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Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

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Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#111
post #96

For me, I have found Firefox to drain my laptop's battery more (Macbook Pro, 2017) compared to Chrome (and Safari). Once it changes, I would gladly go back to using Firefox.

Firefox has been hilariously bad for Macs for as long as I can remember. I refused to touch for over 15 years because it was incredibly slow each time I tried. Now that I'm trying to get out of Google's sphere of influence, I'm kind of forced back into it (Safari just doesn't feel right to me). Speed seems much better than it used to be and I can't really tell any difference between it and Chrome. Memory usage is an…

Is that actual memory use, or cache? If it's the latter, it's actually a good thing.

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#112

I haven't really met anyone who is particularly bothered by these issues. They certainly should be addressed to some degree, but the issues I find people are bothered about in Firefox are something that Mozilla has very little control over: Bugs in sites. As a full-time firefox user, I commonly find that sites have bugs, and when I boot it up in Chrome just to check my hunch, they don't manifest. It's pretty easy to…

How about a chrome plugin for developers which somehow on a press of a button replaces the chrome rendered website with the firefox rendered one within chrome? Or like every second reload or something it uses firefox rendeder instead of chrome's. Or uses headless firefox and somehow in the background compares the current chrome website state with the firefox one. This could work for multiple browsers at the same time and would be a must have for web devs.

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a full-time firefox user, I commonly find that sites have bugs, and when I boot it up in Chrome just to check my hunch, they don't manifest. Also a full-time Firefox user. This is fascinating because I quite literally cannot remember a website for which I had to switch browser so it would start working. What kind of websites are these? Have you noticed any pattern about them? Perhaps it's a certain type of site…

For example's sake, try opening payment/billing setting pages of Google products. For example, pay.google.com doesn't load on FF latest on MacOsX latest.

Thanks, though it works for me on Linux and Firefox 68.0.2.

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#114

I haven't really met anyone who is particularly bothered by these issues. They certainly should be addressed to some degree, but the issues I find people are bothered about in Firefox are something that Mozilla has very little control over: Bugs in sites. As a full-time firefox user, I commonly find that sites have bugs, and when I boot it up in Chrome just to check my hunch, they don't manifest. It's pretty easy to…

> As a full-time firefox user, I commonly find that sites have bugs, and when I boot it up in Chrome just to check my hunch, they don't manifest. Also a full-time Firefox user. This is fascinating because I quite literally cannot remember a website for which I had to switch browser so it would start working. What kind of websites are these? Have you noticed any pattern about them? Perhaps it's a certain type of site…

Skype Web is an example from the top of my head, but I don't run into them a lot either (or don't notice that they are only broken in Firefox, because I rarely care enough to try another browser).

I do see quite a few sites that apparently never have been tested with ublock or privacy badger, but they break on all browsers where those are enabled.

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#115
post #89

This could be a little off topic here. I would like to contribute to Firefox but I have no idea where to start with. I dabble with C and x86 assembly. Can anyone suggest where I should get started? I have barely contributed to any open source projects except for a few minor bug fixes.

Good news! Minor bug fixes are an excellent place to start!

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#116

I haven't really met anyone who is particularly bothered by these issues. They certainly should be addressed to some degree, but the issues I find people are bothered about in Firefox are something that Mozilla has very little control over: Bugs in sites. As a full-time firefox user, I commonly find that sites have bugs, and when I boot it up in Chrome just to check my hunch, they don't manifest. It's pretty easy to…

> As a full-time firefox user, I commonly find that sites have bugs, and when I boot it up in Chrome just to check my hunch, they don't manifest. Also a full-time Firefox user. This is fascinating because I quite literally cannot remember a website for which I had to switch browser so it would start working. What kind of websites are these? Have you noticed any pattern about them? Perhaps it's a certain type of site…

I had trouble with imgur on firefox mobile. it doesn't allow uploads until you request the desktop version (which fakes another useragent string).

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#117
post #110

I wish firefox would give money to people who find security flaws in firefox. I've heard that firefox is not very secure. Other than that, I've switched back to firefox a looooong time ago.

Mozilla have a bug bounty program: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/bug-bounty/

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#118
post #96

For me, I have found Firefox to drain my laptop's battery more (Macbook Pro, 2017) compared to Chrome (and Safari). Once it changes, I would gladly go back to using Firefox.

Firefox has been hilariously bad for Macs for as long as I can remember. I refused to touch for over 15 years because it was incredibly slow each time I tried. Now that I'm trying to get out of Google's sphere of influence, I'm kind of forced back into it (Safari just doesn't feel right to me). Speed seems much better than it used to be and I can't really tell any difference between it and Chrome. Memory usage is an…

This is probably OSX issue, my FF works great on Ubuntu. I wish more users will install Linux on their Macs, it is eons better than OSX Toy.

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#119

> This raises some questions: why is Firefox usage going down, and what does Mozilla need to do to bring it back up? > How does an average user get started with Firefox? This misses the elephant in the room : the main reason Chrome is eating other browsers is that Google is putting its advertising might behind it. You know that little "want a better browser" pop-up displayed on Google's search engine? That's an absol…

not entirely true. firefox has solved a lot of startup and other performance issues, but the core rendering engine still lags when confronted with heavy loads, just a scrollable div of a couple dozen large images is enough to make it stutter seconds at time while they load and render, sure it's partly a developer issue for not using thumbnail in the listing, but chrome shows them all with zero lag.

stating that the only reason chrome is ahead is because advertising is disingenuous: firefox only started catching up with them only in the last three-four years performance wise and the gap it's still there.

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#120
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with this is that the web is competing with native apps. A vanilla HTML site might be good enough in some cases but often you really need to push the envelope of what’s possible the web and that’s hard to do and also support niche browsers on a tight development budget.

You can install a “progressive web app” as a native Android app now. There’s been a big push to develop PWAs on the heels of react and single page apps for a couple years now - google is doing a good job trying to support the web as users move so aggressively to mobile. Facebook basically has its own browser in-app(iOS and Android), i bet that browser has more traffic than Firefox.

Google is a bit schizophrenic though.

You can watch IO talks from Android, Chrome, Flutter where the presenter eventually throws some jabs at other competing stacks as if they aren't from the same employer.

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