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Ciao, Chrome: Firefox Quantum Is the Browser Built for 2017

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Re: Ciao, Chrome: Firefox Quantum Is the Browser Built for 2017

#171

Post by kenning »

vhiremath4 wrote: post #142

With all this push for Quantum, I wonder what the extension landscape is like. I’ve heard people complain about FF dropping support for old extension APIs (absolutely no idea if this is true - just murmurs). As a Dev, would now technically be a good time to consider building an extension for Firefox?

I switched to quantum and the only complaint is that I can't use Video Speed Controller on it. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/video-speed-contro...

That application is so useful, everyone I know who has tried it gets used to it and can't live without it.

Re: Ciao, Chrome: Firefox Quantum Is the Browser Built for 2017

#172

Post by PuffinBlue »

ocodia wrote: post #7
k__ wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here, but I guess getting out of gmail and calendar will be tricky.

Plenty of great email, contacts and calendar services out there, you just need to pay for them. I went with FastMail and it’s been absolutely painless.

The only difficulty with other services and contact syncing is 1) getting them to sync across both Android and iPhone bi-directionally and 2) syncing custom fields.

1 can largely be solved with effort (just about) but last I checked Fastmail doesnt use the same vcard formats as Google/Apple and doesnt support custom fields in contacts. That might have changed recently and I'd be very interested to look again if it has.

I even went as far as a fairly engaged back and forth with Fastmail support (reference to which is in my comment history somewhere here) to work out how they could get bi-directional syncing of custom fields to both platforms working. But they had no plans to implement it.

I appreciate mine is perhaps a niche use case but I've got a lot of contacts with multiple addresses and numbers in multiple countries and short of saving maybe 5 or 6 replica contact entries per individual (which is a mess over) the workable solution was to stay within a walled garden.

Re: Ciao, Chrome: Firefox Quantum Is the Browser Built for 2017

#173

Post by cat199 »

DiThi wrote: post #137
fdej wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It reminds me of Phoenix (to become Firefox), and how much of an improvement it was over the Mozilla browser. It makes me wonder where things went wrong, as I recall the Firefox of ~2005 being snappier than the one of ~2015. The only discrete drop in performance that I can remember was the addition of the AwesomeBar (which was worth it, but it really annoyed me at the time that just typing in an address became sluggi…

> It makes me wonder where things went wrong, as I recall the Firefox of ~2005 being snappier than the one of ~2015. If you visit any page made in 2005 with any recent browser it will be unbelievably fast. Pages became more bloated in the last decade because they could.

this + stuck js + single threading..

chrome's day-one multiprocess support was really the big shift since it allowed js bloat to not kill your session, which in turn allowed more js bloat to exist, which in turn made ff slower..

Re: Ciao, Chrome: Firefox Quantum Is the Browser Built for 2017

#174

Post by kbrosnan »

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #164
Drdrdrq wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, but those 12% (didn't check the numbers, I take your word for it) are much more sensitive about such discrimination. That's IE all over again...

I'd be more sympathetic if there weren't examples of Mozilla explicitly fighting against features supported by the other vendors. The classic example is Web SQL, an immensely useful API that Mozilla fought hard against and successfully lobbied to kill off. Chrome and Safari still support it. So for a wide swath of problems, you can either use WebSQL and drop FF support or hack around with a slurry of third party libr…

> This document was on the W3C Recommendation track but specification work has stopped. The specification reached an impasse: all interested implementors have used the same SQL backend (Sqlite), but we need multiple independent implementations to proceed along a standardisation path. [1]

The w3c requires a standard to have 2 or more independent implementations of a spec. Why should Mozilla or Microsoft be responsible for writing an independent implementation of SQLite just so webSQL can be a standard.

[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/webdatabase/

Re: Ciao, Chrome: Firefox Quantum Is the Browser Built for 2017

#175

Post by fencepost »

vhiremath4 wrote: post #142

With all this push for Quantum, I wonder what the extension landscape is like. I’ve heard people complain about FF dropping support for old extension APIs (absolutely no idea if this is true - just murmurs). As a Dev, would now technically be a good time to consider building an extension for Firefox?

I use a fair number of add-ons but there are now compatible versions for just about everything. Exceptions are things like Video Download Helper that's moved some functionality into the external format converter program it already had, but since I was rarely actually using it anyway it's not impacted me yet.

Re: Ciao, Chrome: Firefox Quantum Is the Browser Built for 2017

#179

Post by eitland »

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #168
eitland wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh come on. We've been pushing this since IE6 ruled. :-) Cross browser compability should be easier than ever so it should just be a matter of being a professional developer.

There are a different and arguably smaller set of warts in 2017 compared to 1999 but that doesn't mean that it's easy to reproduce the exact layout, pixel for pixel, across Firefox, Edge, Opera, UC Browser, Safari, Chrome and other browsers in use.

That's true and to be honest I don’t care too much about pixel perfect.

But I think this thread started with a CMS that didn't even work except in Chrome.

Re: Ciao, Chrome: Firefox Quantum Is the Browser Built for 2017

#180

Post by the8472 »

vim_wannabe wrote: post #167
rene_bg wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use [1] to force YouTube videos being streamed as H.264 instead of VP8/9. This helps with the battery issue (at least on YouTube). [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/h264ify/

I think browser makers (or whoever it needs to be) should offer an option to save battery over a little bit of extra bandwidth. Maybe even make it the default.

youtube's logic selects the codec, not the browser
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