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Firefox: 46 features you might not know about

30 points by davatk 17y ago

webwright 17y ago
They should add the following features: - speed - reliability - small footprint Until then, I'm going to stick with Chrome.
- Methos 17y ago
  I face this dilemma of using Chrome for speed and small footprint VS gazillions of firefox extensions...
  - booticon 17y ago
    FWIW the latest beta of Chrome supports extensions, and there's quite a bit to choose from. Not quite at the level of Firefox, but it's a heck of a start.
    - pbhjpbhj 17y ago
      The latest beta for me on Kubuntu requires 50MB of installs. That's a bit fat for my liking. I have 5.0.307.7 beta but am avoiding the .307.9 update. Appears to be a new dependency on LSB that simple enables the dependencies to be shorthanded rather than giving the genuine deps.
- jules 17y ago
  + uncluttered interface
- decode 17y ago
  This gets said every time Firefox comes up here, so I have to finally ask what I've been confused about for a while: exactly what things are faster that you like so much? I've used both Firefox and Chrome and all of the things I do more than once a day (open new tabs, close tabs, open new windows) are so fast on both that I can't really tell the difference. Is it stuff like that? Or are there web apps I'm not using that are noticeably faster on Chrome? I'm genuinely curious what I'm missing out on.
  - daleharvey 17y ago
    can people not downvote genuine questions below 0, this was not trolling, downvoting is not for general disagreement. xul which is used by firefox to render the ui, while being really easy to use and modify, is incredibly slow, firefoxs renderer is also a little slower, but I think most of it is on the responsiveness in the ui, most people attribute this to the different javascript engines but actually they are very similiar in speed.
    - pbhjpbhj 17y ago
      The two computers I use most, an Athlon 1.1G with 768MB and a dual core Athlon 64 X2 4000+ with 2G both run chrome more snappily and lock up far less often than with FF. FF is still my browser of choice as I'm used to firebug and the other addons. The limitation appears to be flash handling. Practically every website has some flash if only for cookies and/or adverts.
  - samdk 17y ago
    Chrome is significantly faster on a resource-limited computer. I use it on my EeePC for that reason. On more powerful computers I don't notice enough of a difference to feel the need to switch.
  - jamesbritt 17y ago
    Sorry to see you downvoted. Seems like a reasonable question. For me, Chrome starts and renders my default page faster than Firefox. Noticeably faster. I'm not sure if, when following a link that one is faster than the other, since server response time is a factor. However, I've had far fewer cases of of frozen pages with Chrome, and have never had all my tabs and browser instances of Chrome get locked up because of one page page. Firefox, on the other hand, is monolithic in that way. There is one feature of Firefox that is essential for me: invoking firefox from the command line (or a shortcut) starts a new instance. Chrome seems to (usually) want to find an existing instance and open a new tab. I seriously do not want to have a single browser instance with all my tabs; I prefer to have multiple instances with related tabs. It's especially annoying when kicking off a link in chrome opens a tab in an instance in some other virtual desktop. :( OK, Chrome rant over. Chrome has gotten better about supporting bookmarklets and greasemonkey, key aspects of my Firefox use, and overall memory use is much better for me with Chrome.
- Perceval 17y ago
  Mozilla has active projects working on almost all of the complaints mentioned here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Projects https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Projects They are working on startup speed, UI responsiveness, reducing I/O, a new uncluttered theme, redesign of the addon manager, resource packages (to speed up page rendering), and asynchronous calls to the Places database (which powers bookmarks, history, and the location bar). They're not ignoring the problems, although we'd all like to see the results sooner rather than later.
bhp 17y ago
The list doesn't display correctly in Chrome. How ironic.
daleharvey 17y ago
this is such an awesome list, the best thing about it is that safari and chrome support a good chunk of these as well, I never even knew pointer events were implemented. add websockets(which are coming soon), and the one features that really dissapoints me since noone seems to want to address it, clipboard access, and you have a pretty solid base to build most applications.
zaphar 17y ago
cross domain xmlhttprequests? Is this wise?
- user24 17y ago
  Only supported if the server you're requesting to sets an "Access-Control-Allow-Origin" HTTP header specifying that the referer is allowed. You cannot change the referer via JS. If that header is not set, the browser denies the request. It's very well thought out I think. https://developer.mozilla.org/En/HTTP_access_control https://developer.mozilla.org/En/HTTP_access_control

30 points by davatk 17y ago

They should add the following features: - speed - reliability - small footprint Until then, I'm going to stick with Chrome.

