You're right that this is potentially anticompetitive, but
“Companies will regulate themselves” is a cute libertarian bedtime story.
I've never heard libertarians say that. Rather, they say that consumers have the potential to regulate companies if they choose to do so, by voting with their feet. We should do so more often than we do; when there's a free market (monopolies are not free markets) it feels pretty good to tell a company to go screw themselves.
Personally I switched back to Firefox when Chrome tried to force login to my Google account, and I haven't missed a thing (other than some dev tools, e.g. websocket inspection). Firefox Quantum is really good, and their bookmark sync has replaced my previous usage of the now-defunct Xmarks.
“Companies will regulate themselves” is libertarian orthodoxy, and suggesting otherwise is ahistorical and silly. (But then again so is libertarianism.)
The First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech and the press, including the freedom to make mistakes and even outright lie. There is no godlike authority that can tell truth from fiction without fail, and having government censors telling people what they can say (especially w.r.t. political speech) would invert the relationship between the people and their government, making government the master instead of the servant.
Instead, we rely on an educated readership to identify bias and mistakes and call them out, as has been done here. People get the journalism they deserve. To the extent we're failing to teach our children critical thinking skills, we're putting our democracy at risk.
The NY Times and other resources currently considered "credible" have earned that credibility from the people not through government permission but by generally providing a useful service to its consumers, despite all the mistakes they make and biases they present.
The NY Times in particular has unfortunately been burning through that hard-earned credibility capital at an alarming rate, even long before the current last few years, with the result that there are large portions of the country that no longer trust it like they did, with good reason. More recently they have taken the bait proffered by Trump and his ilk and lowered themselves to his level, spinning most articles I've seen with more political or oppositional bias than in the past.
I can only hope this is a cyclical phenomenon, where the citizenry/readership becomes ignorant of the related history and its challenges, simply because we've lived through a period where the battles were won and we could take such things for granted. Just like our predecessors, this generation is going to painfully relearn that everything printed (or typed) should be taken with a grain of salt and cross-checked against multiple sources.
>The First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech and the press, including the freedom to make mistakes and even outright lie. There is no godlike authority that can tell truth from fiction without fail
A word from Herbert Marcuse on this notion:
"This pure toleration of sense and nonsense is justified by the democratic argument that nobody, neither group nor individual, is in possession of the truth and capable of defining what is right and wrong, good and bad. Therefore, all contesting opinions must be submitted to 'the people' for its deliberation and choice. But I have already suggested that the democratic argument implies a necessary condition, namely, that the people must be capable of deliberating and choosing on the basis of knowledge, that they must have access to authentic information, and that, on this. basis, their evaluation must be the result of autonomous thought.
In the contemporary period, the democratic argument for abstract tolerance tends to be invalidated by the invalidation of the democratic process itself."
You've been given an example of a system that might work in a civilized, modern country called Denmark. Maybe it's worth looking into it rather than repeating your First Amendment / "government is the servant" saw.
>The NY Times and other resources currently considered "credible"
Yea, but...
>The NY Times in particular has unfortunately been burning through that hard-earned credibility capital at an alarming rate
Ah, never mind you got it.
>More recently they have taken the bait proffered by Trump
How this isn't being observed by more people is stunning. 100% of the time, NYT, CNN, MSNBC, WaPo are running what they think is an effective awareness and information campaign - and is in reality going to cause scandal fatigue and hurt their credibility. Everyone complains about his Twitter... stop airing every single one of his tweets. In another two years, the country won't be on fire, and statistically Trump has a good chance at re-election.
All the media pearl clutching, faux-rage, and surface depth "activism" aren't helping... well, it's not helping them anyhow.
> and is in reality going to cause scandal fatigue and hurt their credibility. Everyone complains about his Twitter... stop airing every single one of his tweets
I agree but it takes 5 minutes to write an article about how 'terrifying' the latest tweet is by the president and that article will generate a lot of clicks to have a high margin on return so I don't expect to see this stuff go away.
They're a business and have to publish articles to make money and can't just sit on every thing waiting for a big story so I understand. I think all you can do is just ignore it.
> 100% of the time, NYT, CNN, MSNBC, WaPo are running what they think is an effective awareness and information campaign - and is in reality going to cause scandal fatigue and hurt their credibility. Everyone complains about his Twitter... stop airing every single one of his tweets.
But right now it's good for those sweet clicks. They have an audience who loves to get worked up about Trump, just as there's an audience that loves to get worked up about the kind of people who get worked up about Trump. They have their own content, too.
But, basically... yes, what you said. And newspapers mostly lack any credible business plan ideas that don't rely on this.
There is currently no real demonstrated business model to sustainably pay for good journalism. Some are hoping they can at least fund good journalism with clickbait and sponsored content... ugh.
I agree with both of you, and pose this question... do you think they have more desire to see Trump not win again because of their integrity - or want Trump to win because it's extremely good for business?
Seriously, switch to Firefox. It's good again, and prioritizes privacy.[0] After Chrome's forced-sign-in debacle [1] I switched away from Chrome on all my platforms (Windows, Linux, Android) and haven't missed a thing.
The best thing about Firefox is Mozilla's Multi-Account Container tabs[0].
Essentially it allows you to put different tabs into different light-weight profiles, with their own session, cookies, and state. That means if you want to log into Facebook but don't want Facebook following you online, just give Facebook its own container.
Mozilla has anti-tracking already baked in, but Multi-Account Containers are a whole other level of isolation, but without sacrificing usability (like traditional multi-profile/multi-user browsing).
They're quite practical even if you don't care about tracking. I have different containers for my work and personal Google accounts and they make things much easier than relying on Google's support for multiple accounts.
They're also great for development. I have different containers for each user I use while working on logged-in flows. I can just go from tab to tab to test different user experiences or switch between users in a multi-user interaction.
This is one of the things I used to like IE for - perhaps the only thing it got better than the competition:
File | New Session
... and then you have a fresh session context that doesn't share cookies with the others so you can log into services as different users. As a developer this is very handy for testing multi-user workflows, and had numerous uses as a more general user too, and it was easy to do ad-hoc without needing to setup multiple profiles first.
It didn't work for apps that are sensitive to permanent cookies (and other client-side storage) instead if session level options of course, where multiple profiles does (as presumably does Firefoxes containers? - I don't know as I've not yet used them).
That does sound useful. I often end up creating several temporary containers while doing testing and development. The overhead of creating and deleting these is annoying.
Yes, but you can have as many active sessions as you need instead of just two.
Incognito/InPrivate/whet-ever-other-browsers-call-the-feature tabs/windows share the same session so that gives you at most two active sessions: normal and incognito.
The "new session" option in IE can have many more. For a lot of workflows two is enough, but sometimes I want something like "a couple of distinct base users, a manager, and an admin" for testing more complex user workflows.
I don't know how edge does incognito but in other browsers, incognito kills the tab history, so if you accidentally close a tab you can't trivially restore it with ctrl+shift+t or whatever.
That's one of my use cases too. It works pretty well when you're actively using multiple accounts. Amazon doesn't preserve the session very long, so I find that most of the time I open one of my AWS containers they're logged out.
That would be nice. I'd also like the to be able to automatically revert to default container when leaving a site (like the FB container plugin does), to view/manage cookies by container, and to specify more than one container that I like to open sites in so it doesn't bug me about using my default Google container when I open gmail in my work container.
I don't, however, like how the UI/UX is implemented. In particular, the management of containers -- why do I have to dig so deeply to add new containers? Also, as a color-blind person, the slightly colored thin bar above the tab is not a sufficient identifier. It just seems all sort of after-thoughty and jumbled to me.
Having said that, I converted to FF being my primary browser from being a long-time Chrome user and am happy about the change.
It also takes way too many steps to make a site open in a container by default. And there doesn't seem to be any way to manage cookies by container. I'm not even sure what data is showing up in the cookie management preferences page.
Agreed. Container Tabs is fantastic, however the UI needs work. Editing a tab is also pretty awful, you have to navigate to two different areas to tweak all the options.
I wish the addon would sync its container configuration accross Firefox Sync. Setting my containers manually on the multiple computers I use daily is a real pain in the ass.
This. Especially if you use hotkeys for opening container profiles. Since the FireFox UI doesn't allow for container profile reordering in the UI you have to rebuild your profiles in the correct order (because hotkeys are mapped to order of creation based on numeric value) and reselect the appropriate icon and color to match the profile you're used to. Right now containers are not a welcome citizen with regard to Sync. I really enjoy containers but they need to be front and center and a first class citizen in the profile with Sync.
For mobile use container syncing (even just ssyncing which domains go in which container) would make it sooo much easier to protect from tracking.
Firefox for Android is a notable improvement over Chrome, but the add-ons available for it, even simple ones like javascript toggle, are significantly worse. On desktop it retains state for each site, wheread on Android it is a global toggle for all websites.
