Google will keep locking down Chrome and using corporate talk to hand wave it away, only recourse is to leave.
First it’s “sign in” with obtuse ways to turn it off. Then block Adblocking, once again with obtuse ways to disable... the end goal is pretty obvious, get the majority of Chrome users to turn on ads and tie their real names to their Chrome browser.
Of course let “power users” (who’ll turn that crap off anyways) have their switches to do so. It gives Google plausible deniability.
——
To those who say just fork Chrome adfm had a good article explaining why that doesn’t work:
> And while you can use or adapt Chromium to your heart's content, your new browser won't work with most internet video unless you license a proprietary DRM component called Widevine from Google. The API that connects to Widevine was standardized in 2017 by the World Wide Web Consortium, whose members narrowly voted down a proposal to change the membership rules for the W3C to require members not to abuse the DMCA to prevent DRM from becoming a tool to undermine competition.
You know what's horrifying about the idea of "just fork Chrome"? Google can still hurt you by blocking your browser's access to their prime properties (YouTube, Gmail, Maps, etc). Just look at YouTube denying Chromium-based Edge the new redesigned experience for absolutely zero reason.
> Just look at YouTube denying Chromium-based Edge the new redesigned experience for absolutely zero reason.
The reason is almost certainly a new user agent (compared to non-Chromium Edge) that YouTube didn't expect. Chromium-based Edge is still not stable, and therefore, not properly supported by YouTube.
I don't have time to test this, but I'm willing to bet that you'd get the same result by using any indie browser that happens to send a user agent that YouTube doesn't recognize.
First of all, we have no evidence that your Edge example was intentional. In fact, we have evidence to the contrary as they fixed it within hours of it being reported [1]
Now as far as your hypothetical, sure they can, but I use all of those services, YouTube, Gmail, Maps, ... on Chromium every day and they do not block nor have they ever blocked any of them.
The day the Web sold its soul. Such a disappointment when TBL came out in support of that. People who knew better tried to warn us, but they all got shouted down and told there "was no other choice" b/c content creators were going to try an lock down with extensions and it would somehow be worse.
TBL? Can you extrapolate? I google it and its "The Basketball League". I just think your comment had the opportunity to continue to educate me on something I have never heard of or about and to throw in an acronym without having used the the 3 words before is confusing.
Not with extensions, with plug-ins, and they were already doing it. Flash and Silverlight came with DRM for any publisher that wanted to use it. Many did.
I used to have Firefox and Vivaldi ...but honestly I used Vivaldi mainly...when I heard that even Microsoft was going to use chromium I realized...Firefox is literally the last front ! I installed Firefox and started using it as my main browser! What I miss the most is Vivaldi speed dial and bookmarks. Add-ons aren't always a solution ! I miss Netscape days...internet wasn't a megacorp business playground :( !
> I miss Netscape days...internet wasn't a megacorp business playground :( !
You mean "this website is optimized for Internet Explorer 6" days? Or the earlier "this website is optimized for Netscape 2.0" days?
I think the nearest the web ever came to not being any megacorp's playground was when Firefox was at around 30% market share, and IE6 which had 60%+ market share had stopped moving. IOW, when MS still had the playground mostly to themselves, but chose to ignore it. And even then, the web / Firefox couldn't really innovate without breaking IE6 compatibility, so everyone was stuck.
I looked up Vivaldi Speed Dial. It looks like the same sort of thing Firefox, Chrome, and Safari have where a new tab has a pinned list of favorite or most visited sites. What does Vivaldi do that I'm not seeing?
"Most internet videos" probably is overstatement. I'm watching youtube, pornhub and twitch and I don't think that it requires any DRM. The only service with DRM I'm aware of is Netflix and it's terrible anyway.
> I'm watching youtube, pornhub and twitch and I don't think that it requires any DRM.
Depends on the content, If you are watching paid for content on YT it is most likely DRM'ed. [0] An "stats for nerds" example from such a piece of content (Notice the protected line, this line isn't present on DRM free YT Content.). But the vast majority of content on YT is DRM free.
Twitch has some DRM'ed content, things like when they streamed Thursday Night Football. But that was played via the Amazon Video player not twitches normal video player. I remember because the player threw a fit if you didn't have HDCP configured correctly, which most streamers don't. Not that they were trying to re-stream the game, but have it playing on another one of their monitors to see how it was doing. Personally I liked the idea of having a chat alongside the game :-)
> The only service with DRM I'm aware of is Netflix and it's terrible anyway.
Ha! Tell that to their 150 million subscribers. :)
More seriously, using a browser without DRM would be a deal-breaker to many users like myself solely because of Netflix, unfortunately. That said, if you're serious about using a DRM-free browser, there are other ways to watch Netflix (iOS/Android, smart TVs, etc).
| Can we define "most internet video" as Amazon Video, BBC, Hulu, Netflix and Spotify?
Maybe you could in terms of unique videos, but in terms of the volume of watched video, not at all. Netflix itself is responsible for something in the range of 15% of the worlds bandwidth usage.
Either way, it not going to win an end users to have something like that.
I remember of projects that failed because Widevine explicitly didn't work in their Chromium. I assume that Widevine builds nicely but requires a Google-issued key to work.
>your new browser won't work with most internet video
"most internet video"... by what metric? Hours watched? Catalog size? I find it unlikely that DRM videos outnumber non-DRM videos by any reasonable metric.
I wonder if that might backfire. I've been using Chromium for a while now, but whenever I need to see video, I copy paste the url over to Firefox. At some point, I'm going to be bothered enough to just switch permanently to Firefox.
Yes. And on top of the video codec issue, there is also the issue of getting Chrome to build, and integrating code changes from every upstream Chromium release, which is quite frequent. The build setup process is very manual for an outsider, and changes often.
Luckily for us, there's antitrust law. This isn't really possible:
Reproduction steps:
1. Check that Google search is working by opening Chrome, navigating to www.google.com, and searching for any term (such as the name of a newspaper and clicking the link to verify that search works as expected.)
2. Open firefox.com and navigate to www.google.com
You will receive a message:
"It looks like you have Chrome installed! For the most secure experience, please visit this page using the Chrome browser or wait and try again later.."
If you have not used Chrome in the past 1 hour from your same IP address, you receive the page as expected.
The above repro steps should be pretty much impossible under antitrust law. (Due to search monopoly.) Which is a very good thing.
It's usually going to be around any studio produced content Broadcast or Movie. YouTube TV uses it for live broadcasts. The Studios require DRM as part of their content licensing. PlayReady is the other primary DRM competitor.
Because you would need to get a widevine license from google. Mozilla was able to do that, but I know at least one chromium fork had it's application for a license rejected. It technically is possible to copy the widevine library from a chrome install to use with chromium, but non technical people won't know how to do that.
Widevine works with chromium just fine - by which I mean that like with everything chromium it gets broken without apparent reason every now and then, but after some time they fix it.
It's a shame Microsoft didn't want to use Firefox's codebase instead of Chromium for its new Edge browser. I don't know what Microsoft thinks it gained by doing this, but I'm almost certain they'll regret it in the long run, because it's a trap by Google.
Google, Microsoft new "bestie" in this collaboration, will screw them over once it's clear that Microsoft "can't turn back" from using Chromium or even fork it.
