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Browse Against the Machine

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71–80 of 142 posts

Re: Browse Against the Machine

#71

> Chrome wants you to only use Chrome. This is no different than saying Microsoft only wants you to use Hotmail. Firefox did not build Gmail, nor does it have any serious interconnected bookmarks manager. Why would I use Firefox when Gmail does not render well on it and there is no way for me to seamlessly carry bookmarks, history and everything else which is part of daily browser activity? Sure, I use Firefox for wo…

>Why would I use Firefox when Gmail does not render well

I don't know, maybe complain to Google who purposefully fucks up things on Firefox, over and over?

>there is no way for me to seamlessly carry bookmarks, history and everything else which is part of daily browser activity?

...except there is? The Mozilla account stuff does just that.

Re: Browse Against the Machine

#72
I don't have many problems with Firefox desktop, but in particular Firefox on Android (and Chrome to some degree as well) is increasingly a nightmare with news pages. As I'm scrolling and reading, the content jumps around as reflows occur when e.g. an embedded ad or video renders and is squeezed into the content. Instead of rendering the complete page with holes for this embedded content to eventually appear, Firefox seems to render a compact page, and then over the course of literally 2 or 3 minutes, it one by one inserts that content, causing reflow, and unprompted scrolling. So I'm reading and then the shit I'm reading vanishes and I have to scroll to go find it, start reading again, and then FUCK it just happened again, rescroll to read it, and FUCK FUCK FUCK it happened again!

Re: Browse Against the Machine

#73
post #20

Why did I move from Netscape to IE? Speed. Why did I move from IE to Firefox? Speed. Why did I move from Firefox to Chrome? Speed. Why did I move from Chrome to Firefox? Negative feelings about Google. So for myself the only things that work, hand on heart, are Speed or Repulsion. You can't really sell repulsion. Therefore, I think their only hope is Speed. Admittedly I may be a crap example.

That was pretty much the same story for me. On the negative feeling about google, I seems that Google has done massive work trying to get your whole life (online and offline) into their databases. The whole point is to "enhance" the experience of you as a user and business as a google customer. I am not comfortable with the convience-privacy tradeoff but many people are.

Strange my understanding is the point of chrome was cost savings for google - e.g. Billions in bandwidth fees annually saved with improvements to http/2 and vp8... it had nothing to do with data collection. Have you tried chromium?

Re: Browse Against the Machine

#74
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'…

How do you deal with that many tabs in Chrome? I found it to be a nightmare, the tab buttons are small, you can't even see the titles. Typing a part of a URL you remember in the address bar dumps you to Google search instead of the actual URL. Those two reasons were the only thing keeping me from switching to Chrome when it was fast (apparently it isn't now)...

I have used https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/quick-tabs/jnjfein... and https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/onetab/chphlpgkkbo...

But these days I just keep opening a new one... most of the time I am just searching for something on the Internet like documentations so going backward is not really always a requirements.

Re: Browse Against the Machine

#75
post #58
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really​ hope they get this done quickly You don't have to wait for them to enable it for everyone. Enable it yourself by setting browser.tabs.remote.autostart to true in about:config (on ff48-53 this'll use one one process for ui and one for all tabs, I believe on 54+ it'll use more). (As long as you don't have any addons that don't support it, anyway -- after enabling it, check in about:support under "Multiproce…

browser.tabs.remote.autostart should already be default-enabled, unless your extensions aren't compatible with it. It'll tell you "disabled by add-ons" in about:support, if that's the case. And you can enable multiple content processes prior to Firefox 54 by setting dom.ipc.processCount to a number higher than 1. This is the maximum number of content processes that it'll use, as you open more tabs. So, if your number…

Thanks for the correction.

Re: Browse Against the Machine

#76

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 plays extremely well with the rest of MacOS. So well that I don't mind it being behind the curve on web technologies, its adblocking options being inferior or that it is missing some of my favourite plugins.

Zooming and scrolling is extremely smooth, the rubber effect when scrolling out of bounds is enjoyable. The transition animation when using two-finger swipe for back/forward makes me feel in control of my browsing, while on Firefox I feel like the gesture can fire at any time, without warning.

It also integrates with the MacOS dictionary, and since I do most of my reading on the web, it is nice to be able to easily look up words. I really miss my dictionary when I'm on Firefox or Android.

It is also the only browser that can keep my cooling fans quiet on youtube.

The user experience on Safari is extremely impressive.

Re: Browse Against the Machine

#77
I switched from Chrome to Firefox nightly for most browsing some time ago, and it really seems that Firefox is moving at a furious pace at the moment. Its performance and battery usage is light years ahead of a year ago, and in terms of web standards support, at least in some areas, it's the best browser available.

Also (not affiliated): If you've been tinkering with Rust or have thought about doing so, Servo is well worth checking out or helping with - I think helping to prevent Chrome from having an effective monopoly in Web browsing is a noble cause even if you're not worried about Google's motives.

Re: Browse Against the Machine

#78
post #70
post #20

Why did I move from Netscape to IE? Speed. Why did I move from IE to Firefox? Speed. Why did I move from Firefox to Chrome? Speed. Why did I move from Chrome to Firefox? Negative feelings about Google. So for myself the only things that work, hand on heart, are Speed or Repulsion. You can't really sell repulsion. Therefore, I think their only hope is Speed. Admittedly I may be a crap example.

That repulsion is also starting to sell, in my opinion. I had a not-so-positive opinion of Google pretty early on, but it was mostly just a what-if. What if Google with its huge databases gets breached? What if they decide to just make a fortune by selling it all on the black market? Then came along Snowden, NSA scandal, PATRIOT Act. That added onto this what-if: What if the NSA gets breached? What if some crazy dict…

He'll still have an 80+% approval from his base though. And there's only around 2% voter regret. And in the Gallup daily polling, he's up 5% following his disastrous foreign trip on which he curtsied to dictators and criticized allies and has Germany looking like it's going to take its marbles and go home. Right now there's just no awareness of the consequences of what he's doing because the signal to noise ratio is so poor.

I'd like to see a project (even a productize variant of it) that'd make it easier to drop Google, Apple, Microsoft. Something like Lineage OS on the phone, Fedora or Endless on a NUC, and an IPv6 based VPN for the cloud connection between phone laptop and server - which just figures out how to make the proper connection in the background. A cluster option to either a local or remote server instance (2nd NUC, or a Pi, or AWS or other). All the software is out there to make this fairly well possible, it's just non-trivial to setup. I'm even willing for some services to be non-free, e.g. FastMail because email servers are a pain to maintain.

Re: Browse Against the Machine

#80
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no evidence for Mozilla having fired him. All we know is that the media was doing a witch hunt on him and he decided to step back.

“It’s clear that Brendan cannot lead Mozilla in this setting, [...] The ability to lead — particularly for the CEO — is fundamental to the role and that is not possible here.” Mitchell Baker, Mozilla Executive Chairwoman EDIT: The parent said there was no evidence, here is evidence that the board already made its mind up, whether you like it or not is of no consequence. It's still evidence of that bias.

He resigned.

That Baker parrots Eichs own explanation for resigning does not make it so that she fired him.

Neither Eich nor the rest of Mozilla could figure out how to handle the huge media backlash, so they simply decided to give up. Mozilla has a history of being very weak against media onslaughts.

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