Live data from Hacker News

Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice

robert.ocallahan.org

111–120 of 316 posts

Re: Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice

#111

This is actually very true. Having Chrome/V8 out there has definitely improved the state of browsers as far as performance; especially in regards to JavaScript. But now we face a situation where Google is getting such a market share with Chrome and their other web properties where lock in is a very real possibility, and the only way to keep an open, standardized web is to make sure there are still other browsers with…

Lock-in has already begun on Chrome. Now you can't install Chrome extensions from anywhere else but the Chrome store (which means only stuff Google agrees with). Chrome is as closed-down as iOS and WP8 right now (For shame, Google!). It's actually the main reasons I'm waiting to switch from it soon. But not until Firefox gets a security sandbox.

This is not lock in (not for the purpose of lock-in anyway) - it's for security reasons and it is in fact exclusive to Windows. Chrome was getting abused by thousands of extra-crapware installers which would install extra extensions etc. They have taken a gradual response to the issue but it always came down to ">99% of outside extensions installed on windows are crapware. This is exclusive to Windows due to its permission model. This gives users a very bad impression of chrome. Now what?"

I get it, honestly. But hey, if you don't want lock in, the hell are you doing on Windows?

Re: Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice

#112
post #43

Almost every other comment that have been posted so far are complaining that FF tabs are not independent processes. Let me express my contrarian opinion. For my use case FF is just excellent and has served me well, I have absolutely no complains now. There was a time when FF leaked, and held a lot of memory, that time has since passed, at least seams so. I regularly keep several hundreds of tabs open for months on en…

In fact, the infamous memory leak Firefox was 'famous' for was fixed in version 2.5 which tells me that anyone who still complains of memory leaks in Firefox is one who you do not want to listen to for advice.

EDIT: I may have the version number wrong, it's been a long time, and, yes, the "leak" was a combination of things and not just one thing but my point is the same.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice

#113
I hope that FF keeps to be different from chrome. Otherwise why not use chrome directly.

I am using firefox because it is multi-threaded (vs. chrome's multi-process) and thus lighter. My version is still 28 since it has less dependencies than current one.

Be different, otherwise FF may die.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice

#115
Firefox on Windows is nice, but on the Mac the UI feels just slightly off, presumably thanks to the XUL layer. Until they finally ditch XUL and just start doing native UIs, I suspect they'll always be playing catch up in the "feeling native" game. Here are a few examples:

* Still no elastic scrolling, 3 entire years after that became the standard scroll behavior for all Mac apps (this started in Mac OS 10.7)

* Still missing HiDPI icons for most toolbar and sidebar icons, 2 years after the first Retina Macbooks were released

* Took nearly THREE YEARS to adopt the new scrollbar style first seen in Mac OS 10.7 [1]

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=636564

Re: Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice

#116

If Google really wanted to show that they are for openness and privacy, they would have moved Chrome to a not-for-profit foundation instead of owning it themselves.

that would defeat the purpose of them creating Chrome in the first place - to have access to product (by which I mean people using the browser) activities. What other advertising company has ever had as many fingers in as many pies? It’s entirely possible for people in parts of the USA be getting a large percentage of their web content (search, news, video, social etc) from a Google web property, using a device contr…

They are a Tech company, they make most of their money from ad's for now, but I expect in the future, it will be from AI and robotics, since they are investing incredible amounts in those areas.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice

#117
post #43

Almost every other comment that have been posted so far are complaining that FF tabs are not independent processes. Let me express my contrarian opinion. For my use case FF is just excellent and has served me well, I have absolutely no complains now. There was a time when FF leaked, and held a lot of memory, that time has since passed, at least seams so. I regularly keep several hundreds of tabs open for months on en…

Some time ago I made a very (very) light-weight extension for myself that works well for situations in which I have hundreds of tabs opened. It closes them all and stores the linked titles in a simple HTML page (thus searchable), ordered by tab session. It is inspired by OneTab and it is open-source.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-grenade/

Re: Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice

#118

I expect 2 things from Firefox before I consider seriously switching: 1) Bring security sandboxing already. 2) Fix the terrible rendering on Android. Seriously, Firefox has literally the worst rendering out of all mobile browsers. And by worst, I mean slowest . I don't know whether it's some kind of on purpose delayed rendering, or if it's just that slow, but they need to change that. It's especially more obvious on…

Fix the terrible rendering on Android. Seriously, Firefox has literally the worst rendering out of all mobile browsers. And by worst, I mean slowest.

Firefox feels fast on the Nexus 5. I use it over Chrome, because I want to disable third-party cookies. Chrome on Android doesn't give me that option...

Re: Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lock-in has already begun on Chrome. Now you can't install Chrome extensions from anywhere else but the Chrome store (which means only stuff Google agrees with). Chrome is as closed-down as iOS and WP8 right now (For shame, Google!). It's actually the main reasons I'm waiting to switch from it soon. But not until Firefox gets a security sandbox.

This is not lock in (not for the purpose of lock-in anyway) - it's for security reasons and it is in fact exclusive to Windows. Chrome was getting abused by thousands of extra-crapware installers which would install extra extensions etc. They have taken a gradual response to the issue but it always came down to ">99% of outside extensions installed on windows are crapware. This is exclusive to Windows due to its perm…

additionally, on the google help page explaining all of that, it also has a guide explaining how to get around the restriction (which is easy as, drag from the download bar onto the extensions page (last time I used it at least))
Post reply on HN