Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox • Hacker News Board

Re: Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox

#141

Post by mccr8 » Fri, Feb 13, 2015, 6:42 PM UTC

jarcane wrote: post #16

I have some serious issues with Chrome (the permaloading, it's new download blocking 'feature', poor startup time), but I did not find Firefox remotely an improvement. On my system it is half as fast, twice as buggy, and even more memory hungry than Chrome is. I think people overstate Chrome's memory usage as a factor of performance; IME it's still less than FF in total most times, and largely that memory cost doesn'…

I'm sorry that your experience with Firefox has been so poor. Web browsers are a complex application platform, and individual experiences can vary wildly. You may use some web page that does well on Chrome but poorly on Firefox, while others may experience the opposite. Individual browsing habits, in terms of the number of tabs that are open at once, or how long the browser is left open, also vary greatly, and can affect performance on one browser compared to another.

Re: Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox

#142

Post by calinet6 » Fri, Feb 13, 2015, 6:42 PM UTC

Fine, still an evergreen browser, auto-updates and supports standards. Use whatever you want!

Re: Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox

#143

Post by sbochins » Fri, Feb 13, 2015, 6:42 PM UTC

gvb wrote: post #15

I read the article hoping for something insightful, but when I read the paragraph ...a half-dozen tabs that auto-open on launch thanks to the dozens of extensions I've accumulated over the years[...] I had to stop and say "wait, what?" To leverage his analogy that it is like coming home to a new house to find that most of your stuff is already there, it is like not cleaning your house and not taking out the trash for…

I still use pentadactyl, even though it isn't being supported AFAIK. These kind of customizations are not possible on chrome. This is why I never switched even when it was cool.

Re: Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox

#144

Post by jeromegv » Fri, Feb 13, 2015, 6:42 PM UTC

I moved to Safari a year ago when I bought my retina macbook pro. For some reason it was painfully slow in Chrome and super fast in Safari. Never looked back.

Re: Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox

#145

Post by abandonliberty » Fri, Feb 13, 2015, 6:44 PM UTC

jo_ wrote: post #98

mason55 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I keep a lot of tabs open and began to notice Chrome was filling up my memory. I had this problem too and found that Chrome was getting so slow that it was unusable. For those who have this problem and don't want to switch from Chrome there is an extension called "The Great Suspender" which dumps background tabs after a configurable time period of inactivity. It helped immensely.

This looks exceptionally helpful. I have around 50 tabs open, nominally, and my CPU fan is almost perpetually on high for it. Just before installing it, however, I found myself wondering, "Why am I using an app which allows me to keep more tabs open? Why am I not using bookmarks?" Why do we keep open 500 tabs instead of using bookmarks these days?

Give onetab a shot.

I'm still fighting to keep my number of tabs down. It causes significant mental overhead and task switching costs. I've noticed a bump in my productivity by taking the time to close/bookmark/onetab tabs.

Re: Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox

#146

Post by Glyptodon » Fri, Feb 13, 2015, 6:44 PM UTC

I love using firefox on my Android device. But it has more to do with it letting you use browser extensions (unlike mobile chrome) than anything else.

Re: Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox

#147

Post by Greenisus » Fri, Feb 13, 2015, 6:45 PM UTC

jarcane wrote: post #102

vor_ wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes Safari a toy?

Safari on Windows has always been a toy. Now it's an unsupported toy to boot.

So it's a toy because it's a toy?

Re: Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox

#148

Post by JohnTHaller » Fri, Feb 13, 2015, 6:45 PM UTC

FreakyT wrote: post #19

Firefox on Mac still has too many visual issues, and the devs often drag their feet on fixing them. Lion (released 2011) added "bounce" scrolling and auto-hiding scrollbars. It took them nearly half a year to fix the lack of auto-hiding scrollbars nightly builds[1], and even longer for it to finally make it to mainline Firefox. Firefox still doesn't have bounce scrolling. To add to that point, the first high-dpi (ret…

Firefox has a far more diverse selection of extensions. And Firefox extensions are far more powerful than Chrome extensions with much deeper integration into the browser. This can also be a curse with a poorly written extension, though.

It's worth noting that multi-process is why Chrome has a much higher memory footprint than Firefox these days for users running several tabs. Firefox pulls out plugins (Flash, etc) to a separate process so when they crash, they don't take out the browser. It will still cause the browser to pause for a few seconds as it waits to be sure Flash is hung up before asking you to stop the plugin.

Re: Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox

#149

Post by abandonliberty » Fri, Feb 13, 2015, 6:45 PM UTC

chiph wrote: post #22

Something I noticed the other week - Chrome on Windows will scan my desktop on startup (all the icons go back their generic version, and then return). Why would they do that? My desktop isn't where the cache is.

Quitting chrome is also extremely difficult. I end up using tskill to kill all the random background processes.

Re: Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox

#150

Post by Shivetya » Fri, Feb 13, 2015, 6:46 PM UTC

and here I am on my Mac having to swap to Safari at times for youtube and other video presentations because Firefox gives me errors, errors which claim to be provider issues yet Safari does fine including allowing me to see through the videos without stalls.

To each his own, but Firefox can go full retard just as well as any other browser. (their SSL fix is aggravating too)