At least it's an add-on and not built into the browser.
Orbit by Mozilla
131–140 of 417 posts
Re: Orbit by Mozilla
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
For me, the product differentiation of Firefox is a bunch of small convenience features which Chrome in its monolithism refuses to provide, such as: Allowing Backspace to go back a page. The built-in screenshot tool. Being able to turn off smooth scrolling. Support for a menubar, so that I can navigate the features I want quickly. Being able to choose page encodings (I use a non-Latin charset language). A usable/usef…
> Allowing Backspace to go back a page. I mostly agree, but whoever came up with this shortcut should get choked.
You may not like it, but I don't think it's a good reason to remove the option of enabling it for those who rely on it for daily work, which is what Chrome did.
Re: Orbit by Mozilla
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
For me, the product differentiation of Firefox is a bunch of small convenience features which Chrome in its monolithism refuses to provide, such as: Allowing Backspace to go back a page. The built-in screenshot tool. Being able to turn off smooth scrolling. Support for a menubar, so that I can navigate the features I want quickly. Being able to choose page encodings (I use a non-Latin charset language). A usable/usef…
Out of curiosity, what "obvious reasons" issues have you had with Docs and YouTube. I use Firefox for everything, including those, without problems. (Though not in any kind of advanced way.)
Depending on how beefy of a machine you're using, they're much slower in Firefox.
Re: Orbit by Mozilla
#134Why does Mozilla always spin their wheels releasing random side projects? Cloud-hosting an outdated tiny LLM that you can't swap out or run locally, to do basic summarization? This just doesn't feel like an area of strategic focus that makes sense for Mozilla. GPUs are expensive, talent to do inference well is expensive, and the actual product they're shipping seems pretty marginally useful at best. If they shipped v…
For me, the product differentiation of Firefox is a bunch of small convenience features which Chrome in its monolithism refuses to provide, such as: Allowing Backspace to go back a page. The built-in screenshot tool. Being able to turn off smooth scrolling. Support for a menubar, so that I can navigate the features I want quickly. Being able to choose page encodings (I use a non-Latin charset language). A usable/usef…
> Allowing Backspace to go back a page.
Easily solved by https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/go-back-with-backsp... their first party webext.
> Being able to turn off smooth scrolling.
Can disable as easily as Firefox -- chrome://flags/#smooth-scrolling
Actually, Firefox lately introduced a bug that will reset smooth scrolling everytime I remote desktop to my Windows machine. Which is annoying AF and they haven't fixed it for months.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1912246
> Being able to choose page encodings (I use a non-Latin charset language).
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/set-character-encod...
> "Restore Previous Session" feature.
You can do it since.. forever?
Settings -> On Startup -> Continue where you left off
Or just press Ctrl+shift+T when you restart Chrome to restore it manually.
There are some more feature-rich session manager extensions, but they're usually available across Firefox and Chrome.
Re: Orbit by Mozilla
#135Why does Mozilla always spin their wheels releasing random side projects? Cloud-hosting an outdated tiny LLM that you can't swap out or run locally, to do basic summarization? This just doesn't feel like an area of strategic focus that makes sense for Mozilla. GPUs are expensive, talent to do inference well is expensive, and the actual product they're shipping seems pretty marginally useful at best. If they shipped v…
For me, the product differentiation of Firefox is a bunch of small convenience features which Chrome in its monolithism refuses to provide, such as: Allowing Backspace to go back a page. The built-in screenshot tool. Being able to turn off smooth scrolling. Support for a menubar, so that I can navigate the features I want quickly. Being able to choose page encodings (I use a non-Latin charset language). A usable/usef…
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Re: Orbit by Mozilla
#136Why does Mozilla always spin their wheels releasing random side projects? Cloud-hosting an outdated tiny LLM that you can't swap out or run locally, to do basic summarization? This just doesn't feel like an area of strategic focus that makes sense for Mozilla. GPUs are expensive, talent to do inference well is expensive, and the actual product they're shipping seems pretty marginally useful at best. If they shipped v…
Well, you're in luck, sort of. Mozilla has vertical tabs in a new sidebar experience. It's the worst implementation of vertical tabs and a sidebar I've seen in a browser. Complete with typical Firefox UX, it's completely inconsistent and unintuitive to disable. A complete farce compared to Sidebery.
