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

#171

Post by dagenix » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 3:28 AM UTC

hirundo wrote: post #160

dagenix wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He wasn't outed - his donation was public. Its not like some secret conversation was recorded and then reported out of context. He didn't accidentally donate $1,000 to oppose same sex marriage. Once called out on it, he didn't apologize or drop his support of Prop 8. He made a decision and he stuck with it. And Mozilla employees also made a decision. His decision was to oppose their right to be married. Their decisio…

> his donation was public. I think that is wrong too. Anonymous speech is important, and therefore so is anonymous support for speech. That was a lot more clear to LGBT folks before their opinions gained cultural ascendancy, when they benefited from anonymity when expressing their previously heterodox opinions. It helped them win. And there is much more winning to be done for other good causes that are still taboo.

Anonymous speech is super important. Even terrible anonymous speech. But this wasn't anonymous speech. Maybe it was speech he hoped no one would find. But, he made the conscious decision to speak in a public forum by donating money to a cause he supported. Then, when called out on it, he made the conscious decision to publicly re-affirm his support for that opinion.

I won't argue about donation disclosure policies. Maybe donations should be public, maybe they shouldn't - I dunno. But, even if they should be private, they weren't and I don't believe he should get a pass because in an alternate world maybe no one would have known what he did.

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

#172

Post by joeblau » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 3:30 AM UTC

I just ran both of the speed test benchmarks [1][2] mentioned in the article, plus two other tests [3][4].

                    |     Firefox    |     Safari      |    Chrome 
    ----------------|----------------|-----------------|-----------------
    Speedometer 2.0 | 83.0 ±0.91     | 92.1 ±2.8       | 75.7 ±3.4
    JetStream       | 219.40 ±8.5563 | 294.79 ±11.138  | 201.81 ±15.171
    Motion Mark     | 203.71 ±5.41%  | 525.77 ±6.56%   | 388.85 ±4.79
    ARES-6          | 54.06 ±0.95ms  | 16.85 ±1.19ms   | 20.26 ±0.56ms

It looks like Firefox beats Chome in some perfomrance tests but Safari is still faster than Chrome and a lot faster than Firefox. At this point, I'm not sure any of Firefox's features are compelling enough to get me to switch back. I started using Firefox at 0.4 back when I was in college then I switched to Chrome when Firefox got slow, but I think the way I use the web now has changed. I really only use a few sites and I just want better security/ad-block/tracking block tools (which Apple is committing to) and speed.

edit: If someone uses Windows, I would be curious to see how Edge compares to Firefox and Chrome.

[1] - https://browserbench.org/Speedometer2.0/

[2] - https://browserbench.org/JetStream/

[3] - https://browserbench.org/MotionMark/

[4] - https://browserbench.org/ARES-6/

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

#173

Post by ufo » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 3:32 AM UTC

tomnipotent wrote: post #71

make3 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Chromium still comes with lots of googly bits

https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium

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

#174

Post by gnicholas » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 3:33 AM UTC

justsee wrote: post #166

theseatoms wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time I tried Brave, I was dissuaded from adopting it due to poor support for extensions. Hopefully that part's improving.

Yes they're switching to a full Chromium base so all Chrome extensions will be compatible. ETA for releasable build is Sept 7 according to: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/milestone/3

That's great! Will Chrome extension devs need to do anything special to enable compatibility?

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

#175

Post by tymekpavel » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 3:34 AM UTC

joeblau wrote: post #172

I just ran both of the speed test benchmarks [1][2] mentioned in the article, plus two other tests [3][4]. | Firefox | Safari | Chrome ----------------|----------------|-----------------|----------------- Speedometer 2.0 | 83.0 ±0.91 | 92.1 ±2.8 | 75.7 ±3.4 JetStream | 219.40 ±8.5563 | 294.79 ±11.138 | 201.81 ±15.171 Motion Mark | 203.71 ±5.41% | 525.77 ±6.56% | 388.85 ±4.79 ARES-6 | 54.06 ±0.95ms | 16.85 ±1.19ms | 2…

Assuming these are all in ms, how do you conclude that Safari is faster than Chrome or Firefox? It's slower in almost every test.

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

#176

Post by voltagex_ » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 3:35 AM UTC

bufferoverflow wrote: post #101

f311a wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do. For me, it looks like Firefox is struggling with rendering when it comes to any kind of animation/effects, e.g videos, images, as well as js powered animations using SVG/canvas. Even simple things make my laptop boil. Maybe I'm wrong about CPU and it's all about integrated Intel GPU.

I'm having similar issues on a fairly modern laptop with i7-7700hq and GTX1050. After a few minutes of watching YouTube, it gets all jerky and not smooth. I'm guessing something is throttling, though video playback isn't taking a high percentage of either the CPU or the GPU. I tried forcing the builtin Intel GPU on firefox.exe, that didn't change anything.

See if the video codec is shown in "Stats for Nerds". Perhaps hardware decoding for either webm or h264 isn't enabled.

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

#177

Post by callahad » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 3:36 AM UTC

Rebelgecko wrote: post #165

nayuki wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "are you sure" before closing Firefox I believe this feature gets disabled if you enable the feature that automatically restores your previous session when Firefox is opened.

Yeah, there's some arguments about that on their bug tracker page and it looks like someone tried to change that code but it never went anywhere. If you horde tabs like I do it can still waste a lot of time to restart the browser and wait for the session to be restored.

Huh. Is this consistent for you? Since Firefox 55, we should be able to restore 1500+ tabs in under 15 seconds: https://metafluff.com/2017/07/21/i-am-a-tab-hoarder/

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

#178

Post by Manishearth » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 3:36 AM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #12

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…

Not sure I understand. I routinely have a personal Google Drive tab and a work tab in Chrome. Ditto with email.

That's probably because your work account is a Google Apps account, which works much better especially for Drive (the problem is that you can't have more than one non-Apps account using drive at once in the same session. I have no idea why, but it seems to be deliberate). I'm unsure if the brokenness is fixed with Apps accounts on other Google services that are bad at handling multiple accounts.

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

#179

Post by jack9 » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 3:36 AM UTC

alf-pogz wrote: post #97

Mozilla as an organization makes me a bit uncomfortable. I still haven't forgotten the entire Brendan Eich fiasco. Who is to say that extremely politically motivated folks at Mozilla may consider it their duty to expose user(s) in a similar way? How can they purport to be a champion of user privacy after what they did to Brendan Eich?

> Mozilla as an organization makes me a bit uncomfortable

I thought you were going to mention the betrayal that caused a lot of ppl to switch (other than the slowness, inferior default tooling, etc). The deal with yahoo. Same thing that soured me on Java. If you're just going to sell out to maintain a company, because you can't support what you built, maybe you overbuilt. Or maybe it's just greed. Either way, never going back.

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

#180

Post by harry8 » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 3:37 AM UTC

Why doesn't everyone use multiple browsers all the time? I've got chrome, chromium, firefox, opera and use them all in amounts that vary with mood. That mood is probably affected by the differing ways those browsers develop. I don't recall firefox ever being a bad browser or so dramatically worse than others that I would consider stopping using it. I can see the reservations people have with chrome, mostly it's not that it performs badly but that maybe it does things you don't want behind your back. I'm not even 100% sure what chrome does behind our backs - is it nothing interesting? Is it a disgrace? Easy for me to switch if it turns out to be the latter and I'm sure it will become more clear.

I think it would be interesting if browsers did not allow a page to make requests from multiple domains. nyt.com has to serve the ads and the images or forget it. Everyone having to take full responsibility for what they serve seems to me that it would result in an all-around more pleasant web.