honoring the DDP setting on Windows and for HiRes monitor, but it looks like a bug or a misguided feature. I really hope they revert the change. I'm tired of hitting ctrl-- to zoom out on every site.
- iforapsy 13y ago
  An easy fix for the DPI change in Firefox 22 is to set layout.css.devPixelsPerPx in about:config to 1.0. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/962945?page=2#answer-452951 https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/962945?page=2#an...
codesuela 13y ago
Sentiment in the comments indicates how I feel: FirefoX is now the New Browser To use if you want privacy and security but wait there is more: the sole act of installing it is a charitable donation towards the free internet. Firefox problems aside (caugh no multiprocess execution model caugh) thats still a strong sales pitich. And that is one of the few (hip?) trends WE get to influence if not decide the choice wich Browser our close aquaintances use. And that is awesome and and i encurage everyone to excersise it. Bretheren lets turn the tide and make FF no 1 again by leading with a good example! As a long time DDG user and recently reformed ex chrome user I say: Hutzzah PS please pardon my autocorrect
baby 13y ago
Things I advise you to install on Firefox : Tree Style Tab[1] Basically what it does is display the tabs on the left, thus occupying a space that is rarely used on websites (borders). It is so practical for managing many tabs, nesting tabs etc... that I can't understand why a power user who uses a lot of tabs would switch to chrome. Just try to use it for a day or a week and it will change your life. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  Tree style tabs. All-in-one sidebar. Vimperator. Ghostery. Adblock Plus. Stylish (or Stylebot). I've come to rather love the latter under Chrome, which I've been using increasingly lately. Readability. Torbutton. That's off the top of my head, there's a few others I typically add. My main problem with FF lately is that with _both_ FF (well, Iceweasel) and Chromium installed, Chrome pigs out all available memory, while Firefox is single-processed. While the _active_ Chrome tab usually frees up fairly quickly if swapped, Firefox can literally take minutes to dig itself out of heavy swap. Yeah, I still use spinning rust.
  - baby 13y ago
    There's Adblock Plus Pop-up which is a must have as well.
ionwake 13y ago
Why does anyone trust DuckDuckGo more than Google? I am really confused
- thrownaway2424 13y ago
  The only sensible comment in the entire thread! There is no reason whatsoever to trust DDG more than Google. In fact you'd think it far more likely that DDG is a stooge of the NSA than is Google. I do personally find this thread quite amusing because it's so irrational. Firefox + DDG is so slow for searching that you might as well erase 10 years of browser performance improvements and downgrade your DSL line. Chrome omnibar + prefetch + google instant makes for much faster searching vs. firefox which lacks all of those things (and DDG which lacks "instant"). Also I have to type the entire search into firefox's search bar because DDG doesn't have suggestions. And let's not even talk about the gulf in quality between DDG and Google.
- Skalman 13y ago
  Because at the very least it doesn't use tracking cookies, which we know Google does. Whether it tracks based on IP and/or browser fingerprint is impossible to tell - there we have to take their word for it.
bhauer 13y ago
I was surprised to see praise for Chrome's omnibar here. The meddlesome assumption that everything I type into the URL bar is or should be a Google search drives me crazy when I use Chrome. By comparison, Firefox's URL bar does an incredible job of matching fragments of URLs to my history and bookmarks. My personal project has the word "taskforce" in the domain and title. In Firefox, I can type "task" and it's at the top of the options every single time. One down arrow, enter, and done. Chrome puts it as option five under a search for "task" and three predictive recommendations from Google's search engine that start with "task" (none of which I have ever visited in Chrome). "Taskstream log in"? I don't even know what that means. Essentially everything I want to select in the omnibar is always several items down the list. Very frustrating and inevitably one of the chief reasons I close Chrome and switch back to Firefox.
- epmatsw 13y ago
  HN is the most obvious example of this for me. It's one of my most visited sites in both browsers. In Firefox, I can type "y" into the url field, and it's the first result. In Chrome, the same "y" lists youtube, y, yahoo, and youtube (again) before HN.
  - clicks 13y ago
    Try typing 'n'... seeing as the url of this website is news.ycombinator.com. It doesn't start with y, as youtube or yahoo does.
    - oblio 13y ago
      Well, for me that's a fault. Why should the search have to begin with the starting letter of the site? Or why should that be favored? I'd rather point me to the most likely site containing that letter/group of letter. Oh well, it's probably personal preference :)
- stephengillie 13y ago
  I haven't had this problem since I turned off predictive search for the omnibar.
steve918 13y ago
I find it interesting that everyone suggests switching to Firefox and then changing the default search engine since a good deal of Mozilla's income comes from Google paying to be the default search engine.
- decryptthis_NSA 13y ago
  Less data-points for Google /NSA the better it is. Firefox managed quite fine even without $300 million a year and the idea is not use Google for everything, not to ensure that FF has billions in their bank account
jnbiche 13y ago
I also made this switch, and am slowly trying to find my way off of Google services (mostly gmail). I really like Chrome, and might have stayed with Chromium if there had been an easy to install bookmark and password sync server I could run like Firefox has with Weave (for obvious reasons, I no longer want my sync data centralized with Google). Chromium apparently has a server you can run at home, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to do it. In addition, Chrome for Android has no support for self-hosted sync, so unlike with Firefox I couldn't sync my mobile devices even if I could set up a self-hosted server. With Firefox, hosting your own sync server is trivial: there are even several different implementations of the Weave server besides Mozilla. I miss Chrome, since I was very happy with the performance and dev tools, but I've made my decision and will live with it (except when I need to test web development stuff in Chrome).
_pmf_ 13y ago
I'd like to switch back to Firefox, but it's such an unbearably slow hog that I cannot force myself doing it, and I'm not even using anything JS intensive.
draven 13y ago
In Firefox, typing /downl[return] will open a link titled "download" on the current page Using ' (Quick Find within link-text only) instead of / (Quick Find ) is even faster/easier.
drunkenmasta 13y ago
anyone else think that the bigger DuckDuckGo gets the more likely it will turn into something similar to Google in terms of less privacy?
amenod 13y ago
Two suggestions: 1) if you are concerned about privacy you should also turn off malware protection in FF because it sends pages that you visit to Google (yes, I know their privacy policy - do you trust them?). For additional points you can open about:config, search for "google" and remove all occurences. Point being: even FF doesn't completely protect your privacy by default. 2) DDG is great and I use it, but if I were really concerned about privacy I would use a non-US provider (StartPage is based in Netherlands, not sure where they host their servers though). Point being: DDG claims they don't store user data, but that doesn't mean NSA doesn't either. If they are USA based, they must obey USA laws.
tokyovapr 13y ago
Blog post about why DuckDuckGo cannot provide any real privacy assurances when it comes to the NSA... http://etherrag.blogspot.jp/2013/07/duck-duck-go-illusion-of-privacy.html http://etherrag.blogspot.jp/2013/07/duck-duck-go-illusion-of...
kentwistle 13y ago
Looks good! Omnibar instantly makes Firefox more familiar. I have decided to switch back to Mozilla, they seem far more ethical than any competing browser vendor. So I too am going to switch for a while. Firefox & DuckDuckGo.

