I've started using Firefox and can never go back to Chrome
techradar.com
techradar.com
- Native reader mode
- Native PiP mode for videos
Yes, you can get extensions for this in Chrom(e/ium) but having these as a native feature is really nice.
Things I want to see in Firefox:
- Good/extensible keybindings
- Tab groups
- Tab search
EDIT: How do I break sentences to newline in HN without really making a new paragraph? You know, for bullet points, etc.
There's been an open issue for 7 years asking for a shortcut key for the eyedropper[0]. The navigation between developer panels is also a bit tedious. The page focus key, F6, is not configurable.
These are some instances I was thinking when I said I wanted good keybinding support. I'll be really willing to try an extension that achieves these but it's really the browser's job.
With that said, I've tried a bunch of these extensions in the past! I'm not a vim guy so I settled with Link Hints[1] for in-page navigation. I cannot recommend it enough for non-vim guys. It's really underrated.
0: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1177108 1: https://lydell.github.io/LinkHints/
JFYI, Alt+D and Ctrl+L also work.
I've discovered that "ctrl-f esc" also works; focus goes back to the page when the search bar closes. Convenient if you have capslock remapped to escape.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/manage-extension-shortc... is a little hidden, but gives you at least some flexibility.
> Tab search
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/search-open-tabs-firefo..., I use % in the address bar very regularly.
I use * for bookmarks and ^ for history but have never known about this. :)
Thanks!
And yes, I do use extension shortcuts. Can't imagine my life without Bitwarden or Tab Stash keybindings.
See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1177108 to know what I actually meant.
Tab search exists: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/search-open-tabs-firefo..., also you type % into the address bar to start searching over tabs. Not sure if this covers your needs, though.
Privacy and ad-blocking are great, but I could see myself being lazy and switching to a browser with a better UX, if one existed. But you'll have to take Tree Style Tabs from my cold, dead hands
(I'm aware of Orion, but when I last used it I found it to still have performance and polish issues)
Someone in Chrome/Edge/Safari must be thinking about doing this, I don't know why it hasn't been cloned. Can't be too hard to do.
with TST whenever I need to reorder/re-group things, it's a pain (I still appreciate TST a lot)
> I don't know why it hasn't been cloned
opera had vertical, grouped tabs over twenty years ago.
Which raises the question: why would FF sabotage it? Why isn't it easy to hide the default tabs, and why does the sidebar have the name of the extension providing it stuck at the top?
They had all of the warning in the world about how important this extension was to people years before finally removing XUL, half a decade later you still can only repair the display problems through CSS that isn't kept consistent from version to version, and feature requests/bug reports on the issue are filled with antagonism from the project.
Is it this one?
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
No - it is figuratively the killer feature.
If it were literally the killer function this would be a very different discussion.
vs
> (literally the killer) feature
A "killer feature" is a phrase with its own meaning so we can treat it as an atom and apply modifiers to it. The order of operations matters, and I posit that the OP placed their imaginary parentheses as I did in my first example.
Easy, most people never use more than five or six tabs because it’s annoying to have more. TST is a solution to a marginal use case so no one invests the time into developing it.
but most useful is the auto-grouping of child tabs anyways
And Tree Tabs felt like a better Tree Style Tabs (but there were no bugfixes in past 4 years).
Though very rarely Sideberry looses/forgets the tree structure of tabs, and I have to restore it from one of the recent snapshots (which it creates every day automatically).
1. Go to `about:config` and set toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets true
2. Go to `about:support` and find your profile folder
3. Create subfolder `chrome` there
4. Create file `userChrome.css` in `chrome` folder
5. Put this text in it:
#main-window #TabsToolbar {
visibility: collapse !important;
}https://gist.github.com/wlonkly/6c21134adbdeb6eb257f52076bc3...
and it gives me a nice and minimalist UI consisting of just-dense-enough tab titles, with the current tab highlighted. Looks like so:
https://gist.github.com/ruanbekker/f800e098936b27c7cf956c560...
https://superuser.com/questions/1424478/can-i-hide-native-ta...
https://medium.com/@Aenon/firefox-hide-native-tabs-and-title...
/r/firefoxcss is great for asking questions regarding how to customize TST https://www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/search?q=tst&restrict_sr...
That's possible by editing userChrome.css. I don't remember the exact incantations, but I'm pretty sure it's mentioned in TST's docs and/or settings page.
Blank line / new paragraph is really the only option. Short bullet points might look better with the "code" option of preceding with two spaces, like:
- this
- that
*https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
Please no. I actually switched to Firefox on mobile just because I couldn't get tab groups to stay disabled in Chrome.
I think the current design is ugly. The way Edge handles them in the vertical tabs sidebar looks a lot better than the way other Chromium derivatives handle them in the tab strip, but still not the best. I like Vivaldi's implementation better, but the UI is relatively laggy. I miss old Opera.
(Thanks in advance for the solution. I mostly use Firefox anyway)
https://knowtechie.com/how-to-enable-google-chrome-reader-mo...
But on the downside no translate tool (though I read it is coming).
Operates entirely offline.
Bonus points for it being offline.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firefox-trans...
Coworkers look at me like I’m a freak because I usually keep fewer than 10 tabs open :)
Same here, and I don’t even use bookmarks! History and custom search shortcuts are enough.
maybe sometime will come the realisation that a tab, a bookmark and a history entry are basically the same
Haha! That's me. My maximum is 15 and then my cleanliness ghost kicks in. I said tab groups because I like organization even if it's just 10 tabs. I honestly don't know why I said tab search.
The former don't preserve login state (and site state in general) or scroll position, navigating between them requires an internet connection and often uses significant data (important when working from a metered and/or unreliable connection like on a train or plane), just to name a few differences.
I do use bookmarks for longer term organization but my workspace is all handled in tab groups.
I don't use groups (I liked them when tab groups were a feature of Firefox). I search for tabs by typing stuff in the awesome bar, that works.
I always have a lot of tabs and kill everything from times to times. But it's nice to reach a tab that's already loaded when you need it, instead of reloading the page every time, making a network access, using resources and having to wait. A page being already open is also a hint that it's something I accessed recently and that it's most likely the thing I need.
I don't want to waste my time managing bookmarks (actually the sibling comment from lamacase captures my view very well on this). That's not how I use a browser. But it's good they are there for people like you who find a use for it.
For persisting state, it’s simple. You don’t. History is going to send you back where you were if the url scheme is not brain dead. I will personally stop using sites which don’t do that properly because they are annoying to use.
For forms I just fill them when I need to or keep them open for a bit if I forget I would need some information which I need to check. If I realise it’s going to take some time, I just close them and fill them properly when I have all I need.
I have no idea why nobody uses bookmarks and everybody keeps hundreds of tabs open. When did that start? Who even has the RAM for that? How do you even click on them when they’re that tiny? So many things just don’t make sense.
Thus I would expect most people have the RAM unless they're on a yesteryear SBC.
FWIW, I have 128GB of RAM, and fully utilize it.
The unremovable "floating" controls are visually distracting.
Tab search, keybinds, and many many other handy stuff, can be done in vimperator.
I went back to Windows after almost 2 years for work and MS has managed to bloat it too. Don't understand why I need a Math solver. Edge bar is annoying. Favorites and bookmarks are 2 separate things?
I turned them all off obviously but defaults matter.
What turned me off from it was when I lost a year's worth of (unimportant) bookmarks and history. One day I opened it up and it decided to kindly sign me in automatically (probably detected I was signed into an MS site in-browser), and it wanted to automatically sync all my history, auto-fill info and passwords to Microsoft's sync servers. I immediately disconnected my account to stop this, and then it deleted my Edge profile afterwards as a further courtesy.
I understand that these two behaviors are probably Features, but I don't like the feeling of losing control of my software. And now these features like MSFT Rewards, coupon services, credit card services, and the "Bing Bar" (or whatever you call it) are just too much for me. Not to mention every PC I use Edge on tends to assault my eyes with political propaganda since Edge's New Tab page defaults to biased news outlets.
browser.urlbar.suggest.calculator
browser.urlbar.unitConversion.enabled
Both essentially have the idea of "spaces" for web browsers.
