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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

#211

Post by einpoklum »

> I was having trouble loading GMail in Chrome

You should avoid using GMail. Messages sent from and to GMail addresses are occasionally copied to the US government, and analyzed and possibly copied by various commercial companies who pay Google/Alphabet for the privilege. (You should also encourage your friends to stop using GMail).

Also, regardless of whether it's GMail or not - use an email client. GMail and all other email providers suppose access using the IMAP and/or POP3 protocols. That (mostly) guarantees no ads, and is much faster.

As for Firefox - Mozilla has decided to block extensions' access to most APIs and limit them only to a "WebExtensions" API (even though Mozilla's internal UI code is basically just like an extension, i.e. they don't _have_ to do this.) So, FF is only partially customizable and manipulable, and the extension ecosystem is somewhat stunted. I use FF, but let's not go overboard with the praise.

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

#212

Post by BarryMilo »

tapoxi wrote: post #188
agluszak wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chrome extensions are also thriving Yeah, especially with Manifest v3 :) https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/chrome-users-beware-ma...

This post is over a year old. Requiring Manifest v3 has been indefinitely postponed. There are arguments for using Firefox, but if people keep crying wolf about Manifest v3 before it hits and has a negative impact, especially over such a long timespan, it loses its impact.

"Mandatory beatings have been indefinitely postponed"

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

#213

Post by propogandist »

Firefox gets all their operating funding from Google’s Search agreement. This prevents FF from protecting user privacy as it’d jeopardize their primary source of income.

Firefox also has a lot of telemetry and experiments enabled, even if users opt out in the GUI. These have to be disabled in the about:config setting.

It is the slow and uses a lot of RAM, but despite all these thing it’s the second most popular for a reason (kept alive as an easy way for Google Chrome to avoid anti-trust)

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

#214

Post by gabrielsroka »

smiley1437 wrote: post #179
Vinnl wrote: 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

Chrome supports multiple user profiles. I assume Edge and Brave do too.

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

#215

Post by VWWHFSfQ »

jodrellblank wrote: post #85
loa_in_ wrote: 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.

I recently wrote a small JS page, the core of it is a table of tens of thousands of items and a for(let i=0; i In Edge the page loads quickly and the loop is typically under 20ms. In FireFox the page lags many seconds while loading and rendering, and several seconds when the loop involves a lot of hide/show of the table. It's not that I haven't tested, it's that FireFox just isn't as fast as Edge. This simple approac…

I wouldn't make dom changes in a tight loop like that. Better would be to accumulate the changes that need to be made and then do a batch change operation instead of one at a time like it sounds like you're doing. That code would be slow in any browser.

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

#216

Post by VyseofArcadia »

tapoxi wrote: post #188
agluszak wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chrome extensions are also thriving Yeah, especially with Manifest v3 :) https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/chrome-users-beware-ma...

This post is over a year old. Requiring Manifest v3 has been indefinitely postponed. There are arguments for using Firefox, but if people keep crying wolf about Manifest v3 before it hits and has a negative impact, especially over such a long timespan, it loses its impact.

Yeah, there was some blowback to make the big G reconsider, but don't you worry. I'm sure they're cooking up something similarly nefarious to accomplish their goal.

Google is the world's biggest ad company. Sufficiently few people use ad blocking that I don't think it's an existential threat, but as long as the shareholders demand infinite growth, getting rid of ad blocking will be seductive to Google.

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

#217

Post by readingnews »

I use firefox a lot. When I have to build a PC / workstation for grad-students or labs, I install linux, and the distro I use has Firefox by default and no chrome installed. The number one complaint / request I receive when I build a PC / workstation for the grad-students after they get it? Can you please install Chrome?

When I ask them... they have not even tried Firefox. Chrome is all they know, and therefore they do not want to even look at Firefox. As a longtime user of Firefox, I find it odd. I suppose if you put me on a new box, with Chrome as the only browser that came up, I guess I would ask you to install Firefox :)

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

#218

Post by AltruisticGapHN »

Putting aside all politics, end of the day, despite all of Google's shortcomings - they actually got the UX of Google Chrome REALLY RIGHT.

The tabs are awesome. The unified search bar is awesome. The top panel UX is really tight and compact and looks good at the same time. The ability to sweitch between profiles which I now use a lot (work/leisure) works great.

ps: did I mention the smaller details like the immediate visual feedback you get when you use a search keyword? It's frigging awesome and one of the main reasons I abandoned Firefox and never looked back.

I mean even if you disliked Google you can just use Chromium or some un-Googled version.

Chrome is literally the BEST browser UX as far as mainstream is concerned. Obviously power users are always going to find issues with it. But as an attempt to provide a user friendly browser for the largest audience possible, it's simply excellent.

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

#219

Post by kiliankoe »

throwaway290 wrote: post #192
silon42 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to use it, until I wrote my own vertical tabs extension, which acceptably handles thousands of tabs...

Safari has vertical tabs natively now. The interesting part is hierarchical tabs

Where does Safari have vertical tabs? I've been using Orion for a while now mainly for that feature, a WebKit browser with well working vertical tabs.
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