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I've started using Firefox and can never go back to Chrome

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Re: I've started using Firefox and can never go back to Chrome

#201

Post by the_gipsy »

koonsolo wrote: post #176
the_gipsy wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assure you, if you had developed against firefox first, you would have found "performance bugs" on chrome. Source: I developed a web game.

For me, it seems with the latest update of firefox, some textures are not rendered properly. All works fine in the other browsers. Before that, some other update gave issues with some certificate. Looking at all the issues this browser causes, and the very low usage, I'm not spending time tracking down what is going wrong. Safari on iOS is such another problem child, but used high enough to justify the time to invest…

The low usage is a fair point, but "all the issues this browser causes" simply isn't true. You would say the same about chrome if you developed for Firefox first.

Re: I've started using Firefox and can never go back to Chrome

#202

Post by zamadatix »

baal80spam wrote: post #77
flerchin wrote: post #16

Firefox on Android with ublock origin is a _must_. Otherwise the mobile web is nigh unusable.

I use Brave - it has builtin ad/scriptblocker.

There are a dozen Chromium browsers on Android with blockers but it's still not quite the same.

Raw < DNS blocking < custom solutions < uBlock Origin

Re: I've started using Firefox and can never go back to Chrome

#203

Post by wnevets »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #93
binarymax wrote: post #44

I don’t intend to diminish the article itself, since yes ditching chrome and Google is a win for personal privacy. But I can’t ignore the irony of this article loading dozens of trackers. Like, is the cognitive dissonance that bad in web publishing? Do the teams writing the content not know about the way the publisher presents the data? Is this just pure hypocrisy? I’m at a loss.

I feel this sort of black-and-white thinking about morality is responsible for a lot of problems. Short of moving into the desert and becoming some sort of Hesychastic hermit, it's difficult, near impossible to lead a life where you do no evil. The conclusion many draw from that is not to even bother trying. I think the better conclusion is to be forgiving of the failings of others, because they too struggle with thi…

Reminds of "You say you want to improve society and yet you live in one, how interesting"

Re: I've started using Firefox and can never go back to Chrome

#204

Post by banana_giraffe »

kretaceous wrote: post #28

Along with obvious ones like uBlock Origin working perfectly, etc., I have 2 other favorites: - Native reader mode - Native PiP mode for videos Yes, you can get extensions for this in Chrom(e/ium) but having these as a native feature is really nice. Things I want to see in Firefox: - Good/extensible keybindings - Tab groups - Tab search EDIT: How do I break sentences to newline in HN without really making a new parag…

For what it's worth, Chrome has a reader mode, just hidden behind an experimental flag, and a native PiP mode for videos, accessible with the media controls icon that appear when a video is playing.

Re: I've started using Firefox and can never go back to Chrome

#205

Post by thegabez »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #80
thrown1aways wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The article specifically talks of Google breaking those AdBlock extensions I bet there will be a Chromium for without that + Brave is already working on it. Power of open source I guess?

Every feature removed by Google will have to be maintained by the open source community instead. That's going to be a workload that I'm not sure who is going to pick up. After all Chromium right now is maintained by Google. There's some forks like degoogled chromium but they are mainly focused on removing features, not rebuilding ones that have been deprecated. Brave is an option but I don't really like where they're…

The crypto aspect is opt-in

Re: I've started using Firefox and can never go back to Chrome

#206

Post by jlokier »

invalidname wrote: post #21
haunter wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Total opposite experience. At least under Windows Chromium is perfectly fine with 150-200 tabs but FF starts falling apart

Odd. I've been on Mac for more than a decade so no idea. Notice that this only became a thing with Quantum so if you used an older version of FF it wouldn't apply.

I'm with the GP on this: FF is unstable with lots of tabs. It's a big memory hog, and it's been like this for about 2 years in my experience so far. I'm using a Mac with 16GB RAM, and it's not enough for Firefox any more (something changed, it used to use less memory). Using current FF (103.0b9). Lot of tabs, but auto tab-unloading so there shouldn't be a large number active.