I keep having Firefox for Android bug out on me and stop rendering the pages - it's really frustrating as it keeps forcing me back to Chrome. Have you ever hit this issue?
Yes, I have had it start mis-rendering with content being partially covered, killing and reopening Firefox fixes it. Firefox for Android needs work, but the add-ons make it a good experience.
The best thing about FF is about:config. It tunes in to the legacy of Netscape and Amiga where you could and can configure everything to how you like it. This is freedom, unlike chromium.
Sadly there are also 'secret prefs' that are considered so potent that they're not exposed by default in about:config
If you know about them, for example from reading the code, you can create them. So at present about:config is a strange sort of place with lots of knobs but not all of them.
If there's something you really need to configure in Chromium and it's not available as a flag, you can add that feature and submit a pull request. It's an open source project.
The thing is, flags in Chrome exist only until Google decides it shouldn't be an option anymore. Then they take the choice away from you. I disabled the material "design" styled themes for as long as I could, until the flag disappeared.
I tried to move from Chrome's profiles to Firefox's container tabs. I prefer Chrome's take on it where sessions are shared across all tabs in a window rather than across similarly styled tabs in the same window.
.. I just went to find the github issue for other people with a similar need[0] and found someone has posted a link to an extension called sticky containers. A new tab opens in the same container of the last one. It's actually pretty close to what I'm after..
Firefox has always had profiles, very much acting like Chrome's, but for some reason they didn't make it easy to use. Navigate to:
about:profiles
Now you can have multiple windows, each window with its own profile and the profile determines everything, from the browser's history to the extensions installed.
I have tried them but it wasn't simple to use multiple profiles at once, nor was it obvious which profile you were using. I felt as though Firefox was discouraging their use. Are you using them?
I now do the "about:profiles" thing I mentioned. I don't know why they aren't exposing Profiles in the UI in an intuitive manner, makes no sense. For my day to day use, I think Multi-Account Containers are better though.
My one wish is if you could set a default container. I use FF to browser Facebook primarily and want that to be default, but instead I have to load Firefox then load a container then load Facebook. Wish it were just open FF -> Facebook is homepage.
There is also a Facebook-specific container addon that limits Facebook's footprint even more than the standard container addon (and will work alongside it)
Also with the standard container addon you can specify that sites always open only in your specified container, so you could just set Facebook to always open in its own container that way.
So at work we have a jenkins instance, which uses github (on prem) OAuth to sign in, and it logs you out after a very short period of inactivity. Except that jenkins or the way we have it configured or the way we have the reverse proxy in front of it configured is buggy, so sometimes when you try to log back in, you are just redirected to the front page, and you're still not logged in. To workaround this, I had to clean out my browser cache + cookies + other bits of history whenever this happened in order to log in.
Your comment just gave me the idea to: install the container tabs plugin, tell the plugin to always open our Jenkins site in the "Jenkins" container, and then when the bug happens, I can "clear cookies etc" on that container, without destroying my history and login sessions in the rest of my tabs.
After playing around with it for 5 minutes, it seems you can't clear cookies on a container basis. Also apparently only cookies are isolated, but other bits of history aren't. So this might not work. Alas. I almost found a solution. I did find that ctrl-shift-del opens a clear history popup though, instead of going through that wretched menu.
It doesn't clear cache but it will automatically delete any cookies when you close a tab or when you change the domain. That might do what you need, when you use it in conjunction with Containers.
On Chrome, theres an option to list cookies for a site by clicking on that padlock to left of site url, so quicker way of clearing cookies for your Jenkins site. Maybe FF has similar setup.
Then hard refresh browser should clear cache I think (ctr/cmd + shift + r on any system or ctr + f5 on windows).
Thanks, it seems firefox has the same feature on the padlock. Otherwise, from the other comments here, I might be able to try one of these two to help in conjunction with containers:
If you're okay with using chrome: create another profile and only use it for jenkins, in fact, set up a shortcut that opens it in app/kiosk mode and maybe see if there's a commandline flag to clear all history every time you open it, that way all you need to do is click the shortcut and everything else happens in the background and it doesn't affect the rest of your browsing exp.
Container is great. I have to toot my own honk. The addon Session Boss supports container seamlessly. I have multiple GMail accounts that I put in different containers with their own logon and cookies. Session Boss saves the tabs and containers in a session and easily restore them the next time I need them.
The Chrome additional profile feature has also become a lot more confusing and less useful with the auto-sign-in-change debacle, alas.
Which may actually be what pushes me to FF. Not out of spite, just that I was counting on Chrome profiles for this purpose, but they've gotten a lot harder for me to use for that (and were never as good as FF's multi-container thing, it sounds like).
Exactly! unless they make different seed for each WebGL random (which used in fingerprinting) I don't see the point. Plus, they have your IP (or your VPN's), so at most you make your profile less specific, but never "isolated".
Chrome supports multiple profiles. Mozilla's Multi-Account Container tabs isn't multiple profits. It is multiple isolated containers running under the same profile, in the same browser window.
A closer analogy would be if Chrome allowed each tab to have its own profile, rather than each window, and for each one to be lighter weight than a full profile.
Your sibling comment pointed out the same thing. Other than having 2 tabs in the same window with 2 different sets of cookies, which is something I never want (but you might), is there anything Firefox's feature gets me that Chrome's feature doesn't?
With Chrome, even if you manually sync your profiles and keep the same set of extensions installed in both profiles, it runs 2 processes of the same extension. Even when the second profile window is closed.
But for me the deal breaker was managing a separate set of bookmarks.
Beyond minimizing being tracked everywhere you browse, separate environments for office, personal, and client accounts — Google, Fb, IG, LinkedIn, Twitter, PayPal, banks, brokers — are useful in many cases.
daveFNbuck writes [0]:
“They're also great for development. I have different containers for each user I use while working on logged-in flows. I can just go from tab to tab to test different user experiences or switch between users in a multi-user interaction.”
Firefox hasn't supported running multiple profiles simultaneously forever, though I understand that it's possible now. That's actually party oh what got me on chrome originally--I could have my school profile open at the same time as my goofing-off profile and pretend to be researching while I played flash games, yet not showing any of that in my history.
Firefox has supported running multiple profiles simultaneously since before Chrome ever existed - I used them. Chrome was first released in 2008, and here's an article about Firefox's multiple instances from 2007: http://turbulentsky.com/how-to-run-multiple-firefox-profiles....
Multiple profiles in Chrome is super useful, but it doesn't work at the tab level, does it? Just at the window level? Not that that's a fundamental change, but it's a nice usability bump
True, but that for me is a feature (I almost always want new tabs to open in the same container; for instance, when reviewing a Github PR and clicking through to see context).
But from a privacy UX perspective, both Chrome and Firefox accommodate this use case gracefully.
It sounds like you already know this, but for anyone else reading, tabs inherit the container of the tab that opened them (aside from special cases like Facebook Container, which trigger based on the domain).
I tried switching completely a month ago for the third time.
Sadly absolutely nothing has happened in a 5 year time-span. The performance on my high-spec i7 Macbook Pro is abysmal. ( same across several company Macbooks ) The fans speed up constantly like they have done it for years. It's completely unusable for "professional" work or just regular multi tab browsing and drains the battery in no time.
Safari, Chrome, Opera, whatever, doesn't have these problems. I actually haven't experienced an application that feels so sluggish and unoptimised in OSX as Firefox.
Something is seriously wrong and the dev group must not be prioritising it?
I checked their subreddit and loads of people are fleeing the Mac version, even on the newest nightly builds of quantum - seriously what the hell is going on? Why hasn't "the bug" or whatever been found or defined in clear termes in over 5 years?
The day the app works without serious CPU issues i will uninstall Chrome and go to Firefox, but the handling of this problem makes me worried about the dev groups competence.
When i talked to devs in the subreddit many of them were like "Hey, that sounds weird, should be better in the new nightly, are you sure it's not ..." - an absurd answer in the light of the constant stream of people saying this for years and years - even in this thread i see multiple people saying it's useless on OSX.
To the dev group: Get a Macbook (many devs use them), open Firefox, identify the problem - should have happened 5+ years ago.
As a frequent /r/firefox visitor - while I do agree that Fx team should spend more time investigating this, I still have to note that this is not a bug or something ssimilar that can be easily reproduced.
I have late 2013 MPBr and 2014 iMac and never had any issues of a sort ever since quantum release. The only problem (performance wise) were videos on Youtube, but it seems to be fixed already. So it is there for some people and it is not for the others. With dfferent Macbooks\software\setups etc.
I have the exact same issue. I'm using a fully specced MacBook Pro early 2015 with a Retina screen in a scaled mode (1.5x) and Firefox is extremely slow to use. Scrolling isn't fluid at all and CPU usage is very high. When I put it in the normal Retina mode (2x) it's much better, but still not as fluid as using Chrome, which even on 1.5x mode works and scrolls fluidly.
