I came here to make sure that Tree Style Tabs was represented, and I see that it's already been mentioned several times. Why wouldn't Chrome build this in? It seems like they could grab a decent number of power users that way — and presumably make some of their other users happy along the way.
I will note, however, that because of TST on Firefox, I keep way more tabs open there than in Chrome (20x, I'd guess). Based on the few times when I've had more than 15 or 20 tabs open on Chrome, I could imagine that it would bog down most machines. Perhaps they're not building it in because it would encourage people to browse with many tabs open, which would suck up lots of memory?
I can imagine that's the case. Chrome with just moderate number of tabs open (under 100) already becomes unusable, both from UI and performance perspective, while Firefox many times worked fine for me with thousands.
Thanks for the suggestions, and last year I dedicated a six month trial to using those "separate-window" implementations in Chrome, but I'm very sorry to say they remained clumsy.
I group my work into topics by desktop; one browser instance per desktop, with an average total of 200+ tabs across eight windows. Restarting Firefox means sorting eight browser instances, one hotkey to snap them to half-width. Restarting Chrome required sorting sixteen browser windows, then manually aligning each primary window plus its tab window using the mouse. I tried, I really did, but that never became less of a pain.
NoScript is mentioned in the article as not being available on Chrome, and I've heard that Chrome ad-blockers still show ads. Google being an ad company, I wouldn't expect them to allow particularly thorough ad-blocking.
I'm not one to defend Chrome, but the functionality of uBlock Origin you get on Firefox is the exact same as what you get on Chrome. Same filters available and everything.
If you still see an ad in Chrome with uBlock Origin installed, it's likely that the filters haven't updated to block that particular ad yet. Moreover, you'd likely see the same ad when browsing with the equivalent Firefox.
That's true enough; but uBlock Origin is my second line of defense -- the main one is NoScript. It requires quite a bit of savvy to navigate modern websites that way, but if you can work it out it's pretty powerful.
- I am used to the way the software feels (the way it hangs up or freezes... but at work I use Google Chrome because of the proxy and being used to it in that specific place it's firefox I can't stand... with the exception of the company issued laptop on which I installed firefox (no proxy)). Psychosomatic ? Very much, yes.
- free software
- I like the logo and the name (I am a minotaur and phoenix early adopter and moz before that)
- I think they are good people and were there when I (as a user) needed them. I know chrome or IE is there to suck out my soul and my data (yuck).
> I am a minotaur and phoenix early adopter and moz before that
Interesting, I had never heard of Mozilla Minotaur before. I can't find many details online, other than it was a new mail client before Phoenix was renamed Firefox. Was Minotaur an early version of Thunderbird?
100% the same - Chrome might be the faster browser, but it doesn't matter when it's hobbled with ads. I imagine that's even more significant when you have an older phone.
I think the argument misses the point. Most of the people who are using Firefox without extensions are doing so because someone who likes the freedom of the browser -- including the ability to run all current extensions -- suggested it.
>> In fact it's insulting to all those contributors who work so hard on Firefox to say that extensions are the only thing keeping them from switching to Chrome.
The ability to run extensions is just the most popular manifestation of a browser that has always valued user freedom. So my question is, why are they stopping with that mentality? Why blame the victims of such a poor decision? Taking away my option to use extensions seems like the insulting choice to me.
Because, in practice, officially giving unfettered access to Firefox's internals to third-party developers makes changing anything in the Firefox codebase a potential quagmire. It's taken five or six years for electrolysis to begin seeing the light of day, and that's because such a drastic rearchitecture of the browser ended up breaking basically every popular addon in the wild. In the meantime, the inability to evolve the browser has hampered its ability to compete with Chrome, whose deliberately-specified addons API leaves it with no such baggage. Not to mention that the greater scope of Firefox addons has more severe implications for user security, which means that Mozilla has to spend resources to further vet every addon on AMO, which leads to even more complaints at the sluggishness of the apparent bureaucracy.
Addons were absolutely a great way to differentiate Firefox from IE back in the day, but in the context of modern web browsing having such a free-for-all addons interface is a lose-lose proposition. It's absolutely a shame, but the market of browser users has been inexorably making this decision for years now.
