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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

#511

Post by 482794793792894 »

hendersoon wrote: post #338

Tons of extensions don't work. My personal blocker is mouse gestures; the webextensions API simply doesn't support the workflow I've been following for 15+ years. Mouse gestures will NEVER work well on Firefox 57+, just as they will NEVER work well on Chrome. Additionally, mouse gestures are completely broken on both linux and MacOS due to Firefox's implementation of right-clicking and that is not slated to be fixed…

57 just entered Beta. It will be released on the 14th November. That's a whole 6 weeks still.

It also is not the end of all Firefox development. Just because it's not necessarily done for 57, doesn't mean that it won't get fixed or that it will "NEVER" work well.

It's also nonsense to make assumptions about what will work in Firefox in the future based on what works in Chrome, as Mozilla is introducing additional APIs that Chrome does not have.

If you're happy with Vivaldi, your thing. But there also is Firefox 52 ESR, which will continue to get security updates until the 26th June 2018.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#512

Post by dannyw »

rqs wrote: post #509
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…

A Chrome clone? How that opinion came out of you?

Not GP, but I imagine he is referring to the use of Chrome’s extension API, Chrome’s PDF viewer instead of PDF.js, etc.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#513

Post by yorwba »

majewsky wrote: post #475
yorwba wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just found "Use smooth scrolling" under Vimium's advanced options. Might be this page: moz-extension://78ac0671-3b7c-4a05-8771-f46ecdb2b65c/pages/options.html#advancedOptions unless that random string is unique per-user and I just broadcast my password.

When I copy this URL into the addressbar and hit Enter, it just disappears. Probably a security feature.

That doesn't happen for me, I can access the Vimium options by copying the URl. Do you have the extension installed?

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#514

Post by dannyw »

kuschku wrote: post #465
earenndil wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, in stock chrome, it's much easier to install 3rd-party extensions than in stock ff.

Unless you are on Windows, there Chrome makes them impossible.

No, you just load an unpacked extension in developer mode. Hard but not impossible

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#515

Post by rb666 »

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…

Lastpass being borky in Firefox Nightly is one of the reasons I switched back to Chrome some months ago. You're saying 1password is great on Firefox? Do you prefer 1password in general now, if so, why? Lastpass is a lot cheaper for one.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#516

Post by mk89 »

dblohm7 wrote: post #122
mk89 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't share their reports since 2015 - basically when the contract with Google ended. Now, I don't think they are poor, but being a company that doesn't sell your data, doesn't show ads, etc... I mean, frankly, I think that such products are really hard to find nowadays. Their revenues come primarily by Google competitors (Yahoo, etc., which try to appear as default search engine).

>They don't share their reports since 2015 - basically when the contract with Google ended. That's not true at all. The 2015 report was published at the end of 2016. Likewise, the 2016 report should be out by the end of the year.

It was not meant to diminish them, of course. It was a sort of weird argument against "they are rich already" - considering that their last report is dated to 2015, how do we know what happened in the last 1-2 years?

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#518

Post by 482794793792894 »

51Cards wrote: post #98
SirensOfTitan wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 however one of those. While I understand the technical reasons for the switch I don't think it has been handled well. Extensions I rely on daily are going to cease functioning because the WebExtensions API isn't mature enough for the developers to migrate. Are they going to wait? Probably not... most affected will probably abandon their projects because FF rushed the transition and their user base is about to dr…

They had to sort of rush it, because they wanted to rush out multiprocess, to stop the bleeding of users (which has very much worked [1]).

And then they needed to follow up with the switch to WebExtensions relatively quickly, so that extension authors wouldn't start porting their extensions to multiprocess and then after that effort have to rewrite their extensions to be WebExtensions-compatible. They wanted extension authors to be able to just directly port to WebExtensions.

And I do think that a lot more extension authors would have probably abandoned their projects, if they had just ported to multiprocess and then had to port to WebExtensions.

Also, a lot of extensions sort of just continue to function without active maintenance. Those are why it would have just as well been really disruptive to space out multiprocess and WebExtensions by a few years. Then we'd have to start over at 0 extensions twice.

[1] Multiprocess was rolled out in Firefox 48, on the 2nd August 2016: http://netmarketshare.com/report.aspx?qprid=1&qpaf=&qpcustom...

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#519

Post by mda »

3131s wrote: post #375
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.

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…

Fuck chrome? Whoa what did Chrome do?

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#520

Post by mda »

sleavey wrote: post #497

I don't know what everyone's problem was with Firefox. I never noticed significant slow down with the browser, or at least the slow down I saw I blamed on Javascript bloat on websites these days (it started around the time Bootstrap and jQuery really took off). I was even running Adblock+ / later uBlock, had lots of tabs open all the time and browsed heavy websites. I remember reading that comic that Google made to d…

It was slow, janky unresponsive compared to Chrome. Also security was much weaker. I think they addressed some of the issues now.
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