Live data from Hacker News

Firefox Was Always Enough

ianbicking.org

191–200 of 611 posts

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#191
Probably should not bother writing this because it's not going to be appreciated but I will try anyway.

The browser evolved from an information dispersal tool to become a networked operating system with a few implementations loosely compatible.

My suggestion is that now with web assembly we have a chance to almost start over with that. The problem is that people are not really approaching wasm as an operating system or shared platform. Rather they are making piecemeal efforts and adding little bits of functionality in here and there in different runtimes etc.

So so far it seems a missed opportunity to create a framework where people can collaborate on what the platform is. Something like a common ABI. Or a distributed package registry. Or a voting mechanism for new features.

We should have a new shared platform built on web assembly. And for the information distribution part, drop CSS and HTML and start over with content-centric networking and markdown. Focus on instant retrieval and pre-dissemination.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#192

I will make the same comment I made on another post regarding Firefox and Mozilla: a few tips from from no one: 1. Rewrite the Mozilla mission statement. I read that and have no idea what your organization does. Mission statements seem like corporate naval gazing, but if it is honest and well written it keeps everyone focused on what you are working towards. 2. Refocus on Firefox R&D and core technologies - Firefox n…

Mission statement has never made sense except to read into it anything you want that they may get into....

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#193

Recently switched back to Firefox after meandering between Edge and Chrome on multiple platforms (Linux, macOS and Windows) for work and non-work purposes. Firefox Dev Tools are fucking awesome. Firefox sync works great. All the extensions I want are here. It's fast enough in ways that microbenchmarks don't mean anything to me...and it's free as in Liberty (last but not least). I've been looking for a VPN, and even t…

where have you been my whole life? Raindrop looks amazing. Thank you!

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#194
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Safari is the most buggy browser in common use other than IE11. It's also the one that uses the least battery life, it's standards-compliant enough to render most web pages, and it's the only option on iOS.

> It's also the one that uses the least battery life Battery life has always been very top priority for Apple. That's the reason why Apple stopped supporting Flash and basically killed it (thank gosh).

[deleted]

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#195

I will make the same comment I made on another post regarding Firefox and Mozilla: a few tips from from no one: 1. Rewrite the Mozilla mission statement. I read that and have no idea what your organization does. Mission statements seem like corporate naval gazing, but if it is honest and well written it keeps everyone focused on what you are working towards. 2. Refocus on Firefox R&D and core technologies - Firefox n…

Nothing wrong with "We're Building a Better Internet", but they should up their game a bit by actively participating in privacy and projects to decentralize the web (again). For example, I have once envisioned a so-called 'privacy box': A physical box one put's in their own house and provides user friendly decentralized functions by installing extra software (ie using containers) for the local residents. Think filest…

sounds like an Unraid appliance.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can someone determine this? I wonder Firefox itself does not tell me the resource issues are due to an extension.

Firefox has a suite of `about:` URLs[1], one of them is about:performance which will show you the Task Manager (their name) which has a sort of CPU and RAM column. It even shows you when it's javascript on a tab chewing up resources and not the extension. [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/The...

I don't know if the situation has improved, but at least in past it seems about:performance has a problem picking out problems created by an addon doing a ton of DOM manipulation that chews up resources in the tab. Bisecting addons or my preference, a clean profile or safe mode, was usually what I suggested, but YMMV.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#197
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should to treat special characters first (somehow cannot search for ä,ö,ü)

It might be because it's searching using the IMAP server, for some reason those can't often deal with non-ASCII characters. Searching with diacritics seems to work for me in locally-downloaded folders.

Outlook manages to do that even with IMAP server (at least if I do not remember wrongly)

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#198
post #157
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with this. Safari and Chrome are both noticeably better than Firefox on OSX. I'm a Firefox fanboy, still use it on OSX because it's important to me, but the amount of random pauses, crashes, etc is just painful on OSX. It's like none of the Firefox developers use it on OSX or something. And before someone says "oh it's your extensions", that IMO leads to two talking points 1. It's 2020 and major extensions…

Sorry for nitpicking, but it's 2020 and OS X has been called macOS since 2015 ;)

In places. In some places it's still called Mac OS X.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#199
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox can trace its history back to Netscape Navigator, released in 1994. It has failed and come back before. Even if the Mozilla Foundation fails, Firefox would likely survive in some form.

That was in the age of desktop browsers. Nowadays most browsing is mobile, and all mobile devices come with a high quality browser component which is effectively part of the operating system already, used pervasively by applications on the device as a component rather than a standalone browser. Installing a browser, any browser, is already a niche thing to do for the majority of internet users today.

>all mobile devices come with a high quality browser component which is effectively part of the operating system already, used pervasively by applications on the device as a component rather than a standalone browser.

that sounds a lot like M$'s IE before the antitrust case, no ?

Post reply on HN