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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

#371

Post by jchw »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #328
jchw wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

From which end? FWIW, Quantum seemed to fix it. There doesn't seem to be a "bug," just stuff that used to be slow in Firefox. I think people understate how much faster Chrome had been for certain real world workloads.

Of course, the app is being improved too, but apples to apples, Quantum makes it better.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#372

Post by kibwen »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #354
kenhwang wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How much Rust is actually in the new Firefox? I'm not seeing any based on a casual click-around in the repo, though I'll freely admit I haven't scanned the entire source tree. Edit: if there is any, can someone give me a link to the part of the source tree that has it?

I don't know if there's any one location for all the Rust code; it may not make logical sense to put the MP4 parser written in Rust right next to the CSS engine, for example. I believe that https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev is a mirror of the repo in question, and so we can use Github's search function to find every file that it detects as being a Rust file: https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/search?l=rust (which finds 3,274 Rust files, 6,701 C files, and 22,722 C++ files).

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#373

Post by chewz »

I had been using exclusively Firefox for five years until six months ago but I prefer using Chrome now. Poor documentation, tons of telemetry, shady deals like Pocket or Hallo.

You can make Chrome more private and secure then Firefox with few command line options. Or use ungoogled-chromium.

do shell script "open -n -a 'Google Chrome' --args --incognito --disable-sync --disable-reading-from-canvas --disable-voice-input --disable-system-timezone-automatic-detection --connectivity-check-url=" & quoted form of url204 & " --disable-remote-fonts --no-referrers --disable-physical-keyboard-autocorrect --no-pings --enable-fast-unload --enable-media-suspend --enable-offline-auto-reload-visible-only --use-simple-cache-backend --aggressive-cache-discard --disk-cache-size=100663296 --proxy-server=" & quoted form of proxy_url

Checked Firefox 57/58 but can't confirm any visible performance gain. Documentation is lacking. And Firefox 57 has at the moment 58 extensions compatible. And it still has Pocket buil-in.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#374

Post by eslaught »

nine_k wrote: post #343
nly wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome wasn't started from scratch. From day 1 it was built on top of the legacy laid by WebKit, which in turn was built on top of the huge amount of work done under the KHTML project. v8 and sandboxing were its crown jewels. If Apple hadn't open-sourced WebKit, it's unlikely Chrome would have happened.

I think KHTML, as a part of KDE, was open from the start?

Sure it was, but how much additional effort did Apple put into the code base by way of WebKit? Apple didn't need to open source that work, even if the original was open source, and I'm sure the leg up made a big time-to-market difference for Chrome.

Edit: Actually, KHTML is licensed LGPL, and that's a viral license if you make a derivative work. So I suppose Apple was forced to open source their changes when it finally went to market.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#375

Post by 3131s »

JoBrad wrote: post #273
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…

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.

Damn, I am commenting right now from 57.0b4 and it's so, so fast. It properly recovered the 50 or so tabs I had open from the prior version, and even as I rapidly clicked from tab to tab Firefox didn't skip a beat.

I never left Firefox though, it's been my primary browser for ~12 years. Fuck Chrome! I can say without a doubt that 57.0b4 is more performant than any Chrome / Chromium version that I've begrudgingly used to check if my client's sites are cross-browser compatible.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#377

Post by nnethercote »

noncoml wrote: post #309
jopsen wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious what is the concern with pocket?

It's troubled past and weird current state, doesn't make me comfortable with sharing any info that Mozilla shares with them.

Mozilla acquired Pocket a while back. So "shares with them" really means "shares with itself" :)

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#378

Post by Walf »

I could never make the switch to Chrome in the first place. Sure, I use Chrome for the things it does better, like live editing of script in debugger, but Firefox was always streets ahead for customisation – both plugin- and preference-wise. I always found Chrome's preemptive tendencies frustrating, and its general "Chrome knows what's best for you" attitude intolerable for web development work. I also trust Mozilla a hell of a lot more than Google.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#379

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

noncoml wrote: post #227
syshum wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you are one of those that "Open Web" == performance only and you look the other way on things like EME, Pocket, and various other things that lower Privacy and betray the very foundation of the "Open Web"

That's as a bit unfair conclusion. I just believe that if Firefox dies then for sure "Open Web" will die. But, yeah, of course I am not happy with Pocket. But it still better than using Chrome.

One of the big issues I have with Pocket isn't even the privacy problem, it's the integration. Firefox would (IMO) be better served by having such things as extensions included in the default distribution. They could even make a separate tab in the extensions dialogue for them, perhaps hidden behind an about:config preference. That way anyone who doesn't want them could disable them and speed the browser up.

There was some discussion of doing things this way back when it was still called Phoenix. The Seamonkey suite was bloated and slow, Phoenix was the stripped-down browser that just did web browsing but had an extension system to add in extra features. But instead of adding features through the extension system the Mozilla team decided to add them into the base.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#380

Post by 482794793792894 »

JosephLark wrote: post #22
tjr225 wrote: post #7

Switched to Firefox a while ago. I love it. My little tip is to go into add-ons > Appearance, and change over to a compact theme. It looks a lot better than the default theme imo!

Damn it, I was hoping this was going to alleviate my main worry with this new Firefox - the UI. It's so Microsoft Edge-ified. I had more trouble finding this setting than I should have. Appears to be hamburger menu -> customize -> (bottom of page) density drop-down -> select compact. Still not sure if I like it. The tabs alone are still way too big for my liking. Coupled with Ubuntu 17.10 and the Gnome that brings, t…

You can shrink the tab height further with userChrome.css. [1]

Putting this into there should shrink it down a bit further:

  @namespace url("http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul");

  #TabsToolbar {
      height: 24px !important;
      --tab-min-height: 24px !important;
  }
Obviously, you can replace those 24px with even smaller values. it just starts to look silly at some point, because the icons get squished. There's probably a way to tell those icons to scale down differently, if you do want to go even smaller.

You can load the URL "chrome://browser/content/browser.xul" to get the browser UI displayed like a webpage, allowing you to easily use the devtools to inspect the different CSS identifiers, so that you can mess around a bit by yourself.

[1] http://kb.mozillazine.org/index.php?title=UserChrome.css

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