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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)

#91

Post by Fifer82 »

newscracker wrote: post #58
cyberjunkie wrote: post #7

I notice Firefox does not feel as responsive as Chrome is. On my reasonably powerful system, switching between tabs is slow, even slower when large photos load. It's holding me back. I'm typing this from Vivaldi, because I'm constantly looking for a replacement that feels fast and I can have the few 4-5 extensions I typically use.

I'd suggest creating a new profile in Firefox and checking it again. I use Firefox with tons of tabs and don't notice any lag in tab switching. I also don't have multiprocess enabled automatically (when I tried it about a year ago or so it was slower, but it has improved quite a bit in my reading).

Google never made me do anything with profiles. It just worked.

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

#92

Post by necessity »

jonchang wrote: post #49
g00gler wrote: post #37

Why should I use Firefox, or any other browser, from a standard consumer prospective? Let me preface this by saying I am open to a new browser, especially one that is always in "incognito" and doesn't share sessions between tabs/windows. My favorite is Lynx but that doesn't always work . Facebook & Messenger for Android is pretty much spyware and they have over 1B downloads each, so that takes spying out of the discu…

> Why should I use Firefox, or any other browser, from a standard consumer prospective? Because your techie friends tell you to. This moved people off of IE6 to Firefox and this is what initially got people to move to Chrome from Firefox. Google's muscle on its web properties did the rest. Even you admit that Chrome is only marginally better on all benchmarks. For me, it's worth it to help your non-technical friends…

Firefox is just as responsive as Chrome (or even better). Default configs is what ruins the experience, Mozilla is way too conservative with their defaults.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Firefox/Tweaks

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

#93

Post by lmns »

acqq wrote: post #48
danso wrote: post #14

I personally use Chrome and I teach a class that involves some lessons on HTTP/web scraping/web app dev and I ask the class to use Chrome. For me, my bias is towards how much I like Chrome's dev tools, though I haven't used Firefox's in awhile. The ease of creating multiple browser profiles is great, too, though I hear FF has the same thing. I'm not much of a plugin user, but I'll be using Chrome's Secure Shell [0] f…

Can it be said that your bias is purely based on the familiarity? Yes, Firefox has multiple profiles. Putting "all your eggs in one basket" in security context is suspicious. For SSH, Putty is a small program compared to the whole Chrome, security-wise much easier to evaluate. I don't know how using Chrome for SSH can be rationalized. Who is behind of that "Secure Shell" plugin ("offered by chrome-secure-shell-publis…

There's an official SSH extensions from Google.

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

#94

Post by wz1000 »

I've been using firefox exclusively for the last 5 years, and have been extremely happy with it. Sadly, I think my time with it is about to come to an end. With e10s, extensions that have been crucial to my daily needs, namely vimperator and pentadactyl, won't be compatible any more. I know this isn't entirely firefox's fault, as no one is willing to invest the significant amount of effort required to port them. However, from what I hear, WebExtenstions also simply doesn't offer the API to make these extensions possible.

I don't know what I'm going to be using, but I'm very interested in qutebrowser. The dev is active and has shown interest in adding support for WebExtensions to the browser.

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

#95

Post by romanovcode »

fivre wrote: post #44
chridal wrote: post #11

Firefox is going to need a large UI overhaul before I even consider laying my eyes on it. It looks terrible compared to Chrome. Maybe if Mozilla would employ me, I could fix that. It's very hard to stop Chrome's brand at this point.

Chrome's UI remains an anathema to me--its strict requirements regarding how one is supposed to organize tabs and so forth are bogwash, and I'll be sticking with Firefox, which allows me to do whatever the fuck I want re UI component placement and usage, with the help of some extensions, until death do us part. Chrome is the Apple of browsers and it should burn in a fire wrt how it mandates and imposes specific UI pa…

Most people like opinionated UI design because it makes things easier and intuitive e.g. iPhone.

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

#96

Post by hvidgaard »

cyberjunkie wrote: post #7

I notice Firefox does not feel as responsive as Chrome is. On my reasonably powerful system, switching between tabs is slow, even slower when large photos load. It's holding me back. I'm typing this from Vivaldi, because I'm constantly looking for a replacement that feels fast and I can have the few 4-5 extensions I typically use.

Chrome is just as bad for me. I've installed extensions that suspends tabs I'm not using on both browsers and the experience is significantly better. Since I'm not seeing Chrome being clearly better than Firefox in my day to day, I use Firefox simply because of idealistic reasons.

