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If you haven't used Firefox in a while you should really give it another chance. It has vastly improved in terms of CPU and battery usage. It also has a lot of

If you haven't used Firefox in a while you should really give it another chance. It has vastly improved in terms of CPU and battery usage. It also has a lot of great privacy-enhancing features like tracking protection enabled by default and extensions like Facebook Container make it trivial to prevent tracking even further.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
tapoxi 7y ago
Or just use Ungoogled Chromium, and get the performance advantage of Chrome without the tracking.
- Diederich 7y ago
  Is there a quick summary of what major site/features that will be unavailable in Chromium vs. Chrome? I assume, for example, that 'netflix' will be prominently on that list. Thanks.
  - deathanatos 7y ago
    I use Chromium; you can still Netflix. It does, however, require installation of "WideVine", which is an opaque, closed, binary blob. (But you're getting that with Chrome, too, I believe.) You can also do Netflix in Firefox, through exactly the same mechanism.
    - gruez 7y ago
      >You can also do Netflix in Firefox, through exactly the same mechanism. It's somewhat better on Firefox because they run the binary blobs in a sandbox.
- DangerousPie 7y ago
  Is there actually still a performance advantage these days? Would be curious to see some benchmarks. I will say that Gmail/Hangouts feels faster in Chrome but that's obviously not a fair comparison.
  - autonomuzw 7y ago
    Yes, there is definitely a performance advantage especially on mobile. see for example some benchmarks for brave browser, and also a couple of recent tests for desktop browsers. [0] https://brave.com/brave-one-dot-zero-performance-methodology-and-results/ https://brave.com/brave-one-dot-zero-performance-methodology... [1] https://brave.com/brave-saves-batteries/ https://brave.com/brave-saves-batteries/ [2] https://venturebeat.com/2020/01/15/browser-benchmark-battle-january-2020-chrome-firefox-edge-brave/view-all/ https://venturebeat.com/2020/01/15/browser-benchmark-battle-... [3] https://linuxreviews.org/Web_Browser_Showdown:_Six_Browsers_On_Four_Computers https://linuxreviews.org/Web_Browser_Showdown:_Six_Browsers_...
    - cdubzzz 7y ago
      The conclusion of the linuxreviews article doesn’t really make a strong case for any major difference between the browsers — It is hard to declare an absolute winner. Brave and Chromium, seem to be the overall winners but Pale Moon, SeaMonkey and Firefox are not bad choices if you never visit pages with fancy WebGL or WebAssembly ever. Chromium may be the best choice if you watch a lot of video on a laptop if your distributions Chromium package has the hardware video acceleration patches. Lots of “ifs” in there for all conclusions.
- Dirlewanger 7y ago
  Is there definitive proof that all of the Google stuff is really out of a naked Chromium install? I remember reading stuff about it being impossible to wholly untangle Google's stuff from it.
  - ColanR 7y ago
    This is my question as well. Additionally, I've wondered if there are non-explicit behaviors of the browser that are used for fingerprinting.
    - prophesi 7y ago
      https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium/blob/master/docs/design.md#source-file-processors https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium/blob/master/do... "those binaries that cannot be removed do not contain machine code." I'm not sure what's meant by them not containing machine code, but it does seem like some of the binary blobs are retained that can't be built from source or substituted. Honestly, I'd just switch to Firefox to be safe, though Ungoogled-Chromium does automatically set a lot of sane pro-privacy defaults that you'd have to manually change in Chromium/Firefox.
dropdrive 7y ago
As a firefox user, they are spending more money on PR and less on quality. Their UI has gotten progressively worse. And I'm not taking about xul deprecation. Please Mozilla come back to your strengths. SIMPLE: Provide a great alternative.
shadowgovt 7y ago
Given the purpose of the x-client-data header, I'll be shocked if Mozilla doesn't have a similar header for feature-enable-identification to do its own tracking of bugs at scale. ... and if it doesn't, they're developing their browser with one hand tied behind their back on quality assurance relative to alternatives.
wayneftw 7y ago
The days of Firefox are over. Every site I work on has less than a few percent of Firefox users. We don't even test with Firefox, because fuck 'em - I never liked the way Mozilla did anything anyway and their painfully obviously false, preachy holier-than-thou brainwashing campaign that they're constantly running in order to keep getting daddy Google's money has always been annoying. I'd rather use MS Edge. It's actually even faster and lighter than Chrome. So, I've already started using it on my Windows and Mac machines and I'm just waiting for it to be released on Linux so I can use it on my main workstations. I bet Edge exceeds Firefox market share any day now. Maybe Google should start giving Microsoft money too! But even if Edge market share doesn't grow I'll be quite comfortable since it's the WebKit/Chrome/Blink lineage and compatibility that I care about. Fuck that piece of shit Gecko. I'm tired of hearing about it from the extremely tiny but loud minority of Mozillatroids. Now do your duty and fade my comment in your petty attempt at censoring my words. You can't change the truth.
- Shaaaaaaare 7y ago
  Wow, you seem very upset. I suggest going for a walk. Take a couple deep breaths. Calm down. It's just a browser. By the way, what sites do you work on? I'd like to make sure to avoid them.
  - wayneftw 7y ago
    I enjoy ranting against Mozvillains though :) They're not a browser, they're just very annoying preachy people who need to be refuted and since I have no problem doing it, I feel that I am doing God's work.
  - dang 7y ago
    Please don't respond to a bad comment with another one. That just makes the thread worse. Doubly so for personal attacks, which are a bannable offence on HN.
    - wayneftw 7y ago
      What was so bad about my comment? Saying that I don’t support Mozilla/Firefox or just not being anti-Google enough? Also, the guy that you’re responding to simply said that I seemed angry. How is that a personal attack? Somebody else responded that I’m ruining the Internet and somehow that’s not flagged?
ritchiea 7y ago
Has Firefox fixed the bug that made it eat up resources, crank the fans and go nuts on retina MacBook Pros?
- ThePowerOfFuet 7y ago
  Long ago.
pier25 7y ago
I used FF for a couple of months. Its heart is noble but it's just not as polished as other options. Edit: I didn't want to expand because I've already banged that drum too many times on HN. See these other comments of mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22177747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22177747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22059567 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22059567
- sgsvnk 7y ago
  Thank you! Someone said that finally. I really tried hard to like Firefox. But it just really doesn't replace Chrome for me. Maybe it's the ecosystem, extensions, user experience, I'm not sure but the browsing experience is never really the same on FF.
nkcmr 7y ago
As someone who had repeatedly tried to make the jump to Firefox, it _finally_ stuck after quite a few attempts. (CPU and laptop heat issues were problems for a while, now they aren't!) I second this; keep trying even if it isn't for you after a few times, it was worth it to keep trying, officially Firefoxer :)
dheera 7y ago
The one thing that keeps bugging me is the widgets in Firefox (Ubuntu 18.04) look super-dated -- reminds me of NCSA Mosaic and makes me want to close it. Can they please update their widget library? https://imgur.com/a/JYWKhpu https://imgur.com/a/JYWKhpu
tbomb 7y ago
I love FF and have gone back you it for the last few months, after using chrome for years, CPU and battery usage is great now, but coincidentally I've been getting these weird hangups on my laptop. So yesterday I opened up my activity monitor with 6-7 tabs (including 1 youtube tab in a separate window) open I found FF using ~12gb of memory on my MBP. Then to get a comparison, I opened the exact same tabs in a chrome browser (separate window for youtube and all) and found it using under 1gb of memory. This may be is an exceptional case, but for now I just don't have the memory to run FF with docker and dev environments up too.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