That would be declaring a full on browser war with Google. I expect MS don't want to do that yet. It remains an option in the future I suppose.
As I understand it Chromium is a lot easier to wrap your own GUI around than Gecko. XUL is still not completely decoupled, separating them completely is an ongoing effort I think.
Maybe when the embedded Gecko/Servo engine is production ready would be the time for MS to reconsider.
I’ve quit chrome for a while now but... I’m pretty sure they have your real name as long as you signed in once from the same hw and browser footprint. Is real name that important for them? I think everyone’s digital signature is already out there
As a developer and power user, it's difficult for me to switch to Firefox.
However for most average Joe's it's fine and won't make a difference, so I always install and recommend Firefox when I play IT guy for family/friends. Time to start doing this again like we did in 2005!! It worked then and it can now!
As a power user, I prefer Firefox to Chrome, due to its configurability and to the power of certain add-ons. One simple example: multi-row tab bar, thanks to custom CSS for the UI. It used to be even better before the mass murder of the now-called "legacy" extensions, but today we must settle for the less restricted offer.
As a developer, I don't typically use browsers as debuggers or programming environments, so I never experienced game-breaking differences.
I consider myself the same. I quit using Chrome & started using Brave about a year ago. I haven't looked back or missed Chrome. What would you be missing?
Edge & Firefox have also been useful in the same way I once used Opera (special tasks where their features really shine). I really liked Edge's reading mode & for just browsing websites it was great.
First, you are being overly critical. Automatic (forced) sign-in is actually useful. Second, why do you call leaving the "only" recourse? As if it's something completely horrid that you would never ever do freely. Leaving is a completely fine path to take.
With webRequest, Google is "just" testing the waters. Just like with the forced sign-in, they will back down when they see the backlash.
Based only on Google's description, they seem to have a valid reason to remove (even though they say "deprecate", they mean remove) the offending API. However, there's zero chance they can get away with this. For what reason I'm not sure, market share of Chrome is very important to them. So they'll have to keep it or implement some new, acceptable method.
It is so clear to me that we need to support and promote mozilla and Firefox. They're not perfect, but they, wikipedia, eff, archive.org (who else?) are such an important part of the Internet guardianship in the face of the monopolies, that it's our duty to support them.
Doesn't hurt that Firefox is actually a great product.
> Doesn't hurt that Firefox is actually a great product.
Arguably.
On these threads there is always a handful of complaints about the state of Firefox, mostly on macOS. On my machine, I can’t even launch Firefox in headless mode without the fans turning on, which never happened on Chrome. While I haven’t benchmarked it, for normal browsing it does feel slower than Crome.
But what kills it for me is their crippled AppleScript support. Firefox is the worst major browser (even worse than smaller browsers) for an automator on macOS. I rely on browser control every day, so Firefox is useless to me.
I’d sooner switch to Safari, which despite laughable controls (can’t even disable JavaScript on a per-website basis) I can do something with.
On my machine, I can’t even launch Firefox in
headless mode without the fans turning on, which
never happened on Chrome. While I haven’t benchmarked
it, for normal browsing it does feel slower than Crome.
I believe you, but I'm always so confused by hearing this. I use my Mac (2015 MBP) 10+ hours a day, evenly split between FF and Chrome.
Truly is close to an even 50/50 split -- FF is my personal browser and I use Chrome for all work-related tasks.
And they are subjectively indistinguishable in terms of performance. The only exceptions to that statement are, well, Google properties where Google has clearly invested time and money into optimizing things for FF.
One other possible sorta-exception is when I'm using a scaled resolution mode on an external 4K monitor. MacOS warns me, straight up, that these modes will cause performance issues for me and my modest Intel Iris graphics. The whole system's a little sluggish in those modes, and I think FF fares worse than Chrome, but I won't hold that against FF.
FWIW, Safari does feel subjectively more responsive to me when it comes to scrolling and navigating. And I recently spent a few bucks upgrading my PC gaming rig to a 120hz monitor, which makes a massive difference. And I'm one of those weirdos who keeps CRTs around for his old consoles because he enjoys that true zero lag experience. So I am not exactly insensitive to latency. I don't have magic professional gamer golden magic eyes or anything, but it is an area of interest for me.
Headless mode maybe, but for regular users I don't think there's many issues.
I'm running firefox as my daily driver on Mojave with no issues whatsoever. Without seeing this thread, I didn't even know there were issues with the mac version.
I've been using firefox as my daily driver on a 2015 macbook air for the last year. It's been fantastic, not at all slow.
I haven't tried to use applescript/automator with it so i can't comment on whether or not that works, but that doesn't seem like the biggest issue for most users, or even most developers.
Not everyone is understanding what you're saying, as evident by the downvotes you're getting
I'm fulltime FF but I won't pretend that the in-site (site specific) search works as smoothly as it did (does?) in Chrome
In Chrome you would go to foo.com and you would use their search input and from then on, in your address bar you can type foo (or maybe just f, depending on how often you use foo.com), and press <tab> to search within the site
This is a workflow you get used to
For the longest time I wanted this in FF, but I think the real thing that clicked for me was just heavily leaning on duckduckgo's bangs
(Firefox does have in-site search, which you can use by right clicking in the site's search input and clicking "Add a Keyword for this Search", but I'm not even sure how it works heh)
edit2: so I guess my main point should have been: Firefox has a manual step for what Chrome did for "free", after you made your first in-site search, which you were probably already going to do
Basically, Firefox allows you to set a keyword (which I often set to an abbreviation + question mark) which you can link to a site's search URL. For example to search Google Scholar I would type my keyword, "sch?" and then my search query, and after pressing enter I am taken to the site's search results. It's a few more steps you have to take, but has the added benefit of allowing you to add the functionality for any site.
On top of uBlock Origin / uMatrix, some of the other Firefox's trump cards to me are:
* Tree Style Tab: makes tabs much more manageable, no parallel in Chrome. If you open dozens of tabs, after using this, you can only pity the traditional tab management [1].
* Containers and container tabs: it's a bit like having separate Chrome profiles for separate contexts, but you can also have them as tabs in the same window.
* Sync / sign-in server that is open source and that you can run on your own if you choose.
I really enjoy the Containers. The only problem is that you can only have a single container tied to an individual site. I'd rather like it to be tied to a subpath or url "root" so I could use it with GitHub.
I just discovered "Reader-View" in Firefox! Chrome doesn't have anything like that built-in and I've always had to rely on an extension to make CSS heavy pages readable. No more!
very handy to quickly get rid of visual clutter like overlays for cookie consent checkboxes, subscribe notifications or disable-your-adblocker overlays/popups.
I always loved using the ' key to open a find box that only searched links. great for mouseless browsing. (Although I switched off from firefox a long time ago due to their political ideology.)
I don't understand why Mac users use Chrome. Safari seems to be out of fashion: people just assume that it should not be used for some reason, even though it is actually a great browser.
I use Safari for both my own browsing and for development (a fairly large ClojureScript application), and it is by far the best browser on the platform by all measures (speed first and foremost).
The only place where Safari falls short is 3D CAD programs (like OnShape), where Chrome is faster and better.
