IMO Firefox has just 2 things to beat Chrome: better add-ons (like treestyle tabs) and politics (made by Mozilla instead of an ads company). They are burning the first one.
Rikaichan allows translation of Japanese words simply by hovering your mouse over. It works much better than entering words into an online dictionary, since nearly every free JE-EJ dictionary uses the same source, and if a conjugation isn't translatable it will cut the word off giving the meaning and then letting you easily highlight the conjugation to figure out the meaning of the two together. Its just much faster than using something like jisho.org if theres a lot of words in a text you don't know. Rikaisama makes Rikaichan even more powerful with a lot of extra features
Everytime I've ever tried the similar plug-ins on Chrome they've all been terrible, missing words, missing conjugation, or just being slow in general. Its the first check I do every time I think about switching browsers.
However with the new Electrolysis on Firefox its completely broken and it seems like the dev might not want to do a rewrite since the plugin works exactly how you would want it and has for a few years now, but especially not if the sandbox changes make the plugin impossible to work.
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rikaikun/jipdnfibh...
The lookupbar is associated with the window chrome (ie. there is one per window). Inserting it into the DOM requires emulating this behavior by synthesizing one "bar" in each tab, adding and deleting them at the right time, etc.
Inserted content always has the possibility of interacting poorly with the scripts and styles of the underlying page (or other extensions). Rikai-chan already has problems where its overlays will end of underneath page content.
Inserted content goes below the line of death (https://textslashplain.com/2017/01/14/the-line-of-death/). There are other minor deficiencies: you can't get the browser's theme on the bar, etc.
For Rikai-chan, it seems like it'd be nice to allow the background script to write to a page that sits on top of the space that shows the actual page and have the content scripts communicate what should be rendered. AFAIK, the only ways to show something on the screen is to either send it to the content scripts and have them modify the DOMs, or show it in a popup for a button.
But the extension flexibility was one of the major points for me.
I'll have to pin Firefox to 56.x in my package manager.
No browser on Linux can handle different DPI per screen. For Firefox, there's an addon implementing that today, but it won't work with WebExtensions.
So I have to use today's Firefox - or I can't use any browser.
Well, there's also the third option of using a magnifying glass to read websites.
Firefox 57 will have sandboxing and per-tab processes (most likely) plus a better extension system than Chrome's.
Firefox 57 should be at least equivalent to Chromium.
http://www.cvedetails.com/product/3264/Mozilla-Firefox.html?...
http://www.cvedetails.com/product/15031/Google-Chrome.html?v...
During 2016, Firefox had 53 code execution CVE reports.
Chrome had 2.
Firefox only has around 8% of the browser marketshare. Chrome sits between 44% and 60% depending on the source. So it's not a case of Firefox being more popular and attracting more people to target it for hacks. It's just worse software.
And then there's just user inconveniences like how Firefox becomes extremely slow if you open multiple heavy tabs. e10s has yet to fix it, currently, if you enable it, it only opens 2 processes, one for the UI, and one for the rendering engine. So the UI itself might not slow to a crawl but all your tabs will still feel slow if you open heavy stuff.
Firefox also has a slower rendering engine. My eyesight isn't great and I browse web pages with zoom active in between 120% and 150% depending on pages. That makes Firefox behave extremely slow on some pages. It's particularly unbearable, on, say, slashdot pages with lots of comments.
For the same reason smooth scrolling is the first thing Firefox users disable in Firefox. Smooth scrolling works fine on Chrome. FF has never managed to implement smooth scrolling in a way that doesn't slow things to a crawl and makes the scrolling look like stuttering or low framerate.
People often rely on Javascript benchmarks to say "Hey firefox is as fast as chrome!!!11!!" but JS is only one part of what makes a browser fast or slow. What about the parts that actually render the page to something your screen can display?
> Firefox 57 should be at least equivalent to Chromium.
Chrome would have had to stop all development years ago for that sentence to be true.
You can take a look at my results here:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/58doo8csebp9l62/Bench.pdf?dl=0
Each browser has it's strengths and weaknesses it seems, So I run all of them lol For my day to day tab filled behemoth I have to use Firefox, any other browser can't handle the ~80 tabs I have open at once.
In fact me and my roommate have on going challenges on how many tabs we can keep open and up times of the browsers/OS's (He is on Win7). During our battles we have tried tweaking some things and using odd browsers and such, but to be competitive with one another we have to each use Firefox cause it just has that much better memory management/stability.
Here is my latest benchmark as solid proof: https://www.dropbox.com/s/58doo8csebp9l62/Bench.pdf?dl=0
Firefox WebGL works much better on Windows for me; never tried it on OS X. It's probably a Linux-specific issue, but I rarely use Firefox on anything else.
It will list HW acceleration info. You want to make sure electrolysis is running, in the line "Multiprocess Windows: 1/1 (Enabled by user)" should be enabled by default, if it says 0/1 it not active and you will have to manually turn it on.
You can also see if the WebGL renderer is loading properly. On my Debian box it says WebGL2 creation failed (drivers), which would explain my poor performance on that box.
It's worth a shot since Firefox's WebGL rendering is 4x faster then other browsers, it's worth your time taking a quick check.
If you are on a Macbook using battery power I highly suggest using Safari due to it's power consumption profile, your battery will last way longer.
My latest benchmarks: https://www.dropbox.com/s/58doo8csebp9l62/Bench.pdf?dl=0
We need "Safari" for Windows, but not edge.