Early Impressions of Chrome from a Firefox User

24 points by robalex


mdaniel

In Chrome, I have no idea what the autocomplete behaviour is.

and worse, they often fill in what looks like an autocomplete but is in fact a search term (because those sweet, sweet metrics). So you start typing, it looks correct, you hit Enter and cheerfully end up at a search engine. There's a very similar dumbness through which you start typing, it finds the base url (OP's github example is a fine one) so you hit the right arrow to go to the end of the URL to append to it only "poof," no more autocomplete. It's so dumb

But, similar to the post saying there are pros and cons, I think the Chrome Dev Tools are the bee's knees, both in terms of its behavior as well as the command-shift-p "command pallet" akin to a lot of IDEs

For two specific examples that I use constantly: Chrome does not clear the network history when you change pages[^1], and there's a setting that causes the Dev Tools to spawn for newly opened pages (including popups) if the Dev Tools are open for the original page

1: the very idea that Firefox ever thought this was a good idea shows how completely divorced they are from the needs of their users

technomancy

Shocked there's no mention of Manifest V3: https://ublockorigin.com/#manifest-v3-section

plop

The differences in Picture in Picture are because of completely different approaches- Firefox simply lets you turn any video into a PIP floating thing, while Chrome implements the web API, which allows control from javascript and smarter options (I've seen video call sites use the API well).

Firefox seems to be working towards implementing the API which will be cool, as I see no reason why both approaches couldn't co-exist.

rski

Fwiw the latest chrome version has experimental vertical tabs built in, helps a lot with tab management. They can be enabled in the chrome flags somewhere. Of course Firefox had them as built in ages before chrome.

dpedu

Chrome does have screenshotting, though it is built into the developer tools rather than being a first-class feature.

dhamidi

Another often overlooked gem is C[md|trl]+Shift+A to get fuzzy matching across tabs!

This used to require extensions, but was eventually built into Chrome.