uBlock Origin works best on Firefox
github.com
github.com
What. A. Difference! Firefox is so snappy, and at one point it was using less CPU than iTerm2. Mozilla has received a lot of crapped these past years, as did Firefox, but throughout my life this software has been free and open for me to use. I thank the contributors a lot for it.
If you refresh other browsers, it will be fast again.
This helps with performance for sure.
That said, this year I enabled clearing the browsing history and cache every time I close Firefox, which keeps my address bar clutter free and hyper responsive. Searching trough my bookmarks is instant! It keeps the browser lean and clean.
Update it? Clear cache?
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firefox-trans...
[I'm also hoping that things like this and the Common Voice project might eventually lead to an open / privacy respecting Mozilla voice asistant service. Maybe that's just optimism, who knows?]
1. Containers! This is one of the biggest reasons to stick with Firefox. Along with the multi-account containers extension, you can restrict opening of specific domains to specific containers. Gives a huge privacy boost.
2. uBlock (origin)
3. uMatrix
It doesn't work like containers though, you can't open a new tab in a new profile.
- Add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profile-switc...
- Source: https://github.com/null-dev/firefox-profile-switcher
https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/shortcut-for-different-...
Also there's this bug report:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1542189
Hopefully someone will listen to feedback, this time...
Every new tab is its own separate container. I configured it so Ctrl + clicking a link will open a tab in the same container, should I need this for "traditional browsing" where I want to share a session/cookies.
Security by isolation - by default.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...
PS: There's also a neat one called Proxy Containers to assign separate containers to a different proxy.
what VPN provider can you use with this extension?
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/mozilla-vpn/multi-accou...
which is a rebranded mullvad. mullvad is pretty cool (doesn't require any private info for creating an account or paying, and they recently disabled recurring payments so they don't need to store credit card info, even though this has a financial hit to the company https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2022/6/20/were-removing-the-opti...)
The Multi Account Containers extension has an Advanced proxy settings at the bottom when you go in to Manager Containers. I have a go based socks proxy running on docker somewhere. I enter the details for that there. Syntax is socks://ip:port .
I have two socks implementations installed. I A/B test them sometimes but they seem to be basically equivalent in terms of performance.
https://github.com/net-byte/socks5-server
https://github.com/ocassio/go-socks5-proxy (old but works fine)
Note: If you're using a chromium based browser you can use the excellent SwitchyOmega plugin to do this much easier and with more functionality. No containers of course.
- Proxy SwitchyOmega: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/switchyomega/
- Source: https://github.com/FelisCatus/SwitchyOmega
Another option is the FoxyProxy add-on:
- FoxyProxy Standard: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/foxyproxy-sta...
I am aware of foxyproxy. It works OK. I was using it until the containers gained proxy support.
I've found this good for webdev of course ~
It's not a full replacement for uBO either because it won't attempt to do anything fancy to block ads specifically.
However, uMatrix is no longer maintained. Its GitHub page [0] says the project has been archived. I'm still using it, don't know whether there are any risks in doing so.
You can theoretically do the same thing with uBo, but it’s far more involved and not a thing you want to do all the time.
*$strict3p,~css,~image,~script,domain= \
stackexchange.com| \
stackoverflow.com| \
superuser.com
*$strict3p,css,image,domain=stackexchange.com|stackoverflow.com|superuser.com,denyallow=cdn.sstatic.net
*$strict3p,script,domain=stackexchange.com|stackoverflow.com|superuser.com,denyallow= \
cdn.sstatic.net| \
ajax.googleapis.com> Containers! This is one of the biggest reasons to stick with Firefox.
Too bad you still can't chose what add-ons that should run in a certain container. In that sense it is more limited than profiles in Firefox (or Chrome). Speaking of containers, Temporary Containers[2] is a cool add-on too. Not recommended[3] though...
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...
[3] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/recommended-extensions-...
