More reasons to stick with Firefox

mrk

mrk

mrk

Man of Honour
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
103,984
Location
South Coast
Many of you know that Firefox offers more extension and customisation support than any other browser out there. It's the main reason I've been using it as my main browser alongside Chrome, and IE (now Edge too).

Personally I have never had issues with rendering or reliability on PC, but on Android I have noticed content heavy pages (mainly man-sized forum image/gif threads) sometimes struggling to load fast enough.

Seeing the recent news about Quantum being enabled in Firefox, I think it's worth while checking out once more for those who moved away to other browsers and haven't tried it since.

A benchmark from March showed Servo rendering a graphics-heavy page at 60FPS, with a nightly WebKit build at 5FPS and Chrome Canary at 15FPS. Servo's graphics backend is scheduled to arrive in Firefox as part of Project Quantum, and that's just one component.
Click to expand...

http://www.androidpolice.com/2016/1...ct-quantum-improved-rendering-engine-firefox/

Pretty impressive stuff!

Only downside is end of 2017 is when it's expected...

What browsers do you all use?
 
Last edited:
Still using Firefox as I've found it all around the most balanced browser - some excel in some areas but are weak in others, etc. it could really do with some improvements to threading and garbage collection, etc. though - sometimes it can get really bogged down after awhile or after browsing certain sites.
 
howiepoohs said:
Firefox has had its day. I found it too annoying every time it updated, it broke loads of extensions. I've not used it in about 6 years now so maybe it got better.
Click to expand...

It went through a phase of breaking extensions and severe bloat/performance issues but improved a bit more recently - though the latest version seems to get bogged down easily - I've had the browser fired up less than an hour and only visited 3 sites and already typing text for this post has a slight delay :(
 
chrome for desktop + android

- quicker for me
- prefer the UI "overall"
- unified system i.e. syncs my bookmarks etc. to my phone and vice versa
- usually the first to get new experimental stuff i.e. new UI for youtube + google homepage
- it's google, they make good stuff :p
 
I really want to go back to Firefox but it still doesn't feel as fast as Chrome on both desktop and especially Android. I was hoping electrolysis would help but... it seemed to have made the browser less stable.

I suppose once quantum hits I'll be tempted to try again. Servo can't come fast enough, Gecko needs to rest :p.
 
Been using FF since the days of Firebird and tried all of the browsers over time. Always went back to FF though.

Just recently I gave up - the browser is sluggish as hell, bloated and just feels so slow. I had tried Chrome on a friends PC and it was blindingly fast on the same sites I use and the extension support looked miles better. I had Chrome up and running with a heap of them and it's still miles more faster than FF in every area, especially UI speeds.

On Android FF is ok. Tugabrowser (optimised for snapdragon soc's) is what I use. Horribly fast, and has content blockers built in.
 
Last edited:
Problem with Chrome is that the bookmarks manager is still a load of balls.

You can't properly organise bookmarks with separators like you can in other browsers.

And there's no ftp client like fireftp, which has a "copy http URL to clipboard",or right click browse from the ftp window. In fact I've not actually found another client that has that feature, and that's one of the handful of reasons I stick to Firefox, and by relation, Firefox on Android because of the sync feature for everything.
 
Last edited:
Kainz said:
Just recently I gave up - the browser is sluggish as hell, bloated and just feels so slow. I had tried Chrome on a friends PC and it was blindingly fast on the same sites I use and the extension support looked miles better. I had Chrome up and running with a heap of them and it's still miles more faster than FF in every area, especially UI speeds.
Click to expand...

I tried to use Chrome for a bit but while its miles ahead of FF in some aspects its not so great in some areas - I've tried a few different browsers and keep coming back to FF despite the rendering performance being a bit hit and miss at times as overall it just seems the best balanced.
 
mrk said:
Problem with Chrome is that the bookmarks manager is still a load of balls.

You can't properly organise bookmarks with separators like you can in other browsers.

And there's no ftp client like fireftp, which has a "copy http URL to clipboard",or right click browse from the ftp window. In fact I've not actually found another client that has that feature, and that's one of the handful of reasons I stick to Firefox, and by relation, Firefox on Android because of the sync feature for everything.
Click to expand...
Agree with the bookmarks manager - I almost gave up on Chrome because of it but ended up restructuring my existing years old collection of bookmarks. It worked out fine in the end. RSS is a pita though and I had to use an extension just to get the same dropdown RSS functionality as FF.

I rarely use FTP these days so can't answer there.

Rroff said:
I tried to use Chrome for a bit but while its miles ahead of FF in some aspects its not so great in some areas - I've tried a few different browsers and keep coming back to FF despite the rendering performance being a bit hit and miss at times as overall it just seems the best balanced.
Click to expand...
Chrome seems to have come a long way. I used to avoid it because it had site compat issues in the past but I've been using it for about a month now - had zero issues and haven't been compelled to click on the FF icon in the taskbar down below. What frustrated me was just how sluggish the experience felt - and it was running off an SSD with the cache located there too.

At the end of the day, you use a browser to navigate the web. One is very fat, the other isn't and for me offers a much better experience. End of 2017 is just too long to wait.
 
I have already restructured them! If I segmented them into even more folders I'd end up having to scroll just the list of folders alone, which I don't want to do :p

Bookmarks management has been high on the list of user desirable for years now, and Google don't seem bothered :/
 
Chrome. Firefox doesn't come close to the speed of Chrome, especially if you have various extensions installed.

Chrome doesn't seem to have an issue with as many extensions as you want and it'll still start up instantly, whereas Firefox seems to take a bit of time to start up and be usable.

(This is over multiple machines with different addons by the way, so not unique to what I use or my PC).

Chrome is better :D
 
FF on desktop with loads of extensions

Android: Chrome beta but started to use Samsung stock browser now to see if if helps with s7 edge battery.

Apple iPad: Safari
 
Samsung browser on my phone, Chrome at work and Safari at home. I prefer by far for development work but when I'm at home I find Safari the easiest to use.
 
Been ages since I've tried FF. Downloaded it, opened BBC, lag and stutter when scrolling the page. Uninstalled, it's just awful to use when Chrome is pretty smooth.
 
I keep trying Chrome but it doesn't seem to format these forum pages well when zoomed in. Others I've tried in the past but keep going back to Opera. I also us HTC Internet browser. Both those 2 browsers seem to have the ability to reflow text properly when zoomed. This is on an android phone. On PC I use Opera and IE or whatever it's called.

I also try Opera beta. Not really liking the direction they are heading in. They forcing a news reader instead of concentrating on core function. They pig headedly ignore user comments asking for basic stuff like being able to select a zoom level in settings and blunder on with a news reader when most user comments are negative. So the new beta we have a stupid news reader and yet have lost the ability to import saved speed dials from your 'cloud'. I currently don't auto update the standard opera for fear they force the beta version. On the upside it maybe renders pages a little faster.

HTC Internet is no longer dev supported which is a shame as it isn't bad at all.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom