Switching from Chrome to Firefox(frunc.de) |
Switching from Chrome to Firefox(frunc.de) |
We just have to look at what profiles and containers do to understand that while useful, containers can't replace profiles.
The Firefox UI for profile management is just awful. If it were as good as the MAC UI it wouldn't be a point of contention.
If Firefox doesn't restore all your windows on startup, try hitting ctrl+shift+n, that should reopen the last (non-private) window you closed. In my experience this works across sessions, as long as you don't erase the browser history.
You can rebind it back to a normal alt key at the operating system level if you don't care about the AltGr functionality, that'll probably fix a whole bunch of unexpected problems you may be having in other programs. I think Firefox altering the ctrl+alt+left/right behaviour would break more workflows than it fixes, to be honest.
What's it likely to break? I don't have anything bound to that combo by default.
I am not a tab hoarder, I almost never have more than **15** of them open at the same time.You guys have two Google accounts? I didn’t know that this was even possible.
This can be because of a bug in autodetection but it can also happen when you orient your monitor vertically, which many people do with secondary monitors.
Assuming the author has set up ClearType right on their computer, I believe this may be a Firefox bug. ClearType on Windows should take care of this stuff already.
He hits the nail on the head. Why support the fascist empire when you can support those making it better. That said, if you really wanted a privacy focused browser then the Bromine, Waterfox, Opera, DuckDuckGo and Tempest browsers should all be investigated.
For instance it mentions how troublesome it is to use profiles as a "problem". Don't. Use containers. Hundred times more smooth than profiles. Hence why no one cares about making profiles in Fx better, there is already a better solution to the problem profiles solve.
Never had problems with font rendering. The download manager being different isn't a "problem", and even Chrome is changing it to become more like Fx's [0]. So it's not like Fx's version is "bad", just different.
I'd rather have an article on "Switching from Chrome to Firefox? Here are some tips on great features in Firefox".
Like how to use the multi-account containers I mentioned. Or how the address bar ("awesome bar") in Firefox is so much greater than Chrome's in finding stuff (probably because Google wants you to do a google search, not find stuff from your own history or bookmarks). On how Sidebery or other tree-style tabs can make the experience so nice. etc.
My work profile has uBlock Origin with stricter rules which would break some sites/tools I use for work. I also redirect Twitter to Nitter, use a different password manager, etc.
For bookmarks, it's more a question of not wanting to have personal stuff together with work stuff. Then there's some settings that works on one profile but would cause issues (or annoyances) on the other. I also have a different theme for each profile, which stops me from doing personal stuff on sites with my work login (eg: searching on Google).
I also have a profile that is just for the shittiest sites I sometimes find online. I'll have extensions to block the crap, archive pages, etc, which would slow down browsing or break most sites I use.
On Chromium, I had one browser and 3 profiles. Then I decided to move to Firefox and since using profiles (especially switching/opening them, at least on Mac) is a pain, I use 3 different browsers (Firefox, Firefox Dev/Beta, Waterfox) as they all have their own profiles.
Could I live with only one profile? Yes, but that would force me to compromise. Containers alone? I tried to use them, but stopped after searching for stuff on Google and YouTube on the container I had my work Google account logged in. Profiles + Containers are the best of both worlds in one plane.
> but stopped after searching for stuff on Google and YouTube on the container I had my work Google account logged in
Thought I'd mention though, that this is one of the areas I find containers a life-saver. Google's handling of multiple accounts is so badly broken, that I only ever log into a single account on a single container. Easy to keep work and personal Google separate then.
How can you have different bookmarks, extensions, and maybe even a different theme (so you know you're using the right window) with containers?
The answer is: you can't. Because containers and profiles are different things.
That's the "sacrifice" you're asking users to make. To change the way they use browsers, to adapt to something that is useful, but not a complete replacement for the features they want. You're asking them to mix stuff and to be careful not to type personal stuff on a work container (or something like that).
Yes, changing from Chrome to Firefox (and vice-versa) means that you need to make some sacrifices. I moved to Firefox and lost good profile support, have a higher battery drain, and have to deal with Firefox's inconsistencies (UI, ctrl+click behaving differently on links vs bookmarks, etc). I'm okay with the trade-off, but PR talk and positive outlooks don't make these annoyances and downsides go away.
