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Switch from Chrome to Firefox

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Re: Switch from Chrome to Firefox

#571

Post by mook »

folkrav wrote: post #492
mook wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Servo was supposed to be the new, embeddable engine, but that's mostly cancelled now You mean the plan to embed Servo, or Servo itself?

I thought Servo itself was mostly de-funded outside of Quantum; was that not correct? I'd love to hear otherwise.

Re: Switch from Chrome to Firefox

#572

Post by sound1 »

asadotzler wrote: post #498
PascLeRasc wrote: post #442

I really want to switch to Firefox. I don't need it to be better-performing than Chrome on my work PC or Safari on my home machine - I want to support free software. But Firefox's text just looks bad, like really bad. On both a retina Mac screen and 24" 1080p monitors on Windows at work, the fonts look pixelated and blurry, like there's something around the edges of the characters. Contrast seems off too, much lower…

Can you share some screenshots? IMO, text looks somewhat better in Firefox than in other browsers.

Same thoughts! Firefox is MUCH better at font rendering in my experience. (Also MUCH faster with uBlock Origin and uMatrix)

Re: Switch from Chrome to Firefox

#573

Post by weaksauce »

aquova wrote: post #542
wishinghand wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I looked up Vivaldi Speed Dial. It looks like the same sort of thing Firefox, Chrome, and Safari have where a new tab has a pinned list of favorite or most visited sites. What does Vivaldi do that I'm not seeing?

Having switched from Vivaldi back to Firefox about a year ago, the Vivaldi speed dial is similar to the pinned lists of favorites, but it's much more user friendly. You can customize how many sites you see, how many are in each column, number of columns, etc. You can also change the icon to be anything you like. It certainly wasn't a dealbreaker for me personally, and as you said, pinned favorites serve the same purp…

There should be addons that customize the new tab page. I’m pretty sure it’s a possibility with more recent additions to the webext api.

Re: Switch from Chrome to Firefox

#574

Post by mccr8 »

nneonneo wrote: post #236
neogodless wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion, profiles are useful for separating "who I am." Whether that's my personal life and my professional life, or if it's me or my spouse using the same computer. Containers are useful for separating "who I am to my providers." As far as Facebook is concerned, I am a Facebook user, but I don't use Amazon or Google. But Amazon thinks I'm an Amazon user that doesn't use Facebook or Google. You can accomplish t…

You can definitely have two profiles open simultaneously - on MacOS, this is achieved with “open -n Firefox.app --args -P [profile name]”; on Windows, “firefox -no-remote -P [profile name]”. Admittedly, that should _really_ be exposed in the UI somehow, but at least it means you can wrap up the command in a handy desktop shortcut (e.g. one that says “my Firefox” and one that says “her Firefox”).

Be aware that running multiple profiles at once can cause issues with updates. One instance can end up updating, which means that the other instance can no longer create new processes, because it is still on the old version, and it gets updated in place.

Re: Switch from Chrome to Firefox

#575

Post by mattlondon »

ryanolsonx wrote: post #568

Do you guys use Firefox's password manager? Or something else?

I personally use Firefox's sync to save passwords across devices, but most passwords I store in a normal lastpass/1password/etc service.

It comes in very handy to have a non-browser-based password store for when you are out and about and dont have access to on of your own laptops/desktops but do have your phone handly (where you can look up the passwords)

Re: Switch from Chrome to Firefox

#576

Post by ummonk »

mrb wrote: post #505
Yoric wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember of projects that failed because Widevine explicitly didn't work in their Chromium. I assume that Widevine builds nicely but requires a Google-issued key to work.

You don't "build" Widevine. Google distributes a binary (libwidevinecdm.so) which implements a standard API that works with both Chrome and Chromium. The "master" DRM secret key is obfuscated and distributed in libwidevinecdm.so itself.

And no pirate has been able to extract the key yet?

Re: Switch from Chrome to Firefox

#577

Post by sh33mp »

chrisjc wrote: post #126
intothev01d wrote: post #20

I switched a couple of months ago because Chrome is just a bloated piece of garbage. One of my favorite features in Firefox is containers, which I used to have different users for in Chrome. Maybe Chrome has something similar now but it's one of the things I liked when I switched over. Haven't had any issues so far, glad I did

Same, but I was hesitant to switch. All I heard were comments like yours about containers and such. Finally after hearing about it so much, combined with all the talk about Quantum making things faster I gave FF a go. Haven't looked back. I still use Chrome for some tasks such as watching/listening to Youtube. (edit: not bc of performance, but bc I hate OSXs Cmd-Tab ordering)

>not bc of performance, but bc I hate OSXs Cmd-Tab ordering

That's a trivial but surprisingly reasonable reason for using two browsers. OSX has some annoying quirks sometimes.

Re: Switch from Chrome to Firefox

#578

Post by mattlondon »

betaby wrote: post #545

Firefox experience on Linux is lackluster. No hardware acceleration, neither on opensource video drivers, nor on proprietary(Nvidia and AMD). On the same hardware on Win10 Firefox experience is definitely better.

I've not found it to be an issue on Linux - seems to be about as performant as Chrome for me.

The only wrinkle was when I tried to watch Netflix the first time I had to click a button to let me watch DRM'd Netflix streams.

Re: Switch from Chrome to Firefox

#580

Post by smoser »

unsignedint wrote: post #450
wmeredith wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you use an iOS device, Safari is awesome. The integration between all your hardware devices syncing passwords, tabs, bookmarks, reading list, etc. kicks ass. That’s all not to mention its excellent built-in privacy features and that it’s really really fast.

I would argue experiences of alternative browsers on iOS is somewhat artificially hindered... Not that I'm saying Safari is bad browser, but on iOS you can't really set other browser as your default browser, browsers can't use their own engines, etc. etc.

You can set a default browser on iOS w/o Jailbreaking with my app UpTime https://www.producthunt.com/posts/uptime-3/edit
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