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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)

#241

Post by AdmiralAsshat »

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #144
ookdatnog wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The public at large will never be swayed to use less convenient alternatives for ethical reasons. But even so, if a small, dedicated group of people are convinced, they can keep the ethical alternative just alive enough that it remains a somewhat viable alternative. I don't think vegetarianism will ever be the norm, but there are enough vegetarians to create a market for vegetarian food. This creates options for peop…

Vegetarianism can be the norm, but for that to happen one of two things must happen: either the cost of meat has to be prohibitively expensive ("the stick") or vegetarian dishes have to be more appealing to the public at large ("the carrot"). Neither of those things have happened yet. For Firefox to gain market share, either the perceived "cost" of using Chrome has to skyrocket or Firefox has to be superior for a com…

Firefox for Android allows you to install extensions. Most notably, it allows you to install an adblocker like uBlock Origin.

Chrome for Android does not.

I'd consider that a killer feature.

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

#242

Post by soylentcola »

Nexxxeh wrote: post #235
emn13 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a misleading comparison. You imply that firefox is far behind chrome in terms of general quality. Although I use chrome a lot, I also use firefox daily. And the quality difference is essentially nil(1). In many relevant ways firefox was at times better; but the details shift from release to release. I certainly isn't true that typical users would run into huge problems by using firefox. 1: on a desktop. I als…

Firefox is unusually slow on my low-end Windows tablet, while Opera/Chrome is grand. My desktop will power through anything, so Firefox on there. My phone, however... Firefox on Android with uBlock Origin is the best mobile browsing experience I've ever had.

Yep. For people who run Android and don't have superuser privileges for system-wide ad blocking, I typically recommend Firefox and uBlock Origin for a simple way to at least improve web browsing. On mobile it's even more important than desktop I find. On your larger screen and faster machine with a broadband connection, ads are an annoyance. On mobile, they tax the relatively weaker hardware, use up more data, and can pop over/fill the whole screen without much effort and ruin any attempt at productive browsing. It's no wonder people don't bother leaving the silos of Facebook and friends where at least their ads are just inline with the "content" instead of popping over and constantly getting in the way of what you're trying to read.

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

#243

Post by douche »

Sylos wrote: post #223
douche wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mint is a distribution for people who care more about actually using their computers than about ideological purity.

I don't think that's a fair thing to say. To me, being able to trust that my distribution is giving me reasonable help by pre-selecting good applications, is a vital help for me using my computer. I don't have the time to go through all of the applications that I use, so I trust my distribution to do it for me. If my distribution were to make such a misstep as recommending me to send all my internet-data through a pr…

In that case, there are other distributions that align with your goals more closely.

If you're really paranoid, you can use Gentoo or Slack and compile all your software from source. As I understand it, Mint is Ubuntu with a different window manager and all of the closed-source extensions to handle common media formats, that you would normally have to faff around apt-get'ing, pre-installed. It's a desktop Linux for people that either don't know much about Linux, or don't want to get down in the weeds messing and spending hours configuring to do the 95% use cases.

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

#244

Post by namaemuta »

emn13 wrote: post #140
moxie wrote: post #40

What always strikes me about these pleas is how familiar they sound. They're reminiscent of all the things we "should" -- eat better, exercise more, lower our carbon footprint -- and I suspect they all see just about the same level of long term success. Firefox did well when their only real competitor (MS) was actively trying to make their own browser bad in order to preserve the relevance of the desktop OS and their…

This is a misleading comparison. You imply that firefox is far behind chrome in terms of general quality. Although I use chrome a lot, I also use firefox daily. And the quality difference is essentially nil(1). In many relevant ways firefox was at times better; but the details shift from release to release. I certainly isn't true that typical users would run into huge problems by using firefox. 1: on a desktop. I als…

On mobile the most I use (if not the only one) is Firefox for the simple reason of allowing me to add ad-blockers as extensions.

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

#245

Post by angry-hacker »

reitanqild wrote: post #212
TAForObvReasons wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vegetarianism can be the norm, but for that to happen one of two things must happen: either the cost of meat has to be prohibitively expensive ("the stick") or vegetarian dishes have to be more appealing to the public at large ("the carrot"). Neither of those things have happened yet. For Firefox to gain market share, either the perceived "cost" of using Chrome has to skyrocket or Firefox has to be superior for a com…

> For Firefox to gain market share, either the perceived "cost" of using Chrome has to skyrocket or Firefox has to be superior for a common use case. It wouldn't hurt either if we nerds, pros, superusers etc etc stopped spreading FUD like "Chrome is way better".

It's not FUD since Firefox does have many flaws. While I don't like Google and Chrome, for an average user it is better to use.