179 points by abentspoon 13y ago

One really nice thing about firefox is no more He's Dead Jim pages. Chrome (even stable) seems to crash tabs all the time, while in the past 6 months firefox nightly hasn't crashed more than a once or twice. Another annoying thing about chrome is I never got a reason for a crash it just was a crash page and if I tried to reload that page it was very likely to crash silently again, with chrome at least I get the stop script dialog once in a while. Chrome still starts faster (more noticable on windows than linux). There are also a plethora of webkit optimized experiments that don't work for shit on firefox.

jlgaddis 13y ago
> One really nice thing about firefox is no more He's Dead Jim pages. It took me a minute to figure out what you were referring to then I realized I haven't seen one of those in months -- since, I believe, I stopped using Flash.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

barista 13y ago
Windows 8 does this across machines
- Kelet 13y ago
  Argh, you replied just when I had deleted. Sorry. To anyone wondering my comment was saying that I couldn't find any service comparable to Google's sync last time I tried Firefox. Google's sync effortlessly syncs all machines tied to an account including bookmarks, extensions, and themes. I figured I'd try out the latest Firefox and see if I can get it working before I definitively make the comment. Thanks for the tip though. The machines I want to sync between are Windows 7 and Linux though, so no can do.
  - dignan 13y ago
    Firefox sync doesn't do the trick? https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-sync-take-your-bookmarks-and-tabs-with-you https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-sync-take-your-...
    - area51org 13y ago
      It does in theory, but there have been some service problems of late (for a few weeks). I turned it off after growing tired of the error messages.
  - jlgaddis 13y ago
    When I needed/wanted this feature, I found that Delicious (and their plug-in) was the best fit for me.

