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Comment by rc_kas | Hacker News Reader

I <3 you Firefox. I'm so sad that nobody uses you.

I switched back to Firefox from Chrome. I'm interested in hanging on the ride with Rust and Servo integrations (Project Quantum), and I also like how it's community based rather than with standards support and features sometimes suspiciously following some company's agenda that don't always have user needs or interests as top priorities.

I do, almost exclusively. It's nowhere near as bad as some people around here make out. I like it.

Me too. How could I ditch Firefox?! It's been with me since 2004, through the dark days of IE, and still perfectly usable when compared with johnny-come-latelys like Chrome. I've never liked Chrome, and I don't trust Google. Long live Firefox!

It's been my main browser since 2004. So much more flexibility than Chrome.

I wish this ticket would see some movement though! https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=101611

That issue has been open for 16 years? Kind of shocking when you think about it.

I've been using Firefox since the time it was still called Firebird, and I will continue to do so as long as it is in active development.

Plus, having read that article, I feel much more comfortable leaving many tabs open (although I don't think I've ever had more than 100 open simultaneously).

I'm eternally irritated that it doesn't support date inputs. This has been a thorn in my side for years.

This is being actively worked on and coming soon to Firefox.

Should be in 56: https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2017/06/12/datetime-inputs-...

Works on Firefox for Android

I hope it is locale-sensitive. US is the only country that uses mainly the mm/dd/yyyy. Most of the others use dd/mm/yyyy with some important exceptions (China, Japan, Korea) with yyyy/mm/dd (which happens to be the standard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country

actually, it’s almost never dd/mm/yyy, but dd.mm.yyy, and yyyy-mm-dd. Japan is one of the few offenders, almost everywhere else the separator can be used to identify the format.

Australia also uses DD/MM/YYYY. You see ISO dates here and there but it's not as common.

I didn't mean about the separator at all, just the ordering. But good point.

Firefox ships ~100 localizations. (See https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/nightly/all/ for the list.) I'm pretty sure this will be handled appropriately :)

that's just not true... i've used firefox consistently since v. 0.3 (phoenix) so that's at least one. plus a couple others in this thread make a few. i bet there are a few more out there too, so that makes a bunch. =)

anyways, i have ~350 tabs open on firefox 54, and so i can't wait until 55 lands to see this great improvement.

the chrome lead for mac told me that they too are working on better performance with 100's of tabs open and that should land sometime soon as well (even so, i'm a diehard firefox fan so it will be hard to make me switch).

Why not switch to Firefox Beta to get those improvements immediately? With the removal of the aurora channel, Mozilla is trying to get more people on the beta train, that now is the only stabilization phase between Nightly and Release. As a die-hard Nightly user I usually install the Beta (x64) version for other users and, depending on the add-on compatibility, enable e10s or some other features (e.g. TCP Fast Open) that may already be in A/B testing. Right now it makes an amazing difference in user satisfaction.

yes, i have developer edition installed for testing, but still use the release version as my main browser. it's just a couple weeks left to wait so i think i can hang on until then. =)

It is my main browser on Desktop. But after version 57, when Tab Groups extension (formerly Panorama) stops working, I am not sure whether I will continue using it.

"Simplified Tab Groups" [1] is a similar Firefox extension and the developer says [2] he intends to make it compatible with the new WebExtension API.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups/

[2] https://github.com/denschub/firefox-tabgroups/issues/60

A few months ago I switched to Chrome from Firefox for a couple of reasons. However, about a month later I switched back... I just feel dirty using Chromium =/

Although I think the dev tools in Chrome are superior, I love the way I can step through the code and have all the information I need displayed neatly against each step without having to manually watch everything.

Is there anyway to get Firefox to do something similar?

The only thing keeping in Chrome at the moment is that Firefox' debug tools don't let me profile JS line-by-line like Chrome does. Line-by-line testing to see what needs optimisation is seriously useful for the type of stuff I'm doing.

EDIT: obviously, I spend most of my day developing. Firefox definitely has my preference when I'm ust browsing on my own.

> I'm so sad that nobody uses you.

Well that's just false.

Factually false, but statistically true.

Hard to love when the broken extension ecosystem prevents the use of vertical tabs for these scenarios.

Tree style tabs work

That is broken because it supports more tabs. The multiprocess model is precisely why the old extension model had to be abandoned.

Sadly, the new extension model isn’t nearly ready for prime time yet.

I've got vertical tabs from Test Pilot for months now and I'll never turn back. Not sure what you're talking about.

> Not sure what you're talking about.

They changed their add-on API and are in the process of deprecating the older one which allowed for radical UI changes. That's probably what he was talking about.

Will their own test pilot addon stop working then?

Nope, it just that older extensions will and IIRC the developer of the tree-style-tabs extension was really vocal about the fact that he disliked the new API. He had claimed it would be impossible to port his extension to the new system. I'm not clear on the history of it all, so I don't know if it was possible at the time or not.

Yes it will. In fact, the test pilot for Tab Center has already ended. And it will be removed entirely starting after Firefox 56.

https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/tab-center/

> Hard to love when the broken extension ecosystem prevents the use of vertical tabs for these scenarios.

Here's an in-development vertical tabs extension using their new extensions API.

  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-center-redux/

Apparently the tabs still show up at the top because the API to disable that isn't available yet. But you get vertical tabs and it should get better over time. I've been using this and it isn't 100% perfect, but getting better and better.

I've started making another one that try to respect the system's theme: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vertigo-tabs/

Mozilla doesn't care about its community anymore, the lost focus, the mismanage Firefox and its quality gets worse.

The multi process will never work with the current XUL based gecko code base - they could have told us the truth several years ago, instead they put some resources to it, and it gets no we're - it will never work like Chrome 1+ or IE 8+.

Instead they should have focused on maintaining Firefox as it is and put more resources to Servo - which takes way too long already (a new Rust Lang doesn't help).

Where do you get the impression of e10s not working with the current code base? It works pretty great for me with 10+ processes and ~20 add-ons and is already enabled for ~50% of the Firefox population (though with more conservative defaults with the other half mainly blocked on add-on compatibility). There's no maintaining Firefox as it is and integrating Servo (which btw already works quite good on Nightly and webrender is also making great strides). The Rust language actually does help immensely because it makes developing Servo and other rust components way easier. Implementing servo in C++ would have likely taken longer and would definitely have been a maintenance nightmare.

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