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Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

robert.ocallahan.org

51–60 of 303 posts

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#51

I never understood why Mozilla has allowed their main product and their only money maker to fall so far behind. They have a lot of income. I don't mind them going of on various edgy projects. But FF has been inferior to Chrome for many years. They should really refocus their efforts to concentrate on delivering the best browser again, as it was before Chrome came along.

Because capitalism and technological progress (unlike science or art) is about greed and money, and a non-profit is not a competitive vehicle for it.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#52
post #45

I generally agree with the sentiment here, but somewhat similar to using Linux over macOS, my experience has been that it's just a worse user experience in exchange for "doing the right thing." In the end, it's about how much you're willing to sacrifice convenience and user experience for an ethical ideal. For me, the last time I attempted to switch from Chrome to Firefox, it drove me nuts after a few days because of…

If this is your only or main issue with FF, it can't be that bad. I tried Chrome from time to time and the endless processes eating up an immense sum of RAM (I had to add together first to realize) as well as the missing addons drove me away. I never considered myself a participant in the ideological browser war and whenever I have to fix a computer somewhere around my friends and family (besides my parents) I left C…

I've never experienced ram issues with chrome. Is it a tangible problem that noticeably hurts experience or do you kind of have to be looking at the RAM stats to perceive that there's a problem?

I wonder if I'm missing something or am just not the exceptional case where chromes use of memory matters.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#53
As much as I like Firefox, it’s not usable on my “eco” PC (Celeron N3150, 8 GB RAM). Chrome is.

It’s really unfortunate that developers of many interesting products (or websites!) seem to be forgetting about CPU efficiency. The Atom editor is another example.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#54

I never understood why Mozilla has allowed their main product and their only money maker to fall so far behind. They have a lot of income. I don't mind them going of on various edgy projects. But FF has been inferior to Chrome for many years. They should really refocus their efforts to concentrate on delivering the best browser again, as it was before Chrome came along.

> But FF has been inferior to Chrome for many years.

Can we please stop fueling this myth?

Maybe for some of you Firefox lacks something you actually need.

For others, like me and a bunch of others it is completely the other way, -if I was forced to use any other browser it would annoy me to no end (not tree tabs, etc etc).

So while I think it is totally fine to point out where other does better, telling everyone that Chrome is better isn't even true except for very specific cases.

Edit: clarify need

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#56
Chromium is actually a good browser. Until Servo picks up the technical slack, Mozilla will not have a browser I can afford to waste my time running. Firefox is completely unusable for me. The UI is slow, ugly, clunky, and complex. The rendering performance is abysmal. The extensions ecosystem has collapsed from a decade of API breakage, and now total deprecation. The organization is hostile and political because Mozilla lets people push their personal ideological agendas on foundation dollar.

Compared to Chromium, Firefox is a slow, confusing, incompatible security liability with no consistent wins. Even when they do uniquely good things (like the WebGL live shader editor) they are held back by the general inadequacy of the product.

No amount of pleading will change any of this.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#57
As someone who manages a 450-user IT department (academic), supporting roughly 50/50 BYOD/supplied computers, and staring at my stats, Firefox is the most reliable browser. We see %300 more problems with Chrome than Firefox.

Reading the comments my suspicion is that what shortcomings it does have affects the hacker news crowd a disproportionate amount more than usual, or affects the academic crowd disproportionately less

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#58
post #20
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He stepped down himself...

At least that's the official story. Perhaps he was given a choice: resign or get fired.

Having had some (albeit very few) actual interactions with both Brendan Eich and a few members of the board, I do not think that the board was considering firing him, and I think that Brendan decided to resign entirely of his own volition.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#59
I was a long time user of Firefox, mostly because I despise how Chrome is so inflexible and has terrible interface design. Unfortunately, Firefox has continually gotten worse and worse over the last few years. I was tired of the browser slowing down over time, and extensions constantly breaking for no other reason but the fast release cycle.

I ended up switching to Vivaldi. Not only does it fix the majority of things I hate about Chrome, but it supports Chrome extensions which are good enough (but not as good as Firefox).

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#60

This article convinced me personally to switch back to Firefox, but I'm disheartened by seeing a number of comments here which amount to "Firefox is fine," "Firefox is just as good," "The Foundation is fine," and so on. That attitude is a recipe for shrinking market share. FF is competing against extremely well funded, extremely aggressive and competent competitors. You don't get to stop listening to the market in an…

I maintain a copy of Firefox Developer Edition on my system and I make a concerted effort to open it every few days so it can update itself and so I can test any new sites or blog posts I'm working on. I've tried to switch back to Firefox cold turkey in the past and it never works for me, but I might introduce a personal policy of one week on, one week off, alternating between Firefox and Chrome.
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