That was well said. But at the end of the day doesn't it remain an argument that users shouldn't be able to run the extensions that have been freely available, aka "we know better than you." Breaking Firefox to turn it into the browser they wished they had made will be disastrous, I'm afraid. It seems to me there are any number of "middle paths" (or dual paths) that Mozilla could take, but they don't want to do anything to jeopardize their consolidated user base.
> But at the end of the day doesn't it remain an argument that users shouldn't be able to run the extensions that have been freely available
I'm unsure what you're arguing here. Their goal is not to abandon addons for the sake of abandoning addons. On the contrary, Mozilla has been sweating blood for years to strike a balance between 1) making the vast architectural changes that will keep them competitive with other browsers and 2) keeping as few addons as possible from breaking with each release. And rarely do they ever get kudos for their efforts in keeping up this balancing act--instead they just get panned both for not being as fast as Chrome and then breaking some subset of addons anyway. So we've at last reached a breaking point: between electrolysis and project quantum, Mozilla is at last forced to choose between being a slow browser with powerful addons or being a fast browser with limited addons. I'm sure there are plenty of folks on HN who will wish they had taken the former path rather than the latter, but the problem is that Mozilla's mission of influencing web standards depends on having sufficient market share to afford a seat at the standards table, and I happen to agree with Mozilla that there are more people out there who want a fast and secure browser than who want an extensible browser (and I say that as someone who's been using Firefox with addons since version 1). (And for all that the point might still be moot: maybe Chrome with its marketing momentum and Safari and Edge with their platform advantage really are unassailable regardless of which path is taken here.)
In any case, as unhelpful as it may sound, the idea that users won't be able to "run the extensions that have been freely available" is false. Old versions of Firefox will always exist, and every component is thoroughly open source, so if a community (or company) sees a demand for a fork of Firefox with legacy addons support then the opportunity is ripe.
>> that will keep them competitive with other browsers
I understand that is the hope. In reality it does represent a step away from the approach that has made Firefox popular. I would say it's a guess, at best, that Firefox is suffering because it is not moving towards a Chrome-like model fast enough... versus that Firefox suffering because of the move towards a Chrome-like model.
As far as "striking a balance", no that would be something like allowing users who want to keep older extension models do so by agreeing to a dialog box, and then offering to turn such extensions off in case performance problems actually arise.
I still think you're underestimating the difficulty here. This would effectively involve keeping a fork of Firefox in-tree, and trying futilely to keep those two implementations bug-for-bug compatible.
Goodwill, as I like Mozilla much more than Google. I kind of dislike the Chrome UI, but that's a minor point.
A lot of FF is hare-brained, though. E10S solved the unresponsive UI for me, but for the life of me, I don't know how to enable it on my touchscreen Dell. There is no indicator in preferences that tells me whether it is on or off and no button to simply force it.
Javascript-heavy websites tend to burn through the CPU of my Macbook Air, but I don't know how to throttle background tabs. Or at least profile which tab gobbles my cycles. About:performance is not that helpful. Ideally, there would be some indicator if a background tab eats more than x% CPU.
And for those that look at about:support and see it's disabled for some reason (an add-on you use doesn't play nice with it is the common thing), you should install an add-on called Add-on Compatibility Reporter, to tell you which one is causing you issues.
I spoke with a Firefox dev, I was told that due to accessibility settings, multithreading with touchscreens wouldn't come until the current Beta build is released to stable. Technically it should already work on the beta build but it doesn't seem to work for me.
In the meantime, you can force Firefox to enable multiprocess, even if you have a touchscreen by creating a new about:config pref "browser.tabs.remote.force-enable" = true.
For me it's a combination of extensions and philosophy.
Philosophy is pretty clear, but extensions that I find necessary are:
Tree Style Tabs (Chrome does not have a good replacement, I've tried them all)
DownThemAll
LastPass with better functionality
Mouse gestures (this is HUGE for me, I want to be able to lazily browse with my mouse when I please, open/close and switch tabs with just a right-click and a flick)
The Tree Style Tabs author is quite active[1]. I knew, he had a really great, and funny, site[2] for XUL lovers out there.