> The answer is: you can't. Because containers and profiles are different things.
If that's what you need then just use Firefox profiles then! The thing is, most people don't need that, and containers offert better ergonomics for the majority use-case (like the one described in the post). But if you still need the niche use-case, then go ahead and use a profile in Firefox too.
Okay, so what's the logical conclusion here? That the person is lying?
The font rendering is very much off, some people just don't notice or don't care. Denying something others see with their own eyes doesn't help anybody.
Firefox uses my system defined default fonts (DejaVu Sans, DejaVu Serif, Hack) where Chrome completely ignores the system fonts.
IMO using the system defaults is the correct action here.
Anyway after manually configuring Chrome to use the system defaults they look identical to me:
Firefox: https://i.imgur.com/Zplpyiq.png
Chrome: https://i.imgur.com/YWkeZjh.png
So no, font rendering on FF seems fine to me...
Maybe I'm getting old and my eyes aren't seeing the differences but they look the same to me.
I think the commentary is taking an issue with the suggestion that there's something "wrong" with Firefox's font rendering, when it's really Chrome who is the outlier.
Except for those of us with profile specific extensions, which containers don't help with at all.
I would do that if I could get separate history for a different containers.
* Create new container "target"
* Open new Target container
* Go to target.com
* Click the container menu and choose "Always open in..." and if you have a lot of containers, scroll down to "Target"
And then, you still get asked "Hey, you told us to open this in the target container, is that correct?" even though I have *explicitly* said that's exactly what I want.
---
I would like a shortcut button for any site that isn't assigned to a container, where I could click the container menu and say "Create new container and assign this site to it" where it all happens at once. Boom, site isolated.
If this problem is persona/identity/account isolation, then yes.
If you want multiple parallel settings and add-on combinations, then no. I use profiles in firefox for this specific reason.
I've no idea about chrome because I don't use it, but I haven't found any problem with firefox profiles for this purpose anyhow - I just configure the desktop to start firefox with -new-instance -ProfileManager and choose the profile at startup.
If I want multiple profiles simultaneously, I just start them up on different virtual desktops.
I use Chrome and Firefox interchangeably so I don't have a dog in this fight. Containers aka Personalities needs to be made a first class feature in Firefox and not require the above steps to make it useful to the less tech savy end user.
1. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-use-firefox-contain... 2. https://imgur.com/a/mX1P25J 3. https://imgur.com/a/fNyRnLk 4. https://imgur.com/a/GjxJwIP
Officially, you enable them through the MAC extension, which also adds some more UI.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
Other extensions (like Tree Style Tab) can also cause container tabs to be enabled.
Perhaps the documentation needs an update for the latest version if it's been moved elsewhere.
Edit: I just checked in 116; it appears to just be always enabled now.
That keeps me from using macOS's built-in keybinding system to change tabs with the touch of a function key.
Every other program I use from Finder to my database manager allows me to switch tabs with one button. Firefox has no way to accomplish this, which would make it an interruption to my muscle memory and therefore my productivity.
Duck allows it, so that's what I use instead of Chrome.
Also they don't seem to care one bit about user experience (in the genuine sense). There's a long-standing bug open for > 10yrs that Firefox does not disable sleep when uploading or downloading files. The day that I started a long-running downloaded and came back to find that my laptop had gone to sleep before it even hit 5% was when I uninstalled Firefox in a rage.
> It paints a picture that you need to "sacrifice" something to use Fx and lists various "problems".
Well yes, that was apparently the OP's feeling, along with the belief that overall, the "sacrifices" are worth it. So whether or not the issues felt important (or real) to you, they evidently were for the OP - and possibly other people who are considering switching but as of now are used to Chrome's way of doing things.
> For instance it mentions how troublesome it is to use profiles as a "problem". Don't. Use containers.
If some issue arises because a user hasn't adapted their workflow to the new software and there is in fact a different way of doing things that will result in the same features, that's a legitimate thing to point out. But as the sibling comments make clear, that doesn't seem to be the case here, as containers are missing lots of features that profiles have.
