Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try
mobile.nytimes.com
mobile.nytimes.com
Having said that, all sites which I regularly use work perfectly for me in Firefox with acceptable performance. So I never found a reason to switch at all. Rarely, I come across a website which is "best viewed with Chrome"; my default action is to close that site immediately.
I'm stunned. Is this still a thing? Last time I remember seeing websites recommending a browser, it was late 90s with "get Netscape" gifs.
Great response from Alex Russell, but it's clear that the sentiments of the Chrome team aren't translating into policy elsewhere in Google, or we wouldn't be dealing with something like this every few months.
EDIT: So it does! The last reason I was keeping Chrome as my default (so Meet calendar invite links would work) is gone.
Joking aside, I've never really known the difference between Google Talk, Hangouts, etc, but I regularly chat with my contacts from the Gmail website, using Firefox, without any problem so far.
Meet did start to work in latest Firefox recently, and then this week they broke mic audio. -.-
For anyone confused.
Unfortunately, often giving the official thumbs up requires passing some test suite. If companies have gotten better with their development methodology, their testing methodology is still often "Take a bunch of guys in India and have then run through that extensive check list".
Google Flights began blocking Firefox for Android last week, and Google still serves a degraded Search experience to Firefox users on Android (but hey, no AMP).
Despite well-meaning concern from the Chrome team, it's abundantly clear that Google's other product managers do not view interoperability with open, cross-browser standards as a requirement. And while many products eventually gain Firefox support, that support usually only comes months after launch, if at all. To wit, Earth was recently rebranded from "Earth on Web" to "Earth for Chrome," so who knows what's going to happen there.
It's shady for Google to lie to their users especially when they imply its the browsers fault and not just their dev team being lazy gits and not validating that features work on Firefox.
Because that's the only valid excuse I could come up with that would make sense as to why they don't support it beside being shady that is...
> Time for an upgrade. Looks like your browser needs a boost. To get the best Google Flights experience, upgrade to one of the supported browsers.
Given that everyone else on my team uses Chrome, I think we'll likely be sporting a "works best in Chrome" banner soon, especially as most people would be confused by "works best in WebKit/Blink".
Here's a screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/2CCRVDf
Firefox does it at least as well, just having both open is a bit much.
(Doesn't matter if I have 2 or 100 tabs if there is one bad apple.)
Chrome 5.3 GB
Firefox 4.2 GB
I couldn't find a tally of where Windows applies its "memory compression" logic, to be honest I don't even know what exactly it does, but let's assume it's some background task and it did more to Chrome than to Firefox since Chrome had been running longer.
So yes, Chrome needs noticeably more memory, and I prefer Firefox overall, but both can handle tons of tabs in my experience. Chrome also appears to be more responsive under pressure, I assume this is because it splits work into lots more processes than Firefox does, which is both probably a memory drain and a security benefit.
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EDIT in response to your reply:
Please do! I agree that logging would be interesting.
Do you know, does Firefox defer/discard tabs again if they do fully load but you don't use them for a long time? Or are the only deferred tabs, ones that you never looked at this session?
Maybe I should set up logging for this, might be interesting.
Do you know, does Firefox defer/discard tabs again if they do fully load but you don't use them for a long time? Or are the only deferred tabs, ones that you never looked at this session?
Second, when you type stuff into the address bar Firefox searches through opened tabs and suggests switching to that. This minimizes the number of times you'd open a new tab.
Third, there are many addons that help you organize your tabs. There are ways to search for tab content, group them into containers, find duplicates, etc.
How to start having many tabs open? Just change your MO when you use the browser. Want to search for something? Hit new tab and go. Researching something? Open every link you find somewhat promising in a new tab. When you have 200+ tabs opened, another 8-12 won't be a big change. Done with your research? Why close tabs? Just keep them open in case you'll need them later.
Often when I work on a project for, say, half a year I don't close tabs at all, and keep getting back to stuff I accidentally stumbled upon 2-3 months ago. It's very helpful at times to be able to dig stuff up one tab away. One could argue that bookmarks and history could be as helpful, but in practice when you switch to an old tab you see the context around it. What else I was looking at at that time, often information in the neighboring tabs is relevant, yet bookmarks and browser history don't have a good UI to surface it if front of you.
Yes, your browser becomes a memory hog, but as people noticed Firefox has means to compensate that. At 200+ tabs it consumes significantly less memory than Chrome (even with Chrome's load on demand turned on).
It takes time to get used to, and ones or twice a year you'd be doing tab cleaning, but I've being using browsers like this for 15+ years and really see benefits in this workflow.
For context: right now I have 330 tabs opened, Firefox consumes 1.8 GiB of RAM
This is how my Firefox looks like:
https://dosowisko.net/Screenshot_20171030_203716.png
https://dosowisko.net/Screenshot_20171030_203804.png
Once a while I'm getting to 1000-2000 open tabs and this is a point where the whole UI starts to feel a bit heavy, which is the only reason I clean them up then - navigating is a non-issue.
Later on TreeStyle Tab came out, and I've used that ever since. I've got 501 tabs right now (thanks tab count extension), I usually go on purges every so often when it gets around this high and close large groups of them, reading some before closing, bookmarking many of them before closing with a current month/year annotation and other tags, so I can get back down to a more reasonable ~100-200. Even if it didn't have its tree collapsing functionality (I've got 25 tabs collapsed in a tree right now related to setting up and using some new software I started doing last night, it takes up one tab of space when collapsed) I would still use it just for the fundamental insight that with widescreen resolutions being standard vertical screen real estate is much more important than horizontal real estate. Admittedly that's not as big an insight anymore with 4k screens (and I use a big 42inch one). Anyway with TreeStyle Tab I can have tabs that are on the left side of the browser, that grow down, with scrolling, but I can still read the titles of each tab unlike in Chrome where each tab after ~10-20 is just an icon (at best).
The URL bar is also just superior to Chrome's. It's not called the Awesome Bar for no reason. The table at the bottom of https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-search-fire... has a list of commands you can use to match things -- I actually often have that page in my sea of tabs since sometimes I forget a couple sigils but I found it immediately with ctrl+L + "awesome %".
This submission's title is kind of hilarious. Firefox never went away, I started using it pre 1.5 on a Windows 95 machine and though now I use Chrome/Chromium for some things I've never felt the need to leave Firefox. Well, except until recently with the Quantum updates, ironically. For my personal desktop, I'm still pre-Quantum, it works just as it always has, while on my other machines I've been giving the new Firefox a fair chance and am just hoping it gets better. The tree tabs addon port especially isn't as good, I really miss my right click context menu for noscript, etc.
It's a symptom of my non-optimal behavior. Blame the wetware between my ears. On any given moment, I might have perhaps 5-50 new tabs that I actually work in, closing them as I go along (but along those numbers). The rest are mostly left-overs since previous days.
My weakness is eg "this is an interesting read, but I don't have time now", or "this is a good reference, better save that". Over time, those add up.
To actually make it work, I set FF to not load tabs until focused. Then, when I start up, there are in reality a couple of hundred place holder tabs where I can see the icon and page name so I can find them again.
The second enabler is the plugin to have the tabs vertically, in a list on the side, instead of horizontally on top.
I really should just close them all and never look back, but I gotta admit, it's hard to say goodbye to dear friends. In this case though, I only know them by name :P
API documentation. It's very, very useful to have the structure of the APIs represented in a tree of open tabs. It gets messy eventually, but the groups can be easily rearranged.
When Quantum was released, I did a side by side comparison, opening the exact same tabs in each browser, switching browsers each day, manually keeping tabs in sync. Did this for about two weeks. For my use case at that time, Firefox's memory usage was 1/4 of Chrome's right off the bat. After a full day of use, Firefox's memory would double, while Chrome's would triple. Given the starting numbers, this meant at the end of the day, Firefox would be using 4-6GB of RAM, while Chrome's memory usage would be something like 16-24GB.
By the time I switched, I had already moved to Rambox for Hangouts and Gmail and stopped using Keep, in an effort to reduce Chrome memory usage. Rambox mem usage was about half of what I saw with the Chrome Hangouts plugin.
Although I use FF 90% of the time now, I still prefer Chrome, probably due to using it for so long. I especially prefer the Chrome bookmark manager. I really wish I could find a good way to keep bookmarks in sync between browsers! Any suggestions??
A big bonus has been the huge improvement in battery life. I had no idea how much I was losing to Chrome. Safari is supposed to be great for that, but plugins and the fact I'm an Android user means it doesn't offer me much.
The downside is that FF has made my tab hoarding worse. Still, despite doubling the number of tabs, mem usage is still half of what I saw with Chrome.
As for the unused memory is wasted memory argument (which may be tongue in cheek re: browsers), my browser is not my OS and I have a lot more going on than just a browser. 32GB MBP can't come soon enough.....or a touchpad experience on any other hardware+Linux experience+lots'o'RAM. 3 yrs ago, I finally gave in and tried Mac. Touchpad experience is probably the number 1 thing that keeps me here.
Firefox is still bad compared to Safari.
Once you register, all you have to do to save a bookmark is go to "saved.io/www.google.com", for example, and it will save www.google.com.
If you want to save to a subfolder, all you have to do is go to "subfolder.saved.io/www.google.com".
To access your bookmarks you just go to saved.io in whatever browser on whatever device you want. I use Safari on the iPad, Chrome on my Android phone, and Firefox on my desktops and it works great in all of them.
(don't get me wrong, I like libinput's idea and I know old synaptics driver is an awful mess when it comes to its code, but there are still lots of papercuts libinput needs to handle. I believe it will get there, but it's not there yet)
Personally, I port my Chrome extension to a Firefox addons without much trouble, except for the stringent review process by a human developer which raised a lot my opinion of the firefox community.
While magicalbeans may be a bit hyperbolic in their criticism, as a web developer who uses all the major browsers, I am still annoyed every day by little things that are worse in Firefox since that time. It is a reasonable and valid criticism that many useful extensions were broken by the change and that a significant part of the functionality that was lost can't be reimplemented in the new system. The claims that the general reduction in functionality through loss of previous extensions would be a temporary problem and would be corrected as the new model evolved over subsequent versions have proven to be optimistic.
It is also fair to say that claims of extensions being better contained and more stable in the new model have been exaggerated. I see far more problems caused by the smaller number of extensions I now use than I ever saw before, and I have done consistently ever since the change, through three more major versions of Firefox itself and several updates to most of the extensions.
I appreciate the intent to make Firefox faster and more reliable and more secure. Surely no-one would argue that those aren't good things. But the fact is, a lot of stuff did get broken and hasn't been fixed, and for the class of users who valued Firefox for its customisability, it is a worse browser today than it was 9 months ago.
The API is a superset of Chrome's. You can do stuff with Firefox WebExtensions that you cannot do with Chrome.
Pardon ?
Actually FF is better that Chrome!
Then I find Firefox better than Chrome when both run with or without extensions.
I am stuck on FF 53 (and reinstalling it whenever automatic updates sneak past me) since it still has the XUL API Pentadactyl uses to receive keyboard input[0]. The new WebExtension API don't expose the same level of functionality, so it can't be simply ported to them as is.
/usr/bin/firefox53 -P esr
/usr/bin/firefox -P quantum
and if you want access to the same saved bookmarks, just use Firefox Sync to match them up.
It won't help with Pentadactyl, but folks with other use cases may find it useful.
And that was a good thing. However, I regrettably find Google now pushing and pulling the rest of us harder than we want or need. Now that they are in the lead, they give the impression they are the writer of the scrolls. (In fact, a Google employee is the editor of HTML.)
Now, one cannot complain too much. Google's leadership has done far more good for the web and we should be grateful, but too many developers are turning first to them for what to do and how to do things rather than seeing the whole forest.
Only time will tell.
Personally I'm not that grateful to Google. Like you said, it all started out as a good thing - rather innocent. And of course it turned to "profit at all cost" soon after that.
IMHO most people not quite understand the trade-offs involving technology choice. Large companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple (in no particular order) take advantage of that in the interest of their stakeholders. Violating their user's freedom and privacy along the way.
Apple for example is a privacy leader. Easier to secure their walled garden perhaps and they have their own pros and cons but they shouldn’t be in a set with google, Facebook and to a lesser extent, MS.
The performance improvements are quite substantial.
This whole BINARY vs. PLAINTEXT paradox where the binary tends to be more efficient where the plaintext more open and intermediate ground between humans and machines, for me can be solved in a optimal way where the final output is always binary, but where you can assist humans with plaintext latter.
Just look how many beautiful and expressive computer languages we have now where the output is a pure obscure binary.
So i think if you follow this path you can have the best of both worlds. And because of that i tend to disagree with your point of view, where the default must be plaintext.. The layered approach is probably much more sophisticated and less amateurish when you care about waste of CPU cycles and RAM memory, without the need to have only a obscure and opaque representation.
If you're talking about Hixie, it's probably worth mentioning that he previously worked for Mozilla (and Opera).
> a small company can't fend itself from Microsoft. It took Google and Chrome, later, to knock IE and Microsoft into its place with its big push forward.
It wasn't Google that dethroned Microsoft, it was Apple. The combination of Microsoft neglecting Mac, and the resurgence of Apple were the primary drivers away from IE. Chrome had almost nothing at all to do with it, they just out maneuver Apple and Mozilla to steal the crown form the fallen king.
In the late 90s IE was king and many websites demanded it. Netscape lost the browser wars and opensourced Communicator under Mozilla in 1998. Mozilla was in no position to compete with Microsoft so it instead pushed for standards compliance.
