I sincerely suggest using vertical tabs! There's two popular FF extensions for it, the original Tree Style Tab [1] and Sidebery [2]. Most widescreen displays are far wider than web content these days, so you don't lose any horizontal space by switching to vertical tabs, and you gain the ability to actually read the text + organize them by hierarchy.
The post you were replying to isn't replying to an "opinion" or punching down on one. Instead, it is answering the question "Why in the world would anyone actually LIKE the tiny tiny icon-only tabs?"
I personally don't, but I know a lot of people who deal with large amounts of tabs and prefer icons because they can quickly glance over the icons to get to the page they want. I know one guy who has probably 50+ tabs open at any given moment but can still get to whichever tab he wants to out of instinct by going "oh that was in the 5th google sheet tab". I deal with that by not having more than a dozen tabs and grouping in TST but I gotta admit, it's an impressive skill to have.
Do people actually prefer to memorize website favicons and their placement instead of scrolling with some text still visible to let you know what the tab actually is?
This is what I was wondering also, and it makes me think other people look at a much larger range of sites with different icons than I do.
I use Chrome at work because I have to. I often get into the situation with icon-width tabs, and to me it's bad because a lot of my tabs are the same few sites. So the icon doesn't always help me, and I end up using the 'close all tabs to the right' feature a lot.
In addition, a lot of the sites I use at work have time-limited sessions, so going back to a tab from even a couple of hours ago isn't useful because I have to reauth anyway. I guess I could find an old tab and refresh, but I usually just 't' (with vimium) to open a new one and retype the address instead. Maybe for me this is more a preference for the keyboard vs. having to move a pointer around?
This is a great question, and I think the trouble here is that there is a temptation to answer with one off anecdotes from the idiosyncratic example of a single use case. The more peculiar, individualized, unique, and unrepresentative, the more likely it is that we're going to hear that.
This temptation is very strong on HN. I honestly would be fascinated by a blog that gathered together all the extremely specialized use cases that people use as examples of why product XYZ wasn't good enough. That way of thinking leads to interesting to discussion but needs to be tempered by stepping back and looking at how representative those examples are, and I think that step is the point in the process where these conversations always break down.
You can change when the overflow scrolling starts by setting browser.tabs.tabMinWidth to 50 (or any number you want, the unit is pixels) in about:config
> help your parents, brothers and sisters, neighbors, uncles and aunts to do the same.
One sec let me try to explain how to do this to my grandma who is currently x thousand miles away. Oh yea and if something breaks good thing I'm there for tech support amirite.
>Why does you grandma care about when tabs start overflowing?
Oh she doesn't. The issue Grandma, Uncle Fat, Cousin Lou all have is they used this thing and started getting used to it and then they got an update and someone changed everything and they don't know how to do anything anymore. Repeat this three or more times and when you tell them to use something they smile at you and nod then stick with Chrome because it's something they know how to use and doesn't change all the time.
Because grandmas are fictional personas so you can say whatever feature X of software Y is your pet peeve is broken, flawed and it's the most important feature ever.
Brave and Edge are better than Chrome if you care about privacy, but 99% of the code base is still controlled by Google and they don't really have a voice in standards committees. To support the open web it's much better to have engine diversity too.
Or the conspiracy take: Mozilla only survives because Google wants to make sure that an alternative exists so they cannot be considered a monopoly.
That would also explain Mozilla behavior for the last few years... But motivations from big corporations are rarely as singular and neatly defined as I just made it sound, so while that might factor into their actions, it probably cannot be considered to be THE reason for action.
Not the person you asked but I, too, still use Chrome[1] for personal stuff on desktop. Why do I get a black-and-white vibe in this question? Like, either I support an open internet (by not using Chrome) or I am a horrible person for being a BIGCORP shill and I'm no true hacker, shame, shame!
Can't I be simply tired of switching browsers, making even minor adjustments to my workflow, every damn time my current browser manufacturer does something the internet adjudges to be morally corrupt?
I don't disagree with the collective in this case either. For me it's just easier to reconfigure Chrome to not do auto login on every fresh install. Maybe the day Google removes this option is the day I finally switch to Firefox for good. Or maybe I'd wait for a fork/plugin that restores the ability to opt out.
