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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

#361

Post by sfink »

fiblye wrote: post #96
avinassh wrote: post #86

For me, I have found Firefox to drain my laptop's battery more (Macbook Pro, 2017) compared to Chrome (and Safari). Once it changes, I would gladly go back to using Firefox.

Firefox has been hilariously bad for Macs for as long as I can remember. I refused to touch for over 15 years because it was incredibly slow each time I tried. Now that I'm trying to get out of Google's sphere of influence, I'm kind of forced back into it (Safari just doesn't feel right to me). Speed seems much better than it used to be and I can't really tell any difference between it and Chrome. Memory usage is an…

9gb for 4 tabs of HN sounds ridiculously wrong. (Thanks for mentioning what is in your N tabs. I tend to ignore complaints that only give the value of N. Nobody would say "Why is my computer running out of memory when I'm only running 20 applications?")

Can you please file a bug at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org and include an about:memory dump? You'll probably need to report what addons you have too.

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

#362

Post by sinker »

Barrin92 wrote: post #283
jamienicol wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the whole point of Mozilla is to "ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all." https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mission/ Firefox, Thunderbird, and other projects are a means to that end.

to be fair, looking at their product page ( https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/products ) firefox (different spins) and thunderbird appears to be about it at this point. I'm glad for the work they do but I also find the entire size of the operation staggering.

This isn't a jab at Mozilla, but it's actually kind of amazing that throughout this whole time Mozilla has had only two (arguably one) large, successful, consumer-facing projects.

I think this says something about Mozilla or large organizations in general.

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

#363

Post by giancarlostoro »

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?

They are extremely secure Linux laptops based off of Gentoo with everything hardened is what I read here on HN ages back. As others have said major retailers such as BestBuy sell them. My wife bought one for her mother from a Office Depot if memory serves me. Aside from Chrome plugins, it's a secure device. I just rather not have another device that tracks me across the ends of the internet(in this case Google).

From their FAQ: https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/3438631?hl=en

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

#364

Post by dralley »

theferalrobot wrote: post #251
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.

That would be strange considering webrender is not enabled on Mac

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

#365

Post by nkkollaw »

notyourword wrote: post #334
nkkollaw wrote: post #331

I am forced to used Firefox for an app, and the popup that prompts you to update drives me crazy. Chrome--among other things that make it clearly superior to any other browser--gets updated in the background and without stopping your work.

Using the word crazy like that contributes to the stigma associated with psychotic mental illness. It is ableist to use a disability you don't have as a metaphor.

What are you trying to achieve here..? Do you think that anyone will appreciate your SWJ BS here?

Why don't you find something more productive to do with your time?

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

#366

Post by marcani »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #234

The biggest problem for me is, I like to learn by watching videos at 3x speeds. Chrome's audio pitch correction works great whereas Firefox's pitch correction makes the audio unintelligible.

There is a bug report for this: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1383363

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

#367

Post by soperj »

The_rationalist wrote: post #327
soperj wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much new css do you actually use though w/ patchy browser support?

There are many essential css properties that Firefox doesn't support, e.g fit-content

https://caniuse.com/#search=fit-content

All browsers seem to have bugs with it. I also don't understand how it's essential.

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

#368

Post by yoasif_ »

pacavaca wrote: post #85
duncanawoods wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't recall it ever crashing in the past year and I use it all day on multiple computers including nix, macos and windows.

I find it crashed every other morning when I wake up my mac

Probably this bug - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1201401

I never saw it in High Sierra, but after upgrading to Mojave last week, I see it once in a while after resuming from sleep.

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

#369

Post by yoasif_ »

ianmobbs wrote: post #328

Frankly, the usability is what killed my use of Firefox. No pinch-to-zoom without installing an extension in 2019, really?

If you don't use extensions, you can set apz.allow_zooming to true.

There is an open bug with extension pop-ups, so it helps if you don't use them: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1560770

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

#370

Post by yoasif_ »

duckonomy wrote: post #241

I just wish they had a restore feature like chrome does. On firefox, once you close gracefully, there doesn't seem to restore the whole previous session without using an extension.

See https://support.mozilla.org/kb/restore-previous-session
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