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

Here’s Why Firefox is Still Years Behind Google Chrome

howtogeek.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 175 posts

Re: Here’s Why Firefox is Still Years Behind Google Chrome

#131

Post by pcwalton »

"There’s no indication that anyone is working on sandboxing the Windows desktop version of Firefox at the moment."

Yes, they are. The comment quoted is from 2012.

"Comments on Firefox’s bug tracker indicate that developers will be looking at sandboxing the Windows 8 Modern Firefox app, Firefox OS, and experimental Servo browser on OS X"

"will be looking at" is misleading. Servo is sandboxed, today. Both at the OS level (through the same sandboxing primitives that Chromium uses) and through Rust's memory safety features, for two layers of defense.

Re: Here’s Why Firefox is Still Years Behind Google Chrome

#132

Post by gcr »

AJ007 wrote: post #105
Estragon wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if this were true (and there's no reason to believe that Google Chrome is being used in this way), there's still the open-source Chromium browser.

Which Google has made intentionally hard to find. Could your mom or grandmother figure this one out? http://build.chromium.org/f/chromium/layout_test_results/

On the systems I work with, it's easy to walk your grandmother through "click on the black square, now type apt-get install chromium, now hit enter."

Re: Here’s Why Firefox is Still Years Behind Google Chrome

#133

Post by seabrookmx »

bengillies wrote: post #14
kaoD wrote: post #5

I began using Firefox a long time ago (when it was called Phoenix) but switched to Chrome. A couple months ago I switched back to Firefox because Chrome lost my open tab session in some cases (hard crashes when loading the old session), due to privacy issues and because it often triggered long swaps (locking the process) when dealing with lots of tabs (I usually have like 50-60 tabs open in several windows). Also bec…

It's the really small things that annoy me about Firefox. For example, in gmail, when writing an email, I can't hit cmd+right arrow to go to the end of a line. And because links are set to open in a new window, I can't cmd+click them to open them in the background.

Maybe you're on a Macbook that doesn't have one, but the 'End' key serves this exact purpose (jumping to the end of a line).

Re: Here’s Why Firefox is Still Years Behind Google Chrome

#134

Post by gcr »

jcbrand wrote: post #122
q_revert wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

vimperator is probably the most useful web extension i've ever used.. and it doesn't have a good chrome equivalent http://www.vimperator.org/vimperator

I've used Vimperator before but I now use Vimium on chromium and very much prefer it. When you navigate via keyboard (by pressing "f"), Vimperator marks links with numbers, Vimium marks them with letters, from ("a to "zz'). Letters are much nicer when you can touch type and your hands are already on the keys. Vimperator used to do silly things like hide the address bar and force you into doing everything in a kind of…

Pentadactyl (Vimperator fork) annotates links with letters now, I think on the home row.

The very first instructions that you saw when opening Vimium were "How do I unhide the address bar?" It takes two clicks or just a few keystrokes.

Re: Here’s Why Firefox is Still Years Behind Google Chrome

#135

Post by Nursie »

dblohm7 wrote: post #123
Nursie wrote: post #72

I love FF and use FF mainly because of the range of plugins available. However I agree there are problems with it. One of them is disk access - if you have a machine (say a netbook) with a slow disk, firefox seems to stop responding for a few seconds every once in a while. This is exacerbated by an ever growing places.sqlite, but still happens even with that flushed regularly (or chattr +i'd)

Mozilla's Performance Team is doing a lot of work on eliminating I/O from the main thread which is the cause of many of these problems. We're also assisting other teams with this as well. In fact, right now I am working on adding a new feature to the Gecko Profiler that identifies such I/O and makes it easy for platform devs to easily pinpoint the offending code.

Awesome, glad to hear it, it's been a bit of a bug-bear of mine for ages.

If you're anything to do with the mobile/android team, could you tell them their policy of aggressively unloading background tabs is annoying and that it frequently seems to screw up when you hit the back button, either jumping back too far or going to previous ...err... forks in the history tree.

