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

#301

Post by maxyme » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 6:19 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…

FYI, firefox is working on switching to rendering the entire page in opengl which should bring it's motion mark score up substantially. Details on that (and how to enable it in nightly at the bottom of each post) at https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com

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

#302

Post by teekert » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 6:20 AM UTC

thirdsun wrote: post #269

While 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 eff…

Nothing looks strange to me with Demo nr. 4? (FF 60.0.2)

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

#303

Post by lloda » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 6:21 AM UTC

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…

> you do lose the greying-out of downvoted comments

sounds like a win, honestly.

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

#304

Post by nikisweeting » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 6:21 AM UTC

I love Firefox with all my heart, but it's still slower than Chrome for me on an Intel Iris i7 2014 MacBook Pro. They seem comparable with <10 tabs open, but Chrome pulls ahead once I have 50-100 suspended tabs open. I trust Firefox will keep improving though, so I try to use it regularly despite it not being my primary browser.

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

#305

Post by woolvalley » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 6:22 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…

Yeah I agree with your assessment ancedotally. Firefox a few months ago had horrible performance in google maps and strangely facebook. I checked again today, it's improved a lot, but it is still noticeably slower for those two cornerstone websites. It was enough to make me stop using firefox again

I'm glad that the perf issues have been improved. They just need to get a little bit better and most objections for firefox would go away. Maybe as a workaround someone could make an extension that opens specific urls in chrome/safari when you open them. Only use chrome for maps and facebook for example :p

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

#306

Post by beagle3 » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 6:23 AM UTC

nikbackm wrote: post #299

beagle3 wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Other than the issue of cosmetic filters (which I don't personally use), the main difference is that for uBlock you can subscribe to really good lists, collected and curated by a lot of people - so it is "defauly allow, except for these...", whereas uMatrix is "default deny, except for what you explicitly allowed". I run both, occasionally have to allow something in uMatrix, never have to turn uBlock off.

You can configure uBlock to use default deny as well by changing the mode [1]. It's not as fine-grained as uMatrix but works similarly. [1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode

Upvoted for the info, but I'll restate why I use both:

uBlock is my blacklist. uMatix is my whitelist. For various reasons, I occasionally need to skip the whitelist, but I never had a reason to turn off the blacklist in a few years of using uBlock.

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

#307

Post by azinman2 » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 6:23 AM UTC

I spent the last 6 months or so in Firefox after having been out of it for years. It generally has caught up, and was generally pleasurable to use. I’m in the Apple ecosystem, so I wish there was a way to better sync with it like using the system keychain and Safari bookmarks, but it was otherwise holding up nicely. I loved the new containers feature, feeling like I had a fundamentally new way to approach web security.

That was until last week. My Mac lost power due to some construction, and when I turned it back on Firefox had completely erased its previous profile. All my data, all my containers, all my cookies and bookmarks were gone. No evidence on disk for my old profile, despite a faq suggesting it’d be there. Firefox sync somehow was preserved in this blank profile, yet it synced barely anything (a few extensions).

Sorry Firefox, you lost my trust. I’m now back to Safari.

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

#308

Post by Sylos » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 6:24 AM UTC

esturk wrote: post #102

Until Firefox address privacy concerns, I'm not going back. Try opening private tabs and going some where. Now close it and reopen it with Ctrl+Shift+T. All the browsing history is still there. Safaria dna Chrome doesn't do this.

It goes away when you close the Private Browsing window. I cannot feasibly imagine a situation where you need your browsing history to be purged as you close individual tabs. Like, what are you gonna do? Close the tab to have its browsing history purged, when you take a pee break from searching wedding rings, but leave the Private Browsing window open? Just close the window entirely.

It's also very much expected behaviour for many users, to be able to reopen tabs and I'd consider it a bug, if I weren't able to.

What's more, Chrome has you covered for actual privacy concerns.

When you use Chrome Sync, Google gets your browsing history and bookmarks in readable form (and they declare that they use these in their privacy policy). Which means US intelligence agencies, as well as befriended intelligence agencies from other countries, also have access to your data.

When auto-filling data, Chrome will fill out all input fields on a page, even ones that you cannot see. So, dodgy webpages may very well have your address, phone number etc..

Chrome's extension store also has a massive malware problem. Mozilla has human reviewers to prevent this and also requires extension to get user consent for internet connections that are not necessary for the functioning of the extension (telemetry, ads).

To sort of mitigate this problem, Chrome doesn't allow extensions to run in Incognito Mode, which however also locks out privacy enhancing extension. Firefox also blocks tracking scripts and similar in Private Browsing mode by default.

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

#309

Post by cpeterso » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 6:25 AM UTC

Rebelgecko wrote: post #75

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 progra…

There are some "are you sure you want to quit" Firefox extensions that meet your needs.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-ctrl-...

Command-delete works as expected for me (in this HN comment box), deleting only the text on the current line before the cursor.

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

#310

Post by cpeterso » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 6:27 AM UTC

rpenm wrote: post #131

esturk wrote: post #102

Until Firefox address privacy concerns, I'm not going back. Try opening private tabs and going some where. Now close it and reopen it with Ctrl+Shift+T. All the browsing history is still there. Safaria dna Chrome doesn't do this.

You can reopen tabs in a private window, but the session appears to be lost when you close the window.

That's correct. And all private tabs and windows share the same private session, which is discarded when the last private tab is closed.