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I remember waiting on the Mozilla project to deliver something that could browse as well on linux as closed source browsers on windows/mac did. It... took... l

I remember waiting on the Mozilla project to deliver something that could browse as well on linux as closed source browsers on windows/mac did. It... took... long... But there it was. And it still works.

embedding-shape 9d ago
Was this recent? Because Firefox were the browser that worked better than all the rest, for quite many years, maybe 2005-2010, and Firefox had no competition basically until Chrome arrived on the scene. Just the fact that Firefox got browser tabs before anyone else, and Firebug, just took it to another level compared to all the other browsers available at the time.
- lukan 9d ago
  Firefox was bad on linux for a long time. Even running the windows ff build via wine/proton got you better performance than the "native" build (I think that was around 10 years ago).
  - le-mark 9d ago
    Much longer than 10 years! I’ve been on Linux since 2008 an it was never a problem.
- saidinesh5 9d ago
  > Hardware accelerated video decoding (for video playback or for WebRTC) is available via VA-API for both X11 and Wayland. Since firefox-101.0.1-4 package it's enabled by default for Intel/AMD users. From https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Firefox_Hardware_acceleration https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Firefox_Hardware_acceleration I think that was around 2022-23. I remember this affecting my laptop video watching a lot. Google meet feeling sluggish on Firefox is also something I remember until very recently..
  - sspiff 9d ago
    Google still tries to sabotage Firefox experience on Google Apps, especially Meet but also YouTube and sometimes Google Sheets/Docs as well. They want to degrade the experience just enough to get you fed up with FF and go (back) to Chrome, without making it absolutely obvious that's what they're doing. They often label these things as "regressions" because they don't test on Firefox and take forever to fix them. But I can't help but believe it's intentional.
    - duskdozer 9d ago
      Yes, exactly. Google products working worse on Firefox is a problem with Google, not Firefox. I'm not sure why the conflict of interest isn't more obvious.
- vlovich123 9d ago
  Your history is off. Opera was the first mainstream browser to implement tabs and boy was Opera also much faster than Firefox at its peak (both UI, resource usage, and rendering) which overlaps that “peak” Firefox period by a lot. Firefox was great because it was open source but it wasn’t ever really the “best” browser - it was the best open source browser.
  - le-mark 9d ago
    > it was the best open source browser. Yes that was implied because IE was not mentioned either!
    - toyg 9d ago
      When the original Phoenix browser was released, Explorer was in the middle of its slumber with the dreadful v6. Phoenix might not have been as feature-full as IE6, but it was very much the superior experience. It made browsers fun again.
    - vlovich123 9d ago
      That’s a quote you seem to have materialized from thin air - op didn’t make this claim.
      - le-mark 9d ago
        It’s literally the last sentence?
        vlovich123 8d ago
        not sure what you’re quoting but the last sentence of the post I replied to is: > Just the fact that Firefox got browser tabs before anyone else, and Firebug, just took it to another level compared to all the other browsers available at the time. Your quote doesn’t appear.
        vlovich123 8d ago
- cyberax 9d ago
  IE5 and then IE6 were head-and-shoulders better than Mozilla around the 1999-2002 era. They were significantly faster and lighter, and not just because of the deep OS integration but because Mozilla's browser was actually a full Web suite, with a built-in page editor and a mail client. Then Microsoft stopped developing IE, and it became essentially frozen. Mozilla moved ahead with refactoring the browser parts into a lightweight Phoenix (Firebird, Firefox - anyone remembers the FireSomething extension?). But it took _years_ for it to get into a usable state.

embedding-shape 9d ago

Was this recent? Because Firefox were the browser that worked better than all the rest, for quite many years, maybe 2005-2010, and Firefox had no competition basically until Chrome arrived on the scene. Just the fact that Firefox got browser tabs before anyone else, and Firebug, just took it to another level compared to all the other browsers available at the time.

lukan 9d ago
Firefox was bad on linux for a long time. Even running the windows ff build via wine/proton got you better performance than the "native" build (I think that was around 10 years ago).
- le-mark 9d ago
  Much longer than 10 years! I’ve been on Linux since 2008 an it was never a problem.
saidinesh5 9d ago
> Hardware accelerated video decoding (for video playback or for WebRTC) is available via VA-API for both X11 and Wayland. Since firefox-101.0.1-4 package it's enabled by default for Intel/AMD users. From https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Firefox_Hardware_acceleration https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Firefox_Hardware_acceleration I think that was around 2022-23. I remember this affecting my laptop video watching a lot. Google meet feeling sluggish on Firefox is also something I remember until very recently..
- sspiff 9d ago
  Google still tries to sabotage Firefox experience on Google Apps, especially Meet but also YouTube and sometimes Google Sheets/Docs as well. They want to degrade the experience just enough to get you fed up with FF and go (back) to Chrome, without making it absolutely obvious that's what they're doing. They often label these things as "regressions" because they don't test on Firefox and take forever to fix them. But I can't help but believe it's intentional.
  - duskdozer 9d ago
    Yes, exactly. Google products working worse on Firefox is a problem with Google, not Firefox. I'm not sure why the conflict of interest isn't more obvious.
vlovich123 9d ago
Your history is off. Opera was the first mainstream browser to implement tabs and boy was Opera also much faster than Firefox at its peak (both UI, resource usage, and rendering) which overlaps that “peak” Firefox period by a lot. Firefox was great because it was open source but it wasn’t ever really the “best” browser - it was the best open source browser.
- le-mark 9d ago
  > it was the best open source browser. Yes that was implied because IE was not mentioned either!
  - toyg 9d ago
    When the original Phoenix browser was released, Explorer was in the middle of its slumber with the dreadful v6. Phoenix might not have been as feature-full as IE6, but it was very much the superior experience. It made browsers fun again.
  - vlovich123 9d ago
    That’s a quote you seem to have materialized from thin air - op didn’t make this claim.
    - le-mark 9d ago
      It’s literally the last sentence?
      - vlovich123 8d ago
        not sure what you’re quoting but the last sentence of the post I replied to is: > Just the fact that Firefox got browser tabs before anyone else, and Firebug, just took it to another level compared to all the other browsers available at the time. Your quote doesn’t appear.
        vlovich123 8d ago
cyberax 9d ago
IE5 and then IE6 were head-and-shoulders better than Mozilla around the 1999-2002 era. They were significantly faster and lighter, and not just because of the deep OS integration but because Mozilla's browser was actually a full Web suite, with a built-in page editor and a mail client. Then Microsoft stopped developing IE, and it became essentially frozen. Mozilla moved ahead with refactoring the browser parts into a lightweight Phoenix (Firebird, Firefox - anyone remembers the FireSomething extension?). But it took _years_ for it to get into a usable state.