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

marko.fyi

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

#331

Post by paulie_a »

codedokode wrote: post #256
paulie_a wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ip tracking is worthless. Most people have half a dozen devices. I was actually shocked recently that I have 22 devices on my network. Then think about a relatively small business. There could be hundreds of devices. All from the same ip

You can combine IP address with fingerprint built from WebGL video card information, fonts list and rendering details, OS name, CPU type, memory size (yes, browser provides this) and screen resolution.

A small network will likely have identical setups. Plus I pointed out directly the one case of ip tracking being useless. Clearly there are other way to track an individual computers. But your counter argument is irrelevant regarding in my limited scope reply

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

#332

Post by bit_4l »

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…

Didn’t know Firefox has this ability, it’s the reason why I have to stuck with Chrome ever since. Couples of click to switch profile and that’s it.

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

#333

Post by microcolonel »

catalogia wrote: post #300
microcolonel wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Create a browser monoculture just to satisfy webdevs who are too lazy or shitty at their job to support two(2)! I don't see why you have to be so nasty. I'm not lazy, nor bad at my job. Firefox has unique failures in standard compliance and the function of APIs. It's not just a matter of "supporting two browsers", it's a matter of working around the unique deficiencies of Firefox, for which there rarely exist equiv…

Are you too young to remember the IE monoculture? Otherwise I cannot fathom how you could be so petty and short sighted as to suggest that Firefox become a chromium browser. None of the bullshit you're talking about is more important than avoiding a browser monoculture. Not even close .

> Are you too young to remember the IE monoculture? Otherwise I cannot fathom how you could be so petty and short sighted as to suggest that Firefox become a chromium browser.

Are you maybe attributing the ill effects of the IE era to monoculture when they could be better explained by a single controlling interest? I don't think the current situation, where a set of related KHTML forks owned by competing companies make up about 90% of browser market share, is comparable to the IE6 situation.

> None of the bullshit you're talking about is more important than avoiding a browser monoculture. Not even close.

Can you please stop being so uncivil? It's totally unnecessary, and discourages people from engaging in good faith (since they can predict that you'll throw it in their face).

In any event. Chromium is not the new IE6, because it has infinite diverse controlling interests. If you don't like the direction Chromium is taking, and they won't take your patches, you can fork it or maintain a patchset. It is relatively cheap to fork Chromium, and definitely cheaper than developing your own separate browser engine for years, only to become almost competitive. If your patches are really that good, there's a great chance that they will make it upstream.

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

#334

Post by weaksauce »

catalogia wrote: post #247
2ion wrote: post #223

The only drawback I have with FF nowadays is history management. I have enabled 'infinite history' (do not delete old history, ever) so I can keep a journal of what I've visited when. The history, as large as it might turn out, is just a few MB of an sqlite3 database (places.sql) -- problematic is the management of it using the Firefox UI. Searching is laggy and deletion of swaths of entries is impossible as it makes…

> "and deletion of swaths of entries is impossible as it makes the history manager UI hang for many minutes or even hours (=essentially I always kill Firefox when I do this by mistake). I suspect the GUI constructs a view of the sqlite db using single GUI objects tied to single DB entries and therefore has maximum overhead." I've not probed this deeply, but I have encountered it and can confirm it's a problem. To giv…

so i did a little bit of digging into it and it looks like it does a delete command for each of the items that are selected in the list separately. this is all overly simplified as there are other things going on (selecting the nodes to be deleted as well as notifications to other subsystems.)

That item can be a node(website) that has thousands of visits associated with it so it needs to then delete each of those in multiple batches of delete statements chunked by the db variable limit(~100 or 1000 I think).

Then after that transaction sqlite rebuilds the indexes(17 by my count) on the database with those items missing.

then it does the next chunk and continues on in chunks until there are no more items to delete and then the next item that was selected begins the process again. there might also be a problem with redrawing the history list taking time away from the deletion itself too. it's tough to say exactly what the full bottleneck it but the chunking of the deletes like that looks like a culprit.

