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Browse Against the Machine

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Re: Browse Against the Machine

#32

I'm going add a controversial opinion. I've been using Firefox my whole life but recently I'm finding Safari to be a more appealing option than both Firefox or Chrome. Firefox, and Chrome to an extent, are powerhouses. They have a great community with awesome and really creative extensions. Safari only just started adding extensions and it shows: apart from the usual ad blocker stuff, there's not much out there. But…

Safari being MacOS-only doesn't help its cause very much. It's also so far behind on web standards that some started to call it "the new IE"[0]. Since this, apple started to show some new love to safari in the form of the safari tech preview, but it's still far from where it should be...

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12051267

Re: Browse Against the Machine

#33

I'm going add a controversial opinion. I've been using Firefox my whole life but recently I'm finding Safari to be a more appealing option than both Firefox or Chrome. Firefox, and Chrome to an extent, are powerhouses. They have a great community with awesome and really creative extensions. Safari only just started adding extensions and it shows: apart from the usual ad blocker stuff, there's not much out there. But…

On laptops, it's a no-brainer for me(especially when unplugged) because it consumes far less battery. It is also pretty minimalist, and you can easily hide the tab bars so the only thing on your screen when you browse is the web page.

Re: Browse Against the Machine

#34
This sounds a lot like "Why won't people sleep with the nice guy?" Firefox needs to lead with tech and speed. They seem to be flailing around with this tech and that, but not offering anything truly ground breaking. Ultimately, I think that they'll jump on the net neutrality thing and sell themselves off as a delivery mechanism, not a browser.

Re: Browse Against the Machine

#35
post #8

...meanwhile we still can't use "pinch to zoom" (trackpad) in Firefox, which is available in Safari and Chrome for like 5 years now. Such a basic feature! It's the main reason i personally stopped using Firefox.

> ...meanwhile we still can't use "pinch to zoom" (trackpad) in Firefox, which is available in Safari and Chrome for like 5 years now. Such a basic feature! It's the main reason i personally stopped using Firefox. http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2011032210281240... I assume you're on a mac since you mention Safari? I don't have a mac. Please give it a try with the latest nightly. It should loom something…

Yea, the pinch to zoom setting those links refer to is equal to hitting "Cmd +" or "Cmd -" on the keyboard (in Windows it would be Ctrl +). However this zoom doesn't really work properly on all websites, for example with both text and images.

What i was referring to was the "smooth" pinch to zoom like Safari and Chrome which works on any webpage (text + images). I don't know how to properly describe it, here's the example: http://i.imgur.com/AvLLbuy.gif

>I assume you're on a mac since you mention Safari?

Yea, a Macbook with a touchpad.

Re: Browse Against the Machine

#36
post #14

I use Firefox as my main browser at work and at home, but Firefox performance degrades as soon as I have 10 tabs opened. Not FF's entire fault though, a lot of my tabs are JIRA board so there are some stupid Javascript from plugins making the performance more worse. With Chrome, however, I was able to load over 100 tabs easily and I rarely get a crash... So when I need to load lots of tabs, I use Chrome. I still don'…

Firefox on Linux performs really well for me, even with 50-100 tabs open. However I have your same problem with not knowing how to preserve the network history between refreshes, that would be useful.

Re: Browse Against the Machine

#37
post #36
post #14

I use Firefox as my main browser at work and at home, but Firefox performance degrades as soon as I have 10 tabs opened. Not FF's entire fault though, a lot of my tabs are JIRA board so there are some stupid Javascript from plugins making the performance more worse. With Chrome, however, I was able to load over 100 tabs easily and I rarely get a crash... So when I need to load lots of tabs, I use Chrome. I still don'…

Firefox on Linux performs really well for me, even with 50-100 tabs open. However I have your same problem with not knowing how to preserve the network history between refreshes, that would be useful.

Do you use Firefox from Mozilla, or do you use one of the forks?

Re: Browse Against the Machine

#38

I use Firefox myself. It's really fast, until you get into Google websites, like YouTube - those websites work really slow (well, not that slow, just noticeably slower), while there are no issues in Google Chrome - as if that was intentional, even (like, Google detecting Firefox, and providing it slower code).

If this turned out to be true, is there an antitrust case there?

Re: Browse Against the Machine

#39

> I head up Firefox marketing, but I use Chrome every day. This is one thing to use it privately, this is another to say it publicly. I think he should be fired. Not even considering the other contradictions of this article. I think he has no idea how to lead Firefox marketing.

I used to be on the Chrome team and still do the occasional bit of development or maintenance on code I wrote, but I use (mostly) Firefox at home. Two main reasons:

- Firefox on Linux lets me configure the menu shortcut modifier key to Super, while Chrome is hardcoded to the Windows-style Control. (I use Control-W for word erase in vim and shell all the time, which means that the sequence of Control-W followed Control-Shift-T is a regular occurrence in Chrome.)

- Firefox's shift-click to bypass stupid web developer tricks.

Re: Browse Against the Machine

#40
I trusted them until they de facto fired a prominent employee for his political opinions - opinions shared by a large portion of the population.

If they can do that to an employee, what can't they do to you, an anonymous user?

That said, I stick with Firefox for private use. But the trust is gone.

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