The best thing about FF is the “about:config”. It really gives you the control like it should be. I don’t care if it’s slower than other browsers. Sadly, this is not possible yet on iOS. Like others, I use chrome if my locked down FF don’t work on a specific site.
Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try
261–270 of 753 posts
Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try
#262It was only a couple of months ago that I remembered I paid to have my name included in the Firefox advert, as printed in the New York Times: https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2004/12/mozilla-foundation-pl... That was back in 2003!
How much did you have to pay?
I just checked my email archive:
Donation ID: 1184
Donation Amount: $30.00
Donation Name: Steve Kemp
Placed On: 12:07 PM Tuesday October 19, 2004
Payment Type: (paid in full)Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try
#263I have been mainly using Firefox for the last 3 months on desktop, and for over a year on phone - and it's amazing. Highly recommend it. I even uninstalled Chrome now on my main machine- sometimes you run into what appears "Chrome optimized" sites, like back in IE6 days but its rare.
Chrome is still king when it comes to fast JS execution and modern technologies. I'm talking about real world use, I know some benchmarks put FF and Edge ahead. The recent post about real time pose estimation was a pretty example of that - pretty unusable in FF, runs great in Chrome (on Windows at least) https://storage.googleapis.com/tfjs-models/demos/posenet/cam... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17283525
I've been using FF again since 57 came out.
The only real world pages that sometimes crawl to a halt on FF are some Google pages like the old Gmail and Youtube.
Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
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/
Pretty consistent. I haven't timed it, but it certainly feels like more than 15 seconds for my 50-100 tabs. I'm not in quite as pure of a situation as that benchmark though-- I have plenty of other programs using memory and I'm waiting for the page to actually render. During some of my Firefox launches lately I also had a bunch of other applications launching at the same time since I was trying to debug a WebGL page that sporadically hangs/reboots my machine (in both Firefox and Chrome)
Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try
#265Firefox 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…
> The alternative is that they keep XUL
I do not believe that was the only alternative. I have spent a lot of time reading bug reports / feature requests relating to this functionality, and it certainly seems that much of it could be enabled, but apparently never will. The developers seem to think that giving extensions "too much power" would be dangerous, and thus it is best not to let anybody choose power over safety guarantees.
It seems a little too harsh to bring up Linus Torvald's "If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it" quote, but it tends to come to my mind whenever I read the abovementioned discussions.
Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tridactyl is quickly approaching parity with pentadactyl
Especially after installing the native message. Want a bind to open something in mpv/youtube-dl `";v": "hint -W exclaim_quiet mpv"` Want to open a text field in gvim? Hit `ctl+i` Want to remove the extra chrome: run `:guiset gui none` I stuck on the ESR of firefox for a long time because I wasn't willing to give up vimperator. Its not the same, but its pretty close. There are 2 main pain points, which I don't know it…
did not know about the video cool thanks
Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try
#267Firefox 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…
It’s for your average NY Times reader that doesn’t keep up with the day-to-day tech news world.
Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try
#268I 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…
I second this. I've been using FF with uBlock origin on the desktop and on Android for years now. I'm using fairly demanding and rapidly changing web apps for my customer's cloud stuff, and FF runs it flawlessly where it would have memory-leaks etc just three years ago.
The only complaint I've had was with dog-slow SVG animations a couple years ago (for a simplistic game programming project with the kids), but I believe that has since long improved as well.
I hope we can keep the level of relatively mature support for Web standards accross browsers as it is, rather than make the Web more complex all the time.
Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try
#269While Firefox is my primary browser there's still something off with their CSS transform / CSS transition performance. Take these hover effects, particularly demo #4, as an example: http://preview.codecanyon.net/item/card-css3-portfolio-cards...
While certainly excessive those demos run flawlessly and smoothly on Chrome, but are struggling on Firefox. An observation I made often when it comes to complex transform effects in Firefox. Does anyone else experience this?
Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
From /some/ security perspectives, not all. Enough to actually ditch firefox for all websites? The convenience of only using one browser seems to me to be pretty limited and is clearly a security concern in itself as opposed to using multiple. (How many is optimal? - Well how many are there? How easy is it for you to use each of them - make the call that suits you given your assessment of the concern.)
I don't see the security issue with using the one browser which is least likely to let a webpage root you.
"root you" what does that mean in this context? Does it mean the exploit can read what you're typing in that browser? It can see your browser history? It actually has root on your machine and can and will do anything and everything? Does it mean less than any of that? All of these exploits are possible and none desirable.
What is your chance of getting an exploit that gives some remote entity administrator permissions against your will from say, your bank? If you have a browser that use say for your bank logins and nothing else I'd estimate the chance of you falling victim to an exploit and suffering loss has decreased.
Given a website: which browser is most likely to lead to you being exposed to an exploit. Answer will depend on the website.
If you fall victim to a cross site scripting security issue, the sites you visit in another browser are not vulnerable.
The cookies you accumulate containing information that you have probably not confirmed is all harmless are not available to a different browser if your browser has a problem.
"Least likely" is not a constant and is quite challenging to estimate accuratel as it depends on your browsing pattern which is not constant and the vagaries of exploits in the wild which are un-knowably not-constant. If the exploited security flaw you encounter is in browser A, browser B is the safer option. Using one browser exposes all of your internet activities to the exploit. Using multiple browsers exposes a subset.
You might get stuck with a mono-culture if everything else is a disaster, but choosing a mono-culture of your own volition is not great practise if your second and later options aren't dead losses. I don't think firefox has ever been a dead loss, if you do and can justify it to yourself, great.
If it is necessary to be more paranoid https://www.qubes-os.org/ is probably a reasonable option. As it is our operating systems, be they proprietary or open source, suck and pointing it out is not terribly controversial. Qubes is a reasonable response - is it a reasonable cost for each of us in time and hassle? Individual decisions are required for each of us to say.
One browser? No reason to be stuck with it, you can do better for basically zero hassle.