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Firefox 65.0 released

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Re: Firefox 65.0 released

#151

I remember about a year or two ago, there was a lot of press on HN about a new Firefox engine that made it extremely fast. Ever since then, I've only seen negative comments about Firefox. Did that just not pan out as much as people had expected?

I think many people are still angry about losing their extensions and not having capable apis to be able to replace them.

Re: Firefox 65.0 released

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A scaled resolution is now default on most MacBooks. I haven't noticed battery problems but certainly seen RAM usage at least double that of Chrome and considerably above Safari.

If you are worried about battery performance, I can personally attest that Firefox is better than chrome in terms of battery performance. Still Safari is the best in terms of battery endurance (its a VERY SIGNIFICANT difference). But then again its Safari, so you have to decide whether you want a capable browser (FF/Chrome) or a battery efficient one.

In my personal experience, other than Apple crippling the extension feature by moving them over to the App Store, Safari is a pretty damn capable browser. It's actually been rather interesting to see drastical improvements in it yearly, even the Mojave build's come with a serious performance boost. Firefox overall feels a lot slower than Safari with some exceptions. The only major killer feature I've noticed is the Devtools on FF.

Re: Firefox 65.0 released

#153
post #2

Does anyone know what the decoding performance of AV1 is these days? I'd love to play with it, but back when I last tried my oldish laptop did NOT like decoding it.

dav1d is the state of the art currently, but i dont know if it's used by FF. https://code.videolan.org/videolan/dav1d

It is, however it's not enabled by default for now. It will be in a few releases after we figure about a couple issues with the build system.

Re: Firefox 65.0 released

#154

I remember about a year or two ago, there was a lot of press on HN about a new Firefox engine that made it extremely fast. Ever since then, I've only seen negative comments about Firefox. Did that just not pan out as much as people had expected?

No, Firefox has become faster and overall better. But there was a price paid, and not much gain in other terms. Extensions were lost and Mozilla still didn't deliver important APIs which people wait for over 2 years now. Number of users didn't really grow yet. New Engine also has still several problems. And the important android-version didn't receive the update as many people anticipated. There were also some privacy-related scandals from Mozilla, which seems to have eaten most of the shaky progress from that time.

Overall, still many reasons for people to be grumpy.

Re: Firefox 65.0 released

#155
I’m a diehard Firefox user and supporter, but with every release there are still things I wait on the WebExtensions support to improve:

1. There’s still no full featured Tab Mix Plus possible with the current APIs. That’s been a big bummer for some years now.

2. The most downloaded session management extension now is still not as rich and good as the old XUL extension Session Manager (from mozdev).

3. I probably have to search again for a WebExtension equivalent for this one. Lazarus was a nice form saving extension in the past. Not sure if something similar exists or is even possible.

Re: Firefox 65.0 released

#156
post #114

At the risk of a downvote storm, a few months ago I tried to switch from Chrome to Firefox until I had a call of two hours via Google Hangouts and Firefox started to degrade the voice until a point of no return. I don't know if this is common in very demanding "web apps".

Once Google finishes killing off Hangouts, maybe you can give it another try. Google has no incentive to fix performance issues for competitor browsers in a product that is end-of-life.

Re: Firefox 65.0 released

#157
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably. It's pretty sad when you see something great stuck in a local minima because of "thinking heads" that know better.

They should bring back Brian Eich, things were better for the users when he was in charge.

He's running brave now

Re: Firefox 65.0 released

#158
post #141
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pretense that all Linux users should be (or already are) technically capable is really harmful to the ecosystem. No, you should not expect Ubuntu or Debian users to figure out on their own (1) why the tar.gz file they download doesn't do anything meaningful and (2) how they will get this version of Firefox instead without any further instructions. Running Firefox from a tarball is a very specific use case for a s…

> No, you should not expect Ubuntu or Debian users to figure out on their own If someone knows what Debian is and has chosen to install it I think its fairly safe to assume they have some Linux knowledge. Ubuntu on the other hand is the most likely to work without any tweaking. Its the default choice for less technical people wanting to try Linux as well as more experienced people who want a hassle free install.

Maybe I should not have started with the distinction between "technical" and "non-technical".

My argument is that even technical users, with the skill to install Debian [1] or far beyond, should not have to figure out this problem. Even if your users can figure out how to solve such problems, they shouldn't have to confront them with a thing to figure out if you don't need to.

The Linux ecosystem is so full of the attitude "oh well, my users can figure it out". It really annoys me, and it really holds stuff back.

[1] This really is not an amazing skill. I know plenty moderately computer literate people capable of getting through the straightforward Debian installer that are not up to date on Linux packaging systems. Just think of all the intermediately skilled Windows users looking to switch.

Re: Firefox 65.0 released

#159
post #4

I feel like I've been waiting a long time for autoplay blocking - does this keep being pushed back or have I missed a feature cancellation/config setting/extension announcement?

I see it's available on Firefox Mobile (Android) under Settings → Advanced → Media → Allow autoplay.

Re: Firefox 65.0 released

#160
post #117

Still waiting for vimperator so I can use browser like I used to use only 2 years back. Tridactyl is good but no :map, no :js and alphabets instead of numbers for links.

When did you last look at Tridactyl?

- :js is there

- You can have numbers with :set hintstyle numeric

- You can have Vimperator style link filtering with :set hintfiltermode vimperator

- There's no map (and probably never will be), but you can bind sequences of keys to "ex-commands", which is probably 99% of what you want, e.g, :bind t open google what time is it

The main problem I have with Tridactyl is that it's pretty janky at the moment.

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