Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try • Hacker News Board

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#451

Post by bambataa » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 9:33 AM UTC

zamalek wrote: post #229

fencepost wrote: post #85

I haven't seen anyone mention this, but Firefox is my "daily driver" for almost all browsing, and is also locked down with uMatrix, uBlock Origin, DecentralEyes and Ghostery (though I could probably drop Ghostery without missing it). Chrome has uBlock Origin and a few other things but interferes with pages less. I keep a set of pages for some specific web apps (e.g. GMail, Google Calendar, task management, etc.) open…

> Firefox is my "daily driver" I only have FF Developer Edition (IE and Edge, blegh) installed on my host. The only time I open Chrome or otherwise is inside a VM. If a website doesn't work I just close the tab. That is assuming that ever happens; off the top of my head this hasn't happened since the Quantum beta launched.

Even with Quantum I still find Firefox is almost unusably slow on some pages. It also causes very spikey resource usage. I’d like to use it exclusively but sometimes when I want to cool down my laptop I just switch to Chrome. This is on a Retina MacBook.

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#452

Post by VexorLoophole » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 9:37 AM UTC

nneonneo wrote: post #441

One Firefox addon single-handedly changed my browsing experience - Tree Style Tabs. With a little bit of styling & userChrome modification, you get a browsing experience that (a) handles huge numbers of tabs in a sane fashion, (b) takes up only a bit of space on the side, freeing up valuable vertical room & making all your tab names nice and readable, and (c) makes organizing and pruning tabs a snap. It's heavily cus…

Can you post your styling and userChrome setup?

Sounds stupid but i like the concept of TreeStyleTabs but i always disabled it after some time. Firefox finally looks slick again on MacOS. And i want something nice to look at when i work 8+ hours with it. And Tree Style Tabs always turned me off somehow.

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#453

Post by samuell » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 9:40 AM UTC

Ah, just discovered it (still?) supports live bookmarks, based on RSS/Atom feeds (Right click on toolbar, add the "Subscribe" button, etc).

Having live feed icons in the bookmark bar has been the best way to follow news I ever used. Hope this gets support in other browsers, like Brave, too.

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#454

Post by quickthrower2 » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 9:41 AM UTC

severine wrote: post #428

I always refrain from talking in Firefox threads because my use case is so different from the HN crowd, but still... I have a netbook with 1Gb RAM. It was a handout from the owner, as it was painfully slow even after cleaning and tweaking the Win 7 install. Eventually, the owner got a new beefier laptop and I got the netbook. Long story short: I put Xubuntu on it, and it's still my daily driver and main computer 6 ye…

Do you do any coding on that machine? If so, very cool.

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#455

Post by crashocaster » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 9:42 AM UTC

I'd love to use Firefox full-time, but I have always had font rendering issues whenever I've tried it out (on debian). Not only cosmetic issues, like blurriness or ugly rendering, but sometimes even simply incorrect rendering of characters.

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#456

Post by Crontab » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 9:42 AM UTC

whalesalad wrote: post #4

I switched cold turkey to Firefox a few months ago. It was fine for a bit but eventually became unbearably slow. I made the switch on both my work MacBook Pro (retina) and my personal MacBook Air. Both had similar issues. That and the fact that it ships with things like Pocket made me jump back to Chrome.

I really wish they offered a version without Pocket. I am not happy with it being included.

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#457

Post by dreamer_ » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 9:48 AM UTC

thirdsun wrote: post #405

teekert wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing looks strange to me with Demo nr. 4? (FF 60.0.2)

For me the frame rate is struggling to keep it even remotely close to 60fps. It's certainly not smooth. This happens in FF 61.0 Beta on an iMac 5K, but the issue applies to versions that date back to pre-Quantum days. I noticed the problem is more visible if large elements are affected by the transform effects, a smaller window renders those smoother for example.

For me, it works perfectly on both FF and Chrome (Linux), but I wonder how WebRender will deal with it; can you test Firefox Nightly with "gfx.webrender.all" set to true?

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#458

Post by dorianm » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 9:51 AM UTC

Firefox is dead, it's at 6% market share now:

    Chrome	57.36%	60.60%	47.77%
    Safari	13.96%	17.27%	22.16%
    UC       	7.88%	1.69%	0.32%
    Firefox	5.45%	5.89%	6.21%

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#459

Post by SXX » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 9:51 AM UTC

WhitneyLand wrote: post #438

Ff has portable plugins across systems even Android if I recall correctly. Is the lack of plugin suppport for iOS 100% legal/policy issues? Is there even a shread of any techicnal issue preventing it? I wonder if there is any poisbble way to reimagine the way plugins work, such that powerful extensibility could exist within an iOS browser and pass the appstore appproval gauntlet.

  > Is the lack of plugin suppport for iOS 100% legal/policy issues? Is there even a shread of any techicnal issue preventing it?

It is both legal, but also technical issue since Apple doesn't allow alternative rendering engines on iOS. Firefox for iOS is basically same webkit as Safari using and so Mozilla can do nothing about extension support since it's completely different code base from Desktop and Android versions.

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#460

Post by SXX » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 9:53 AM UTC

SimeVidas wrote: post #54

didgeoridoo wrote: post #3

Ironically, the thing that drove me to Firefox was the excellent Account Containers system that I found necessary to manage being logged into multiple Google Apps accounts simultaneously (I have five ). Each tab owns one account — that way, Google Drive files from my work don't randomly refuse to open because I'm also logged into my personal account. (Chrome has no solution for containing accounts across tabs, last I…

For me it’s Twitter. With container tabs, it’s so easy to manage multiple Twitter accounts. I couldn’t live without it.

Why don't you use TweetDeck?

https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/