> Never had problems with font rendering.
That's just "works on my machine". OP did have problems, they posted screenshots.
> The download manager being different isn't a "problem", and even Chrome is changing it to become more like Fx's [0]. So it's not like Fx's version is "bad", just different.
FF's download manager is missing a feature that OP actively used, which is drag and drop of downloaded files. So from that point of view, it's clearly a downgrade.
> I'd rather have an article on "Switching from Chrome to Firefox? Here are some tips on great features in Firefox".
Like how to use the multi-account containers I mentioned. Or how the address bar ("awesome bar") in Firefox is so much greater than Chrome's in finding stuff (probably because Google wants you to do a google search, not find stuff from your own history or bookmarks). On how Sidebery or other tree-style tabs can make the experience so nice. etc.
If users have issues with a software, I think it makes a better impression to pick them up from where they are than to do some "there are no problems, move along, citizen" approach.
It's the users who decide what the important issues of a software are, not the developers.
Well, it worked on their machine as well without their fixes. Chrome's font rendering is the one that's the most off from my system behavior, but the article makes it sound like Fx has broken fonts. While it's just a preference from the author.
> FF's download manager is missing a feature that OP actively used, which is drag and drop of downloaded files. So from that point of view, it's clearly a downgrade.
No, it supports that. I use it all the time.
> If users have issues with a software, I think it makes a better impression to pick them up from where they are than to do some "there are no problems, move along, citizen" approach.
My point was that this isn't issues so much as things just being slightly different. When framed as "problems" it however paints them negatively, as if Fx way of doing things are somehow "wrong". That's my issue with the article, not that it points these things out.
Your comment is roughly of the form “that detailed article lists poor solutions to the problems you’ll likely encounter when switching to Firefox, so please instead follow my detailed instructions about alternate ways to fix the problems you’ll likely encounter when switching to Firefox.” It hardly makes anything feel simpler or more enticing!
What exactly does Firefox do differently? I find that the Chrome bar learns very quickly which results to prioritize, based on my input.
You can type three characters from the middle of a word, and Firefox will match it, while Chrome will not.
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server
from the default value of 6 to 24 or 32.
Experimental results for a website: (time until finish loading)
No of Conns Prime Cache w/o Cache
6 (default) 25 s 257 s
12 21 s 212 s
18 18 s 190 s
24 15 s 147 s
Increasing connection count will make HTTP 1.1 websites faster, but they'll also cause random rate limiting errors if you increase the value too much. How high you should set this value is up to you, but it's one of the first things you should reset when websites start acting weird in Firefox but not in other browsers.
Mozilla should up its game in educating the public that Edge and Chrome aren't following the standards correctly. This seems IMHO pretty important in a world where everything relies on the browser to sandbox things.
What's the difference in their CORS implementations? As far as I know all three major browser engines follow the modern spec.
I don’t think most people care about this. What they may care about is whether something works on their default browser, which is likely to be Edge or Safari or Chrome. Mozilla should instead target Microsoft and Google on the standards tracks and in forums where discussions on standards (and on security) happen.
Ultimately we have already passed the point where the web is defined by what Chrome (and to a limited extent what MobileSafari) does.
Which solution are you suggesting? Not having a standard?
I currently use Mac OS and I see no difference between text rendered on Firefox and text rendered in other Mac OS applications, but there is a world of difference between Chrome and anything else.
So if I had to make a bold claim without evidence, I would guess Firefox uses the OS default font rendering (i.e. it will be as bad the rest of your OS), meanwhile Chrome's font rendering is universally bad (i.e. it does not follow what your OS uses, on any platform, and if you don't like it, then there's not much you can do).
95% of the time I'm in Firefox, as one should be -- with all the good adblockers etc.
And for the 5% unavoidable garbage of "things I must use/sign up for in life" that don't implement things properly, including Zoom, I keep Chrome around.
At least use a different chromium based browser instead of chrome itself. Brave is a fine option.
