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Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox

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

#291

Post by throwawaymsft »

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…

It doesn't matter. The user gets a bad experience and blames Firefox. "Oh, it's those naughty extensions slowing everything down!" smirk the developers.

Do you think the user cares? Firefox is the one who opened themselves up to get abused by. (Same things happened on Windows, you'll get a machine full of crapware if you install popular apps. OSX has a curated app store. Look at the difference on an average windows and OSX machine.)

Some solutions instead of blaming the user:

* Name & shame poorly-performing plugins in the interface. (OSX does this with "apps using significant power" in the battery meter)

* Have a plugin speed rating in the store

* Have performance requirements for plugins (users will report usage data, you have X seconds to startup, if you average higher you will be reviwed/yanked.)

Asking users to not install extensions when extensibility is one of your selling points is not a good idea. Fix how they interact with the browser.

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

#292

Post by terminado »

JohnTHaller wrote: post #139
nvk wrote: post #7

The biggest issue I have with Chrome is how aggressive it's been about linking Google IDs with the browser. I've lost data twice by bugs related to not having a linked ID. Please Google, understand this; I don't want my browser linked with my Google account.

You absolutely must link your Google Chrome install to your Google ID on Windows or you will lose data. Google Chrome now has a "feature" that will automatically reset your homepage, search settings, wipe all extensions and wipe all extension data whenever it detects an unexpected change to any of your settings files or they do not match up to the PC they are locked to. The goal was to prevent third parties from hija…

  You absolutely must link your Google Chrome install to 
  your Google ID on Windows or you will lose data.
Oh man... Settings and bookmarks are not "data" in any substantial sense.

Incognito mode at all times, no Google ID ever, trash local history on every exit. I don't carry the expectation that my bookmarks must live on and follow me from machine to machine.

I don't care about what my search preferences are. I simply turn address bar searches off, or point it to localhost. I don't conduct rampant web searches from the address bar, because an address bar is an address bar, and I only feed it well-formed URLs. I don't waste my time regularly using web sites that can't provide me with a URL that isn't intended to be typed, and sub pages that I can't readily navigate to.

Address to long? No soup for you. Absurd URL parameters? No soup for you. Deeply nested pages, locked away behind a login, 30 clicks deep, and obscured by dark patterns? No. Soup. For. You.

Preferences are preferences, and that's all they are. The default install should be completely useful and practical as-is, on a clean install. If it isn't then preferences should be exportable to plaint-text using an open standard.

Firefox happily dumps its bookmarks as simple JSON. As a result, when I want to transport my bookmarks I can, although, digging back into my archive more than a year 50% tend to perish due to simple link rot.

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

#293

Post by gorhill »

For what it's worth, one fact and an anecdotal observation:

One fact: Currently, Chromium-based browsers suffer from a nasty memory leak: each time one bring up an extension's popup UI, a big chunk of memory is leaked.[1] This alone for me justify using Firefox over Chromium if one has an extension which popup UI must be accessed often.

Anecdotal observation: I have noticed since a couple of versions now that it appears Chromium's garbage collector can be very lazy sometimes. To the point where I am wondering if this is a bug, because the memory would just not be reclaimed by the browser until I forced it through the developer console: upon clicking the trash can in the Timeline tab, 60 MB were re-claimed for one of the extension (from ~130MB to 70MB). This was after waiting for an hour to see if it would be reclaimed. Yes, there was a lot of idle time while I waited.

[1] https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=441500

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

#294

Post by jlarocco »

hackuser wrote: post #190
moe wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I left Firefox because it was measurably slower than Chrome at the time (and not by a small margin) and because crashes/hangs would usually take the whole Browser down.

> I left Firefox mainly because it was measurably slower than Chrome at the time (and not by a small margin) I have no idea what your experience was, of course. Many people said this for years while Firefox consistently won or tied in objective comparisons. Having dealt with end-user complaints for years, I've learned to doubt reports that rely on subjective perceptions of things like 'speed'. Sometimes the new, cool…

I switched to Chrome primarily because of that doubting. For a while a pretty good chunk of people were complaining about Firefox's speed and memory usage, and the dev team stuck their head in the sand and blamed plugins, extensions, slow hardware, OS problems, malware, and everything under the sun except Firefox itself. At some point people just said, "Fuck it, I'm not even trying to convince them any more, I'm just switching to Chrome."

Also note that Firefox was "winning" objective benchmarks on things that didn't matter. Rendering speed doesn't mean much to me if it takes 10x longer to open the tab before rendering begins.

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

#296

Post by bitslayer »

FilterJoe wrote: post #177
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…

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…

The whole point of having separate processes for each tab is that it isolates them. If one crashes, the others remain up. It supports multiple processors, too.

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

#297

Post by maxerickson »

AngrySkillzz wrote: post #288
jo_ wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Because maintaining a large catalogue of bookmarks is a nightmare; good luck finding anything unless you are incredibly meticulous about organizing them. In addition, I think it's a spatial locality thing. I find that I'm a lot more likely to come back to an article/page/etc. if it's still open than I am to remember that I bookmarked it and wanted to come back later.

I just had to look up how to do it, but in Firefox you can search bookmarks from the url bar by starting off with a * and a space.

(I'm glad I looked it up, this makes me more inclined to make bookmarks without sorting or tagging them)

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

#298

Post by Spiritus »

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…

Completely agree. The complete lack of OS X native feel turns me off. There's not even a swipe animation for going back/forward in history. I know most of the work is done, but just finish this already, it's been ongoing for like 4 years now.

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

#299

Post by lelandbatey »

macNchz wrote: post #58
nvk wrote: post #7

The biggest issue I have with Chrome is how aggressive it's been about linking Google IDs with the browser. I've lost data twice by bugs related to not having a linked ID. Please Google, understand this; I don't want my browser linked with my Google account.

This was the driving reason I switched back to Firefox as my main browser about a year ago. It reached a tipping point when I discovered that there was no way to unlink a Google apps business account from Chrome without resetting the browser entirely. Being that I'd never intended to 'sign into Chrome' in the first place (the form looks awfully similar to the gmail login), I essentially rage-quit Chrome and haven't l…

Similarly, I became uncomfortable with the integration that Chrome was encouraging. Add to that the issues it was having with font rendering and displaying at different DPI's, and FireFox has been my go-to browser ever since.

Additionally, I've found FireFox to be more consistent about it's quality, vs having occasional releases with a jump in bugs/instability.

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

#300

Post by _lce0 »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #277
yellowapple wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might sound silly to some, but I wouldn't be surprised if Google limited its usability tests to high-end machines with RAM in the double-digits. I reckon most programming teams have this issue, since even if they're dogfooding, they're doing so on high-end hardware, meaning that low-end hardware is untested and often unusable. Google isn't the only culprit; many websites nowadays will start to lean heavier towar…

I have 16GB and regularly have >100 tabs open in Chrome. It works, kind of, as long as I don't try to run anything else at the same time. The article persuaded me that Firefox may be worth a try again. As for testing - you'd think testing on a range of hardware would be standard. Testing exclusively on top spec machines is just unprofessional.

I've using firefox on a 4Gb linux machine for about two years so far.. and it's working just fine, each release it keeps better and better
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