Internet Explorer 4 on Mac and PC were based on the same code but when IE5 launched in 1998, it wasn't available on Mac. When it did eventually land, IE5 for Mac was based on a different code base and rendering engine. This caused a problem for Apple because their platform was no longer on feature parity with the PC when it came to the Internet. IE in general was slow but IE5 on the Mac was worse.
Apple announced Safari at Macworld in early 2003 with a big emphasis on performance, during the demo Steve Jobs spent 30 seconds closing and reopening the browser to drive home the fact that it loaded fast. Apple went to great lengths to make Safari standards compliant and fast but they went one step further and worked with the most popular websites around to make sure they too were standards compliant too.
Around the same time Apple brought Safari out of Beta at the 2003 WWDC, Mozilla released Phoenix (Firefox) with an emphasis on standards compliance and performance. This set the stage because Apple and Mozilla were now aligned in a common goal, to make the web fast and standards compliant, and neither of them registered on Microsoft's radar.
It was Apple's push for the adoption of standards compliance by major websites that allowed Firefox to capture 25% of the PC market and by the time Microsoft responded with IE7 in 2006, it was already too late. Microsoft had lost, the world had decided that IE was garbage and there was nothing they could do to save the sinking ship.
Apple saw this power void IE left and so in addition to launching full Safari on the iPhone in 2007, they also launched Safari for Windows in a bid to become the dominate browser on all the major platforms. Unfortunately Google saw that same vacancy but Google was the default search engine in Safari and in Firefox. Apple and Mozilla were contractually obligated to promote Google Search so in 2008 when Chrome was launched, there was nothing they could do to stop Google promoting Chrome on google.com.
When Chrome arrived in 2008 it touted compatibility with Safari and adherence to standards compliance but the killer feature was stability. At the time all browsers crashed, it was accepted as an eventuality. It was so bad that Session Restore had been touted as a major feature. Chrome launched with multi-process isolation so that when something crashed, it didn't bring down the whole browser. Google's other innovations were rapid development cycles and background updates. This meant their browser always had the latest features and their users were always up to date. It took Mozilla years to catch up, Apple still has not.
But I do agree that one company shouldn’t control the internet or browsing experience end to end. Although as far as pushing web standards and browsing Google has mostly been a good citizen. Let’s just pretend AMP wasn’t a thing.
But Firefox is free software :)
[0]https://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-sn...
I typically have 2-8 tabs open (hasn't changed much over the years). Maybe other usage patterns used to cause problems... Also worth noting I was always on Linux; maybe Windows/Mac versions weren't as good?
When quantum came out, I didn't personally notice a big performance improvement in terms of user experience (though I don't doubt it's there, and I don't watch CPU/MEM constantly). I've seen these headlines and have just been thinking to myself "but it's always been good!"
I think this is because there is a marketing campaign for firefox at the moment.
When it was front page reddit, the comments were overtly positive and any pro-chrome comments were downvoted to oblivion.
Thinking there is a massive marketing campaign and thats why we are seeing it.
Since this had no effect, except causing an instant loss of a lot of users (one that hasn't been completely felt yet due to esr), and a slight bump in chrome's user numbers, there's no resort other than advertise heavily the benefits of not using google's browser, without mentioning google negatively because they generally rely on google for funding. So just weird platitudes about "freer people web standard access foundation" or something. Or talk about start-up times that no one cares about, and which don't make them distinctive from chrome.
The immediate problem is the vast majority of people who are sympathetic to that branding were already firefox users, and at some point were turned off because firefox killed some plugin or other or it just stopped being updated, or because of some UI change which are now explicitly not mitigatable in quantum. The way firefox responded to those complaints (which is not materially, even once; when a meeting of firefox management has determined something is going to be done, it is going to be done, and exactly in that way) has assured that target audience that development by a non-profit is no more amenable to consumer desires than development by the largest, most predatory companies in the US. At least Microsoft and Google are big enough that user complaints catch fire in the mainstream media, and they're forced to respond to a critical audience. If firefox decides that they're going to take out the back button, because "in a modern internet, users shouldn't be moving backwards", you're just going to find a closed WONTFIX bug with 400 angry comments from users on it, and a few comments from Mozilla explaining how their user testing showed that people don't want a back button, the bug tracker isn't for general complaints, that the tone of the thread was very negative and regrettable, and that the thread was being closed for further comments.
The real problem is that Firefox has 10x as many employees as it needs, and is just another corporate bureaucracy collapsing under its own weight. Should have been slim and user-focused, and instead of rhetoric about a "free people web standard internet brings people together", central and visible in every conflict regarding the internet and its architecture, and the distribution of knowledge in general. It used to be almost that, but I think the fight over h264 broke it.
Now, the only reason it's alive is to keep the forces of antitrust from google's door.
Their employees, whether intentionally or inadvertantly, also brigade message boards.
Do you have any idea how much work it takes to maintain a modern web engine in 2018?
It wasn't really a mass exodus, but a gradual wax & wane over time (with more moves FF->C over the long term than C->FF).
In development fields the count is complicated by people who regularly use both, but prefer one.
> I typically have 2-8 tabs open
I tend to have many open[1], over several windows on different desktops. I use open tabs more than I use bookmarks! Every once in a while I go through the open tabs and close those I've not touched in a while that I don;t expect to touch any time soon (obviously the need to have it open has passed). I currently use Chrome more then FF, and here The Great Suspender[1] is a godsend for saving RAM (and to a lesser extent CPU time) Chrome would otherwise consume.
[1] TGS lists my current use on this machine as "22 windows, 148 tabs"
I didn't switch to Chrome when it first came out, but over the next couple of years I found Firefox frustratingly slow and crash-prone. When I cut over, everything was drastically faster and more reliable, plus the feature set (extensions, url completion, incognito for parallel sign-ins, and so on) was noticeably better. High memory usage was the only price, and Chrome surrenders that somewhat gracefully when it's needed.
I'm hoping to make the switch back. Chrome has become more frustrating as Google adds brand alignment, and moreover I simply don't like being siloed by a brand. But the usability gain was massive when I first switched, and I'm only making the move now because there's been a lot of good news out of Mozilla.
Even today, Travis-CI really struggles in firefox, it's modern pleasing animations are just so atrociously coded. And remember when the Reason (facebook language) website was unveiled, it really killed firefox, because of some strange shadow effect applied to all letters or something ...
Whether inadvertently or not, the Chrome team hit on a genius way of gaining market share by focusing on dev tools so heavily.
(Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla.)
I've seen no difference in performance in recent years, at least on my home machines. My browser performance is basically limited by my internet connection, making all the browser v browser speed tests moot. (At work I have to use windows+IE+bing+outlook because work are idiots.) I switched to chrome last year because a couple quality of life plugins were not longer compatible with the latest versions of firefox.
What I want is firefox from a couple years ago, back when all the plugins I wanted worked nicely together (mostly privacy and dev tool stuff). Firefox needs to simplify itself, to get rid of things that can be handled much better by plugins.
Edit: spelling
As a developer i noticed some minor default CSS bugs with the new Firefox Quantum that didn't used to be there but that's about it.
I also use Chrome in my development cycle so it does seem to have some neat features that Firefox is lacking but I doubt regular users would ever notice that.
It was just never enough to make me switch although I would appreciate Mozilla putting more effort into their developer tools.
P.S. I end up having over 100 tabs open so yeah... although my OS is Linux not Windows so your mileage may vary.
one feature directly related to it is support for extensions. why can chrome run extensions on the desktop (ie ad blocker) but not on mobile? the answer should be obvious.
I don't have a whole lot to add to this discussion that hasn't already been said except:
I'm the frontend developer at my job, and my coworkers are slowly discovering that I'm not joking when I say that Chrome is the new IE, for reasons pertaining to this. One example that I think made a few of them realize what I mean when I say that was during that short time recently when Chrome Experiments worked in every browser except Chrome, and the reason why that was the case: a (shady, to me) built in whitelist.
People have different workflows and different priorities in that department, the best thing a browser could do to try and gain market share is keep their mind open to these differences and try and enable all of them. Something most browsers fail at to one degree or another.
For example, I loved firefoxes two address bar approach over chrome's omnibar. I would set the default search on the address bar to route to google's browse by name (it auto selects showing a search results page or going to the first result (i'm feeling lucky) based on how confident it was that the first result was what the user wanted) and the default search on the search bar to google. If I wanted to go somewhere by name I'd type in the address bar, if I wanted to search for something and be sure i got a results page I could just type it in the search bar.
I've used chrome for my daily driver despite loving firefox for one simple reason, and that's the Google Voice extension. It has a little number in the icon next to the address bar, that tells me how many unread voicemails or text messages or missed calls I have on my cell phone, its always visible in the window I have active on at least 1 monitor 99% of the time, and it's the primary way I keep track of incoming text messages as well as missed calls.
I would be lost without this so despite firefox having a lot of features I prefer over chrome, chrome is still my daily driver because of one extension that firefox doesn't have last time I checked.
Google won. Everything people hated MS for in the 90s Google has actually accomplished. Resistance is futile.
But then sometimes the free option is also, i.e. in addition, the better choice for other reasons as well. And those cases (e.g. Postgres, Darktable, etc.) are worth pointing out, because they may serve as gateway drugs to free software, for users that may not initially care for it because they associate it with invariably bad user experience.
I have an article brewing on this, because I increasingly think it's important. When free software does not suck from an UX perspective, there is zero reason not to use it. That's a huge market.
I also can't recommend highly enough Firefox on Android, particularly with uBlock Origin and the "Dark Background and Light Text" addon (currently at version 0.6.8 for ease of finding). For HN you'll want to use the "Simple CSS" dark setting instead of the default - that keeps the arrows, but you do lose the greying-out of downvoted comments.
Edit: I also think it's interesting how much Chrome now minimizes and almost hides the Chrome App Store to add new extensions. It's almost as if it's not making Google any money and people keep installing adblockers through it.
[1]: https://www.ghostery.com/blog/ghostery-news/ghostery-email-i...
The exposure happened because they sent a mail with a lot of people in the CC: field. Amateurish but it happens. The irony is that the mail was to inform you of the privacy changes due to GDPR.
As for Ghostery having a breach and exposing email, etc. that would require that I actually create an account for Ghostery. It works just fine without.
For now, sooner or later it's going to be mandatory for sure.
Other than the issue of cosmetic filters (which I don't personally use), the main difference is that for uBlock you can subscribe to really good lists, collected and curated by a lot of people - so it is "defauly allow, except for these...", whereas uMatrix is "default deny, except for what you explicitly allowed".
I run both, occasionally have to allow something in uMatrix, never have to turn uBlock off.
It's not as fine-grained as uMatrix but works similarly.
uBlock is my blacklist. uMatix is my whitelist. For various reasons, I occasionally need to skip the whitelist, but I never had a reason to turn off the blacklist in a few years of using uBlock.
recommend checking out 'night light mode' for night browsing -- it does some things a little nicer like dims images and uses low contrast (full disclosure: i am the author. feedback welcome!)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/night-light-m...
I only have FF Developer Edition (IE and Edge, blegh) installed on my host. The only time I open Chrome or otherwise is inside a VM. If a website doesn't work I just close the tab. That is assuming that ever happens; off the top of my head this hasn't happened since the Quantum beta launched.
The only complaint I've had was with dog-slow SVG animations a couple years ago (for a simplistic game programming project with the kids), but I believe that has since long improved as well.
I hope we can keep the level of relatively mature support for Web standards accross browsers as it is, rather than make the Web more complex all the time.
sounds like a win, honestly.
For the 'New Tab' page I now use 'New Tab Tools' to set the background to black. But I am still unhappy that its not possible to set all other pages to a dark theme.
Also that Vimium doesn't work with those pages is a shame as well. I hope Mozilla fixes that regression soon. Web Extensions should have the same abilities as the XUL extensions.
[0] https://www.userchrome.org/ [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/comments/73dvty/tutorial... [2] https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomCSSforFx/ [3] https://github.com/Timvde/UserChrome-Tweaks
http://unexistance.blogspot.com/2014/09/of-firefox-solarize....
in which all background & foreground color are of your choice. been using it for 5 years at least
Maybe you can get away with using the solarized theme, but I prefer having a black background...
Thanks for this suggestions anyway
heck, I'm using a black background nowadays, trying to mimic blackboard color ha
Deletes cookies & local storage after you leave a website. You can whitelist a few domains like Github etc. for convenience. The only downside is you'll get "privacy reminder / cookie accept" popups every time anew.
EFF makes an extension called privacy badger. It learns which websites are tracking you automatically. and blocks them or their cookies.
Not only that FF on Android is awfully slow for me. But they also refuse to support either Android accessability services or the new auto completion services which makes them basically totally useless if you want to use a password manager on Android.
This one thing (and the performance, but that I could ignore) is what totally prevents me from using FF.
It's a great browser and I've came back to it even before the changes in Quantum, because the UI is better and it's also a browser I can trust to protect my interests.
Just one thing to consider ... recently in Chrome 66 they introduced the means for cosmetic ads blocking via stylesheets that can no longer be overridden, as Google finally succumbed to demands for it. Firefox has been supporting the feature for years and is on the cutting edge in regards to protecting privacy.
For example I'm using Multi-Account Containers + Facebook Container, an add-on which sandboxes Facebook. Along with the blocking of trackers that's now built-in, Firefox is leading the offense against privacy invading web services (although granted Apple's Safari doesn't do a bad job either).
The only downside of Firefox is that Chrome's dev tools are still better, however Firefox has been improving a lot lately and I'm pretty sure they'll be on par pretty soon. After all, lets not forget that Firebug, which then inspired every other browser, was an add-on that happened for Firefox.
