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Give Firefox a chance

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Re: Give Firefox a chance

#251

Post by saagarjha »

floatboth wrote: post #208
latexr wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Webkit and blink are browser engines Petty sure Webkit is also a browser you can build and run, like Chromium.

No, WebKit is an engine. It ships with small demo browsers for some platforms (minibrowser for gtk, at least) but that's it. You might be confused by Apple calling its nightly Safari builds "WebKit technical preview" or whatever. It (used to) show up as "WebKit.app", but it's literally Apple Safari.

"Safari" is a proprietary browser that uses WebKit, which is open source. Safari Technology Preview (purple Safari) and WebKit.app (black Safari) are just Safari, but with the WebKit swapped out through various methods. Oh, and MiniBrowser works on macOS as well.

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#252

Post by the_pwner224 »

edraferi wrote: post #240
auscompgeek wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe extensions have to explicitly add support for synchronising settings. For example, uBlock Origin supports Firefox Sync: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Cloud-storage

Cool, I’ll dig into this. Would be helpful if the Firefox store made it clear if extensions support this. Also, why do some first-party extensions ignore it?? Also: there are other things sync still misses, like config.

For about:config, I put all my rules in a user.js file. Make that file in a synced folder (Dropbox, Nextcloud, Syncthing, etc.), go to your FF profile folder, and in there make a symlink to the actual synced user.js.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/User.js_file

Alternatively every about:config option has a corresponding option that enables sync for it. But that gets messy with many options.

https://superuser.com/questions/466291/firefox-sync-aboutcon...

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#253

Post by saagarjha »

bbernoulli wrote: post #144
latexr wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t hold me to this, but I think you may be able to build Webkit from source, giving you a functional browser. I think Chromium is to Chrome as Webkit is to Safari. The latter have proprietary code on top of the open-source former.

Blink is to Chromium/Chrome as Webkit is to Safari Webkit and blink are browser engines and Chromium/Chrome are both browsers, but Chromium doesn't include the closed source pieces that Chrome does.

Chromium is a pretty functional browser in and of itself; WebKit does not ship with this. Pretty much all of Safari's UI is not open source.

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#254

Post by saagarjha »

ur--whale wrote: post #72
jmull wrote: post #48

If you’re on MacOS, also consider Safari.

The reason I walked away from Chrome a couple of years ago is because of the amount of information it sends to Google. I'm curious to know where Safari stands in that regard: how much and how often does it "call home"? Oh, and also : how much of it is Open Source? In my experience, Apple is particularly good at OpenSourcing lots of pieces while keeping the juicy bits proprietary. Can Safari be 100% rebuilt from sourc…

> Can Safari be 100% rebuilt from source?

No. WebKit (the browser engine that Safari uses) is open but the browser UI is not.

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#256

Post by iamdamian »

TheArcane wrote: post #248
iamdamian wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've commented out that part of the CSS for people who want those bars. Thanks for sending this.

Thanks, it looks great now. Any more recommendations to make it cleaner?

I'm glad to hear it :)

A few other things that made the experience better for me:

  - Disable "one-click search engines" (which is where the cruft in the address bar dropdown comes from)
  - Move as many extensions as you can into the overflow menu
    (I don't interact with them much, with the exceptions of Multi-Account Containers and maybe uBlock)
  - Right click on the Bookmark star in the address bar to remove it

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#257

Post by dave7 »

lscotte wrote: post #249
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.

Beach ball? What does that mean?

It's the Mac equivalent of Windows' old-style "hourglass" or more modern "spinning blue circle".

Basically means "become unresponsive, perhaps eventually needs process killed"

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#258

Post by bosie »

lscotte wrote: post #249
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.

Beach ball? What does that mean?

On macosx that means your OS or at least the process is unresponsive. The mouse cursor then becomes a 'beach ball': https://cdn.macpaw.com/uploads/images/spinning-wheel.png

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#259

Post by onetom »

I switched about a year ago and I was also pleasantly surprised, UNITL I've realized that it's eating up several GIGABYTES!!! of memory, even when I just have a handful of tabs open. What's worst, it doesn't releases all the memory when I just close the tabs! When I restart FF and cycle thru the tabs to make sure they are loaded, it uses a lot less but still in the GB range.

I compared the same set of tabs in Chrome and it consumes about half or 2/3rd of the memory. (Tested under macOS only) While I work on machines with 16GB & 32GB, I find it unreasonable to waste so much memory usage on the browser windows. I'm looking into alternatives. I think most pages would be better viewed by just extracting the text content and the links, like Reader View mode...

I've checked out pretty much all active projects on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_lightweight_web_... and https://qutebrowser.org/ seems to be the most usable one which consumes even less memory than Chrome, while still supporting JavaScript and video playback. Or maybe I shall switch back to Opera/Brave/Chromium? I've tried so many...

I'm already used to keep closing tabs manually which I don't need, like web.whatsapp or gmail and the like. I even came across the Tab Wrangler extension, which automatically cleans my tabs up. I can highly recommend it to conserve memory!

So other than the memory usage issue, I'm satisfied with the current FF. It's web developer console is almost as good as Chrome's. It supports Ctrl-Tab jumping to the MRU (Most Recently Used) tab. Has built-in reader view. The Multi-touch Zoom add-on even brings "zooming by 2 finger pinching" capability to FF, which is almost as good as the auto-zoom by 2 finger tap.

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#260

Post by Aelius »

amake wrote: post #13
ramraj07 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What plugin allows this feature in Firefox now?

Tab Center Redux https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/tab-center-redux/

This is the most stable option for sure. The more popular Tree Style Tab is still rather buggy, even after its complete rewrite.
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