Haven't used Zoom in browser much so can't say what one can find there. I just run the desktop app. It's definitely something where you can go a few years with everything working fine then suddenly hit like 4 sites where you're like "wtf, why is shit so broken?". Chipotle and similar joints' online order pages were another place that would spontaneously break.
And I'm guessing that's either deliberate or lazy on Zoom.
On Mac I still use safari for the performance and battery saving.
I'd bet the cost of all those network calls outweighs anything else in the rendering pipeline.
I'm not sure why but Linux also seems slower in Firefox's benchmarks. My guess is that Mozilla is optimising for their most common users (and Linux users have a high probability of picking Firefox anyway). Hopefully more Windows features will make it into the Linux build soon.
The part about JPEG XL seems strange, given that the article linked in the blog post says Mozilla too is rejecting JPEG XL:
> Mozilla's Martin Thomson wrote that while JPEG XL "offers some potential advantages," it wasn't "performing enough better than its closest competitors (like AV1F) to justify addition on that basis alone."
Could someone maybe clarify this point?
I would add: embrace tab containers (https://support.mozilla.org/fr/kb/utiliser-conteneurs-firefo...), especially if you love chrome profiles.
They do half of what profiles do: they isolate cache, cookies, sessions, etc. But they do so in a very light manner and fast manner. The UI is better too. So for things that don't need getting different settings or extensions and so on, containers are the way to go.
Containers are nice, but you can't have different bookmarks, extensions, settings, etc. It's not a replacement for profiles.
(Though I still use it out of muscle memory. alt+F2 firefox -P is so quick to type.)
Containers on the other hand, fit the use-case of personas perfectly. I can keep logins separate, keep a work / home session separation, etc. Best of all, I set up certain websites to always use a particular container, even when I'm currently browsing in a different container tab. I can't imagine going back to Chrome profiles.
Main account, one for testing (no extensions installed), one for work (with work extensions), one for nsfw content.
Keeps everything nice a separate.
It is like evaluating bicycles based on their towing capacity. Any website that requires a high performance JavaScript implementation is already doing so much wrong that you should just leave.
Mozilla occasionally breaks everything with new Firefox releases, and you can end up with a non-functional tabs bar until you reinstall the newest version of Firefox UI Fix. Not so much a problem if you're a techie, but a big problem for the non-techies you install it for.
Firefox used to have a pretty Chrome-like tabs bar with curved trapezoid corners and a lighter highlight for the selected tab.Then one day they decided that's bad, made it all flat rectangles and inverted the color scheme. Someone on the UX team had to justify their existence I guess. So my muscle memory was telling me that the tab that is selected is not selected and I couldn't get anything done.
Okay not a problem, set up some flags that revert the old scheme, done. A few months later, Mozilla breaks that functionality because fuck you. Okay still not a problem, find and install a custom theme that makes the task bar look normal again.
Half a year later they release a new patch that breaks the custom theme by sliding the tabs bar roughly 50% up so it's being clipped by the fucking window. I no longer have any clue what file changes I made to mod in that custom theme so I'm stuck with a broken install of Firefox unless I nuke my profiles. Yaaaay.
sigh
In my probably decade+ of using it, Chrome has never been this annoying.
This makes old reddit, HN, and google cloud console all dark mode friendly and it really "just works"
Is there a way to re-enable this in chrome? It’s been replaced with the dreaded Firefox downloads butt Next to the address bar.
You can also keep it visible in Firefox. Right click the menu bar, click Customize, right click the downloads button, then unclick the hide when empty button.
It seems like over the past few years Chrome has gotten more comfortable with shoving stuff into the top right section, with icons just popping in and out based on context. I used to have muscle memory for my extensions there, and now from right to left there's a kebab settings overflow button, a profile switcher icon (I don't even use profiles), a reading list button (again, not using that), an extensions overflow puzzle piece icon, and finally my extensions. I always have to think twice before clicking anything up there.
Now having the download button that's only sometimes there is one more thing to throw me off. I couldn't even figure out what would make it disappear. I'd clear the downloads list and it's still there.
You can also just go to `about:profiles` in the address bar, without having to launch Firefox with the -p switch. I even have `about:profiles` as my homepage so when I launch Firefox, I then decide which profile I will be using.
