Live data from Hacker News

Ciao, Chrome: Firefox Quantum Is the Browser Built for 2017

wired.com

191–200 of 340 posts

Re: Ciao, Chrome: Firefox Quantum Is the Browser Built for 2017

#191
post #30

And yet 95% of the time I try to watch YouTube in Firefox, it just hangs, never actually playing. Yet Chrome works flawlessly every time. I'm not saying Google is doing anything malicious here, I think it's more of a "we put a lot more effort into making YouTube work" kinda thing.

YouTube is now written in Polymer, a library made by Google that uses the Web Components specifications, which currently only Chrome supports natively[1], so they have to rely on polyfills on the rest of the browsers, so it's understandable that YouTube can perform bad on browsers other than Chrome.

[1]: https://caniuse.com/#search=web%20components

Re: Ciao, Chrome: Firefox Quantum Is the Browser Built for 2017

#193
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Firefox had a larger market share, it would be easy to make the argument for cross-browser compatibility. But when Firefox is not even 12% of Chrome's usage globally http://gs.statcounter.com/ and likely much less for your customers it's difficult to appeal to ideals

How many millions of users is that 12% again?

Hundreds of millions to be in the right ballpark. Even if the web has a billion users, 12% is 120 million users on Firefox.

Re: Ciao, Chrome: Firefox Quantum Is the Browser Built for 2017

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think browser makers (or whoever it needs to be) should offer an option to save battery over a little bit of extra bandwidth. Maybe even make it the default.

youtube's logic selects the codec, not the browser

No, it’s a negotiation wherein the client submits its list of supported protocols and the server chooses between them.

Re: Ciao, Chrome: Firefox Quantum Is the Browser Built for 2017

#195
post #187

Firefox is a great browser, but what bothers me: - Design: On Windows it integrates better but on MacOS the header is just somehow ugly. Chrome just feels more stable in this point. Also the scrolling to top when Chrome goes over the 0px line and bounces back - that's just a nicer behaviour. - Clearing history and cookies: I yet didn't manage to find a fast solution to do this in Firefox. Please, dear Firefox team, i…

why is the header ugly on MacOS? it actually has the same color and looks like it's part of the menu bar.

Re: Ciao, Chrome: Firefox Quantum Is the Browser Built for 2017

#196

Apparently they still didn't fix the issue with edit boxes and dark themes on linux. There are two things that keep me on Chromium - that, and the ability to appify a website.

The dark text boxes can be fixed by doing a bit of configuration editing[0], not ideal I'll admit but it goes a long way to making it usable on linux.

[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/firefox#Unreadable_inpu...

Re: Ciao, Chrome: Firefox Quantum Is the Browser Built for 2017

#197

With all this push for Quantum, I wonder what the extension landscape is like. I’ve heard people complain about FF dropping support for old extension APIs (absolutely no idea if this is true - just murmurs). As a Dev, would now technically be a good time to consider building an extension for Firefox?

Yes, Firefox has transitioned to the new WebExtensions API for add-ons. They first announced the transition over two years ago and Firefox 57 is the first release to disable the old add-ons API:

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-dev...

Before Firefox Quantum's release there were around 21,000 add-ons available on https://addons.mozilla.org/ and as of right now there are 7,002 add-ons compatible with Firefox Quantum. Almost all of the top 20 add-ons have made the switch to the new API.

So I'd say now is a good time to build an extension for Firefox. The transition to the new API model is complete, there's lots of room for new add-ons compatible with the new API, and more APIs will be added with each new Firefox release to enable more features for WebExtensions:

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2017/11/20/extensions-in-fir...

Re: Ciao, Chrome: Firefox Quantum Is the Browser Built for 2017

#198
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately telemetry is everywhere now, and it disgusts me greatly. Personally, I find the idea that software should continuously phone home about its use, and this silent data collection/monitoring, extremely abhorrent. Some apps that really do not need to interact with the network at all do it, and those can be easily firewalled, but not so with a browser. Edit: Wow, downvotes for opposing pervasive telemetry. N…

Every app and app developer could use crash/bug reports. I can understand your paranoia that something else is being sent but I would hardly call the idea of asking to send back bug reports abhorrent.

The comment that you were replying to didn't mention anything about "asking to send back bug reports."

Re: Ciao, Chrome: Firefox Quantum Is the Browser Built for 2017

#199
post #153
post #84

I'm surprised at the success of Mozilla's PR push for this. It seems the time is right for this. Probably helps that tech sites seem to compete to have an article on every "current" topic.

'DOM' panel in FF DevTools unfortunately still doesn't distinguished between inbuilt native DOM nodes and custom DOM nodes from JS code - making the DOM panel still completely useless. Firebug grouped non-native DOM nodes (the interesting ones for devs) and sorted them on top, and marked them in bold font - non of these is in the new FF. Until DOM panel still a work-in-progress, I cannot switch. I still keep a Firebu…

> inbuilt native DOM nodes and custom DOM nodes from JS code

What does that mean? What are "inbuilt native" DOM nodes, or "custom DOM nodes"?

Re: Ciao, Chrome: Firefox Quantum Is the Browser Built for 2017

#200
I'm all into the "switch firefox on again" and removed my chrome from my quicklaunch. It's fast as a browser should be, and I trust mozilla a lot more than google.

Yet, webkit/blink powers today a lot more than google chrome. I think headless mode & nodejs(v8) integration (e.g. nwjs/electron) is still a major missing feature to call it "a browser build for 2017"

Post reply on HN