Switch from Chrome to Firefox
mozilla.org
mozilla.org
First it’s “sign in” with obtuse ways to turn it off. Then block Adblocking, once again with obtuse ways to disable... the end goal is pretty obvious, get the majority of Chrome users to turn on ads and tie their real names to their Chrome browser.
Of course let “power users” (who’ll turn that crap off anyways) have their switches to do so. It gives Google plausible deniability.
——
To those who say just fork Chrome adfm had a good article explaining why that doesn’t work:
> And while you can use or adapt Chromium to your heart's content, your new browser won't work with most internet video unless you license a proprietary DRM component called Widevine from Google. The API that connects to Widevine was standardized in 2017 by the World Wide Web Consortium, whose members narrowly voted down a proposal to change the membership rules for the W3C to require members not to abuse the DMCA to prevent DRM from becoming a tool to undermine competition.
https://boingboing.net/2019/05/29/hoarding-software-freedom....
Before I canceled my Netflix subscription (due to lack of use), I was using Firefox to view it.
To my knowledge Widevine DRM works with Chromium. You can watch DRM'd videos: https://forum.manjaro.org/t/how-to-install-widevine-on-chrom...
I mean if you could just build Widevine and decrypt content it wouldn't be very good DRM.
You mean "this website is optimized for Internet Explorer 6" days? Or the earlier "this website is optimized for Netscape 2.0" days?
I think the nearest the web ever came to not being any megacorp's playground was when Firefox was at around 30% market share, and IE6 which had 60%+ market share had stopped moving. IOW, when MS still had the playground mostly to themselves, but chose to ignore it. And even then, the web / Firefox couldn't really innovate without breaking IE6 compatibility, so everyone was stuck.
Sounds kinda similar to what you are looking. It does No. of sites, custom columns, custom pictures, and custom backgrounds. It really gives you a lot of control compared to all the other extensions I tried.
To get around this limitation, one could set up a personal speed-dial start page.
see: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...
they also have most requested urls as a privilege too so it could be recreated and extended with a little effort.
It has become a little more customisable now, thankfully.
And honestly, when I watch Netflix, it's usually in my Surface, in which case I'll use the app.
Isn't Electron basically just a Chrome tab as an app (to over simplify it?
I presume it would afford Google the same level of tracking that Chrome does.
Not sure about in-browser IP tracking, though...
More like a full, independent installation than just a tab.
Well, yeah, that was the whole point.
If we're saying fire up Chrome just to watch Netflix, I'm suggesting saving some effort and/or isolate the rest of your browser by wrapping it in a very basic Electron app.
At the very least, you wouldn't get auto-logged into your "browser" or anything like that.
Make the switch.
Minor annoyance, though. Still switched in desktop as I was on mobile
Ha! Tell that to their 150 million subscribers. :)
More seriously, using a browser without DRM would be a deal-breaker to many users like myself solely because of Netflix, unfortunately. That said, if you're serious about using a DRM-free browser, there are other ways to watch Netflix (iOS/Android, smart TVs, etc).
> Ha! Tell that to their 150 million subscribers. :)
I'm not sure that a large number of subscribers is a convincing argument of the non-terribleness of a service. A quick Google search suggests that Comcast, excuse me, Xfinity, has somewhere in the neighbourhood of 30 million subscribers. I don't think that you will find any argument telling them how terrible Xfinity is.
The original statement was like saying, "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded."
The services used to have more or less the same catalog, but it’s become more and more broken up.
To get everything you need to subscribe to 4+ services, and if you drop Netflix, you lose a hefty part of their catalog because it’s on none of the others.
Once they turned on their 250GB data cap tho it became far less useful since my wife/kids would stream several gigs a day or more of TV.
Depends on the content, If you are watching paid for content on YT it is most likely DRM'ed. [0] An "stats for nerds" example from such a piece of content (Notice the protected line, this line isn't present on DRM free YT Content.). But the vast majority of content on YT is DRM free.
Twitch has some DRM'ed content, things like when they streamed Thursday Night Football. But that was played via the Amazon Video player not twitches normal video player. I remember because the player threw a fit if you didn't have HDCP configured correctly, which most streamers don't. Not that they were trying to re-stream the game, but have it playing on another one of their monitors to see how it was doing. Personally I liked the idea of having a chat alongside the game :-)
Dunno about PornHub.
And genuinely, most people are choosing between privacy and convenience.
And with Firefox you don't need to choose.
Seems like ffmpeg libraries, developed outside of the web browser, support nearly all video formats a user could encounter on the internet.
Also, the part of the statement that reads "your new browser won't work with most internet video" is intriguing.
Can we define "most internet video" as Amazon Video, BBC, Hulu, Netflix and Spotify? (Widevine users listed on its Wikipedia page)
Seems like there is much, much more video on the internet that does not come from those sources.
Maybe you could in terms of unique videos, but in terms of the volume of watched video, not at all. Netflix itself is responsible for something in the range of 15% of the worlds bandwidth usage.
Either way, it not going to win an end users to have something like that.
IOW, it was not about tech issue, but about social issue / blame-shifting.
"most internet video"... by what metric? Hours watched? Catalog size? I find it unlikely that DRM videos outnumber non-DRM videos by any reasonable metric.
I guess you could call it a feature at that.
Microsoft is vaccuuming it all up. Meanwhile Microsoft is making tons of great moves to get devs and users back on their side.
And I've heard that these days, Office 365 collaborative work is at least as good as Google Docs, if not better !
Wow, that's pretty damning!
Yes, they control Office and are the defacto office document standard. What they do with Office now is affordable and ubiquitous. No other office document suite can do this. They are a for-profit company, and Office serves their customers very well. Yes, in Ballmer's days this wan't the case, but today you can run Office (365/Cloud) on a Chromebook and on Android and iPhone as supported apps.
Funny how that changes. If anyone told me in 1999 that Microsoft would eventually become one of the Good Guys...
It's government's responsibility to foster competition to push back against companies wanting to limit it. Govt is doing a shitty job and gets an F.
Well, at least we have Edge on Linux now so duopoly can live on...
The reason is almost certainly a new user agent (compared to non-Chromium Edge) that YouTube didn't expect. Chromium-based Edge is still not stable, and therefore, not properly supported by YouTube.
I don't have time to test this, but I'm willing to bet that you'd get the same result by using any indie browser that happens to send a user agent that YouTube doesn't recognize.
Why almost certainly? We're seeing antagonistic, self-preserving and dare I say abusive monopolistic behavior from Google with Chrome's anti-adblocking. Why the benefit of doubt when blocking a competitor's browser?
More pointedly, would an independent YouTube have behaved similarly for as long?
The web is a standard. Auto failing based on user agent is a sign of developer incompetence.
If only that were true. The web is, at best, a series of suggestions. See also https://caniuse.com
Chromium-based Edge is not stable. It's a new thing that I don't expect website owners to test against. The error message showed that the new design is tested against the latest version of Edge. Complete rewrite of Edge still hasn't replaced the old Edge.
Also, no, the web is not a standard. There's no fixed set of things that a browser should implement and call it a day. It's constantly-evolving depending on the needs of the owners of the website. It's why nobody dares to create a browser from scratch nowadays.
I'd been using YouTube's new layout just fine on Edge Chromium for at least a week before getting the "not supported" message.
Very happy with my Edge switch so far! And I did it before the ad blocking really reared its ugly head too.
Google needs to faceplant hard on this one.
It depends on what you choose as your choice of technology, if you choose web components then you really can only really offer that same experience to users that have a browser that supports that API natively (without polyfills) which old Edge did not do.
My understanding of this situation with yt was that our server side detection code was wrong based on an update in edge (or our UA management), and we don't do feature detection in the client because it is too slow... So we send people to the older version.
Developers care a lot more about this ‘experience’ than users do.
Yes it’s fun to play with the new shiny, but users don’t care.
User experience is an excuse, it’s double-talk.
And besides, your claim is doubtful at best since Chromium Edge doesn't share any User Agent string elements with previous EdgeHTML versions. Your YT developers would have needed to be intentionally malicious to match "Edg/" as a trigger to downgrade the user experience.
It seems pretty clear from the fact that nonsense user agents like "TotallyNotMicrosoft" and "IE6" worked, that there is a blacklist, not a whitelist.
Now as far as your hypothetical, sure they can, but I use all of those services, YouTube, Gmail, Maps, ... on Chromium every day and they do not block nor have they ever blocked any of them.
[1]https://twitter.com/addyosmani/status/1133782407419613184
> And it may even be a quick ‘n dirty deliberate hack to exclude Chredge this way, just so it doesn’t pollute their telemetry / testing of new website features.
That test proves nothing without seeing the Google's code. Feature detection is incredibly slow, requiring JS and multiple round trips. Whereas user agent strings are instantaneous.
Read the reply too. ;)
Turning the block on was intentional, and turning it off was intentional.
We can only guess at their motivation, and I can guarantee you it was not benevolent given what Mozilla said recently about their interactions with Google.
However for most average Joe's it's fine and won't make a difference, so I always install and recommend Firefox when I play IT guy for family/friends. Time to start doing this again like we did in 2005!! It worked then and it can now!
It would probably take me a bit to figure out exactly how to work with the FireFox advanced debugging tools, but it's familiar territory.
Installing is one click - as simple as the chrome web store.
If you want the ability to unload tabs, firefox struggles with it. The best addon is https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/unload-tabs/ but it admits that it is buggy. Haven't tried it though.
Even on a newer computer Firefox feels jagged and hangs. Memory leaks still happening years later. It is so frustrating to see Firefox using 1.5GB of RAM when only 2 tabs remain.
Quantum helped a lot, but it's still not enough for me and many others.
What popular sites don't work in Firefox?
Really? Do you have examples? I haven’t faced this issue. Some websites breaks somehow if you block 3rd party tracking (by breaking I mean that some pictures or video embedded into the page won’t load), but that’s an opt-in feature so I don’t think that’s what you mean.
What developer tools available in chrome but not firefox?
