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Comment by lelanthran | Hacker News Reader

Good! Give everyone the push they need to break the web homogeny of Chrome everywhere.

I'm tired of all the (mostly technical) people whining that they need Chrome, and only Chrome can browse the internet. Then you ask them for a site that doesn't work and conveniently "it was some time back and I don't remember the details".

I've been using FF since before it was called Firefox. In the last 10 years I've not come across any site that doesn't work with Firefox - online shopping, social media, banking, custom line-of-business internal apps, ERP apps... you name it.

And, TBH, if I did, I'd just visit that one site with Chrome, and still use FF daily.

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> In the last 10 years I've not come across any site that doesn't work with Firefox

I have. The dominos pizza website (at least in Ireland) basically never works with Firefox. I normally end up using Safari for that particular site.

Additionally, lots of stuff doesn't work when Advanced Tracking Protection is on, enough that if I have any issues my first step is disabling that.

Did you ever click 'report broken website' button? It's there specifically for those cases.

where is this button?

In the hamburger menu

Fox years with no changes, seemingly.

> The dominos pizza website (at least in Ireland) basically never works with Firefox.

Sounds more like a feature than a bug /s

I now daily drive firefox, there are unfortunately plently of broken sites. Nebula's video player is broken in widescreen for example.

Interesting. I also use Firefox and Nebula works fine for me. Do you have any extensions that may be causing that?

I keep firefox as a backup browser after more than 25y of on again off again use.

It simply does not work well on a lot of sites including government or bank websites. Wish it did.

But I'm wondering if you are doing something wrong. I just tried nebula in Firefox 151.0.3 and it works flawlessly. Full screen works, all buttons in the player work. I also tried it on Firefox for Android and it works.

Do you have any other websites that don't work?

Even on a blank profile.

A lot of web devs simply do not test on anything else, even for billion and trillion dollar companies, I've seen it first hand.

This includes a lot of state and federal government websites.

Note: I have said nothing about nebula, I don't even know what that is if it's not the network overlay.

https://nebula.defined.net/docs/

Probably referring to the content platform: https://nebula.tv/

Nope, literally used it last night. No problems.

For me it's speed.

I used FireFox for the same reasons, for years. Every time I started Chrome, it was a breath of fresh air. Everything was just slightly faster to react, to switch tabs, to scroll, to interact.

I kept reading posts about how the FireFox team was increasing performance, yet it never seemed to really impact it. Maybe because I often have several windows with a dozen tabs each (yes, one of those people.)

These days I have given up, and I haven't tried it for about two years now, maybe more. Is it any better? Does anyone know, for real, not a marketing blog post?

It still lives on the Dock, next to Safari and Chrome. I can't bear to remove the icon.

And Mozilla seems way off in the weeds with its product and corporate strategy. At this point, I'd pay for a non-Chromium, highly performant, privacy-first browser.

> Every time I started Chrome, it was a breath of fresh air. Everything was just slightly faster to react

Are you opening "several windows with a dozen tabs each" in Chrome? If not, then it's hardly a fair comparison.

Absolutely. In fact I find I can use Chrome more heavily.

> Every time I started Chrome, it was a breath of fresh air. Everything was just slightly faster to react, to switch tabs, to scroll, to interact.

Well, with unblockable ads coming to Chrome, that will no longer be true.

There is no world in which browsing on Chrome with ads is faster than browsing on Firefox without ads.

> Is it any better? Does anyone know, for real, not a marketing blog post?

Well, since moving from ads to no-ads results in roughly a 30% performance increase, you can expect Firefox with uBlock origin to beat out anything in Chrome.

> And Mozilla seems way off in the weeds with its product and corporate strategy.

Agreed.

I really don't think so. Firefox performance is really that bad. I sadly had to stop using it.

> Well, with unblockable ads coming to Chrome, that will no longer be true.

You've been arguing strongly (condescendingly, really) against people making (what you see as) uneducated claims about Firefox. Yet there you are, doing the same with Chrome.

Sadly same here. firefox ran FoundryVTT poorly in the browser, like 12 fps, on Linux. Chromium had 0 issues with it, 60 no problem.

