Live data from Hacker News

Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox

gizmodo.com

511–520 of 654 posts

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

#511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tabs were one of the major reasons I switched over to Chrome. At the time, firefox resized the tabs as soon as space became available, making closing a bunch of tabs a pain. They don't do that anymore, but now they have the tab scrolling feature which adds a gui element if there are too many tabs. Thing is, once you close enough tabs, those elements go away immediately, making closing a bunch of tabs a pain. Biggest…

I switched to Chrome a few years ago for the same reason. Another reason was Chrome had an 'omnibar' that takes in both urls and search queries. I was instantly sold on that.

Browser world has change a lot in the past two years.....

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

#512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+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.

Tree Style Tabs looks like it has a potential to allow querying HTML via SQL. I have been thinking about this for a while. I do not have a concrete idea for an application, but it would be cool to retrieve titles of all open sites in certain group/tree. Almost like some sort of scraper.

I had similar thoughts recently. This kind of hierarchical and persistent 'view' into a graph (the web) could possibly be useful in other contexts (perhaps even as a general computer interface), and not just for graphs but generally as a hierarchical scratch board for queuing and structuring tasks and information. I'm thinking about implementing this in an experimental package for Emacs.

As for existing things, I've found Tab Counter quite useful in combination with TSTs.

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

#513
I'm a developer focusing on mass appeal internet web apps. Chrome is number one there and that's what I use for everything but testing. Chrome HAS been crashing more and more but I could just as easily attribute it to the countless chrome extensions I have installed in 30+ tabs. Btw, Chrome seems fast and light enough to be able to handle the load. Actually, it just seems like I'm pushing chrome more and more lately. I do agree, flash crashes all the time, the browser crashes sometimes. It's not the end of the world, I wouldn't switch.

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

#514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the stable version? I would doubt that, because my Firefox still freezes.

No. Firefox's multi-process support ("Electrolysis" aka e10s) is only enabled in the Nightly channel. Firefox does not yet use tab-per-process like Chrome. Nightly only uses two processes: one from the browser (the "chrome" process) and one for all tabs (the content process). You don't get crash or security isolation between tabs when they all share one content process, but that process can be sandboxed by the OS and…

It already does. Electrolysis allows you to specify how many processes you want to allow maximum.

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

#515
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Those "objective comparisons" then probably compared the rendering engines or some other micro benchmarks. My main problem was the GUI, not the rendering (though the latter probably played its part in slowing the GUI down). Opening/closing/moving tabs was sluggish. Just opening Firefox with my ~20 tabs open would take many times as long as opening Chrome with the same number of tabs. You didn't need a stopwatch to se…

Of course, things have changed since then....

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

#516
post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bec…

Chrome may be killing your battery to make it feel "peppier" https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2013/07/08/windows-timer-r...

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

#517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not cross-platform.

That doesn't make it a toy. It makes it a bad choice if you need a browser to be cross-platform, but not everyone has that as a prerequisite. Safari tends to get sand kicked in its face a lot when people talk about browsers, but it's actually the one I keep finding myself coming back to. I got frustrated recently by Safari's JS performance on certain web sites (ones with badly written JS web chat clients, I think, bu…

Very much agreed. A few months ago, I, very much like the person who wrote the article, gave up on Chrome because of huge memory issues (and more importantly, eating up my Air's battery). I converted to Firefox, but on OSX, it is absolutely abysmal.

Finally tried Safari and have not looked back. It is a breeze to use, and I in particular love the shortcut to read articles later. Memory footprint is much lighter, and even with 10+ tabs, I've noticed it doesn't eat a lot of battery.

Also agreed with your point about the extensions. I have the usual suspects like Adblock and Ghostery installed, along with LastPass, but Safari's extensions leave a lot to be desired.

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

#518
post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just always open Incognito windows?

Bookmarks, extensions etc. are all missing in Incognito windows.

Actually they don't. If you go to the settings menu you can allow everything that works in normal mode to also work in incognito.

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

#519

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 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 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.

It still is crazy and messy. For organizing the various projects there are bookmarks and bookmark folders. Having tons of tabs open != organization.

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

#520

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 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.

Between Tree Style Tabs and The Fox Only Better[0] I can't see myself going to Chrome or any other browser. The UI is pretty much hidden until I need it, giving me maximum browsing space.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/the-fox-only-...

Post reply on HN