Agreed. On macOS, Safari is fastest, hands down. All while preserving battery life better than Chrome, and even Firefox. PiP, swipe to peak navigation, pinch to zoom, better 1Password integration, Apple Pay, etc. are all more than just nice to have features.
However, my biggest gripe about Safari has to be the developer tools. They're noticeably slower, clunkier, and the network tab is unpredictable at times. I think it's getting better, but I defer to Firefox to do development.
Because to me the Chrome integration with 1Password X extension is by far the easiest, you get the dropdown right there in the field. In Safari, I have to click the 1Password extension button next to the address field and then select Autofill.
Interesting. I don't have a Mac but it would be worth trying.
TBH the ability to use uBlock Origin was my only killer requirement, but Container tabs are a leap in web security. I hope that idea gets stolen and becomes a norm in browsers. (Or First Party Isolation in general).
Extensions. Safari has almost none of them and I need them. And not just uBO. I have 10+ of them install and I'd say 8 of them are mandatory for me. I don't care about Safari being the fastest or battery life.
Also dev tools are so much better in Fx and Chrome...
Safari user here—I personally have never used extensions much (probably my own loss), and on Safari I just have 1Password and uBlock°.
Besides Safari's lack of extensions I find it to be more or less on par with Firefox, assuming you're in the Apple ecosystem. The dev tools feel extremely polished and feature complete. The only thing Safari's dev tools lack IMO is no fancy CSS support for things like grid or animations.
I occasional open up Firefox Dev Edition when I get a weird bug on a webpage and that sort of thing but besides that Safari has served all my needs perfectly.
I don't understand why people are use the same browser for browsing and development.
I use Chrome for development. It has lots of helpful extensions, like the React and Redux devtools, extensions for cookie editing, screen measuring, JSON formatting and so on. I often need to forcibly restart tabs (or the entire browser) due to misbehaving devtools, so it's great having a dedicated browser for it. Same goes for cookies and local storage state. It's completely separate.
I use Safari as a browser. I has the basic extensions (adblocker, etc.) that I need personally. Its development tools are terrible, but that's okay — I only use them in the very rare case where a rendering/JS problem only shows in Safari.
I use Safari for non-work browsing (the dev tools make it unusable for work, in my opinion). I was a Chrome user, but Chrome nuked the battery on my mbp in record time. Safari has its kinks and oddities, but it sips the battery even with a ton of tabs open, and it's good enough that I've been using it for about a year with pretty much no thoughts of switching. I also like not feeling like I have the big G looking over my shoulder all the time.
Safari doesn't support doesn't support multiple user profiles, and it doesn't support uBlock Origin.
If you're switching browsers because you're upset that Chrome is breaking uBO, it makes no sense to switch to another browser that's never supported uBO and probably never will.
uBlock Origin is available on Safari. Installing it results in a "will slow down your browser" which is apparently just a CYA warning from Apple for any extensions not installed via the App Store.
Safari supports multiple user profiles because it’s running on a Unix operating system that provides full user accounts.
If you’re switching browser because google is breaking ad blocking, it absolutely makes sense to switch to one with a blocking technology that the browser vendor specifically added, rather than grudgingly allowed.
It also makes sense to use a browser where the blockers don’t get access to what you’re actually browsing. What’s the point of blocking trackers if the blocker just tracks what you do?
If you use an iOS device, Safari is awesome. The integration between all your hardware devices syncing passwords, tabs, bookmarks, reading list, etc. kicks ass.
That’s all not to mention its excellent built-in privacy features and that it’s really really fast.
I would argue experiences of alternative browsers on iOS is somewhat artificially hindered...
Not that I'm saying Safari is bad browser, but on iOS you can't really set other browser as your default browser, browsers can't use their own engines, etc. etc.
Safari is so much better at preserving battery life it's not even funny. I'm still using Firefox because I find their containers concept incredibly useful, here's hoping Apple steal that idea with the next version of macOS.
How's the dev tools (aka whatever the equivalent of Chrome "dev tools" is)?
As a web dev, the main reason I don't switch is I know how to use Chrome dev tools, and hate spending time I could be producing code instead learning new tools for something like this. But eventually I'll get myself to (prob to FF rather than safari, as long as I'm switching).
I prefer Safari's dev tools, actually. The UX is far better, Chrome's dev tools UI is so incredibly cluttered. The only area I find where Chrome's dev tools outshines Safari's is JS profiling — that tree chart graph is pretty useful. The other 95% of the time I stay in Safari.
The dev tools in Safari are OK, usable and useful enough for the odd task. But there's no reason your everyday browser has to be your primary web dev environment too. I switch to Chrome when doing front-end web dev or hacking in WebGL playgrounds.
The dev tools are pretty good, just laid out slightly differently than the other browsers, and not quite as deep in some areas. But FWIW I use Safari as my primary browser and FF Developer Edition for the dev tools, and that arrangement works well for me. I do use Safari dev tools when I’m running on battery though - I get about 2 more hours of life, which is more than worth it.
Safari dev tools are terrible and laid out in a completely un-intuitive manner. It's somewhat sad because the original Safari dev tools (which now live on as the foundation for Chrome's) were best-in-class.
At some point they decided to mimic Xcode which pretty much put a nail in them for being useful for anything.
I tried switching to Safari for a few months. Somehow it caused really odd beach balling and freezing of the computer. After a while I couldn't be bothered to jump all the various hoops to debug it, the solution wasn't simple or obvious, and switch to Brave, then finally back to Chrome when dark mode came about.
If uBlock stops working, I'll switch off in an instant though.
I use a lot of different platforms, and Safari only runs on a couple of them. Firefox lets me sync bookmarks, settings and extensions across all of them.
Safari has a few things not going for it:
1) ad blocking options are really inferior to chrome (for now) or firefox so a lot of what you gain in speediness gets taken away by some of the garbage that modern websites spit back at you.
2) The dev tools are confusing now. They have good ones but they need to redesign some of the UI on it.
3) There's not a good way to containerize things which means you end up having to open private windows when trying to login to services with different users.
While I disagree about ad-blocking and webdev options, Safari's reader mode and overall OS performance is a reason enough to never touch another browser. I have no use-case for multi-user containerization so no opinion there.
To add to others points I find that safari often lags behind implementing standards features and sometimes straight up implements then wrong. For that reason I make a point of not using it.
Also as far as I can see I have to upgrade my OS in order to upgrade by browser with safari. Sometimes I just can't be bothered to wait for a 40 minute upgrade to complete.
Safari redesigned their dev tools at some point a long time ago and made the interface (IMO) terrible. Until they did that I used to use it a lot more.
Safari is a great browser if you don’t need the most cutting edge features or extensibility though, and I believe it’s also the best optimized for battery life.
That's what WebKit's devtools look like, across all branded browsers. Blink stayed with the old layout and iterated on it.
I don't really care which one I use, but change for changes' sake is frustrating. I'm used to Blink/old Webkit and I don't see any reason to learn a new layout.
I legit can't even use the Safari tools even if I try. I have no idea how its supposed to work...the idea is not just terrible. It makes absolutely no sense and I have to google stuff to figure out how to use it every time I do.
