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Give Firefox a chance

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Re: Give Firefox a chance

#121

Post by latexr »

gavinpc wrote: post #114
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.)

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

I’ll extend the quote a bit more:

> make it good. For many of us it isn’t

I’m saying Firefox isn’t good enough for many of us (mostly various subsets of macOS users).

As for resource hunger, in my case I see it in headless mode (it always turns the fans on), but every point in that list apart from (lack of) AppleScript support was lifted from other complaints I’ve seen in similar HN threads, not my experience.

Most of those problems I could live with in the name of supporting Firefox, but not the lack of AppleScript support. That seems to be the case for many of the aforementioned macOS users: we want to like Firefox, but theres a detail it screws up so bad for our needs, it becomes unusable as a daily browser.

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#122

Post by kevingadd »

dgellow wrote: post #80
ancientgallery wrote: post #41

The adblock-related thing pushed me to Firefox, and I've been using it for about a month. The only problems I have are regarding PDF files: 1) Dark mode (via dark reader) won't work on PDFs. 2) The Print-to-file (Ctrl + P) save location defaults to "~/mozilla.pdf" and there seems to be no option in preferences to change this default (titles often are multi-word long and copy pasting is a huge pain. Chrome just picks…

Interestingly enough, Windows 10 replaced the pdf reader by Edge (which is based on Chrome’s engine), and the experience is really neat.

The version of Edge that pops up to read PDFs is not Chrome-based, as far as I know. Chrome-based Edge is basically brand new.

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#123

Post by RandomGuyDTB »

gavinpc wrote: post #114
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.)

In every test I've seen Firefox has beaten Chrome in terms of speed.

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#124

Post by kevingadd »

igetspam wrote: post #11

I use FF as my daily driver. I am forcing myself to do it because I value privacy. Unfortunately FF doesn't make it easy. Chrome may be a memory hog but FF gets OOM killed multiple times a day and every night. I'm not a light user but I'm also not a tab junky. The big consumers are the 3-5 gmail tabs and the 3+ slack tabs. Other than that, it's normal browsing. Chrome ate all my memory but FF just dies.

Gmail and slack tabs are real monsters, yeah. My one slack tab for work will easily eat up a gig of ram over the course of a day (or less), and gmail tabs work up an appetite too. Twitter is also bad and I've occasionally seen a twitter tab eat up a gigabyte. I still run Slack in a Firefox tab though, since the native Slack.exe client has a habit of allocating 40GB of heap and paging out all my other applications.

It periodically gets worse when site authors make changes, and in practice a lot of these are site bugs. I file reports on Bugzilla when I see FF leaking memory on these sites and it usually doesn't turn out to be an FF bug. Maybe worth making reports on bugzilla though, the team is very responsive and they might be able to figure out a workaround for its memory usage in your scenario.

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#125

Post by nashashmi »

xf86alsa wrote: post #78
nashashmi wrote: post #62

I switched to Firefox after the adblock debacle. My biggest problem is with cookie management on desktop. Chrome allows me to block certain cookies or keep them just for sessions. In Firefox cookie management is hard. If I want to list up all the cookies I can't do it.

Perhaps Cookie AutoDelete could help? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autode... I use it to set which site I'd like to keep cookies for multiple sessions for, and which I'd like cookies to be forgotten for as soon as I've left. It doesn't have per-cookie granularity however, if that's what you're looking for.

Thank you. That works somewhat.

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#126

Post by signal11 »

edraferi wrote: post #110
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.

Have you tried the Temporary Containers[0] add-on? It has an “Automatic Mode” that makes links open into fresh containers by default. Then you can create rules to dial that back as needed for usability. I use this in concert with the Multi-Account Containers[1] Add-on. I create names containers for things where I need persistence (“work” “personal” “LinkedIn”) and then everything else is isolated by default. The main…

I was using "Containers on the Go" until recently, I'll try this out, thank you!

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#127

Post by latexr »

kevingadd wrote: post #120
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 ver…

I feel like there might be some miscommunication between our posts, because it looks like you’re arguing against my points but I agree with you.

Both of our points can be true and the same time, and I believe they are.

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#128

Post by nottorp »

Interesting that the adblock thing is finally nudging people away from Chrome. I've found it disrespectful of its users long ago.

The last straw for me was when it started to prevent my computer from sleeping because some unspecified page had active WebRTC connections. There is no option to disable WebRTC in Chrome.

I don't understand: why do they dare prevent my system from sleeping just because some page is doing some p2p stuff in the background? Why would a page even be allowed to do p2p stuff in the background?

Anyway, these days i use Safari (with its nice battery related optimizations) as my main browser with Firefox as a backup. Not missing Chrome in the least.

Edit: I just noticed i had a Chrome instance (with no pages) open and pressed cmd+Q to close it... and it told me "hold cmd q to quit. What the hell Google? Why do you think you're so special?

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#129

Post by dontbenebby »

orpheline wrote: post #101

I'm apparently one of those rare people who never switched off Firefox - it's been my default browser on Mac and Linux for years. Open source, good plugin ecosystem, and does everything I need (not a web developer, so the dev tools were never a strong selling point for me). I've used Chrome here and there through the years, but the more invasive Google became about data collection, the less inclined I've been to use…

I'm the same way. I tried Chrome when it was new but at the time it didn't have a NoScript equivalent so I went back to FF.

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#130

Post by latexr »

RandomGuyDTB wrote: post #123
gavinpc wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.)

In every test I've seen Firefox has beaten Chrome in terms of speed.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20255943. Slowness is a point I’m lifting from other arguments, not my own complaint. I could live with slowness, but that is not my deal breaker.
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