I've been using Brave for a while and I'm considering going back to FF, partly to get out of Chromium.
However, this is a point I don't get. What do I care if these features are native or plug-ins? My Brave plugins are synced, so whenever I install Brave and set it up I immediately. If the plugin is well done, there is no difference, and for people who don't care about that particular feature it could be less bloat to have it on a feature.
Specifically for the Reader mode, the Chromium Addon I use comes from the Firefox code for the same functionality, so it's just as good. Kudos to FF, OSS is awesome.
Blank lines separate paragraphs.
Text surrounded by asterisks is italicized. To get a literal asterisk, use * or *.
Text after a blank line that is indented by two or more spaces is reproduced verbatim. (This is intended for code.)
Urls become links, except in the text field of a submission.
If your url gets linked incorrectly, put it in <angle brackets> and it should work.
Alt-7 on the number pad give you a bullet "•", Alt-0151 an em dash "—"
This fixes most of the links on HN for me - I'm one of those people who doesn't like the browser to save anything, so every time I visit a site it's for the first time - so anyway reader mode just cuts right through all the shit in one click, no cookie banners, no subscribe banners, no interruption banners, it gets straight to the content if it's there (sometimes even cuts through shallow front end paywalls) - honestly if the site looks horrible and reader mode doesn't work, close tab - can't be arsed.
It also makes far better use of screen space than most site designs, e.g those common yet horrible headers with css position: sticky. Pretty much every big news site is made better by pulling any content into reader mode.
% - Tab search
^ - History search
* - Bookmark search
Especially since I have to rely upon the browser for most 3rd party services due to the lack of a proper Linux client.
But running Firefox on Linux mobile has largely been a community effort, I wish Mozilla realizes the need-gap and invests in official Linux smartphone version.
But I'm actively moving away from 3rd party extensions in FF as I found a recommended extension promoting anti-vaccine agenda[1], The only extensions I use now are ub & Multi-account containers. I would prefer if FF integrated them by default and thorough reviews for recommended extensions.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210924045611/https://github.co...
Really wondering why this is so neglected in all browsers. I know quite a few users that like to accidentally press CTRL + T when trying to write a capital T after sitting 2h on a site to put in some info.
It is good that browsers grow more sceptical of sites capturing hotkeys, but some sites really benefit from the question if you really want to leave that page. As far as I know this is the only long-term supported solution. Restoring tab might work but not on all sites.
two leading spaces changes text to code formatting
perhaps lines are closer together here.At the outset, yes, chromium based browsers feel snappier..
But, stuff that Chrome will not have and are absolutely essential
1. Containers... I use another unverified extension to match urls and automatically assign containers...
2. Ublock origin
3. Tree style tabs
4. Developer console... Edit and resend any request
That said, i still end up using chromium for teams and outlook 365 (pwa install feature is nice)... But that's only because i don't have any other options with those two
Chromium hasn't been interested in this feature but nothing would stop someone from making a Chromium derivative that does this.
It's fast enough to just run Chrome in a loop, and on each exit wipe and unpack the original state again.
I call it Groundhog Day Mode.
To answer the poster's curiosity, I messed it up by pressing the neighbouring key by accident and not checking sufficiently. :-P
I think the first heads-up version to the public only allowed 10,000 origins to be blocked, meaning that advertisers would only need to purchase 10,001 domains and they would be able to send ads to users again.
It's been a point of sour discussion with the chrome web team for years. They've tried to adjust it to make it more palatable with the public but advertising is just too important for Google to implement the API that users want.
Google has gone so far as to use its resources to silently take control over the web to ensure that ads remain, first with AMP based web pages, and then with FLoC advertisements. Now they've replaced that with Topics but many are eyeing that very cautiously.
Also it's just going to be totally crippled once manifest v3 extensions are mandatory
It's a fork of kintesh/containerise which seems unmaintained and had case problems.
It's not on FF addons site - so please satisfy yourself that it isn't doing sinister stuff before installing.
Teams web is crippled on FF with no video sharing & filters last I checked... Teams app is also crippled on linux - so the webapp is preferable.
Outlook's been broken the last week - just doesn't load and the service worker seems to get stuck in a loop.
Chrome is also more stable. For some reason my Firefox randomly freezes once or twice a month and gets stuck in a crashing loop where only a reboot will fix it.
But on principle I use Firefox whenever possible. I appreciate the effort that went into it. Still have to use Chrome daily for one or two business web apps that block FF.
Reported memory use (in Activity Monitor) varies, 8GB-25GB, and it's often swapping. Sometimes it uses more, and then the system crashes. Often it fills my remaining 20GB of free disk space for swap space. Surprisingly, even opening HN pages and only following HN links (i.e. all text-only), the memory usage grows in this way over time.
It's not possible to scroll smoothly or type a comment like this without pauses and occasional spinning beach balls. Just scrolling through a page with two-finger drag, it will stop every 10 seconds or so, then jump forwawrd. Moving the cursor with the cursor keys in this comment window is similar.
The constant jank and pauses may be entirely due to memory swapping or some other garbage-collection like overhead, I have no way to know.
What other people write about this issue is that it's likely some combination of number of tabs, and the fact that modern pages need a lot of memory for large images, compositing and similar, and perhaps memory used by add-ons. But all of this has suggestive evidence against it: If I go to about:memory and click "Minimize memory usage", it consistently brings memory usage down to not much more than when Firefox starts up, without appearing to change any functionality or deactivate any tabs; and when it starts up it's using less than 8GB despite loading up the same session. It also does this itself spontaneously from time to time, though not reliably enough.
That said, I switched from Safari when I realised Safari was also being a memory hog and was causing everything else on the laptop to be slow. At the time I switched, Firefox was a lovely breath of fresh air in that department. Even though I copied over all my tabs from Safari (by hand), Firefox ran in very much less RAM, and life was good again on the laptop.
Something has changed since then, making Firefox much worse for memory usage, and I don't yet know what it is.
And I see the real memory usage grown, eventually to crashing size, even when I'm just reading around HN, clicking many article headings and comments but remaining within the HN text-only site.
I agree it's probably made worse caused by specific sites, but I haven't been able to figure out which ones, or perhaps it's wide range of them, which defeats browsing in general. However, I now avoid Telegram Web, because that does consistently crash Firefox for me eventually (I've seen reported memory use grow to 67GB when TW was open, about three times).
Whatever it is, it doesn't look like site JavaScript holding data in large JavaScript objects or DOM trees, because minimizing memory use with "about:memory" reduces the size to workable levels without any other observable effect on open pages.
So I'm inclined to think of the Firefox as having a severe reclaimable-but-not-reclaimed memory leak or cache problem of some kind, that is outside the world of JavaScript data.
I do find that some websites end up using 1GB+ of memory if you leave them running for an extended period of time (looking at you MacRumors forums) but that happens on Safari and Chrome, too. HN is usually the safest one that uses the least memory. Sites with lots of ads load all kinds of crap and can use surprising amounts of memory.
I bet there are settings to be configured.
Chrome also would crash occasionally and force me to reload tabs. I don't think chrome is significantly faster in practice.
Personally, I have found FF really stable lately on both Windows and Linux and use it whenever possible as you do. And like you, I also need to fire up Chrome for the odd thing now and then.
My Chrome does that every other day on Linux. It has been that way for the last year or two. I can get around a full restart and loss of tabs by killing some GPU renderer processes.
- Easier to create and use multiple profiles (somewhat mitigated by Mozilla's multi-container add-on)
- Google Translate integration
Also, there’s an offline translate extension being worked on in open source: https://blog.mozilla.org/mozilla/local-translation-add-on-pr...
With the new offline translation support I actually prefer this setup as I can try the local translate first, then if the quality is bad or the language isn't supported I can make the decision if I want to upload the page to Google.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/right-click-s...
