It’s time to give Firefox a fresh chance • Hacker News Board

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

#161

Post by anotherevan » Sun, Apr 15, 2018, 9:40 PM UTC

johnp_ wrote: post #71

zeta0134 wrote: 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…

If `extensions.pocket.enabled` doesn't sync (I don't know if it does by default), consider adding `services.sync.prefs.sync.extensions.pocket.enabled`, then it will synchronize across devices. Bookmark sync is currently getting a complete overhaul to fix the various shortcomings: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WoM7JEatr_QJ1CrGk2rwoSDy...

With the upcoming death of Xmarks, I've often idly wondered how hard it would be to write a Chrome extension that could use Firefox's bookmark sync facility.

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

#162

Post by woolvalley » Sun, Apr 15, 2018, 9:40 PM UTC

Firefox is fairly unusable performance wise with google maps and surprisingly facebook. Those are two huge apps that I feel like are table stakes for a web browser. Facebook is even more surprising, since it isn't an amazing webgl program rendering a complicated map view, it isn't created by a direct competitor and at facebook's size, making something work better for %1 of users is a big gain.

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

#163

Post by acqq » Sun, Apr 15, 2018, 9:42 PM UTC

jiveturkey wrote: post #72

glogla wrote: 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.

Google collects enough information even without Chrome, and very much so without you signing in. I know because I use only Firefox or iOS. And then even if I never watch youtube logged in, youtube videos that I once watched "follow" me even to the other, new computers or locations. I'm sure about that because it's very exact songs, very exact groups etc.

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

#164

Post by haZard_OS » Sun, Apr 15, 2018, 9:53 PM UTC

giancarlostoro wrote: post #56

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…

I couldn't agree more. In addition, I am one of the (apparently) few who use FF almost exclusively on my mobile devices. No, FF isn't perfect on my phone but it works just the way I need it to 90% of the time. In fact, I've been quite satisfied with the mobile version of FF Nightly.

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

#165

Post by acqq » Sun, Apr 15, 2018, 9:54 PM UTC

com2kid wrote: post #156

KozmoNau7 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It is possible, but I can run Opera with hundreds of tabs for days on end with no problem. With performance degradation over time, it is hard to determine if it is hardware slowly fading, or software bloat running its natural course. I should run a mem tester though. Fwiw I can load the same page up in Opera or Chrome and it will smoothly play, while FF trips over itself in the background.

I saw the same behavior that you describe. The problem is, there are still serious bugs in the "old" (e.g. Gecko) code, not in the "newest and greatest" "new features" code. And just recently they fired exactly the developers fixing such bugs:

https://www.cnet.com/news/layoffs-mozilla-taiwan-changes-fir...

"Taiwan programmers working on Gecko, a core part of Firefox, lost their jobs, one person familiar with the layoffs said. That's global open-source work, in contrast to newer, regional projects coming from Taiwan"

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

#166

Post by anotherevan » Sun, Apr 15, 2018, 9:55 PM UTC

chimen wrote: post #148

2 things chrome still has above ff for me: - NO bar above the tabs - I CAN double-click to select independent word in url

For the latter, if you're willing to go into about:config, try setting browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll to true, and browser.urlbar.doubleClickSelectsAll to false and see if that gives you the desired behaviour.

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

#167

Post by StudentStuff » Sun, Apr 15, 2018, 9:59 PM UTC

bad_user wrote: post #64

Pistos2 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With respect to your analogy: What of Chromium [with the right settings switched in the user's favour]?

Switching off Chrome is like "voting with your wallet", because you're increasing the market share of another entity / project, increasing its legitimacy in the eyes of your friends and colleagues or in the stats that all major websites are collecting on browsers. But switching to Chromium does none of that. Also stripping Google's integration out of Chromium leaves you with a much less capable browser. Are you, for…

Google has let the AOSP apps languish, and has used GApps as a bludgeon to keep control of the parts of Android they care about. Having phones running secure kernel versions obviously isn't a priority for Google, nor is consistent, functional E911 (look at the VoLTE shenanigans with Motorola and T-Mobile!).

What is a priority is building and extending the moat of GApps, locking services into relying on Maps APIs, push notifications, Play Games APIs, etc. Replacing these APIs is a huge task, and many apps will just outright crash if Google Maps isn't on your phone, let alone Google Play Services. The only reprieve is to use F-Droid, which is not the most consistently maintained app store.

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

#168

Post by StudentStuff » Sun, Apr 15, 2018, 10:02 PM UTC

Pistos2 wrote: post #122

bad_user wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Switching off Chrome is like "voting with your wallet", because you're increasing the market share of another entity / project, increasing its legitimacy in the eyes of your friends and colleagues or in the stats that all major websites are collecting on browsers. But switching to Chromium does none of that. Also stripping Google's integration out of Chromium leaves you with a much less capable browser. Are you, for…

Maybe my needs are much more modest than that of the average user, but, as a matter of fact, I do get by without using extensions from the Google Chrome store which are not open source. I do install open source ones from there, but I'm ready to download from source and avoid the store, which I do indeed do in some cases. Even if Chromium's source is developed by Google employees, it being open source at least allows…

Even when maintainers try their best, Chromium still logs and reports information: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?pkg=chromium;d...

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

#169

Post by chiefalchemist » Sun, Apr 15, 2018, 10:10 PM UTC

bugmen0t wrote: post #145

chiefalchemist wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I would greatly appreciate any links to how tos. I looked into this 3+ yrs ago and came up empty.

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

#170

Post by zoffix222 » Sun, Apr 15, 2018, 10:11 PM UTC

pmoriarty wrote: post #82

Since Firefox permanently broke Pentadactyl, I've been wanting to switch to Qutebrowser, but Qutebrowser doesn't yet have NoScript or RequestPolicy functionality, so I'm stuck with Firefox for now.

Brave browser has NoScript in settings.