Interestingly I try Chrome once every which and go right back to Firefox for exactly the same reason. I find the Chrome UI intolerable. Tiny tabs, inflexible GUI, less interesting extensions, etc. I also tend to use _many_ tabs (grouped by topic I'm working on) so maybe I'm a bit of an unusual case.
It is probably a quite subjective thing. I use Firefox as main browser but test things in Chrome. Neither UI really bothers me, but I prefer Firefox for ideological reasons. The dev tools in chrome are better though imo.
I feel like Firefox's Dev Tools are better in so many small ways at the fundamentals it's really sad every time someone says they prefer Chrome Dev Tools. (Plus, Firefox's Dev Tools inherited from Firebug and at least from that sort of continuity perspective arguably are the most mature Dev Tools codebase.)
A lot of the reason so many people seem to like Chrome Dev Tools better seems to be exactly the sort of "Works best in IE6" mentality that so many devs only spend time testing in Chrome and customizing Chrome Dev Tools how they like and making sure Chrome Dev Tools work right that it just becomes inertia that that is what they like better.
Little tweaks to sourcemap generation options, for instance, can be all it takes to get Firefox Dev Tools working just as well as Chrome for code debugging, but so many devs work in Chrome only that the defaults in so many places are accidentally so Chrome-centric.
Similar goes for all the Chrome-only Dev Tools extensions. At this point even the Dev Tools Extension Models are close enough between Chrome and Firefox that it mostly just needs more people using Firefox for development to catch up on extensions.
Could well be.
I do very little web development, and I used chrome back in the days when that was my fulltime job. It might be more of a case of familiarity rather than them actually being better. :)
One thing I think Chrome is better at is emulating CSS media, so we can check layouts when printing, for example. I don't even see how to do that in Firefox.
I'm the opposite with tabs, I try to keep them as minimal and just away as much as possible. Thankfully ff is pretty customizable so my setup is fine now, but the default top bar felt just gigantic and distracting coming from Chrome.
Interesting, but it requires adding a file to your machine. I'm constantly on different machines. Being able to log in, get all my info and settings, and then log out leaving the machine in its original state is invaluable to me.
Not the OP, but I'll chip in with my $.02. I really want to like Firefox, but everything UI feels wrong (on macOS). From tabs, where the close button is on the wrong side (right) and if you click the + button to open a new tab the cursor ends up over the new tab, not over the + button so you can click again to open a new tab. The whole UI looks and feels non-native. Pressing ESC in full screen mode does not bring the window back to its original size. In-page search opens a clunky (javascript?) search field in the bottom status bar. Firefox does not support proper macOS dark-mode (try cmd-O). Cannot print to PDF. (Magic mouse) gestures does not work. No automatic keychain integration for login forms. Fonts are rendered different than in Chrome and Safari, e.g. thin fonts are tick and font's in general look more ugly (something with antialiasing?). The list goes on and on. Basically Firefox feels like browser version of Slack.
The other one that bugs me the most is lack of bouncy overscroll with my trackpad. Being used to that in the rest of the OS, it feels very jarring when you scroll up to the top of a page and it abruptly jerks to a stop.
> From tabs, where the close button is on the wrong side (right)
Chrome does this.
> and if you click the + button to open a new tab the cursor ends up over the new tab, not over the + button so you can click again to open a new tab.
Chrome does this too.
> The whole UI looks and feels non-native.
Yep, that describes Chrome.
It sounds to me like you're a Safari user, since the things you're describing are things Safari does correctly. I'm a die-hard Safari user, and both Chrome and Firefox feel wrong to me. But Chrome feels even worse than Firefox does.
> From tabs, where the close button is on the wrong side (right)
In Firefox, using the Customize option from the menu, you can move the new tab button to the left side of the tabs, or even to the far right side so that it doesn't move.
agreed, the list is huge and so many of them seem like minor fixes -- for example the white flash that appears when opening a new tab in dark mode can be fixed with userChrome.css. its been an issue for a year. i don't know if mozilla is just broke or what, but it sure feels like their projects are hanging together by a thread. i still use it because i want them to succeed. i would be happy to work on it personally if mozilla would have me lol (instead ive made lots of extensions).
