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The endless browser wars

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Re: The endless browser wars

#181

Post by danaliv »

sdeframond wrote: post #142

> having to retry broken web sites in Chrome is a ritual that many Firefox users have had to get used to. I, for one, have been using Firefox both on desktop and mobile for years without ever having to install Chromium, or even any Webkit-based browser. Where does the idea that the web does not work well with Firefox come form exactly ?

For some n=1 anecdata, I very (and I do mean very) occasionally have to bail out of Firefox and use Chrome, most recently on Logitech's ecommerce site. I confess though that I'm never quite sure whether it's a browser issue or the fact that I've got Firefox configured to extreme "adtech is psychological warfare" mode.

Re: The endless browser wars

#182

Post by [deleted] »

da_big_ghey wrote: post #149
CivBase wrote: post #111

> The larger problem, though, is that it's not at all clear that Firefox will remain a viable alternative to Chrome. Its market share has been falling for years, and not everybody is pleased with the directions that the Mozilla Foundation has taken. I'm disappointed by how many people cling to Chrome/Chromium under the justification that they don't like where Mozilla is going. If you can't tolerate Firefox because of…

I've tried to use Firefox, even though I don't like Mozilla's direction. But it just sucks too much. The new updates have made it worse, not better: these days, it leaks CPU. What do I mean? If I leave it running for too long with a bunch of tabs open, it will eat more and more of my CPU until it's hogging it all. Killing and re-opening solves it, but I can't do that all the time. Surf, Midori, and Qutebrowser are al…

[deleted]

Re: The endless browser wars

#183

Post by sam0x17 »

1MachineElf wrote: post #155
dimitrios1 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's another angle here I think you are missing > If you can't tolerate Firefox because of Mozilla's problems, how can you possibly stomach Chrome/Chromium with Google at the wheel? It's because it's not enough to be wrong about something (according to certain people), but you must be punished for being wrong. And narcissists can't handle a company not being "100% right" so they punish them by going to their compe…

How about Brave as a Chromium-based alternative to Firefox that isn't worse for the cause?

Agreed -- Brave takes all those proprietary APIs for things like bookmark synchronization and does them in a distributed way without hitting third party servers. This is the way forward. I have 10 devices on my sync chain and it works great!

Re: The endless browser wars

#184

Post by pdimitar »

nikon wrote: post #173
atombender wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until recently, I used Firefox on my Mac, and had been for a couple of years. I got tired of the browser being a bit slow and consistently consuming 20-30% CPU even when not doing anything. My MacBook Pro's fan was running 100% of the time. I don't have many tabs open and never found an explanation. Last week, I decided I had enough, and switched over to Chrome. Now the fan doesn't run anymore, and Chrome consumes mu…

I did the same, but Chrome -> Safari. My battery life is considerably better.

Safari almost has no extensions, and is severely lagging on a workstation-grade Mac and I suspect it's the huge amount of bookmarks that I have.

Furthermore, invoking the list of tabs (actually a grid of tabs) is also very slow and feels like the machine is struggling doing it.

I like Safari. It's extremely lightweight. But it's not given proper attention by Apple, which is a big shame. They have the resources to make it as fast as Chrome is. But they don't. :(

Re: The endless browser wars

#185

Post by arpyzo »

I wish more people with give Firefox a honest try. I've been using it for years and I love it.

It's very rare that I need to pull up Chrome to use a site, and frankly I blame the website developer. How hard is it to write a web application that works in Firefox? IMO, one has to be pretty sloppy or lazy to wind up creating a Chrome-only site.

Firefox allows me to customize it exactly that way I want, and it's reached the point where I haven't been forced to change that look and feel in a long time. It has a ton of cool features I haven't even had a chance to take advantage yet, such as setting up my own sync server.

That said, it has its warts, and the developer's decisions have frustrated me at times, but this goes for pretty much any software that gets "upgraded" on a regular basis.

Give is a shot. You might find you like it more than you expected.

