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It’s time to give Firefox another chance

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131–140 of 733 posts

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#131
post #9

I was very critical of Mozilla in the past about all their "science projects" like Rust. While I appreciate Rust, I thought it was wrong for Mozilla to be wasting resources on it, instead of focusing on Firefox. I was so harsh with them only because I strongly believe that Firefox is my only hope for a free web. But then I tried 57, and I must admit, boy was I wrong. This thing is fast! I haven't stopped recommending…

Rust was pretty much designed to solve problems for Firefox. It's IMO the best bet Mozilla has made these last few years and we're just starting to see them reaping the rewards.

It was denintely a long term play. The worry i had was what if they get 80% down that road and find out it would t work for some reason (say they wouldn't be able to get performance high enough)? They’d have lost a TON of time and resources.

Glad to see they got it to work.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#132
post #7

Switched to Firefox a while ago. I love it. My little tip is to go into add-ons > Appearance, and change over to a compact theme. It looks a lot better than the default theme imo!

Damn it, I was hoping this was going to alleviate my main worry with this new Firefox - the UI. It's so Microsoft Edge-ified. I had more trouble finding this setting than I should have. Appears to be hamburger menu -> customize -> (bottom of page) density drop-down -> select compact. Still not sure if I like it. The tabs alone are still way too big for my liking. Coupled with Ubuntu 17.10 and the Gnome that brings, t…

There's work to use Gnome client-side decorations for the title bar here, which should help with screen real estate: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1283299

It probably won't land in time for 57, but hopefully soon!

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#133
post #9

I was very critical of Mozilla in the past about all their "science projects" like Rust. While I appreciate Rust, I thought it was wrong for Mozilla to be wasting resources on it, instead of focusing on Firefox. I was so harsh with them only because I strongly believe that Firefox is my only hope for a free web. But then I tried 57, and I must admit, boy was I wrong. This thing is fast! I haven't stopped recommending…

If you look at great science projects like the LHC, a lot of the funding is "wasted" building the infrastructure needed to actually build the project, while Mozilla missed the target a few times "Firefox OS", I never saw Rust with bad eyes, it was made to enable Firefox to become a top tier browser again.

It's like CERN, why did they waste all those resources on this World Wide Web thing? Couldn't they just linotype their papers like everyone else?

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#134
post #56

Just switched to Firefox beta to test this out. Looking good so far! The other thing that I've been waiting for is better multi-profile support. You can get a (pre-release) version of that now by opting into the Containers experiment: https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/containers

Firefox has has profiles since well before the first version of Chrome was released. Unfortunately the UI has always been sort of hidden. You can launch with `-P` or `-ProfileManager` to get a profile selection menu. Or nav to `about:profiles` for a slightly more convenient (but less attractive) version. Firefox profiles are great. Better than Chrome profiles, though less convenient, for now. Interested to see how Co…

Aha! I didn't know about `about:profiles`, thank you

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#135

FF56 has a weird problem. It seems all keyboard shortcuts are extremely slow with a delay of several seconds. For example closing a tab with "X" is fast, but pressing "Command+W" causes several seconds delay. Has anyone else seen this problem?

I haven't had that issue but please report it on bugzilla.mozilla.org if you can.

Also I would encourage you to try Firefox Beta, currently on version 57, to see if the issue is present there (also that is the version of Firefox the article is talking about).

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#136
post #26

SeaMonkey (mozilla suite) is the only web browser I have ever truly enjoyed using. I use the browser, email client, irc client, address book, and calendar every single day. Extremely disappointed that Mozilla has basically given a big middle finger to the SeaMonkey/Thunderbird (comm-central) communities with the removal of XUL/XPCOM add-ons, necessity of multi-process, introduction of webextensions, removal of suppor…

> show me a single Persona that doesn't look like shit

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/herbal-guitar... — especially with the new Photon UI (57)

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#138
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citation needed. Google Analytcs and ads are so widely that most of your browsing will be tracked regardless of browser, even regardless of your search engine (but the search engine is also quite major since they can track what you were trying to search for before jumping into the web). But there's also a privacy policy explaining what chrome actually sends: https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/browser/privacy/

It is worth mentioning Chromium is open source too.

And known to contain questionable things.

https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#139
post #103
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention Firefox for Android that supports extensions (uBlock etc.).

Unfortunately, for me at least, it's not a viable option. Firefox on android still feels significantly more sluggish than chrome. Plus, googles questionable business practice of embedding chrome into many apps, while making opening links very fast, adds another three clicks to someone not using chrome.

From a technical position that may be true, but one cannot discount the speedup you subsequently get if you run an ad/script/tracker blocker on mobile...
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