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I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

howtogeek.com

121–130 of 536 posts

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#121

How are the Firefox dev tools these days? Every time I've tried in the past I end up missing the Chrome dev tools, and it's too much of a pain to have one browser for development and one for browsing. I would love to switch, though.

I actually have the exact opposite experience when I try out Chromium based browsers. I end up missing FF dev tools. I love the ability to edit and resend network requests. I'm sure I could figure out how do to so in Chrome devtools, but just not as intuitive (at least to me!)

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony that Google, who made their bones on the "open web", is now attacking open web standards and trying to turn the internet into their own walled garden that they control every aspect of I hope is not lost on the people here.

I have trouble seeing that as irony in a world where "embrace, extend, extinguish" exists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis.... We could also start calling it Embrace, Extend, and Enshittificate

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#124
post #57
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What doesn't work with YouTube on Firefox? Asked as on mobile I run as few apps as possible, so use the web version. Haven't seen any issues.

> What doesn't work with YouTube on Firefox? The performance is way worse (which Google engineers will explain by some browser API being slower in Firefox and they haven't yet had time to optimize it, N years later [they did the same with Inbox + Firefox before]) and you'll also see more ads if you're not a paying user and using Firefox compared to if you used Google Chrome.

The last serious performance issue I saw with FF+YT was when YT added a glowing border around videos when the tab was in dark mode. FF just wasn't able to efficiently run that effect. I don't think it's very reasonable to say that YT or any other site should be limited by the performance problems of FF. Maybe they should have detected the issue before release but the explosion of browser x platform x dark/light theme x graphics driver is a large space to sweep.

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s also laziness in software development practices. Developers (still) only develop and test with Chrome. My last job a bunch of us used Firefox as our main browser, which was hugely helpful. As recently as yesterday I ran into an e-commerce site that didn’t work in Firefox (CPC Farnell, I’m looking at you), giving some obscure security error in multiple languages. I thought it might be caused by an extension at fi…

> Developers (still) only develop and test with Chrome I've heard this before... Oh yeah, replace Chrome with IE and you've got the same thing happening again.

Developers will always be time crunched / lazy. Why target multiple platforms when you can just support one?

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#126
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do web dev and prefer safari. It’s less power hungry on a laptop. If you develop for the lowest common denominator, every other browser just works. There’s something to be said for adding _less_ features to web browsers. A simple web is a web where open source solutions can compete with chrome. It helps avoid a browser monoculture.

Yeah but we’re not in a simple web. Safari isn’t trying to make it simple for you, they just use it to keep you in their walled garden. PWAs are a great example of this. The general idea was even a product of the Jobs era of Apple, before the App Store. Safari and iOS’s poor support of PWAs is exactly a result of Apple wanting to prevent app distribution channels other than their App Store. Choosing safari is choosin…

I get that Apple shouldn't be allowed to dictate which features belong on the web, but you're just letting Google to it instead if you opt to use Chrome.

Maybe I don't care about PWAs (which I don't), maybe I don't feel like the majority of APIs introduced lately belongs in the browser. There's very little of what you should be able to do on the web that you could not do 10 years ago. Yes, flexbox is awesome, let's have that, so is the dialog tag. WebGL, Blutooth, USB, device memory, battery status... No, the browser doesn't need to support that.

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#127
post #91

Recently I preventively migrated from Vivaldi, and Firefox lacked: Gestures, "search with" context menu, "add active tab" in a bookmarks bar folder, autorenaming downloads, custom keybindings, tab squeezing (it keeps them wide and shows scroll buttons), last tab standing, proper double-click-drag selection and text editing in general. Probably a dozen more things that I cannot remember now. Also "sync" just doesn't w…

"Foxy Gestures" for gestures. "Context Search Origin" for a context menu search.

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ended up switching back from Firefox to Chrome after a few weeks because I found that if I had more than about 6 YouTube tabs opened, the YouTube interface would become very laggy. I blamed it on Firefox at the time but maybe it was something intentional by Google.

How…how many videos are you watching at one time?

Not OP but I read it as "6 tabs" not "6 YouTube tabs."

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#129
post #23

Currently the main attack facing Firefox is coming from advertising companies such as YouTube. It’s crazy to think that some software engineers might actually intentionally degrade user experience on non-Google browsers or for people using adblockers. The mentality here is pretty disturbing: it’s almost like punishing users for making the choice to browse the web without ads, or without the surveillance mechanisms th…

[flagged]

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#130
post #23

Currently the main attack facing Firefox is coming from advertising companies such as YouTube. It’s crazy to think that some software engineers might actually intentionally degrade user experience on non-Google browsers or for people using adblockers. The mentality here is pretty disturbing: it’s almost like punishing users for making the choice to browse the web without ads, or without the surveillance mechanisms th…

about youtube being totally unusable on firefox: is it just youtube/google being evil as is customary or also firefox having loads of memory leaks, as its usual too? (plenty of mem leak bugs with video/audio reported over the years, many very recent and still open)

I was about to write that YouTube works flawlessly for me in Firefox on Mac, but I just upgraded to a monster of a M4 MBP, so it's probably just overcoming these issues (malicious or otherwise) via brute force.
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