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HN on firefox is bad. Comments doesn't have any hierarchy. HN has to fix that. I use firefox on android as it is the only one that has extensions. I use uBlock

HN on firefox is bad. Comments doesn't have any hierarchy. HN has to fix that. I use firefox on android as it is the only one that has extensions. I use uBlock and mht extensions. On linux desktop too firefox is used mostly as it uses less memory than chrome when you have too many tabs open

lucb1e 11y ago
And on top of that, it's also a principle matter for me. Unless I run into impossibilities, I prefer free and open source software because it offers more control, privacy and hackability, and it will act in my best interest instead of that of the company behind it.
pmontra 11y ago
HN on Android looks exactly the same in FF, Chrome and the stock browser. I checked right now. Even the zoom behaviour is the same. The only browser that makes the site behave better is Opera with text reflow on zoom enabled. I can't understate how useful that feature is in general and I can't understand why every browser doesn't offer it. It's the reason why I'm using Opera on Android despite using Firefox on the desktop. Another reason I'm not using FF on Android is that it's noticeably slower at rendering the page at the end of a scroll action. It seems that blink is better at that. I'm adblocking with AdAway on the device I rooted and with Adblock Plus (a local proxy) on the one I didn't root. You get them on F-Droid. https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=org.adaway https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=org.adaway https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=org.adblockplus.android https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=org.adblockplus....
- rubberstamp 11y ago
  opera has always been innovative browser with good features as long back as i can remember(opera on Nokia s60v3 back then). features like great speed dial on mobile n desktop, save for offline, opera turbo mode, syncing bookmarks between desktop n mobile, website overview mode, text reflow.. I have to use addons with other browsers to have these features on chrome or firefox. Opera has a great team. Has poor market share though. They also had good security. Opera wasn't vulnerable to some big ssl bug discovered a couple of years ago. Most other browsers were. They recently switched their rendering engine to webkit though
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    And ever since that switch it felt like they had fired all their engineers and got lost chasing some kind of design shiny. I guess i should have seen it coming when they were gushing about their "coast" concept.
    - tripzilch 11y ago
      they actually did fire about 100 people from the Presto team (previous engine) as they switched to webkit.
      - digi_owl 11y ago
        well damn, i missed that one...
        tripzilch 11y ago
        Yeah. I was a big Opera user (/fan) before that ..
- digi_owl 11y ago
  Opera is slipping though. Ever since they abandoned their presto lineage and move to a Chrome derivative, they have been busy crapifying their browsers by focusing on shiny over functionality. Just wish Vivaldi had gone mobile first...
- tombrossman 11y ago
  Here is what the comments look like on FF for Android: https://i.imgur.com/5e7hIMK.png https://i.imgur.com/5e7hIMK.png Does it look the same on Chrome, with no indentation for comments and replies? I've removed Chrome so I'm unable to test but I thought this was just a bug.
  - dmm 11y ago
    No it looks completely different in Firefox for mobile. There is no way on FF to distinguish which comments are children.
  - pmontra 11y ago
    I don't have Chrome on the phone but I have answered here about FF https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10880486 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10880486 Check the parent posts.
- dmm 11y ago
  > HN on Android looks exactly the same in FF, Chrome and the stock browser. I just checked too and Firefox looks different in the comments and it has been broken since the beginning of the mobile changes. The comments on FF for Android do not have any additional indentation to suggest they are children. On firefox every comment takes the entire width of the screen, even if it's a heavily nested reply. On chrome comments have additional space on the left side indicating if they are children and who they are replying to. The frontpage looks fine on Firefox. The comments do not look fine. When you view a stories comments on Firefox for android it's impossible to tell what comments are children.
  - pmontra 11y ago
    Solution found: > The comments on FF for Android do not have any additional indentation to suggest they are children. I reinstalled FF on my phone and you're right. On my tablet FF behaves like Chrome. Some media queries gone awries or some FF quirk on smaller screens? FF-desktop behaves like the one on the phone when the window is resized to be narrow so it seems to be consistent with itself. HN is using a media query to set the indentation using an empty image and setting its width. Check the /news.css file. Each comment is a tr, with 3 td elements. The image is the first one, then the votes arrows and the text. FF arranges those td in vertical, blink keeps them on the same row. Digging into the CSS I realized that it's because of the display: block at line 88. If I remove it FF indents the comments. Opera keeps looking good.
    - bzbarsky 11y ago
      Oh, that's awesome. The CSS is clearly setting these to display:block, so they should in fact stack. But the page is also in quirks mode (no doctype), and in quirks mode Chrome (and WebKit) seems to compute the display of <td> to "table-cell" no matter what the styles say. So yeah, someone just wrote CSS that depends on a bug in Chrome/WebKit and either didn't bother to test in other browsers or doesn't care whether it works there. Edit: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=369979 https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=369979 is the 1.5-year-old bug report on Chrome to remove this unnecessary quirk. Let's see what HN does if/when the Chrome folks fix that one...
- damien 11y ago
  Yea, the slow scrolling on Android is annoying. I believe it's caused by not using the native functionality, which I hope gets fixed soon: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=776030 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=776030
  - pcwalton 11y ago
    That bug is not about using the native scrolling infrastructure. I don't see a reason why the native Android functionality would be better than what Gecko already does. (I wrote the initial version of Firefox for Android's scrolling code.)
derf_ 11y ago
> HN on firefox is bad. Comments doesn't have any hierarchy. On desktop, at least, you can fix this by making your browser window wider (just resize the window: you'll find a threshold past which the hierarchy appears or disappears). That doesn't help much for mobile, where you can't really resize windows.