tapoxi 7y ago

Or just use Ungoogled Chromium, and get the performance advantage of Chrome without the tracking.

Diederich 7y ago
Is there a quick summary of what major site/features that will be unavailable in Chromium vs. Chrome? I assume, for example, that 'netflix' will be prominently on that list. Thanks.
- deathanatos 7y ago
  I use Chromium; you can still Netflix. It does, however, require installation of "WideVine", which is an opaque, closed, binary blob. (But you're getting that with Chrome, too, I believe.) You can also do Netflix in Firefox, through exactly the same mechanism.
  - gruez 7y ago
    >You can also do Netflix in Firefox, through exactly the same mechanism. It's somewhat better on Firefox because they run the binary blobs in a sandbox.
DangerousPie 7y ago
Is there actually still a performance advantage these days? Would be curious to see some benchmarks. I will say that Gmail/Hangouts feels faster in Chrome but that's obviously not a fair comparison.
- autonomuzw 7y ago
  Yes, there is definitely a performance advantage especially on mobile. see for example some benchmarks for brave browser, and also a couple of recent tests for desktop browsers. [0] https://brave.com/brave-one-dot-zero-performance-methodology-and-results/ https://brave.com/brave-one-dot-zero-performance-methodology... [1] https://brave.com/brave-saves-batteries/ https://brave.com/brave-saves-batteries/ [2] https://venturebeat.com/2020/01/15/browser-benchmark-battle-january-2020-chrome-firefox-edge-brave/view-all/ https://venturebeat.com/2020/01/15/browser-benchmark-battle-... [3] https://linuxreviews.org/Web_Browser_Showdown:_Six_Browsers_On_Four_Computers https://linuxreviews.org/Web_Browser_Showdown:_Six_Browsers_...
  - cdubzzz 7y ago
    The conclusion of the linuxreviews article doesn’t really make a strong case for any major difference between the browsers — It is hard to declare an absolute winner. Brave and Chromium, seem to be the overall winners but Pale Moon, SeaMonkey and Firefox are not bad choices if you never visit pages with fancy WebGL or WebAssembly ever. Chromium may be the best choice if you watch a lot of video on a laptop if your distributions Chromium package has the hardware video acceleration patches. Lots of “ifs” in there for all conclusions.
Dirlewanger 7y ago
Is there definitive proof that all of the Google stuff is really out of a naked Chromium install? I remember reading stuff about it being impossible to wholly untangle Google's stuff from it.
- ColanR 7y ago
  This is my question as well. Additionally, I've wondered if there are non-explicit behaviors of the browser that are used for fingerprinting.
  - prophesi 7y ago
    https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium/blob/master/docs/design.md#source-file-processors https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium/blob/master/do... "those binaries that cannot be removed do not contain machine code." I'm not sure what's meant by them not containing machine code, but it does seem like some of the binary blobs are retained that can't be built from source or substituted. Honestly, I'd just switch to Firefox to be safe, though Ungoogled-Chromium does automatically set a lot of sane pro-privacy defaults that you'd have to manually change in Chromium/Firefox.

