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Firefox 78

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Re: Firefox 78

#81

Post by markandrewj »

viraptor wrote: post #20
Santosh83 wrote: post #12

Great. Unlike many, I walk my talk and have always used Firefox since more than a decade with no exceptions. The very commonly given reason that DevTools are better in Chrome still doesn't stop one from using Firefox for all other general browsing. Unless we support alternatives we really shouldn't complain when they gradually die off in a space that is increasingly coming under the control of giant corporations with…

> reason that DevTools are better in Chrome still doesn't stop one from using Firefox for all other general browsing It doesn't even stop you from developing with FF. DevTools were completely usable for years and unless you need very specific functionality, FF is just fine.

Chromes development tools are good, but Firefox has also been doing some interesting things in this area recently. In some regards Firefox pioneered modern web development with tools like Firebug. I think developers sometimes forget that for most users developer tools are not a selling feature though. There are a number of things, that both Firefox, and Safari, do better then Chrome, from a regular user perceptive. As an example, download and bookmark management. All that said, Chrome for mobile is really excellent compared to some of the other Android browsers I used in the past. I use both browsers daily, and find things I like and dislike about both.

Re: Firefox 78

#82

Post by chrismorgan »

snide wrote: post #25

I recently tried to move to Firefox (again). I try to to this every couple years. I run into the same three blockers every time. 1. The omnibar completion isn't as good. Chrome figures out where I go pretty regularly, and autocompletes extremely well based upon habits. 2. The dev tools aren't as good. I mostly work in the frontend, and simple things like how you write css overwrites with tab completion is just not as…

1: as you’ve said, the quality of such completion depends on habits; if you’re just shifting to the browser, it doesn’t have the full details with which to do good completion.

2: strongly disagree; I use Firefox, and on the odd occasion where I’m doing something in Chrome, it drives me insane with things like its CSS editing experience, because it does things in what I find to be a much less native-feeling way, whereas Firefox’s behave in a mostly native way, so that things tend to work the way I expect. There are glaring problems with it (mostly around “completing” a whole new word when I press Space when that makes an otherwise valid value nonsense; I really should file a bug about that if there isn’t one), but I find Chrome much more painful to interact with. And what do you know, a lot of it probably comes down to familiarity and what you’re used to.

3: Chrome is a disaster for large numbers of tabs. On most screen sizes it’s just about hopeless with even thirty tabs, maybe as few as twenty, both for reasons of performance and because of its infinite tab shrinking folly. Firefox, on the other hand, can handle hundreds of tabs in a session with perfect equanimity (though performance will definitely be affected by that point).

On DuckDuckGo, I find it to yield good results most of the time, and it’s rare for me to reach for !g.

In most of these sorts of things, it’s much more about what you’re used to and know how to interact with, than any inherent superiority of one over the other.

Re: Firefox 78

#83

Post by buu700 »

Santosh83 wrote: post #12

Great. Unlike many, I walk my talk and have always used Firefox since more than a decade with no exceptions. The very commonly given reason that DevTools are better in Chrome still doesn't stop one from using Firefox for all other general browsing. Unless we support alternatives we really shouldn't complain when they gradually die off in a space that is increasingly coming under the control of giant corporations with…

That was one of my bigger reasons for a long time, but last I checked FF's dev tools were finally comparable to Chrome's.

At this point I'm just blocked on https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042. I've seriously tried switching to Firefox a few times, and I really want to switch, but it's just not acceptable to have my CPU regularly pinned at 200%.

Re: Firefox 78

#84

Post by Jallal »

askjdlkasdjsd wrote: post #70

Hate to be cynical, but I feel like they're just releasing a new one every week just to stay in the news.

Last release was done on June 2, 2020: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/77.0/releasenotes/

The previous one was done on May 5, 2020: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/76.0/releasenotes/

And the one before on April 7, 2020: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/75.0/releasenotes/

More or less, one release per month. Hardly "every week".