I was about to make a snarky comment about how filthy rich should he be, based on how TST is always praised everywhere, so I went to look for a donation button to link to my planned snarky comment.
I didn't find any donations button, so I dug a bit more and found this[3]: 'I am an incumbent IT engineer, but apart from my company's work, I'm serializing articles in the manga format entitled "Cis Tube Girls" in the monthly magazine on Linux related technology called Nikkei Linux.'
No processes. No hangouts. No index service started without asking. Chrome on Windows is a pig. Back when I was using it then nonstop then 25% of CPU usage was pegged to Chrome. I gave up trying to manage Chrome and switched to Firefox.
Recently Firefox said they were moving away from threads to processes. I think that's a mistake. Killing Chrome was a pain at times because when it does hang all the child processes had to be killed independently. It was possible to restart Chrome with orphaned processes. What a mess.
Also, I like the implementation of profiles in Firefox much better. I have a different profile for work, home and various side jobs. Very nice.
Chrome developers are crap developers and they hide behind processes because they don't have the chops to do threads. I hate to see Firefox move in that direction. Maybe Firefox needs to since Firefox is adopting Chrome extensions. But I refuse to use Chrome because it has crappy performance and usability. Hopefully Firefox doesn't move in the same direction.
I love Firefox because it's like the Emacs of browsers [1]. It's self-discoverable, it can be scripted and it has dozens of wonderful extensions.
To me, dropping their plugin architecture to achieve compatibility with Chrome is a bit absurd. Vimperator, GreaseMonkey and many others make Firefox unique.
[1] I know there's Conkeror, but the project seems to have stalled.
Not only has Conkeror stalled, but scrapping XUL is a surefire way to murder it in cold blood. The only option going forward would be to rewrite it as an alternate browser that uses Gecko and/or Servo as the engine.
My hope is that the move to WebExtensions will actually help here. Currently, Conkeror is theoretically compatible with Firefox extension-wise, but it often meant writing a bunch of glue code to expose Firefox extension functionality without Firefox' actual UI. Now that extensions are forced to be UI agnostic, it seems reasonable that a browser that's Firefox-compatible could have a much easier time with that. Hopefully a post-XUL Firefox will continue to support something along the basic lines of XULRunner (i.e. present a Firefox window without the actual UI) to make that easier than having to fork Firefox itself.
From my understanding, the initial rollout of multi-process has a single render process (in addition to the main browser process). There are ongoing experiments to determine the optimal number of processes, so it's likely to increase soon. In the future you can force this to 1 by using the "dom.ipc.processCount" pref if you don't want your process manager to resemble Chrome.
That's correct. Firefox currently uses one main browser process, one content process (for all tabs), and a plugin sandbox process. Multiple content processes (aka "e10s-multi") are coming soon, currently two content processes are the default in Firefox Developer Edition (53) and Nightly (54). More content processes will be added, though the Firefox team is quite aware of the concerns about memory usage. The next step will probably be four content processes plus a ServiceWorker process.
I feel like that defeats the point of multiprocess; on Chrome at least, the one-process-per-tab model is intended to isolate tabs from one another without having to duplicate a bunch of work that the OS does already.
You're correct that it defeats one of the points of multiprocess, but you still get parallel performance gains trivially that will scale well as more cores are added as well as isolation of crashes where it doesn't kill your whole session.
> Chrome developers are crap developers and they hide behind processes because they don't have the chops to do threads.
This might undermine the rest of your argument. Chrome developers are pretty damn sharp, and they use processes so they can add features the fastest while maintaining the best security profile (and record).
But I agree with your overall point. I'm saddened by the need for the browser to suck up more and more of my computer's resources - more gigabytes of ram, more cores - in order to enable web developers to develop ever-flashier applications faster. The balance has swung way too far, web applications (and even static content sites) need to be less flashy, and spend more time on reasonably sane implementations and libraries.
I'm also sad that Firefox is pressured into just doing what Chrome does. But I can understand, they don't see an alternative, they have to "keep up" with websites and user bases that can't be trusted.
> Recently Firefox said they were moving away from threads to processes. I think that's a mistake. Killing Chrome was a pain at times because when it does hang all the child processes had to be killed independently. It was possible to restart Chrome with orphaned processes. What a mess.
