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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

#651

Post by jamiek88 »

bjpbakker wrote: post #512
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…

> Google's leadership has done far more good for the web and we should be grateful Only time will tell. Personally I'm not that grateful to Google. Like you said, it all started out as a good thing - rather innocent. And of course it turned to "profit at all cost" soon after that. IMHO most people not quite understand the trade-offs involving technology choice. Large companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple (in no par…

Conflating freedom and privacy to lump them all in together is a bit unfair I feel.

Apple for example is a privacy leader. Easier to secure their walled garden perhaps and they have their own pros and cons but they shouldn’t be in a set with google, Facebook and to a lesser extent, MS.

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

#652

Post by sandworm101 »

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…

>> I didn't personally notice a big performance improvement in terms of user experience

I've seen no difference in performance in recent years, at least on my home machines. My browser performance is basically limited by my internet connection, making all the browser v browser speed tests moot. (At work I have to use windows+IE+bing+outlook because work are idiots.) I switched to chrome last year because a couple quality of life plugins were not longer compatible with the latest versions of firefox.

What I want is firefox from a couple years ago, back when all the plugins I wanted worked nicely together (mostly privacy and dev tool stuff). Firefox needs to simplify itself, to get rid of things that can be handled much better by plugins.

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

#654

Post by deevolution »

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…

I regularly have 50+ tabs open... i know friends who will have multiple browser windows open and im talking like 5 - 10 windows with 50-100+ tabs in each window. Browser developers absolutely have to account for the fact that some people are lazy and dont want to close tabs or browser windows. If a browser can handle these extreme cases, its got a bright future.

Edit: spelling

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

#655

Post by inapis »

blt wrote: post #89
_2d30 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially on YouTube where I believe there’s an issue with Firefox not using the most efficient encoding on the videos.

Do you have details? I noticed that Youtube on Firefox makes the fan spin up on my 2013 rMBP a lot. I currently use Firefox but as a heavy Youtube watcher this is a pretty big negative.

This is because Youtube pushes VP8/VP9-encoded video by default to save on bandwidth. Unfortunately, absence of a hardware decoder consumes a ton of battery. Both Firefox and Chrome receive VP9 encoded video.

Safari doesn't understand VP9. So Youtube pushes H.264 video which can be hardware accelerated.

To force youtube to send H264 in firefox/chrome you need something like https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/h264ify/

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

#656

Post by badosu »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #555
paulie_a wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally was never impressed by firebug. I haven't checked it out in a while but it was incredibly clunky.

Isn’t it essentially the prototype for all modern browser dev tools though? As in, they are all substantially similar to what Firebug was like, and Firebug existed before any of the others? I could be getting my history wrong, but from what I remember Firebug was absolutely mind-blowing.

I remember the first time I found the firebug JavaScript snippet, I could finally use a decent debugger when testing other browsers.

That was equally kind blowing to me.

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

#657

Post by baby »

Improvotter wrote: post #643

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. Open…

Chrome doesn’t have tree style tabs. It’s hard to use as a power user.

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

#659

Post by Raidion »

more-coffee wrote: post #430
nothrabannosir wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox’s biggest problem is rapacious battery draining. Unplug your charger and Safari feels like a dainty butterfly in a soft summer breeze, while Firefox thrashes around like a drunken Godzilla in mid-90s Tokyo. The energy usage tab on the activity monitor consistently shows Firefox at a ~40 “score” (whatever that unit is), and Safari more around 4. Anecdotally, the difference in battery time is real. This is the…

It is pretty fundamental. While Safari lacks features, it feels so much lighter and is noticeably less memory/CPU intensive. As a developer who needs every MB of memory, this makes me resort to Safari for pretty much everything. I'll occasionally use Firefox/Chrome when I really really need their superior webdev tools.

What tools in FF do you think are better than Chrome? Honestly, my computer is beefy (and firmly attached to a power source) enough that performance is rarely an issue with any browser, and Chrome dev tools seem to be superior in most ways, with the slight exception that it's harder to see what events are bound to an element, but the software I develop usually has fairly tight couplings so that feature isn't needed often.

I need someone to make a case that FF dev tools are better than Chrome, simply because without performance being an issue, I need confidence that switching would be a net productivity increase despite having to learn the slightly different tooling of the FF dev tools.

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