Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

mobile.nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

571–580 of 753 posts

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

#571

Post by falsedan »

magicalbeans wrote: post #482
radmuzom wrote: post #467

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.

> some of the features of the old extensions are impossible to implement in the new extension engine

I am stuck on FF 53 (and reinstalling it whenever automatic updates sneak past me) since it still has the XUL API Pentadactyl uses to receive keyboard input[0]. The new WebExtension API don't expose the same level of functionality, so it can't be simply ported to them as is.

0: https://github.com/5digits/dactyl/issues/99

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

#572

Post by callahad »

kees99 wrote: post #478
radmuzom wrote: post #467

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.

Google themselves launched or re-launched five Chrome-only sites last year (Hangouts, Meet, Adwords, Earth, and Allo). Six if you count the Google Advanced Protection Program.

Google Flights began blocking Firefox for Android last week, and Google still serves a degraded Search experience to Firefox users on Android (but hey, no AMP).

Despite well-meaning concern from the Chrome team, it's abundantly clear that Google's other product managers do not view interoperability with open, cross-browser standards as a requirement. And while many products eventually gain Firefox support, that support usually only comes months after launch, if at all. To wit, Earth was recently rebranded from "Earth on Web" to "Earth for Chrome," so who knows what's going to happen there.

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

#573

Post by vitro »

ubercow13 wrote: post #558
bollockitis wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched to Firefox a week or so ago for the same reasons. My issue is that I can't make Firefox usable for me without a bunch of tweaks. For example, scrolling with the mouse wheel feels like scrolling through mud. I like smooth scrolling but the defaults are too slow. Font rendering is also janky unless I disable hardware acceleration, which is a real shame. On Chrome, I do nothing but add a home button to the to…

There are lots of parameters in about:config to tweak scrolling (unlike in Chrome). Try searching for 'wheel'

My favorite is mousewheel.*.delta_multiplier_y - this way you can quickly scroll through long document by holding delta key modifier. Really handy!

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

#575

Post by ddalex »

nneonneo wrote: post #434
manveru wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much the only time I use chromium now is when I need to debug Websockets, since the traffic is impossible to see in Firefox. Really hope they fix https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1373639 some day.

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.

Just use Charles debugging proxy with the SSL mitm enabled, it's much easier

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

#576

Post by pmontra »

Rovanion wrote: post #520
latexr wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not just experiments. Neither Google Hangouts nor Meet worked in Firefox until the 22nd of May this year.

Meet didn't even work in Chrome on Ubuntu 16.04 last time I checked. A customer of mine that went all Google talked about going back to Skype, which fixed most problems in the last months (with the obvious exception of the uselessly sparse layout.)

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

#577

Post by vitro »

kees99 wrote: post #478
radmuzom wrote: post #467

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.

Don't know if it is an issue of Firefox or Google just makes it slow, but viewing custom Google maps with few thousands of pins takes much longer time to parse and render in Firefox than in Chrome, where it feels almost instantaneous compared to Firefox.

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

#579

Post by retSava »

paulintrognon wrote: post #495
retSava wrote: post #481

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.

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...

Ha, as with any hoarding, they are not all useful and I'm the first to admit it :).

It's a symptom of my non-optimal behavior. Blame the wetware between my ears. On any given moment, I might have perhaps 5-50 new tabs that I actually work in, closing them as I go along (but along those numbers). The rest are mostly left-overs since previous days.

My weakness is eg "this is an interesting read, but I don't have time now", or "this is a good reference, better save that". Over time, those add up.

To actually make it work, I set FF to not load tabs until focused. Then, when I start up, there are in reality a couple of hundred place holder tabs where I can see the icon and page name so I can find them again.

The second enabler is the plugin to have the tabs vertically, in a list on the side, instead of horizontally on top.

I really should just close them all and never look back, but I gotta admit, it's hard to say goodbye to dear friends. In this case though, I only know them by name :P

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

#580

Post by rubber_duck »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #556
sureaboutthis wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 forwa…

Mozilla too gets to write certain bits. WebAssembly is all Mozilla. I guess Google has more resources to invest in Chrome is the bigger difference.

Is it really ? I was under the impression that a large influence and a precursor to wasm was NaCL from Chrome along with ASM.js from Mozilla. Also Microsoft seems to be very involved in WASM.
Post reply on HN