Give Firefox a chance • Hacker News Board

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#211

Post by tssva » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 5:31 PM UTC

I've given FF several chances and each has been awful.

Performance on my Macbook Pro is horrible. It will often peg the cpu so badly that the laptop appears to be locked up. This is a known issue which Mozilla has chosen not to address and instead seems to hope the switch to webrender will fix. I say "seems to hope" because the bug for the issue doesn't give confidence that the full cause is truly understood and specify exactly how a switch to webrender will fix it. Maybe Mozilla knows and has done testing but it certainly isn't reflected in the bug report.

Firefox on Android is bloated, slow and is a terrible UX experience. Mozilla obviously recognizes this because they have already announced an effort to completely replace it. There are other Mozilla provided browsers for Android which do perform better but they have a limited feature set compared to Firefox and don't meet my needs.

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#212

Post by floatboth » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 5:33 PM UTC

krzyk wrote: post #100

weystrom wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just opening a new tab, when you have a lot of tabs open, is slow on Firefox. Chrome is also much better for web video. Sites like Youtube and twitch.tv perform better on Chrome. I don't have any benchmarks on hand, but that's how I feel after switch between two browsers for a while. I think I'm sticking to Chromium.

Youtube slows down on non-Chromium browsers on purpose (Shadow DOM v0 and see also problems Edge devs had with it). Try non-Google websites to compare speed.

YouTube feels very fast for me in Firefox. The v0 polyfill is not slow, you shouldn't notice any slowdown from it unless your hardware is really really bad.

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#213

Post by nkozyra » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 5:36 PM UTC

kwhitefoot wrote: post #74

jjoonathan wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having your passwords quickly available on every computer, every phone, every OS, and every browser is great. Browser-plugin + app password managers do all 4, while password managers provided by the OS or browser typically fail at one of those. They fail hard, too, by making it difficult to manually extract passwords when you need to. They also tend to lack features like password generation, note storage, etc. It's a…

> by making it difficult to manually extract passwords Not true for Firefox. Just go the privacy settings, forms, saved logins.

Similarly easy for Chrome - Settings -> Passwords then once OS password entered you can see each.

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#214

Post by brianpgordon » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 5:38 PM UTC

stonewhite wrote: post #142

needle0 wrote: 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.

I have gone Vivaldi and after a month, I don't see myself reverting to either FF or Chrome. Needs some tweaking in the settings, yet it is fast and neat the in the end. I don't see myself going back with my current experience.

Vivaldi is excellent. There are so many little quality-of-life improvements that I can't imagine living without. The one single feature that had me hanging onto Firefox all these years was unlimited browser history. Chrome throws away your history after 3 months (https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=500239), which is insane. With Vivaldi I finally get unlimited history and the superior Chrome dev tools.

I'm not super pleased about Vivaldi being closed-source, but with the direction Mozilla has been going I didn't see it as too much of a betrayal.

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#215

Post by WaltPurvis » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 5:39 PM UTC

mgkimsal wrote: post #43

I do give it a chance, regularly, but it's never enough to be 'default'. Pins. Loved the idea. Unfortunately, they often go missing. Loading the browser, about 15% of the time, I get the "oh this is embarrassing" screen, with "restore your session". If I don't restore right then, all pins are gone. For good. Forever. I've lost way too much time recreating those over the last couple of years. Have never had this happe…

In Chrome, a pinned tab will close when you hit Cmd-W, which is never what I want to happen. E.g., I have Gmail pinned, I open several more tabs, then at some point type Cmd-W several times to close those tabs, but if I type one extra Cmd-W my Gmail tab goes away (and the window closes). Again, I never want pinned tabs to be closed that way. The whole idea of pinning something is to make sure it stays in place. That's what pinning means.

It's really irritating (as you can probably tell).

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#216

Post by yinyang_in » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 5:39 PM UTC

Scarbutt wrote: post #181

dallen33 wrote: post #38

If you’re on a Mac, just use Safari. Feels better than any other browser on the Mac.

No decent adblockers.

It has unblock origin. It works well for me.

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#217

Post by Tomte » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 5:40 PM UTC

arianvanp wrote: post #112

jjoonathan wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having your passwords quickly available on every computer, every phone, every OS, and every browser is great. Browser-plugin + app password managers do all 4, while password managers provided by the OS or browser typically fail at one of those. They fail hard, too, by making it difficult to manually extract passwords when you need to. They also tend to lack features like password generation, note storage, etc. It's a…

Euhm the firefox password manager syncs between devices and even has a standalone app https://lockwise.firefox.com/ Edit: Though Lockwise is relatively new, and currently opt in. And misses features like importing passwords bulk from other password managers

And — at least on iOS — is glacially slow. Startup times of twenty seconds weren't the rule, but not uncommon, when I tried Lockwise last week. Even at the best of times startup took five seconds at least.

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#218

Post by snazz » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 5:41 PM UTC

CryptoBanker wrote: post #199

snazz wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see most of your points as anecdotal (of course someone will come around with a contrasting anecdote, but neither means anything), except for > no add on support (even for those add-ons who had an an FF product) Assuming we’re talking about Android here, what do you mean by this? Mobile Chrome has no extensions, whereas Firefox supports the full suite of desktop addons. I can use uMatrix and even developer exte…

The video notification thing is for the purpose you mention, however, it doesn't seem to detect the tab closing and there is no way to force it to other than restarting the phone

That does sound like a bug then. I’m sorry I doubted its validity, but I’m still impressed that one person can run into so many deal-breakers and others have never had any trouble at all.

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#219

Post by mevile » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 5:43 PM UTC

bredren wrote: post #192

I've tried twice to switch back to Firefox since this chrome add-on code change issue, including setting it my default browser. I had it beach ball on me a few times and crash twice in just 8 days. Chrome almost never beach balls, and very very rarely crashes. I painfully gave up on firefox again for now. Its gotta be stable and fast and it just wasn't for me.

Curious, I haven't had this experience. Firefox has been very stable and fast for me. I'm on an older Macbook Pro (mid 2015).

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#220

Post by thomasfedb » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 5:44 PM UTC

edraferi wrote: post #99

Lazare wrote: post #59

I switched to Chrome from Firefox years ago because Chrome has a better UX (faster, snappier, cleaner UI). A couple years ago I tried to switch back to Firefox (right after the Quantum project landed, and Firefox was meant to be a lot faster), but found FF to still be bloated, slow, and painful to use. A couple weeks ago I made another try to switch back to FF, and I have found the experience to be very pleasant this…

I had the same experience. Switched to Chrome from Firefox years ago, tried and was disappointed by the initial Quantum release, tried Firefox again with the “Chrome is killing uBlock Origin” announcement, very pleased this time. My main gripe with Firefox at the moment is Sync. It just doesn’t sync everything you need. My Firefox profile is highly customized, with a lot of extensions that all have their own complex…

You can sync your custom prefs, by creating a 'services.sync.prefs.sync.[pref name]' preference set to true for each pref you want to sync. Cumbersome, but probably automatable.