Methos 17y ago
I face this dilemma of using Chrome for speed and small footprint VS gazillions of firefox extensions...
- booticon 17y ago
  FWIW the latest beta of Chrome supports extensions, and there's quite a bit to choose from. Not quite at the level of Firefox, but it's a heck of a start.
  - pbhjpbhj 17y ago
    The latest beta for me on Kubuntu requires 50MB of installs. That's a bit fat for my liking. I have 5.0.307.7 beta but am avoiding the .307.9 update. Appears to be a new dependency on LSB that simple enables the dependencies to be shorthanded rather than giving the genuine deps.
jules 17y ago
+ uncluttered interface
decode 17y ago
This gets said every time Firefox comes up here, so I have to finally ask what I've been confused about for a while: exactly what things are faster that you like so much? I've used both Firefox and Chrome and all of the things I do more than once a day (open new tabs, close tabs, open new windows) are so fast on both that I can't really tell the difference. Is it stuff like that? Or are there web apps I'm not using that are noticeably faster on Chrome? I'm genuinely curious what I'm missing out on.
- daleharvey 17y ago
  can people not downvote genuine questions below 0, this was not trolling, downvoting is not for general disagreement. xul which is used by firefox to render the ui, while being really easy to use and modify, is incredibly slow, firefoxs renderer is also a little slower, but I think most of it is on the responsiveness in the ui, most people attribute this to the different javascript engines but actually they are very similiar in speed.
  - pbhjpbhj 17y ago
    The two computers I use most, an Athlon 1.1G with 768MB and a dual core Athlon 64 X2 4000+ with 2G both run chrome more snappily and lock up far less often than with FF. FF is still my browser of choice as I'm used to firebug and the other addons. The limitation appears to be flash handling. Practically every website has some flash if only for cookies and/or adverts.
- samdk 17y ago
  Chrome is significantly faster on a resource-limited computer. I use it on my EeePC for that reason. On more powerful computers I don't notice enough of a difference to feel the need to switch.
- jamesbritt 17y ago
  Sorry to see you downvoted. Seems like a reasonable question. For me, Chrome starts and renders my default page faster than Firefox. Noticeably faster. I'm not sure if, when following a link that one is faster than the other, since server response time is a factor. However, I've had far fewer cases of of frozen pages with Chrome, and have never had all my tabs and browser instances of Chrome get locked up because of one page page. Firefox, on the other hand, is monolithic in that way. There is one feature of Firefox that is essential for me: invoking firefox from the command line (or a shortcut) starts a new instance. Chrome seems to (usually) want to find an existing instance and open a new tab. I seriously do not want to have a single browser instance with all my tabs; I prefer to have multiple instances with related tabs. It's especially annoying when kicking off a link in chrome opens a tab in an instance in some other virtual desktop. :( OK, Chrome rant over. Chrome has gotten better about supporting bookmarklets and greasemonkey, key aspects of my Firefox use, and overall memory use is much better for me with Chrome.
Perceval 17y ago
Mozilla has active projects working on almost all of the complaints mentioned here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Projects https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Projects They are working on startup speed, UI responsiveness, reducing I/O, a new uncluttered theme, redesign of the addon manager, resource packages (to speed up page rendering), and asynchronous calls to the Places database (which powers bookmarks, history, and the location bar). They're not ignoring the problems, although we'd all like to see the results sooner rather than later.

bhp 17y ago

The list doesn't display correctly in Chrome. How ironic.

daleharvey 17y ago

this is such an awesome list, the best thing about it is that safari and chrome support a good chunk of these as well, I never even knew pointer events were implemented. add websockets(which are coming soon), and the one features that really dissapoints me since noone seems to want to address it, clipboard access, and you have a pretty solid base to build most applications.

zaphar 17y ago

cross domain xmlhttprequests? Is this wise?

user24 17y ago
Only supported if the server you're requesting to sets an "Access-Control-Allow-Origin" HTTP header specifying that the referer is allowed. You cannot change the referer via JS. If that header is not set, the browser denies the request. It's very well thought out I think. https://developer.mozilla.org/En/HTTP_access_control https://developer.mozilla.org/En/HTTP_access_control