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Comment by politelemon | Hacker News Reader

Firefox on Android has been a game changer, because being able to use UBO with a browser is a necessity now, so I appreciate that work.

Overall this highlight set looks quite good, the introduction of several security feature reduces the need (but doesn't completely eliminate the need) for their Multi-Account Containers extension, which is also an important tool.

I notice no mention of their bizarre 'colorways' experiments which just validates to me that it is a waste of time and importantly their limited resources.

Keep up the good work, Mozilla! (Except colorways)

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> Except colorways

It's not even so much that that was bad—except in the way all FF updates are a little bit bad, since they like to hit you with useless pop-ups or spammy extra tabs that auto-focus next time you open the browser—as that it was weird.

Making a huge deal out of adding themes—a feature FF had years and years ago, except that they were much better then—was so strange. They acted like it was some kind of big deal and I was over here like... wait, did you guys cut that feature at some point? It was like Microsoft making an announcement about adding a Start button, and all the copy reading like they didn't even realize that was something they'd already done.

The time-limited aspect was also odd (and, in that case, a little bad, in that I think many found it off-putting).

Firefox still has themes: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/themes/

Huh. Makes it even stranger, then.

Did we lose the ability to change buttons sizes and icons and padding and placement and such when they started cutting out XUL some years back? All those themes just look like background images, and it seems the demo images they use for them don't even display real buttons or other UI elements (which makes sense if you can't change them anyway, and don't want to have to regenerate those images every time FF modifies those).

You can still style every aspect of the UI by editing a userChrome.css in your profile folder, and enabling some setting.

This is hidden and undocumented because Mozilla now have a terrible attitude towards users.

Ah, cool. I do miss the days of using easy-to-install themes to stick with older UI if I didn't like the direction the UI was going (Firebird 0.7 FTW—though the Firefox 1.5 UI was pretty good too) but it's nice the functionality's still kinda there, if not the ease of use.

[EDIT] I'm not up on this stuff in FF because it's my minutes-a-week secondary (read: for non-Apple operating systems) browser, and hasn't been my hours-a-week primary browser for nearly a decade, so I don't bother to customize it much anymore, but it is nice knowing some stuff I used to like about it is still there in case I ever go back to using it as my primary.

I use this feature, but I don't mind that it's hidden because there are no stability guarantees for such themes, new versions of Firefox can and do break them.

I don't think “colorways” is a particularly demanding experiment as far as Firefox is concerned. Firefox has a built-in theming system, they just created a few more built-in themes that are only available for a limited time. I could probably have created “colorways” in <1 week despite not knowing anything about browser themes/extensions.

I agree with you across all your points: positive, critical and kudos. Having to occasionally use a browser without ad blocking (or container isolation) is unbearable. The original internet has largely died but Mozilla has made it's passing slightly less terrible.

What is UBO?

uBlock Origin.

Ads on mobile are generally a big impact to user experience (small screen, data limits) so blocking them is a killer feature for Firefox android.

Ublock origin, an adblocker

uBlock origin, the adblocker

Brave also blocks ads, and by default.

Because Brave's business model is to replace the website's advertisements with their own, and give you monopoly money crypto tokens.

Just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Not even close.

Brave ads are optional, and way way more subtle than normal ads, they don't even appear in the website itself, it just a small notification!

And most importantly, you get paid!

Paid? Or given a crypto asset of questionable utility?

If you exchange the crypto asset to fiat right away you don't care about the utility of the crypto itself.

How much does it cost to make that transaction, and how difficult is it compared to buying something with a credit card at walmart.com?

I believe Brave's crypto features are opt-in; if you don't want to use them because it's too much of a hassle to actually use that crypto or convert it to fiat you don't have to, you can still enjoy its built-in adblocking.

Not only that it uses better sandboxing and security features especially on Android systems. Brave also protects you better against fingerprinting than FF+UBO. Firefox for Android is not nearly as secure as Chrome and Brave on Android.

Source:

https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

https://grapheneos.org/usage

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