So, honest question, because I'm genuinely bewildered: why would you bother doing this, when Firefox exists, is perfectly functional, and isn't made by Google?
As well as the translate page button, the other great feature chrome has that I miss dearly is the highlights chrome has in the scrollbar when doing a ctrl-f find-in-page. That is super-useful and a real pain in the arse that Firefox does not support it.
I played around with prototyping an extension to replicate it (or as close as I could get) but it was hard to nicely override the ctrl-f hooks.
FYI, you can press the enter button to go to the next highlighted word in Find-in page.
When was firefox actually significantly slower? That is x2 slower or worse.
This may never happen unless privacy was as profitable as selling data on people's behaviour.
My apologies if I have misunderstood you.
I guess what I'm really saying is that frequently used things probably involve human phycology and emotions just as much as someone's intelligence.
I completely stopped using all products and services from FAAMG and committed to a complete digital detox plan. Using my devices with a clear intention in mind, rather than getting sucked into a dopamine driven vortex of dark patterns, has changed my life for the better.
For email, I made a protonmail and I’m still in the slow process of changing my email over on all the critical websites I depend on. For my phone, I got a Light Phone II. For my desktop and laptop OSes, I use Linux distros (Solus and Manjaro are my favorites). For GPS, I use a Garmin, and for reading, I use a Kobo e-reader.
It’s ironic that devices that do everything for us, instead of specializing in one important thing, have negatively impacted our lives when they were supposed to improve them.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firefox-color...
This bug has been pending for many years now and I don't think it ever going to be on their priority list soon.
- It starts slower then Chromium.
- Right click and "Open in new private window" actually opens in a new private window. I prefer how Chromium does it, grouping all sites opened like this as tabs in one window.
- In Chromium, I can easily set any URL as a custom search engine with whatever parameters I like. In Firefox, I can't.
In my experience, Chromium renders and is interactive ~~faster~~ earlier, but they have about the same time between launch and browse. On Chromium, I launch, type in a site, hit enter, and wait and wait as it finishes actually starting up. FF takes longer to appear but is ready to browse as soon as it does. Or at least it did until some time in the last year or two, at which point it started taking a page out of Chromium's book. But honestly, I don't do cold starts that much so it doesn't bother me much one way or another.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/add-custom-se...
No, an extension shouldn't be necessary, but it works (I use it to search with searx).
As a bonus, it isn't made by Google. I was a hardcore Google fan a few years ago, but after seeing what they are doing with Chrome and the internet, I just could not keep using Chrome any longer.
Also, I block firefox myself. It phones home a lot, even when you tell it not to.
Do you have sources on this? I use Firefox on Mac OS with Little Snitch and have never had Firefox try to phone home with analytics disabled (a one click decision on first start of the app).
firefox.settings.services.mozilla.com
shavar.services.mozilla.com
aus5.mozilla.orgThe other two appear to be safe browsing and automatic update related. Those two services can be disabled form the regular settings UI, I think? Have you found that to not work?
[0] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-stop-firefox-making...
Then I blocked it and got this constant nag pane "Firefox cannot update to the latest version". all. the. time.
I finally found out some magic on macos:
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/org.mozilla.firefox DisableAppUpdate -bool TRUE
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/org.mozilla.firefox EnterprisePoliciesEnabled -bool TRUE
Reasoning there seems good enough but I’m not sold on it being absolutely required.
aus5 is the server from which Firefox downloads new Firefox updates. “aus” stands for Auto Update Service.
I’m not exactly what data is downloaded from firefox.settings.services.mozilla.com.
The problem is whenever I start FF it hangs for 30 seconds before I can type the first url in. That duration and the fact that it's consistent means it's clearly a network timeout.
I have a locked down computer, layers of security enhancements so I kind of understand something I've done is causing it.
However, why should it lock up for 30 seconds if it can't do some background thing! On startup! It's an atrocious UI failure. And it's been this way for 5 years that I've been counting, through their Quantam speedup etc. Major flaw and unfixed for aeons of 6 week release cycles.
Btw it's not updating as it still updates ..
It's actually really bad design to have a lockup like that, and especially on the critical hot path of the first time you use it! It's a sign actually of bad user experience design, and it's one of a number of bad anti-user things I've found about it. Things that Chrome gets so right!
I want to ditch Chrome because of the many Google anti-features, but UX is also very important to me I use the browser all day every day and I'm extremely fast at the UI with advanced shortcuts etc. Firefox locking up for 30 whole seconds before I can use it not only destroys my flow but is actually an eternity - I could have about 40 chrome tabs opened with urls types and autocompleted or pasted into the url bar in that time ..
Sadly Firefox blows on a large number of design decisions. I get the impression that user experience is down the list at Mozilla, below either Google donations or SJW antics. Whatever, but they consistently fail on important points. I wish it wasn't so I truly do. I'm in the process of moving to Brave in anticipation of uBlock finally being sabotaged by Google.