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How to Firefox

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Re: How to Firefox

#111

Post by echoangle »

mattlutze wrote: post #89

I am surprised how many people have so many problems with Firefox. I've never felt impeded by loading speeds, and my ADHD regularly has me forgetting to restart it, to the tune of 100+ tabs open across multiple desktops. My wimply little MacBook Pro doesn't seem to mind. The only downside I've found is that, because so many people just default to "Chrome or nothing," there's occasionally sites that have bugs because,…

> My wimply little MacBook Pro

How old is it? Is a MacBook Pro wimpy now?

Re: How to Firefox

#112

Post by marttt »

zac23or wrote: post #79

I use Firefox, Chrome, and Edge on a Windows 10 machine. I use Chrome 90% of the time because Firefox is slow and has many bugs on video sites like 9gag. The screen goes black, the video loses vertical sync, etc. The same happens with Edge. In my experience, the problem with Firefox's popularity is technical. I'll use Firefox more often if it improves. Before Firefox 3.6 (probably that version), Firefox was my most u…

> Before Firefox 3.6 (probably that version), Firefox was my most used browser, but after that version, Firefox started getting slower and more buggy.

Haha, I remember that same feeling, with 3.6 being "peak" Firefox back in the day. My 3.6 was heavily hand-tailored to my needs via about:config etc. Just some dedicated end-user here, but I did know it very well. Version 4 felt considerably worse on a WinXP system, some essential-to-me add-ons broke, etc. I remember feeling really - as in, really - frustrated when I finally had to make the switch.

Apparently, 3.6 is the longest supported Firefox version ever, 27 months: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_3.6#End_of_life

Re: How to Firefox

#113

Post by esskay »

eclecticfrank wrote: post #32
midnitewarrior wrote: post #24

Just use Brave Browser. https://brave.com/ It's like de-Googled Chrome, as it's based on the same Open Source Chromium browser, has all of the ad-blocking and anti-fingerprint tools built in, and all of the Google taken out. You can also run popular browser extensions published for Chrome, but you don't need to worry about ad blocking, as Brave has you covered by default. It also blocks YouTube ads effectively, by de…

Brave wants to replace "bad" ads from third parties with their own "good" ads.[1] They have also in the past been caught adding their own referral codes to crypto transaction URLs pasted into their browser. [2] [1] https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/how-to-earn-and-use-cryptocurre... [2] https://www.pcmag.com/news/brave-browser-caught-redirecting-...

I'm not sure trying to bad mouth it by bringing up a 5+ year old long fixed thing is the right way to go about making a point. Heck if we're doing that theres vastly more "wrong" over at Mozilla and Google to complain about in that timeframe.

Aa of right now Brave has two "features" that you can disable - the crypto thing and a vpn advert. Once those are off, they are off. You don't see them anymore, they aren't sitting in the background running, and they aren't calling home.

It's no different to Mozilla's constant and blatant attempts to reactivate telemetry data in Firefox updates despite opting out - I'd argue that's a bigger offence.

Re: How to Firefox

#114

Post by Mashimo »

iamkonstantin wrote: post #18

I tried Firefox just a few days ago, but it didn't work out. I just missed too many things out of the box. My main browser is Vivaldi (so all the chromium goodies + privacy + made in EU). Safari comes in as a close second, I tend to use it on the go because it syncs well with my Mac and Apple throttles any other browser on iOS.

Ah, nice share.

I was looking at different chrome alternatives and most of them had ~something~ wrong with them. I have not tried vivaldi yet, but from a bit of research it seems just like the browser I was looking for. Thanks for sharing.

Any specific thing a first time user should know? Use build in ad blocker or install uBlock Origin?

Re: How to Firefox

#115

Post by akazantsev »

arp242 wrote: post #86
akazantsev wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only way to access it with `about:profiles`? It looks like a joke. How could users possibly find this? UPD. The more I look at this, the worse it gets. Hidden under a special URL, requires you to launch the default profile before you can switch to another profile (yes-yes, there are command-line hacks). It's more like a user data manager for devs than profiles for users. Even containers look better than these pro…

You can use "firefox -ProfileManager". I didn't even know about about:profiles. There is some work on improving the UI: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-management Anyway, your claim was "Firefox has no profiles". That is not true.

Really? Then you can claim that Chrome has supported "profiles" since its inception, with the `--user-data-dir` command-line switch. If something is not user-visible, it is as good as non-existent. Firefox has no profiles as far as a regular user is concerned.

Re: How to Firefox

#116

Post by pixelesque »

cainxinth wrote: post #87

I switched after Manifest v3. I won’t go back to Chrome as long as it limits ad-blocking, but I do miss its speed. Firefox takes a long time to open (especially when you have a lot of extensions). Even with the same number of extensions, Chrome opens in a jiffy. There are other areas of slowdown as well. Sometimes I hit Control+D to bookmark a page and nothing happens. At first I thought maybe I was doing something w…

Note that Firefox for me within the last 3/4 months seems to have (I assume it's by design?) changed to automatically add a bookmark to the most-recently-added bookmark folder WITHOUT asking which folder to use (it just adds a blue star in the address bar) which is pretty annoying IMO and isn't the behaviour I want 95% of the time.

Pressing Ctrl/Cmd-D a second time then does "Edit bookmark", and allows you to change it.

Might that be contributing to what you're seeing? (blue star appearing is fairly obvious though).

Re: How to Firefox

#117

Post by phoronixrly »

zac23or wrote: post #79

I use Firefox, Chrome, and Edge on a Windows 10 machine. I use Chrome 90% of the time because Firefox is slow and has many bugs on video sites like 9gag. The screen goes black, the video loses vertical sync, etc. The same happens with Edge. In my experience, the problem with Firefox's popularity is technical. I'll use Firefox more often if it improves. Before Firefox 3.6 (probably that version), Firefox was my most u…

So after all of the things you outlined, you're still fine with using Chrome despite the ads?

Re: How to Firefox

#118

Post by voidUpdate »

skrebbel wrote: post #39

I would just like to add that in my experience, "How to Firefox" is just: - Download Firefox - Install uBlock Origin - Use Firebox Somehow this blog post makes it seem like adopting Firefox is hard, or overwhelming, or some multi step process, and if you don't do those steps you're effectively downgrading. But really it isn't. It's a browser. Its UX is great. It just... works. The suggestion that to use it properly y…

- Work out how to transfer everything across from whatever you were using before

Re: How to Firefox

#119

Post by prophesi »

A tip I would add to this article is that Firefox natively supports sidebar tabs now without needing hacky extensions. Go to about:preferences under the Browser Layout section of the General tab, and select Vertical Tabs. The tab group functionality along with Multi-Account Containers are a lot more useful under this layout IMO.

Re: How to Firefox

#120

Post by helij »

A lot of hate and bashing of Firefox here. On my Linux machine (relatively modern desktop) there's no difference in speed between Chrome(Chromium) and Firefox. A lot of people talk about goodies and extensions. I get it, life is easier with some of those but I just don't care. I use it barebones with enhanced tracking protection and it works flawlessly. Don't see many ads, the ones I see are not intrusive.
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