Meta's ad manager breaks maybe once a year on Safari, so I have to boot up Chrome. Also recently there's been an odd bug on more than one sites (at least Zoho mail and, again, Meta) where the top 20 or so pixels are hidden behind the tab bar. Again works in Chrome. But mostly Safari has been fine.

I switched to FireFox like 8 years ago, but to be completely honest there are maybe 2-3 very important sites that straight up do not work for me at all with FireFox. Like, completely unusable, not just weird graphical issues.

Such as?

accuweather.com was the biggest one, though it looks like they fixed it sometime in the last month.

I used accuweather.com in Firefox a bunch a decade ago. Did not have problems.

It was specifically broken like 4~ years ago and fixed within the last month or so.

YouTube is an example of a site that Firefox has trouble handling.

Unsure if its a Firefox bug, Google pushing nonsense or uBlock Origin but constantly the YouTube UI Lags, video playback buffers, freeze, etc. Some days its near unuseable on Firefox, but I push through.

> YouTube is an example of a site that Firefox has trouble handling

That's fully on Google. I use plenty of other streaming sites where Firefox handles full-screen video just fine. Coming from the web search company that penalizes the rest of the Internet for slow-loading pages, Youtube is basically an embarrassment and I'm convinced this is completely intentional.

It's gotten so bad that I don't even try to watch Youtube in-browser any more; when someone posts a link that I think might be worth the effort, it goes straight into youtube-dl and I'll watch it offline or not at all.

'Then you ask them for a site that doesn't work' - For me it was Youtube. Debian 13, Gnome, apt update && apt install firefox, try playing a video. It's always noticebly slower, and last time it didn't even play at all. It might be skill issue or Google malicious behavior or both, but I'm ashamed to say installing Chrome was easier than troubleshooting. I'm slowly growing balls to sacrifice my comfort and migrate nontheless. But I'm tired of people pretending it's just as good and easy to use. Also, if anyone's wondering, gaming on linux still sucks, just a bit less.

Google makes google-owned properties perform worse on Firefox on purpose and you fell for it.

> 'Then you ask them for a site that doesn't work' - For me it was Youtube. Debian 13, Gnome, apt update && apt install firefox, try playing a video. It's always noticebly slower, and last time it didn't even play at all. It might be skill issue or Google malicious behavior or both, but I'm ashamed to say installing Chrome was easier than troubleshooting. I'm slowly growing balls to sacrifice my comfort and migrate nontheless. But I'm tired of people pretending it's just as good and easy to use.

These are very different experiences we have. I've been using FF on Linux and on Windows since before the first day I found Youtube, and have not yet had a period where it doesn't work.

It's not pretending when tens of thousands are browsing that self-same site just fine over the period you had problems.

I've used Debian, Mint, Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, Slackware and more. In none of them did I need to do anything specific to make FF work on youtube.

> Also, if anyone's wondering, gaming on linux still sucks, just a bit less.

What am I doing wrong? All the games I want to play just seem to work without issue, including new AAA titles, with exceptions for things that use kernel level anticheat that I wouldn't play anyway specifically because of that.

Arc Raiders, Helldivers 2, Factorio, etc just fine. I'm even involved in some alpha / beta testing for a couple of new games.

Just running fedora + proton (wine). I just use the regular steam client like anyone else.

> whining

- Chrome is safer due to the proper sandboxing of tabs.

- Try watching anything on YouTube on Firefox - for me even 360p stream (on 12c, mostly idle Linux PC) stutters to the point of being unwatchable. None of the is/browser settings work. Yeah, I realise YouTube is owned by Google

That's just my first two (just look it up, don't take my word for it), to show your "whining" claim is just an uneducated hostility not bound in facts.

> - Try watching anything on YouTube on Firefox - for me even 360p stream (on 12c, mostly idle Linux PC) stutters to the point of being unwatchable.

I'm literally watching Lowko videos right now, on a computer made in maybe 2010, running Linux Mint and FF.