dropdrive 7y ago

As a firefox user, they are spending more money on PR and less on quality. Their UI has gotten progressively worse. And I'm not taking about xul deprecation. Please Mozilla come back to your strengths. SIMPLE: Provide a great alternative.

shadowgovt 7y ago

Given the purpose of the x-client-data header, I'll be shocked if Mozilla doesn't have a similar header for feature-enable-identification to do its own tracking of bugs at scale. ... and if it doesn't, they're developing their browser with one hand tied behind their back on quality assurance relative to alternatives.

wayneftw 7y ago

The days of Firefox are over. Every site I work on has less than a few percent of Firefox users. We don't even test with Firefox, because fuck 'em - I never liked the way Mozilla did anything anyway and their painfully obviously false, preachy holier-than-thou brainwashing campaign that they're constantly running in order to keep getting daddy Google's money has always been annoying. I'd rather use MS Edge. It's actually even faster and lighter than Chrome. So, I've already started using it on my Windows and Mac machines and I'm just waiting for it to be released on Linux so I can use it on my main workstations. I bet Edge exceeds Firefox market share any day now. Maybe Google should start giving Microsoft money too! But even if Edge market share doesn't grow I'll be quite comfortable since it's the WebKit/Chrome/Blink lineage and compatibility that I care about. Fuck that piece of shit Gecko. I'm tired of hearing about it from the extremely tiny but loud minority of Mozillatroids. Now do your duty and fade my comment in your petty attempt at censoring my words. You can't change the truth.

Shaaaaaaare 7y ago
Wow, you seem very upset. I suggest going for a walk. Take a couple deep breaths. Calm down. It's just a browser. By the way, what sites do you work on? I'd like to make sure to avoid them.
- wayneftw 7y ago
  I enjoy ranting against Mozvillains though :) They're not a browser, they're just very annoying preachy people who need to be refuted and since I have no problem doing it, I feel that I am doing God's work.
- dang 7y ago
  Please don't respond to a bad comment with another one. That just makes the thread worse. Doubly so for personal attacks, which are a bannable offence on HN.
  - wayneftw 7y ago
    What was so bad about my comment? Saying that I don’t support Mozilla/Firefox or just not being anti-Google enough? Also, the guy that you’re responding to simply said that I seemed angry. How is that a personal attack? Somebody else responded that I’m ruining the Internet and somehow that’s not flagged?

ritchiea 7y ago

Has Firefox fixed the bug that made it eat up resources, crank the fans and go nuts on retina MacBook Pros?

ThePowerOfFuet 7y ago
Long ago.

pier25 7y ago

I used FF for a couple of months. Its heart is noble but it's just not as polished as other options. Edit: I didn't want to expand because I've already banged that drum too many times on HN. See these other comments of mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22177747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22177747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22059567 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22059567

sgsvnk 7y ago
Thank you! Someone said that finally. I really tried hard to like Firefox. But it just really doesn't replace Chrome for me. Maybe it's the ecosystem, extensions, user experience, I'm not sure but the browsing experience is never really the same on FF.

nkcmr 7y ago

As someone who had repeatedly tried to make the jump to Firefox, it _finally_ stuck after quite a few attempts. (CPU and laptop heat issues were problems for a while, now they aren't!) I second this; keep trying even if it isn't for you after a few times, it was worth it to keep trying, officially Firefoxer :)

dheera 7y ago

The one thing that keeps bugging me is the widgets in Firefox (Ubuntu 18.04) look super-dated -- reminds me of NCSA Mosaic and makes me want to close it. Can they please update their widget library? https://imgur.com/a/JYWKhpu https://imgur.com/a/JYWKhpu

tbomb 7y ago

I love FF and have gone back you it for the last few months, after using chrome for years, CPU and battery usage is great now, but coincidentally I've been getting these weird hangups on my laptop. So yesterday I opened up my activity monitor with 6-7 tabs (including 1 youtube tab in a separate window) open I found FF using ~12gb of memory on my MBP. Then to get a comparison, I opened the exact same tabs in a chrome browser (separate window for youtube and all) and found it using under 1gb of memory. This may be is an exceptional case, but for now I just don't have the memory to run FF with docker and dev environments up too.