Switched back to FF on my desktop a couple months ago when I got my keon and I love it. The only thing that's hard to get used to again is a search bar separate from an address bar. Chrome really had that figured out. A unified bar in FF would make it the perfect browser.
The thing is there are people like me who prefer a separate search bar. I don't want google search results showing up when I'm just trying to look through my history or bookmarks.
It also is a privacy issue -- if the URL bar tries to autocomplete search results, then it necessarily sends every URL you type to google/etc.
What I miss, however, is a way to configure search engines and keyboard search without re-enabling the search box. I wish it was somewhere in settings or an about: page.
Basically, when you type something in the address bar it would show your history and add "Search for ..." as the last option. So, even if you had large history, it was enough to press the UP arrow and switch from address to searching.
AFAIK, this is still the way it works on SeaMonkey.
Also Firefox's address bar is much better at searching your history, saving you from doing Google searches. For example you can type the words in the titles of articles you've read and Firefox's AwesomeBar does a good job at suggesting past entries.
This is awesome when you no longer remember the domain or url, but you remember a word or two. In such instances searching on Google doesn't help either.
This feature to me has been an epiphany actually. Google has no interest in developing something like the AwesomeBar, because they'd rather see you doing searches on Google instead.
Edit: Ah, I suppose the auto-complete is different.
you need Foobar [1].
Did you RTFA?
"Firefox separates the address and search bars. Coming from Chrome, that sounds insane. Use Omnibar to combine the two."
I've never made the full switch to Chrome. First, as a long time linux user, Firefox was never so bad on it (startup time, random freeze for i/o...).
Second, when Chrome was (a lot) faster Firefox had way more addons. Now Chrome has kinda fixed that (I still miss some essential addons, like Tree Style Tab), but Firefox is again about as fast as Chrome.
Regarding Google, I've found that it's result are often better than DuckDuckGo. But I promised myself that sometime I'll make a week using only DuckDuckGo, and see if I can survive without Google.
[DuckDuckGo !Bang](https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html)
If you still need a Google result, try appending !sp which will give you a Startpage result (Google result with privacy)
The bang syntax is just awesome, and I rarely need to !g my results.
My personal project has the word "taskforce" in the domain and title. In Firefox, I can type "task" and it's at the top of the options every single time. One down arrow, enter, and done. Chrome puts it as option five under a search for "task" and three predictive recommendations from Google's search engine that start with "task" (none of which I have ever visited in Chrome). "Taskstream log in"? I don't even know what that means.
Essentially everything I want to select in the omnibar is always several items down the list. Very frustrating and inevitably one of the chief reasons I close Chrome and switch back to Firefox.
Your experience might be worse, probably because you haven't used chrome enough.
In your example, you said "n" leads to news.ycombinator.com. In Firefox, "n" leads to me to news.cnet.com, which I also visit fairly regularly. Meanwhile, "yc", or "hac", or "nator" yield Hacker News. In Chrome, "yc" yields a suggestion of "yc.edu" (whatever that is) and "hac" yields "hacked games." Part of my distaste for this is that it reveals that everything I type into the omnibar is sent to Google for analysis. I have once accidentally pasted a password into the omnibar field and had a sudden panic. I know it's Google, and DBE, and all of that. But still.
Back to the fragments point, I might remember a site had something to do with "combi" in the name. Type that into Firefox and it knows what I want, even if I've only visited it once several months ago. Google thinks I want "combivent respimat." No joke. Apparently it's a drug.
In fact, as I experiment right now, I can't even get Chrome to suggest news.ycombinator.com by typing "combinator" into the omnibar. As a user of Chrome I am required to remember the domain started with 'y'. In Firefox, the browser tries to help me.
As an exercise, can you tell us what sites are suggested when you type "combinator", "host", "hub" (this one is an example of a plausible case--"It was something-hub", type "hub", "oh yeah, github!"), etc?
I wonder if the recommendations are however slightly linked to CPC of the terms, wouldn't surprise me.
Yes, it has a terrible memory leak issue, but all of my computers have enough ram as to not notice.
I'm still not ready to make the switch to DuckDuckGo. I figure that if I'm going to stick with Gmail no matter what, if Google already has that information, collecting a few search queries is nothing.