I'm also using Firefox on an underpowered Ubuntu machine and it works wonderfully there though (no HiDPI screen).
FWIW I’ve used it on a low spec MacBook Pro for a year and a half without a problem. Never had any complaints, and it’s only gotten better after the Quantum changes.
I do know what he's talking about, as I've had the same exact problem.
When I did research about it (about a year ago) it seemed the devs were considering retina macbooks with a non-default resolution as origin of the bug for some reason - I'm referring to the display setting that appears as "more space" in the regular OSX settings menu, not some arcane hidden configuration.
I regularly check back because I love the idea of using their open source, somewhat privacy-focused alternative to chrome, but it's been years and still not a fix in sight.
Me too, and as it happens, I'm running on retina with "more space" enabled. Firefox is unusably slow, to the point where I'm probably abandoning it after a few weeks of really trying to get into it. Which is a shame, because I love the idea of multi-account containers and other privacy features.
I think there should be some kind of survey. Every thread on HN has these posts complaining about this problem, and every thread has people like you insinuating we are doing something "whacky" or "crazy" with our laptops.
To me it seems that a large segment of users using the Retina screens (most people on the osx platform) has severe performance problems. Some people have no problems. And that is just the state of affairs.
The weird thing for me is that there is no official "issue" or information about the problems since so many experience it.
I had the exact same experience as the grand parent comment.
Seriously wanted to switch to Firefox after the browser-sign-in "feature" but the performance on my high-end 2018 macbook pro with 16gb ram was just abysmal (20 tabs open tops).
Having a bunch of windows, human spacial memory works surprisingly well for recognizing sequences of tabs. And Firefox allows you to search through the titles of all open tabs in the URL bar.
> I was the one who opened them, of course I know what's on those tabs.
I rarely have more than 10 open at a time and sometimes completely forget what's there or why I opened it - I find uber-tabbing impressive and baffling in equal measure.
If you know what you're looking for, what does having it open (but probably knocked out of memory?) have over using search/URL autosuggest? Just a workflow thing, or is it faster?
I think of my tabs as my documents (the ones I'm working with today, this hour or even this very moment).
I prefer keeping those documents on my table, because this saves me some time\effort and just more convenient (subjectvly). So active tabs are the documents right in front of me and knocked out of memory ones are the ones I'm going to work with soon or needed for some sort of reference waiting their time in some sort of document organizer.
>I rarely have more than 10 open at a time and sometimes completely forget what's there or why I opened it
Well, I just have good memory :D It's part of the way schooling goes here in Russia I guess and maybe the upbringing. Memory training was just another daily routine. Sometimes it's really hard for me to believe that some people can't remember the plot or the characters from the book they read a year ago, while I still can quote a book I read 15 year ago.
In the end I guess everything goes down to what kind of processes influenced your brain development or something like that.
> If you know what you're looking for, what does having it open (but probably knocked out of memory?) have over using search/URL autosuggest?
I typically have related tabs around the one I find. E.g. recently I researched some details about the python requests library, but haven't finished implementing it yet. I can go back to that group of tabs that's in a somewhat logical order. Autocomplete wouldn't have that, and also suggest links I've already discarded as not interesting.
I've tried a few times to replace this workflow with bookmark groups etc, but I never got that to work in a way I'm completely happy with, and making my own extension that does it exactly like I want it to would be an interesting project, but too much work for now.
What I find useful is a browser extension that lets me copy-paste a list of all URLs in a window with their titles, so at the end of a research session I can move the entire list quickly to a markdown file and save it with a few notes.
I also have my tab panel removed via userChrome.css and instead use Tree Style Tab, so all of my tabs are organized.
This doesn't really help with navigation when you have 100+ of them, but this structure maps to your internal memory organizer too. Sort of.
It's like orrganizing things you keep in your room\apartment - you may have LOTS of things and from a 3rd person point of view they may seem unorganized, but not for you - you put things according to your own logic and even if you forget the exact coorditanes of some item you still can find if quick enough because you know where you should look for it.
Some sites, like gmail, and many technical sites (google cloud console) still take a good amount of time to load. Keeping a bunch of them open in tabs cuts down on the 10 seconds it'll take to open again.
I think it has to do with running the Macbook Pro at scaled resolution which is pretty much standard among devs on MB pro no? (otherwise you will have very little screen real estate).
I just created i Profile through the Gecko profiler once again but i don't know if that captures the CPU data? What external profiler do you use?
Do I understand correctly that you're checking CPU usage immediately after having scrolled up/down, or while scrolling up/down, right?
Apparently, there are already people working on that bug. If I understand things correctly, Firefox uses transparent windows, but transparent windows use lots of CPU on some macOS configurations, and this somehow wasn't detected during testing (I imagine that the computers used for testing didn't have these configurations).
If this is the same bug, as is likely, the bug is identified and developers are working on it: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429522 . If you wish, you may leave a message on that bug mentioning that you are available for profiling and testing a fix.
It is my impression (but don't take my word on it) that the fix will ship in Firefox 65, which is currently in Nightly. Now, I'm not sure that the fix has already landed in the current Nightlies, but do you have the possibility of testing on Firefox Nightly if the problem is still present?
(usual caveat: Nightly has Telemetry activated by default – if you don't like Telemetry, don't forget to disable it)
I use the nightly builds and I definitely do not have that problem with around 750 tabs open on my non-retina MacBook Pro. It does suck down memory though.
Which doesn't change anything since the Macbook Pro has been sold with Retina displays for what, the last 6 years?
The fact that Firefox works exclusively on ancient laptops or edge cases doesn't make anything better. All Apple devices today are sold with Retina screens and the Pro Lineup, and therefore most devs has had Retina screens for 6+ years.
Usually I expect software to perform better on newer hardware than it does on old. Are you suggesting the probles you're experiencing have to do with a retina display.
I have periodically had firefox problems in performance on all platforms including the new Mac air I bought my wife, her old Mac Pro and various Ubuntu and Windows installations. As a general rule it is because I've kept it open for several days with lots of tabs with media in them running. I mean it's irritating but not an ongoing catastrophe that means I can't use. As I said in some other thread recently I have over the past 10 years I think had two occasions where FF performance was so bad I had to leave the platform for a some time until it was fixed.
I see a lot of people in this thread claiming problems, and I see a lot of people claiming no problems, and some like me in between. So I don't know what the statistical breakdown of performance complaints about FF in comparison to all other issues (and if those complaints are actually likely to be related), but maybe it is not as great as you think it is?
Good question. As i wrote in my other comments these comments are large amounts in every FF thread on HN. Also loads of devs (including myself) are at companies where no one uses FF because of performance issues which of course is anecdata albeit a bit broader.
My guess would be most people have issues but most consumers don't know better. Some have no issues, and it seems that's the ones with older "non retina" displays.
I have a colleague whose Mac has the same issue as you (2015 MBP 15" Retina). Chrome runs awesome for him, Firefox crawls. However, I have the same model and for me Firefox is as snappy as anything.
You're right that this needs to be fixed, but its lame to assume that Firefox devs do not test on Macs. You're simply experiencing a bug that is hard to reproduce, that is all.
Firefox is snappy at the beginning, but starts getting really slow and clunky after about 8 hours, or sometimes 2-3 days of the laptop being suspended and then turned on again. I can make it fast again if I close the browser and re-open it. But it's not slow right out of the gate.
Also slow is relative. If someone hasn't had an experience with a faster browser, then "slow" just feels normal. I had that after using Firefox for ~9 months. It just felt normal, and then got a bit slow and unusable after a while. After switching back to Chrome on Mac, it was like a breath of fresh air. I forgot what a responsive UI felt like.
I have sympathy, debugging is hard! But it's weird that across hundreds of threads no one from the dev group has anything to say, or that there is not disclaimer or "ask for help" or whatever.
"Yes we are aware that a certain percentage has severe performance problems on osx, we believe this has to do with the Retina displays blah blah" - instead it seems like no one from the dev group has been following this problem when you ask them. Despite weekly threads, just like the posts here on Hackernews in every FF thread.
Possibly because complaining on hacker news and calling people incompetent on threads they have no reason to personally follow isn't an optimal strategy for receiving tech support.
I will admit it was too harshly written, the issues seems to only be on the osx platform and Firefox is great on all other platforms, but the issue has been detailed in their own tracker and subreddit for many years.
Sure, it's a mid-2012 MBP with the "high res" matte screen. A six year old machine is hardly an edge case in the context of a problem you've been seeing for at least five years. I've not had problems with FF performance on the handful of retina machines I've used for work either.
If the Mozilla devs aren't paying attention to and haven't remedied the problem you're experiencing, perhaps you're the edge case?
