One really nice thing about firefox is no more He's Dead Jim pages.
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.
> One really nice thing about firefox is no more He's Dead Jim pages.
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.
Argh, you replied just when I had deleted. Sorry. To anyone wondering my comment was saying that I couldn't find any service comparable to Google's sync last time I tried Firefox. Google's sync effortlessly syncs all machines tied to an account including bookmarks, extensions, and themes.
I figured I'd try out the latest Firefox and see if I can get it working before I definitively make the comment.
Thanks for the tip though. The machines I want to sync between are Windows 7 and Linux though, so no can do.
Firefox is comparable to Chrome in terms speed and features. However, Mozilla doesn't have the same incentive to collect and use data on their customers that is inherent to Google, an advertising company. In addition to that, Firefox is fully open source, unlike Chrome which contains closed source components from Google.
How is it "just" a window to web content? You never mind things like tabs, bookmarks, the developer console, browsing history or, say, the "Back" button, I guess.
My biggest problems with Firefox after using Chrome for so long is stability. I find that web pages can lock up the entire browser rather than just a tab, and this isn't just a rare occurrence, when I tried to give it a chance a week ago, it happened several times. I am amazed they still haven't picked up the separate process per tab feature yet.
Really? That seems odd. I have been using firefox on a 6 year old macbook pro for many years and mac is not exactly there best supported platform. I can't remember the last time this happened to me. Do you have a test case which can be replicated? What's your platform?
The separate process per tabs feature has different drawbacks. Notably, it means Chrome uses more memory and can handle way less simultaneous open tabs than Firefox.
The project to do this (Electrolysis) turned out to be a lot more effort than I think people anticipated, and was paused for a while last year to allow some other changes to happen. It resumed this year, and you can follow development from https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis which includes links to meeting notes and the experimental branch if you want to try it out.
I made the switch to DDG about 2 years ago and am pretty happy, though I do occasionally use the !g.
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.
It doesn't do that anymore, since at least last fall when I switched to Firefox full time. I remember running into this previously -- maybe Fx 3.5 days? -- when I tried to do a unit conversion google search and it would send me to a horrible unit conversion site.
Since the post was about privacy I'd like to point out that unifying the address and search bar means that you can't search through your history/bookmarks (or do keywords searches) without sending the information to your search engine (so that it can show result propositions) which is kind of a privacy leak IMO. Also when nothing from your history/bookmarks/keywords searches have matched in the awesome bar, it does act like a search bar. You just don't have result propositions as you type.
I don't use Omnibar, because by typing words into the address bar directly, Firefox does do a search.
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.
> Google has no interest in developing something like the AwesomeBar
As far as I can tell, chrome's address-bar behavior is trying to do something like the FF "awesome bar", i.e., combine searches of past urls and titles of pages you've visited, plus google search results, etc., into a single DWIM-like result.
Chrome's results aren't as good as FF's (I typically have to type more to get what what I'm looking for, and the ordering is often not ideal), but it does appear to have similar goals. Chrome used to be much worse at this, but seems to have improved somewhat over time.
As to why exactly FF's results are better, my guess is that it weights the results differently, emphasizing pages you've visited often even if the match is in the middle somewhere, whereas chrome seems to give prefix matches more weight....
[I normally use FF, but use chrome occasionally too...]
Huh, I guess I'm old-school (though I think of Firefox as relatively "new school")? Command-K and Command-L are burned into my hands, and I find it jarring to have the address bar acting like a search box. That, the lack of an "Awesome Bar", and no multiple shortcuts for refresh made switching to Chrome nigh impossible back when it was compellingly faster than Firefox.
The first thing I do when setting up Firefox is configure some keyword searches. Second, I remove the search box from the toolbar. I guess I miss search suggestions, but I'm more of a quickly-type-a-query-and-then-hit-enter person so I don't gain much from suggestions when I use Chrome.
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.
> 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.
I miss the functionality from browser in Mozilla Suite.
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.
This is exactly how Firefox currently works, but you just press enter instead of up and then enter. If what you've got in the address bar doesn't look like an address, it'll google it for you.
Firefox has built-in support for Keyword Search bookmarks. You don't need to install an add-on to create aliases.
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.
I've never used Chrome, always been on Firefox so that part is really not a big deal for me, but I did try DDG in the past and there always comes a point where results aren't quite up to par.
I actually never ended up switching to Chrome from Firefox in the first place, but those are still good tips. I guess I did the right thing :)
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?
