Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

robert.ocallahan.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 303 posts

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#31

Post by llukas »

mikekchar wrote: post #15

I'm genuinely curious what the perceived threat is. I'm not happy about having a handful of browsers being dominant, but Chromium is legitimately free software. I'm very slightly worried that most people choose the Chrome branded version (which is not free-as-in-freedom), but there is so little between the two that I'm not sure it matters. V8 is forked into Node now so it would be pretty difficult to do horrible thin…

You must have missed recent HN news about google stripped build of Chromium - one that doesnt use binary blobs from Google.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#32

Post by douche »

bilbobeer wrote: post #3

What is most strange is that on linux, mint to be specific, on a recent install they advised to install 'chrome', even if you didn't plan to use it, the logic went "It's better to have a back-up browser" I say never have a GOOGLE PRODUCT of any kind near you, or on any electronic device in your control. What gives to tell people to put Chrome on their OS, note also that mint comes pre-installed video tools that are c…

Mint is a distribution for people who care more about actually using their computers than about ideological purity.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#33

Post by AgentME »

rvern wrote: post #14
viraptor wrote: post #5

Unfortunately Chrome/ium has the best security story at the moment. Mainly due to good separation/sandbox. Firefox is only now catching up, slowly. So while I'd like to use FF, it's simply not a reasonable choice for me.

What makes you believe Chromium has better sandboxing than Firefox? That may have been true in the past, I doubt it has much truth to it today. Furthermore, if you use GNU/Linux it should be trivial to give your web browser better sandboxing than what it does by itself. (You can use AppArmor or SELinux, you can run it in a systemd-nspawn container, you can use Firejail…)

Chrome has a process for each tab that's sandboxed so that most exploits would be trapped and unable to escalate out of the sandbox. Firefox has nothing like that yet, but it's coming eventually with the new multiprocess architecture that they're ramping up.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#34

Post by chopin »

Perceptes wrote: post #17

I generally agree with the sentiment here, but somewhat similar to using Linux over macOS, my experience has been that it's just a worse user experience in exchange for "doing the right thing." In the end, it's about how much you're willing to sacrifice convenience and user experience for an ethical ideal. For me, the last time I attempted to switch from Chrome to Firefox, it drove me nuts after a few days because of…

A thousand times this. Ironically Firefox had this feature in the past ( I don't remember the exact version). My workaround is to start Firefox in anonymous mode always (Settings->Privacy->History->"Never remember history). But it's a workaround and I wish Firefox would be able to open links in an incognito window.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#35

Post by apatters »

This article convinced me personally to switch back to Firefox, but I'm disheartened by seeing a number of comments here which amount to "Firefox is fine," "Firefox is just as good," "The Foundation is fine," and so on.

That attitude is a recipe for shrinking market share. FF is competing against extremely well funded, extremely aggressive and competent competitors. You don't get to stop listening to the market in an environment like this. It will run you out.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#36

Post by kristopolous »

rvern wrote: post #8
anilgulecha wrote: post #7

The only reason chromium is my primary browser is the developer tools (it's a pain to use Firefox for normal browsing, but Chromium for debugging.) I can only hope for chrome's devtools to be ported to firefox. (firebug is close but slow).

For every person who says Chromium's developer tools are better than Firefox's, you can find another person who will say exactly the reverse. It's possible one of the two positions is correct and the other is not, but I find it more likely that people are just used to particular developer tools and that there is no significant difference between the two. People get work done with Firefox and Chromium's developer tool…

Depends what you are building. Chrome seems to handle ionic and cordova better but I use Firefox for everything else

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#37

Post by gcb0 »

warcode wrote: post #25

Did Firefox fix their performance degradation over time yet? Every time I try to switch back its fine for 2 weeks and then starts to get slower, like the internal database breaks or something. This is two weeks with 2-3 windows, with 5-20 tabs each, without restarts. So far Vivaldi has been the best chrome replacement for me.

did you report it?

for regular users i don't give this kind of assine reply, but here on hacker news, i expect everyone used Firefox for a good decade before switching to chrome now, so i expect you did the minimum to the project and have at least abugzilla account to say "me too" on some bug.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#39

Post by rvern »

AgentME wrote: post #33
rvern wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you believe Chromium has better sandboxing than Firefox? That may have been true in the past, I doubt it has much truth to it today. Furthermore, if you use GNU/Linux it should be trivial to give your web browser better sandboxing than what it does by itself. (You can use AppArmor or SELinux, you can run it in a systemd-nspawn container, you can use Firejail…)

Chrome has a process for each tab that's sandboxed so that most exploits would be trapped and unable to escalate out of the sandbox. Firefox has nothing like that yet, but it's coming eventually with the new multiprocess architecture that they're ramping up.

Firefox has sandboxing for tabs as well, and has had it before e10s.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#40

Post by moxie »

What always strikes me about these pleas is how familiar they sound. They're reminiscent of all the things we "should" -- eat better, exercise more, lower our carbon footprint -- and I suspect they all see just about the same level of long term success.

Firefox did well when their only real competitor (MS) was actively trying to make their own browser bad in order to preserve the relevance of the desktop OS and their dominance in that area.

Now that they have a competitor (Google) which is actively trying to make their own browser good in order to increase the relevance of online services and their dominance in that area, Firefox hasn't fared so well.

I don't necessarily disagree with the author of this post, but it doesn't seem like moral high ground alone is going to make Firefox any more successful than the other things we "should."

What I wonder about is what larger systemic or structural shifts would have to occur for Firefox and the other "shoulds" of the world to have a chance.

Post reply on HN