Re loss of screen space: yes. However the reasoning is that losing some horizontal space is not as bad as loosing vertical space.
I'm using Sideberry (moved from TST) on FF and i think it's good but Edge has great native vertical tabs implementation which doesn't require any "advanced" configuration to make it work.
I fix it with the extension and then installing the extra software, but it really shouldn't be necessary.
Containers are excellent, but not the same. I would like my work Bitwarden separate from my personal Bitwarden.
The "recommended extensions" vetting process is another excellent reason to stick with Firefox.
>Recommended extensions differ from other extensions that are regularly reviewed by Firefox staff in that they are curated extensions that meet the highest standards of security, functionality, and user experience. Firefox staff thoroughly evaluate each extension before it receives Recommended status.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/recommended-extensions-...
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-gr...
Add this:
#TabsToolbar { visibility: collapse !important; }
And I believe this is necessary: about:config toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets => false
Honestly, I'm surprised this hasn't been made more seamless yet but it is what I always do.
Using the same settings, including extensions, is why I use containers.
Creating several containers is something that I can do in under a minute. If I decided to add an extension, it applies to all containers. Creating a single profile takes several minutes. Maintenance is also a concern, since the configuration of those profiles will diverge unless I am conscientious about updating them all at the same time.
Profiles and containers serve different purposes and can be used in parallel. The main problem with Firefox lays in the difficulty in accessing profiles.
I certainly don't have a problem with it being 'done', I just had 'move to nuTensor' on my mental to-do list just for the potential security/API fixes, ensuring it remains available etc.
I am on a laptop so I don't have an extra screen to put video on, but every now and then I will have something playing in the background. It's nice to be able to have a small view of it in the corner while working.
We can't let google win, even if they kind-of have already. It's important to have a choice
One per monitor with different extensions and security setting, which I use for different accounts.
(https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firefox-trans...)
I'm assuming it's gonna merge into Firefox once they're satisfied with it.
Also EU supported its early development, which I think is quite cool: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/825303
Firefox has reall gone down hill in the last few years, unfortunately Mozilla really doubled down on the woke agenda.
The tracking code is usually initialized first, before the rest of the code in the app bundle. So if the network request fails due to ad blocking, the tracking code breaks. And if it isn't caught, the rest of the code doesn't load.
While you may be completely trustworthy, there is simply no way to know; I'll just click through.
||ad.server.com,redirect=noop.js
I do encountered a weird specific performance bug that is when cosmetic filtering is enabled, some heavy sites become very lagging, even affecting typing [1][2]. It also happens with other ad blockers. Unfortunately the author was unable to reproduce it.
[1] https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/1687
[2] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=129245...
Maybe the EU can fork Firefox?
I experience the opposite of you with Chrome struggling with several tabs.
At around 30 tabs, Chrome absolutely throttles my moderately powerful 8 core 16 thread CPU laptop with 24GB RAM, while Firefox has no issues with it. Firefox doesn't even sweat even if I have those tabs open with Spotify and Gmail, one that presumably uses hardware DRM decryption, and the other websockets for email and chat, plus whatever tracking Google wants to do.
Also try switching to av1 codec, if you have a recent video card (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/03/firefox-will-efficie...), but not sure if it will help much if it's not the video lagging.
Brave: 8.46s Firefox: 26.91s
Same machine, an older thinkpad (i5-6300U). I posit that the perf differences may be masked by newer hardware.
I share the experience with Maps, though I never see it these days as the G gets its own ungoogled-chromium sandbox and don't get to play with other domains here anyway.
Sounds like user agent / window.navigator sniffing in order to block the browser.
Classic microsoft. They will never change.
The problem isn't that Firefox is bad. It's that many site are designed specifically for chrome, and they don't bother testing against Firefox. And for the average user, all they really notice is thay some sites don't work in Firefox.
how is that firefox problem if the service is actively hostile towards firefox?
Actually, I noticed voice started working last month. I could see the video but not send mine, but it might in the future.
