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Ask HN: What's stopping you from using Firefox as your primary browser?

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Re: Ask HN: What's stopping you from using Firefox as your primary browser?

#71

Post by aswan »

nfirvine wrote: post #56

I switched to Firefox for a week and wanted to kill myself. Basically, extensions still aren't forced to behave. As soon as you install a non-e10s extension, it disables e10s entirely, and then you're in the bad old days of single-process train wreck. LastPass specifically seems like it has a bug where it locks the UI (beachball) while it populates login fields, and if you've got a lot of passwords (which we do), it'…

There is a lot of work underway in this area. The Webextensions project is the big long-term effort. But regarding e10s, it is true that e10s is an all-or-nothing proposition. However, as of Firefox 51, extensions do not disable e10s unless they are explicitly marked as incompatible with e10s. The rollout was deliberately done slowly in this area to favor stability over getting e10s enabled quickly, I think that was pretty clearly the right decision.

Re: Ask HN: What's stopping you from using Firefox as your primary browser?

#72

Post by jlmansilla »

Nothing, in waterfox flavor, it is my default browser since a lot. Sync, extensions, bookmarks and Saved for later, amazing restore session feature. Usually I keep open about 600+ tabs in two Firefox Windows (core I3, win7, 8 GB RAM) and no problem.

Re: Ask HN: What's stopping you from using Firefox as your primary browser?

#73

Post by tym0 »

x0137294744532 wrote: post #51
diminoten wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DDG isn't very good at searching, and isn't linked in any way to my Google account, so it's a severe convenience downgrade, with no visible benefit to my life.

> DDG isn't very good at searching You can use the !g bang to search on google. > with no visible benefit to my life. The main advantage I personally see in using DDG is to be able to directly search on sites. For instance: * I need to lookup foo on wikipedia: !w foo * I need to search for foo on amazon: !a foo * I need to lookup a video on foo: !yt foo

All things you can do directly from your browser url bar.

Re: Ask HN: What's stopping you from using Firefox as your primary browser?

#75

Post by charlieegan3 »

I find that the syncing of settings within addons is lacking. The sync of firefox's own settings also seems to miss some things (menu layout for example).

I'd also like some kind of profile implementation like Chrome has.

I use firefox as my main browser on my personal laptop, just not on my phone or at work.

Re: Ask HN: What's stopping you from using Firefox as your primary browser?

#76

Post by jacek »

vanous wrote: post #34
jacek wrote: post #17

1) It is significantly slower. That's probably because multiprocess ("e10s") is not enabled (and I don't even know why). 2) Stable version still does not support touch scroll on Linux (only Developer version does). Also do not understand why.

I use FF as primary. Enabled touch and love it. Debian unstable, FF stable. Enable e10s MOZ_USE_XINPUT2=1 firefox dom.w3c_touch_events.enabled

I still don't know how to enable e10s. That trick works on Developer version, not stable.

Re: Ask HN: What's stopping you from using Firefox as your primary browser?

#77

Post by qhoc »

Few reasons:

1. Firefox crashes would take down the entire browser, not just specific tab

2. I often load a lot of tweets in Twitter.com tab (back 4 hours). This causes Firefox to freeze.

3. If I refresh the slow tab, I watch memory not being clean and still stay there for several minutes. Chrome clears memory very quickly.

4. Why is the space around address bar so large? They are like 15 px top and bottom. What a waste.

5. Postman is only Chrome

6. Chrome Dev Tools is 10x better

I have no complain about CSS rendering issues or anything like that. It's mainly just performance. Also I tend to use Firefox in the firewall because the Proxy feature works quite well to connect to my internal lab.

Re: Ask HN: What's stopping you from using Firefox as your primary browser?

#78

Post by valbaca »

0. The Killer Feature: My bookmarks are always synced with my Google account. I've lost many-a-good set of bookmarks because I didn't think to export them. Bookmarks are typically: a few key ones, a lot of old archived links, and a few important new ones. Losing those new ones is rough. Never again.

1. Chrome Dev Tools >> Firebug

2. minimal interface, especially vertical pixels, which are a premium on laptop

3. 1 crashed tab = only 1 crashed tab

4. tab right-click actions: duplicate, close others, close to the right. I use these all very often.

I'm sure plugins can replicate each of these, but having these out of the box keep me on Chrome

Re: Ask HN: What's stopping you from using Firefox as your primary browser?

#79

Post by sssilver »

Just installed a fresh FF Developers edition, no addons.

Comparing to Chrome's current beta, with about 15 installed/active addons including uBlock Origin.

Firefox has Gmail + https://www.nytimes.com/

Chrome has Gmail + 2 windows, each with 30+ tabs + https://www.nytimes.com/

Pressing in Chrome to page down in https://www.nytimes.com/ -- completely smooth pagedown

Same in Firefox -- significant lag, jitter, tearing. Pressing the second time -- don't even see animation, just see the page offset jump.

I'm on Sierra 10.12.2 (16C67)

This is what's stopping me.

Re: Ask HN: What's stopping you from using Firefox as your primary browser?

#80

Post by untangle »

nfirvine wrote: post #56

I switched to Firefox for a week and wanted to kill myself. Basically, extensions still aren't forced to behave. As soon as you install a non-e10s extension, it disables e10s entirely, and then you're in the bad old days of single-process train wreck. LastPass specifically seems like it has a bug where it locks the UI (beachball) while it populates login fields, and if you've got a lot of passwords (which we do), it'…

I had reversion episodes too – until I followed the protocol described by AdamKalisz on Superuser [1]. The "extra" steps made a big difference. [1] https://superuser.com/questions/1029400/how-to-enable-electr...
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