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Tell HN: Firefox Is an awesome browser right now

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171–180 of 619 posts

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

#171
For my new job, I've switched to using the Orion Browser [1] from Kagi since I was noticing some weird typing lag on my MacBook in Firefox. I still use Firefox at home on Windows, but native vertical tabs in Orion are enough for me to use it full time. It's also handy that it supports both Firefox and Chrome extensions, albeit some features don't fully work (e.g. "Block element" of uBlock Origin doesn't let me choose anything).

I'm not a fan of Mozilla currently, but they do have the least bad non-chromium, multiplatform browser out there.

[1]: https://browser.kagi.com

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

#172

I use Firefox sort of begrudgingly. It's marginally less bad than the other options, but it's still an awful browser. I vehemently disagree with almost all of its design decisions, and with every new release they seem to stray even farther from sane UX. It has hamburger menus on desktop and a lot of weird space-saving design that makes no sense on a modern high resolution display. Buttons are small, have cryptic flat…

> Buttons are small...

I don't understand this criticism. How often do you actually have to use those buttons? At best, once in a long while. So given that, why not make the buttons unobtrusive.

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

#173

I use Firefox sort of begrudgingly. It's marginally less bad than the other options, but it's still an awful browser. I vehemently disagree with almost all of its design decisions, and with every new release they seem to stray even farther from sane UX. It has hamburger menus on desktop and a lot of weird space-saving design that makes no sense on a modern high resolution display. Buttons are small, have cryptic flat…

Some of those things are sorted out easily with Librewolf (patched Firefox) and Arkenfox (drop-in user.js configuration).

Both are easy and encouraged to customize but also work fine out of the box.

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

#174
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…

Occasionally, the first page takes 30+ second to load. I am on Lubuntu 20.04 and only have ublock extension active.

Usually to "fix it" (bringing time to below 10s), Hamburger Menu -> Help -> More troubleshooting information -> Clear Startup Cache. Also making sure my dns/network is up by pinging successfully a external website before launching Firefox.

But sooner or later startup time will creep-up again. I'm not quite sure what's happening. Maybe it's trying to load various file from disk (and not the SSD), or waiting for some blocking network request. I guess maybe I'll get luckier when I'll migrate to 22.04. My chrome is completely broken and cannot be installed at all since I've inactivated Snap forever for botching the migration process from 18.04 to 20.04.

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

#175

I love Firefox too but this is a really weird post. The OP is clearly having performance issues with Chrome presumably due to extensions interfering or something else. I can guarantee you that Google makes sure Gmail loads at least as fast in Chrome as in Firefox. Chrome is customizable too (panes you can open/close), Chrome extensions are also thriving, and Chrome was the one who invented the "clean look", same as F…

> Chrome extensions are also thriving

Yeah, especially with Manifest v3 :) https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/chrome-users-beware-ma...

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

#176

I use Firefox sort of begrudgingly. It's marginally less bad than the other options, but it's still an awful browser. I vehemently disagree with almost all of its design decisions, and with every new release they seem to stray even farther from sane UX. It has hamburger menus on desktop and a lot of weird space-saving design that makes no sense on a modern high resolution display. Buttons are small, have cryptic flat…

This also sounds like Chrome and Edge.

Yeah.

I think part of the problem is that if all they're doing with their browser is to emulate Chrome, they'll never be more than a Chrome clone.

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

#178
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.

Can you give an example of something JS heavy that is slow in Firefox? I haven't encountered something like that in a very long while.

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

#179
post #49

> I'd be glad to learn of any other cool features and extensions that y'all might want to share. I'm sure others will be sharing it as I type this comment as well, but for many HN readers, Multi-Account Containers [1] are bound to be a godsend. Easily log in to different accounts for any website, in different tabs. Great feature that's not available in other browsers. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/mult…

Holy crap thank you!

I have to log into multiple Microsoft365 tenants and it drove me crazy with the amount of signing OUT I needed to do when switching accounts, to the point where my crappy workaround was to use different browsers for each account (Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Opera, Brave, etc) but I started to run out of different browsers.

This multi-account container extension is a godsend

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

#180

I love Firefox too but this is a really weird post. The OP is clearly having performance issues with Chrome presumably due to extensions interfering or something else. I can guarantee you that Google makes sure Gmail loads at least as fast in Chrome as in Firefox. Chrome is customizable too (panes you can open/close), Chrome extensions are also thriving, and Chrome was the one who invented the "clean look", same as F…

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