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Comment by latexr | Hacker News Reader

I’m tired of seeing “change to Firefox” arguments that never address its faults. Particularly on macOS, Firefox is unusable for many users — read this thread and any others on HN where Firefox is the topic, and you’ll find the same complaints:

* Lack of AppleScript support (my main complaint, every other was lifted from other comments).

* Lack of other basic features such as pinch-to-zoom.

* Poor Keychain support.

* Slow.

* Resource-hungry.

And this article comes out just after reports of a 0-day exploit of Firefox on macOS[1].

If you want people to give Firefox a chance, make it good. For many of us it isn’t, and shouting over and over that it’s good doesn’t make it so. Fine if it works for you, but it doesn’t for many.

[1]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/06/poten...

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> make it good

Are you arguing that Firefox is not even "good," or just not perfect?

(I use Firefox on a Mac all day and the only kind of "resource hunger" I've observed can be pinned to the web pages that it's running.)

> Are you arguing that Firefox is not even "good," or just not perfect?

I’ll extend the quote a bit more:

> make it good. For many of us it isn’t

I’m saying Firefox isn’t good enough for many of us (mostly various subsets of macOS users).

As for resource hunger, in my case I see it in headless mode (it always turns the fans on), but every point in that list apart from (lack of) AppleScript support was lifted from other complaints I’ve seen in similar HN threads, not my experience.

Most of those problems I could live with in the name of supporting Firefox, but not the lack of AppleScript support. That seems to be the case for many of the aforementioned macOS users: we want to like Firefox, but theres a detail it screws up so bad for our needs, it becomes unusable as a daily browser.

In every test I've seen Firefox has beaten Chrome in terms of speed.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20255943. Slowness is a point I’m lifting from other arguments, not my own complaint. I could live with slowness, but that is not my deal breaker.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=chrome-7...

Keep using Chrome on your mac, then (though be aware that there are 0-day exploits found for Chrome on a somewhat regular basis too), or even better: Use Safari. At least it's not Chrome. Fight the monoculture.

The vast majority of computer users are still not using MacOS and those people can also do some good by using Firefox even if you can't.

When it comes to "slow" and "resource hungry" the Firefox devteam is very responsive to bugs. I've had approaching a dozen performance issues I personally reported get fixed.

I feel like there might be some miscommunication between our posts, because it looks like you’re arguing against my points but I agree with you.

Both of our points can be true and the same time, and I believe they are.

It’s also really rough for me on Windows too. I try it every months a new release comes out and I don’t last a day.

Sites render badly (names colors and fonts look wrong on Firefox but look the same on Edge Chrome and Safari (macOS))

It hangs multiple times a day

Some heavy JS sites are much slower in FF than Chromium

It takes dev tools minutes to become responsive on the site I work on, while in Chromium they load up very quickly.

> look the same on Edge Chrome and Safari

In other words: Blink, Blink, and WebKit (of which Blink is a fork) look the same. This is why people talk about supporting Firefox to avoid a monoculture.

Regular edge, not chromium Edge. So that’s three different rendering engines that can do it right, and one that doesn’t.

> And this article comes out just after reports of a 0-day exploit of Firefox on macOS

Chrome also has regular zero-days.

Yes, I’m saying the timing is not the best because this one was serious and is still fresh; if you’re already discontent with Firefox, articles trying to convince you to switch won’t do the job, right now.

I think the rethoric is targeting Chrome users. Users fully satisfied with Safari won’t find that much to bite by going to firefox.

I’m also not fully satisfied with Safari (poor control over privacy — content blocking is weaker than uBlock Origin, and you can’t disable cookies and javascript on a per-site basis).

Sorry. Don't know about these issues on macOS. I wrote this note based on my case (using Ubuntu and Windows)

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