6 ms·

PSA: if you are not already using it, and you care about the future of humanity, then give Firefox a(nother) go. Its actually quite good these days.

by fergie 7y ago

chapium 7y ago
Its still not great though :( (relatively speaking)
- airstrike 7y ago
  I had been a hardcore Chrome user since the comic book days and switched back to Firefox last year. Imported my passwords and bookmarks and the transition couldn't have been smoother. I still have Chrome installed but haven't opened it more than a handful of times since. What about your experience hasn't been great?
  - WalterSobchak 7y ago
    Why do you choose to use the built-in web browser password manager?
    - zamalek 7y ago
      I'm still using 1Password, but the built in one is starting to look pretty good. They even have an Android app for your passwords now. It's not just "browser passwords" like practically everyone else.
    - firefoxbitching 7y ago
      Really convenient. I use KeepPassXC, but Firefox PW is streamlined very well.
  - Nannooskeeska 7y ago
    I can't speak to the experiences of chapium, but my issue with Firefox is that I always experience a slowdown of some sort after it's been open and in use for a few hours. I have to go into about:profiles and "restart normally" to make it go away for another few hours. I never had this problem with Chrome. I'm on my third or fourth attempt to switch to Firefox in the last year and it's still happening. I'm tempted to switch back to Chrome, but I really, really don't want to. It's not my computer either - my work PC, at least, is a powerhouse. Also, I find Chrome's dev tools to be marginally better - but I'm not sure if that's just my familiarity with them over Firefox's. Quick edit: there are some other problems I have with Firefox, but they're all relatively minor and don't bother me nearly as much as the random slowdowns and short freezes.
    - randomdude402 7y ago
      `about:restartrequired` brings you to a screen where you can just hit enter, allowing for a restart without using the mouse. That said, I don't think I use it much more often that I had to use `chrome:restart` when I had to use chrome.
    - chapium 7y ago
      I always seem to run into performance hitches or glitchy behavior. Both Chrome and Firefox use very aggressive prefetching, but I find that the UI response time feels better in Chrome. Edge (the chromie version) is my go to for stay out of my way browsing.
  - firefoxbitching 7y ago
    Mobile: Too much. Web: - Syncing: 1. Very often hangs on "slow" networks. Syncs for minutes at a time and stops the browser from loading new pages (annoying) 2. Mangles bookmarks. Merges folders I don't want merged and adds bookmarks I've deleted before - RAM creep 1. Memory leak? Firefox consistently takes up more and more memory the longer I use it 2. Poor suspend/dump functionality on Linux. If you have multiple tabs open, Firefox can quickly freeze your entire system (swap makes no difference). I have to use a 3rd party addon to have inactive tabs "suspended" so my system doesn't freeze 3. Unlike chrome, I don't think Firefox runs seperate processes for tabs. OOM killer never triggers. - Slow 1. It's just slow. Even on a great laptop with a gigabit connection, it's slow. - Long startup (self-explanatory)
mav3rick 7y ago
Future of humanity. Yes, Firefox will save us all.
terminaljunkid 7y ago
I am wary of Mozilla, a completely suit-ruled shitshow that is technically incompetent because of that, as much as I am wary of Google.
BossingAround 7y ago
Yep, I consciously switched away from Chrome to Firefox. In benchmarks, Chrome destroys (or at least destroyed when I tried it) Firefox, but I personally have never noticed any slowness from Firefox. I still have like 20+ tabs open every day, and I can do the same things I did on Chrome. So, Firefox it is for me.
unlinked_dll 7y ago
There have been some recent updates where my manual settings in about:config seem to be ignored (I have all the dark theme/gtk theming options set to false or otherwise disabled) and it still uses this trash dark theme on some sites, like DDG and GitHub. As well file and custom URIs are completely broken when installed as a snap. I cannot view any file on my system by manually typing in file://path/to/file whereas the uri functions fine in chrome. Custom application URIs require manually setting Firefox to open them in the given application, which is actually non trivial since it can't seem to find any application in the default browser, and it doesn't respect any system configuration. Meanwhile chrome just works. These are issues I have only with Firefox on some installations, I can't seem to recreate them all the time.
fizixer 7y ago