Your argument against a multi-process architecture is you once encountered a process-reaping bug in chrome. Can't even.
> I refuse to use Chrome because it has crappy performance and usability.
I worked as a platform engineer at Mozilla for several years. I heard so many unfounded opinions about <browser>'s <performance/memory/whatever> consumption that ran contrary to every benchmark and defied every attempt to extract statistics from the user that you'd think I would be numb to it. But I still get chills.
The advice was always the same though. "Does this occur if you open a fresh profile without your 900 tabs or 50 addons?" -- "If I'm going to do that I might as well switch to Chrome!" -- Well, I mean, okay.
> Chrome developers are crap developers and they hide behind processes because they don't have the chops to do threads. I hate to see Firefox move in that direction. Maybe Firefox needs to since Firefox is adopting Chrome extensions. But I refuse to use Chrome because it has crappy performance and usability. Hopefully Firefox doesn't move in the same direction.
This is insulting to a lot of very smart people who spent an enormous amount of time working on these engines. You can't just infer two traits about random software, attribute it to the biggest technical difference you can see, and then state that as fact. A multi-process architecture is much more difficult to get right than a multi-threaded one, and every single modern browser is pursuing it because it is worthwhile on numerous axis. Citing nothing but a vague luddite sentiment, you assert the hundreds of engineers who have spent years working on chrome don't "have the chops" to "do threads". Wat.
> Recently Firefox said they were moving away from threads to processes. I think that's a mistake.
It's the only reason I'm still on Chrome/Chromium. I like my exploding processes to be in a sandbox, but that's just me. It's been 10 years since Vista RTM'd and Firefox lagging behind IE. Still a bigger wonder is that the same company is also behind Rust - if you care about security why not put your browser in a sandbox first?
Fortunately (at least for now), Firefox uses N:M process:thread model instead of 1:1 like chrome (I am typing this in Firefox with 40+ tabs but using only two processes and with a chrome with single OneTab's tab using 10+ processes....) and it allows you to turn off e10s in about:config.
Generally speaking, I use Firefox because I've always used Firefox. At no point have they ever done something that's made me upset enough with my browsing experience to jump platforms entirely.
It's familiar, it has the extensions I need and it hasn't buggered up in any significant way that I uninstalled it from frustration.
It's the same for me: I've used it since it was Netscape 2. I've used the single-digit Mozilla milestones (the ones that crashed if you opened more than one window, or if you looked at them funny). I've survived the "flamey bird renaming" era. I'm simply used to the way it works. Yes, it has changed, but any change has been gradual.
Also, on Android it has the uBlock Origin extension, which with its ability (in advanced mode) to block images and Javascript helps keep the data consumption low (and make the sites load faster).
It's a similar situation for me. I've used Firefox for a long time, and it currently gives me the least-worst experience of the major browsers. That's probably the only reason I still use it.
I wouldn't say I like using Firefox, though. In fact, I think the user experience has gotten a lot worse for me over time. On more than one occasion I've wanted to move away from it.
Really the only thing that keeps me using Firefox is that none of the other major browsers offer a significantly more compelling experience at this time. I find all of the major browsers to be mediocre at best.
If a better non-Firefox browser did come along, I'd likely switch away from Firefox as soon as I found out about the alternative. I have no real ties to Firefox itself.
While I long upgrade from Firefox, I imagine most don't change because people hate change. I remember back when I switched I noticed all the little tiny differences, and while there were different and in most cases better ways of doing that in Chrome, I was use to my current way and any change slowed my productivity down. In the long run, I knew Chrome would be a better solution when I finally dove two feet in. But for many they are happy with what they have and while Chrome would offer a superior experience, the change wouldn't be worth it for many. And the rest I imagine fall into the category of I hate company x, so don't want to use it and then end up sticking with company that they believe on the surface is more inline with their values.
> vast majority of users could switch to Chrome and get all the same extensions with almost identical functionality [4]
On desktop, maybe. On mobile, definitely not. Chrome for Android does not support extensions at all.
Firefox, on the other hand, does. If you want uBlock, Ghostery, whatever on your mobile browser, you don't have other choice than Firefox. And if you like your bookmarks synced between mobile and desktop, that makes Chrome on desktop no-go option too.
