Live data from Hacker News

Tell HN: Firefox Is an awesome browser right now

news.ycombinator.com

231–240 of 619 posts

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

#233
post #119
post #70

I now use Brave on everything: Linux, Mac, iOS, iPadOS. Mozilla has some really weird stuff going on in their financials that bother me, and as a result, I just can’t use their products anymore. This is similar to my feelings about Google, Microsoft, and so on. I prefer tech companies to just be tech companies and not branch into other fields. I understand that Brave’s stance on certain things bleeds into politics wi…

Sure, Mozilla seems to have quite severe organizational issues, but to me, the deep integration of a crypto wallet into Brave is what's keeping me away from it. A Crypto pivot didn't end well for Opera, it ruined one of my favorite OSM apps for iOS (maps.me; fortunately there's an open source spin-off available now, i.e. Organic Maps), it left a bad taste in my mouth when Signal did it... I use Firefox as my main bro…

It’s possible to be completely bearish on the crypto ponzi, and use Brave with all the crypto features completely disabled.

Their crypto play is a novel revenue generation scheme which doubles as a “web3” marketing campaign to acquire a niche userbase. Good for them, but it’s not for me so I opt out all of it, and it’s trivial to do so.

Brave is more aggressive on protecting user privacy than all the other browsers also, including Mozilla who is completely dependent on Google to pay their bills.

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

#234

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…

> 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?

Have you tried changing the desktop Firefox icon to be chrome's icon and naming it Chrome?

This complaint sounds like the old meme from years back of not so internet savy folks who thought "the internet" was inside "the blue ball" (the old IE icon). I.e., these students only know "Chrome" and only look for the chrome icon. It would be interesting if they would complain if the icon matched their possible expectations.

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

#236
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

I have seen this phrase in several places, but cannot find the origin of the phrase. Where is it from?

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

#237
Recommend:

1. Sign up to Firefox sync

2. Install the Multi-Account Containers extension. Create containers to partition your identities. Eg: Banking, Shopping different Gmail accounts, different AWS console accounts etc

3. Install the "containerise" extension so you can create URL rules that automatically open sites in the correct container. (It can match URL regexes, allowing you to identify different accounts on each platform. Eg: on gmail, 'mail.google.com/mail/u/?authuser=hunter12@gmail.com', which you can bookmark as "Hunter12 Gmail")

4. Kagi search

5. uBlock Origin extension

6. Simple Tab Groups extension

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

#239

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 also has objectively better performance ( https://www.phoronix.com/news/Firefox-Chrome-109-Benchmarks ), especially for 3D performance. I'm sure on modern machines both browsers are more than fast enough, but I'm not quite sure why everyone seems to think firefox is faster. On the other hand, I feel like the nyxt browser ( https://nyxt.atlas.engineer ) has a spot on HN, its very much like emacs in the sense ev…

"objectively better performance" What are yon talking about? How many people browse the web on an i9 13900K with 32GB RAM? Try a 5 year old laptop with 4GB RAM and you'll see a completely different picture - Firefox is far better at managing limited memory.

Also on Android (probably on iPhones as well) Chrome doesn't allow installation of ad-blockers - making it 10x slower than FF with uBlock Origin.

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

#240
post #222

Funny timing for me to see this on HN today After some years of love/hate relationship with Vivaldi, I'm currently trying (once again...) to go back to Firefox after one too many chrome-based browsers fuck-up: opening Edge in a windows VM suddenly got my RAM usage up by 32GB, which were shared with my non-VM chrome-based browsers (chromium, vivaldi). First time just crashed my whole computer, second time I had to kil…

Recently started Vivaldi and it's pretty nice! I switched because it's the only decent browser that I can remove the address bar and use it only with a hot key. So far it seems fast enough and haven't run into bugs.

It does have a ton of features that I'll never use that I wish were extensions or something

Post reply on HN