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

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

snazz.xyz

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 401 posts

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

#311

Post by pcwalton »

Medicalidiot wrote: post #223
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…

Firefox is a dumpster fire on Mac. No pinch to zoom? Whatever. Scrolling issues? Whatever. Lighting up my CPU to the point it's noticeably warm on idle? Not cool. Having 60% of the battery life as Chrome and 50% of Safari? Unacceptable. Simply idling Firefox on my Mac would use almost the same amount of battery as actively browsing Safari. I love Firefox on my home Linux desktop, but that's as far as my love goes at…

Fixes are starting to land for the power consumption issues. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429522

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

#312

Post by luckylion »

ipozgaj wrote: post #292

Manifest V3 and killing web.request API were the reasons that finally convinced me to go back to Firefox. Almost a month later, I didn’t find a single thing that would make me go back to Chrome. My main complaint about fresh Firefox installations is that it takes a lot of time to fine tune everything. Every single time I have spend hours changing settings in about:config, from disabling telemetry, Pocket, changing ne…

> My main complaint about fresh Firefox installations is that it takes a lot of time to fine tune everything.

And a lot of it is barely documented and there's no easy way to set/test it. Took me quite a while to go through the different things for scrollwheel scrolling until I had found a style regarding speed, distance, acceleration etc that I feel good using.

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

#313

Post by Accacin »

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…

Exactly, at my place we have about eight front-end developers. Guess how many (excluding me) use Firefox? None. When I started I found a tonne of little bugs just because no one thought to test in Firefox.

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

#314

Post by louiz »

meerita wrote: post #157

> What privacy has the average Joe user gained by switching to Firefox? None. They’re still using Google Search and (most likely) other Google products. They’re being subjected to misleading ads on their new tab page. From their perspective, installing Firefox was a pointless hassle. I use DuckDuckGo instead Google in Firefox. I'm a happy user. I will switch to Safari as soon as I get a new iPhone and ditch my Xiaomi…

"The everage joe".

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

#315

Post by feanaro »

Faark wrote: post #219
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…

Just now I came across an info table [0] for some game that should allow sorting by columns, but doesn't work on my Firefox, only Chrome. Yeah, its just some fan site for a game and thankfully doesn't happen that often to me, yet. But I feel like those many smaller sites, that I'd prefer to exist over all content centralized on a few giant platforms, are especially susceptible to not testing on many clients. And yes,…

Interesting, this is the only example given that I was able to confirm does not work. I'm glad this discussion is making you consider contacting the author. I feel like we've dug ourselves into an IE-shaped hole all over again and this kind of grassroots action is very important for getting out.

As an aside, immediately upon seeing the website, I had a split-second thought of the content reminding me of Don't Starve. Amusingly, the website turns out to be about Oxygen Not Included, another Klei game. :-)

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

#316

Post by aembleton »

apostacy wrote: post #265

I don't want Firefox to "beat" Chrome, that is a terrible idea that is killing Firefox. Even if Firefox was superior in every way, Google has more leverage, and will always be able to shift the goalposts to stay ahead of their competition. And they will also be able to get the vast majority of users who don't know what Chrome is and just want to go on Facebook. But what exactly does beating Google at their own game e…

Agreed, and focusing upon the telematics is not a good idea when many Firefox users might be switching them off.

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

#317

Post by sroussey »

Isinlor wrote: post #193
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 use Firefox all the time and use it for web development. But modern frontend stack - with the whole pile of transpilers, uglifiers, and what not - is almost unusable with Firefox, because source maps don't work with Webpack. https://github.com/webpack/webpack/issues/1194 This put me in a position where I had to choose between switching to Chrome for development or not using Webpack that comes nicely integrated into…

Source maps don’t work well on Chrome either. :/

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

#318

Post by Silhouette »

Accacin wrote: post #313
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…

Exactly, at my place we have about eight front-end developers. Guess how many (excluding me) use Firefox? None. When I started I found a tonne of little bugs just because no one thought to test in Firefox.

There is definitely a vicious circle here. For many web sites/apps, the browsers that matter are Chrome on desktop and Chrome and Safari on mobile. There is now a huge gap between the number of people using those and the second tier browsers, which in most contexts are IE, Firefox, Edge and (desktop) Safari. That inevitably leads to development and testing resources concentrating on the 80% with the other 20% often being an afterthought if they are considered at all. But then there are more bugs in the second tier browsers, which just opens the gap wider.

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

#319

Post by sroussey »

frutiger wrote: post #185
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…

It’s likely that we visit vastly different corners of the internet. As a full time Safari user I can’t remember the last time I had such an issue.

Any site that uses WebGL2
Post reply on HN