Firefox does 'gah! your tab just crashed' on my amazon tabs at a rate of about 1 in every 4 times. Once it decides to do that on a particular tab, no amount of refresh or reopen, or restart-firefox fixes it. I'm using Ubuntu 14.04, and this has been happening consistently for the last 5+ years. Every. single. goshdarn. effing. firefox. release. (sorry just wanted to vent. I've tried every solution I could find on askubuntu, stackoverflow, what not. Nothing fixes it. I know I should be filing a bug report, and/or upgrading my OS, but I don't have the time, patience to deal with that. I need to finish school first.).
- josteink 7y ago
  > I'm using Ubuntu 14.04, and this has been happening consistently for the last 5+ years. Might help updating to a modern version of Ubuntu with a modern kernel and modern (and less buggy) GPU drivers? Browsers are increasingly using GPU-acceleration these days. If your GPU drivers are buggy, that can probably cause a whole lot of “fun”.
  - fizixer 7y ago
    Or I could be a happy camper of Chrome/Chromium for as long as I like.
    - Symbiote 7y ago
      Ubuntu 14.04 is no longer supported by Canonical. No security patches etc.
- jmngomes 7y ago
  I've used Firefox since I cannot recall when, on Ubuntu 16 and 18, and Windows 7 and Windows 10. Although I've experienced very rare crashes, like I have with Chrome/Chromium, my experience is that Firefox is stable and does everything I need, including some basic web dev/debug.
nonbirithm 7y ago
The rewrite of Firefox on Android is just not there yet. Yesterday it updated and now it crashes frequently at random intervals, when you open a new page it scrolls down to the center automatically, you can't copy the text of links, the text editing cursor can suddenly jump around when typing after moving it, the highlight search action is hidden behind a context menu because Wikipedia is given priority, you can't copy links that don't use the http/s protocol, you can't use sites like MEGA because it doesn't support the downloading APIs necessary, and there are many other features I wish were there but aren't like full WebExtension support. On desktop it isn't compatible with physical smartcards, so it is impossible to do my job using Firefox or a browser with an engine besides Blink. I was wanting to contribute code but haven't found time for it yet. However, what I can stand even less is a Blink monoculture and the web's standards being controlled by a single entity. The real reason I switched to Firefox was because Google intends to make API deprecations to WebExtensions to make uBlock Origin incompatible, probably in order to retain more revenue in their ad business. At that point I would be forced to switch in the future anyway, so I decided to get used to Firefox's warts early on. The exposes about Chrome automatically signing you in in the browser if you sign in with YouTube happened afterward, and I only felt more justified in switching. As a side note, I can no longer find the "identity consistency between browser and cookie jar" toggle that allows disabling this anymore. My usage of Firefox is for political, not technical, reasons.
Mandatum 7y ago
Moved back to Firefox after the Quantum release in Jan 2018. There were a few hiccups, and I still have to use Chrome or Safari or Edge for some of my local DRM-infested video streaming sites, but by about Q3 2018 I've never had any reason to use another browser. Containers is a game-changer, paired with Sync I've been able to easily segregate work, personal, and client environments with ease. I work for many large organisations under NDA at any one time - and being able to colour-code and name my tabs has been invaluable to me. Also the Dev Tools, are great for debugging or sniffing traffic. I'm not a web developer but often need to debug client implementations that consume API's and it's just as good as Chrome. (Imagine that, FireBug used to be the standard, then Chrome came along and became "just as good", now Firefox has natively caught up.) Finally - speed. Quantum finally killed Chrome's performance for me, and they've finally caught up on power-consumption on MacOS which as someone who regularly has to take multi-hour flights without charge ports available is a god-send. The DRM issues piss me off, but it's the modern version of browser-restrictive Flash or Silverlight apps. I'll wait for someone else to get fucked off enough to create a bypass for Firefox, or maybe I'll get to a stage where I develop something to do so. Chrome is dead, long live Firefox.
flipchart 7y ago
My major issue switching to FF is still the lack of a Chrome-style translate function. I live in a country where I don't speak the language, so rely heavily on translating. Copy/pasting into Google translate is too slow for general browsing, and being able to switch between translated and un-translated near instantly means that I can still navigate the site when inevitably the translation breaks the JS navigation. Switching also allows me to very slowly learn the language. I'd love to use FF, but this is still a blocker
- Shorel 7y ago
  This is what I use in Firefox: https://about.imtranslator.net/tutorials/presentations/imtranslator-translator-for-firefox/ https://about.imtranslator.net/tutorials/presentations/imtra...

