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Comment by amanzi | Hacker News Reader

Just use Firefox! And then install Firefox on your friends' and family's computers too, and set it as the default for them. Spread the word...

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Firefox has a nasty history of following chrome's choices

Yeha they merhed the URL and search boxes. I am not a fan. Now and then my browser thinks a local hostname is actually a search term.

Fortunately you can undo that in firefox (separate boxes -- ctrl-l for location, ctrl-k for search, and disable the "search if not a url" option), but it's not the default, and that leads to more and more people using bing to search for google to then search for facebook, as they have no concept of the idea of a URL (or indeed a program, a file or a directory) :(

Just follow your hostname with a / to get around that. It's muscle memory for me at this point.

It's configurable. I have a separate search and URL box

The hiding www thing along with AMP in general made me finally leave Chrome after over a decade using it. I don't use Firefox, though.

What do you use instead then?

Vivaldi. But if desktop Firefox gets as slick as the new Firefox Preview on Android is becoming I might start using it on desktop.

Vivaldi? So just a rebranded Chromium then. Maybe it's not sending private information to Google but it's still leveraging the HTML rendering policies dictated by Google.

What has that got to do with my stated reasons for leaving Chrome?

I'm on a Mac - if only it were that simple. Firefox still has poor performance on Retina Macs, and Safari is removing support for a bunch of extensions I use daily in the upcoming Catalina release. I use ungoogled-chromium but would love to move to Firefox sometime soon. They just need to sort out the performance issues.

Firefox is almost entirely funded by Google IIRC.

Phrasing it like that is quite misleading..

Yes they receive money for having google.com as the default homepage if I remember correctly. The way you worded it makes it sound like Google controls them.

It's misleading to claim Chrome/Google doesn't have an immense control over web standards and protocols.

You do realize OP was simply referring to Google having direct control of Firefox financially, not via web standards, yeah? You're implying OP is saying something that they're not.

The comment I replied to tried to imply Google has little control over Firefox ("The way you worded it makes it sound like Google controls them."), the immense control is true, it doesn't matter what OP said in this situation.

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