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

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#641

Post by bigbugbag » Sat, Sep 30, 2017, 10:40 PM UTC

Sideloader wrote: post #10

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…

And FF Developer Edition still lets you install unsigned extensions.

waterfox has been doing since firefox stopped doing it, actually waterfox is doing right everything firefox does wrong:

    Disabled Encrypted Media Extensions (EME)
    Disabled Web Runtime (deprecated as of 2015)
    Removed Pocket
    Removed Telemetry
    Removed data collection
    Removed startup profiling
    Allow running of all 64-Bit NPAPI plugins
    Allow running of unsigned extensions
    Removal of Sponsored Tiles on New Tab Page
    Addition of Duplicate Tab option
    Locale selector in about:preferences > General

https://www.waterfoxproject.org/

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#642

Post by bigbugbag » Sat, Sep 30, 2017, 10:42 PM UTC

internetionals wrote: post #50

teleproto wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One wonders why all the UI issues weren't solved long ago. Good that they're fixing them now, but what were they waiting for to decide to do it? (Rendering performance is a separate topic, that's been waiting on rust/servo.)

A Large part of the reason they couldn't easily address the UI performance was because of the old extensions. The reason that Firefox switched to webextensions was in order to switch to a formal extension API that could be supported long term, instead of the old open integration API which made it difficult to readable without breaking all sorts of extensions. There reason they adapted the web extension API that chrom…

Also the fastest way to accelerate the bleeding of long time supporters and power users who would not be using firefox if not for extensions.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#643

Post by bigbugbag » Sat, Sep 30, 2017, 10:45 PM UTC

482794793792894 wrote: post #59

craftyguy wrote: post #44

Earlier 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…

It seems to me waterfox has both legacy extension and multiprocess support.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#644

Post by bigbugbag » Sat, Sep 30, 2017, 10:50 PM UTC

Arubis wrote: post #30

Boy, I _really_ didn't want to swap to Chrome. I'd held on through about a year ago, even despite knowing it was slower, a memory hog, and so on; at least this way, _someone_ on my team was viewing our site in FF and would notice discrepancies. I hated to let Google manage yet another aspect of my life. But as some point, too much was too much. Unable to bear vanilla, Google-owned Chrome, I ended up in (closed-source…

So you've not used opera before they switch to chromium ?

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#645

Post by bigbugbag » Sat, Sep 30, 2017, 11:00 PM UTC

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…

Same here, did not experience performance issues with firefox despite having several hundred tabs open at all time. I do have decent hardware, but having noscript and an adblocker does wonder to keep the browser smooth.

Maybe it's different under windows ?

When a client calls me because his browsing is slow, it was usually caused by a malware ridden computer not by firefox.

On the other hand, running chrome often felt slower for some reason and the rest of the time both were comparable speed.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#646

Post by bigbugbag » Sat, Sep 30, 2017, 11:04 PM UTC

mda wrote: post #520

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.

What kind of hardware and OS were you running when you experienced this ? My own experience over a number of different computers, years and settings is the exact opposite: chrome being less responsive or both being about the same.

At times firefox was slower but it always turned out to be due to a malware ridden computer or a combination of dubious firefox extensions. srware iron did feel faster than both iunder certain conditions though.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#647

Post by khazhoux » Sat, Sep 30, 2017, 11:04 PM UTC

Wait... I just downloaded 57beta, and loaded CNN and USAToday, two sites with terrible video autoplay.

Immediately upon loaded CNN, my fan starts spinning up loudly (2016 macbook pro). When I loaded USAToday in another tab, I had to just quit FF because CPU was maxed out and laptop was overheating.

So...?

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#648

Post by cpeterso » Sat, Sep 30, 2017, 11:05 PM UTC

vanviegen wrote: post #430

zdkl wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah further proof for google that being sneaky Gets Shit Done. We collectively need to factor this into our product choices and stop encouraging the sneakiest of them all.

I understand that it's quite trendy to shit on Google's parade these days. But how exactly is bundling Flash player sneaky? Or are you alluding to some sort of bait and switch that was executed to suck people into the Google sphere? If so, please explain! Chrome was never marketed as a privacy-minded browser, was it?

Chrome bundles the Flash Pepper plugin, but Adobe's Flash NPAPI plugin installer also bundled Chrome as an opt-out "make Chrome my default browser" setting. So a Firefox user downloading the Flash NPAPI plugin (for their Firefox) would, by default, end up downloading the Flash NPAPI plugin, Chrome, and Chrome's Flash Pepper plugin. If the user really wanted Chrome, they would have downloaded it instead of downloading Flash NPAPI plugin that works in Firefox and not in Chrome.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#649

Post by bigbugbag » Sat, Sep 30, 2017, 11:07 PM UTC

mda wrote: post #556

3131s wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Seems to me you had a corrupted profile or you installed the wrond extension(s). Have you tried comparing both on a brand new user profile ? A day and night difference on a fresh profile is unheard of, they should be comparable speed.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#650

Post by bigbugbag » Sat, Sep 30, 2017, 11:08 PM UTC

amiga-workbench wrote: post #541

3131s wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've used them side by side before and the default scrolling behaviour felt janky as hell. I'll be very pleased if they have improved performance as much as everybody is saying, I want off the Google botnet.

have you tried waterfox ?

Alternatively have you tried enabling smooth scrolling ?