1. You can have multiple profile sessions running at the same time.
2. It is best to theme your alt profiles with a different color so you don't confuse them. For example, green one is for one profile and the red one another.
3. "firefox -p 'profile-name'" launches directly into a profile
4. "firefox -p 'profile-name' -private-window" launches a profile in a private window
5. I use keybindings on linux to auto launch different profiles.
As for why you should consider multiple profiles. It gives you the ability to separate concerns. I use a main account, one for work, one for testing stuff, another that has no extensions, and one for anything NSFW.
Too many of you don't keep NSFW stuff off your work profiles, I'm embarrassed for you during your zoom meetings when the url autocomplete briefly betrays your interests.
Umm, I keep NSFW stuff off my work computer. I'm not really comfortable with less separation than this.
As you should, but I've worked with a lot of new people, and salesmen, that don't get this.
My profile use is about big concerns and work modes. For example my work profile has some developer plugins, separate password managers, bookmarks, and snippets. Doing so keeps everything nice and removed from my home life.
Containers are for separating websites from one another, while profiles are for separating browser bits from one another. This includes settings, plugins, extensions, themes, bookmarks, snippets, password managers, etc.
So my first one is 'Chrome devtools has a little button to instantly switch to mobile view, where you simulate (more or less) the viewport of various mobile devices'. I don't see this in Firefox.
On the bright side, it keeps a running diff of the css changes you make. Super useful when you're trying to fix some stupid layout thing, get it working and then forget all the changes you made.
The CSS dev tools for things like grids and flex in the Firefox dev tools are much better than Chrome's. The debugger is a tad slower if you need to prettify obfuscated Javascript but both do a good enough job at it.
I also prefer the theme Firefox applies to the dev tools, they feel more native and less like something slapped onto the browser.
I currently have Firefox for most things, but I seemingly always have chromium open to check to see if a website isnt behaving correctly.
What a terrible time for computing. Chrome is in total control of web. Nvidia + M$ have complete control of high performance computing, and M$ sucks. Apple captures tons of attention and time with their marketing but has low quality products.
I use Chrome as a fallback too when the measures I've taken to protect my privacy break websites I can't get around, but in most cases websites just work in my experience. Almost all of the issues I run into are caused by addons messing with websites, like content blockers.
Sure there is some half effort from Nvidia to support Linux, but you can do 1 google search to realize Nivida and Linux do not play together nicely.
My only gripe is the loss of Tab Groups (I'm a tab hoarder) and I haven't been able to find a decent replacement.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
You install TST, and then you remove the strip of tabs across the top. Much cleaner look and basically you have all your bookmarks all there, forever. Mostly as unloaded tabs of course but they're one click away in the tree somewhere.
So I switched to Sidebery, which seemed much faster at first and I still have it enabled sometimes. But after a while and many tests to be sure, I found Sidebery was the single reason Firefox was taking an extra 10GB or more RAM. Just today, I opened about ten Hacker News tabs for an afternoon's read, and the RAM usage crept up from 18GB to 28GB. These are text-only sites as you know, and like most people I didn't read the articles only the HN comments :-) So that's a lot of unexplained RAM. I disabled Sidebery in that window and the memory usage crept back down to 18GB. (If I launch Telegam in a Firefox window with Sidebery enabled it goes up to 67GB then crashes as my SSD is too full for that much swap!). If Sidebery is disabled all along, the memory usage doesn't creep up like that.
These are figures reported by iStat Menus on macOS on my laptop. The swapping induced by the higher RAM usage caused scrolling to be extremely janky, as well as editing in forms and text boxes.
So unfortunately for me, to have a reasonable browsing experience, I found I can't use either of the good tab-sidebar extensions Tree Style Tabs or Sidebery with Firefox at the moment, each for a different reason.
I haven't seen other people reporting these issues, and each one took me a while to recognise. Therefore I asume these issues are related in some way to the total numbe of tabs and/or windows I have and that most people aren't affected (enough to matter), or those affected haven't found the cause.
