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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)

#121

Post by chrismorgan »

blub wrote: post #104
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…

Firefox is good. It has support for modern standards, is performant, has tracking protection built in and plenty of extensions. Google is winning because it's bundling its browser just like Microsoft used to and is aggressively advertising it on all of its web properties, which might have a reach of close to 100% of the web-using population. Firefox also has a reputation for being slow, gotten probably from people do…

Firefox can cope with hundreds of tabs just fine. Way better than Chrome can cope with a similar workload, both in terms of memory usage and UI (Chrome winds up with tabs only a few pixels wide, with no information visible!).

Firefox’s reputation is because of its history: when Chrome was new it did perform really well and Firefox did have serious performance issues. Chrome has been marvellous for Firefox. The sad thing about it is that these past several years Firefox has been better than Chrome in those departments than Chrome, but people aren’t aware of it.

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

#122

Post by viraptor »

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…)

> What makes you believe Chromium has better sandboxing than Firefox?

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Sandbox#Linux and https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/docs...

There's more details than I can easily describe in a HN post, but in general read those links to learn why

> if you use GNU/Linux it should be trivial to give your web browser better sandboxing than what it does by itself

There's a difference between sandbox separating it from the system (what apparmor/selinux can do) and sandbox of each content and plugin (what browser itself can do, mostly with seccomp). Or in a practical example - why do I care that a website can't write to my home directory, if it still has full access to my bank in another tab.

e10s helps a bit, but it's still in early stages. It wasn't even enabled for everybody until 12th Sept this year. Even now, I believe (please correct me if untrue) that there's only one child for all web content, not one per tab.

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

#123

Post by pjmlp »

rvern wrote: post #27
pjmlp wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not something that the average joe and jane can do.

Neither the article nor Hacker News are intended for the average Joe.

You right, average Joe only uses Chrome, Edge and Safari on their mobile phones and desktop computers.

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

#124

Post by simula67 »

blub wrote: post #104
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…

Firefox is good. It has support for modern standards, is performant, has tracking protection built in and plenty of extensions. Google is winning because it's bundling its browser just like Microsoft used to and is aggressively advertising it on all of its web properties, which might have a reach of close to 100% of the web-using population. Firefox also has a reputation for being slow, gotten probably from people do…

> Google is winning because it's bundling its browser just like Microsoft used to and is aggressively advertising it on all of its web properties, which might have a reach of close to 100% of the web-using population

Not because Chrome is a better browser. All these sheep ( like me ) which get hoodwinked into using Chrome by Google's marketing blitzkrieg. Silly us. But wait,

> Firefox also has a reputation for being slow, gotten probably from people doing ridiculous things as keeping tens of tabs open and not restarting it for days - learn to use bookmarks!

What a bunch of dummies, amirite ? Firefox is obviously the best browser. If you find that it is not 'Teh Awesome', you are using it wrongly and there must be something wrong with you.

PS: I am trying to use Yandex browser. So far, so good.

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

#125

Post by NTripleOne »

rvern wrote: post #27
pjmlp wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not something that the average joe and jane can do.

Neither the article nor Hacker News are intended for the average Joe.

But the issue itself is one that both affects and is caused by the "average Joe".

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

#128

Post by jcranmer »

ryan-allen wrote: post #9
tbrock wrote: post #4

I wish Mozilla would refocus efforts on making Firefox best in class again. It's been at least 5 years since Firefox was truly relevant. Interest started to wane when Chrome's JavaScript execution blew it out of the water on release but continues to erode mindshare as the development tools languish.

My interest waned when Mozilla fired Brenand Eich over a political donation.

Can we please just let this conspiracy theory die? Mozilla did not fire Brendan Eich, he resigned of his own volition.

If you want further evidence, a very prominent Mozilla employee posted on his blog, syndicated on the Mozilla blog feed, an active solicitation for people to donate to a UK initiative to ban gay marriage. What followed was a massive shitstorm [1], including calls that said person be fired from the project. He remains employed to this day. I find it amusing that no one appears to have mentioned this incident during the entire Brendan Eich debacle [2], though.

[1] I'd actually link to a relevant copy of the page on archive.org, but that updates too infrequently to capture pages that change daily. [2] Interestingly, when trying to find the page on archive.org, I did discover that the news of his donation first became public about the same time. Two years before he was appointed CEO.

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