Maybe I'm not as critical about the UI, but I have both browsers open at the same time so I took a second to compare them.
Both browsers have a row of tabs. Below that is a second row. The left most set of buttons is navigation (back, forward, refresh, etc), then the address bar, then on the very right of the row is a set of buttons for extensions, settings, etc. The remaining portion of the window is the webpage. I'm just not seeing many differences. The view of recently downloads is different, but nothing that bothers me from either one.
I also just compared how both browsers displayed HN main page. Slight differences in color of orange and font weight, but only noticeable if comparing both directly (and besides devs, who does that?).
So I guess I'm asking what about the UI/UX is bothering you. I'm almost hesitant to ask because I'm sure if you point something out that bugs me, I'll never un-see it.
Firefox doesn't deal with touchscreen and touchpad gestures very well. Take, for instance, the two-finger pinch-zoom-in gesture. Chrom(ium), Opera, Edge, Safari etc. all smoothly and instantaneously magnify the area where the mouse is. Firefox, on the other hand, reflows the entire page with each zoom (as the other browsers do when you do a ctrl +/- zoom), which is inconsistent with how we're used to interacting with touchscreen devices, in addition to being quite laggy on a reasonably modern laptop and tending to undershoot or overshoot the desired zoom level. This zoom behavior is also a lot less useful for looking at a particular item on the page, since the reflow-zoom doesn't seem to depend on mouse position on any way (so any element not at the center of the screen will no longer be visible past a certain zoom level, no matter where you put the mouse pointer when zooming in), which makes using it a lot more frustrating on smaller monitors.
I do not own a touch screen device that is not a mobile device, so I have not experienced that. I also realize that my comments only related to the UI portion, not taking into account how responsiveness (or lack of) affects the UX portion.
I am a firefox user but will switch to chrome when using google maps. Simply because using maps on firefox on my windows tablet sucks, but its a breeze in chrome.
Otherwise I completely avoid chrome because of the privacy issues, and because firefox has 'containers' and is a little snappier.
On the surface they're quite similar, I agree. I won't pretend that Firefox has some whole separate UX decision process that's ruining it for me. It is, like all decisions between similar products, a matter of my own pet nit.
I dislike Firefox's zooming behavior. I have to zoom into websites because I have poor vision. Chrome's zoom behavior has been extremely natural for me, and easy to adjust to. When I used Firefox I attempted to use 'vanilla' as well as an extension that aimed to improve the zooming behavior by separating scale of text from scale of other elements, etc.
I was unable to find a solution that worked for me. I hated using the extension, which itself had a pretty bad UX, and I couldn't get preferences to save properly for individual webpages.
I can't use a browser with poor zooming behavior, I rely on it too much. As I write this I am zoomed in 250% in Chrome, for example.
Those pet-bugs or pet-nits are, in my opinion, the huge thing that keeps people from moving (alongside the perceived friction of moving data over). I wouldn't read too much into mine.
> When I used Firefox I attempted to use 'vanilla' as well as an extension that aimed to improve the zooming behavior by separating scale of text from scale of other elements, etc.
Your reply resounded with me a little. I agree with the person you replied to, I don't like the UI/UX.
I think it's the 'second level' of UI stuff - menu's behind buttons, settings pages, things like that. I think Chrome does a good job balancing 'advanced user' and 'basic user' stuff. Firefox feels a little too 'dumbed down' for me.
I'm honestly trying hard to put a fine point on it, but it a lot of it just feels 'off'. I'd love a very minimal-design, maximum function look into it.
I was going to add a stipulation about the about:settings type stuff being different and what not, but chose not to originally. My thinking was how often are you in settings that it's a problem? I'm not a browser power user, so I only go in to the settings usually after reading something here. I set it, and forget it. Maybe 30 seconds?
As far as dev stuff, I'm really only familiar with Firefox after Firebug was rolled into the browser so that it is similar to Chrome with a Cmd-Option-i key press. I hear people stating that the dev tools are still very different. All I really ever use it for is seeing how the DOM is changing in the inspector, looking for output in the console, and see what files are doing (404,200,500, params/response, and CSS values type of stuff. Both browsers do what I need in a way that I can't tell the difference.
It's almost entirely the more in-depth stuff. For example, differences I find annoying include seeing raw ajax values, re-runnning those queries, and how Chrome can't select individual log levels to view in the console.
On top of that, various parts of Firebug's console UI was better than either one's current console, mainly in how it displayed data.
I felt like this as well when I was still using Chrome for everything (I switched when Firefox launched Quantum). For me it simply turned out that after getting used to Firefox (again) I had no problems at all with the UI. Chrome felt better before the switch because I was used to it.
> I also just compared how both browsers displayed HN main page. Slight differences in color of orange and font weight, but only noticeable if comparing both directly (and besides devs, who does that?).
So on the color thing, one of our designers noticed and I looked into it. Turned out to be an open bug report for Chrome(ium? I forget) where it's using the wrong color profile for css, and resulted in images not matching borders and backgrounds.
Maybe I'm not as critical about the UI, but I have both browsers open at the same time so I took a second to compare them.
Both browsers have a row of tabs. Below that is a second row. The left most set of buttons is navigation (back, forward, refresh, etc), then the address bar, then on the very right of the row is a set of buttons for extensions, settings, etc. The remaining portion of the window is the webpage. I'm just not seeing many differences. The view of recently downloads is different, but nothing that bothers me from either one.
I also just compared how both browsers displayed HN main page. Slight differences in color of orange and font weight, but only noticeable if comparing both directly (and besides devs, who does that?).
So I guess I'm asking what about the UI/UX is bothering you. I'm almost hesitant to ask because I'm sure if you point something out that bugs me, I'll never un-see it.