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Comment by VLM | Hacker News Reader

"The first thing people complain about with browsers is ..."

They changed the browser UI, either the browser devs or the site devs via stupid javascript tricks (messing with scrolling, etc). I got driveby download powned and my CC info stolen and five spam toolbars in the UI I can't get rid of. There are too many spammy ads. They make is as hard as humanly possible to use bookmarks to encourage the use of a search engine every single time you go to a site thus monetizing ad views. Typosquatters. "Journalism" sites with one line of the article per page of spam. Spam "answer" websites.

Memory is way, way down the list.

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> They make is as hard as humanly possible to use bookmarks

Chrome has a "star" button right in the address bar, FF and IE have Ctrl+B to create a bookmark.

And both Chrome and FF have a pretty good auto-complete in the address bar (I just have to type "ne" to get Hacker News, "ma" for google mail, "youp" and "yout" for video streams, etc pp).

People vastly underestimate the power of keyboard shortcuts. I work as a freelance consultant/support guy and everyone is surprised how fast I work with even the slowest computers. Most can't believe how much time one can save by knowing at least Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V, Alt-Tab and Ctrl-Tab.

I use mostly the same functionality that you describe here, with the exception of "youp". What does that autocomplete to... Ohhhh, I see what ya did there.

Two words for you: Incognito Mode

> Chrome has a "star" button right in the address bar, FF and IE have Ctrl+B to create a bookmark.

The Classic Theme Restorer add-on for FF allows you restore the star button to the address bar. On FF, Ctrl-D bookmarks the current page, while Ctrl-B opens a list of bookmarks.

I don't get it; I'm on FF 29 without that addon, and I have a star button on the bar (not in the address text input, but on the same bar). What's the point of the addon?

The point is the star button is not in a convenient location in FF 29... I find have to search for the star button now when need to bookmark something. I guess it made to much sense to have right in the address bar so they moved it... The Classic Theme Restorer may be in my near future.

UPDATE: I used the Customize feature to move the star button just to the right of the address bar and that is good enough for me.

What's the use of an uncategorized bookmark? I always drag the url into a bookmark folder in the toolbar (which I always have open; apparently come people hate that.) For uncategorized stuff, well, I guess that's why I have 300+ tabs open right now...

And Tree Style Tabs. Cannot live anymore without TST. That really ought to be in the core. Especially since it's sometimes a little buggy, though that may be because FF is changing underneath it.

Oddly, I'm on Nightly, and the star button is to the right of my url bar. I don't remember moving it back there, and I don't know why I would, since I never use it.

Ok, it's gone now.

Definitely. In a browser-on-pc setting, who even cares about memory any more? We have loads of it.

And who would want to use a browser anywhere other than a PC, right?

We appear to be talking about ABP on desktop firefox, no?

It's true; my comment wasn't fair.

Returning to your original point: I've been working on Firefox's memory consumption for about three years now. There are quite a few people who take your viewpoint. But there are also plenty of people who care very deeply about memory usage. Some of this makes sense, e.g. from people who are on low-end machines. But some of it is less rational... there is a subset of people for which memory consumption is almost a moral issue, and excessive usage indicates the general decay of western civilization, or something like that.

The problem surely applies just as well to ABP on mobile Firefox?

If you think everyone or even most people out there want to upgrade their computers every couple years, and go for models with lots of RAM in them.. I'm sorry, you're wrong. Some geeks might have 16G or 32G but that's it.

Besides, whatever happened to Web browsing being a lightweight activity accessible for everyone even on his grandma's old PC?

Even a chromebook has multiple GB of RAM now. Yes, a lightweight browser on old machines is desirable, but everything has had more than enough RAM for an extra 100MB for ABP for multiple years.

The Chromebook Pixel I'm sitting behind right now has 4GB. I find it frequently insufficient for Chromes needs. I bought it a year ago; the websites that I use give me the same sort of content that they did a year ago.

Tons of people. There's all the people using old computers, because they're still plenty good (except when using applications written by people who think they don't have to worry about memory), and all the people on shoestring budgets using cheap computers that are for the most part good enough (except when using applications written by people who think they don't have to worry about memory).

Also, people who let their machine and browser rund 24/7. I'm currently stuck with an 8GB machine because I hit the maximum RAM supported by the mainboard and I don't have the time to go through a full productive machine migration right now.

So I restart my browser every 48 to 72 hours to reduce the memory footprint (which is one of those clunky "hacks", but it still works).

> In a browser-on-pc setting, who even cares about memory any more?

I do. I have 16GB of RAM (the max for my computer) and have 3GB of swap used. About 8GB of that is Firefox, and I (obviously) run more than just a browser on my computer.

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