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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

#411

Post by nend »

patates wrote: post #44
nend wrote: 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…

> Every page in Firefox was taking 60+second to load That really sounds like a broken installation. Out of curiosity, would you care to share what add-ons you have/had installed?

Yeah good point, could be that. Just keeper and ublock, on windows

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

#412

Post by rrishi »

qbasic_forever wrote: post #40

Your Gmail/Google cookies are probably in a weird state with chrome. Clear the cache and all saved cookies (will log you out of every site fyi) and I bet it will load right up again. But all that said, yes, Firefox is very good. I wish it was a little more bleeding edge with stuff like experimental web standards (native filesystem access, USB, etc.) but I still use it for most of my browsing.

> Your Gmail/Google cookies are probably in a weird state with chrome. Clear the cache and all saved cookies (will log you out of every site fyi) and I bet it will load right up again.

That's definitely a likely candidate. I'll try that, thanks!

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

#413

Post by jeroenhd »

altairprime wrote: post #372
marginalia_nu wrote: post #134

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…

Telemetry is not synonymous with tracking. You can implement telemetry while not tracking users. You can track users without telemetry. There is a lot of telemetry , but there doesn’t seem to be any tracking.

What's the difference here? There's a unique client ID included in the report, so that means statistics can be tracked at the individual level.

In theory you can have telemetry without tracking but I'm pretty sure nobody does it anymore.

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

#414

Post by rrishi »

AndroidKitKat wrote: post #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…

Interesting, definitely going in my list of browsers to try at some point in the future.

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

#415

Post by nend »

dxxvi wrote: post #153
nend wrote: 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…

Did you try to clean up Firefox (i.e. remove the whole Firefox profile on the disk)?

No, but at the same time I don't really want to diagnose my browser. I just want something that works.

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

#416

Post by GuB-42 »

I use both Chrome and Firefox daily and I must say that over the years, from personal experience, Firefox has improved to the point of being about as fast and stable as Chrome. The downside is that Firefox lost most of its identity, the big one being XUL, which made for more powerful plugins and customization.

So yeah, Chrome and Firefox are more of less interchangeable now and the choice is essentially about how much you like Google, and specific details. Details include the presence or absence of a plugin you particularly like, support for video codecs and DRM (for streaming platforms), and specific features and bugs. Generally, I find Chrome better on the "specific details", one of it ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=791429 ) actually was the trigger that made me switch to Chrome some years ago.

About extensions, I think all the extensions I use are available on both platforms or have equivalents. Now using

- uBlock Origin (of course)

- SponsorBlock for YouTube (autoskips sponsors in YouTube videos, user-contributed)

- Behind the overlay (remove most overlays, have many equivalents)

- URL to QR code (shows the current URL as a QR code, so you can scan it to open it on your phone, have many equivalents too)

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

#418

Post by rrishi »

eps wrote: post #69

If you are on Firefox and you run into an overall system slowdown, check how many subprocesses it has spawn. With the release of Fission (their website isolation tech) this number becomes unbound. In my case it was close to 100, each eating up at least 50MB with some well into hundreds megs. It was a swap fest. Not sure what they were thinking, but a simple post-update warning would'be been nice... or perhaps it was…

Thanks for the heads up. I'll keep an eye out.

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

#419

Post by xwowsersx »

jeroenhd wrote: post #408
xwowsersx wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I haven't figured out with container tabs: say I'm currently in one of the container tabs and I want cmd + T to open a new container tab. This doesn't work by default, AFAICT...instead it opens a regular non-container tab. How can I make it so that I get a new tab for the same container I'm currently on. Right now, I have to either go to File > new container tab or right-click the tab and click "new tab"..b…

Control + Shift + a number key should open a tab in a specific container. You can map containers to specific number keys in the addon settings.

Oh awesome, thank you!

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

#420

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

bmacho wrote: post #347

No it is not. In the past months/years they removed: - ability to zoom out images. Firefox has two different zooms, but none of them can zoom out images. If an image doesn't fit your screen, you can't see it period. - ability to open an image in the same window - ability to use different search engine in the search bar and URL bar - ability to quickly change search engine clicking the magnifier icon top right - custo…

zoom: not experienced here. I just visited a page with an image that doesn't (naturally) fit; Ctrl-scroll zooms it to fit (and back)

image in same window: seems true, but i can't imagine why you'd want this

search engines: I use single letter keywords to drive this. "g foobar" searches on google for foobar. "d foobar" searches duckduckgo. "o foobar" searches on google maps. Never had any desire to "quickly change the search engine" or have custom search engine URLs given keywords.

download speed: shows in the download dialog for me

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