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Yahoo Starts Prompting Chrome Users to “Upgrade” to Firefox

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Re: Yahoo Starts Prompting Chrome Users to “Upgrade” to Firefox

#141
The odd part here is that Firefox has gone back to being my primary browser. The fact that it now disables/disallows extensions the Play store doesnt like and flat out locks you from doing so manually really annoyed me.

Don't try to out-Apple Apple, it doesn't win you any favor.

While they aren't packaged by default, some of the tools around FF for .js work just as well as on Chrome, and the only thing hat Chrome has that I can see FF doesn't is process isolation.

Re: Yahoo Starts Prompting Chrome Users to “Upgrade” to Firefox

#142
post #2

Seems like that has no doubt been an important part of the deal that Yahoo! and Mozilla made. It's an interesting way to get back at Google's heavy promotion of Chrome on their properties.

To be perfectly honest, I'm sick of Chrome being pushed down my throat at every turn (including in emacs-w3m; if I'm using emacs-w3m, I'm pretty damn sure I know what Chrome is and I consciously choose not to use it). Yes, I know it's their baby, yes I know it's their SE; but this headline brought a wry smile to my face. Turnabout is fair play :P

I mean, they probably just detect if your user agent is not Chrome. It'd be silly to complicate it further by checking if it's not some relatively obscure thing that's super techy just for the benefit of excluding people that will for sure not use Chrome.

Re: Yahoo Starts Prompting Chrome Users to “Upgrade” to Firefox

#143
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've just started using duckduckgo.com. Don't have any complaints so far.

I have but one, and it's that it consistently fails to find me what I need as well as Google does. I made a serious effort this week to use DuckDuckGo and made it my default search engine. I wasted so much time googling stuff I'd just DDG'd to find what I actually wanted. I love and support DDG fully, but Google still does search better, imo. Apparently !g is a thing though? I may have to give that a try so I can hav…

Well, !g will just redirect you to Google Search.

And I've noticed lately that DuckDuckGo has gotten much better at short queries lately, at the expense of longer queries. Any query over about 4 words goes straight to Google.

Re: Yahoo Starts Prompting Chrome Users to “Upgrade” to Firefox

#144
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this can be generalized further: I've been using $RELATIVELY_FRESH_BROWSER_INSTALL again recently. I stopped when it was slower and less stable than $BROWSER_I_HAVE_NOW_BEEN_USING_A_LONG_TIME. These days it often feels faster than $BROWSER_I_HAVE_NOW_BEEN_USING_A_LONG_TIME.

Does this apply when all the major browsers (save IE, though it's been a while) update unobtrusively?

Yes, it would. It's not based completely on performance gains you may see in new updates. Profiles bloat up over time with data (history, cookies, cache, etc) and the bigger it is, the more the browser has to process. So, over time, your browser will slow down. A fresh install of a new browser would result in all this data not existing. If it doesn't have to parse hundreds of megs of files, it'll generally be faster.

Re: Yahoo Starts Prompting Chrome Users to “Upgrade” to Firefox

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't encountered problems with Hangouts. But the new Firefox Hello service for in browser webcam chats is pretty awesome: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-hello-make-rece... (disclaimer: I do actually work for mozilla)

Seems only tangential, since I don't see anything about group calls or screen share (which are the main features we need Hangouts for).

I believe group calls will be in Firefox 35. Not sure about screen sharing, but it's being worked on and coming soon.

Re: Yahoo Starts Prompting Chrome Users to “Upgrade” to Firefox

#146

Despite the browser wars, the newest annoyance is having to use Yahoo's search engine. I figured I would give it a few weeks and see how good it was compared to Google. Two weeks in and I'm done with it. Almost every search is useless to me. Even just doing local searches was painful. Type in pizza + your city and I got a bunch of ads and "Top 10 pizza places in (insert your city here)" and a ton of Yelp reviews. All…

> Despite the browser wars, the newest annoyance is having to use Yahoo's search engine.

Have to? Changing the default search engine in Firefox is as simple as clicking on the search-box dropdown and selecting a different search engine. Two clicks.

Re: Yahoo Starts Prompting Chrome Users to “Upgrade” to Firefox

#147
post #141

The odd part here is that Firefox has gone back to being my primary browser. The fact that it now disables/disallows extensions the Play store doesnt like and flat out locks you from doing so manually really annoyed me. Don't try to out-Apple Apple, it doesn't win you any favor. While they aren't packaged by default, some of the tools around FF for .js work just as well as on Chrome, and the only thing hat Chrome has…

> The fact that it now disables/disallows the Play store doesnt like...

I assume here you're referring to Chrome, not Firefox?

Re: Yahoo Starts Prompting Chrome Users to “Upgrade” to Firefox

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried DDG for a while (a month, but probably a year ago now) but found I was always doing "!g ". So I just went back to using the address bar for searching and just the standard FF shortcuts (called "search engine keywords" IIRC) + a few extras I've added over the years. On Firefox I have g - google ddg - duckduckgo yt - youtube w - wikipedia etc. easy to type without the bang at the front (Google and Wikipedia are…

you can use startpage if you want Google's results with none of the privacy leakage.

I wonder how they got that deal.

Re: Yahoo Starts Prompting Chrome Users to “Upgrade” to Firefox

#149
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are bangs good? Why not just go to the site? Also Stackoverflow's search and many other site searches are totally rubbish. Not a bit, but totally rubbish. Here's an example: "!so c# read file" => this delivers useless results, the top result being "Reading Excel files from C#" Compare that to "stackoverflow c# read file" on google, which delivers what you actually want, with the question "Reading From a Text File…

You don't have to load the site (trivial, but not negligible), throwing a bang in front of an already written search is simpler than rewriting the search, and google doesn't build a profile around you as another entity is doing the search.

another entity is doing the search.

What? It redirects your browser to Google, it's you doing the search, not any other entity. They don't proxy or anything.

Re: Yahoo Starts Prompting Chrome Users to “Upgrade” to Firefox

#150
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on what you want. If you're primarily interested in speedy javascript, process isolation across tabs (so busy tabs don't lock out the UI), or debugging web apps, I think Chrome is better. Chrome in particular seems to have a much smoother JS execution profile; it may be down to GC, or something else, but Chrome generally has fewer frames dropped for any given demo. On the other hand, Firefox is way more fe…

Firefox's JS is pretty speedy too though, and it's faster than Chrome for things compiled with emscripten due to asm.js, like every Humble Mozilla Bundle game, anything made with Unity or Unreal Engine, anything using stuff like sql.js or other C libraries, etc.

Yeah, I think the main benefit of Chrome these days is mainly about UI performance more than anything else. They achieve that extremely well with the process isolation. Firefox is moving in that direction to with their electrolysis project, so it'll be interesting to see where that goes.
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