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

#335

Post by xen2xen1 »

robbrown451 wrote: post #262

My biggest gripe with Firefox is that it doesn't support MIDIAccess. So any web app that works with an electronic piano, doesn't work. They've been saying they are working on it for years. Works in Chrome, Brave, Opera, Edge, etc. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/MIDIAccess https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=836897 It's actually pretty bizarre since the basic functionality (hit a note on the…

Your biggest problem is that it doesn't work with a MIDI keyboard? Ok? I have to ask why this is so important? What is the use case here?

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

#336

Post by microcolonel »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #278
microcolonel wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...for a fraction of a second faster load speed of some pages (, which is often even "fake" as Google artificially slows down some pages for Firefox users or engineers them in Chrome optimization specific ways,) disregarding any privacy concerns... That is false and defamatory. Chromium is noticeably faster than Firefox on a large swath of popular websites and web applications, the majority of which Google does not…

Deactivate pre-loading of websites the website you look at links too and then talk again. Chrome uses all kind of tricks to trick you into thinking it is the faster rendering browser. Deactivate the gimmicks and then look at a comparison. There wont be much difference there. Also I'd rather have my browser have a low memory footprint, than using GBs of more RAM, just to load a page a fraction of a second faster. Stil…

> Deactivate pre-loading of websites the website you look at links too and then talk again. Chrome uses all kind of tricks to trick you into thinking it is the faster rendering browser. Deactivate the gimmicks and then look at a comparison.

Why would I hobble interesting performance features of the browser just to compare it unfairly to a browser which lacks those features, or doesn't implement them properly? FWIW I have some forms of prefetch disabled, it's still faster. Chromium is in fact faster, in addition to having more of those "tricks" to hide latency.

> Still the whole argument is laughable, because even if I saw every page a second or 2 slower, it would still be worth it, if it protects my rights online.

What rights do you gain by using a Netscape fork rather than a KHTML fork? Both Mozilla and Google censor extensions and occasionally install proprietary components the user did not ask for; but Google doesn't preach about being some saintly do-gooder (and Chromium distributions with privacy and do-good claims like this are about as trustworthy as Mozilla).

> Also using more memory just because I have more, to the degree of using all of it, is not a good strategy. Sorry, I run other applications too, the browser is not the only contender for my RAM.

AFAIK it will size down when other applications allocate more memory.

> I highly doubt that Firefox does anything half as aggressive with regard to memory as Chrome does, in order to "impress the user" with their speed.

Is that... a good thing? Seems like you're spinning Firefox lacking sophistication as some sort of great advantage.

Added: If you just don't want to be attached to google services, or have the possibility to accidentally enable a google service, you can try ungoogled-chromium.

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

#337

Post by agumonkey »

jnet wrote: post #7

I switched over to Firefox when I read that Chrome was limiting the functionality of ad block extensions and it's been a fantastic browser so far.

same, except it isn't fantastic but I can't suffer Google games anymore (also, my laptop is ancient)

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

#338

Post by hu3 »

lol768 wrote: post #169
Dumblydorr wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Please don't do that.

This thread is full of generic comments and anecdotes devoid of details. Did you downvote all of them as well? Or just the ones that don't agree with your opinion?

This is Hacker News not BugZilla. It's perfectly fine for users to expose their anecdotes without having to provide extensive details.

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

#339

Post by pbasista »

zamalek wrote: post #306
bobbylarrybobby wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scrolling doesn’t elastically over scroll; it just hits a hard stop at the page boundaries

Apple patented the elastic scroll.

Such a patent seems to be owned by Google:

https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2012148617A3/en

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

#340

Post by bondolo »

jedberg wrote: post #232

I switched to FireFox about a year ago. Containers is a killer feature. But the container UX is still not perfect. Only recently did they fix it so you can log into a site via Facebook or Google. But my biggest issue is power management. On my Mac, when I run Firefox, the fans spin at around 3K at all times and the load is moderate at all times. When I turn off Firefox and switch to Chrome or Safari, the fans spin at…

Did it not get better with FF 70 for you? They switched the rendering to use a better API on MacOS: https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/2019/10/22/dramatically-red...
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