from Hacker News

Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

by abentspoon on 7/12/13, 5:31 PM with 148 comments

• by Spittie on 7/12/13, 8:29 PM

  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.

• by gnosis on 7/12/13, 7:02 PM

  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.

• by bhauer on 7/13/13, 3:16 AM

  I was surprised to see praise for Chrome's omnibar here. The meddlesome assumption that everything I type into the URL bar is or should be a Google search drives me crazy when I use Chrome. By comparison, Firefox's URL bar does an incredible job of matching fragments of URLs to my history and bookmarks.

  My personal project has the word "taskforce" in the domain and title. In Firefox, I can type "task" and it's at the top of the options every single time. One down arrow, enter, and done. Chrome puts it as option five under a search for "task" and three predictive recommendations from Google's search engine that start with "task" (none of which I have ever visited in Chrome). "Taskstream log in"? I don't even know what that means.

  Essentially everything I want to select in the omnibar is always several items down the list. Very frustrating and inevitably one of the chief reasons I close Chrome and switch back to Firefox.

• by jlgaddis on 7/12/13, 6:28 PM

  > But the keyboard shortcuts mean I can ... without reaching for the mouse, and using a very limited set of shortcuts.

  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/

• by ibrahima on 7/12/13, 8:08 PM

  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).

• by hillbillyjack on 7/12/13, 5:57 PM

  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.

• by binarymax on 7/12/13, 6:03 PM

  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.

• by baby on 7/13/13, 1:08 AM

  Things I advise you to install on Firefox : Tree Style Tab[1]

  Basically what it does is display the tabs on the left, thus occupying a space that is rarely used on websites (borders). It is so practical for managing many tabs, nesting tabs etc... that I can't understand why a power user who uses a lot of tabs would switch to chrome.

  Just try to use it for a day or a week and it will change your life.

  [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

• by cupcake-unicorn on 7/12/13, 6:10 PM

  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?

• by area51org on 7/12/13, 6:14 PM

  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.

• by JefWin on 7/12/13, 10:12 PM

  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.

• by jnbiche on 7/13/13, 4:39 AM

  I also made this switch, and am slowly trying to find my way off of Google services (mostly gmail).

  I really like Chrome, and might have stayed with Chromium if there had been an easy to install bookmark and password sync server I could run like Firefox has with Weave (for obvious reasons, I no longer want my sync data centralized with Google). Chromium apparently has a server you can run at home, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to do it. In addition, Chrome for Android has no support for self-hosted sync, so unlike with Firefox I couldn't sync my mobile devices even if I could set up a self-hosted server.

  With Firefox, hosting your own sync server is trivial: there are even several different implementations of the Weave server besides Mozilla.

  I miss Chrome, since I was very happy with the performance and dev tools, but I've made my decision and will live with it (except when I need to test web development stuff in Chrome).

• by tempestn on 7/12/13, 11:34 PM

  DDG's obviously gotten a massive boost from this whole issue: https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=duckduckgo

  I was a bit surprised that Firefox hasn't: https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=firefox

  but obviously it has a lot more inertia. (Or maybe everyone switches to DDG first, and THEN looks for Firefox, so Google Trends doesn't know about it...)

• by teaneedz on 7/12/13, 8:11 PM

  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.

• by amenod on 7/13/13, 1:30 PM

  Two suggestions:

  1) if you are concerned about privacy you should also turn off malware protection in FF because it sends pages that you visit to Google (yes, I know their privacy policy - do you trust them?). For additional points you can open about:config, search for "google" and remove all occurences. Point being: even FF doesn't completely protect your privacy by default.

  2) DDG is great and I use it, but if I were really concerned about privacy I would use a non-US provider (StartPage is based in Netherlands, not sure where they host their servers though). Point being: DDG claims they don't store user data, but that doesn't mean NSA doesn't either. If they are USA based, they must obey USA laws.

