Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try • Hacker News Board

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#71

Post by tomnipotent » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 2:17 AM UTC

make3 wrote: post #58

nimbius wrote: post #53

1. does it still require me to use pulseaudio to compile it. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1345661 2. does it still send DNS data to third parties for analytics. https://www.ghacks.net/2018/03/20/firefox-dns-over-https-and... 3. Am i still required to build Pocket when I build Firefox? are we still forbidden from removing pocket? 4. Is telemetry still shipped on by default? https://www.theregister.co.u…

They mean, as an alternative to Chrome, which is undoubtedly less open then Firefox. So, genuine question, what do you use, then? GNU IceCat?

> they mean, as an alternative to Chrome, which is undoubtedly less open then Firefox

Chromium is just as open as Firefox.

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#72

Post by yjftsjthsd-h » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 2:17 AM UTC

savoytruffle wrote: post #62

noobermin wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that is Firefox's fault vs. Safari being optimized for usage on MacOS machines obviously.

It's a native Mac application. Why shouldn't it be "optimized"?

Portability, I suppose

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#73

Post by furgooswft13 » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 2:17 AM UTC

pmoriarty wrote: post #2

Firefox permanently broke Pentadactyl. I'm really not going to be excited about Firefox until it has something of that caliber again.

Palemoon + Pentadactyl works perfectly.

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#74

Post by fencepost » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 2:17 AM UTC

balladeer wrote: post #42

noobermin wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different strokes. This certainly was not my experience.

What you didn't find to be true in your case - Firefox becoming slower over time (as OP says) or Firefox shipping with Pocket? Or both? Personally my reason was Pocket incident and since then I never went back to Firefox. Checked few months ago and they still had Pocket. Besides I am pretty happy on Safari except the lack of extensions which I am kind of used to by now.

They still have Pocket, but it's both less in the way and now actually owned by the Mozilla Foundation though that's not really made obvious.

The most obvious place you'll see it is on the default new tab/blank tab page where top trending stories being saved on Pocket are listed. It's a crowd-curated list of stories that people have found interesting enough to save to read or return to later, almost like a technology news site where people vote stories up...... But no commenting.

(https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/27/mozilla-pockets-pocket-in-...)

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#75

Post by Rebelgecko » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 2:18 AM UTC

I switched from Chrome to Firefox a few months ago and am mostly happy, with just a few annoyances:

There's a setting to prompt "are you sure" before closing Firefox, but it doesn't actually work. I really miss this feature (which works as expected in Chrome) since unless I'm turning my machine off a pretty much never close my browser intentionally

Shortcuts in text input also work differently than every other program on my computer. Command-backspace deletes the whole text field, not just the text before the cursor. ^t doesn't transpose, ^k behaves differently when text wraps, etc

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#76

Post by susam » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 2:20 AM UTC

Firefox was never away, at least for me. Therefore the expression "Firefox is back" sounds a little odd to me.

I have been using it since 2006 (Firefox 2.0). Back then, the presence of the Firebug extension for Firefox made me switch to Firefox as my primary browser.

Two years later, Chrome arrived but Firefox remained as my primary browser because I wanted to continue using the Vimperator extension for Firefox that allowed mouseless browsing with Vim-like key bindings and commands.

Firefox still remains as my primary browser with Chrome being an additional browser that I use sometimes. These days, I use the Vimium extension for both to use Vim-like key bindings. I occasionally use Safari and qutebrowser too.

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#77

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 2:21 AM UTC

jasonlotito wrote: post #67

tomnipotent wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sums it up nicely. I refuse to use Firefox until they remove Pocket, it's an absolute tragedy that it was ever included by default and forced onto a user base that never asked for it.

What's your problem with them including a technology they own in their browser?

[deleted]

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#78

Post by furgooswft13 » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 2:22 AM UTC

I find it kind of ironic that Mozilla rewrote Netscape Navigator from scratch with the lofty idea of creating an entire cross-platform application development platform, not just a browser. XUL, XULRunner etc. But it never caught on and they abandoned all that to focus on just the browser. Yet now Electron is everywhere...

Before its time and abandoned in the nick of it. And no one cares about native GUI's anymore apparently.

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#79

Post by com2kid » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 2:22 AM UTC

After running for a few hours, Firefox starts making my entire computer lag, eventually to the point of freezing up for seconds at a time multiple times per minute.

Over time Firefox's video playback gets more and more janky, until it drops more frames than it shows. In task manager I can see FF using 50% of my GPU to play a 720p stream from Twitch.

Closing FF completely and reopening it fixes the problem, until it happens again.

Chrome has none of these issues.

Love the privacy, not a big fan of the performance problems.

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#80

Post by ReverseCold » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 2:22 AM UTC

didgeoridoo wrote: post #3

Ironically, the thing that drove me to Firefox was the excellent Account Containers system that I found necessary to manage being logged into multiple Google Apps accounts simultaneously (I have five ). Each tab owns one account — that way, Google Drive files from my work don't randomly refuse to open because I'm also logged into my personal account. (Chrome has no solution for containing accounts across tabs, last I…

> Google Drive files from my work don't randomly refuse to open because I'm also logged into my personal account

Ugh, this is a common problem apparently. Why can't they just make it open files from my org domain using the only org account I'm logged into. >:(