It’s time to give Firefox another chance • Hacker News Board

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#321

Post by HeavyStorm » Sat, Sep 30, 2017, 2:16 AM UTC

koolba wrote: post #274

ricw wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not representative of either the time frame or the resources available to Mozilla. Mozilla has had Hundreds of millions of annual income through their search associations [1]. It’s surprising how they’ve wasted that amount of money to finally in 2017 build a browser that can compete again. This is 9 years after google chrome was released! They have absolutely no excuse for falling this far behind. They squand…

You can't say Mozilla and squander in the same sentence without referencing their phone OS.

True story.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#322

Post by Karunamon » Sat, Sep 30, 2017, 2:17 AM UTC

ShabbosGoy wrote: post #315

Dylan16807 wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is my account old enough for you? Sure, it "furthers their tracking and advertising network". But do they track you through chrome , as asked?

Chromium has been found to phone home on a regular basis. The data (or metadata) that is sent back is most likely beneficial for Google. I have Google Analytics on my startup's SPA when it can't even be crawled by Google due to the framework we use. The only logical explanation is that Chrome sends data back on the sites you visit.

Let's do a quick thought experiment and imagine all the completely legitimate reasons that a browser might have to call home. Off the top of my head:

* Any of the disableable features like safe browsing

* Addon code update checks (chrome web store)

* Certificate pinning list updates

* CA certificate bundle updates

* Browser code update checks

* Uploading crash reports

* HSTS list updates

* Settings synching

I also believe Firefox has analogues for every single one of these.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#323

Post by andrew3726 » Sat, Sep 30, 2017, 2:19 AM UTC

criddell wrote: post #280

JoBrad wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not lying - I just downloaded it, and it is crazy fast. GMail (maybe not the best metric, but an important one for me) loads about twice as fast as in Chrome, and scrolling has no stuttering at all, even on very long pages. I may actually make the switch.

I was actually thinking about switching to Chrome because of GMail (or rather Inbox). When I open Inbox in Firefox, it can take 20 to 30 seconds for the cursor to stop spinning and I have a 300 Mbps connection.

on which firefox version? have you tried nightly?

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#324

Post by matt4077 » Sat, Sep 30, 2017, 2:19 AM UTC

krapp wrote: post #260

thereare5lights wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is only true if your company operates to maximize shareholder value. If your company exists to serve its employees as its first priority, then your statement is false.

Companies can't exist to serve their employees as a first priority - because companies exist to make a profit. Even if the owners care more about their employees than about profit, that profit still has to come first. No profit... sooner or later, no company.

This is an insane discussion, but I can't resist: By definition, "profit" is the share of revenue that is not needed for the existence and work of the company.

There's even a category of enterprises successfully working in such a framework. They're called–oh happy day–"non-profits".

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#325

Post by digi_owl » Sat, Sep 30, 2017, 2:20 AM UTC

jd3 wrote: post #215

digi_owl wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are targeting something that only exist in the drug haze filling the marketing and design offices. The same marketing that insisted that Mozilla shift their major version on every release, and that keep producing sugar coated videos for the most vapid of reasons. Face it, the FOSS world has become a bastion of champagne pimping social climbers that just want to add to their score card that they have worked on so…

Their marketing problem is, in my interpretation, based around the flawed mindset that you should treat users as non-technical cattle. This is the chrome way. The problem is, Mozilla has historically thrived off of the opposite - the 'hacker' mentality. The only reason Mozilla even exists is due primarily to Jamie Zawinski! I agree with your point about the shift in major version releases — this was another marketing…

Err, and as for focusing on Seamonkey i fear that ship has long since sailed. As best i can tell, Seamonkey today is a "thin" UI wrapper around whatever Firefox source Mozilla barfs out ever so often. They are even stripping out Seamonkey features just to get the thing to compile so they can actually produce a working binary.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#326

Post by Retric » Sat, Sep 30, 2017, 2:20 AM UTC

koolba wrote: post #274

ricw wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not representative of either the time frame or the resources available to Mozilla. Mozilla has had Hundreds of millions of annual income through their search associations [1]. It’s surprising how they’ve wasted that amount of money to finally in 2017 build a browser that can compete again. This is 9 years after google chrome was released! They have absolutely no excuse for falling this far behind. They squand…

You can't say Mozilla and squander in the same sentence without referencing their phone OS.

Around 2012 when they started Android still sucked, so IMO it was a reasonable choice. They also killed it off fairly quickly so no big deal.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#327

Post by andrew3726 » Sat, Sep 30, 2017, 2:20 AM UTC

nextos wrote: post #256

agumonkey wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Firefox beta is very nice. My only (big) regret is that APIs that make Vimperator work are getting phased out. I can't live without Vimperator.

Well, there's vimium-ff [1] which works pretty good for me.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimium-ff/

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#328

Post by yjftsjthsd-h » Sat, Sep 30, 2017, 2:27 AM UTC

jchw wrote: post #296

noobermin wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 coupl…

> the app we developed at my workplace was painfully unusably slow in Firefox

Have you considered addressing this bug?

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#329

Post by yjftsjthsd-h » Sat, Sep 30, 2017, 2:29 AM UTC

yuhong wrote: post #140

Sylos wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And known to contain questionable things. https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium

The point is how it compares to Firefox though.

And the answer, particularly in light of the above link, is that compared to Firefox it falls utterly short.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#330

Post by yjftsjthsd-h » Sat, Sep 30, 2017, 2:34 AM UTC

Klathmon wrote: post #27

roblabla wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it's true the firefox debugger is lacking in certain areas, it's also better than chrome in others. Debugging CSS animations is much easier in firefox, but firefox lacks a way to look at websocket packets. One thing I like about firefox is that its debugger is a just a React webapp : https://github.com/devtools-html/debugger.html . So it's fairly easy to add to it !

I know the chrome dev tools are also just a web app themselves (or at least for the most part are). I don't know the stack, but I do remember there is a way to open dev tools FOR the dev tools window.

Okay, obvious question: are they portable enough that we could just wholesale import them into Firefox?