I’m in the middle of trying this exercise now. Some of the differences are just getting used to new design.
For me the most jarring thing is how Firefox’s omnibar works. It isn’t good at showing me the sites I’m looking for after typing just a few characters. Instead, it shows absolutely every page I’ve recently visited at one of those sites.
Another design thing is the amount of information on the default new page has a ton more info than I’m used to seeing (or really want to see). Hence a question I posted yesterday:
> For me the most jarring thing is how Firefox’s omnibar works. It isn’t good at showing me the sites I’m looking for after typing just a few characters. Instead, it shows absolutely every page I’ve recently visited at one of those sites.
Interesting! I think this may be a case where, over time, as you use a search mechanism, you get used to the kinds of searches that work well with that mechanism. I've had similarly frustrating experiences with Chrome's address bar, which I'm not used to using.
Firefox has a concept of "frecency", a metric that combines frequency of visit and recency of visit to determine what you're most likely to want based on what you typed. (It also gives some preference to the starts of words/domains, and some other heuristics.) However, I can easily believe that before Firefox has enough information, typing at it would produce suboptimal results. That's something worth reporting as a bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Firefox&c... . Please feel free to use any of the text above to help describe the issue, if it helps.
> Another design thing is the amount of information on the default new page has a ton more info than I’m used to seeing (or really want to see).
Complete agreement. I disable the new tab page on desktop, as I really just want a blank page. (On mobile, I find the default new tab page more useful and usable.)
When I type in ‘news.’ Firefox still gives me ‘hackernewsgrid.com’ as the first result, even though I haven’t visited that page in years, and in fact it is completely down.
I’m not sure how the omnibar works, but I’m not extremely impressed.
When I type “n”, I’m likely either going to news.google.com or HN. Firefox will guess correctly that I’m thinking of HN and fills that in as the URL. However, the main HN URL and Google News are something like 8 and 9 in the list. Everything above those two is a mix of things that happen to have an “n” somewhere in the URL that I may have recently visited.
As the grandparent comment says, you just get used to how Firefox works. For example, I would've never even thought to type "news" to look for hackernews in the omnibar after using it so long-- I just instinctively know that Firefox will find it easier based on domain name, so I type "yc" for "ycombinator.com"
I can see how this is going to be confusing for a new Firefox user, but it's easy to get used to.
I have several sites that I visit daily. All of them can be accessed by typing in the first character, or, at most, two characters - the url then appears in the navbar, just hit <enter>.
The strange thing is, every nine months or so, FF will forget one of these urls. It doesn't do it for all of them at once, just one, and it's not related to upgrades. All I have to do is enter the full url and hit enter, and things are back to normal again for that particular url for many months.
Not the OP of that comment, but I feel the same way.
I use macOS, so maybe it’s different on Windows. A few things bug me, it’s hard to really pin it down. It just doesn’t feel finished. The Save File dialog window feels like it’s from Mac OS 9, or at least its sentiment is. The behaviour is confusing, because if you press cancel, you still end up with a file in you Downloads. It would better if it just dealt with it the way Safari and Chrome do. A lot of the dropdowns and other inputs feel a little old too, everything ends up looking like 2003, which isn’t terrible, but I would imagine it puts people off when switching from Chrome.
The address bar is also very odd, it almost always suggests the wrong thing for me. I’ve adjusted the settings, but even for a site I just visited with the exact name in the page title, I still end up with the search as the default result.
That's some very reasonable feedback. Please consider reporting those as issues (the latter perhaps coordinated with the other commenter's bug report). Emphasize that it substantially affects the first-time user / new user experience; that may help get appropriate attention.
The search bar in Firefox always assumes you're attempting to visit a URL if you type two words separated by a dot. It's incredibly frustrating trying to search things like "table.sort" and being redirected to a URL that doesn't resolve to anything and will almost certainly not for a while. Chrome doesn't have the same behavior (it ships with a list of valid TLDs). I get that you can work around it easily by typing a space, but the habit is ingrained for me due to switching from Chrome and this alone makes me want to switch back, if not for the desire for Mozilla to succeed. There is a bug for this issue[0] which has been open for 5 years.
