91–100 of 340 posts
> It baffles me that some people thinks Firefox is becoming a “Chrome clone”, it’s just not the case, it’s just plain silly to make such statement. That's probably the single most reassuring statement about Firefox that I've heard in some time, coming from a serious dev who makes a popular cross-platform addon for both Firefox and Chrome.
What do you think of Opera becoming Chrome?
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I think I qualify as a poweruser by some standards, I tend to have 100's of tabs open and I've never left Firefox for speed reasons or others because it has held up extremely well over the years. My machine has a lot of RAM so maybe that's one reason things have been quick, and the main drive is an SSD. Is there anything specific about the 57 release that makes you feel caused the speed bottle-neck to disappear?
57 is lightning fast. Like, almost uncomfortably so on my machine. Broay this is because quantum is much further along in nightly than on the other channels. Specifically, they're more aggressive with multithreaded settings, multiprocess is enabled, and the quantum css component is turned on, too. Is also helps that we compare to chrome. On Linux chrome doesn't even do GPU rendering. So the HN crowd probably has a di…
I thought you were overstating it but I just tried it out and you're right, it's crazy fast.
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Also, the move to WebExtensions is a move to a more secure extension model. Traditional XUL extensions were comparable to the extension developer compiling their own code into the browser. Yikes. WebExtensions should be better sandboxed and have better permissions management. You can't get those security benefits if you allow older XUL extensions to stick around. You have to sunset XUL extension at some point.
To be perfectly honest I'm not at all interested in "better permissions" for plugins when it comes with the removal of flexibility that you get for free. If I've got plugin-installing malware on my system, I've got worse problems than a rogue plugin. Give me more useful over more secure any day of the week.
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Can you recommend a search engine? I'm trying DuckDuckGo, but it's just not as good.
I always hit DDG first then if the results aren't great just append the Google bang (!g) in the DDG search field to get an unbubbled goog search. The DDG bang system is one of its best features in my mind. https://duckduckgo.com/bang
Might be time for another go?
Web/browser Extensions is a terrible standard is it EXTREMELY limiting for power users. While that my not impact a ad blocker, there are countless extensions that can not work with Web Extensions and will make Chrome err sorry Firefox far less appealing to people. For me, more than a few of the extensions I use regularly are not compatible with Web Extensions, and a few of them that are critical to my productivity ar…
Do you have one example of such extension that won't work with web extensions?
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I always hit DDG first then if the results aren't great just append the Google bang (!g) in the DDG search field to get an unbubbled goog search. The DDG bang system is one of its best features in my mind. https://duckduckgo.com/bang
How often do you end up at Google though; a few years back I tried DDG for a couple of months but ended up basically always doing !g and so went back to Google. Might be time for another go?
I probably do less searching than I used to, but the bang system really helps me search other sites much more effectively. The more common bangs I use are !w for wikipedia, !so for stackoverflow, !imdb, !gh, !tpb, !bm for bing maps, !bi bing images.
Keep in mind that it's not within Google's incentives to facilitate ad-blocking and prevention of tracking. After all, that's where the lion's share of their revenue comes from. However, Mozilla is free to actively support such efforts.
The default configuration of Safari is actually protecting you better than Firefox's and most users don't have an ad blocker installed.
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I think I qualify as a poweruser by some standards, I tend to have 100's of tabs open and I've never left Firefox for speed reasons or others because it has held up extremely well over the years. My machine has a lot of RAM so maybe that's one reason things have been quick, and the main drive is an SSD. Is there anything specific about the 57 release that makes you feel caused the speed bottle-neck to disappear?
Here's an in-depth article on Firefox 57 and all the big changes: https://www.cnet.com/special-reports/mozilla-firefox-fights-...
and the whole article is on a floating div?
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57 is lightning fast. Like, almost uncomfortably so on my machine. Broay this is because quantum is much further along in nightly than on the other channels. Specifically, they're more aggressive with multithreaded settings, multiprocess is enabled, and the quantum css component is turned on, too. Is also helps that we compare to chrome. On Linux chrome doesn't even do GPU rendering. So the HN crowd probably has a di…
Firefox has always been unbearably slow on Linux for me. It's the main reason I swapped to Chrome in the first place. I tried switching back to Firefox about 6 months ago, same problem of extremely slow and laggy UI. Interesting to hear 57 is faster now, it may be worth trying again.
On Linux, manually enabling GPU acceleration as user ac29 describes below can a big difference. Unfortunately, a lot of Linux GPU drivers have issues that prevent acceleration from being enabled by default for some users.