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Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox

gizmodo.com

201–210 of 654 posts

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

#202
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 had the exact same reaction. Why would an extension automatically open multiple tabs? That sounds pretty malware-ish.

I remember one or two extensions I liked started injecting ads into pages with updates, which led me to uninstall them but would probably go unnoticed by a lot of users.

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

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So still not in stable and Chrome has had it for what? 4 years now? EDIT: Ok, downvote me all you want but it's a fact, not opinion. I'd give FF another shot once it's in stable but as it is now I'm not going to waste my time playing on a nightly build.

> So still not in stable and Chrome has had it for what? 4 years now? Chrome is a much newer browser. At the time Chrome was released, it was the only browser with this design, because it's much easier to do when starting from scratch. Chrome benefited greatly simply from observing the design decisions of Firefox, IE, etc. that had had several years to play out by that point. In ten years (assuming Chrome is still ar…

IIRC Chrome did not have this feature day 1, they added it after the fact. That's not to say they didn't plan for it but still.... Also "Chrome benefited greatly simply from observing the design decisions of Firefox, IE, " Yes and Firefox benefited from observing the browsers before it, so what?

> "In ten years (assuming Chrome is still around then), it will also have similarly antiquated design decisions that make sense to us now,"

You can't say that with any certainty whatsoever maybe Chrome will fair better than FF has or maybe we will see a re-write of Chrome's core to deal with future changes.

As I said elsewhere in this thread I will use the browser I deem best at the current point in time. Right now, for me, that browser is Chrome (I couldn't care less which browser has been around longer).

As for "it just means that it's not great to compare a brand-new browser with one that's been around (and used!)[0] for a long time" this is so wrong.... of course I can compare the two, they both do the same thing at the end of the day (provide a portal to the internet). When FF came out (and in it's heyday) no one said "You can't compare FF to IE, FF is a brand new browser" No, instead they/we all switched to FF because it was BETTER. Now, at least IMHO, Chrome is BETTER and so I've switched again. If that changes I will switch yet again.

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

#204
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…

The problem is using many open tabs with Chrome. If you use no more than 3 or 4 tabs, Chrome is generally fine. If you use more than that, Firefox has some built-in features to help with tabs such as delayed tab loading and tab grouping. It also has more and better extensions for helping with multiple tabs. Furthermore, it doesn't launch a new process for each tab. In a browser comparison I wrote last month, I includ…

This is probably b/c most people at Google use computers with 32GB of ram.

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

#205
post #47
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, that's part of why I use Chrome. Having all my Google accounts and apps available is a huge feature to me. Plus Firefox crashing is a huge downside. As for privacy implications, there's no reason to believe Google does anything inappropriate, and I rather like having my internet experience tailored based on past behaviour. To each their own I guess.

Plus Firefox crashing is a huge downside. How do you get Firefox to crash? What does about:crashes say? Did you report the bug?

Is there a better way to report the bug than just use the built-in crash reporter? I still get super sporadic crashes, I think it has to do with having too many tabs loaded.

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

#206

Wait, has gizmodo turned into a blog lately? I mean, that's not journalism, that's a rant supported by no benchmarking or any evidence of sort...and while i do agree on the message, i believe that anyone who wants to be called journalist should at least write like one.

What do you mean "turned into"? Gizmodo describes itself as a "Technology blog focused on gadgets."

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

#207

What drives me nuts is the fact that even after I explicitly close it, Chrome insists on opening up all the tabs I had open before. Reloading those tabs takes time, and I can only pray it's not some poorly coded webpage that performs an undesired action based on the URL. If I explicitly close an app, my expectation is that all the resources I had open close as well (to be fair, Atom does the same thing)

So turn off that setting then.

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

#208
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair quite a few users left Firefox because they found it "bloated" or "it didn't work anymore" but never realized they were the ones that installed the bloat/adware/malware.

For me the bloatware was Firefox 3.0 that installed itself against my wishes. I was using then Firefox 2 or 2.5 (don't remember) quite happily. It was just great (compared to Explorer). Chrome showed up... But Firefox 2.5 was still much better. Then one day, Firefox started to INSIST to install 3.0, then 3.5, then one day it just did, no matter how hard I tried to keep my old version. And then behold, Firefox 3.5 had…

Can you people explain why you are downvoting me for my anecdote?

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

#209
post #34
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…

To be fair quite a few users left Firefox because they found it "bloated" or "it didn't work anymore" but never realized they were the ones that installed the bloat/adware/malware.

I'd hate for this to become the revisionist history of the migration from FF -> Chrome.

When I finally made the move FF had no extensions, no malware or any add-ons. I ran the same (mostly) version on Ubuntu, OSX and Windows 7. It had become unusably slow on all platforms. Looking around on the Internet in those days saw enough validation of the problem being widespread in terms of speed and memory resources that I tried Chrome and found it significantly snappier.

In fact, I still do, although I note the great strides FF has taken in that regard. My problem is I haven't seen the same degradation in Chrome that I saw in FF a few years back. If it's getting bloated, I've missed it (in terms of palpable heft with slowdowns, crashes).

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

#210
post #180

I just tested Firefox 37 (Developer Edition) and Firefox 38 (Nightly). The multi-process "Electrolysis" support in 38 is great. Several tabs with flash plugin work fine now, without slowing down the whole browser. Though, I still see only one main process for all web sites (there is a child process "plugin-container"), that's a bit disappointing. IE 9+, Chrome and Safari 7+ spawn a new process for every x sites - a c…

If you have Electrolysis there should be more than just firefox and plugin-container. Currently I run Nightly as my main browser and have to keep it disabled though due to some plugins I use lacking Electrolysis support (the fix is not on the plugin maker's side.)
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