>And if you like your bookmarks synced between mobile and desktop, that makes Chrome on desktop no-go option too.
The extensions/ad blocker argument is 100% legit, but unless I misunderstand you, Chrome has had history and bookmark sync across signed-in platforms (mobile/desktop) for a very long time!
I think he means that since you can't use chrome on mobile because of lack of extensions, you can't use it on desktop unless you want out of sync bookmarks.
> Chrome has had history and bookmark sync across signed-in platforms (mobile/desktop) for a very long time!
Yes it did, but the requirement above is AND, not OR - if I want 1) ad blocking in mobile browser AND 2) synced passwords/bookmarks/whatever, I cannot use Chrome at the desktop, because it sync only with mobile Chrome and mobile Chrome doesn't do 1).
Yep. If you make a change that upsets nearly 40% of your userbase, can you really act surprised when you hear people complain about it? Even if you go with the comparatively tiny 5% estimate of users who are 'unable' to switch, that's still a number that's in the millions.
This is the sort of thing that Google does all the time - optimize for the 90% at the expense of the remaining 10%. I think a lot of the more extreme backlash is because of that vocal (but not insignificant!) minority which is disappointed by the perception that Mozilla is going down the same route as Google (and all the other tech behemoths before them).
I could switch to Chrome but I have Firefox set up already and know how it works.
I sincerely hate the Firefox developers for breaking addons constantly and now making it so I can't even edit addons without a painful signing process.
Addons in Firefox seemed more powerful in the past but I'm confident WebExtensions will remove this advantage.
> I sincerely hate the Firefox developers for breaking addons constantly
Exhibit A for why it's a good idea to allow addons only through a specified addons API (i.e. how Chrome does it): your users won't hate you merely for daring to make normal changes to your codebase.
Firefox's address bar is much more intelligent than Chrome. The moment i type a keyword it shows me the sites i visited from the past that has this keyword.
Firefox also supports flick gesture from my Wacom tablet on my Windows machine to scroll up/down webpages.
I use Chrome apps for long-running things that are actually like apps. Gmail and Hangouts for example. It's nice to have a separate icon for them too. But I still do all my regular browsing in Firefox.
I genuinely just like it better than Chrome or Edge. I think Chrome is an excellent browser, and for about a year I used Chrome instead of Firefox (due to Firefox really not working anymore, having to restart the thing several times a day -- I also tried Opera, but it didn't fare any better) but I never liked using it as much as I liked Firefox. So at some point I tried Firefox again, and it has stuck so far. It's probably still not the most stable browser, or the fastest per se, but I generally like Mozilla's design decisions a bit better than Google's, and, well, it's super subjective but between Google and Mozilla, I have a bit more sympathy towards the latter (without hating the former or anything).
I also use Firefox on my Android phone. I like that it can synchronize my profile, and it's also quite usable.
Frankly I'm reasonably happy about the state of browsers (there have been times where, in my role as web developer, I wasn't quite so happy ;)) overall: seems like everybody's made at least a decent browser. I'm glad I can pick whichever browser I like best, not whichever one sucks the least. :P
Also, I've been using it since 0.4, the first browser that could replace IE6 well for me, at that time (compatibility was still an issue -- am I old?)
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 197 ms ] threadExcept for the UI, Chrome is generally ahead. It's not insulting to Firefox contributors. Competing with Google is hard.
I will note, however, that because of TST on Firefox, I keep way more tabs open there than in Chrome (20x, I'd guess). Based on the few times when I've had more than 15 or 20 tabs open on Chrome, I could imagine that it would bog down most machines. Perhaps they're not building it in because it would encourage people to browse with many tabs open, which would suck up lots of memory?
I group my work into topics by desktop; one browser instance per desktop, with an average total of 200+ tabs across eight windows. Restarting Firefox means sorting eight browser instances, one hotkey to snap them to half-width. Restarting Chrome required sorting sixteen browser windows, then manually aligning each primary window plus its tab window using the mouse. I tried, I really did, but that never became less of a pain.
If you still see an ad in Chrome with uBlock Origin installed, it's likely that the filters haven't updated to block that particular ad yet. Moreover, you'd likely see the same ad when browsing with the equivalent Firefox.
