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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

#711

Post by Sylos »

Khaine wrote: post #466
Sylos wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also still considered one of the main-reasons for Chrome eating up all market share, that they now have the leading mobile OS under their control. You can invest a lot of money trying to remedy that, before it's actually a waste of money. And a lot of technologies and standards that were developed as part of Firefox OS still are very much around today. In terms of standards, they did a lot of work for camera and…

I thought the reasons that they lost market share was that they started cloning the chrome interface stripping out usable features (i.e. status bar) at the expense of fixing memory and performance issues. I stopped using Firefox when they removed the status bar and made it an extension and then went and bundled in a read later service extension.

To my knowledge, it was actually Google cloning the Australis interface, they just happened to release it earlier.

And no, these UI changes were not made at the expense of fixing memory and performance issues.

The reason why they didn't fix those memory and performance issues, is because it would have required introducing the (now introduced) multiprocess architecture.

That would have required breaking all extensions (which is now being done with Firefox 57, along with breaking them to switch to a new extension API). So, that would have pissed off power users even more.

And also just in general, you have to understand that power users are not that important for market share. They make up maybe 1%. If they bring their friends and family all along, then maybe 15%.

There's a big number of users that are able to choose their own browser, but are not power users by any means. For example, around 40% of Firefox users don't have any extensions installed [1].

[1] The figure is from Sep 2015, but I don't think things have changed much since then. And if anything, the trend has so far been for this number to increase. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1229949

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#712

Post by qkls »

mda wrote: post #697
JoelTheSuperior wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fairness I (and I suspect many others) refuse to use Chrome on privacy grounds.

Serious question, you think firefox has any quantifiable privacy benefit over chrome?

It's a benefit that it's not owned by a company that collects your data to sells ads.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#713

Post by tajen »

MikusR wrote: post #401
tajen wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox is fast but I'm using several profiles (one for programming websites, one for sysadmin accounts, one for personal, one for politics) and running ~3 instances is sluggish. Chrome has built-in profile management so it's just as fast with 1 or 3 instances. I don't believe it's such an unusual usecase, even my parents ask me all the time how to protect their privacy. A good idea that Ted Cruz might have missed.

Firefox has tab containers.

I understand Firefox certainly made a safe implementation, but the risk of making a mistake is too high.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#714

Post by squarefoot »

Thankfully I never switched to Chrome/ium; at first there were some FF extensions still not ported to Chrome that kept me from switching, then came privacy concerns keeping me away from it, finally when I was still running a slow machine as main PC and FF started to become slow and bloated it came Palemoon offering the same functionality at higher speed. Now Although I still run Palemoon on my main PC and all netbooks/laptops, I install Firefox on all customers/friends/relatives PC plus a basic set of addons for privacy protection (ublock origin + disconnect + https everywhere) and have to admit it got really better with time.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#715

Post by david-cako »

justboxing wrote: post #6

Am I the only one here who thinks that nothing can beat the Chrome debugger ? Nothing comes even close. It's a different story if you are just browsing, like the 95% or more of the internet consumers.

Definitely not. I moved to Firefox when 57 was pushed to nightly, and I quickly realized that I have to keep Chrome around for any sort of web dev. Firefox's debugger is slow, it slows the page itself down significantly, and the layout is much less intuitive (to me).

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#716

Post by ascagnel_ »

kuschku wrote: post #467
clouddrover wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Netflix is force of habit, it works great in Firefox now Netflix doesn't work great in either Firefox or Chrome, but that's not the browser's fault. Netflix only streams 720p video to Firefox, Opera, and Chrome whereas it will stream 1080p or better to Safari, IE 11, and Edge: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23742 You can see the playback details (formats, resolution, bit rate, etc.) of the video you're currently…

> Netflix only streams 720p video to Firefox, Opera, and Chrome whereas it will stream 1080p or better to Safari, IE 11, and Edge Yeah, that's due to DRM. The simple solution is to disable the EME plugin, and just pirate everything (while still paying for Netflix). You pay for it, and have a moral right to it, and you can watch it in 1080p or 4K easily.

If you pay for Netflix, you're paying for the right to watch anything currently available in their library. If you pirate stuff, unless you're careful to keep that library up-to-date with Netflix's, you won't have the moral right to it.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#717

Post by thereare5lights »

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.

Looks like nonprofits and coops don't exist then.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#718

Post by dragonwriter »

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.

> Companies can't exist to serve their employees as a first priority

Yes, they can.

> because companies exist to make a profit.

They may or may not. Companies generally exist to serve their owners interests, which may or may not be profit. And the owners may be the employees, as in a labor coop.

> No profit... sooner or later, no company.

You know there are not-for-profit companies, right? (Not necessarily tax exempt nonprofits, which have additional behavioral.and other restrictions.)

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#719

Post by kuschku »

ascagnel_ wrote: post #716
kuschku wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Netflix only streams 720p video to Firefox, Opera, and Chrome whereas it will stream 1080p or better to Safari, IE 11, and Edge Yeah, that's due to DRM. The simple solution is to disable the EME plugin, and just pirate everything (while still paying for Netflix). You pay for it, and have a moral right to it, and you can watch it in 1080p or 4K easily.

If you pay for Netflix, you're paying for the right to watch anything currently available in their library. If you pirate stuff, unless you're careful to keep that library up-to-date with Netflix's, you won't have the moral right to it.

Well, that’s an interesting question. If you’ve made a reasonable effort to pay, but have not found an option, some countries even allow you to copy without approval of the copyright owner, legally.

So this is a question that very much depends on ideology and jurisdiction. (I, personally, think that if I pay for Netflix and Amazon Prime, I have a moral right to any older content, and if I pay for a movie ticket for newer content that’s twice as expensive as a DVD of which the cinema gets less than 10%, I have a moral right to rewatch it)

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#720

Post by hendersoon »

482794793792894 wrote: post #511
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 API…

Unfortunately many of my blockers, such as functioning in new tab and other internal pages and anywhere on the chrome of the browser, are WONTFIX.
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