To this day I cannot fathom anyone willingly switching from Firefox to Chrome/Edge/any other Chromium-based browser. There are so many tiny features that are useful at least to myself, while a minor JavaScript performance advantage isn't something that important in the grand scale of things.
Firefox is increasingly unfriendly to power users. Wouldn't surprise me if they got rid of this feature someday because they have statistics showing few people use it.
I see this so much so, it's to the point that If I see you're using something else, I assume you're not a developer, and you're likely not a power user.
Everyone is there for a different minority used feature. By caring only about the feature used by the majority, you are actually satisfying no one.
That’s why product managers use persona on top of metrics. Nice products have niche features and some kind of personality. You don’t want to overfocus on them but stripping them all is a losing move.
WordPerfect and Quattro Pro (now WordPerfect Suite, I think) seem to persist due catering to special needs of law firms. Catering to some niche users can keep you afloat despite an otherwise market-dominant competitor.
Firefox would have no users at all if Mozilla abandon us nerds and power users who all rely a slightly different set of Firefox's obscure features. If Mozilla were smart, they would embrace us instead of wishing we were more like normal users (if we were, we'd be using chrome already!)
If you only focus on the most popular features you eventually narrow your product to one feature, so obviously there is a balance in there somewhere between focus and utility as well. Identifying why people use your product is as important as knowing what they use. Chrome does all the things I actually use from Firefox, but I use Firefox because when I ever need slightly more hackability it is there for me. That is at best, a once a year occurance.
"WTF" is there to maintain in the feature anyways? If it's such a bloated mess that this kind of small feature causes maintenance issues and a lot of effort to include in subsequent releases, then maybe it is time for Firefox to fail.
Sigh, I've been using Firefox for almost 2 decades, and this is the first I've heard of this feature.
yep, just hit up 'manage search engines' and add a shortcut. I use this to navigate to servicenow documents when someone IMs me their number, one of my most used workflow helpers.
https://<your servicenow base url>/text_search_exact_match.do?sysparm_search=%s
You can do it in Raycast along with a lot of other shortcuts outside of web browsers. I actually like it better through Raycast because it acts as a universal search, app launcher, calculator, 1Password interface, etc. that's always available and not dependent on a browser.
Non power users would use this more if the docs, marketing and promotion of it was prominent and talked about (or made to look "sexy" for lack of a better word). I think what we're seeing is that the "UX" folk have hijacked the conversation and made it so that it is the only expression of the capabilities an app has for user interaction.
I'm sitting here, recalling all my chats and meetings and workshops with UX folk, and not once can I recall the topic of keyboard shortcuts or tab sequence being brought up. It was all about color, branding, spacing, user flow, "journeys", "experience", conversion funnels, and all things visual.
(function () { let sel = window.getSelection(); let Qr; if (sel && sel.toString().length > 0) {Qr=sel.toString()} else {Qr=prompt('Search Site for','');} let hna=window.location.hostname; if(Qr) { location.href='http://www.google.com/search?&q=site:'+encodeURIComponent(hna)+'+'+escape(Qr) }})();
You can attach to a keyboard shortcut with a launcher or applescript.
Another great thing that only seem to exist for Firefox is Tree Style Tab [1] and a bunch of plugins around it. It completely changes the way I browse.
There is an honest but much, much more limited attempt top bring a something similar to Chromium: [2].
Is there a good way to hide the top tabs without getting into barely supported config files?
I like TST, but I gave up on it because I could never get the top tabs hidden correctly, and all the information I could find on the internet was different levels of out of date.
I see a sibling comment posted a link to some tab bar hiding CSS, but having gone though the same "different levels of out of date" problem myself I'll add my own solution that I'm currently using in Firefox 114 on Windows 11. Not perfectly space efficient, but avoids some issues with totally hiding the window titlebar, since I still wanted to keep the minimize/maximize/close controls up there.