Oh, and I love that they are refactoring its internals via Rust. That's an awesome development.
SSLKEYLOGFILE=$(pwd)/ssl_keys.log firefox -P
Second, launch tcpdump:
tcpdump -i en0 -w dump.pcap
Browse to the site you want to debug and make some websocket requests.
Finally, you can use tshark to inspect the traffic:
tshark -n -r dump.pcap -o http.ssl.port:443 -o ssl.keylog_file:ssl_keys.log -Y websocket -Tfields -e frame.time_relative -e ip.src -e ip.dst -e data
You can also configure Wireshark to use the log file, so that you can inspect the traffic interactively; to do so, edit Preferences -> Protocols -> SSL and set the (Pre-)Master Secret key log filename appropriately.
I'm about to start a new contract doing React development again though. I wonder if I'll stick to FF or if I'll get dragged back to Chrome for DevTools support...
Plus, FF for Android is amazing. I can run Privacy Badger and uBlock Origin on my mobile browser!
I thought Safari was leading the charge, so I did a little digging. I haven’t reached a conclusion yet but found out about Firefox’s Tracking Protection[1]. Any idea how it compares to uBlock Origin? If you’re the kind of person that’d rather use as few extensions as possible, would using Firefox’s TP with a solid list be as effective as using uBlock Origin with the same list?
[1]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection
I have been using it since 2006 (Firefox 2.0). Back then, the presence of the Firebug extension for Firefox made me switch to Firefox as my primary browser.
Two years later, Chrome arrived but Firefox remained as my primary browser because I wanted to continue using the Vimperator extension for Firefox that allowed mouseless browsing with Vim-like key bindings and commands.
Firefox still remains as my primary browser with Chrome being an additional browser that I use sometimes. These days, I use the Vimium extension for both to use Vim-like key bindings. I occasionally use Safari and qutebrowser too.
There is so much wrong with this bundling but yes, it's probably still better then IE...
I hope they fix that regression.
High on my list is for the extensions to work on about:* and addons.mozilla.org pages.
I like to use Vimium everywhere and 'Dark Background and Light Text' to also work on the preferences.
Also I really miss DownThemAll... I tried a couple of replacements, but they didn't for instance download all books from a Humble Book Bundle.
There's actually an about:config setting that fixes this already. I put a helper in Tridactyl for it called `:fixamo` [1], but you can easily do it manually by setting
"privacy.resistFingerprinting.block_mozAddonManager" = true
and
"extensions.webextensions.restrictedDomains" = ""
(Unfortunately, this does nothing about about: pages or the PDF viewer which used to work but was "fixed" :( ).
[1] https://github.com/cmcaine/tridactyl/blob/8c49d26340cdc0db3c...
Just changing "extensions.webextensions.restrictedDomains" is apparently not enough.
I also tried :fixamo in tridactyl, but it just returns: "# Error: Attempt to postMessage on disconnected port"
I was using version 1.13.1pre1454 with FF 60.0.2.
---
That's a particularly unhelpful error, sorry about that. It usually means that Tridactyl can't access the native messenger. Did you install it with `:installnative`? What is the output of `:native`?
I did not, but now I have.
:fixamo now doesn't return any error but still doesn't work.
Adding "privacy.resistFingerprinting.block_mozAddonManager" manually and setting it to true did the job. Thanks!
So far I like Tridactyl, especially the useful commands, but since it seems to be incompatible with other addons that overwrite the NewTab page. I think I will have to disable it.
I also miss the smooth scrolling experience with j,k from VimiumFF, jumping lines like Tridactyl does makes me loose the point were I left of. I might check back how the progress is going tough.
You need to restart the browser afterwards. Sorry, people usually find the command through the help page where it has all of these caveats.
We have smooth scrolling, you just need to do `set smoothscroll true`. It's a bit rubbish, though.
You can often fix the new tab page by disabling and re-enabling the new tab add-on you want. Every time Tridactyl is updated it will steal the page back, so I'd suggest that you don't use the beta releases and instead use the normal ones.
We could reasonably easily provide a build that didn't use the new tab page (we occasionally get people who feel very strongly about this) but I'm afraid it's quite low down my list of priorities. If you're feeling up to it there's an issue open: https://github.com/cmcaine/tridactyl/issues/534
But I won't hold it against you if you use Vimium. It's very well polished : )
:help fixamo
Does not state that I need to restart firefox afterwards. [1]
I did restart firefox after I installed `native` and before I run :fixamo. :native also returned that the it was installed correctly before I run :fixamo.
[1]: fixamo
fixamo(): Promise<void>
Defined in src/excmds.ts:290
Simply sets
"privacy.resistFingerprinting.block_mozAddonManager":true
"extensions.webextensions.restrictedDomains":""
Requires native.
Returns Promise<void>If you're saying that a restart didn't make fixamo work, would you mind filing an issue so we can try to fix it?
Edit: sorry, I should have been clearer: fixamo edits a file which is only read at Firefox startup, so you need to run fixamo and then restart.
No I haven't tried that. After I run :fixamo and that didn't work I just opened about:config and change those settings myself without restarting firefox.
Edit: Since I now continued to test tridactyl I found that this newtab overwriting function gets pretty annoying from a usability perspective. When I start a new Tab with [Ctrl]+[t] and immediately type my desired address part of it will be overwritten when 'about:blank' is inserted. I guess you want people to use just a binding to :tabopen, but I do like my options. Also since :tabopen do not contain my bookmarks I prefer using the address line.
Huh, that is annoying. I hadn't noticed that. There's not much we can do about it though, short of just disabling the new tab page.
The lack of bookmarks in tabopen is annoying, I agree. We rushed to get the completions out with Tridactyl, and did it shoddily and haven't bothered to rewrite it yet.
There is bmarks which just completes from bookmarks, but that opens things in the current tab.
I can also use it on android with ublock etc. Chrome hasn't even been installed in my main computer in maybe a year, firefox works for everything I need, including google apps for business mail and youtube.
My biggest reason for using it is the fact that it is open source, the other is that ad-block software actually block calls to adds not just the display of them as in chrome.
Looking at the past market share we're clearly the minority
I could be getting my history wrong, but from what I remember Firebug was absolutely mind-blowing.
That was equally kind blowing to me.
| Firefox | Safari | Chrome
----------------|----------------|-----------------|-----------------
Speedometer 2.0 | 83.0 ±0.91 | 92.1 ±2.8 | 75.7 ±3.4
JetStream | 219.40 ±8.5563 | 294.79 ±11.138 | 201.81 ±15.171
Motion Mark | 203.71 ±5.41% | 525.77 ±6.56% | 388.85 ±4.79
ARES-6 | 54.06 ±0.95ms | 16.85 ±1.19ms | 20.26 ±0.56ms
edit: If someone uses Windows, I would be curious to see how Edge compares to Firefox and Chrome.
[1] - https://browserbench.org/Speedometer2.0/
[2] - https://browserbench.org/JetStream/
Safari beat the other two browsers in all four benchmarks.
| Firefox | Edge | Chrome
----------------|-----------------|-----------------|-----------------
Speedometer 2.0 | 65.70 ±01.100 | 59.10 ±01.300 | 86.92 ±00.600
JetStream | 191.73 ±14.598 | 226.78 ±12.531 | 162.21 ±02.1999
Motion Mark | 173.67 ±04.61% | 432.36 ±13.07% | 279.61 ±13.67%
ARES-6 | 63.72 ±01.26ms | 77.97 ±20.19ms | 27.65 ±00.79msSo Metal-only isn't really an option for many projects, it's OpenGL + Metal or just OpenGL (for now).
There will be a free OpenGL-over-Metal implementation sooner or later, so I would still go with OpenGL for a cross-platform application.
I'm glad that the perf issues have been improved. They just need to get a little bit better and most objections for firefox would go away. Maybe as a workaround someone could make an extension that opens specific urls in chrome/safari when you open them. Only use chrome for maps and facebook for example :p
The energy usage tab on the activity monitor consistently shows Firefox at a ~40 “score” (whatever that unit is), and Safari more around 4. Anecdotally, the difference in battery time is real.
This is the biggest reason to keep using Safari on Mac in battery mode. (Or Always Be Charging :) )
I hope they can ever fix this :( sounds pretty fundamental, but I know little.
My measurements are that on some specific pages, even when I "do nothing" Firefox uses up to twice as much CPU. Luckily, it's not always twice as much battery drain, because even idle uses power. But it's definitely visible and measurable: from 3 hours of other browsers you'd probably have only 2 of Firefox.
You know you're old when you hear people making references to Godzilla in the 90s :-)
I need someone to make a case that FF dev tools are better than Chrome, simply because without performance being an issue, I need confidence that switching would be a net productivity increase despite having to learn the slightly different tooling of the FF dev tools.
Also, being cross-platform complicates things a lot: I'm certain that Safari has access to a number of libraries that are energy-efficient but exist only on macOS/iOS.
I have a vague hope that maybe the Rust community can find a way to somehow develop a standard benchmarking tool that takes into account energy use. This would help considerably on the front of refactoring Firefox towards better energy efficiency.
- Battery draining...it's seriously really bad. Even if the app is just open on my MacBook, I go from ~8hours of battery to like ~2hrs. I travel a lot...it's untenable
- Performance is generally pretty good, but it never felt better than Chrome.
- At first CPU on streaming video (Twitch, YT, etc) was better on Firefox, but over time I got the infamous "fan spinning" and CPU churning issues.
- Site compatibility: about 10-15% of sites I would visit broke.
- Nitpick, but not deal breaker: icons on my bookmark toolbar didn't work consistently. I would save a bookmark and it would stick to some other site and I could never clear the cache to fix it. It also frequently used non-retina images.
| Edge 42 | Chrome 67 | Firefox 61
----------------|-------------------|------------------|------------------
Speedometer 2.0 | [3] 76.8 ±1.0 | [1] 118.0 ±1.3 | [2] 85.7 ±2.1
JetStream | [1] 283.0 ±21.4 | [3] 235.1 ±2.4 | [2] 240.8 ±2.7
Motion Mark | [3] 273.2 ±12.9% | [2] 305.4 ±0.9% | [1] 445.7 ±0.8%
ARES-6 | [3] 65.4 ±16.5ms | [1] 17.8 ±0.4ms | [2] 51.4 ±1.7msMoz://a could easily ship the best browser on the market if they actually cared about the users, instead of taking Google money and pretending to be a competition.
It's more the opposite. They get a huge amount of money from Google. It's pretty hard to replace. E.g. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation#Financing for a mention + source of 300 MUSD per year.
And there is only one thing which I don't like — high CPU usage compared to chrome. It makes my old MacBook air very noisy because of the fan spinning. When I use chrome it's completely silent.
This YouTube page will show which codecs are currently enabled in your browser: https://www.youtube.com/html5
Safari doesn't understand VP9. So Youtube pushes H.264 video which can be hardware accelerated.
To force youtube to send H264 in firefox/chrome you need something like https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/h264ify/
This YouTube page will show which codecs are currently enabled in your browser: https://www.youtube.com/html5
Would be curious to see some actual benchmarks comparing the latest browsers, does anyone do those on a regular basis? A quick google search didn't turn up anything more recent than last december: http://themainframe.ca/comparing-firefox-chrome-and-safari-b...
Maybe I'm wrong about CPU and it's all about integrated Intel GPU.
This YouTube page will show which codecs are currently enabled in your browser: https://www.youtube.com/html5
You can check in about:support whether it is disabled. There's a section at the bottom of the article about how to force-enable various features if you want to see how glitchy it really is on your machine.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1407536
Honestly, I’ve given up on Firefox.
(Chrome has no solution for containing accounts across tabs, last I checked. You have to spawn entire new Chrome instances.)
ADDED: In general a lot of services don't handle multiple accounts terribly well. I've had issues with Wordpress as well. I actually have two different soft-key authenticator programs related to making personal and work accounts play nice.
In particular: you can log into different profiles in the browser (each window can be associated with up to one profile, and they can be different), by clicking the little "Sign In" tab in the upper right corner. See also https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2364824?hl=en&co=GE....
You can then open tabs under the different profiles with right-click, "Open link as", and selecting the appropriate profile.
(Personally, once I tried profiles, I never touched multiple-accounts-logged-in again.)
Except this has been a problem for years, and according to a friend of mine who's had a "personal" Apps account from back when it was free, never has been a problem for Apps users, so I'm not sure what's going on on their end.
fwiw, I use multiple Chromes, each with its own project / client, own password manager, etc. I don't think I could maintain the silos I do with FF. I wish I could sack Google (Chrome) but I can't, afaik.
You can type "about:profiles" into the URL-bar to manage your profiles (which you can also bookmark for easier access).
You can also run "firefox -P" in a terminal to access a similar GUI. With "firefox -P profile_name", you can start a specific profile. To run multiple profiles in parallel from the CLI, you have to start further profiles with "firefox -P profile_name --new-instance" (Linux) or "firefox.exe -P profile_name --no-remote" (Windows). This is because when you click on a link in an application, it needs to know in which browser instance to open that link.
As for resource usage, the profiles separate everything. Browsing history, bookmarks, logins, add-ons etc. It's essentially like a second Firefox installation. This also means that it actually runs two instances, so twice the RAM usage and somewhat more CPU usage to move that data around.
The Container Tabs on the other hand only separate what needs to be separated in order to look towards webpages like two different browsers. So, there's a different cookie jar, different localStorage, different HTML5 Web Storage etc., but other than that it's the same as just opening two tabs. So, probably not even 1% more RAM usage than using Firefox without any separation.
