[GrayShade]

They didn't try to, they actually won. Microsoft switching to Blink was had news for Mozilla, and sites that are "optimized for Chrome" started to crop up all over the place.

Yes, Firefox is slow on Macs, but you should consider switching to it. We know how it went with IE back then. On Android, the extension support alone makes it so much better than the competition.

[irrational]

Is Firefox slow on Mac for you? I haven't noticed slowness in a long time.

[GrayShade]

I don't use a Mac, but it's a known issue with the high-resolution ones. I believe it doesn't use the OS compositor, so it ends up redrawing too much.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1191965

[spiralganglion]

I've used a few retina Macs to do various kinds of web dev. Firefox tends to do some things fastest (eg: re-layout when resizing the window), some things the slowest (eg: certain large, complex CSS animations). For most things, it's perceptually equivalent to Chrome or Safari. Some things that are fast/good in Chrome will be slow/bad in FF, and vice versa. The biggest shortcomings I currently face are (1) a lot of banding when layering lots of complex gradients, due to a poor job of dithering and (2) weird handling of certain colors on my P3 display due to the assumption that colors are in the full display space rather than sRGB.

[lou1306]

A big problem of early Quantum Firefox on HiDPI Macs was its high battery usage. I think it got slightly better with later releases, but I don't have data to support that.

[acdha]

For people running in non-default scaled resolutions. In the default configuration it's somewhere in between Safari (best) and Chrome (worst).

[tssva]

I have never run my MacBook Pro in anything but the default scaling resolution. Quantum has been and continues to be a nightmare on my device. Unusably slow performance with high CPU utilization and occasionally spiking CPU utilization to 100% for prolonged periods. Usually long enough that I am forced to reboot the laptop.

[spiralganglion]

Unfortunately, a non-native scaling mode is the default on new Mac laptops now. You need to switch to one of the custom scaling modes to get a true, native 2x.

[jhasse]

> On Android, the extension support alone makes it so much better than the competition.

Firefox doesn't open links handled by apps directly with the app, like almost every other Android browser does. This makes it unusable for me.

Here's the bug report (7 years old) btw: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=806385

[anhner]

I consider that a feature. If I go to youtube.com with firefox, it means that I intentionally want to avoid opening the app, so I don't want every video I click on in firefox to open with the youtube app.

However, I think there was an option to have it enabled if you wish to.

[TeMPOraL]

+1. YouTube example is spot-on, as this is no.1 case where I actively avoid the app in favor of the browser. YoutTube's app and mobile website have some ridiculously stupid extra filtering that silently removes many videos - videos that are suddenly accessible if you check the "Request desktop version" box in the browsers. It's almost an universal occurrence that the video I'm searching for is one that gets silently filtered out in the app.

[GrayShade]

Nb. with extensions you can also get background play and even ad blocking on YouTube.

[TeMPOraL]

> background play

Oooh, I so very much want that. Thanks, I'll check it out!

[GrayShade]

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-backgro...

[jhasse]

> However, I think there was an option to have it enabled if you wish to.

No, otherwise that bug would have been marked as fixed.

[icebraining]

Eh, that's interesting, I quite prefer that behavior over Chrome's, as it gives me more control with (what I feel is) minimal extra effort.

[kkarakk]

it slows down your workflow with minimum effort too. transforming/accessing data quickly is a big part of doing anything on mobile and i don't need a browser that stops the flow in between

[eythian]

I personally don't mind that. Also, it gives you a button to open the page in the app, so it's not like it makes it unusable.

[msla]

When Firefox killed RSS support, they mutilated my bookmarks to remove all of the RSS URLs.

Those bookmarks were mine, and Firefox destroyed them without even giving me a chance to opt-out.

I can't use Firefox if it's going to do stuff like that. I use qutebrowser, instead.

[GrayShade]

To be fair, they communicated that change. Did you miss the chance to export your RSS list? I think it was supposed to export an OPML so you could add them to another feed reader. Some of them are even available as Firefox extensions.

> without even giving me a chance to opt-out

It didn't flip a pref, the infrastructure behind that feature was removed because it was a maintenance nightmare, and not enough people were using it. You could have opted out (for a while) by switching to the ESR.

I haven't tried qutebrowser, does it have extension or RSS support?

[msla]

> I haven't tried qutebrowser, does it have extension or RSS support?

It has a userscript:

https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/blob/master/misc/...

... but extensions in qutebrowser are admittedly in a very early and immature state now, and the codebase for them is going to be changed.

[headsoup]

Didn't Firefox automatically export them to an OPML file on your desktop?

[msla]

No.

[icebraining]

Sounds like you got hit by a bug, because it definitively should've: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/feed-reader-replacement...

[mthoms]

So, you just restored from a backup then?