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- Hacker News
- I use Zen (firefox under the hood) and I just don't understand all of the bitching people do about Firefox. Once I learned all about manifest v2 deprecation it was such an easy decision to move away from Chromium based browsers. The transition was one of the most painless things I've ever done in the software world.
Literally what is the issue?
by jkahrs595 - +1 for Zenby joey5403
- +1 for Zen, it's a great browser. I've been using it for 1.5 years now and I'm loving the UI/UX.by Insanity
- It's that Firefox occasionally breaks websites because most devs only test and target for Chrome. And that it is now more CPU and RAM-hungry than Chrome.
Also that it is controlled by Mozilla, an org ALLEGEDLY more interested in fringe politics than tech.
by dartharva - Abject fear. They are afraid that the best option will go away. They're afraid that their perfectionism and critiques have driven it to a point of failure. They're afraid that a project is big as a browser can't really be open source. They're probably also angry at the squandering of resources at Mozilla particularly on executive salaries.
But yeah it's ultimately fear.
by simpaticoder - Of my cohorts, I am probably the most loyal firefox fan. That said, I've broken up with it twice, and am currently in the second breakup b/c at work we're mandated to use the Island browser due to security reasons, and my work machine absolutely cannot handle two browsers running while I also have all of the work dependencies and IDEs and slack running.
I know much of this is subjective, but the chrome experience just feels better / faster. This is what precipitated the first breakup, and when I think about the situation now, it feels like this dynamic is probably long lasting. It does make me sad though. I'll come back to firefox later, perhaps when I get a laptop refresh and can be a little more cavalier with RAM.
- It seems like the Browser Wars are going to converge on a singular point: "Do I need to access Big Tech services?"
As long as the business world is going to continue centrallizing on the likes of Microsoft, Google, and Cloudflare, any existing or future alternative browsers will either have to kowtow on the alter of compatibility or make the deliberate decision not to support "advanced features" that enable the next generation of proprietary webmail, social media, banking webpages, etc - tending towards a total revocation of privacy in exchange for KYC via a glut of metadata.
This will get even crappier as mechanisms used to filter out "suspicious" traffic (read: competing products) become standard. I imagine using Firefox in 2030 will be akin to using Tor in 2019 - web requests will be blocked, denied, or deemed "insecure".
Lynx revolution when?
by trashcan_man - I treat firefox the same way I treat politics. If I am around people I know understand the importance of firefox and are commited to using it then we can talk about its problems. If I am around anyone else I wont say a bad word about firefox. Why would I say a negative thing about firefox to a google chrome user, any point they make is instantly undermined by their usage of google chrome. To sit there and talk badly about firefox just reinforces their resolve in choosing google chrome.
Plus I genuinely like firefox its a great browser and I dont feel bad telling people that its good.
by Fizz43 - Related: There's also Ladybird that is developing quickly and is aiming for an alpha release this year. It's a truly independent browser engine built from scratch.
- What’s the real selling point? Yeah non profit but is it gonna be faster and better than WebKit? The reason I switched to chrome a long time ago was tab isolation, how much faster it was than Firefox, and built it better developer tools. What’s ladybug got going for it?by HaloZero
- I just wish Ladybird can do what Electron currently does, but with much better resources. Especially in today's age where memory is so expensive.by figmert
- This is mentioned under every Firefox discussion despite being possibly years away from being generally useful if the will ever progress to that point.
It’s not really a feasible alternative.
by SirHumphrey - I am using firefox, but it is pretty hard to keep using it. I don't want the whole world to converge on one browser engine, but I also want things to work, and Firefox does not make it easy.
Firefox on my laptop has a propensity for eating lots of RAM, and constant CPU usage, even if nothing is going on. Task manager is useless. Profiler just shows "GC collecting".
Mobile firefox is OK, it simply feels like it's designed for a different person. For example even Chrome has "force reader mode" button.. Firefox does not. And don't even get me started on the "new tab" [age - it gives me 6 choices and all of them are "AI" ones which never show what I want. The only way to show a manually curated link list is "collections" and those do not get synced, and occasionally disappear for no reason.
by theamk - Too much RAM use is rare for me, but when it happens I just open the tab unloading page and unload all the tabs. Usually it’s Jira’s fault.by mplanchard
- Yeah similar. When I leave firefox running on the macbook, after a couple of days I get an out of memory, 32GB used type error (8GB macbook). Maybe it's the sites I have open keep requesting stuff? Not sure.by tim333
- > Mobile firefox is OK, it simply feels like it's designed for a different person. For example even Chrome has "force reader mode" button.. Firefox does not.
