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How to Firefox

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Re: How to Firefox

#361

Post by godelski »

efreak wrote: post #357
VHRanger wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With ublock origin enabled on an android device I'd argue it's rather much faster

The app itself is insanely slow to start up, and it always has been. Try killing Firefox and Chrome, open the browser via a link from another app and see how long it takes for the page to start rendering. I suggest a page with a different color background and nothing else. Chrome is always fast, while Firefox is almost always very slow (pinning the app to my recent list helps on Samsung devices, but isn't available e…

Is Chrome being cached?

This is actually not a good test because there are a lot of tricky and subtle things that can make the comparison highly unfair. Smartphones will cache apps so that they don't fully close. Then, if you do actually force kill them they will start up in the background.

Are we surprised a Google phone caches the Google browser which is considered to be a high priority app, commonly used, and even the backbone of other apps?

Re: How to Firefox

#362

Post by Arnavion »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #308
mattlutze wrote: post #89

I am surprised how many people have so many problems with Firefox. I've never felt impeded by loading speeds, and my ADHD regularly has me forgetting to restart it, to the tune of 100+ tabs open across multiple desktops. My wimply little MacBook Pro doesn't seem to mind. The only downside I've found is that, because so many people just default to "Chrome or nothing," there's occasionally sites that have bugs because,…

> 100+ tabs open across multiple desktops. My wimply little MacBook Pro doesn't seem to mind. There's a bug on Linux where background windows continue rendering, even if they're in an inactive workspace or not visible in any other way. This really hits performance, but it doesn't seem to be fixable due to some limitation on GTK3. If I hide/resize my system status-bar, every single window gets resized to match the new…

Just an idea. In my SwayWM setup, a) I run every application in its own cgroup (via systemd-run), and b) I have a daemon that subscribes to window and workspace events, gets the current tree, figures out the PIDs corresponding to invisible vs visible windows, figures out the cgroups corresponding to those PIDs, and then uses cgroup freezer file to freeze / unfreeze them. Other than a few hard-coded exceptions that I want to run while invisible (IRC client etc), any invisible application is transparently frozen and unfrozen.

For "single-instance applications" like firefox, launching a new firefox while the existing one is frozen will hang, so instead of launching /usr/bin/firefox directory I have an intermediate ~/.local/bin/firefox script that unfreezes the firefox cgroup and then exec's /usr/bin/firefox.

Of course if at least one FF window is visible then this doesn't help with your problem, since the cgroup as a whole will be unfrozen. It only helps if none of the FF windows are visible.

Re: How to Firefox

#363

Post by godelski »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #181
voxic11 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you use Firefox for Android? I use it for the extension support but its noticeably slower than Chrome on Android.

I'm on iOS, I guess I mainly use Firefox on Desktop, on iOS there's no point in me using Firefox since its forced to use Webkit under the covers.

I browse with Orion (for ad blocking) but still have Firefox installed because I can click Share -> Firefox -> Send Tab. Maybe I stumble upon a video I want to watch but not now. Maybe I stumble upon a long form article or reference or something that just is shitty on a mobile interface and I push it to the computer I'm literally sitting next to while having my phone in hand too.

Re: How to Firefox

#364

Post by [deleted] »

AnonC wrote: post #248

This is a good list of why and how to get started with Firefox. I’ve been a Firefox user since the days of Phoenix (and before?). I use Firefox as my main browser at work, even though almost everybody else uses Chrome or Edge. One irritant I’ve seen with Firefox over the last several years is that on Windows 10 it always crashes on quitting. I’ve submitted all the crash reports religiously and have briefly looked at…

[deleted]

Re: How to Firefox

#365

Post by efreak »

moffkalast wrote: post #207
giancarlostoro wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm about the same, I don't even know what the loading speeds issue is about, I still remember Firefox Quantum beating the daylights out of Chrome, and I don't know if Chrome ever fully caught up to Quantum? What's really funny is for ages Chrome would load the browser window even if the whole browser UI wasn't done loading, and sometime after Quantum, Firefox started doing the same trick to make you feel as though i…

What I've found recently is that Linux is surprisingly Firefox's achilles' heel. Canvas and WebGL run easily an order of magnitude slower than Chromium. Check with https://webglsamples.org if you don't believe it. All of it runs capped at 60 fps on Chrome for me, Firefox struggles to break 30 on mid tier settings in aquarium and stutters horribly throughout most of them. I'm sure it's fast at loading static sites, bu…

Try indexeddb. Apparently Firefox is faster than Chrome in recent years when it comes to putting items into a database, but my experience with multi-gigabyte databases (the database contains image blobs and metadata for use as a local webapp) is that chrome is far faster than Firefox. I'd rather use Firefox sure to increased indexeddb limits (for mobile devices with limited storage), but it's just that much slower. I have a chrome-based browser installed on my phone just for PWA use.