Please don't force Teams on anybody though, this is unacceptable in 2022 for a company like Microsoft when its alternatives have been working in Firefox for years.
It didn't work at all in Chromium too, because apparently it relied on the Widevine DRM on Chrome (?!). That's nuts. That's bullshit. If you don't have it, it fails with an obscure error message like "Unable to join the conference" without any reason. Good luck guessing why.
If you look on the mozilla bugtracker, there are many people having this same issue
A profile can make a bug with vague or difficult steps to reproduce surprisingly actionable.
So I use it in a tab on Firefox. Much smoother.
Things that come to mind that I use often:
* AWS console
* Google Maps
* Confluence
Hell, even the front page of Hacker News loads a bit faster on Chromium than on Firefox. Sure, the difference is negligible in absolute terms, but still. I get around 5-600 ms for Chromium, and around 8-900 for Firefox. Both running on X11/Linux 5.19-zen on a Ryzen 5650U with 32 GB of RAM.
I haven't used Chrome intensively in a long while, but I seem to me remember at the time (many years ago, on a Mac) it would slow to a crawl after a few days with many open tabs. I don't have any such issue with Firefox on Linux.
AWS Console being completely stateful with its accounts and roles is only usable in Firefox with Containers.
And as for Google Maps I don't see any difference between Chrome and Firefox.
I use Confluence for work, and so have to use Chrome. It's slow and terrible everywhere.
They obviously can. But why would you expect anything good to come out of this? I don't think any government entity is particularly known for writing excellent consumer software, nor would I want my tax dollars to be spend on such a project that is better provided by the private sector.
(Not literally my tax dollars, since I don't live in the EU any longer.)
More realistically, the EU could give some money to Mozilla (or similar) to make Firefox better.
That would get over my first objection of them likely being incompetent by themselves.
The reason for forking rather than throwing money at Mozilla is that Mozilla doesn't seem to be doing a great job of managing themselves. Maybe they need some competition. Also, Mozilla is an American company; the EU would naturally want to give money to an EU company that hires EU citizens to do such high-value, high-paid work, not send that money to the US. Plus, they can get a lot more software talent for their Euro in the EU (esp. eastern EU) than in America.
I skimmed over the issue here: my more precise point is that government entities generally aren't good at building things when they outsource the actual building, either.
(Some people even go so far as claiming that outsourced government projects are worse than in-house ones.)
> The reason for forking rather than throwing money at Mozilla is that Mozilla doesn't seem to be doing a great job of managing themselves.
That might be true. Or perhaps they just have different priorities, and the EU can specifically pay them to do some work on EU priorities?
> Also, Mozilla is an American company; the EU would naturally want to give money to an EU company that hires EU citizens to do such high-value, high-paid work, not send that money to the US.
That's, alas, true from a political point of view. But not from a macroeconomic economic point of view, or just getting bang-for-your-buck.
> Plus, they can get a lot more software talent for their Euro in the EU (esp. eastern EU) than in America.
Mozilla can already hire from anywhere, too, can't they?
In any case, I already mentioned in my comment that the EU can pay someone other than Mozilla. The point I wanted to make is that the EU should not fork Firefox, but rather try to get their favourite contributions upstreamed, if possible.
In any case, I still think it would be a waste of taxpayer money for the EU to pick winners (ie award the project to someone). Instead they should focus on streamlining bureaucracies and regulation etc so that private entities (companies, or foundations or otherwise) that provide what people want (software or otherwise) can flourish in the EU.
Private companies tend to settle into local-maxima, it takes a lot of cash to explore outside those bounds, i.e. apollo, ITER.
Regardless, control of the software and distribution channels that govern the effective online life of about a billion people is power, and if the shoe were on the other foot I'd bet there'd be USGov investment to rebalance it.
To bring up another example: in our timeline, government-funded militaries were an earlier driver of electronic computing.
