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

mobile.nytimes.com

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

#681

Post by cpeterso »

inapis wrote: post #655
blt wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/ad…

Firefox uses H.264 for YouTube on macOS, so it can use the system's H.264 hardware decoder.

This YouTube page will show which codecs are currently enabled in your browser: https://www.youtube.com/html5

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

#682

Post by cpeterso »

voltagex_ wrote: post #176
bufferoverflow wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm having similar issues on a fairly modern laptop with i7-7700hq and GTX1050. After a few minutes of watching YouTube, it gets all jerky and not smooth. I'm guessing something is throttling, though video playback isn't taking a high percentage of either the CPU or the GPU. I tried forcing the builtin Intel GPU on firefox.exe, that didn't change anything.

See if the video codec is shown in "Stats for Nerds". Perhaps hardware decoding for either webm or h264 isn't enabled.

YouTube prefers VP9, when available. You can try disabling VP9 in Firefox by setting the about:config pref "media.mediasource.webm.enabled" = false. Depending on your GPU, Firefox may be able to decode H.264 using a hardware decoder.

This YouTube page will show which codecs are currently enabled in your browser: https://www.youtube.com/html5

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

#683

Post by chme »

bovine3dom wrote: post #508
chme wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the info. :) Great work so far! High on my list is for the extensions to work on about:* and addons.mozilla.org pages. I like to use Vimium everywhere and 'Dark Background and Light Text' to also work on the preferences. Also I really miss DownThemAll... I tried a couple of replacements, but they didn't for instance download all books from a Humble Book Bundle.

> High on my list is for the extensions to work on [...] addons.mozilla.org pages. There's actually an about:config setting that fixes this already. I put a helper in Tridactyl for it called `:fixamo` [1], but you can easily do it manually by setting "privacy.resistFingerprinting.block_mozAddonManager" = true and "extensions.webextensions.restrictedDomains" = "" (Unfortunately, this does nothing about about: pages or…

privacy.resistFingerprinting.block_mozAddonManager does not exist in my about:config.

Just changing "extensions.webextensions.restrictedDomains" is apparently not enough.

I also tried :fixamo in tridactyl, but it just returns: "# Error: Attempt to postMessage on disconnected port"

I was using version 1.13.1pre1454 with FF 60.0.2.

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

#684

Post by bovine3dom »

chme wrote: post #683
bovine3dom wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> High on my list is for the extensions to work on [...] addons.mozilla.org pages. There's actually an about:config setting that fixes this already. I put a helper in Tridactyl for it called `:fixamo` [1], but you can easily do it manually by setting "privacy.resistFingerprinting.block_mozAddonManager" = true and "extensions.webextensions.restrictedDomains" = "" (Unfortunately, this does nothing about about: pages or…

privacy.resistFingerprinting.block_mozAddonManager does not exist in my about:config. Just changing "extensions.webextensions.restrictedDomains" is apparently not enough. I also tried :fixamo in tridactyl, but it just returns: "# Error: Attempt to postMessage on disconnected port" I was using version 1.13.1pre1454 with FF 60.0.2.

Have you tried adding the setting that doesn't exist manually? There's a little + button you can click on about:config.

---

That's a particularly unhelpful error, sorry about that. It usually means that Tridactyl can't access the native messenger. Did you install it with `:installnative`? What is the output of `:native`?

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

#685

Post by lemeow »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #623
mkirklions wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Agree - and I don't think the lead New York Times consumer technology reporter would have publicly documented all the reasons why he's switching back to Firefox unless he genuinely felt that way.

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

#686

Post by rpearl »

alf-pogz wrote: post #546
siddboots wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not doxing by any definition I'm familiar with. Also, this sentence... > Folks at Mozilla actively chose to find a touchy topic, and expose it to cause the "bad culture fit" argument. You are insinuating that folks at Mozilla exploited his position on same sex marriage towards a hidden agenda of some kind. Another interpretation is that folks at Mozilla simply took issue with his position on same sex marriage.

I'm absolutely insinuating that, and the agenda was not hidden. They did not want Brendan Eich to be CEO. It was a hit job. https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-under-fire-inside-the-9-da...

I don't know why you keep missing the mental leap here: Yeah, people at the company--and outside it--did not want a CEO willing to spend money to actively remove the rights of a group of people. That is the thing they did not want.

They didn't go digging to find something to hurt him: he took action, public and on the record, specifically taking away the rights of others.

It is true, people did not want that, and they did not hide that fact.

Signed, a gay, now married, 2011 Mozilla intern who did not pick up a full time offer in part because some 2012 news of Eich's donation surfaced around the time I was considering pursuing it.

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

#687

Post by chupasaurus »

atVelocet wrote: post #611
chupasaurus wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go get some Chromium Stable installation for Windows. Choose wisely, though [0]. [0] https://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-sn...

Or better use one of these: https://chromium.woolyss.com/ https://download-chromium.appspot.com/

These are not the official repos and they can contain some malicious code.

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

#688

Post by atombender »

greggman wrote: post #349
atombender wrote: post #93

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

Chrome profiles are too coarse-grained: Not only is the entire window associated with that profile but each profile also has separate settings, histories, bookmarks, everything. All I'd want here are separate cookie spaces.

Firefox profiles are similar to Chrome's. But the container tabs that people are talking about in this thread are better than Chrome profiles. They're per tab, and last I checked they only separate out cookies and local storage.

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

#689

Post by atombender »

ComodoHacker wrote: post #200
atombender wrote: post #93

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…

This kind of defeats the purpose of multiple accounts. Remember, we started to have them to separate our work/home/personal lives, to build separate digital profiles that companies (like Google) store on their servers. Now you beg Google to recognize and unify them (which I guess they have almost done already by themselves).

I'm not begging anything of Google, but I would want them to make this work better.

Google accounts are not just about data and personalities, but also about permissions. As long as I'm "logged into" multiple accounts, it should be able to map the content I'm trying to see to an account. Or at least offer to switch to that account. For example, if I'm trying to view a company document, but my default account is my personal account, then I don't want to see an often obscure "permission to view denied" error, which always freaks me out and makes me think I've been locked out or something.

Better yet, build this badly-needed auth stuff into the browser and allow apps to negotiate access with the browser.

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

#690

Post by oscargrouch »

skywhopper wrote: post #596
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…

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…

> But HTTP/2 and QUIC are taking us back into the realm of non-standard and more rigid and opaque binary protocols.

This whole BINARY vs. PLAINTEXT paradox where the binary tends to be more efficient where the plaintext more open and intermediate ground between humans and machines, for me can be solved in a optimal way where the final output is always binary, but where you can assist humans with plaintext latter.

Just look how many beautiful and expressive computer languages we have now where the output is a pure obscure binary.

So i think if you follow this path you can have the best of both worlds. And because of that i tend to disagree with your point of view, where the default must be plaintext.. The layered approach is probably much more sophisticated and less amateurish when you care about waste of CPU cycles and RAM memory, without the need to have only a obscure and opaque representation.

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