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

#246

Post by yAnonymous »

emn13 wrote: post #140
moxie wrote: post #40

What always strikes me about these pleas is how familiar they sound. They're reminiscent of all the things we "should" -- eat better, exercise more, lower our carbon footprint -- and I suspect they all see just about the same level of long term success. Firefox did well when their only real competitor (MS) was actively trying to make their own browser bad in order to preserve the relevance of the desktop OS and their…

This is a misleading comparison. You imply that firefox is far behind chrome in terms of general quality. Although I use chrome a lot, I also use firefox daily. And the quality difference is essentially nil(1). In many relevant ways firefox was at times better; but the details shift from release to release. I certainly isn't true that typical users would run into huge problems by using firefox. 1: on a desktop. I als…

For starters, Firefox lacks in speed, security and stability compared to Chromium and this is not a matter of opinion, but hard facts. Sandboxing is not fully implemented, there's no process/tab separation and Webkit renders most pages faster than Gecko.

The developer tools are slow, lacking in features and can reproducibly be crashed. FF is relying on broken extensions for things that should be core functionality. The "Awesome bar" is so mediocre, I wonder how it got its name.

I've been using FF for about 10 years and tried to stick with it, but there are so many quantifiable things that it's worse at that I recently switched to Chromium and it did make my life and work faster and easier.

If your statement was true, I'd still be using Firefox.

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

#247

Post by Razengan »

asveikau wrote: post #236
Razengan wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The public at large will never be swayed to use less convenient alternatives for ethical reasons. There have been countless practices which were once the convenient norm but are now seen as archaic or barbaric, at least in some parts of the world; Slavery, serfdom, monarchies, dowry, arranged marriage, virgin sacrifices, involuntary circumcision, blood feuds, war crimes, excessive pollution... I'm sure the transiti…

> Slavery, serfdom, monarchies, dowry, arranged marriage, virgin sacrifices, involuntary circumcision, blood feuds, war crimes, excessive pollution... To be clear, we are comparing all this to using chrome and having browser homogeny?

I found that amusing while writing it too :P but the comment I replied to brought up vegetarianism and seemed to be making a general point about ethics vs. convenience.

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

#248

Post by indlebe »

newscracker wrote: post #215
indlebe wrote: post #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…

I prefer Firefox over Chrome for several reasons, including usability, flexibility and freedom. Could you list down a few things that are problematic, in your experience, with Chrome but are not so in Firefox? Although it could be construed as purely anecdotal, it may provide some insight and understanding into the strengths and weaknesses of the two browsers.

Printing and PDF viewing are the most common issues we see with Chrome, doing either often crashes the whole browser. Windows 10 seems to be the most problematic OS for Chrome, we see quite a few unresolved cases where Chrome crashes before it can print on this platform. Fillable PDFs with Chrome, fuhgeddaboudit!

Those are the top 2 issues by far, with legacy web app issues as a semi-distant third. This is our fault for using legacy php 3/4 apps that still work, but firefox doesn't produce any issues and is reliable for this purpose.

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

#249

Post by pitay »

sangnoir wrote: post #184
pitay wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What did cause you to switch? What follows here are my observations on what are the advantages/disadvantages of the two browsers: The biggest advantage to Chrome that I can think of is it has its own implementation of Flash in it, rather than using the Flash plugin. This allows Chrome to not have another container process, unlike in Firefox which does spawn a container process for Flash, which uses a ton more CPU cyc…

> What did cause you to switch? I'm not GP, but I switched because Chrome had better dev tools. For a while, I was using Firefox for browsing and Chrome for dev, but I ended up using just Chrome. It also didn't help that Firefox dropped its 1st party browser sync (Weave) and Chrome had bookmark & history syncing natively

Thanks for the reply.

So it seems people have switched because of:

* Process Isolation

* Dev Tools

* Bookmark and History Syncing

* Chromecast

Also some people have mentioned performance, but this is unclear.

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

#250

Post by verroq »

maftieu wrote: post #221
verroq wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry but that is just not true, Firefox has miserable DOM performance that results in laggyness, freezes on pages that work fine with Chrome. Until the Firefox people accept that their browser sucks can they finally try to make it better. There is no sandboxing (in the works for how many years now?), their pdfjs is not as fast as the chrome native plugin, they force me to use the insecure and terribe flash plugin th…

Maybe it works best on Chrome, just because more and more web developpers test and optimize their app/site for... Chrome? (I've really saw this). Is this the return of the "IE era"?

Yeah Chrome is starting to snowball, it is easier to tell users to use Chrome instead of fixing Firefox quirks.
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