Also, perhaps I'm missing something, but as far as I can tell Chrome is at least partially open source, no? http://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/get-the-code
Why aren't people forking it to create a more privacy friendly version?
In fact, on the mac, with the same number (34) of tabs, the same content, no add-ons or extensions, Firefox takes 600MB - 800MB, Safari takes around 900MB-1GB and Chrome takes around 900-1.2GB. I use these browsers every day and I have the same results every day.
I have the same tabs open now in Firefox, all 34 of them and it's only taking 740MB. You just can't beat that. It's really awesome.
(I'm not saying Firefox has memory leaks. Though it's extremely unlikely it has none, same goes for Chrome and Safari)
> Also, perhaps I'm missing something, but as far as I
> can tell Chrome is at least partially open source, no?
> http://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/get-the-code
>
> Why aren't people forking it to create a more privacy
> friendly version?
I don't think this is as terrible as you think anymore (or if it is really even an issue anymore). The MemShrink[0] project has made huge progress. See also: https://areweslimyet.com/
Can't take that "One size fits all" mentality of Chrome.
The main thing I'm really annoyed with DDG about is that they don't (no longer?) treat double-quoted search terms as literal. I'll often get results that are close to but not exactly what I asked for.
This is really frustrating, as my entire intention in double quoting search terms is to ask for exactly those search terms and nothing else.
As far as DDG's privacy boasts go, I'd love to see them confirmed by frequent audits from a trusted and respected entity like the EFF. For all we know, DDG might be lying (or being forced to lie) about not tracking or spying on its users and not handing over the data it collects on us to others.
My motto is: trust but verify. So far, there's no way to do that in the case of DDG. Still, I'd much rather use a service that at least pays (pretty convincing) lip service to respecting its users' privacy than services where there's clear evidence of abuse and contempt for its users' privacy, such as Google or Facebook.
[1] http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/ff524480.aspx
For people who still like Google search more, but want the privacy, I'd suggest startpage.com. I see even the Tor Browser Bundle uses it as the default search engine (you can still switch to DDG and others, too).
"DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "about 50" sources, including Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wikipedia, Wolfram Alpha, Bing, its own Web crawler, the DuckDuckBot, and others."[1]
Haven't tried DuckDuckGo yet, but I know my day is coming.
My experience is quite the opposite to yours. neither ff or chrome crash much, and chrome is significantly faster.
FF, on the other hand, is faster (!) and doesn't crash often.
Lion-style scrollbars, the bouncy effect when you hit the top and bottom of a page, and back/forward swipes have no animation. It's pretty terrible in terms of usability compared to Safari and Chrome.
Chrome only has the black back/forward animations. Firefox Nightly's animation is exactly like Safari, although you has to enable them specifically for now in about:config.
It also has ML-style scrollbars where they enlarge when you mouse over them.
So OS X integration has certainly improved.
I'm glad both approaches exist.
If you bookmark any website's search results page, you can add a keyword and edit the bookmarked URL to include a printf-style %s placeholder. When you enter the keyword plus some string, Firefox opens the bookmarked URL, substituting your string for %s.
For example, I have a "w" keyword search for Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/index.php?search=%s and a "yt" keyword search for YouTube https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s&search=Searc...
This is why I love vimperator[0]. I actually preferred pentadactyl[1] but development apparently stalled so I switched back.
[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/vimperator/
[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/pentadactyl/
Having a web browser fully integrated in to a powerful editor like that is fantastic. It's far more powerful than what you'd get from the Pentadactyl/Firefox combination, with the disadvantage that w3m can't handle Javascript.[1]
w3m's also far faster and a lot less bloated than Firefox. For sites that work without Javascript and where I only care about getting information in text format (which is probalby 99% of the sites I use), it's just about perfect for me. For the rest, I have Firefox, Opera, and Chromium as backups.
[1] This is not a big loss on most sites, as they can usually be used just fine without it. In fact, it's often good to have Javascript turned off so as to avoid Javascript exploits, tracking and advertising.
That and the fact that color settings for w3m are pretty hard to tweak just right for whatever terminal / foreground/background you're using.
The fact that so many pages render much more readably without CSS is .... sad, actually.
Basically what it does is display the tabs on the left, thus occupying a space that is rarely used on websites (borders). It is so practical for managing many tabs, nesting tabs etc... that I can't understand why a power user who uses a lot of tabs would switch to chrome.