I just wrote that their support subreddit is filled with posts about performance on OSX, this thread in itself already has loads of posts with people complaining about it, and my post just is getting lots of upvotes - how is that an edge case?
Also all Firefox threads on Hackernews has these posts, every single one.
As i said before i have been following this for years. You having a 2012 computer is 100% the edge case - not that there is anything wrong in that, i love keeping tech for as long as possible.
> You having a 2012 computer is 100% the edge case
How so? It's the same processor (Ivy Bridge) and GPU combo (HD 4000 + GT 650M) as the first few revisions of the retina MBP models. The big difference is the display resolution (1680x1050 vs 2880x1800).
You're saying this problem goes back five years (2013). Whether or not the 2012 model is particularly common now, the guts were common in 2013 back when you claim to have seen the problem.
I've got a newer (still non-retina) iMac and have used a variety of retina machines for work and haven't seen any performance problems with FF either. Sure, if I run a bunch of flash based video players I can get the fans to go nuts but that's not a FF problem (the same thing happens if I use Chrome, flash is just an inefficient means of rendering video).
If the Mozilla devs haven't reproduced your complaint on a first class platform it's a pretty safe bet that you're doing something whacky whether or not you realize it.
So all the people in this thread are doing something "whacky" including all of the people from all of the other Firefox threads on Hackernews, and the constant stream of people in the subreddit?
We are not discussing if your computer is an edge case tech wise, but if it represents a "commonly used device" on the osx platform, ie, a device with a Retina display. In other words an edge case market wise.
Also another guy just wrote "Definitely not an edge case", about all his companys computers above me.
I don't get your point in trying to say we are "whacky" people because we say there is a problem. Once again read other FF threads on HN an these posts are in every one.
"but the handling of this problem makes me worried about the dev groups competence."
Basically you said the developers of a major browser, browser engine, programming language etc etc etc are all stupid because firefox doesn't work optimally on some subset of mac users machines. If this effects 1 in 1000 mac users this could be biting quite a few people certainly enough to inspire a lot of complaints and still effect a tiny portion of firefox users especially if firefox users are already underrepresented on macs due to historical poor showing.
If Macs are 9% of desktops/laptops and firefox users are around 10% then 0.9% of users are mac firefox users even given an even distribution of users or more realistically 0.5% of users.
If a bug effects in in 100 users its effecting then 0.005% of users. If it effects 1 in 1000 its effecting 0.0005% of users.
The prior posters statement about poor performance with scaling sounds interesting and importantly repeatable. If its the source of the challenge in question it seems like it would be great to submit a bug report.
Bugs that effect everyone are quickly fixed. Bugs that effect a small minority are more apt to slip through. This seems like a more satisfying conclusion than just assuming Mozilla hires morons for 6 figures.
It's not eleven, not by far. It's enough that I see this bug as the number one reason no one uses firefox at my job, where there are hundreds of devs - anecdotal evidence of course, but still telling.
I don't know why you're trying to deffend the idea that this bug is not a (relevant) thing. I'm not OP btw.
> I don't know why you're trying to deffend the idea that this bug is not a (relevant) thing. I'm not OP btw.
Why? Hand waving and tantrums don't mean that what OP is experiencing is representative of the state of Firefox on OSX. OP is positing that it's this ancient bug that Mozilla developers have just ignored because they're so awful/incompetent/lazy/whatever, but there's no way it would be problematic on hardware that dates back to the original problems.
It just smacks of frustrated user doing something out of the norm and falling prey to this idea that their own experiences are OBVIOUSLY representative of the norm.
Me? I'd guess that OP is doing something like running with a non-scaled display, running something else that's disabling the integrated GPU, running a poorly behaved corporate plugin or anti-virus, loading something so memory intensive the computer is swapping to disk, has a poorly behaved corporate font installed (or too many fonts), or something else along those lines. Basically something that seems normal to OP but is, in reality, not.
I've seen plenty of poor behavior from Firefox and from the Mozilla devs, but this idea that Firefox just performs poorly across the board on OSX (or some increasingly specific subset of OSX) seems very unlikely given how much focus Mozilla has been giving to performance as of late. More likely I expect there's just a very vocal minority.
This is again anecdotal, but last time I reformatted my mac I tried to install firefox first to see if the bug was still there with no other software or config installed. Literally the only thing I had done before installing was setting up the basic settings (wallpaper, resolution, keyboard language, etc). The bug was still there. It's a 2013 macbook pro with no config attached, so there's nothing quirky in the hardware department.
I'm not making a judgement on Mozilla devs and their competency or work ethics, and I don't think OP is either, but the fact remains that the bug is there and I'd guess it's decently easy to replicate given that I've encountered it in the wild a lot. If it's one tenth as usual as my personal experience suggests it should be at the top of their backlog.
> before installing was setting up the basic settings (wallpaper, resolution, keyboard language, etc)
Plenty of things there could be edge cases. In fact the very first thing I thought of was resolution. Running a non-scaled retina display could definitely cause all sorts of problems as all of a sudden the browser is rendering a much bigger canvas.
> I'm not making a judgement on Mozilla devs and their competency or work ethics, and I don't think OP is either
OP is absolutely judging Mozilla employees and if that carried through to the bug reports I'm sure OP filed, well, that could definitely color the response from Mozilla.
I just dont get it. This is a highly technical forum.
Most people here are superusers, and i personally am a dev.
Off course i have tried everything possible, clean install, new profile, HW acc off, boot to safe mode etc. To insinuate that i have installed some weird plugin and even talked directly to the FF devs without trying basic troubleshooting or have some weird anti virus plugin installed is beyond weird.
I also wrote it's the same with all of my colleagues MB's (15 people).
So how is this a tantrum and a vocal insignificant minority of it comes up again and again and the post is sitting at the top with lots of people agreeing? (i know not everyone has the problem).
Your other points i don't get. Scaling should not be an issue as it's not an issue for any other apps - disabling the GPU by accident, what? All other software works fine. You shouldn't need a discrete GPU for browsing.
That you suggest all of these hundreds of people are imbeciles with weird plugins is beyond disrespectful when so many of us has tried to help mozilla debugging to no effect and with little info in return. Most of us are devs or superusers - the issue has been detailed through many technical blog posts, and investigated by highly technical people thank you.
Definitely not an edge case, our whole company uses MacBook pros with retina display and all have the same issue. Fans spin like crazy, usability is abysmal. The moment that is fixed I'd switch. I've also reported the bug to Mozilla.
I’ve had the same problem for years, a few months ago someone suggested it might be because I don’t use my screen at the default resolution. I have a slightly lower resolution setting on my retina MacBook Pro. And that somehow this causes firefox to go insane and have a nervous breakdown. Is it possible that you are also not using the default display resolution? If everyone who has the problems shares this particular setting, that might point to something.
Late 2016 15 inch Macbook Pro, LG 5k screen with the scaling set one tick into the "more space" direction. With Firefox performance is still significantly worse than with Chrome. This is a real bummer, I really miss tree style tabs.
I have been using Firefox on my Macbook Pro 2015 for the past years without any problems and seriously it consumes a lot less memory compared with chrome
Thanks but check out the other comments, or their subreddit, or any other HN FF thread. Many people have this problem.
Also i am a dev - i have tried all possible options to remedy this issue. I even wrote that i talked to FF devs directly. Wouldn't it be weird if i hadn't tried basic techniques?
It's like there is this weird tribal thing going on where there is this passive aggressive attitude towards the people having problems like "you guys must be idiots" even though there is dozens of comments with anecdata about no one using FF at their companies because of performance issues.
A lot of people have issues, some don't - doesn't make the ones that do have them complete imbeciles.
It's definitely frustrating, and sometimes even advanced devs don't know (or forget) about some detail that might be helpful.
Sometimes "why someone hasn't tried that" is less about being clueless and more about not assuming how much people know about things.
I can imagine someone at Mozilla going "how do we debug this" and failing to reproduce the problem (I run FF on two different Macs/OSX versions and it runs ok on both)
Maybe FF can add some telemetry or have a special debug version for those with the issue, but I see how it can be frustrating
IIRC this bug is known (something about compositing and rounded corners on Mac because of how Core Graphics works) and there's work going on to fix it. The Webrender stuff helps here too, I think.
(I don't know the exact details, I have a vague recollection of pcwalton explaining it to me)
just to confirm, did you get the "Developer Edition"? I've been using it on Mac (2014 MBP w/ Retina) for a while and it's fine. That said, I haven't been using it as my main browser ... yet.
Electron apps like Slack and VS Code tend to eat up my RAM capacity and CPU cycles. Whenever I quote everything except for Firefox my MacBook Pro calms its fans down.
Firefox is a way better experience than Chrome these days. Google, you constantly add new features that nobody wants, and furthermore, make it WAY more difficult for those of us who care about privacy to turn your tracking BS off.