This is false. I am seeing that button right now in Firefox, on the right side of the address bar.
by cubefox - I have exactly the same problem. Firefox uses far too much RAM. I ended up going back to Chrome over it, even though I prefer Firefox otherwise.by wccrawford
- From my experience it's inconsistent and that's incredibly frustrating. Overall the whole mobile interface needs to be overhauled imo. These guys need to simply copy Safari and call it a day. I still have never used a mobile browser that's as thoughtfully designed as Safari, and I've used basically all the major ones.by mitchell209
- >Mobile firefox is OK, it simply feels like it's designed for a different person. For example even Chrome has "force reader mode" button.. Firefox does not.
I'm using Fennec from F-Droid, but I have a little document symbol on the URL bar I tap for reader mode. I guess the issue is it doesn't show on all sites then?
by opan - I don’t know you, but most people I work with for some reason keep so many tabs open, the tab bar is squeezed so you can barely see a favicon
Probably due to my age, I religiously close every tab after I read it. If that gets more than a dozen, I literally quit the browser and declare bankruptcy because it’s not worth it to sort through the mess of tabs I clearly am not using.
Firefox is old too. I’m sure it could manage memory better, but couldn’t we all? If you have tabs in GC and using CPU when you aren’t using them, kill them maybe? What else is that tab doing all day when you aren’t looking?
I’ve never understood why people keep so many tabs open and why they’ll literally switch to an entirely different browser platform rather than change a bad habit
by mingus88 - I don't know why but I have a different experience. My daily driver is a 13 year old Thinkpad with 16Gb memory, I use Firefox all the time, I routinely have 50+ tabs open, I really have no complaints.
I also use Firefox on Android, I have less experience of using other browsers on mobile but what I've got is fine for me.
I'm not questioning your experience but I would like others, who might be considering using Firefox, to know that different people have different experiences.
by glaucon - Firefox is the best of a bunch of bad options, but isn't above critique. It does suck when they do anticonsumer stuff and shove weird stuff like pocket in, but you can't leave which makes it similar to the democratic party where you can't really do anything, but they keep making really poor decisions.by Nail2680
- Firefox have forks like Zen which allow you to have the best of both worlds.by nickthegreek
- Pocket was awesome. I am sad it’s gone and even though I found replacements I just don’t use them as much as pocket.by dyauspitr
- The similarity goes deeper since they're funded by the very thing they claim to oppose.by lioeters
- For those interested in how the alternative browsers are doing, I just put up an alternative to https://wpt.fyi (displays the WPT test results of each browser) which is IMO easier to navigate, and shows Servo / Ladybird by default:
The headline results are:
- Chrome 94.7% (1053647/1112582)
- Firefox 90.6% (1008073/1112582)
- Safari TP 88.7% ( 987377/1112582)
- Ladybird 84.2% ( 937019/1112582)
- Servo 74.4% ( 827216/1112582)
So Ladybird is catching up with the other pretty fast! Although it's worth noting that it still has a bunch of extra work to do with regard to performance.
(my engine Blitz whose website this is on scores 42.2% for specifically the `css` subset, compared to 50.3% for Servo and 72.3% Ladybird)
(the results above exclude the `encoding` suite, because that's 1 million test ~50% of the whole suite, that doesn't really measure rendering capability).
by nicoburns - nice to see someone else fighting with the same suite. i run css part of WPT on pdf engine (paged output, no js) and hit most of the same problems.by exsol
- I love WPT (I even have a bookmark comparing all of these browsers as well as Flow[0] that I check regularly).
But this is absolutely NOT how this site is meant to be used. For example, Ladybird jumped from about 30% to over 70% when it added a bunch of unicode logic. Secondly, these tests aren't all even officially agreed upon standards. Some are specific to Chrome features that are still in the draft stages for W3C. Many tests are written by the developers of the engines themselves. Chrome, having a larger team, will naturally contribute many more tests relevant to whatever feature they're prioritizing
[0] https://wpt.fyi/results/?label=master&product=chrome&product...
by culi - Part of the blame for what's wrong with the web right now is on web developers:
- We "need" firefox or else everything's just chrome
- Forks of chrome don't count as different browsers because they all use the same engine
- Using the same engine makes you basically just chrome because you can't diverge from upstream
- You can't diverge from upstream because it moves too fast and you need to keep merging with it
- You need to keep merging with upstream because upstream is implementing new web platform features
- You need those web platform features because if you don't add them then websites will stop working in your fork
- Websites will stop working in your fork because web developers don't support older browser versions
- Web developers don't support older browser versions because... they don't care?
If web developers had a culture of supporting, say, 10 years of previous browser versions, then chromium would lose a lot of the power it has to drag the forks (and firefox) behind it. I don't really see this happening without some sort of major culture shift, though. Maybe if we had some versioned web standard that lagged behind the "real" ones so sites could say "StableWeb 2.0 Compatible!" or something.
- >You can't diverge from upstream because it moves too fast and you need to keep merging with it
Blink is very modular. Merging your changes is easier than you think. Exponentially easier than creating a whole other browser engine.
by charcircuit