Just try to use it for a day or a week and it will change your life.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
That's off the top of my head, there's a few others I typically add.
My main problem with FF lately is that with _both_ FF (well, Iceweasel) and Chromium installed, Chrome pigs out all available memory, while Firefox is single-processed. While the _active_ Chrome tab usually frees up fairly quickly if swapped, Firefox can literally take minutes to dig itself out of heavy swap.
Yeah, I still use spinning rust.
I was a bit surprised that Firefox hasn't: https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=firefox
but obviously it has a lot more inertia. (Or maybe everyone switches to DDG first, and THEN looks for Firefox, so Google Trends doesn't know about it...)
as of just now
also compare them: https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=firefox#q=firefox%2C...
firefox jumped about as much as ddg recently, but that's a blip on firefox as a whole
(The part about everyone finding Firefox on DDG was a joke.)
I am really confused
I do personally find this thread quite amusing because it's so irrational. Firefox + DDG is so slow for searching that you might as well erase 10 years of browser performance improvements and downgrade your DSL line. Chrome omnibar + prefetch + google instant makes for much faster searching vs. firefox which lacks all of those things (and DDG which lacks "instant"). Also I have to type the entire search into firefox's search bar because DDG doesn't have suggestions. And let's not even talk about the gulf in quality between DDG and Google.
Chrome (even stable) seems to crash tabs all the time, while in the past 6 months firefox nightly hasn't crashed more than a once or twice. Another annoying thing about chrome is I never got a reason for a crash it just was a crash page and if I tried to reload that page it was very likely to crash silently again, with chrome at least I get the stop script dialog once in a while.
Chrome still starts faster (more noticable on windows than linux). There are also a plethora of webkit optimized experiments that don't work for shit on firefox.
It took me a minute to figure out what you were referring to then I realized I haven't seen one of those in months -- since, I believe, I stopped using Flash.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/tab-mix-plus/
For some reason, I also think this exact thing.I also know other people who share this sentiment. I wonder if it comes from Firebug just being the first to the scene?
I'm sure they'll fix all that in time, they have a good development team, but to say Firebug is clearly superior is obviously based on not having used the Chrome tools to do anything significant.
(pretty much switched to Chrome entirely because of web development and Firefox taking too long to reload, but might switch back once I don't need to do web dev for a while).
I really like Chrome, and might have stayed with Chromium if there had been an easy to install bookmark and password sync server I could run like Firefox has with Weave (for obvious reasons, I no longer want my sync data centralized with Google). Chromium apparently has a server you can run at home, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to do it. In addition, Chrome for Android has no support for self-hosted sync, so unlike with Firefox I couldn't sync my mobile devices even if I could set up a self-hosted server.
With Firefox, hosting your own sync server is trivial: there are even several different implementations of the Weave server besides Mozilla.
I miss Chrome, since I was very happy with the performance and dev tools, but I've made my decision and will live with it (except when I need to test web development stuff in Chrome).
DDG is also my go-to search engine.
Personally, I feel better supporting Mozilla and DDG more.
1) if you are concerned about privacy you should also turn off malware protection in FF because it sends pages that you visit to Google (yes, I know their privacy policy - do you trust them?). For additional points you can open about:config, search for "google" and remove all occurences. Point being: even FF doesn't completely protect your privacy by default.
2) DDG is great and I use it, but if I were really concerned about privacy I would use a non-US provider (StartPage is based in Netherlands, not sure where they host their servers though). Point being: DDG claims they don't store user data, but that doesn't mean NSA doesn't either. If they are USA based, they must obey USA laws.
PS please pardon my autocorrect
This goes for the Android versions as well. If I click the address bar there in Chrome, it will go to the edit mode, which I rarely use. In contrast FF goes into edit mode + it shows relevant possibles from history underneath.
Using ' (Quick Find within link-text only) instead of / (Quick Find ) is even faster/easier.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/googlesharing...
As long as you trust the proxy to not be an adversary.
Sometimes[often times] the default proxy will go down. I've had luck using the following alternate:
googlesharing.riseup.net
Those are little js that will remove the flash/silverlight video and replace it with an mp4. This also effectively kills youtube ads.