Yep. I did this about a year ago. You have to create a Mozilla account (if you haven't already) in order to sync your tabs and history across devices, but that should be a given.
I find the Firefox sync a bit clunky compared to Chromes though. I think Chrome sends udpates to Google on each change whereas Firefox polls and updates on a schedule which means sometimes if you put a device to sleep (or if you're on iOS and the app gets suspended) your history and tab state won't be propagated and it'll be missing on your other devices which can be frustrating when you're away from those devices.
Yes.
> transition literally just: Install Firefox everywhere and start using it instead?
Almost. You will have to create a firefox account and export/import your bookmarks. That's it.
“How Firefox Sync keeps your data safe even if TLS fails” https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-firefox-sync-keeps-...
> Passwords can now be imported from Chrome on macOS in addition to existing support for Windows
Yes, each (bookmarks, history, passwords, tabs ) can be turned on or off per device basis.
Only minor gripe is userChrome.css seems to not be used now.
Set this option to true: toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets
Is there a new method available/forthcoming, or is this more control planned to be wrenched out of user's hands?
The issue with this is that they could start controlling the standards and everyone would have to follow behind instead of everyone working and doing what’s best for consumers.
While chromium is open source, that doesn’t mean they have to accept merges from the community. It only means that they have to provide the source code. Yes it can be forked, but now you have to maintain or develop your engine. If they’re the dominant ones and are setting standards, that won’t help much.
By using another one you are helping keep a neutral ground.
The difference between MySQL and MariaDB is that you have PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQLite, MSSQL among a bunch of others, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_relational_datab...
So the issue isn’t forking or not, but the fact that it’s still close enough that gives chromium the competitive edge and could kill the market.
That entire industry is a dumpster fire of greed, fraud, and misrepresentation.
Whoever are pushing them - including Telegram that I otherwise like - are damaging their reputation in my eyes.
>takes crypto donation hostage and opens funds in other people's names (i.e. scams crypto to artificially create demand for that BAT)
If you use Brave you literally are part of the problem.
My gripe there is that it started showing push notifications of ads!!! Once I blocked all its notifications everything went to normality.
Why not use Firefox?
The only two things I'm missing in safari to be hones are:
- A no-script extension or similar.
- Sync part of my work is on a no macOS machines I don't have safari there, so no sync. I partially overcome this with bookmaster for bookmarks, but I still missing tabs and read it later list. However, firefox doesn't have this later feature on desktop —and I don't why.
Safari 13.0.2 versus Firefox 70.0 versus Chrome 77.0
Playing the same YouTube video at the same quality (1080p) and watching Energy Impact in Activity Monitor while the video played, I saw averages of: Safari used 20, Firefox used 45, Chrome used 45.
So on that task at least Safari is still king, but Firefox is on par with Chrome.
More work is planned to reduce the energy usage for scrolling and full screen video. Though I guess for your example you don't watch things fullscreen.
~6,4W average in Safari 13.0.3
~8,6W average in Firefox 70
This is why, for example, Safari does not have 4k video on Youtube, while being perfectly capable of playing 4k videos in general.
Depending on the machine, VP9 can be decoded in hardware on Firefox on Windows, but chip support is limited.
All that said, we're working on our video playback performance as we speak, especially on OSX (because it was so bad a few release back), but also in general.
I found this extension that forces FF to use H264 instead: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/h264ify/
On my old MBP I'd rather consume more bandwidth than more more CPU.
Web Render might allow doing it properly, since the rendering is not on the CPU anymore.
> Safari’s compositor is entirely Core Animation based; Safari basically skips step 2.
(Step 2 is "the Firefox “compositor” assembles Gecko layers to produce the rendering of the window")
Anyway, I imagine that's the price to pay for being crossplatform. You can't implement everything for every platform. Safari only has to work on macOS/iOS.
Speaking for Chrome's implementation, efficiently rendering video on macOS does require CALayer compositing, but it's not sufficient.
Only certain types of decoded frames can be efficiently scanned out (different from the types that can be used efficiently in OpenGL compositing). Actually entering the most efficient fullscreen video mode requires some magic. Matching macOS behavior exactly when a fallback to OpenGL compositing is required can be difficult (eg. colorspace bugs can result in flickering).
I have not looked at the new code in Firefox, but I would expect that not all of the benefit would be realized in a first release. In any case it's a huge undertaking to support a single platform; congrats to the team for making it happen!
iina is open source and have a lot of codec available.
I don't know if it change something on energy consumption, though.
mpv https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0I'm running Nightly on OSX and I confirm all those improvements are there, but more are coming.
This should give pretty noticeable speed and battery improvements on Retina Macbooks.
[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/70.0/releasenotes/#new