People citing privacy as a reason to move away from Chrome are doing so on moral rather than technical grounds. Chromium itself doesn't have anything harmful in it, so there's no point in forking. Chrome is just Chromium plus some third-party proprietary plugins (Flash, the PDF renderer).
There's enough security researchers (of any hat color) crawling over the Chrome binaries that I'm fairly confident there are no backdoors being introduced. To verify, you could disassemble the Chrome binary and compare it against a disassembled Chromium binary that you built. You could also use a packet sniffer and/or MITM proxy to verify that no unexpected data transmissions are occurring.
That probably depends on your definition of ‘backdoors’. Some of the data Chrome sends to Google could easily be considered a breach of privacy (and the corresponding functionality hence supposedly doesn’t exist in Chromium).
The Wikipedia page on Chromium[0] gives some differences, though my remark was admittedly mostly based on the description of the chromium package in Debian[1], which at least claims ‘usage tracking’ (and the generally useless and backdoor-like auto-updater).
1. The probability of discovering something in all that binary code, especially with the intricate and non-orthogonal nature of x86/x64 assembly and odd compiler optimisations. This isn't some 80's game.
A comparison:
28500000 = Chrome binary size [1]
750000000 = Human Genome size (converted to bytes - 1BP = 2bits so 4BP per byte) [2]
So we're only 26x more complicated than Chrome and we have absolutely no fucking idea what is going on with us most of the time.
2. The probability of a vulnerability being published to Google versus selling it on the private market.
The actual comparison would be between the Chrome binary size and the Chromium binary size, which is quite small if you exclude embedded graphical resources.
I don't understand your point. If there were such a difference between Chromium and Chrome, then it would surely show up in a diff of the binaries' disassemblies. The size of the binaries doesn't matter, because (assuming you trust the Chromium source and your local system) only the difference between the two is relevant.
I said that the binaries could be diffed, then you responded that finding a difference is unlikely because the binary is very large. I don't understand what the absolute size of the binaries has to do with being able to compare them.
True. But also true of firefox. But you can install chromium and firefox from source and be sure that apart from your compiler nobody planted anything in your browser.
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/
There aren't any memory leak issues in Firefox. I have been using Firefox since Firefox 10 and it has made huge strides in memory performance so much so that it beats every browser out there on memory benchmarks.
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.
As a long time Opera+FF user, I'm surprised I never came across the Custom Tab Width add-on, or even bothered to look for such an add-on. Made my day. :)
As a Mac guy, I switched back to Firefox when Chrome became practically unusable (slow, crashy). Pleasant surprise: Firefox is snappier and much-evolved since I last used it.
Haven't tried DuckDuckGo yet, but I know my day is coming.
This makes no sense. I, like many people here use a Mac and Chrome and can't remember the last time it crashed. I suspect this is something specific to your installation, possibly a rogue plugin you've installed.
My experience is quite the opposite to yours. neither ff or chrome crash much, and chrome is significantly faster.
On my system -- and I've tried everything I could think of, including blowing away my profile -- it's slow, crashy, and hangs a lot. It's a newish Macbook Pro with plenty of disk and RAM.
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.
As a long-time user of Pentadactyl, Firefox, and vim, I'd like to make the heretical suggestion to try w3m in emacs.
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.
The most annoying thing about w3m for me these days is the fonts in my default terminal window. I've been shopping around for a better alternative (GNOME terminal or XFCE4's terminal seem to beat my trusty old rxvt). The ability to dynamically resize fonts is also kind of nice (yeah, I'm old school).
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.
"Chrome Inspector is nice and all, but Firebug is clearly superior. I no longer recall why I hold this opinion. I'm looking forward to finding out."
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?
In my experience, Chrome is way better than Firebug or Firefox's builtin tools for development. Firefox's debugger doesn't appear to have any way to debug webworkers for example. You can't reformat source. They only just got SourceMap support and it doesn't appear to work as good. No syntax coloring. Poor profiling tools, can't get a timeline which shows frames per second, breakdown of paint/style recalc/layout/composite, no memory/heap profiling UI, etc. No explorer for local storage or filesystem apis, no manager for app-cache. Nothing like chrome://net-internals for analyzing network issues, and on and on.
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.
I tried Chrome last week, but I still think the FF has a better UX, so I switched back. My biggest problems was that, out of the box, Chrome's address bar is just plain bad. It only shows 5 possible targets, while in FF I can go through my whole history, and the most used page comes up first. I didn't really noticed that I used it that much, until I tried Chrome.
