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

151–160 of 733 posts

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#151

Post by agumonkey »

hdhzy wrote: post #51
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…

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

I now use Firefox Focus as default html viewer for links. Very good.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#152

Post by starrychloe »

Arubis wrote: post #30

Boy, I _really_ didn't want to swap to Chrome. I'd held on through about a year ago, even despite knowing it was slower, a memory hog, and so on; at least this way, _someone_ on my team was viewing our site in FF and would notice discrepancies. I hated to let Google manage yet another aspect of my life. But as some point, too much was too much. Unable to bear vanilla, Google-owned Chrome, I ended up in (closed-source…

Profits pay your salary, commie.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#153

Post by Manishearth »

kibwen wrote: post #129
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.

> 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.

This is incorrect. The Quantum Flow work affects mobile Firefox.

The thing that is not on mobile Firefox is Stylo.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#154

Post by cpeterso »

kibwen wrote: post #129
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.

> 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.

The Quantum project includes more than Stylo and WebRender. There are lots of small performance fixes ("Quantum Flow") in core Gecko code that should improve performance on Android. Stylo for Android is currently targeting Firefox 59. I don't know if WebRender will support Android.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#155

Post by fasdf33 »

freehunter wrote: post #94
teleproto wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citation needed. Google Analytcs and ads are so widely that most of your browsing will be tracked regardless of browser, even regardless of your search engine (but the search engine is also quite major since they can track what you were trying to search for before jumping into the web). But there's also a privacy policy explaining what chrome actually sends: https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/browser/privacy/

>Citation needed. A company known for tracking the ever-loving shit out of everyone across the Internet distributes a best-in-class web browser absolutely for free. If that's not enough, I really hope you're able to hold on to that innocence as you start using the Internet more and more in the future.

Their point is that Chrome isn't sending all the data and their privacy policy for CHROME points this out.

This isn't difficult to test: sandbox default chrome in a VM and see what happens.

But they don't need to because of your point. uMatrix makes it plenty clear all your bits are belong to Google.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#156

Post by fasdf33 »

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.

For their own reasons.

If you like it, offer it.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#157

Post by remir »

sevensor wrote: post #67

Firefox's strength was originally that technically astute people liked it and people who saw them liking it followed suit. They lost a lot of geek mindshare to Chrome when Chrome hit the scene, but I see this as a return to roots. People who know enough to understand the difference, see that very interesting things are happening with Firefox, and in addition it's not offered by the world's biggest advertising company…

Firefox was better than IE, but eventually, Chrome became better than Firefox for a majority of people. Silent auto-update, anti-phishing, sandboxing, extensions that "just worked". It also came with it's own flash plug-in, which was great for non-technical people back when Flash was relevant.

Chrome did a lot of things right and for a while, it was the browser I installed on friends and family PCs because it was trouble free and I knew they would always have the latest version installed automatically.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#158

Post by Sylos »

keypusher wrote: post #137

There are certain legacy extensions I simply cannot live without. Tab Tree is one. Are there any routes to move forward with legacy extensions?

Forward, not really. Mozilla has very much already used the opportunity to rip out tons of legacy code and so most legacy extensions are already not anymore compatible, even if you tell Firefox to load them.

And just as well, most of these performance improvements would not have been realistically doable, if Mozilla were still forced to not break compatibility.

What you can do, is to move to Firefox 52 ESR. It won't have the performance, but it has the legacy extensions and will continue to get security updates until June 26, 2018.

There's also some forks, namely Pale Moon and Waterfox, which seem motivated to try to keep this legacy extension system alive for longer, so maybe that works for you, too. Personally, I doubt they're able to. The old extension system was a major maintenance burden for Mozilla, so I can't imagine the far smaller teams behind Pale Moon and Waterfox taking that on.

Lastly it should be noted that Tab-Tree-like extensions will be possible with the new extension API and some implementations are already underway:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-tabs/

(Not a tree, but tabs in a sidebar: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-center-re...)

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#159

Post by jd3 »

SirensOfTitan wrote: post #48
jd3 wrote: post #26

SeaMonkey (mozilla suite) is the only web browser I have ever truly enjoyed using. I use the browser, email client, irc client, address book, and calendar every single day. Extremely disappointed that Mozilla has basically given a big middle finger to the SeaMonkey/Thunderbird (comm-central) communities with the removal of XUL/XPCOM add-ons, necessity of multi-process, introduction of webextensions, removal of suppor…

Very few people are bothered by the movement to WebExtensions, multi-process, or removal of complete themes. Many, however, have stopped using the browser as it has felt slow and clunky for quite a while now. The recent changes have actually attracted me back to the platform after a decade of using Chrome.