PSA: if you are not already using it, and you care about the future of humanity, then give Firefox a(nother) go. Its actually quite good these days.

by fergie 7y ago

PSA: if you are not already using it, and you care about the future of humanity, then give Firefox a(nother) go. Its actually quite good these days.

chapium 7y ago

Its still not great though :( (relatively speaking)

airstrike 7y ago
I had been a hardcore Chrome user since the comic book days and switched back to Firefox last year. Imported my passwords and bookmarks and the transition couldn't have been smoother. I still have Chrome installed but haven't opened it more than a handful of times since. What about your experience hasn't been great?
- WalterSobchak 7y ago
  Why do you choose to use the built-in web browser password manager?
  - zamalek 7y ago
    I'm still using 1Password, but the built in one is starting to look pretty good. They even have an Android app for your passwords now. It's not just "browser passwords" like practically everyone else.
  - firefoxbitching 7y ago
    Really convenient. I use KeepPassXC, but Firefox PW is streamlined very well.
- Nannooskeeska 7y ago
  I can't speak to the experiences of chapium, but my issue with Firefox is that I always experience a slowdown of some sort after it's been open and in use for a few hours. I have to go into about:profiles and "restart normally" to make it go away for another few hours. I never had this problem with Chrome. I'm on my third or fourth attempt to switch to Firefox in the last year and it's still happening. I'm tempted to switch back to Chrome, but I really, really don't want to. It's not my computer either - my work PC, at least, is a powerhouse. Also, I find Chrome's dev tools to be marginally better - but I'm not sure if that's just my familiarity with them over Firefox's. Quick edit: there are some other problems I have with Firefox, but they're all relatively minor and don't bother me nearly as much as the random slowdowns and short freezes.
  - randomdude402 7y ago
    `about:restartrequired` brings you to a screen where you can just hit enter, allowing for a restart without using the mouse. That said, I don't think I use it much more often that I had to use `chrome:restart` when I had to use chrome.
  - chapium 7y ago
    I always seem to run into performance hitches or glitchy behavior. Both Chrome and Firefox use very aggressive prefetching, but I find that the UI response time feels better in Chrome. Edge (the chromie version) is my go to for stay out of my way browsing.
- firefoxbitching 7y ago
  Mobile: Too much. Web: - Syncing: 1. Very often hangs on "slow" networks. Syncs for minutes at a time and stops the browser from loading new pages (annoying) 2. Mangles bookmarks. Merges folders I don't want merged and adds bookmarks I've deleted before - RAM creep 1. Memory leak? Firefox consistently takes up more and more memory the longer I use it 2. Poor suspend/dump functionality on Linux. If you have multiple tabs open, Firefox can quickly freeze your entire system (swap makes no difference). I have to use a 3rd party addon to have inactive tabs "suspended" so my system doesn't freeze 3. Unlike chrome, I don't think Firefox runs seperate processes for tabs. OOM killer never triggers. - Slow 1. It's just slow. Even on a great laptop with a gigabit connection, it's slow. - Long startup (self-explanatory)

mav3rick 7y ago

Future of humanity. Yes, Firefox will save us all.

terminaljunkid 7y ago

I am wary of Mozilla, a completely suit-ruled shitshow that is technically incompetent because of that, as much as I am wary of Google.

BossingAround 7y ago

Yep, I consciously switched away from Chrome to Firefox. In benchmarks, Chrome destroys (or at least destroyed when I tried it) Firefox, but I personally have never noticed any slowness from Firefox. I still have like 20+ tabs open every day, and I can do the same things I did on Chrome. So, Firefox it is for me.

unlinked_dll 7y ago

There have been some recent updates where my manual settings in about:config seem to be ignored (I have all the dark theme/gtk theming options set to false or otherwise disabled) and it still uses this trash dark theme on some sites, like DDG and GitHub. As well file and custom URIs are completely broken when installed as a snap. I cannot view any file on my system by manually typing in file://path/to/file whereas the uri functions fine in chrome. Custom application URIs require manually setting Firefox to open them in the given application, which is actually non trivial since it can't seem to find any application in the default browser, and it doesn't respect any system configuration. Meanwhile chrome just works. These are issues I have only with Firefox on some installations, I can't seem to recreate them all the time.