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.
Another particular nagging problem with Firefox is that "full screen doesn't even hide the tabs or address bar (just the OS X bar, assuming you're using OS X). It would be nice if you can add a way to change Firefox's settings so that, in full screen, the only thing visible is the web page.
I've been using DDG and Firefox for years now, and don't miss Google at all.
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.
I assume because he switched to DDG for privacy reasons, not because he thought the search was better. Also DDG has some search features that neither Google nor Bing have.
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]
I can't believe someone misses Chrome's "Tiny Tab" thing, I think it's the single most broken thing about the browser. In Firefox I used to use multi row tabs and then Tree style tabs when I had too many tabs. In Chrome all I can do is open a new window. I don't see what's useful at all about having 20 reddit icons.
(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 made this switch myself recently. The web dev tools in FF are still a bit weak in pseudo areas and media queries but I'm living with it for now. BTW, why doesn't Firefox have "paste & match style"?
DDG is also my go-to search engine.
Personally, I feel better supporting Mozilla and DDG more.
I'm glad to see more and more people switching (back) to Firefox, as I admit I'm quite a Firefox fanboy.
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.
I used DDG for two months and as a developer trying to find the latest bugs, code snippets, and help; It was a lot harder on DDG than in Google. I would always end up having to type google.com <tab> in my address bar to search for programming related items. That being said, people have pointed me to resources to help me improve my search results.
I had the same problem. I switched to DDG and Firefox when the PRISM story broke but ended up using !g on so many queries I made Google my default again. I find Google much better when I'm searching for API docs, StackOverflow Q's etc.
You don't need DDG for that. Both Firefox and Chrome support adding shortcut keywords for search boxes.
For example, in Firefox all you have to do is to right click on a search box and select "Add Keyword for this Search".
It's much better than DDG because:
1) if you care about privacy, then this is obviously the right way, as you don't have to redirect through a third-party's server
2) you can add shortcuts for whatever you want, without being limited to a fixed set. For instance I type "dex someWord" for getting the definition of words in my native language. I type "word hello" for doing a search on wordnik.com. I type "w definition" for Wikipedia. I type "mvn package" for doing a maven package search. I type "gem library" for doing a RubyGems search.
And yeah, it's easier to add a shortcut that's relevant to you, then it is to read that DDG document you linked to.
I haven't played with Firefox keywords really but isn't the saved search still going through whatever the default search engine is (in Firefox, Google)?
[Update] I guess my point is that DDG has it ready to go and the syntax is usually easy enough to figure out without building up one's own keyword list.
Maybe I'm missing something, but it just seems that DDG offers a better solution.
Example: I use the letter 'd' for DDG searches in the address bar. In the "Show all bookmarks" window for the DDG bookmark, I've filled in "Location: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%s" and "Keyword: d" .
When I enter into the address bar: "d turkey trot [return]"
Firefox turns that into "https://duckduckgo.com/?q=turkey trot" and initiates the DDG search.
But you can use the same FF keyword feature to auto-generate a URL for any site. If you go to BoingBoing a lot, you could just enter 'bb [return]'.
[Note: some of the DDG 'bangs' are out of date ... try !js]
I switched to DDG some time ago, and I totally live happy with it. Besides, lately they improved the quality a lot, both on the results and on speed performances.
The bang syntax is just awesome, and I rarely need to !g my results.
same, everyone I know switched to Chrome, and always had said "why are you still using Firefox?". Because I've used it since 0.5 or whatever, I like the browser, I've stuck with it. It doesn't install a bunch of uninstallable tools into Windows either like any Google app does (Try and find where you uninstall the Google update binaries, it involves deleting folders, editing the registry, editing scheduled tasks)
Same thing here. I always used Firefox, and never got the hype about Chrome. I like Mozilla goals stated in their manifesto way more than Google's ambiguous "don't be evil" which doesn't even hold up to its promise.
I made the exact same two switches over the past week and agree with the author. Honestly it's been great. I'm also slowly migrating away from my gmail and to a hosted email on my domain.
Are people switching to DuckDuckGo simply because of paranoia? I don't care if Google knows whatever I'm searching for, it helps them improve their search results. DuckDuckGo's search is nowhere near as good as Google.
