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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

#361

Post by jodrellblank »

chronial wrote: post #169
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…

> It's not that I haven't tested, it's that FireFox just isn't as fast as Edge. Only in this one specific case. You don't know the other cases. What you do is write code and check if it's fast enough in Chrome. If it's not you change your code. You never check if it's fast in Firefox instead and then go on with your day, saying "well chrome's just slow".

> "You don't know the other cases."

Why would I care about the other cases? It's no use to me if FireFox is really fast at caching if I'm not using caching.

> "What you do is write code and check if it's fast enough in Chrome. If it's not you change your code."

I can't change my code, it's at the limit of (my understanding of JavaScript/web performance) crossed with (how much work time I can spend developing this page). I've already got rid of function calls in the inner loops, trimmed the data set aggressively, pushed more into SQL than in client side, have an out-of-band dataset generator so querying the DB isn't part of page load it's a static page served with static compression, it's taken days longer than I wanted to get even this functionality fast enough to be as fast as I want, if it needs double the time and SpiderMonkey performance expertise to cater for FireFox then the result is tell people to use Edge for it.

> "You never check if it's fast in Firefox instead and then go on with your day, saying "well chrome's just slow""

I did check if it was fast in FireFox and it wasn't. I carried on trying to make it faster until I ran out of ability and it went from 'okay I guess' on Edge to 'great that's what I hoped for' on Edge. And sluggish on FireFox. The reason I don't go on saying "Chrome's just slow" is because Chrome isn't.

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

#362

Post by mattkrause »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #309
Georgelemental wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate the space saving. Not everyone has a 4K 30 inch display

Why can't a browser exist that makes use of such a display though? Seems like every browser is targeting 12½" monitors to the detriment of proper desktops.

I would not be shocked if 13” was, in fact, the modal display size.

A lot of people work off of laptops or even tablets.

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

#363

Post by rrishi »

mpawelski wrote: post #268
rrishi wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, I haven't run into it as upto now and I was checking some pretty cool and intense CodePens earlier. I'll look into some threeJS demos to see how it goes (ex. https://bruno-simon.com/ ). Are there any other specific JS demos you've had a bad experience with?

For me a good example have always been https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/ which rendered very poorly on Firefox. I see it's better now, but still, try to hover over the table (do couple of mouse movement, some circles or something) and see that it's not as responsive as Chrome is. Another example is iD[0] Editor on https://www.openstreetmap.org/ . But there, to be fair, it's also slow on Chrome but I feel it'…

> https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/

Oh man this was a rough one both for FF and Chrome but Chrome did perform better slightly on cursory glance.

Thanks for providing these links, they're definitely a good rule of thumb benchmarks to test new browsers

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

#364

Post by rrishi »

ldh0011 wrote: post #330
rrishi wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That 3D website ( https://bruno-simon.com/ ) ran well enough though it did cause my laptop's fans to run but I believe that happens in Chrome too. So far, I haven't found much of a difference in performance of websites but it's still early times for me.

I tested this on FF/Chrome/Safari on an M1 Max, couldn't see any difference at all between FF and Chrome but on Safari it was incredibly slow (which actually let me drive the car, that thing turns fast). I also wasn't aware prior to clicking that it was even possible to create web apps like this.

That person (Bruno Simon) is fantastic at creating 3D experiences on the web. He has a course on three.js too that I hope to buy and go through hopefully within this year.

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

#365

Post by nunez »

The reasons why I continue to use Safari right now despite wanting to use Firefox really badly:

1. Apple Pay integration only works in Safari. 2. Firefox on iOS uses MobileWebKit underneath, which is basically just Safari with a mustache 3. Firefox on iOS is (was?) also buggy in weird ways, like tabs would close unexpectedly or pages would fail to load. 4. (Biggest reason) Firefox on iOS does not support extensions. Safari does.

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

#366

Post by savingsPossible »

vanilla_nut wrote: post #284
Vinnl wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is one of those moments where I realize other folks on HN have almost exactly the same Firefox setup as me. Nice list of add-on recommendations! I would add in a couple more, for anyone tempted to switch away from Chrome or Safari: - Redirector: https://www.einaregilsson.com/redirector/ Very helpful for redirecting "new" reddit to old.reddit.com, AMP links to normal links, Twitter to Nitter, etc. - RES (Reddit E…

Would you share your redirector redirections list?

(Sorry for the lazyness :P)

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

#367

Post by YoshiRulz »

brailsafe wrote: post #310

I've been using it on desktop for a while, but on Android it's pretty rough, at least with the address bar on the bottom. I think there's a bug with touch locations being mapped to the correct place on a website.

I can't fathom why you prefer it at the top, but it's in Settings > Customise.

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

#368

Post by k_ »

frebord wrote: post #240
k_ wrote: post #222

Funny timing for me to see this on HN today After some years of love/hate relationship with Vivaldi, I'm currently trying (once again...) to go back to Firefox after one too many chrome-based browsers fuck-up: opening Edge in a windows VM suddenly got my RAM usage up by 32GB, which were shared with my non-VM chrome-based browsers (chromium, vivaldi). First time just crashed my whole computer, second time I had to kil…

Recently started Vivaldi and it's pretty nice! I switched because it's the only decent browser that I can remove the address bar and use it only with a hot key. So far it seems fast enough and haven't run into bugs. It does have a ton of features that I'll never use that I wish were extensions or something

I'm experimenting with that right now on firefox with userChrome.css changes, and it's starting to work:

/* Kinda unrelated, but I'm using this to go with Sidebery / Tree Style Tab */

#TabsToolbar { visibility: collapse; }

/* Hide the whole top bar */

#nav-bar {

  position: fixed;
  top: -10vh;
  width: 100%;
  z-index: 1;
  height: 0;
  min-height: 0 !important;
}

#urlbar-container:focus-within, #search-container:focus-within {

  position: fixed;
  top: 15vh;
  left: 50%;
  background: #111;
  outline: 4px solid #f8b218;
  box-sizing: border-box;
  padding: 1em;
  transform: translateX(-50%);
  width: 40vw;
  border-radius: 4px;
}

Top bar stays hidden, but url bar / search bar appear when I press ctrl+l / ctrl+k. Likely need to tweak css to your likings, and you need to set toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets to true in about:config to enable userChrome.css (you can find various guides on that if needed)

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

#369

Post by jodrellblank »

Mizza wrote: post #30

"BypassPaywallsClean" is a must-have extension for the modern internet. Does anybody else use multiple browsers? Maybe it's just because I'm doing web-dev right now, but I think using as many browsers as possible is necessary as I find inconsistencies that could become bugs all the time. I use Firefox as my "main" and Chrome as my "alt".

> "Does anybody else use multiple browsers?"

Yes, now everything is in a browser there aren't different programs visible on the taskbar so I make do with different browsers for different tasks. It's not because I love browsers, it's a bodge for the decline of good dedicated desktop GUI programs.

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