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Switch from Chrome to Firefox

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Re: Switch from Chrome to Firefox

#381

Post by ProAm »

rkangel wrote: post #357

What is the actual performance story these days? Last time I tried Firefox (soon after they were making a fuss about Quantum) I was fairly disappointed. I'm including performance of the Android browser here (because they work in concert as far as I'm concerned). Also, what pain am I going to hit with DRM and online video? I use the usual suspects - Amazon, Netflix, Youtube.

FF is fast on the desktop but still very slow on android. Im not sure what the difference is, but Ive switched to using a chrome fork on android and FFon my desktop and am pretty pleased.

Why do you say they work in concert?

Re: Switch from Chrome to Firefox

#382

Post by mceachen »

asdff wrote: post #328
mceachen wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably because an adblocker, like virus detection, consumes potentially non-trivial CPU, and may introduce race conditions of extensions applying deltas to a DOM which results in rendering and behavior bugs.

adblockers are just filters and aren't scanning your files like an antivirus, little cpu used I imagine.

uBlock origin's lede is "Finally, an efficient blocker. Easy on CPU and memory." Ad blocking, pre-ublock, could take noticeable resources.

Re: Switch from Chrome to Firefox

#383

Post by benatkin »

MrRadar wrote: post #333
SilasX wrote: post #189

Um, Firefox does the same sorts of thing. A) Want to use unsigned addons to play around, or tweak your existing ones[1]? Nope, even if you allow them in about:config, you can't; you have to use a special development version and update it separately. B) Want to customize your keyboard shortcuts? Sorry, that's not safe, you have to use a crippled API that won't take effect until a given page loads. C) Want to control y…

> A) Want to use unsigned addons to play around, or tweak your existing ones[1]? Nope, even if you allow them in about:config, you can't; you have to use a special development version and update it separately. Signatures were mandated for add-ons because there was a plague of malware (or near-malware, such as third party anti-virus software) silently installing add-ons that broke Firefox in various ways. If the end-u…

Yes, I think that was actually a good choice. It's a bit of an inconvenience for people who want to install at our own risk, and we have to get used to a different colored icon, but it's too easy to get a user to go into about:config and change a setting and for them to forget about it. With Firefox Developer Edition they at least have to do a big download, install it, and go into about:config, and there's a chance they'll one day notice it and think "I'm not a developer. Why do I have Firefox Developer Edition?"

Re: Switch from Chrome to Firefox

#385

Post by BlueTemplar »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #60
radamadah wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Adblock Plus ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-plus/ ), and I also have AdBlock installed ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-for-f... ), just in case the first one doesn't work. They are two of the most popular adblock plugins on Firefox. Or you could just use uBlock Origin on Firefox ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin )!

I strongly recommend uBlock Origin in favor of AdBlock. AdBlock is a commercial endevour that makes deals with advertising companies to let their ads through.

Which you can turn off. And eyeo-owned Flattr is a way to do micropayments without ads.

Re: Switch from Chrome to Firefox

#386

Post by bluescrn »

ajudson wrote: post #343
bluescrn wrote: post #306

While Firefox is pretty great, be under no illusion that it’s a utopia of openness. It’s plugins are signed and quite tightly controlled. They banned the controversial ‘Dissenter’ plug-in seemingly for political reasons, and recently had the expired certificate ‘oops’ that rendered all plugins unusable for a day or so (without fiddly workarounds) They too could well bend to corporate pressures to limit ad-blocking, t…

Did they block it, or just ban it from their store? I thought people could still install it themselves.

The expired cert weekend gave me the impression that using unsigned plugins, while possible for dev purposes, is quite a pain, and therefore being banned from the ‘store’ would pretty much mean banned from mainstream (non-dev, non-forked) releases of Firefox?

I may be wrong, though?

Re: Switch from Chrome to Firefox

#387

Post by purple_ducks »

JoshMnem wrote: post #202
soulofmischief wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't get me wrong-- on the Firefox side of things, it's been the user experience of the browser itself which has been suffering. Every single update since Quantum has made things worse. Three days ago I opened up Firefox to find out all of my settings had been nuked, 200+ tabs, themes and extensions lost, about:config reset, search settings reset (hello again Google) etc. I'm still fuming mad about this. I don't fee…

It might just be the nature of computers. A similar thing happened to me on Chrome during a recent update. I was using it as a backup browser and lost everything there when Chrome stopped working. I deleted it from my laptop and haven't missed it at all. I now use multiple Firefox profiles to work as alternate browsers. If you go into your profiles directory is the old profile still there? It might have just created…

> It might just be the nature of computers

Computers are not conscious.

Re: Switch from Chrome to Firefox

#388

Post by fabrice_d »

mook wrote: post #265
fencepost wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really wish that if Microsoft was going to abandon having their own engine that they'd gone to Mozilla instead.

They really can't, though. There's a pile of corpses of people who tried to embed Gecko, because it turns out Netscape/Mozilla is really bad at keeping a stable ABI. I doubt anybody remembers K-meleon anymore, for example. As far as I know Servo was supposed to be the new, embeddable engine, but that's mostly cancelled now and the Rust bits are just being rolled into Gecko (via Project Quantum). I believe that's why…

Well, they are not embedding Blink to build a new browser either - they just fork Chrome. They could have forked Firefox the same way and customize it to their liking.

But that would not have solve their web compatibility issue in such an easy way.

Re: Switch from Chrome to Firefox

#389

Post by submeta »

I tried to switch two years ago, but back then Firefox was very resource hungry on my MBP so I stick to Safari. Chrome - with Google‘s approach to privacy - was no option at all, even if their browser was magnitudes better (which it was not; the differences are marginal in my perception). A few months ago I tried FF again. This time I was amazed. No CPU spikes. Super fast startup. - I cannot explicitly express my arguments and my sentiment, but my gut feeling says that Google‘s approach to privacy is totally wrong. So I don‘t want to touch any of their products. That‘s why I migrated my emails to fastmail.com, am using duckduckgo.com instead of Google.com, switched to Firefox from Chrome, to Dropbox from Google Docs. Abandoned Google Photos.

Re: Switch from Chrome to Firefox

#390

Post by jmull »

mmastrac wrote: post #288
jrochkind1 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How's the dev tools (aka whatever the equivalent of Chrome "dev tools" is)? As a web dev, the main reason I don't switch is I know how to use Chrome dev tools, and hate spending time I could be producing code instead learning new tools for something like this. But eventually I'll get myself to (prob to FF rather than safari, as long as I'm switching).

Safari dev tools are terrible and laid out in a completely un-intuitive manner. It's somewhat sad because the original Safari dev tools (which now live on as the foundation for Chrome's) were best-in-class. At some point they decided to mimic Xcode which pretty much put a nail in them for being useful for anything.

> ...completely un-intuitive manner

No, it's just that you're used to something different.

I primarily use Safari for development and when I switch to Chrome or Firefox it feels unnatural and weird at first. Then I acclimate and all is well.

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