Just look it up :))))

this sounds like a weird driver issue. in 30 years of watching content on YouTube, I've never seen it stutter unless I was using some weird low power PC.

That's pretty okay spec laptop, stuttering happens only in YT on Firefox (even at 360p), never in chrome (even at 4k), or on any other site. Up to date Fedora, always recent kernels (happens on all), everything pretty much latest, symmetric 1Gbit Ethernet + fibre uplink, etc, etc.

If you'd look it up you could see its not a single person problem, it's seemingly random.

The only negative experience I've had is with google sites.

No.

You do realize that people have stuff to do and want their browser to be both 1) fast and 2) compatible with all websites?

Firefox is slower than Chromium, and always will have some compatibility issues, because all websites are made with Chromium in mind.

You can pretend all you want that "well ackshually standards exist and all website makers should use things from the standard", but it's not realistic, everyone will just stick with what works on Chromium.

Also projects like Ungoogled Chromium exist, but for some reason Firefox fanboys conveniently ignore them and pretend that all Chromium-based browsers are evil and Firefox is our last bastion of hope (it isn't and also it sucks)

People are also too lazy to go vote and then cry when someone gets elected that they didn't want to. Sometimes participating in society means not always taking the easiest path.

It won't matter if dozens of nerds use Firefox, Chromium is just better in every way and that's the reason for it's popularity. No amount of "voting" will change that.

Manifest V3 doesn't prevent anyone from blocking ads, as proven by uBO Lite. And yet misinformation about MV3 takes place in every Chromium vs Firefox debate.

That sounds like the apple fanboys "but it just works, why wouldn't I like a monopoly"

> Firefox is slower than Chromium,

IME, ads introduce a 30% or more performance penalty, the only way Chrome is "faster" is if you view ads on FF.

So, sure, if you don't want to block ads, Chrome just might be slightly faster. But the browser that never fetches ads in the first place is always going to be faster.

For some bizarre reason you think that you can't block ads on Chromium. uBO Lite exists and blocks ads just as well as uBO.

Chromium is technically faster but in practice it doesn’t matter if you don’t have an adblocker. Adblocking significantly lowers render and JS load and lessens memory pressure. It varies site to site, but keep in mind that ads have to be fetched and then displayed. That’s not free.

Firefox with uBlock origin is basically as fast as a web browser can get.

> It varies site to site, but keep in mind that ads have to be fetched and then displayed. That’s not free.

Move your ad blocking to a different layer. Like say, network level.

You could, but at the very least you'd need to MITM all HTTPS, and that means installing your own CA on all devices

This can be done but it’s not sophisticated enough for many ads. Websites are smart and will smuggle ads through known-good domains that you can’t block. You really need to be able to navigate the dom and use JS heuristics to identify ads and popups.

uBO Lite exists and blocks ads just as well as uBO. Why do people pretend it doesn't exist?

Because it doesn’t work just as well, because the blocking is less dynamic and filter lists are more out of date. For simple ad blocking scenarios it’s fine, but it will actually miss some ads on some websites.

I've yet to see any ads on uBO Lite so I'll assume it's false, unless you give an example

uBO lite struggles with dynamically inserted ads. I’m not sure if it works with YouTube midrolls, I haven’t tried it. I did try paramount plus months ago though, which uBlock handles but Lite doesn’t. That’s not really an intended use case for an adblocker though, IMO, so maybe it’s fine. And, maybe it’s improved by now.

> I did try paramount plus months ago though, which uBlock handles but Lite doesn’t. That’s not really an intended use case for an adblocker though, IMO, so maybe it’s fine.

What was not an intended use case for an ad blocker in your opinion? To block ads in video? Why?

I mean because paramount plus has an ad free tier, which I don’t pay for. In my mind adblockers are primarily a security and performance tool, not a tool to circumvent paying. That’s a nice side effect though.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48474710

I'll take slower and safer anytime over the jungle of ads and the dangers it exposes users to. If something doesn't work properly on FF I open up Chrome, use the site and then close it.

And to be honest FF is working fine for me, haven't run into anything too slow to my taste so far.

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