Edge & Firefox have also been useful in the same way I once used Opera (special tasks where their features really shine). I really liked Edge's reading mode & for just browsing websites it was great.
As a developer, I don't typically use browsers as debuggers or programming environments, so I never experienced game-breaking differences.
I can't even switch because one of the vital extensions for my workflow do not exist any more and the author of the Chrome equivalent doesn't want to port it. (I even offered a little money, I probably can't pay enough for an experienced developer to do the full port.)
Wait, you haven't had a security update for your browser since 2017?
Reproduction steps:
1. Check that Google search is working by opening Chrome, navigating to www.google.com, and searching for any term (such as the name of a newspaper and clicking the link to verify that search works as expected.)
2. Open firefox.com and navigate to www.google.com
You will receive a message:
"It looks like you have Chrome installed! For the most secure experience, please visit this page using the Chrome browser or wait and try again later.."
If you have not used Chrome in the past 1 hour from your same IP address, you receive the page as expected.
The above repro steps should be pretty much impossible under antitrust law. (Due to search monopoly.) Which is a very good thing.
Google, Microsoft new "bestie" in this collaboration, will screw them over once it's clear that Microsoft "can't turn back" from using Chromium or even fork it.
As I understand it Chromium is a lot easier to wrap your own GUI around than Gecko. XUL is still not completely decoupled, separating them completely is an ongoing effort I think.
Maybe when the embedded Gecko/Servo engine is production ready would be the time for MS to reconsider.
With webRequest, Google is "just" testing the waters. Just like with the forced sign-in, they will back down when they see the backlash.
Based only on Google's description, they seem to have a valid reason to remove (even though they say "deprecate", they mean remove) the offending API. However, there's zero chance they can get away with this. For what reason I'm not sure, market share of Chrome is very important to them. So they'll have to keep it or implement some new, acceptable method.
Personally I disable the cloud-based suggestions and rely only on my local history.
https://www-archive.mozilla.org/docs/end-user/keywords.html
Basically, Firefox allows you to set a keyword (which I often set to an abbreviation + question mark) which you can link to a site's search URL. For example to search Google Scholar I would type my keyword, "sch?" and then my search query, and after pressing enter I am taken to the site's search results. It's a few more steps you have to take, but has the added benefit of allowing you to add the functionality for any site.
I'm fulltime FF but I won't pretend that the in-site (site specific) search works as smoothly as it did (does?) in Chrome
In Chrome you would go to foo.com and you would use their search input and from then on, in your address bar you can type foo (or maybe just f, depending on how often you use foo.com), and press <tab> to search within the site
This is a workflow you get used to
For the longest time I wanted this in FF, but I think the real thing that clicked for me was just heavily leaning on duckduckgo's bangs
(Firefox does have in-site search, which you can use by right clicking in the site's search input and clicking "Add a Keyword for this Search", but I'm not even sure how it works heh)
edit: okay so this is how it works https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from-address... and I just added `a` for amazon.com and I typed `a` in the address bar and pressed <enter> and it didn't do anything, hm
edit2: so I guess my main point should have been: Firefox has a manual step for what Chrome did for "free", after you made your first in-site search, which you were probably already going to do
Well also I'd like the address bar to be a fucking address bar and not an address-but-sometimes-search bar.
Minimally you can restore the search bar, and now `ctr-k` will focus that bar, while `ctrl-l` will continue focusing the address bar
HOWEVER.. if you type keywords and not a domain in the address bar, it's still gonna search. That's the rub you don't like, I suppose
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-search-bar-firefox-...
user_pref("keyword.enabled", false);
user_pref("browser.fixup.alternate.enabled", false);
user_pref("browser.urlbar.suggest.searches", false);
user_pref("browser.urlbar.filter.javascript", true);
I was highlighting what I missed when switching over
Arguably.
On these threads there is always a handful of complaints about the state of Firefox, mostly on macOS. On my machine, I can’t even launch Firefox in headless mode without the fans turning on, which never happened on Chrome. While I haven’t benchmarked it, for normal browsing it does feel slower than Crome.
But what kills it for me is their crippled AppleScript support. Firefox is the worst major browser (even worse than smaller browsers) for an automator on macOS. I rely on browser control every day, so Firefox is useless to me.
I’d sooner switch to Safari, which despite laughable controls (can’t even disable JavaScript on a per-website basis) I can do something with.
The widespread issues for many, though not all, Mac users, will not make it a ubiquituous browser.
What I think damages Firefox's user-friendliness more is how easy it is to get to setting screens that look scary to the average user. For example Firefox recently started recommending an extension called "Enhancer for YouTube" when a user visits YouTube after upgrading to some new version of Firefox. Upon installing the extension, you get taken to the extension's settings screen which has a design that would definitely throw off my non-techie family members [1]. Also, take a look at the Firefox release notes for iOS [2] – sure it's "nice" for us devs to have access to raw GitHub issue labels or whatever those are – but for non-techie users they might be interpreted as conveying a certain messaging that Firefox is not really designed for them.
[1] https://i.imgur.com/8TIetRA.png [2] https://i.imgur.com/QoUG1ZF.png
I want to love it, but even after a fresh install of MacOS every time I go to use it on my 2015 MBP it grinds to a halt.
I'm sticking to ungoogled-chromium for now. I really hope it's resolved down the line!
Personally, I've use Firefox as my primary browser since before I started using Macs, and after 6 different Macs between home and work, I've never had any problems with it.
It has come a long way, and I want to like it, just really hard in its current form.
They have a webrender newsletter with progress updates usually every couple of weeks, one of the recent posts talks about the release timeline but it's all kind of vague at this point: https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/2019/05/21/graphics-team-sh...
It's SO much fucking better.
Lots of folks on here claiming that Firefox has been just as good as chrome in terms of performance for years, and frankly that's an utter load of BS.
On top tier hardware (and honestly - most hardware in general) chrome was always blindingly fast, and Firefox just wasn't. It was perceptibly slower at just about everything.
It was just annoying enough that I'd always switch back to chrome for personal use.
Not anymore. This last week is the first time I can remember that I honestly can't tell the difference in speed. If anything, Firefox may actually be legitimately beating chrome in terms of speed.
It's been a pleasant breath of fresh air. Google may lose me as a chrome user (personal use at least), which is something I just couldn't have imagined a year ago.
I'm running firefox as my daily driver on Mojave with no issues whatsoever. Without seeing this thread, I didn't even know there were issues with the mac version.
There are. As an example, complaints of Firefox on retina Macs abound.
> Without seeing this thread, I didn't even know there were issues with the mac version.
Read any recent HN thread on Firefox, and you’ll find more people exposing their issues with Firefox on macOS.
On my machine, I can’t even launch Firefox in
headless mode without the fans turning on, which
never happened on Chrome. While I haven’t benchmarked
it, for normal browsing it does feel slower than Crome.
Truly is close to an even 50/50 split -- FF is my personal browser and I use Chrome for all work-related tasks.
And they are subjectively indistinguishable in terms of performance. The only exceptions to that statement are, well, Google properties where Google has clearly invested time and money into optimizing things for FF.
One other possible sorta-exception is when I'm using a scaled resolution mode on an external 4K monitor. MacOS warns me, straight up, that these modes will cause performance issues for me and my modest Intel Iris graphics. The whole system's a little sluggish in those modes, and I think FF fares worse than Chrome, but I won't hold that against FF.
FWIW, Safari does feel subjectively more responsive to me when it comes to scrolling and navigating. And I recently spent a few bucks upgrading my PC gaming rig to a 120hz monitor, which makes a massive difference. And I'm one of those weirdos who keeps CRTs around for his old consoles because he enjoys that true zero lag experience. So I am not exactly insensitive to latency. I don't have magic professional gamer golden magic eyes or anything, but it is an area of interest for me.
I usually have perhaps 5-15 tabs open in FF and I've really never had a reason to even look at about:performance.
But, I do understand that different people have different usage patterns. I run an ad-blocker and I don't typically have any "heavy" resource-sucking tabs open. Hacker News, old Reddit, Twitter, Wikipedia, NYT, etc. That kind of thing. Not heavy video/streaming/interactive stuff.
Anecdotally my understanding is that really heavy tab users (like many dozens or even hundreds of tabs) feel/felt that Chrome handed that better than FF.
Sorry.
Personally I feel it is worse than that: there have been som issues so bad that I hardly get Hanlons razor to work at all, notably one where just having a search result page open in Firefox would consistently spin up my CPU for no good reason twice a minute.
(Of course there were a number of other weird lagging issues as well.)
I haven't tried to use applescript/automator with it so i can't comment on whether or not that works, but that doesn't seem like the biggest issue for most users, or even most developers.
It doesn’t. They don’t have a dictionary.
> but that doesn't seem like the biggest issue for most users, or even most developers.
I specifically said (emphasis added):
> But what kills it for me is their crippled AppleScript support.
Though I’m sure I’m not alone, because I have several users (of tools I’ve built that interact with browsers) and fellow developers that share the same complaint.
I seem to remember speed being a difference. It’s been awhile. I also switched from gmail to outlook because gmail was using headers and footers for ads which was annoying on a 4” SE.
How was it ever permitted to use Gecko underneath? Have the iOS app rules changed in recent years? Did they used to be more permissive?
* Tree Style Tab: makes tabs much more manageable, no parallel in Chrome. If you open dozens of tabs, after using this, you can only pity the traditional tab management [1].
* Containers and container tabs: it's a bit like having separate Chrome profiles for separate contexts, but you can also have them as tabs in the same window.
* Sync / sign-in server that is open source and that you can run on your own if you choose.
[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
What benefit do the Firefox containers have that Chromium profiles are missing?
E.g. you can run your email tab in the default container, and a bank app in a separate "money" container next to it.
Or you can run one gmail (or outlook, etc) account in one tab, and an another gmail (or outlook, etc) account in another tab next to it.
Containers were actually the reason for me to switch over from Chrome about a year ago. The biggest benefit I see is that they're made easy to extend via add-ons.
