Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to Firefox

kau.sh

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 505 posts

Re: How to Firefox

#151

Post by Torwald »

> I want to do my part to convince you to switch to Firefox and show you how I use it.

Last time I checked, the tab closed button was still on the right side of the tab. On the macOS version. This is a deal breaker. Therefore FF is useless to me as a Mac user.

Other browsers on the Mac have this correct. Safari, Opera, Vivaldi at least.

Vivaldi is the other contender, who is at least on par if not better with FF in terms of privacy.

Problematic privacy is of course the reason why Chrome wasn't even installed on my machines ever. Opera and (arguably so) Brave are the others with privacy endangering issues.

There are other Mac only options, but they have even worse problems, being cloud dependent and whatnot.

I do like the concepts of what they are trying to do in most of the cases, but for now I prefer the clarity of Safari.

Now, some of you might not be Mac developers, so let me say something about app development on the Mac. There is a manual with guidelines of how to do it. It is called the Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) and that stuff is very important. It would be a very interesting process to develop something like this for a desktop Linux, btw.

When I have to work with apps that don't adhere to the HIG, that's bad for productivity and enjoyment. So I don't.

In the case of FF I was willing to hack the UI CSS to correct the button issue. Hey, it's FF after all. Two upgrades later, the thing wasn't working any more. Ok, bye bye FF!

For a while FF was the most microsoftian app on my Mac, because it always announced it's updates without me being able to silent those notifications.

I am still watching, it's FF after all, but if Mozilla can't correct these (actually minor) issues of keeping the UI clean, I can't have it.

Re: How to Firefox

#152

Post by skotobaza »

adithyassekhar wrote: post #42

This is really hard to read. I can't get the tone of the article or how I'm supposed to feel about it. Or is it a generation gap, I was born in 2000.

>I can't get the tone of the article or how I'm supposed to feel about it

It's a tech article. What do you expect to feel while reading it?

Re: How to Firefox

#153

Post by shakna »

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,…

I was surprised to hit this one today. Government department, supporting exactly one browser on most people's main device.

https://www.ato.gov.au/online-services/technical-support/min...

Re: How to Firefox

#154

Post by napkin »

The author recommends this add-on- “Auto Tab Discard”- apparently optimising tab memory management. Why wouldn’t the standard distribution adopt it?

I’m reminded of when I used to maintain an epic-sized vimrc, compiled my kernel for a different IO scheduler, etc. The plight of the “power-user” is walking a fine line between tool refinement and over-complication (which in my case can stem from procrastination).

There are many reasons to strive for a minimalist setup, main one being that setting everything up from scratch shouldn’t feel exhausting.

That said… Firefox, with just uBO and a few basic privacy settings tightened, is pretty great.

Re: How to Firefox

#155

Post by SwiftyBug »

One thing that keeps me on Firefox, that I've never seen another browser implement, is per-tab profiles. Chrome and Safari also have profiles, but they require one profile per window.

Re: How to Firefox

#156

Post by voxic11 »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #129
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,…

I'm about the same, I don't even know what the loading speeds issue is about, I still remember Firefox Quantum beating the daylights out of Chrome, and I don't know if Chrome ever fully caught up to Quantum? What's really funny is for ages Chrome would load the browser window even if the whole browser UI wasn't done loading, and sometime after Quantum, Firefox started doing the same trick to make you feel as though i…

Do you use Firefox for Android? I use it for the extension support but its noticeably slower than Chrome on Android.

Re: How to Firefox

#157

Post by cosmic_cheese »

pixelesque wrote: post #104
eclecticfrank wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Give us an example where Chrome is faster than Firefox, so we can see if it is more important than having uBlock Origin. I use both Firefox and Chrome for work and haven't noticed any speed differences (without measuring).

I suspect part of it might be interactive-ity with the event loop: let me explain. I regularly have to use web browsers (I try and want to use Firefox, but Chrome is faster for me in this scenario) on an under-provisioned (yes I know, but I don't have any control over that!) VM which runs VDI sessions on both Linux and Windows (with VMWare on Windows). On both Windows and Linux, Firefox's UI (in this CPU-constrained…

I think that Chromium’s UI stack is also just more solid, being closer to “native” and being drawn with Skia and such, as opposed to the Firefox approach (previously XUL, which was always slow and clunky and later switching to a web tech based UI).

There used to be Gecko based browsers that fixed this with alternative native UIs (Camino, K-Meleon, and Epiphany aka GNOME Web), but then Mozilla removed embedding support and ever since anybody wanting to use Gecko are stuck with the design decisions of the Firefox team whether they want to be or not.

Re: How to Firefox

#158

Post by jcalvinowens »

Maybe most people don't care, but the difference build times is insane... Chromium takes nearly 4x as long to compile as the entire rest of a modern Linux system and it's toolchain combined.

I completely stopped using chromium two years ago and haven't looked back.

Re: How to Firefox

#159

Post by seanclayton »

bool3max wrote: post #85
eclecticfrank wrote: post #80

Lots of Firefox hate here, but little discussion about the articles kicker, which is the exclusion of uBlock Origin from Chrome. I hope this will mean that in the long run Firefox (and other secondary browsers) will gain more users again. For me, Firefox is a solid piece of software. Works well in strict privacy mode, with uBlock Origin and Multi-Account Containers.

In the long run Alphabet will find a way to bar non-vetted browsers from accessing the Internet.

Some of us want a different world and believe it's possible.

Re: How to Firefox

#160

Post by alt227 »

adithyassekhar wrote: post #42

This is really hard to read. I can't get the tone of the article or how I'm supposed to feel about it. Or is it a generation gap, I was born in 2000.

> This is really hard to read.

I am old and I agree.

It is full of things that break the flow of reading like asking a hypothetical question to the reader and following it up with a plosive like 'BOOM!', or inserting useless conversational stops like like 'sure,' 'But...', and '...Nope!'.

Makes it sound/feel like an excited toddler is desperate to tell you something, but cant really get to the point.

Post reply on HN