- I am used to the way the software feels (the way it hangs up or freezes... but at work I use Google Chrome because of the proxy and being used to it in that specific place it's firefox I can't stand... with the exception of the company issued laptop on which I installed firefox (no proxy)). Psychosomatic ? Very much, yes.
- free software
- I like the logo and the name (I am a minotaur and phoenix early adopter and moz before that)
- I think they are good people and were there when I (as a user) needed them. I know chrome or IE is there to suck out my soul and my data (yuck).
Interesting, I had never heard of Mozilla Minotaur before. I can't find many details online, other than it was a new mail client before Phoenix was renamed Firefox. Was Minotaur an early version of Thunderbird?
http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/2190891/Moz...
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/03/03/26/055232/new-mozilla-...
>> In fact it's insulting to all those contributors who work so hard on Firefox to say that extensions are the only thing keeping them from switching to Chrome.
The ability to run extensions is just the most popular manifestation of a browser that has always valued user freedom. So my question is, why are they stopping with that mentality? Why blame the victims of such a poor decision? Taking away my option to use extensions seems like the insulting choice to me.
Because, in practice, officially giving unfettered access to Firefox's internals to third-party developers makes changing anything in the Firefox codebase a potential quagmire. It's taken five or six years for electrolysis to begin seeing the light of day, and that's because such a drastic rearchitecture of the browser ended up breaking basically every popular addon in the wild. In the meantime, the inability to evolve the browser has hampered its ability to compete with Chrome, whose deliberately-specified addons API leaves it with no such baggage. Not to mention that the greater scope of Firefox addons has more severe implications for user security, which means that Mozilla has to spend resources to further vet every addon on AMO, which leads to even more complaints at the sluggishness of the apparent bureaucracy.
Addons were absolutely a great way to differentiate Firefox from IE back in the day, but in the context of modern web browsing having such a free-for-all addons interface is a lose-lose proposition. It's absolutely a shame, but the market of browser users has been inexorably making this decision for years now.
I'm unsure what you're arguing here. Their goal is not to abandon addons for the sake of abandoning addons. On the contrary, Mozilla has been sweating blood for years to strike a balance between 1) making the vast architectural changes that will keep them competitive with other browsers and 2) keeping as few addons as possible from breaking with each release. And rarely do they ever get kudos for their efforts in keeping up this balancing act--instead they just get panned both for not being as fast as Chrome and then breaking some subset of addons anyway. So we've at last reached a breaking point: between electrolysis and project quantum, Mozilla is at last forced to choose between being a slow browser with powerful addons or being a fast browser with limited addons. I'm sure there are plenty of folks on HN who will wish they had taken the former path rather than the latter, but the problem is that Mozilla's mission of influencing web standards depends on having sufficient market share to afford a seat at the standards table, and I happen to agree with Mozilla that there are more people out there who want a fast and secure browser than who want an extensible browser (and I say that as someone who's been using Firefox with addons since version 1). (And for all that the point might still be moot: maybe Chrome with its marketing momentum and Safari and Edge with their platform advantage really are unassailable regardless of which path is taken here.)
In any case, as unhelpful as it may sound, the idea that users won't be able to "run the extensions that have been freely available" is false. Old versions of Firefox will always exist, and every component is thoroughly open source, so if a community (or company) sees a demand for a fork of Firefox with legacy addons support then the opportunity is ripe.
I understand that is the hope. In reality it does represent a step away from the approach that has made Firefox popular. I would say it's a guess, at best, that Firefox is suffering because it is not moving towards a Chrome-like model fast enough... versus that Firefox suffering because of the move towards a Chrome-like model.
As far as "striking a balance", no that would be something like allowing users who want to keep older extension models do so by agreeing to a dialog box, and then offering to turn such extensions off in case performance problems actually arise.
A lot of FF is hare-brained, though. E10S solved the unresponsive UI for me, but for the life of me, I don't know how to enable it on my touchscreen Dell. There is no indicator in preferences that tells me whether it is on or off and no button to simply force it.
