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That's a cool blog post, and kudos to the Mozilla people, but I have to wonder about the mindset of the user whose stuck with Firefox even as his setup was unus

by jfb 14y ago

That's a cool blog post, and kudos to the Mozilla people, but I have to wonder about the mindset of the user whose stuck with Firefox even as his setup was unusable to the point of needing to install a restart button add-on. I mean, I know from being habituated to a given routine, but that seems particularly self defeating behaviour, especially considering that decent alternatives to Firefox exist?

dman 14y ago
I have a bunch of custom addons that I have written for my workflows - moving to other browsers is not an option because they arent as easily extensible as firefox.
- jfb 14y ago
  That makes sense. Speaking as someone who bought MachTen just to host Emacs on a Macintosh in the bad old days, I am sympathetic. I just am much more of a consumer of browsers than someone who relies on them to hack with.
  - dman 14y ago
    Just looked MachTen up - http://www.tenon.com/products/mt1.jpg http://www.tenon.com/products/mt1.jpg made me nostalgically remember afterstep which was the first window manager I used in linux.
srean 14y ago
> stuck with Firefox even as his setup was unusable to the point of needing to install a restart button add-on. That seems hyperbole to me. As I have commented on HN several times before FF was the only full featured browser that worked for my browsing habit. I browse from a old laptop that only has 512MB of RAM. On this m/c I would keep some 300 or more tabs open for months on end, without shutting FF down or rebooting the laptop. What I did have to do was reset the default cache sizes and some caching policy sizes, disable flash, and have an add-on that unloads the content of an idle tab. So strictly speaking I didn't have all of 300 tabs loaded in memory (but that was a good enough approximation for me). I agree FF can hog a lot of memory, but I think it was and is eminently usable if one is willing to tweak the about:config settings a bit and install a few helpful plugins like flashblock etc.
nnethercote 14y ago
It's simple -- he was using NoScript and Ghostery. Those add-ons don't exist for other browsers. I can imagine that a very privacy/security-oriented user would be willing to put up with some significant inconvenience to use those add-ons. (It's fortunate that the inconvenience has now been fixed.)

by jfb 14y ago

dman 14y ago

I have a bunch of custom addons that I have written for my workflows - moving to other browsers is not an option because they arent as easily extensible as firefox.

jfb 14y ago
That makes sense. Speaking as someone who bought MachTen just to host Emacs on a Macintosh in the bad old days, I am sympathetic. I just am much more of a consumer of browsers than someone who relies on them to hack with.
- dman 14y ago
  Just looked MachTen up - http://www.tenon.com/products/mt1.jpg http://www.tenon.com/products/mt1.jpg made me nostalgically remember afterstep which was the first window manager I used in linux.

srean 14y ago

> stuck with Firefox even as his setup was unusable to the point of needing to install a restart button add-on. That seems hyperbole to me. As I have commented on HN several times before FF was the only full featured browser that worked for my browsing habit. I browse from a old laptop that only has 512MB of RAM. On this m/c I would keep some 300 or more tabs open for months on end, without shutting FF down or rebooting the laptop. What I did have to do was reset the default cache sizes and some caching policy sizes, disable flash, and have an add-on that unloads the content of an idle tab. So strictly speaking I didn't have all of 300 tabs loaded in memory (but that was a good enough approximation for me). I agree FF can hog a lot of memory, but I think it was and is eminently usable if one is willing to tweak the about:config settings a bit and install a few helpful plugins like flashblock etc.

nnethercote 14y ago

It's simple -- he was using NoScript and Ghostery. Those add-ons don't exist for other browsers. I can imagine that a very privacy/security-oriented user would be willing to put up with some significant inconvenience to use those add-ons. (It's fortunate that the inconvenience has now been fixed.)