5 ms·

Firefox is a great browser and Mozilla is a (generally) great organization. It's my daily driver on all my devices (except my TV ha), it's fast and has great pl

Firefox is a great browser and Mozilla is a (generally) great organization. It's my daily driver on all my devices (except my TV ha), it's fast and has great plugins that also work in mobile. Philosophically I'm very much a "root for the underdog" type of person so it makes me happy that way, too. Only very rarely (every few months) am I forced to use Chrome for a site - and in my view, that's a huge ding on the site devs, not on Firefox. It's strange hearing reports of "scroll lag" in the other comments. It's possible I'm just lucky. Or there's a misconfiguration somewhere in their setup that Chrome somehow avoids. It's true that I still mostly use Chrome for webdev - I've become more used to it's (excellent) dev tools, even though Firefox and Firebug started that whole trend. It feels very right to separate my "user browser" from my "dev browser" in this way!

systems_glitch 3y ago
Same. Been using it since it was called Camino then Firebird, a confusing namespace collision :P
- dylan604 3y ago
  Maybe they can use Screaming Chicken for a future name
  - ragingrobot 3y ago
    That's reserved for use after build 197.3.
- BearOso 3y ago
  Camino was actually a separate, but similar slim-down project for Mac. It had Mac OS Cocoa controls, so it fit in better. Camino was originally named Chimera. It was started by Dave Hyatt, the guy who went to Apple to build Safari and WebKit, which Chrome now uses.
- ok123456 3y ago
  Phoenix for me.
coldtea 3y ago
>It's strange hearing reports of "scroll lag" in the other comments. It's possible I'm just lucky. Or there's a misconfiguration somewhere in their setup that Chrome somehow avoids. Don't forget the other possibility: someone using Firefox having internalized this lag as "normal behavior".
- javajosh 3y ago
  As an aside, I am very much against this trend of accusing people of "internalizing" a bad thing such that they aren't aware of it. It's using therapy-speak as an ad hominem attack, and in my view reflects poorly on the speaker. Most of the people on HN are software developers and are conversant in a wide variety of tools on many platforms, and certainly I am (one can infer that from my post). So to assert that I simply don't know what scroll lag looks like is not only absurd, but also fundamentally disrespectful and ignorant. The simple fact is that you do not, cannot, know what other people experience on their machines. Each physical system is characterized by roughly 10e10 bits - the number of combinations is (10e10)!. In other words, wild and alien configurations exist that you've never seen, and cannot imagine. Compared to this, the chances that someone has software that behaves slightly differently on their system than on your system is approaching 1. Have some humility.
  - coldtea 3y ago
    Considering this as a possibility is anything than "fundamentally disrespectful and ignorant". I've known lots of developers who thought that some broken, slow, erratic, or stupid, program or OS behavior is the normal, because that's what they've been used to. They could be great programmers too, they just didn't venture much outside the stuff they used. As for the diatribe, I don't care for this recent trend of perceiving something somebody said as some kind of abuse of "therapy speak" (before this comment I've seen a few stories about some actor "abusing therapy speak" and such lately, so I assume it's some new fad going on). I don't read about therapy, or had any therapy speak in mind. "Internalized" has been used for decades as a term, and here just means "accepted this lag as the baseline as they don't have a frame of reference". Might not even be the right word, I probably was looking for normalized (is that therapy speak too?). So there's that.
wackget 3y ago
What do you find lacking in Firefox dev tools? For me I actually prefer them to Chrome.
- swores 3y ago
  They just said they're more used to the Chrome version, not that the Firefox version is lacking. (Personally I'm with you in preferring Firefox dev tools - although I'm not someone who needs to use them more than a few times a month - not because I have any specific issues with Chrome dev tools, but because I prefer Firefox, and Mozilla, generally, and I've not found anything that FF can't do.)
- javajosh 3y ago
  I don't find them lacking - I just don't use them regularly so it feels awkward when I do use them.
- hardcopy 3y ago
  Not who you replied to, but: performance analysis, service worker debugging, indexeddb inspection (I use firefox devtools primarily)
  - azeirah 3y ago
    Have you tried the new profiler since you're talking about performance analysis? It's insanely in-depth.
- Scarbutt 3y ago
  Mozilla fired the dev tools team, so features get in more slowly compared to Chrome.
barrotes 3y ago
I took an old laptop and transformed it into an Arch Linux based smart-tv (thanks to a stabilized "air mouse" and AwesomeWM to configure windows positions and shortcuts through LUA). Now I basically do everything through Firefox in kiosk mode: it's fast, you can avoid ads, telemetry et similia through configuration tweaks and extensions. The only problem I have is with Sky/NowTV services, that are not accessible by web browser and don't have Linux apps and are not (yet?) working through wine. All the rest I use (Prime Video, Netflix, Mubi, Discovery+ etc) work great with it, way faster and cleaner than usual smart TV apps. This with a 15W-TDP 4th-gen i3 based old entry level laptop. That's just to say that Firefox can actually be pretty good for TV!
RVRX 3y ago
> Only very rarely (every few months) am I forced to use Chrome for a site - and in my view, that's a huge ding on the site devs, not on Firefox. I find this very common with Credit Card and Banking Sites. Very often they either refuse to log me in or log me out sooner than they should on Firefox, or certain pages within the site will just not load. I'm guessing they prioritize security, and only test this stuff in Chrome ;(
- ranting-moth 3y ago
  I've had this happen and businesses have lost my business because of it.
  - copperx 3y ago
    Using Chrome to support small businesses seems reasonable to me. They might not have a big development budget to test their site on all browsers.
    - Vrondi 3y ago
      Chipotle is definitely not a small business.
    - supertrope 3y ago
      Many businesses don't bother with a website anymore and just have a Facebook page. It's like how in 1998 businesses would mention their AOL Keyword alongside www.example.com. Reddit.com and Discord have replaced many individual forums.
- alekratz 3y ago
  The place I run into this the most is, strangely, chipotle.com. Still can't order online on Firefox.
cozzyd 3y ago
> except my TV ha I was sad when they discontinued Firefox for my TV (even though it was mostly an Amazon-funded workaround to get youtube on FireTV which went away when YouTube started working...).
azeirah 3y ago
Firefox dev tools have been letting me down the past few months. I'm working on a pretty nasty (legacy and poorly optimised) but otherwise still rather "normal" website at work. Opening the dev tools makes Firefox hang for almost a minute, I suspect this is due to some issue with source maps, thousands of source files and large (several megabytes of) minified code. The debugger often reports _wrong_ values on hover especially in useEffects whereas console.log shows the right one. Other than the js debugger I have 0 problems with the Firefox devtools, it often spearheads features that I use on a day-to-day basis like highlighting grid layouts. Super nice!
- javajosh 3y ago
  Yes! Their grid layout/comprehension tool is first-rate.
aden1ne 3y ago
As for sites that don't work in FireFox, here's a huge one: Office365 does not support FireFox on MacOS[0]. Mostly it works, but some things unfortunately don't. For instance, my employer's Teams site just doesn't render at all in FF. [0]: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/which-browsers-work-with-microsoft-365-for-the-web-and-microsoft-365-add-ins-ad1303e0-a318-47aa-b409-d3a5eb44e452 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/which-browsers-wo...
- copperx 3y ago
  Do you know what features Firefox is missing on MacOS?

