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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

#251

Post by theferalrobot »

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…

Same problem here, last time I mentioned this on HN I got an angry mob after me but its true. Firefox is totally unusable on a mac. I believe the culprit is the WebRender implementation FF has.

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

#252

Post by flas9sd »

tgv wrote: post #64
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…

Mozilla does have some way of dealing with bugs in sites. They're maintaining a site/database which Firefox consults for workarounds. More info: https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/cd1lob/how_firefox_...

thanks for the heads-up - `about:compat` and its enabling "Go Faster Addon" was news to me: giving a channel for concrete action following an opinion piece. Feels like a vendor distributed greasemonkey. It is called user-agent after all.

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

#253

Post by pfraze »

luckylion wrote: post #213
quantummkv wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me tell you about a fascinating anecdote that happened to me a few years ago. My grandfather bought a new laptop. I set it up with firefox and saved his common sites (gmail, facebook, etc) to the new tab page so that he dosen't have to do anything else to open them. A month later I get a call from him asking about why he is unable to find gmail and facebook. What happened is that my grandpa ended up with google c…

Would he generally install software if he sees an ad for it, or was that special because it wasn't obvious that it was an ad and therefore had more trust (like some security product company saying "your door is unsafe, buy our product" vs your friend telling you that your door is unsafe)? It's strange that Chrome doesn't take the bookmark, bookmark-bar status and new-tab-page from firefox - if they did, he likely wou…

I'd wager it was the "Browse Faster" ad - which coming from Google is a tempting click.

Just a small aside on the grandparents topic: my grandfather lost every dime to email scams in the late 90s. The man was a Westpoint grad who served in the Pacific theater as an officer, and in his last years he clicked away his retirement. Installing Chrome is a pretty benign mistake but boy, we need guard rails for our older folks.

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

#254

Post by lucb1e »

mamon wrote: post #242
lucb1e wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As another Firefox user, I know the pop up very well. Not even the results page where people at distracted, it's on the actual Google homepage (as well as other places). Abusing monopoly in one market to monopolize another.

Is it possible that this is somehow forbidden by EU law, that's why me, being EU citizen, never encountered it?

I'm an EU citizen as well.

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

#255

Post by lucb1e »

detaro wrote: post #243
mamon wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it possible that this is somehow forbidden by EU law, that's why me, being EU citizen, never encountered it?

running an adblocker?

Now that you mention it, I think I remember an ad blocker indeed blocks those ads.

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

#256

Post by tux1968 »

Ensorceled wrote: post #225
feanaro wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You mentioned your anecdote multiple times, but expect others to only mention theirs once? Not to mention it was likely a different person responding to you each time. It seems like a very natural pattern, not surprising.

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

#258

Post by thekyle »

ferzul wrote: post #21
giancarlostoro wrote: post #15

I still wish FirefoxOS had pivoted on to Netbooks. As much as I appreciate the tech behind a Chromebook I rather buy a Macbook air than be another Chrome browser footprint. I would love a Quantumbook (or whatever) to be a thing. It would make for a nice change especially if they build a Linux Distro that is very secure much like ChromeOS is (rogue Chrome plugins aside).

I've never seen a Chromebook, not from my friends not in a shop when I'm trying to buy something. I guess they're not in the market here - lots of things aren't since it's a physically very large, medium sized country a long way from the major markets. Who has them? are they somehow useful?

Every major retailer in the U.S. that I've visited has them. Walmart, Best Buy, Target, Amazon, etc.

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

#260

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

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…

I don't remember many times that I encountered Firefox-specific web bugs.

I've had bugs where the site doesn't work in Firefox but works in Chrome, but as far as I can tell, those were always caused by the aggressive privacy settings I use in Firefox (whereas the Chrome profile is mostly default).

I'm not particularly concerned with the article's complaint about onboarding. The problem is that Firefox is simply slightly worse (less polished, often slower) in many, many aspects.

On Desktop, Firefox is quite usable, even if it is a bit less polished than Chrome.

On Mobile, it's another story. The only thing saving it is the fact that Chrome doesn't let you install extensions, so you have the choice between an ad-filled web on a browser that runs well, with the ads slowing you down (with Chrome), and a clean web in a slow browser with an unpolished UX and infuriating bugs that don't get fixed (with Firefox). So far, I'd say the two experiences are comparably annoying.

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