While I still consider DuckDuckGo to be in the "not bad" category, Firefox is in the "seriously awesome" category now.
If you have been away from Firefox for a while like me, give it another shot. It won't disappoint you for sure.
[0] https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2019/12/03/firefox-p...
For me its been fantastic.
The only thing I missed from the ordinary Firefox on Android was that Firefox used to have a brilliant hack with the sharing option where they would show the two most frequently used options (+ a sharing button to access the rest) instead of just one or just the sharing button.
This saved me a few seconds again and again and again.
Wonder why no one else does that?
And there really needs to be an easy way to switch profiles. Firefox has had profiles for basically forever, but it's much easier to switch profiles in Chrome.
Of course you can also create launchers/shortcuts for Firefox with "firefox -P profilename" but again that's work you have to do on each machine you use.
Me too! I'm not as bothered by software-politics as many of the commentators on here (I don't hate Facebook, and worked there for four years; I don't hate ads; I don't worry too much about trafficking and privacy...) but Chrome fucking with the URL was a bridge too far. I switched to Firefox and when Google walked back their hiding-the-URL business, I never bothered switching back, because I didn't trust them anymore.
Companies take note: users' trust that you won't arbitrarily change their workflow in annoying ways is hard to win back.
- Do they really need to see* http:// or https:// if immediately to the left is the icon which indicates secure/insecure (which is more than just "protocol is https or not")?
- Do they really care to see* if they are at www.site.com or m.site.com or site.com or do they just want to know they are at site.com which they expect to be as they make their purchase or log in?
* noting that bookmarking, copying, or editing the URL operate on the full URL and this is just a visual change otherwise
And voila now the leftmost (first) text they read is not a bunch of jargon it's the thing people look at the URL for the most.
That you couldn't think of any reason tells me you didn't try not that you disagreed with the reasons and had an actual lesson to share about why. Again: "it changed, change bad" people impossible to distinguish from "it changed, actually bad".
As you said www.example.com being functionally different from example.com was already a broken workflow, users weren't differentiating it. Continuing to display something users haven't understood for 20 years was not considered a strong enough reason to simplify the URL display now in a way that causes the same errors users were commonly making anyways.
Maybe dropping the protocol definition in the URL is debatable, as probably 99.99% of the time in Chrome a user is going to be either http or https, but dropping a part of the hostname is unacceptable in my book.
Would dropping .com be acceptable? All a user wants to see is that they went to Google, to an average user the .com could be seen as redundant clutter as well. Might as well have the address bar show "google" or "cnn" or "facebook" in it, as clearly that's what a user cares about.
You can't really get rid of the TLD without breaking the security model of the web (e.g. a lock icon and google.com is different than a lock icon and google.gtld). Would it be nice to refactor that? Probably. Is it reasonably possible at this point? No.
You mean the strawman repeatedly trotted out by people defending shitty changes as justifications for why their shitty change is necessary? Ever wonder why so many things suck nowadays?
Can "the larger group" be used as an excuse for a bad change? Sure! But so far the only reason mentioned as to WHY this change is bad is "www.site.com and site.com could technically be different sites" and I'm not sure how that is supposed to be clear regardless if www shows post load or not or how that's supposed to outweigh the advantages.
HTTP currently shows "Not secure" to the left of the URL. It's still easy to differentiate.
(I do think hiding www is stupid, but hiding http vs https is reasonable so long as they're still marked differently. Ideally http should be a more noticeable error, like it is if there's any user input box, or better yet a massive error like it is for self-signed certs and HTTPS.)
I care what I need.
A standard user was probably fine with something like AOL keywords.
If other people have different preferences, that’s fine! They can keep using Chrome.
Also, even if that weren’t true, change is a cost. It’s perfectly reasonable to complain about change as being intrinsically bad without giving any other reason.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/chrome-and-fi...
E.g. "<lock icon> https://www.google.com/example/" would display as "<lock icon> google.com/example" until you interact with the URL.
If you're into privacy-conscious search engines and want one that's not susceptible to blanket FISA warrants[0], check out either Qwant[1] or SwissCows[2].
[0] - DuckDuckGo's address is in Pennsylvania - 20 Paoli Pike, Paoli, PA 19301.
[1] - https://www.qwant.com
[2] - https://swisscows.ch/
EDIT: I right click the search box and make qw and sw keywords for them.
EDIT2: I'm just looking for a functional google alternative.
In the console I get a warning and an error:
> Content Security Policy: Couldn’t process unknown directive ‘script-src-elem’
> TypeError: browserLanguage is undefined
France has a more permissive surveillance regime than the US[0], and as a foreign (US) user I have no recourse if they spy on me.
Furthermore, here are some quotes from qwant:
>We do not use any cookies or other advertising tracers to create your profile for commercial purposes. This means that you can use Qwant with confidence, we will never try to establish your psychological or commercial profile to sell it to third parties, here or elsewhere. [1]
Note the "for commercial purposes" in the first sentence, and the "to sell it to third parties" in the second. These are weasel clauses.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/24/france-big-bro...
[1] https://betterweb.qwant.com/5-reasons-to-be-brave-and-choose...
That should probably read 'more pervasive'.
Also >France
I don’t necessarily mean that good or bad. Just interesting how... different it is. Seems good if you know your thug exists already and someone approved it for their results.
You won't be worse off, it isn't a big effort to get used to FF devtools, but you must accept a learning curve if you want to switch.
I had to get used to Chrome devtools because javascript debugging is a lot better there. For completeness sake, CSS debugging is much better in Firefox. In time, I think both will converge.
That being said, I still switched back to Firefox and ddg after I close devtools.
> Firefox now supports simulation of meta viewport in Responsive Design Mode.
we had a recent dialog about it here:
https://old.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/ecyhmr/mozilla_...
there's some cool stuff in the works but it doesnt sound like there's a plan to internalize the work into devtools but to keep it as a web app and rely on a serviceworker for "localness" - not great, imo.
I've found it's extremely valuable to be developing sites in Firefox using the dev tools simply to help catch issues that the rest of the team ignores as they're all stuck on Chrome. Fights monocultures by default!
Maybe make a perf switch in the console, which dumps the text without formatting or other features. Something that can handle one million lines of logs and search in it. Being able to search the logs is critical. Filtering doesn't work as I need to see the surrounding logs, what happened after. I don't need to see all one million lines at the same time though, it can be buffered to only show 100 lines above it and 100 lines below it. Chromium has such an optimization. But search is a bit slow.
I also have to keep clicking the clear button to prevent the page from freezing if the dev tools console is open when loading the page.
I generally like the FF tools better nowadays, but Chrome’s are a bit faster.
Really like the ability to outline flexbox and grid elements.
Rather than having to remember all the small changes you made, you can just copy and paste the script out (or even just view what you changed).
But is it good enough? Hell yes.
HN discussions:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20050173 (281 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20044430 (893 comments)
I have Firefox in the dock on iPhone and it's really great but random links, e.g. via messaging, get opened by Safari first.
It's still not as quick as Chrome (my laptop is not recent, not helping) but I'd rather support Mozilla.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21945206
It is not 100% bug free yet, though