fizixer 7y ago

Firefox does 'gah! your tab just crashed' on my amazon tabs at a rate of about 1 in every 4 times. Once it decides to do that on a particular tab, no amount of refresh or reopen, or restart-firefox fixes it. I'm using Ubuntu 14.04, and this has been happening consistently for the last 5+ years. Every. single. goshdarn. effing. firefox. release. (sorry just wanted to vent. I've tried every solution I could find on askubuntu, stackoverflow, what not. Nothing fixes it. I know I should be filing a bug report, and/or upgrading my OS, but I don't have the time, patience to deal with that. I need to finish school first.).

josteink 7y ago
> I'm using Ubuntu 14.04, and this has been happening consistently for the last 5+ years. Might help updating to a modern version of Ubuntu with a modern kernel and modern (and less buggy) GPU drivers? Browsers are increasingly using GPU-acceleration these days. If your GPU drivers are buggy, that can probably cause a whole lot of “fun”.
- fizixer 7y ago
  Or I could be a happy camper of Chrome/Chromium for as long as I like.
  - Symbiote 7y ago
    Ubuntu 14.04 is no longer supported by Canonical. No security patches etc.
jmngomes 7y ago
I've used Firefox since I cannot recall when, on Ubuntu 16 and 18, and Windows 7 and Windows 10. Although I've experienced very rare crashes, like I have with Chrome/Chromium, my experience is that Firefox is stable and does everything I need, including some basic web dev/debug.

nonbirithm 7y ago

The rewrite of Firefox on Android is just not there yet. Yesterday it updated and now it crashes frequently at random intervals, when you open a new page it scrolls down to the center automatically, you can't copy the text of links, the text editing cursor can suddenly jump around when typing after moving it, the highlight search action is hidden behind a context menu because Wikipedia is given priority, you can't copy links that don't use the http/s protocol, you can't use sites like MEGA because it doesn't support the downloading APIs necessary, and there are many other features I wish were there but aren't like full WebExtension support. On desktop it isn't compatible with physical smartcards, so it is impossible to do my job using Firefox or a browser with an engine besides Blink. I was wanting to contribute code but haven't found time for it yet. However, what I can stand even less is a Blink monoculture and the web's standards being controlled by a single entity. The real reason I switched to Firefox was because Google intends to make API deprecations to WebExtensions to make uBlock Origin incompatible, probably in order to retain more revenue in their ad business. At that point I would be forced to switch in the future anyway, so I decided to get used to Firefox's warts early on. The exposes about Chrome automatically signing you in in the browser if you sign in with YouTube happened afterward, and I only felt more justified in switching. As a side note, I can no longer find the "identity consistency between browser and cookie jar" toggle that allows disabling this anymore. My usage of Firefox is for political, not technical, reasons.

Mandatum 7y ago

Moved back to Firefox after the Quantum release in Jan 2018. There were a few hiccups, and I still have to use Chrome or Safari or Edge for some of my local DRM-infested video streaming sites, but by about Q3 2018 I've never had any reason to use another browser. Containers is a game-changer, paired with Sync I've been able to easily segregate work, personal, and client environments with ease. I work for many large organisations under NDA at any one time - and being able to colour-code and name my tabs has been invaluable to me. Also the Dev Tools, are great for debugging or sniffing traffic. I'm not a web developer but often need to debug client implementations that consume API's and it's just as good as Chrome. (Imagine that, FireBug used to be the standard, then Chrome came along and became "just as good", now Firefox has natively caught up.) Finally - speed. Quantum finally killed Chrome's performance for me, and they've finally caught up on power-consumption on MacOS which as someone who regularly has to take multi-hour flights without charge ports available is a god-send. The DRM issues piss me off, but it's the modern version of browser-restrictive Flash or Silverlight apps. I'll wait for someone else to get fucked off enough to create a bypass for Firefox, or maybe I'll get to a stage where I develop something to do so. Chrome is dead, long live Firefox.

flipchart 7y ago

My major issue switching to FF is still the lack of a Chrome-style translate function. I live in a country where I don't speak the language, so rely heavily on translating. Copy/pasting into Google translate is too slow for general browsing, and being able to switch between translated and un-translated near instantly means that I can still navigate the site when inevitably the translation breaks the JS navigation. Switching also allows me to very slowly learn the language. I'd love to use FF, but this is still a blocker

Shorel 7y ago
This is what I use in Firefox: https://about.imtranslator.net/tutorials/presentations/imtranslator-translator-for-firefox/ https://about.imtranslator.net/tutorials/presentations/imtra...