barista 13y ago

One question, Why?

epmatsw 13y ago
Firefox is comparable to Chrome in terms speed and features. However, Mozilla doesn't have the same incentive to collect and use data on their customers that is inherent to Google, an advertising company. In addition to that, Firefox is fully open source, unlike Chrome which contains closed source components from Google.
- area51org 13y ago
  ... and, as I mention above, the Mac version has been pretty bad over the last few months, enough to drive users away (including me).
  - epmatsw 13y ago
    Really? I've been using Nightly exclusively on my laptop and haven't noticed any problems. Maybe just lucky. Edit: Oh, the mac version of Chrome. Gotcha.
    - area51org 13y ago
      Yeah, I'm still on Chrome on various Windows VMs and PCs with no problem.
rschmitty 13y ago
People are concerned about their privacy
lurkinggrue 13y ago
To me Firefox wins over Chrome for interface customization. Can't take that "One size fits all" mentality of Chrome.
- 13y ago

Hilyin 13y ago

My biggest problems with Firefox after using Chrome for so long is stability. I find that web pages can lock up the entire browser rather than just a tab, and this isn't just a rare occurrence, when I tried to give it a chance a week ago, it happened several times. I am amazed they still haven't picked up the separate process per tab feature yet.

fizz_and_buzz 13y ago
Really? That seems odd. I have been using firefox on a 6 year old macbook pro for many years and mac is not exactly there best supported platform. I can't remember the last time this happened to me. Do you have a test case which can be replicated? What's your platform?
lurkinggrue 13y ago
I never could make the switch to Chrome due to the limited interface. That and the Proxy setup being the IE control panel.
Wilya 13y ago
The separate process per tabs feature has different drawbacks. Notably, it means Chrome uses more memory and can handle way less simultaneous open tabs than Firefox. I'm glad both approaches exist.
mcpherrinm 13y ago
The project to do this (Electrolysis) turned out to be a lot more effort than I think people anticipated, and was paused for a while last year to allow some other changes to happen. It resumed this year, and you can follow development from https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis which includes links to meeting notes and the experimental branch if you want to try it out.

binarymax 13y ago

I made the switch to DDG about 2 years ago and am pretty happy, though I do occasionally use the !g. Switched back to FF on my desktop a couple months ago when I got my keon and I love it. The only thing that's hard to get used to again is a search bar separate from an address bar. Chrome really had that figured out. A unified bar in FF would make it the perfect browser.

k-mcgrady 13y ago
When I was using Firefox I used this extension to unify the address/search bars. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/omnibar/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/omnibar/
- binarymax 13y ago
  Wow, thanks!
- epmatsw 13y ago
  Is this not default behavior? I've never had an addon installed, but just typing in a query and pressing enter in the URL routes it to Google... Edit: Ah, I suppose the auto-complete is different.
  - binarymax 13y ago
    Also Sometimes for some non URL queries it defaults to what feels like an 'I'm feeling lucky' search.
    - FreeFull 13y ago
      I don't think it does that anymore. I haven't observed it for quite a while.
      - wukkuan 13y ago
        I can confirm that. I really miss that feature.

daturkel 13y ago

Is there any substitute in firefox for Chrome's keyword searching? That's the only chrome feature I really care about.

wcunning 13y ago
If you mean going to the address bar, typing wiki [tab] and getting a search of wikipedia for whatever you type next, then yes. See this article on how to do it: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from-address-bar https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from-address....
cpeterso 13y ago
Firefox has built-in support for Keyword Search bookmarks. You don't need to install an add-on to create aliases. If you bookmark any website's search results page, you can add a keyword and edit the bookmarked URL to include a printf-style %s placeholder. When you enter the keyword plus some string, Firefox opens the bookmarked URL, substituting your string for %s. For example, I have a "w" keyword search for Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/index.php?search=%s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/index.php?search=%s and a "yt" keyword search for YouTube https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s&search=Search https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s&search=Searc...
- daturkel 13y ago
  Awesome, that's exactly what I was looking for.

