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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

#471

Post by codalan »

dandellion wrote: post #410
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…

They removed RSS, removed compact mode, removed bookmark descriptions... I'm scared that at their current pace by 2030 they'll remove the last remaining feature and it will disappear.

Sometimes I wonder if Mitchell Baker and the product team are paid by Google to destroy their own browser.

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

#472

Post by madeofpalk »

wrldos wrote: post #76
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.

Lets be clear here. They were only tested on some developer's fast machine on Chrome. All the users are going to be using it on some bag of shit $300 laptop running crapware infested Edge so they will be suffering like your Firefox users are. The problem is the left hand side of the chain. Stop pulling in thousand layer garbage abstractions and making the user pay the penalty for it.

No, Firefox just flat out has some worse JavaScript performance and bugs/incompatibility with other browsers.

I’ve been/am currently burned by Firefox’s pretty poor IndexedDB support and performance. IDBObjectStore.getAll() fails with a cryptic exception if you store too much in IndexedDB (iirc 256mb is the limit), whereas Chrome and Safari have no problem with it. It also has terrible performance - about 4x slower than Chrome, with Safari having the best performance.

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

#473

Post by pja »

rft wrote: post #431
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…

As a long time FF user my opinion of it took quite a hit recently. I wanted to hack together a small personal extension, likely outside the scope of what Tampermonkey can do easily. I was really shocked by the mandatory signature enforcement. You need to get your extension signed by Mozilla with no way to disable it in the standard FF, the about:config setting does nothing (see [1]). Your temporary extension will als…

Usually you find that the reason these barriers exist is because people were abusing the previous system.

There are (sadly) plenty of people out there who will install a browser extension & tweak an about:config setting if you set up the right incentives to get them to look past the warnings.

The price of protecting these people from those that would take advantage of them is developers having to download a different version of the browser in order to develop their extensions.

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

#474

Post by ccouzens »

crazygringo wrote: post #142

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…

> I can guarantee you that Google makes sure Gmail loads at least as fast in Chrome as in Firefox.

Why? I can imagine them working hard to make sure that Gmail loads fast in Chrome. The Gmail team probably suggests changes to the Chrome team and vice versa.

So long as Gmail is fast in Chrome, I can't imagine Google would be all that upset about Firefox or any other browser loading it faster. At most it would be an indicator that they need to make changes to stay competitive.

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

#475

Post by archontes »

bmn__ wrote: post #300
archontes wrote: post #267

I want to begin typing a website's name, have firefox recognize it and indicate it to me, and press 'tab' to begin searching. The lack of that single feature makes firefox unpleasant to use for me.

What does begin searching mean? I just tested, the tab key cycles through the list of results for the input typed into the location bar. What should happen instead?

If I type 'goog', and the history result is google.com, then pressing tab should result in calling the search function in the tab with google as the search engine, and with the cursor in the box for the query.

It should not cycle through the drop down menu.

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

#476

Post by archontes »

rrishi wrote: post #440
archontes wrote: post #267

I want to begin typing a website's name, have firefox recognize it and indicate it to me, and press 'tab' to begin searching. The lack of that single feature makes firefox unpleasant to use for me.

This feature is present in my install. You should try updating perhaps.

Will try.

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

#477

Post by cx0der »

hosteur wrote: post #422
raffraffraff wrote: post #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 ea…

Would love to actually be able to use Firefox Sync. But I refuse when I cannot self host it. It seems it is not actually possible to self host it.

Looks like you can with some extra steps https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncstorage-rs

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

#478

Post by zamalek »

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.

On the contrary, colossal GitHub diffs routinely crashed Chrome for me [in the past], while Firefox dealt with them effortlessly. Different browsers have different strengths.

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

#479

Post by innerbits »

account42 wrote: post #390
innerbits wrote: post #130

Firefox is my primary browser at present but definitely has annoyances: - unable to close pinned tabs without custom extensions - unable to undo close open tabs after closing last window (also solved with extension) - pins itself to taskbar and install desktop icon on every install - I prefer how downloads' progress is handled in Chrome better - Not all settings are synchronized (esp. around privacy), making it very…

> unable to close pinned tabs without custom extensions Middle click works and there is also a context menu option to close the tab.

I should've clarified that I meant closing using keyboard shortcuts

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

#480

Post by overtomanu »

djbusby wrote: post #261
Idiot_in_Vain wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you can just use FF containers - which is 99% less work.

Yea, but those came about after I'd built the wrapper for quickly launching different profiles of either Chrome or FF. FF containers are more work than the 2 clicks I do now, powered by some Python I wrote like 15 years ago (with minor maintenance).

you still have to switch through browser windows right? with containers it is just a tab click and you can put related tabs for a particular topic in a single window
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