In my set up I currently have a new container created every time I open a new tab, either blank or from a link, and automatically removed after I close them, which is made possible by Temporary Containers add-on in auto mode.
This creates automatic boundaries for all of my browsing. I then also have persistent containers for sites I want to be logged in to.
If a person wants to access an ad-ridden website using several accounts in Chrome, they need to install, configure and maintain all of their favorite ad-blockers and anti-tracking extensions in several Chrome profiles. Lame.
In my experience, people who prefer profiles over containers are mostly casual users who don't configure profiles and use maybe one or two extensions.
Plus, you can also move existing tabs into a given container the same way, not just new tabs, all at the cost of a single tab refresh.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/search-and-sw...
Just hit reader mode and its all gone.
I use Safari for both my own browsing and for development (a fairly large ClojureScript application), and it is by far the best browser on the platform by all measures (speed first and foremost).
The only place where Safari falls short is 3D CAD programs (like OnShape), where Chrome is faster and better.
Safari is a great browser if you don’t need the most cutting edge features or extensibility though, and I believe it’s also the best optimized for battery life.
Then they were redesigned and everything was moved to different places.
I’m sure they still work fine, it’s just a learning curve to understand where everything was moved. It’s a matter of opinion but IMO the Firefox and chrome tools both have a more intuitive UI as well.
Edit: just to be clear this is what I liked https://webkit.org/blog-files/inspector-elements-panel.png
I don't really care which one I use, but change for changes' sake is frustrating. I'm used to Blink/old Webkit and I don't see any reason to learn a new layout.
However, my biggest gripe about Safari has to be the developer tools. They're noticeably slower, clunkier, and the network tab is unpredictable at times. I think it's getting better, but I defer to Firefox to do development.
if you have a retina display, this "even" is sort of a joke, because ff is so CPU-heavy (and often slow) that it's unusable for me https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042
But it is true that for some users Firefox on retina is barely usable. It is a confirmed bug.
TBH the ability to use uBlock Origin was my only killer requirement, but Container tabs are a leap in web security. I hope that idea gets stolen and becomes a norm in browsers. (Or First Party Isolation in general).
Am I using it wrong in Safari?
Because to me the Chrome integration with 1Password X extension is by far the easiest, you get the dropdown right there in the field. In Safari, I have to click the 1Password extension button next to the address field and then select Autofill.
The one thing about 1Password X is it doesn't integrate with the installed 1Password app on your system, which means no TouchID, for one.
If uBlock stops working, I'll switch off in an instant though.
Also as far as I can see I have to upgrade my OS in order to upgrade by browser with safari. Sometimes I just can't be bothered to wait for a 40 minute upgrade to complete.
As a web dev, the main reason I don't switch is I know how to use Chrome dev tools, and hate spending time I could be producing code instead learning new tools for something like this. But eventually I'll get myself to (prob to FF rather than safari, as long as I'm switching).
At some point they decided to mimic Xcode which pretty much put a nail in them for being useful for anything.
No, it's just that you're used to something different.
I primarily use Safari for development and when I switch to Chrome or Firefox it feels unnatural and weird at first. Then I acclimate and all is well.
The other day I had to shut down a chrome tab that was utilizing 1.5 gigs of ram though. That's crazy. There's definitely no perfect browser.
I have switched on my phone, but desktop thats a pretty harsh trade off.
I actually really liked Safari when I used it. The issue for me is just that I don't only use OS X and like having my stuff synced across devices.
If I had an iPhone I would probably be very happy with Safari.
1. Swiping back on the trackpad to navigate backwards freezes the page for a couple of seconds. It then redraws the page with any updated elements (perhaps a refresh?).
2. The element CSS attributes in the dev tools often fail to update the DOM, duplicate with every keystroke, or revert what you have typed.
That’s all not to mention its excellent built-in privacy features and that it’s really really fast.
Not that I'm saying Safari is bad browser, but on iOS you can't really set other browser as your default browser, browsers can't use their own engines, etc. etc.
If you're switching browsers because you're upset that Chrome is breaking uBO, it makes no sense to switch to another browser that's never supported uBO and probably never will.
For it to work on future macOS versions, the developers would need to convert it to a Safari App Extension and cough up $99/year. They’re not interested.
https://safari-extensions.apple.com/details/?id=com.el1t.uBl...
If you’re switching browser because google is breaking ad blocking, it absolutely makes sense to switch to one with a blocking technology that the browser vendor specifically added, rather than grudgingly allowed.
It also makes sense to use a browser where the blockers don’t get access to what you’re actually browsing. What’s the point of blocking trackers if the blocker just tracks what you do?
The utility comes from having multiple sandboxed, separate profiles running at the same time with separate cookie jars, in separate memory spaces. Kind of like docker containers for the browser. Chrome does this magnificently--I have personal, school, and work profiles all running and open at the same time. It's very useful if you have multiple accounts on any services and need access to them simultaneously (i.e. multiple google accounts). Also useful if you don't want the browser in one of the profiles to remember any sites/cookies from another area of your life. I wouldn't want some of sites I visit on my own time to autocomplete at work, but I still want to have it when I go home.
As far as I know it also isn't possible to make any sort of CLI incantation to open the safari binary as a different user (like sudo with specifying a different non-root user) and not have it override whatever is currently running.
https://www.bettercloud.com/monitor/the-academy/how-to-creat...
No profile support. I have four profiles in use right now, mostly "thanks" to the fact that Twitter can't run multiple accounts at once and Tweetdeck is garbage. Three "private" profiles and one for "work" stuff. That's a dealbreaker for me.
In addition, as a web developer, Chrome has way better development tools, and I like to use Chromecast integration and see full URLs in a real address bar, not just the domain like Safari does.
Preferences > Advanced > Show full website address
I'd really like to switch to Safari especially because it is extremely battery friendly but there are so many features it lacks :'(
Also dev tools are so much better in Fx and Chrome...
Besides Safari's lack of extensions I find it to be more or less on par with Firefox, assuming you're in the Apple ecosystem. The dev tools feel extremely polished and feature complete. The only thing Safari's dev tools lack IMO is no fancy CSS support for things like grid or animations.
I occasional open up Firefox Dev Edition when I get a weird bug on a webpage and that sort of thing but besides that Safari has served all my needs perfectly.
Safari's inspector always feels obtuse compared to Chrome or Firefox but maybe I'm just not used to it.
Much less than that of Fx or Chrome. No support of extensions means I can't use something like https://github.com/vuejs/vue-devtools, no command menu, poor debugger, no performance\memory usage information etc. The list can go on and on. Safari's dev tools are about at the same level as they were in Chrome or Fx 5+ years ago.
As for the extensions part... well, not everybody needs them, I guess, but I can't really imagine my browser without at least, 1P, uBO, Stylys, Tempermonkey, TreeStyleTabs, Tab Session manager, Bloody Vikings! and All Mangas Reader.
I use Chrome for development. It has lots of helpful extensions, like the React and Redux devtools, extensions for cookie editing, screen measuring, JSON formatting and so on. I often need to forcibly restart tabs (or the entire browser) due to misbehaving devtools, so it's great having a dedicated browser for it. Same goes for cookies and local storage state. It's completely separate.
I use Safari as a browser. I has the basic extensions (adblocker, etc.) that I need personally. Its development tools are terrible, but that's okay — I only use them in the very rare case where a rendering/JS problem only shows in Safari.
One word: iCloud. I don't feel like being encapsulated in Apple's ecosystem because their support on non-Apple products is limited, buggy, and/or non-existent.
You completely disregard one of the biggest appeals to Chrome, which is its massive extension support (which Safari is miles behind on).
I keep trying to switch but every time it is clear that Safari is an inferior product (aside from efficiency, where it beats the heck out of Chrome).
FF has tab scrolling, but you also have tree style tabs which is better than chrome when you have a lot of tabs. Container tabs are also a big plus and is what made me start using firefox again. Chrome has a tree style tabs extension but the user experience makes it unusable for me. I can't find it for safari.
Firefox is still slower & consumes more CPU than chrome and safari after all of the improvements. Especially on a few heavyweight websites I use a lot, like facebook and google maps. Chrome is fast enough by comparison. So on my personal macbook I never use firefox because it's too slow.
If safari fixed it's tab issues then I would use it. But being silent apple, they will probably never fix that because it goes against some designer's idea of good design. Look how long it took to get favicons in tabs and it's still not the default option.
This will show an overview of all your tabs at once. Just start typing to find a particular tab by name.
A two-finger pinch-in gesture will also trigger the Tab Overview.
Another fun one: use Command-Option-<+> and Command-Option-<-> to make text larger or smaller (as opposed to zooming the entire page).
To view other shortcuts, click the View menu in Safari, and then hold down the Option key.
Note that this is probably one of the least discoverable features I've ever seen.
Safari has poor controls if you care about privacy and having some modicum of control over the websites you visit.
In Chrome we can — on a per-site basis — disable/enable JavaScript; disable/enable cookies (and local storage); allow only some cookies; set which cookies clear on exit. You can also do more, but those are the ones I use.
You can do all that without extensions, and the controls are right there on the omnibar. In Safari, I can’t even do that with an extension (that I’m aware of).
Safari guesses what is privacy invading or not, and as such makes mistakes. I appreciate their effort, but I don’t believe it’s good enough.
This month we got reports of browser fingerprinting on iOS that happened via the phone’s gyroscope[1]. There was a way to not be affected: disabling JavaScript.
[1]: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/05/21/iphone_mems_gyrosco...
However as I posted in another comment, Safari is the new IE when it comes to bugs and standards compliance.
Here's an example that broke many many sites that use OAuth2 Auth Code Flow for login (including the main UI portal my company provides clients): https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=194906
This was also an issue in iOS, and since Apple doesn't let any other browsers actually use their own rendering engine on that platform (they're just wrappers around Safari's guts) this was broken for all iPhone users no matter the browser.
This is just one example. There's been numerous other issues such as disabling third party cookies by default.
I can only surmise that Mac users use Chrome/FF because the internet just _works better_ when they do.
