Ask HN: What's stopping you from using Firefox as your primary browser?

Pure inertia. I'm going to change right now. Been meaning to do this for weeks. Just one change to one line in my i3 startup config and that will be that.

Update: I'm back in Firefox. Already been nagged twice by Google to use Chrome.

  * I need to lookup foo on wikipedia: !w foo
  * I need to search for foo on amazon: !a foo
  * I need to lookup a video on foo: !yt foo

I use Firefox as my primary browser but I use Chromium for the Yubikey integration on GitHub, which either Firefox or GitHub does not support.

Edit: another advantage of Chromium is that Google has put so many resources into securing it; reportedly as a direct result of this, vulnerabilities in Firefox are easier to find (and cheaper in vulnerability markets).

Occasionally Firefox has had terrible performance problems on macOS.

I use FF as my primary. There are so many more really nice plugins for Chrome though that FF doesn't have. So, sometimes I just have to use Chrome.

I've installed "Chrome Store Foxified" and it's hit or miss on if a given Chrome Plugin will actually work in FF.

Frankly: speed. As a web developer it notice it all the time. Chrome (using Canary) is faster in every aspect; Firefox renders slowly, becomes unresponsive over time, hangs often when using web sockets (webpack); the developers tools seem to have problems with large files and so on.

I actually love Firefox' dev tools and I really would like to use it - and it's not a bad browser at all- but as a developer all the small things add up (same reason why I cannot use Safari as my daily browser).

It's slow, and has very non-native UI on macOS.

1. UI (More UI overhead than Chrome) 2. Speed (Noticeably slow than Chrome) 3. UX (Moving tabs out of the window looks and is bad) 4. Extensions (Missing some essential stuff I use) 5. Breaks some Website (One of my regular websites doesn't work correctly in Firefox)

Can't login to comment here. It may be one the following extensions 'pocket', 'ublock origin' or 'pushbullet'. That said, I do switch back and forth between firefox and edge as default browser, depending on activity.

I use it but it's frustrating that it doesn't support multithreading which is why it's so slow. Fortunately that will be fixed soon though.

'I'm Feeling Lucky' is actually my default search in a Chrome tab. It's super fast to just type 'espn ncaab scores' in a new tab and get exactly what you want without any clicks.

For Google results, I preface with a 'g '.

If Firefox had this feature (it may and I haven't found it) I'd probably switch over. Chrome takes up so much memory on my Mac with its Google Chrome Helpers, it's a pain.

1) It is significantly slower. That's probably because multiprocess ("e10s") is not enabled (and I don't even know why). 2) Stable version still does not support touch scroll on Linux (only Developer version does). Also do not understand why.

I use bookmark keywords to search various sites in Firefox.

For example, a bookmark to search Amazon:

  Name: Amazon Search
  Location: http://www.amazon.com/s/?field-keywords=%s
  Keyword: ams

So now if I enter the following in my address bar:

  ams keyboard

I am brought to an Amazon search results page for keyboards.

I don't like the tab-to-search version in Chrome very much by comparison. There is a service called Shortmarks that aims to emulate this behavior in Chrome, but I'm not sure how I feel about using it.

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I switched to Chrome about 5 years ago because Firefox was getting slow for me. Recently I am strongly considering switching back. My biggest continual annoyance with Chrome is poor searching of previous visited pages when typing partial URLs into the address bar. The main thing holding me back right now is I am wondering how this will impact me when using a Chromebook.

I use it, it's just fine. Doesn't feel like there's a lot to choose between it and chrome. I actually struggle to believe that people can easily tell small benchmark level speed differences between browsers reliably in real world use. There's just too many factors and too little repeatability.

I use it as a primary browser, but there are a few web apps on which it's so uselessly slow or chews so much CPU (consistently 90-100%) that the only viable option is to run them on another browser. Shame.

> For me it's a simple feature in Chrome "tab to search" which frustratingly has never been ported into Firefox

Firefox has a similar feature called 'Quick Searches' (look in Firefox's Bookmarks menu). For example, I have one for Flickr - keyword 'fl', url 'https://www.flickr.com/search/?q=%s&w=all'.

So if I type 'fl bridges' in the address bar I go to https://www.flickr.com/search/?q=bridges&w=all

I use a Chromebook, can't run Firefox easily.

1. I switched to Chrome after I got fed up with firefox's tabs not being sandboxed. I worked at a company that ran an app using silver light. It freezing would often lock up my browser (or at least that's what I thought was happening at the time). I switched to chrome and liked the overall "tighter" experience.

2. Now its security issues. I'm watching closely however to see how firefox evolves over the next year.

1) speed.

2) politics. I remembered them announcing that they'd block intrusive ads by default, then quietly backtracked after advertiser backlash.

I understand their balancing act but this demonstrated to me that they'll continue to be beholden to those with power and money in the internet world.

Also, there's clearly competing factions inside Mozilla the company and we have no transparency into their inner workings.

I never stopped using Firefox since I started using it the first time (around 2004). It's quite fast and pleasant with NoScript.

Chrome is my primary browser "at work", and I use it at home for video (Youtube, Twitch, etc.), and for any guests I have over.

Speed. It takes twice as long as Chrome to start, and it's noticeably slower when using it to browse web pages.

I don't like the design of the user interface - at all. If Firefox looked and worked exactly like Chrome, I'd use it in a heartbeat. There's way too much clutter everywhere. At some point I'd like to redo the entire design for them.

While watching a Youtube video on OSX, when I hit the fullscreen button in Firefox the video takes about ten seconds to go fullscreen. It only takes three seconds in Chrome. (And <1s in Safari, but Safari is missing some of the extensions I use.)

Security. Or the perception of it being less secure than Chrome. Not sure how correct the perception is.

I prefer Chrome's speed, minimal UI, and truly automatic updates (as in they're applied without ever even prompting me).