Chrome's tabs are nicer to use. They're visually easier to parse at a glance and arguably nicer to look at. Chrome's tab dragging is really tight and predictable.
Chrome's first paint is faster and more consistent. I think when I used macOS, Chrome had DNS preloading but Safari didn't.
It's been a while since I used macOS (RIP my 2012 13" MacBook Air), but Chrome's scrolling behaviour is more effective -- "solid" is how I'd describe it.
The omnibar is simple and usually shows exactly the right suggestions. Safari's address bar often didn't have the thing I wanted, and had extra things that I definitely didn't want or took a second for my brain to parse.
Chrome's context menu has better contrast, being black on white rather than black on silver. The choices are ordered better as well.
This is all that comes to mind right now.
An employee at my old company used a Mac Mini. She's not computer-saavy, but she far preferred Chrome over Safari. I asked her why and she couldn't describe it -- just that she was certain. I think it would be really insightful to do studies where you take tiny features from Safari, like the context menu colour, put them in Chrome and survey users on how they liked the product.
Tab management is worse on safari vs chrome. Until recently, there were no favicons in tabs so it was hard to differentiate, and once you have a lot of tabs you have to scroll, while on chrome there is no scrolling and you can use favicons to see all of your tabs at a glance.
FF has tab scrolling, but you also have tree style tabs which is better than chrome when you have a lot of tabs. Container tabs are also a big plus and is what made me start using firefox again. Chrome has a tree style tabs extension but the user experience makes it unusable for me. I can't find it for safari.
Firefox is still slower & consumes more CPU than chrome and safari after all of the improvements. Especially on a few heavyweight websites I use a lot, like facebook and google maps. Chrome is fast enough by comparison. So on my personal macbook I never use firefox because it's too slow.
If safari fixed it's tab issues then I would use it. But being silent apple, they will probably never fix that because it goes against some designer's idea of good design. Look how long it took to get favicons in tabs and it's still not the default option.
I'd use Safari over Chrome, but Safari has a couple of show-stopping bugs:
1. Swiping back on the trackpad to navigate backwards freezes the page for a couple of seconds. It then redraws the page with any updated elements (perhaps a refresh?).
2. The element CSS attributes in the dev tools often fail to update the DOM, duplicate with every keystroke, or revert what you have typed.
I'm sure it's fine for casual users, and you can't deny the battery life improvements when using Safari.
However as I posted in another comment, Safari is the new IE when it comes to bugs and standards compliance.
Here's an example that broke many many sites that use OAuth2 Auth Code Flow for login (including the main UI portal my company provides clients): https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=194906
This was also an issue in iOS, and since Apple doesn't let any other browsers actually use their own rendering engine on that platform (they're just wrappers around Safari's guts) this was broken for all iPhone users no matter the browser.
This is just one example. There's been numerous other issues such as disabling third party cookies by default.
I can only surmise that Mac users use Chrome/FF because the internet just _works better_ when they do.
This is probably the only reason I don't use Safari on macOS. Especially since their new extension API came out, most of the (few) extensions I was even able to find are now manual-install pains.
No extensions, no sync between devices if you don't want to (or can't) use iOS, and overall worse experience for me than anything else I can use on Mac. But I'm using Opera, not Chrome. I think that Vivaldi is currently the best browser, but unfortunately they don't have mobile version yet.
> The only place where Safari falls short is 3D CAD programs
Safari has poor controls if you care about privacy and having some modicum of control over the websites you visit.
In Chrome we can — on a per-site basis — disable/enable JavaScript; disable/enable cookies (and local storage); allow only some cookies; set which cookies clear on exit. You can also do more, but those are the ones I use.
You can do all that without extensions, and the controls are right there on the omnibar. In Safari, I can’t even do that with an extension (that I’m aware of).
No profile support. I have four profiles in use right now, mostly "thanks" to the fact that Twitter can't run multiple accounts at once and Tweetdeck is garbage. Three "private" profiles and one for "work" stuff. That's a dealbreaker for me.
In addition, as a web developer, Chrome has way better development tools, and I like to use Chromecast integration and see full URLs in a real address bar, not just the domain like Safari does.
I also use safari as my main browser. When there is the rare case when a site malfunctions (not so rare anyways... sheesh its like IE all over again) I have brave-browser pulled from brew.
I’ve tried chrome in the past but it installed some sort of GoogleUpdater daemon without permission and I absolutely hate that. The same reason I don’t install MSOffice on my machines. If a desktop application needs a background service for wathever reason I don’t want it anywhere near my computers.
One word: iCloud. I don't feel like being encapsulated in Apple's ecosystem because their support on non-Apple products is limited, buggy, and/or non-existent.
Safari UX sucks -as someone who used windows all their life and recently transitioned to mac. i do not understand the choices and can't integrate them into my workflow
As others have said, Safari has vastly inferior dev tools. I am not a fan of the UI at all. Also, Safari generally lags other browsers in supporting features. They added beacon years after others, even Edge had support for it way before Safari.
As a web developer I don't like Safari. Safari is for me the number 1 reason to implement workarounds in HTML/JS/CSS because stuff does not work in Safari which is no problem on Chrome and Safari.
Vastly inferior dev tools, amateur tab management (no multi selecting tabs to rearrange or close), and a lack of extensions that are super valuable in web dev.
I keep trying to switch but every time it is clear that Safari is an inferior product (aside from efficiency, where it beats the heck out of Chrome).
I switched a couple of months ago because Chrome is just a bloated piece of garbage. One of my favorite features in Firefox is containers, which I used to have different users for in Chrome. Maybe Chrome has something similar now but it's one of the things I liked when I switched over. Haven't had any issues so far, glad I did
> One of my favorite features in Firefox is containers
I switched a couple months ago from Chrome to Firefox as well but to tell you the truth, I just heard about containers and what you could do with it. I guess I must've been living under a rock, this is amazing!
I was already glad I made the switch for the less resources being used on my aging Macbook Pro and better privacy features, but containers just took this experience to the next level for me!
EDIT: What actually triggered my switch was at one point, a few tabs on Chrome(regular things like Youtube) started causing my CPU/fan to go crazy on my MBP 2015(the last decent MBP). Instead of trying to figure out what extension or what setting was causing the problem, I thought I'd give FF a try and just couldn't look back after.
I love FF and use it daily. But honestly, the "some random tab has runaway javascript" is as much of a problem on FF as it is on Chrome. If you leave a JS-heavy site open long enough, sooner or later you'll have some runaway JS come and bite you in the battery. The only complete solution I've got is... to turn it off and back on again. The entire browser, not just the offending tab.
"Currently, add-on sync leaves setting synchronization to the individual add-on. If an add-on has support for syncing settings, they will be synced. If not, they won't. For now, if an add-on doesn't preserve settings during Sync, you should contact the add-on's author and request Sync support."
On the other hand Firefox actually lets you move your profile folder from one computer to another without throwing up a panic flag and resetting everything.
Same, but I was hesitant to switch. All I heard were comments like yours about containers and such. Finally after hearing about it so much, combined with all the talk about Quantum making things faster I gave FF a go. Haven't looked back.