There are some tab group extensions, but I found Simple Tab Groups lost hundreds of my tabs several times, with no indication that it had lost them (they just weren't there when I went to find them later), so I stopped using it.
I wonder if it would be a reasonable task to set up an “opinionated” fork of Firefox with all the changes being UI/UX-related and keep it up to date with mainline… that would make fresh installs more effortless and allow improvements that aren’t practical with regular Firefox.
Is Firefox embracing JXL?
a) Don't hint/grid fit. b) Don't use cleartype color fringing.
That's reason enough to avoid Chrome for me. Compound that with Chrome's low quality image rescaling algorithms (and the absolute boneheadedness of their bug triaging, where any reports about it will invariably get filed under the wrong component and be closed before anyone who can actually understand the problem will look at it) and oh so many SVG rendering quality issues. I really hope Firefox can survive the current leadership and remain a strong alternative for decades more to come.
As of right now there's substantially more browsers that use Blink (and comprise over half of the market share) though so Firefox and Safari will always be outliers.
Safari for some reason is rendering everything at different sizes than Chrome or Firefox, I don’t know why.
The profile interface for FF is archaic and hard to manage.
Separate profiles was always a better solution than contained tabs.
On the other hand containers allow me to specify which ones to open on automatically and so I can use lots of different containers for different uses that I want to separate, e.g. Facebook, Gmail, HN... Something lots of people want to do, but you can't really do with profiles (well you could but it would be super annoying). Moreover I can use temporary containers so I have isolated tabs for all the general browsing (all websites where I haven't specified a specific container) with all the tracking information being deleted as soon as I close the tab.
Actually password managers are very common, and immediately relevant to this conversation. I have a password manager for work, and one for personal. That puts us a bit higher than your pretty dismissive 0.00001% estimate.
Literally the first thing that came to mind and there are many more examples.
I use a tool called Junction which allows me to choose which browser opens up a link, which solves for your second issue.
Isolated browsers are much better than isolated tabs.
To add a new site to a new container, I manually edit the file (accessed through the pencil button) and add the line with the proper syntax:
!*.sketchy-website.tld , My Isolation Container
Regardless, I don't care about profiles or any of this other stuff, but I don't begrudge the author for mentioning things that aren't up my alley. In my mind, when I read a list-based article, I don't expect everything to be relevant to me.
As for my information, I'm comparing the install base for TST with that of uBlock Origin (both only counting Firefox). It's not a perfect measurement, since not all Firefox users have uBO either, but it should if anything overestimate TST's relative popularity.
Tree-style tabs [0] has 163,716 users.
uBlock Origin [1] has 6,175,439 users (only counting Firefox).
That places TST at about 2% of the install base of uBO, which is plenty small to justify my saying that most Firefox users (and prospective users) don't care about TST.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...
For example, here are a pair of pages which make a cross-origin fetch for a resource that either does (yes-cors) or does not (no-cors) opt into cross-origin resource sharing. In all three browsers yes-cors displays the contents of the resource, and no-cors (correctly) displays "error".
https://www.kingfisherband.com/test/yes-cors
https://www.kingfisherband.com/test/no-cors
[1] With the exception of some standardized legacy cross-origin contexts like images, but then they all protect the contents in the same way.
On macOS opening a new profile through that also opens the window in the background and may also mess up your Firefox icons in the dock, not to mention that you'll break your profiles if you make the mistake of opening a profile from a different FF version on your current FF (eg: stable profile on FF Developer can't be opened again by FF stable). We can use profiles, but it's not a good experience.
On Chromium (and Chrome, Brave, etc), there's an icon at the top right corner. You click it, then select the profile and that's it. Fast, simple, user friendly.
(Edit to add: I sometimes forget that the average HN user is different from the average computer user. They're used to click on things, not to type "firefox -P" :P )
The annoying thing for me is that Firefox already has a similar UI button that could easily be adapted to switch profiles. It even looks like Chrome's, but all it does it show you your Firefox/Mozilla account.
It's designed like their goal was to make the few buttons you want to use most the hardest to find.
I'm not going to the profiles page to restart Firefox, show my profile directory in Finder/Explorer, Rename a profile, or Remove a profile. For some reason all those buttons get first placement.
