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I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

howtogeek.com

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Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#381

Post by wruza »

ethbr1 wrote: post #216
lxgr wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sometimes do have several Youtube tabs open to line up things I want to watch next.

To this, have you tried running a no-autoplay style extension? (Not exactly this scenario, but lists might be modifiable) I expect YT is probably doing some preloading or heavyweight running in a loaded-but-not-playing tab. Convert that to load-on-click, and you'll likely fix your issue.

We’re shifting targets here.

The fact is, it doesn’t happen in Chrome for “magical” reasons, according to a comment few levels up. And regular non-tech users won’t debug this with click to play or whatever. We expect that YT does it absolutely intentionally.

It bends userbases however it wants due to its multi-dimensional reach, and we’re like “hmm maybe extension would help prevent accidental preloading issue”. I just don’t get it.

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#382

Post by lousken »

mvdtnz wrote: post #299
Sanctor wrote: post #110

I really want to switch to Firefox but cannot because it doesn't sync bookmark favicons. My bookmarks bar is filled with bookmarks without names that I can recognize by the icons. I refuse to re-visit every bookmark when I login from a new PC, which is often. This has been requested for 17 years: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=428378 Every other browser sync solution has this feature. Firefox insists on…

The thing is that Firefox has SO MANY papercuts in this category. They all seem minor but they all represent a deal breaker for one user or another. For me it's the address bar on the bottom on mobile (ludicrous decision, whoever came up with that should leave the industry and I mean that) and their refusal to auto fill credit cards on mobile even though I know it works on desktop and I know it works in other regions…

i am not sure if i understand this post, where else should the address bar be if not at your fingertips at the bottom?

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#383

Post by Daunk »

bcraven wrote: post #35
Daunk wrote: post #27

My very old, and bad, laptop takes an extremely long time to start Firefox. However, forks like Floorp are a lot quicker to start. And since I'm pretty strict about using the same tools everywhere (no matter the OS) I'm now using Floorp on my main PC as well. But I'm not sure Floorp can be trusted... does anyone have anything to say about it?

This reads like one of those cases where simply buying a new laptop will be the easiest solution.

I barely ever use my laptop. It works fine 99% of the time, Firefox is like the 1% that's too slow to be usable with it. Floorp solves that.

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#384

Post by recursive »

segasaturn wrote: post #371
jshen wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't like YouTube's ads, great don't use it. You aren't entitled to get it for free though.

Google isn't entitled to invade my privacy, harvest my data and waste my time with ads. Installing an adblocker isn't an act of entitlement, it's an act of self-defense.

And google is entitled to infer that you're using it and serve you different content, or none at all.

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#385

Post by lousken »

avg_dev wrote: post #373

how is the webauthn story for FF? I recall that some hardware tokens could sometimes play weird with FF on Mac, I am not sure if Windows had the same thing. that was one practical advantage Chrome had.

i use yubikey every day on linux version of ff, after a year of going back and forth with microsoft works fine with ms365; github worked out of the box, ...

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#386

Post by recursive »

cornstalks wrote: post #319
ustad wrote: 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…

> It’s crazy to think that some software engineers might actually intentionally degrade user experience on non-Google browsers Is this actually a thing? As far as I'm aware all degradations in non-Chromium browsers have been unintentional bugs, either caused by a YouTube bug or a non-YouTube bug (i.e. in the browser or an extension) (note I'm specifically not commenting on the last portion of your comment regarding "…

If you have a lot of technical churn, and only test perf on Chromium, then you could certainly claim that the result is "unintentional", but it's almost guaranteed based on that circumstance.

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#389

Post by WorldMaker »

cornstalks wrote: post #326
WorldMaker wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Should have detected the issue" implies it was an accident. YouTube has intentionally tanked performance in non-Chrome browsers before and been caught. Even when they weren't actively sabotaging other browsers they had big Chrome banners and "Works Better in Chrome" signs for several years in the past. If they did it _then_, it's hard to give them the benefit of the doubt that they just "missed it" now, and easier t…

> YouTube has intentionally tanked performance in non-Chrome browsers before and been caught. Can you please share sources regarding this? I'm not familiar with any instance like this.

Edge (Spartan or Legacy) had a big fight with YouTube that YouTube was doing a hidden (not visible to users) DOM animation underneath the video player in a way that Chrome ignored but tanked Edge performance. There were several release cycles where Edge would specifically target that hidden animation performance, only for YouTube to make the animation worse and ratchet it back.

I lived through that as a user. (I was one of the like 5 Edge Spartan users, I know, lol.) I could see the dumb animation in dev tools and manually delete it for better performance. It was a nice thing I had some technical skills. I know for mainstream users the solution was "watch YouTube in Chrome".

It's hard to find to other sources because Microsoft intentionally broke the SEO on the Edge brand and you know Google is the only other major search engine. Not that they'd intentionally down-pagerank bad news about a Google property, I'm sure.

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#390

Post by doctor_radium »

rileymat2 wrote: post #181
basilgohar wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a management problem, not a developer problem. Yes, developers should advocate, but it's not the developers' burden to make time out of thin air.

I have never had a manager that said “don’t make it work for firefox”. What I have seen is developers do it wrong to start, then tasks to fix it get low priority due to market share based priority.

Early fall 2023 it certainly feels like I caught Verizon discriminating against Firefox. It was a CSS issue in their payment portal where some information wasn't rendering as a DHTML popup but at the bottom of the page. You could still pay your bill, but to an untrained eye it looked broken. I reported it and was sent to "Executive Custom Service", which would never acknowledge the problem. They would call once a week and make some statements like the problem was on my side and they couldn't reproduce it at all, to which my BS meter kept responding "I don't believe you." After several weeks of this, the issue mysteriously disappeared one Saturday morning, with no further word to me. I'd also complained to my state PUC (this was a landline bill) and think the added pressure helped convince them to do the right thing, even though the PUC has no online jurisdiction.

At the time I hadn't thought to go back to tech support and ask somebody there to simply try it with Firefox. Then Verizon would have been pointing fingers at themselves.

Any Verizon developers here? I'd love to know the real story.

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