For launching multiple profiles in parallel from the command-line, I already tried to explain it in my previous comment, though it is more finicky that way.
And containers in firefox are simply amazing! I use it very often to access "admin accounts" on the occasion without the hurdle to use private browsing.
I think, the Windows Task Manager groups processes in the most stupid of ways, where when a (parent-)process has spawned many child-processes, then only the parent-process and its resource usage is shown. You have to go into the "Processes"-tab to see all Chrome-processes and manually add up their resource usage.
Ugh, this is a common problem apparently. Why can't they just make it open files from my org domain using the only org account I'm logged into. >:(
I wouldn't call it 'infuriating', but it's something that I can't figure out "how does this of all things break this of all things?"
First, it almost never remembers what account you used with what service. If I do some Google Cloud stuff under my work account, I don't want Google Maps using my work account, or vice versa. The list of accounts in the upper right corner, and what's signed in/out, seems completely random and broken.
The second problem is that Google's various apps are wildly inconsistent in how they deal with multiple accounts. Some (like Maps) have apparently been "modernized". Others (like BigQuery; I've had issues with Google Drive, too) don't understand multiple accounts at all. It doesn't matter that you sign into a work account. Open that app and it will use some other account.
A sign they've not mastered this at all is that it doesn't work at the URL level. You can bookmark a Google Docs document, for example, and then switch your accounts. Going to the bookmark (or just going back) to the Docs page gives you a "permission denied" error because you're using the wrong account. Same thing with sharing URLs — if someone at work sends me a Google Docs URL, it's bound to not work because it'll try to use what I try to keep as my default account, which is my personal one. Sometimes I just munge the "authuser=1" part in the URL.
It's amazing that a Google app can't simply resolve the union of identities you're signed in as. I have two accounts, work and personal, and one of them has access, after all.
I might consider FF just to work around this.
Google drive is the biggest annoyance though with multiple accounts.
I dont want this, it's better to be explicit with the accounts. However they are just using cookies and Chrome gives each "profile" a separate cookie container which works well and I prefer it to the mess it would be at the tab level. I have separate window profiles for work and personal and can keep everything (including passwords) completely separate.
BigQuery has a new UI built into the console: https://console.cloud.google.com/bigquery
You might need to sign up for the alpha/beta test: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf6hyfvoWZ8eUbbKWq9...
Google's mistake was the account switcher. Supporting multiple accounts is fine, but pretending they support concurrent logins is nonsensical.
But I have no choice to use multipel Google accounts, since my company uses Google Apps or G-Suite or Google For Work or whatever it is called today, and I'm consulting for a third company that also does this.
But if google knows who you are and you’re not logged in at be moment? Hidden behind login page.
Remember, we started to have them to separate our work/home/personal lives, to build separate digital profiles that companies (like Google) store on their servers. Now you beg Google to recognize and unify them (which I guess they have almost done already by themselves).
Google accounts are not just about data and personalities, but also about permissions. As long as I'm "logged into" multiple accounts, it should be able to map the content I'm trying to see to an account. Or at least offer to switch to that account. For example, if I'm trying to view a company document, but my default account is my personal account, then I don't want to see an often obscure "permission to view denied" error, which always freaks me out and makes me think I've been locked out or something.
Better yet, build this badly-needed auth stuff into the browser and allow apps to negotiate access with the browser.
in FF afaict you can only use one at a time and you have to choose at launch
That said, do try multi-account containers, unless you really rely on extensions and theme being different per profile - they're great: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
My only concern now is with using multiple devices. Do I just sign into to both profiles on each device? I only worry because there was a big snafu that occurred with their password manager that synced nothing and everything disappeared. (I no longer trust google with that stuff).
Firefox profiles are similar to Chrome's. But the container tabs that people are talking about in this thread are better than Chrome profiles. They're per tab, and last I checked they only separate out cookies and local storage.
Agree that you shouldn't try mixing personal and Google apps account in the same session...it always breaks eventually. (Why can't Google get that right?)
Though unfortunately, history and bookmarks are not isolated to their individual containers, and Firefox's profile management system is a PITA compared to Chrome's easy button in the title bar.
The only major thing I wish it did better is if it conserved battery power as well as Safari does. If I want to maximize my laptop's battery life I don't really have a choice other than Safari on my MBP.
Are there any (recent) tests you know of that compare battery life between safari and the other major browsers?
Otherwise in general, the native browser is usually the best bet for battery life. They render differently and have tighter integration overall as you noted. Firefox or native is the way to go, and if native browsers keep improving, even Firefox should watch out.
I have a netbook with 1Gb RAM. It was a handout from the owner, as it was painfully slow even after cleaning and tweaking the Win 7 install. Eventually, the owner got a new beefier laptop and I got the netbook.
Long story short: I put Xubuntu on it, and it's still my daily driver and main computer 6 years in.
I have always used Firefox and, believe this 1Gb RAM multitasker, it's getting noticeably better year after year.
Thank you mozillians!
edit: i mean ubuntians, debianists, xfcers, fossers, hners, party people!
The netbook runs Sublime Text nicely.
I remember compiling a 2.4 kernel on a 486 once, only kernel to suppose the PCMCIA network card. It didn't go quickly. If you really want to compile the program, vou can always do the compilation on a server.
When dkms recompiles one custome module I use on an 8 year old laptop it takes a few seconds. Even when you're working on projects that take a long time (say on ffmpeg), you're not typically recompiling the entire thing each time. On the other hand doing a full build for all architectures takes hours on a desktop, so is far more sensible to ship off to a build service running elsewhere on the network.
Large scale compiling on a desktop machine feels like a fairly niche problem compared with the vast majority of "code" written today.
So yeah. Even JS is "compiled" now with webpack.
Of course there are tradeoffs when using such a machine but the point is that "modern" web browsing is a resources hog and GNU/Linux+Firefox makes it possible for everyone.
More seriously, both personal and economic issues make this a reasonable tradeoff for me. I assure you it has nothing of masochistic, though maybe it has a stoic streak.
edit: Again, to not derail the point, Firefox works great, even multitasking, in a low-powered netbook.
On Android the performance is comparable to Chrome, but I can never get used to some of their UXes (pressing the X button doesn't clear the address bar, instead closes it). Also no seamless page opening with Google search app (although I suspect they can't do much about this)
AFAIK the implementation of CustomTabs is open and the API agnostic so Firefox could provide FirefoxCustomTabs if they wanted to.
I can have the same amount of tabs/workload in Chrome and my laptop copes fine with good performance. If I do the same in FF (with likely less plugins installed) it often spikes to 100% CPU usage, chews through my battery like nothing else and just gets bogged down/slow. I _want_ to use FF but can't sacrifice having a burning hot laptop with terrible battery life on my lap.
Before its time and abandoned in the nick of it. And no one cares about native GUI's anymore apparently.
Webdevs have tried for 20 years to recreate these interfaces from scratch in HTML with still highly questionable results, and of course no real integration, visual or otherwise, with the host OS.
For me, the biggest impediment for writing XUL, when I was into FF extension development, was the extremely lackluster documentation. Despite Mozilla's ambitions they never seemed to promote the app development part of their platform much. It also suffered from much the same problems as Electron does today with performance and bloated memory usage compared to native apps. Though I imagine if they stuck with it, with the much improved JS and rendering engines (and multicore CPUs and 16gb standard RAM) in-use today, it would have become just as good enough as Electron is considered.
Fact is, HTML/CSS/JS benefits hugely from it's own inertia, and the near instant answers to most any question on Google/Stackoverflow. Hard to compete when you are basically an internal Mozilla project.
I'm sure Mozilla, or someone, could package the current Firefox stack in a similar way to Electron as an alternative, but it would be largely the same thing and have similar issues compared to native. So why bother I guess.
How's wxWidgets doing? Does anyone still use that?
Electron enabled cross-platform localized applications where nothing else stayed within the budget, with developers you already had.
It isn't that no one cares about native GUI's, it is that it isn't commerical, except in rare circumstances (games, visualization software, giant applications built by 1000s of developers, probably).
This is not written by us btw :)
However, in recent times I have had to switch more and more apps to Chrome because the UI breaks in Firefox: intercom.io, trello.com, notion.so.
Probably no fault of Firefox, but if a UI is broken there is no choice but to migrate.
you also have the choice of not using the broken website
I am using Firefox exclusively and I rarely find sites that don't work with Firefox after I disable blocking extensions.
This sounds like something you've done; do you have some weird extensions installed?
Most notably is asana (it sometimes makes firefox use 100% cpu) and slack. Unfortunately we have slack at work but we're working to replace it as it has become increasingly bloated, user-unfriendly and buggy.
Volunteers will triage the issues and report them either to the site devs or Mozilla devs as deemed necessary.
The recent post about real time pose estimation was a pretty example of that - pretty unusable in FF, runs great in Chrome (on Windows at least)
https://storage.googleapis.com/tfjs-models/demos/posenet/cam...
The only real world pages that sometimes crawl to a halt on FF are some Google pages like the old Gmail and Youtube.
Usually people who say that are complaining that Gecko is missing some bleeding-edge DOM API that was pushed out by Blink.
If you think that Firefox/Gecko doesn't have any modern tech, then you're not looking closely enough.
1) tab stacks, 2) the ability to save and reopen an entire session, 3) a page load progress indicator in the URL bar, 4) using Ctrl-F highlights the position of all matching locations in the page in the right-hand scroll bar, and 5) the window panel, which keeps track of all closed tabs and windows so you can reopen everything if you accidentally close a window.
Some of those are small perks, and some of them are major. I'd love to see Firefox implement some of them.
I don't usually shill for products but Vivaldi is a really good browser.
AFAIK firefox does that too, it just doesn't show it. Just test it: click on a large file download link and leave the dialog alone for some seconds. Once you actually click on Save, Save As or Open... it opens instantly (or already has a large downloaded chunk, depending on the file's size and your bandwidth of course).
https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/5347/technologies-behind-viv...
EDIT: I want to add that I run the Snapshot versions of Vivaldi (currently 1.16.1211.3), and it could be that the Sync was introduced only in a Snapshot in December. So I have no idea if the sync can be found in the Stable releases as well. Anyways, it's under Tools/Settings/Sync tab if it's there, otherwise it isn't :)
I might not be the heaviest of the heavy users (figuratively speaking :), for example I have total of 3 Chrome extensions installed (uBlock origin, some exif viewer and Google translate), so I am not aware of things that may not have worked correctly.
I used to use Opera (first 12, then the Chrome version of Opera which I didn't like), and then switched to Vivaldi when I found out about it.
search shortcuts is probably my favourite feature (putting "r" in front of a search term to search directly on rotten tomatoes, or "d" to search on dictionary.com), its a great timesaver
Ironically, or maybe intentionally, Google services are the only thing degraded. Google even refuses to give you the regular home page. Thankfully you can just get an extension that fakes Chrome useragent on the offending pages, but it's the darkest pattern I've ever seen
Personally my reason was Pocket incident and since then I never went back to Firefox. Checked few months ago and they still had Pocket. Besides I am pretty happy on Safari except the lack of extensions which I am kind of used to by now.
The most obvious place you'll see it is on the default new tab/blank tab page where top trending stories being saved on Pocket are listed. It's a crowd-curated list of stories that people have found interesting enough to save to read or return to later, almost like a technology news site where people vote stories up...... But no commenting.
(https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/27/mozilla-pockets-pocket-in-...)
Mozilla rewarding everyone involved in the Pocket debacle by buying the company was weird.
Or just open the Options page and click Home way over on the left.
For me Mozilla was the "open" browser (and "clean" too). Integrating Pocket in it by default, in a way that it cannot be "completely" removed, put me off. Heck, they could just ship the browser with it installed as a "normal" extension that can be "completely" removed like any other extension. And maybe disable this extension by default, or keep it enabled they'd really want it that way.
And no, if I want curated trending stories I will go the website I want to read those from. Or I'll install a relevant extension of my choice; maybe Pocket.
As for Pocket - I don't use it, but prefer this non-inclusive addon instead of Google spying on my every move (yes, you don't have to log-in to google account and you can install ad-blockers but still). And also I don't want to end up with "Best viewed with Inter^WChrome" Internet.
(* ) (using Firebird, then long time Opera user until version 12, then made a switch to Firefox, then to Vivaldi for a 1-2 years and now back to Firefox again)
Mozilla owns Pocket (Read It Later). It's sort of like me complaining Safari comes with iCloud support by default.
So sort of not.
I can't stand Chrome on OSX, I only use Safari when on battery and FF when plugged in. Chrome just brings my Mac Boook to a grinding halt.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/disable-or-re-enable-po...
How to remove the "Recommended by Pocket" stories on the about:newtab page:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/hide-or-display-content...
I don't want to be using Firefox when whatever the next boneheaded move they make lands. Mozilla burned every bit of goodwill I ever for them had when they destroyed an odd decade or so of muscle memory and customization of a tool I use every day. Yeah, so they're supposedly pro privacy. Neat. Whatever. They also have the organizational attention span of a toddler on Red Bull.
I'll weigh in with Linux + Windows experience: FF is currently the best browser. It pulls a bit more CPU but it also trumps with very good privacy options out of the box and in about:config (first party isolation, which I've been using as daily driver for a few months now)
Containers allow me to isolate aspects of myself and contain tracking or otherwise unwanted websites in their own little world.
