Live data from Hacker News

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

robert.ocallahan.org

201–210 of 266 posts

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

#201

Why not just say "Good Riddance?" From a pragmatic perspective, the fewer browsers we as developers need to support, the better. There has never been any meaningful standardization between browsers. Even "modern" browsers are all different enough that you need to test and code specific paths for each of them unless you stick to trivial things. Personally, I want the same thing I wanted back in 1996 when I started thi…

Good riddance to you then !

Personally I want the same thing that I wanted back in 1995, for narrow minded people who wants a one size fits all solution and do not understand the importance of openness of the web and standards to disappear so we get rid of the stupid "I'm developing for the most popular browser because I don't care".

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

#202
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you install alternative browsers on ChromeOS, when the OS is basically a UI managing Chrome instances?

No. But unless I'm mistaken ChromeOS doesn't come close to having a dominant position in the OS market. Isn't this somewhat analogous to not being able to install another OS on an iOS device or even a non Webkit based browser? Again just to be clear, these questions are in good faith, I'm not simply trying to be argumentative, I'm hoping to get a better understanding of the issues.

Like I said, apparently they are selling like hot cakes by USA schools, so it holds dominant position in USA education system.

Yes if you think in Global market share, Chromebooks don't matter. I hardly see them on sale here when traveling across Europe.

However any US software company doing web applications for the American school system will probably be biased to focus on Chrome.

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

#203
The funny thing is that the number one criticism of firefox is that it is running almost entirely out of google money since its beginning.

There was fear that when chrome overtook firefox that google would not need firefox anymore, and if it falls below use share of relevance google would remove their advertising money and firefox would just disappear as mozilla goes bankrupt. I'm not sure this situation has been fully addressed today but mozilla has been working on it for some time.

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

#204

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/…

My personal biggest problem with FF is that it uses too much screen real estate compared to Chrome. For example, the tabs are really fat, and the address bar is much thicker, leaving less space for actual content. Perhaps FF should include a "look-like-chromium" option to win over users (since chromium is open-source, I guess they will not run into copyright issues there).

I also switched from Chrome to Firefox about a year ago and the fat tabs are the only thing that I don't like. The removal of `browser.tabs.tabMinWidth` is very annoying (now you need to create a new CSS file in your profile directory, but there is hardly any documentation for that). Also, 15px of the total tab width are taken by ellipses when the tab title is truncated.

There are add-ons which claim to fix that, but they always change other stuff as well. I just want to get rid of the ellipses and make the tabs take up at most 50-60px. The current 100px-wide tabs have roughly 8px of horizontal padding, 16px favicon, another 8px of whitespace, 40px title, 15px ellipses, and then even more whitespace on the right.

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

#205

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/…

My personal biggest problem with FF is that it uses too much screen real estate compared to Chrome. For example, the tabs are really fat, and the address bar is much thicker, leaving less space for actual content. Perhaps FF should include a "look-like-chromium" option to win over users (since chromium is open-source, I guess they will not run into copyright issues there).

you can use this https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/thintabs/ or even better tab bar on the left with this https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/tab-center.

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

#206
post #94

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. Howe…

It's a shame. What I did is installing VimFX, that is e10s ready, and stick around using for some weeks, trying to reproduce the same workflow I have for years with vimperator. It's a pain at first, but I got used to it and now I don't have to care if vimperator/pentadactyl will be ported or not.

IIRC, even the architecture VimFX is built on is planned to be obsolete by the end of the year.

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

#207

Once every 6 months, I make an honest attempt to switch to Firefox. I want to use it. However, at least on macOS, I don't buy the argument that it's faster/uses less RAM. I usually have a TON of tabs open[1], and Firefox is horrible at pulling that weight. It's just a slower browser, and I can't tolerate that. [1] http://imgur.com/a/mt2OE

Haha, I can't call it ton of tabs.

My usage of tabs is pretty intensive, I guess. I use them like temporary bookmarks I have to have a look at, and/or to find things very quickly (thanks to the tab search).

The week before Christmas, before I decided to nuke all my tabs for the holidays, my work computer's Firefox Nightly was handling more than 500 tabs (despite regular cleaning). Just even try to get 100 random page tabs in Chrome, if you can. If you are just able to, I'd say you have a pretty good amount of RAM.

After a few days back to work, and still careful cleaning, I currently hold 61 tabs on this browser on macos, more than 400 on my own linux laptop, more than 50 on my mobile nightly (and a dozen of addons on it at least, where do I get that on Chrome ?).

Oh and well Firefox containers are also pretty awesome, I currently use in this browser 4 browsing context together in just this serie of 30 tabs (I use a panorama-like addon to have it back to manage more tabs)

I generally avoid apps if I can (not only for some obvious reason, but moreover because my current cheap motorola android phone only allows to install new apps if I uninstall other ones, because you know I only have 200MB free, even if this is a small app...) and I stay on the web version of the mobile service, currently the "install my app" on every website (often on every page of it, despite having addons to nuke those banners) is pretty terrible, and it bothers me quite a lot, enough for me to drop visiting/using some service apps

I have a weekly hangouts for my work, and google decides it needs a dedicated plugin for FF, not for Chrome. If I go instead on talky.io for example for the same call, I actually have a better video experience than hangouts on both firefox+plugin (which can be sluggish, hello stupid plugin !) and Chrome.

