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Tell HN: Firefox Is an awesome browser right now

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Re: Tell HN: Firefox Is an awesome browser right now

#51
post #9

I just switched back to chrome for the same reason. Every page in Firefox was taking 60+second to load. Tried it on chrome and pages were loading instantly. I had originally switched to Firefox for privacy concerns but that and the memory usage/occasional crashing were too much for me. edit: not sure what the downvotes are for. I'm glad there's a second option out there. It didn't work for me but figured it was worth…

Snappyness is really a feeling. It could be cache or something else. Sometimes you want to use something else. Like cpu doing some work on something else while it put the browser on pause. All browsers should be able to render all sites really fast.

I don’t have a dedicated browser, I use edge chrome safari and Firefox interchangeably. However, I work on websites for a living. Using different browsers is part of the job and if I don’t I might miss something breaking somewhere.

Generally my thinking has been get passwords into 1P, store bookmarks and interesting sites in zotero. Now, all I use the browsers for its pure rendering capabilities.

Re: Tell HN: Firefox Is an awesome browser right now

#52
post #13

I love Firefox but some JS heavy demos etc. just don't work fast enough. I hate that I know exactly why. It's because they were only ever tested on Chrome during development.

If developers are writing in a vanilla style based on open standards, then why should there be performance idiosyncrasy among browsers?

Re: Tell HN: Firefox Is an awesome browser right now

#53
post #26

Feels a bit PG submarine-ish, but I'll bite. Firefox took away a lot of accessibility options in a large August 2021 and broke my trust in them. Good that they brought back extension options in Android, as I read other comments, but taking away the text size render option killed me.

Wow... after some searching I eventually found out what PG is... Paul Graham (PG) wrote an essay titled "The Submarine". http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Re: Tell HN: Firefox Is an awesome browser right now

#54
post #29
post #2

Firefox on Mobile supports uBlock origin, and is very nice as well. edit: on Android

Unfortunately Firefox on Android is noticeably slower than Chrome / Kiwi browser. But on desktop it is great!

It's a mixed bag. Ad blocking speeds up some websites substantially. IMO that makes Firefox mobile faster overall.

Re: Tell HN: Firefox Is an awesome browser right now

#55
post #29
post #2

Firefox on Mobile supports uBlock origin, and is very nice as well. edit: on Android

Unfortunately Firefox on Android is noticeably slower than Chrome / Kiwi browser. But on desktop it is great!

I frequently have to close all my tabs because the browser has become unresponsive.

Re: Tell HN: Firefox Is an awesome browser right now

#57

Not on Android (it stutters on scrolling even on newest Pixel). And I also think it's not the most safest browser on Android because Chromium is much more hardened there. Source: https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing

FWIW we don't have that issue on a Pixel 5a, OnePlus 7 Pro or Galaxy S21 Ultra.

Re: Tell HN: Firefox Is an awesome browser right now

#58
I switched to Firefox several years ago out of principal, but it's been a struggle to stay with it.

2 big issues I have are the tendency to freeze, and then say "restart to keep using Firefox" because it updated in the background and can't continue.

The other was almost a deal breaker, and still could be. When using a barcode scanner, Firefox can't keep up with the characters coming from the scanner. It will randomly drop characters. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why some scans weren't working, and the scanner works perfectly in Chrome, works perfectly in a text editor and intermittently drops characters randomly in Firefox.

If it were just the start character, or the end character it wouldn't matter so much, but it drops characters in the middle of a barcode. It has for years, it's a known issue, I don't see it ever being fixed.

Re: Tell HN: Firefox Is an awesome browser right now

#59
post #13

I love Firefox but some JS heavy demos etc. just don't work fast enough. I hate that I know exactly why. It's because they were only ever tested on Chrome during development.

Interesting, I haven't run into it as upto now and I was checking some pretty cool and intense CodePens earlier.

I'll look into some threeJS demos to see how it goes (ex. https://bruno-simon.com/ ). Are there any other specific JS demos you've had a bad experience with?

Re: Tell HN: Firefox Is an awesome browser right now

#60
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, what do you need different profiles for? Kids/SO?

I use it when I need to log into multiple AWS accounts.

The official Container Tabs extension on Firefox seems to be perfect for that. You can login to different accounts on the same profile.
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