With all the things they've addressed in Firefox recently and with Chrome's manifest v3 nonsense, I'm running out of reasons not to switch.
I have a web app that allows customers to make templates for their standard operating procedures that they pull from our main product. For writing steps and substeps, I use a WYSIWYG HTML editor called TynyMCE. I went with it because I was able to implement it in an afternoon, their licensing was compatible with our use, and I had a tight deadline.
We failed to anticipate just how large some of the templates clients would be making, so sometimes when they open a template they end up having a couple hundred of these editors hidden behind drag and drop enabled accordions.
Firefox chokes on the initial TinyMCE calls for these large templates, taking quite a long time to fully render the page. Once it's done, everything is nice and snappy, but it's like a 20-30 second wait after the wire even on my beefy 5900x.
Chrome seems to handle this just fine.
It's possible that the culprit is a bad polyfill or a Firefox-specific bug in TinyMCE, I haven't put much work into diagnosing it yet beyond verifying that TinyMCE is eating up all the CPU time. For now my planned solution is to just write my own WYSIWYG editor, because TinyMCE ultimately offers a lot more than we actually need, and it was only a stopgap solution to get out a polished MVP. But needless to say, for the first time in years, I found myself spending a non-trivial amount of development time in Chrome. Sadly I've never actually had a client use this app with anything other than Chrome or Safari, so this is naturally a low-priority issue.
Here are instructions of using the profiler with just a few clicks: https://profiler.firefox.com/
I am sure Mozilla would appreciate a bug filed in Bugzilla if you can.
The Firefox Profiler is an amazing piece of work. It's my tool of choice even for non-Firefox scenarios, since it can load in perf profiles (and even Chrome profiles, though I haven't tried that). It has grown into a general profiler front-end, and continues to see significant improvements. I have heard of a number of people adopting it as their system profiler of choice for arbitrary workloads, not just browser-related ones.
(I work at Mozilla, but not on the profiler. At least not most of the time. I've added some small things in to give it more information about my specific subsystem. I have enormous respect for the work going into the profiler, both the functionality and design.)
The reason TinyMCE won out was because they made self-hosting easy under license terms that my employer was OK with, and wrapping the whole thing in a Vue component only took me a few hours.
FWIW, TinyMCE is a bit long in the tooth these days. I implemented my own from-scratch WYSIWYG editor back in 2010, and it wasn’t even the best option then (ckEditor was much better), and many people were using the unreliable lightweight jquery based editors because TinyMCE was considered too heavyweight.
I wouldn’t like to say for sure that’s it’s the source of your problems (Firefox’s contenteditable implementation is also “quirky”), but it could well be.
What if you only loaded/initialized the editors when they became visible?
For your own mental health, don’t. I was looking for an old article describing how bad the API is, written by one of the authors of a WYSIWYG JS editor, but I can’t find it.
Or
https://medium.engineering/why-contenteditable-is-terrible-1...
Are two that I remember reading... nearly 10 years ago, holy hell can someone please make time slow down? Which discuss the common API pitfalls with `contenteditable` -- though I've no idea how painful it is in 2022. Could be a lot better now?
> Could be a lot better now?
Effectively zero progress. Last year I heard some work being done on an alternative API but I haven’t see that since. I don’t expect anything to be done before 2025 if ever.
Basically it just lets you extend how many roles/accounts you can switch between in the AWS console UI.
Also keep in mind although Firefox containers is made by Mozilla it's a plugin that you have install, which was very counter intuitive when I first wanted to use it.
I believe Apple is doing something similar with their virtualization API - it's there, some folks can use it, but they don't want to surface it to the masses.
In practice, it feels like that has hurt adoption. You can't pave the cowpaths if the cows aren't venturing out of the corner of the field.
I leave Safari as my default browser, although I actually use it the least. But I like having the same "default" experience on my desktop and phone. If I am opening a link from Mail.app or punching something into Alfred it will open in Safari. I use some light ad-blocking. I use Chrome for work. I use Google Translate a bit and this works extra well in Chrome. Plus, Google apps and whatnot. Limited ad-blocking because I'm often using ads platforms. I use Firefox for all my intentional/casual browsing. Maximum ad blocking.
Adblock Plus, Ghostery, and Hush on macOS.
