• @[email protected]
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    1 year ago

    I’ve switched to Firefox but there’s definitely a few things that irritate me about it.

    First thing is when I boot up my computer, launch Firefox, it launches long enough for me to click a bookmark then closes to perform an update. And then doesn’t automatically reopen…

    I also have it set to not “remember” my tabs after closing. Yet when I launch Firefox for the first time after rebooting or closing ally tabs, it gives me a “hmm… we’re having a hard time finding your previous session” message. Uh, yeah, I told you not to look for it… can I just have the regular “new tab” page?

    It also might just be because I’m used to chrome, but I feel the mobile app is severely lacking. I hate that I can’t access my bookmarks directly from the new tab page, and that the tablet version doesn’t show you your bookmark bar. The synchronization between mobile and desktop isn’t great either, I’ll have a very long specific search query that I’ve used multiple times on my phone, yet it doesn’t offer it for auto-complete on desktop, I have to search the entire term again or go digging through my history. When you’re searching long model numbers and the like, this is incredibly frustrating.

    Finally, and I don’t know if this is a Firefox issue, but there’s some memory leak that occurs when viewing a webcam stream from my raspberry pi that only has happened in Firefox. The first time I noticed it happening my PC slowed to a crawl, when task manager finally opened Firefox was taking 23GB of RAM. So I have to use chrome to keep that steam open for more than a few minutes at a time.

    • hungrybread [comrade/them]
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      51 year ago

      Are they? I watch YouTube on Firefox all the time, seems fine on my machine.

      I think maybe 5+ years ago there were some performance issues caused by YT relying on features that were only implemented in Chrome, but I don’t recall having any issues wrt that for years.

      • RoabeArt [he/him]
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        41 year ago

        I wouldn’t say “completely fucked”, but for a few years I noticed YouTube on Firefox has this occasional quirk where videos will quit playing and infinitely buffer at the exact same timestamp. Like there’s no way around it except skipping about 30 seconds ahead with the seek bar, or doing a Ctrl-F5 (hard refresh) and starting the whole video over. Opera GX doesn’t seem to have this problem at all.

        But it’s still not a big enough deal to make me give up Firefox completely.

    • space_comrade [he/him]
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      31 year ago

      Wym? Youtube works just fine for me with uBlock Origin. Very rarely there’s some wonkiness but nothing unbearable.

      • idkmybffjoeysteel [he/him]
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        11 year ago

        I’ve got uBlock and Privacy Badger but turning them off or going incognito doesn’t help at all. The most common issue I get with YouTube is the video keeps freezing. Apparently this is because Google deliberately fuck it so that other browsers have to play catch up constantly. I have heard this is why Microsoft gave up and adopted Chromium.

        The other issue is that if I open more than one YouTube tab my laptop sounds like it is about to take off into space. I can have an unlimited number of tabs from any other website open though.

  • @[email protected]
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    1 year ago

    People saying FF is slower: like how much slower? are we taking like 14 millisecond slower? Cause everything seems pretty instantaneous here. Maybe its because i’m old enough to remember DSL and 56k internet, but I think FF os crazy fast and even if Chrome would be 25% faster I wouldn’t switch to evil google for that.

    • @[email protected]
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      1 year ago

      It used to be a lot slower, which is why when Chrome showed up with its shiny new V8 engine (and other features) people switched from Firefox en masse. Now the performance difference is no longer noticeable.

      • @[email protected]
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        41 year ago

        Ye a few months ago I remember that the benchmarks showed firefox was just as fast as chrome again or minimally faster/slower in certain benchmarks

    • @[email protected]
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      51 year ago

      https://www.phoronix.com/news/Firefox-Chrome-109-Benchmarks

      I wish firefox was faster but benchmarks are pretty common, it’s not hard to test. It’s kind of an unfair fight at this point honestly, large swaths of the web are just built for chrome. There are other benchmark options out there, but even using Mozilla’s own kraken benchmarking solution, it loses tremendously more than it wins. I honestly really respect them for not building their benchmarking system to make their solutions come out on top.

      In some benchmarks the lag from firefox is very significant and then on the other hand, when firefox does win, chrome is usually right behind it. It’s not ideal.

    • @[email protected]
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      181 year ago

      61 Firefox windows and 427 tabs (don’t judge, I know I have a problem) and I have no performance complaints - admittedly, not all of them are active/rendering simultaniously, but still…

      Firefox (and its forks) have been my go-to for 15 years.