Reported memory use (in Activity Monitor) varies, 8GB-25GB, and it's often swapping. Sometimes it uses more, and then the system crashes. Often it fills my remaining 20GB of free disk space for swap space. Surprisingly, even opening HN pages and only following HN links (i.e. all text-only), the memory usage grows in this way over time.

It's not possible to scroll smoothly or type a comment like this without pauses and occasional spinning beach balls. Just scrolling through a page with two-finger drag, it will stop every 10 seconds or so, then jump forwawrd. Moving the cursor with the cursor keys in this comment window is similar.

The constant jank and pauses may be entirely due to memory swapping or some other garbage-collection like overhead, I have no way to know.

What other people write about this issue is that it's likely some combination of number of tabs, and the fact that modern pages need a lot of memory for large images, compositing and similar, and perhaps memory used by add-ons. But all of this has suggestive evidence against it: If I go to about:memory and click "Minimize memory usage", it consistently brings memory usage down to not much more than when Firefox starts up, without appearing to change any functionality or deactivate any tabs; and when it starts up it's using less than 8GB despite loading up the same session. It also does this itself spontaneously from time to time, though not reliably enough.

That said, I switched from Safari when I realised Safari was also being a memory hog and was causing everything else on the laptop to be slow. At the time I switched, Firefox was a lovely breath of fresh air in that department. Even though I copied over all my tabs from Safari (by hand), Firefox ran in very much less RAM, and life was good again on the laptop.

Something has changed since then, making Firefox much worse for memory usage, and I don't yet know what it is.

Re: I've started using Firefox and can never go back to Chrome

#207

Post by notriddle »

blacksmith_tb wrote: post #164
binarymax wrote: post #44

I don’t intend to diminish the article itself, since yes ditching chrome and Google is a win for personal privacy. But I can’t ignore the irony of this article loading dozens of trackers. Like, is the cognitive dissonance that bad in web publishing? Do the teams writing the content not know about the way the publisher presents the data? Is this just pure hypocrisy? I’m at a loss.

I was actually pretty impressed that a mainstream (read 'ad-supported') outlet would run a story that encourages you to set up uBlock etc. Contrast it to this article that ran recently[1] on 'securing' your browser, which somehow manages to avoid mentioning that adblocking would do ten times more to protect you than any of the config changes it recommends... 1: https://gizmodo.com/how-to-secure-web-browser-chrome-edg…

There are sensible game-theoretical reasons for behaving that way. Individually choosing to forgo tracking hurts your competitive edge. Advocating for ad blocking, environmental regulations, or other industry-wide taxes will not, because everyone gets hit with that.

Re: I've started using Firefox and can never go back to Chrome

#208

Post by nathanasmith »

doliveira wrote: post #2

Firefox is worth it if only for the Ctrl-Tab going in recently used order. I hate using Chrome and needing to use the mouse to actually find a tab

As another big fan of MRU tab switching, there is an extension for Chromium based browsers that enables this feature: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/quick-tabs/jnjfein...

Re: I've started using Firefox and can never go back to Chrome

#209

Post by layer8 »

tryauuum wrote: post #189
layer8 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The benefit of MRU order is that you can use it blindly to go to the last- n th tab without having to eye-coordinate with the contents of the tab bar. It becomes an automatic muscle-memory thing.

how many tabs do you have open on average?

Usually less than a dozen, though I don’t quite see the relevance. I use MRU to switch between two to four (rarely more) related tabs.

In code editors I often have several dozens of tabs open, and MRU is a crucial usability feature when coding, so I’d say that its usefulness is independent of the number of open tabs.

Re: I've started using Firefox and can never go back to Chrome

#210

Post by pure_simplicity »

kretaceous wrote: post #28

Along with obvious ones like uBlock Origin working perfectly, etc., I have 2 other favorites: - Native reader mode - Native PiP mode for videos Yes, you can get extensions for this in Chrom(e/ium) but having these as a native feature is really nice. Things I want to see in Firefox: - Good/extensible keybindings - Tab groups - Tab search EDIT: How do I break sentences to newline in HN without really making a new parag…

Tab groups and search are there in the form of this excellent extension. Not native, but so well integrated that it may as well be.
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