dotmanish 13y ago

fwiw, FireFox on MacOS shrinks the tabs to favicon before scrolling, without using an add-on. The article screenshots indicate it spoke of Linux.

dendory 13y ago

I've never used Chrome, always been on Firefox so that part is really not a big deal for me, but I did try DDG in the past and there always comes a point where results aren't quite up to par.

cupcake-unicorn 13y ago

I actually never ended up switching to Chrome from Firefox in the first place, but those are still good tips. I guess I did the right thing :) Yes, it has a terrible memory leak issue, but all of my computers have enough ram as to not notice. I'm still not ready to make the switch to DuckDuckGo. I figure that if I'm going to stick with Gmail no matter what, if Google already has that information, collecting a few search queries is nothing. Also, perhaps I'm missing something, but as far as I can tell Chrome is at least partially open source, no? http://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/get-the-code http://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/get-the-code Why aren't people forking it to create a more privacy friendly version?

jmillikin 13y ago
> Also, perhaps I'm missing something, but as far as I > can tell Chrome is at least partially open source, no? > http://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/get-the-code > > Why aren't people forking it to create a more privacy > friendly version? People citing privacy as a reason to move away from Chrome are doing so on moral rather than technical grounds. Chromium itself doesn't have anything harmful in it, so there's no point in forking. Chrome is just Chromium plus some third-party proprietary plugins (Flash, the PDF renderer).
- kryten 13y ago
  Well you hope it is. All sorts can happen between source and binary.
  - jmillikin 13y ago
    There's enough security researchers (of any hat color) crawling over the Chrome binaries that I'm fairly confident there are no backdoors being introduced. To verify, you could disassemble the Chrome binary and compare it against a disassembled Chromium binary that you built. You could also use a packet sniffer and/or MITM proxy to verify that no unexpected data transmissions are occurring.
    - 13y ago

ashmud 13y ago

As a long time Opera+FF user, I'm surprised I never came across the Custom Tab Width add-on, or even bothered to look for such an add-on. Made my day. :)

eCa 13y ago
Tab Mix Plus is another option, with plenty of settings for everything concerning tabs: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/tab-mix-plus/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/tab-mix-plus/

area51org 13y ago

As a Mac guy, I switched back to Firefox when Chrome became practically unusable (slow, crashy). Pleasant surprise: Firefox is snappier and much-evolved since I last used it. Haven't tried DuckDuckGo yet, but I know my day is coming.

hnriot 13y ago
This makes no sense. I, like many people here use a Mac and Chrome and can't remember the last time it crashed. I suspect this is something specific to your installation, possibly a rogue plugin you've installed. My experience is quite the opposite to yours. neither ff or chrome crash much, and chrome is significantly faster.
- area51org 13y ago
  On my system -- and I've tried everything I could think of, including blowing away my profile -- it's slow, crashy, and hangs a lot. It's a newish Macbook Pro with plenty of disk and RAM. FF, on the other hand, is faster (!) and doesn't crash often.
mayhew 13y ago
I hope Firefox's OS X integration improves soon. Lion-style scrollbars, the bouncy effect when you hit the top and bottom of a page, and back/forward swipes have no animation. It's pretty terrible in terms of usability compared to Safari and Chrome.
- Watabou 13y ago
  It has all that in the latest Firefox Nightly. Chrome only has the black back/forward animations. Firefox Nightly's animation is exactly like Safari, although you has to enable them specifically for now in about:config. It also has ML-style scrollbars where they enlarge when you mouse over them. So OS X integration has certainly improved.

