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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

#481

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 becaus…

yeah, performance-wise I can't complain :) I'm a compulsive tab hoarder with about 400 open (admittedly, have to enable the "don't load until focused"-setting) on a 5 yo laptop with lots of other stuff running. No problem at all.

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

#482

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 becaus…

Firefox broke off backwards compatibility with massive amount of extensions - without them stock FF is quite shite and unusable. Not only that, some of the features of the old extensions are impossible to implement in the new extension engine.

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

#483

One Firefox addon single-handedly changed my browsing experience - Tree Style Tabs. With a little bit of styling & userChrome modification, you get a browsing experience that (a) handles huge numbers of tabs in a sane fashion, (b) takes up only a bit of space on the side, freeing up valuable vertical room & making all your tab names nice and readable, and (c) makes organizing and pruning tabs a snap. It's heavily cus…

Can you post your styling and userChrome setup? Sounds stupid but i like the concept of TreeStyleTabs but i always disabled it after some time. Firefox finally looks slick again on MacOS. And i want something nice to look at when i work 8+ hours with it. And Tree Style Tabs always turned me off somehow.

I use the "Sidebar" style on my Mac, with the TST add-on from piro_or. I previously used a different tree style tab addon but it was not updated for WebExtensions.

TST addon preference style:

    /* Compact tab layout */
    :root { --tab-height: 20px !important; }
    .tab { height: 20px !important; }
    /* Shrink space between pinned tabs and tab bar, only when pins are present */
    #tabbar[style*="margin"] { margin-top: 20px !important; }
userChrome.css:

    /* Hide tab bar in FF Quantum */
    @-moz-document url("chrome://browser/content/browser.xul") {
      #TabsToolbar {
        visibility: collapse !important;
        margin-bottom: 21px !important;
      }

      #sidebar-box[sidebarcommand="treestyletab_piro_sakura_ne_jp-sidebar-action"] #sidebar-header {
        visibility: collapse !important;
      }
    }
Then I needed to turn on the title bar (right click toolbar -> customize -> check title bar at the bottom), and select Density -> Compact. The whole thing ends up looking like this: https://imgur.com/a/c4j9QxR

With some very small tweaks you could change it to look more like a Mac toolbar, I guess, but as it stands it's pretty svelte.

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

#484
post #478

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 becaus…

> website which is "best viewed with Chrome" I'm stunned. Is this still a thing? Last time I remember seeing websites recommending a browser, it was late 90s with "get Netscape" gifs.

Not only is it still a thing, Google itself is a major culprit of it. Seems like every new experiment they release is “best viewed” in — or worse, “requires” — Google Chrome.

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

#485
I've been using it for a few months now as my daily borwser on my personal Win10 machine and its been great.

I cant say I noticed any compelling reason to move off of Chrome, but I thought I'd at least try out modern Firefox to see what I am missing.

It feels a bit faster than Chrome for day-to-day browsing in totally non-scientific testing. Where it really shines though is in WebGL where it is HUGELY faster than Chrome for me. My laptop has a fairly high-end discrete GPU and Chrome feels like it is doing software rendering, but Firefox feels silky smooth so I guess Firefox is actually using the GPU and Chrome is not.

I've just installed it on my work 2016 MBP. Keyboard still sucks, but I cant blame Firefox for that. However, on OSX, Firefox feels sluggish compared to Chrome.

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

#486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was thinking more of compilation times, but of course if you write JS for example in VIM then this is not an issue (given that it can run a browser).

Yeah, when I've tried, those kind of things seemed like could get really annoying, but for those I have a Proxmox install in another handout (4Gb RAM laptop with broken screen) :)

The netbook runs Sublime Text nicely.

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

#487
post #370
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…

The same for me, but with the recent Firefox they broke the old addons and the current ones cannot do the same. I hope they fix that regression.

Breaking "old" add-ons with no working replacement and no way to implement quite a few of them killed FF for me. What those idiots at Mozilla don't get is that without the add-ons their stock browser is no better than any other.

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

#488

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 becaus…

yeah, performance-wise I can't complain :) I'm a compulsive tab hoarder with about 400 open (admittedly, have to enable the "don't load until focused"-setting) on a 5 yo laptop with lots of other stuff running. No problem at all.

(withdrawn)

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

#489
post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a very similar background with Firefox / Firebug and Vimperator, but there was a period where - despite all JS benchmarks seemingly proving otherwise - Chrome's real / perceived performance completely blew FF out of the water. Specifically things like startup time, opening a new window or tearing a tab off one, time to first content displayed when clicking a link, etc. As a result from about 2011 to 2017, I ke…

Do you mean "Quantum hit the mainstream"? Most of Servo itself it still a research project at this stage.

Yepp, you're right.

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

#490
post #478

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 becaus…

> website which is "best viewed with Chrome" I'm stunned. Is this still a thing? Last time I remember seeing websites recommending a browser, it was late 90s with "get Netscape" gifs.

Well, "best viewed in IE" was the thing till 2010 or so. The Chrome version I have never seen except on sites experimenting with advanced features unavailable elsewhere.
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