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

Give Firefox a chance

dev.to

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–378 of 378 posts

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#371

Post by yoklov »

edraferi wrote: post #308
yoklov wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The storage is more limited for synced extension data than for unsynced data. IMO this is quite unfortunate, and is mostly a consequence of the implementation of extension storage sync being done separately from the rest of sync (which in retrospect was a mistake, but at the time that wasn't clear). Also, the limits are copy-pasted directly from the limits chrome places on sync, so it's possible there are compatibili…

Oh that’s pretty cool. I’ll try that. I just assumed that this behavior would apply to everything once I turned sync on, and then was disappointed when it didn’t work. I had no idea it was an optional feature. I guess it doesn’t fit the key-value paradigm, but this feature would be a lot more discoverable if there was a “sync?” Attribute next to each about:config item.

Being a global persisted key value store, about:config has a lot of things stored in it that.... do not necessarily make sense syncing, hence it being opt-in. Sync is guilty of this too, and will store things like your last sync time in about config, for example. Clearly not meaningful to sync directly.

A checkbox like you describe was actually discussed in the past, but at this point it’s unlikely. The current design of letting any synced machine change any pref on any remote machine (effectively) has dubious security implications, and has gained an additional hoop you must jump through in nightly.

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#372

Post by krzyk »

blueberry_47 wrote: post #347
krzyk wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you using any addons that might cause that mem usage? I am a tab junky (regularly > 200+ tabs, sometimes 1000+) and Firefox never died, and it is used on a laptop that has also IntelliJ + java apps which use quite a big chunk of memory. You might consider reducing number of processes used by Firefox, I set it to 3 even when I have 4 cores available, it helps reduce memory usage. Linux with 16GB of RAM.

What's the use case for 1000+ tabs? Just curious.

It's like temporary bookmark really - something that I want to read today.

I just don't close tabs that often as I should, I forget I wanted to read or I get distracted etc.

And I don't force close tabs when closing the browser.

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#373

Post by MrMember »

orpheline wrote: post #101

I'm apparently one of those rare people who never switched off Firefox - it's been my default browser on Mac and Linux for years. Open source, good plugin ecosystem, and does everything I need (not a web developer, so the dev tools were never a strong selling point for me). I've used Chrome here and there through the years, but the more invasive Google became about data collection, the less inclined I've been to use…

I've been using Firefox for ages, probably 2003 or 2004? When Chrome came out I gave it a try and it was neat, but it didn't have several crucial extensions so I stuck with Firefox.

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#374

Post by igetspam »

kevingadd wrote: post #124
igetspam wrote: post #11

I use FF as my daily driver. I am forcing myself to do it because I value privacy. Unfortunately FF doesn't make it easy. Chrome may be a memory hog but FF gets OOM killed multiple times a day and every night. I'm not a light user but I'm also not a tab junky. The big consumers are the 3-5 gmail tabs and the 3+ slack tabs. Other than that, it's normal browsing. Chrome ate all my memory but FF just dies.

Gmail and slack tabs are real monsters, yeah. My one slack tab for work will easily eat up a gig of ram over the course of a day (or less), and gmail tabs work up an appetite too. Twitter is also bad and I've occasionally seen a twitter tab eat up a gigabyte. I still run Slack in a Firefox tab though, since the native Slack.exe client has a habit of allocating 40GB of heap and paging out all my other applications. It…

If and when there's time, I'll have to reach out. I can't imagine a world in which anything running on my laptop needs 40GB of heap allocated. I've only run the Slack desktop app once or twice though. Felt like a beast even then.

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#375

Post by igetspam »

krzyk wrote: post #98
igetspam wrote: post #11

I use FF as my daily driver. I am forcing myself to do it because I value privacy. Unfortunately FF doesn't make it easy. Chrome may be a memory hog but FF gets OOM killed multiple times a day and every night. I'm not a light user but I'm also not a tab junky. The big consumers are the 3-5 gmail tabs and the 3+ slack tabs. Other than that, it's normal browsing. Chrome ate all my memory but FF just dies.

Are you using any addons that might cause that mem usage? I am a tab junky (regularly > 200+ tabs, sometimes 1000+) and Firefox never died, and it is used on a laptop that has also IntelliJ + java apps which use quite a big chunk of memory. You might consider reducing number of processes used by Firefox, I set it to 3 even when I have 4 cores available, it helps reduce memory usage. Linux with 16GB of RAM.

Nothing much. The biggest consumer could be tampermonkey but the last script I was using has been disabled for a while. I am using multiple profiles though, which could be a problem. My non primary provide gets reaped more than the primary. I'll try cutting down the number of cores it can use and see if that does anything.

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#376

Post by efreak »

iamdamian wrote: post #163
Chirael wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know that web pages would have have access to user chrome settings but I still have to ask, do any of those changes make browser fingerprinting easier?

This is a great question the honest answer is I don't know. That said, I would be incredibly surprised if web pages had access to the settings in that file.

Likely anything that changes the size of the viewport helps with fingerprinting, including tab location/size and even showing/hiding the bookmark bar. It's not just browser settings either; if you're using DisplayFusion's snap points like I do to have a border around maximised windows, fingerprinting is probably very easy.

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#377

Post by archey1 »

JaggedJax wrote: post #131
archey1 wrote: post #119

Firefox is absolute garbage on any OS that isn't Windows. I think that's probably the biggest thing for the power user crowd...but as a someone that finds dual booting too inconvenient, so I virtualize instead, and will never touch an Apple product..works great for me and most family members and friends I set up with it are pretty satisfied. The new built-in tracking protection is pretty great, and the only extension…

I recently switched to Firefox as my default on both Linux and Android. Things work great and I have not noticed issues. On Linux it's working perfectly. On Android it's also very nice, but I subjectively feel it may be slightly slower than Chrome.

Every time I used FF on Linux, it had serious issues with hardware acceleration.

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#378

Post by archey1 »

floatboth wrote: post #210
archey1 wrote: post #119

Firefox is absolute garbage on any OS that isn't Windows. I think that's probably the biggest thing for the power user crowd...but as a someone that finds dual booting too inconvenient, so I virtualize instead, and will never touch an Apple product..works great for me and most family members and friends I set up with it are pretty satisfied. The new built-in tracking protection is pretty great, and the only extension…

Firefox is excellent on FreeBSD :P

I'll take your word for it, I've never used it.
Post reply on HN