This article annoyingly misses to mention THE reason to use Firefox over Chrome. Supporting Mozilla.
..plus supporting the open web!!
Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox
441–450 of 654 posts
Re: Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox
#442Earlier quoted context omitted.
Edit: I want to apologize to eridal. I misread his/her statement and though the browser in question was Chrome, not Firefox. So, public apolgy: I'm very sorry, eridal. I thought you wrote something you did not. My comment was wrong as a result. I have corrected my mistake, and wish to apologize to you personally for misreading what you wrote. Original message with the offending part removed, mistakenly assuming erida…
I, at least, do typically run with anywhere from 50-200 tabs (or more!) at any given time. Yeah, there's some slowdown if you're running on an 8GB machine (I'm typing this on a Macbook Air with a Firefox session with at least 100 tabs open at the moment (SEE EDIT)), but it's certainly way more than I used to get with Chrome before I switched back to Firefox a couple years back (Tree View Tabs being the motivating fac…
Tree View Tabs? Do you mean Tree Style Tabs?
Re: Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox
#443Earlier quoted context omitted.
To spin it more positively, he and his ilk more generally represent our users than more "in the know" tech-journalists. I think this is a rough article, but likely one that either many users will empathize with, so the overarching idea that browsers should be doing something to prevent bloat is probably a sound one.
I guess I see journalism the old-fashioned way: you're not an expert on everything, but you do research and distill the concepts for regular readers. This guy clearly didn't do research. Yes, Chrome uses a massive amount of memory, but that was originally a feature . Most people had way more memory than they needed at any given time, so Chrome heavily used memory to decrease processing time and therefore improve rend…
> Now that the age of SoCs/tablets/etc is upon us, people don't have as much extra memory as they did when Chrome first arrived. That may have an impact on how usable Chrome is (don't know if it's smart about "dialing down" its memory usage).
To me, the worst part is that Chrome seems, even without significant extensions, to be a CPU hog. And that translates into worse battery life. I switched to Firefox strictly because of the better battery life; with Chrome and GMail open it was like my battery had a hole in it. (Now I get to deal with random hangs that lock input for a while because a tab has a sad in Firefox. I hate us.)
Re: Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox
#444Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google also happens to be behind the Chromebook effort, so I would be surprised if they don't do any testing on Chromebooks.
Maybe some testing of, say, a few tabs, but I'd be very surprised if a significant number of Chrome devs (or any Chrome devs, for that matter) use Chromebooks for Chrome development ( maybe the Chromebook Pixel, but even that seems unlikely). The Chromebook is optimized toward content consumption; while I'm sure it's possible to do serious programming on ChromeOS (just as it's possible to do serious programming on An…
I remember having a few Google engineers coming to my uni to do a talk - afterwards they mentioned that internally they've been doing a large amount of programming work using internal tools on Chromebooks.
Re: Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox
#445Earlier quoted context omitted.
I regularly have several hundred tabs open in Firefox with no problems. Some people may think this is crazy or messy but I find it very useful for organizing the various projects I'm working on for different clients and my own personal projects. Tab groups and delayed loading make it all very smooth. Such usage is just not possible with Chrome. I tried to switch to Chrome but couldn't find the features I needed and d…
I find that over time I end up with a bunch of tabs whose content seems interesting that grow over time. My working set is off to one side while the 'to read' tabs stack up over to the left. I'd found a big boon for this workflow in the very simple extension "Export Tabs[1]." It's really simple: click an icon on the toolbar and it lists open tabs by title and then by URL. Now when I notice that I've got a real glut o…
I'm old school. My to-read queue goes off to del.icio.us. After all the switches and selling and buying, in the end, it's not half bad. Bookmarklets plus droidicious on Android and I have a dependable bookmark store.
Re: Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox
#446Earlier 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…
We are in the weird situation where even most web application developers run their dev environment on beefier machines than the VMs they are hosting it on.
Great point. I think this is horrible practice and I've seen it lead to lots of slow/clunky code and UX.
Next time I start a new team we're all getting Raspberry Pis for development.
Re: Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox
#447I use the Epic Privacy Browser, built on chromium and way better than firefox and chrome.
Re: Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox
#448Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It also has more and better extensions for helping with multiple tabs. Exactly. Tree Style Tab being the biggest reason I've never switched to Chrome.
+1 for Tree Style Tab. I like to keep dozens of tabs open, and to drag and drop 'em into hierarchical groups. I also like to additionally organize the tab trees into multiple windows; the windows can be distinctively named with the FireTitle extension to identify them quickly. I admit that I never learned Panorama or Tab Groups. Tree Style Tab does just about everything I need.
I'm not sure what Panorama or Tab Groups are, though I suppose I could infer the purpose/function of Tab Groups based on the name.
> I like to keep dozens of tabs open
Only dozens? Son, I just closed a Firefox session (in order to switch over to Nightly) with 233 tabs (plus another window with 10 or so). Didn't even push the 6GB mark.
When it comes to browsing, Chrome is like a modern soldier with all his gadgets and gizmos to keep him nice and sandboxed and safe from his adversaries ("adversaries" being poorly-designed "responsive" "web-scale" "mobile-first" "semantic" "Wangular.js" "jQWOP" "SASSy" "single-page" "web applications"); a good marksman, but easily overwhelmed should he find himself at close range and significantly outnumbered.
Firefox, in the meantime, is better likened to what would result if SkyNet had based its Terminators on Viking berserkers: almost naked, wielding nothing more than battle-axes (axen?) in each hand, charging at hundreds of foes in a magic-mushroom-fueled frenzy and winning. Yet, even if he should fail, 'twould matter not, for he only dreams of dying in such a great battle (as he does every week or so when I inevitably need to restart the Firefox process) and ascending to Robot Valhalla; and someday, Servo Firefoxson will grow from boy to man, and upon doing so, himself join the epic battles to avenge his father.
Re: Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox
#449> Remember when we all switched from Firefox to Chrome? I remember the hype, but I never switched. Firefox was always good enough for me. And really, Firefox overtook Chrome in performance a while ago already. And naturally Mozilla's manifesto is way better to support than Eric Schmidt's "you don't need privacy if you have nothing to hide" idea.
Firefox gets nearly $1mn/day from Google...they're using your browsing history to target new tab page ads to you...they're not a good choice if you care about privacy. They have, though, pressured Yahoo to do some good stuff -- they have zero leverage over google, in fact google has tons of leverage over them. Try the Epic Privacy Browser if you care about privacy!
Re: Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox
#450Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are forks of chromium like iron improving the situation... If people would use them and contribute.
I wouldn't recommend Iron. http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/notes/2009/12/iron.ht...
Epic Privacy Browser is a great choice for a chrome alternative, especially if privacy matters to you.