If Firefox suited my needs 100% as well as Safari, this is why I’d still not use it. God damn is it noisy. You’re a browser, I have no interest in engaging with you more than necessary, whatever-I-was-trying-to-do is what I care about. Please stop acting like a kid who’s not getting enough attention. It’s off-putting.
What is this noise you're referring to? I'm 90% Firefox and 10% Safari and I don't understand this comment.
I may be forgetting about nags that don't allow themselves to be disabled, but if so, they're infrequent enough that they seem insignificant and obviously non-memorable.
Edit: I should add, when I had to have Chrome installed I really didn't like the fact that it updated itself automatically via a daemon process. I don't think having a constantly running background process for a browser, especially one from a giant advertising company, is a good alternative.
I had literally just installed Firefox minutes ago (inspired by this thread). During the install it asked me if I wanted to make it the default browser, and I had said no. This is what we mean by nagging. Firefox needs to know when to shut up and get out of the way.
> you'll have had to endure the burden of responding to this nag just once in years of using Firefox.
Twice. For this one particular nag. Next time Mozilla releases some shitty VPN or AI program, it will nag me again. If I don't log in to a Mozilla account, it will nag me to. If I don't try Pocket, I will be nagged to try it.
Let's not even talk about Apple and their dark patterns (the whole green bubble messages as one example).
The only reason Safari doesn't is because they aren't developing it because it's too broken already. So much doesn't work with Safari.
Safari is under active development, gets new features all the time, and has a dev blog you can subscribe to over RSS [0].
You may not like Safari, and you're welcome to your opinion about it, but you're not welcome to your own facts.
> shitty VPN
The Mozilla VPN is a rebranded Mullvad VPN, AFIK which I understand is very good.
Even if there are a few more nags than Chrome or whatever, I guess, I'm happy knowing that I'm making it a bit harder for Google to know what I'm doing online.
Even if one wants a particular version for testing. Chromium doesn't do this ime. And this isn't to say it's a reason not to use FF but it is a counter-example to simply being able to dismiss something without it being annoying.
And while Firefox has lots of flags and ways to tweak things like this, it's not straightforward and requires time to interrupt my workflow to address. Definitely not worth it for me on macOS. I might change my tune if I switch to Linux, but at that point I'll likely look into something like LibreWolf.
The noisy part was this notification steals focus so you can't type into the search bar immediately, you have to hit escape or click out to gain focus again. And the popup kept appearing until I realized you had to specifically press "yes, keep changes" on the notification to get it to stop (usually I canceled out of it reflexively to do actually important things). If you just hit Escape or tried to use the URL bar it would come back next session and steal focus again.
It sounds like something minor but the idea of stealing focus to re-confirm a change you already confirmed is a mild source of headaches, and not necessary in my view. Not to mention, this process would repeat itself for every Firefox installation synced with, since the extension counts as a fresh install each time. In a world where switching browsers is trivial, I think minor annoyances like those are best removed.
The primary reason I don't use it 100%, but 90/10 like you, is due to extensions and those few sites that doesn't work in Firefox.
Yes, definitely agree with that. But I think of "noise" as stuff that interrupts your normal interaction with web sites and in that regard I don't think Firefox is particularly noisy.
There are definitely a lot of features, settings and extensions with Firefox and while I don't use very many of them I do really appreciate the ones that I do use.
Firefox displayed a pop-up ad for Mozilla VPN over an unrelated page (382 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36077360
I tabbed away from Firefox for a bit, and when I tabbed back I had a full screen popup ad for Mozilla VPN overlayed on top of the webpage I had been using.
Once I get the browser installed and running, what you describe matches 0% of my experience with it.
Most of what they’re nagging me about won’t even make them money. It’s marketing-changelog pages nobody reads. They could save some money by keeping text change logs where people who care can find them, and dropping those altogether.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Negative_salary...
(the bug is that text replacement does not work in FF on mac, something that saves me so much time daily)
I have to go to another app, insert an emoji there and copy it over.
I tried switching to Firefox like 3 times this year, but there's always something putting me off. I really really want to though.
But sometimes, it "works" but there's no opening animation and it instantly runs the closing animation of the pop up and it's gone again.
It's really weird.
Sometimes fn+E does work, but it writes an unwanted "e".
