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

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

#81

I thought this was Hacker News, not Hacker Sponsored Content?

I just reviewed the article for their sponsorship disclosure, and it doesn’t have one so this isn’t sponsored.

This article is like every other product release article, plus the recent revival effort from Mozilla is news worthy.

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

#82

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

With all due respect, less than 0.1% of browser users likely feel that way. Don't mean to discredit or invalidate your feelings, I just feel the need to disclaim that it's impossible to meet people's need with that granularity. The alternative is that they keep XUL, make 0.1% of the install base happy, and ditch the performance increases that Quantum/WebExtension have given us... at which point there wouldn't be a NY…

Less than 0.1% of users used any one now-broken extension, or all XUL extensions collectively were <0.1% of the user base?

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

#83
>The browser, made by the nonprofit Mozilla, emerged in the early 2000s as a faster, better designed vessel to surf the web. But it became irrelevant after Google in 2008 released Chrome, a faster, more secure and versatile browser.

Irrelevant? More versatile (even though it didn't even have extensions until v5)? Why?

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

#84
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What browser do you recommend?

OP would probably recommend you to write your own browser.

That would be great. However, the webs standards are bloated as hell. I know you were probably being factitious. However, I think it's a big problem that web standards have gotten so complicated.

The browser would also have to backward compatible, and handle mal-formatted and bloated code written by god who knows. There are features that are the antithesis of privacy and disabling some of the features breaks quite a few sites. Sadly, the web is no longer linked documents, but has full blown apps. It's honestly freaking insane.

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

#85
I haven't seen anyone mention this, but Firefox is my "daily driver" for almost all browsing, and is also locked down with uMatrix, uBlock Origin, DecentralEyes and Ghostery (though I could probably drop Ghostery without missing it). Chrome has uBlock Origin and a few other things but interferes with pages less. I keep a set of pages for some specific web apps (e.g. GMail, Google Calendar, task management, etc.) open in Chrome, but otherwise only use it when something just won't work in my locked-down Firefox.

I also can't recommend highly enough Firefox on Android, particularly with uBlock Origin and the "Dark Background and Light Text" addon (currently at version 0.6.8 for ease of finding). For HN you'll want to use the "Simple CSS" dark setting instead of the default - that keeps the arrows, but you do lose the greying-out of downvoted comments.

Edit: I also think it's interesting how much Chrome now minimizes and almost hides the Chrome App Store to add new extensions. It's almost as if it's not making Google any money and people keep installing adblockers through it.

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

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'd hardly call Pocket being on new pages even if you disable it (you cannot remove it) being less in the way.

Mozilla rewarding everyone involved in the Pocket debacle by buying the company was weird.

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

#89
post #11
post #6

I've switched to Firefox on most of my devices. And there is only one thing which I don't like — high CPU usage compared to chrome. It makes my old MacBook air very noisy because of the fan spinning. When I use chrome it's completely silent.

Especially on YouTube where I believe there’s an issue with Firefox not using the most efficient encoding on the videos.

Do you have details? I noticed that Youtube on Firefox makes the fan spin up on my 2013 rMBP a lot. I currently use Firefox but as a heavy Youtube watcher this is a pretty big negative.

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

#90

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?

It was acquired so that Mozilla could create a new revenue stream with recommended & sponsored content. To rephrase, they forced a feature on me so that they could sell ads.
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