I have hotkeys assigned to each profile via macOS shortcuts. Cmd-shift-# focuses a given profile. Or opens a new window of that profile if there wasn't one already.
Links from other apps always open in the most recent profile.
This makes it very simple to ensure links I click in Slack/iMessage/etc open where I want them to.
(Took the time to write this out in the hopes some Firefox folks see this..)
While it works kinda OK, Profiles switching is such a core element to using a browser for Work & Personal use. Chrome makes this simple.
I use Firefox. It works OK. Is that why I think the Google docs are not very good?
I am on a Mac (for work) so in reality I am using Safari it seems from what I have been reading!
FF is sluggish to open first time and if there is an update, god help you.
EDIT: and for the record, I’m still upset Microsoft didn’t choose FF and willingly increased Google’s grasp
Even then, I expect some of it is the fact I use an obscene number of plug-ins to break most social media sites (to prevent overuse).
It once was a serious problem. No more
1) when the console is open, you can right-click on the reload page button and choose hard reload.
2) when inspecting CSS properties, you can change many of them by dragging them with the mouse left and right. That makes positioning elements so much easier than guessing and adjusting a dozen times.
Does Firefox support that yet??
Containers are useful and we can do interesting things with them (eg: temporary containers), but they don't replace profiles. With a profile I don't have to mix personal bookmarks with work bookmarks, I can use different extensions/settings, a different theme so I don't use the wrong profile by mistake, etc.
- Add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profile-switc...
- Source: https://github.com/null-dev/firefox-profile-switcher
Maybe it’s changed but I wrote them off years ago as a result.
I log into Chrome with my Gmail account and my browsing history+passwords are carried across all the devices I use in a typical week, Windows, Mac, iPhone. This is huge, as I rely on history a lot.
My last 3 jobs also had Google-based accounts, which means I'm able to maintain two browser contexts where I don't dirty up my personal history with boring work stuff.
I assume Firefox probably offers account syncing, but there's no reason to switch at this point. They lost me more than a decade ago, I loved Chrome's out-of-the-box interface. It made Firefox seem ancient and cluttered with all the unnecessary buttons, and massive borders and tabs consuming precious screen space.
edit: And I'm now reading that Firefox supports multiple browser contexts but requires some effort. No thanks.
I had my paid GAFB account suspended years ago without explanation, could not get in touch with support, and as it took so long to get in touch with support, my data had been deleted by that point, meaning I lost many, many, many years of irreplaceable photographs from my Drive. Haven't touched cloud storage since.
Lesson learned: Drive is not a substitute for backups, nor is it a place to keep the only copy of important information. Now running Unraid.
Plus it is all end-to-end encrypted unlike the Google one.
Passwords go in the password manager.
Instead of history I use tagged bookmarks or a notes file (obsidian.md) with actual notes about why I wanted to save that link.
If I actually ever want to sync anything between work and home PC or to/from my phone (rare), it's an explicit choice to plug into USB and drag it over, or intentionally put it in dropbox. Not just something that just randomly implicitly happens or sometimes doesn't.
But different strokes for different folks.
The biggest improvement over the account-based Chrome experience is that you could even have contexts (containers) for several things if you like - a container group for social media, a different container group for banking, work, shopping, etc.
All in different tabs, color-coded / labeled by container group, each with isolated cookies, etc but shared bruiser history in the same window just like in Chrome (I'm assuming) but with better privacy.
[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
Over the past few years it has gotten much better. Out of sight better.
Is it the Rust project? I do not know. But I no longer have to suffer nobly, FF is just better
Give it a try.
Tree Style Tab, for example, allows control over how new tabs are opened in relation to existing tabs if you don't like FF defaults. Even if you don't like the tree view, you get a UI that adds settings for how your tabs should open and stay grouped.
Firefox provides essential functionalities that are altogether missing in Chrome:-
1. dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled - Enable copy paste
2. dom.event.contextmenu.enabled - Always enable context menu (right-click)
3. First party isolation.
There's also some sites that seem to actively make things worse on purpose or refuse to load even if they otherwise do work. I think YouTube was noted for doing this a few years ago.
In other areas, small company sites may claim Firefox just doesn't work on their site. Sometimes prompted because an ancient version once was broken and the browser entry list was never updated, or they simply forgot to account for it in the grouping of "Internet Explorer or Other." I see this more often than I would like.
Tbh this whole idea that the web is broken on ff is not true, tho it is true some web assembly apps fail to work properly in my experience.
I challenge anyone here to give an actual useful site that fails to work properly in ff.
This is just the most recent example I remember, unfortunately there have been enough at this point that if I'm doing anything important (such as filling and submitting some important form), I do it in Chrome because I don't want it to silently break in FF and cause other issues with invalid or corrupt data submitted to the service.
I can't reproduce this in FF 104.
I miss vimperator so much.
(this claim is based on rather limited testing so please correct me if I'm wrong)
In Chrome it works reliably for me; in Firefox it works for a small subset of the sites that work in Chrome.
Also as far as making extensions go I like how in chrome you can use dev-tools-protocol within extensions as you can you cool things like intercept the body of a response with it.
That being said I'm really wanting a better browser but for me Firefox is not it.
Even with containers, when I suspend a tab, when I unsuspend I would want it in the same tab group
Why? Battery. Efficiency. On the new M1 Macbooks I can run Safari and be unplugged all day long. The increased power consumption and battery drain is noticeable when using FF and I can't make it all the way through the day. As far as extensions go, I have 1Blocker and it works well, it does block YouTube ads. The only things I miss are Tree Style Tabs and Container Tabs.
I also find performance on FF to be a lot worse than both Chrome and Safari. Firefox gets sluggish with many tabs open. JS-heavy sites will be jittery and laggy in Firefox, but buttery smooth in Chrome. Having 100 tabs open is sluggish in Firefox, but smooth in Chrome/Safari. In FF some sites will occasionally crash their tab, but they don't crash in Chrome/Safari. Etc.
Then there's the attitude of Mozilla constantly changing the interface, shoving things like Pocket or Mozilla VPN in my face. Sorry Firefox, but I've left and not coming back.
Probably 2/3rds of the bugs I get are specifically related to Safari while the other 1/3rd are just general issues that affect every browser.
It's insane to me that they provide no way to possibly resolve this without going out and spending money to buy their hardware.
I'm not even using Mac OS currently, but I don't think it's Apple's job to make your web app run like on Chrome when Google is calling the shots on so-called "web standards" with tens or hundreds of new features every quarter, with necessarily surprising results. Personally, I'd find it ok if you just label your app with "Best run on Chrome" because that's the reality the web has degraded to, and the actual problem of web apps. Or deploy as Electron app on Mac OS.
Maybe Apple could provide a Mac OS + Safari VM, like MS was doing (or still is doing?) when they were producing IE. But then the question is on which machine would you be able to run those VMs given Apple is heading towards ARM-only instruction set machines. Should Apple commit to produce x64 binaries for backward-compatible emulation on historic hardware? Personally, I do like Apple's innovation where the rest of the industry is lagging behind.
[1]: https://www.xda-developers.com/safari-for-windows-editorial/
=> https://WebKit.org/downloads
They’re not marketed as “Safari” because Safari is part of macOS, but it’s an official build of the same rendering engine.
But unfortunately they don't provide binaries, so you have to build from source.
https://trac.webkit.org/wiki/BuildingCairoOnWindows#Download...
It's funny to me how many people give one tiny reason and are like... Nope goodbye forever.
I use this to my advantage by using FF as my daily driver. I believe that if my site is fast on Firefox, then it's damn near fast enough for everyone.
So anecdata, but I wouldn’t rely on Chrome automatically working well if Firefox does.
I would be surprised if this is solely due to Firefox btw; I trust YT-owner Google about as far as I can toss the lot of them.
Though MS Teams often gets stuck in a reload loop inside a container, but Teams is a total trainwreck anyway.
One thing I love about Chrome/Edge profiles is being able to different extensions enabled/disabled and configured differently across them.
