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

Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

robert.ocallahan.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 343 posts

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#231

Post by legends2k »

sametmax wrote: post #2

And it didn't work. Some people were aware of this. A few took the time to read/discuss/think about it. A minuscule fraction of passionate people acted on it. And the rest of the world took the path of least resistance, as usual. People don't shape society willingly. They mostly let life happen to them. Even when you see them protesting, it's the consequence of an emotional reaction and a group effect, not the reflec…

> People don't shape society willing…

Logged in just to say, “what a paragraph, haven't read anything with such clarity lately.”

Thanks for it. Yes, I'm using Firefox since 2.0 and never changed once.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#232

Post by hannasanarion »

bzbarsky wrote: post #210
hannasanarion wrote: post #120

Frankly, I don't want to choose firefox. Their priorities are utterly misplaced. I can't believe people don't talk about the dark gtk theming bug more often. It's one of the most common firefox questions on stackoverflow: If you have a dark gtk theme, like Arc-dark or Adwaita-dark, then Firefox randomly colors certain web page elements (usually text boxes) dark to match your desktop theme. Almost always resulting in…

There were lots of requests to have form controls "look native", which is why they were changed to use the desktop theme... One problem with that, as you note, is web pages that are setting a color but not a background color on elements, which is a web development 101 mistake. But there's just no way to win here: either you can use the OS theme for widgets and things fail when sites make this mistake, or the widgets…

> One problem with that, as you note, is web pages that are setting a color but not a background color on elements, which is a web development 101 mistake.

If it works correctly for 99.9% of users (those who aren't running linux, with firefox, with a dark GTK theme), than it isn't a mistake on the part of the website, it's a bug on the part of the browser.

User theming is not about to sweep over the web. It didn't happen in 2000 when this bug was first opened. The web has changed a lot since then, we've seen web 2.0 and the dawn of the social internet. But there are zero signs of a user-defined theme revolution. AFAIK themes still don't exist in Windows and OSX. It is absurd to continue to insist that the issue is about to fix itself, as maintainers have done on the bug report I linked.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#233

Post by gambler »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #90

Easy path to success for Firefox is to continue to beef up security and privacy tooling for their users and have sane defaults. They've been winning a lot of users who feel abandoned by the big companies in this space. A problem and conflict of interest for them regarding this is that they are funded mainly by Google. Firefox has a conflict of interest here because they are not doing all they can here because that wo…

Most people don't care.

Firefox became popular by being fast and offering tabbed browsing when IE didn't. I think being fast and offering radical quality of life feature is a good strategy to follow even now.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#234

Post by Drakim »

jasonvorhe wrote: post #197
nindalf wrote: post #9

Just so we can avoid rehashing the discussion whenever a post encouraging the use of Firefox is posted. - Yes, Mozilla is still the better browser when it comes to privacy. - Yes, Mozilla has made missteps with Pocket and Mr. Robot. - Yes, it is slow/resource heavy on certain Macs with non-default resolutions. Yes, Mozilla is working on a fix. - Yes, it has become really fast for most users after Quantum improvements…

* No, Chrome isn't the next IE because it doesn't feature proprietary web features

Chrome does have proprietary web features.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#235

Post by RussianCow »

nchie wrote: post #113
shaki-dora wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s hard to prove or disprove without having an alternate universe ready for A/B testing. Although, frankly, I can’t shake the feeling I’ve been living in the B-branch for, say, the last two years. If so, let me just say: if your results are not yet conclusive, please ask your statisticians for what “multi-armed bandit” means to them, then shoot them if the quizzically look at you. You may even skip the question.…

What are you even talking about? You're making it sound like Firefox has ever been a lot worse than Chrome, but that's far from the truth. I've used both quite a lot and I've always preferred Firefox, even _without_ considering the privacy aspects. I still use Chrome on my laptop as Firefox doesn't support decent pinch zooming (that's more or less my only complaint), but for desktop usage I definitely choose Firefox…

Not the OP, but when Chrome came out, it was leaps and bounds ahead of Firefox in terms of performance, and it took Firefox many years (until just recently, with Quantum) to catch up. I personally endured it, but it was definitely hard after having used Chrome for a short while, and I don't blame anyone for making the switch back then.

Most users don't care about features; they just want a browser that works well.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#236

Post by EpicEng »

feanaro wrote: post #49
nindalf wrote: post #9

Just so we can avoid rehashing the discussion whenever a post encouraging the use of Firefox is posted. - Yes, Mozilla is still the better browser when it comes to privacy. - Yes, Mozilla has made missteps with Pocket and Mr. Robot. - Yes, it is slow/resource heavy on certain Macs with non-default resolutions. Yes, Mozilla is working on a fix. - Yes, it has become really fast for most users after Quantum improvements…

- Yes, Firefox does support Containers, which are a very innovative privacy feature allowing you to maintain separate browser sessions (cookies, site preferences, ...) towards different websites inside a single browser instance.[1][2] [1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers#w_what-are-c... [2] https://www.thechiefmeat.com/guides/containers.html

An almost completely non-discoverable feature which most people won't even understand, let alone use. I think it's awesome as well, but stuff like this doesn't move the needle.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#237

Post by csdreamer7 »

chucksmash wrote: post #208
csdreamer7 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never been able to move over to Chrome. Chrome always synces my bookmarks out of place. My bookmarks are how I get things done and run on muscle memory. Because of this I have been a loyal FF user for decades. I tried Chrome again last year and bookmarks still sync out of order. It boggles my mind that Google never fixed this or just isn't a problem for people (do people care?). As an FF user for decades, esp…

I think you're referring to Containers. If so, you can always fallback to separate Firefox profiles (run `firefox -p` to open the profiles menu iirc) if Containers aren't flexible enough for you. I've been a 95% happy Containers user since it was a Test Pilot experiment but there are certainly cases where it's not enough. In my case, not being able to use the mobile device emulator in a container tab was a big pain.

Those are terrible compared to the easy profile switching that Chrome offers. Containers also don't keep the pages you lasted work on the last time I checked. (If they do please let me know.)

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#238

Post by Slashbot »

Firefox ceased to be a best browser the day it released Quantum.. That day sealed it's fate into irrelevancy.

I use Vivaldi.com now (chromium based backend, with alot more effort put in than those who work at google or mozilla or any of the fking companies with huge amounts of money doing fuck to improve the user experience with a web browser).. all the other browsers pale in comparison to the features and customization that is built into it. Sorry Mozilla not sorry you are are fking idiots for the direction you took with Firefox, you killed it. You let everyone done, you didn't care about the very user and developers who made your browser popular in the first place.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#239

Post by RussianCow »

hartator wrote: post #199

I don’t fully get the cult-like altitude with Mozilla. Just pick the best web browser. If it happens to be Firefox, great, if not pick, Chrome, Chromium, Brave, Opera, Safari, or whatever you feel is best for you. Mozilla has been losing marked shares since then and a moralist message is not the way to go.

Unless you actually care about the moral issues, like privacy?

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#240

Post by u801e »

vram22 wrote: post #131
feanaro wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Yes, Firefox does support Containers, which are a very innovative privacy feature allowing you to maintain separate browser sessions (cookies, site preferences, ...) towards different websites inside a single browser instance.[1][2] [1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers#w_what-are-c... [2] https://www.thechiefmeat.com/guides/containers.html

Interesting. I guess it may be possible to use it to be logged into and use different email accounts, e.g. foo@emailservice.com and bar@emailservice.com from the same browser instance. That would be helpful.

Alternatively, you could use a desktop email client like Thunderbird to do that :)
Post reply on HN