Because sensible people don't deliberately handcuff themselves to trillion dollar megacorps. How can I get my Safari bookmarks on my Android phone?
Chrome's first paint is faster and more consistent. I think when I used macOS, Chrome had DNS preloading but Safari didn't.
It's been a while since I used macOS (RIP my 2012 13" MacBook Air), but Chrome's scrolling behaviour is more effective -- "solid" is how I'd describe it.
The omnibar is simple and usually shows exactly the right suggestions. Safari's address bar often didn't have the thing I wanted, and had extra things that I definitely didn't want or took a second for my brain to parse.
Chrome's context menu has better contrast, being black on white rather than black on silver. The choices are ordered better as well.
This is all that comes to mind right now.
An employee at my old company used a Mac Mini. She's not computer-saavy, but she far preferred Chrome over Safari. I asked her why and she couldn't describe it -- just that she was certain. I think it would be really insightful to do studies where you take tiny features from Safari, like the context menu colour, put them in Chrome and survey users on how they liked the product.
I’ve tried chrome in the past but it installed some sort of GoogleUpdater daemon without permission and I absolutely hate that. The same reason I don’t install MSOffice on my machines. If a desktop application needs a background service for wathever reason I don’t want it anywhere near my computers.
Container tabs are great. Combined with Tree Style Tabs and Containerise addons, you have something unbeatable in both terms of security, privacy and user friendliness.
Containers are useful for separating "who I am to my providers." As far as Facebook is concerned, I am a Facebook user, but I don't use Amazon or Google. But Amazon thinks I'm an Amazon user that doesn't use Facebook or Google. You can accomplish this with profiles, but in Chrome (last I checked) that meant multiple windows, rather than just sites being displayed in tabs that indicate the container in use. So for that purpose, I believe containers are more useful.
(I also think Firefox should step up their profile game, because when my spouse and I alternate using a computer we share, it's inconvenient for me to close all her Firefox windows so I can open my profile!)
Go to about:profiles, click the "Launch profile in new browser" button under the profile you want.
Yes, it's not obvious, and the UI has a lot to be desired if you want to explain the feature to some non-techie, but you no longer need to close the other Firefox instances in order to launch a different profile. I think this was added a couple releases ago.
It's definitely something I'd like to see worked out better as a power user feature.
Having a container is nice compared to opening a private window because you don't have to do 2FA every time.
So in your case you could have say a "work" container and a "home" container. Each of these could persist logins for all of the services you are using without having to switch between users and have different windows open you just have the 2 tabs.
What I think people find more useful is the ability to make a container for say "facebook". Anytime you open facebook it puts it in a new tab with a sandboxed browser session. It's similar to having a separate profile but it's just for facebook use and you don't have to think about it so much. If you click a link to facebook it opens it in your new container already logged in meanwhile facebook does not see you as authed in any of your other tabs.
Instead of you needing to know all the tricks and tweaks needed to make it work well, they're in the box.
I don't even know it's there until it does something unexpected but necessary. For example the Facebook Container has no idea I pay YouTube not to show adverts. So inside Facebook any inlined YouTube video has adverts. If I follow a link to YouTube, I appear outside the Container and have no adverts but don't get followed by Facebook (they'd need YouTube to co-operate)
I switched to Chrome a few years ago (and even to a Chromebox as my daily driver, on my second now because I wanted Android app support) because Firefox was a bloated piece of garbage, if I left 5-10 tabs open for a few weeks in Windows they'd be using several gigabytes of memory from a leak, memory use growing hourly.
Edit: I don't know why I'm being downvoted, this is even on Mozilla's own site showing it hasn't been fixed:
"Firefox's memory usage may increase if it's left open for long periods of time. A workaround for this is to periodically restart Firefox"
With an alternate solution being:
"Add RAM to your computer" ... "RAM is cheap"
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-uses-too-much-m...
I have not had this issue at all with Chrome in Windows 7, Windows 10 or ChromeOS.
https://www.ghacks.net/2019/03/01/firefox-67-automatically-u...
There's also this:
https://www.ghacks.net/2012/05/22/make-firefox-more-responsi...
I still use Chrome for some tasks such as watching/listening to Youtube. (edit: not bc of performance, but bc I hate OSXs Cmd-Tab ordering)
That's a trivial but surprisingly reasonable reason for using two browsers. OSX has some annoying quirks sometimes.
What is this?
I switched a couple months ago from Chrome to Firefox as well but to tell you the truth, I just heard about containers and what you could do with it. I guess I must've been living under a rock, this is amazing!
I was already glad I made the switch for the less resources being used on my aging Macbook Pro and better privacy features, but containers just took this experience to the next level for me!
EDIT: What actually triggered my switch was at one point, a few tabs on Chrome(regular things like Youtube) started causing my CPU/fan to go crazy on my MBP 2015(the last decent MBP). Instead of trying to figure out what extension or what setting was causing the problem, I thought I'd give FF a try and just couldn't look back after.
I had a google container for a while, but opening links opens a new tab and closes the google container, so therefore you cant it back or forward without reopening that container tab. Same thing if I click a container link or something and it pushes it into a new tab, I loose that ability to go backward.
It's just a minor gripe but I'm so into the habit of hitting the back button on my mouse while browsing rather than cmd shift tab.
I hope Mozilla won't deprecate those..
They did this for political reasons. Regardless of what kind of trash talk takes place on Dissenter, the point is that nobody is forced to use it.
My point: neither Google nor Mozilla should be trusted and both seek to be your totalitarian Internet overlord.
1. https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/36490/firefox-and-chrome-ban...
[1]: https://reclaimthenet.org/firefox-rejects-free-speech-bans-f...
I also made a simple, private(!) extension before I learned about the signing-requirement and that it won't work without uploading it. So I canceled my career as an extension-writer and just went to bed angry.
They really fucked this up (without even mentioning the "armag-addon").
I have darkmode on, on the entire internet. Had it for eternities before ff, thanks to an extension. Great reader extension. Even ported (to webextensions) extensions still have great versions for xul.
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/04/15/the-case-for-exte...
Mozilla could not advertise Firefox as secure if they allowed unsigned addons.
With the way Google tries to strongarm standards and at the same time defy them, it's the modern Internet Explorer and it's a PITA to develop for.
Imagine permitting cross-origin drag-n-drop and a page is clickjacked: the user may end up dragging a sensitive item in the clickjacked page into an invisible iframe with a drop point layered on top of whatever target the user thinks they're dropping data into, and the end result would be that data intended for one endpoint, in this case the endpoint that was clickjacked, is sent to another.
It'd be a nontrivial attack to mount, but as you posed the challenge, I can see it done as part of e.g. a phish where a site like dropbox is iframed in a clickjacking attack (assuming they haven't mitigated it).
I can sketch (literally) what the dom might physically look like if it helps convey the attack I have in mind more effectively.
https://www.contextis.com/media/downloads/Context-Clickjacki...
There have also been plenty of UXSS bugs in various browsers caused by cross-origin drag-and-drop.
So in my case I go to work and get reports that X is no longer working, lucky for me in JS is easy to patch third party code and fix this issue but I could not find a ticket that explains why Chrome did this.
There are several more #ifdefs I've had to add due to weird chrome glitches (like around the html5 video player, which just works seamlessly with Firefox).
Every single update since Quantum has made things worse. Three days ago I opened up Firefox to find out all of my settings had been nuked, 200+ tabs, themes and extensions lost, about:config reset, search settings reset (hello again Google) etc. I'm still fuming mad about this.
I don't feel like drudging up old history but my most recent bug was that Chrome doesn't properly bubble mouse click events when some UI elements fire.
WONTFIX of course, apparently I should just use event.preventDefault() even though every other browser handled this particular mouse event correctly. Chrome was the only outlier. So now I am writing code specifically for Chrome.
Two years ago I had an SVG rendering bug that turned out to be so deep that I had to spend two weeks debugging and come up with an incredibly convoluted scheme for loading dynamic SVG icons because `<use/>` is broken hot garbage on Chrome. Bug report dead in the water. More code just for Chrome.
You get the picture. I now have to develop on Chrome as much as I hate it, even though FF has better debug messages and stability, just because it saves time testing every little thing out.
In my experience as a developer companies don’t even issue me a USB backup drive to run time machine on my work issued MacBook Pro unless I specifically request it.
I'm in a weird position where this particular Firefox on this particular machine didn't have a backup.
I'm waiting on a new drive to come in the mail as we speak.
So chew me out. Sue me. I didn't have a backup for this one Firefox instance out of half a dozen.
But please don't normalize the expectation that my browser deleting everything with an automatic update is somehow a user error.
Microsoft doesn't get a free pass, neither does Mozilla.
But most people just don’t and a response of “restore from your backup” is unhelpful to them :(
Do you similarly give Microsoft a free pass when automatic Windows updates delete your grandmother's photo album?
Of course, Firefox should not be pushing rushed, unfinished releases as they have been, they should never destroy data even one update every 10 years, because it is supposed to be stable software.
If you go into your profiles directory is the old profile still there? It might have just created a new profile for you.
Did you double-check your profile folder? Firefox might have created a new profile for you while leaving the old profile there. If you're on Linux or Mac, try typing this in a terminal:
firefox -ProfileManager -no-remote &
(I'm not sure how to find the profile folder on Windows.)
Computers are not conscious.
e.g. on windows it's %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\your_profile\sessionstore-backups. After you close FF you can copy over the .jsonlz4 backup to your_profile and replace the sessionstore.jsonlz4 file.
It would be great if they developed a graph mapping Chrome extensions to Mozilla equivalents. Then the user could confirm installation of the ones with 1:1 parity, like LastPass, allow users to select similar extensions, or skip installing an equivalent.
There are some Chrome-Exclusive extensions that keep me hooked. That and Firefox’s Storage inspector is terrible, there isn’t a native way to clear localstorage during development.
Fork of Chrome and most if not all Google extensions work.
It's like ditching Facebook for Instagram.
While I agree that the inspector could be improved, this is false. Dev tools > Storage tab > Expand local storage > Select domain > Right click a key/value > Select "Delete all". Done.
