why firefox is the best browser (2 killer-features)#

Firefox is heavy, slow, monstrous.

As we know from an ancient joke on Bash.org (back when Bash was still cool [lord, I sound like an old man]):

- how do you find which process is eating the most memory in Linux?
- echo firefox

Introduction#

With the switch to the Quantum engine things got somewhat better (though I’m not a fan of the idea of spawning a separate process for each of my >1024 tabs), so I returned with relief to my beloved Firefox. However, until yesterday there was only one reason why it was the best-of-the-best, and then suddenly I discovered another one. This is what prompted me to write this post, so here are those two reasons.

1. Tree Style Tab#

This is a plugin that displays tabs in a sidebar as a tree. It’s convenient for me for several reasons:

• on a widescreen monitor there’s usually a lot of empty space on the left/right (yes, I’ve been using this plugin since the days when laptop displays were (almost) square!)
• googling something and clicking through results creates a new branch in the tree — and once the question is resolved, you can close all those tabs at once (you could do the same by opening a new window each time, but with my habits that means more than 10 windows, which isn’t very convenient)
• a tree — or a mindmap — is a structure more compatible with how the brain works than a flat list, so it’s easier to navigate
• even if you just have 10 plain tabs with no hierarchy, displayed as a flat list — the tabs look far more informative than in the traditional tab bar. and that’s only ten of them!

I fell in love with this plugin ages ago, it’s wonderful. And due to some quirks of Chrome’s internal architecture — this kind of functionality cannot be implemented in Chrome! I tried, and there is only one plugin that attempts to replicate it — by creating a new window, meaning the tab sidebar is one window, the current tab is another, and it tries to make them work together in a clunky, broken way. Looks terrible, works even worse.

For a long time this single plugin was enough for me to put up with all of Firefox’s sluggishness, memory consumption, and the fact that Chrome is now the new Internet Explorer — so countless sites work poorly in other browsers, and Google’s own services — Drive, Photos, YouTube — are noticeably slower: on Radio-T they reported that Google was caught throttling and serving different pages to “their own” Chrome versus other browsers (maybe I should try spoofing the user agent or something…)

But the second killer feature, absent from Chrome, and the one that actually inspired this write-up, is

2. Custom search, or Keywords in bookmarks#

Firefox out of the box can search across several search engines: type in the address bar

@wikipedia foo bar

and instead of your default (Google) you’ll get a Wikipedia search. @ddg gives DuckDuckGo, and as for the rest — they’re all right here: about:preferences#search But searching YouTube, for example — that’s not there. And that’s where it started — I caught myself searching YouTube quite often, felt too lazy to type the full URL, and wanted to just do

y fly me to the moon

to listen to Sinatra.

Here’s the thing: the solution to this problem is achievable via keyword on bookmarks! If you, like me, didn’t know about this:

• any bookmark can be assigned a keyword — a shortcut that, when typed in the address bar, opens that bookmark
• the bookmark itself can be dynamic, and using the placeholder %s, everything you type after the keyword gets substituted into the URL!

COMBObreaker! No more hunting for plugins just to search in Google Maps, JIRA, or anywhere else! Create the bookmarks you need, assign them one- or two-letter shortcuts — and your navigation reaches a whole new level!

This is so great that on my work laptop I’ve already built up shortcuts like:

• J - go to a Jira ticket by its full number: J PROJECT-123 -> https://jira.com/browse/PROJECT-123 useful when copy-pasting a number from chat, email, etc.

• JN - same Jira, go to the main project using just the number: JN 123 -> https://jira.com/browse/MYPROJECT-123 I use this when someone dictates a ticket number or I remember/see it and type it manually

• JB - a plain static link to the Jira Board

• W - search the corporate Confluence

• T - translate a word from English using Google Translate

• TZ - open a bookmark with our team’s time zones

On the personal side — YouTube and Maps search (Y and M), but I see a lot of potential here to grow.

Conclusion#

To everyone who patiently read all the way to here — I hope it was interesting or useful. If you already knew all this — great, drop a comment. And if not — well, maybe I didn’t write this for nothing )

PS. Perhaps the migration from mouse-clicking to “command-line”-style operations is the first small step toward Vimperator — but I’m definitely not ready for that yet.

Update#

The original post was written a couple of years ago, and now (December 2023), while porting this article from the blog into articles, I want to note that the second killer feature actually does exist in Chrome: Chrome lets you add “custom search engines” and from a usability standpoint it works the same way — you can create either a static shortcut to a page or a search with a placeholder. You can configure it here: chrome://settings/searchEngines