Re: Here’s Why Firefox is Still Years Behind Google Chrome

#136

Post by pcwalton »

numbsafari wrote: post #58

He gives a bunch of "ways" in which FireFox is (in his opinion) behind Google Chrome. The only "reason" (why) he gives is mentioned very briefly: > With so many former Firefox developers now working on Chrome at Google, perhaps it makes sense that the innovation has been happening in Chrome, not Firefox. The real question we should be asking is what happened to investment in FireFox? Why has mozilla had a hard time r…

> Most importantly, what happened to Mozilla that it stopped being an innovator and became an imitator? Is it something inherent in it's status as a "not for profit"? Is there something wrong with it's values and goals that prevents it from being truly innovative?

pdf.js, sweet.js, Persona, asm.js, Rust, and Servo aren't innovative?

Re: Here’s Why Firefox is Still Years Behind Google Chrome

#137

Post by throwaway420 »

Firefox still feels a tad slower than Chrome, but it's normally fast enough.

The big problem I have with Firefox is developing extensions. Developing browser extensions in Chrome vs building them in Firefox is like night and day. While I'm not an expert, I've built a few extensions for each browser.

Building one in Chrome has been a very pleasant experience for me - the documentation is good and up to date and things work very logically.

But developing Firefox extensions is an exercise in complete frustration. Documentation is hard to find and out of date. Functionality that is needed is frequently changed and deprecated. Common things are made difficult and frustrating. There are code examples found all over the web, but most of them are out of date.

Purely speaking with my developer hat, I would not build another Firefox extension if not absolutely required to for a specific project. And I dislike a lot of Google's policies and love Mozilla's nature, but I think Google is clearly much further ahead in terms of offering a pleasant development experience.

I don't know what the answer is, but for me personally Firefox isn't working.

Re: Here’s Why Firefox is Still Years Behind Google Chrome

#138

Post by q_revert »

jcbrand wrote: post #122
q_revert wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

vimperator is probably the most useful web extension i've ever used.. and it doesn't have a good chrome equivalent http://www.vimperator.org/vimperator

I've used Vimperator before but I now use Vimium on chromium and very much prefer it. When you navigate via keyboard (by pressing "f"), Vimperator marks links with numbers, Vimium marks them with letters, from ("a to "zz'). Letters are much nicer when you can touch type and your hands are already on the keys. Vimperator used to do silly things like hide the address bar and force you into doing everything in a kind of…

to me vimperator isn't just about having a few vim bindings here and there, it completely redefines the browsing experience... also, when you "f" to find links, you can just enter a piece of the url string and vimperator opens it.. either way, it doesn't matter much..

vimium is a lightweight clone of vimperator, if that's what you want then of course you'll prefer it..

these "problems" you're talking about in vimperator are features once you actually embrace it and use it properly. it's a power user's tool.. and should be recognized as such..

http://i.imgur.com/vznzJMV.png

Re: Here’s Why Firefox is Still Years Behind Google Chrome

#139

Post by takluyver »

Estragon wrote: post #85
SeanDav wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To this list you can add the deal breaker - Firefox is not mining your data and then passing it on to the NSA.

Even if this were true (and there's no reason to believe that Google Chrome is being used in this way), there's still the open-source Chromium browser.

Chromium is inferior in certain respects, such as lacking an integrated PDF viewer.

Re: Here’s Why Firefox is Still Years Behind Google Chrome

#140

Post by ds9 »

My criteria are different from this guy's. My baseline requirements are: OSS, maximum configurability, minimum conflict of interest on the part of the vendor.

A proprietary product of a data-mining company? Seriously? It's comical that the writer even bothers to mention "security" in such an unsecurable context.

Moz + Noscript + Request Policy is not perfect, but a lot closer to my ideal than Chrome.

Post reply on HN