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Give Firefox a chance

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Re: Give Firefox a chance

#22
post #2

I've given Firefox multiple chances, but we've had no progress with the MacOS performance issues for years. Also, no pinch-to-zoom? 2007 called, and it wants its browser back.

Firefox will still often call for the dedicated GFX card (boosting battery usage) and then refuse to let it go even if you close the tab. I generally switch to Safari when I'm trying to maximize battery life.

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#23

I left Firefox because of its memory consumption on MacOS. Have they fixed it?

Memory, and CPU on a retina MBP in my case. The bug is still open, with no signs of being fixed anytime soon. I really do want to switch back, but this is a deal breaker.

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#24

I use FF as my daily driver. I am forcing myself to do it because I value privacy. Unfortunately FF doesn't make it easy. Chrome may be a memory hog but FF gets OOM killed multiple times a day and every night. I'm not a light user but I'm also not a tab junky. The big consumers are the 3-5 gmail tabs and the 3+ slack tabs. Other than that, it's normal browsing. Chrome ate all my memory but FF just dies.

Is the OOM problem still there even after Quantum release? This was the main turn off factor for me with FF long ago, and when the OOM fails to even trigger, the famous swap thrashing occurs.

I tried again with Quantum, but then there were still stability problems causing the whole browser to lock up (just like Edge. But same problem existed in FF since long ago too), so I've never tried it anymore since then. Twice bitten, thrice shy.

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#25
post #7

Vertical. Tabs. For my usecase, nuff said. Chrome developers WONTFIXed requests for this a long time ago, so keep using Firefox I will (that and doing my part to preserve web engine diversity). Additionally, I've begun trying out Brave/Vivaldi/Opera to see if I can uninstall Chrome from my system entirely; They all run Blink, so I assume I can open the occasional compatibility-issue pages on those.

What plugin allows this feature in Firefox now?

Tree Style Tab is another option, allowing vertical tabs with nested hierarchy: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

As someone that likes to use open tabs as a sort of todo list, I can't live without that extension. Allows me to keep different trees open for various purposes: PRs in one tree, Issues in another, academic/scientific paper to-read list, forum posts, etc

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#26
Is there any way to select multiple tabs and drag them around in FF like you can in Chrome?

Edit: Holy smokes, it works now! How long has that been a thing?

Shift will select the tabs between current and clicked, while Ctrl will select / deselect clicked tab.

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#27
post #26

Is there any way to select multiple tabs and drag them around in FF like you can in Chrome? Edit: Holy smokes, it works now! How long has that been a thing? Shift will select the tabs between current and clicked, while Ctrl will select / deselect clicked tab.

use the shift key while selecting the tabs.

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#28

I switched back to Firefox from Chrome earlier this year, and the experience has been very positive. It performs well, feels snappy, the dev tools are on par with Chrome's and everything feels right. The only negatives are that container tabs are still taking a bit of getting used to (why can't I have a 'Work' window in which all the new tabs are 'Work' tabs by default?) and the initial migration of passwords was a b…

For passwords the browser's built in management is inferior to password managers.

I use 1Password (most polished) and there's also Bitwarden (hosted, but open source) and others. And I use my password manager every day, so if there's a cost associated, it's worth it.

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#29
Not much content in this article. A single benchmark which shows nothing of real-life cases. Two minor technical features, one of them already in Chrome beta. Lastly, an appeal to fight Chrome's monopole. Surprisingly, not a word about privacy.

I do give Firefox a chance, but it gets tiring.

Many years ago, I dropped Firefox's ancestor for Opera 6. The UI and the features were miles ahead (e.g. Mozilla had no tabs). Yet I wanted to support free software so, once in a while, I tried to use Mozilla/Firefox again, but so many features where lacking, and the reactivity was really bad. When Opera dropped their engine and UI to become a new Chromium derivative, I switched to Firefox. I tried to get used to it, but for the past year my main desktop browser has been Vivaldi, a Chromium derivative.

I still use Firefox, but I'm getting more and more irritated against it. I had to search the web in order to change the tile of empty tabs (no buttons, no context menu, only drag-n-drop from bookmarks). Who designed such an unguessable interface?

I can't stand horizontal tabs in my brower. The Tree Style Tab extension was a strong point of pre-quantum FF, though its CPU usage was noticeable. Unfortunately, it's been a pain since I upgraded to Quantum, with many bugs and slowness.

Another example: my last FF ESR upgrade introduced a calamitous rewrite of the download interface. It's inconsistent, error-prone and ridden with several bugs. For weeks, I duplicated many downloads because the notification is absurdly small and quick. Now I've learned to click on the FF icon to check if the download started.

A last example: this morning, I selected 5 finished downloads and removed them. No reaction for 2 seconds, so I pressed the key again, just as the suppression begin, in slow motion. It took FF 3 seconds to remove 6 entries from the log.

With uBlock against tracking, DDG+Qwant for search, and a custom cookie handler (no third-party, white-list for those that persist after a tab closes), I don't think FF has anything to offer me on privacy. So the only reasons that keep me interested in Firefox are Free Software and Web diversity. I'm afraid these moral incentives don't weight much against many practical reasons.

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#30
From developer point of view, isn't this a bit of a false dilemma? I have open, at the moment:

- Safari (general browsing)

- Safari Technology Preview (studying, reference)

- Chrome Canary (development, debugging)

- Chrome (main QA)

- Firefox (work account related stuff)

- Brave (consuming video content)

This is all on MacBook Air from 2013, so performance concern is also a moot point really.

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