The only item on my wishlist is to make multi-window tab handling better, I think Chrome still wins that on the UI/UX front (since FF sometimes feels like it's about to crash when I drag a tab out of the window)
Strongly disagree. The web is just the medium, the places people visit might have reached a new low, but the platform is only getting better. Just at the state of cross browser in 2015 vs 2018!
Over time Firefox's video playback gets more and more janky, until it drops more frames than it shows. In task manager I can see FF using 50% of my GPU to play a 720p stream from Twitch.
Closing FF completely and reopening it fixes the problem, until it happens again.
Chrome has none of these issues.
Love the privacy, not a big fan of the performance problems.
I don't know if it's an architectural limitation of how e10s was implemented, but Firefox still feels like a single-process browser. On the other hand, Chrome remains responsive even after a week of being open.
It also doesn't support Chromecast, so I have to switch to Chrome whenever I want to play a YouTube video on the TV. I've seen quite a few websites with JS or CSS bugs on Firefox, and some Chrome extensions don't have Firefox versions (e.g. Streak CRM.) I also have to switch to Chrome whenever I use "Google Meet" for a call. (That's not Firefox's fault, but it's an issue you experience when you use Firefox.)
The only reason I switched to Firefox is so that I could remove the little blue dot on pinned tabs [1]. I would get a new email, and the Gmail favicon would update with a (1). I'd read the email on my phone, and the icon would go back to (0). But there would be a little blue dot telling me about a change on the page, so I'd still have to click the tab to remove the dot. Same issue for Drift chat, Trello, etc. After months and months of clicking the tab just to remove that little blue dot, I finally cracked and switched to Firefox. Firefox also has that little blue dot, but at least you can disable it by hacking some CSS [2]. If Chrome gave me the option to disable that blue dot, I'd switch back immediately.
[1] https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/sxDEUm...
https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2004/12/mozilla-foundation-pl...
That was back in 2003!
I feel like the era where people were passionate about open source as a goal in itself has really waned in recent years. Maybe because a lot of the major battles were won, or because more companies are realizing that open source is a logical business choice in a lot of cases.
Or maybe it's just rosy retrospection at play and I've just become jaded.
Donation ID: 1184
Donation Amount: $30.00
Donation Name: Steve Kemp
Placed On: 12:07 PM Tuesday October 19, 2004
Payment Type: (paid in full)That was until last week. My Mac lost power due to some construction, and when I turned it back on Firefox had completely erased its previous profile. All my data, all my containers, all my cookies and bookmarks were gone. No evidence on disk for my old profile, despite a faq suggesting it’d be there. Firefox sync somehow was preserved in this blank profile, yet it synced barely anything (a few extensions).
Sorry Firefox, you lost my trust. I’m now back to Safari.
Do you not have any backup services running?
While certainly excessive those demos run flawlessly and smoothly on Chrome, but are struggling on Firefox. An observation I made often when it comes to complex transform effects in Firefox. Does anyone else experience this?
This happens in FF 61.0 Beta on an iMac 5K, but the issue applies to versions that date back to pre-Quantum days. I noticed the problem is more visible if large elements are affected by the transform effects, a smaller window renders those smoother for example.
Irrelevant? More versatile (even though it didn't even have extensions until v5)? Why?
1. Firefox was at ~30% market share at its apex (it's now half that)
2. It got surpassed by a newcomer with no previous experience in browser making in less than 3 years
3. And the newcomer was so much better at technical stuff and marketing that it not only kept superseding Firefox but it kept growing uninterrupted ever since
3. Meanwhile, instead of stabilizing and reversing the trend, Firefox's usage share just kept tumbling down to the level of Internet Explorer's (Internet Explorer!)
4. It. Never. Recovered. Seriously, it had around 12% market share a month ago[1], below IE's share. That's ridiculous.
Of all those points, I think maybe #4 shows Firefox's irrelevancy best: the most generous estimates now place it around 14% global market share, barely above while Chrome is striving at around 60%. If IE is becoming more and more irrelevant (it is, right?), then surely Firefox is becoming just as irrelevant as well.
Even though the data isn't ideal and there are probably some +/- percent point errors between Netmarketshare, W3counter, Alexa, Google, etc., the trend is identical among all these reporting platforms.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/m...
1: https://netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?options...
The main reason for Firefox's (and IE's) decline IMHO is the pink line "Mobile vs Desktop" in the chart you linked to. People won't bother installing a different browser if the one that comes with the device they use is halfway decent (on iOS, they don't even have a choice). And so as more and more browsing comes from smartphones and tablets, more and more people will use Chrome (Android) or Safari (iOS).
Unfortunately, this is quite a depressing finding for Firefox, because it means that all technical enhancements will not be able to move the needle much. (The rise of Firefox on the desktop was arguably helped by the EU requiring Microsoft to implement the browser choice window in Windows; unless something like this comes along for the dominant mobile platform(s) it will be an uphill struggle.)
Edit: And the move to mobile might even affect desktop browser usage because of things like link- and password-syncing. If you use Chrome on mobile, you might want to also install Chrome on your PC to be able to sync your settings across.
> Unfortunately, this is quite a depressing finding for Firefox, because it means that all technical enhancements will not be able to move the needle much
Precisely, and this is exactly what becoming irrelevant is. It does not matter anymore.
The author said FF became irrelevant after 2008, which is false. It was popular for a long time after.
The answer to the question "how popular is a browser" should not be answered by anything other than stats for your own sites. Global stats don't interest me.
While Chrome certainly did rise in popularity and overtake FF, it was absolutely not in 2008 that happened according to the browser stats of the network of mainstream popular sites I worked on for a few years at that time. I do remember seeing a discrepancy in the "global stats" vs the actual stats from Google analytics I was accessing on a regular basis, which told a different story.
Firefox feels really fast and light. I think I’m Making it my primary browser from now on.
For me, whether FF is faster or slower than Chrome is largely irrelevent (unless ofc it's extreme). What matters to me is that it feels like Mozilla are fighting for me, and Chrome are fighting for the advertising revenue.
Mozilla, for all their mistakes, do care about their users and privacy (but make some stupid mistakes).
But sometimes they really drop the ball. And by 'sometimes', I mean 'repeatedly'.
* The time they dragged their heels fixing a bug whereby Firefox didn't clear IndexedDB when it clearly should have [0]
* Integrating with a proprietary bookmark-management solution, 'Pocket', presumably for the money [1][2]
* Making it difficult to disable address-bar search (no, I don't want Google getting a record of every URL I type in) [3]
* Their general mismanagement isn't really the point here, but it's still true: dumbing down the UI and turning Firefox into a me-too Chrome and annoying power-users, breaking plugin compatibility (Firefox's big killer feature), and pretending for the longest time that their performance was competitive with Chrome when it quite clearly wasn't (evidenced in the release of Quantum, when they finally really were performance-competitive with Chrome). Also the Mr. Robot fiasco.
[0] https://superuser.com/a/1250955/
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9876504
[2] https://news.slashdot.org/story/15/06/09/1722236/mozilla-res...
Firstly and most importantly none of the extensions that I use seem to sync settings which make it very annoying when you have 3 computers that you're using daily (Linux, MacOS, and Windows).
Sometimes it just still crashes and it's annoying.
Firefox doesn't support debugging websockets like Chrome does.
Opening file types in Firefox is a bit annoying, it constantly asks it every single time for a file type it never saw before. Just let me save it damnit, I don't want to be bothered about the file type.
How do you even open PDFs in Firefox? If I set the file handler to Firefox itself, then it will recursively open the file in Firefox.
Firefox doesn't play well with window manager like i3. Sometime when I'm working with Firefox, I'll need to force a resize of the window before Firefox notices that it's not a 1000px wide, but 500px wide. This happens very often. If you're saying that I should report this. I really cannot be bothered most of the time because I'm not a huge fan of their issue tracking software and most of these already have bug reports, but are just ignored.
Firefox sometimes doesn't know how to handle a font and it makes it unreadable for some reason, alright?
Firefox and dark mode GTK themes don't mix well together. You still have to manually add some CSS to what Firefox loads on every page just to make website input text readable or not black. Firefox uses the theme's settings for most stuff when it doesn't make sense when the whole web assumes you're using a white theme.
That's about it I guess?
Is the lack of plugin suppport for iOS 100% legal/policy issues? Is there even a shread of any techicnal issue preventing it?
I wonder if there is any poisbble way to reimagine the way plugins work, such that powerful extensibility could exist within an iOS browser and pass the appstore appproval gauntlet.
> Is the lack of plugin suppport for iOS 100% legal/policy issues? Is there even a shread of any techicnal issue preventing it?
Safari leaves everyone in the dust (at least on a Mac).
I cant say I noticed any compelling reason to move off of Chrome, but I thought I'd at least try out modern Firefox to see what I am missing.
It feels a bit faster than Chrome for day-to-day browsing in totally non-scientific testing. Where it really shines though is in WebGL where it is HUGELY faster than Chrome for me. My laptop has a fairly high-end discrete GPU and Chrome feels like it is doing software rendering, but Firefox feels silky smooth so I guess Firefox is actually using the GPU and Chrome is not.
I've just installed it on my work 2016 MBP. Keyboard still sucks, but I cant blame Firefox for that. However, on OSX, Firefox feels sluggish compared to Chrome.
Performance is on par with chrome, memory usage is a bit more. I still use both, but I only use chrome for google's sites.
And of course, it "doesn't" support USB keys like Yubikey, as in, it totally does if you change a config flag, but websites like Vanguard and even Google just check user-agent and if it returns Firefox, it prompts you to use other methods because the key "isn't supported."
I mean, how is this not a bug? You wouldn't expect the latest Emacs release to not support user config files (I'm stretching the analogy here a bit) or something, right?
I was also upset by the death of most of my favourite add-ons, particularly Vimperator, so I bullied a friend into writing Tridactyl with me [1]. If you tried it around the death of keysnail it might be worth giving it another go now, as I think it is a lot less bad than it used to be (although I can guarantee it still has bugs). It certainly is not as polished as cVim.
Other alternatives include Vim Vixen and Sakakey.
Part of the reason I haven't done so is because I disagree with you - Tridactyl is pretty usable to me, and there's loads of things I want to fix in that that are a higher priority to me.
OK, I understand that your priorities are different, and this problems seems quite hard to solve, considering how many problems other addons have with the enforced async-architecture. But just accepting the clusterfuck and live with it is really sad.
The problem is bureaucratic - the schedules of those involved rarely overlap, and they have very little motivation to work on it.
The meta bug for the API is here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215061
Again, I strongly recommend that if you care about this, you look through the issue on the BMO (especially see depends on and blocks), figure out what the next step is, and do it :)
I suspect it would not take very much time at all, although there could be a reasonable amount of waiting for replies from Mozillians.
However.
I still find it very crash-prone. Less so over time, since Quantum came out, but still.. very crash-prone.
Perhaps I use it differently from others?
I use different Profiles to separate concerns (and give myself some small modicum of cross-concern privacy - if nothing else auth cookies are reliably separated). At any given time, I have up to 5 separate Profiles running.
With Firefox, each Profile is a fully separate PID (I assume their newer Containers are not), and there are affiliated PIDs for "Firefox CP Web Content" (similar to Google Chrome Helper, I assume).
On any given day when I log into my system in the am, one or more of those Profiles has crashed, all affiliated PIDs are dead and the Crash Reporter is up.
I don't believe anything I'm doing in any of the Firefox Profiles is particularly unusual, or extreme. No social networking, or anything with infinity-scroll. No video streaming (eg: Youtube).
So Mozilla - what gives?
Despite that complaint, I still happily use it because I believe Mozilla is much more interested in my privacy, and much more dedicated to FOSS, and because I mistrust Google. Thanks Mozilla!
Finally a big media outlet with the right advice, the only extension you need is uBO. And a wrong one - using 1Password [0]. KeepassXC is safer, but hey, baby steps, right? :))
Chrome is snitching to Google, IE is Windows I stopped using, Safari is best, if you're rich :) Other browsers are too rare - easy for fingerprinting.
[0] www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/28/flaws_in_password_management_apps
If I had data that Enpass was full of holes, I'd switch back instantly!
I do store some non-critical passwords in Safari, it uses Keychain and Apple is pretty good on security. I would not store passwords in other browsers though.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Fusion
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/meetings/2...
I used different profile to do what sandboxing is doing for facebook. Both methods are very good at isolating cookies, but it's still an easy job to know who you are based on IP address and a bit of easy fingerprinting (IP address + screen resolution + browser version gets you a long way).
This year, I decided to start using tor-browser as my main browser, keeping a firefox profile for facebook and making an other for google products.
It's a bit slower, I had to change a few habits (like being always logged in or retrieving url from history by simply typing part of it), but in the end, I'm glad to not have this paranoid-friendly feeling of constantly being watched anymore. I realized that even if I never thought anyone was looking at me specifically, I was acting as if it was the case, because of the perception that everything was recorded and could be used. Mass-surveillance and private social profiling are creating generations of paranoid, this can't be good.
If you are using CSS grid then media queries are not where it is at, the design is content driven and not screen size driven.
I also use multiple profiles via Profile Manager pretty frequently - it's super handy to have the ability to launch a clean browser environment for debugging purposes, and to have separate work profiles for different jobs to avoid cross-contamination. Firefox Sync also works quite well between all of my devices, and it's properly end-to-end encrypted for improved security.
Sounds stupid but i like the concept of TreeStyleTabs but i always disabled it after some time. Firefox finally looks slick again on MacOS. And i want something nice to look at when i work 8+ hours with it. And Tree Style Tabs always turned me off somehow.
