Live data from Hacker News

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

mobile.nytimes.com

491–500 of 753 posts

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

#491

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.

The new extension engine is from december 2015, so not really new. https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/12/21/webextensions-in-... The API is very close to Chrome, am I right ? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Po...

Personally, I port my Chrome extension to a Firefox addons without much trouble, except for the stringent review process by a human developer which raised a lot my opinion of the firefox community.

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

#492

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).

Do people write compiled programs any more? (en-mass) Especially large ones?

I remember compiling a 2.4 kernel on a 486 once, only kernel to suppose the PCMCIA network card. It didn't go quickly. If you really want to compile the program, vou can always do the compilation on a server.

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

#493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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(withdrawn)

I'm writing this from a 2016 Thinkpad with 508 open tabs in Chrome. works. (wouldn't work if turned off the ad-blocker, but why would I do that...)

Firefox does it at least as well, just having both open is a bit much.

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

#494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, Chrome refuses to show binary WebSocket traffic, so I just use SSLKEYLOGFILE + Firefox + Wireshark/tshark to debug secured WS traffic. tshark can even be configured to dump out the packets basically as they come in.

I am struggling quite a bit to make this work. Do you have any good writeups on how to do this?

First, launch Firefox:

    SSLKEYLOGFILE=$(pwd)/ssl_keys.log firefox -P 
("firefox-bin" on some Linuxes, "/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox" on Mac, etc.). This launches a Profile Manager; pick a profile that isn't being used by any other running Firefox. This avoids accidentally logging keys for normal browsing traffic, making it easier to pick out the target SSL traffic and avoiding a security risk.

Second, launch tcpdump:

    tcpdump -i en0 -w dump.pcap
(where en0 is your primary Internet interface).

Browse to the site you want to debug and make some websocket requests.

Finally, you can use tshark to inspect the traffic:

    tshark -n -r dump.pcap -o http.ssl.port:443 -o ssl.keylog_file:ssl_keys.log -Y websocket -Tfields -e frame.time_relative -e ip.src -e ip.dst -e data
The -e fields I chose there are just examples; this particular example dumps out all the websocket payloads to a file.

You can also configure Wireshark to use the log file, so that you can inspect the traffic interactively; to do so, edit Preferences -> Protocols -> SSL and set the (Pre-)Master Secret key log filename appropriately.

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

#495

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.

I am genuinely interested: why so many and how can you handle 400 open tabs?? How do you navigate between them? I am lost as soon as I have more than 10 tabs open at the same time...

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

#496

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.

> without them stock FF is quite shite and unusable

Pardon ?

Actually FF is better that Chrome!

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

#497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me the frame rate is struggling to keep it even remotely close to 60fps. It's certainly not smooth. This happens in FF 61.0 Beta on an iMac 5K, but the issue applies to versions that date back to pre-Quantum days. I noticed the problem is more visible if large elements are affected by the transform effects, a smaller window renders those smoother for example.

For me, it works perfectly on both FF and Chrome (Linux), but I wonder how WebRender will deal with it; can you test Firefox Nightly with "gfx.webrender.all" set to true?

Thanks! gfx.webrender.enabled (not .all) alone does indeed solve the performance issues, however only in Nightly (v62), not in the Beta (v61) channel.

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

#498

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 Chr…

To be fair the MBP keyboard always sucks regardless of browser.

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

#500

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…

A lot of people forget that the only browser used by most everyone was IE and that was stagnant and smelly as they come. Firefox nudged the web forward when it was introduced, and made quite a splash on its own by capturing about a fourth to a third of usage from IE, but a small company can't fend itself from Microsoft. It took Google and Chrome, later, to knock IE and Microsoft into its place with its big push forward.

And that was a good thing. However, I regrettably find Google now pushing and pulling the rest of us harder than we want or need. Now that they are in the lead, they give the impression they are the writer of the scrolls. (In fact, a Google employee is the editor of HTML.)

Now, one cannot complain too much. Google's leadership has done far more good for the web and we should be grateful, but too many developers are turning first to them for what to do and how to do things rather than seeing the whole forest.

Post reply on HN