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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

#531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Firefox followed Chrome's lead. It also has separate processes for each tab now.

Firefox on my PC seems to disagree with you. Try to use any site with a Flash video player since some of the recent updates and you're very likely to see a hang. I don't know whether the cause is Firefox or Flash, but the end result is still taking out the entire browser session, not just the tab with the Flash video.

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

#532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its been my recent experience too, I keep a lot of tabs open and began to notice Chrome was filling up my memory. Very strange that Google let the situation get so bad. Mind you I find the Chrome developer tools far more powerful and intuitive than those in Firefox which stops me moving entirely.

I hear quite a few people talking how they have 30-50 tabs open, how do people manage something like that? And why would anyone need so many simultaneous tabs open?

Agreed. Sibling comment is talking about devoting "hours" to closing tabs, I'm not even sure if it's a joke.

I've presently got 2 tabs open: HN and this comment form.

Even when neck deep into documentation or github issues I don't think I've ever gone above 20 tabs, it definitely doesn't seem like it could be productive.

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

#533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In Firefox you can just put them into groups, so they stop being tabs. Later, you can open a whole group when you need it. It's much more organized...

More than being more organized, it's really changed the way I browse. Throughout the day I'll build buckets of things to read/deal with and keeping them in groups makes it incredibly simple (and less stressful) to run through.

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

#534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome doesn't run Adobe Flash; it runs its own version called PepperFlash by default. I know because I witnessed them breaking one Flash video-recording feature after the other trying to reimplement the damn thing...

>Chrome doesn't run Adobe Flash Yeah, it does. Pepper Flash is just Flash repackaged to use Chrome's new plug-in architecture; it is still written by Adobe. (Although perhaps Chrome does deserve the blame for some crashes related to how it integrates with the browser.)

Pepper Flash is maintained by Google themselves, not by Adobe, as far as I can tell.

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

#535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Chrome doesn't run Adobe Flash Yeah, it does. Pepper Flash is just Flash repackaged to use Chrome's new plug-in architecture; it is still written by Adobe. (Although perhaps Chrome does deserve the blame for some crashes related to how it integrates with the browser.)

Pepper Flash is maintained by Google themselves, not by Adobe, as far as I can tell.

Looks like you are right; googling it definitely suggests that. Thanks for the correction.

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

#536

Firefox's performance has improved a lot and that's really impressive. I tried moving back to Firefox but in the end I just prefer the Chrome UI too much. Using a custom search engine on Chrome can be just a matter of a couple of key presses after opening a new tab whereas in firefox I'm either stuck holding down alt and using the arrow keys or switching to my mouse. And adding new search engines is super easy in Chr…

But do you seriously think there is a better search engine to configure it to?

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

#537
I've felt this same sentiment recently, but regarding the Chrome browser for Android. It used to be perfectly fast, but over time (with updates) it just seemed to get slower and slower on my Galaxy S4, to the point where now it sometimes can take fifteen seconds to register a scroll event on a site like Reddit. Heavier sites are practically unusable. Even as I type this, I see my characters suddenly appearing in groups of twenty or so at a time, where several months ago it was not a problem. And I never even have more than three tabs open normally.

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

#538
post #34

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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…

Apparently Rekonq has a Windows version, at least according to a Google search and resultant blog post and winkde repo. http://lpapp.blogspot.com/2012/09/randa-rekonq-installer-for...

Generally Rekonq is considered the better maintained KDE browser nowadays.

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

#539

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…

> It chokes on all 1 word phrases, spending many seconds attempting to find webpages for that word instead of searching. Chrome instantly searches.

If I've understood what you're saying, I believe this was fixed in Firefox 33: https://msujaws.wordpress.com/2014/08/01/faster-and-snappier...

As for the general complaint about Firefox's address bar: I find it to be vastly superior to Chrome's at finding sites I've visited before. I can type in fragments of URLs and/or page titles (even partial words) and get matches immediately in a way that Chrome (and Safari) can't compete with.

For years I wondered why the other browsers were so much worse at this. Then somebody pointed out to me that, for the case of Chrome, Google would much prefer you find a page via Google search than via your browser history...

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

#540
post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

The historical FF record: https://areweslimyet.com/

That site is the historical record of memory usage on one automated benchmark on one particular test machine. It's useful for finding memory regressions but you really can't draw general conclusions from it.

In particular, it's worst-case behaviour (esp. spikes) that hurts the most with memory usage, and Firefox is much better in that regard than it used to be.

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