Re: How to Firefox

#366

Post by sfink »

voidUpdate wrote: post #118
skrebbel wrote: post #39

I would just like to add that in my experience, "How to Firefox" is just: - Download Firefox - Install uBlock Origin - Use Firebox Somehow this blog post makes it seem like adopting Firefox is hard, or overwhelming, or some multi step process, and if you don't do those steps you're effectively downgrading. But really it isn't. It's a browser. Its UX is great. It just... works. The suggestion that to use it properly y…

- Work out how to transfer everything across from whatever you were using before

Which is actually not bad these days. Firefox imports a lot of stuff from a bunch of different browsers. (Or so I've heard; I haven't used a bunch of different browsers and built up enough stuff to know for myself.)

Re: How to Firefox

#367

Post by dabedee »

Instead of arguing about tab management and rendering performance, we should be asking what does a healthy browser ecosystem look like in five years? Do we want 95% of users on browsers controlled by advertising companies (Google), hardware manufacturers optimizing for their own services (Apple), or cloud providers with obvious conflicts of interest (Microsoft)? Firefox's technical quirks are fixable. The uncomfortable reality is that true browser independence might require something Mozilla has consistently failed to achieve: sustainable revenue that doesn't depend on surveillance capitalism. Until that happens, we're choosing between degrees of corporate control, not between freedom and captivity.

Re: How to Firefox

#368

Post by CraigJPerry »

>> Let’s face it, Safari between Mac and iPhone is a sublime experience.

I daily drive safari and firefox has a far better sync experience. Safari will randomly delay syncing, i've never had that with firefox. I regularly quickly search something on a tab on phone to be picked up later at my desk. It's not a reliable sync process.

Bookmark management? Firefox wins as soon as you want to do something a bit custom because you have so many bookmarks.

Dev tools? You guessed it.

Safari is still better on battery life though.

Re: How to Firefox

#369

Post by kingosam »

ahmetcadirci25 wrote: post #229
sebstefan wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - I can't run the extensions I develop in dev mode. I haven’t been able to find a solution for this. That said, I don't encounter this issue in LibreWolf. I don't have this problem. I was gonna type a long winded thing to descrbe how I do it but since you managed to make it work in LibreWolf it's likely not an issue with how you're doing it >- I experience video codec issues, which I hope I’m not the only one facin…

- In Librewolf, when I set the `xpinstall.signatures.required` preference to `false` in the `about:config` section, I'm able to install my `.xpi` extension. However, this setting doesn't work in Firefox. - The other issue was related to codecs. On Windows, I encountered an error message saying: "No video with supported format and MIME type found." The issue was resolved after installing the following codecs on Window…

If I recall signatures.required is disabled in main firefox for security reasons. You need Firefox Nightly or Firefox Dev edition to use it. Anyway I changed to chrome for my plugin.

Edit: found some info about it

> Setting xpinstall.signatures.required to false will not work on the Beta or Release versions of Firefox on Mac or Windows. Doing so has no effect. On Linux, depending on your distribution, the setting may be respected and does work on some distributions of the release version of Firefox.

https://superuser.com/questions/1432789/all-of-my-firefox-ad...

Re: How to Firefox

#370

Post by kingosam »

sebstefan wrote: post #213
ahmetcadirci25 wrote: post #147

This is something that has been on my mind for years — I want to use Firefox, but for some strange reason, it just doesn’t feel as smooth as Chrome. Here are the features of Firefox that I find particularly appealing: - The Firefox Multi-Account Containers feature, in my opinion, is what puts this browser at the top. - Additionally, the privacy extensions work incredibly well. However, there are some drawbacks: - Str…

> - I can't run the extensions I develop in dev mode. I haven’t been able to find a solution for this. That said, I don't encounter this issue in LibreWolf. I don't have this problem. I was gonna type a long winded thing to descrbe how I do it but since you managed to make it work in LibreWolf it's likely not an issue with how you're doing it >- I experience video codec issues, which I hope I’m not the only one facin…

> I don't have this problem. I was gonna type a long winded thing to descrbe how I do it but since you managed to make it work in LibreWolf it's likely not an issue with how you're doing it

You're probably lucky that it's working, as it should be disabled in the release version of firefox.

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