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How Firefox Got Fast Again

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Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#411

Post by mijowi »

jakub_g wrote: post #401
tspike wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the reminder. I just downloaded the latest FF beta and exiled Chrome to an "only when needed" role. All the back-and-forth about speed and features is understandable, but misses the point that Firefox needs our support if we are to have any real non-proprietary options for what is quickly becoming the base system abstraction layer for most computing.

BTW: if using Android, if FF is not for you, try Brave instead of Chrome. It feels exactly like Chrome (it's Chromium-based), but has a built-in adblocker, tracker blocking, HTTPS everywhere, no nagging to sign in, and does not throw "suggested news" (with no opt-out) upon you. Brave's founder is ex-Mozilla's CEO (Brendan Eich). However latest FF on Android is actually not bad, at least if you have a modern phone (th…

Use FF nightly on Android. It's got the quantum update and it's great. I haven't had it break on me yet, but I keep a working APK just in case.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#412

Post by nikisweeting »

m_st wrote: post #16

I switched from Chrome to Firefox 57 beta and couldn't be happier. Only issue so far was the ugly black title bar on the Mac, but switching to the integrated 'Light' theme fixed that. Too bad 'Light' isn't the default on macOS. Also note their updated Firefox on iOS. It looks and works just fine now and comes with Firefox Sync which gives you access to your tabs, bookmarks and history.

"Light" themes hurt my eyes and look horrible, dark all the way for me. To each their own :)

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#413

Post by PascLeRasc »

I decided to give FirefoxNightly a chance as a longtime Chrome user/apologist. It's impressive and I like the design changes, but it's still keeping my MBP very warm and listed as "Using Significant Energy" in the battery info while I've been using it for ~3 hours. Not to mention it feels kinda laggy, especially in text input. Still, I like the changes like seeing zoom percent in the omnibar and the preferences menu design. I won't be switching over fully, but I'll keep it around and continue to check out changes.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#414

Post by repsilat »

k__ wrote: post #376

How long will it take to forget about this again? The whole story reminds me of something a project manager, who worked at the Google homepage, once said. They worked their asses off to get the page smaller and smaller so the UX was unbeatable. Then, after they got enough users, they focused on different things, and more and more stuff was included. Somehow Firefox went the same way, right? First they created it so i…

It's not all them -- I think the saying that "Moore given and Gates taketh away probably translates across to browsers and web pages, too. Browser speed increases to render HTML and run JS faster, people worry less about performance and write slower pages because browsers are faster now, rinse and repeat. This applies even more so to served ad code, where there are no incentives to perform well.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#415

Post by JoshMnem »

jakub_g wrote: post #401
tspike wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the reminder. I just downloaded the latest FF beta and exiled Chrome to an "only when needed" role. All the back-and-forth about speed and features is understandable, but misses the point that Firefox needs our support if we are to have any real non-proprietary options for what is quickly becoming the base system abstraction layer for most computing.

BTW: if using Android, if FF is not for you, try Brave instead of Chrome. It feels exactly like Chrome (it's Chromium-based), but has a built-in adblocker, tracker blocking, HTTPS everywhere, no nagging to sign in, and does not throw "suggested news" (with no opt-out) upon you. Brave's founder is ex-Mozilla's CEO (Brendan Eich). However latest FF on Android is actually not bad, at least if you have a modern phone (th…

From what I've read, Brave doesn't block ads -- it replaces them with other ads. I don't think that it's a good idea.

Firefox for Android also allows browser extensions, which gives some control of the software back to the user.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#416

Post by Johnny555 »

ghostcluster wrote: post #206
e40 wrote: 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…

But weren't they locking those users because their algorithm thought it saw malware? It's not like Google said "You're writing a story about bombs or some other inappropriate subject so we're locking you out".

This sounds like one of those "damned if you do, damned if you don't" no-win solutions for Google. Users (and Google) don't want Google to allow people to use Google Docs to distribute malware and harvest passwords, they don't want someone at Google to look at their documents to see if they are "safe" (which Google couldn't realistically do even if they wanted to), so then people got upset when the automated software Google uses to look for these problems did a bad job for some people.

While it'd be nice if every system and process worked well 100% of the time and had no bugs, that's just not a realistic expectation.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#417

Post by luhn »

robin_reala wrote: post #269
luhn wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you use 1Password with Firefox on iOS? It's not an option for me in the Share modal, so I've been having to switch to Safari.

It was only added in the last couple of weeks I think. Clicking the menu button in the address bar then “Share page with” shows it for me.

Yeah, seems to have been fixed in 10.0 and I was running several versions behind. (For whatever reason iOS didn't list it as an available update.) I reinstalled Firefox and now it works.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#418

Post by jakub_g »

JoshMnem wrote: post #415
jakub_g wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BTW: if using Android, if FF is not for you, try Brave instead of Chrome. It feels exactly like Chrome (it's Chromium-based), but has a built-in adblocker, tracker blocking, HTTPS everywhere, no nagging to sign in, and does not throw "suggested news" (with no opt-out) upon you. Brave's founder is ex-Mozilla's CEO (Brendan Eich). However latest FF on Android is actually not bad, at least if you have a modern phone (th…

From what I've read, Brave doesn't block ads -- it replaces them with other ads. I don't think that it's a good idea. Firefox for Android also allows browser extensions, which gives some control of the software back to the user.

I was not aware of it - thx for info. A bit strange indeed.

Link for the other if interested: https://www.brave.com/about-ad-replacement/

Edit: from the link content, I understand they actually backtracked from this proposal after a backlash from publishers.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#419

Post by keithnz »

mattmanser wrote: post #18

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.

I don't think it's too late, always room for a better browser, I've swapped to Quantum and I think it's better than chrome, especially as a dev. I swapped to chrome when it came out, and it's been the better browser for a long time, but I think that's changed. I'm certainly recommending it. Even Edge feels better than chrome at the moment.

The other thing I'm trialing is using duckduckgo as a search engine which is quite good, but google is still mostly better, but since you can google from ddg, I'm sticking with it for the moment.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#420

Post by JoshMnem »

e40 wrote: post #193
mapgrep wrote: 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…

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?

Firefox containers[1] are new, but you could always do this with Firefox profiles. If you're on Linux or Mac, open a terminal and type:

    firefox -ProfileManager -no-remote &
(I alias it to `ff`.)

Create different profiles[2] for each separate browser you need, and then make shortcuts to launch them.[3] Each Firefox profile will work like a completely separate browser.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

[2] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...

[3] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Command_Lin...

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