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Tell HN: Firefox Is an awesome browser right now

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Re: Tell HN: Firefox Is an awesome browser right now

#351

Post by godshatter »

smiley1437 wrote: post #179
Vinnl wrote: post #49

> I'd be glad to learn of any other cool features and extensions that y'all might want to share. I'm sure others will be sharing it as I type this comment as well, but for many HN readers, Multi-Account Containers [1] are bound to be a godsend. Easily log in to different accounts for any website, in different tabs. Great feature that's not available in other browsers. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/mult…

Holy crap thank you! I have to log into multiple Microsoft365 tenants and it drove me crazy with the amount of signing OUT I needed to do when switching accounts, to the point where my crappy workaround was to use different browsers for each account (Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Opera, Brave, etc) but I started to run out of different browsers. This multi-account container extension is a godsend

You can also make new profiles on about:profiles and open a browser as another user without destroying SSO for your current user. I'm assuming Chrome has something similar, but I've never installed it so I don't know.

Re: Tell HN: Firefox Is an awesome browser right now

#352

Post by bee_rider »

shaunsingh0207 wrote: post #181
crazygringo wrote: post #142

I love Firefox too but this is a really weird post. The OP is clearly having performance issues with Chrome presumably due to extensions interfering or something else. I can guarantee you that Google makes sure Gmail loads at least as fast in Chrome as in Firefox. Chrome is customizable too (panes you can open/close), Chrome extensions are also thriving, and Chrome was the one who invented the "clean look", same as F…

Chrome also has objectively better performance ( https://www.phoronix.com/news/Firefox-Chrome-109-Benchmarks ), especially for 3D performance. I'm sure on modern machines both browsers are more than fast enough, but I'm not quite sure why everyone seems to think firefox is faster. On the other hand, I feel like the nyxt browser ( https://nyxt.atlas.engineer ) has a spot on HN, its very much like emacs in the sense ev…

Firefox did win in the small JavaScript benchmark they had, which covers 99% of the use case “websites that I’d willingly return to.”

Re: Tell HN: Firefox Is an awesome browser right now

#353

Post by SilasX »

lol768 wrote: post #258
crazygringo wrote: post #142

I love Firefox too but this is a really weird post. The OP is clearly having performance issues with Chrome presumably due to extensions interfering or something else. I can guarantee you that Google makes sure Gmail loads at least as fast in Chrome as in Firefox. Chrome is customizable too (panes you can open/close), Chrome extensions are also thriving, and Chrome was the one who invented the "clean look", same as F…

> There's nothing actually substantive about it. It doesn't feel like it belongs on HN. Most of the comments on every new Firefox release post are just as bad and have nothing to do with the actual release (folks whining about how their incredibly-niche use-case isn't supported anymore which breaks their workflow etc.), so in some ways it's nice to see something positive (which I would wager is more representative of…

By coincidence, just this morning I had a panic because I tried to close FF by closing the only window (which is something I need to do periodically because memory usage will build up over time), and I thought I had lost the tabs because when I opened it back up, they were gone with no way to restore. Apparently the behavior had changed so that closing the last window no longer closes FF, but just that window a la Skype.

(Fortunately I was able to figure out what was going on and restored the previous window.)

Also, the automatic "check before exiting FF" got turned off somehow.

So, yeah, lots of fun surprises to deal with.

Re: Tell HN: Firefox Is an awesome browser right now

#354

Post by godshatter »

alexelcu wrote: post #208
II2II wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't Firefox's profiles accomplish the same thing? (Yes, I understand they are difficult to access but they are still there.) That said, containers are a handy tool for people who want to access multiple accounts without the trouble of setting up individual profiles. Keep in mind, if you're only trying to access a personal and work Google account you probably don't want to spend time setting up a separate profile…

Yes, but Firefox's profiles are very hard to use (apart from keeping multiple Firefox channels installed, e.g., stable, beta), I tried, and I couldn't. Starting a profile is difficult, and also switching between windows, since the OS sees profiles as different apps. It's probably not hard to fix, but Mozilla has had other priorities.

Just open about:profiles. You can create new ones, remove old ones, set which one is the default and can open them in a new browser. I use this all the time to open a browser as a new SSO functional user without having to log out.

I don't know why they don't add this somewhere in the menus and I don't know why you can't bookmark about:profiles, but this works well for me as it is.

Re: Tell HN: Firefox Is an awesome browser right now

#355

Post by rrishi »

raffraffraff wrote: post #237

Recommend: 1. Sign up to Firefox sync 2. Install the Multi-Account Containers extension. Create containers to partition your identities. Eg: Banking, Shopping different Gmail accounts, different AWS console accounts etc 3. Install the "containerise" extension so you can create URL rules that automatically open sites in the correct container. (It can match URL regexes, allowing you to identify different accounts on ea…

Thank you for the suggestions. I have got uBlock origin and will look into Multi-Account Container pretty soon too!

Re: Tell HN: Firefox Is an awesome browser right now

#356

Post by xigoi »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #187
starik36 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Buttons are small... I don't understand this criticism. How often do you actually have to use those buttons? At best, once in a long while. So given that, why not make the buttons unobtrusive.

If the buttons are small, they are harder to click. It's also harder to understand what they do, which is important when they have icons that are just cryptic monochrome squiggles. What's the merit in making the buttons unobtrusive? What are you going to do with all those saved pixels? There is no pixel shortage on desktop! That's a mobile design consideration. When the browser is covering a sixth of my screen it's a…

> There is no pixel shortage on desktop! That's a mobile design consideration.

