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Comment by cies | Hacker News Reader

I find it's browser competitive with Chromium. Use it every day. No revival needed: just more users.

So please: just install and use FF already! :)

While I second this (I use Firefox as my main browser more or less uninterrupted since 15 years) some of what I perceive within the org worries me.

Mozilla does a lot of cool stuff aside of the browser, but what annoys me about ads in the address bar, shamelessly pushing pocket (a icon which for some reason I have to remove over and over again from the GUI) and similar things is not that they try to monetize their browser. What annoys me is that they don't have the trust in their own product that people would be willing to support them if they just asked. What annoys me is that they try those borderline dark-patterns and still try to sell it as a great feature for the user.

Just be honest to your users and if they understand your reasons they will support you, if they trust your decisions. Firefox was once a browser whos users bought T-shirts on it after all.

Agreed. I tried to find a compiled list of the proper about:config settings to disable all ads and integrations but it was constantly a guess and check. I still haven't figured out how to remove ALL of the default search/suggestion providers without manually removing them.

I recommend arkenfox's user.js[0] which uses (mostly) sane defaults oriented toward privacy and security. If nothing else, their user.js file is annotated so a quick Ctrl+F can help you find the exact settings you want to change.

[0] https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js

It's a company, it's a bit weird if they have to ask all the time for support, so they try to monetize in ways that finally are not really invasive. (At least that's my opinion)

They try, they fail, they try again, they fail again. It's hard to monetize from such a product, that's unfortunately the truth.

I use it as my daily driver on Linux (Gnome 3), and on Android.

I prefer it to Chromium due to its more native feel, the quality of the multi-device password and history sync, and the ability to zap tabs to and from my laptop.

adblock also works wonderfully.

I don't trust Google to implement these features or honour my privacy.

Same. After a brief flirt with Vivaldi, I came back to FF. Been a user for more than a decade.

It's fast and have good extensions. But they should divert their resources from pointless UI redesigns (proton) to better memory and power management.

I use FF almost exclusively on a desktop but can't afford luxury of running it on a laptop.

No idea why you can't afford to run it on a laptop. I use it in every single laptop I have, from 8gb RAM to 32gb of RAM, to my own smartphone, multiple tabs, multiple windows, etc etc and have no issue at all.

I admit that power mgmt and memory was a big issue before, but it improved, and it's still improving.

I don’t think the memory management part has gotten anywhere at all. Open 10 tabs on Firefox and I lose 2-3GB of my RAM just like that. Chrome and Edge never cross 700MB.

Firefox is a colossal RAM guzzler.

I have the opposite problem. I regularly open lots of tabs, and Chrome just expands its real estate pushing things into swap. Firefox just chugs on like a champion.

Definitely the opposite of what I see, as well.

The RAM think really depends on the websites and what resources they are allocating. The browser is really just accommodate that. Sites that do continuous scroll are the worst as they often don’t release resources as they go.

I mean, it consistently gives me highest energy score on a macbook.

I find that the video codecs used by sites are often the determining factors in that. If the site is playing videos using a codec that is handled well by the browser then the energy use is low. Otherwise it can jump up dramatically.

And Chromium does not?

Safari does not.

Good old KHTML :)

With multi containers extension, it’s actually a better browser than Chrome for me. It’s perfect for my needs.

I'm starting to see more and more sites employing faulty JS that happens to work in Chromium...

No http, no ftp, sends browsing data to google by default (safe browsing), DoH trown down the throat. I'm tired. Pale moon is better.

The Safe browsing implementation is designed with the intention that Google can't infer the URLs of sites you visit from any queries sent to them: https://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/posts/how-safe-browsing-works-...

Obviously you have to trust the FF Devs, but you're already doing that by running FF in the first place.

Pale Moon is good, but its slow JavaScript engine means it gets bogged down to a halt on the modern web -- and this problem will only get worse.

Yup, for me chrome is getting buggier while FF is pretty stable.

The decline in usage tells another story: for whatever reason most people find not so competitive with Chromium.

User's actual opinion may not matter here, at all. Popularity may be self-serving.

The only thing that's keeping me on Firefox is the lack of persistent pinned tabs In Chromium.

Vivaldi supports it, but it's too slow.

I've used Chrome and Firefox and I don't notice a significant difference between them. Why should I switch if there's no benefit to me?

Because mono cultures are not good. Because all platform controlled by one tech giant is not good. Because otherwise all sites will "build for IE6", ohh sorry, "build for Chrome".

Because Mozilla is a non-profit and is more interested in protecting your privacy than Google who monetizes your lack of privacy.

Not sharing your entire browsing history with some random company would be the reason.

Tried that, eated up my entire RAM.

A reasonable web browsing experience is no longer possible (on any browser) on machines with 8 GB of RAM or less. Horrific, but true. Either get more RAM, use something like Total Suspender to suspend inactive tabs to disk, or limit yourself to 10-15 tabs open at once (and fewer than that if you're using modern, heavy JS web applications).

Dunno man, I'm actually using it right now and with 4 tabs open it's using 1.3 gb of RAM. These websites aren't specially heavy either, none of them it's Facebook or another social network.

My understanding is that the RAM per tab metric drops as you have more tabs. Firefox is more willing to cache stuff when you have only 4 tabs open, so that's not a great metric. Plus you have to consider the base RAM use of the browser itself. 1.3 GB isn't all that much on a modern system with 8 GB available, for example; the problem is more that Firefox doesn't handle 20+ tabs very well especially when you've got Twitter, Google Docs, Slack, etc open.

I never have any problems with Firefox having 80+ tabs open spread across 5 window.

How much RAM do you have? How much RAM does Firefox use, e.g. after you've had it open for several days?

My recent experience of keeping 1000 tabs around and auto unloaded (managed by Sidebery, a vertical tab bar plugin), is that it usually occupies 3~5 GBs.

I turn off my computer every day. RAM consumption after some time of usage isn't bad at all...

Ah the myth. I currently have 100+ tabs open on my old android phone, which has less RAM than any computer sold in the last decade.

How's that the myth? I literally tried it, it always end up eating more RAM than Chromium dunno why.

What is the meassurable difference?

How much RAM do you use? My wife’s 8gb and my 16gb Macs have never seen Firefox get especially RAM hungry

Could be one of the extensions you installed?

And Chrome/Chromium didn't?

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