• by codesuela on 7/13/13, 12:59 AM

  Sentiment in the comments indicates how I feel: FirefoX is now the New Browser To use if you want privacy and security but wait there is more: the sole act of installing it is a charitable donation towards the free internet. Firefox problems aside (caugh no multiprocess execution model caugh) thats still a strong sales pitich. And that is one of the few (hip?) trends WE get to influence if not decide the choice wich Browser our close aquaintances use. And that is awesome and and i encurage everyone to excersise it. Bretheren lets turn the tide and make FF no 1 again by leading with a good example! As a long time DDG user and recently reformed ex chrome user I say: Hutzzah

  PS please pardon my autocorrect

• by andrasokros on 7/12/13, 6:47 PM

  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.

• by draven on 7/13/13, 8:45 AM

  In Firefox, typing /downl[return] will open a link titled "download" on the current page

  Using ' (Quick Find within link-text only) instead of / (Quick Find ) is even faster/easier.

• by cenhyperion on 7/12/13, 9:41 PM

  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.

• by _pmf_ on 7/13/13, 8:25 AM

  I'd like to switch back to Firefox, but it's such an unbearably slow hog that I cannot force myself doing it, and I'm not even using anything JS intensive.

• by ww520 on 7/13/13, 12:54 AM

  I use Firefox mainly and Chrome/IE for testing sometimes. Firefox has been pretty solid; however, one really annoying change in v22 is that it blows up the default zoom level. That makes websites look very big. They said it's honoring the DDP setting on Windows and for HiRes monitor, but it looks like a bug or a misguided feature. I really hope they revert the change. I'm tired of hitting ctrl-- to zoom out on every site.

• by ashmud on 7/12/13, 6:13 PM

  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. :)

• by 1O0101ll100O on 7/12/13, 9:13 PM

  You can still use the Googlesharing addon to proxy your searches through a concentrator.

  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

• by ionwake on 7/13/13, 1:09 AM

  Why does anyone trust DuckDuckGo more than Google?

  I am really confused

• by Hilyin on 7/12/13, 6:03 PM

  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.

• by teeja on 7/12/13, 10:38 PM

  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).

• by anthemcg on 7/12/13, 6:46 PM

  "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?

• by rc4algorithm on 7/12/13, 6:49 PM

  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.

• by carlob on 7/12/13, 11:24 PM

  I'm currently using DDG + Safari with Glims. I would love to switch to Firefox, the only thing that's holding me back is the lack of a good replacement to ClickToPlugin killers.

  Those are little js that will remove the flash/silverlight video and replace it with an mp4. This also effectively kills youtube ads.

• by tokyovapr on 7/13/13, 3:26 PM

  Blog post about why DuckDuckGo cannot provide any real privacy assurances when it comes to the NSA... http://etherrag.blogspot.jp/2013/07/duck-duck-go-illusion-of...

• by kentwistle on 7/13/13, 6:19 PM

  Looks good! Omnibar instantly makes Firefox more familiar. I have decided to switch back to Mozilla, they seem far more ethical than any competing browser vendor. So I too am going to switch for a while. Firefox & DuckDuckGo.

• by prettyfly on 7/12/13, 10:53 PM

  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.

• by dendory on 7/12/13, 6:09 PM

  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.

• by dotmanish on 7/12/13, 6:08 PM

  fwiw, FireFox on MacOS shrinks the tabs to favicon before scrolling, without using an add-on. The article screenshots indicate it spoke of Linux.

• by dewarrn1 on 7/12/13, 10:38 PM

  Searching the current page for links in Firefox (using ') is a great feature and one of the things I miss most when I have to use Chrome.

• by daturkel on 7/12/13, 6:04 PM

  Is there any substitute in firefox for Chrome's keyword searching? That's the only chrome feature I really care about.

• by steve918 on 7/13/13, 4:10 AM

  I find it interesting that everyone suggests switching to Firefox and then changing the default search engine since a good deal of Mozilla's income comes from Google paying to be the default search engine.

• by drunkenmasta on 7/13/13, 12:34 PM

  anyone else think that the bigger DuckDuckGo gets the more likely it will turn into something similar to Google in terms of less privacy?

• by barista on 7/12/13, 5:59 PM

  One question, Why?