systems_glitch 3y ago

Same. Been using it since it was called Camino then Firebird, a confusing namespace collision :P

dylan604 3y ago
Maybe they can use Screaming Chicken for a future name
- ragingrobot 3y ago
  That's reserved for use after build 197.3.
BearOso 3y ago
Camino was actually a separate, but similar slim-down project for Mac. It had Mac OS Cocoa controls, so it fit in better. Camino was originally named Chimera. It was started by Dave Hyatt, the guy who went to Apple to build Safari and WebKit, which Chrome now uses.
ok123456 3y ago
Phoenix for me.

coldtea 3y ago

>It's strange hearing reports of "scroll lag" in the other comments. It's possible I'm just lucky. Or there's a misconfiguration somewhere in their setup that Chrome somehow avoids. Don't forget the other possibility: someone using Firefox having internalized this lag as "normal behavior".

javajosh 3y ago
As an aside, I am very much against this trend of accusing people of "internalizing" a bad thing such that they aren't aware of it. It's using therapy-speak as an ad hominem attack, and in my view reflects poorly on the speaker. Most of the people on HN are software developers and are conversant in a wide variety of tools on many platforms, and certainly I am (one can infer that from my post). So to assert that I simply don't know what scroll lag looks like is not only absurd, but also fundamentally disrespectful and ignorant. The simple fact is that you do not, cannot, know what other people experience on their machines. Each physical system is characterized by roughly 10e10 bits - the number of combinations is (10e10)!. In other words, wild and alien configurations exist that you've never seen, and cannot imagine. Compared to this, the chances that someone has software that behaves slightly differently on their system than on your system is approaching 1. Have some humility.
- coldtea 3y ago
  Considering this as a possibility is anything than "fundamentally disrespectful and ignorant". I've known lots of developers who thought that some broken, slow, erratic, or stupid, program or OS behavior is the normal, because that's what they've been used to. They could be great programmers too, they just didn't venture much outside the stuff they used. As for the diatribe, I don't care for this recent trend of perceiving something somebody said as some kind of abuse of "therapy speak" (before this comment I've seen a few stories about some actor "abusing therapy speak" and such lately, so I assume it's some new fad going on). I don't read about therapy, or had any therapy speak in mind. "Internalized" has been used for decades as a term, and here just means "accepted this lag as the baseline as they don't have a frame of reference". Might not even be the right word, I probably was looking for normalized (is that therapy speak too?). So there's that.