TST addon preference style:
/* Compact tab layout */
:root { --tab-height: 20px !important; }
.tab { height: 20px !important; }
/* Shrink space between pinned tabs and tab bar, only when pins are present */
#tabbar[style*="margin"] { margin-top: 20px !important; }
/* Hide tab bar in FF Quantum */
@-moz-document url("chrome://browser/content/browser.xul") {
#TabsToolbar {
visibility: collapse !important;
margin-bottom: 21px !important;
}
#sidebar-box[sidebarcommand="treestyletab_piro_sakura_ne_jp-sidebar-action"] #sidebar-header {
visibility: collapse !important;
}
}
With some very small tweaks you could change it to look more like a Mac toolbar, I guess, but as it stands it's pretty svelte.
Firefox has been my daily driver for over 5 years, with all my history and bookmarks synced across all devices I had to have it on ChromeOS too.
It does a great job. The Tree Style Tabs extension really makes life easy and with u2f support, there are very few things I need to use Chrome for now (Looks at hangouts!).
https://blog.mozilla.org/webrtc/firefox-is-now-supported-by-...
I tried this out, but it said "experimental" and didn't really work on the pixelbook. It only asked for microphone permission, not camera, and neither speakers nor microphone worked.
If you setup Containerize properly you'll never use anything else other than FF again. It can accept wildcards to break out of containers.
DDG Privacy Essentials is also a must-have, as you get the functionality of Privacy Badger & HTTPS Everywhere in one addon. It also works a little better in my tests when compared to HTTPS Everywhere. DDG PE also gives you a privacy grade on sites you visit, which is a pretty nice addition.
I've been using Firefox since it was in beta (as Phoenix). Never left. I used Navigator before and so it was a natural transition. It has always been better than everything else if you knew how to to utilize the features it has that others don't.
It's good for the internet that Firefox succeeds. If they managed to take back the lead I hope they don't give it up a third time.
Different machines, this one is: Intel I-6700-HQ 2.6GHz 4-core/8 logical 16GB RAM...
1) automatically switch proxy based on URL regex/wildcard
2) I should be able to quickly add a new rule for the current website with a keyboard shortcut
3) should be able to import rulesets from old Foxyproxy
Foxyproxy pre-Quantum could do all of this, but the new version cannot do 2). Also none of proxy add-ons work with Firefox Android. I really need this functionality to have normal Internet access because of stuff like [1].
[1] https://meduza.io/en/news/2018/04/17/russia-s-federal-censor...
Firefox is my main browser but I find chrome's developer ecosystem better.
For e.g. the Chrome Dev tools protocol, puppeteer etc. I hope there's some kind of standardization (other that Webdriver) or easier automation and testing on Firefox.
(But well, after the latest privacy changes announced by Apple, I might just stay with Safari for good)
Day to day, the biggest difference I notice is that my adblocker extension works on Android, no more "[vibrate] omg ur phone haz been hax0red download our stuffz".
Extensions:
uBlock Origin - great ad blocker, works on Android.
DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials - includes privacy tracker list, https everywhere, and visible privacy rating
Settings:
First Party Isolation On - IMO this is a top feature and should be on by default.
Tracking Protection On (with Strict Block List).
I also took the opportunity to change my search engine from Google to DuckDuckGo, which has been mostly fine. It's a bit more work to find something on Google Maps, but that's understandable.
There's a setting to prompt "are you sure" before closing Firefox, but it doesn't actually work. I really miss this feature (which works as expected in Chrome) since unless I'm turning my machine off a pretty much never close my browser intentionally
Shortcuts in text input also work differently than every other program on my computer. Command-backspace deletes the whole text field, not just the text before the cursor. ^t doesn't transpose, ^k behaves differently when text wraps, etc
I believe this feature gets disabled if you enable the feature that automatically restores your previous session when Firefox is opened.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-ctrl-...
Command-delete works as expected for me (in this HN comment box), deleting only the text on the current line before the cursor.
For example, in the developer tools, you are not able to pick an element when the page is frozen using `debugger` command. Also there is no way to hijack a particular event and enter debug mode.
There are many things like these that make me constantly go back to Chrome while developing. Although small, they really add up. As much as I like and support Firefox, I do not think it is quite there with the same level as Chrome.
I have colour coded my chrome personalities for me, me-as-lists and me-at-work and I slide desks sideways in OSX to get between them. I never mistake one for the other, I have distinct cache state, distinct password/form completion, and unified plugins within limits.
Not that I dislike FF, but the 'chrome does it worser' meme about how to be multiple google people: Chrome does it different
So for me it isn't time to give Firefox another try. It's time to keep using Eich's far more innovative new browser, Brave.
Some opinions are trivial. I think Wendy's produces a superior burger to Burger King. Someone else might disagree. We can have a friendly discussion about our points of view.
Other opinions aren't so trivial. Take, for example, denying the right to marry to a whole segment of the population, a right that you yourself enjoy, for no reason whatsoever. Its kinda hard to have a friendly discussion between one group of people that are asking for basic rights for themselves and another group of people that are trying to specifically deny those rights, benefit themselves in no way, and have no good reason why. I'm not really sure why the people being denied those rights are supposed to just throw up their hands and accept that.
And its not a right to be a CEO - its a privilege. Its a false moral equivalency to say that the privilege of being a CEO is somehow equivalent to the basic right to be treated equally.
It doesn't really matter what people thought 10 years ago. Or 100. Recently isn't a proxy for right.
He made a decision and he stuck with it. And Mozilla employees also made a decision. His decision was to oppose their right to be married. Their decision was to oppose his privilege to be their CEO.
I think that is wrong too. Anonymous speech is important, and therefore so is anonymous support for speech. That was a lot more clear to LGBT folks before their opinions gained cultural ascendancy, when they benefited from anonymity when expressing their previously heterodox opinions. It helped them win. And there is much more winning to be done for other good causes that are still taboo.
I won't argue about donation disclosure policies. Maybe donations should be public, maybe they shouldn't - I dunno. But, even if they should be private, they weren't and I don't believe he should get a pass because in an alternate world maybe no one would have known what he did.
Also, Prop 8 was in 2008. He was appointed to the CEO position in 2014 - 6 years later. He had every opportunity to apologize. Everyone makes mistakes, even big ones. But, he refused to apologize. He held the same opinion in 2014 that he did in 2008 and he made that clear.
Why would he have the right to express his opinion on same-sex-marriage but Mozilla employees wouldn't have the right to express their opinion on his fitness to be their CEO?
I think a lot of people forget that there's a world beyond liberal urban areas. Allowing it to become socially acceptable for companies to fire employees for their political views is also handing a tool for conservatives to suppress their employees' liberal politics.
And again, it's sending the message that the majority of Californians are not welcome at the company. It makes Mozilla hypocrites whenever they purport to support diversity or inclusion, and gives credence to the idea that Silicon Valley companies are deliberately hostile towards non-liberals.
Views on gay marriage shifted rapidly between 2008 and 2014. I think its wrong to assume that just because 52% of people voted to support Prop 8 in 2008 that 6 years later opinions hadn't changed. And lets not forget that Prop 8 was ruled unconstitutional in 2010 - 4 years before he was made CEO and continued to publicly support Prop 8.
* - By "might", I mean "has happened a lot for a long time". LGTB people have faced discrimination for a long time for wanting to live their life in a way that harms literally no one. Anti-LGBT people facing consequences for their actions to discriminate against others in a way that benefits literally no one is a relatively recent occurrence.
No political views should be inherently fireable offenses, only things like harassment that have nonpartisan criteria. E.g. Supporting proposition 8 is not a fireable offense, actually calling gay employees slurs is. Conversely, opposing stricter border controls is not a fireable offense on its own, saying that anyone who supports Trump's border policies is a Nazi that deserves to be punched is a fireable offense because it's a threat of violence. Firing must be made on non-partisan criteria.
> Views on gay marriage shifted rapidly between 2008 and 2014. I think its wrong to assume that just because 52% of people voted to support Prop 8 in 2008 that 6 years later opinions hadn't changed. And lets not forget that Prop 8 was ruled unconstitutional in 2010 - 4 years before he was made CEO and continued to publicly support Prop 8.
Should anyone that supported the McCain–Feingold Act (the act overturned by the Citizens United case), or Chicago's handgun ban be fired as well? Both of those were found to be infringements on people's constitutional liberties. Again, this is what I'm referring to when I say that people many of the justifications for Eich's termination aren't really well thought out, and end up justifying the termination of lots of other people as well. The blanket statement that a certain political view should be a fireable offense because it was later determined to be unconstitutional is going to end up justifying the firing of lots of other people.
The problem isn't that he had some thought in his head - its that he took that thought in his head and turned it into action. And those publicly documented actions made it impossible for his employees to trust him to make decisions in their best interest. Having the trust of his employees is 100% part of his job - the fact that he lacked that made him unfit to be CEO.
Supporting something that turns out to be unconstitutional clearly shouldn't be a fireable offense. But, both of the examples you cite are cases where a person can cite reasonable reason for their support that aren't merely about controlling the lives of others for no purpose. I probably made a mistake in mentioning it was overturned at all - I'm just saying, he continued to argue for something that wasn't even relevant anymore - in 2014 when this controversy erupted, same sex marriages were actively occurring in California. It seems likely that some of his employees may have benefited from this. And, yet, in 2014 he continued to support the prohibition of same-sex marriage - actively advocating against the life choices that his employees were making at that very time.
Banning certain political views almost always going to harm overall inclusion. According to some of the first results on Google 33% of Americans oppose gay marriage [1]. For comparison, the total African American population in the us is under 14% - less than half. Firing an employee for anti-gay marriage politics and then turning around and claiming it is attempting to be an inclusive company is hypocrisy.
Refraining from firing people regardless of their political views would not cause the world to fall apart. Government employers are legally obligated to tolerate employees political views by the 1st Amendment, and can only fire them for other just causes. Over 20 million people are employed by the Federal, State, and local governments in the US so respecting employers' politics clearly feasible.
> But, both of the examples you cite are cases where a person can cite reasonable reason for their support that aren't merely about controlling the lives of others for no purpose.
The people that supported Proposition 8 can also cite what they believe are reasonable justifications for their support of Proposition 8. Sure, you may not agree that their justifications are reasonable. But that works both ways. Plenty of gun-rights supporters would claim that gun control is "merely about controlling the lives of others for no purpose". So in your moral framework, a gun-rights supporting company would be equally justified in firing pro-gun control employees as Mozilla was in firing Eich, just as long as they consider gun control to be "merely about controlling the lives of others for no purpose".
I really hope you realize that you're supporting the ability of a privileged elite (stockholders, CEOs, managers, etc.) to police their employees' political activity and coerce them into political submission through the threat of termination. Sure, bosses where I live (a liberal costal city) are usually liberal. But in much of the country, they're not.
1. https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/record-percentage-am...
> Banning certain political views almost always going to harm overall inclusion.
Nothing was banned here. His position was that same-sex marriage should be illegal. Their position was that someone who supports same-sex marriage isn't fit to be a CEO of a large company, making decisions about a diverse workforce, based in a state where same-sex marriage is legal.
I'm also unclear about your definition of inclusion - is it just finding the largest number of people that happen to agree with each other?
> Refraining from firing people regardless of their political views would not cause the world to fall apart.
Its not about the world falling apart. Its about the right of employees to express their opinion of someones fitness to be their CEO. Which is totally the right of the employees of Mozilla to do.
> I really hope you realize that you're supporting the ability of a privileged elite (stockholders, CEOs, managers, etc.) to police their employees' political activity and coerce them into political submission through the threat of termination.
You are literally arguing that employees (ie: not the privileged elite) shouldn't speak out against the opinions of their CEO (ie: the privileged elite).
Because there is no non-partisan determination of what is a 'super racist' or otherwise intolerable view, while there is a non-partisan (or at least fairly non-partisan) determination of what is harassment. Plenty of people I know think that any and all race-based affirmative action policies are 'super racist'. Would they justified in telling their direct reports that support affirmative hiring policies, or who donated against Proposition 209 (the proposition that banned race based affirmative action in California public universities) to quit? Sure, it may mean that occasionally someone with extreme political views get hired. But if they genuinely hold views that are truly extreme, they will inevitably end up committing harassment. Again, how for do you think that somebody who genuinely believes in Nazism or enslaving Africans is going to get without making an HR violation? They'd probably make an HR violation during the interview and not even get the job. And if they don't, then that's an indicator that the notion that their views were intolerably extreme wasn't correct.
> Nothing was banned here. His position was that same-sex marriage should be illegal. Their position was that someone who supports same-sex marriage isn't fit to be a CEO of a large company, making decisions about a diverse workforce, based in a state where same-sex marriage is legal.
You're missing the part where Eich's bosses tell him to quit. If managers are going around telling employees to quit when they support X, then the company is effectively banning or at least drastically reducing employee's ability to support X.
> I'm also unclear about your definition of inclusion - is it just finding the largest number of people that happen to agree with each other?
No - the whole point I've been arguing since the beginning is that attempting to cultivate political homogeneity is inevitably going to end up hurting inclusion.
> Its about the right of employees to express their opinion of someones fitness to be their CEO. Which is totally the right of the employees of Mozilla to do.
> You are literally arguing that employees (ie: not the privileged elite) shouldn't speak out against the opinions of their CEO (ie: the privileged elite).
Nowhere do I argue that employees shouldn't speak out against their CEO. Judging by statements made in your other comments, this seems to stem from the erroneous belief that Eich was entirely motivated to resign by Mozilla employees' displeasure to learn his political views. This is not the case. Eich's bosses (the Board) told him to resign. To make Eich's situation analogous to a normal employee, it'd be as if your manager scheduled a meeting with an employee and told them, "We noticed that you donated to ______. We do not tolerate this political view. You need to quit".
