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Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

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Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#221

Post by bishalb »

privethedge wrote: post #140
hutzlibu wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Mozilla cannot enforce idealism on the developers. They do already a great job with documentation, but they could and should improve on the dev-tools. Chrome dev tools are now in a state, that I only use them for developing and debugging. Built in code editor with autocomplete. And I can debug ... and change code while debugging. And it works great (mostly). Firefox dev tools on the other hand barely work for me…

I personally prefer firefox's dev tools to chrome's ones.

Yeah but it's somewhat laggy compared to chrome's.

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#222

Post by GeekyBear »

avinassh wrote: post #86

For me, I have found Firefox to drain my laptop's battery more (Macbook Pro, 2017) compared to Chrome (and Safari). Once it changes, I would gladly go back to using Firefox.

Firefox still uses OpenGL to draw the window to the screen and also uses transparency in those windows, unfortunately neither of those things play nice with the scaled windows in MacOS.

They are in the process of converting their code to use Core Animation instead of OpenGL to draw to the screen, which will help tremendously with the power consumption issue, so help is on the way.

As a temporary workaround until all those changes land, you can have Firefox opt out of using scaled windows on a retina Mac by getting info on the Firefox app and then checking ”Open in Low Resolution” on the get info panel.

Transparency in Firefox can be turned off by going to about:config, and setting gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque to true.

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#223

Post by Medicalidiot »

torben-friis wrote: post #215

Everyone's talking about what Firefox should do to beat chrome, and meanwhile here I am still suffering the bug that makes it unusable for many MacBooks with retina screens set to "more space". Start Firefox and fans are blaring in seconds, hundreds of reports, years of waiting and no solution... Maybe making it usable in one of the most common devices for devs would be a start, I've got a full building of coworkers…

Firefox is a dumpster fire on Mac. No pinch to zoom? Whatever. Scrolling issues? Whatever. Lighting up my CPU to the point it's noticeably warm on idle? Not cool. Having 60% of the battery life as Chrome and 50% of Safari? Unacceptable.

Simply idling Firefox on my Mac would use almost the same amount of battery as actively browsing Safari. I love Firefox on my home Linux desktop, but that's as far as my love goes at the moment.

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#224

Post by zamadatix »

superasn wrote: post #60
tyingq wrote: post #7

I feel there's an opening for mobile experience on Android. Chrome is pretty terrible in that space. No extensions, no reader mode, no eacape from AMP, etc.

I think kiwi browser(1) is great in this regard. It supports almost all the chrome extensions including ublock, reader mode, etc. It also has a mode which automatically redirects to non-AMP version of site automatically. (1) https://www.google.com/search?q=kiwi+browser+android

I can't bring myself to trust this browser. There is a repo out there but it's not the whole browser and it's extremely out of date compared to the app. Free things based on open source code that aren't open source themselves give me the heebie jeebies without a clear reason why.

Also the browser itself tends to be a version or two behind which isn't particularly comforting either.

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#225

Post by Ensorceled »

feanaro wrote: post #105
NullInvictus wrote: post #32

I haven't really met anyone who is particularly bothered by these issues. They certainly should be addressed to some degree, but the issues I find people are bothered about in Firefox are something that Mozilla has very little control over: Bugs in sites. As a full-time firefox user, I commonly find that sites have bugs, and when I boot it up in Chrome just to check my hunch, they don't manifest. It's pretty easy to…

> As a full-time firefox user, I commonly find that sites have bugs, and when I boot it up in Chrome just to check my hunch, they don't manifest. Also a full-time Firefox user. This is fascinating because I quite literally cannot remember a website for which I had to switch browser so it would start working. What kind of websites are these? Have you noticed any pattern about them? Perhaps it's a certain type of site…

As a (mostly) full-time firefox user, I commonly find that sites have bugs and some are unusable in FF. What I find fascinating is that every time I mention this on HN or elsewhere, somebody also chimes in with this "doesn't happen to me" message and demands to know which sites.

Every damn time.

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#226

Post by hutzlibu »

privethedge wrote: post #140
hutzlibu wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Mozilla cannot enforce idealism on the developers. They do already a great job with documentation, but they could and should improve on the dev-tools. Chrome dev tools are now in a state, that I only use them for developing and debugging. Built in code editor with autocomplete. And I can debug ... and change code while debugging. And it works great (mostly). Firefox dev tools on the other hand barely work for me…

I personally prefer firefox's dev tools to chrome's ones.

To write and debug code?

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#227

Post by abacadaba »

bad_user wrote: post #124

Firefox has plenty of room for improvement, but this article doesn't touch on it. 1. People don't install their own browser, unless they're on a new computer and want the browser they've always used — people are conservative when making technological choices and when they switch browsers, it's often because they get a friend to install it for them, or they buy a new computer, or install some app that tricks them into…

Although I have come to not mind pocket as a decent and not completely invasive news feed, I still have absolutely no concept of wtf pocket actually _is_ beyond some kind of bookmark sync addon that's now first party, but not like the firefox account sync that i dont use either?

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#228

Post by awinder »

torben-friis wrote: post #215

Everyone's talking about what Firefox should do to beat chrome, and meanwhile here I am still suffering the bug that makes it unusable for many MacBooks with retina screens set to "more space". Start Firefox and fans are blaring in seconds, hundreds of reports, years of waiting and no solution... Maybe making it usable in one of the most common devices for devs would be a start, I've got a full building of coworkers…

I would absolutely love to see a project like Camino start up again, that was the last time I had a tolerable experience with a “Mozilla browser”. I’m in alignment with what they want to do on the web but I’m on a Mac and the experience has just been not right for as long as I’ve been a Mac user. There’s obviously issues though given that project was 3rd party to the mozilla org, but if they’re not gonna build a nice Mac browser, can we not find a way for someone to & kick money back or something lol.

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#229

Post by judge2020 »

mamon wrote: post #173
joelthelion wrote: post #87

> This raises some questions: why is Firefox usage going down, and what does Mozilla need to do to bring it back up? > How does an average user get started with Firefox? This misses the elephant in the room : the main reason Chrome is eating other browsers is that Google is putting its advertising might behind it. You know that little "want a better browser" pop-up displayed on Google's search engine? That's an absol…

>> that little "want a better browser" pop-up displayed on Google's search engine? I actually do not know what you're talking about. Been using Firefox for the last few years and haven't seen this pop-up once.

For reference, booting up Windows Sandbox and loading google:

https://i.judge.sh/any/Diamond/WindowsSandbox_hE75Eaor7Z.png

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#230

Post by jimmaswell »

feanaro wrote: post #105
NullInvictus wrote: post #32

I haven't really met anyone who is particularly bothered by these issues. They certainly should be addressed to some degree, but the issues I find people are bothered about in Firefox are something that Mozilla has very little control over: Bugs in sites. As a full-time firefox user, I commonly find that sites have bugs, and when I boot it up in Chrome just to check my hunch, they don't manifest. It's pretty easy to…

> As a full-time firefox user, I commonly find that sites have bugs, and when I boot it up in Chrome just to check my hunch, they don't manifest. Also a full-time Firefox user. This is fascinating because I quite literally cannot remember a website for which I had to switch browser so it would start working. What kind of websites are these? Have you noticed any pattern about them? Perhaps it's a certain type of site…

One of the two bike registry websites only worked in Chrome, with some JS error in Firefox. Some function was always defined in Chrome but never in Firefox by the time somescript tried to use it. Wasn't addon-related. Seems fixed now.
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