jlgaddis 13y ago

> But the keyboard shortcuts mean I can ... without reaching for the mouse, and using a very limited set of shortcuts. This is why I love vimperator[0]. I actually preferred pentadactyl[1] but development apparently stalled so I switched back. [0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/vimperator/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/vimperator/ [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/pentadactyl/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/pentadactyl/

gnosis 13y ago
As a long-time user of Pentadactyl, Firefox, and vim, I'd like to make the heretical suggestion to try w3m in emacs. Having a web browser fully integrated in to a powerful editor like that is fantastic. It's far more powerful than what you'd get from the Pentadactyl/Firefox combination, with the disadvantage that w3m can't handle Javascript.[1] w3m's also far faster and a lot less bloated than Firefox. For sites that work without Javascript and where I only care about getting information in text format (which is probalby 99% of the sites I use), it's just about perfect for me. For the rest, I have Firefox, Opera, and Chromium as backups. [1] This is not a big loss on most sites, as they can usually be used just fine without it. In fact, it's often good to have Javascript turned off so as to avoid Javascript exploits, tracking and advertising.
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  The most annoying thing about w3m for me these days is the fonts in my default terminal window. I've been shopping around for a better alternative (GNOME terminal or XFCE4's terminal seem to beat my trusty old rxvt). The ability to dynamically resize fonts is also kind of nice (yeah, I'm old school). That and the fact that color settings for w3m are pretty hard to tweak just right for whatever terminal / foreground/background you're using. The fact that so many pages render much more readably without CSS is .... sad, actually.

anthemcg 13y ago

"Chrome Inspector is nice and all, but Firebug is clearly superior. I no longer recall why I hold this opinion. I'm looking forward to finding out." For some reason, I also think this exact thing.I also know other people who share this sentiment. I wonder if it comes from Firebug just being the first to the scene?

cromwellian 13y ago
In my experience, Chrome is way better than Firebug or Firefox's builtin tools for development. Firefox's debugger doesn't appear to have any way to debug webworkers for example. You can't reformat source. They only just got SourceMap support and it doesn't appear to work as good. No syntax coloring. Poor profiling tools, can't get a timeline which shows frames per second, breakdown of paint/style recalc/layout/composite, no memory/heap profiling UI, etc. No explorer for local storage or filesystem apis, no manager for app-cache. Nothing like chrome://net-internals for analyzing network issues, and on and on. I'm sure they'll fix all that in time, they have a good development team, but to say Firebug is clearly superior is obviously based on not having used the Chrome tools to do anything significant.

andrasokros 13y ago

I tried Chrome last week, but I still think the FF has a better UX, so I switched back. My biggest problems was that, out of the box, Chrome's address bar is just plain bad. It only shows 5 possible targets, while in FF I can go through my whole history, and the most used page comes up first. I didn't really noticed that I used it that much, until I tried Chrome. This goes for the Android versions as well. If I click the address bar there in Chrome, it will go to the edit mode, which I rarely use. In contrast FF goes into edit mode + it shows relevant possibles from history underneath.

rc4algorithm 13y ago

Another particular nagging problem with Firefox is that "full screen doesn't even hide the tabs or address bar (just the OS X bar, assuming you're using OS X). It would be nice if you can add a way to change Firefox's settings so that, in full screen, the only thing visible is the web page.

Skalman 13y ago
On my Linux fullscreen (F11) shows nothing but web content.

gnosis 13y ago

I've been using DDG and Firefox for years now, and don't miss Google at all. The main thing I'm really annoyed with DDG about is that they don't (no longer?) treat double-quoted search terms as literal. I'll often get results that are close to but not exactly what I asked for. This is really frustrating, as my entire intention in double quoting search terms is to ask for exactly those search terms and nothing else. As far as DDG's privacy boasts go, I'd love to see them confirmed by frequent audits from a trusted and respected entity like the EFF. For all we know, DDG might be lying (or being forced to lie) about not tracking or spying on its users and not handing over the data it collects on us to others. My motto is: trust but verify. So far, there's no way to do that in the case of DDG. Still, I'd much rather use a service that at least pays (pretty convincing) lip service to respecting its users' privacy than services where there's clear evidence of abuse and contempt for its users' privacy, such as Google or Facebook.