I have to scroll the page down to find the one and only button I want to click every single day.
I don't think I've ever had trouble getting CUDA to run. It seems to be the only thing Nvidia cares about making work reliably on Linux.
Then again, they have the problem that they think that it's appropriate to open the last used profile if you start Chrome again, which can lock out inexperienced users out of the other profile since they don't know how to get that one started.
For me the normal solution of creating separate profiles in Firefox is to use Firefox Portable and have each profile live in their own directory / installation.
Additionnaly virtually everybody owns a smartphone which is used for the personnal stuff.
I've got Firefox, Opera and Chrome and each one has different logins :D gotta be honest, didn't even know Chrome and FF can also do that!
Edge's multi-profile support blows them both out of the water though, with the ability to right click tabs and move them between profiles, automatically open links for certain domains in certain profiles, being able to set a default profile for external links, etc...
Something about chrome DIY’ing font rendering instead of using the platform’s when I last looked into this
Even Edge font rendering started looking way better — only after they switched away from chrome’s diy font rendering.
(Aside: IMO chrome on android is good but all others are bad at font rendering. Probably uses platform rendering on Android)
This is aesthetic preference, there's no such thing as "correct". It goes back to the old debate on Mac vs. Windows font rendering -- do you like pixel alignment or do you like letterform accuracy? There's no right answer.
How?!
This is how example.com renders: https://i.imgur.com/MFo7ACg.png
Pay attention to how the word "illustrative" renders: https://i.imgur.com/lFJIEZG.png
See e.g. the boldness on e.g. the first "l"? Firefox's clearly has two very dark vertical strokes in adjacent pixels -- one black, one dark blue right next to it. Its rendering is substantially bolder than Windows's. I can understand if you personally prefer that, but how can you claim they look the same?!
For example this. I'm trying hard to click on the "Sun 1 Oct" button.
Google sites - with exceptions, like Maps or YT - are full of things like this.
If more people understood this, we would be asking for better profile support on Firefox and for container support on Chromium, not suggesting containers to people who need profiles or trying to use profiles as if they were tab containers.
I want profiles because they provide exactly what you mentioned: separation. I need different extensions, bookmarks, history, etc. And inside each profile I can use containers if I want to.
So explain me:
1. How do I set up a new profile in Firefox. In Chrome creating a new Profile takes 3 clicks and entering a name.
2. How I open two instances/windows of Firefox at the same time each with a different profile. In Chrome opening a second profile is two clicks (when Chrome is already running)
This will create a separate firefox instance running with that profile. It's not as nice as having a button in firefox to accomplish this, but if you use different shortcuts or keyboard commands to launch things it works quite well.
In my linux setup, I removed the -no-remote option for some forgotten reason.
That seems a bit overkill to me. Creating profiles can be done at about:profiles and starting a profile with a shortcut to firefox --profile $PROFILENAME. Not sure how that could be simpler
I'm not a fan of Chrome, by any means, but you can't be serious here. A Chrome-style built in profile switcher is how it could be simpler.
The icon is slightly different and is in a different place (same vicinity though, somewhere on the top-right), but the "Responsive Design Mode" is equivalent to Chrome's "Device Toolbar". See https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/devtools-user/respon...
Because you can activate mobile view in Firefox WITHOUT devtools opened, but in Chrome that's impossible.
Lot of times I hated this at Chrome.
Also, that shortcut in Firefox will immediately give you mobile view, and in Chrome not as you first need to type shortcut for Devtools.
Kind of enough, but...
> This is aesthetic preference, there's no such thing as "correct".
"Correct" for the purposes of this discussion could be the normal OS rendering, and deviation from that is what would be "off"-ness.
They either get hinted by someone else about “some cool feature”, or do a Google search if they know what they're looking for.
> Plus, it's definitely not going to get people to switch from Chrome.
Given that it's only enabling multiple profiles that require such a step (afterward you get a GUI prompt at start-up), you just Google “how to Firefox profiles” once, follow the steps and call it a day. In fact, most people would need to do the same googling if they wanted to use multiple chrome profiles as well…
