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It’s time to give Firefox a fresh chance

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Re: It’s time to give Firefox a fresh chance

#141
post #38

Here's my favorite metaphor to explain Chrome and Firefox. So, imagine you have two cars to chose from. The first car, called Chrome, is really cool - it's quick, it's nice, it's reliable, it's comfortable. There's just one thing. There's a guy on the back seat. He's always there. He writes down wherever you're going. When you go shopping, he makes a copy of the receipt. When you drive with someone, he listens to the…

Chrome only collects information on you if you “sign in” doesn’t it? Which it doesn’t do by default although yeah it does push you to make that choice. And all the browsers need you to sign in if you want multi device sync.

I use Chrome without signing in but I'm sure it doesn't make a difference: Google knows your IP and the IP from where you normally use Gmail. I don't believe that they don't infer who is using Chrome.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox a fresh chance

#142
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Viewing pdfs was a big difference some time ago. Nowadays Firefox seems to have catched up. While I switched back to Firefox as well, I still miss Chrome's print dialog. It looks much simpler, yet does everything I need with a lot less clicks.

For printing, try the Print Edit add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/print-edit/ EDIT: The Firefox Quantum version (thanks politelemon): https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/print-edit-we... It's not simpler, but it's worth trying just to see and appreciate it; I've never this functionality elsewhere. You edit the document in Print Preview in an amazing number of ways, from removing secti…

Print Edit WE (by the same dev) appears compatible with Firefox Quantum

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/print-edit-we...

Thanks - I'll give this a try

Re: It’s time to give Firefox a fresh chance

#143

I never gave up on Firefox. I always knew Google Chrome was sending back telemetry data or whatever and never looked back. Also with how many sites are "only working in Chrome" these days I still hold the claim that Chrome is working itself to being the next IE in terms of breaking the web for people using other browsers. I still hold respect for Chrome in other areas though. Firefox was always complained about but h…

> how many sites are "only working in Chrome" these days Which sites? I've never encountered one that worked only in Chrome.

Found one the other day, https://athletigen.com/ can't login unless using Chrome

Re: It’s time to give Firefox a fresh chance

#144

Firefox, on occasion, cannot play videos above 4fps until I restart it. After running for awhile, Firefox slows my entire system down to the point there is a 250ms-500ms delay for every key press. Despite all this I keep trying to make FF my primary browser, but wow it is hard. I'm actually using Opera as my day to day, it has hotkeys that are just a little bit better than Chrome's, backspace still does what I'm used…

Your computer may have memory issues, I've seen similar symptoms before.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox a fresh chance

#145
post #38

Here's my favorite metaphor to explain Chrome and Firefox. So, imagine you have two cars to chose from. The first car, called Chrome, is really cool - it's quick, it's nice, it's reliable, it's comfortable. There's just one thing. There's a guy on the back seat. He's always there. He writes down wherever you're going. When you go shopping, he makes a copy of the receipt. When you drive with someone, he listens to the…

Chrome allows for multiple users. FF does not. That why, in my case, forces me to Chrome.

There are various ways to to do that with Firefox. You can use different profiles (completely new settings, add-ons, etc. everything back to default) or multi account containers (gives you different sessions per tab-group)

Re: It’s time to give Firefox a fresh chance

#146
post #83
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My same analogy with cars would be : "Would you drive a car produced by Exxon". Google interest is not the web, it's its own profit.

Mozilla made 530M in 2016 - they're a company. Firefox is is a strategical business decision. Their interest in the web is the exact same interest as Google's in the web. $$$.

Mozilla does not work for shareholders.. All that money goes back into Mozilla itself.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox a fresh chance

#147
post #9

I switched to Firefox as my primary browser a couple of months ago, and have been happy enough that I haven't looked back. It is significantly more smooth and performant than it was; the work on Quantum cannot be understated, and the minor fiasco with their extensions ecosystem, though painful, I feel was the right move. With that said, a few anecdotes keep jumping out at me: - Pocket integration. Dive into about:con…

A lot of the JS problems arise from developers building against v8. I primarily develop with Firefox and do the same the other way: wrote a demo last year that ran at 60fps in Firefox, but <15fps when I tried it in Chrome. Turned out that out-of-index array accesses drop v8 out of a performance optimisation, but had I developed against it in the first place I might have abandoned the whole approach as lacking performance instead of just realising it was a quirk of a particular engine. Incidentally rewriting it to guard against out-of-array accesses only got Chrome up to 50fps so it was still down on Firefox. Maybe other assumptions of mine?

Re: It’s time to give Firefox a fresh chance

#149

I never gave up on Firefox. I always knew Google Chrome was sending back telemetry data or whatever and never looked back. Also with how many sites are "only working in Chrome" these days I still hold the claim that Chrome is working itself to being the next IE in terms of breaking the web for people using other browsers. I still hold respect for Chrome in other areas though. Firefox was always complained about but h…

What sites only work with Chrome? Even though Safari has a minuscule desktop market share, I can't see most sites being incompatible with iOS.

Microsoft Teams used to reject Firefox. Changing the UA to Chrome solved the issue.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox a fresh chance

#150
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both Chrome and Firefox seem to use slightly more battery than Safari on my 2016 MBP. When I say slightly more, I mean that according to Activity Monitor, they both have ~3x more "energy impact", however in practice I haven't noticed a difference in my battery life. The major difference with Firefox is that on some websites (namely Google Maps, Youtube, Twitch, sometimes Gmail), Firefox spikes my CPU usage/temperatur…

Yep, I experience the same issue on a 2015 13" MBP. Appears to be an issue w/ FF and OS X scaled resolutions ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?format=default&id=... )

Oof, that bug doesn't inspire confidence that this will be a worthy experiment. Thanks for the link though, I'll test against a fresh install of osx on a laptop.
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