Re: The endless browser wars

#186

Post by approxim8ion »

crocodiletears wrote: post #161
approxim8ion wrote: post #2

Holding strong to Firefox as long as I have to. What really strikes me is why more people aren't pushing for open-source browsers. One would think that it is important to have an element of trust for something that makes up the bulk of your computer's uptime, but perhaps open source is no longer a good indicator of trust for projects as large and complex as modern browsers, or people are willing to trust them anyway.…

I switched over to Waterfox after their recent blog post[0]. Not a political matter, it just reeked of paternalism. I'll hold on to Gecko as long as I can, but Mozilla keeps making decisions that force me to hold my nose. [0] https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2021/01/08/we-need-more-than-d...

shrug I'm not the biggest fan of the post, but unless their opinions become downright offensive or affect their product in any way I'm not inclined to drop it. Different strokes for different folks, of course.

Waterfox seems nice enough but I'm not sure how I feel about it being a fork of an older version essentially. It'd help if I had an idea about the technical stuff that goes into the browser, but I'm just not sure if I can trust it as much as I do Firefox for example.

Re: The endless browser wars

#188

Post by jjav »

CivBase wrote: post #111

> The larger problem, though, is that it's not at all clear that Firefox will remain a viable alternative to Chrome. Its market share has been falling for years, and not everybody is pleased with the directions that the Mozilla Foundation has taken. I'm disappointed by how many people cling to Chrome/Chromium under the justification that they don't like where Mozilla is going. If you can't tolerate Firefox because of…

> I'm disappointed by how many people cling to Chrome/Chromium under the justification that they don't like where Mozilla is going.

A very key point. I may rage against the occasional anti-user decisions Mozilla makes every now and then, but objectively Google and thus Chrome are 100x worse in every aspect. Mozilla still does respect privacy and user choice mostly, even if they blunder sometimes. Google is an advertising company with a mission fundamentally contrary to privacy. No way I would ever run Chrome.

And that's before considering the monoculture risk of a single browser which is an even larger threat. Maybe some are too young to remember when IE was dominant and there was a real fear of them closing off most the popular web to be Windows/IE only.

Today Google's control over interoperable web traffic is larger than Microsoft's ever was, through things like the curse of recaptcha that makes browsing more difficult on non-chrome. Another reason to vote with my mouse clicks and never run Chrome.

Re: The endless browser wars

#189

Post by jjav »

da_big_ghey wrote: post #149
CivBase wrote: post #111

> The larger problem, though, is that it's not at all clear that Firefox will remain a viable alternative to Chrome. Its market share has been falling for years, and not everybody is pleased with the directions that the Mozilla Foundation has taken. I'm disappointed by how many people cling to Chrome/Chromium under the justification that they don't like where Mozilla is going. If you can't tolerate Firefox because of…

I've tried to use Firefox, even though I don't like Mozilla's direction. But it just sucks too much. The new updates have made it worse, not better: these days, it leaks CPU. What do I mean? If I leave it running for too long with a bunch of tabs open, it will eat more and more of my CPU until it's hogging it all. Killing and re-opening solves it, but I can't do that all the time. Surf, Midori, and Qutebrowser are al…

> If I leave it running for too long with a bunch of tabs open, it will eat more and more of my CPU until it's hogging it all.

That's not normal Firefox behavior. I run multiple windows (one in each monitor), each of them with many dozens of tabs and only time I ever quit Firefox is if I have to reboot the machine for an update, so it runs for many months on end. Never seen this runaway CPU consumption.

Re: The endless browser wars

#190

Post by PascLeRasc »

aquova wrote: post #136
maceurt wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I could stomach firefox, but everything about it just absolutely infuriates me. Even with a bunch of addons it is bothersome to run. The issue is that most people spend majority of their time on a PC in a web browser, including myself. Even a 5% worse product is still going to add up to a sizable amount of wasted time/ unneeded frustration. I personally spend hours tinkering with my OS to make it better for me…

Out of curiosity, what is it that makes Firefox 5% worse than Chromium-based browsers in your eyes?

When I use Firefox on my work laptop I get harassed by Microsoft. They keep signing me out of Outlook and saying they wouldn’t have to do that if I was on Edge. And they occasionally put up a message on Microsoft To-Do that they won’t sync my changes because I’m on an unsupported browser. This doesn’t happen with Chrome so unfortunately that’s what I use now. It’s not Firefox’s fault, it actually works better for me everywhere else, but I wanted to stop signing in 6 times a day.
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