Is there a good transition path for someone who uses a lot of Google products? In particular, I use Chrome across all my devices, and I depend on the ability to search my history/recent tabs/etc from anywhere. Will Firefox give me the same ability? Is the transition literally just: Install Firefox everywhere and start using it instead?
> Is the transition literally just: Install Firefox everywhere and start using it instead?
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.
Agreed to what everyone else said, but to me the killer feature of Firefox Sync is that you can send tabs from one browser to another, so I can find links on my work computer and ship them directly to my home computer or phone to read later, and they'll just show up when it syncs next.
I'm actually not sure if this is a native Chrome feature, but I can instantly send tabs to my other devices with right click > "send to your devices" > list of devices with a Google account signed in (Which is my phone and laptop for me on my desktop).
As long as you use it everywhere in the same way you presently use Chrome everywhere, yes. You can also import a certain amount (history & bookmarks, not, I think, current & recent tabs) to get started.
Firefox Sync let's you syncronize Bookmarks, Open tabs, Logins, History, Add-ons and Preferences across devices by logging in once with username password
If you click on the 'x hours ago' part of the comment next to the username you will get a parent link and can then reply to and save individual comments.
I just tried this. Interestingly I'd left it on v68 and it cooked my MBP, fans all on max immediately. When I updated to 70 it seems to work perfectly. CPU temp in the 40s. Gonna leave it on in the background and see if it suddenly spikes.
That's a slightly worrying precedent, they're calling the way to diaable certain bits of obnoxiousness (the header bar in Tree Style Tabs comes to mind) "legacy", which is usually a precursor to removal.
Is there a new method available/forthcoming, or is this more control planned to be wrenched out of user's hands?
Guess we are dealing with purists here. Mind you that Chromium is free and open-source just like MySQL. A strategical move by the community to fork MySQL to MariaDB to ensure it remained free and open from the tech giant after it was acquired by Oracle. How Brave is any different? It made a similar move. Some people hate crypto. Fine. Personally I've never used the Brave crypto. Perhaps FF 70 has completely fixed its performance problem, sure, happy to switch. But before that really happens Brave is still a viable interim solution.
The issue is the engine. There are few big engines out there and chromium is taking a lot of the market.
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.
It is an opt-in system. They're not making you use it and you don't lose anything by choosing not to opt-in. What exactly are they doing that you would consider "shilling"?
Last I checked it was looking like they would now be as "good" as Chrome, which is much worse than Safari. Hopefully that improved or will soon improve.
There are other options (paid ones) that are equal —or even better since they are quite automatic— than ublock.
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.
Firefox Sync syncs your tabs, bookmarks, passwords, etc. Your read it later list is synced through Pocket (which is owned by Mozilla). They exist on desktop and mobile.
Recently switched from Safari to Firefox because of the awful extensions environment in Safari but definitely missing the battery life. Really wish one browser could just get everything right
This is what I am most excited about. I have been using the improvements through nightly since they were released, I think little more than a month, and I couldn't be happier. I'd hate to have to use Chrome and I welcome the competition to webkit.
I don't know about other usages, but energy consumption while using YouTube is important to me (usually have something playing while I work) so I just did a quick measurement.
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.
You could try a plugin which forces h264 Youtube. Just about anything made in the last decade has mature hardware support for decoding h264, but not necessarily for VP8/9. This may be what's going on here.
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.
Safari does not support vp8 or vp9 when playing youtube, and youtube serves h264 instead. h264 is less efficient in terms of compression ratio (more to download for the same quality), but h264 is decoded in hardware on OSX, and VP8 or VP9 isn't, which explains what you see.
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.
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!
I don't know what iina is, but youtube-dl + mpv mentioned by Angeo34 does exactly that (stream videos without pre-downloading them). Youtube-dl just gets the stream URL and mpv plays it. And it's easy to use, just:
i am very very eager to test and use this. FF is my main driver but it's a heat machine on my mac 10.11.6. I wonder if i gain something to upgrade my macOS (4g ram :()
Yes, Nightly is (I'm simplifying a bit but it's generally true) release + a few weeks of patches + different default settings, sometimes experimental things enabled, etc.
I'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