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Comment by SwellJoe | Hacker News Reader

This. I'm happy to put up with some mild inconvenience to move toward more open ecosystems. I have predominantly used Linux since 1995 (since long before Linux was nice on the desktop), and as Firefox OS devices make their way to the US, I'll likely migrate off of Android.

Also, Firefox, the browser, is really firing on all cylinders these days. The developer edition is awesome, syncing is awesome and works across all devices (I use Firefox on phone, tablet, and Linux and Windows). And, most importantly, I trust Mozilla more than any other browser provider. I store a lot of stuff with Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Flickr, but I'm not entirely happy about it (to varying degrees).

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Is the sandboxing released into public builds yet? I've been sort of holding off on making the jump back to FF until that happens. Still champing at the bit a little for precisely the reasons you mention. Firefox is worthy of support simply by virtue of being both open, and supported by an organization whose motives aren't intrinsically suspect.

Not yet. Sandbox is heavily tied to e10s aka. electrolysis, what is planned for Fx39 (meaning that we should expect it for Fx41+).

For what it's worth, Firefox has been somewhat more stable for me than Chrome on Linux lately (there are other reasons to want the sandboxing, but stability is one of them). Now that Flash is so much less common than it was a few years ago, the instances where my browser dies due to a misbehaving plugin have dropped to almost none. Also, the only reason I ever start Chrome is to watch Netflix or other sites that won't work in Firefox (I still had to tweak the user agent to claim to be something different to convince Netflix to work); so it's possibly not surprising that it crashes more than Firefox.

And, of course, it's anecdotal.

Netflix should work in Firefox, though you need Microsoft's Silverlight plugin. Mozilla is actively working on EME (aka HTML5 video DRM) for 2015.

Wow. When did Silverlight become available for Linux? I knew it was available for Android, Mac, and Windows. But, last time I looked it wasn't available for Linux. Which is why I've been using Chrome for Netflix, as it has HTML5 video DRM (I guess; I just followed instructions online months ago and it worked and I haven't changed it since).

But, I see that Microsoft does provide a download for Linux and FreeBSD and even Solaris! Oh, wait, it's a redirect to Moonlight. I didn't think it worked with Netflix, but if I find myself with some free time I might play with it.

I use pipelight, and it just uses what seems to be silverlight through wine. Haven't had any problems.

It should be noted that while Firefox doesn't have tab sandboxing, it does isolate Flash (by launching it in a separate process called plugin-container).

Here's how firefox describes plugin-container [0]: Plugins are loaded separately from Firefox, allowing the main Firefox process to stay open if a plugin crashes.

This is different than a sandbox. A sandbox limits what the plugin is capable of doing to the system. The whole point of sandboxing flash is that it has had numerous security holes.

0. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/what-is-plugin-containe...

Sync is so awesome I have a bunch of devices, and use sync on all of them, and it just works. I second the trusting Mozilla more than any other browser provider (and even general service provider, if you think of Google/Amazon/Facebook/etc that way)...

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