Google Chrome can die in a fire as far as I'm concerned.
It took away credibility. A lot of it. It also alienated too many “almost evangelist” users (like me) who had converted countless users from other browsers in high school and college. Many of them haven’t been able to reconcile with what might seem a tiny change now. Also the jarring and bizarre way Mozilla pretty much stonewalled everyone on it who wanted it to be discussed.
I don’t know it would make sense to you, or most, but it felt like a breach of trust and seeing it is still baked into the browser itself (yes, they bought it; yes, you can turn it “off”) and that you can’t “completely remove” it, I don’t “that part” has changed. Besides the separate standalone add-on was a lot more useful and I was a full time user until that debacle when I moved to Safari (and Pinboard).
Purely from a feature development perspective, I guess I don't see how adding a read-it-later / bookmarking feature would generate so much consternation. Functionally its roughly equivalent to Reading List + Bookmarks on Safari, with some delicious-like aggregate smarts.
Would it have been better to have built it internally instead of through acquisition? I admit I'm unfamiliar with the inside baseball on it's integration, but breach of trust sounds pretty drastic. My read (as an uninformed outsider) is that they probably acquired Pocket for a song, it filled a gap in the product offering, and it offers the potential of a future optional revenue stream that aligns well with the web as a document reading medium (subscription).
There's all sorts of internal browser features you can't 'completely remove'. How is bookmarking different?
Mozilla was developing a private Reading List feature that used Firefox Sync. They suddenly replaced it with Pocket, which sent users' bookmarks to a third party that engaged in data mining. (The acquisition came later.)
Users suspected money was involved. Mozilla employees insisted that Pocket hadn't paid for the integration. Months later, it came out that there was a referral deal.
Pocket was and is an extension. It just gets special treatment.
Mozilla acquired Pocket in early 2017 and said they would release the source code. That still hasn't happened.
It's just a bundled extension inside Firefox. You can't uninstall bundled extensions, and you can bundle yours in your custom Firefox installation if you want.
Did a similar thing for a project, rolled out customer's own Firefox extensions (for office workflow) to employee desktops. Extensions were bundled because the employers sometimes uninstall them and freak out because they can't work anymore.
Oh that's a bummer. They should add that functionality back and bake it into same UX. FWIW Safari Reading Mode information is linked to your Apple ID so it's stored externally as well.
Eh, what does that say about Mozilla wanting to be the "good guy"? If they want to be good then they have to constantly be held accountable to the high standard they like people to think that they are at. They don't get their cake and eat it too.
I agree, it's incredibly useful. I did a lot of research on this a few days ago, because I wanted to see if it might be possible to raise some funding to work on it. I found lots of abandoned open source projects. I'm sure there's a lot of Firefox users who would appreciate a Chromecast add-on, but there's a lot of political and economic reasons why it's probably not going to happen.
In the end I decided that it was just easier to switch back to Chrome instead of going down that road, and I'm so happy I can cast videos/tabs to my TV.
Does it prioritize privacy? I haven't used Firefox in a long time, so my impressions of it are based on news stories, like them launching a partnership with sketchy VPN services or building in "easter egg" advertisements for television shows.
Firefox is still very imperfect in their prioritising of privacy, but when we're looking at the question of "use Chrome or Firefox", that's hardly significant in comparison.
I'm curious what you're using currently if Firefox's privacy imperfections are of concern? Safari?
In terms of technical implementations, Chrome naturally surpasses everything else in a naïve myopic comparison (and always will), but holistically a secure algorithm isn't going to protect you if you've voluntarily handed the keys to the kingdom to umpteen untrusted parties. Chrome gets all the technical details right in a context where doing so seems redundant.
Sorry but this is a bit clueless, what are you trying to secure exactly, if it's not your own data? You can't honestly thing that data is safer in Chrome than Firefox.
Firstly, why just Google engineers? Many Google employees and any 3rd parties Google share data with would be included.
Secondly, that's a single step in the threat model; it's not just about what a Google engineer would do with your data, it's about attack surface area when any Googlers (or Google infra, or Google partner infra) that is compromised automatically exposes you.
The simple act of transmitting and storing your data to anyone, no matter how secure their systems are, is still by definition less secure than simply not transmitting that data.
No. There was some FUD which was spread that was eventually outed to be written by PIA, one of their competitors. The entire thing mostly just elicits an eyeroll.
They will also block all third party cookies effectively blocking most ads. Chrome or Chromium would never build in such a feature and make it ON by default. Because tracking and personalized ads are there business model.
Lately it introduced the ability to do "Multi-Account Containers". They behave like light profiles. But you can use containers to box social networks. See:
This ability is currently unmatched in other browsers.
It also has built-in tracker blocking. Nothing you can't get with uBlock Origin or Privacy Badger, but it's nice to have it on by default, especially in Private Mode.
Note that people complain about the "strict mode" of that tracker blocking not being enabled by default. However I can tell from my experience that the strict mode breaks websites.
The reason this is outrageous is because they weren't doing this kind of thing before. The reason this isn't outrageous when Chrome does it is that Chrome always does this. Using this as a reason to distrust Firefox and instead trust Chrome is insane.
It's valid criticism but seeing this presented in arguments about why Firefox is bad (and you should be using Chrome instead) is absurd.
Firefox is significantly more trustworthy than Chrome (the outrage over Mozilla's occasional screw-ups exists because that behaviour is decidedly not the established norm for Mozilla whereas the same behaviour from Google surprises no-one).
The context in this thread was "Switch to Firefox. It prioritizes privacy, unlike Chrome". In other words, "Firefox is more privacy-focused than Chrome".
Piling on Mozilla for past screw-ups creates the impression that this statement is wrong and that both browsers are equally bad at privacy because neither of them is consistently perfect.
Even if the criticism is technically correct, piling it on like this creates a skewed impression that if you care about privacy you might as well use Chrome because even if you switch to Firefox your privacy will be invaded anyway.
This normalises the level of invasiveness of Chrome and equivocates its consistent and intentional behavior with a series of exceptional missteps.
In case you think "But I never mentioned Chrome", well, Chrome and Firefox were the only options in the original post so anything negative about Firefox implies a positive about Chrome and vice versa. If you wanted to call out specific behavior, either present an alternative (Brave? Ice Weasel?) or clarify that you're addressing the behavior categorically and not just that instance of it specifically.
If someone says "Don't use A. B is better because it doesn't do $thing" and then you respond by "I've seen B do $thing" that implies equivalence between A and B even if B did $thing only a few times out of carelessness whereas A intentionally does $thing all the time because its business model depends on it. It doesn't matter that you didn't mean it that way, it doesn't matter that it's true and it doesn't matter that this is a mistake on part of the audience. Humans are flawed and communication requires you to take those flaws into account -- unless you just want to express yourself.
It's not perfect but IMO it's better than Chrome. Logging in to my Gmail account in Firefox doesn't do the same obnoxious stuff it does in Chrome (changing browser profile, start synching lots of stuff with Google).
Of the problems I've had with Firefox, some of them are actually due to it being _too_ privacy focused, and not having good UX explaining why common operations don't work as expected. For example I couldn't save a file onto my computer and was pulling my hair out until I did a binary search through every version of Firefox, found the first version that didn't work, read deep into the patch notes, and discovered that I needed to set the magical flag of dom.ipc.plugins.sandbox-level.
I want to love FF, I really do!
But the fact that it causes my CPU usage to go through the roof every couple of minutes for no apparent reason makes me want to pull my hair out...
Chrome massacres my 2012 MBA, the fan spins up within 30 seconds of launch. Firefox runs smooth as butter, mucho tabs and no fan. It seems people have widely different experiences, very weird. I wonder if it's a graphics card thing.
I'm on a Mac, a 2015 MacBook Air and a late-2012 Mac Mini, and don't have any perf problems with Firefox, using the standard, public builds (so not the dev ones). This is with an around 10-15 tabs open, with sync, and 10 add-ons of various stripes.
Then again, I don't do heavy web development or have a tab open with e-mail all day (e-mail is in Thunderbird) so maybe that makes a difference?
Pretty much the same here. FF has always been a battery eater, and even if only one tab is open, it's the sole app in the "Apps using significant energy".
I have a MacBook Pro. The fan spins up sometimes. So what? It also spins up when I’m doing other tasks. I’m always plugged in. So I have no opinion to share about battery performance.
Different commenter here, but same issue as the parent. I'm on a 2016 MBP. When I use Chrome, my fans stay off or at around 1200rpm at all times unless I open a video or a Twitch stream, at which point they jump up to around 1400rpm and the highest the CPU temp gets is around 50c.