I still use Chrome for some tasks such as watching/listening to Youtube. (edit: not bc of performance, but bc I hate OSXs Cmd-Tab ordering)
> One of my favorite features in Firefox is containers
Container tabs are great. Combined with Tree Style Tabs and Containerise addons, you have something unbeatable in both terms of security, privacy and user friendliness.
Does anyone know an extension or option in containers to preserve your browsing trajectory between containers?
I had a google container for a while, but opening links opens a new tab and closes the google container, so therefore you cant it back or forward without reopening that container tab. Same thing if I click a container link or something and it pushes it into a new tab, I loose that ability to go backward.
It's just a minor gripe but I'm so into the habit of hitting the back button on my mouse while browsing rather than cmd shift tab.
I don't understand how it's better than multiple profiles. I use multiple accounts for the same services (Asana, AWS, email, etc.) how can I manage that with containers?
In my opinion, profiles are useful for separating "who I am." Whether that's my personal life and my professional life, or if it's me or my spouse using the same computer.
Containers are useful for separating "who I am to my providers." As far as Facebook is concerned, I am a Facebook user, but I don't use Amazon or Google. But Amazon thinks I'm an Amazon user that doesn't use Facebook or Google. You can accomplish this with profiles, but in Chrome (last I checked) that meant multiple windows, rather than just sites being displayed in tabs that indicate the container in use. So for that purpose, I believe containers are more useful.
(I also think Firefox should step up their profile game, because when my spouse and I alternate using a computer we share, it's inconvenient for me to close all her Firefox windows so I can open my profile!)
Containers helps keep things sandboxed and lets you use the same window with different tabs representing different sessions.
So in your case you could have say a "work" container and a "home" container. Each of these could persist logins for all of the services you are using without having to switch between users and have different windows open you just have the 2 tabs.
What I think people find more useful is the ability to make a container for say "facebook". Anytime you open facebook it puts it in a new tab with a sandboxed browser session. It's similar to having a separate profile but it's just for facebook use and you don't have to think about it so much. If you click a link to facebook it opens it in your new container already logged in meanwhile facebook does not see you as authed in any of your other tabs.
LOL, I'll sometimes just use different channel versions of browsers for different accounts when I have to access them regularly. The worst imho is when you have a google personal account and a google business (apps) account for work.
It's definitely something I'd like to see worked out better as a power user feature.
>I switched a couple of months ago because Chrome is just a bloated piece of garbage
I switched to Chrome a few years ago (and even to a Chromebox as my daily driver, on my second now because I wanted Android app support) because Firefox was a bloated piece of garbage, if I left 5-10 tabs open for a few weeks in Windows they'd be using several gigabytes of memory from a leak, memory use growing hourly.
Edit: I don't know why I'm being downvoted, this is even on Mozilla's own site showing it hasn't been fixed:
"Firefox's memory usage may increase if it's left open for long periods of time. A workaround for this is to periodically restart Firefox"
Firefox banned Dissenter[1], a plug-in that did nothing nefarious - only enables browser users of the plug-in to chat / comment with each other about webpages.
They did this for political reasons. Regardless of what kind of trash talk takes place on Dissenter, the point is that nobody is forced to use it.
My point: neither Google nor Mozilla should be trusted and both seek to be your totalitarian Internet overlord.
But it looks like they didn't "ban" it, they just don't want to host it
on their store [1]. As long as they don't refuse to sign these
"problematic" add-ons, this is fine (although it's worrying that they
are able to do so because of this signing-required-crap).
At least one extension maintainer (yappy, a pushbullet alternative) says that they are unable to sign their extension because of the 3rd party library they use, so while they have both firefox and chrome extensions, only the chrome one works.
Use WaterFox or Pale Moon. XULExtensions are fantastic.
I have darkmode on, on the entire internet. Had it for eternities before ff, thanks to an extension. Great reader extension. Even ported (to webextensions) extensions still have great versions for xul.
You can't have both the ability to install unsigned addons and one-click addons in a software designed for average Joe, and not end up with massive malware problems.
What the heck bugs are you running into that surface as a result of chrome being chrome? I’m no google fan but I find chrome to be far and away the most stable and enjoyable browser to debug with.
Don't get me wrong-- on the Firefox side of things, it's been the user experience of the browser itself which has been suffering.
Every single update since Quantum has made things worse. Three days ago I opened up Firefox to find out all of my settings had been nuked, 200+ tabs, themes and extensions lost, about:config reset, search settings reset (hello again Google) etc. I'm still fuming mad about this.
I don't feel like drudging up old history but my most recent bug was that Chrome doesn't properly bubble mouse click events when some UI elements fire.
WONTFIX of course, apparently I should just use event.preventDefault() even though every other browser handled this particular mouse event correctly. Chrome was the only outlier. So now I am writing code specifically for Chrome.
Two years ago I had an SVG rendering bug that turned out to be so deep that I had to spend two weeks debugging and come up with an incredibly convoluted scheme for loading dynamic SVG icons because `<use/>` is broken hot garbage on Chrome. Bug report dead in the water. More code just for Chrome.
You get the picture. I now have to develop on Chrome as much as I hate it, even though FF has better debug messages and stability, just because it saves time testing every little thing out.
So in my case I go to work and get reports that X is no longer working, lucky for me in JS is easy to patch third party code and fix this issue but I could not find a ticket that explains why Chrome did this.
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=158753 meant PhotoStructure had to do user agent sniffing. If it's Firefox, I can stream the original image directly, and the correct thing happens. With Chrome, I have to do the rotation server-side before I send it to the browser (or I'd have to send metadata about the image to rotate it client-side with CSS, either is irritating).
There are several more #ifdefs I've had to add due to weird chrome glitches (like around the html5 video player, which just works seamlessly with Firefox).
I think GP means that Chrome deviates from some HTML/CSS/JS/etc official standards, and that they don't intend to fix a lot of these discrepancies. So when you write code how it's supposed to work according to the standards, and it works well in Firefox, it might not work right in Chrome. (And GP suggests this is common.)
One that's particularly annoying to me a while ago was you cannot drag and drop elements from an iframe to another iframe from another domain. IIRC it was only an issue in Chrome.
Readit News
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20038872
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20050173
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20044430
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20037562
First it’s “sign in” with obtuse ways to turn it off. Then block Adblocking, once again with obtuse ways to disable... the end goal is pretty obvious, get the majority of Chrome users to turn on ads and tie their real names to their Chrome browser.
Of course let “power users” (who’ll turn that crap off anyways) have their switches to do so. It gives Google plausible deniability.
——
To those who say just fork Chrome adfm had a good article explaining why that doesn’t work:
> And while you can use or adapt Chromium to your heart's content, your new browser won't work with most internet video unless you license a proprietary DRM component called Widevine from Google. The API that connects to Widevine was standardized in 2017 by the World Wide Web Consortium, whose members narrowly voted down a proposal to change the membership rules for the W3C to require members not to abuse the DMCA to prevent DRM from becoming a tool to undermine competition.
https://boingboing.net/2019/05/29/hoarding-software-freedom....
The reason is almost certainly a new user agent (compared to non-Chromium Edge) that YouTube didn't expect. Chromium-based Edge is still not stable, and therefore, not properly supported by YouTube.