[1] For work purposes I use Firefox but it's not for any hacktivist idealism. It just fits my workflow. In Android I use Firefox full time too because I got fed up of AMP but it's still all about the experience.
Chromium is more like ~35 million lines of code. And Brave is implementing Manifest V3, there's no choice in the matter. They'll be forced to because they rely on Google's Chrome Web Store (and chromium itself), which will stop accepting MV2 submissions in 2022. Their current claim is that they'll support the blocking webRequest functionality from MV2, that's it. You better hope Google doesn't block submission of MV3 extensions that use MV2 APIs that only work in forks.
> Chromium is more like ~35 million lines of code.
Incorrect. It's ~5 million [0]
> And Brave is implementing Manifest V3.
Incomplete. Brave already announced that they're leaving the webRequest API intact. [1]
> You better hope Google doesn't block submissions...
Have ya heard of a thing called installing software? You can easily install extensions without clinging to a walled garden. Brave makes this easier than Chrome.
Nothing said here has proved that Google has complete control over anything. Anyway enjoy using Firefox I guess? And you'd better hope that other web devs start to test with Firefox because most of them, including me, won't bother for the piddly amount of market share they still have.
My friend, your [0] is almost a decade old. I can pull the repository and prove that Chromium is even more than 35 million sloc.
There's also nothing "incomplete" about what I said. I did say that they claim they're leaving blocking webRequest intact.
Brave also doesn't make sideloading extensions easy. Enjoy your constant nagging from having developer mode enabled. Most users won't even go through the trouble.
> Did you not realize that the repo contains a copy of every third party lib they use?
Except it doesn't. And even if it did, my point is valid. Those libraries are being used in Chromium, and thus need to be maintained for use in Chromium. You can't just let your dependencies rot :)
> It didn't go from 5 to 35 LoC in 5 years buddy
It...did? Do me a favor, write a JavaScript engine, layout engine, crossplatform audio library, crossplatform gfx stack, webgl implementation, webgpu implementation, and about 9000 other things and keep it under 5 million lines. You can't. The web has legitimately expanded in scope to the point where we're pushing double digits on total lines of code.
> Imagine also thinking that Brave will go through the trouble of leaving the webRequest API in place and then sit on their hands and not finish the other side of that equation.
Now we're speculating about something that hasn't actually happened yet. Where is Brave's equivalent to addons.mozilla.org? Am I supposed to hope they have a perfect plan to deal with the limitations of Manifest v3 and just haven't announced it yet? I'll believe it when I see it.
> Those libraries are being used in Chromium, and thus need to be maintained for use in Chromium.
And they certainly are... by the originators. The Chromium team maintains a few patches here and there, which is why they're in the repo to begin with friend.
> It...did?
No, I said it didn't. All of the things you listed are not originated by the Chromium team. Also, Google can't just take them away so anyone who wants to use them can. Nobody has to re-invent the entire wheel here.
> Now we're speculating.
We're using logic. Did you see the new Brave search engine? You think they can't build a store to host extensions? That's rich.
It's really no big deal to open it when you want to watch any of those. I've never heard anyone complaining about switching from your phone's browser to the Netflix app on your phone, so I don't see why opening another browser on your computer is a big deal.
Container tabs. Good text rendering. Support for some niche css features, the WebExtension implementation can support more advanced extensions (sidebar, runtime theme modification, dns, etc). shift+right click to bypass websites that block context menus. if a website uses the background-image css property, the firefox context menu will have the correct image options and chrome won't. i can hold ctrl and properly select HTML tables to paste into spreadsheets.
Does anyone here only have a single browser installed on their computer? I always install Chrome, but do less than 0.1% of my browsing in it. What's the reason you couldn't have both? Storage?
What you gain from using something other than Chrome is privacy, and using something other than Chromium makes it harder for Google to gain more control of the internet.
That being said, I find both Firefox and Safari to be better experiences than Chrome.
Security. Whenever I push myself to go use Firefox I very rapidly run into obvious bugs and things like page display corruption that has the terrible bad code smell of shoddy insecure software.
I would really, really like to switch, but not for now.
That's unfortunate, you should try updating your GPU drivers (if you're on linux there's some different things you need to change). Firefox uses the GPU for more stuff so bad drivers really heck it up.
And set DDG as the default browser.
I can't imagine why anyone here on HN still would use Chrome.