hnriot 13y ago
DDG is Bing with some front end work, why not just use Bing and then you can use quotes searches without problem [1] [1] http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/ff524480.aspx http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/ff524480.aspx
- mtgx 13y ago
  I assume because he switched to DDG for privacy reasons, not because he thought the search was better. Also DDG has some search features that neither Google nor Bing have. For people who still like Google search more, but want the privacy, I'd suggest startpage.com. I see even the Tor Browser Bundle uses it as the default search engine (you can still switch to DDG and others, too).
- gnosis 13y ago
  It's not just Bing. "DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "about 50" sources, including Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wikipedia, Wolfram Alpha, Bing, its own Web crawler, the DuckDuckBot, and others."[1] [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duckduckgo#Features https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duckduckgo#Features

ibrahima 13y ago

I can't believe someone misses Chrome's "Tiny Tab" thing, I think it's the single most broken thing about the browser. In Firefox I used to use multi row tabs and then Tree style tabs when I had too many tabs. In Chrome all I can do is open a new window. I don't see what's useful at all about having 20 reddit icons. (pretty much switched to Chrome entirely because of web development and Firefox taking too long to reload, but might switch back once I don't need to do web dev for a while).

teaneedz 13y ago

I made this switch myself recently. The web dev tools in FF are still a bit weak in pseudo areas and media queries but I'm living with it for now. BTW, why doesn't Firefox have "paste & match style"? DDG is also my go-to search engine. Personally, I feel better supporting Mozilla and DDG more.

Spittie 13y ago

I'm glad to see more and more people switching (back) to Firefox, as I admit I'm quite a Firefox fanboy. I've never made the full switch to Chrome. First, as a long time linux user, Firefox was never so bad on it (startup time, random freeze for i/o...). Second, when Chrome was (a lot) faster Firefox had way more addons. Now Chrome has kinda fixed that (I still miss some essential addons, like Tree Style Tab), but Firefox is again about as fast as Chrome. Regarding Google, I've found that it's result are often better than DuckDuckGo. But I promised myself that sometime I'll make a week using only DuckDuckGo, and see if I can survive without Google.

joeblau 13y ago
I used DDG for two months and as a developer trying to find the latest bugs, code snippets, and help; It was a lot harder on DDG than in Google. I would always end up having to type google.com <tab> in my address bar to search for programming related items. That being said, people have pointed me to resources to help me improve my search results.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- k-mcgrady 13y ago
  On DDG you can add !g to the start or end of a query and it will do the search on Google.
  - Spittie 13y ago
    That's one of the best, and yet one of the worst feature of DuckDuckGo. When I tried using it a while ago, I ended up always searching for "!g <query>", since I knew I would always get equal or better results. I'm glad it's this easy to search on Google from DuckDuckGo, but it also makes the switch harder. Or, at least, it did for me.
    - k-mcgrady 13y ago

1O0101ll100O 13y ago

You can still use the Googlesharing addon to proxy your searches through a concentrator. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/googlesharing/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/googlesharing... As long as you trust the proxy to not be an adversary. Sometimes[often times] the default proxy will go down. I've had luck using the following alternate: googlesharing.riseup.net

cenhyperion 13y ago

I made the exact same two switches over the past week and agree with the author. Honestly it's been great. I'm also slowly migrating away from my gmail and to a hosted email on my domain.

JefWin 13y ago

Are people switching to DuckDuckGo simply because of paranoia? I don't care if Google knows whatever I'm searching for, it helps them improve their search results. DuckDuckGo's search is nowhere near as good as Google.

teeja 13y ago

Over several years of comparing, I find DDG results are fine for reasonably common questions and recent stuff. Sometimes when doing deep searches for more arcane topics (especially farther back in history) Google will get to what I'm looking for sooner. But I usually use Google Books for that stuff (which is where they retain a -big- advantage).

dewarrn1 13y ago

Searching the current page for links in Firefox (using ') is a great feature and one of the things I miss most when I have to use Chrome.

tbe 13y ago
I wish there was a way to do this search only on the currently visible part of the page. Installing a hit-a-hint type of addon would then be less of a prerequisite for me to use the browser.

prettyfly 13y ago

Is there anyway to specify a time range on queries on DuckDuckGo? Such as "last year", "any time", "last week" etc. Works on StartPage but would be nice to have it on DDG too.

hunterjlang 13y ago
check out http://help.dukgo.com/customer/portal/articles/215622 http://help.dukgo.com/customer/portal/articles/215622
- prettyfly 13y ago
  Thanks

carlob 13y ago

I'm currently using DDG + Safari with Glims. I would love to switch to Firefox, the only thing that's holding me back is the lack of a good replacement to ClickToPlugin killers. Those are little js that will remove the flash/silverlight video and replace it with an mp4. This also effectively kills youtube ads.

