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Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox

gizmodo.com

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Re: Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox

#261

Post by wcameron »

nostromo wrote: post #14

I recently switched to Safari for similar reasons. Safari is much faster than it used to be. It's also tightly integrated with my phone, including password management functionality (similar to LastPass) that works on all my devices. You can also get AdBlock for Safari now, which wasn't always the case. It also has a snazzy built-in RSS reader and just looks better than Chrome.

I used to love Safari but they've lost me with the direction their UI has taken the last few years. There's something about not showing the full URL by default that bugs me.

Re: Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox

#262

Post by yellowapple »

grandalf wrote: post #204
FilterJoe wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is using many open tabs with Chrome. If you use no more than 3 or 4 tabs, Chrome is generally fine. If you use more than that, Firefox has some built-in features to help with tabs such as delayed tab loading and tab grouping. It also has more and better extensions for helping with multiple tabs. Furthermore, it doesn't launch a new process for each tab. In a browser comparison I wrote last month, I includ…

This is probably b/c most people at Google use computers with 32GB of ram.

This might sound silly to some, but I wouldn't be surprised if Google limited its usability tests to high-end machines with RAM in the double-digits. I reckon most programming teams have this issue, since even if they're dogfooding, they're doing so on high-end hardware, meaning that low-end hardware is untested and often unusable. Google isn't the only culprit; many websites nowadays will start to lean heavier toward excessive features - making them borderline-unusable on slower computers - because they were developed and tested on fast computers exclusively.

Re: Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox

#263

Post by johnward »

vhost- wrote: post #185
johnward wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Click your user icon. Click add account. Add school account. Now you can use both.

This doesn't always work. Right now, on both Firefox and Chrome, I can only use one account. On Firefox I click the user icon, choose my work account and my personal account loads. On Chrome I click the user icon, choose my personal account and my work account loads. It's so fucking frustrating. I've cleared cookies, cache and history completely and the problem just comes back later that day.

This does happen to me sometimes. I'm a consultant so I end up having to use customer gmail accounts and my personal account. So of course it always logs in with my personal since the browser logs in with that. Then I add this customer. Sometimes when I click to switch accounts it keeps sending me back to my personal account. I'm sure someone from the GMAIL team is on HN so they might see this.

Re: Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox

#264

Post by Gracana »

vhost- wrote: post #185
johnward wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Click your user icon. Click add account. Add school account. Now you can use both.

This doesn't always work. Right now, on both Firefox and Chrome, I can only use one account. On Firefox I click the user icon, choose my work account and my personal account loads. On Chrome I click the user icon, choose my personal account and my work account loads. It's so fucking frustrating. I've cleared cookies, cache and history completely and the problem just comes back later that day.

That list is totally broken, it won't update when you get logged out of one of your accounts, and like you've seen if you try to go to one of those accounts, you get bumped over to the one you're still connected to. If you do the "add account" thing and add the one that's not working, you'll be authenticated and able to switch back and forth for a while.

Re: Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox

#266

Post by hackuser »

speeder wrote: post #208
speeder wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me the bloatware was Firefox 3.0 that installed itself against my wishes. I was using then Firefox 2 or 2.5 (don't remember) quite happily. It was just great (compared to Explorer). Chrome showed up... But Firefox 2.5 was still much better. Then one day, Firefox started to INSIST to install 3.0, then 3.5, then one day it just did, no matter how hard I tried to keep my old version. And then behold, Firefox 3.5 had…

Can you people explain why you are downvoting me for my anecdote?

Feedback as requested: It's the all caps hyperbole. It contributes little; it undermines interesting, valuable discussions; it's contagious, spreading from one poster to another; and it's also used so much in so many forums that long ago it became tiresome and dull.

That wasn't your whole post, but when I see it I stop reading and move on. Anyway, don't worry too much about a few negative mods.

Re: Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox

#267

Post by skrowl »

gvb wrote: post #15

I read the article hoping for something insightful, but when I read the paragraph ...a half-dozen tabs that auto-open on launch thanks to the dozens of extensions I've accumulated over the years[...] I had to stop and say "wait, what?" To leverage his analogy that it is like coming home to a new house to find that most of your stuff is already there, it is like not cleaning your house and not taking out the trash for…

Throw bartab heavy on to firefox - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bartab-heavy/...

Now you can have HUNDREDS of tabs (in firefox's nice tab groups, of course) and they'll only stay open / in-memory for a configurable amount of time after you stop using them.

Keeps memory utilization tight. I'm currently south of 500MB utilization with hundreds of tabs open and lots of extensions: Disconnect Search, DownThemAll, FoxyProxy, Greasemonkey, HTTPS Everywhere, Imagus, Stylish and uBlock

Re: Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox

#268

Post by chipotle_coyote »

lucian1900 wrote: post #158
vor_ wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes Safari a toy?

It's not cross-platform.

That doesn't make it a toy. It makes it a bad choice if you need a browser to be cross-platform, but not everyone has that as a prerequisite.

Safari tends to get sand kicked in its face a lot when people talk about browsers, but it's actually the one I keep finding myself coming back to. I got frustrated recently by Safari's JS performance on certain web sites (ones with badly written JS web chat clients, I think, but never mind) and switched to Firefox 36 for a few weeks. On both machines I used it on it would just... get slower over time, and not a lot of time to boot: about 24-48 hours. And I rarely have more than a dozen tabs open at once, and that's on the high end.

If I was going to knock Safari for anything -- other than the JS issues -- it's that it's got much weaker extension support than Chrome or Firefox. But the only extensions I really use are Instapaper and 1Password. (I'm one of the weirdos who doesn't use Adblock Plus; instead, I've just uninstalled Flash, and if I want to use a web site that absolutely requires it I'll hop into Chrome for that.) I like the way it handles tabs, most versions are pretty stable, and the linked list sidebar -- where it pulls out links from your Twitter feed -- can be surprisingly useful.

Re: Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox

#269

Post by logn »

derf_ wrote: post #125
igl wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are forks of chromium like iron improving the situation... If people would use them and contribute.

Why would you use and contribute to one of them instead of Firefox?

Firefox is a giant ugly beast of code and it too has an overlord (albeit, a gentler one). And FF dev forums/tickets are not exactly joyous places, especially for non-Mozilla employees. If I had to contribute to an open source browser, it would be in a small community of friendly volunteers.

Re: Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox

#270

Post by pbreit »

doe88 wrote: post #18
nvk wrote: post #7

The biggest issue I have with Chrome is how aggressive it's been about linking Google IDs with the browser. I've lost data twice by bugs related to not having a linked ID. Please Google, understand this; I don't want my browser linked with my Google account.

They want to make their little OS inside your current OS, so that's it, they introduce accounts, users, apps, notifications... Meanwhile most people (including me) just want to browse the damn open internet.

Sorry, but "most people" couldn't care less about whatever concerns you have and actually appreciate the benefits of easier Google app usage.
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