(/rant)
I know this it heresy to say on HN, especially coming from someone who whines about gov surveillance as much as the next person, but I personally love YouTube's recommendation system. And I know from experience it uses what you actually spend time watching to make recommendations (not just what you click on). So I'd personally miss having them be able to measure that...
I feel like YouTube knows me better than any other service I use (besides maybe Spotify which also measures what you actually listen to) and I pay to be a YT subscriber so I don't se ads on iOS mobile (jailbreaking doesn't provide with me ROI).
I hear a lot of HNers complain YouTube recommends conspiracy or negative politics stuff (see: Twitter and Reddit for that who also completely suck at recommendation systems despite aggressive analytics) but to me it sounds like a) they don't actually use YouTube often enough to tell it what you want or b) they are using blockers/not logged in so it can't learn what you like.
BUT THAT BEING SAID, getting to use a minimalist <video> tag sounds very nice otherwise.
It's Chrome dominating, Webkit a somewhat distant second [1], and Firefox a third, quickly disappearing into oblivion [2].
[1] There's a huge number of weird versions of WebKit running on TVs and such.
[2] It's barely around 200M users, but it's bleeding users slowly and surely https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity and https://news.itsfoss.com/firefox-decline/
* Blink (Google)
* WebKit2 (Apple and some folks, mainly WebKit2Gtk)
* Gecko (Mozilla)
Microsofts Trident is dead, they now use Blink.
Operas Presto is dead, they now use Blink.
KDEs KHTML (the predecessor of WebKit1) is dead.
WebKit features also WebKit2Gtk (Epiphany) and Qt5-webkit (Otter) with native integration. Both use the native toolkits, which is an advantage! Interaction with the open-source community around WebKit seems rather good and the engine is integrated by others. Gecko seems not to be integrated by others but by forks only? You remember when Chrome was considered slick and fast? Originally Chrome used the native toolkit on every platform. Now Chrome ships an own toolkit, similar to Firefox.
And? Maybe there is a new engine on the block:
https://github.com/SerenityOS/ladybird
PS: I think the Epiphany guys doing a nice job but need more developers. The upcoming release will support Web-Extensions.
Granted, that was more about mobile devices but it still stuck with me. Effortless and safe concurrency would tip the scales to having hundreds of low power cores instead of a dozen high powered cores. I want that world, esp for mobile devices and laptops.
Unfortunately nothing had improved by the time I left in 2021.
Bonus: Charging your mobile phone takes less percents off your battery life than with a macbook.
Did they work? Yes! Performance on lightly loaded systems was about the same as OSSpinLock but on loaded ones, they provided massively better responsiveness. They also did something extremely useful for laptop users: they cut down power consumption as a lot less cycles were wasted having the CPUs spinning on locks that couldn’t be acquired.
Firefox is supposed to get that too. Believe it's in Nightly already.
- better privacy protections
- not wanting to leave web standards entirely to Google/Apple (for-profit corps)
Brave attempts to address the first, but does little about the second as it uses Blink (i.e. Chrome's engine). Personally, I care a lot more about the second.
They’re not wives, you can have more than one.
Firefox will have no such problem, as Mozilla has specifically committed to keeping the necessary features.
It does in theory also help block some malicious sites so you do get a bit of added security in that way. That can also be helpful if you have kids - block sites you don't want them on etc.
Personally I've also found their servers to be reasonably performant, no issues with query response times or anything like that.
But now that I'm using native tabs, it is much easier for me to use multiple windows because the tabs are attached. Thanks for pointing this out!
It's not a direct apples to apples comparison, but my anecdotal evidence, on Linux, is the opposite. I usually use Firefox on my Linux/X11 box, but every now and again I fire up Chromium and always get the feeling that it's much snappier.
Someone should make an automated Unmozilla’d Firefox that rips out all phone-home and advertising. I’d run that.
* CPU Usage is extremely higher than in chrome for video call/meeting related websites.
* Font rendering is horrible on a lot of websites. I think this is more fault of the website developers, but it doesn't change the fact that I as end user with Firefox have subpar experience.
* The native OS integration seems very janky, from swipe to go back, to pinch to zoom, something feels off about them.
* I've encountered a lot more websites that didn't quite work smoothly. This is same as one of the points above of web developers being at fault here, but it still doesn't change my experience with FF.
I want to use Firefox, but not if it degrades my experience - which it currently very noticeably does.