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

It’s time to give Firefox another chance

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 733 posts

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#121

Post by sf_rob »

smnrchrds wrote: post #106
pps wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was what I was thinking, until three days ago someone mentioned here about Bitwarden. It's perfect, no more LP for me, you should try it too :) https://bitwarden.com/

It looks good. And I don't want to come off as dismissive, I am just genuinely wondering: How can I know they are trustworthy? Has it been recommended by any security or cryptography experts? This is the first time I am hearing about Bitwarden and not being a security expert, I don't know how I can ascertain their trustworthiness.

I'd love an answer to this as well.

Tangentially, this is a rare moment when I want a service to charge me money to assure myself that they are adequately incentivized to take my service/business seriously.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#122

Post by dblohm7 »

mk89 wrote: post #102
fabrice_d wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have a lot of money in the bank. Donations are a drop in the bucket and I would even argue that there are other orgs that deserve your money more than Mozilla.

They don't share their reports since 2015 - basically when the contract with Google ended. Now, I don't think they are poor, but being a company that doesn't sell your data, doesn't show ads, etc... I mean, frankly, I think that such products are really hard to find nowadays. Their revenues come primarily by Google competitors (Yahoo, etc., which try to appear as default search engine).

>They don't share their reports since 2015 - basically when the contract with Google ended.

That's not true at all. The 2015 report was published at the end of 2016. Likewise, the 2016 report should be out by the end of the year.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#123

Post by anthonybsd »

I'm a little confused on how they tested loading speed. I.e. they use webpagetest suite which is made for testing website speed NOT web browser speed. In other words it's being tested on live websites, subject to network latencies and what not? Doesn't seem like a very robust methodology. Am I just confused here?

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#124

Post by kkylin »

rightos wrote: post #2

I was extremely skeptical of all the changes they were doing - I said it myself 100 times, "they're just building a Chrome clone, they're killing all the features I like in favor of speed". But here I am, running Nightly because holy shit this thing flies. Their work has paid off and they're not even done yet. Webrender is coming, it's not quite stable enough for daily use yet (mostly just graphics glitching and inte…

I'm not even running Nightly, just switched to 57 beta. It's a big improvement on 55 & 56 (which already felt faster than older versions).

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#125

Post by MBCook »

gotofritz wrote: post #108
rightos wrote: post #2

I was extremely skeptical of all the changes they were doing - I said it myself 100 times, "they're just building a Chrome clone, they're killing all the features I like in favor of speed". But here I am, running Nightly because holy shit this thing flies. Their work has paid off and they're not even done yet. Webrender is coming, it's not quite stable enough for daily use yet (mostly just graphics glitching and inte…

Even if "they were just building a Chrome clone", it would still be valuable because of the privacy concerns

If they could only get near-Chrome speeds with significantly better battery impact that would also be a huge win.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#126

Post by Sylos »

makmanalp wrote: post #46

AFAIK this quantum release was mostly about a new/better CSS engine, right? If this helps this much, I'm very excited for webrender.

The new (written from scratch) CSS engine definitely did give a big performance boost, but I'd say it was only about 1/4 of the increase from 56 to 57.

Another big factor is the new UI. It's partially just more efficient, partially uses animations to make it look faster / more responsive, partially enables new performance features, such as "tab warmup", which starts loading in a tab as you hover your mouse over it, so that it's instantly there when you actually click.

Then they're still benefitting from the new multiprocess architecture. A lot of performance problems can be solved by just throwing a lengthy task into a background thread.

Then the deprecation of the old extension API is also significant. The old extension API had essentially no abstraction from Firefox's source code, so Mozilla couldn't even really refactor code without breaking extensions. Now that that's deprecated, they were able to throw out big chunks of code [1] and refactor what's left.

I presume that made it a lot easier to work with the code and find performance problems, but also just in general, they put a lot of effort into fixing hundreds of smaller performance issues that taken together did make a big difference, too.

Not to mention that lots of those old extensions had performance problems themselves as well.

And lastly, they also just made sure that the right things have the right priorities. Your background tab is not as important as the tab that you're looking at and so on. Again benefitting from the multiprocess architecture.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1347507

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#129

Post by kibwen »

ATsch wrote: post #103
hdhzy wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention Firefox for Android that supports extensions (uBlock etc.).

Unfortunately, for me at least, it's not a viable option. Firefox on android still feels significantly more sluggish than chrome. Plus, googles questionable business practice of embedding chrome into many apps, while making opening links very fast, adds another three clicks to someone not using chrome.

> Firefox on android still feels significantly more sluggish than chrome.

Note that none of the Quantum work has been turned on for mobile Firefox yet. I hear it will be coming online in nightly this cycle, targeting Firefox 58.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#130

Post by sf_rob »

marumari wrote: post #99
neves wrote: post #41

I was using developer extension and it disabled all of my beloved plugins. I hurried back to the "normal version". How is the update of the plugins to the new browser? Will it go live with uBlock, Tree tabs etc?

Both uBlock Origin and Tree Style Tabs (as well as Tab Center Redux, which I prefer) are already compatible with Firefox 57.

Tree Style Tabs was a recent update, so OP may have missed that.
Post reply on HN