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Give Firefox a chance

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Re: Give Firefox a chance

#111

Post by beder »

nvrspyx wrote: post #81
jhasse wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm sure I could configure it back [...] It's literally one click in the "Chrome" menu.

They’re talking about the keyboard shortcut. It’s much quicker to use CMD + Q to quit any app on Mac, but Chrome insists on making you hold it down. Clicking through the menus defeats the purpose and misses the point. I’ve turned to using Alfred and typing “qgc” to Quit Google Chrome, although I use Alfred for most navigation now.

FWIW, I turned this option (to not quit on Cmd+Q) a long time before it was the default, and it's saved me time so many times - I absolutely love it. Before, I would constantly try to hit "Cmd+W" and accidentally tap the Q, and the whole browser would close.

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#112

Post by arianvanp »

jjoonathan wrote: post #55
nkozyra wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For passwords the browser's built in management is inferior to password managers. Can you expound? After years of using various pw managers I found it being embedded in the browser very useful.

Having your passwords quickly available on every computer, every phone, every OS, and every browser is great. Browser-plugin + app password managers do all 4, while password managers provided by the OS or browser typically fail at one of those. They fail hard, too, by making it difficult to manually extract passwords when you need to. They also tend to lack features like password generation, note storage, etc. It's a…

Euhm the firefox password manager syncs between devices and even has a standalone app https://lockwise.firefox.com/

Edit: Though Lockwise is relatively new, and currently opt in. And misses features like importing passwords bulk from other password managers

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#113

Post by latexr »

ur--whale wrote: post #72
jmull wrote: post #48

If you’re on MacOS, also consider Safari.

The reason I walked away from Chrome a couple of years ago is because of the amount of information it sends to Google. I'm curious to know where Safari stands in that regard: how much and how often does it "call home"? Oh, and also : how much of it is Open Source? In my experience, Apple is particularly good at OpenSourcing lots of pieces while keeping the juicy bits proprietary. Can Safari be 100% rebuilt from sourc…

Don’t hold me to this, but I think you may be able to build Webkit from source, giving you a functional browser.

I think Chromium is to Chrome as Webkit is to Safari. The latter have proprietary code on top of the open-source former.

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#114

Post by gavinpc »

latexr wrote: post #108

I’m tired of seeing “change to Firefox” arguments that never address its faults. Particularly on macOS, Firefox is unusable for many users — read this thread and any others on HN where Firefox is the topic, and you’ll find the same complaints: * Lack of AppleScript support (my main complaint, every other was lifted from other comments). * Lack of other basic features such as pinch-to-zoom. * Poor Keychain support. *…

> make it good

Are you arguing that Firefox is not even "good," or just not perfect?

(I use Firefox on a Mac all day and the only kind of "resource hunger" I've observed can be pinned to the web pages that it's running.)

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#115

Post by dontbenebby »

signal11 wrote: post #47

If anyone from the Firefox team is reading this: containers are a great idea (I love them), it’s just that currently they’re too much work. Even on AMO, there’s now a bunch of site-specific container addons (Facebook container, Twitter container, Google container, etc) which clearly isn’t scalable. A little bit of UX work is clearly needed to make them more mainstream and a first-class feature in Firefox.

>If anyone from the Firefox team is reading this: containers are a great idea (I love them), it’s just that currently they’re too much work.

Also it's hard to export them... it's my understanding they don't travel with sync, you have to manually set them up on each machine.

I have a pretty complex setup, so that frustrates me.

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#116

Post by m463 »

I should mention the uMatrix add-on - it will speed up firefox more than anything while blocking third-party nonsense.

I change the default rules to allow only first-party by default, then the first time I load a page turn stuff on and save:

  * * * block
  * * frame block
  * 1st-party * allow
  * 1st-party frame allow

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#117

Post by dontbenebby »

arianvanp wrote: post #112
jjoonathan wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having your passwords quickly available on every computer, every phone, every OS, and every browser is great. Browser-plugin + app password managers do all 4, while password managers provided by the OS or browser typically fail at one of those. They fail hard, too, by making it difficult to manually extract passwords when you need to. They also tend to lack features like password generation, note storage, etc. It's a…

Euhm the firefox password manager syncs between devices and even has a standalone app https://lockwise.firefox.com/ Edit: Though Lockwise is relatively new, and currently opt in. And misses features like importing passwords bulk from other password managers

It would be nice if they added a way to import Keepass DBs.

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#118

Post by ken »

lkbm wrote: post #49
idoubtit wrote: post #29

Not much content in this article. A single benchmark which shows nothing of real-life cases. Two minor technical features, one of them already in Chrome beta. Lastly, an appeal to fight Chrome's monopole. Surprisingly, not a word about privacy. I do give Firefox a chance, but it gets tiring. Many years ago, I dropped Firefox's ancestor for Opera 6. The UI and the features were miles ahead (e.g. Mozilla had no tabs).…

> I still use Firefox, but I'm getting more and more irritated against it. I had to search the web in order to change the tile of empty tabs (no buttons, no context menu, only drag-n-drop from bookmarks). Who designed such an unguessable interface? Whenever I hear people complain about the settings being impossible to figure out, I always open them up and try. So I opened settings, which has a search input at the top…

I tried Firefox here just now to see if it's gotten any better since I last tried.

I open the preferences window. Well, not quite. Instead of a preferences window like every other application I've ever used, it's some sort of webpage which opens in a new tab in the same window as the webpage I'm browsing. The controls are all completely custom, and the layout looks nothing like any preferences window I've seen since Netscape.

Also, the Firefox UI doesn't use the same language as the rest of the OS (which is English), or even the webpage content displayed by Firefox (also English). It's all displayed in the language I tried to learn last year, for some reason.

In the search box at top, typing "language" finds nothing, and typing the word for language in the language I'm seeing shows a fancy control with "English (United States)" at the top. There's nothing I see which would indicate why the UI is not English. I google for "how to change firefox ui language", and all the pages I find say to set it here, and restart.

Thus ends another adventure in attempting to use Firefox, and it ends the same way all my adventures do: nothing is standard, everything is custom, and so it doesn't work right. This time, I didn't even get far enough along to complain that all the keyboard shortcuts are broken.

Dear Mozilla: for Firefox to win me back, it has to be a good web browser. Stop trying to be an operating system. I already have one of those. "Look/act like every other application" is the correct answer in every case.

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#119

Post by archey1 »

Firefox is absolute garbage on any OS that isn't Windows. I think that's probably the biggest thing for the power user crowd...but as a someone that finds dual booting too inconvenient, so I virtualize instead, and will never touch an Apple product..works great for me and most family members and friends I set up with it are pretty satisfied.

The new built-in tracking protection is pretty great, and the only extension most people really need is uBlock Origin.

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#120

Post by kevingadd »

latexr wrote: post #108

I’m tired of seeing “change to Firefox” arguments that never address its faults. Particularly on macOS, Firefox is unusable for many users — read this thread and any others on HN where Firefox is the topic, and you’ll find the same complaints: * Lack of AppleScript support (my main complaint, every other was lifted from other comments). * Lack of other basic features such as pinch-to-zoom. * Poor Keychain support. *…

Keep using Chrome on your mac, then (though be aware that there are 0-day exploits found for Chrome on a somewhat regular basis too), or even better: Use Safari. At least it's not Chrome. Fight the monoculture.

The vast majority of computer users are still not using MacOS and those people can also do some good by using Firefox even if you can't.

When it comes to "slow" and "resource hungry" the Firefox devteam is very responsive to bugs. I've had approaching a dozen performance issues I personally reported get fixed.

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