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Comment by rraghur | Hacker News Reader

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rraghur

You'll have to pry Firefox from my cold, dead hands!

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

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uBlock Origin does exist on chrome btw https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpa...

But with Manifest v2 will be crippled.

As the other poster said, I meant Manifest v3 (can't edit anymore).

To answer the poster's curiosity, I messed it up by pressing the neighbouring key by accident and not checking sufficiently. :-P

As far as I know Chrome has its own tracking which can't be blocked.

Is this not why people use Chromium?

It's not feature complete.

What features are incomplete?

Manifest V3 (The browser plugin API) severely hampers uBlock Origin's abilities to block as many things as it can.

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.

It cannot do CNAME uncloaking because Chrome's extension API do not provide dns resolving like on Firefox. Another example if HTML filtering where on Firefox an extension can rewrite the HTML from requests on the fly (e.g. to remove script tags, etc.). That's also not possible on Chrome and uBlock Origin will only make use of this on Firefox. There are probably more limitations, these are just two from the top of my head.

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...

Also it's just going to be totally crippled once manifest v3 extensions are mandatory

I am confused about the "I don't have any other choice" comment. I assume you mean because Firefox doesn't support whatever teams uses for meeting audio/video, or maybe it's the install feature you mentioned, but I use Firefox for both and use my phone for meetings.

There are times when I've noticed Teams to fail if I try to open it from one of my Container tabs. It complains about supported browser and stuff. But it opens perfectly on the default tab always.

basically that workplace uses teams & office

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.

Have you tried clearing cookies & session store ?

Which container extension are you using for domain grouping? I've been looking for a good one

https://gitlab.com/NamingThingsIsHard/firefox/bifulushi

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.

Perhaps someone can build a container system around chrome (or in fact any application). Ideally, an OS should be able to do something like this.

The way Firefox style containers work they need to be "built into" not "built around". It's not as much about creating a profile and running it separately (that's just standard profiles in Chrome/Firefox, or normal OS level sandboxing) as it is auto-launching webpage requests into that profile based on matches and integrating the profiles into the app UI so the tabs stand out, can co-exist in the same window, and can be managed via built in tab creation UI.

Chromium hasn't been interested in this feature but nothing would stop someone from making a Chromium derivative that does this.

On linux, just create a separate login and use Chrome there. In fact, what I do is create a separate user, start Chrome once, do any configuration I want and then create a tarball of the separate user's home directory. Then to start a fresh it's just a wipe of the whole directory and unpack the tarball again.

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.

On Linux you could do the same with mount namespace without making a separate user etc.

Or you can just use Firefox.

I used to do this on Firefox, it's where I learnt the trick (before some sites made it necessary to use Chrome, and before Firefox had containers).

This loses substantial affordances Firefox containers give you (eg, right click->open in container, always open domain in container, access to bookmarks etc)

Why not use the native user profile function? E.g. set up a “user profile” dedicated to access only Meta/Facebook properties (and therefore only be able to track you within that container)

"4. Developer console... Edit and resend any request" - there have been extensions for that in Chrome for a long time, though I don't know if they integrate with the developer tools/network tab itself. Agree it would be handy - I use the "replay" command in Chrome DevTools quite a bit, and if I need to modify it usually end up importing it into Postman (via the copy as cURL command, which I believe Firefox also supports).

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