Javascript-heavy websites tend to burn through the CPU of my Macbook Air, but I don't know how to throttle background tabs. Or at least profile which tab gobbles my cycles. About:performance is not that helpful. Ideally, there would be some indicator if a background tab eats more than x% CPU.
Go to about:support page and in the first page, check the Multiprocess Windows row.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Schedule
In the meantime, you can force Firefox to enable multiprocess, even if you have a touchscreen by creating a new about:config pref "browser.tabs.remote.force-enable" = true.
Philosophy is pretty clear, but extensions that I find necessary are:
Tree Style Tabs (Chrome does not have a good replacement, I've tried them all) DownThemAll LastPass with better functionality Mouse gestures (this is HUGE for me, I want to be able to lazily browse with my mouse when I please, open/close and switch tabs with just a right-click and a flick)
I was about to make a snarky comment about how filthy rich should he be, based on how TST is always praised everywhere, so I went to look for a donation button to link to my planned snarky comment.
I didn't find any donations button, so I dug a bit more and found this[3]: 'I am an incumbent IT engineer, but apart from my company's work, I'm serializing articles in the manga format entitled "Cis Tube Girls" in the monthly magazine on Linux related technology called Nikkei Linux.'
Seriously, check this comic: http://system-admin-girl.com/about/
I love Firefox, Tree Style Tabs, Google Translate, and the Internetcetera. I love you Piro, thanks!!!
[1] https://github.com/piroor
[2] http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/xul.html.en
[3] https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...
Recently Firefox said they were moving away from threads to processes. I think that's a mistake. Killing Chrome was a pain at times because when it does hang all the child processes had to be killed independently. It was possible to restart Chrome with orphaned processes. What a mess.
Also, I like the implementation of profiles in Firefox much better. I have a different profile for work, home and various side jobs. Very nice.
Chrome developers are crap developers and they hide behind processes because they don't have the chops to do threads. I hate to see Firefox move in that direction. Maybe Firefox needs to since Firefox is adopting Chrome extensions. But I refuse to use Chrome because it has crappy performance and usability. Hopefully Firefox doesn't move in the same direction.
To me, dropping their plugin architecture to achieve compatibility with Chrome is a bit absurd. Vimperator, GreaseMonkey and many others make Firefox unique.
[1] I know there's Conkeror, but the project seems to have stalled.
My hope is that the move to WebExtensions will actually help here. Currently, Conkeror is theoretically compatible with Firefox extension-wise, but it often meant writing a bunch of glue code to expose Firefox extension functionality without Firefox' actual UI. Now that extensions are forced to be UI agnostic, it seems reasonable that a browser that's Firefox-compatible could have a much easier time with that. Hopefully a post-XUL Firefox will continue to support something along the basic lines of XULRunner (i.e. present a Firefox window without the actual UI) to make that easier than having to fork Firefox itself.
From my understanding, the initial rollout of multi-process has a single render process (in addition to the main browser process). There are ongoing experiments to determine the optimal number of processes, so it's likely to increase soon. In the future you can force this to 1 by using the "dom.ipc.processCount" pref if you don't want your process manager to resemble Chrome.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/Multiple_content_proce...
This might undermine the rest of your argument. Chrome developers are pretty damn sharp, and they use processes so they can add features the fastest while maintaining the best security profile (and record).
But I agree with your overall point. I'm saddened by the need for the browser to suck up more and more of my computer's resources - more gigabytes of ram, more cores - in order to enable web developers to develop ever-flashier applications faster. The balance has swung way too far, web applications (and even static content sites) need to be less flashy, and spend more time on reasonably sane implementations and libraries.
I'm also sad that Firefox is pressured into just doing what Chrome does. But I can understand, they don't see an alternative, they have to "keep up" with websites and user bases that can't be trusted.
The extensions, histories, settings, etc. are separate in different Chrome profiles, I'm not sure what more I'd want them to do.
Your argument against a multi-process architecture is you once encountered a process-reaping bug in chrome. Can't even.
> I refuse to use Chrome because it has crappy performance and usability.
I worked as a platform engineer at Mozilla for several years. I heard so many unfounded opinions about <browser>'s <performance/memory/whatever> consumption that ran contrary to every benchmark and defied every attempt to extract statistics from the user that you'd think I would be numb to it. But I still get chills.
