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Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

pcworld.com

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Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#141

Post by anonymousab »

kevincox wrote: post #92
zelphirkalt wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although Firefox had profiles for ages and you could start Firefox with the profile manager and "new instance allowed" to choose a profile at the start of each new instance. More hidden then in Chromium, but definitely possible. EDIT: Just for completeness sake, here is the command to open Firefox with profile manager and new instances: firefox --new-instance --ProfileManager %u

Yes, but with this UX it may as well not exist for 99% of users. Container tabs while still a little power-user is something that can be explained to the average user.

One of the major problems with container tabs is that they share a lot of persistent state between them, such as browsing history. Profiles are mostly isolated by comparison.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#142

Post by RicoElectrico »

guerrilla wrote: post #129
RicoElectrico wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

asos.com did not work properly on FF until recently. Opening some categories would yield an "oops" error. Seems it's fixed in the latest release, but it goes to show how fucked up is webdev if nobody from asos.com tested it with Firefox.

What... I've used it for years. Never seen this. Maybe it was temporary.

It persisted for a few months. Probably it had to do with PL locale, as they did not strip diacritics in category names from URLs

Oh, and I did turn off uBlock Origin, for that matter.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#143

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

almog wrote: post #79
kristiandupont wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm starting to see broken sites What are some examples of this? I keep seeing this complaint and I keep asking for examples but I always get "just various sites"-like answers. FF is my primary browser and I am not seeing it. I am genuinely curious as to whether it is starting to fall behind but I can recall maybe two or three instances the past couple of years where I opened a site in Brave to see if it worked the…

Gmail, other than being sluggish on FF, its browser history (back button) is broken on Firefox (though gmail's keyboard shortcuts still work).

I use this feature to stick it to them and never use logged in Google properties from my main Firefox. I can discard their cookies at will. I have a Chromium sandbox they can track me in for Gmail.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#144

Post by was_a_dev »

andrepd wrote: post #60
Synaesthesia wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really nice on Android to have extensions like YouTube background player and uBlock origin.

Any YouTube I watch on android I watch on NewPipe. It's amazing.

I've always stuggled with NewPipe, not because of NewPipe itself, but because YouTube and it's algorthim.

People act as if the algorthim is some sort of evil entity, but my viewing habbits follow recommended videos and content aware search. I find sticking to subscriptions and trending videos to be very trapping.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#145

Post by shadowgovt »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #90
zonotope wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use firefox and don't see broken sites per se, but there are many sites where performance, especially js performance, suffers. Gmail and other Google sites are sluggish for example, as well as Amazon. It sometimes takes a minute after visiting amazon.com for their js to initialize and I can begin to interact with the site. This is not the case for chromium. I stick with firefox because of multi-account containers,…

Google sites have long been suspected to do things intentionally in a way that is only optimizing for Chrom(e/ium), maybe even intentionally slow on other browsers, which is mostly Firefox. No surprise there at all. However I do not see this stuff about JS init to take that long on amazon. It might be a special thing in your case. Did you try things like a new profile, to test, whether it still happens?

It's not so much "intentionally broken on Firefox" as it is "between adding features and debugging Firefox performance issues, one gets you promoted and one doesn't." Because the former benefits all users and the latter benefits about 5% of users at most.

The banal evil of neglect vs. intentional maliciousness.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#146

Post by _dark_matter_ »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #90
zonotope wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use firefox and don't see broken sites per se, but there are many sites where performance, especially js performance, suffers. Gmail and other Google sites are sluggish for example, as well as Amazon. It sometimes takes a minute after visiting amazon.com for their js to initialize and I can begin to interact with the site. This is not the case for chromium. I stick with firefox because of multi-account containers,…

Google sites have long been suspected to do things intentionally in a way that is only optimizing for Chrom(e/ium), maybe even intentionally slow on other browsers, which is mostly Firefox. No surprise there at all. However I do not see this stuff about JS init to take that long on amazon. It might be a special thing in your case. Did you try things like a new profile, to test, whether it still happens?

It is not just suspected, all Firefox Android users are served a different Google search experience than Chrome. One that is much worse.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#147

Post by skinnymuch »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #117
prox wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope you become a full time user, lets curb the direction Google wants to go in.

Even if the entire HN community would switch to Firefox, it would still be a drop in the ocean to curbing Chrome's market share. Also Firefox hasn't been doing itself any favors by alienating both the average Joe consumers and the professional devs over the years.

I don’t think that’s true. If the entire HN community which I assume includes tons of casual weekly reading non-logged in users, that would be massive. The number of people outside HN who would try out FF again would be a sizable multiple of the HN community.

If everyone thinks negatively, then no change will happen. Keeping reality in perspective is important, but improving things is really important too.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#148

Post by guerrilla »

wildrhythms wrote: post #134
guerrilla wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Video heavy sites, especially YouTube. It loads extremely slowly compared to Chrome. And has much more video stuttering. Probably Google is sabotaging YouTube in Firefox. Hmmm... I've never had this problem and I use YouTube heavily. You sure your video acceleration and codecs and all that are set up right?

How does one 'set up' video acceleration and codecs?

I don't remember but I had to enable something in FF for acceleration at one point and I assume you'd have to have the right codecs installed. This is on Arch Linux.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#149

Post by guerrilla »

RicoElectrico wrote: post #142
guerrilla wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What... I've used it for years. Never seen this. Maybe it was temporary.

It persisted for a few months. Probably it had to do with PL locale, as they did not strip diacritics in category names from URLs Oh, and I did turn off uBlock Origin, for that matter.

Okay, I can see that being a thing. I've only used it in Swedish and English.

Re: Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox

#150

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

formerly_proven wrote: post #24
haunter wrote: post #21

>Automatic blocking of autoplay videos And then this very site has an automatic playing video in the article lmao Also a lot of these claims are so-so imo. "Lighter on system resources" "Speedier website browsing" I usually have 60-70 tabs open across 5-6 windows. Firefox absolutely shits itself all the time but Chromium doesn't. Anyways I use ungoogled-chromium https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium

> I usually have 60-70 tabs open across 5-6 windows. Firefox absolutely shits itself all the time but Chromium doesn't. Last time I checked I had a few thousand tabs open with Firefox and it doesn't do anything except use memory.

I have no problem in Firefox with dozens of tabs. Meanwhile my extensionless Chromium install will consume all memory if it is left open for a couple weeks with just two or three tabs.
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