Firefox Keeps Getting Faster
blog.mozilla.org
blog.mozilla.org
> Firefox hangs after using it for a long time
> Firefox may hang if left open for long periods of time. To fix the issue, restart Firefox.
So I can choose between closing all of my open tabs at the end of each workday or randomly losing them during the workday. Since having my tabs open when I start work helps me jump back in, I've settled on randomly losing my tabs.
They also suggest using their session restore feature after a hang, but with this type of crash, Firefox is never able to restore your tabs. It also doesn't record the crash report in about:crashes. Overall, not great and it has me thinking of trying Brave.
1. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-hangs-or-not-re...
You can use “Open previous Windows and tabs” to keep your tabs between restarts. It only works on the last window you have closed though.
Unless I say so, a normal web page shouldn't eat gigs of RAM or tons of CPU.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/task-manager-tabs-or-ex...
Alt+F, Q exits all windows at once and also restores them the next time you launch firefox.
It's strange that it wouldn't report this as a crash. They're normally pretty good at telemetry (sometimes to a fault..)
This doesn't save the page state, so if you were filling in a form, you'll lose that information, but it does mean that wherever you reopen Firefox, you end up pretty much exactly where you were when you closed it.
I guess you'd still need to regularly close and reopen the browser as a whole (I do that at end of the day anyway when I turn my machine off), but it may be more convenient than losing state.
Having to wait half a minute on every tab switch to wait for that gigantic mess of enterprise grade websites served from an ancient box on the other side of the solar system to load is not conductive towards concentrated work.
When I lose firefox (usually when power outage) I just cycle through all the tabs with ctrl+tab, by the time I get back to the first one it has reloaded (and the others do so in the background). It's not a big deal.
I lived through the days where force closing Firefox was the only way to preserve sessions. Things honestly aren't that much better. I'd take a zero percent chance of success over 80. At least then failure is known and predictable instead of just reliable enough to get you to trust it.
Opening a second window with CMD+N (mac user just like the sibling) often brings up some random page from my history. This has been so annoying that I disabled the restore feature. Since then I think it hasn't happened again.
(I now use Sidebery.)
Currently, the problem might be gone, I will try that out. Thanks for your answer!
Edit: I also don't have these stability issues, but I did have issues with my suspend mode on that laptop, no matter the os (win/ubuntu)
General
Startup
[X] Open previous windows and tabs
In my case I like to be able startup the browser without opening all the prior tabs, but then be able to selectively reopen the prior tabs by window or by individual tab. That's what session managers do.
> They also suggest using their session restore feature after a hang, but with this type of crash, Firefox is never able to restore your tabs. It also doesn't record the crash report in about:crashes
Also the setting you suggested doesn't work if you have multiple windows that close. It only saves one window session.
?? It does? I have like 20 windows on the go with multiple tabs each and it brings them all back.
There's people in this thread repeating claims that are literally not true.
I know it's just paper over the real problem, but couldn't you restart at the end of the day rather than at the beginning?
It only ever lasts 3-4 weeks because Windows has to reboot for patches at least once a month.
I feel like I'm from another planet when I've been raised with the concept of "a reboot a day keeps the blue screen away".
I always shut it down on Friday evenings though.
Plus, there's a delay of up to 2 minutes at launch, when Firefox reads something from disk for minutes, with minimal compute.
Bug reports on this result in denial.
It was quite visible in top or about:memory or about:processes
So maybe there's a real issue but us linux users simply aren't noticing it..
Another thought. Perhaps it is the sqlite db? Maybe a large one that somehow isn't getting vacuumed on shutdown?
Maybe try testing in a clean profile...
Edding for something more neutral: https://github.com/graysky2/profile-sync-daemon
I leave multiple tabs open for weeks+ on Windows (and android), I have never experienced any issue (except when windows decides to update - but firefox always restores itself without issue, or I can press ctrl+shift+t to reopen previous tab/session). There must be something specific to the other commenter's setup, whether it be specific addons or specific pages that are causing the crash.
Maybe you should check it for suspicious DLLs using Process Exporer or outright attach a debugger and see what the UI thread is blocked on when it stops responding.
You probably one of those people who confuse tabs with bookmarks and think you should have 500 tabs open with only 4 gigs ram and having not shutting your PC or Browser down for weeks. It that causes issues I think Mozilla should have that on low priority.