Re: Firefox 78

#85

Post by monus »

jiggawatts wrote: post #37

Wow, they finally got around to fixing a certificate-handling issue. That must have closed a bunch of decade-old bugzilla issues. Now if they could just get around to supporting intermediate CA certificates and all of the Windows certificate stores, not just a couple of randomly chosen ones, that would be swell. Also, IPv6 support in PAC files would be nice. If any Mozilla employees come to YC News: Unimportant-seemi…

I have resisted using anything other than Firefox since the IE days but I have been literally forced to switch to Chrome because of this issue on my work Macs and every time I checked, I was surprised to see that’s not implemented. Finally. Thank you Mozilla!

Re: Firefox 78

#86

Post by lou1306 »

akerro wrote: post #11

Pocket is great and totally deserves more promotion. I know this will trigger a lot of people saying it's spyware, I used to think that too, but then I embraced it and it's great for bookmarking, syncthing tabs, reading news as podcasts on mobile etc. It's great.

I also use Pocket a lot. Alas, I do wish that they had Kindle integration... As of now I use crofflr [1], which mostly works but is unfortunately no longer updated.

[1]: https://www.crofflr.com/

Re: Firefox 78

#87

Post by wybiral »

Santosh83 wrote: post #12

Great. Unlike many, I walk my talk and have always used Firefox since more than a decade with no exceptions. The very commonly given reason that DevTools are better in Chrome still doesn't stop one from using Firefox for all other general browsing. Unless we support alternatives we really shouldn't complain when they gradually die off in a space that is increasingly coming under the control of giant corporations with…

I used Firefox back when it was competing with IE and then switched to Chrome for a while because of the performance difference.

But I switched back to Firefox about 3-4 years ago because of the growing Chromium monoculture (which is even greater now that Edge is using Chromium) and because the performance difference isn't really there anymore.

Mozilla has done some great work keeping up with the giants. Lockwise is great. The "Send Tab to Device" feature is great. And they're working on offline voice recognition using DeepSpeech in future releases (Chrome sends all audio to Google for recognition).

Re: Firefox 78

#88

Post by jamoes »

msclrhd wrote: post #7
Yizahi wrote: post #3

Does it still have UglyBar from v77? Seems like that.

See https://www.userchrome.org/megabar-styling-firefox-address-b... for details on how to customize the new address bar, including userChrome css for keeping its size confined to the dropdown UI like other dropdown/combobox UI elements.

Also see https://superuser.com/questions/540851/go-back-to-not-select... for details on how to disable the clickSelectsAll behavior.

This issue is frankly far more important than the style changes they made. It's a muscle-memory issue that drastically affects daily usage. I was so desperate to restore the sane behavior of not selecting everything on a single click that I was recompiling firefox prior to discovering this workaround.

Re: Firefox 78

#89

Post by philliphaydon »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #40
logeekal wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love to use Firefox and run away from Chrome but but but... Firefox never matches the perfomace with chrome in windows. Although, in linux Firefox FTW.

I use Firefox as my main browser, in Windows 10. Its performance doesn't seem any worse than Chromium-based browsers. Looking at [0], it seems Firefox sometimes outperforms Chrome/Chromium, and sometimes loses, depending on what's being tested. [0] https://arewefastyet.com/

For me performance is better than chrome by a long shot now. Used to be FF was a memory hog and got slow and clunky. Now if I have 5 windows and 30+ tabs open for days, chrome will slow to a crawl while FF will happily continue to run at the same speed as if 1 tab was open.

Re: Firefox 78

#90

Post by wybiral »

burtonator wrote: post #38
Santosh83 wrote: post #12

Great. Unlike many, I walk my talk and have always used Firefox since more than a decade with no exceptions. The very commonly given reason that DevTools are better in Chrome still doesn't stop one from using Firefox for all other general browsing. Unless we support alternatives we really shouldn't complain when they gradually die off in a space that is increasingly coming under the control of giant corporations with…

Love that FF exists but one of the things that always strikes me is that if FF is successful in their mission they will cut off their major revenue channel. Google is still the majority of their revenue is it not? The reason they're making that money is off the backs of other consumers who are NOT benefiting from the privacy features that you guys want to see everywhere. Willing to be totally wrong here and would lov…

They've experimented with other forms of revenue. Things like Pocket and VPN [1]. I assume that if Google pulled the plug they could find another sponsor but Google may not want to do that anyway, otherwise they run the risk of being an obvious monopoly.

[1] https://vpn.mozilla.org/

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