Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Mongoose on December 28, 2013, 05:10:30 am
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I've been a loyal Firefox user ever since I first graduated from the Internet diapers phase and realized what a piece of **** IE6 was. Over the years, though, I've become more and more disillusioned with the direction the Mozilla team is taking the project, particularly in terms of basic functionality and UI. It started around the time of FF4, with various button merges and the default to "tabs on top" appearance (complete with a laughable video detailing why it was "the better way to browse"). In the past year or so, since the move to the rapid-release schedule, the idea seems to be to turn FF into as much of a Chrome clone as possible in both appearance and functionality (ignoring the fact that if people wanted something that looks and feels like Chrome, they'd just go download ****ing Chrome instead).
The main takeaway from this is that there have been any number of features I consider integral to my daily browsing experience that have been moved from the standard options menu to toggles buried somewhere in about:config, or else just removed from FF entirely. There have been a few different occasions when I've been forced to download an extension just to keep the browser working as it did previously. The most recent casualty with the update to FF26 was the complete removal of the old separate downloads window: Mozilla had removed the options dialog for this in favor of pushing their new (overly-convoluted) integrated downloads display, but they at least left the old system in place if you tweaked an about:config option, which I had. Now that older option has been removed entirely, and the only way I'm able to keep using it is via an extension some kind developer whipped up. Looking ahead a bit, it seems as though the straw that will break my back will be the release of the completely-redesigned "Australis" theme at some point next year, when even the ability to keep my tabs right above the page view will be removed for good. There's already someone who's whipped up yet another extension for the beta release to revert things back, but it's come to the point where I feel like I'm having to rely on the whims of various third-party developers just to maintain a sane browsing experience, and there are no guarantees that said add-ons will be maintained into the foreseeable future. (Case in point: I was using a lovely little theme that adapted the colorful old FF3 buttons for more modern versions, but the developer eventually gave up on it because of how disgusted he was getting with Mozilla's policy directions.)
I've used Firefox for long enough that the idea of completely jumping ship is really unappealing: Chrome is right out, because it's the exact unappealing direction that Mozilla is currently heading, and beyond that there are who knows how many obscure options. However, I just stumbled across something that might solve my problem: Pale Moon (http://www.palemoon.org/), an independently-developed browser based on the FF source that aims for increased efficiency and (most importantly for me) rejects the Mozilla team's more recent UI philosophies. Since it's basically FF at heart, most extensions apparently work just fine on it, so it seems like it should be a fairly-seamless transition. I don't know that I've ever seen it mentioned around here, but does anyone have any experience with it?
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in general i hate what everyone is doing to uis these days. one of the things that made windows usable was the fact that its interfaces were mostly consistent (for at least a decade). they were being slowly replaced, but that really didnt bother me up until vista when everything was renamed and old features that i use were deprecated. firefox has produced some annoyances, but its not enough to make me switch to a really obscure browser.
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I use Pale Moon exclusively. I don't really use too many extensions, but the ones I do use are all compatible, and Pale Moon doesn't eat as much memory as Firefox does.
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How fast does Pale Moon boot up, relative to FF? That's been my big qualm with FF lately, which Chrome doesn't seem to have a problem with. Other than that, I still like FF, even the UI changes (as long as I restore the actual menu bar every time I install it. Hate that one-button thing :mad:)
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the only reason i use FF is because IE can't ad block. mozilla can screw off with their UI and inability to run downloaded programs directly. i can count on no hands how many times i've clicked on a link to a virus and gave it my permission to run. which is what i would have had to do to make this 'security feature' effective at all.
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How fast does Pale Moon boot up, relative to FF? That's been my big qualm with FF lately, which Chrome doesn't seem to have a problem with. Other than that, I still like FF, even the UI changes (as long as I restore the actual menu bar every time I install it. Hate that one-button thing :mad:)
Sorry I can't really answer this in any meaningful way, besides to say that since I have a SSD the difference between all of the browsers isn't significant enough to notice or matter very much.
I want to like Firefox and its ilk. I really do. I've been using it since the beginning of time, it seems. But the rapid-fire "updates" and bloat are getting on my nerves. Just as I make a post in this thread a couple of days ago to say that I use Pale Moon exclusively, it "updates" again and now I've been noticing a significant hangtime when opening new tabs in the background. At this point I feel like that if I could figure out how to make YouTube my ***** on Chromium (since Google likes to kill any extensions that let you mess with it) I'd probably go back - but I'm in the middle of a move and don't really have enough free time to migrate. Again.