I use Brave on Linux mainly because I cant justify testing my webdev stuff not con Chromium and I tend to use the same Browser for everything, its also faster.
Mozilla like so brag about speed but I think the lost objectively measured to Blink a looooong time ago. Servo was given to the Linux Foundation and is far from ready. When its ready it will probably be pretty fast.
Firefox has a sessionrestore.js and also a sessionrestore.bak. ( And also sesstionrestore.bak2 if I remember correctly )[1] It is the only browser that took session restore seriously because around ~16 years ago an idiot constantly went on Mozillazine and Bugzilla to file crash report of lost sessions that could have thousands of tabs.
If your sesstionrestore crashed or get wiped, i.e you restart your browser and those tabs were not there, you could also copy and past the .bak files and rename it as .js. It wont be everything you had since the bak file may have been a few hours old. But at least you got something back.
As to crashing. In the old days it was some tabs in the background doing JS with memory leakage. But if I remember correctly Firefox now pause Tabs that is unused for long period of time. If it isn't background Tabs that is causing problem. I would suggest similar to what I wrote to Animats, make a new Firefox profile and migrate all your History, Cookies etc to the new profile and see if it improve things. This used to be a manual process but I believe recent Firefox has made this easier with Firefox Retune or Refresh ( Sorry all of this are on top of my head you will have to do some Google search for the actual name)
If I were to rate Browser stability, it would be Firefox > Chrome > Safari. On both MacOS and Windows. The same ranking for session restore function where I have lost multiple sessions on Safari over the years. And in case anyone wondering why Safari is not stable and that may not be their experience, it is that something on MacOS ( the OS itself ) sometimes triggers Safari to reload all the Tabs even if they were originally sitting idle. This create huge I/O spike and generally leads to crashing or halt for a long period of time. Other than that it is pretty much on par with others.
[1] Those file and extensions names were something on top of my head so you have to google it to double check
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/introducing-firefox-quan...
See ARC browser. It's developed by a minuscule team but what they do is turn the experience of browsing the web into pure smooth pleasure. They will never in a million years gather enough talent to outcompete the V8 engine, but what they can do is develop better user workflows to empower them.
Firefox could be such a workhorse of a browser. They could add so many features to make the lives of academics, researchers, journalists and professionals in general better. Who cares if it's a bit slower than Chrome if it allows to efficently write my article or keep together the sources for my thesis?
I don’t have a need to efficiently write an article in a browser - or code within a browser which is more my thing. I have a dedicated IDE for that, and leave browsing to browsing.
Browsers imo should just be browsers and leave the end user applications to the web app developers, plugin developers, etc. So in that sense I’m happy with where they are, and very happy they are doing their own stuff rather than being another Chrome-based browser.
Also I didn't say I should write in the browser, I said the browser should let me collect information from the internet in such a way to make my job easier
Hiding it in usercss isn’t supported and is liable to disappear at any point (say, the developers decide they’re tired of maintaining some part of the code that makes the custom usercss flag work). It serves the purpose for now, but cannot be relied upon in the long term and as such is a hack.
Unless there's something I'm missing re: Mozilla's history/market-positioning?
Aside from that I just think it’s a good idea to push for implementation of basic functionality like hiding bars that don’t pair nicely with popular vertical tab extensions. I shouldn’t need to resort to usercss mods to do something that simple.
Firefox have also the "Browser Toolbox"[2], homologous to the web development tools, that one can use for to explore the css of the UI, select elements, etc, and modify them for to see how would look the modifications before to put them within the userChrome.css
The tabs I think that are under the id=TabsToolbar, so an #TabsToolbar{ display: none !important; } or similar should work, in addition to correct with other css params the space that it leaves.
Note: What happens is they change things from time to time, and after an update one have to correct the css again, I warn.
[1] https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomCSSforFx
[2] https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/devtools-user/browse...
The problem here, though, is that the core browser becomes the lowest common denominator. When I set up a computer, I don't want to have to spend all day getting my browser into a usable state. I don't want to have to recommend Firefox with the asterisk that you need half a dozen plugins to make it good. I don't want to wake up and find that the tab management plugin I like has been bought out by a sketchy company that's now using my browser as a proxy server for scrapers.
