Hacker News Reader

Comment by kej | Hacker News Reader

You can just do this anyway, you know. Firefox is pretty great these days.

I wish Mozilla focused more on Linux support. I tried switching to Firefox multiple times, and in day-to-day use I always keep running into unfixable problems like bad font rendering, slow webgl performance, ui glitches etc.

Problems like this never happen when I'm using Firefox on Windows, and honestly the state of Firefox on Linux is kind of surprising since it's the most commonly recommended and preinstalled browser on Linux distros.

Right now I'm using Chromium but I'd be eager to switch if there was anything better which could provide me with a fast and stable browsing experience.

I'm using Firefox on Linux¹ and I have experienced none of those problems. Although I'm not particularly happy with the direction that Mozilla has been headed, Firefox is certainly a vast improvement over Chrome or even Chromium.

1. Latest version of Firefox (not ESR), Latest Debian, both Intel & AMD graphics. I can't speak for NVIDIA graphics on Linux as I gave up on NVIDIA a few years ago.

Admittedly there were a few issues in the past, just nothing in the last couple of years that I can think of.

I was on Linux for about 10 years without a single issues with Firefox until it was turned into a snap package. Slow as hell startup times and other oddities. Removed that and installed from apt and it was back to perfectly stable. Font rendering was always different but I wouldn't say worse. In fact, now that I'm fully back on Windows, the font rendering on Linux is the only thing I really miss. Windows seems a bit blurry in comparison.

It depends on how Firefox was installed, snap and flatpaks are becoming the default for firefox on a few distros every variant of each that I've tried has those issues

I usually have to download the developer edition from the website and setup a desktop entry for decent performance

Agreed, I have the same experience. I switched to Vivaldi lately because of tab groups, I want to switch back to Firefox because Vivaldi has various annoyances but tab groups are keeping me from going back.

Sideberry extension solves this for me

I'll try that, thanks! The issues I've had with tree-style tabs previously was that I use a portrait screen, so horizontal space is at a premium, and I can't afford a thick sidebar always showing.

The font thing in particular is interesting because Firefox is actually generally ahead of Chrome when it comes to most things related to fonts

https://wpt.fyi/results/css?label=experimental&label=master&...

> I always keep running into unfixable problems like bad font rendering, slow webgl performance, ui glitches

Been using Firefox on Linux as my daily driver and haven't seen any of that. Can you provide any examples?

Admittedly there are a lot of variables here, and this may not be a fair test at all, but it's interesting to me that Firefox on Windows loads many web pages much faster (relative to Chrome) than Firefox on Linux loads those same web pages (according to Mozilla's own metrics).

Take a look at IMDb, Imgur, LinkedIn, Netflix, Outlook, Twitter, Wikipedia on the following pages. In all these cases, using Chrome's performance as a benchmark, Firefox performs worse on Linux (often significantly) than it does on Windows. I didn't see any cases where Linux performs significantly better than Windows.

https://arewefastyet.com/win10/warm-page-load/overview?numDa...

https://arewefastyet.com/linux64/warm-page-load/overview?num...

Wikipedia is a shocking case (because it's such a simple site). Chrome loads Wikipedia in about the same time on Linux as it does on Windows (unsurprisingly). Firefox takes almost three times longer!

Again, I don't have any way to get enough data to verify these numbers. They might be incorrect. But if Mozilla's performance metrics for Firefox on Linux are screwy, then doesn't it speak in favor of OP's point that nobody has looked into the issue and fixed it?

I didn't notice it before but I think you're absolutely right about these websites. Thanks for sharing

I can’t report any of those issues, my biggest gripe is Ubuntu forcing a snap package on to me

You need Firefox from the Mozilla PPA.

Yes I know, but requiring me to add a PPA purely because canonical want to push snap is toxically bad faith

> bad font rendering

would I be correct in guessing that you're using the snap? It's pretty, uh, garbage. The Chromium snap keeps having font problems too.

this is fun because the snap works perfectly on my machine, and it's fast as the native version. I think the snap version is far better than running it natively (more secure). A web browser is a hacker's dream.

I specifically mean the font problem, where the system fonts weren't making it into the snaps. Seems to have resolved in recent weeks.

I have been main driving Firefox on Linux for the past six years, on Lubuntu, without any kind of problems. None whatsoever. It's fast and it's rock solid stable.

Edit: some people mentioned it's Firefox snap that has problems. I'm using the apt-get package one.