What benefit does Microsoft have by using Mozilla instead? Earnest question.
Electron, the software framework VSCode uses, runs on Chromium. Github maintained and developed the framework and they are currently owned by Microsoft. If Microsoft contributes to Chromium and improves performance they benefit in a lot of places: their new browser is improved(Edge Chromium), their own framework(Electron), and their own product (VSCode).
A pox in every pot!
Or you could just use uBlock Origin on Firefox (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin)!
(I tend to use uMatrix.)
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338#iss...
> eyeo GmbH (owner of Adblock Plus) is a business partner of Google (through its "Acceptable Ads" business plan), and its business share some the same key characteristics as the Google's ones above:
> It gets revenues from the displaying of ads with those with which it has a contract (Google, Taboola, etc.)
> It expressly names uBlock Origin as a risk factor to its business
Anything "Adblock" should be avoided. Borderline malware imo, and there is no reason to use them when you've got uBO/uMatrix.
AdBlock plus also has the "acceptable ads" program that most people dislike but it can be easily turned off. The rest is mostly politics.
The main reason is, as you said, cache. The more unused RAM you have, the longer caches will be kept. It includes disk cache, browser cache, etc... But it can also make the CPU cache more efficient. L2 cache is about 10 times faster than RAM, and the less RAM you are using, the more cache will be used. L1 cache is even faster but here, access patterns matters as much as raw size, if not more.
Editing to say I've been reading on the fallout of the Chrome adblocking issue and many seem to think that DNS blocking is the way forward, but how long until it isn't? I've mentioned this before, but there has to be some way to do this without using browser-based solutions. I use them as well as a Pi-hole, but I dislike the browser-based solutions as a whole. What I'd like to see is a proxy, preferably web-based (cloud) that I can point my router and mobile devices to take advantage wherever I happen to be. Imagine a proxy that acts like /dev/null. It fools the sites into believing they are sending down ad data, but the proxy strips out that garbage. I know this does nothing for the bandwidth used, but I'm just thinking as I type. I understand HOW to do this, but my coding skills are not at that level. And I doubt this should be written in Python, although it likely could be. 20 years ago, I would be doing it in Perl, although those skills have fallen by the wayside since I have no real use case for Perl these days.
I use Firefox exclusively because of the sidebar tab extension and will probably use it until Firefox dies a slow death.
> Switching to Firefox is fast, easy and risk-free. Firefox imports your bookmarks, autofills, passwords and preferences from Chrome.
1. Select what to take from Chrome.
2. Let Firefox do the rest.
3. Enjoy the web faster, all set up for you.
Edit: This page (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/download/) is the firefox download page. The article linked (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/switch/) is not that page, it's a page specifically explaining the [trivial] process of switching from Chrome. It also happens to have a download link.
Maybe we can get the black bar up too ;)
In Firefox, go to Preferences -> Search and click on "Add search bar in toolbar". Also uncheck "Show search suggestions in address bar results".
Then ctrl-l will only autocomplete URLs and ctrl-k will search. Once you're in the search box, press TAB to cycle through your search providers. You can add additional search providers easily.
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Using_keyword_searches
I didn't think about adding sites like rubygems and mdn, but that's a good idea.
Edit: I just tried it and it works. Example: create a bookmark in Firefox and change the URL to the one below. Set the keyword to "r" in the bookmarks editor. Then you can type `r devise` in the address bar to search rubygems.
https://rubygems.org/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=%S? - default search engine
w - wikipedia
t - dictionary
y - youtube
d - duckduckgo
I've switched to DuckDuckGo, and using their ! operators (!w for Wikipedia, !map for Google Maps) picks up most of the slack.
Can you please make the popped up bookmark dialog box much much bigger? Please!
When clicking the star icon at the end of the address bar, the bookmark dialog box pops up. But it is too small! It only shows very few folders and choices. In order to locate a desired bookmark folder, people have to click and scroll many times. The whole dialog box is $^%&*& too small! Please make it bigger to show much more folders! Like three times bigger! Chrome has the same problem. Firefox can do better!
Also, please make the last used bookmark folder as the default folder at the next time when the bookmark dislog box opens, because people often bookmark many related/similar pages consecutively in one short period of time. Thank you. I love Firefox.
It's been amazing. With the ad-blocker she almost never texts me now with suspicious stuff. Also, it was super easy to teach her that if she ever gets into a situation that feels shady, just close the browser and open it up again. Starting from a clean slate every time in a well protected browser makes her feel a lot safer because she knows that if things get scary, she can just close the window and start over.
Having to log in every time hasn't turned out to be that much of an inconvenience either. See actually feels safer because of it. It makes perfect logical sense to her that the website ask her to login every time. "My bank asks me for my ID every time I go in to deposit a check, so of course it makes sense to ask for my password every time I open my browser and visit the website."
Anyway, my takeaway is that Firefox + uBlock Origin for parents is really a wonderful thing.
I'm not saying forking Chrome would be easy, it's complicated software, I think it would require a lot of labor to keep it competitive over the long term, which is the real barrier.
But I'm not sure if the DRM is an insurmountable barrier, Firefox plays that same video somehow, it should be at least theoretically possible to get a forked Chrome to do it the same way?
You mean stuttering and jerky? I imagine that's a result of not using Google's preferred codec DRM voodoo -- and copying it will just spread the misery, not make it better :(
Now might be a good time to do it, considering the lack of love for Google in EU these days ?
Like, if you forked FF, you wouldn't be able to display video either?
That is EVIL.
It means effectively there will never be another open source browser that can be display commercial-popular video, Firefox is IT, they have an open source monopoly? Oh geez.
To roll out the welcome mat for any new or returning users, I have some general suggestions.
Consider the following extensions: Containerise; Decentraleyes; HTTPS Everywhere; Livemarks; Privacy Badger; Redirect AMP to HTML; uBlock Origin.
For privacy settings: set custom privacy settings to block trackers 'in all windows', block cookies from all unvisited websites, block cryptominers and fingerprinters. Of course enable 'Do Not Track'. Then block all new permission requests for location, web cam etc. Lean towards whitelisting sites that you do want these settings, as stringent privacy settings like this can in rare instances, break sites. The only example I've ran into is during NCAA March Madness and the site used to watch the games, but you may find others.
Random bits: I'd also suggest enabling the dedicated search bar for quick DDG bang updates. I also give Mozilla some information so my preferences can be added to the collective as to not be removed at some point down the road. Yes to 'Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla', 'Allow Firefox to make personalized extension recommendations' and 'Allow Firefox to send backlogged crash reports on your behalf'. Can't say I suggest Firefox Studies though, that's one thing Mozilla rubbed me the wrong way with.
With all of that and your own further customization to make it yours, you should be a happy Firefox user. :)
https://www.howtogeek.com/346981/how-to-install-any-chrome-e...
I can't recall if I used that Chrome Store Foxified but I do know that i'm using all of my chrome extensions and firefox and don't miss chrome at all.
I pay for G Suite personally, I have nothing against google except that I knew their free gmail account doesn’t have support and I wanted to be able to contact someone if I ever had a problem with my mail.
Edit: or if you really just want to avoid big companies, https://puri.sm/posts/purisms-librem-one-suite-of-privacy-pr...
I noticed this too in FF on Linux, I inspect elemented and for some reason a huge number of websites were using Nimbus Sans as the font... Later when I eventually used someone's Windows install I realized that Nimbus was only being used on my computer... Wtf?
It's a font developed long ago by some famous font foundry, and a subset covering common characters was made free and included in Linux printer drivers. It is visually very similar to Helvetica/San Francisco. I installed GNU FreeFont (probably available in your distro's repos) which looks the exact same but covers many more characters than Nimbus. In Firefox I went to the font config settings, set FreeSans/FreeSerif as the default fonts, and unchecked the option to allow websites to specify custom fonts. Just don't disable the checkbox to download web fonts, or icon fonts with various icons/glyphs will show as boxes.
It's truly beautiful - every once in a while I see some text and just stop reading and stare at it for a few seconds. On the rare occasion when I go to a website about fonts I use another browser to be able to see their CSS-specified fonts.
The only browser that I think could make me switch is qutebrowser, though the lack of an adblocker is an obstacle for me.
Just kidding. I do not do this.
qutebrowser has a built-in adblocker (based on a host blacklist) which works fine for most scenarios.
There's also https://gitlab.com/jgkamat/jblock though that's not really supported until extension support is finished.
But great to know there's some progress.
Whatever it is, its not in Firefox.
In some cases it looks like Chrome takes extra efforts to find physical files on disk from bad URLs, and in other cases Chrome does more with virtual file structures included in the same bundles (the webpack:// pseudo-URLs often point to other "sections" of the same JS bundle) creating a virtual file tree from them that looks close enough to the on-disk file tree as to seem effectively the same to many developers.
https://github.com/webpack/webpack/issues/3603 https://github.com/webpack/webpack/issues/1194
That last one does mention at least one already fixed Mozilla bug:
On the other hand, Firefox's layout dev tools, like the grid and flex box inspector, are way better than doing the same task in Chrome, in my experience.
Firefox also has an amazing flexbox inspector and inline breakpoints.
Step 4: Spend weeks getting used to new shortcuts, finding equivalent extensions/plugins and getting used to their dev tools.
Both follow the WebExtensions-standard, so there’s not really much to “port”, if anything.
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2018/02/22/removing-support-...
Then again maybe I'm being unfair here because if I'm really honest about it, the reason I didn't switch over to Chrome was that you couldn't start an in-page text search by hitting the / key like I was used to doing in Firefox. (I've since found many other reasons to keep using Firefox but at one stage that was the sticking point...)
I'm not sure how hard it would be for the RN team to switch to another browser such as Firefox or the new Edge so I can uninstall Google Chrome from my computer.
While not a deal breaker it would be nice to have a more native macOS feeling version of Firefox but I guess Mozilla have other things to work on.
Is there something comparable for Firefox?
Fair enough, I'll consider that next time such a situation comes up.