tempestn 13y ago

DDG's obviously gotten a massive boost from this whole issue: https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=duckduckgo https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=duckduckgo I was a bit surprised that Firefox hasn't: https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=firefox https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=firefox but obviously it has a lot more inertia. (Or maybe everyone switches to DDG first, and THEN looks for Firefox, so Google Trends doesn't know about it...)

hayksaakian 13y ago
it is the #1 related term (duckduckgo firefox) as of just now also compare them: https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=firefox#q=firefox%2C%20duckduckgo&cmpt=q https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=firefox#q=firefox%2C... firefox jumped about as much as ddg recently, but that's a blip on firefox as a whole
- tempestn 13y ago
  Ya, that's what I meant by the 'inertia' of Firefox. It takes a lot to move the needle on it. The comparison is definitely illustrative though. (The part about everyone finding Firefox on DDG was a joke.)

ww520 13y ago

I use Firefox mainly and Chrome/IE for testing sometimes. Firefox has been pretty solid; however, one really annoying change in v22 is that it blows up the default zoom level. That makes websites look very big. They said it's honoring the DDP setting on Windows and for HiRes monitor, but it looks like a bug or a misguided feature. I really hope they revert the change. I'm tired of hitting ctrl-- to zoom out on every site.

iforapsy 13y ago
An easy fix for the DPI change in Firefox 22 is to set layout.css.devPixelsPerPx in about:config to 1.0. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/962945?page=2#answer-452951 https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/962945?page=2#an...

codesuela 13y ago

Sentiment in the comments indicates how I feel: FirefoX is now the New Browser To use if you want privacy and security but wait there is more: the sole act of installing it is a charitable donation towards the free internet. Firefox problems aside (caugh no multiprocess execution model caugh) thats still a strong sales pitich. And that is one of the few (hip?) trends WE get to influence if not decide the choice wich Browser our close aquaintances use. And that is awesome and and i encurage everyone to excersise it. Bretheren lets turn the tide and make FF no 1 again by leading with a good example! As a long time DDG user and recently reformed ex chrome user I say: Hutzzah PS please pardon my autocorrect

baby 13y ago

Things I advise you to install on Firefox : Tree Style Tab[1] Basically what it does is display the tabs on the left, thus occupying a space that is rarely used on websites (borders). It is so practical for managing many tabs, nesting tabs etc... that I can't understand why a power user who uses a lot of tabs would switch to chrome. Just try to use it for a day or a week and it will change your life. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

dredmorbius 13y ago
Tree style tabs. All-in-one sidebar. Vimperator. Ghostery. Adblock Plus. Stylish (or Stylebot). I've come to rather love the latter under Chrome, which I've been using increasingly lately. Readability. Torbutton. That's off the top of my head, there's a few others I typically add. My main problem with FF lately is that with _both_ FF (well, Iceweasel) and Chromium installed, Chrome pigs out all available memory, while Firefox is single-processed. While the _active_ Chrome tab usually frees up fairly quickly if swapped, Firefox can literally take minutes to dig itself out of heavy swap. Yeah, I still use spinning rust.
- baby 13y ago
  There's Adblock Plus Pop-up which is a must have as well.

ionwake 13y ago

Why does anyone trust DuckDuckGo more than Google? I am really confused

thrownaway2424 13y ago
The only sensible comment in the entire thread! There is no reason whatsoever to trust DDG more than Google. In fact you'd think it far more likely that DDG is a stooge of the NSA than is Google. I do personally find this thread quite amusing because it's so irrational. Firefox + DDG is so slow for searching that you might as well erase 10 years of browser performance improvements and downgrade your DSL line. Chrome omnibar + prefetch + google instant makes for much faster searching vs. firefox which lacks all of those things (and DDG which lacks "instant"). Also I have to type the entire search into firefox's search bar because DDG doesn't have suggestions. And let's not even talk about the gulf in quality between DDG and Google.
Skalman 13y ago
Because at the very least it doesn't use tracking cookies, which we know Google does. Whether it tracks based on IP and/or browser fingerprint is impossible to tell - there we have to take their word for it.