The advice was always the same though. "Does this occur if you open a fresh profile without your 900 tabs or 50 addons?" -- "If I'm going to do that I might as well switch to Chrome!" -- Well, I mean, okay.
> Chrome developers are crap developers and they hide behind processes because they don't have the chops to do threads. I hate to see Firefox move in that direction. Maybe Firefox needs to since Firefox is adopting Chrome extensions. But I refuse to use Chrome because it has crappy performance and usability. Hopefully Firefox doesn't move in the same direction.
This is insulting to a lot of very smart people who spent an enormous amount of time working on these engines. You can't just infer two traits about random software, attribute it to the biggest technical difference you can see, and then state that as fact. A multi-process architecture is much more difficult to get right than a multi-threaded one, and every single modern browser is pursuing it because it is worthwhile on numerous axis. Citing nothing but a vague luddite sentiment, you assert the hundreds of engineers who have spent years working on chrome don't "have the chops" to "do threads". Wat.
It's the only reason I'm still on Chrome/Chromium. I like my exploding processes to be in a sandbox, but that's just me. It's been 10 years since Vista RTM'd and Firefox lagging behind IE. Still a bigger wonder is that the same company is also behind Rust - if you care about security why not put your browser in a sandbox first?
I also use Edge on my Surface tablet, for the same reasons.
It's familiar, it has the extensions I need and it hasn't buggered up in any significant way that I uninstalled it from frustration.
Also, on Android it has the uBlock Origin extension, which with its ability (in advanced mode) to block images and Javascript helps keep the data consumption low (and make the sites load faster).
I wouldn't say I like using Firefox, though. In fact, I think the user experience has gotten a lot worse for me over time. On more than one occasion I've wanted to move away from it.
Really the only thing that keeps me using Firefox is that none of the other major browsers offer a significantly more compelling experience at this time. I find all of the major browsers to be mediocre at best.
If a better non-Firefox browser did come along, I'd likely switch away from Firefox as soon as I found out about the alternative. I have no real ties to Firefox itself.
On desktop, maybe. On mobile, definitely not. Chrome for Android does not support extensions at all.
Firefox, on the other hand, does. If you want uBlock, Ghostery, whatever on your mobile browser, you don't have other choice than Firefox. And if you like your bookmarks synced between mobile and desktop, that makes Chrome on desktop no-go option too.
The extensions/ad blocker argument is 100% legit, but unless I misunderstand you, Chrome has had history and bookmark sync across signed-in platforms (mobile/desktop) for a very long time!
Yes it did, but the requirement above is AND, not OR - if I want 1) ad blocking in mobile browser AND 2) synced passwords/bookmarks/whatever, I cannot use Chrome at the desktop, because it sync only with mobile Chrome and mobile Chrome doesn't do 1).
What? You can't describe 38% of your user base with the word "only". This should read "a whole 38% of Firefox users ..."
I use Firefox because I trust it better than chrome, but I need those extensions I am using.
This is the sort of thing that Google does all the time - optimize for the 90% at the expense of the remaining 10%. I think a lot of the more extreme backlash is because of that vocal (but not insignificant!) minority which is disappointed by the perception that Mozilla is going down the same route as Google (and all the other tech behemoths before them).
I enjoy having the ability to tweak some tiny little settings that help my workflow here and there.
I sincerely hate the Firefox developers for breaking addons constantly and now making it so I can't even edit addons without a painful signing process.
Addons in Firefox seemed more powerful in the past but I'm confident WebExtensions will remove this advantage.
Exhibit A for why it's a good idea to allow addons only through a specified addons API (i.e. how Chrome does it): your users won't hate you merely for daring to make normal changes to your codebase.
Firefox also supports flick gesture from my Wacom tablet on my Windows machine to scroll up/down webpages.
It's always wanting me to sign in to my Google accounts and sync everything. Why would I want to sign in to a browser?
It wants to run extensions as background processes (wtf?). Why would I want my browser to run "apps"?
It's like it wants to be an OS wrapped in an OS. Why wouldn't I just use my OS?
At this point, it just feels like bloat to me. I want a browser. That's all. I guess I use Firefox for what it doesn't try to do.