Pulse Browser – An experimental Firefox fork

I'm glad to see someone still has the courage to work on browsers - which is increasingly declared "infeasible". Well done.

> We have been moving further away from privacy and towards

But sorry, I literally stopped reading at that point.

The only feature that people want and need from browsers, and the only reason to even glance twice at yet another Firefox fork is enhanced privacy and cast-iron control over what a browser is doing.

There is enormous scope here to add value - adding client web application firewalls, different, customisable jailing schemes, detailed easy to understand monitoring, file monitors, inviolable fine-grained per-io-device permissions, better Tor and IPFS integration.

How about starting with a browser that can remember your privacy settings, instead of silently "updating" and defaulting back to the worst possible settings as Firefox does? Having the latest (probably broken and more privacy invasive) presentation features would be very low on my list.

Pressing F11 in Firefox is even more minimalistic

> We have been moving further away from privacy [...]

I appreciate your honesty, but hearing this was enough for me to file your project into the "not touching with a ten-foot pole" bucket alongside the likes of Wave Browser.

Currently the 3rd most requested feature on Mozilla Connect is native vertical tabs: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/native-vertical-tabs-li...

Any chance we could see something like this in Pulse Browser or is that something that just requires touching too much of the underlying code base to be viable? ^^

> Sorry about Vercel's insight stuff, not sure how that got enabled,

How do you "accidentally" enable such user-hostile tracking? This gives quite a bad image of the site and the associated project. Will you "accidentally" enable telemetry as well on some future versions of Pulse?

kudos, we do need new browsers. Appreciate you guys putting efforts. Hope you guys succeed in your endeavor.

I appreciate your initiative on creating a fork of Firefox and trying to innovate on it. The following criticism of the project is well intentioned, even if harsh:

> We have been moving further away from privacy and towards developing/iterating on features faster

That is fine but what have you done on the Privacy aspect? I tried out your alpha and immediately on startup it tries to connect to location.services.mozilla.com . So I disabled geolocation, and it still insists on connecting to Mozilla. So I check settings to see if there is an option to disable checking for updates, but there is no such option. If you want me to create config or policy files, I don't see how your browser is making things any easier than Firefox. And hence my question - what privacy features have you actually incorporated or enabled in Pulse Browser?

(Note: I am not questioning your rationale of the default settings, which is necessary for the average user, but the lack of ease for power users to customise any feature. Please look into how Pale Moon / White Star and Orion browsers ensure that disabling phoning home features in settings actually means that the browser will not make any automatic network connections on startups - they are the only 2 browsers that do this, and thus show that they genuinely respect their users.)

Otherwise, your whole project is just a browser extension bundled with the browser. Nevertheless, a good effort. You might find this resource useful for your project - https://sammacbeth.eu/blog/2020/12/27/firefox-fork.html

Haha, I don't necessarily disagree with you on this..

My only view on this is it would be nice to have a general chrome compatibility switch. I've not accounted for the feasibility of this from a technical or commercial perspective, so I can't advocate for it beyond a nice to have feature.

It's even worse than that. You could build a site "just for chrome", only test on Chrome and still it should just work with Firefox. The sites blocking Firefox are doing so explicitly, because the site would work otherwise.

Just go to about:compat in Firefox and you can see them. Most of them are simple UA locks but some require more advanced logic.

I've learnt to sorta live it and workaround it but one egregious example was a passport renewal site for a (non US) country whose image uploading function failed silently on image upload.

Repeated the process multiple times for an hour until it occurred to me to just try a chrome-based browser. Worked fine after that.

I've run into quite a few crypto-related sites that break in weird ways when interacting with wallets / etc. The relative frequency of these issues on crypto sites are really the most disappointing - so much for decentralisation, anti-monopoly, etc, etc

Not keen to name and shame in this thread but my primary worry is that it will drive away more people from Firefox.

So what is your preferred browser?

'Incompatible' is one way to put it. Privacy and security is set to the most restrictive by defaults Firefox offers (more in line with Tor) and users are supposed to opt into every feature that may compromise those ideals. Honestly it's helped me in some cases: spoofing its user agent, I can actually use Slack in a tab and if I disable it Slack will report I'm using an unsupported browser and block access to the chat.

Many of these aren't trying to advertise as particularly private with uBlock built-in as a feature.

Pray tell why Javascript should be involved in the deletion of history entries from a SQLite database in an app distributed as a binary that is largely written in Rust.

I know the answer, because it's UI update code. I don't fucking care about the fancy UI updates, delete the entries and get out of my way. Javascript in most websites is obnoxious enough, in a browser it had better be good or it's beyond obnoxious, much like your reply.

Like bookmarks, history is an underrated and under-served feature.

"who removes history entries by selecting thousands of them manually? Okay, this guy, but who else?" Me too. When I read the first guy's comment I was like "Goddam it's not just me"

I use the example as the opposite of a canary in a coalmine, a good omen, some way to divine good attitude and thus, good things to come. If I wanted to point to areas where Mozilla have clearly wasted effort that would be easy enough, the comments and submissions to HN are littered with them. The point is that there are basic functions in the browser that are ignored while these other - shall we call them debacles, because that's what they tend to end up as - are released and pilloried or ignored.

Hence, to see something like this be fixed would be a sign that developer time is going into the core product. It could be anything else more fundamental than whatever I've seen announced by Mozilla lately.

> I mean, who removes history entries by selecting thousands of them manually? Okay, this guy, but who else?

I’ve often done it to clear out useless repetitive history entries that are just clogging up results when typing in the address/search bar. Ideally it would simply not make entries for some kinds of redirects and I could define rules of URLs to exclude, but in the absence of that I might just go through once or twice a year and delete a few of the biggest repetitive patterns. And how slow it’s been for the last decade has been rather frustrating at times. I just tried deleting a couple of thousand (I use Nightly, where a fix apparently landed last week) and it took half a second, which is much more relaxing than the ten or twenty seconds of full-blocking CPU thrashing that it used to be.

I do understand what you mean, and in general I agree, but in this specific example making it faster doesn't require "optimizing" anything! If I am understanding correctly the "naive" algorithm here is the fast one, so it takes more effort to make it slow than it does to make it fast.

I don't really mind it, you can do whatever you want. I just have a problem with the choice of the word fork in this context, but I guess technically you're not wrong per se. Although it's more a fork of that dot browser build than of firefox itself, is that correct?

How automatic are updates? Will it warn me when I am out of date and can update itself (e.g. clicking a button, not going back to the home page and needing to DL and install each version)?

Yeah, as a developer it sucks that most users don't get the best perf we offer because they happened to use to the slower one.

I don't want too. But I think in shoes of others. Clearly we want them to not want to too but the market share speaks itself.

Ah-ha, ok, makes sense. Thanks!

Yeah, makes sense. Thanks!

Thanks for confirming! And yep, makes sense as a url sharing mechanism. Cheers, and good luck with this browser; the more diversity in the browser world, the better!

nope. all chromium derivates have an option to switch ti firefox but they dont

`firefox -P` with a better UI?