I somehow was lugging around up to 2,400 tabs for much of last year and it handled it surprisingly well. Got down to 30 at one point, now back up to nearly 400 :/
Very rarely a website won't load, I just change the user agent to Chrome and refresh and it almost always works fine.
> Firefox Quantum was a revolution in Firefox development. In 2017, we created a new, lightning fast browser that constantly improves. Firefox Quantum is the Firefox Browser.
[1]: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browsers/quantum/
Try running a very compute intensive script (that chokes your CPU/GPU). In my experience Firefox becomes unusable, Safari is still buttery smooth.
Now maybe Safari simply performs better, or maybe that's some OS level prioritization unfairly advantaging Safari, but to me as an end user, that's irrelevant.
TL;DR The truth is, no one has ever used Firefox or Chrome on iOS.
You say you know it's webkit based... but the entire engine for any browser on iOS is Safari, not merely webkit based. Apple doesn't have a policy of "your browser must be derived from webkit" they have a policy of forcing browsers to use the literal same engine built into iOS that Safari is using - i.e you are just using Safari with a different UI, there is only one browser engine on iOS.
This is an annoying detail to have to repetitively explain to people, and Apple benefits from this blurring of the lines in the army of users defending them for browser diversity. Honestly, if i had an iOS device I would use the Safari app - and as a web dev and a user I fucking hate Safari, but what's the point in using a different UI, they are all the Safari engine, the main browsing experience is by definition the exact same.
Combine this with the fact that I still get E2EE sync and better integration with my OS, Firefox is no longer tempting to me. And I used to be a Firefox power user for years.
For me, the enhanced plugin ecosystem and additional control that Firefox offers simply isn't worth a slower browser that isn't as well integrated.
If I used windows or Linux I would probably give it a try again.
Or should I be stealing this content and leave everyone involved poorer for it?
It’s your prerogative to not block ads and to spoon feed all your watch data to Google for easy monetisation and tracking, but it’s clear the original comment wasn’t talking about that route. YouTube is clearly not “the perfect app” in that person’s view when it requires an extra paid service and a higher loss of privacy.
Frankly, from your other replies it seems like you realise this. Which makes this exchange a massive waste of time for everyone. Please don’t purposely fuel disagreements.
You’re not starving, this isn’t food.
Understand that I’m not advocating for not supporting creators, that argument is entirely in your head. No one is after you.
More importantly, you need to learn what the “royal you” is. It’s not literally about you, specifically.
That’s not what was said either. You keep putting arguments in other people’s mouths and assuming the worst version possible.
Unfortunately it has become clear there is no point to this discussion. You’re bent on only rambling about the point in your own head instead of what was being discussed.
I wish you a happy new year, but I do not wish to further this interaction.
Merry whatever though, hope things go better for you than they did in this interaction.
Orion is also webkit, but buggy, isn't it? I don't care for it.
There’s platform-agnostic issues too, however. Firefox is my primary browser on Windows and Linux, but it has a pile of UI papercuts which I’ve kinda-fixed with userchrome.css hacks, and the result is underwhelming (as is the possibility of these hacks periodically breaking with updates). It’s enough of a frustration that forking Firefox to properly fix them would be tempting if keeping up with the firehose of security patches from mainline weren’t so daunting.
My biggest wish is for Gecko to re-gain embedding support on desktop platforms so I can build my own browser around it, making keeping it secure as simple as updating dependencies.
On desktop, various Firefox updates would change my settings subtly and nag me about features I had no interest in. On top of that, it was simply a slower browser, both with DOM manipulation and Javascript.
For example, when I made my latest research project (https://pl.aiwright.dev) Firefox would routinely struggle with the large complex graphs (over 100k nodes, though only a few hundred nodes attached to the DOM at any given time). Safari handles it with no issues whatsoever. I'm sure there are likely workarounds to speed things up on Firefox, but I don't have the time or energy for something like that since it's a research project, not an end-user facing product.
Maybe you can make the argument that switching to Firefox will incentivize improvements, but so far that hasn't been my experience. I've now moved away from Firefox to things like Orion (which is still quite buggy, but useful enough). Safari seems to be getting better over time, with things like containers now and extensions like Userscripts [2].
[1]: https://pl.aiwright.dev
[2]: https://github.com/quoid/userscripts