FF Evangelists

morrowind@lemmy.ml to Lemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world – 925 points –
176

My favorite part of Firefox is Ublock Origin.

Mine is the tail plug, but UO is a strong second.

Does the plug get sent to you automatically or do you have to register somewhere?

I was browsing for plug-ins and extensions and after I installed a bunch, it just appeared.

Which is unavailable on Chrome?...

Google is in the process of undermining the effectiveness of uBlock Origin and other adblockers on Chrome and other Chromium browsers. I believe that change comes into effect this year.

But even before those changes were announced, uBlock Origin’s creator and main dev has stated that uBO is most capable on Firefox.

Does it work flawlessly on Android, iOS, and desktop? I'm really asking, because I ditched Chrome when it was less shitty than it currently is...

mobile Kiwi browser supports desktop chrome extension but has only android version

All iOS browsers have to use Webkit (or did last time I checked). So there's not much of a point of running Firefox on iOS. It's basically the same browser no matter what browser it says it is.

Isn't the EU in the process of killing that Webkit-necessity?

It is, but Apple being Apple, they are going all malicious compliance and will break evening else for non-Safari browsers lol

Also this only applies in EU. To use 3rd party apps stores you won't be able to leave the EU for more than 30 days at a time as well

The Orion browser for iOS is capable of using Firefox and Chrome extensions, although support can be a little spotty. Ublock works quite well though.

If it still works, I believe it has been neutered

It works 100% still as far as I can tell (my parents use Chrome with BO)

Till June, when Google starts dropping support for manifest V2 and you’ll have to use uBO lite.

I still firmly believe there is at least one sane engineer there who'll discourage this, knowing this will drive the last few tech-savvy users and their family members and close friends away and I will die on this hill

I’m all for people using Firefox instead of Chrome, but RAM being used up shouldn’t be a complaint unless something else needs that RAM. If it’s there, it should be considered usable.

Yep, I didn't buy that RAM to sit being unused.

It's specifically about the efficiency of the usage. If it's not used effectively, then it really is a waste.

And we all know how efficient the Web is nowadays...

Why could ram usage be a waste? I thought only the allocation is the performance heavy part, allocated ram does not cost extra performance.

I'm referring to the philosophy behind the usage of said allocated ram.

If you allocate 5 cookie jars to store 1 cookie in each jar, then that's not good.

If you store 2 cookies per jar, that's better already, but still kind of crap.

If the websites keep putting rocks in those jars, then you'll obviously run rampant with usage. (Read: https://tonsky.me/blog/js-bloat/ )

The goal is to store as many cookies in least amount of jars. You might crumble them down and reconstruct them later (compression and/or clever code) but that could take more brain (processing) power (of which we kinda have, especially on the desktop).

As you've said, it's often a tradeoff between processing power and memory usage and depending on the application, you can configure things the way you need them (at least when you're coding it).

If it did a good job freeing it up when needed then sure, but it doesn't.

they're right tho

Yeah. Use Firefox or kiss a free Internet goodbye.

I worry even Firefox is losing its principles on the matter.

Then use a firefox fork that's more in line with your beliefs. It's a pro of open source

chromium is open source too.

But Chrome, the actual application you download (as well as several forks), is closed source.

Agreed. I just wanted to point out that you can have open source with a chromium based browser

But that's not the real issue. The issue is that any Chromium-based browser -- open source or not -- helps Google maintain hegemony over web standards. Even if makers of other Chromium-based browsers try to maintain a fork of the rendering engine, they'll be perpetually playing catch-up removing user-hostile misfeatures because Google controls the upstream branch.

Google still has control over Chromium. Manifest v3 is a Chromium thing, not a Chrome thing. All forks of Chromium will get it and none of the browsers using Chromium as a base has moved to fork and maintain their own version of Chromium.

This means that Google effectively has a monopoly over all browsers that aren’t WebKit or Gecko based, which is a tiny portion of all browsers. Leading to Google deciding how people access the internet. It’s already worrying that Google is the internet for a lot of people, the fact that they can do more or less anything with Chromium means that they can do whatever they want with the web standard.