But IBM was hot on their heels. Similarly Konrad Zuse was starting to build computers in Germany.
If there hadn't been a war to divert so many resources globally from the private sector into the militaries, these business driven efforts would have started the early computer age at about the same time (perhaps earlier even?). At no cost to the taxpayer.
No, not that I'm aware of. Sure, they can hire someone from EU and fly them to the US to work, but I'm not aware of them having offices in the EU. Why would the EU want to pay for EU devs to be flown to the US and paid inflated US salaries, instead of just keeping that talent at home?
>In any case, I already mentioned in my comment that the EU can pay someone other than Mozilla. The point I wanted to make is that the EU should not fork Firefox, but rather try to get their favourite contributions upstreamed, if possible.
That's impossible. Any time you have a different entity working on a software project, it becomes forked. So either you just keep the internal fork and upstream as much as you can, and hope that the parent org takes these submissions, or you release your fork publicly if the parent org isn't cooperative enough. Either way, it's a fork. Quite simply, every time you clone a git repo, it's a fork.
Anyway, sure, they should try to get their contributions upstreamed, but what if Mozilla is recalcitrant? The EU would be correct to release their own version for EU use.
>In any case, I still think it would be a waste of taxpayer money for the EU to pick winners (ie award the project to someone). Instead they should focus on streamlining bureaucracies and regulation etc so that private entities (companies, or foundations or otherwise) that provide what people want (software or otherwise) can flourish in the EU.
So, just let Google own the browser market? I don't see how this is useful or productive. Streamlining regulations isn't going to magically make it economically feasible for some start-up to somehow make money making a web browser.
> The Bergamot Project Consortium is coordinated by the University of Edinburgh with partners Charles University in Prague, the University of Sheffield, University of Tartu, and Mozilla. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 825303.
The plugin basically kills tabs if you are not using them, after you click on them they get restored and forms get refilled. There is also a way to exclude websites, but I have not yet found a site breaks.
I don't really care about all the fight about Chrome vs Firefox, I just want to know if someone will port uBlock to MV3.
And this is why Google has the ability to force things like Manifest V3 down people's throats.
Glad I stopped using Chrome years ago.
Apple has the exact same limitation on Safari yet no one claims "Apple forced Declarative API down people's throat" and actually praise them for the privacy it brings.
I'm perfectly fine with extensions not being able to snoop of every single request I make. It's fine for you to disagree. If anything, it sounds like people here trying to shove their preference of Firefox down everyone's throat.
Most people use chrome and don't care.
I'd actually expect a small performance increase because the browser is preloading the block list, rather than querying it every time.
uBlock does provide some other feature like disabling network pre-fetching, and I'm not sure if those can be fully replicated. But I tend to prefer the performance improvement of pre-fetching anyway.
What's the point in porting uBlock to MV3 if it means neutering it? You already have numerous other ad blockers which don't go all the way and have stuff like "acceptable" ads.
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338#iss...
You can follow the issue tracker for any progress related to MV3 development of uBO but from what I can see, there isn't much interest yet in porting uBO to MV3 because it's not worth it.
This EFF article also goes into details about why MV3 is harmful for adblockers.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/googles-manifest-v3-st...
Whatever MV3 may offer, I for one do not want adblockers to be compromised. If anything, they should be more powerful rather than less. Hypothetically and optimistically speaking, even if a MV3 port of uBO offers 80% of the current functionally, it would still be detrimental for browsing the "modern" web.
Chrome does not block requests reliably at startup when opening saved tabs and doesn't allow CNAME uncloaking. Adding something along the lines of
CNAME 60 puppies analytics.google.com.
Also, what about the new Orion (Beta) browser based on Safari / WebKit? If I remember right, they claimed they had made changes to WebKit to support uBlock Origin better and properly than either Safari or Chrome.
Only other theories I can come up with would be Tor Browser interfering with uBO functioning optimally, or its version of FF not being new enough to work optimally with uBO.
