Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

robert.ocallahan.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 266 posts

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

#231

Post by _phaq »

nyordanov wrote: post #204
amelius wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ellipsis will take up less space from Firefox 53 onwards: https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2016/12/20/these-weeks-in-f...

As for the CSS-file, you have to create a folder called "chrome" in your profile folder and then in that folder create a file "userChrome.css".

In that file, you have to have the following line at the top of everything else: "@namespace url("http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xu...");"

From that point onwards, I'd just search on userstyles.org. In the advanced search, select "App" from the first dropdown, then it'll show you pretty much only Firefox-styles.

If you found something that suites your taste, you can click the "Show CSS"-link and copy-paste that into userChrome.css. Just make sure that you don't have the @namespace-line twice.

This for example sets the minimal tab-width rather low: https://userstyles.org/styles/53019/firefox-5-minimal-browse...

You can also find userstyles that for example hide the close-button until you hover over the tab or merge the close-button with the favicon.

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

#232

Post by cornedor »

amelius wrote: post #187
cornedor wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is 5px [1] on my system (osx, 1080p), it also does look a lot like Chrome. [1] http://i.imgur.com/h4acDaK.png

On Linux the difference is 10px (FF versus Chromium), [1]. [1] http://imgur.com/a/TX7Qm

You could try the developer edition, the default theme is more compact, even smaller than chrome on osx. (you can choose a dark and light theme in the developer tools)

http://i.imgur.com/jsvfSvU.png

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

#233

Post by lmedinas »

roystonvassey wrote: post #120
rubyn00bie wrote: post #97

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/…

+1. Moreover, I find Google/Chrome behaving like MS of late 90s when they used to force IE down Windows users. For instance, to use Chromecast to stream youtube videos from my laptop, I am required to necessarily use a buggy, bloated Chrome that takes ages to boot up. There's no plugin made available for Firefox which is exasperating.

Same here unfortunately i was not able find an alternative to chromecast that can work with Firefox.

Its these little things and in general Video support that I keep my Chrome installed. Most of the times i end up using Chrome at home more than Firefox.

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

#234

Post by pyrale »

pherq wrote: post #224
pyrale wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/

For reference, most of the surveys listed by Wikipedia[0] (not including that one, for some reason), list Firefox at about 30% in that period. I assume that the stats in your link comes from visitors to their own site, which given the focus (web development) seems like it could easily be biased towards more technical users (and thus over-represent Firefox compared to wider surveys). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…

Regardless of the peak value, your data tends to confirm that IE was on its decline before the introduction of chrome.

It is true, however, that chrome came at about the right time to capture a large share of its users (as well as a good share of FF users).

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

#235

Post by snovv_crash »

agumonkey wrote: post #208
nachtigall wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..

If you have LastPass, make sure you updated to plugin 4.x. Earlier versions didn't play nicely with the new multithreading, causing big lags.

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

#236

Post by rimantas »

jasonkester wrote: post #45
colechristensen wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, but most of the good things that have happened with the browser are directly because there was competition. If one wins and the others disappear it's simply going to be too tempting for the winner to abuse it's position because nobody will have another choice.

Actually, most of the good things that have happened with the browser have a reference implementation in IE6. Their current "modern" standards were all written after that point. The stagnant few years after Netscape screwed up Navigator 6 was actually a little mini golden age for web developers. Essentially one target, with a ton of features that are only now being recreated in modern browsers. It's just a shame that…

You did not do much web development then, did you? It was not "reference implementation", most of the nice things were not implemented at all and many that were there were buggy. And even if the box model makes more sense it was still a bug because it did not behave as the spec say. Or rather did not behave under some conditions. Lucky are the people who forgot or never new the joys of standards/quirks/whatever-in-between modes.

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

#237

Post by y4mi »

majewsky wrote: post #215
necessity wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably better to block ads on your cellphone via hostfiles or a custom nameserver that blocks ads. Try turning your phone on and sniffing its packets with tcpdump on a notebook (use Wireshark to decrypt if WPA). You'll be surprised by the amount of servers from ad companies that are contacted before you even unlock your screen, if you let apps start at boot.

I suppose that requires root access?

hostfile yes, dns no

[pihole](https://pi-hole.net/) is a project aimed only at that niche.

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

#238

Post by ryandrake »

rubyn00bie wrote: post #97

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/…

As someone who's never used Chrome in his life, and who's not a web developer, I can say I don't notice any of this in my day-to-day browsing.

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

#239

Post by WayneBro »

usrusr wrote: post #178
smsm42 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one could reasonably outcompete Microsoft. Then suddenly nobody even discusses IE anymore. And tons of people use Linux.

Your "suddenly" did not come out of thin air, it happenned after regulation. Microsoft was not broken down or fined to oblivion, but they did change their behavior a lot when they started hitting regulatory boundaries. Internet Explorer was practically put into maintenance mode for many years when it became clear that Microsoft would not be allowed to own the web like they owned the PC. We cannot know the outcome of…

Apple and Google are far, far worse than Microsoft ever had been and I'd take a Microsoft monopoly any day of the week over those two.

You can't do shit these days without having to deal with Apple's ridiculously selfish and tyrannical business model or Google's all-knowing, ever watchful gaze.

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

#240

Post by Yetanfou »

Wubdidu wrote: post #216
Yetanfou wrote: post #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)…

Huh? I'm still running my own sync server and it was really easy to setup. https://docs.services.mozilla.com/howtos/run-sync-1.5.html Working fine with Firefox on macOS and Android. You can even setup the authentication server, but I didn't see why I'd need that. Having the data on my own server is enough for me.

It is still possible to hack 'old' sync accounts into nightly builds but this will soon disappear as well. The Android version does not support 'old' sync accounts any more.
Post reply on HN