That should be a major concern for everyone. Chromium needs to be taken away from Google.

all browsers that aren’t WebKit or Gecko

I don't get this part. Are all engines other than those 2, based on Chromium?

Perhaps you are forgetting Ze great Konqueror ?

::: spoiler Because it has always been KHTML. There's a meme for that. Check it out :::

I think Konquerer is no longer actively maintained.

Fun fact (which you may already know) the two most popular browser engines today are based on KHTML)

Yeah I think so.

Their quest for a revenue stream is leading them down a dark path imo.

I mean I get that they need money. I don't really have a solution. I just feel very uneasy about where this is headed.

I'm never giving it up out of principle, but I dunno about the RAM usage. Firefox was above 7GB last I looked. I have RAM to spare though, so I don't really care.

There's a Tab Discarder extension that suspends old tabs so they're stored on the drive rather than ram.

do you have time to hear about our lord and savior Firefox with Ublock Origin?

+sponsorblock +youtube dislike

Noscript. Fuck your website and all your fancy functionality.

I want to see static on my screen when I visit.

Don't tell the react devs about this one

God, fuck react in the eye with the pointy shit-covered hunting-sticks of our ancestors. Useless technology that directly breaks the web because there’s never any fallback, so all you get is a blank page. Not even a “please-enable js” message.

Yeah not a fan of the bloat for bloats sake. I like the idea of components, but it should be statically compiled

That's hardly React's fault. Blame the web devs to jump into making websites after having completed a 2-week React bootcamp and nothing else.

Adnauseum

isnt that the one that clicks on ALL the ads so they have a harder time profiling you?

the scriptures allow for this one on sundays, but dont tell the orthodox traditionalists.

Firefox uses lots of RAM

And not very efficiently either, can't seem to handle 99+ tabs and starts getting unstable as you get closer to that number.

Chrome at least can handle 300-600 tabs across 30 windows (The most I've ever pushed it) without breaking a sweat

I think you have a tab problem.

I suggest you try out a 12 step program. Tabaholics Anonymous works.

Are you the guy that posted on the Microsoft forums about Edge crashing after 1600 open tabs?

Hell the fuck no, I only ever run a single tab in edge, the tab to download another browser

FUCK edge

That's one more tab than you need, tho.

(Hint: use an OS that comes with Firefox -- and a package manager, for that matter -- by default.)

For win10/11, you should be able to bypass using a browser and install directly from an elevated cmd using winget.

They used Chrome in the instructions, but it works with Firefox too. (It's my preferred method.) https://www.how2shout.com/how-to/a-single-command-to-install-google-chrome-on-windows-11-or-10.html

The winget package manager should already be installed on updated systems, but if not, you can install it from the Microsoft Store app. It is listed as 'App Installer' and is authored by Microsoft.

And I thought I was a monster with 50 tabs.

Man the highest tabs amount of tabs i get up to is in the 30s, and only in private browsing mode.

Oh whoops, I should close some windows, because I currently have 623 open tabs in Firefox across 107 windows. It's working fine, even with all my plugins running. Firefox is good at unloading dormant tabs.

They're probably talking about their experience on their hardware, we don't know what machine or what version of Firefox they're talking about. (It's possible it's a really old version and not really relevant now or it's possible their experience is valid for their hardware)

Well, I HATE having many tabs open. Just bookmark them for later. So far, FF is friendlier with how I go whereas the last times I tried Chrome, it often allocates RAM at launch for a thousand tabs that will never exist (hyperbole but you get it)

I am not sure what you can possibly expect of any program. That is absurd.

Well if Chrome "The RAM Eater" can handle it, then it's obviously not that absurd ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yep, I use Firefox for the idea, but let's stop kidding ourselves that it is in any way memory efficient or fast

Best thing about Firefox is stability somehow it works nearly all devices

So for some reason Firefox doesn't work most of the time on my parent's ISP. It simply doesn't find sites 80% of the time. I can take the same wifi adapter and move it to my place and it works fine. I've messed arounfld with different DNS and stuff, and I just can't get it to be reliable there.

It's super annoying.

Aww man that sucks but hey atleast you can try Firefox forks maybe they can work

people don't complain to get solutions, they complain so everyone knows how miserable they are

and to shame people into making a solution, hopefully.

Or at least that's what we tell ourselves. Because it makes us feel better.

I was at a party a few weeks ago and when we needed to use a web browser, one of the first things that happened was one of the attendees taking the computer to install FireFox.

I put in a tailplug and put on fox ears every time I use Firefox.

"I'm so used to getting fucked by Chrome and Edge that I just feel like something's missing if I don't."

I actually got kicked out of school because I wouldn't use internet explorer, but Firefox is still the best option. Always was. Even if you need a special chair.

Please elaborate, sounds like a crazy story.

Well, it was high school, and they didn't like my tail plug. Kept calling it 'inappropriate'. I kept laying out my arguments for why chrome and IE are trash, but they just could not tolerate open source, I guess.

Ngl, I've never had issues with either for ram. my experience with Firefox is mostly the sameas chrome with ram usage. The main reason Im on Firefox is cause it's been a whole lot more stable for me than chrome.

It's about the amount of tabs you keep open. Every site will take a piece of RAM and a max of 5Gb per tab if not mistaken.

I think GChrome has a feature now where it tries to "kill" the tabs you're not using to mitigate this issue but it's opt in.

I switched from Chrome to Firefox on my Mac desktop and the memory usage was cut in half at least. I only use it on my Linux notebook, so I have no idea about the memory usage difference there, but there was an unquestionable difference on the Mac. It has 16 gb of ram and is from 7 years ago, so it was before the M-chips and their ram hunger and still gave me memory warnings.

Now I never have memory issues on it. All it took was switching to Firefox.

So it definitely makes a difference on some systems.

If the majority of ram isn't being utilized you either have a problem or have entirely to much ram. I'm not saying programs can't be memory hogs, but they should utilize what resources are there to perform better. It would be like turning on a flash light, using all of the power and then covering half the bulb while trying to cross a field in the dark. The CPU and GPU use more electricity when running at higher percentages, ram is negligible for the most part.

i always hear this but it's obviously not true lol, if i ever see my ram reach max usage the computer shits itself and i'll likely have to restart it because most things become utterly frozen

full RAM utilization is patently not something you want.

But they said "majority" not "entirety."

This is a post about being upset chrome is using 40% of RAM on the system

Who only has a single program running at a time on their PC? Are we in the 90's?

Everyone uses multiple programs. Who said you'd only have one program open?

Using 40% for one of your most important programs seems totally reasonable to me.

In my personal experience chrome rarely gives up ram and will starve programs that need it more. While that works if you're only running chrome, if you're using it in the background while doing something else then you can find important programs running out of memory. The result is that you have to close and reopen chrome.

Granted, I haven't used chrome or a chromium-based browser in a very long time, so chrome might have gotten better at giving up memory when other programs need it. However, if I'm playing a game, doing rendering, working in a game engine, etc, then usually I have a browser open in the background with YouTube or Twitch and/or programming/visual references. I don't need or want a browser consuming as much memory as it can, just enough for it to play videos, show me reference images or tell me how to program something. It absolutely doesn't need +8gb of ram to do that (I saw it hit 16gb once, which was when I switched to Firefox; 16gb is ridiculous no matter how many tabs you have open).

Been using Firefox for years. Still a stupid dumb human, no fur.

2 more...

Firefox users may very well be doing that and no one will know because Google is not spying on them through their browser.

Kind of is. Part of Firefox revenue is from Google, who pays to have google as the default search engine

I will never not be upset at people who don't realize how ram works

I'd say it's more the unwillingness to switch from shitty Chrome as if it was a bad thing to do.