On Firefox, my fans will randomly jump up to 3000rpm when doing only normal web browsing, even on simple sites like HN. I'm using FF right now to post this comment, and as soon as I opened HN, my CPU temp went from 40 to 50c. And this is the only tab I have open. If I open a video, or heaven forbid a Twitch stream or Google Maps, my fans instantly go to 7000rpm and my CPU temp goes to 70-80c. Even just opening Gmail makes FF go haywire. And it isn't just "my fans spin up, big deal". Browsing the internet on FF turns my MBP into a slag of near-molten metal that is too hot to even touch, and I can only imagine what it's doing to my battery life.
I want to like FF, I really do, but this is simply a dealbreaker for me, and even though it's a known issue, Mozilla seems uninterested in fixing it (I have previously seen a response from Mozilla that essentially amounted to "it's hard for us to optimize FF for certain sites, so we aren't going to even try").
It's clearly not an issue for everyone, but I definitely have noticed that I'm not the only one who has these issues, either.
Exactly the same with me: I tried switching to Firefox 63 last week on a 2015 MBP running MacOS 10.11, and compared to Chrome it seems to use a lot more CPU and thus makes my machine run noticeably hotter.
I guess this might be due to the new Rust layout engine I've heard about which is more parallelised?, but even just having a single tab playing youtube or a gif uses more CPU in Firefox, so maybe it's something with hardware acceleration?
It's funny how the promise of multicore CPUs was that appropriately engineered workloads could hit new heights of efficiency and overall performance but the cynical reality is that I'm glad for the most part that the partitioning between cores puts a hard limit on how much still commonplace single-threaded processes can take the piss.
> even just having a single tab playing youtube or a gif uses more CPU in Firefox, so maybe it's something with hardware acceleration?
My investigations (their bugzilla, the news about their company, I've been following for a long time) point to the opposite: it's the "old code" which nobody wants to improve: it doesn't help if the "new" code is fast to draw Some detail when the "old" decides to draw or update the stuff that doesn't even has to be updated or drawn. And it's not just drawing too, it's all the processing that happens during the life of the page with the "moving" images. Nobody, as "especially managers in Firefox." There was a number of developers in some Asian country, paid by Firefox, who were in charge for fixing in the old code, and they were simply fired. It seems it's not "strategic" for the managers to "fix" things, only to "experiment" with "new" things like ads or "new technologies" or whatever.
The "more CPU and GPU use" of Firefox is absolutely observable on any platform, not only on Macs. There are also the bugs submitted, but it doesn't seem that there's any priority in fixing them. From their perspective "it works, it's just that those who measure such use notice it." It's of course not so. The battery is empty earlier, the notebooks are hotter, the response lags. There are reported bugs demonstrating exactly what you observed: compared to any other browser even a single video on the "modern" site in Firefox needs much more processing power. It’s easy to reproduce in Windows too.
But obviously fixing the performance problems is not priority for the managers, when there's anything "new and shiny." Because they don’t see that as serious bugs: “the same page uses 10% of the max possible power in Chrome but 20% in Firefox.” “Who cares?” It’s too long-term goal.
If you are a web dev you will either way have both browser installed for testing. The question is what will you use as your main browser apart from developing.
Try viewing Imgur.com on Safari. Just scroll a bit until you get a couple gifs displayed and check the CPU usage on the imgur.com tab. Just insane that a few gifs destroy an i7. Is it bad video compression? I notice imgur attempts to make gifs from mp4 files and vice versa but damn. A 5 year old iPhone has no problem with this task.
It'd be nice if you could throttle processor usage. I'd rather have a choppy experience on the occasionally website than constant fans and having my Mac turn into a heater.
I think Servo is going to be a massive Good Thing (tm) for Mozilla, but they have messed up a few times with UI anti-patterns and sneaking extensions into updates that users didn't opt for. They have seriously breached our trust like Google and it will take years to earn back that trust.
I switched to Firefox away from Chrome recently. I am happy with this but I wish they had a friendly UI you could bring up to expose cookies to be shared between tabs on an opt-in basis. Cookies should be isolated per-tab by default. Cookies and other persistent data should be forgotten as soon as the tab is closed. I don't like container tabs, I think it gets confusing to manage tab groups by profile. I want to quickly mouse over and say "expose this tab's cookies to this other tab".
I'm still sad I can't get perfect "tree tabs" going. I have a plugin I use to show parent and child tabs in a tree arrangement but nothing looks sexy about it:
I want an actual tree of lines shown to each row/tab to quickly visualize how the tabs were created from parent-to-child. How it currently looks is too busy with borders everywhere. It's functional but not what I envisioned. I can't hide the tab bar at the top as far as I know. I'm just frustrated that I remember trying to make this work in like 2002 and it's soon to be 2019. I feel like browsers aren't made for workstations, but casual consumption. They should enable so much productivity.
I also wish they focused on minimizing and isolating references to various Web APIs, so it would be easier to unreference and orphan them - unreachable from advertisers.
I'm afraid our hopes of Servo resurrecting Mozilla were short lived. From what I understand, work on Servo for Desktop has been phased out considerably.
I will admit I was secretly hoping that Servo would become a new, minimalistic, privacy-focused browser that would also blow Chrome out the water with performance.
Its a shame they just plugged some parts into Firefox and called it a day. Instead of getting us a new shiny browser that could compete with Chrome, Mozilla focuses efforts on dubious Pocket/Cliqz/VPN integrations and a bunch of progressive outreach programs.
Unless something changes drastically, Firefox will descend into irrelevancy very soon (if not already). And that's bad for all of us.
We haven't called it a day. The servo team still exists, we still work on Servo.
Working on a production ready project is hard and takes forever, the integration work was a pit stop where we had an opportunity to get our work out to users. We'll take these opportunities as we get them.
> we had an opportunity to get our work out to users. We'll take these opportunities as we get them.
Compared to the number of people who browse the web on desktop, the number of VR/AR users is statistically insignificant.
Moving Servo's focus away from desktop and towards niche VR/AR experiments will only accelerate the decline of Firefox. Or rather, fail to slow it down.
> sneaking extensions into updates that users didn't opt for.
If you have auto-updates enabled, Mozilla, like Google, has complete control over the source code that runs on your system. Had they wanted to sneak new source code in, they would have specifically not packaged it as an extension, which made it user-visible and limited to the extension API in its capabilities, and instead just patched the Firefox code to include it. So, they were decidedly doing the opposite of sneaking it in.
> They have seriously breached our trust like Google
Mozilla has made some mistakes, absolutely, but it really is not anywhere close to being "like Google". It's still the far superior choice, personal freedoms-wise, over Chrome.
This is definitely within my skillset but far from user-friendly. I'm just remarking on how simple it is to put a toggle in the settings to show/hide the tab bar and they haven't done this because they're pushing a particular look that is very similar to the design choices for Chrome.
It is possible to hide the top tab bar but extensions are not allowed to do it. You have to write some css file to set the tab bar to display:none. I think there’s a description of the process somewhere in the github repo for that extension (maybe in an issue)
Many people won't switch because either Firefox is slow on their platform (MacOS) or stuff they use are slow on Firefox (Google ecosystem, many other webapps optimized for Chrome)
I use Firefox on MacOS. It is easily as fast as Chrome for me (and I have tons of tabs open in multiple windows). And I use Google Docs/Sheets/etc. all day long with zero slowdowns.
I use Firefox on MacOS. It is much slower than Chrome for me (and I don't tend to hold open many tabs or windows). I use Google Mail/Groups/Calendar all day long which became unusable in the last months.
Open your email in thunderbird or move your email somewhere else. This is all part of googles game. They slow down youtube in every other browser as well.
IIRC this isn't intentional, but it's not due to benevolence either: The whole custom elements fiasco (which is largely Google jumping the gun and shipping an unstandardized API that they eventually had to deprecate) means that some Google properties are still written on custom elements v0, and use a polyfill on non-Chrome.
I'm on macOS and Firefox is at least as fast as Chrome. Granted, I'm on nightly with WebRender turned on, but that will be in regular Firefox soon enough.
Last I checked on osx Firefox just doesn't feel as native as Chrome. I'm not sure if it's the weird window chrome or the scrolling that feels non-native but something just feels off.
AFAIK there was a bug causing it to eat a lot of CPU on non-native resolutions (display scaling), which may explain some differences in user's experience.
Likewise. FF turns my 2012 rMBP into a frying pan for any web page with moving content (video, animated GIFs, ads) or just significant JS (Google docs). I would prefer FF, so I keep checking every couple of years, but no improvement. Unusable.
On those same pages, Chrome and Safari work just fine.
If Apple were making MBPs better each year instead of demonstrating their "courage" ("This time we're taking X away from you because as long as Windows is the only competition, whaddya gonna do about it?") I would have already bought a new one, and that would presumably have more powerful graphics and not get as hot, but I would still want to verify that FF wasn't running the battery down faster than Chrome or Safari.