Re: Orbit by Mozilla
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most non-tech "normies", which is to say 95% of the population, barely know what a browser is. They couldn't describe the function of one, or discriminate what makes one better than another. They certainly won't give a crap about Servo, or extremely marginal improvements in page load time (at best).
Given that web browsers are the heaviest application most users are running, and they are running them on low end 10yr old laptops with 8gb of RAM, I think an ultra modern lightweight web browser would be noticeably better. Web browser crawl on these low end laptops. This is how Firefox became popular in the first place, by being better. The “we need an alternative to the “WebKit/blink/chromium” monopoly is what the…
Web slowness has much more to do with sites than with browsers. Where sites have accumulated Everest-sized balls of JavaScript mud, web engines have only become more optimized. If you visit “old web” style pages (Macintosh Garden for example) on old machines with modern browsers there’s no speed problem at all.
In the face of all that JS, there’s only so far a spiffy new browser can improve the situation, aside from maybe drop large chunks of legacy web standards but then you’re breaking large chunks of the web.
Re: Orbit by Mozilla
#138Why does Mozilla always spin their wheels releasing random side projects? Cloud-hosting an outdated tiny LLM that you can't swap out or run locally, to do basic summarization? This just doesn't feel like an area of strategic focus that makes sense for Mozilla. GPUs are expensive, talent to do inference well is expensive, and the actual product they're shipping seems pretty marginally useful at best. If they shipped v…
For me, the product differentiation of Firefox is a bunch of small convenience features which Chrome in its monolithism refuses to provide, such as: Allowing Backspace to go back a page. The built-in screenshot tool. Being able to turn off smooth scrolling. Support for a menubar, so that I can navigate the features I want quickly. Being able to choose page encodings (I use a non-Latin charset language). A usable/usef…
Chromium has "restore previous session" - I use it every time I start my browser (I've had a session going for months if not years).
Re: Orbit by Mozilla
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
> from Google to survive. If Google stops the payments, Mozilla probably goes out of business. > I think it’s pretty clear why they keep on doing this type of side project. It’s not clear to me. I agree they would have some problems if Google declined to pay them because the next best offer would be lower. But the best way to keep these payments, or to increase them, is by making a better browser and giving people a…
Most non-tech "normies", which is to say 95% of the population, barely know what a browser is. They couldn't describe the function of one, or discriminate what makes one better than another. They certainly won't give a crap about Servo, or extremely marginal improvements in page load time (at best).
They also wouldn't use Firefox - they'd use Chrome, Edge, or (more likely) Chrome/Safari mobile. People who use Firefox are already tech people or the family of.
Re: Orbit by Mozilla
#140Why does Mozilla always spin their wheels releasing random side projects? Cloud-hosting an outdated tiny LLM that you can't swap out or run locally, to do basic summarization? This just doesn't feel like an area of strategic focus that makes sense for Mozilla. GPUs are expensive, talent to do inference well is expensive, and the actual product they're shipping seems pretty marginally useful at best. If they shipped v…
> Why does Mozilla always spin their wheels releasing random side projects? Because some project manager had "AI" on his performance goals this year. Firefox is buggy as hell - which is incomprehensible given its age, but older brother Netscape had the same problem 20-ish years ago. The Netscape 4.x days were absolute hell and you could go hardly a day without the browser crashing. Despite this, it's packed with nons…
As a counterpoint I'm a heavy firefox user and haven't had crash in many months, and even that was because I was testing some experimental webgpu thing which I had to manually enable. It has its fair share of odd bugs but what kind of big piece of software nowadays hasn't? It's honestly no less cromulent than Chrome.