For example, I have a "private" profile that always runs windscribe vpn and other privacy-heavy extensions that I might not necessarily want running on my "base" profile.
Then evil Google emerges, Chrome got fat, FF trimmed up and went privacy-as-a-default, and I'm back on FF again for the better part of the last decade.
Opera had a look-in around 2008 but it didn't last long, although some of the features were nicely done, it just had a clunky feeling and the rendering was ... Different.
> ...Create and manage blockchain identities and assets. > ...access blockchain content... > ...Encapsulate the blockchain technology ... enabling developers to build powerful Apps.
The 2020 forum posts describes mx6 as:
> The main browser features of mx6 will be developed based on a deeply customized chromium code base and existing mx5 codebase. All bitcoin related features will be developed by Maxthon team. Mx6 also has an open API to enable other developers to integrate their code.
Vivaldi works quite well as a thinner Chrome alternative IMO.
But it increasingly got more config-involving to make FF do what I wanted and maybe I overdid some settings/plugins and websites started to show incorrectly. Also the imho (much) too high salary for the CEO annoyed me (Mozilla is supposed to be "Internet for people, not profit").
Tried Brave and it was a nice experience after some initial cost to e.g. disable crypto. Some weeks ago I uninstalled FF on all my computers...
I miss a few features, but nothing major.
So when he launched Brave I wanted to give it the benefit if the doubt. But the early messaging about what conditions ads are replaced was hamfisted and I stopped using it relatively quickly.
That being said... all the browsers (FF, Brave, Chrome, Safari, etc.) embody the agenda of their respective organizations. The question you may want to ask is "what organization has the most motivation to address issues I care about most?"
This is why I use Lynx.
That being said, perhaps they should just piggyback off WebKit/Blink and save themselves a ton of resources.
It’s not too difficult to disable, but Firefox does push suggestions by default and has a revenue sharing agreement with Pocket.
"Mozilla Corporation" bought Pocket in 2017.
Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocket_(service) :
> On February 27, 2017, Pocket announced that it had been acquired by Mozilla Corporation, the commercial arm of Firefox's non-profit development group. Mozilla staff stated that Pocket would continue to operate as an independent subsidiary but that it would be leveraged as part of an ongoing "Context Graph" project.[6] There are plans to open-source the server-side code of Pocket,[11][12][13] with more than 50 repositories already available on the company's GitHub account, including their iOS app.
In fact, this little nugget supports my original post: “the commercial arm of Firefox's non-profit development group”
An old write up: https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html
Clueless as I am I had a look at page 6-7 of https://nonprofitlight.com/page/6 where we find helm men of charities earning around 4 m.
This entry strikes me as funny:
--------------
https://nonprofitlight.com/ny/new-york/trustees-of-columbia-...
TRUSTEES OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK
Total Revenue $5,554,552,356
Total Expenses $5,268,492,284
Net Assets $15,984,284,555
Lawrence Gerald Lenke PROFESSOR OF SURGERY $4,741,060
OR ----------
https://nonprofitlight.com/ky/louisville/university-of-louis...
UNIVERSITY OF LOUISVILLE ATHLETIC ASSOCIATION
Total Revenue $126,934,461
Total Expenses $122,421,563
Net Assets $126,332,991
Fredric Scott Satterfield Head Football Coach $4,140,900
--------
https://nonprofitlight.com/ca/mountain-view/mozilla-foundati...
MOZILLA FOUNDATION
Total Revenue $28,388,184
Total Expenses $21,889,786
Net Assets $53,411,636
Mark Surman EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR/PRESIDENT $286,990
----------
Right, now I'm more clueless than I started out.
Other browsers have a menu entry for this (File -> Open Location... in Chrome) so keyboard shortcuts can be switched in the Keyboard settings but Firefox doesn't have this. :|
I've tried various methods without success. If anyone had a working solution I'd be very grateful.
Edit: I moved off Windows around 2005 followed by a decade of Linux and since then Mac.
This might work: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/shortkeys/
For me it's "the key to the left of the spacebar" in terms of muscle memory, so Cmd on Mac.
Tried it, as well as modifying omni.ja... From the add-on page (I tried it):
> shortkeys cannot override Firefox default shortcuts
This issue requires action from Mozilla, there are no user solutions as far as I'm aware.
Here is a rule that does it (only for left command, but that's probably sufficient): https://genesy.github.io/karabiner-complex-rules-generator/#...
I went back to Firefox just because of Chrome api change against adblockers, and found it very usable and mature, but it's a tougher sell to my friends as the difference unnoticeable
Also, check out Firefox Focus on Android. Pretty convenient to use as the default browser for guest browsing.
I only have four extensions now: uBlock Origin, I Don't Care About Cookies, one for user agent switching, and one for removing HTML elements via the context menu.
Isn't this equivalent to the element zapper in uBO?[1] It's not available from the context menu but you can assign a shortcut to bring it up.[2]
[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Element-zapper
[2] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Keyboard-shortcuts
programs.firefox.profiles.<name>.extraConfig = builtins.readFile ./user.js;
DNS blocking is better than nothing, but it's very basic when compared to a browser extension like uBlock Origin.
But BAT is a different beast as it doesn't use mining. So my concern is not the same as for general crypto schemes.
It's the BAT idea in particular that I don't like though. It's just a new, more indirect, payment scheme for advertisers. I just want the advertising industry to die and get out from between the content creators and consumers. I know this is not a realistic viewpoint but I'm not willing to contribute to it. Brave solves the privacy problem to some extent but not the ad problem. And in a way they even promote ads by paying users to view them.
Brave seems to be looking to make the current system more palatable (and of course become the gatekeeper for this new tech which would be priceless if it ever took off). I've long given up on the ad system completely. I already pay for the sites I like and use a lot (at least where they offer this option) but I don't make any exception for adblocking ever. Even when they're non-tracked.
They can try to "ban" whatever they want, but it's not happening.
The advertising monetization model can't be stopped dead in its tracks. The fact is that it's the simplest way for content providers to generate revenue, and that won't change overnight. What BAT is attempting to do is establish a market between content consumers and providers. The BAT wallet is funded either by attention, i.e. consuming ads, or by directly purchasing BAT. In that sense, the advertising middle-man could eventually be removed from the transaction.
Note that I don't use Brave, nor particularly care about the company, but BAT is the best idea that works in practice to overcome the ad business model. It should be celebrated for that, and we need more such projects. We also need them to be friendly for content providers to integrate in order to boost adoption.
I agree, but it's not like I can't wish for it :)
> Note that I don't use Brave, nor particularly care about the company, but BAT is the best idea that works in practice to overcome the ad business model. It should be celebrated for that, and we need more such projects.
I don't like being told how I should feel about something :) I don't celebrate them and I won't. For me the solution is ever more and ever more efficient adblockers, as well as bans on tracking like the EU is doing. This is something that does really work. Many sites are really seeing a drop in income from ads and are looking for alternatives now. Hurting someone in their wallet really works.
I think BAT is a dead-end, they don't have the market power to bring about this change, and the ideal outcome is only one of the possible ones around. Seeing as how you really do celebrate their solution but still don't use it illustrates the issue I see with it.
On a small scale, paying to be able to take away ads (or getting paid to see them — ultimately, the difference is negligible, given how pervasive ads are in our lives) is a nice experience to have. But it has a lot of implications long-term on our society, given ads are the primary way we finance pretty much all information we have access to these days.
How does this affect upward mobility? If a person in poverty wants to get out of poverty by learning a difficult skill, getting access to the information and learning it will be a longer, more difficult process for them. They will be interrupted more often than wealthier people, they will have less time to dedicate to doing the task at hand than wealthier people, etc.
I personally think it's difficult to get excited about any system that wraps the way we gate access to information in our society without considering this element, because the ability for people to move up in life is really one of the great promises of the internet, and nobody should lose that.
In fact I see people who are more wealthy not using adblockers and paywall bypassers because they feel like they should support the sites somehow. It's a similar thing with downloading video content, many of my better-off friends are not downloading because they are worried about content disappearing. They actually care about the overall economic model working. My friends from worse circumstances (I know many people in lesser-off countries) don't give a shit about that and download all they can get. And I agree with them.
