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Switching from Chrome to Firefox

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Re: Switching from Chrome to Firefox

#241

Post by Dumblydorr »

Firefox has bad performance for my use cases. It crashes around 50% of the time I open Gmail, and the other 50% of the time it crashes with any old tab. I know Gmail is bloated and less performant now but it's been my address for 15 years. Does Mozilla want me to deal with the constant crashes or abandon Firefox or abandon Gmail?

Re: Switching from Chrome to Firefox

#242

Post by kgwxd »

woranl wrote: post #222

I would like to switch to Firefox too, but it just lacks some of the most key features. It cannot effectively create large blob from chunks through the use of Filesystem & FileWriter API. Yes, I can use IndexedDB for blob storage, but the time required to copy and paste chunks in/out of IndexedDB will grow exponentially for large blob. There is simply no other effective ways to build a large blob from chunks that can…

What sites need that to run efficiently?

Re: Switching from Chrome to Firefox

#244

Post by Zarel »

mschuetz wrote: post #219
thibran wrote: post #175

Firefox is nice. But over time there are more and more things I need to configure to get a "good" browser experience. Things I do: - about:preferences#general > Startup > restore previous session - about:preferences#general > Tabs > uncheck Ctrl+Tab cycle ... - about:preferences#general > Downloads > always ask where to save - about:preferences#home > Firefox Home Content > disable all except Top Sites - about:prefer…

> - about:preferences#general > Downloads > always ask where to save I hate the default behaviour so much. What's wrong with asking me where to save the file? I almost certainly have a place in mind where the file should go.

I think it's easier to drag-and-drop from the Downloads folder to where I want to save it, than to dig through a Save dialog to find the folder I want to save something in. So it's less work whether or not you want to put your download somewhere long-term.

Re: Switching from Chrome to Firefox

#245

Post by whatever_dude »

ropiwqefjnpoa wrote: post #243

I switched from Chrome to Firefox a few months ago across all my devices. Got to say, I should have done it earlier.

Ditto. I waited a bit because I was afraid the change would be difficult, I'd be missing something, etc... in the end it was a super smooth transition.

Now every time I see some new disastrous Chrome-related news I just nod and move on.

Re: Switching from Chrome to Firefox

#246

Post by baggachipz »

deepburner wrote: post #117
r_singh wrote: post #97

I use Safari full-time and am pretty happy with it. Pinned tabs, the keyboard shortcuts, developer options, ghostery extension, I find everything pretty neat. Anyone else here feel the same?

I would use it since it's the native browser but last I checked it didn't have any proper ad blockers due to apple shenanigans. I would consider swapping back if I could use ublock origin.

This is the one reason I still use Firefox. They care less about privacy, but the inability of Safari to have a proper ad blocker is a deal-breaker.

Re: Switching from Chrome to Firefox

#247

Post by amelius »

I'm using Firefox 71.0 (64-bit) on Ubuntu, and password fields are completely broken! I've tried disabling add-ons, and running in private mode, nothing helps. The only thing that works is if I run in a different profile where there is no account "Sync".

Re: Switching from Chrome to Firefox

#248

Post by whatever_dude »

soulofmischief wrote: post #194
thibran wrote: post #175

Firefox is nice. But over time there are more and more things I need to configure to get a "good" browser experience. Things I do: - about:preferences#general > Startup > restore previous session - about:preferences#general > Tabs > uncheck Ctrl+Tab cycle ... - about:preferences#general > Downloads > always ask where to save - about:preferences#home > Firefox Home Content > disable all except Top Sites - about:prefer…

That's funny, Chrome's lack of Ctrl+Tab cycling via most recent is a death blow for me. I love that about Firefox, and love that it's configurable. Otherwise... yeah. It's pretty unusable out the gate.

My new pet theory is that software nowadays is _anti_ power user.

In the 90s and 2000s, software came with a bunch of features that most users would want, and also a few small but powerful features that a tiny portion of their users ("power" users) really cared about. Almost every software had "power" features of some kind. A config file, command line arguments, that kind of stuff.

Nowadays, popular software like Chrome are all too eager to drop "power" features; to make themselves simpler. This avoids confusing general users, at the cost of alienating "power" users.

Dropping Ctrl+tab (heck, making shortcuts support a low priority) is one of such features.

Re: Switching from Chrome to Firefox

#249

Post by bzbarsky »

Eli_P wrote: post #181

I found it interesting how Chrome and FF handle differently cpu-heavy code like this: arr = new ArrayBuffer(4) arrInt = new Uint32Array(arr) t0 = performance.now(); for (; arrInt[0] On Windows it takes 2.5 secs even on old chrome versions, while it never finishes on the latest FF. The latter's call stack says firefox.exe!TargetNtUnmapViewOfSection(), xul.dll!get_stored_pointer. I wonder if that happens on other platf…

Are you running that in a web page, or in the devtools console?

I just tried running it in a web page, with the last line replaced by `console.log(performance.now() - t0);` and on my hardware it finishes in ~1.5 seconds in Firefox and ~2 seconds in Chrome.

Similar if I run it in a devtools console like so:

    (function() {
      var arr = new ArrayBuffer(4)
      var arrInt = new Uint32Array(arr)
      t0 = performance.now(); for (; arrInt[0]
and hence avoid the undeclared global variable accesses. If I run the original code in the devtools console, it is in fact quite slow in Firefox, because global variable access is slower in the devtools console there. So each get of `arrInt` takes a quite long time. That's https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=793345 and I suspect that's what you're running into here.

The main moral is to not do performance testing in the console, because it's a _very_ different execution environment from actual web pages.

Re: Switching from Chrome to Firefox

#250

Post by kgwxd »

psv1 wrote: post #78

For people who are considering switching away from Chrome - give Brave a try, it's really good. I was a bit reluctant for a while because their branding is weird and there's too much focus on their crypto ad model. But if you switch the crypto stuff off, you have a fork of Chrome that performs just as well and also has a few additional privacy features and isn't linked to your Google account. Highly recommend.

For me, a browser has to support uBlock Origin, as it works today. I don't want the browser vendor deciding how ads and trackers get blocked, it's a conflict of interest and it's never been done better than uBO anyway. Won't all chromium based browser break proper ad/tracker blocking once that manifest v3 thing happens?
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