I can't help but wonder if it is because firefox is actually behind or if google is sabotaging them.
- Steve Jobs
I didn't like it either at first, but then I realized it was just because it was different than Chrome. In time, I liked how Firefox did it better. You're always guaranteed to see the favicon and 3 or 4 letters of the tab's title no matter how many tabs you have. In Chrome, you're eventually looking at triangles or lines with no way to differentiate them.
But I can't see the tab's favicon or letters because they're 100% hidden from me.
I currently have 49 tabs open in Chrome. If I set Firefox to be the same exact width as Chrome, I can open 27 tabs at the same time. If I open up the 28th, it starts hiding tabs.
I actually have no issue with how Chrome does it. Just seeing the favicon is enough when dealing with a large number of tabs.
EDIT: Just tested opening 49 tabs. None of the tabs show anything more than just the favicon and about 90% of the first letter. Not really sure how this is better than what Chrome does, which is show 49 favicons without scrolling.
You can scroll on the tab bar.
With Firefox, you get the Favicon and at least the first few characters of the page title. And if you use the tab drop-down, you see all, or most, of the title (depending on how long it is).
I just tested that and it was absolutely false.
Maybe there's some setting that controls this behavior, but my Firefox is pretty much completely stock. shrug
I understand that some people will feel differently of course. And it's less of an issue in the first place if you don't keep ludicrous numbers of tabs open.
I don't know what you're on about. I opened the maximum number of tabs that my browser window can have visible (~90) and at no point were they indistinguishable blobs. Every single one still had a favicon.
If you're looking for information on this preference, it went away between FF4 and FF57(?) but should be back and working now so you'll see a lot of old information about it being removed.
Edit: FF58, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404465
Change to something smaller.
Chrome finally fixed that a couple months ago. The favicon-hiding behavior was awful though.
I don't need to know the physical location of my tab. That's what the address bar and Ctrl+Tab are for.
> if you type in the address bar FF will match against open tab names and urls, and let you switch to them.
Hence my comment:
> That's what the address bar and Ctrl+Tab are for.
Something that Chrome also has.
Sure, I could put all those papers on my desk into a drawer, or even file them, but who's got time for that? (Answer: those who are succesfully less cluttered than the cluttered among us).
The only wrinkle was when I tried to watch Netflix the first time I had to click a button to let me watch DRM'd Netflix streams.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Hardware_video_accelera...
I have however found the lack of hardware accelerated video decoding to be a HUGE bummer, watching youtube absolutely destroys my laptops battery life. That is also a problem in Chrome though as far as I know.
Initially I ran into problems because I took on too much at once, I tried enabling uMatrix at the same time as I switched over. Once I removed uMatrix I was doing much better, and I'm saving it for another month or two.
Several features of Firefox are real killer apps for me. Adding a taxonomy to my bookmarks has really helped as I've moved more heavily into org-mode. I've started adding a couple of tags to every bookmark I save, that really helps with organization and recall. Beyond tags, the container tabs feature has been pretty amazing. Being able to sign into multiple Office 365 accounts is great, plus the obvious use case of "keep those few times I use facebook in their own special sandbox".
I've donated a few bucks to Mozilla, and I recommend everyone do that. Google seems to rapidly be heading towards 1990s Microsoft territory, with the added "bonus" of discarding apps that they lose interest in.
There isn't enough functional parity for me - although I'm certainly an outlier - so I've attempted the switch and went back to chrome.
One of the issues is that I spend a lot time writing in English and then a lot in Portuguese. Chrome can spell check both and ff needs me to tell which language I'm using.
1) I’m a heavy window/tab user. 300+ tabs across 10+ windows is normal. I have not been able to recreate the same tab bar overflow behavior as in chrome, default ff will keep tabs at fixed width and scroll horizontally, making it impossible to see how many tabs there are in the window. Changing css helps but there are still enough problems with small width tabs not showing favicons, always showing (and overlapping) close tab button etc.
2) performance when switching videos e.g. on yt to full screen and back is terrible. Latest MacBook, external uwqhd screen, took upwards of 3 seconds every single time from pressing f to having the video show. Might not sound like a lot but it adds up. If everything else is fast this will just feel extra slow
Hiding the bar defeats its purpose and with small icons I can fit more tabs horizontally without scrolling than vertically with tree tabs. Another reason would be if dev tools are open and they already take away half the horizontal space
So usually I have tabs in one window related to a single project or topic until they overflow (chrome will never scroll the bar. If it doesn’t fit the tab icons are simply invisible) at which point I just split in two windows that stay in the same Mac space for that project/topic
However, in the past few years, Firefox has been improving left and right, with it's Rust components, containers in core, and it's new dialect in design. The recent improvements alone should convince someone to switch.
The reason why I stayed with Firefox is because Chrome is from, well, Google. It boggles my mind to see someone praising a browser that is from a an advertiser. They never put ads on the browser (I'm looking at you, Opera), but systematically did a lot to track it's users and make money out of it.
You can clearly see the difference in motivation when Firefox removing a whole API of add-ons vs Google removing one particular API feature.
I like Brave's concept of Shields, which block ad-trackers. I also think one of the more interesting concepts in Brave is the Rewards ad-revenue-sharing program. I haven't turned it on yet, so I don't know how well it works (if at all) but I find the idea interesting and outside the box when considering the major browser players.
The developer tools in Brave are exactly what you would expect.
Brave has worked well for me so far, so I'll continue with it for the time being.
A good bug report with solid reproduction steps can often be more useful than a mediocre patch.
Alternatives like ungoogled chromium exist, but aren't as powerful/stable as the real thing, so why not use Firefox. Call me overly optimistic, but augmenting the firefox/mozilla community with participating/privacy conscious users can only lead to good down the line.
As for Chrome, the latest announcement is a bit troublesome, but i still find it better than alternatives.
Chrome is on the left, Firefox is on the right. In my opinion, Firefox's text looks terrible.
One HUGE issue over Chrome is that many websites break for me due to broken JS that was only tested on Chrome, including internal sites for work. Ugh.
The visuals of FF including their website are beautiful. Wish they would put that same design team on Rust, which has a website made by a clown now.
(You probably meant 57, when quantum was introduced (alongside breaking the entire add-on ecosystem).)
I noticed no speed difference whatsoever when I upgraded from Firefox 55 to 66 a few weeks ago. The difference between 55 and 66 is that a bunch of useful add-ons are gone, some of them are no longer possible due to missing APIs, and I had to find alternatives for most that were rewritten (and spend time reconfiguring everything). In the end, the design didn't really change after I removed the tab bar on top, and speed is also about the same. Which is fine for me, I never understood the slowness complaints, but I guess I typically work on relatively high end laptops (well, this particular one was only 700 euros and is now 1 year old, it's not terribly high end, but I think I got good value on this one and it's probably more than what most people spend... though maybe not HN people... yeah, I don't know where the slowness complaints come from).
I think they now defer loading of some of the components until the application starts and that's helping a lot.
Anyway, when I have the same tabs and extensions in FF as in Chrome, the FF CPU usage is huge. I tried several things from the web, but nothing helped. Now I'm back on Chrome, which is less nice looking and less convenient, but the CPU usage is barely anything.
I think there's away to turn this off too, but I don't remember how, sorry.
Not trying to turn HN into a bug hunting board, but I found this:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042
Might be useful to someone.
When I try it a little bit it seems fine, but after using Firefox for a week going to Chrome seemed like a relief in terms of performance. I'm missing some cool features from Firefox like containers, but performance is more important.
For example, when I press Apple + Shift + C, I copy the URL and save it as markup. I want this functionality in Firefox -- it's not good if I can't keyboard shortcut.
Also... and this one is a bit more painful... we use Lighthouse for a lot of testing. Contractually, it's an easy thing to build in, "We'll meet scores of at least 85 on Lighthouse for accessibility..." and I can't run that out of Chrome. Any similar tool suggestions?
I found a lot, but I haven't found suitable replacements for:
* Lighthouse - Chrome Web Store || https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/lighthouse/blipmdc...
* Create Link - Chrome Web Store || https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/create-link/gcmghd... (need to have keyboard shortcut and export link to MarkDown for easier pasting into GitHub issues).
Also... I'd love a good replacement for Xmarks. If Firefox wrote a plugin for Chrome that lets me keep my bookmarks from Firefox sync in sync with Chrome I would be happy. I have to have multiple browsers... and I miss how easy Xmarks made it to go between them.
Ad-driven content should be a viable business model, but the way it's currently done is simply unacceptable, and Google shouldn't crack down on people's conscientious objections via ad-blockers without providing a viable alternative.
Let me tell you brothers and sisters, it was a blessing to see Firefox having the same speed as Chrome, and no bloating. Sure, for each tab opened it alos creates a firefox.exe in task manager, but so does Chrome. I can live with that. Now all I need is to move my entire productions from Windows to Linux and I'll be really free. But that's gonna be at least an order of magnitude harder then switching from one browser to another.
Firefox can do this, but it's not intuitive and it opens 6 different Firefox apps on my Mac, so it isn't easy to distinguish between each profile. On Chrome, I simply click the person switcher at the top right and I can switch between sessions very easily.
A) Want to use unsigned addons to play around, or tweak your existing ones[1]? Nope, even if you allow them in about:config, you can't; you have to use a special development version and update it separately.
B) Want to customize your keyboard shortcuts? Sorry, that's not safe, you have to use a crippled API that won't take effect until a given page loads.
C) Want to control your setup? Sorry, their "studies" feature is owned by the marketing team and can make arbitrary changes to the app on the fly, all the way up to its cryptographic infrastructure! (As we learned in the recent add-on mishap [2].)
I use Firefox, but they're not obviously better on these matters.
[1] Like, I don't know, if you made a big deal about underprivileged groups getting into coding, and actually wanted to take the concept seriously rather than just get some photogenic token to write hello-world for a photo op.
Not the CTO post during the issue; the follow up that was supposed to be more technical.
> We’ll be running a formal post-mortem next week and will publish the list of changes we intend to make
everything else is based on Chrome/Chromium.
