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Comment by snthd | Hacker News Reader

For me the compelling features of Firefox over chrome are

* better search/address bar behaviour (particularly in finding relevant bookmarks. Chrome wants to turn everything into a Google search)

* Integration with Firefox on android (which I need because it supports ad-blocking extensions)

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Definitely agree with the address bar, I'll add a few:

* Being able to disable unnecessary features and phoning home using about:config is great

* Extensions look and feel more native (this will probably change because Mozilla has decided that cloning Chrome is the way to go)

* Extensions are more capable, still no decent side tabs in Chrome

* They're not an ad agency, so they don't ban extensions they don't like or nag you when you install something unapproved

* Font rendering manages to not look terrible

I'll admit though, Chrome still kills Firefox on UI speed and in many security technology ways. My biggest worry is that Mozilla will fail to achieve Chrome UI speed while ditching the things that make Firefox unique today.

It's quite hard to find any relevant setting in about:config.

Extensions used to be more capable, this is about to end. Decent side tabs in chrome is called vivaldi, (actually a decent chrome is vivaldi).

Mozilla effectively bans extensions they don't like since the made signed extensions mandatory.

I disagrre on the speed and performance difference, with 150+ tabs opened at all times firefox works while chrome struggle to deal with 50 tabs. All this on a core i5 16GB RAM SSD laptop. I guess YMMV here.

Vivaldi seems like more of the same, sends statistics information with no way to disable it. On Firefox, all of that is in about:config and easily copied around as user.js.

> Mozilla effectively bans extensions they don't like since the made signed extensions mandatory.

Not true. They sign very liberally and you can even host signed extensions for your own users exclusively without listing them on addons.mozilla.org at all.

That doesn't help, when you really needed an unsigned extension, or at least signed with your own key (and enroll your own key to firefox installation).

For example, FreeIPA used to have an extension, that configured Firefox to your own domain (enrolled an root signing certificate, configured trusted domains for GSSAPI, etc. - all the dangerous things). But because the extension was customized for your own domain, obviously, it could not be signed.

So, it was killed instead. Nowadays, you get a list of steps, you have to do by hand. On every desktop.

Getting an extension reviewed can take months. They periodically publish how many have been in the queue for over 10 days, but they otherwise dont say how long the tail is. It's long.

I started using Vivaldi after struggling with slowdowns in Firefox. Even with the new multi-processor window support enabled, my browser still frequently slowed to a crawl.

I miss some of the extensions of Firefox and Vivaldi does have some interesting bugs, however development on Vivaldi seems rapid. Recently they finally combined the web page inspector into the browser (it use to open a separate window).

I've loved Firefox for years and would honestly rather use it, but the performance problems turned me away.

I switched away from firefox once they announced they were moving to the Chrome extension model (and thereby sank their "better extensions" selling point.)

they expanded the API so it's way less limited than chrome extensions. I don't understand how that's not known by folks who read HN at this point.

Sure. But in practice everyone is just going to make extensions that are compatible with "all" the browsers, and there are developers who have simply decided not to rewrite their firefox extensions.

http://fasezero.com/lastnotice.html

doubtful, otherwise folks woudldn't have spent so much time on stuff like sqlitebrowser and other bits.

It is less limited than chrome extensions API, but still way more limited than the old API. Still no Tree Style Tabs or DownThemAll!.

There's a Tree Style Tabs-like WebExtension. It has a few quirks, though. It runs in the sidebar. It doesn't hide the top tabs (though you can do this with Stylish). It has its own menu for tabs which does not include some options (like send tab to device).

There was a very good non-nested side-tabs extension in Firefox Test Pilot, but it has expired.

Tab Center (the extension from Test Pilot that expired) is not an WebExtension. It is a classic extension that will stop working in FF56.

Yes, I'm using it ;)

Try Pale Moon, it's great.

They are keeping the current Extension model.

However long that will last. They are already considering rebasing on a newer Firefox codebase for their UXP plans.

Quoted below is from Pale Moon roadmap [0]

Long-term plans

Our long-term plans for Pale Moon involve (potentially) moving our browser to the UXP (Unified XUL Platform) that is currently being worked on alongside the browser. This will at its earliest be somewhere in 2018.

Plug-ins

Pale Moon supports NPAPI plug-ins. Unlike Firefox, we will not be deprecating or removing support for these kinds of plug-ins. This means that you will be able to continue using your media, authentication, and other plug-ins in Pale Moon like Flash, Silverlight, bank-authenticators or networking plug-ins for specific purposes.

[0]: https://www.palemoon.org/roadmap.shtml

the address bar behaviour on chrome is so obnoxious! i can never find stuff that is on my history -- with firefox, couple of keywords and i can find almost anything.

Is this also the case with vivaldi ?

I miss opera where it would also search in page content from cache, not only URL or title.

Sadly it seems that Vivaldi, for now at least, only search the url and title.

the address bar behavior is actually inferior to what opera offered back when it was a browser.

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