Chromium browsers have a lot of issues, and so does firefox, but ram usage is not one of chromes weaknesses, Chromium regularly preforms better for me then firefox does under low ram scenarios, Both in terms of chrome being responsive, and in terms of chrome not crippling everything else around it.

This is correct. Ive helped a bunch of people (in Linux) complaining that chrome was eating all their ram when in fact it wasn't. Memory management is hard and it's easy to look at the wrong indicators.

It does love its ram but not as much as people think.

As for the last question, yes the murring and the tail thingy aren't forbidden, to be clear.

Just create more ram out of thin air with zram. I've got 60gb now. 30 something actual ram (some of my 32gb gets allocated for the APU) and the same amount as zram. I can run 2 chrome instances now!

But why would you want to even run one Chrome instance?

One is dedicated to the power of our lord and savior jesus christ.

The other is for Kim Possible foot porn.

Show off. I have 12 GB of DDR3, and a swap partition on spinning rust.

(save me)

Yeah, with lz4 your zram will be fast too so you can do some gaming with it

Do I want to know what "murring" is?

Orion > Firefox.

I've not heard of orion before, what do you like better about it? Is it WebKit based?

Hi, not the Original Commenter but an occasional user of Orion.

It is webkit based but has full compatibility for all Firefox and Chrome extensions. Plus in my experience it's really fast at loading stuff - noticeably so.

It's being developed by the people behind the Kagi search engine which is also really good

It is webkit based

So not better than Firefox and OP is just silly.

Why would being WebKit based make it bad? Because it supports the web engine duopoly?

On an iPhone in specific it means there's no real difference between them beyond mostly the cosmetic. It's not just that it's WebKit, it's that it's WebKit that's also behind Apple's walled garden.

Firefox that doesn't render with gecko isn't really Firefox, is it? I mean I get that Mozilla endorses the app, but it's not the same Firefox as it would be almost anywhere else.

As I mentioned above, it's quite snappier than safari and even Firefox. It's clear that they've worked on performance.

That's not my point. My point is that all iOS browsers are essentially the same browser because they're forced to be.

I agree. The recent EU ruling has atleast fixed that problem for EU citizens while the rest of the world catches up.

We were however discussing browsers in the context of desktops in the original thread. On MacOS, other engines are allowed.

Your issue is with apple's draconian policy on ios, not webkit.

Further, two F1 cars using the same engine can perform vastly differently depending on how they're tuned and how the car is built. While I do concur that it is criminal to not let us strap a jet engine to the f1 car, doesn't mean that there aren't differences between the currently legal cars beyond the coat of paint.

i just want a web browser that doesn't cause me to have strokes, and doesn't give me internet aids.

How fucking hard is it to write a piece of software jesus fucking christ.

Motherfucker have you tried looking at a browser implementation? It might just be the single most complex piece of software on the planet today. It's basically an OS, JS environment and GUI toolkit in one

thats exactly the problem.

That would make sense as to why it's such a dogshit piece of software, wouldnt it? That's why windows is bad after all.

Also fun fact. I recently had a spat with firefox taking like 30s to startup, apparently for SOME fucking reason, someone thought a 25s timeout would be sane in the event that discord doesn't detect xdg-desktop-settings or whatever the specific was.

brave doesn't eat ram like that, not unless you have a lot going on at once.

it's chromium
also they have done some shady stuff in the past and the ceo is a homophobe

also they have done some shady stuff in the past and the ceo is a hardcore homophobe

It's a boy-who-cried-wolf situation. Too many false homophobia accusations have gone around for be to believe any of them anymore.

just use ungoogled chromium

Edit: what the fuck?! I did not expect this much hate for recommending an open source, privacy preserving, technologically superior browser. You guys need to touch grass.

"just buy a bmw and hack the heated seats into a switch that you physically installed into the dash" this u right now

Welcome to Lemmy. You may only advocate for Firefox.