Nothing else, other than Firefox, lets me customize in the way Firefox does either. As a security conscious person, this matters.
Signatures were mandated for add-ons because there was a plague of malware (or near-malware, such as third party anti-virus software) silently installing add-ons that broke Firefox in various ways. If the end-user could disable that requirement then the malware could do that too. The only way for Mozilla to address the issue was to hard-code the signature requirements. I don't think asking power-users to use Nightly/"unbranded" versions of Firefox to load unsigned extensions is something you should count against them.
I can accept that there might have been a malware problem when signatures weren't the default requirement, but that's not the change I'm talking about, where they ignore a user's explicit preference that they're okay with unsigned add-ons.
Remember, Chrome allows you to turn off this setting by just flipping a switch into dev mode. Where's the torrent of compromised Chrome browsers from this vector?
>I don't think asking power-users to use Nightly/"unbranded" versions of Firefox to load unsigned extensions is something you should count against them.
It is when that version doesn't get the same updates and has to be maintained separately.
Additionally, keep in mind that when the signature requirement was added there were still XUL/XPCOM extensions which could hook the browser much deeper than Chrome-style extensions and wreak much more havok.
Ah, so a vector that required code signing doesn't protect against.
But if your threat model is that extensions can be added without the user's consent, then that is the vulnerability you should fix. And it still wouldn't justify blocking a user who is aware of the risk and chooses to disable that layer of default protection.
What we're talking about is whether malicious extensions are something attackers want to use. Having to package an entire browser is a win - it's super noisy and means there's a huge binary to lug around.
Well, yeah, in the sense that Mozilla people don't really think through what threat model they're protecting against here.
>What we're talking about is whether malicious extensions are something attackers want to use. Having to package an entire browser is a win - it's super noisy and means there's a huge binary to lug around.
The vast majority of that benefit comes from the default requirement for code to be signed, not from the barely measureable fraction of users that knowningly disable this protection and then get pwned.
Attacker has code execution on your system and wants to maintain persistence and exfiltrate sensitive browser data. Sounds reasonable for Mozilla - at least, it's not totally nuts of them to consider this in their threat model.
One avenue, and a popular one, is to then sideload a malicious extension. An attacker who can disable the extension check can do this easily. An attacker who can't has to resort to other means - packaging a separate payload to host the extension.
Does that sound reasonable? I don't want to argue, just to explain my perspective on this issue based on the attacks I have seen.
Taking a swipe at adblocking, obscuring where you're "logged into the browser" are IMHO - much bigger deals.
Also, what pain am I going to hit with DRM and online video? I use the usual suspects - Amazon, Netflix, Youtube.
I gave up and went back to Chrome, which has been as performant as ever.
If so, my experience has been the same, though I have been sticking with it for now.
I often find I have to close out Firefox and restore my session to stop it from churning so hard my fans spin. This is particularly true after it has been running for a while or after resuming from suspend.
Why do you say they work in concert?
I will say when I first started using Firefox on mobile it did seem slower, but the ability to use extensions like ublock has always made up for it. I think speed has gotten a bit better lately, but there's still room for improvement there.
Because I want my saved passwords, bookmarks and recent tabs shared between the two.
I don’t know if its LastPass or a limitation of Firefox that’s causing it, but it’s enough of a headache for how often I use LastPass that it prevents me from switching browsers.
Is there an alternative to LastPass that has a better user experience on Firefox? If so I’ll try it.
EDIT: I'll test out Bitwarden.
Unfortunately - my company is standardized on LastPass, so it makes it extra difficult
- Going full screen on Youtube takes longer than Chrome at least on OS X and there is a momentarily black screen.
- Moving the cursor to the top of a full screen video in Chrome brings down the OS X menu bar this is useful if you want to check the time/date/other menu bar activity, in FF nothing happens when moving the mouse to the top of the screen in full screen mode.
- When a page requests to send web notifications FF basically pretty much blocks the entire browser until you answer whether you want to allow the notification or not, this is very annoying if you visit many sites for the first time that ask for notification permission, which apparently a lot of them nowadays do, making it more apparent now that I switched to FF from Chrome.
There might be settings you can change to fix these, but even if that's the case not having them set as default makes me question whether I made the right choice making the switch.
Second thing I did was try to open a private window using the universal macOS shortcut of Cmd+Shift+N. Nothing happened, because Firefox decided to use Cmd+Shift+P unlike all other browsers. No problem, this is a macOS app, I’ll just change the keyboard shortcut in system preferences and I’ll be good to go. Except after doing that, Firefox doesn’t actually respect the remapped shortcut (an issue which has existed for 11 years).
And the baked in color management is not correct for a macOS app, and the right click menus are not Mac-like and don’t respect dark mode.
I thought it was time to make the switch, but the reality is that Firefox is still an even poorer macOS app than Chrome. Fix that and I’ll switch tomorrow, as I really want to ditch Chrome!
The main difference I've noticed is how easy it is to get the same experience and in some cases a better experience on Firefox just but taking 15-30 minutes to set it up.
Chrome was my browser for almost all of the 2010s and now I'm happy to say I'm not stuck with it.
https://github.com/jasonraimondi/alfred-workflow-launch-fire...
I have seen successful crowd-funding projects where the budget is always transparent and communicated to the public. I am certain this motivates the masses to donate.
Wouldn't it be better for Mozilla to make their funding fully transparent, to attract the masses?
As long as we're saying how we really feel, we should +1 to move it up the ladder.
Anyone thinking of switching to a browser that doesn't have any script-interpretation ability? (Text-only or html/css only?) What options are currently out there?
I use Chrome for years, but recently a new update(I dunno the exact version) lags my laptop so much that it can not even used normally, everything delay several seconds, I spend several days and finally found out its the Chrome did this to my computer.Note: I am using an old laptop, but its still solid.
So I have to reinstall Chrome, I have no choice. Then I give firefox a try, to my surprise, with just a few of clicks, all my bookmarks and cookies are all ported to firefox seamlessly, very comfortable feature I'd say.
So yeah, if you are using old PC like me, u may feel lags when using new Chrome browser, and I suggest u to switch to Firefox, I DOES work!
My least favorite parts of firefox (switched last weekend) are:
Dark mode. Dark Reader from Chrome is dead slow on Firefox, and none of the 5 others I've tried from Reddit/HN recommendations come close to its usability on Chrome.
Extension / config syncing. I want the same settings and extensions on my mobile device as my desktop, but it seems like only some configuration settings are able to sync, and add-ons/extensions don't sync between mobile and desktop. I know it's on purpose, but I'd like the option to choose.
"Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at https://internal-xxxxxxx. (Reason: CORS header ‘Access-Control-Allow-Origin’ missing)."
Does anybody know what kind of knob I have to turn on/off in FF to make this disappear?
What killed chrome for me is the gradually failing linux support. Had a persistent bug on all my linux machines with chrome (and chromium) would only update the view if the mouse is moving. I actually put up with that for a few months before I switched to FF.
They too could well bend to corporate pressures to limit ad-blocking, they already have the tech that could be used to block widespread use of ad blockers?
I may be wrong, though?
This is no surprise at all. Competitive pressure for "desktop" (non-crippled computers incl. Laptops) required providing suitable extension APIs, but the writing was on the wall for a long time.
Some powerful people inside Google consider it theft to browse the web while blocking ads.
Anyway, I am not a hater on Google, I appreciate their open contribution to deep learning tools and I happily pay for GCP, Play books and movies, and I use gmail as a backup email.
But for me, Firefox is just such a better experience than Chrome.
It is also a good idea to have a diverse ecology for Internet infrastructure, tools, and platforms. More choices are better.
Everything else is on Firefox now.
I want search engines, home pages, and plug-ins way more than I need my bookmarks.
A big thank you to Mozilla. Keep up the great work!
It seems pretty bad.
Here is this HN thread in both for comparison (On Win10)
https://i.imgur.com/ZDVoWXI.png
Notice how the Firefox sample seems bolder, but with uneven letter weight and generally a higher line height. It's not good for readability. Kerning is a bit iffy also.
The easiest solution is to install Windows in VirtualBox and do it there, with Firefox Sync on.
* No global zoom by default which also remembers per-page zoom changes. * Bookmarking is overly cluttered with with other other, toolbar, menu, etc. * Skype Web doesn't work on Firefox. * User profiles which are as easily accessible as in Chrome.
I can't for the life of me figure out how to do this. I went to File > Import from another browser... and got a dialog that only allowed me to select "Cookies, Browsing History, or Bookmarks". No mention of autofills or passwords.
Am I missing something here?
I think the Manifest V3 change on ad-blocking is probably a big win for FF and will likely make many people switch over to FF permanently.
Isn't surf based on WebKit?
Sorry if the question is silly
(It's also possible to CSV export from Chrome's password manager. I used this to import everything into BitWarden.)
Are you positive (not just assuming, cause it would amke sense) FF MacOS still uses the MacOS keychain? Cause that's a plus if so.
Will WebRender fix the CPU taxing problem, and will that be released for macOS in a subsequent release?
about:config
gfx.webrender.all -> true
restart browser
There is still an open problem on Retina Macbooks with scaled resolution where the performance drops like 10x over non-scaled versions.
This cycle will only repeat itself, Google is an advertising company.
If you work for this company, please quit and ply your talents somewhere less motivated to exploit people.
It's IE6 all over again just in different ways.
Perhaps I'll try a chronium fork. Sure it's not as good of a move but maybe I'll have better luck with issues. I'll likely try Firefox again to see if things are better (I usually use Firefox for some things at work anyway).
As I mentioned before I switched entirely to Firefox about a year ago. I only switched back fairly recently (Firefox shipped separate processes _years_ ago). I also continue to use Firefox daily at work. It still isn't as good, as much as I hate to say it. Some issues have gotten better but not all. They are still not equivalent (especially in web dev tooling) and many sites, like YouTube, still have weird issues in Firefox (full screen mode on my Surface Pro 4 still doesn't work right; it's like it switches to a weird software renderer).
