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Goodbye Firefox

Longliner
Seasoned Pro
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Registered: ‎22-10-2014

Goodbye Firefox

Posted several times in recent years over my inability to view my PN bills and statements using Firefox, forcing use of IE then Edge. Earlier this year forum suggested a fix which worked for a while but then didn't. 

The last straw has been FF's introduction of double line spacing on bookmarks menus etc. involving tedious scrolling There was a temporary fix involving changes to the css file but it no longer works. Many complaints on FF forum have been told to like it or lump it. One poster wrote the epitaph that the ultimate fate of all open source software was to suffer death by a thousand tinkerers' cuts.

After at least 15 years on FF, which we gladly repaid with generous contributions, our household moved to Vivaldi six weeks ago. Simple design, easy setup, faster for our applications anyway, above all no need to restore our layouts after every other update. And our Plusnet accounts appear a few seconds after they have been selected. For simple souls like myself Vivaldi seems the answer -- so far!

12 REPLIES 12
shutter
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Registered: ‎06-11-2007

Re: Goodbye Firefox

Not seen any double line spacing on menu`s with Firefox 91.0.1

 

bookmarks menu 1.pngbookmarks menu 3.jpgbookmarks menu 4.jpg

7up
Community Veteran
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Re: Goodbye Firefox

I gave up on FF years ago and that was due to the constant memory leaks. I still have it installed but it's not my main browser, just one of i use for the odd thing here and there. I now use chrome and despite google being a pain randomly removing certain features, it is still easy enough to put up with compared to FF which was winding me up.

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bmc
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Re: Goodbye Firefox

So FF has memory leaks - that might explain a few things.

 

I use Win7 and until very recently IE11. However with it going out of support and more and more websites not supporting it I've moved to FF as my main browser. Principly because I like my bookmarks shown down the left hand side of a page and couldn't find another browser that did this.

 

And now I'm getting regular "out of memory" warnings from Win7 - it crashed the system once so I've started paying attention to them.

 

I also use Chrome, Vivaldi and Brave but for particular tasks - I know which websites ae open on them at any given time.

 

Brian

Baldrick1
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Re: Goodbye Firefox

Personally I value my privacy so go nowhere near Google products if I can avoid it.

Firefox with Duckduckgo as a search engine works fine for me.

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gleneagles
Aspiring Legend
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Registered: ‎02-08-2007

Re: Goodbye Firefox

+1

With the added addition of the above used via Linux mint and a VPN 

 

We are born into history and history is born into us.
Longliner
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Re: Goodbye Firefox

When I ditched Firefox I ditched Google as well. I tried Duckduckgo maybe 5/6 years ago and while I liked the idea it was little use in finding the stuff we wanted. What a difference in 2021 -- none of us have found fault so far, though we can hardly believe we are free of Google tracking and its enraging habit of presenting up to a page of adverts for whatever we are looking for.

Again we're non-techies with basic needs such as historical research, some Freeview streaming, email etc and this year's combination of Vivaldi, DDG and Plusnet 40MB/phone package is proving our best yet.

When I do need to provide personal details, particularly for info from Facebook, my throwaway email addresses include a person of indeterminate gender with somewhat strange interests. We were quite pleased when following Google searches regarding employment law on gender this person received an ad for various pleasure enhancing devices which were also beyond our technical abilities 😀

idonno
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Re: Goodbye Firefox


@bmc wrote:

So FF has memory leaks - that might explain a few things.

And now I'm getting regular "out of memory" warnings from Win7 - it crashed the system once so I've started paying attention to them.


out of memory? I really can't say I've had any such warnings using FF since before Win XP appeared on the scene. I'd be looking at the amount of memory on the computer.

 

Certainly my version of FF uses more memory (currently just under 1Gb) than say Edge but then I have Adblock, Privacy Badger etc all running on it, whereas with Edge I have none of those (its about 350Mb running the same video). But then I have lots of memory to play with and its something I have increased over the years with each new build. I can recall my surprise looking at the cache size on a browser about 4 years ago and suddenly realising it was over 1Gb! Years ago I use to think 100Mb was large.

 

Over the years, I've used Netscape, IE, Opera, then FF, occasionally Edge but Chrome, just a couple of times. Plus, a couple of other browsers that have popped up. At the end of the day, I've still tended to gravitate back to FF. Very customisable. On the phone though, its Opera. FF just doesn't work as well.

 

And yes, another DuckDuckGo, although at work it doesn't work as well as Google does when it comes to locating more obscure items of kit.

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RobPN
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Re: Goodbye Firefox

I mainly use Chrome these days because it doesn't seem bloated, and whilst there may be an element of tracking by Google it won't do them a lot of good as I don't bother logging in, I refuse most cookies, and AdBlock takes care of ... err ... ads etc..

 

Edit:  typo

Jonpe
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Re: Goodbye Firefox

I did get double spacing on the drop-down menu on tvguide.co.uk for a while once but never anywhere else.

After my recent troubles with a dodgy Dell update, when the computer is busy FF seems to jump and cover the taskbar.  Before it just said "Firefox is not responding" at the top of the screen (overwriting the tabs) and it was still possible to close the browser by right clicking on the taskbar.

The good thing about Vivaldi is that it works in all The Four Seasons I suppose. 😀

7up
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Re: Goodbye Firefox


@bmc wrote:

So FF has memory leaks - that might explain a few things.

 

I use Win7 and until very recently IE11. However with it going out of support and more and more websites not supporting it I've moved to FF as my main browser. Principly because I like my bookmarks shown down the left hand side of a page and couldn't find another browser that did this.

 

And now I'm getting regular "out of memory" warnings from Win7 - it crashed the system once so I've started paying attention to them.


FireFox has been known for years to leak memory (a technical term for using too much of it - not really a leak lol). When i switched from IE to FF years ago i immediately noticed a huge difference in teh memory consumed. Chrome was a lot better but even that likes to gobble up a lot of ram. Chrome is however very good when restoring tabs - it doesn't reload every single tab, it just reloads the last displayed one and the others as you click on them. FF the last i checked would reload the entire lot.

 

The rest of you talking about duckduckgo, vpns etc... you realise that although they make this claim to keep your data private, it could be anyone behind it and they could be logging absolutely every single detail. Whats to say the NSA or CIA is not operating your VPN or the duckduckgo search engine? - Oh you mean that bit of text on their website that says "we'll keep you annonymous..." Just like a politician claiming they'll do X,Y or Z!!!

I need a new signature... i'm bored of the old one!
Baldrick1
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Re: Goodbye Firefox


@7up wrote:

The rest of you talking about duckduckgo, vpns etc... you realise that although they make this claim to keep your data private, it could be anyone behind it and they could be logging absolutely every single detail. Whats to say the NSA or CIA is not operating your VPN or the duckduckgo search engine? - Oh you mean that bit of text on their website that says "we'll keep you annonymous..." Just like a politician claiming they'll do X,Y or Z!!!


I accept that if the CIA or NSA wish to see what I'm up to then there's nothing that I can do about it. But why would they unless I attract their attention?

On the other hand there are commercial organisations who provide 'free' services to build up as full a picture of you as they can so that they can perhaps flog this information to other companies and to openly 'target' you with advertising. These are the ones that I try to block and avoid as much as practicable.

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VileReynard
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Re: Goodbye Firefox

The test is:-

Do you see many web adverts?

Do any you see correspond with your internet accesses?

Mine don't 😀

"In The Beginning Was The Word, And The Word Was Aardvark."