I myself don't have this worry. Content will never disappear one way or another. We had content on the internet before ads were really a thing and it was better than it is now in many ways. And I like cutting into the big megacorps' profits.
Raw < DNS blocking < custom solutions < uBlock Origin
Secondly, enabling JS on per site basis is easier on FF Android with UBO. Speeds up browsing a lot.
FF + uBlock, on the other hand, has no problem with this.
[1] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/11/firefox-sync-privacy/
[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
If only it synced with my vpn so each container got its own ip.
Was a real chance to do something better rather than just doing the minimum (rebrand an existing VPN client app) and potentially pulling in a new customer base.
Technically as it's possible to use multiple profiles you may even be able to configure different sets for the same URLs.
IE also had/has MRU tabs.
That doesn't explain why the other method isn't at least an option in Chrome but I figured it was worth mentioning for those that missed the functionality.
I must admit, however, that I do have Tab Flip for Tree Style Tab, with Shift+F2 to switch between the current and most recently selected tabs (like Ctrl+6 in Vim to toggle between the most recent buffers), and have added similar elsewhere, with Meta+F2 to switch between most recent workspaces in the Sway or i3 window managers:
bindsym Mod4+F2 workspace back_and_forth
bindsym Mod4+Shift+F2 move container to workspace back_and_forth, workspace back_and_forth
Its likely more useful for those who tend towards many tabs open at once
A) name tab groups;
B) lock specific groups which mimics the capability of bookmark folders (clicking a link doesn’t remove it from the group).
The extension has helped me reduce the number of open windows on my laptop, among other productivity improvements.
MRU should always be the default, this is also what IDE's do, and alt+tab does with main windows.
What is even the point of ctrl+tab cycling to next tab? You got to press it dozens of times to go back to the original tab... Why would anyone use that? You can use ctrl+pgdn and pgup to go to next/previous which is more sensible for this.
So disappointingly, now I turned this feature on in FF, and I'm disappointed to see that it only cycles through most recent tab of current window. I wish it would go through any window. I have always dozens of windows with dozens of tabs each, and I find myself sometimes just opening the same URL again due to not bothering trying to find back a tab I was in just a few minutes ago due to not having a ctrl+tab that goes to most recent tab in any window.
ctrl+tab cycling to the next tab is essential for many ways of surfing the web.
For instance, research a topic and tap up many tabs. Now go through them one by one. And in the process of doing so you might want to tab up even more.
At this point cycling to the next tab becomes a way to navigate the history, but where you have the context of each step preserved. MRU in this context is a nightmare.
MRU for tabs doesn't make any sense to me, that purpose is served by switching to another window instead (which is, and should be, MRU).
finding back your tab amongst the many open ones is a nightmare without some form of easily accessed recently used list that also works across windows
>finding back your tab amongst the many open ones is a nightmare without some form of easily accessed recently used list that also works across windows
not at all, they are ordered and you already know the direction you want to go. Unlike MRU that breaks down completely after a few tabs.
As soon as you have to search for anything the MRU is poisoned beyond sense and you have to start all over again.
Opening multiple tabs from one place, and then going through them exactly in that order, is just not something that happens often for me.
> As soon as you have to search for anything the MRU is poisoned beyond sense and you have to start all over again.
Not at all. Imagine you were reading some document in some tab. This tab could be in any window, on any workspace.
Now you check your email in-between, which is another tab in another window.
Now after checking your email, you want to go back to the document you were reading: try finding it back amongst all windows across all desktops, possibly not anymore the front tab because you also just opened a link from the document, or instinctively opened the discord tab of the window the document was in or paused some youtube music that was playing, or whatever!
MRU solves that perfectly. We're talking about 100s of tabs across multiple windows here. With MRU you only have to go through maybe max 10 or so, which is easy to find the document back in.
In code editors I often have several dozens of tabs open, and MRU is a crucial usability feature when coding, so I’d say that its usefulness is independent of the number of open tabs.
I have tree style tabs so my tabs are all already ordered in a vaguely meaningful way, but the recent use order of my last tabs is completely unpredictable to me!
With this feature on ^tab might as well be random for how badly it confuses me.. I'm so glad Mozilla hadn't removed the opt-out yet.
I really don't want to have a "works best in Chrome" banner but until Firefox catches up I don't have much choice (don't get me started on Safari, I've already given up).
I hope things have changed now and ff is just as good as chrome now with the recent progress in ML and so many good open source projects for tts and dictation.
Source: I developed a web game.
Before that, some other update gave issues with some certificate.
Looking at all the issues this browser causes, and the very low usage, I'm not spending time tracking down what is going wrong.
Safari on iOS is such another problem child, but used high enough to justify the time to investigate and fix.
https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2016/10/24/distrusting-new...
>Looking at all the issues this browser causes, and the very low usage, I'm not spending time tracking down what is going wrong.
Your point of "been hearing this" is what?
Testing in Firefox is a pretty good way to approximate standards compliance, and then you have to deal with bugs when running on Chrome, if you do it that way around.
If you look at the usage numbers, it just makes no sense to support this browser anymore.
Here are the facts:
- multiple game devs have issues with Firefox
- Firefox doesn't support File System Access API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/File_System..., other browsers do.
- Usage of Firefox is very low
Live with reality people.
It seems the reality is that people disagree with your opinion.
Still doesn't change my assessment it's not worth it.
Edit: especially since according to experience, when Firefox doesn't work for users, they just switch to another browser.
Ok, people here don't like it. They can make their own tradeoffs. But in my opinion my choice is not that crazy.
I do have some other problems only happening on Firefox that I don't know the cause of (so probably something I can fix) but I certainly would like to remove that banner. Mozilla fixing the filter issues is a huge leap toward that and gives me motivation to look into the other problems.
Somehow they managed to get on-par with Chrome performance. So, I switched back to FF after being a Chrome user for years.
But they couldn't keep up, so I was forced to leave them again.
I went for Brave, because I wanted to reduce my use of Google products and I couldn't be happier.
Chrome performance, good adblock integrated, Tor, IPFS, and crypto wallet out of the box. Awesome piece of tech.
uBlock Origin
Sponsorblock - skips sponsored segments/outros/self promotion etc that has spread like a plague across YouTube
Brave with uMatrix works well for me. Disabled the metrics and crypto stuff.
But they have been on a road of adding increasinly user hostile "features" to the browser that I just can't take.
I snapped when they implemented automatic updates. I've never been so pissed at a piece of software than I have been at firefox when I hit Ctrl-T and the damn thing refuses to work until I restart it. And for a long time, it wouldn't even restart, it just exited.
While I'd prefer to install updates manually through apt (like every other piece of software on my laptop), if they are going to be so patronizing that they won't allow that, they need to fix they update process to not require a restart. Until that happens I'll use chromium.
Regardless if you open settings UI there is a radiobox to toggle between auto-installing updates and just notifying you when your version is out of date. If that's not there then it's your distro's build that is forcing updates to be done that way, not Mozilla.
HTTPS everywhere is discontinued and replaced by built in browser features.
Privacy Badger doesn't do user side learning anymore as people proved that in itself could be used for fingerprinting.
- Multi Account Containers - does exactly what it says on the tin. I load Google stuff inside a Google container for example, and banking websites all get their own container only used for that purpose.
- Auto Cookie Optout, with their config added to uBlock Origin. Basically automatically clicks "essential cookies only" everywhere it can (it helps to allow loading of these sites automatically in uBlock and uMatrix, otherwise it can't). Possibly not an issue if you're outside the EU, though.
- uMatrix so I have some level of control over what loads when I want it.
- ClearURLs - takes out tracking and unnecessary URL parameters. uMatrix tends to block and warn if you do click one and you can find the dest_url without parameters on its warning page, where ClearURLs fails.
- Decentraleyes - injects resources instead of loading them from CDNs. Quite mixed results with this but it is still on the list for the moment.