lucb1e 11y ago

And on top of that, it's also a principle matter for me. Unless I run into impossibilities, I prefer free and open source software because it offers more control, privacy and hackability, and it will act in my best interest instead of that of the company behind it.

pmontra 11y ago

HN on Android looks exactly the same in FF, Chrome and the stock browser. I checked right now. Even the zoom behaviour is the same. The only browser that makes the site behave better is Opera with text reflow on zoom enabled. I can't understate how useful that feature is in general and I can't understand why every browser doesn't offer it. It's the reason why I'm using Opera on Android despite using Firefox on the desktop. Another reason I'm not using FF on Android is that it's noticeably slower at rendering the page at the end of a scroll action. It seems that blink is better at that. I'm adblocking with AdAway on the device I rooted and with Adblock Plus (a local proxy) on the one I didn't root. You get them on F-Droid. https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=org.adaway https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=org.adaway https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=org.adblockplus.android https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=org.adblockplus....

rubberstamp 11y ago
opera has always been innovative browser with good features as long back as i can remember(opera on Nokia s60v3 back then). features like great speed dial on mobile n desktop, save for offline, opera turbo mode, syncing bookmarks between desktop n mobile, website overview mode, text reflow.. I have to use addons with other browsers to have these features on chrome or firefox. Opera has a great team. Has poor market share though. They also had good security. Opera wasn't vulnerable to some big ssl bug discovered a couple of years ago. Most other browsers were. They recently switched their rendering engine to webkit though
- digi_owl 11y ago
  And ever since that switch it felt like they had fired all their engineers and got lost chasing some kind of design shiny. I guess i should have seen it coming when they were gushing about their "coast" concept.
  - tripzilch 11y ago
    they actually did fire about 100 people from the Presto team (previous engine) as they switched to webkit.
    - digi_owl 11y ago
      well damn, i missed that one...
      - tripzilch 11y ago
        Yeah. I was a big Opera user (/fan) before that ..
digi_owl 11y ago
Opera is slipping though. Ever since they abandoned their presto lineage and move to a Chrome derivative, they have been busy crapifying their browsers by focusing on shiny over functionality. Just wish Vivaldi had gone mobile first...
tombrossman 11y ago
Here is what the comments look like on FF for Android: https://i.imgur.com/5e7hIMK.png https://i.imgur.com/5e7hIMK.png Does it look the same on Chrome, with no indentation for comments and replies? I've removed Chrome so I'm unable to test but I thought this was just a bug.
- dmm 11y ago
  No it looks completely different in Firefox for mobile. There is no way on FF to distinguish which comments are children.
- pmontra 11y ago
  I don't have Chrome on the phone but I have answered here about FF https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10880486 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10880486 Check the parent posts.
dmm 11y ago
> HN on Android looks exactly the same in FF, Chrome and the stock browser. I just checked too and Firefox looks different in the comments and it has been broken since the beginning of the mobile changes. The comments on FF for Android do not have any additional indentation to suggest they are children. On firefox every comment takes the entire width of the screen, even if it's a heavily nested reply. On chrome comments have additional space on the left side indicating if they are children and who they are replying to. The frontpage looks fine on Firefox. The comments do not look fine. When you view a stories comments on Firefox for android it's impossible to tell what comments are children.
- pmontra 11y ago
  Solution found: > The comments on FF for Android do not have any additional indentation to suggest they are children. I reinstalled FF on my phone and you're right. On my tablet FF behaves like Chrome. Some media queries gone awries or some FF quirk on smaller screens? FF-desktop behaves like the one on the phone when the window is resized to be narrow so it seems to be consistent with itself. HN is using a media query to set the indentation using an empty image and setting its width. Check the /news.css file. Each comment is a tr, with 3 td elements. The image is the first one, then the votes arrows and the text. FF arranges those td in vertical, blink keeps them on the same row. Digging into the CSS I realized that it's because of the display: block at line 88. If I remove it FF indents the comments. Opera keeps looking good.
  - bzbarsky 11y ago
    Oh, that's awesome. The CSS is clearly setting these to display:block, so they should in fact stack. But the page is also in quirks mode (no doctype), and in quirks mode Chrome (and WebKit) seems to compute the display of <td> to "table-cell" no matter what the styles say. So yeah, someone just wrote CSS that depends on a bug in Chrome/WebKit and either didn't bother to test in other browsers or doesn't care whether it works there. Edit: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=369979 https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=369979 is the 1.5-year-old bug report on Chrome to remove this unnecessary quirk. Let's see what HN does if/when the Chrome folks fix that one...
damien 11y ago
Yea, the slow scrolling on Android is annoying. I believe it's caused by not using the native functionality, which I hope gets fixed soon: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=776030 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=776030
- pcwalton 11y ago
  That bug is not about using the native scrolling infrastructure. I don't see a reason why the native Android functionality would be better than what Gecko already does. (I wrote the initial version of Firefox for Android's scrolling code.)

derf_ 11y ago

> HN on firefox is bad. Comments doesn't have any hierarchy. On desktop, at least, you can fix this by making your browser window wider (just resize the window: you'll find a threshold past which the hierarchy appears or disappears). That doesn't help much for mobile, where you can't really resize windows.