Over several years of comparing, I find DDG results are fine for reasonably common questions and recent stuff. Sometimes when doing deep searches for more arcane topics (especially farther back in history) Google will get to what I'm looking for sooner. But I usually use Google Books for that stuff (which is where they retain a -big- advantage).
I wish there was a way to do this search only on the currently visible part of the page. Installing a hit-a-hint type of addon would then be less of a prerequisite for me to use the browser.
Is there anyway to specify a time range on queries on DuckDuckGo? Such as "last year", "any time", "last week" etc. Works on StartPage but would be nice to have it on DDG too.
150 comments
[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 199 ms ] threadChrome (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.
I figured I'd try out the latest Firefox and see if I can get it working before I definitively make the comment.
Thanks for the tip though. The machines I want to sync between are Windows 7 and Linux though, so no can do.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-sync-take-your-...
Edit: Oh, the mac version of Chrome. Gotcha.
Can't take that "One size fits all" mentality of Chrome.
I'm glad both approaches exist.
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.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/omnibar/
Edit: Ah, I suppose the auto-complete is different.
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.
As far as I can tell, chrome's address-bar behavior is trying to do something like the FF "awesome bar", i.e., combine searches of past urls and titles of pages you've visited, plus google search results, etc., into a single DWIM-like result.
Chrome's results aren't as good as FF's (I typically have to type more to get what what I'm looking for, and the ordering is often not ideal), but it does appear to have similar goals. Chrome used to be much worse at this, but seems to have improved somewhat over time.
As to why exactly FF's results are better, my guess is that it weights the results differently, emphasizing pages you've visited often even if the match is in the middle somewhere, whereas chrome seems to give prefix matches more weight....
[I normally use FF, but use chrome occasionally too...]
Did you RTFA?
"Firefox separates the address and search bars. Coming from Chrome, that sounds insane. Use Omnibar to combine the two."
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.
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.
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.
you need Foobar [1].
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/foobar/
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...
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?
All sorts can happen between source and binary.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_(web_browser)#Differe...
[1] http://packages.debian.org/wheezy/chromium
1. The probability of discovering something in all that binary code, especially with the intricate and non-orthogonal nature of x86/x64 assembly and odd compiler optimisations. This isn't some 80's game.
A comparison:
So we're only 26x more complicated than Chrome and we have absolutely no fucking idea what is going on with us most of the time.2. The probability of a vulnerability being published to Google versus selling it on the private market.
[1] http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/bloat/
[2] http://www.biostars.org/p/5514/
The binary size may be similar but that doesn't mean the content is. Consider the two cases below to back up my assertion:
I said that the binaries could be diffed, then you responded that finding a difference is unlikely because the binary is very large. I don't understand what the absolute size of the binaries has to do with being able to compare them.
True. But also true of firefox. But you can install chromium and firefox from source and be sure that apart from your compiler nobody planted anything in your browser.
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/
[0] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/MemShrink
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)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/tab-mix-plus/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duckduckgo#Features
(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).
DDG is also my go-to search engine.
Personally, I feel better supporting Mozilla and DDG more.
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.
When I tried using it a while ago, I ended up always searching for "!g <query>", since I knew I would always get equal or better results.
I'm glad it's this easy to search on Google from DuckDuckGo, but it also makes the switch harder. Or, at least, it did for me.
[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)
For example, in Firefox all you have to do is to right click on a search box and select "Add Keyword for this Search".
It's much better than DDG because:
1) if you care about privacy, then this is obviously the right way, as you don't have to redirect through a third-party's server
2) you can add shortcuts for whatever you want, without being limited to a fixed set. For instance I type "dex someWord" for getting the definition of words in my native language. I type "word hello" for doing a search on wordnik.com. I type "w definition" for Wikipedia. I type "mvn package" for doing a maven package search. I type "gem library" for doing a RubyGems search.
And yeah, it's easier to add a shortcut that's relevant to you, then it is to read that DDG document you linked to.
[Update] I guess my point is that DDG has it ready to go and the syntax is usually easy enough to figure out without building up one's own keyword list.
Maybe I'm missing something, but it just seems that DDG offers a better solution.
When I enter into the address bar: "d turkey trot [return]" Firefox turns that into "https://duckduckgo.com/?q=turkey trot" and initiates the DDG search.
But you can use the same FF keyword feature to auto-generate a URL for any site. If you go to BoingBoing a lot, you could just enter 'bb [return]'.
[Note: some of the DDG 'bangs' are out of date ... try !js]
The bang syntax is just awesome, and I rarely need to !g my results.
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