And having a browser that's not minimalist is known to work. We have tabs today, for instance, because of the fine folks at Opera pushing the boundaries of what the browser can be. Not every browser needs every feature, but some things are just good quality of life improvements that plugins should be able to disable (versus requiring plugins to add all nonessential features).
You want a browser that can preload plugins on install with a config.
It's also funny how you bring up innovation. The thing is plugins enable much more innovation because a plugin can be made by a single person with a great idea and relatively little knowledge. Just imagine everyone who wanted to try out some innovative new feature would have to build their own browser first.
I usually go to the url box to copy the url. one day, it suggested me to use a keyboard shortcut instead based on how often I did it. Little things like this that are built-in to the experience without having to install plugins and make sure they work together is a breath of fresh air.
They don't want to settle for a niche for academics, their mission is to be a popular mainstream browser (even if they're failing at that ATM).
Performance has always been a metric that drove people to/away from browsers (at least for those of us who know what browsers are, know that alternatives exist, and are willing to try them). Add-ons can provide whatever weird workflow empowering gimmicks people want to set up for themselves rather than being limited to what the browser itself provides. Every OS I've used a browser on provides things like note/screenshot taking, and not everyone wants vertical tabs, ARC doesn't give you any choice. It's ARC's way or nothing. Firefox is still the browser that gives people the most control over how they work. Firefox truly empowers users.
And as for customisation, that’s actually been eroded over the past 3-5 years in FF compared to, say, 10 or 15 years ago. For example, I can remember a time when the interface itself had the option (a checkbox) that miniaturised the icons of the entire search bar UI - this has been gone for years and there is now no way to change that without installing an entire theme. Now every user is stuck with the same general interface/UI spacing.
I’ve used FF since maybe 2008 and in my experience it’s never been worse than it is now in terms of performance, its interface customisability, and its benefits vs its largest competitor. If I end up using it as my primary browser it will be because of Google’s insanity with adblockers, not because FF itself is a good alternative (indeed it’s just that FF is the ONLY alternative).
Privacy with Firefox out of the box isn't that much better than Chrome’s either, but what sets Firefox apart is that it can be very effectively hardened. At work I deal with all kinds of compromised and malicious websites and nothing beats Firefox once you've got it locked down.
> I’ve used FF since maybe 2008 and in my experience it’s never been worse than it is now in terms of performance, its interface customisability, and its benefits vs its largest competitor.
It's gotten more difficult to customize firefox over the years for sure, but what competitor offers better interface customizability? What can you customize in Chrome that you can't in firefox? What's chrome's equivalent to userChrome.css? Check out https://old.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/ for examples of what you can accomplish.
The idea is to reduce attack surface as much as possible, and disable features like searching/calculating from the address bar, service workers, wasm, prefetch, webgl, redirects, the PDF reader (no files ever just auto-download or open in anything by default), Firefox View, webrtc, network prediction, the social API, reader mode, there's some stuff about certificates, TLS and SSL etc.
There's also a section for preventing fingerprinting, disabling telemetry/reporting/safebrowsing, all the stuff here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-stop-firefox-making... and to keep changes from being made so no auto-updates, and experiments/normandy/shield studies are disabled.
There are a bunch of guides to harden firefox online, and ours seems to be some combination of several of them. The Tor browser guys do some great work keeping an eye on some of the changes that get made.
In the end basically no active content of any kind is allowed by default. Some sites don't work at all with this stuff turned off or removed and it's a bit too locked down for day to day use but I'm surprised and how often things work well enough to get what you need at least. For example, an article might load just fine, but site navigation will be broken which isn't really an issue if you just wanted to read the article.
Most of the sites that will get you infected just by visiting them require JS, so disabling that alone helps a ton. For something you know is really evil it's often best to just download and analyze the site offline, but for poking around even in highly questionable places it's pretty nice.
I'd rather stick with Safari or Firefox.
[1]: https://caniuse.com/webusb
Clearly we’re talking about browser exploits in this particular line of comments, not privacy, and with exploits so defined Chrome is far superior to FF.
Most people here who use a Chrome based browser would almost certainly use a Chromium derivative anyway, like Brave.
