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

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#551

Post by woranl » Sat, Sep 30, 2017, 2:00 PM UTC

I found Firefox very inefficient when working with large file says a 2GB file. It doesn't have filesystem api like Chrome does. There is no ability to do low-level create, read, update and delete (CRUD) file operations. For example, you cannot write bytes in the end of a file and continues to grow it. IndexedDB only allows adding and removing whole files. As the file size get big, the inefficient file handling will cause Firefox to run out of offline storage and the processing time will get longer exponentially as the file size increases.

Speed improvements are good, but the lack of basic features is what kills Firefox. It is not ready for heavy duty web app.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#552

Post by staticassertion » Sat, Sep 30, 2017, 2:00 PM UTC

sitkack wrote: post #531

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.

Chrome didn't start from scratch. It was based off of WebKit which was based off of KHTML [0], the code has a lineage that dates back to at least 1998. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KHTML

But as a new project they didn't have to worry about breaking things, supporting current users, etc.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#553

Post by fernandotakai » Sat, Sep 30, 2017, 2:06 PM UTC

badsectoracula wrote: post #545

mk89 wrote: post #81

Never 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.

> And they have some of the best extensions. Sadly 11 of the 14 extensions i use do not work on Firefox 57 (i just tried it). The browser is indeed faster - it feels faster than Chrome and Edge - but i never really had an issue with its performance. On the other hand i have a very big issue with the functionality that is lost. Stylish, FireFTP, Greasemonkey (with its own extensions), Better Reader, DownThemAll and a…

same with me. vimperator doesn't work on fx57, which means i won't be updating soon.

it's a big dealbreaker for me.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#554

Post by jamiesonbecker » Sat, Sep 30, 2017, 2:08 PM UTC

As well as the vastly better Firefox, I've been very impressed by the new Brave browser[1].

Actually, extremely impressed. I normally do dev with Chrome for heavy JS (even compared to new devel edition ff) and even though Brave's devtools seem to match up to an older version compared to Chrome, page updates etc are just so much faster in Brave than in Chrome. Fast renders matters a LOT when you're developing. (Btw, there's a bug in the install script if you're using Brave on Debian[2].)

It's still early days and doesn't have as many features as FF and Chrome (in particular for me, Stylish is missing, but the privacy and ad blockers that I prefer are there), but, wow... rendering is faster than Chrome in the common case, or at least strongly feels that way.

I also like how they're focused first and foremost on privacy and ad blocking, but also make it easy to donate to your favorite sites in place of ad revenue. It seems like a balanced approach. Brave seems to be very similar to Mozilla with its strong focus on user privacy.

It's nice to see competition heating up in the browser space again.

1. https://brave.com 2. https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/issues/6902

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#555

Post by chimeracoder » Sat, Sep 30, 2017, 2:12 PM UTC

Manishearth wrote: post #468

chimeracoder wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla (the foundation) is a non-profit corporation, but Mozilla (the corporation that creates the free browser) is a for-profit corporation. They're separate entities. Of course, non-profit corporations are still able to turn profits as well. They just can't distribute dividends to shareholders.

To be clear: The for-profit is wholly owned by the non-profit; so there are no shareholders (except for the non-profit). There are restrictions around what 501(c)(3)s can do. The existence of Firefox helps push the goals of Mozilla Foundation, and also bring extra money to the table of the non-profit (but not unbounded! There are similar restrictions on how much money can travel back that way) This is not an uncommon…

Yes, and to be clear, I don't have any issues with this setup. I just wanted to correct the original statement, because it annoys me when "for-profit vs non-profit" is used to imply things that it doesn't actually imply (lack of a profit motive). Or when people imply that being as non-profit means that the company can't or doesn't actually turn a profit.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#556

Post by mda » Sat, Sep 30, 2017, 2:16 PM UTC

3131s wrote: post #530

mda wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I agree with the GP -- I never noticed this in Firefox and years back I was surprised to learn after the fact that Chrome had come to dominate in market share. Was Firefox less performant on Windows or something? I never really got what people were complaining about as a user of Firefox on Linux... However, the new beta is purely awesome. I don't think I've ever been so excited about a new software version release! W…

My experience is mostly on linux. Chrome was way better on all aspects i mentioned. It was like day and night.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#557

Post by EpicEng » Sat, Sep 30, 2017, 2:20 PM UTC

eat_veggies wrote: post #362

EpicEng wrote: post #258

I did, didn't work, went back to Chrome. It was faster and had a smaller memory footprint than I remember, which was great. It also started stuttering on my macs every ~5 seconds or so. The page would just lock up. Couldn't find a solution. The only hints were to disable graphics acceleration, but those were years old. On my windows machines it crashed, and crashed hard. Single tab has an issue, the entire browser cr…

For pre beta software, that's perfectly understandable.

Not pre-beta, it was the official stable version. I should have made that clear.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#558

Post by EpicEng » Sat, Sep 30, 2017, 2:22 PM UTC

EpicEng wrote: post #258

I did, didn't work, went back to Chrome. It was faster and had a smaller memory footprint than I remember, which was great. It also started stuttering on my macs every ~5 seconds or so. The page would just lock up. Couldn't find a solution. The only hints were to disable graphics acceleration, but those were years old. On my windows machines it crashed, and crashed hard. Single tab has an issue, the entire browser cr…

To be clear; this was the stable version. I apologize that your favorite browser didn't work well for me.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#559

Post by EpicEng » Sat, Sep 30, 2017, 2:24 PM UTC

3131s wrote: post #370

EpicEng wrote: post #258

I did, didn't work, went back to Chrome. It was faster and had a smaller memory footprint than I remember, which was great. It also started stuttering on my macs every ~5 seconds or so. The page would just lock up. Couldn't find a solution. The only hints were to disable graphics acceleration, but those were years old. On my windows machines it crashed, and crashed hard. Single tab has an issue, the entire browser cr…

> No thanks FF, I'll try again in another decade. You should hope that you'll have the option to do so in a decade, or maybe by then we'll all be getting extorted by Google after they've strangled the open web to death.

Right. A bit dramatic, but I guess I'm in the same camp as the vast majority of other people out there who just wants a browser that doesn't get in my way.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#560

Post by tomxor » Sat, Sep 30, 2017, 2:25 PM UTC

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…

Just chiming in... I knew they were doing major replacements in parts of their engine but it started to become observably and blatantly obvious to me when doing cross browser testing. That thing makes chrome look like a lawnmower, it renders CSS with ease - here's hoping the reset of the browser gets the love it needs to bring it all together.