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The Firefox Dilemma

blog.tawhidhannan.co.uk

61–70 of 208 posts

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#61
post #21

My main reasons for using Firefox are side tabs and being able to prevent tab reuse when searching or using the address bar. Chrome simply isn't configurable enough to make it nice to use for me.

I suspect this is partly why Firefox is losing the battle. By concentrating resources on nice-to-have user functionality rather than implementing core technologies that web developers actually build sites with, we end up with more and more websites that only work in Chrome. Far fewer users care about browser config than "does my internet banking site work?". Firefox probably needs to work on that, even if it means ma…

Yes, I use Firefox for browsing, but Chrome for developing.

I should probably give Firefox's tools another chance, but last time I checked Chrome's dev tools was alot better.

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#62

1. I like firefox's omnibar/awesomebar more than chrome's. It seems to read my mind better [1]. It also have some features [2] I think most people are unaware of. 2. Firefox have bookmark tags. 3. Firefox scroll the tabs instead of compressing the width until they're unusable. (It's also possible to set the minimum tab-width) 4. It's much simpler to get ctrl-tab MRU behavior [3] in Firefox last time I checked. 5. Fir…

bookmark tags are probably going to be the next to go when Firefox decides "too few people are using it".

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#63
post #19
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we should just let the Google hegemony control the web and suck up all our data along with doing the same to our phones?

No, but you can't move Mozilla forward without firing incompetent directors flying chartered jets and getting $1M USD remuneration for nothing. All success Mozilla ever had was due to hard work of volunteer developers who pulled out Firefox, and all the money Mozilla directors scored was due to them slicing off the project piece by piece for last 10 years. P.S. There is a whisper going around that Google's only reaso…

Could I get some citations?

What I've seen coming out of Mozilla over tthe past few years, from DeepSpeech to Rust and Servo appears to be foundational technology written by Mozilla engineers. This tech has the potential to do a lot of good, having it be a public resource is important IMO.

Mozilla's intentions and fears seem to be very reasonable, driving what they do from AV1 to fighting DRM, though they have hit dead ends with Firefox OS (now Kai OS) and other side projects, the organization is still doing work that is in the best interest of the common person, unlike what the tech giants have been doing.

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#64

1. I like firefox's omnibar/awesomebar more than chrome's. It seems to read my mind better [1]. It also have some features [2] I think most people are unaware of. 2. Firefox have bookmark tags. 3. Firefox scroll the tabs instead of compressing the width until they're unusable. (It's also possible to set the minimum tab-width) 4. It's much simpler to get ctrl-tab MRU behavior [3] in Firefox last time I checked. 5. Fir…

I like that Firefox Test Pilots often produce interesting, visible experiments.

I'm a fan of Firefox Color: https://color.firefox.com - which allows you to express the UI color scheme in a shareable/saveable URL.

There's also Side View: https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/side-view - which allows a persistent column to the side regardless of which tab you're in. Useful on widescreens.

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#65
I’ve been using Firefox since about 0.93, with about a year in the middle when I used Chrome as my primary browser, because it ran from a USB disk much better than Firefox did at the time, and that was what I needed at the time. (I am glad that Chrome came along, because by showing how bad Firefox was in some areas it spurred Mozilla on to improve it, so that it’s no longer bad like that.)

I look at the sessions of people that use Chrome, and I wonder how they ever manage to get anything done: tab management is uniformly hopeless. Firefox, on the other hand, copes with hundreds of tabs with perfect equanimity. (I currently have 165 tabs spread across three windows—one for personal stuff, one for work stuff, and one for a particular work project; this is a fairly typical number; I might have less than twenty once a year or so, and I’ve had as many as 450 before.)

I use the Tree Style Tab extension for a vertical tab bar with hierarchy. I’ve suggested it to family members once or twice each, and my dad and two of my sisters use vertical tabs (two via Tree Style Tab, one via some other extension) and wouldn’t be without ’em. Most of the rest of the family uses Firefox too, and I believe Firefox is the leading browser used by my coworkers at FastMail by quite a margin.

Firefox’s awesome bar is aptly named. It’s way more useful than Chrome’s.

I am an idealist and not fond of Google, and while that’s a factor, it’s not the primary reason I use Firefox. I use Firefox because I find it simply better. (Same deal with using DuckDuckGo over Google. It’s more usable with keyboard shortcuts and bangs, and finds results every bit as good as Google’s.)

I also use Firefox on my phone; there, it’s more of a mixed bag: it’s markedly slower than Chrome in general, but I can install regular extensions like uBlock Origin and Stylus. There, my dislike of Google is more of a factor.

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#66
I like idea to list what Firefox does better.

My addition to the list: Firefox has better kerning support while Chromium team ignores the problem (e.g. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=888374... and https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=912052).

For the context: I'm software developer working in printing.

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#67
post #62

1. I like firefox's omnibar/awesomebar more than chrome's. It seems to read my mind better [1]. It also have some features [2] I think most people are unaware of. 2. Firefox have bookmark tags. 3. Firefox scroll the tabs instead of compressing the width until they're unusable. (It's also possible to set the minimum tab-width) 4. It's much simpler to get ctrl-tab MRU behavior [3] in Firefox last time I checked. 5. Fir…

bookmark tags are probably going to be the next to go when Firefox decides "too few people are using it".

No, that’s bookmark keywords, which are not widely used and difficult to discover, and for which there’s a rough alternative in search engines. I believe it’s on the chopping block, or at least it looked to be a few months ago, as I discovered when looking through Bugzilla to see about exposing bookmark keywords to WebExtensions so that I could make an extension that would implement DuckDuckGo’s !bangs in the browser.

Tags, on the other hand, are actually shown in the regular UI without needing to open the full bookmark manager. Much more discoverable, at least.

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#68
post #10

A big problem is that the web standard is too complicated. Browsers are pretty much a virtual os that can do almost everything. For anyone to make a browser from scratch today is not feasible. We will move towards a monoculture, because there is no alternative unless we make a drastic shift in rethinking how the web should work.

Maybe Chrome can compete with itself by swapping out the rendering and Javascript vms.

> Maybe Chrome can compete with itself by swapping out the rendering and Javascript vms.

Not that I have any insider information but from the complaints I've read about how the committees that handle promotion requests at Google, I'd be surprised if there aren't Google engineers already trying their hand at this.

What I'd like to know is how much does Chrome cost Google? I've read that Mozilla spends just under half a billion dollars a year so I'd expect Google likely spends at least a billion a year on Google Chrome (and associated tasks). Not sure how we'd come up with a number though because I wouldn't know how to put a price tag on things like webp, webm, depot tools, or the Google infrastructure that Google Chrome team gets to use (presumably for free).

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#69

I’ve been using Firefox since about 0.93, with about a year in the middle when I used Chrome as my primary browser, because it ran from a USB disk much better than Firefox did at the time, and that was what I needed at the time. (I am glad that Chrome came along, because by showing how bad Firefox was in some areas it spurred Mozilla on to improve it, so that it’s no longer bad like that.) I look at the sessions of p…

> I currently have 165 tabs spread across three windows

How do you manage this setup? I'm specifically interested in how you can assign tabs to different windows and have this information persist across restarts.

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#70
I use Firefox not because I am scared of Chrome or Chromium. I mainly use it because it has Tree Style Tab extension and it's mobile version allows installing Ublock Origin adblocker. And then to get sync and all the nice things across the board, I use it on all my devices. I don't see the bad power consumption on my MacBook as some have mentioned and it doesn't feel slower than Chrome.
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