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How Firefox Got Fast Again

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251–260 of 713 posts

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#251
post #52

I switched back to Firefox 54 from Chrome when multiprocess browsing ("Electrolysis") came out of beta. It's been absolutely great. It's fast and I trust and like the nonprofit behind it. And all the extensions I care about are available. My main issue with Chrome was the endless nags to sign in to a Google account, and just generally wanting less dependence on Google. I also like that Firefox has a built in tracking…

Good luck with it all

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#252
post #145
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but man, Google has just eaten their lunch the past 10 years. Maybe because Google actively pays people to install Chrome without the users knowledge, and force it as default. That’s pretty much the definition of malware already. It’s hard to win against someone that does such hostile behaviour.

Also because Mozilla wasted a lot of effort on FirefoxOS. That's when the browser really stagnated.

They had to try. Mobile devices are way more restrictive than the PC ever was. The companies that dominate the OS have unprecedented power and leverage.

If Mozilla's goal is to strengthen the interests of a wide range of users against the narrow interests of two or three oligopolists they have to consider entering the OS game in spite of the immense difficulties.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#253
post #52

I switched back to Firefox 54 from Chrome when multiprocess browsing ("Electrolysis") came out of beta. It's been absolutely great. It's fast and I trust and like the nonprofit behind it. And all the extensions I care about are available. My main issue with Chrome was the endless nags to sign in to a Google account, and just generally wanting less dependence on Google. I also like that Firefox has a built in tracking…

> I also like that Firefox has a built in tracking protection (not just Do Not Track toggle but actual blocking of trackers Here's something I find curious. When Apple does it, it's because they want to kill the open web and drive more people to their closed Apple News platform. When Mozilla does it, it's because they're saints. How am I able to reconcile these two?

> How am I able to reconcile these two?

It's like reviews on Amazon. You skim the highs and the lows and you read the rest. People who say Apple is killing the open web are at the extreme. Skim what they say just to be familiar with their argument, but be careful not to get sucked in.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#254
Multiprocessing did nothing for me, since I apparently hadn't configured it to use more than one process. Some extensions I had were keeping it from doing so. Once I got all that sorted out, it flew. If you're still on a slowish FF, make sure you're actually multiprocess.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#255

Serious question, is this too little too late? Firefox has taken a massive nosedive in the last few years, in the UK at least. My two big clients have them on less than 2% share. Just checked one, 5 years ago they had 9.55% share, today it's 1.8%. Even taking into account the growth of mobile, that's dire.

Percentage of total users is deceptive in some ways. The absolute number of FF users can stay the same, or even rise, and their % share can decline. It is absolute number of users that impacts the deals they can make. That's not to say a larger % wouldn't be good for FF.

Firefox needs a serious presence in mobile. If the browser is competitive with Chrome, and also supports webextensions, it stands a fairly good chance, at least boosting up a few percentage points.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#256
post #132

Firefox 56 had some kind of performance regression[1], but FF Quantum is a joy to use. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/74irm5/is_ff_super...

Yes, for my girlfriend, during some last few months Firefox is much slower than before: she uses it mostly for Facebook and Youtube, she doesn't have any extensions installed by herself (not counting the stuff that is in Firefox because Firefox marketing initiatives, like Pocket) and no adbockers, but Firefox uses so much CPU that it gets completely unusable. And she is not any extreme Facebook user: she has less tha…

> So what's going on here? It's just the propaganda machine claiming the opposite of what is actually happening at the moment. They maybe have good goals but at the moment it's worse than, for example, a year ago.

It sounds like you are hitting some kind of bug. Feel free to file issues about it if it's reproducible; the telemetry should also be automatically reporting the issues you're seeing.

I would like to respectfully suggest that you hitting a bug is not evidence of a "propaganda machine".

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox has supported multiple profiles for ages. Just run it with -P. It allows you to have separate history, extensions, bookmarks, everything. The new panel containers are also handy. They allow you to have shared history and bookmarks but separate cookies and sessions. You can be logged into the same site on different accounts in two tabs in the same window.

There's no easy way of switching between them, starting a new firefox instance requires running from a command interpreter with -P specified, even the selection window isn't great. The containers feature is the alternative you want to propose here.

I went deeply into trying to use containers as a profile replacement, replacing Chrome with the new Firefox beta for one month, and I can report that it is not the right direction to go in:

- New tabs do not inherit current container

- No way to make Ctrl-T do this by customization (I investigated extensions (can't remap Ctrl-T) and even system-wide Ctrl-T remapping with Karibiner; neither gives you what you want)

- History is shared across containers. So e.g. work URLs mixed up with personal. That's contra to one of the main purposes of Profiles.

- External applications do not open a tab in the current container. So e.g. clicking in a link in work slack will fail because it will not open in a tab which has work cookies / google account etc.

Evidently Containers are not designed as a Profile replacement. I'm not sure what they are for but I don't think it's a need that I have.

As I understand it using the long-standing Firefox profiles feature is the way to go, but personally I switched back to Chrome after a month of the new Firefox Beta because of the convenience of Chrome profiles. I should try Firefox profiles, but I exhausted my experimentation energy on Containers.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#258
post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The signing into an account in chrome is the killer feature for me. I have work and a couple of personal accounts that I have signed in in different browser windows. That allows me to keep things separate (extensions, mail, browsing, bookmarks, etc). How do FF users do this?

But now that Google has fundamentally broken users' trust by locking people out of their own Google Docs through automated machine learning algorithm, can't you see why people are wanting to protect themselves from a corporate culture that allows those kinds of zealous and intrusive policies? It was locking out journalists drafting stories! How can you trust Google anymore? There's something rotten festering in Mount…

People seem to have the laughable idea that somehow only government censorship is bad, or that corporations aren't capable of censorship in the first place because they're private entities. I mean, yes, the world will look like that if you reduce everything to contractual relationships like libertarians seem to do, but personally I hope we could hold corporations accountable for actions like these. Like it or not, we've become extremely reliant on cloud services; Google closing someone's account without the possibility of appeal may not be politically motivated censorship, but it's still arbitrary censorship (even if you did click on the "agree" button on the EULA nobody ever reads).

Why shouldn't we hold corporations to the same standards as governments? If we don't want the government arbitrarily censoring people, why are we OK with corporations doing it?

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#259
I'll be looking to downgrade to Firefox Extended Support Release 52.4.1 [1] and using the hidden settings to enable Electrolysis [2]. Currently on 56 and it's very fast but with 57 tabs mix plus is gone [3].

[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/all/#en-...

[2] https://fossbytes.com/how-to-make-firefox-faster-by-enabling...

[3] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-mix-plus/

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#260
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends a bit: if devs switch back I'd say definitely. If devs are ready to repeat the IE 6 story, this time with Chrome. Getting companies to do cross browser testing seems hard even if it it should be simpler than ever before.. :-/

Until they figure out a way to address their irrelevance on Mobile, devs will never fully switch since they have to do testing on mobile devices. It is really sad that Gecko is becoming so good, but is mainly used to power a product in what is becoming a niche market (yes, desktop is becoming a niche in terms of users relative to mobile).

The amount of desktop usage hasn't gone down with mobile usage going up. Desktop isn't niche.

That said, more market share for Fennec would be nice.

(This comment written in Fennec.)

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