I don't have time to test this, but I'm willing to bet that you'd get the same result by using any indie browser that happens to send a user agent that YouTube doesn't recognize.
Now as far as your hypothetical, sure they can, but I use all of those services, YouTube, Gmail, Maps, ... on Chromium every day and they do not block nor have they ever blocked any of them.
[1]https://twitter.com/addyosmani/status/1133782407419613184
You mean "this website is optimized for Internet Explorer 6" days? Or the earlier "this website is optimized for Netscape 2.0" days?
I think the nearest the web ever came to not being any megacorp's playground was when Firefox was at around 30% market share, and IE6 which had 60%+ market share had stopped moving. IOW, when MS still had the playground mostly to themselves, but chose to ignore it. And even then, the web / Firefox couldn't really innovate without breaking IE6 compatibility, so everyone was stuck.
Depends on the content, If you are watching paid for content on YT it is most likely DRM'ed. [0] An "stats for nerds" example from such a piece of content (Notice the protected line, this line isn't present on DRM free YT Content.). But the vast majority of content on YT is DRM free.
Twitch has some DRM'ed content, things like when they streamed Thursday Night Football. But that was played via the Amazon Video player not twitches normal video player. I remember because the player threw a fit if you didn't have HDCP configured correctly, which most streamers don't. Not that they were trying to re-stream the game, but have it playing on another one of their monitors to see how it was doing. Personally I liked the idea of having a chat alongside the game :-)
Dunno about PornHub.
[0] - https://cejack.tk/2019-05-30_19-57-03-280.png
Ha! Tell that to their 150 million subscribers. :)
More seriously, using a browser without DRM would be a deal-breaker to many users like myself solely because of Netflix, unfortunately. That said, if you're serious about using a DRM-free browser, there are other ways to watch Netflix (iOS/Android, smart TVs, etc).
Seems like ffmpeg libraries, developed outside of the web browser, support nearly all video formats a user could encounter on the internet.
Also, the part of the statement that reads "your new browser won't work with most internet video" is intriguing.
Can we define "most internet video" as Amazon Video, BBC, Hulu, Netflix and Spotify? (Widevine users listed on its Wikipedia page)
Seems like there is much, much more video on the internet that does not come from those sources.
Maybe you could in terms of unique videos, but in terms of the volume of watched video, not at all. Netflix itself is responsible for something in the range of 15% of the worlds bandwidth usage.
Either way, it not going to win an end users to have something like that.
To my knowledge Widevine DRM works with Chromium. You can watch DRM'd videos: https://forum.manjaro.org/t/how-to-install-widevine-on-chrom...
"most internet video"... by what metric? Hours watched? Catalog size? I find it unlikely that DRM videos outnumber non-DRM videos by any reasonable metric.
I guess you could call it a feature at that.
Make the switch.
And genuinely, most people are choosing between privacy and convenience.
And with Firefox you don't need to choose.
Reproduction steps:
1. Check that Google search is working by opening Chrome, navigating to www.google.com, and searching for any term (such as the name of a newspaper and clicking the link to verify that search works as expected.)
2. Open firefox.com and navigate to www.google.com
You will receive a message:
"It looks like you have Chrome installed! For the most secure experience, please visit this page using the Chrome browser or wait and try again later.."
If you have not used Chrome in the past 1 hour from your same IP address, you receive the page as expected.
The above repro steps should be pretty much impossible under antitrust law. (Due to search monopoly.) Which is a very good thing.
And honestly, when I watch Netflix, it's usually in my Surface, in which case I'll use the app.
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Google, Microsoft new "bestie" in this collaboration, will screw them over once it's clear that Microsoft "can't turn back" from using Chromium or even fork it.
As I understand it Chromium is a lot easier to wrap your own GUI around than Gecko. XUL is still not completely decoupled, separating them completely is an ongoing effort I think.
Maybe when the embedded Gecko/Servo engine is production ready would be the time for MS to reconsider.
However for most average Joe's it's fine and won't make a difference, so I always install and recommend Firefox when I play IT guy for family/friends. Time to start doing this again like we did in 2005!! It worked then and it can now!
As a developer, I don't typically use browsers as debuggers or programming environments, so I never experienced game-breaking differences.
Edge & Firefox have also been useful in the same way I once used Opera (special tasks where their features really shine). I really liked Edge's reading mode & for just browsing websites it was great.
What developer tools available in chrome but not firefox?
With webRequest, Google is "just" testing the waters. Just like with the forced sign-in, they will back down when they see the backlash.
Based only on Google's description, they seem to have a valid reason to remove (even though they say "deprecate", they mean remove) the offending API. However, there's zero chance they can get away with this. For what reason I'm not sure, market share of Chrome is very important to them. So they'll have to keep it or implement some new, acceptable method.
Arguably.
On these threads there is always a handful of complaints about the state of Firefox, mostly on macOS. On my machine, I can’t even launch Firefox in headless mode without the fans turning on, which never happened on Chrome. While I haven’t benchmarked it, for normal browsing it does feel slower than Crome.
But what kills it for me is their crippled AppleScript support. Firefox is the worst major browser (even worse than smaller browsers) for an automator on macOS. I rely on browser control every day, so Firefox is useless to me.
I’d sooner switch to Safari, which despite laughable controls (can’t even disable JavaScript on a per-website basis) I can do something with.
Truly is close to an even 50/50 split -- FF is my personal browser and I use Chrome for all work-related tasks.
And they are subjectively indistinguishable in terms of performance. The only exceptions to that statement are, well, Google properties where Google has clearly invested time and money into optimizing things for FF.
One other possible sorta-exception is when I'm using a scaled resolution mode on an external 4K monitor. MacOS warns me, straight up, that these modes will cause performance issues for me and my modest Intel Iris graphics. The whole system's a little sluggish in those modes, and I think FF fares worse than Chrome, but I won't hold that against FF.
FWIW, Safari does feel subjectively more responsive to me when it comes to scrolling and navigating. And I recently spent a few bucks upgrading my PC gaming rig to a 120hz monitor, which makes a massive difference. And I'm one of those weirdos who keeps CRTs around for his old consoles because he enjoys that true zero lag experience. So I am not exactly insensitive to latency. I don't have magic professional gamer golden magic eyes or anything, but it is an area of interest for me.
The widespread issues for many, though not all, Mac users, will not make it a ubiquituous browser.
I'm running firefox as my daily driver on Mojave with no issues whatsoever. Without seeing this thread, I didn't even know there were issues with the mac version.
I haven't tried to use applescript/automator with it so i can't comment on whether or not that works, but that doesn't seem like the biggest issue for most users, or even most developers.
