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

robert.ocallahan.org

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

#61

Post by aluhut »

Waterluvian wrote: post #52
aluhut wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I only open the process overview if something doesn't work as it should (like most people I guess). Every time I tested it I came to a point where I had issues. Maybe too many tabs, maybe wrong content, I don't know. It wasn't possible to find the "right process" there to kill too. I would just go and kill them from big to small and this is also the moment where I realize: I shouldn't have to care about which tab caused that or why. I don't have this problem on FF and if I have there is exactly one process I'd have to kill and I didn't have to do that for some versions already. Even with it being cramped with Addons. Old and new ones. I barely had Ublock on Chrome...

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

#63

Post by Tharre »

rvern wrote: post #23

Chromium is free software too, but that does not justify any usage of Chrome. If you use Chrome, you can't justify it on Chromium being open source. As for Chromium itself, it is very obvious that it is not actually meant to be used by anyone: it has no stable releases, no binary downloads (except the nightlies published by the build system), and its website is hosted on nothing else than… Google Sites.

Chromium does have stable releases, they are the same as for chrome. And about every linux distribution out there ships chromium binaries, so what's your point?

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

#64

Post by mikekchar »

llukas wrote: post #31
mikekchar wrote: post #15

I'm genuinely curious what the perceived threat is. I'm not happy about having a handful of browsers being dominant, but Chromium is legitimately free software. I'm very slightly worried that most people choose the Chrome branded version (which is not free-as-in-freedom), but there is so little between the two that I'm not sure it matters. V8 is forked into Node now so it would be pretty difficult to do horrible thin…

You must have missed recent HN news about google stripped build of Chromium - one that doesnt use binary blobs from Google.

I certainly did. Searching for it doesn't seem to bring anything up. Care to post a link? I even did a duckduckgo search for binary blobs in Chromium and only found the 18 month old discussion of Chromium installing hotwords (which has been resolved now).

You're not, by any chance, thinking of the Chromium OS are you?

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

#66

Post by startling »

warcode wrote: post #25

Did Firefox fix their performance degradation over time yet? Every time I try to switch back its fine for 2 weeks and then starts to get slower, like the internal database breaks or something. This is two weeks with 2-3 windows, with 5-20 tabs each, without restarts. So far Vivaldi has been the best chrome replacement for me.

Do you install firebug?

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

#67

Post by ffggvv »

aorth wrote: post #60
apatters wrote: post #35

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.

This is the problem. You value your convenience more than your freedom, and the future of privacy.

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

#69

Post by startling »

rvern wrote: post #14
viraptor wrote: post #5

Unfortunately Chrome/ium has the best security story at the moment. Mainly due to good separation/sandbox. Firefox is only now catching up, slowly. So while I'd like to use FF, it's simply not a reasonable choice for me.

What makes you believe Chromium has better sandboxing than Firefox? That may have been true in the past, I doubt it has much truth to it today. Furthermore, if you use GNU/Linux it should be trivial to give your web browser better sandboxing than what it does by itself. (You can use AppArmor or SELinux, you can run it in a systemd-nspawn container, you can use Firejail…)

All of that is only marginally helpful without X sandboxing.

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

#70

Post by microtonal »

cft wrote: post #51
the_duke wrote: post #48

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.

And still, Linux outperformed most commercial competitors in the embedded and server spaces without being a single commercial entity. Apache was the most successful webserver for a long time, despite coming from a non-profit organisation, etc.

I also believe that Firefox should look to exploit Google/Chrome's weaknesses more: Google relies fully on ad income. Firefox relies on sending users to someone's search engine/default page. Why not offer a version that shows the web as most of us see it: ad-free and with less tracking.

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