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

#97

Post by rubyn00bie »

Daily Firefox user here. Switched back from Chrome a couple years ago and haven't looked back.

Just seeing the comments here exasperates me...

So for those who don't know, the Internet is heavily biased towards Chrome. Simple pages that should render no differently in FF than Chrome are often broken. This "Chrome is great, screw everything else" attitude is exactly how we ended up with IE and stagnation in standards/development in the late 90s/early 2000s. The biggest feature of IE was faster rendering and better performance versus Netscape.

It's seriously an issue that developers/engineers are only targeting Chrome and I think a large part of that is also due to V8 powering Node.js. I'm not trying to bash Node here... Developers are so hooked in its (chrome) ecosystem they don't even realize the bias. I'm beyond excited to see things like Chakra being able to replace V8 in node because I think it will be a huge boon to making a more free and open web.

Anymore I've started to protest by refusing to use sites that are flagrantly broken in FF. I block em in /etc/host and call it a day. What happened to standards? Why can't I use a browser you don't like?

Also FF for those that haven't used it in a while:

•) it uses less ram than chrome especially with a lot of tabs open

•) is quite performant and getting better

•) has vastly improved its Dev tools... the folks responsible for them are very receptive to ideas and happy to hear them.

•) multi-process Firefox is MUCH more responsive than its single process alternative but must be enabled currently (I think). Also make sure your extensions are compatible with it.

•) personally, I think, the developer edition Firefox I think is much more attractive than Chrome

I really hope the web doesn't just work in one browser and that things start to improve. Reading comments here gives me little assurance that will happen :(

Edit 1: formatting and note about folks making the FF Dev tools.

Edit 2: clarity in final paragraph and added sad face.

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

#98

Post by dest »

kevingadd wrote: post #22
cyberjunkie wrote: post #7

I notice Firefox does not feel as responsive as Chrome is. On my reasonably powerful system, switching between tabs is slow, even slower when large photos load. It's holding me back. I'm typing this from Vivaldi, because I'm constantly looking for a replacement that feels fast and I can have the few 4-5 extensions I typically use.

Yeah, this is an unavoidable consequence of their (current) 1-process model for tabs. They have a system for running tabs in a process separate from the browser, but they don't currently split tabs out into multiple processes, so you can get lag on switching tabs. IIRC they are working on expanding this so that tabs are split across multiple processes, without using Chrome's resource-hungry Process Per Tab approach.

More info on multiprocess firefox: Electrolysis http://www.ghacks.net/2016/07/22/multi-process-firefox/

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

#99

Post by bkolobara »

My company uses Firefox LTS and all internal applications we develop must work with it.

I use Chrome as my development browser, mostly because of some plugins that help me with development. From time to time I run into inconsistencies between them (latest was that Firefox closes desktop notifications after 4 seconds and you can't change this duration). Googling for this kind of issues takes me usually to the Firefox issues tracker where I find a bug that's open since 4-5 years and hundreds of comments. Most of the time I find a weird workaround that someone else recommended in the comments and I go with it, because bug reports like this are never fixed. I have the same experience with other big open source projects, like Gnome. It looks to me like the maintainers take every feature recommendation as an insult and claim that you are "using it wrong".

So I get demotivated and give up arguing for positive changes as I know that every comment I post on an issue tracker will be received with a lot of negativity. I argue where I can make a change,in my company/to my supervisor to switch to Chrome. And that's the reason Chrome is winning, it's just a better product. I see this "we need to go to Firefox" posts all the time, but it's just getting worse and worse (in case of market share). It can only work if we sit down and make it a superior product. And this can only happen if the maintainers start being more welcome to suggestions and new developers. I love Firefox and want to see it take market share back.

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

#100

Post by necessity »

jonchang wrote: post #28
abhpan27 wrote: post #13

People choose firefox over IE because firefox was better. People choose chrome over firefox and IE because chrome is better. Want to beat google? create better. Not negativity.

Not sure this is necessarily the case - Google cross-promoted Chrome extremely heavily across all its web properties, ran massive ad campaigns, and contractually obligated Android vendors to preinstall and use Chrome as the default on their handsets. Mozilla, lacking the power or money to do any of these things, wouldn't be able to compete on these fronts, regardless of who built the better product.

MS did pretty much the same with IE and Windows... Someone made something better, people went for it.
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