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It’s time to give Firefox another chance

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Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#141

Post by tmzt »

kenhwang wrote: post #76
noncoml wrote: post #9

I was very critical of Mozilla in the past about all their "science projects" like Rust. While I appreciate Rust, I thought it was wrong for Mozilla to be wasting resources on it, instead of focusing on Firefox. I was so harsh with them only because I strongly believe that Firefox is my only hope for a free web. But then I tried 57, and I must admit, boy was I wrong. This thing is fast! I haven't stopped recommending…

Rust was pretty much designed to solve problems for Firefox. It's IMO the best bet Mozilla has made these last few years and we're just starting to see them reaping the rewards.

I don't know how this relates to the creator of Rust or its actual origin story, but Mozilla has been trying to get many of the same results out of C++ for a long time. You can look at the evolution of smart pointers in the codebase, along with more formal ways of representing error return codes (borrowed from MS COM), and general good practices.

It seems at some point they became aware of how unsuited C++ is for parallel processing, and how important it would be for browsers in the future. Even compartmentalization or running tabs in their own process is a form of parallelization. This requires an efficient way of sharing memory and preventing race conditions and errant writes, as well as a way to protect these processes from cross-site scripting attacks, buffer over- and underruns, etc.

Computing hardware has also moved on from the CPU-centric world and the gains in battery life from dedicated GPU hardware being used even for rendering tasks, and now for font processing and other things were too good to pass up.

I'm a long time follower of Mozilla's development, and extremely excited about what's happening with Firefox.

(I'm also currently a Chrome user, leaving in large part due to profile corruption issues and inferior built-in development tools. I hope to be able to run Firefox and WebRender on both Ubuntu and Windows.)

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#142

Post by floatboth »

superkuh wrote: post #101
chank wrote: post #77

Still comes bundled with Pocket. No thanks.

Even worse, it's a walled garden. You can't edit or make your own extensions without getting each change approved by Mozilla first. They say to use the alpha(dev) or unbranded versions but the former is unstable and the later has no packaging or language support.

Yes, if you want to run unsigned addons, you need Dev or Nightly. That makes sense. Not letting "normal" users accidentally install malware extensions is really good.

"is unstable" isn't a good reason to avoid it. I've been using Nightly as my daily (heh) driver for a long time. It's been awesome.

BTW, approval is really fast now: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2017/09/21/review-wait-times...

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#143

Post by eropple »

ACow_Adonis wrote: post #139
ATsch wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

From a technical position that may be true, but one cannot discount the speedup you subsequently get if you run an ad/script/tracker blocker on mobile...

I just use a VPN application that host-blocks that stuff.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#144

Post by gervase »

jorvi wrote: post #116
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/

Why is it people never offer 1Password as an alternative? Sure, it's paid and slightly more expensive, but they have regular security audits and their apps on each platform are really well made and second to none. Their change logs are also always a pleasure to read, they even mention each bug by issue tracker number! Only problem is no Linux app.

Password managers are kind of a funny niche; the Venn diagram of people who use them, and power users, are probably more overlapping than most. I would venture that those (power) users want full cross-platform compatibility (Win, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android).

Additionally, it's probably not helping that their historical pricing model makes no sense for users who interact with many platforms on a daily basis. I didn't even know it had changed until I re-checked it after reading your comment.

Just my 2¢ as someone who previously considered 1Password once upon a time, and dismissed them. They may deserve a fresh look these days, but now they're competing against much more robust competitors than they were back in 2010(?).

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#146

Post by amaranth »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #13

Worth looking at this resource, which seems to suggest that Chrome still leads in some of the benchmarks, even in memory usage: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=firefox-... Just one study among many, but, worth keeping in mind. Firefox is making strides, but Mozilla still has work to do if they want to stop losing market share. I say this as a Firefox user.

Most of those benchmarks are (directly or indirectly) benchmarks of the JavaScript engine. The few that aren't are instead benchmarking the implementation or the compositor. The main speedups in Firefox 57 are in styling and the DOM which are more of a "feels faster" thing than something you can easily benchmark in real-world scenarios other than "how long does this page take to load?"

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#147

Post by crispinb »

I tried it again on my notebook having seen the Project Quantum dev edition announcement here. Initially impressed by its speed, I've been using it since (3 days I think?). I've found after a few hours it slows down in two very irritating respects -- scrolling gets very janky and reluctant, and switching tabs takes nearly a second. I suppose this may be due to an extension, but given I only use my notebook for work, I don't think I'm going to go through a process of elimination to find which one right now. Back to Chrome for the time being, but I like the current FF incarnation enough to give it another go.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#148

Post by ac29 »

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.

You can run the "cloud" side on your own hardware, a docker image is provided.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#149

Post by floatboth »

proactivesvcs wrote: post #42

Give Firefox another chance, after Mozilla recently announced opt-out telemetry? Give them another chance now that they're siding with the likes of privacy-ignorant Microsoft? The same vendor that keeps bolting on features that seem irrelevant to its user base, such as "assumed touch", app store etc? Surely one would only offer Mozilla another chance once they have extended an olive branch, rather than a closed-circu…

Telemetry doesn't collect any private data. It's all performance measurements. I run Nightly with all the additional opt-in telemetry flags because I want to help Firefox development.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#150

Post by agumonkey »

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…

The amount of work, the extent for how long they've been doing so, all relative to the funding they got.. it's even painful to think about. Chrome shadowed them overnight, had Google infinite wallet and started from scratch. Mozilla became the old slug..

Since then they got Rust off ground, servo yielding good fruits, firefox cool n quiet.

Once again kudos.

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