Some of this may be platform specific to Windows (can't speak to window management buttons on other platforms), but hopefully it helps if anyone in this thread needs it or lands here later from search results:
/* Hide the tabs within TabsToolbar*/
.toolbar-items {
display: none;
}
/* Make the min/max/close buttons align to the right*/
#TabsToolbar {
display: flex;
flex-direction: row-reverse;
}
/* Hide the titlebar spacers, which push the buttons away from the corner */
.titlebar-spacer {
display: none;
}
/* Hide the sidebar header */
#sidebar-header {
display: none;
}
Stupid that this sort of fiddling is required when other browsers (like Edge and Brave) are doing native sidebar tabs, but I do like how compact Firefox's can be, plus being a tree instead of a flat list.
Enabling userChrome.css files and finding where to put it is left as an exercise to the reader.
IIRC there's also a config flag you need to set, otherwise it won't load the userchrome file. I forget the details, it's been a while since I set this up.
Not really, Chrome-based browsers have search keywords too.
What I would like most on the Chrome-based browser I have to use at work is history (^ keywords) and bookmark searching (# tag keywords, or * bookmark keywords) using "awesomebar" operators that Firefox has.
I'd really really like it if a form of search keywords could be used for forms that don't work as GET requests.
Funny enough, I just posted on Mastodon looking for recommendations of other browsers to try.
While I love the flexibility and openness that Firefox brings, there is a resource issue for me on my macbook pro. I have to spend a lot of time in Google Meets for work, and video conferencing via Firefox seems to redline the computer... It sounds like a jet engine and I wind up thermal throttling to the point that my machine becomes completely unresponsive.
I'd love to stay with Firefox - especially for the cross-device tab sharing and search - but the need for something stable is superseding my want to use a non-Google browser.
I have no doubt that Google is hamstringing performance on Firefox. But that is far outside of my sphere of control so I am focusing on the things I can effect.
Another member recommended disabling hardware acceleration so that is the first thing I'll try. If you have any other recommendations on how I can reduce the impact of the issue I'd love to hear them.
I use vivaldi because of the tab stack feature and until firefox gets support for something close to it I just can't switch. I tried to browse the web without it but I always come back to vivaldi. I have a tab hoarding problem and it's the only browser that actually makes helps me manage it.
I use Firefox mainly because of TreeStyleTab which lets me have 1k-2k tabs with no problem. Beats all other vertical tab options I've seen so far in other browsers
Custom bookmark / search engine functionality is easy to replicate on Linux with a few shell scripts, though.
I use Brave and yet use some complex search engines such as making POST requests to APIs based on the search input and telling the browser to open a URL provided in the API's HTTP response.
Consider just how many layers of JavaShit webdevs want to slap down on their websites these days, that "minor" performance difference adds up. Death by a thousand cuts, basically.
And then there’s tree style tabs. But actually I moved to Chrome due to how many issues I ran into with tree style tabs due to firefox not letting do its thing
I second this. I've had the very rare message saying the tab tree has gotten out of sync (always as a consequence of me moving tabs between incognito windows), but the first time it happened clicking the message refreshed the tab tree successfully; the second time it didn't but toggling the sidebar off and on fixed it. I've had no problems with stability.
And to me the context menu option to unload tabs is a killer feature.
It became slow and the only reason that was keeping me in Firefox (TST) started getting more and more broken so I switched. I used to be so vocal about TST back in the days that I’m probably the reason you use it btw.
Firefox without a command character searches everywhere; you use a command character to restrict your search to a specific category (history, bookmarks, open tabs etc).
Assumably Chromes does the same (ie without some prefix searches everywhere, with some prefix —or keypress— searches in a specific category). If Chrome doesn't do that, then Firefox's is the much better UX, otherwise they're equivalent.
To this day I cannot fathom anyone willingly switching from Firefox to Chrome/Edge/any other Chromium-based browser. There are so many tiny features that are useful at least to myself, while a minor JavaScript performance advantage isn't something that important in the grand scale of things.