        • @[email protected]
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          1 year ago

          indeed! had I not posted this, I would be asking the same question!

          so, its quite a bit more mundane than you might have hoped for.

          a mix of…

          • ~40% locally served internal pages (mostly zabbix, mail/web server monitoring, some development pages, etc).
          • ~60% non-local pages - currently lots of retro computing stuff, debian stuff, github (sigh)

          the most recent page I opened was an archive.org page on TI-84 firmware disassembly.

          I make heavy use of Firefox containers for separation. honestly, Firefox is an absolute workhorse for me. if the Firefox ecosystem were to fall into the void, I would be dead in the water.

          • @[email protected]
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            21 year ago

            That’s a really interesting set of pages!

            I remember opening hundreds of random github repos and starring them for “further research”, and never looking at them again.

            Also yes, life without Firefox would be miserable.

    • @[email protected]
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      41 year ago

      Last time I tried it? Like freeze and be unresponsive on my phone for seconds at a time slow. (My phone doesn’t lock up though, I can still go to the home screen, swipe to see notifications so it’s not the phone locking up completely)

      • @[email protected]
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        11 year ago

        Yes, this. Many pages have a 5-15 second blank delay for reasons I can’t figure out when using Firefox. I still use Firefox, but that delay is rough on my blood pressure some days.

    • @[email protected]
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      11 year ago

      It’s clear, slower is relative. FF is slower in the startup and rendering some heavy loading webs, but the difference certainly isn’t sooo dramatic. It’s not a reason to avoid it, the only reason depends of the use of a browser, if it fits your needs or not.

    • @[email protected]
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      11 year ago

      I haven’t experienced that. What is the use-case that makes this happen? I have one machine with only 8 gig and firefox is fine, and a 16 and 32 gig machine, firefox has never eaten 8 gigs

      • Kichae
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        41 year ago

        What they mean is “I use woefully malformed websites loaded up with all sorts of weird shit that eats ram on the regular, and somehow that’s my browser’s fault”

      • Joe Cool
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        21 year ago

        I have a VPS with 1 GB of RAM and Firefox with up to 3 tabs is fine. OK, it’s running Linux maybe FF on Windows is worse.

  • @[email protected]
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    21 year ago

    I usualy love it, but for some reason Firefox fails to retrieve web pages about 75% of the time when on the internet connection at my parent’s house, and I don’t know why.

    It acts like a DNS failure, but the DNS settings are the same in Firefox, Chrome, and the router.

    Meanwhile Chrome and Edge work great.

  • @[email protected]
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    61 year ago

    does anyone recommend any Firefox alternatives? I genuinely hate Firefox’s UI and keybinds and the scrolling tabs

    • @[email protected]
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      1 year ago

      Floorp, I use it and I love it. It’s especially great for Opera refugees, it has workspaces and stuff. Soon Firefox will support tab groups natively, and then Floorp will be perfect. It’s a Firefox fork though.

      • Tab groups and non-independent tab muting (seems like it was domain-specific rather than tab-specific last I tried) are the two main things that kept me from switching back to FF as my primary browser (still use it for DTA, for example, but DTA got a big nerf back during the major extension overhaul, so that was a letdown). Tried some extensions, but none really worked in a way I considered usable and didn’t want to just keep trial and erroring through them given I already have a browser that functionally meets my needs, even if I’d rather not be using a chromium browser.

        If native tab groups work well enough, I’ll probably give it another chance.

          • I sometimes just need to mute something for a second that I’m otherwise listening to. Or I’m switching between multiple sources, and don’t want like 3 or more playing at the same time… usually all on the same domain. I don’t want to have to actually go to the tab and mute it. I’m frequently muting and unmuting things that way to the point that even if its the only source of sound, I still mute by tab instead of just turning my computer volume off sometimes out of habit, so its a deal breaker.

            I think this just says more about the perils of embracing untreated ADHD than the internet itself.

    • @[email protected]
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      131 year ago

      you may not even have to change to another browser or fork, please have a look at some designs in https://trickypr.github.io/FirefoxCSS-Store.github.io/ select a design and follow the page, and you shall find the instructions (usually just downloading/pasting userChrome/Content.css)

      and for scrolling tabs, if your problem is very small tab size, then try changing browser.tabs.tabMinWidth in about:config

  • @[email protected]
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    671 year ago

    chrome used to be good. Emphasis on the past tense.

    Firefox was always good. Chrome was very briefly better. Firefox has not suffered enshittification like chrome did.

    • GTG3000
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      191 year ago

      I mean, I clearly remember firefox being terrible back when Chrome was just beginning to take off.