- Sideberry, basically another tree style tabs.
Nice testing sites for these extensions are basically any newspaper website or shopping website, which are all thoroughly infested with trackers and such.
But does it also object to 'legitimate' interests?
1/ You can't mute tabs by default
2/ You can't prevent videos to auto-start.
Simple as that, I think muting tabs was possible in the past, but of course, Chrome team removed that function because youtube.
I actually find Chrome to be faster and generally appreciate the contributions that Google has made to try to keep the web competitive with the proprietary platforms, but I can't get past the auto-start video issue.
That Firefox is doing this is very much like yesterday's new Facebook URL
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32117489
where people complained Firefox screwed up by escalating.
I believe that was a single person.
The popular graphical browsers keep growing in size and complexity but I am still doing the same basic tasks on the web, i.e., retrieving files and consuming them. For these basic tasks, the so-called "modern" browsers are overkill. Chrome is something like 150MB with dynamic libraries. The text-only browser I am using to submit this comment is a 1.3MB static binary.^1
1. It does not matter which one. Generally, all of them can be modified and re-compiled to suit personal tastes, a process that (compared to compiling Firefox, Chromium, etc.) is relatively quick and only requires modest computing resources. There is no shortage of people with both the skill and the time to write such text-only browsers. Whether we can we say the same for those with both the skill and time to write "modern" graphical browsers intended to compete with the likes of Chrome is left as a question for the reader. Users of "modern" web browsers have very little control over them. We never see anyone report they disliked something about Firefox, Chrome, etc., so they modified the source and re-compiled. On the contrary, we routinely see people report they switched from the browser of one "tech" company profiting from online advertising to the web browser of another. Or we see people reporting use of some browser "extension" that the "tech" company browser vendor can disable at any time.
Links, elinks, links2, netrik, w3m, ..?
Honestly I wonder though why anyone would want JS for a text-only browser.
Maybe I have just been using one too long to remember what it is like to think the (text-only) web requires Javascript.
IME, if the goal is to read text/plain or text/html, then JS is never needed.
Generally, I can always retrieve the text/html of a website without ever using JS.
Many times times I do not use a browser for the retrieval step.
Sometimes websites might make gratuitous use of Javascript to make requests the www user never specified.
For example, the www user types example.com, but the content of the website is actually found at example.cdn-123.com.
The web developer may use Javascript to make HTTP requests to example.cdn-123.com.
In such cases, I will retreive the content from example.cdn-123.com, making the requests myself, without using Javascript.
Often JSON is returned instead of text/html. This is ideal.
Because there is no need to read text enclosed in HTML tags there is no need for a browser.
For example, I search YouTube by retrieving JSON not HTML.^1 I use netcat plus a localhost forward proxy instead of a browser to make HTTP requests. Then I transform the needed data from the JSON into a TSV table using a custom single purpose program. Optionally, I then load the table into a database using sqlite3.
1. The initial search returns HTML with embedded JSON that I extract. The continuation search returns only JSON.
=== RELEASE 2.1pre29 ===
Mon Apr 16 01:49:07 MET DST 2007 mikulas:
Javascript was removed. The reason is that it is very buggy, Martin
Pergel doesn't have time to develop it and code is so messy that no one
else can understand it.
If you use links for special purposes (embedded devices, etc.), you can
bring javascript back by copying javascript files from previous release,
removing "dnl javascript" lines from configure.in, adding *.c and *.h
files to Makefile.am and re-running automake and autoconf.
Javascript hooks from main code were not removed --- they just won't be
maintained.
=== RELEASE 2.1pre28 ===
Wed Apr 11 01:39:36 cet 2007 mikulas:
Fixed a bug in decompression and javascript document.write introduced in
previous release (compressed data were displayed after document.write)
(BTW. because the javascript interpreter has bugs, Martin Pergel has not
time for it and the code is so messy that it couldn't be understand by
anyone else, javascript will likely be removed in next release)That is, the Chrome binary alone is like 150MB.
1. Noticabely slower and less snappy than Chromium in both page load and interaction.
2. HTML5 rendering is horrendously slow.
3. Shortcuts mapped by chars, not keycodes; e.g. pressing ctrl+t on Cyrillic layout will do nothing instead of opening a new tab.
I have about 30 tabs open across 3 windows on my 10 yo. laptop, that I upgraded to 8GB of RAM. If I try to open even 10 tabs in Firefox, the laptop slows down to hell.
Running a local speed test to my Linux server on MS Edge, I get ~910Mb/s download (CPU maxes out) and ~980Mb/s upload.
If I fire up Firefox and run this same test, I get ~260Mb/s download/upload, with the CPU maxed out of course.
MS made lots of Windows specific optimizations, with a focus on memory use. The other killer feature is 'secure mode' that disables JS JIT, which is where most if the security issues have come from in modern browsers. Plus, in this context, MS's incentives align much closer to mine than one if the largest advertising companies in the world.
It wasn't disappointing, but it's just that I didn't have a reason to stay there.
The Chromium (and its derivatives) builds makes it clear they have a compile farm of unlimited compute and ram, so it's just "which kind of bad" I nowadays, I guess
I wish firefox would have live captions for audio/video. It's one of the few features Chrome has that I use regularly and miss on FF.
But still love Firefox.
Not to mention that I always hit some glitches in sites or some things not working in Firefox because developers didn't even bother to test on Firefox or just plainly refuse to support it.
Brave on Android is also best Android browser I used.
i hate this. i really want firefox to succeed and i really appreciate their stated goals with respect to privacy, and their significant contributions to the internet commons.
Choosing a feature like speed which is arbitrary and relative seems overly reductive.
firefox supports a policy.json to turn off upgrade nagging via the `ManualAppUpdateOnly` key:
{
"policies": {
"ManualAppUpdateOnly": true
}
}What if you feel like you can handle this not particularly difficult problem?
Only for a short while in the early 00s my poor laptop couldn't runt FF with 256M RAM so I had to use Opera. I had to enter PF rules to make the stupid ads in the UI disappear. But within probably 2 years I had a new laptop and was back with FF.
The main sell in the early 00s was that afaik noscript could not function in Chrome or Opera due to the design of its web plugins, so FF pretty much had a monopoly of the paranoid like me.
And by now I just feel that any privacy enhancements can be done with a custom user.js so I see no reason for any other browser than the upstream FF.
The one thing that keeps me from switching from Safari to Firefox is that I cannot customize tab switching. In every macOS program I use, I use the same key binding to switch between tabs. Because there is no "Next tab" or "Previous tab" menu item in Firefox, I cannot assign this function to a key with the macOS keyboard shortcuts in System Preferences.
I've looked in Firefox's setting and searched online and haven't found anything that helps. Though, to be honest, I'd prefer it to be part of the system native options so that it can follow me during upgrades.
At this point, I'm willing to consider employing BetterTouchTool, if that's a solution. But again, I'd rather go native.
As of right now Firefox stays the side browser for code testing and whatnot, but it falls short for daily use for me.
Fortunately it looks like there has been at least a little movement on this recently (bumped from a P4 to P2)
It still doesn't work on Mac or Linux.. FFS.
If you consider a simplified definition of cognitive dissonance that goes something like “thoughts or actions that do not match your beliefs or values”, then the behavior described by the parent comment could be cognitive dissonance, but probably only if certain things are true:
- The person understands the nature of Google’s business
- The person believes that using Chrome still benefits Google even when anti-tracking extensions are installed
That said, the people who understand enough to be categorized as such are not the average Chrome user. The average user is not experiencing cognitive dissonance, they just don’t know any better.
> I'd say my motivation
I’d be careful not to generalize your own experience here. Just the fact that we are having this conversation on HN puts us in a bubble that is not representative of “most people”.
My motivation is privacy. The motivation of many people I know is “ads are super annoying”. Privacy awareness is growing, but most people are not as aware as the people on this thread.
Spot on. As said many many times, the browser is the new OS.