I'm fulltime FF but I won't pretend that the in-site (site specific) search works as smoothly as it did (does?) in Chrome
In Chrome you would go to foo.com and you would use their search input and from then on, in your address bar you can type foo (or maybe just f, depending on how often you use foo.com), and press <tab> to search within the site
This is a workflow you get used to
For the longest time I wanted this in FF, but I think the real thing that clicked for me was just heavily leaning on duckduckgo's bangs
https://duckduckgo.com/bang
(Firefox does have in-site search, which you can use by right clicking in the site's search input and clicking "Add a Keyword for this Search", but I'm not even sure how it works heh)
edit: okay so this is how it works https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from-address... and I just added `a` for amazon.com and I typed `a` in the address bar and pressed <enter> and it didn't do anything, hm
edit2: so I guess my main point should have been: Firefox has a manual step for what Chrome did for "free", after you made your first in-site search, which you were probably already going to do
Personally I disable the cloud-based suggestions and rely only on my local history.
https://www-archive.mozilla.org/docs/end-user/keywords.html
Basically, Firefox allows you to set a keyword (which I often set to an abbreviation + question mark) which you can link to a site's search URL. For example to search Google Scholar I would type my keyword, "sch?" and then my search query, and after pressing enter I am taken to the site's search results. It's a few more steps you have to take, but has the added benefit of allowing you to add the functionality for any site.
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* Tree Style Tab: makes tabs much more manageable, no parallel in Chrome. If you open dozens of tabs, after using this, you can only pity the traditional tab management [1].
* Containers and container tabs: it's a bit like having separate Chrome profiles for separate contexts, but you can also have them as tabs in the same window.
* Sync / sign-in server that is open source and that you can run on your own if you choose.
[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
Just hit reader mode and its all gone.
I use Safari for both my own browsing and for development (a fairly large ClojureScript application), and it is by far the best browser on the platform by all measures (speed first and foremost).
The only place where Safari falls short is 3D CAD programs (like OnShape), where Chrome is faster and better.
However, my biggest gripe about Safari has to be the developer tools. They're noticeably slower, clunkier, and the network tab is unpredictable at times. I think it's getting better, but I defer to Firefox to do development.
if you have a retina display, this "even" is sort of a joke, because ff is so CPU-heavy (and often slow) that it's unusable for me https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042
Am I using it wrong in Safari?
Because to me the Chrome integration with 1Password X extension is by far the easiest, you get the dropdown right there in the field. In Safari, I have to click the 1Password extension button next to the address field and then select Autofill.
TBH the ability to use uBlock Origin was my only killer requirement, but Container tabs are a leap in web security. I hope that idea gets stolen and becomes a norm in browsers. (Or First Party Isolation in general).
Also dev tools are so much better in Fx and Chrome...
Besides Safari's lack of extensions I find it to be more or less on par with Firefox, assuming you're in the Apple ecosystem. The dev tools feel extremely polished and feature complete. The only thing Safari's dev tools lack IMO is no fancy CSS support for things like grid or animations.
I occasional open up Firefox Dev Edition when I get a weird bug on a webpage and that sort of thing but besides that Safari has served all my needs perfectly.
I use Chrome for development. It has lots of helpful extensions, like the React and Redux devtools, extensions for cookie editing, screen measuring, JSON formatting and so on. I often need to forcibly restart tabs (or the entire browser) due to misbehaving devtools, so it's great having a dedicated browser for it. Same goes for cookies and local storage state. It's completely separate.
I use Safari as a browser. I has the basic extensions (adblocker, etc.) that I need personally. Its development tools are terrible, but that's okay — I only use them in the very rare case where a rendering/JS problem only shows in Safari.
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If you're switching browsers because you're upset that Chrome is breaking uBO, it makes no sense to switch to another browser that's never supported uBO and probably never will.
https://safari-extensions.apple.com/details/?id=com.el1t.uBl...
If you’re switching browser because google is breaking ad blocking, it absolutely makes sense to switch to one with a blocking technology that the browser vendor specifically added, rather than grudgingly allowed.
It also makes sense to use a browser where the blockers don’t get access to what you’re actually browsing. What’s the point of blocking trackers if the blocker just tracks what you do?
https://github.com/el1t/uBlock-Safari/blob/safari/README.md
That’s all not to mention its excellent built-in privacy features and that it’s really really fast.
Not that I'm saying Safari is bad browser, but on iOS you can't really set other browser as your default browser, browsers can't use their own engines, etc. etc.
As a web dev, the main reason I don't switch is I know how to use Chrome dev tools, and hate spending time I could be producing code instead learning new tools for something like this. But eventually I'll get myself to (prob to FF rather than safari, as long as I'm switching).
At some point they decided to mimic Xcode which pretty much put a nail in them for being useful for anything.
If uBlock stops working, I'll switch off in an instant though.
Also as far as I can see I have to upgrade my OS in order to upgrade by browser with safari. Sometimes I just can't be bothered to wait for a 40 minute upgrade to complete.
Safari is a great browser if you don’t need the most cutting edge features or extensibility though, and I believe it’s also the best optimized for battery life.
I don't really care which one I use, but change for changes' sake is frustrating. I'm used to Blink/old Webkit and I don't see any reason to learn a new layout.
Chrome's first paint is faster and more consistent. I think when I used macOS, Chrome had DNS preloading but Safari didn't.
It's been a while since I used macOS (RIP my 2012 13" MacBook Air), but Chrome's scrolling behaviour is more effective -- "solid" is how I'd describe it.
The omnibar is simple and usually shows exactly the right suggestions. Safari's address bar often didn't have the thing I wanted, and had extra things that I definitely didn't want or took a second for my brain to parse.
Chrome's context menu has better contrast, being black on white rather than black on silver. The choices are ordered better as well.
This is all that comes to mind right now.
An employee at my old company used a Mac Mini. She's not computer-saavy, but she far preferred Chrome over Safari. I asked her why and she couldn't describe it -- just that she was certain. I think it would be really insightful to do studies where you take tiny features from Safari, like the context menu colour, put them in Chrome and survey users on how they liked the product.
FF has tab scrolling, but you also have tree style tabs which is better than chrome when you have a lot of tabs. Container tabs are also a big plus and is what made me start using firefox again. Chrome has a tree style tabs extension but the user experience makes it unusable for me. I can't find it for safari.
Firefox is still slower & consumes more CPU than chrome and safari after all of the improvements. Especially on a few heavyweight websites I use a lot, like facebook and google maps. Chrome is fast enough by comparison. So on my personal macbook I never use firefox because it's too slow.
If safari fixed it's tab issues then I would use it. But being silent apple, they will probably never fix that because it goes against some designer's idea of good design. Look how long it took to get favicons in tabs and it's still not the default option.
This will show an overview of all your tabs at once. Just start typing to find a particular tab by name.
A two-finger pinch-in gesture will also trigger the Tab Overview.
Another fun one: use Command-Option-<+> and Command-Option-<-> to make text larger or smaller (as opposed to zooming the entire page).
To view other shortcuts, click the View menu in Safari, and then hold down the Option key.
I actually really liked Safari when I used it. The issue for me is just that I don't only use OS X and like having my stuff synced across devices.
If I had an iPhone I would probably be very happy with Safari.
1. Swiping back on the trackpad to navigate backwards freezes the page for a couple of seconds. It then redraws the page with any updated elements (perhaps a refresh?).
2. The element CSS attributes in the dev tools often fail to update the DOM, duplicate with every keystroke, or revert what you have typed.
However as I posted in another comment, Safari is the new IE when it comes to bugs and standards compliance.
Here's an example that broke many many sites that use OAuth2 Auth Code Flow for login (including the main UI portal my company provides clients): https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=194906
This was also an issue in iOS, and since Apple doesn't let any other browsers actually use their own rendering engine on that platform (they're just wrappers around Safari's guts) this was broken for all iPhone users no matter the browser.
