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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

#191

Post by drampelt »

com2kid wrote: post #79

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 h…

I've been having the exact same problems. Been trying to use Firefox primarily for the past few months but it gets frustrating having to restart it all the time.

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

#192

Post by furgooswft13 »

jploh wrote: post #108
furgooswft13 wrote: post #78

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 app…

I remember XUL. Not a fan but it's sad it didn't take off. We need an Electron alternative.

The idea was essentially the same, except instead of HTML + JS it was XUL + JS. And XUL provided a far richer set of built in controls, and was far more powerful and flexible than HTML, especially at the time it was conceived and still arguably today. Critically it tried to render all the standard GUI elements we were accustomed to in the 90s and early 00s using the native APIs of whatever OS it was running on.

Webdevs have tried for 20 years to recreate these interfaces from scratch in HTML with still highly questionable results, and of course no real integration, visual or otherwise, with the host OS.

For me, the biggest impediment for writing XUL, when I was into FF extension development, was the extremely lackluster documentation. Despite Mozilla's ambitions they never seemed to promote the app development part of their platform much. It also suffered from much the same problems as Electron does today with performance and bloated memory usage compared to native apps. Though I imagine if they stuck with it, with the much improved JS and rendering engines (and multicore CPUs and 16gb standard RAM) in-use today, it would have become just as good enough as Electron is considered.

Fact is, HTML/CSS/JS benefits hugely from it's own inertia, and the near instant answers to most any question on Google/Stackoverflow. Hard to compete when you are basically an internal Mozilla project.

I'm sure Mozilla, or someone, could package the current Firefox stack in a similar way to Electron as an alternative, but it would be largely the same thing and have similar issues compared to native. So why bother I guess.

How's wxWidgets doing? Does anyone still use that?

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

#193

Post by wutbrodo »

tymekpavel wrote: post #175
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.

I know that at least for the Jetstream benchmark, higher scores are better (ie they're not just time measurements). If you make an assumption that makes the parent comment contradict itself, it seems like it would make sense to investigate your assumption instead of thinking the parent comment is contradictory.

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

#194

Post by dagenix »

manfredo wrote: post #159
dagenix wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mere fact that a lot of people believe something, doesn't make it right or just. Justice is protecting the weak and the powerless from the powerful, not voting on who has human rights and who doesn't from week to week. Also, Prop 8 was in 2008. He was appointed to the CEO position in 2014 - 6 years later. He had every opportunity to apologize. Everyone makes mistakes, even big ones. But, he refused to apologize.…

And who gets to say what protections people should and should not receive? If a company genuinely believes that pro-LGBT views are harmful, then in your framework they're equally justified to fire employees that donated in opposition to Proposition 8. I think a lot of people forget that there's a world beyond liberal urban areas. Allowing it to become socially acceptable for companies to fire employees for their poli…

You can't just throw your hands up in the air and say that because there is no absolute scale with which to measure human rights, everything goes. And I think its also not good policy to say that because an organization might* fire a pro-LGTB employee for their views, that everyone should be let to act however they want without consequences. In your view, what publicly expressed opinions would disqualify someone to be a CEO? Anything?

Views on gay marriage shifted rapidly between 2008 and 2014. I think its wrong to assume that just because 52% of people voted to support Prop 8 in 2008 that 6 years later opinions hadn't changed. And lets not forget that Prop 8 was ruled unconstitutional in 2010 - 4 years before he was made CEO and continued to publicly support Prop 8.

* - By "might", I mean "has happened a lot for a long time". LGTB people have faced discrimination for a long time for wanting to live their life in a way that harms literally no one. Anti-LGBT people facing consequences for their actions to discriminate against others in a way that benefits literally no one is a relatively recent occurrence.

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

#195

Post by crispinb »

itsjloh wrote: post #182
tyteen4a03 wrote: post #15

When it stops being a battery hog on Macs, sure. On Android the performance is comparable to Chrome, but I can never get used to some of their UXes (pressing the X button doesn't clear the address bar, instead closes it). Also no seamless page opening with Google search app (although I suspect they can't do much about this)

I keep trying to switch back to it on my Mac Pro (I've tried three times in the last 12 months) but after a week or two I always end up switching back to Chrome because the CPU/battery impact it has. I can have the same amount of tabs/workload in Chrome and my laptop copes fine with good performance. If I do the same in FF (with likely less plugins installed) it often spikes to 100% CPU usage, chews through my batter…

Exact same deal here. That plus the lack of keyboard shortcuts for many extensions keeps pushing me back to Chrome. But I love the account containers enough that I keep trying again. I imagine it will get there eventually.

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

#197

Post by AlexCoventry »

harry8 wrote: post #180

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 t…

A few years ago, at least, chrome had a significantly better design, from a security perspective. Hopefully FF has caught up, but I haven't looked into it.

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

#198

Post by yourapostasy »

com2kid wrote: post #79

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 h…

See what happens when you switch to Nightly Firefox.

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

#199

Post by drewmol »

mikedilger wrote: post #155
fencepost wrote: post #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…

Is there a reason to use both uBlock Origin and uMatrix? I thought uMatrix was a more explicit version of the same functionality as uBlock Origin (and written by the same guy).

I use them together, uMatrix as a fine grained control tool where I can setup a saved profile and click-allow until functionality & appearance are acceptable to me, and for 'one-off' or 'fuck-it no time' situations I just toggle uMatrix off. It is very rare I have to turn off uBlock Origin as well (the nuclear option). This leaves me four-five quick clicks away from the median or average user experience.

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

#200

Post by ComodoHacker »

atombender wrote: post #93
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's account management is infuriating! First, it almost never remembers what account you used with what service. If I do some Google Cloud stuff under my work account, I don't want Google Maps using my work account, or vice versa. The list of accounts in the upper right corner, and what's signed in/out, seems completely random and broken. The second problem is that Google's various apps are wildly inconsistent i…

This kind of defeats the purpose of multiple accounts.

Remember, we started to have them to separate our work/home/personal lives, to build separate digital profiles that companies (like Google) store on their servers. Now you beg Google to recognize and unify them (which I guess they have almost done already by themselves).

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