Earlier quoted context omitted.
I now use Firefox Focus as default html viewer for links. Very good.
That's basically a wrapper around Webview, that in turn is chrome based...
That's true on IOS but on Android is the real thing
It’s time to give Firefox another chance
291–300 of 733 posts
Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you look at great science projects like the LHC, a lot of the funding is "wasted" building the infrastructure needed to actually build the project, while Mozilla missed the target a few times "Firefox OS", I never saw Rust with bad eyes, it was made to enable Firefox to become a top tier browser again.
Ironically Firefox OS would become a lot more viable with these sorts of performance improvements. Using Firefox Nightly I have actually felt an occasional sensation of blurring between native and web, because of how quickly some sites render and respond. I wonder how applicable these innovations will be on the mobile web. You'd have thought parallel processing would be particularly important in mobile processors whe…
Firefox OS was ahead of it's time in the most literal sense. What they really should have done was FIRST work on all these new web APIs that allow you to make web apps that can accomplish things that only native apps could do before. They didn't exist 5 years ago, and that was a problem.
Perhaps if they focused on making web apps as capable as native apps first, it would have been a viable platform.
Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
Firefox has has profiles since well before the first version of Chrome was released. Unfortunately the UI has always been sort of hidden. You can launch with `-P` or `-ProfileManager` to get a profile selection menu. Or nav to `about:profiles` for a slightly more convenient (but less attractive) version. Firefox profiles are great. Better than Chrome profiles, though less convenient, for now. Interested to see how Co…
"great" may be stretching it more than a little. They have indeed worked for a very long time (which is definitely great), but launching multiple firefoxes at once with different profiles is (has been? haven't tried for over a year) an absolute nightmare for anyone not launching it exclusively from the CLI with aliases. I actually made app wrappers just so I could click things instead of having a weird blend of "you…
App wrapper? You can just edit the shortcut.
Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that it's likely because Apple has much more leverage and their major source of funding isn't their browser. I could imagine a world where ad-based services started blocking/paywalling Firefox user-agents. Hopefully now that Apple has opened the door Mozilla is safe to walk through too.
You actually think that websites would ban Firefox' user agent?!?
You mean, like half of Google’s newer products?
Google Allo Web, Hangouts, the Inbox Beta, Google Earth, etc all don’t work, or for a long time didn’t work in Firefox.
Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance
#295I hate Chrome. Never stopped using Firefox
Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance
#296I had tried to migrate back to Firefox so many times that I got burned on it and decided it wasn't worth trying again. Despite this, when I heard the Quantum announcement I decided to give it a download and immediately fell in love again. Photon looks great, the dev tools are wonderful, and it's Fast. And this thing doesn't have annoying Chrome idiosyncrasies - I can tell Firefox to permanently trust my Kubernetes ce…
Curious, before this last time, when was the last time you tried to migrate back? Because I've been enjoying the majority of the things you've cited (other than quantum) for the last few years or so now.
A couple major releases ago. To be fair, most of this isn't new, but other problems had precluded my ability to move for a long time to enjoy these features. For example, the app we developed at my workplace was painfully unusably slow in Firefox (even slower than Edge sometimes!)
I also previously had problems with single tabs causing stuff to lock up or at least respond slowly. This happened with SoundCloud a couple times. Seems good now!
Nightly always helped a bit, but I had trouble with that too. This nightly has yet to crash once across the 4 computers and 2 Android devices I've installed it to, so I'm very impressed. I previously used LastPass which broke several times on Nightly builds in the past. Since then I've migrated to 1password, an unrelated but definitely pleasant change for using Firefox.
But mostly, boy those perf improvements are real. Side by side, it's hard to believe how fast performance changed between versions.
Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance
#297FYI the U2F key support landed in Nightly (probably stable in 58). Enable "security.webauth.u2f" and "security.webauth.webauthn" to enable it. Of course, now it's up to the developers to allow U2F support via Firefox (instead of hard-coding it to Chrome/Chromium). I've successfully verified that it works on three different services that don't hard-code the support to Chrome/Chromium.
Works with all test sites, and most other sites...
...except for Google.com, which still hardcodes it to Chrome (doesn’t even seem to work in Chromium there for me).
Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance
#298Never abandoned Firefox. Now what? :) And please, donate to Mozilla, if you can. They really do deserve some help. Fighting against giants like Google, MS and Apple... They have products running on all kinds of possible platforms, also on old Android phones! And they have some of the best extensions.
AFAIK, donations to Mozilla Foundation can't actually fund development projects by Mozilla Corporation (like Firefox, etc.)
The best way to help them out is to help get the marketshare back up, so that the next time they sign a contract for the default search provider, they have more negotiating power.
Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
One might argue because they were "distracted" with making a phone OS and other endeavors.
Yeah, but that's nonsense that bad journalists write or Mozilla marketing people say, because it's more understandable for normal readers and makes it more credible that things will change. The truth is that they were in a dilemma situation where they had to choose between not killing all extensions or fixing performance by introducing a multiprocess architecture (which required breaking all extensions). So, the firs…
The first Firefox release with multiprocessing work was one of the 3.6 ones where they shipped out of process plugins in a patch release. Judging by Wikipedia, that was 3.6.4 in 2010 (look for OOPP). I thought it was later…
Having to break legacy extensions due to internal changes is understandable. It would have reduced stress for the users if the new API was shipped first, then the changes made and the old one broken, though. Heck, they even thought of it first and did that - you may remember Jetpack. It never picked up steam because the APIs were too limited and too many people ended up resorting to the old APIs, though. Even now with WebExtensions they're shipping lots of new API extensions want in the same release that drops support for the old ones…
Oh, and they had multiple breakages as more and more things went out of process, not one giant one. That's life, really; things take time to build. I believe part of the pushback is that people just finished porting to e10s only to find that their new code will need to be rewritten again for WebExtensions.
Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance
#300Is there a plugin for it to use Chrome sync? I'm way too invested in Chrome sync to lose it at this point.
No, Chrome sync is Google’s proprietary service, and no one except for Google and some homebrew solutions supports it.
But there are builds of Chromium that support Firefox Sync – Samsung’s Android browser even uses Firefox Sync by default