When I do any search on Google ( rarely happens now, partly because of this, I'm using most of the time duckduckgo ) Google tells me to install Chrome to have a better experience...

When I open Gmail, it tells me in FF that it needs a plugin for running hangouts text discussion ( but behaves ok without it). Did google have no engineer in the last 10 years for needing a plugin for IM ? Seriously ?

When I click on the call button of Slack (the website, not the app, hello Slack, you cost me 10 time less memory for my 5 Slacks if I'm using FF tabs instead of your dedicated Chrome based app !!), it tells me "Please switch to Chrome".

Yes this 2014 post is fcking right, we're back to IE6 stage, but know your true OS (the web) is controlled (not totally, but still a lot) by Google, whereas Microsoft could never make it with MSN ( I mean before MSN was an IM service, at the start it was an alternative web owned by Microsoft), so at some point IE6 was still better than current situation

Oh, BTW, My ZTE open C using latest version of FirefoxOS was fcking awesome (despite its bad screen and its worse camera), came from ok to good to awesome when I decided to updated regularly to the latest version of FirefoxOS. Performance was so great with this bad hardware I was just baffled(even webgl games worked pretty well). Some little stalls apart, really understandable given the hardware, it was almost as good as my 10 time more expensive Samsung with 10 time more memory, lot better cpu and gpu. This little phone became awesome only when Mozilla implemented the Webextensions standard in FFOS : you could easily write OS-wide extensions ( like ad-blocking... yes OS wide adblocking would have been really easy, but in general it was meaning total user control over the phone thanks to third party developers).

When they announced they'll stop working on FirefoxOS (for phones at the time) -- and they had reasons to do it -- I was having at least 40 tabs open to try finding a better phone I could buy with FFOS, or at least on which I could deploy FFOS on it with an actually good hardware ( notably a better camera, better screen and bigger, and some more CPU/ram to see where it could compare to my android with the same kind of hardware ). I never bought that first power user phone I dreamt of, and I really think it would have become my main phone, not a secondary one like my "toy" ZTE open C

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

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know Firefox has made immense progress in a lot of hard components. But the UI lag is ... ridiculous. And I mean it lovingly, I have nothing against "slow", I still love my HP48 calc which is sluggish in a way, but it's not jitter-lag. I love Firefox extensions, I love the bookmark editor, I love the non-big-corp centric coupling. But I can only use it for long periods of time if chrome has a bug (I use canary). Or…

You might want to "refresh" your Firefox, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13227658

Let's see if that improves things.

ps: refresh done, still lagging on tab open/close. That said, I use Nightly, and I'm not sure it's not instrumented and thus slower..

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

#209
I've been using Gecko-based browsers for... well, more or less since Gecko became a viable alternative to its predecessor (whatever the rendering engine in Netscape Communicator was called). I sometimes use Chromium for sites which insist on using a webkit/blink-based browser but I never stick around them for the simple reason that sites look better on Gecko than they do on Webkit/Blink, mostly due to (in my opinion) better font rendering in Gecko.

Note that I say Gecko, not Firefox. While I currently use Firefox I keep on switching between it and Seamonkey, what used to be the Mozilla suite. I run nightly builds for both, when one of the misbehaves I switch to the other until I get fed up with whatever bothers me in that build and switch back.

Chromium often is a bit quicker, especially in javascript-heavy sites, but it it a memory hog. It also looks rough around the edges, the user interface is not as configurable (overly large tabs and fonts in the UI are a constant annoyance) and it's normal (Linux) builds are more unstable than Firefox and Seamonkey nightly builds.

Firefox and Seamonkey used to have another advantage over Chromium in that it was possible (and easy) to run your own sync server. Now that the 'old' sync engine has been deprecated for good this advantage is gone due to the lack of a self-hosted 'new' sync engine. This means I have to make-do without a sync engine as don't see why I would give so much of my data to any company.

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

#210
post #23

(2014)

And even more relevant today. Especially after yesterday's fiasco where Chrome doesn't allow installing self-made extensions permanently—forcing you to publish on the Chrome Web Store [0]. There were a few years (2010-2014) when Chrome was a clear industry leader: in design, web standards, resource consumption, and championing openness on the Internet. Not anymore, at least for me: * Firefox has built-in Reader mode…

I use Firefox on both mobile and desktop, they've made massive strides recently and it now feels lighter and faster than Chrome, however there is some sort of memory leak in either Firefox and one of my (limited) extensions and it slows down slowly until it no longer is responsive and I need to restart it.

I too can't wait for Servo, although the reality is that it's still an experiment and is miles away from being anywhere near feature complete or compatible with the years worth of edge cases coded into Gecko, I wouldn't hold my breath on Firefox being based on Servo in the medium term, however Servo will find a use in quite a few niches where the content is much more controlled, courtesy of it's compatibility with the CEF.

Post reply on HN