For FF mobile the UI is less convenient than Brave. In Brave the icons for adding a new tab and switching tabs are at the bottom of the screen, while in FF they're in a menu at the top. Because I use my phone in portrait mode I have to reach my thumb up to the menu every time to create or switch tabs. It's really tiresome and I use Brave instead due to this. Also, the URL bar on mobile FF has the 'X', but its behavior is completely different from Brave. It closes the bar entirely rather than clearing it. I also get that it's a thing to get used to after switching, but why not just delegate cancellation to the Android back button? (Could it be due to iOS?)
One Firefox option I love but don't see used much is the optional search bar you can add next to the url bar. I MUCH prefer to use that for searching for two main reasons:
1. It always "just works". I've run into problems with both Chrome and Firefox getting confused by a search term I entered into the URL bar.
2. The search string persists even after clicking on results. This is particularly helpful when I'm having trouble finding a good result and want to make a slight change to my previous search string, or I want to remember exactly which search term brought up a specific result.
Chrome is dead simple, minimal, and predictable. When I want something, I look in the one menu. Firefox, on the other hand, has multiple bars, multiple menus, sidebars, icons plus text. It's too much.
What bothers me, are dialogs and windows not written in html and css (not sure what it is, maybe XUL?). Chrome basically eats it own dog food = everything is html. Firefox still has settings done in non html way. It may sound marginal problem to you, but IMO browser should be showcase for html and html should be used everywhere. Also amount of popup dialogs/windows should be reduced. Again settings, about, ... should be html page, instead of popup window, which cannot be until it's rewritten as html page (so it's related to my first point).
UI elements written in HTML are hella buggy. For example, Chrome's hamburger menu (I don't know if it's written in HTML but it sure feels like it):
1. Spacebar doesn't select items
2. Key equivalents don't work while it's open
3. Cut/Copy/Paste often does not work, depending on where the keyboard focus is
4. Inapplicable menu items don't disable properly
5. The caret continues blinking in text fields even though keyboard focus is in the menu
etc etc. This sort of basic bugginess is embarrassing and entirely avoidable by using the native platform controls, instead of re-inventing them poorly.
Have you tried customizing the UI? Last time I tried out-of-the-box Firefox it disgusted me pretty quickly due to how Chrome-like it was, but that's because I never liked the default Chrome UI. In any case I bring up customization since while I've never left Firefox, their last good out-of-the-box UI was like Firefox 1.4 or maybe 2. Firefox is incredibly customizable though (even if less so now) and so it looks and feels how I prefer which no other browser duplicates out of the box (not even Firefox) and no other browser even makes possible. I guess I'm a "power user" for wanting to fit the tool to my hands rather than my hands to the tool, and Firefox is the only browser that spares a thought for me.
Even extensions in Firefox can't customise the page you see when you open the browser! I used a "new tab" extension, but for some reason Firefox doesn't treat the first tab you open as a "new tab"(1). I quickly noticed heaps of annoyances like that when I recently tried to switch to Firefox.
1. I'm pretty sure there is an issue for this in their tracker but they don't seem to think it's important enough to fix.
Thank you. Unfortunately I've moved on to Vivaldi (happily). If your solution works I didn't find it, nor did any internet searching help me to find it.
I used to use Firefox but it blew chunks at doing intranet authentication. Auth prompts for days. I had to use an extension that loaded an IE browser pane so that I wouldn’t spend half my work day typing my password. I hope they have improved.
By default, intranet authentication (spnego) is disabled in Firefox. There are numerous guides explaining how to turn it on, and it takes all of a couple of minutes to set up correctly after which point it just works.
FWIW IE has this problem too, in that by default it only enables negotiation for unqualified hostnames. If you want people to use an FQDN, you have to go add that FQDN to a list buried behind a couple of advanced dialogs.
