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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

#622

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...

https://i.imgur.com/W54I14m.png

API documentation. It's very, very useful to have the structure of the APIs represented in a tree of open tabs. It gets messy eventually, but the groups can be easily rearranged.

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

#623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's been my experience/preference as well. In fact I have been very taken aback by all the "Firefox is back" and "time to try Firefox again" headlines. I guess I didn't realize what sort of exodus occurred when chrome came out. But honestly, I never ran into performance issues with Firefox over the years and various versions, including the overhaul with Firefox 3. I typically have 2-8 tabs open (hasn't changed muc…

> I have been very taken aback by all the "Firefox is back" and "time to try Firefox again" headlines. I think this is because there is a marketing campaign for firefox at the moment. When it was front page reddit, the comments were overtly positive and any pro-chrome comments were downvoted to oblivion. Thinking there is a massive marketing campaign and thats why we are seeing it.

Though there is undoubtedly a marketing campaign going on right now, there's nothing suggesting they're engaged in the kind of reddit manipulation you're describing.

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

#624

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…

The power of a company like Google can be great when harnessed appropriately. When Chrome was the new kid on the block, they had every incentive to be compatible, faster, better, more flexible, etc. Now that they are the leader, their incentives are very different. I'm very concerned about the rapid move away from straightforward text-based protocols to opaque binary protocols. Yes the performance is better, but the…

HTTP/2 is standard and isn't opaque. You can use any number of high quality tools to dump it -- here's one: https://wiki.wireshark.org/HTTP2 .

The performance improvements are quite substantial.

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

#625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's account management is infuriating! First, it almost never remembers what account you used with what service. If I do some Google Cloud stuff under my work account, I don't want Google Maps using my work account, or vice versa. The list of accounts in the upper right corner, and what's signed in/out, seems completely random and broken. The second problem is that Google's various apps are wildly inconsistent i…

I just setup multiple profiles in chrome which is one thing it seems to do better than FF imo. You can select a profile in the top right corner. Everything about them is separate. cookies, history, extensions , theme so I give each one a different theme make it clear what profile I'm using. in FF afaict you can only use one at a time and you have to choose at launch

Your comment has convinced me to do this. This is pretty fantastic. It was driving me nuts being signed into both work and personal gmails to access either my files or adwords. Not to mention YouTube which would open under the work account sometimes or drive. Plus now I can rip out all the work bookmarks and shove that into a work only profile.

My only concern now is with using multiple devices. Do I just sign into to both profiles on each device? I only worry because there was a big snafu that occurred with their password manager that synced nothing and everything disappeared. (I no longer trust google with that stuff).

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

#626

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…

I'm curious as to why you haven't replaced it with something with better performance. It just seems masochistic to use a netbook with such a pathetic amount of RAM on it as your main computer.

You should see my bike :)

More seriously, both personal and economic issues make this a reasonable tradeoff for me. I assure you it has nothing of masochistic, though maybe it has a stoic streak.

edit: Again, to not derail the point, Firefox works great, even multitasking, in a low-powered netbook.

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

#628

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…

That's been my experience/preference as well. In fact I have been very taken aback by all the "Firefox is back" and "time to try Firefox again" headlines. I guess I didn't realize what sort of exodus occurred when chrome came out. But honestly, I never ran into performance issues with Firefox over the years and various versions, including the overhaul with Firefox 3. I typically have 2-8 tabs open (hasn't changed muc…

I'm primarily a Firefox user, but WebGL heavy apps tend to run way better in Chrome.

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

#629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

NaCL is more like Google's ActiveX. wasm directly builds upon the experience and success Mozilla had with asm.js.

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

#630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

c/c++ are still very much alive and now we have rust, golang, etc.

So yeah. Even JS is "compiled" now with webpack.

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