You could've re-read the thread before posting such an obviously false comment.
Here's the first mention of privacy and security in this thread:
> I think firefox focusing on performance, customization, and security/privacy is smart.
I also heavily disagree with your view that spyware has nothing to do with security, and your extremely narrow view of what counts as security exploits. The Chromium specific APIs are riddled with security issues as I mentioned in my other reply.
Security and privacy are not the same thing, nor are they directly related. Lack of privacy can literally be designed into a secure system, which is one way of describing how Chrome works. It doesn't really matter how you choose to esoterically define the words if everybody else's meaning is different.
When people talk about Chrome being secure, they're talking about the browser's resistance to being compromised by a third party. It's that simple. Nobody cares that you have some esoteric view whereby Google's inherent lack of privacy protections, wherein Google is able to collect information about the user through their browsing habits, is also part of the browser. That is a matter of privacy, not security, and Google very clearly sets out all the ways it collects information about the user in its various policies. Security relates to whether third parties - using the browser architecture itself as a conduit - are able to compromise the browser in such a way as to obtain or manipulate user information, data, or elements of how the user interacts with the system, in a way that is not approved by the user and about which he is likely unaware. Every user of Chrome agrees to Google's collection and use of certain data, and ergo such data collection does not involve security issues whatsoever. That you might disagree with Google's privacy policies is not to the point. Note that if the aggregated user data were to be surreptitiously accessed by a third party, this WOULD be a security issue - but that isn't what we're talking about, is it?
If talking about security, Chromium has been the most secure browser for at least a decade. Safari and Firefox are significantly worse at security than Chromium browsers are. That's not really debatable - just go look at results of the various hacking contests, look at the number of active exploits and how long they are in the wild and unpatched, etc.
On privacy, Firefox is undoubtedly better, although Mozilla has had snafus over the years. Mozilla also literally makes something like 99% of its revenues through agreements it has with Google search, so go figure.
One final note - as has been the case for at least 15 years now, Firefox with uBlock Origin and NoScript and a few other addons are probably the most secure you can get, albeit at significant cost to usability and convenience. When discussing security I think it's inherent that people are discussing the vanilla, out of the box install of a browser. Having said that, I currently use Brave and find it to be the best mix of features of Chrome without the rest of the Google privacy problems; despite being a very long time Firefox user, it just isn't good enough these days, although if Google succeeds in killing adblockers in Chrome I'll have to move to Firefox regardless.
Good day.
> Note that if the aggregated user data were to be surreptitiously accessed by a third party, this WOULD be a security issue - but that isn't what we're talking about, is it?
But we are talking about third parties gaining access? The mentioned Web APIs are intended for use by third parties. It's not even aggregated user data, but individual ones.
WebUSB made it possible to work around Yubikey phishing protection [1]. WebMIDI allows websites to overwrite device firmware, which is a dangerous capability that could result in a sandbox escape [2]. Granting a website WebNFC permissions makes it possible to read TOTP tokens stored on Yubikeys at any point later on [3], which is worrying because ordinary users can't possibly deduce that from permission prompts. Battery Status API was heavily abused for fingerprinting by the time it was removed from Firefox [4]. I'm amazed that you dismissed that as a "hypothetical" concern, because if anything, it's the legitimate uses of the API that was hypothetical [5]. Uber used it to "inflate Uber prices for desperate users with low batteries." [5] [6].
But one don't even need theses examples to see how bad theses APIs are. Hardware are mostly designed to work with local applications. To expose them to websites is a fundamentally flawed idea. Google justifies them by adding permission prompts each time a problem emerges, but users can't possibly be expected to be fully aware of the consequences of allowing raw hardware access to websites with mere dialogs that they blindly click through.
And oh I wish there were only 3 bad APIs like you hinted. There are more than that. WebMIDI, WebNFC, WebSerial, WebHID, Generic Sensor API, File System Access, Low-level Sockets API, Network Information API, and the list goes on.
These aren't isolated examples. It's part of a broader pattern where Google ships an anti-feature, asks for "feedback" which means nothing because "devs already depend on it," and "standardizes" it despite opposition from the remaining browser vendors [7] [8].
I’ll judge browser security based on a broad set of examples rather than a cherry-picked one every time.
