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Comment by Arubis | Hacker News Reader

Boy, I _really_ didn't want to swap to Chrome. I'd held on through about a year ago, even despite knowing it was slower, a memory hog, and so on; at least this way, _someone_ on my team was viewing our site in FF and would notice discrepancies. I hated to let Google manage yet another aspect of my life.

But as some point, too much was too much. Unable to bear vanilla, Google-owned Chrome, I ended up in (closed-source!) Vivaldi. It was...alright.

About two months ago, I tried out FF Nightly. And by god, it's the best browser I've ever used. And the Nightly builds are (typically) _more_ stable than production-issue from other vendors.

So very happy to be back! Mozilla may have their issues, but I'll gladly take imperfect and pro-user over differently imperfect and profit-driven any day.

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> And the Nightly builds are (typically) _more_ stable than production-issue from other vendors.

Yeah, I switched to Nightly a couple releases ago (I'd use Dev edition before that because in the past Nightly used to be really unstable) and it's been great. The only time I've been getting crashes are when I flipped stylo on early (which was to be expected), and a couple of random crashes here and there.

In fact, I've had more problems in Chrome (Stable) these last two weeks, where their devtools hanged everything in multiple cases and Netflix wasn't working at all. And Chrome isn't my primary browser -- I only use it for Hangouts and Netflix (Netflix is force of habit, it works great in Firefox now). (I used the devtools because I'm using the new rewritten devtools in Firefox Nightly and they don't have a prettyprint button right now)

> Netflix is force of habit, it works great in Firefox now

Netflix doesn't work great in either Firefox or Chrome, but that's not the browser's fault. Netflix only streams 720p video to Firefox, Opera, and Chrome whereas it will stream 1080p or better to Safari, IE 11, and Edge:

https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23742

You can see the playback details (formats, resolution, bit rate, etc.) of the video you're currently watching on Netflix by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Alt+D.

I use Safari to view Netflix though I'd prefer to use Firefox. I'm paying Netflix for access to 1080p video, but I only actually get 1080p video with Safari.

Yeah, I'm aware of that. IIRC a few years ago it was even worse on Firefox because of DRM issues or something (I don't recall).

Also in the past Firefox's media stack used to be a bit more RAM-hog-y, but that's no longer the case IME either. I still stick media stuff in a different browser so that if I'm doing a build or something expensive I can just close the browser.

> Netflix only streams 720p video to Firefox, Opera, and Chrome whereas it will stream 1080p or better to Safari, IE 11, and Edge

Yeah, that's due to DRM.

The simple solution is to disable the EME plugin, and just pirate everything (while still paying for Netflix). You pay for it, and have a moral right to it, and you can watch it in 1080p or 4K easily.

Maybe I'm missing something, but doesn't your OS have a native Netflix app?

My OS is Arch Linux.... so no

If you pay for Netflix, you're paying for the right to watch anything currently available in their library. If you pirate stuff, unless you're careful to keep that library up-to-date with Netflix's, you won't have the moral right to it.

Well, that’s an interesting question. If you’ve made a reasonable effort to pay, but have not found an option, some countries even allow you to copy without approval of the copyright owner, legally.

So this is a question that very much depends on ideology and jurisdiction. (I, personally, think that if I pay for Netflix and Amazon Prime, I have a moral right to any older content, and if I pay for a movie ticket for newer content that’s twice as expensive as a DVD of which the cinema gets less than 10%, I have a moral right to rewatch it)

I haven't crashed nightly (I'm running the developer edition nightly) in months, but I've seen some rendering bugs since they rolled in the overhauled bits. Not as much as one might expect from a bunch of new parts, though. The quality of Firefox is just generally very high.

> And the Nightly builds are (typically) _more_ stable than production-issue from other vendors.

I actually managed to crash nightly yesterday! Maybe this seems like it ought to be banal, but I think it says something admirable when users are surprised to remember that your pre-beta software is pre-beta. :P

I am more than willing to try Firefox BUT I need a couple of things :

-an extension to allow to treat chrome + firefox history and open tabs as one on all devices (basically what I already have with chrome on desktop + mobile)

-a password manager that integrates with both (this one should be easy enough .. just buy lastpass or an alternative).

So you've not used opera before they switch to chromium ?

OT, but (in case you didn't know) you can use asterisks to italicize text, so instead of _this_ you'll have this.

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