wackget 3y ago

What do you find lacking in Firefox dev tools? For me I actually prefer them to Chrome.

swores 3y ago
They just said they're more used to the Chrome version, not that the Firefox version is lacking. (Personally I'm with you in preferring Firefox dev tools - although I'm not someone who needs to use them more than a few times a month - not because I have any specific issues with Chrome dev tools, but because I prefer Firefox, and Mozilla, generally, and I've not found anything that FF can't do.)
javajosh 3y ago
I don't find them lacking - I just don't use them regularly so it feels awkward when I do use them.
hardcopy 3y ago
Not who you replied to, but: performance analysis, service worker debugging, indexeddb inspection (I use firefox devtools primarily)
- azeirah 3y ago
  Have you tried the new profiler since you're talking about performance analysis? It's insanely in-depth.
Scarbutt 3y ago
Mozilla fired the dev tools team, so features get in more slowly compared to Chrome.

barrotes 3y ago

I took an old laptop and transformed it into an Arch Linux based smart-tv (thanks to a stabilized "air mouse" and AwesomeWM to configure windows positions and shortcuts through LUA). Now I basically do everything through Firefox in kiosk mode: it's fast, you can avoid ads, telemetry et similia through configuration tweaks and extensions. The only problem I have is with Sky/NowTV services, that are not accessible by web browser and don't have Linux apps and are not (yet?) working through wine. All the rest I use (Prime Video, Netflix, Mubi, Discovery+ etc) work great with it, way faster and cleaner than usual smart TV apps. This with a 15W-TDP 4th-gen i3 based old entry level laptop. That's just to say that Firefox can actually be pretty good for TV!

RVRX 3y ago

> Only very rarely (every few months) am I forced to use Chrome for a site - and in my view, that's a huge ding on the site devs, not on Firefox. I find this very common with Credit Card and Banking Sites. Very often they either refuse to log me in or log me out sooner than they should on Firefox, or certain pages within the site will just not load. I'm guessing they prioritize security, and only test this stuff in Chrome ;(

ranting-moth 3y ago
I've had this happen and businesses have lost my business because of it.
- copperx 3y ago
  Using Chrome to support small businesses seems reasonable to me. They might not have a big development budget to test their site on all browsers.
  - Vrondi 3y ago
    Chipotle is definitely not a small business.
  - supertrope 3y ago
    Many businesses don't bother with a website anymore and just have a Facebook page. It's like how in 1998 businesses would mention their AOL Keyword alongside www.example.com. Reddit.com and Discord have replaced many individual forums.
alekratz 3y ago
The place I run into this the most is, strangely, chipotle.com. Still can't order online on Firefox.

cozzyd 3y ago

> except my TV ha I was sad when they discontinued Firefox for my TV (even though it was mostly an Amazon-funded workaround to get youtube on FireTV which went away when YouTube started working...).

azeirah 3y ago

Firefox dev tools have been letting me down the past few months. I'm working on a pretty nasty (legacy and poorly optimised) but otherwise still rather "normal" website at work. Opening the dev tools makes Firefox hang for almost a minute, I suspect this is due to some issue with source maps, thousands of source files and large (several megabytes of) minified code. The debugger often reports _wrong_ values on hover especially in useEffects whereas console.log shows the right one. Other than the js debugger I have 0 problems with the Firefox devtools, it often spearheads features that I use on a day-to-day basis like highlighting grid layouts. Super nice!

javajosh 3y ago
Yes! Their grid layout/comprehension tool is first-rate.

aden1ne 3y ago

As for sites that don't work in FireFox, here's a huge one: Office365 does not support FireFox on MacOS[0]. Mostly it works, but some things unfortunately don't. For instance, my employer's Teams site just doesn't render at all in FF. [0]: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/which-browsers-work-with-microsoft-365-for-the-web-and-microsoft-365-add-ins-ad1303e0-a318-47aa-b409-d3a5eb44e452 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/which-browsers-wo...

copperx 3y ago
Do you know what features Firefox is missing on MacOS?