If Google wowed the world and introduced a free (beer or speech, doesn't matter) Windows-killer OS[0] that was better in every way than Windows, was Windows-compatible, tons of people would use it. You and I wouldn't.
[0] I do know about ChromeOS, yes
And I am amazed how Firefox doesn't have profiles unlike Chrome, or at least the implementation is so counterintuitive (I use "Personal" profile as a Facebook container for instance). On the other hand, Chrome profile switching and isolation are just still so good. I hope this is not some patent-protected thing which Firefox can't just copy for good.
If Mozilla team is reading, here is some direct feedback for why I couldn't completely switch over.
When chrome launched, I was thrilled that it had firebug features "built in" and that it didn't eat up 80% of my RAM.
The article mentions Firefox being not a processor hog anymore, has that changed that drastically?
After a while, Firefox would be incredibly sluggish and when I switched to chrome, I haven't looked back at all. These days, I use brave browser for personal browsing and chrome for work
I use Firefox and can't say that I've thought much about browser resource usage, which probably means it's not catastrophically bad, at the very least.
Why not try it out and see if it's better for you now?
[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/09/https-actually-everywh...
> Which is why Mozilla Firefox is such a breath of fresh air, as it uses much less of your CPU while still delivering a fast browsing experience.
This.
Even for identical set of tabs, Chrome eventually slows down my entire machine, whereas Firefox does not!
In both Linux and Mac (don't know about Windows because I don't use it).
Anecdotal.
Meanwhile Chrome, with all its usual bloat, works perfectly fine.
I do notice that as time goes on I seem to be having more issues with sites breaking under uBlock Origin, but to be fair I think I’m using all the blocklists, not just the defaults, so I think breakage is expected. It’s easy to turn off for particular sites, so it’s not a huge issue for me.
Somewhat related - I’m really enjoying the new Thunderbird. It feels way more polished than the previous version.
So... not sure Firefox works for me (though... dang... it's JavaScript implementation has come a long way) but solidly support the idea of finding something other than Chrome.
Oh. Also. Most of my news browsing I now do with lynx in a terminal window. I see no ads, autostart videos or kruft. And HN doesn't look too bad in Lynx.
The only three things I miss from Chrome are:
- swiping down to refresh page
- a Delete action on the menu of text box selections
- the option to run webpages as separate apps
For that last one, I do use Chrome for a couple of sites (Wordle and Quordle), but Firefox is excellent for everything else.
The option is "Add to home screen"/"Install app" in the menu.
--
Also about 1: did you tried to put the bar in the bottom?
It's even laggy after I completely wiped it from my system and used a fresh Firefox installation.
Any ideas?
Are you sure that it is not due to the "smooth scrolling" being enabled? I remember it used to enabled by default on fresh installations of FF.
If that's not a problem you have, then I can't think of a reason not to use Firefox.
Still I mainly use firefox and on most computers it's the only browser I even have installed.
PS: Firefox indeed has a lot of good plugins (for some reasons, only Firefox got them)
Yeah, it is good to get the job done.
Maybe HN can help save it, therefore the web, and therefore the future for our children's children? :-P
This headline article is a good first step ;)
And no offense if TechRadar is writing articles like this... they should open their own site without any of the extensions and watch the ads, popups, autoplay videos and such. Maybe they will notice the problem doesn't start with the browser of your choice.
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338#iss...
I bet there will be a Chromium for without that + Brave is already working on it. Power of open source I guess?
Brave is an option but I don't really like where they're heading with their crypto tokens.
If you don't care about that, firefox with uBO is really much better IMO.
Chrome is only going downhill from now. So is Edge, Microsoft has already at the stage where they don't prioritise user experience and appeal anymore and are priorising monetisation. Like with the "buy now and pay later" scams they're including. It's IE4 all over again, once they arrive at the desired marketshare the user is just a dumb sheep to them again.
Unfortunately Mozilla is far from perfect, they're becoming too corporate and weaseling in monetisation schemes totally in conflict with their goals. But they're still a world better.
Meanwhile they try to make the browser as mainstream friendly, not understanding that the mainstream has long given up on them and they only have the last remaining bastion of hardcore privacy users left. Whose user patterns they're not seeing because they focus too much on telemetry.
I think since they became Mozilla Inc they started thinking like big tech and are slowly becoming just like it. But because their foundation origins the declining marketshare is not ringing their alarm bells like they, in a real company, would.
If they really wanted to diversify and get me to pay for something, they have to do more than just resell mullvad. I'm a mullvad user but I much rather pay for that directly as it gives me a lot more features. I love mullvad but I want to use it in more than just a browser.
What I'd want to see and would pay for:
- A service like Apple's iCloud Private Relay that really makes browsing more anonymous (rather than a basic VPN which they offer now, that's too little too late).
- Paid Sync storage (with full E2E so I have no reason to self-host)
- An archiving service of webpages (also E2E). Because onenote sucks more and more
Basically things other than 'quick wins' but that need some serious vision and development. Right now they're thinking way too much like a lazy CEO, doing a quick tie-in with another service hoping for some takeup or some cheap marketing benefit.
If they want to diversify and get people to pay they really have to offer some real benefits that are a gap in the market. Those exist but they need some more work than just a quick joint marketing effort.
See "uBlock Origin works best on Firefox" in the official GitHub repo's wiki:
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
The big picture however, is that Firefox works for you, chrome works for Google.
Flash-forward 2016 or 2017 (don't remember precisely), two things changed at the same time: Firefox started feeling less poorly developed, Google started making changes in Chrome that really bothered me on a more ethical / privacy level (general stance on default values in privacy/security settings, increasing hiding stuff from me such as in the address bar or the network tab, features added "for my own good", heavy use of dark UI patterns, etc.).
I felt I needed to get out of Chrome rapidly, and there was no way it was going to be Edge (trust had to build, and it takes years), so I started re-using Firefox more heavily while anticipating I'd be frustrated. That day never came: the months passed and Firefox kept getting better and faster.
I guess I had my epiphany when I discovered there was a hard profile switcher in Firefox, which makes separation of concerns both easy and efficient to implement. This is not the "containerized tabs" thing (which I could never trust, don't ask me why) but the actual hard profile switch, that makes it impossible from one Firefox instance to access what happens in another instance simply because the separation is controlled by the operating system.
Now, when I click the Firefox icon, a list of profiles is shown on the screen: (browsing, work, facebook, linkedin, banking, shopping, training-X, training-Y, etc.). I select the profile and the browser is themed in a way that I instantly know which profile is in front of me.
I also wanted to make sure than if I mistakenly open a link to a third-party website in my "work" or "banking" profiles, that link would never actually be queried. The trick is very simple: I configured a proxy that points to a non-existing service (127.0.0.1:9999) and added the list of trusted domains (work + banks) in the proxy exceptions list. Anything else gets clicked/opened in these sessions gets directed into a black hole.
If you're interested in reaching this setup, simply replace your firefox shortcut by adding: -ProfileManager at the end of the command-line. From that point on, a window with a list of profiles will be shown everytime you click the Firefox icon, and you can have truly separated browsers running.
By the way, Firefox does track you. At the very least, it phones home, and it gives each installer a unique identifier.
I suspect the answer is somewhere in the middle.
Here's the bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1703668 - sounds like it would work, but not with acceptable performance at present
For those who are more privacy focused LibreWolf is a good fork.
It's weird because they use the same spell check engine that Chrome, Apple, LibreOffice, and a bazillion other commercial and open source things use, and those almost never produce false positives on my writing.
Mozilla needs to address things like this if they want to stop losing share to other browsers.
I've had problems with both Edge and Chrome changing the current virtual desktop or behaving weird until I click at least once on every window that opens
My first browser was Opera and I'm a huge fan, so to see that the CTO of Opera has decided to basically recreate Opera is very alluring.
I'm curious if anybody else ran into it or it's just my setup.
Just saying.
But I can’t ignore the irony of this article loading dozens of trackers. Like, is the cognitive dissonance that bad in web publishing? Do the teams writing the content not know about the way the publisher presents the data? Is this just pure hypocrisy? I’m at a loss.