      It was a lumbering monolith that ate all your ram and loaded pages at a glacial pace. Chrome was a multi-process revolution from that.

      Then, firefox got it’s shit together and chrome got overloaded with corpo bullshit.

      • @[email protected]
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        1 year ago

        It used to take firefox ages to open. I switched back after the big update in the mid 2010s that made it good again.

    • Felix
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      31 year ago

      firefox is going on a steady decline more recently with ads on the homepage by default, plus new telemetry being introduced. hopefully it can change direction

    • drzoidberg
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      211 year ago

      This. Firefox has always been just good. It wasn’t great or anything, it was just a good browser. Then chrome came around and it had more, better features. It was a bit more memory usage, but those were for the additional features Firefox didn’t have.

      Firefox didn’t really change a whole lot, it added synching features across accounts, and didn’t get worse. It just stayed the same.

      The people made Firefox better, because now they’re creating add-ons for Firefox, where chrome had more.

      I feel like once chrome got the majority of browser users, it immediately started going to shit. I have no proof of this, just a memory of it being better until it was announced that chrome was the most used browser, and the near immediate heavier memory usage.

      • @[email protected]
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        110 months ago

        I don’t know what rock you’ve been living under where you think base Firefox wasn’t ever improved

      • @[email protected]
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        61 year ago

        It’s all telemetry so the advertising company that made Chrome can harvest your data for resale at bargain bin prices

        • @[email protected]
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          1 year ago

          Yes, but not neccesary other Chromium do it, that depends only on the corresponding devs. Chrome is a RAM and Data Hog, because use for every tab a own process, but Vivaldi Hibernate the background tabs and because of this use less RAM than other Chromium and even FF. But generally all US browsers send data to Alphabet, googleanalytics and googletagmanager, except Edge (also Chromium), but in change it sends data to other MS partners which are even worst (Towerdata). I use Vivaldi for this, because it’s the only existing EU browser (after the French UR browser died some years ago) maybe apart Konqueror from KDE (Linux only, KHTML or KDE WEBKit engine), no data for third parties, nor Google, despite the Chromium base. The Browser companies are the problem, not the engine which they use.

  • Caveman
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    1061 year ago

    FF is doing great. All the have to do now is the Steam strategy. Do nothing and wait for the competition to fuck themselves over.

    • @[email protected]
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      161 year ago

      Thats the problem tho, the new mozilla leadership is on the “do anything but nothing” ship. I really hope they either dont do anything too horrible or someone forks it if they do.

      • Caveman
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        31 year ago

        Yeah, it’s been a huge waste of resources trying to reinvent everything.

      • @[email protected]
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        91 year ago

        there are already forks in place if you’re dissatisfied with firefox like librewolf, floorp or the new one from mullvad

    • @[email protected]
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      341 year ago

      You mean hope that they too don’t become subject to enshittification? I don’t have a lot of faith in that.

      Besides that, Google is controlling as fuck. They might keep fucking themselves over but there’s no way they won’t start attempting to ruin things for the rest of us.

      • @[email protected]
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        131 year ago

        It seems Mozilla is not immune to the AI hype. I just hope their AI endeavour won’t kill them when the AI hype finally ends.

        • ☂️-
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          1 year ago

          to be fair they are the only ones i know of putting it to actual good use.

          ai itself is not the problem.

        • KubeRoot
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          131 year ago

          Thankfully the AI use is very tame so far, used for stuff like offline alt text generation and offline translation. I’m personally still concerned about copyrights and ethics of the models used, but at least it’s directed towards providing specific features, not a magic cure-all.

          • @[email protected]
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            111 year ago

            I’m more concerned with Mozilla spending its meager resources to chase some fads instead of focusing on improving firefox.

    • @[email protected]
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      131 year ago

      Steam’s strategy was to be first to market and essentially the only player in the game for a decade, making themselves the default.

  • @[email protected]
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    141 year ago

    I have been on the firefox train since it was new. I witnessed the rise of Chrome and Chromium, and never really felt the pull, and worried about everyone targeting the same platform. Figured I’d stay on FF until I had no choice. Don’t see myself leaving.

    • @[email protected]
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      31 year ago

      Figured I’d stay on FF until I had no choice. Don’t see myself leaving.

      i’m in a similar boat and given the overwhelming majority popular use of chrome, it feels clear to me that firefox will eventually stop working and i wonder what surfing will like like for me in the future.

      i suspect i’ll have to go back to use chrome again.