This is just one example. There's been numerous other issues such as disabling third party cookies by default.
I can only surmise that Mac users use Chrome/FF because the internet just _works better_ when they do.
You completely disregard one of the biggest appeals to Chrome, which is its massive extension support (which Safari is miles behind on).
Safari has poor controls if you care about privacy and having some modicum of control over the websites you visit.
In Chrome we can — on a per-site basis — disable/enable JavaScript; disable/enable cookies (and local storage); allow only some cookies; set which cookies clear on exit. You can also do more, but those are the ones I use.
You can do all that without extensions, and the controls are right there on the omnibar. In Safari, I can’t even do that with an extension (that I’m aware of).
No profile support. I have four profiles in use right now, mostly "thanks" to the fact that Twitter can't run multiple accounts at once and Tweetdeck is garbage. Three "private" profiles and one for "work" stuff. That's a dealbreaker for me.
In addition, as a web developer, Chrome has way better development tools, and I like to use Chromecast integration and see full URLs in a real address bar, not just the domain like Safari does.
Preferences > Advanced > Show full website address
I’ve tried chrome in the past but it installed some sort of GoogleUpdater daemon without permission and I absolutely hate that. The same reason I don’t install MSOffice on my machines. If a desktop application needs a background service for wathever reason I don’t want it anywhere near my computers.
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One word: iCloud. I don't feel like being encapsulated in Apple's ecosystem because their support on non-Apple products is limited, buggy, and/or non-existent.
Because sensible people don't deliberately handcuff themselves to trillion dollar megacorps. How can I get my Safari bookmarks on my Android phone?
I have switched on my phone, but desktop thats a pretty harsh trade off.
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I keep trying to switch but every time it is clear that Safari is an inferior product (aside from efficiency, where it beats the heck out of Chrome).
I switched a couple months ago from Chrome to Firefox as well but to tell you the truth, I just heard about containers and what you could do with it. I guess I must've been living under a rock, this is amazing!
I was already glad I made the switch for the less resources being used on my aging Macbook Pro and better privacy features, but containers just took this experience to the next level for me!
EDIT: What actually triggered my switch was at one point, a few tabs on Chrome(regular things like Youtube) started causing my CPU/fan to go crazy on my MBP 2015(the last decent MBP). Instead of trying to figure out what extension or what setting was causing the problem, I thought I'd give FF a try and just couldn't look back after.
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I hope Mozilla won't deprecate those..
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Services/Sync/Addon_Sync
I still use Chrome for some tasks such as watching/listening to Youtube. (edit: not bc of performance, but bc I hate OSXs Cmd-Tab ordering)
That's a trivial but surprisingly reasonable reason for using two browsers. OSX has some annoying quirks sometimes.
What is this?
Container tabs are great. Combined with Tree Style Tabs and Containerise addons, you have something unbeatable in both terms of security, privacy and user friendliness.
I had a google container for a while, but opening links opens a new tab and closes the google container, so therefore you cant it back or forward without reopening that container tab. Same thing if I click a container link or something and it pushes it into a new tab, I loose that ability to go backward.
It's just a minor gripe but I'm so into the habit of hitting the back button on my mouse while browsing rather than cmd shift tab.
Containers are useful for separating "who I am to my providers." As far as Facebook is concerned, I am a Facebook user, but I don't use Amazon or Google. But Amazon thinks I'm an Amazon user that doesn't use Facebook or Google. You can accomplish this with profiles, but in Chrome (last I checked) that meant multiple windows, rather than just sites being displayed in tabs that indicate the container in use. So for that purpose, I believe containers are more useful.
(I also think Firefox should step up their profile game, because when my spouse and I alternate using a computer we share, it's inconvenient for me to close all her Firefox windows so I can open my profile!)
So in your case you could have say a "work" container and a "home" container. Each of these could persist logins for all of the services you are using without having to switch between users and have different windows open you just have the 2 tabs.
What I think people find more useful is the ability to make a container for say "facebook". Anytime you open facebook it puts it in a new tab with a sandboxed browser session. It's similar to having a separate profile but it's just for facebook use and you don't have to think about it so much. If you click a link to facebook it opens it in your new container already logged in meanwhile facebook does not see you as authed in any of your other tabs.
It's definitely something I'd like to see worked out better as a power user feature.
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I switched to Chrome a few years ago (and even to a Chromebox as my daily driver, on my second now because I wanted Android app support) because Firefox was a bloated piece of garbage, if I left 5-10 tabs open for a few weeks in Windows they'd be using several gigabytes of memory from a leak, memory use growing hourly.
Edit: I don't know why I'm being downvoted, this is even on Mozilla's own site showing it hasn't been fixed:
"Firefox's memory usage may increase if it's left open for long periods of time. A workaround for this is to periodically restart Firefox"
With an alternate solution being:
"Add RAM to your computer" ... "RAM is cheap"
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-uses-too-much-m...
I have not had this issue at all with Chrome in Windows 7, Windows 10 or ChromeOS.
https://www.ghacks.net/2019/03/01/firefox-67-automatically-u...
There's also this:
https://www.ghacks.net/2012/05/22/make-firefox-more-responsi...
They did this for political reasons. Regardless of what kind of trash talk takes place on Dissenter, the point is that nobody is forced to use it.
My point: neither Google nor Mozilla should be trusted and both seek to be your totalitarian Internet overlord.
1. https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/36490/firefox-and-chrome-ban...
[1]: https://reclaimthenet.org/firefox-rejects-free-speech-bans-f...
I have darkmode on, on the entire internet. Had it for eternities before ff, thanks to an extension. Great reader extension. Even ported (to webextensions) extensions still have great versions for xul.
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/04/15/the-case-for-exte...
Mozilla could not advertise Firefox as secure if they allowed unsigned addons.
With the way Google tries to strongarm standards and at the same time defy them, it's the modern Internet Explorer and it's a PITA to develop for.
Every single update since Quantum has made things worse. Three days ago I opened up Firefox to find out all of my settings had been nuked, 200+ tabs, themes and extensions lost, about:config reset, search settings reset (hello again Google) etc. I'm still fuming mad about this.
I don't feel like drudging up old history but my most recent bug was that Chrome doesn't properly bubble mouse click events when some UI elements fire.
WONTFIX of course, apparently I should just use event.preventDefault() even though every other browser handled this particular mouse event correctly. Chrome was the only outlier. So now I am writing code specifically for Chrome.
Two years ago I had an SVG rendering bug that turned out to be so deep that I had to spend two weeks debugging and come up with an incredibly convoluted scheme for loading dynamic SVG icons because `<use/>` is broken hot garbage on Chrome. Bug report dead in the water. More code just for Chrome.
You get the picture. I now have to develop on Chrome as much as I hate it, even though FF has better debug messages and stability, just because it saves time testing every little thing out.
So in my case I go to work and get reports that X is no longer working, lucky for me in JS is easy to patch third party code and fix this issue but I could not find a ticket that explains why Chrome did this.
There are several more #ifdefs I've had to add due to weird chrome glitches (like around the html5 video player, which just works seamlessly with Firefox).