bhauer 13y ago

I was surprised to see praise for Chrome's omnibar here. The meddlesome assumption that everything I type into the URL bar is or should be a Google search drives me crazy when I use Chrome. By comparison, Firefox's URL bar does an incredible job of matching fragments of URLs to my history and bookmarks. My personal project has the word "taskforce" in the domain and title. In Firefox, I can type "task" and it's at the top of the options every single time. One down arrow, enter, and done. Chrome puts it as option five under a search for "task" and three predictive recommendations from Google's search engine that start with "task" (none of which I have ever visited in Chrome). "Taskstream log in"? I don't even know what that means. Essentially everything I want to select in the omnibar is always several items down the list. Very frustrating and inevitably one of the chief reasons I close Chrome and switch back to Firefox.

epmatsw 13y ago
HN is the most obvious example of this for me. It's one of my most visited sites in both browsers. In Firefox, I can type "y" into the url field, and it's the first result. In Chrome, the same "y" lists youtube, y, yahoo, and youtube (again) before HN.
- clicks 13y ago
  Try typing 'n'... seeing as the url of this website is news.ycombinator.com. It doesn't start with y, as youtube or yahoo does.
  - oblio 13y ago
    Well, for me that's a fault. Why should the search have to begin with the starting letter of the site? Or why should that be favored? I'd rather point me to the most likely site containing that letter/group of letter. Oh well, it's probably personal preference :)
stephengillie 13y ago
I haven't had this problem since I turned off predictive search for the omnibar.

steve918 13y ago

I find it interesting that everyone suggests switching to Firefox and then changing the default search engine since a good deal of Mozilla's income comes from Google paying to be the default search engine.

decryptthis_NSA 13y ago
Less data-points for Google /NSA the better it is. Firefox managed quite fine even without $300 million a year and the idea is not use Google for everything, not to ensure that FF has billions in their bank account

jnbiche 13y ago

I also made this switch, and am slowly trying to find my way off of Google services (mostly gmail). I really like Chrome, and might have stayed with Chromium if there had been an easy to install bookmark and password sync server I could run like Firefox has with Weave (for obvious reasons, I no longer want my sync data centralized with Google). Chromium apparently has a server you can run at home, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to do it. In addition, Chrome for Android has no support for self-hosted sync, so unlike with Firefox I couldn't sync my mobile devices even if I could set up a self-hosted server. With Firefox, hosting your own sync server is trivial: there are even several different implementations of the Weave server besides Mozilla. I miss Chrome, since I was very happy with the performance and dev tools, but I've made my decision and will live with it (except when I need to test web development stuff in Chrome).

_pmf_ 13y ago

I'd like to switch back to Firefox, but it's such an unbearably slow hog that I cannot force myself doing it, and I'm not even using anything JS intensive.

draven 13y ago

In Firefox, typing /downl[return] will open a link titled "download" on the current page Using ' (Quick Find within link-text only) instead of / (Quick Find ) is even faster/easier.

drunkenmasta 13y ago

anyone else think that the bigger DuckDuckGo gets the more likely it will turn into something similar to Google in terms of less privacy?

amenod 13y ago

Two suggestions: 1) if you are concerned about privacy you should also turn off malware protection in FF because it sends pages that you visit to Google (yes, I know their privacy policy - do you trust them?). For additional points you can open about:config, search for "google" and remove all occurences. Point being: even FF doesn't completely protect your privacy by default. 2) DDG is great and I use it, but if I were really concerned about privacy I would use a non-US provider (StartPage is based in Netherlands, not sure where they host their servers though). Point being: DDG claims they don't store user data, but that doesn't mean NSA doesn't either. If they are USA based, they must obey USA laws.

tokyovapr 13y ago

Blog post about why DuckDuckGo cannot provide any real privacy assurances when it comes to the NSA... http://etherrag.blogspot.jp/2013/07/duck-duck-go-illusion-of-privacy.html http://etherrag.blogspot.jp/2013/07/duck-duck-go-illusion-of...

kentwistle 13y ago

Looks good! Omnibar instantly makes Firefox more familiar. I have decided to switch back to Mozilla, they seem far more ethical than any competing browser vendor. So I too am going to switch for a while. Firefox & DuckDuckGo.