Yahoo Starts Prompting Chrome Users to “Upgrade” to Firefox • Hacker News Board

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

#221

Post by Bud » Sat, Dec 13, 2014, 7:17 PM UTC

bad_user wrote: post #218

JetSpiegel wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people still continue to use the crappy web interfaces for email?

If you're also referring to the Gmail interface, it's because all the desktop clients I tried suck - this year alone I tried Thunderbird, Apple Mail, Microsoft Exchange and Mailbox and I can't even remember the apps that I tried on my iPad or on my Android. They all suck compared to Gmail's web interface.

Out of curiosity, have you tried Airmail on the Mac? I tend to agree with your observations about the clients you mention, but Airmail really stands out as excellent to me (although I like version 1 better than the recent version 2).

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

#222

Post by IgorPartola » Sat, Dec 13, 2014, 7:26 PM UTC

I love me some Firefox. I do. I am really glad that it is a major browser, and that people use it. I am very grateful for the innovation it brings. But I cannot bring myself to use it. Chrome was late to the party, but it got a fundamental issue right: tabs and plugins get their own process spaces. This is huge for performance. I am lucky to own a newish top of the line computer and I trnd not to have more than a dozen tabs open at once. I cannot do this workflow in Firefox. It gets slower as I go, and it's memory usage creeps up. Flash makes things worse (don't recommend that I turn it off; doing front-end work still involves it from time to time). I fire it up periodically to check it out, but it just does not work for me and that makes me sad.

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

#223

Post by bad_user » Sat, Dec 13, 2014, 7:39 PM UTC

Bud wrote: post #221

bad_user wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're also referring to the Gmail interface, it's because all the desktop clients I tried suck - this year alone I tried Thunderbird, Apple Mail, Microsoft Exchange and Mailbox and I can't even remember the apps that I tried on my iPad or on my Android. They all suck compared to Gmail's web interface.

Out of curiosity, have you tried Airmail on the Mac? I tend to agree with your observations about the clients you mention, but Airmail really stands out as excellent to me (although I like version 1 better than the recent version 2).

Thanks for the tip, I'll try it.

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

#224

Post by bad_user » Sat, Dec 13, 2014, 8:49 PM UTC

WorldWideWayne wrote: post #206

tszming wrote: post #178

I always joke to my friends that why Chrome didn't bring extension support to Android - Because extension support will hurt Google's mobile ads revenue so deeply if you can install adblock with one click. So, please also consider support a non-profit organization like Mozilla, when their products are actually not weaker.

I like the Adblock app for Android that runs it's own proxy, thereby filtering ads from all apps, including the browser.

In terms of privacy, I don't like the idea of installing a proxy on my phone that can monitor everything I do. At least for Firefox that add-on has to go through their review process, which is pretty strict.

With Firefox on my Android I'm also using HTTPS Everywhere and Ghostery. Both are a really good idea on mobile phones - HTTPS Everywhere is useful because you tend to connect to a lot of public networks and Ghostery is very useful because a lot of websites are not optimized for mobile traffic and tend to load all kinds of crap, like social buttons, which I don't miss because Firefox on Android makes sharing easy.

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

#225

Post by canvia » Sat, Dec 13, 2014, 9:05 PM UTC

bonzoT wrote: post #6

dochtman wrote: 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.

agreed. the term upgrade also brings with it a connotation of being better. I am doubtful that this is this case.

Supporting Mozilla over Google is definitely an upgrade.

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

#226

Post by psychometry » Sat, Dec 13, 2014, 9:34 PM UTC

swift wrote: post #199

psychometry wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox certainly has a larger library of add-ons and those add-ons are more powerful than ones available from Chrome in terms of customizing the browser. The problem is that once you install all the add-ons you're accustomed to having in Chrome, Firefox slows down enough that it's not even worth it. This was my experience using FirefoxDeveloperEdition for the past month and although I miss Firefox's far superior add…

Which add-ons did you have installed?

In Chrome: 1Password, AdBlock, a Gmail checker, a cookie editor, FlashBlock, Ghostery, Hacker News Enhancement Suite, Imagus, Reddit Enhancement Suite, Stylish.

Once I'd installed the corresponding Firefox add-ons, the UI became too unresponsive too often for me to put up with it.

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

#227

Post by preillyme » Sat, Dec 13, 2014, 10:05 PM UTC

Given that Firefox now uses Yahoo as its default search engine, this move doesn’t come as a huge surprise. Yahoo clearly wants as many people as possible to use Firefox — and with it its search engine (which is powered by Microsoft Bing).

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

#228

Post by mschuster91 » Sat, Dec 13, 2014, 10:43 PM UTC

cbd1984 wrote: post #173

ultramancool wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

IME, Chrome is slower in terms of UI responsiveness, especially when starting up (massive disk usage) and switching tabs/making new tabs (pegs at least one core of my CPU, whole browser goes catatonic).

Usually chrome's UI stickyness goes away when you either buy more RAM or install a SSD instead of a HDD. Chrome's disk usage is crazy.

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

#229

Post by Brakenshire » Sat, Dec 13, 2014, 10:58 PM UTC

gtk40 wrote: post #210

Istof wrote: post #125

I love Firefox but it is unusable on my Android phone because it uses close to 100% CPU (I tried the latest version less then 2 weeks ago) ... edit: downvote me, but Firefox is still way too CPU intensive on Android

Interesting. I use it as a daily driver on a lower powered phone (Moto G first gen) and in fact, it's about the only browser that works well on my older Android tablet (Dell Streak 7 on HC).

Works well on my old Android phone as well.

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

#230

Post by zxcvcxz » Sat, Dec 13, 2014, 11:19 PM UTC

psychometry wrote: post #226

swift wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which add-ons did you have installed?

In Chrome: 1Password, AdBlock, a Gmail checker, a cookie editor, FlashBlock, Ghostery, Hacker News Enhancement Suite, Imagus, Reddit Enhancement Suite, Stylish. Once I'd installed the corresponding Firefox add-ons, the UI became too unresponsive too often for me to put up with it.

I have most of those installed (plus some others) in FF Nightly and I'm running fine.

It sounds to me like one of the plugins probably has a bug.