> You're missing the part where Eich's bosses tell him to quit.
If his bosses told him to quit, its because it was clear his employees didn't trust him. And they had every right not to trust him. And absolutely no reason to trust him. He hadn't screwed them in the 11 days he had been CEO, but had in the past and, by reaffirming his beliefs, made it very reasonable for the employees to believe he would in the future. What is the board supposed to do? Fire everyone but him?
> No - the whole point I've been arguing since the beginning is that attempting to cultivate political homogeneity is inevitably going to end up hurting inclusion.
Inclusion isn't about finding the worst examples of humanity and including them - its about including actually diverse people (which his employees actually were), trying to live their own lives, on their own terms, and not dictating to others how to live theirs. Its not about taking a single person, the CEO, and letting them say and do whatever they want. It is totally irrelevant what portion of the US still disagrees with same-sex marriage, unless you are going to argue thats OK. Its not. Its disgusting. Either tell me you believe thats OK or stop arguing that because X% of people believe in discrimination that somehow makes it legitimate. I don't care if you live in LA or in a single stoplight town in the middle of nowhere - discrimination is bullshit and cloaking it in the idea of everyone being allowed to have their own opinions only enables discrimination.
> Nowhere do I argue that employees shouldn't speak out against their CEO
So, what, the employees get to speak out as long as nothing comes of it? If something comes of it, thats the problem? What is the actual point of speaking out then?
Its been 4 years since he was sacked. Since then, there has not been a wave of pro-LGTB firings across the US. At least not, any more than were being fired before. Since then, there has been a greater recognition of LGTB rights, same-sex marriage is legal across the US, and opinions such as his have been further pushed into the trash can of history where they can live with other bullshit opinions. If employee outrage against a CEO that is clearly mis-aligned with their values, basic human values, is going to cause so many unintended consequences - where are they?
There are no moral absolutes. Life isn't math. But, his opinions, his positions, are abhorrent to any decent human being. You can try to cloak your argument in to a hand-wavy invocation of the idea that morality is changing and the norms of society aren't fixed - but try to defend what he actually advocated for. Is that ok? Tell me its ok to discriminate against your LGTB employees. Put that on record. Tell me that actively working against LGTB rights is ok and is something we should tolerate. Tell me that people that support LGBT rights in a state where same-sex marriage is legal should suck it up and support someone that doesn't believe in their rights. I don't want to hear about some hand-waving side effects - tell me about the actual issue here.
"Yes" or "No" - LGTB people have rights?
This is a blatant straw man. Of course people skills and abilities must be considered. At all points in this discussion I have only focused on employee's political behavior. The notion that I have stated that candidates' skills should not be taken into account is a total fabrication on your part.
> Inclusion isn't about finding the worst examples of humanity and including them - its about including actually diverse people (which his employees actually were), trying to live their own lives, on their own terms, and not dictating to others how to live theirs. Its not about taking a single person, the CEO, and letting them say and do whatever they want. It is totally irrelevant what portion of the US still disagrees with same-sex marriage, unless you are going to argue thats OK. Its not. Its disgusting. Either tell me you believe thats OK or stop arguing that because X% of people believe in discrimination that somehow makes it legitimate. I don't care if you live in LA or in a single stoplight town in the middle of nowhere - discrimination is bullshit and cloaking it in the idea of everyone being allowed to have their own opinions only enables discrimination.
You're writing this with the erroneous notion that the people in charge are going to agree with your views. What about the people who have bosses that are part of the 1/3 of the population that doesn't believe in gay marriage? Are they supposed to just suck it up and get told to quit if they donate to pro-LGBT causes? You make broad statement like, "discrimination is bullshit and cloaking it in the idea of everyone being allowed to have their own opinions only enables discrimination" but don't consider the fact that lots of people consider things like affirmative action to be unjust discrimination. Heck, even here in California it was banned by popular vote. Does it follow that companies should grep for donors that were against Proposition 209 and tell them to quit? You claim that letting people have their own opinion enables discrimination. Sure, to a degree that's true but letting companies police their employees' opinions is an even bigger enabler of discrimination.
> What is the board supposed to do? Fire everyone but him?
This is another fallacious argument. The board doesn't need to choose between retaining Eich and firing everyone but him. They can fire nobody. Believe it or not, plenty of adults cooperate and work with people that have views different from theirs.
> So, what, the employees get to speak out as long as nothing comes of it? If something comes of it, thats the problem? What is the actual point of speaking out then?
I'm not sure why you're fixating on the employees. I did not mention them until you brought them up. My point has, since the beginning, been about the choice Eich's firing (or if you want to get pedantic, the asking of his resignation) from his superiors. As I have written before, the employees are equally entitled to make their opinions known.
> There are no moral absolutes. Life isn't math. But, his opinions, his positions, are abhorrent to any decent human being. You can try to cloak your argument in to a hand-wavy invocation of the idea that morality is changing and the norms of society aren't fixed - but try to defend what he actually advocated for. Is that ok? Tell me its ok to discriminate against your LGTB employees. Put that on record. Tell me that actively working against LGTB rights is ok and is something we should tolerate. Tell me that people that support LGBT rights in a state where same-sex marriage is legal should suck it up and support someone that doesn't believe in their rights. I don't want to hear about some hand-waving side effects - tell me about the actual issue here.
If your point of view is that the majority of Californians in 2008 we're "abhorrent to any decent human being" then your views are likely fringe. If you can't bring yourself to see what a decade ago was the majority of people, and what is 1/3 today, with even the most basic degree of respect then I don't think your have any business attempting to portray yourself as advocating tolerance. Dismissing half to a third of your countrymen's politics (assuming you're American) as "abhorrent to any decent human being" is the opposite of tolerance.
> "Yes" or "No" - LGTB people have rights?
Yes, LGBT people have rights. Refraining from firing Eich would not have been an infringement of those rights, though. Simply working with a co-worker who believes that civil liberties and rights should be regulated differently than you do is not a violation of those rights and liberties. No more than employing a pro-bussing employee is violating our 14th Amendment rights. No more than employing an employee that disagrees with Citizens Unitied is violating our right to free speech.
You seem to be operating under the noting that mere tolerance of a point of view is tantamount to an endorsement of that view. This kind of thinking is highly corrosive, and it is impossible to build an inclusive group composed of people that harbor this perspective. If a group if such people come together, the only way they would reach harmony is when they achieve political homogeneity. The notion that tolerance of a view is an endorsement of that view is implicitly a demand to be intolerant towards views one disagrees with. It is sobering to meet someone on HN that follows this line of thought.
Marriage has become regulated by the state due to its implications on all citizens. Just because someone doesn't agree with how the state legislates sexual relationships doesn't mean they should be antogonized. Their views can be beneficial to the argument regardless of which side they take.
Simply shutting down conflicting political ideologies doesn't really lead to any rational discussion on the matter. To give an example, consider the current legal strife with gun control. Some people want the state to increase gun regulation and others don't. If each party simply supports their case by saying the other party is discriminating against their way of life, the discussion wouldn't lead to anything sensibly intelligent.
People should have the ability to defend any argument they wish, so long as they remain civil about it. This is especially the case in matters which actually concern the people themselves. Their propositions may be wrong and detrimental to society but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be able to express their thoughts.
This is actually not true. For example, it would have been illegal for Mozilla to fire Eich for his donation. This is because political activity is considered protected in California (like gender, race, etc.), so firing someone for making a political statement or for donating to a political cause is illegal.
We will probably learn more about this defense as the Google/Damore case proceeds.
A green handle of "communist_" does not inspire automatic belief that you truly had friends at Mozilla Corporation or know of any such tweets.
Again, if you mean the six Mozilla Foundation employees who tweeted against me as (poorly) reported by Ars Technica (see https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/03/mozil...), they were not "his employees". They worked for an entirely separate organization from the one I was running.
Back-story: Mozilla Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit set up in 2003 (I was founding board member, and a co-founder of mozilla.org in 1998 at the start). Mozilla Corporation is the for-profit, wholly-owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation which exists at arms length to make taxable revenue from Firefox. The two orgs are loosely connected; the Mozilla Foundation is much smaller and all about getting and giving grants.
Incorrect. At least, it's incorrect as far as consequences levied by their employers. In the United States, government employees are protected by the First Amendment. E.G. a government department that fired employees for pro or anti gay marriage donations would mean that the government is privileging one political opinion over the other:
> the rationale now is that while government may deny employment, or any benefit for that matter, for any number of reasons, it may not deny employment or other benefits on a basis that infringes that person’s constitutionally protected interests. “For if the government could deny a benefit to a person because of his constitutionally protected speech or associations, his exercise of those freedoms would in effect be penalized and inhibited. This would allow the government to ‘produce a result which [it] could not command directly.’ . . . Such interference with constitutional rights is impermissible."
Source: https://www.law.cornell.edu/anncon/html/amdt1cfrag5_user.htm...
Edit (since HN isn't letting me respond):
> In his case, his employees exercised their right to speak, said they thought he wasn't fit to be CEO, demanded his resignation, and he resigned.
This is not entirely correct, and is omitting a substantial part of the story. The company board (who are effectively Eich's bosses) told him to step down as CEO. The CEO doesn't have have a manager and so can't really be fired like a normal employee, but the board telling him to resign is functionally the same thing.
In the US, the notion of equal protection under law is stated unequivocally in our founding documents. It is not the government's business to sanction some personal relationships but not others.
Not debatable at all, IMO, when looked at objectively,
It's also worth mentioning that at the time of his firing, the Supreme Court had yet to rule that banning gay marriage was illegal. Eich was fired before the Supreme Court made Proposition 8 unconstitutional.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desegregation_busing#Reaction
At-will employment goes both ways.
In most states, political beliefs do not, and should not, qualify employees for membership in protected classes. Under California law the situation is murkier, but most conservatives like Eich would agree with that sentiment, I'd hope. But then, the definitions of traditional terms like "conservative" are becoming hard to keep up with nowadays.
ICYMI, I've posted before on HN about false claims of unlawful harm that keep coming up. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14845509 as a source of links; also for the thread in which it lives, which unfortunately runs to high indentation level before trailing off.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14849041 is worth a read too on the topic of law and harm.
Why does this matter now? Obviously it matters to lots of people (including here in these comments) who keep bringing me up, either to attack Mozilla or to attack me. You can search Twitter and try to keep score -- I think subtweeted sentiment has turned in my favor, but both sides keep going.
My Mozilla exit is a prop in the culture wars, even though I never harmed anyone and am still doing what I've always done: working with people from all backgrounds, innovating via open source and open web tech against the big Internet superpowers who emerge and, due to network effects, end up operating against their users' interests.
It's time to drop the prop and stop fighting. I don't expect everyone to listen, but I'll give it a shot here anyway:
What we need most, on the Web and in the world, is unity against big threats such as surveillance capitalism. Apple and Brave block third party tracking by default. I hope Mozilla will do the same if its search revenue-share deals allow that. In the mean time, if you do choose to use Firefox, you can enable its optional Tracking Protection feature.
I agree that our most critical current tech challenge, maybe on par with energy, curing disease or extraterrestrial diaspora, is the decentralization of internet services. You are peculiarly positioned to make a positive contribution to that. If the inquisition succeeds in quashing you they may accomplish genuine harm.
Consider how people's opinions on Mark Zuckerberg colour their opinions on Facebook, or how often Satya Nadella is referenced in conversations on Microsoft's corporate culture and how it may or may not have changed (and how the previous culture is often literally referred to as the "Ballmer era").
ETA for releasable build is Sept 7 according to: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/milestone/3
Firefox crucified their CEO over his PRIVATE conservative views and that was scary how quick the mob turns on someone. If they turned on the got damn inventor of javascript, how quick will they turn on your minion employee?
One of the two have to go: The CEO, or the employees. Do you want to live in the world where Mozilla fires thousands of employees who disagree with their CEO's view that gay marriage should be prohibited?
Mozilla is irrelevant for me now. I just want a browser, I don't care about their political views.
This is also what I hate about Tim Cook and Apple, he's too political.
No, this is a false scenario. Neither of the two have to go. It's totally possible for employees to continue to choose to work at the company even if they don't agree with their CEO's political views. Plenty of adults manage to work with people that have significant political differences. A more realistic second choice is that some employees choose to quite and most choose to stay.
The case that is being misrepresented even now in comments on this post consists of the six Mozilla Foundation employees tweeting that I should step down. They did not work for me. It may be they spoke for some who did work for me, but many on my staff were outraged by their tweets. I had support across a broad spectrum of people inside the Mozilla Corporation.
I'd suggest you take a look.
Also, the constant updates to the dev tools like the Shape Path Editor is amazing!
On paper, Quantum does lots of good things. In practice, my experience with it is not nearly so positive. And the plugin breakage of the last few years has been extremely irksome.
Firefox, on the other hand, has consistently fast & buttery smooth scrolling.
I'm surprised this doesn't get called out more.
I wish I could figure out why because I miss uBlock Origin since Chrome on Android doesn't offer it.
This used to run much much better in Chrome than in Firefox. Mozilla must have done a ton of optimization to their JavaScript engine.
There are still many things to be fixed on the internet, though:
- social media
- trust networks, moderation, reviewing, discovery
- openness of OSes/devices, native programming frameworks
- open implementations of ML/AI applications such as speech recognition/synthesis, NLP, web search
- decentralization of services, like IPFS
Any chance Mozilla will be working on these problems or funding research/development?