Chrome just _always_ works. And I hate to say it, too.
FF performance is improved, but still lagging, especially on Mobile.
Moving away from large corps, breaking up the homogeny of the web, keeping XUL alive, having a browser focused on the end UX rather than the UI and the corp needs, and having add-ons that can actually affect the browser - not the little playground Google thinks will be profitable.
Firefox supports every extension I care about.
I'm a convert.
For the life of me I cannot understand why anyone uses Chrome. But if anyone has information on Chrome that I do not, please let me know.
- TRR (Trusted Recursive Resolver -- e.g. DNS Over HTTPS) - Add-On supports on Android - Multi-Account Container (although this is more of Add-on)
Well... I have that one, too... Chromecast.
Also VAAPI support on linux, which firefox ironically treats like a second class citizen. Can't watch HD videos on youtube without my cpu melting on Firefox.
Even with Crostini, there doesn't seem to be a good way to get an official FF build onto the chromebook. Or am I missing something?
https://github.com/jasonraimondi/alfred-workflow-launch-fire...
What extensions in particular are you missing?
'Switching' doesn't stop Chrome from working, it just imports the Chrome data so you don't have to re-create bookmarks, etc.
Yes. Good advice.
Overall once firefox did process isolation, chrome had no more reason to exist.
I ask because I keep reading about how Google is bad because of their business, but I haven't seen an actual pcap, or any reporting for that matter, on what Google actually sends back home.
If you have, or know of a place that has done that, I'd be interested to read about it.
Until then, Chrome, and Firefox are just more tools in my arsenal; and people trying to get me to ditch one, just because they dont like it, is just outright dumb.
Edge is also best (but on Windows).
Usually the browser designed by the authors of the platform you run it on, will be best for power consumption, sometimes significantly so.
It's an Apple tradition — if you like what's in the box, great, but you won't be able to customize it much later.
https://webkit.org/blog/8825/release-notes-for-safari-techno...
Safari is the new IE when it comes to bugs and standards compliance.
Here's an example that broke many many sites that use OAuth2 Auth Code Flow for login (including the main UI portal my company provides clients): https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=194906
This was also an issue in iOS, and since Apple doesn't let any other browsers actually use their own rendering engine on that platform (they're just wrappers around Safari's guts) this was broken for all iPhone users no matter the browser.
I avoid using iDevices for this reason alone.
The sync between devices is very well done.
It comes in very handy to have a non-browser-based password store for when you are out and about and dont have access to on of your own laptops/desktops but do have your phone handly (where you can look up the passwords)
Or Enpass, or if you still want free then Bitwarden.
And Google is evil.
On my Mac its upto 2 times faster and in my android phone it's upto 4 times faster.
It's even more faster in case if site is full of ads and internet connection is slow.
I really wish Microsoft would open source the Edge/Titan engine. There can't possibly be any NSCA code in there they don't own the rights too anymore.
There was a port of node that used Chakra instead of v8, but I don't think it's maintained. And this is only one piece of the puzzle.. Electron also relies Chromium itself for rendering so this would probably be a pretty sizable effort.
It's corporations in a monopolistic position that let EEE happen - you know, like what Google is doing with Chrome right now.
If Internet Explorer's engine released under GPL or MIT can break Google's monopoly without simply handing it over to Microsoft, then all the power to it.
It's pretty clear what the plan is here, Google naturally sees ad blocking as a threat and they know that they can't outright disable ad blockers so they take the long route to take it over. Make it functional enough that most users won't bother looking for an alternative but make sure that it can't threaten your business model.
Anyone know what MSs stance on Rust is?
Electron, the software framework VSCode uses, runs on Chromium. Github maintained and developed the framework and they are currently owned by Microsoft. If Microsoft contributes to Chromium and improves performance they benefit in a lot of places: their new browser is improved(Edge Chromium), their own framework(Electron), and their own product (VSCode).
Then again, they would face the same issues had they adopted Gecko. Maybe less so because Mozilla could be more easily influenced than Google (in some ways). The main argument for adopting Gecko would have been that giving Google complete control over Web evolution is a threat to Microsoft and that adopting Gecko would reduce that threat. I'm a big Mozilla fan but I think it would have been a weak argument.
Also, if Huawei were to fork Android they'd be responsible keeping their fork of a huge code base secure by push security updates, and Microsoft is much more likely to be able to do that competently than Huawei is.
I believe that's why Webkit was based on KHTML… the Mozilla developers Apple hired realized that had a better chance of working.
Maybe Mozilla has changed since all that happened and they're more friendly to embedders now? I've been out of the loop for a few years at this point. I don't think I've heard anything though, and they've built up a reputation…
But that would not have solve their web compatibility issue in such an easy way.
You mean the plan to embed Servo, or Servo itself?
So it's possible, but not immediate.
Safari actually did the same recently[1], so it's not an alternative if you dislike this move by Chrome. The only difference seems to be the limit of rules (30k for Chrome vs 50k for Safari, whereas some lists used by uBO have over 75k).
[1] https://adguard.com/en/blog/legacy-safari-extensions.html
https://backstage.1blocker.com/say-hello-to-1blocker-x-8b55e...
https://www.microsoftedgeinsider.com/en-us/welcome?channel=d...
I find it odd how there will be Google Hate, and unanimous Firefox support.
I guess I'm looking to hear from users who actually removed Google from their life and are happy. Chrome is only 1 of the Google products I've used.
You can choose to not pick a side on a two-candidate election. The most voted-for candidate will still be elected.
(Even when you factor in indirect systems like an electoral college, someone will be elected.)
I've never been much of a Chrome user. A few years ago, Chrome was unusable for me on my 2GB work machine, and was a battery-killer on my own laptop. So I stuck with Firefox at work, Safari at home.
DDG is a great search engine. I can't remember the last time I used the "!g" operator, and got any results better than the DDG ones.
The one product I still use Google for is maps, and only when I want to see a good street view or areal photo. For mobile, Apple Maps does just fine. For simple directions on the desktop, OSM works great.
I'm totally happy. 10 years ago, Google was putting things out there that weren't possible with other services. Their mapping was tremendously better than MapQuest, their email was so much nicer than Hotmail, etc.
But now they're bloated and slow. Everything seems to lag as you watch the UI components slowly appear on the screen. And the alternatives today for each product (search, maps, email, browser) are all very much competent.
What did you move to for email? Fastmail with a custom domain? I've long considered ProtonMail but unlikely to go that route.
I'm between paying for iCloud storage and using that, or Outlook.com The additional phone backup space with iCloud would be very nice anyway, so as a monthly payment, it's a one-stop shop. At this point it's extremely unlikely I'll ever go back to Android so that works for me. Or, just moving to Outlook.com. I'm leaning towards Outlook simply because of the better calendar system. Both Gmail and Outlook support email reminders for calendar items. I could get used to iOS-only notifications, but I really prefer notifications to come through email since I often include explicit instructions.
Thanks for the StartPage tip! I'm going to start doing that whenever I want a second opinion on my search results.
I personally don't think it belongs on the front page just because of news regarding a competitor, the only discussion this link sparks is the same discussion that's already been had twice this week (20044430, 20050173).
uMatrix could not be verified for use in Firefox and has been disabled.
I use Firefox as my "virgin" broswser for testing or when I need to manually override proxy settings for my own MitM purposes. But that's about it.
[citation needed].
Firefox has sync to all devices too.
Whether or not Chromium or Firefox are more to your liking is another matter, and whether or not switching to Chromium accomplishes what you want to accomplish by leaving Chrome is another matter.
I was not recommending that anybody switch from Chrome to Chromium. Personally I do not find that Chromium fixes what I consider broken about Chrome, which is what I was alluding to when I said "whether or not switching to Chromium accomplishes what you want to accomplish by leaving Chrome is another matter." The negative reaction I received for that post makes me think people believe I was recommending Chromium. I do not; I recommend Firefox.
Also, a Chromium fork could use the Widevine binary blob the same way Chrome does today; I am not sure I understand this argument.
My preference would be to use https://github.com/atlas-engineer/next, because I'm a huge Common Lisp fan, but without uMatrix and uBlock Origin (or something equivalent) it's not a viable alternative yet.
I've been trying to switch to Firefox lately. I still prefer Chromium's UI, but I won't tolerate Google's new anti-adblock stance.
I'd probably get it to run but it would need more time than I'm willing to invest in this. Plus would I have to build it new everytime there's an update‽
It's just to much hassle for me.
It’s almost not even a competition anymore.
https://www2.computerworld.com/article/2978984/who-can-stop-...
For those who think I'm just jabbing and that a VM would be too unpactical: at work (we're a security firm) we have a fresh VM for each new project for compartmentalization. Our browser, tools, everything runs in there and nothing should ever reach the host --- unless, of course, you have a VM escape, but then you need two zero-days instead of one. For more sensitive projects, even more measures are taken, but that's rare: you have to draw the line somewhere.
Just saying "Chrome is the only secure option" is a little too short-sighted I think.
Over the years, I've seen countless forks of browsers that make these big promises but don't have the developer resources and funding behind them that make the main browsers possible. I can't imagine it's easy to just backport every feature and bugfix from upstream while also making your own changes.
Unless one plans on building a business or a foundation around a browser, the best that an OSS browser fork can hope for is to be a valiant effort that will quickly be superseded by another fork that promises to be even more private and ub3r l33t than the others.
Firefox is in great shape right now, and if it's not working well for some people(I'm honestly not having issues with it at this point), then we need to find ways to make Firefox more viable, whether it's getting people to donate to the Mozilla Foundation or better promotion or what.
This breaks a site I built called reVddit [2], and after discussing with Mozilla devs [3], I'm unable to come up with a solution that doesn't significantly alter user experience and maintenance costs.
I find it ironic because the intent of reVddit is to increase transparency, one of Firefox's key principles. I'd love to hear ideas if anyone has any insight into any of this.
[1] https://github.com/disconnectme/disconnect-tracking-protecti...
[3] https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.dev.privacy/XO84Ezrw...