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

#391

Post by nathan_f77 » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 8:15 AM UTC

I switched to Firefox 5 months ago, and the experience hasn't been great. I expecting good things after reading about Firefox Quantum, but it's noticeably slower than Chrome. There's often a lag while scrolling, and it just doesn't feel as smooth.

It also doesn't support Chromecast, so I have to switch to Chrome whenever I want to play a YouTube video on the TV. I've seen quite a few websites with JS or CSS bugs on Firefox, and some Chrome extensions don't have Firefox versions (e.g. Streak CRM.) I also have to switch to Chrome whenever I use "Google Meet" for a call. (That's not Firefox's fault, but it's an issue you experience when you use Firefox.)

The only reason I switched to Firefox is so that I could remove the little blue dot on pinned tabs [1]. I would get a new email, and the Gmail favicon would update with a (1). I'd read the email on my phone, and the icon would go back to (0). But there would be a little blue dot telling me about a change on the page, so I'd still have to click the tab to remove the dot. Same issue for Drift chat, Trello, etc. After months and months of clicking the tab just to remove that little blue dot, I finally cracked and switched to Firefox. Firefox also has that little blue dot, but at least you can disable it by hacking some CSS [2]. If Chrome gave me the option to disable that blue dot, I'd switch back immediately.

[1] https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/sxDEUm...

[2] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1181537

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

#392

Post by Accacin » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 8:16 AM UTC

It's great Firefox 'is back' but I never really left, and when I did try to use Chrome I just felt a bit 'dirty'.

For me, whether FF is faster or slower than Chrome is largely irrelevent (unless ofc it's extreme). What matters to me is that it feels like Mozilla are fighting for me, and Chrome are fighting for the advertising revenue.

Mozilla, for all their mistakes, do care about their users and privacy (but make some stupid mistakes).

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

#393

Post by tyfon » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 8:16 AM UTC

susam wrote: post #76

Firefox 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…

Yes to me too.

I can also use it on android with ublock etc. Chrome hasn't even been installed in my main computer in maybe a year, firefox works for everything I need, including google apps for business mail and youtube.

My biggest reason for using it is the fact that it is open source, the other is that ad-block software actually block calls to adds not just the display of them as in chrome.

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

#394

Post by bovine3dom » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 8:17 AM UTC

zmix wrote: post #218

This journalist does not seem to know about the tech world he reports about. Not a single word has been shed about all those high quality addons, that Firefox users once had, and how huge the quality gap is between Chromium based add-ons and what was available for Firefox. In my opinion, this is so extreme, that I switched over to Vivaldi browser, now that XUL is gone.

What add-ons are available for Chrome-likes that you miss in Firefox?

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

#395

Post by tyfon » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 8:19 AM UTC

isolli wrote: post #344

I have always used Firefox, ever since they implemented tabbed browsing (an incredible improvement, for those who don't remember the time before that). However, in recent times I have had to switch more and more apps to Chrome because the UI breaks in Firefox: intercom.io, trello.com, notion.so. Probably no fault of Firefox, but if a UI is broken there is no choice but to migrate.

I've notice that some of the new fancy webapps that boosted of being write once run everywhere have issues in firefox.

Most notably is asana (it sometimes makes firefox use 100% cpu) and slack. Unfortunately we have slack at work but we're working to replace it as it has become increasingly bloated, user-unfriendly and buggy.

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

#396

Post by isolli » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 8:19 AM UTC

ChrisSD wrote: post #382

isolli wrote: post #344

I have always used Firefox, ever since they implemented tabbed browsing (an incredible improvement, for those who don't remember the time before that). However, in recent times I have had to switch more and more apps to Chrome because the UI breaks in Firefox: intercom.io, trello.com, notion.so. Probably no fault of Firefox, but if a UI is broken there is no choice but to migrate.

I use trello in Firefox and haven't noticed anything that's broken. What specifically is broken for you?

Hm you're right. At some point I could no longer move lists around, but it's back now. It was the third UI to break after Intercom (customer replies not shown unless I reloaded) and Notion (down arrow does not scroll the page down), so I tried Chrome and it fixed the problem. Maybe I should have tried restarting Firefox...

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

#397

Post by teel » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 8:21 AM UTC

chrisper wrote: post #346

teel wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vivaldi does have a sync feature! But I don't know if you're aware of that already, and FF/Chrome sync have something special in their Sync that Vivaldi doesn't.

Was it added recently?

It's been there at least 6 months already. I think I started using it around the time it was added. According to my password safe, I put the sync name/password in there on 1st of December last year.

EDIT: I want to add that I run the Snapshot versions of Vivaldi (currently 1.16.1211.3), and it could be that the Sync was introduced only in a Snapshot in December. So I have no idea if the sync can be found in the Stable releases as well. Anyways, it's under Tools/Settings/Sync tab if it's there, otherwise it isn't :)

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

#398

Post by fbn79 » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 8:22 AM UTC

Theodores wrote: post #336

fbn79 wrote: post #332

I'm missing something or Firefox inspector console (the base of web development) is still far from reaching Chrome levels?. For example, if I inspect an element and change window size I don't see applied media query updated in the element tab. Chrome instead let me see in real-time what media query rules are applied. This is really a strong limitation in web development.

Depends on what matters, if you are using CSS grid then Firefox is the goto browser. If you are using CSS grid then media queries are not where it is at, the design is content driven and not screen size driven.

No. I'm not using CSS Grid

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

#399

Post by isolli » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 8:22 AM UTC

peteretep wrote: post #385

isolli wrote: post #344

I have always used Firefox, ever since they implemented tabbed browsing (an incredible improvement, for those who don't remember the time before that). However, in recent times I have had to switch more and more apps to Chrome because the UI breaks in Firefox: intercom.io, trello.com, notion.so. Probably no fault of Firefox, but if a UI is broken there is no choice but to migrate.

> because the UI breaks in Firefox: intercom.io, trello.com, notion.so This sounds like something you've done; do you have some weird extensions installed?

No. It's a work computer (Ubuntu 16.04) so I just use Firefox as is. I checked and the Trello bug was gone, but the Notion bug is still there: for content that exceeds the screen, the down arrow will not let you go down further than the visible content.

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

#400

Post by isolli » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 8:24 AM UTC

ar0 wrote: post #360

isolli wrote: post #344

I have always used Firefox, ever since they implemented tabbed browsing (an incredible improvement, for those who don't remember the time before that). However, in recent times I have had to switch more and more apps to Chrome because the UI breaks in Firefox: intercom.io, trello.com, notion.so. Probably no fault of Firefox, but if a UI is broken there is no choice but to migrate.

Are you sure this isn't some Firefox add-on that you are using that is causing this? (E.g. uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger or activating Firefox's built-in anti-tracking protection or maybe just blocking third-party cookies; which could be solved by whitelisting the problematic webpages.) I am using Firefox exclusively and I rarely find sites that don't work with Firefox after I disable blocking extensions.

Thanks for the suggestion, but I don't have any blocking extensions installed. If you use Notion you can check for yourself: there is no way to scroll down a page with the down arrow if the content exceeds the screen.