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Comment by gosseyn | Hacker News Reader

I used to have Firefox and Vivaldi ...but honestly I used Vivaldi mainly...when I heard that even Microsoft was going to use chromium I realized...Firefox is literally the last front ! I installed Firefox and started using it as my main browser! What I miss the most is Vivaldi speed dial and bookmarks. Add-ons aren't always a solution ! I miss Netscape days...internet wasn't a megacorp business playground :( !

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> I miss Netscape days...internet wasn't a megacorp business playground :( !

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.

I looked up Vivaldi Speed Dial. It looks like the same sort of thing Firefox, Chrome, and Safari have where a new tab has a pinned list of favorite or most visited sites. What does Vivaldi do that I'm not seeing?

Having switched from Vivaldi back to Firefox about a year ago, the Vivaldi speed dial is similar to the pinned lists of favorites, but it's much more user friendly. You can customize how many sites you see, how many are in each column, number of columns, etc. You can also change the icon to be anything you like. It certainly wasn't a dealbreaker for me personally, and as you said, pinned favorites serve the same purpose, but it does feel more restrictive on FF.

Did you try Infinity Tab Pro (which is free)?

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.

I'm going to check this out ! Thank you :D

You can set custom icon in FF. But yea, only rows not columns are customizable.

There should be addons that customize the new tab page. I’m pretty sure it’s a possibility with more recent additions to the webext api.

I don't know for sure in this case, but WebExtensions are normally forbidden in the browser's own pages.

To get around this limitation, one could set up a personal speed-dial start page.

they don't let you run in browser contexts normally but they definitely let you set your own new tab page(with webextension privileges) as part of the extension which lets an extension do whatever they want.

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 used to be more customisable but FF wanted to dictate what users saw, for some reason, partially advertising ("recommended by pocket"). They really like to imitate the worst of commercial enterprise sometimes.

It has become a little more customisable now, thankfully.

It's way more than just pinning ! I organize my YouTube subscription in folders with themes like tutorials recipes and subfolders...you can do that on Firefox with the bookmark toolbar but in a less user friendly way and less visually pleasing way toi. what makes it worse is that it used to be possible on Firefox! It's not a deal breaker or anything ! But I miss that XD ! I had a hundreds of bookmarks organized on Vivaldi ! I still don't know how to "transition" that to firefox :/

Add-ons are a solution, though. Have you tried the FVD Speed Dial extension?

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