That's interesting. Is there somewhere that lays this out (which models, etc)? This is a retina display so I'm curious why it would affect some and not others.
Other than some Google sites optimized for Chrome (which reminds of sites working only in IE...), Firefox on MacOS works pretty well, better than Chrome on average.
Safari on MacOS is probably the winner, because Apple invests a lot on battery saving and performance of its sw.
What about developer tools? As a front-end dev I'm very pleased with the tools Chrome offers. I only tried Firefox's dev tools briefly but can they compare?
Their dev tools are comprehensive and have a very similar UI to Chrome. Personally, it wasn't hard to pick it up and I haven't (yet) run into any limitations.
Yes, they're mostly the same. On some points Firefox is better (e.g. DOM Inspector, Network tab, animations, dark theme), on others Chromium is (e.g. Profiler, sources). I use both.
Sadly, Google Chrome has moved beyond just providing good performance. They now nicely manage all of your google accounts, which is really nice when you have a work account, personal account, etc. These nice small but nice features can really lock you in, especially if you use Chrome on your phone as well as your computer.
It's clear that the current round of browser wars isn't just about speed and standards compliance, but also feature lock-in too.
I’ve been contemplating this for a while, and I just took the jump today. You’re right it’s just as good. Especially since google s-canned inbox, I’m feeling pretty vindictive (switched to paid proton mail as well).
Performance. Firefox still lags in performance. Granted you may only see the difference in edge cases, but I work for a company that creates a performance-sensitive web-app and the difference is big.
I do agree however that the entire industry standardizing on Chrome is not great for anyone (including Google). I'm surprised that Microsoft isn't continuing Edge development, even only as a hedge and to have a sensible default for Windows - especially if you're building Windows Apps and you need a browser control. Why give that up to Chrome? And it isn't like Microsoft can't afford it - they are almost a trillion dollar company.
Firefox 3 was much better. No Pocket. No article/news recommendations. Panorama view. Firefox used to be my favorite until it started to get bloated. Prioritizes privacy? Then let me turn recommendations and Pocket permanently off.
I tried and simply couldn't do it. Although I know in my case it's a very specific issue with multiple profiles.
I have a work and personal profile for Chrome and even tho I could make that work on Firefox, one very simple thing makes it completely unusable to me: clicking a link always opens on one particular window/profile.
On Chrome whatever window you last used will be the one opening the url, which is extremely necessary when using multiple profiles.
Perhaps one day that's going to be implemented and I can go back to the good old FF.
If understand your scenario, you can do that with FF, if you don't force a url to be always opened in one profile. For instance you can have sites hard-linked to specific profiles (e.g. social networks) and others that are not, so they stay in the current session (e.g. paypal, which otherwise is broken by the multi account feature).
Adapting a comment I posted in a different Firefox thread:
I'd like to use Firefox. I prefer its ideals to everything else. I've tried it out several times the last year. It's okay. Unfortunately, I always end up going back to Safari. Despite the performance improvements, Safari still feels like a faster, sleeker, smoother, and more user-focused browser.
Firefox is still pretty ugly. On macOS, it feels chunkier and less natively integrated. It does not feel like a first-class citizen of macOS, but rather like a gtk+ or Qt app ported to the Mac.
Safari's "omnibar" is superior to Firefox's. Safari actually suggests web sites (see https://imgur.com/a/dY2SWKB), which I use all the time. Wikipedia is a major one. Start typing "Richard Fey", for example, and the first hit will be the Wikipedia page for Richard Feynman, complete with a short summary and photo. Firefox forces me through a Google search. I use DuckDuckGo and its shortcuts, but Safari's suggestions are more helpful.
I also tried out Firefox on iOS some time ago, and it wasn't as nice as Safari. For there to be a point to this, I'd need the same browser in both places, with perfect syncing of bookmarks, cookies, tabs, etc., just like Safari. I'm not tied to iCloud for this, though it'd be nice to use iCloud and not yet another cloud syncing mechanism.
Lastly, migrating is a pain. There's apparently no way to import my current Safari session (I have probably 60-70 tabs) or history (I keep everything I visit, going back years), which means I'd lose stuff by migrating and would have to migrate tabs over incrementally. Hard to try out a browser in any meaningful way this way.
Here's a few things Firefox could do to interest me:
- Make super-sleek platform-specific UIs that feel native. Do you really need a platform-agnostic GUI toolkit for the chrome? The renderer is the portable part. I don't care about theming myself, and wouldn't miss it if my browser didn't have it (Safari doesn't). I prefer an opinionated browser that knows what it should look and feel like.
- Innovate by addressing actual user pain points. Containers are an innovation, but they target techies and fail the grandmother test. I'd like true containers, where every 2nd-level domain is contained. This means having to be innovative about how to address cross-origin things (Google spreads itself over many domains, and then you have things like OAuth).
Another huge innovation you could bring to the table is to fix the user identity and authentication problem. I use a password manager, but why are we still logging in with user names and passwords these days? Why is the password manager using brittle form fills rather than APIs, for God's sake? Here's my solution: When I go to Reddit or whatever, and I'm logged out, what if my browser showed a little bar at the top that said: "This web site would like to use your profile 'Atombender'. [Accept] [Ignore]". On accept, browser and web site would negotiate through some kind of opaque, cryptographically secure token (via some plugin API so that providers like 1Password and Apple can store your state) so that the browser can prove that I am me, and the web site can prove that it is itself. No more phishing, no more remembering passwords. Web sites can only identify users that you've granted access to your identity to, and like ApplePay your true identity should be hidden behind an opaque identifier. Standard protocols could be defined for things such as email addresses and phone numbers, so that I can edit the email for my profile locally, and it would automatically make an API call to the web site to update the email address on that end. Things like deleting an account, setting up 2FA etc. would be part of this API. Of course, to accomplish this you have to design a standard and make web sites use it. Mozilla used to have enough clout to do this, anything is possible.
Another area where innovation is needed: Fix the tab problem. Bookmarks, tabs, windows -- we can do better. Why isn't a tab and a bookmark sort of the same thing? Why is bookmark editing so bad? Why do bookmarks get broken when the web site disappears or changes? A bookmark should save a complete copy of that page!
And why can't I search my history of visited web pages? I remember reading an article a few weeks ago. It mentioned Charlemagne's reign but the title was about something completely different. I don't remember anything else. How do I find it? Browsers only record the title and URL and visit time. Why can't I search for "Charlemagne" in the browser and get a hit?
- Firefox can interest me with great performance, but Quantum has been disappointing on macOS. I remember the standalone WebRender (?) demo app a few years ago, and it was insanely fast. Maybe because it had less legacy baggage. Firefox could charm me by using significantly less RAM and less idle CPU.
- Why don't browsers have adblocking built in? I use 1Blocker, and it has a clunky UI where you can point the cursor at a page element to block that specific element. This could be made so smooth.
- To catch more developers' mindshare, Firefox could develop a super-modern, low-resource-usage Electron competitor with some kind of easy (gRPC?) glue for interfacing with languages. Join forces with Slack to make it happen.
Just some ideas. I don't pretend I know better than the Firefox team, and I'm just one data point, of course.
But like many people I see Firefox as being increasingly less relevant. I don't see this as being caused only by the ascendancy of Chrome, either.
I, too, really want to like Firefox, but usability (at least on Mac) is clearly not a priority. Standard keyboard shortcuts are broken, and have been for years. There’s abstraction layers (unique to FF) to figure out how to make a text field work like a text field. The preferences dialog box is gone, for some reason.
When FF wants to be a Mac app, I’ll be the first one in line to use it.
A good chunk of people who actually care about their computer/work on a computer a lot use a Macbook, and use it while on battery power. So battery efficiency is a major issue for me and because my browser is basically constantly open and full of tabs, I have no choice but to use Safari.
After quantum I did my best to switch but I had the following problems: no scrollbar search highlights, terrible Linux/gnome dark theme integration, angular source maps not working. After a couple of weeks I got back to Chrome.
I tried to switch to firefox a few months ago, but it had no way to view websocket frames in the dev tools. This was kind of a deal breaker for me at the time as I was doing a lot of ws work. Have they remedied this?
I just had to switch back to Chrome because firefox couldn't handle multiple (4+) 1080p x264 streams in the same window. Chrome managed to handle 18 of them, across two windows, without a hitch.
Fair bit at the moment, am grinding marbles on stream.
But it's not the particular use-case that's the problem, it's the drastic difference in performance characteristics which is more of a sliding scale than a one-time issue. Firefox is pound-for-pound slower in general browsing activities for me, and chokes on javascript-heavy pages much quicker than Chrome. It's still an order of magnitude better than IE in that regard, but on a sliding scale, Chrome's out in the lead with FF somewhere in the middle.
I'm hanging on to FF for idealogical reasons, but that's it. If the browsing experience was my only measure, it'd be Chrome all the way.