Also, the author in this case is a staff writer for the publication. The entire point of her being on staff is to write content for that site.
Publishing is a very competitive field, especially in the last decade as newspaper jobs have gone dry. Don’t trash on the writer because of where they work.
A climate scientist traveling to a conference to meet with policy makers with a goal to increase awareness about a particular issue might be forced to use a mode of transportation that itself contributes to the problem of climate change.
Should the scientist adopt an absolutist/idealist position and refrain from anything that contributes to the problem, up to and including not traveling at all, because of the harm that the plane will cause in transit? Should they discard the potential longer term impact of convincing policy makers to change policy?
This is a classic case of missing the forest for the trees.
> I'm really surprised by all the apologists
It think you are misinterpreting the sentiment. An apologist would defend the tracking and ads themselves. People are not defending tracking, they are defending the utility of using the available medium to raise awareness about tracking and tools that can help mitigate it.
> the article is clearly click bait trying to cram ads down your throat
I would reframe this to something like: the majority of the content publishing business has adopted a model that embraces click bait and cramming ads down readers' throats.
This is the reality we're in.
As an author, if you want to bring awareness to this problem, or offer solutions to this problem, it only makes sense to publish that content where the readers are.
At no point does the article try to reframe the problem of tracking itself as a good thing. If it did, this would be a very different conversation.
When I did my internship in an ad agency the first thing I was told was to install an adblocker. Talking about hypocrisy.
Is it possible there's an innocent explanation? Like to avoid accusations of impression fraud or otherwise mitigate the risk of false impressions?
Yet I imagine one would also need a non-blocked browser to check results and competitor ads too.
Warren Buffet can advocate for changes in the tax laws that benefit the country while still playing hard by the existing rules.
Authors can advocate for changes to the web while their host is still doing the bad thing.
These can be seen as hypocrisy, but I think there is a large dose of honesty and in some cases humility in these situations.
So either way, nothing has changed from the typical user standpoint who wants to just use a browser that not only doesn't hog their computer but takes privacy very seriously and with that simple experiment I have done, it is clear users are still no better off.
They might as well use Brave instead of Firefox which actually disables ALL these ads by default on the first install by having Brave Shields ON.
The conclusion many draw from that is not to even bother trying. I think the better conclusion is to be forgiving of the failings of others, because they too struggle with this. Maybe the point isn't to be perfect, but to reach for what's good.
"Do as I say, not as I do" is rarely forgivable. One or two lingering trackers? Maybe. But that's not the case here.
On a web dominated by tracking, the harsh reality is that the avenues capable of reaching the widest audiences are going to bring with them some…baggage.
To conclude that this is dishonest is missing the forest through the trees.
Since tracking is the dominant reality, one of the best things a smart consumer can do is use tools that help counteract it.
An article like this is using the medium available to help people similarly unable to change that medium navigate it a bit more safely.
> Can't have your cake and eat it, too.
What is the cake here? What double standard does the author benefit from if his writing encourages more people to switch to a browser that is more resistant to the tracking people are accusing the author of (endorsing? It’s not clear what the accusation actually is).
Let’s examine an alternative: The author tries to convince the publisher to forego the apparatus that currently drives their business model or they’ll threaten to publish elsewhere.
The publisher calls this bluff, and the author self-publishes instead.
Fewer people read the article, fewer people switch to Firefox, and fewer people gain a modicum of protection from tracking.
What about this outcome is better?
If you gatekeep the act of publishing privacy awareness content in this way, the only thing that happens is fewer people become aware. The only thing that can weaken tracking (aside from regulation) is making it less effective.
This mindset that only the pure/virtuous/perfect implementation is acceptable, and anything else is somehow unacceptable seems like a really good way to make no progress at all.
Refusing to acknowledge the situation we’re in is just denial.
If we take a common example of how I've seen this play out:
A: iPhones and Apple are evil because they require child slavery.
B: But.. you own an iPhone?
A: Oh so I'm just supposed to go live in the woods?
I don't think B supports child slavery. B is pointing out that even people espousing this idea participate in the system because the alternative (not owning the iPhone) results in a worse outcome.
Exactly. But switching to individual context around societal question is the problematic argument here. Properly contextualizing means to use individual cases to explain impact, but that is not done here.
Society is formed by many individuals, and it doesn't necessarily matters what most of them do to address a particular problem. We have division of responsibility.
You can be a serial killer and admit that murdering innocents is immoral.
The identity and the actions of the person making the argument have no bearing on the validity of the argument itself, it should be judged purely on its own merits.
Is that statement that "murdering innocents is immoral" actually correct or not, regardless of who makes the statement?
This is very different from the 'holier than thou' perspective taken by those who condescendingly dismiss arguments that they are contributing to things, by their own free actions, that they claim are evil.
The argument's validity rests purely on its own merits, regardless of who espouses or expresses it.
I can be a smoker and admit that smoking is absolutely horrible for you. Just because I am a smoker doesn't mean that the statement that smoking is horrible for you is incorrect.
I think we're just talking about two fundamentally different things.
1) Whether or not people are hypocrites (and yes, they definitely are).
2) Whether or not that hypocrisy invalidates their arguments (and no, it has no bearing on the validity of their argument).
Maybe it also involves greed for viewership, "wanting to make it big" with some article, who knows. There is not much preventing people from setting up a blog by themselves or ask someone else to help them publish in an ethical way, at least in many countries.
I guess at least some positive outcome can be concluded: People, who read on those websites might learn a thing or two.
I don't think there's an easy answer to this. It's easy to focus too much on not doing evil that you miss the opportunity cost of doing good.
Last I heard FF was generating a unique identifier on each installer download. https://www.ghacks.net/2022/03/17/each-firefox-download-has-...
I'm hoping the Duck Duck Go browser or Vivaldi is better.
1:https://gizmodo.com/how-to-secure-web-browser-chrome-edge-fi...
And to be fair to the business people, it's not like they have much choice. There are no major privacy-focused ad networks and they need a source of revenue. What do you expect them to do?
"Finally, it is always possible that man, as the result of coercion or other circumstances, can be hindered from doing certain good actions; but he can never be hindered from not doing certain actions, especially if he is prepared to die rather than to do evil."
At some point a company may have to make a decision that results in their death if they want to continue to act morally.
But much, much more often they simply modify their morals slightly and continue on. We humans are great at that.
Aim them at the ad technology firms that set the ground rules for the industry decades ago. The publishers are generally not the ones who let it degrade like this—the ad industry, which set the expectations for advertisers and marketers, did.
Chrome is still faster on some sites, so I still have it installed and pull it out when I have a specific need. For example: Watching long videos in unfocused windows.
While I agree it'd be better if we lived in a world there were 5 separate major browser engines all neck and neck using 5 separate huge sources of funding I also agree the Chromium based browser monoculture doesn't feel or function like the IE monopoly did. If anything I've almost wondered if e.g. Mozilla's resources would be better spent being another Chromium based build that insures development of functionality Google refuses to maintain (like proper blocking APIs) instead of trying to compete 1:1 on every line of code.
Also, Firefox syncs tabs and logins really nicely. Much better experience than I had with Chrome, that one was very unreliable.
Everything listed can be achieved by using uBlock Origin
There is a reason why people abandoned Firefox, Mozilla refused to fix the performance issues, they refused to do something about the toolbar bloat, the browser became a nest for adwares/malwares, a security and privacy nightmare
and later they refused to abandon the Google deal
Google came with chrome and everyone switched, safe, efficient, reliable, and it stayed with the same UX since the beginning, a win for the users
Privacy? they don't share your data with anybody, there are no 3rd party addons or 3rd party links, unlike with Firefox for example (Pocket, Google, Duckduckgo, and various Ads in your home page)
Chrome or Chromium is the way to go if you care about:
- security
- privacy
- battery usage
Concerning their position of power, i don't buy it, Apple and WebKit have a greater impact imo and now that Microsoft is working on Chromium, it no longer is a viable argument