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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

#501

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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…

> Such usage is just not possible with Chrome. In your opinion, what makes this "impossible"? I also use a few hundred tabs at any one time (also to the consternation of everyone who sees any _one_ of the Chrome windows I have open) and I'm very happy with Chrome.

How do you see which tab is which? (I gave up on Chrome about 20 months ago for Firefox's superior tab handling, better stability, and being less of a resource hog. Oh, and for not spying on me.)

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

#502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I wish the Firefox address bar wasn't something stuck in 2005. It chokes on all 1 word phrases, spending many seconds attempting to find webpages for that word instead of searching. Chrome instantly searches. Also, having a separate address bar and search was novel in 1999, when search was novel. However, let's get real: a single address bar capable of nearly instantly deciding between search and location isn't a pip…

Firefox awesomebar has worked nicely for me for years across linux, mac and windows installations.

I'd say you either have a seriously old oc, have something weird in your profile or you are doing something seriously wrong.

Furthermore, awesomebar lets me automatically do full text searches across titles and urls, something chrome still cannot really do (with firefox you can search a couple of fragments of the url or title and off it goes and finds it, quick.)

Furthermore, two separate boxes are the best of both worlds, both awesomebar and quick (ctrl+k)access to your preferred search engine.

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

#503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this essentially when I run high numbers of tabs: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta... Though another comment has led me to wonder if FF doesn't have something similar built-in.

Tree Style Tabs is essential if you keep many tabs open. Not only does it make it possible to read the window titles and use screen real estate more effectively, it facilitates tab hierachies (parent page A opened links to B, C, D, parent page B opened links to E, F, G, etc).

There is a very simple extension called Tab Counter which works very well together with TSTs and it helps to remind me when it's time to clean up the tab bar. It also appears to bring peace of mind that all tabs are still there, it's just the missing status bar. :)

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

#504
post #310

The only reason I don't use Firefox anymore is because it doesn't automatically pick up changes in my proxy settings, whereas Chrome does. So with Chrome I can have tabs open on my laptop at work, then bring it home and continue to use the same tabs, while with Firefox I have to remember to go in and change my proxy settings.

I asked our networking folks and there are couple parts to fix this. First, this bug recently landed which allows us to respect the system network status better: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=939318 I believe thats enabled on windows in FF35, but won't be enabled in Mac/Linux until FF38. There is a separate issue to deal specifically with recovering from proxy settings that have gone bad, though: https…

Thank you for the helpful response. There are a lot of other little things I don't like about Chrome, so once this little issue with Firefox is fixed I want to switch back to it. Good to know that there is a bug filed for it!

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

#505
post #408

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Chrome is way ahead of Firefox in terms of security. It's worth the performance trade-offs. Each website is rendered in a separate process with a sandbox, each with an empty chroot + process namespace + network namespace + tiny seccomp-bpf + syscall whitelist. Chrome also has a stronger sandbox, pioneers better SSL, supports PIE on binaries, uses pepper - doesnt use native Flash plugins, the JIT compiler does randomi…

Worth the performance trade-off for who? For my own use cases, Chrome drags my whole system performance into a gutter and shoots it full of bullets. In other words, it’s not just a “trade-off”, but rather Chrome is completely and utterly unusable, while both Safari and Firefox handle the load with no problem.

I actually have more problems with Firefox's performance than with Chrome's (in terms of processor power), Chrome definitely uses more memory, but it's super fast; firefox is just abysmally slow and can;t handle more than a few tabs. Tried both browsers on Windows 8.1 and Linux, with different machines (home and work computers), too.

However, my high memory consumption in Chrome was due to using AdBlock, which is much lower now that I switched to uBlock. Even back with AdBlock, memory was never an issue with many tabs open.

My only problem (which is probably not Chrome's, but my laptop's fault) is that sometimes, when having ~20 tabs open, and certain tabs are idle for a long time, they take a bit of time to re-render once I visit them again, but that also used to happen in Firefox.

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

#506
post #335

Earlier 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 have a whack of tabs open all the time as well, and if I do it in Chrome it just kills my battery where as in firefox it doesn't. (on fedora 20)

Running down the battery is a well known feature of Chrome on on Windows https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2013/07/08/windows-timer-r...

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

#507

I recently switched to Safari for similar reasons. Safari is much faster than it used to be. It's also tightly integrated with my phone, including password management functionality (similar to LastPass) that works on all my devices. You can also get AdBlock for Safari now, which wasn't always the case. It also has a snazzy built-in RSS reader and just looks better than Chrome.

My biggest issue with Safari over firefox is location bar - it's simply cumbersome and stupid compared to the Firefox Awesomebar. I like being able to type two distinct parts of a URL or title and that Firefox just groks it.

Otherwise, I agree completely.

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

#508

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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 have a 4GB Windows 7 machine with over 500 tabs in Firefox and it still runs Office, IE11 and various other stuff without any problems. Mind you, Firefox only loads tabs when you click on them, so only about 30-50 are actually "live"....

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

#509
post #477

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Google's way of handling accounts is infuriating. I have multiple g-mail accounts. One of them is my primary personal one, and another one I use is a shared account that my band uses for business and soundcloud. Google makes it hellish to sign out of one and into the other. For the longest time, I had them linked, and my band mates could see my personal e-mail. I don't know if they could get past a log in point, but…

Create a chrome user for each google account. There is then a hotkey for quickly switching between users.

The keyboard shortcut that I found is Control-Shift-M to open a box around the profile, down-enter to select "Switch person", then Tab-(Tab-)enter to select the other account. Anyone know if there's a shorter shortcut?

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

#510
post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Create a chrome user for each google account. There is then a hotkey for quickly switching between users.

The keyboard shortcut that I found is Control-Shift-M to open a box around the profile, down-enter to select "Switch person", then Tab-(Tab-)enter to select the other account. Anyone know if there's a shorter shortcut?

On mac it's just cmd + `
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