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Hang on to Your Firefox

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Re: Hang on to Your Firefox

#131

Post by cubefox »

bastawhiz wrote: post #68
SirHumphrey wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is mentioned under every Firefox discussion despite being possibly years away from being generally useful if the will ever progress to that point. It’s not really a feasible alternative.

If the goal is browser diversity, is the answer really Firefox? Or is it one of the active in development projects from people who are motivated to do something new? What exactly is Firefox going to do differently to grow its market share? Or just "more of whatever the last fifteen years have been"? Unless they have a plan to do better it seems foolish to trust that they'll steer the project miraculously towards succ…

> If the goal is browser diversity, is the answer really Firefox? Or is it one of the active in development projects from people who are motivated to do something new?

The former. Ladybird is currently not practically usable, it is unclear whether it will ever catch up to the main engines, and even if it does, it is unclear whether it will ever reach the market share that Firefox has. It is a nice project but science fiction at this point.

Re: Hang on to Your Firefox

#133

Post by zamadatix »

gnuplustoejam wrote: post #80

If you hate on Firefox because they're on X for outreach and marketing — like every other browser — you are certifiable. Your opinion is extreme and summarily discarded as noise.

FWIW, if you're reading this article your opinion is extreme and summarily discarded as noise by pretty much everyone else too.

I don't say that because I personally mind if they are on X one way or the other, I've just given up on the idea anyone but an extreme few, usually tech nerds, seem to give a damn about this topic as a whole.

Re: Hang on to Your Firefox

#134

Post by cubefox »

theamk wrote: post #3

I am using firefox, but it is pretty hard to keep using it. I don't want the whole world to converge on one browser engine, but I also want things to work, and Firefox does not make it easy. Firefox on my laptop has a propensity for eating lots of RAM, and constant CPU usage, even if nothing is going on. Task manager is useless. Profiler just shows "GC collecting". Mobile firefox is OK, it simply feels like it's desi…

> Mobile firefox is OK, it simply feels like it's designed for a different person. For example even Chrome has "force reader mode" button.. Firefox does not.

This is false. I am seeing that button right now in Firefox, on the right side of the address bar.

Re: Hang on to Your Firefox

#135

Post by at1as »

I think FF is in a difficult place.

The only community they have any penetration in is the developer one (in its prime non-technical people would tell me they used Firefox since IE was insecure. Their techy friends would tell them to use it and the message carried some actual weight back then).

Today they are a large organization that needs to make money to sustain itself, while facing declining usage, and less favorable terms for search engine integrations.

And our community (developers) is the least likely to take kindly to the increasing monetization slop (promoted articles, pestering about pocket and their VPN offering, continually requiring accepting new ToS, reminders to use new features, etc).

I mostly use FF, because I think we'll lose something if it disappears (for example, DRM will become intolerable, web inspectors will become more opaque, and generally future web standards may be much more controlled by a small set of large orgs with their own interests).

But I use FF with less enthusiasm every passing day

Re: Hang on to Your Firefox

#136

Post by happytoexplain »

51Cards wrote: post #92
happytoexplain wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only? No. Best? Yes, it's not even close. I got the Chrome extension that adds the "Open in Firefox" option to the hyperlink right-click menu. That's how I view all YouTube videos. I'd switch completely to Firefox except for all my data being on Google. It's clear that eventually I will switch to Firefox completely. Google is pure evil.

I don't understand, all my data sits on Google too but I never use Chrome for anything? What issues are you having?

1. Laziness.

2. My employer requires Chrome or Edge to access all resources.

Re: Hang on to Your Firefox

#137

Post by khriss »

Mashimo wrote: post #17
hx8 wrote: post #6

I am under the impression that Firefox is the only web browser which has access to quality ad blocker. Am I incorrect in this? How is this not enough of a selling point for everyone to switch to it?

uBlock lite is enough for me. I switched from normal to lite and did not notice a difference.

If that's enough for you, then by all means use Chrome.

Re: Hang on to Your Firefox

#138

Post by nicoburns »

For those interested in how the alternative browsers are doing, I just put up an alternative to https://wpt.fyi (displays the WPT test results of each browser) which is IMO easier to navigate, and shows Servo / Ladybird by default:

https://blitz.is/wpt

The headline results are:

- Chrome 94.7% (1053647/1112582)

- Firefox 90.6% (1008073/1112582)

- Safari TP 88.7% ( 987377/1112582)

- Ladybird 84.2% ( 937019/1112582)

- Servo 74.4% ( 827216/1112582)

So Ladybird is catching up with the other pretty fast! Although it's worth noting that it still has a bunch of extra work to do with regard to performance.

(my engine Blitz whose website this is on scores 42.2% for specifically the `css` subset, compared to 50.3% for Servo and 72.3% Ladybird)

(the results above exclude the `encoding` suite, because that's 1 million test ~50% of the whole suite, that doesn't really measure rendering capability).

Re: Hang on to Your Firefox

#139

Post by happytoexplain »

andrew_lettuce wrote: post #63
happytoexplain wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laziness. Also I swear YouTube runs much worse on FF. But that's secondary.

I switched my family off Google after almost 20 years on our own domain. In hindsight it was ridiculously easy, although there are still some weird Google account required links that ultimately have me just moving on. Yt does run worse on FF but that's because of unlock (I believe) they tend to stall out intentionally instead of showing you ads and attempt to get you to switch.

Yeah, I believe the stall-out issue is sabotage, but it also visibly takes longer to just render the page. On FF, a YT page jumps around for almost two whole seconds while it renders for me (not to play the video - to render the page). This may also be sabotage by Google, I don't know.
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