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Firefox 29

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Re: Firefox 29

#481

Post by xerophtye »

dilap wrote: post #63

I love Firefox -- for what it's done, what it represents, and what it helps guard against. I have fond memories of those early versions of Firefox (nee Firebird) that busted open the IE monopoly, and where hands-down the best browser going at the time. But it's never felt very good on the Mac to me, and it still doesn't. Here's a few early thoughts on this release, from the perspective of a happy Safari user, w/ a pr…

>Separate address and search bars is old-fashioned. As a user, I don't want to have to make this distinction, and it's hard to imagine most users-on-street wouldn't find this confusing

umm... I don't know if this works on mac too, but at least in the windows Firefox, you actually CAN use the address bar as a search bar. So why two bars? well the search bar also lets you CHOOSE your search engine, unlike Chrome which hardwires you to google. Yes yes, you might say but why would i want to search anywhere else? Well just like you hate having to actually GO to google to search on google, people hate going to wikipedia or wolfram alpha or ask.com etc etc before searching there. So it lets them query their engine of choice right from the bar. Oh and depending on your version, the address bar automatically searches on the engine selected in the search bar.

Now since you are a fairly old user of FF, i don't really understand the need to tell you all this, ut i just felt your nitpick about the searchbar saw this "feature" as a "design flaw"

Re: Firefox 29

#482

Post by andreastt »

nandhp wrote: post #241
hbt wrote: post #212

If you want a highly customizable browser, Firefox is it. Chrome is in its infancy when it comes to customization and they often make decisions that prevent power users from taking advantage of their browsing experience. For example, they've disabled custom stylesheets in recent releases despite a clear indication that people were sharing themes, they have very old bugs that don't get resolved (like the stupid white…

> There isn't a feature in Chromium or Google Chrome that Firefox doesn't deliver. Multi-process browsing. It is incredibly annoying when my entire browser locks up because one of the fifty tabs I have open is doing something stupid. That never happened in several years of using Chrome, and it happens several times a day in Firefox.

So Firefox does support multi-processed tabs through Electrolysis (its IPC layer). From what I understand this is used primarily on Firefox OS to sandbox app runtimes.

Doing one process per tab, which is what Chrome does, comes at a very steep cost in increased memory usage. If you compare a Chrome and Firefox instance holding 20 or 30 tabs, the memory consumption is going to be dramatically different.

Bill McCloskey did a nice writeup on this back in December: http://billmccloskey.wordpress.com/2013/12/05/multiprocess-f...

His article explains how you can try out the experimental multi-process support in Firefox, but that it works differently to Chrome's. I think Chrome's way of doing it wastes a lot of system resources and that we need to be more clever about how we spend a user's system resources.

Re: Firefox 29

#483

Post by josteink »

nailer wrote: post #91
danford wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Separate address and search bars is old-fashioned. As a user, I don't want to have to make this distinction, and it's hard to imagine most users-on-street wouldn't find this confusing Use the customizer. People complain when they change and complain when they don't > The address bar is square edged while the search bar is round edged, which is displeasingly visually. (I realize this is because there's a convention o…

>> Separate address and search bars is old-fashioned. As a user, I don't want to have to make this distinction, and it's hard to imagine most users-on-street wouldn't find this confusing > Use the customizer. Most users-on-street don't want to customise either. Edit: The moderation on this is baffling. Does anyone genuinely believe users want to customise to achieve reasonable defaults? HN should ban new users from m…

> Edit: The moderation on this is baffling. Does anyone genuinely believe users want to customise to achieve reasonable defaults?

They might find your position unreasonable, and your absolutism not contributing to the discussion.

It's absolutely not given that Chrome's behaviour is the "reasonable" default.

Re: Firefox 29

#484

Post by josteink »

nailer wrote: post #127
drewblay wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most users-on-street don't want to customize either. Most users on the street aren't on the hacker news forum. Also if you are going to play the "most users on the street" game, then most users on the street aren't going to install a browser that didn't come with the OS.

> Most users on the street aren't on the hacker news forum. I don't think anyone said they were. > then most users on the street aren't going to install a browser that didn't come with the OS. That's true. So it's even more important to retain them by having sensible defaults.

> That's true. So it's even more important to retain them by having sensible defaults.

What's sensible about mixing three things (location, history and internet-search) into one location?

In Chrome I can't find anything in my history because the browser starts searching the internet instead. It's a horribly frustrating user-experience.

Which you cannot even customize. In Firefox you can customize the behaviour. I know which browser I prefer.

Re: Firefox 29

#485

Post by carey »

ldng wrote: post #479

Where is the reopen last closed tab menu entry ? VERY helpful when you close an old tab inadvertently ! And no, the history does not cut it if a don't remember the tab content and/or if it's one or two day old ...

Ctrl-Shift-T still works, or you can turn the menu bar back on and use History → Recently Closed Tabs.

Re: Firefox 29

#487

Post by alandarev »

wahsd wrote: post #315
conductor wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Separate address and search bars is old-fashioned. As a user, I don't want to have to make this distinction, and it's hard to imagine most users-on-street wouldn't find this confusing As a user, I want separate edit bars for separate functions. I don't want Google know everything I type (or mistype) in the address bar. When I type foobar in the address bar please give me anything that returned the web server at foo…

I don't understand the issue. alt+d for address bar ctrl+k for search bar. What's so complicated?

Less elements to worry about. I switched from Firefox to Chrome few years ago and now find separate bar being unintuitive. If I stayed on Firefox, I would say that having united bar is intrusive to privacy and illogical.

My final point, letting users decide would be the best option here, and Firefox did exactly this! I managed to reconfigure it into a single address-bar working as search bar too, except search engine auto-completion.

Re: Firefox 29

#488

Post by ahoge »

ldng wrote: post #479

Where is the reopen last closed tab menu entry ? VERY helpful when you close an old tab inadvertently ! And no, the history does not cut it if a don't remember the tab content and/or if it's one or two day old ...

Press Alt -> History -> Recently Closed Tabs

The one at the very top (with "Ctrl+Shift+T" next to it) is the most recently closed one.

You can of course also just use that shortcut.

Re: Firefox 29

#489

Post by ahoge »

brianstorms wrote: post #202

I've always had a bookmarks bar of single and double letters, like R for Reddit, Y for YCombinator, F for Facebook, $ for stocks, etc. Now with FF29 I have these blasted file folder icons next to each of my little codes, cluttering up the whole bookmarks bar. I can't find any way of getting rid of the file folders -- not even thru Customize. Anyone found a way?

Quite different, but... you could try ShortcutKey2URL [1].

Then you could, for example, use Ctrl+Q followed by:

Y for YCombinator, F for Facebook, and so forth.

Pressing Ctrl+Q not only switches into that "trigger once mode", it also displays the list of available shortcuts.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ShortcutKey2U...

Re: Firefox 29

#490

Post by voyou »

epochwolf wrote: post #134
danford wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's not full screen though. That's maximize, you are incorrect. http://i.imgur.com/lO0g7oS.gif

Interesting. I've never seen this before and the only references I've been able to find on it in a quick search was a compiz setting in 12.04. Is this built in to the stock ubuntu releases? If so, what version?

Fullscreen mode has been a standard feature of Linux window managers for a long time - it was certainly available in the metacity WM (used by Gnome 2) 10 years ago.
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