[Why use Android instead of iOS. Answer: NetGuard.]
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio... https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-use-collections-add... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/collections/1731011...
Easy to block this with NetGuard.
The "For Developers" schtick has really become pathetic. I am not a "developer". I am a user who does not care for sending free data to "tech" companies.
Perhaps Mozilla's partners can be sold the idea that Mozilla is only allowing "developers" to potentially have more control over surreptitious data collection, e.g., by using "add-ons", and the assumption by those partnering with Mozilla is that "developers" are all on the side of online advertising. Not quite.
Whatever the reasons for it may be, the entire "developer" vs "user" distinction has become absurd. It assumes (incorrectly) there are no people who know how to build, program and use computers who are not "developers". Not everyone wants to apply their computer know-how to profit from online advertising and associated surveillance.
The last time I looked this was a problem because I currently have over 200,000 active rules.
Does it prevent CNAME shenanigans?
Yes. https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/amp/apples-safari-browser...
Please define 'powerful'. Until pretty recently iOS was unable to block youtube ads. I'm still getting popunder ads even though I use a really comprehensive block list on my iPhone.
Safari blocking capabilities is just a "good enough" that most wont riot but definitely doesn't get even close to uBlock ballpark.
But I mean Brave has PLENTY of skeletons in its closet and is a dark horse that really doesn't seem to have the momentum. Firefox had TONS more momentum and they're still hardly relevant nowadays.
I would bet Brave has the same if not MOVE "momentum" as Firefox. Mozilla's things the old monetization model of the web should stay that way. They think ad blocking is bad, that is why they will never offer it by default. They also think the web should be even more censored than Big Tech wants. Used to be a big FX fan, but:
1. The above. And they were in bed with Google from day 1. 2. Chromium is just faster. 3. I am a web dev, and it feels extremely silly to use a browser engine that nobody uses as a browser.
Not sure when I made my switch to Brave, but it was like 1 or 2 years ago. I was holding strong on Firefox. Their Servo was promising, but then they ran out of money and laid off the staff working on it.
Brave also has their BAT going, that I find utterly stupid if not a straight scam. They advertise "no ads - no tracking" that is true by default. But then they want you to sign up for their stupid token to "get paid to look at ads that TRACK YOU" it's kind of hilarious how they market this shit. They do more or less exactly what Google is doing, except that the advertisers will probably get the real names of people who are this BAT BS. But the funny thing is they do not care, they get behavioral data of all kinds of browsing habits and that is EXACTLY what they want. Brave sells it as this great "privacy" thing, yet you have to give them your data for the payouts, so they know exactly who you are I am pretty sure. Not done it, will never do it but with all the Crypto regulation and KYC and so on they're just building a tiny "competitor" to Google that more or less does the same thing, maybe a little bit more privacy-friendly. I detest this idea. But a small community of people is all over this crap. Anyway, I stop my rant. Just deactivate the symbol for display on the address bar, thankfully they have a setting for that. Without BAT Brave is a great Browser.
Five years after Firefox officially released, it was used by a third of the internet. People had a religious fervour around Firefox, Microsoft was the great satan for unleashing IE6 upon the planet, it was a great evil for sites to not support Firefox or god forbid actively block Firefox user agents.
For about two straight years Firefox after release absolutely slaughtered IE in almost every way (extensions, tabs, customization, performance, web standards), it was still clearly the best browser for the next two years, and Chrome had to create a bleeding-edge world-class browser and promote it with a gigantic large scale global ad campaign before Firefox started to falter.
By contrast, brave was released 6 years ago I've never seen a non-tech person use Brave in my life. It's biggest technical advantage seems to be a souped up adblocker. It really doesn't compare to Firefox's momentum.
I usually go between 6-10 sites and use tabs mostly as a "read later". Sometime last year I started getting a lot of open tabs, and closing them one by one (to keep my read later tabs) is pretty darn annoying. I switched away from FF for that.