It really has taken up speed and feature-wise it can compare itself with Chrome no problem.
Only issues I have are videos (sometimes FB makes problems here) and the "Multi-Account Containers" log me out of some sites (Twitter) when I closed Firefox.
Having live feed icons in the bookmark bar has been the best way to follow news I ever used. Hope this gets support in other browsers, like Brave, too.
BTW, haven't used Chrome/chromium in years unless it was for testing purposes.
Talking about privacy, Firefox can do a better job than Safari? I heard Apple talking a lot about how Safari is becoming great at this.
Want a bind to open something in mpv/youtube-dl `";v": "hint -W exclaim_quiet mpv"`
Want to open a text field in gvim? Hit `ctl+i`
Want to remove the extra chrome: run `:guiset gui none`
I stuck on the ESR of firefox for a long time because I wasn't willing to give up vimperator. Its not the same, but its pretty close. There are 2 main pain points, which I don't know it will be possible to address. First the page has to before its functional. Second currently domain keybinds take priority (looking at you github).
> Want to remove the extra chrome: run `:guiset gui none`
Top bar with so much padding is one of the main reasons I am not using Firefox.
Also the awesome command bar at the bottom is something that I've always found missing in vimium, (which has an omnibar but it's placing feels awkward.)
I think I am going to make firefox as deafult.
You know how mathematicians get excited by exp(-i*pi)+1=0? This is like that but for all of the things I'm embarrassed about in Tridactyl:
- our documentation is not great, particularly of current configuration/possible configurations, hence why the GP didn't know about it
- hints don't support pipes - obviously this should be `hint | ! mpv`
- hints don't support pipes because of a bad architectural decision: we have most stuff living in a background script, when really we should probably have most stuff run on the web page where all the objects live, so that passing them around is easier
- we don't have an argument parser, so silent versions of commands have to be separate functions
...but I'm very glad you like it!
Regarding your pain points:
1. Tridactyl actually works really soon after the page starts loading, but only for commands that don't add UI. Personally I use quickmarks to escape from slow loading pages. Otherwise, this will probably never be fixed.
2. This isn't actually true. Tridactyl does override page binds. The reason you think GitHub is stealing a Tridactyl bind is because GitHub steals `/`, but Tridactyl doesn't bind anything to `/` - that's a default Firefox bind! (And whoever decided it would be a great idea to use that in GitHub should probably test their code in more browsers).
Yeah Tridactyl is great. While I'm not a great JS/TS developer I might be able to offer a couple of pull request for documentation. Is there anything I can help with currently?
> 2. This isn't actually true. Tridactyl does override page binds. The reason you think GitHub is stealing a Tridactyl bind is because GitHub steals `/`, but Tridactyl doesn't bind anything to `/` - that's a default Firefox bind! (And whoever decided it would be a great idea to use that in GitHub should probably test their code in more browsers).
Didn't know that. Interesting.
The next big win in documentation is configuration docs, but there's a type doc bug I'm waiting on first before I can merge it.
However, the `tutor`, new tab page, help page introduction and addons.mozilla.org page (stored on repo as amo.md) always fall out of date, so time spent reading through those and adding things that are missing or out of date is always time well spent. The changelog is probably the easiest source of truth to work from.
Thanks!
Some things have Bugzilla tickets to fix in a future release, but something just won't be possible as it stands today.
Don't mean to discredit or invalidate your feelings, I just feel the need to disclaim that it's impossible to meet people's need with that granularity.
The alternative is that they keep XUL, make 0.1% of the install base happy, and ditch the performance increases that Quantum/WebExtension have given us... at which point there wouldn't be a NYT article and we'd all just be stuck in a browser monoculture.
I do not believe that was the only alternative. I have spent a lot of time reading bug reports / feature requests relating to this functionality, and it certainly seems that much of it could be enabled, but apparently never will. The developers seem to think that giving extensions "too much power" would be dangerous, and thus it is best not to let anybody choose power over safety guarantees.
It seems a little too harsh to bring up Linus Torvald's "If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it" quote, but it tends to come to my mind whenever I read the abovementioned discussions.
Anyone else run into that?
I am on beta channel, small 2-3 mb updates every couple of days.
firefox is stable.
I would recommend it.
Chrome 57.36% 60.60% 47.77%
Safari 13.96% 17.27% 22.16%
UC 7.88% 1.69% 0.32%
Firefox 5.45% 5.89% 6.21%
I've never felt Firefox becoming irrelevant
It's also very much expected behaviour for many users, to be able to reopen tabs and I'd consider it a bug, if I weren't able to.
What's more, Chrome has you covered for actual privacy concerns.
When you use Chrome Sync, Google gets your browsing history and bookmarks in readable form (and they declare that they use these in their privacy policy). Which means US intelligence agencies, as well as befriended intelligence agencies from other countries, also have access to your data.
When auto-filling data, Chrome will fill out all input fields on a page, even ones that you cannot see. So, dodgy webpages may very well have your address, phone number etc..
Chrome's extension store also has a massive malware problem. Mozilla has human reviewers to prevent this and also requires extension to get user consent for internet connections that are not necessary for the functioning of the extension (telemetry, ads).
To sort of mitigate this problem, Chrome doesn't allow extensions to run in Incognito Mode, which however also locks out privacy enhancing extension. Firefox also blocks tracking scripts and similar in Private Browsing mode by default.
Mobile - Opera
Office - Chrome
Home -- FirefoxNo, it didn't.
> Chrome, a faster, more secure and versatile browser.
No, it wasn't.
Articles like this are perpetrating the myth about "better" Chrome, while it had always been slower and had less features than Firefox.
Only if at the very beginnning. For a long time now Chrome is much faster than Fx both in rendering (withough Fx WebRender) and general responsiveness.
PS: at that time I was working for almost full time on Asus Eee PC, with 1Gb memory and early model of Atom CPU, so that was the reason to try Chrome widely marketed as "faster" (as I said above, it wasn't in practice, at least for me).
The only real black eye for Mozilla in this story is that they promoted him at all. If he's just some dude that does his own work, doesn't manage people, and keeps his mouth shut, then, maybe you let his abhorrent opinion slide. But, he was literally the CEO and would make decisions that would impact lots of people.
This really doesn't have anything to do with user privacy in any way whatsoever--nothing about user privacy was surfaced or breached in any way. Nor is there any indication, in mozilla's extremely open source code, that Mozilla would be collecting any information like this.
So, uh, what do you mean by "in a similar way"?
I'm not here to start conspiracies, I'm simply stating that the entire event left me feeling that there are some big players at Mozilla that will use ethically gray areas to achieve their goals, and the people who indulged in that gray area won and are still part of the organization.
Due to that, I am out. I should state that, politically speaking, I was not in solidarity with Eich's position. I am opposed to what people at Mozilla did.
That's a strange way of referring to having someone run an organization who actively works to curtail the human rights of some of his employees. And said employees and their supporters speaking out against that.
How exactly is taking publicly available information about a (comparatively) high profile individual and sharing it doxing?
Political donations are public information[1]. As far as I can tell, (and according to Mozilla), the group that made public the information about Eich was The LA Times, in 2012. Two years before he was made CEO[2][3].
In what way is retweeting a two year old newspaper headline about the recently promoted CEO of your company remotely doxxing?
[1]: http://projects.latimes.com/prop8/results/
[2]: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo-resignat...
[3]: http://articles.latimes.com/2012/apr/04/business/la-fi-tn-br...
> Folks at Mozilla actively chose to find a touchy topic, and expose it to cause the "bad culture fit" argument.
You are insinuating that folks at Mozilla exploited his position on same sex marriage towards a hidden agenda of some kind.
Another interpretation is that folks at Mozilla simply took issue with his position on same sex marriage.
They didn't go digging to find something to hurt him: he took action, public and on the record, specifically taking away the rights of others.
It is true, people did not want that, and they did not hide that fact.
Signed, a gay, now married, 2011 Mozilla intern who did not pick up a full time offer in part because some 2012 news of Eich's donation surfaced around the time I was considering pursuing it.
I thought you were going to mention the betrayal that caused a lot of ppl to switch (other than the slowness, inferior default tooling, etc). The deal with yahoo. Same thing that soured me on Java. If you're just going to sell out to maintain a company, because you can't support what you built, maybe you overbuilt. Or maybe it's just greed. Either way, never going back.
This article IMO is the least inaccurate of the press coverage from around that time: https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-under-fire-inside-the-9-da...
2. does it still send DNS data to third parties for analytics. https://www.ghacks.net/2018/03/20/firefox-dns-over-https-and...
3. Am i still required to build Pocket when I build Firefox? are we still forbidden from removing pocket?
4. Is telemetry still shipped on by default? https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/24/mozilla_considers_m...
Then no, its certainly not time for me to try firefox.
So, genuine question, what do you use, then? GNU IceCat?
Chromium is just as open as Firefox.
The browser would also have to backward compatible, and handle mal-formatted and bloated code written by god who knows. There are features that are the antithesis of privacy and disabling some of the features breaks quite a few sites. Sadly, the web is no longer linked documents, but has full blown apps. It's honestly freaking insane.
And thanks for answering and not just dismissing the question.
2. We are not sending DNS data to third parties "for analytics." We are openly and transparently conducting a DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) experiment with a very small portion of users running Nightly test builds of Firefox. The experiment places a massive notification banner in the browser window with prominent buttons to disable or accept the experiment.
The details on DoH and how it improves both security and privacy are explained by Lin Clark in https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/05/a-cartoon-intro-to-dns-ove... (HN discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17196415).
3. Firefox is Free Software, under an OSI-approved license. You're not "required" to build pocket, nor can or would we "forbid" you from removing it when you build Firefox.
...but you could also save yourself a lot of time and just toggle the "disablePocket" group policy: https://github.com/mozilla/policy-templates/blob/master/READ...
Still seems like a really bizarre thing to get hung up on when the extent of "Pocket in Firefox" is a toolbar icon and a section of the new tab page, both of which can be hidden with 1-2 clicks, after which they're completely inert. But hey, whatever floats your goat.
4. Yes, we gather a limited amount of telemetry by default. Unlike other modern platforms, this is always available for your own inspection (see about:telemetry and https://telemetry.mozilla.org/), and you can opt-out with a single checkbox. We actually reduced the telemetry we gather last year: https://medium.com/georg-fritzsche/data-preference-changes-i...
I think you are being defensive and completely underplaying the effort required by saying “1-2 clicks”.
Dude, these things should be opt-in and not opt-out.
I think it would be interesting if browsers did not allow a page to make requests from multiple domains. nyt.com has to serve the ads and the images or forget it. Everyone having to take full responsibility for what they serve seems to me that it would result in an all-around more pleasant web.
What is your chance of getting an exploit that gives some remote entity administrator permissions against your will from say, your bank? If you have a browser that use say for your bank logins and nothing else I'd estimate the chance of you falling victim to an exploit and suffering loss has decreased.
Given a website: which browser is most likely to lead to you being exposed to an exploit. Answer will depend on the website.
If you fall victim to a cross site scripting security issue, the sites you visit in another browser are not vulnerable.
The cookies you accumulate containing information that you have probably not confirmed is all harmless are not available to a different browser if your browser has a problem.
"Least likely" is not a constant and is quite challenging to estimate accuratel as it depends on your browsing pattern which is not constant and the vagaries of exploits in the wild which are un-knowably not-constant. If the exploited security flaw you encounter is in browser A, browser B is the safer option. Using one browser exposes all of your internet activities to the exploit. Using multiple browsers exposes a subset.
You might get stuck with a mono-culture if everything else is a disaster, but choosing a mono-culture of your own volition is not great practise if your second and later options aren't dead losses. I don't think firefox has ever been a dead loss, if you do and can justify it to yourself, great.
If it is necessary to be more paranoid https://www.qubes-os.org/ is probably a reasonable option. As it is our operating systems, be they proprietary or open source, suck and pointing it out is not terribly controversial. Qubes is a reasonable response - is it a reasonable cost for each of us in time and hassle? Individual decisions are required for each of us to say.
One browser? No reason to be stuck with it, you can do better for basically zero hassle.
Google Chrome is proprietary software. There's no way to back up any claim of it being "secure" because there's no way to determine what proprietary programs do. Users lack the permission to inspect the program's source code, alter the program, or distribute altered versions.
Firefox, by comparison, was never proprietary. Users were and are free to run, inspect, share, and modify Firefox (with perhaps a minor naming hurdle that apparently isn't hard to overcome as Debian demonstrated for years). In fact, this is likely a reason why TorBrowser is based on Firefox. Software freedom isn't about guaranteeing the user security, it's about addressing the inequity between users and developers inherent in non-free software. The technical advantages or disadvantages come and go and are apparently only as far as developers want to take them. People can and do learn to become software developers. And free software's technical merit can be improved by anyone willing to do the work. So we can add impressive technical features to free software. But we have no way to make proprietary software free. So the path to getting software we can evaluate against a claim of "security" and back up that claim starts and ends with software freedom.
This proprietary software apparently allowed for sending Google every URL a Chrome user types in (http://www.favbrowser.com/google-chrome-spyware-confirmed/) and making it easy for extensions to spy on Chrome users (https://labs.detectify.com/2015/07/28/how-i-disabled-your-ch...) which many Chrome extensions apparently do, or activating a Chrome user's microphone and sending the captured data to Google (https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2015/06/google-ch...). Hardly behavior users are likely to call "secure" because such behavior does not look out for the security of its users, but instead securing access to Chrome user's data.