Crappy font rendering is a Linux problem. The appearance of the same font in different applications can vary wildly. It’s really shit.

The appearance varies widely because everything has incompatible layers on top of freetype, some of which respect your Freetype configuration and others which take... _ahem_... liberties.

It also doesn't help when Mozilla and Google statically-link ancient font libraries in the name of security.

Isn't linking to outdated libraries a security threat?

You need a robust font selection. With few options installed the replacements selected autom6for some are kind of shitty. On arch you can install ttf-ms-fonts other options are available.

> I wish Mozilla focused more on Linux support.

FWIW I use Firefox on Linux every day and haven't particularly noticed any difference from Firefox on Mac. Works pretty awesome on both.

Also it would be healthy for the web ecosystem overall if users, especially power users, would use less Chrome. Any excuse to uninstall Chrome is a good excuse.

I have to use either edge or chrome for work, so keeping a consistent ecosystem for home too works well. I can’t recall why FF couldn’t be used. Windows Hello, maybe? Anyways, when I checked 3 or so years ago, it was a conscious decision on FF’s part to not support an absolutely critical feature. Not having Adblock would be enough reason for me to want to juggle two browsers, but FF is simply not a desirable option right now, as much as I would love for it to be.

Or at least change their user agent to skew the statistics. :/

Statistics come from google analytics, which most Firefox users block. When I compare stats from my webservers with GA, it’s clear that either bots overwhelmingly prefer Firefox UAs, or it’s underrepresented in GA stats.

If the Firefox version is more than a year old, it’s a bot.

Or, the first time I've booted this computer in >1 yr.

I’d really discourage browsing random websites with a browser that is years out of date.

> You can just do this anyway, you know. Firefox is pretty great these days.

Agree to that. Chrome might delay cutting off user control of web content but in the end they will push through what is best for google, in other words what is best for advertisers, in other words what's worst for me. As a public for-profit advertising company, they can't really do anything else.

Firefox rocks!

Especially on macs

I found it's lack of support for native functionality in MacOS too irritating (eg doesn't support system wide autocomplete - so my @@ shortcut that puts my email address in doesn't work in FF - I know I could put it in again in FF but it's annoying it just doesn't work) so I went back to Chrome in the end.

I was using Edge for a while but the absolute car crash their UI has become - and can't be configured - sent me running screaming for the hills.

Edit - and don't get me started on the massive slowdowns once I have more than a handful of tabs open.

My biggest complaint with Firefox on macOS is the lack of support for native picture-in-picture. They implement their own version that doesn’t stay visible when you swap between the virtual desktops; won’t overlay on top of full screen applications; and can’t be moved across monitors (iirc) either.

Now that's weird as PIP in FF always worked fine for me - including swapping between desktops and full screen. In fact I thought PIP in Chrome wasn't as well implemented as took several more clicks to activate.

Can't comment about monitors as I don't use a multi monitor setup on my Mac.

Your experience made me curious, I had to check and it looks like you're right – it does work between desktops and full screens. In fact it even works between monitors. Don't know why I thought it was in such a bad state, but I'm glad you replied. Cheers!

Switched to Firefox for like 6-12 months, eventually moved back to Edge a couple of weeks ago. Had to open it constantly anyways.

I couldn't get used to Firefox's DevTools and the JSON viewer in Firefox is bad compared to the JSON Formatter chrome extension.

Huh. I'm rather surprised you're comparing the out of the box firefox json formatting (rather good compared to chrome's non-existent formatter) to an extension. Are there no JSON formatting extensions for firefox?

I used an extension a while ago, however, it became unnecessary once the built in json view was implemented. Not sure if it's still around or whether it offers any advantage over the built in feature.

Couldn't find any that were on the same level as the one I use with Edge.

Well, Firefox's default JSON view is miles better than Chrome's JSON view.

Firefox is so spammy and not better for privacy. It opens tabs all the time to advertise how much that big browser is taking care of your privacy, while begging for your email to upload your passwords to their server so you can [place minor feature here] reopen a tab on your desktop.

How do I know this? I use Firefox for porn on mobile, therefore didn’t connect it to ANY of my Google accounts, anything, blank state Firefox, imagine my happiness when PornHub greets me with “Hello [NAME] [SURNAME], would you like to sign-in with that Gmail account that you also happen to use for work?”

This single datapoint absolutely proves that Mozilla’s care for privacy is a legend. Like saying “A honest politician.”

Reply on news.ycombinator.com