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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

#641

Post by seba_dos1 »

andrewl-hn wrote: post #515
paulintrognon wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Oh, that's not hard. First, Firefox doesn't squeeze tabs past certain limit, so you don't have these tiny-tiny tabs that you can't click. You get the scrolling, but it won't bother you after a while. Thus, visually even with 1000 or 2000 tabs browser UI stays clean. Second, when you type stuff into the address bar Firefox searches through opened tabs and suggests switching to that. This minimizes the number of times…

Exactly this! I'm also using Tab Center Redux to have tabs on the left side, which seems better UX- and space-wise for me even with just a few tabs open, although in the past I've used Firefox's default UI as well for a long time and it worked fine, unlike Chrome's UI.

This is how my Firefox looks like:

https://dosowisko.net/Screenshot_20171030_203716.png

https://dosowisko.net/Screenshot_20171030_203804.png

Once a while I'm getting to 1000-2000 open tabs and this is a point where the whole UI starts to feel a bit heavy, which is the only reason I clean them up then - navigating is a non-issue.

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

#642

Post by dbt00 »

rubber_duck wrote: post #580
giancarlostoro wrote: post #556

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.

If they're not all involved, it won't work, but firefox really lead asm.js, which was the actual precursor to webassembly. NaCL was more like a competitor that tried to do something similar but never got the kind of mainstream adoption needed for cross-browser support.

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

#643

Post by Improvotter »

I've tried using Firefox for a month last month and decided to switch back to Chrome for a couple of reasons.

Firstly and most importantly none of the extensions that I use seem to sync settings which make it very annoying when you have 3 computers that you're using daily (Linux, MacOS, and Windows).

Sometimes it just still crashes and it's annoying.

Firefox doesn't support debugging websockets like Chrome does.

Opening file types in Firefox is a bit annoying, it constantly asks it every single time for a file type it never saw before. Just let me save it damnit, I don't want to be bothered about the file type.

How do you even open PDFs in Firefox? If I set the file handler to Firefox itself, then it will recursively open the file in Firefox.

Firefox doesn't play well with window manager like i3. Sometime when I'm working with Firefox, I'll need to force a resize of the window before Firefox notices that it's not a 1000px wide, but 500px wide. This happens very often. If you're saying that I should report this. I really cannot be bothered most of the time because I'm not a huge fan of their issue tracking software and most of these already have bug reports, but are just ignored.

Firefox sometimes doesn't know how to handle a font and it makes it unreadable for some reason, alright?

Firefox and dark mode GTK themes don't mix well together. You still have to manually add some CSS to what Firefox loads on every page just to make website input text readable or not black. Firefox uses the theme's settings for most stuff when it doesn't make sense when the whole web assumes you're using a white theme.

That's about it I guess?

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

#644

Post by seba_dos1 »

samplesizeme wrote: post #543
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 a tab hoarder as well and switched to Firefox last year for this reason. I have a 16GB MBP and I had to restart Chrome twice a day due to memory usage. The most I saw was 25GB of RAM used by Chrome (thank you solid state swap!) When Quantum was released, I did a side by side comparison, opening the exact same tabs in each browser, switching browsers each day, manually keeping tabs in sync. Did this for about two…

Recently I've found out that touchpad experience is mostly determined by software. Windows drivers for common laptops are usually bad, and so are defaults on common GNU/Linux distributions (most of them use libinput now, which isn't quite ready for touchpads yet), however, playing with Synaptics X11 driver can make wonders. I have never understood why people believe Mac touchpads are so good until I've tried Wayland and Windows on my Lenovo Yoga - and wow, it sucked big time. Turns out I just happened to accidentally, cluelessly configure it just right when I was setting up my Arch on this machine.

(don't get me wrong, I like libinput's idea and I know old synaptics driver is an awful mess when it comes to its code, but there are still lots of papercuts libinput needs to handle. I believe it will get there, but it's not there yet)

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

#645

Post by Bartweiss »

afranchuk wrote: post #609
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…

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…

This is an interesting take, since it's so difference from my experience. There's definitely some difference in use cases that had a large impact - whether that's device memory, open tabs, or even choice of websites.

I didn't switch to Chrome when it first came out, but over the next couple of years I found Firefox frustratingly slow and crash-prone. When I cut over, everything was drastically faster and more reliable, plus the feature set (extensions, url completion, incognito for parallel sign-ins, and so on) was noticeably better. High memory usage was the only price, and Chrome surrenders that somewhat gracefully when it's needed.

I'm hoping to make the switch back. Chrome has become more frustrating as Google adds brand alignment, and moreover I simply don't like being siloed by a brand. But the usability gain was massive when I first switched, and I'm only making the move now because there's been a lot of good news out of Mozilla.

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

#646

Post by sneakycr0w »

I have been switching back and forth between Chrome/Chrome Canary and Firefox/Firefox Dev Edition, and I think I've finally come to the conclusion that Firefox is my preferred source, especially as a web developer. There's small things the dev tools does that I really appreciate, like showing variable types by default.

Also, the constant updates to the dev tools like the Shape Path Editor is amazing!

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

#647

Post by Bartweiss »

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.

Outside of the Google projects people have mentioned, I hardly ever see this. Well, I do see "doesn't work on IE" or "please dear god stop visiting with IE 6" pretty often, but I can hardly blame sites for that...

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

#648

Post by jimbofisher1 »

dspillett wrote: post #632
afranchuk wrote: post #609

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 guess I didn't realize what sort of exodus occurred when chrome came out.* It wasn't really a mass exodus, but a gradual wax & wane over time (with more moves FF->C over the long term than C->FF). In development fields the count is complicated by people who regularly use both, but prefer one. > I typically have 2-8 tabs open I tend to have many open[1], over several windows on different desktops. I use open tabs…

You may have just changed my life with The Great Suspender...

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

#649

Post by akoncius »

eat_veggies wrote: post #602
callahad wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Googl…

Allo works on Firefox now, but before, I used to set my user-agent to Chrome's and it'd work.

it's not a definition of working when you need to cheat system in order to get it working.

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

#650

Post by ChristianBundy »

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.

I'm dealing with this now. We're working on a very complex map visualization with D3, and Firefox runs it choppy as hell. On the other hand, WebKit/Blink browsers (Chromium, GNU Web (Epiphany), others) run it buttery smooth.

Given that everyone else on my team uses Chrome, I think we'll likely be sporting a "works best in Chrome" banner soon, especially as most people would be confused by "works best in WebKit/Blink".

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