Firefox 57 is why I switched to Chrome in the first place. If I'm going to use a butchered UI, I might as well use the original from whom everyone copied. And on top of that accessibility was a nightmare.
My grandmother had glaucoma and could not use Firefox 57 in any capacity because the feature to have large chunky Netscape/Mosaic buttons was removed completely. I had to switch all her stuff over to SeaMonkey, which still had the ability to have large buttons, so she could use a web browser.
Right now I have this bug in Firefox where the results from the drop down menu are incorrect. As in, if I get an autocomplete result that is several lines down - say, foobar.com - and I click on it then I'll be taken to barbar.com. If I click on the result that is several lines above foobar.com then I get foobar.com. I don't know how to explain this correctly.
I've been trying to use Firefox at work for years. It doesn't work well in my company's intranet (lots of Sharepoint). Random pieces of the the company website do not show up and I get way too many certificate warnings. Chrome, Edge, and IE work fine. Firefox hasn't worked through 2 iterations of our intranet over the course of 10+ years.
I think the reason is probably network.negotiate-auth.delegation-uris and network.negotiate-auth.trusted-uris in about:config, and your authentication is failing.
Since Chrome, Edge, and IE uses Windows certificate infrastructure and Firefox uses its own, it won't understand directive perhaps pushed through your company's group policy. You can specify address of your intranet site, in style of https://.example.com (where subdomain of example.com is covered in this case) and it should work.
As for certificate, is it using internal certificate of some sort? If that's the case, you will have to load it to Firefox's NSS.
Also, scrolling on firefox is awkward and imprecise. They seem to prefer bouncy accelerated/decelerated scrolling where Google Chrome is as sharp as a knife. When I take my finger off the scroll wheel, I want scrolling to stop immediately, I don't want it to keep moving for a handful of pixels to artificially slow down.
I'm trying to use Firefox both on my home and work machines, but until Mozilla fix their horrendous developer tools I have to keep both browsers open side by side
It actually prioritizes calling home, stopping ad-blockers from working on Mozilla owned sites, etc.
Don't get me wrong, I am a Firefox user myself, and I do think that Firefox is the most privacy oriented browser when compared to the other popular ones, but nowadays it is a pain in the butt to disable all of their spyware on about:config.
That kind of exists, but it's still giving Google power because it relies on their software. It basically makes it really difficult for anyone to shape how the web works besides Google, since no one has any browser market share.
For example, WebAssembly started out as a Mozilla project. What if Mozilla didn't exist, or Firefox didn't have any market share? It would never have been created. Think of all the accumulated features/innovations that could exist over the next few years that might not if the only browser engine being used is controlled by a single company.
Firefox has had its fair share of debacles this year too. Chrome works better on Linux for me, and Firefox is full of strange and unusual bugs which Mozilla shows little or no interest in fixing.
If Mozilla forked Chromium this year, Firefox would be a better browser (even with the very interesting developments coming from the Servo camp, E10S, etc. etc. etc.). Firefox has accumulated bugs, particularly around their implementation of SVG, since about 4.x, and it doesn't seem to be getting any better on that front.
As only big companies can underwrite development and then support ongoing/backlog compatibility quirks-mode work for a new engine, you are effectively saying "no" to other, higher-order values offered by new browsers than the engine.
Yes, I include Mozilla in "big companies" (2017 big revenue, which won't recur from what I can tell; big pay to chair too). Nevertheless, Mozilla has mismanaged Servo into an AR/XR only position where it won't go big, and Mozilla (for same reasons as MS) faces pressure to bail on Gecko.
Blaming little browsers for using chromium/Blink is blaming them for surviving.
Successful genes (e.g. for adaptive auto-immunity) tend to sweep. Think of WebKit and now (on desktop) chromium/Blink as such alleles. We may not like it but it happens whatever we may wish. I've chosen to fight for user rights at a higher domain of discourse: private ads, anonymous donations, ad and tracking protection by default. The time for a more radical new engine will come; it isn't now.
Inclined to agree. I see the fact that Microsoft is abandoning Edge in favour of a Chromium-based browser as a fundamentally bad thing for the web due to the loss of competition amongst browser engines (me of 10 - 15 years ago would probably be appalled by this sentiment, but times change).
Brave, as yet another Chromium based-browser doesn't feel like it's helping. That, and the name "Brave" absolutely grates on me. It's a web browser: what exactly is brave about it? Too pretentious for my taste.
The name is not about the company, rather the user who takes control of their own Web economics. This requires facing down some anti-ad/tracker-blocking, and supporting favorite sites and creators (easily done from grants, no need to pay; but still requires courage compared to false security of taking ads and tracking).
I always thought "Opera" was pretentious, personally! But I'm friends with long-time CTO, who does go to Bayreuth every year for Wagner, so I mean this is best possible way ;-).
No it's not. It's frequently hanging certain tabs which I'm forced to close and reopen because I get the grey spinner and my 8 core machine grinds down to a halt.
On Android when opening the embedded webview powered by Firefox, whether the page will load without being forced to open it in the full browser is a coin toss.
It doesn't help that Mozilla has lost most of my goodwill by being such a mixed bag when it comes to politics and decision making the past few years.
I still use it, because I like that a part of the company is trying to move the needle forward in browser tech, I find container tabs better than Chromium profiles and up until recently I could get bypass paywalls without workarounds, but unless things improve by the time Brave moves the Chromium fork out of beta, I'm moving to Brave.
Mozilla has a political stance that I do not support, and they openly use Firefox to push it. This doesn't get brought up enough on places that lean liberal such as HN, but it is a reason why I, and several other people I know, cannot use it in good faith.
It's also a fair bit slower than Chrome, which doesn't help.
Can you be more specific about what you perceive to be their political stance, how that impacts your browser usage, and how it differs from that of the other browser vendors?
Nothing built on X does mixed DPI well, because X itself (in most configurations) treats multiple monitors as simple viewports onto a single screen. A single screen with multiple DPIs doesn't make sense virtually any more than it does physically.
Wayland is supposed to help with this, since it has a more modern take on screen virtualization (a la Windows or Mac). Getting all the user software to work on Wayland (via XWayland) is a nontrivial ongoing task. I'm not sure what Gnome Shell's state of affairs is w.r.t. Wayland, but I do know the ecosystem missed the boat with Ubuntu 18.04, which elected not to make Wayland the default due to stability and usability issues. So it might be a while before a major stable distro makes the move.
This is not intended to contradict your point, but the first video is an obvious marketing fluff piece almost certainly funded by the Chinese government (China Daily is not an independent news source). It is designed to manipulate foreign opinion in favor of China and distract from their pollution problem. The video does not represent scientifically persuasive evidence in favor of your point.
"As we get closer, I can feel the temperature change. Here it's not just cool, it's actually a little cold."
Well no shit; those mountains you're strolling through peak at 7000 feet and higher [0].
Yes, I realize that it is obviously Chinese propaganda, but I used it to show that deserts are entirely reversible. You are right that the altitude definitely has a cooling effect, but it also doesn't change the fact that the trees stabilized a desert into a forest.
You can and absolutely should hire one yourself. Additionally, if you have a buyer's agent, don't make the mistake of using theirs either -- the buyer's agent has the same conflict of interest that the seller's does, despite the fact that in most cases they have a fiduciary responsibility to you, the buyer.
Another complication to be aware of: Inspectors can face "blackballing" by banks or realtors if they scuttle too many deals by finding bad things. If you find an independent inspector, don't balk at paying a little more -- they may need it to make up for business lost from being honest.
> Additionally, if you have a buyer's agent, don't make the mistake of using theirs either -- the buyer's agent has the same conflict of interest that the seller's does
Not exactly. Real estate agents do care about repeat business and referrals.
These struggles sound much harder than what I've had to deal with; please accept my sympathy.
About the student debt: That's a lot of debt. I suspect you and many other millenials were lied to when you were told that getting that much student debt is normal and necessary, when it is in fact neither. For example it takes longer to graduate when the student alternates semesters of school and work, but it does get them through (especially if the school has a strong co-op program), without nearly as severe a crushing debt load. Second, the overall benefit of an education goes way beyond the differences between schools, i.e. for many careers an inexpensive school is just as good as an expensive one. (Counterpoint: if you want to be on the Supreme Court someday, you apparently have to go to Harvard Law School...)
I confess that I'm puzzled when I hear about such high debt numbers from new grads, and the main explanation I can think of for what's different now from when I came up is that people are systematically being told that any college debt is a good investment (and loans are freely granted on that basis), when it plainly is not (and they should not be).
There is a lot true in this - though I personally think it has more to do with parents being put in a bind, than with adolescents being lied to - but there is one obvious thing you're missing: tuition and fees are much much higher now, across the board.
[0]: https://github.com/a327ex/SNKRX/blob/master/devlog.md