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

#461

Post by isostatic » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 9:54 AM UTC

dorianm wrote: post #458

Firefox is dead, it's at 6% market share now: Chrome 57.36% 60.60% 47.77% Safari 13.96% 17.27% 22.16% UC 7.88% 1.69% 0.32% Firefox 5.45% 5.89% 6.21% https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

Firefox works fine for me, so I'm not sure what "dead" means.

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

#462

Post by zabil » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 9:56 AM UTC

I've talked about this before.

Firefox is my main browser but I find chrome's developer ecosystem better.

For e.g. the Chrome Dev tools protocol, puppeteer etc. I hope there's some kind of standardization (other that Webdriver) or easier automation and testing on Firefox.

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

#463

Post by isostatic » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 9:56 AM UTC

quickthrower2 wrote: post #454

severine wrote: post #428

I always refrain from talking in Firefox threads because my use case is so different from the HN crowd, but still... I have a netbook with 1Gb RAM. It was a handout from the owner, as it was painfully slow even after cleaning and tweaking the Win 7 install. Eventually, the owner got a new beefier laptop and I got the netbook. Long story short: I put Xubuntu on it, and it's still my daily driver and main computer 6 ye…

Do you do any coding on that machine? If so, very cool.

If it can run something as hungry as a webbrowser, of course you can do coding. The resources to run vim (or even emacs) are tiny in today's world. You probably wont be doing any 3D work or massive amounts of video manipulation, but even in the latter case it will be more than powerful enough.

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

#464

Post by AsyncAwait » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 10:03 AM UTC

bambataa wrote: post #451

zamalek wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Firefox is my "daily driver" I only have FF Developer Edition (IE and Edge, blegh) installed on my host. The only time I open Chrome or otherwise is inside a VM. If a website doesn't work I just close the tab. That is assuming that ever happens; off the top of my head this hasn't happened since the Quantum beta launched.

Even with Quantum I still find Firefox is almost unusably slow on some pages. It also causes very spikey resource usage. I’d like to use it exclusively but sometimes when I want to cool down my laptop I just switch to Chrome. This is on a Retina MacBook.

This is macOS-specific, I had noticed it there too, but not on Linux.

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

#465

Post by StavrosK » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 10:14 AM UTC

bad_user wrote: post #374

Just dropping a note in support of Firefox ... It's a great browser and I've came back to it even before the changes in Quantum, because the UI is better and it's also a browser I can trust to protect my interests. Just one thing to consider ... recently in Chrome 66 they introduced the means for cosmetic ads blocking via stylesheets that can no longer be overridden, as Google finally succumbed to demands for it. Fir…

This is a great point. It's evident in Chrome's course so far that the browser has put Google's interests first, whereas Firefox puts the users' interests first. That's why I stuck with FF when it was slow, and I'm very glad that's all fixed now.

Plus, FF for Android is amazing. I can run Privacy Badger and uBlock Origin on my mobile browser!

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

#466

Post by andyjohnson0 » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 10:15 AM UTC

Took this as a hint to move my personal browsing from Chrome over to Firefox. Fairly quick process to move bookmarks etc over, and so far its looking pretty good. Real test will be how much friction I get with using FF on my android phone. Anyone here gone down this route recently?

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

#467

Post by radmuzom » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 10:16 AM UTC

Most of the comments here are about using or not using Firefox, depending on it's features as compared to primarily Chrome. However, for me, it is not about being better or having more features at all - it is because I like Firefox and want to support Mozilla and believe that Google should not control the web. It is somewhat similar to the free software vs. open source debate - one should use free software not because it is better, but because it is the right thing to do (I understand that not many people agree with this philosophy, which is fine).

Having said that, all sites which I regularly use work perfectly for me in Firefox with acceptable performance. So I never found a reason to switch at all. Rarely, I come across a website which is "best viewed with Chrome"; my default action is to close that site immediately.

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

#468

Post by fareesh » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 10:16 AM UTC

I would use Firefox if their track record for adding feature support was as good as Google. Also I vastly prefer the webkit inspector to the Firefox one, which feels very clunky and slow.

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

#469

Post by growlist » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 10:17 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…

Firefox since at least 2004!

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

#470

Post by colshrapnel » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 10:18 AM UTC

I always wanted to have an incognito browser as default option on my mobile. Recently I chanced to discover Firefox Focus on Google Play and that's exactly what I wanted. Now it's the default option to open random links, whereas Chrome and vanilla Firefox are used for the several trusted cities with permanent authorization.