I am going to write up some extremely long-winded rant in blog form at some point before the FF57 release materializes, but suffice it to say, most developers that I know who have been involved with Mozilla since the Netscape days (and also those who build most of the add-ons/products that I care about, such as SeaMonkey) have shown nothing but disappointment at Mozilla's reckless plan for the Firefox 57 release. Literally just read the developer comment response to almost any Mozilla blog post about web-extensions/complete themes from the past ~year and you'd see that more than "Very few people" are bothered by this.

Perhaps normal users don't care (or just haven't noticed yet), but most of the features which make the Mozilla platform so enticing to power users (what ever happened to XULRunner?) are being decimated because Mozilla is losing market-share and needs free advertising.

Let's not beat around the bush; Mozilla is losing market-share because people get flustered into downloading chrome due to that Microsoft-tier advert that gets plastered onto the google search page in any non-Chrome browser. Yes, Firefox had been feeling chuggier and bloated for awhile, but the core feature-set that made the platform a dream to use for power users never waned. Speeding up the browser while retaining its core feature-set are not mutually exclusive conditions.

I think that if these "normal" users understood how powerful complete themes and the XUL/XPCOM apis are, they would be up in arms. It's not that people don't want complete themes, for example. Were it not for Mozilla's incompetence (there's a bug somewhere that tracks how the total reported download count for complete themes was inexplicably reduced to just 10% of what it previously was, never recovering; there used to be hundreds of thousands of users of complete themes around ~2007-2009), such as the time wasted making incessant changes to the core browser theme that nobody asked for (nothing has ever looked as good as the Suite/SeaMonkey), is what has truly been the cause of these 'modernizations.'

XUL and the add-on SDK are so powerful that I basically re-created two old unix programs ('picons newscheck-faces' and 'xfaces' [0]) over the past couple of weeks. This simple XUL/XPCOM project of mine now brings an incredibly fast & powerful cross-platform solution to two of my favorite old mail visualization programs that have suffered extreme bit rot (I swear more people used Plan 9's vismon than the verious picons/faces programs).

When the legacy add-on api removal finally hits SeaMonkey, my whole extension will cease to function. In fact, it doesn't even work in the current SeaMonkey 2.54a1 nightly. Can you explain to me a similar cross-platform browser/mail client that provides similar APIs for me to rebuild my extension? The answer is no, because in a couple of months the one that did will no longer exist.

Anyway, my point is that I'm not exactly sure who Mozilla is targeting with the Firefox 57 release — perhaps their jet-setting upper management; perhaps nobody.

[0]: http://kinzler.com/picons/ftp/demo/

https://i.imgur.com/EnDMKuO.png

https://i.imgur.com/k40BISq.png

https://i.imgur.com/lvv9REm.jpg

(features not even pictured above: Face header decoding, X-Face header decoding, X-Image-URL header, and Contact Card Image support)

edit: also, as the one guy that has been updating the internal chrome:// url page in recent years, show me a browser that gives this amount of access to its internal tools: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Chrome_URLs#early_Mozilla_Suite_an...

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#160

Post by Manishearth »

Arubis wrote: post #30

Boy, I _really_ didn't want to swap to Chrome. I'd held on through about a year ago, even despite knowing it was slower, a memory hog, and so on; at least this way, _someone_ on my team was viewing our site in FF and would notice discrepancies. I hated to let Google manage yet another aspect of my life. But as some point, too much was too much. Unable to bear vanilla, Google-owned Chrome, I ended up in (closed-source…

> And the Nightly builds are (typically) _more_ stable than production-issue from other vendors.

Yeah, I switched to Nightly a couple releases ago (I'd use Dev edition before that because in the past Nightly used to be really unstable) and it's been great. The only time I've been getting crashes are when I flipped stylo on early (which was to be expected), and a couple of random crashes here and there.

In fact, I've had more problems in Chrome (Stable) these last two weeks, where their devtools hanged everything in multiple cases and Netflix wasn't working at all. And Chrome isn't my primary browser -- I only use it for Hangouts and Netflix (Netflix is force of habit, it works great in Firefox now). (I used the devtools because I'm using the new rewritten devtools in Firefox Nightly and they don't have a prettyprint button right now)

Post reply on HN