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Comment by pontifier | Hacker News Reader

I switched to Firefox several years ago out of principal, but it's been a struggle to stay with it.

2 big issues I have are the tendency to freeze, and then say "restart to keep using Firefox" because it updated in the background and can't continue.

The other was almost a deal breaker, and still could be. When using a barcode scanner, Firefox can't keep up with the characters coming from the scanner. It will randomly drop characters. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why some scans weren't working, and the scanner works perfectly in Chrome, works perfectly in a text editor and intermittently drops characters randomly in Firefox.

If it were just the start character, or the end character it wouldn't matter so much, but it drops characters in the middle of a barcode. It has for years, it's a known issue, I don't see it ever being fixed.

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> the tendency to freeze, and then say "restart to keep using Firefox" because it updated in the background and can't continue.

I never encountered that, neither freezing nor being forced to restart. By default Firefox will only download updates in the background and inform you that the update will be installed if you restart.

That is incorrect. By default, it installs in the background and then displays the behaviour reported by GP. You probably have it set to not install before prompting you.

No, I'm using the default settings of Firefox for Windows. I just installed Firefox in a new Windows VM to confirm this. Automatic installation of updates in the background is enabled by default there. There's also a checkbox to use use a background service for installing updates which is enabled by default, though that's likely a Windows specific feature.

> Automatic installation of updates in the background is enabled by default there.

I'm confused. That's what I said is the default, and you said it isn't. Now you start by saying "no" to me, and confirming what I had said. Sorry if I've missed something though, I'm really tired right now.

You're right to be confused, sorry. I meant to day "Automatic installation of updates when Firefox is not running is enabled by default there."

I said "no" to "have it set to not install before prompting you" because I use the default settings. Now I'm actually also a bit confused whether you meant "it installs in background [while browsing]" or "it installs in background [while Firefox is not running, using the background update server]"

With the default "when Firefox is not running" setting, the updates should _download_ in the background and then inform you that it will be installed next time you restart.

The freezing and forced restart as reported by pontifier does not sound like default behaviour, it sounds like "when Firefox is not running" is unchecked.

Assuming you're talking about an actual barcode scanner device: barcode scanners commonly present as USB keyboards to the OS. The thing about USB keyboards is that events aren't pushed to the computer but are polled at a set rate (commonly 125Hz). It could be that the scanner produces the numbers quick enough to approach the USB polling rate, and maybe Chrome has some additional smarts to handle it, or maybe Firefox just adds a bit of overhead that's enough to lose some of the characters. You could try increasing the computer's polling rate and see if that helps.

The scanner works perfectly in everything except Firefox. I've tried multiple scanners, I've tried different settings. I think I even tried setting an inter-character delay. Firefox is the only thing that seems to drop characters. I basically had to write the back end of my web app to do error checking after the fact and reject barcodes that didn't have the right number of characters. Which doesn't help at all when some barcodes are different lengths. I had to add an extra step for the user to tell the back end how many characters were in the barcode before they can scan one.

Just a guess but you could avoid the step with length input (if the only purpose is to check for errors) if you checked the CRC checksum of the barcode. But that's just an uneducated guess, I have no idea how your app works.

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