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Comment by whateveracct | Hacker News Reader

i'm sympathetic to this philosophically, but firefox is so bad on linux (of all platforms) for my normal use it's crazy. slack chokes up constantly on it (maybe due to too much local data?) and when i lose internet, firefox will get stuck saying "can't connect" when chrome, ping, curl all do fine.

and tbh..using my google account to sync my bookmarks is gonna beat any value-add firefox can offer. i have chrome on my iphone just to open safari pages in it to bookmark-sync them for later.

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> when i lose internet, firefox will get stuck saying "can't connect" when chrome, ping, curl all do fine.

When you lose Internet, how are Chrome, ping, and curl all connecting? Am I missing something?

Just an aside: I frequently see people say things like "X software is bad because [thing that makes it completely unusable]". This is always very surprising to me, because it's obviously a bug state, and not the expected operation of the program. Granted, the program being completely broken for you is a perfectly good reason to use a different program, but you can't really use it to call the program "bad", because almost by definition, it's something that very few other users are seeing. If a program instantly crashes whenever you try to launch it, it's a bit silly to rate it one star in your app store of choice, because (almost certainly) the failure state is both unexpected and fixable.

So, case in point, it's simply not true that "Firefox is so bad on Linux". Most users are not seeing absurdly slow websites, nor broken connections. This is obviously some kind of bug. I'm not going after you in particular, but this is a very common thought pattern on this site, and I want to highlight it.

oh sorry, i meant when i regain connection after losing internet

I use Firefox all the time on Linux. Sounds like there's something else funny going on with your system.

Firefox offers an account (bookmarks, tabs, etc) sync functionality with between the desktop browsers and mobile apps.

It works great for me on Linux. There are obviously some confounding factors here that happen to disproportionately impact Firefox on your system.

I use it daily on Linux for years now!

I've used it under openSUSE (either Leap or Tumbleweed), under Lubuntu, under kubuntu, and now under KDE Neon and I never had any issue with it!

Naturally, there are lots of people that can't say the same! But my experience has been mostly a breeze :)

There are some decisions I don't agree with... But that's life...

Setting all else aside, I'd use Firefox over Chrom{e|ium} browsers simply on technical and user-experience grounds. For general browsing, it simply works better, more quickly & smoothly.

Admittedly, I do keep Ungoogled Chromium & Brave around for the occasional Chrome-centric website, but I only end up using them a couple times a month.

I am only a causal Slack user, so while I haven't had any issues on Firefox using Slack, I could imagine there being issues.

Firefox on Linux has consistently worked brilliantly for me for years - until a few months ago. I now find it really struggles with Zoom, and regularly becomes barely responsive with Slack.

But I don't know if this is because of changes to Firefox, Slack/Zoom, Linux, Nvidia drivers, or something else. And I have no way to find out, short of retraining as a desktop performance engineer.

Firefox Sync will synchronize your tabs and bookmarks. So, Chrome is about at the same level.

As far as apps choking on it, considering Slack can't be arsed to make their calls work on Firefox, I have an idea who to blame, and it's not Mozilla.

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