I'm using Firefox on half of my laptop's screen, so I'm glad the menus don't take up that much space.

Re: Tell HN: Firefox Is an awesome browser right now

#357

Post by jodrellblank »

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #215
jodrellblank wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently wrote a small JS page, the core of it is a table of tens of thousands of items and a for(let i=0; i In Edge the page loads quickly and the loop is typically under 20ms. In FireFox the page lags many seconds while loading and rendering, and several seconds when the loop involves a lot of hide/show of the table. It's not that I haven't tested, it's that FireFox just isn't as fast as Edge. This simple approac…

I wouldn't make dom changes in a tight loop like that. Better would be to accumulate the changes that need to be made and then do a batch change operation instead of one at a time like it sounds like you're doing. That code would be slow in any browser.

You say "it would be slow in any browser" but that's not true. It's fast in Edge and Chrome and slow in FireFox.

> "then do a batch change operation"

What would the 'batch change' be if not a loop over all the changes, making the changes one by one?

Re: Tell HN: Firefox Is an awesome browser right now

#358

Post by alexelcu »

agluszak wrote: post #175
crazygringo wrote: post #142

I love Firefox too but this is a really weird post. The OP is clearly having performance issues with Chrome presumably due to extensions interfering or something else. I can guarantee you that Google makes sure Gmail loads at least as fast in Chrome as in Firefox. Chrome is customizable too (panes you can open/close), Chrome extensions are also thriving, and Chrome was the one who invented the "clean look", same as F…

> Chrome extensions are also thriving Yeah, especially with Manifest v3 :) https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/chrome-users-beware-ma...

Mv3 blocking has some advantages, and may be enough for most people, currently, at least until things escalate. Mv3's blocking capabilities are similar with Safari's, and have the advantage of performance and security.

You can see it for yourself by trying uBO Lite:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin-lite...

This extension is Mv3 compliant and decent enough. It blocks Google's trackers and ads, it blocks YouTube ads.

Also, keep in mind that other Chromium browsers have ad-blocking built-in, e.g., Brave and Vivaldi.

And Google's problem will be that all of Chrome's competition will have better adblocking as a selling point (except for Edge). So they can't keep Mv3 functionality too ineffective.

Re: Tell HN: Firefox Is an awesome browser right now

#359

Post by wintermutestwin »

Vinnl wrote: post #75
Vinnl wrote: post #49

> I'd be glad to learn of any other cool features and extensions that y'all might want to share. I'm sure others will be sharing it as I type this comment as well, but for many HN readers, Multi-Account Containers [1] are bound to be a godsend. Easily log in to different accounts for any website, in different tabs. Great feature that's not available in other browsers. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/mult…

And some more tips: - Translate web pages locally, without sending any data to remote servers: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/firefox-translation... - Vertical/tree-style tabs: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/sidebery/ - If you're in the EU: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/consent-o-matic/ - If you use RSS: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/feed-preview/ And I assume you've al…

>- Vertical/tree-style tabs: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/sidebery/

This is the biggest reason why Chrome sucks - they have no workable version of vertical tabs.

Reasons why horizontal tabs are clearly inferior:

1. Screens (generally) have way more horizontal space than vertical and you read webpages vertically. I already have an OS top bar and a browser top bar taking some of this valuable vertical space.

2. Most webpages have predefined right and left margins, so vertical tabs don't take away from the visible space of the page.

3. The size of the tab header is critical for being able to read the name of the tab. I have my vertical tabs set to 30 characters. If I had horizontal tabs with 30 characters, I could fit maybe 6 tabs on the screen at once.

4. Ease of having many more concurrently open tabs. I easily have 38 tabs open and visible without scrolling. 8 of those are pinned tabs which take up the space of one tab. I use 6 different windows (which are category titled using the Titler extension). That is 228 tabs open at once and very easily accessible and readable. (of course I use Total Suspender to keep them from taking too many resources)

All this said, Firefox still sucks because vertical should be the default or at least a simple toggle. As it is, you have to trust some extension and then you have to jump through obnoxious hoops just to get the damn horizontal tabs turned off. And yes, there are some other browsers that have vertical tabs built in, but I am not touching Edge or Opera as they are from dubious companies. I also think that Brave is working on it, but they seem dubious as well.

Now to my complaints about Sidebery (which is superior to Tree Style Tabs). Sidebery has tree style as well, but I turn it off as it undermines the value of #3 above. It has panels, which are goofy and, while you don't have to use them, you still lose a tab worth of space for it. You also lose an even larger tab space to the Sidebery title (which is a menu and an X that aren't necessary. Sidebery doesn't work well with the Titler extension - when you want to move a tab to another window, it doesn't show you the title.

Re: Tell HN: Firefox Is an awesome browser right now

#360

Post by xigoi »

montroser wrote: post #74
seren wrote: post #2

Firefox on Mobile supports uBlock origin, and is very nice as well. edit: on Android

Yes, Firefox on Android is really fantastic now. I've been impressed to find literally zero compatibility issues in the last year with it being my primary browser on mobile. Works perfectly with my bank, works with heavy WebRTC apps, etc. It's quite a feat, especially given its market share is so low, and so there are relatively so few users to report feedback.

I've found that with doesn't work on Firefox Android — and the issue has been reported for years.
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