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Using Firefox for a faster, calmer and distraction-free internet

marko.fyi

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161–170 of 374 posts

Re: Using Firefox for a faster, calmer and distraction-free internet

#161

Post by microcolonel »

No, you make it function properly before I consider “[giving] it a chance”.

Firefox is ridden with decade-old compliance bugs, and is generally a pain to write applications and documents for. That's just part of why web applications and documents work worse in Firefox than they do in Chromium.

Mozilla should derive from Chromium, if they want to actually deliver a web browser worth choosing. They can even fight their small battles with niche concerns more efficiently this way; but alas they will choose to make their users suffer needlessly for the scintilla of a principle of “implementation diversity”, which in practice just means “Firefox workarounds”.

Re: Using Firefox for a faster, calmer and distraction-free internet

#162

Post by ubercow13 »

dguo wrote: post #82

The post briefly mentions multi-account containers[1]. I have loved using them and regard them as a killer feature for Firefox. Very few websites support account switching. Google is probably the best example, and even then, I don't really want to log in to both my personal and work Gmail within the same session. But containers effectively and cleanly enable multiple sessions for all websites. Like tabs so many years…

Containers still have quite a bad UX though. It’s OK to open a tab in the desired container and load Facebook, but whenever you leave Facebook via a link, it will stay in the same container. If you eventually end up on a website you want to be logged in to, you’ll have to manually switch to the right container again.

It seems like containers are a powerful concept with multiple different uses, but the UX for each of those uses would need to be different and at the moment it’s not optimised for any of them. Maybe there are extensions that can fix this for specific use cases but when I looked it seemed hard to work out which ones I’d want.

Re: Using Firefox for a faster, calmer and distraction-free internet

#163

Post by RavinduL »

The only thing that keeps me from moving back to Firefox is the lack of support for precision touchpads---a feature present in Chromium-based browsers, Edge UWP, and even Internet Explorer!

Several issues have been opened on Bugzilla in this regard [1][2], none of which have been resolved to date.

[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1564022

[2]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=890878

Re: Using Firefox for a faster, calmer and distraction-free internet

#164

Post by zelphirkalt »

gear54rus wrote: post #76
vbezhenar wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there definite plans for uBlock Origin not to support new blocking API?

Come to think of it it's a great opportunity to move more people off chrome. Make sure proper ad blocking only works in firefox and make google choke on their evil policies masked with performance concerns.

Also less development overhead, when one does not need to develop for Chrome any longer. Seems like a sweet deal to take. With a more focused development, we might see more improvements for the code of the Firefox extension.

Re: Using Firefox for a faster, calmer and distraction-free internet

#165

Post by jeena »

Hitton wrote: post #147

Reasons I use Firefox instead of Chrome: better customizability (both about:config and interface - for instance allows me to move tab bar under urlbar, it's more complicated than it used to be though), allows autoscroll on Linux without having to resort to buggy extension, allows to disable calls to Google/Mozilla/Cloudflare..., and finally has generally more powerful addons (even though it's worse than XUL based one…

My reasons:

1. I feel I can trust Mozilla much more than I can trust Google.

2. I can run my own sync server for passwords, bookmarks, etc.

Re: Using Firefox for a faster, calmer and distraction-free internet

#166

Post by markosaric »

shultays wrote: post #156

I have been using firefox... forever now and only thing I miss is translate functionality chrome has. I searched for some extensions but they were opening a new window for translation which does not compare to google's inlined translation. Any suggestions?

I miss that too but the good news is that it is coming thanks to the EU funding[1].

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21321430

Re: Using Firefox for a faster, calmer and distraction-free internet

#167

Post by floatingatoll »

bhauer wrote: post #119
pcr910303 wrote: post #101

As I have already said in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21026626 : Firefox really should take care of it's native interface, it feels like a cross-platform app, and while it does have some worthy features to consider, for me it's too non-mac (and in that aspect, it really doesn't look like an Window/Linux app either) for someone using Safari to migrate.

> it really doesn't look like an Window/Linux app either) I guess this is a subjective matter because to my eye, it looks fantastic on Windows, matching the Windows 10 dark theme very well. The active tab highlight looks like the open app highlights in my top-docked Windows taskbar. And the Firefox Container color-bars look great below that. Its sharp edges are a match for the sharp look of Windows. To me, Chrome is…

On Mac it remains very apparent that most UI is constructed by Firefox rather than macOS native.

Re: Using Firefox for a faster, calmer and distraction-free internet

#168

Post by everybodyknows »

T-mobile's login page last month dropped Firefox support -- returned a cryptic complaint about "agent ID".

There is actually something we can do to make T-mo reconsider: Call up one of their agents and play the naive user reporting the problem. Then voice a complaint when told that "the site supports Chrome and Safari". These calls get logged as an expense, presumably charged to the earlier policy decision to drop FF.

Re: Using Firefox for a faster, calmer and distraction-free internet

#169

Post by lol768 »

Dumblydorr wrote: post #129
lol768 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I see you are downvoted and I think that is wrong. I downvoted the comment. I'm just not sure it adds anything useful to the conversation when it's not representative of the vast, vast majority of experiences that users have. It sounds like an anecdotal, isolated issue. I didn't post a top-level comment to say I've been using Firefox for over a decade without it crashing because it's just not remarkable or interest…

So you downvoted me for sharing the fact that I have given firefox numerous chances and it has continued to not be what this thread promised? That's just hivemind in action, you're punishing someone for going against the HN grain. Besides, by downvoting those with issues, you're burying their comment away from others who may have similar issues or know the fix. Downvotes should be for trolls and shills and low effort…

I didn't downvote you for dissenting, and I explained this in my comment.

But what can we take away from the anecdote? We don't know anything about your system's hardware components, we don't know if you're using X or Wayland, we don't know which versions of Firefox you tried. We've not seen any BugZilla reports or crash reports. We don't know what websites are problematic.

I would have no problems with folks saying "on device X, I had issues where the Firefox would use 100% of a CPU core when I visited website Y. Here's my https://profiler.firefox.com/ link, I reported it on BugZilla but the bug hasn't been fixed yet.". That's specific, useful anecdotal information that developers can follow up on and users can use to evaluate whether it's a deal breaker for them or not.

Generic comments like "performance is terrible for me, I've tried multiple times" are just going to get replies from users who've had no problems at all.

Re: Using Firefox for a faster, calmer and distraction-free internet

#170

Post by edcastro »

dguo wrote: post #82

The post briefly mentions multi-account containers[1]. I have loved using them and regard them as a killer feature for Firefox. Very few websites support account switching. Google is probably the best example, and even then, I don't really want to log in to both my personal and work Gmail within the same session. But containers effectively and cleanly enable multiple sessions for all websites. Like tabs so many years…

I just wish they had per-container proxy support. That would make me immediately switch to Firefox.
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