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Comment by Semaphor | Hacker News Reader

Recently, they had this annoying modal ad (with no "close when clicking outside" feature) telling me that I can make my browser colorful. I care about web-health and containers is far too much of a must-have feature to make me switch, but I’m finally starting to get annoyed.

Without containers, I’d probably bite the bullet and start using some chrome fork that doesn’t show me useless ads.

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Recently they also changed the urlbar to do a search when you type anything... even localhost. INFURIATING. To stay polite. Messed with about:config but did not find a way to disable that crap.

So Chrome and FF are in the same boat: "UX" "designer" taking non-sensical decisions for the whimsical greater good.

I do not have this change.

Me neither. And this is the first time I've heard about it; such changes often raise a lot more havoc on the social media outlets.

I presume grandparent has either hit a bug, has some unusual/untested about:config combination, or, most likely, an addon that broken.

I do not have this issue, but I have a very customized about settings.

Here is the relevant about:config settings I have these changed for the URL bar:

  browser.urlbar.suggest.searches false
  browser.urlbar.searchSuggestionsChoice false 
  browser.urlbar.showSearchSuggestionsFirst false

Also for your urlbar you want to change it so it always shows the scheme and every part of the URL.

  browser.urlbar.trimURLs false

Stop Firefox trying to help with incomplete urls and loading the wrong site:

  browser.fixup.alternate.enabled false

Setting the above about:config entries should stop URLS you type being sent to a search engine and also stop some other surprises in the URL bar.

The Settings have several checkboxes to switch of (or on):

* Tips and News from Mozilla and Firefox * Recommendations while surfing * Recommend addons while surfing

I'm not entirely sure what you saw that made you angry, but I'm pretty sure you can switch them off rather than abandon the entire browser.

That goes for a lot of Firefox hate, I find: quite often people are ranting online about some new or removed feature, which they can dis- or enable easily in the settings. Or -a tad harder- in about:config. Or even a tad harder, with an addon.

That makes me think those ranters don't really want their problem solved, but just want to vent some anger about X changing something that they are emotionally not ready to see changed.

Firefox for iOS has NO about:config feature and a paltry amount of settings under Settings submenu.

Weirdest criticism I've heard. Either someone know it's all Safari in a skin (due to Apple's restriction), or someone didn't heard of this limitation.

How much does all iOS browsers being built on top of Safari actually limit what one can do?

Obviously the actual page rendering and JavaScript executing would be Safari. But 99% of the time when I hear people advocating for browser X over browser Y it is not because X has better rendering or a better JS engine. It is because of higher level things, like containers (Firefox over Chrome) or better profile handling (Chrome over Firefox) or better spell checking (everything over Firefox).

Does having to build on top of Safari on iOS also constrain those higher level things?

> Does having to build on top of Safari on iOS also constrain those higher level things?

Yes!

> containers (Firefox over Chrome)

No, they can't install add-ons (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-ons-firefox-ios). Even if they could built this into the browser, they can't (see how the profiles are handled).

> better profile handling (Chrome over Firefox)

No, Chrome does not support this feature on iOS (https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2364824?hl=en&co=GE...). iOS' WebKit limits this to only one permanent profile and one ephemeral profile. You can technically have multiple profiles in the iPad - that is, if you're a school, and that's really more of a OS-wide user account thing. (G did a hack over this by rewriting that profile when switching profiles - but it's not truly a multitask thing, and violates Apple Developer Guidelines).

> better spell checking (everything over Firefox)

No, and for more sensible reasons. Users do expect consistent spell checking because they use the keyboard to do that. Regardless, if you want to implement spell checking in-browser, that's impossible. If you want to do it outside of Safari, go ahead - it's just not integrated to those Apple things (more of a dedicated Grammarly interface rather than desktop spell checking).

> Tips and News from Mozilla and Firefox

Was switched off.

All the others (according to the linked information) are irrelevant for intrusive pop-up ads. By all means, please explain to me which of those settings do something different from what they are supposed to do, or tell me about an about:config settings that tells Firefox to never show me pop-up ads.

What made me angry: https://i.imgur.com/s9hC23U.png which blocks the interaction with any part of Firefox until I click "Not Now"

Sounds like a bug then. Is there a bug-report for this?

Is this not a one-time thing that's shown after every update? Or is it recurring?

It was one time for me. Although I do think what they advertised there and the way they advertised it was nonsensical and disrespectful to the user.

Yes, I got that one too and was extremely perplexed that it didn’t close when I clicked outside it and I had to hunt the tiny x instead.

I found the colored browser cool, but the infuriating part is that Firefox is deliberately only offering features for a limited time. And if I didn't want to pick a color, not being able to click outside to close would be annoying.

Unlike many here, I don’t mind FF giving their browser more mass-appeal (here in Germany it’s still a major browser), so adding that color feature is fine. I just don’t need intrusive advertisement about it. It’s even worse for me, because I use FF on multiple machines and with several profiles, so I saw the ad over 10 times in total.

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