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the only reason i use FF is because IE can't ad block
Adblock Plus has been available to IE for quite some time now.
https://adblockplus.org/en/internet-explorer
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Tabs on top doesn't bother me but the whole download window thing pissed me off real bad. And yeah, what's up with the whole "I want to be exactly like Google Chrome" thing?
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the only reason i use FF is because IE can't ad block
Adblock Plus has been available to IE for quite some time now.
https://adblockplus.org/en/internet-explorer
i'm trying to make this work, but i can't seem to get it to actually block ads. how does one add filter lists to the IE version?
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just because you can, doesn't mean you should
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Using Internet Explorer makes web developers cry and rip their hair out. Using anything else just pisses them off.
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and yet i find IE to be the most universally compatible. i've encountered websites that don't work right on FF and are fine on IE, but never the other way around.
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thats because microsoft (and probibly google too) keeps shoehorning in their own html features, and web developers are dumb enough to use them instead of the established standards.
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thats because microsoft (and probibly google too) keeps shoehorning in their own html features, and web developers are dumb enough to use them instead of the established standards.
Or because Mozilla refuses to implement certain standard features because it somehow goes against their beliefs or something.
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Citation needed for that latter one.
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For example, SVG 1.1 support in Firefox (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/SVG_in_Firefox).
Some developers say "Oh, we'll get it done... eventually... *wink* *wink*", while others hope that certain SVG features somehow go away and others still refuse.
Hell, there's a bug report (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=273171) on a specific feature for almost a decade!
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I was using the All-in-One Sidebar extension to deal with various irritations, but it seems FF 26 broke it and now I have no access to the downloads window with it installed.
Thanks, Firefox devs!
Seriously, quit ****ing with the user interface.
At least Tab Mix Plus still works.
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I am a longtime Opera user and something similar happened to it during migration to a new rendering engine. Whole program was completely changed, many features removed and simplified, and after many months it still doesnt have bookmarks, RSS reader or proper synchronisation like it used to have.
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Use Opera and FF normally, started using Chromium (I refuse to touch Chrome), so I might look at Pale Moon.
My Firefox makes a point at regularly crashing at oppurtune intervals, or the Flash Player chokes a violent death. Doesn't change the fact the Mozilla team has left the routine memory leaks in place (considering that I turned disk caching and swap allocation fucntions off, consigning it to RAM instead for improved performance on my unstable 'Nix rig) has left me with a mixed opinion. Considering Icecat and Iceweasel are based off of FF, hopefully Pale Moon has less derp.
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how the **** do you make a browser with no bookmarks :banghead:
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how the **** do you make a browser with no bookmarks :banghead:
Bill Gates and Richard Stallman secretly engaging a Browser love affair?
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I guess the affair opens the gates for stall'n progress?
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I've been using Pale Moon for the longest time (3 years?)
Since benchmarks mean nothing to me (what difference does a thousandth of a nanosecond make to the average user?), I can tell you that Pale Moon loads up the moment you double click on it.
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Had chrome hanging up my system again -> installed Pale Moon thanks to this thread -> everything so silky smooth. I won't ever look back.
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Well, I just downloaded it today. I imported my bookmarks and settings from Firefox, tinkered with the tabbed browsing settings a little, and so far it's performing wonderfully. I don't see any real need to go back to FF.
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Pale moon looks to be a great browser. However with them compiling all of this for windows, i'm left surprised with no binaries for linux. This i thought was awkward since they are an opensource project compiling straight up from open source code. The developers probably just want to keep things simple focusing on windows only for now (i do commend their developers for releasing for different processor architectures on windows versus the one executable for them all).
Doing a little more research, it seems that the pale moon community is enthusiastic about the idea of anyone compiling binaries for linux for testing. Other pale moon users recommended just to run pale moon under wine. I don't need to switch to a different browser that badly; native os integration definitely helps in the area of browsers (for example: i don't want to have to install the windows version of flash under wine for youtube). I would like to switch browsers myself.
I am still looking for something that has standard features, and is simple. I immediately tried out midori. Midori is awesome, but i dumped it returning to firefox. Midori was noticeably slower than firefox, a great deal slower in its current iteration (i really hope midori got that fixed; i thought it was great enough to switch to). Pale moon on the other hand sounds great. But, i'll muck around with it when it gets compiled for linux.
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It's funny...I'm the one who posted this thread in the first place, and I installed Pale Moon several weeks ago, but I'm such a creature of habit that it took me until today to finally start using it as my daily browser. :p