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Give Firefox a chance

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Re: Give Firefox a chance

#91

Post by nvrspyx »

Yetanfou wrote: post #39
igetspam wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. My laptop is a Xeon with 32GB RAM and I can't keep FF alive for more than 4-6 hours. I let upstream (ubuntu) keep packages updated so I'm current.

That is... puzzling. I use Firefox on a 2GB Thinkpad T42p, regularly have 100+ tabs 'open' (as in 'opened in the background' which means it'll start rendering when I actually open the tab) over 2 or 3 active windows and I have never seen it being killed by the OOM killer. It can crawl due to paging but it does not get killed. To me this sounds like you should either add a bit of swap space or tune the OOM killer to b…

If they’re having OOM problems, especially with 32GB of RAM, I’d expect it to start thrashing the swap as it does mine on my Ubuntu box. As much as I like FF, it is not consistent across hardware/OS setups and I imagine it makes it rather difficult for Mozilla to debug as this has been an ongoing problem for years at this point.

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#92

Post by epr »

Chromium by itself is really great. I miss nothing.

I see lots of browsers mentioned here that are chromium derived, but add extra features. I switched several years ago from chrome to chromium and have never missed any features from chrome ever. If you have concerns about privacy, you can read the source code.

https://chromium.woolyss.com

I use the builds edited by "Nik", which include video codecs, widevine, and auto-updating.

If you are considering switching from chrome but aren't sure you will like the added features of another chromium-derived browser, I would suggest trying this first to see if you would really miss anything.

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#93

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

You know what? I did, and it sucks. I have a few Lubuntu laptops I use when streaming on twitch to monitor the dashboard and they consistently become unresponsive when performing this task. Sometimes it is "just" the browser and I can still watch the mouse cursor jerk across the screen when I move it, other times everything is frozen doing god-knows-what and I just have to hard boot the thing. For my stream yesterday, I switched to Chromium and everything went fine.

If you want me to use your product, make it actually work.

Edit: This is an article that literally says I should give FF a chance, and I respond that I did and still don't like it, and you downvote me in your fanboyism. Welcome to /r/svwebdev I guess.

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#95

Post by aduitsis »

Even as we are headed for a monoculture where the only existing browser will be for all intents and purposes controlled by one or more very big companies, one can read various complaints on HN regarding Firefox battery usage, font rendering, development facilities, etc.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, and of course people have the right to complain about whatever they wish.

But, can we please all of us stop pretending that we care about freedom, privacy, etc? Because if we did care, we'd put our proverbial money where our mouths are and try to cope with these defects, just to make sure that a higher purpose is served.

(Genuinely don't want to offend anyone nor do I dismiss anyone's problems with Firefox, especially on macosx)

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#96

Post by krzyk »

ArmandGrillet wrote: post #57
petepete wrote: post #10

I switched back to Firefox from Chrome earlier this year, and the experience has been very positive. It performs well, feels snappy, the dev tools are on par with Chrome's and everything feels right. The only negatives are that container tabs are still taking a bit of getting used to (why can't I have a 'Work' window in which all the new tabs are 'Work' tabs by default?) and the initial migration of passwords was a b…

> why can't I have a 'Work' window in which all the new tabs are 'Work' tabs by default? Same. I've tried Firefox last month and it is the only no-go I've no. With Firefox profiles being a thing, I wonder if a front-end to manage them like in Chrome is in development.

I don't think so, Firefox had profiles since forever and they don't have a nice UI for handling those for the whole time.

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#97

Post by latexr »

idoubtit wrote: post #29

Not much content in this article. A single benchmark which shows nothing of real-life cases. Two minor technical features, one of them already in Chrome beta. Lastly, an appeal to fight Chrome's monopole. Surprisingly, not a word about privacy. I do give Firefox a chance, but it gets tiring. Many years ago, I dropped Firefox's ancestor for Opera 6. The UI and the features were miles ahead (e.g. Mozilla had no tabs).…

> Not much content in this article.

I could say that of every dev.to article I’ve ever encountered. I have no idea why that’s the case — I could understand it if they were all by the same author, but they’re not. Maybe I’ve been unlucky and unlikely amount of times.

> Lastly, an appeal to fight Chrome's monopole. Surprisingly, not a word about privacy.

I have the feeling the author is rehashing arguments they’ve read without fully understanding them. They’re curious about Brave[1], which goes against the stated goal of decreasing Google’s dominance (being based on Chromium).

[1]: https://dev.to/dtroode/comment/c89l

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#98

Post by krzyk »

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.

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#99

Post by edraferi »

Lazare wrote: post #59

I switched to Chrome from Firefox years ago because Chrome has a better UX (faster, snappier, cleaner UI). A couple years ago I tried to switch back to Firefox (right after the Quantum project landed, and Firefox was meant to be a lot faster), but found FF to still be bloated, slow, and painful to use. A couple weeks ago I made another try to switch back to FF, and I have found the experience to be very pleasant this…

I had the same experience. Switched to Chrome from Firefox years ago, tried and was disappointed by the initial Quantum release, tried Firefox again with the “Chrome is killing uBlock Origin” announcement, very pleased this time.

My main gripe with Firefox at the moment is Sync. It just doesn’t sync everything you need. My Firefox profile is highly customized, with a lot of extensions that all have their own complex config. Sync will keep the actual extensions synced, but not their settings. You have to rely on manual import/export features provided by the extensions themselves. Some first party extensions (eg Containers) don’t even give you that option.

You can get some of that by syncing your profile folder directly, but it’s very fragile. It hasn’t played nice with the generic folder syncing tools I’ve tried.

I think this is painful because Firefox really encourages customization, and it’s really useful! I just don’t want to have to keep track of that customization on every device. I trust Firefox Sync’s security model and want to do more with it.

Re: Give Firefox a chance

#100

Post by krzyk »

weystrom wrote: post #90
mrkeen wrote: post #73

Every time the Firefox v Chrome debate comes up I feel a little crazy when speed gets discussed. They're the same speed, right? Web pages on the other hand... 2 seconds to bring in the bulk of the content. Another second spent firing ajax requests to all the trackers. 2 seconds for me to click through all the Cookie notifications, GDPR violations, and bald-faced lies that the site values my privacy. What's a ballpark…

Just opening a new tab, when you have a lot of tabs open, is slow on Firefox. Chrome is also much better for web video. Sites like Youtube and twitch.tv perform better on Chrome. I don't have any benchmarks on hand, but that's how I feel after switch between two browsers for a while. I think I'm sticking to Chromium.

Youtube slows down on non-Chromium browsers on purpose (Shadow DOM v0 and see also problems Edge devs had with it).

Try non-Google websites to compare speed.

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