[1]: https://www.wired.com/story/chrome-yubikey-phishing-webusb/
[2]: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/58
[3]: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/238
[4]: https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/publications/battery-s...
[5]: https://groups.google.com/g/mozilla.dev.platform/c/5U8NHoUY-...
[6]: http://www.forbes.com/sites/amitchowdhry/2016/05/25/uber-low...
[7]: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/459
[8]: https://twitter.com/rich_harris/status/1220412711768666114
At this point I can only assume that your conflating of security and privacy is pathological, and I very much doubt that we can have a fruitful discussion about this.
example.com wants to
Control and reprogram your MIDI devices (SysEx)
[Block] [Allow]
I am so glad both Apple and Mozilla doesn't subscribe to you or Google's definition of "security." These gaping security holes can cause so much damage, and to see these as "features working as intended" shows how disconnected you are with actual users. Even the infamous ActiveX would not have security issues if we redefined security under your terms. A browser should never ever include capabilities for full system compromise as one of its features. No permission prompt should ever let that happen.
You also need to consider the inherent danger of exposing hardware to websites when considering whether permission prompts are adequate. Again, hardware aren't designed with the expectation that they'll be exposed to websites. Browser vendors can't possibly be aware of the security implications of doing so for every device out there either. That was one of the core arguments of my previous reply and I wish you hadn't omitted that. Unfortunately, my point about the permission prompt was taken out of context and spun into a "pathological" view that "everybody in the world besides myself" would laugh at.
Lastly, you might want to actually look at the examples I posted. Some of them don't or didn't involve permission prompts and enabled attack by third parties. Which I believe to be a security issue even under your terms.
When I try to navigate somewhere else, it hangs, looks like it's loading, but gets... stuck?
However, always works with new tab.
Also on Pixel 4a. It's not that old, jesus.
Tracker: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/home
For now, I’m sticking to Safari, which is fine as well, and (not surprisingly) works like every app should word on macOS
Also, once you use Safari tab groups + tab preview its hard to go back to FF.
The extra bar from the mouse-over is kind of silly but, a TERRIBLE EXPERIENCE?
Yes, it should be fixed though.
That's true of iOS, not of macOS.
For whatever reason Firefox likes to make everything a little bolder and more spaced out, and on top of that doesn't seem to support the most widely used anti-aliasing CSS properties.
I resorted to injecting -moz-osx-font-smoothing in userContent.css on websites I visit frequently that look particularly bad.
* The TreeStyleTab extension (I think was the name) is pretty bad. For example, it doesn’t restore the tab hierarchy on restart.
You want your software to be really snappy, we all agree on that. But past some point, it's physically impossible for a human to tell the difference. I believe a human can't detect if a tab takes 10ms or 1ms to open.
Firefox has been past the point where "fast" matters for a very long time (and that's a great thing!)
I'll make sure FF telemetry is enabled for me. I typically disable them because I don't trust vendors to not include something I consider sensitive.
Add to that the non-macOS text handling, macOS-unlike font rendering, its insistence to not use the system-wide spell checker provided by the OS etc. It feels a bit rude at times.
I think it's a super-solid browser that unfortunately doesn't give a shit about the platform it's running on. Irritatingly, it's fine with being a black box, so much more than the Chromiums are (for all their various faults).
That or a browser is a billion dollar project nowadays and Mozilla doesn't have the resources to compete?
I run into site quirks on Firefox from billion dollar companies and government sites at least weekly.
Most sites work as expected. And I had more update issues with Firefox than chrome (chrome was never outdated, firefox sometimes was versions behind until I manually opened the about dialog)
A technically superior, or safer, or more private, or whatever the current line of argumentation and marketing is, does not matter. Mozilla VPN does not matter.
Now, I just want native vertical tabs.
It's annoying that Edge and Brave and Vivaldi does it better.
AND an F2 style command line like Vivaldi, PLEASE!!
Copy this https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/shortcuts/quick-commands/
Also I don’t have specifics but get the sense the security sandboxing is not in the same league as chrome.
Thats one thing I like about Brave, the bookmarks are auto synced somewhere
467 on chrome vs 372 on firefox
EDIT: I rely highly on the Restore Previous Session feature. That might be why.
Anyway, the intent of my original comment was just to say that they should do some more investigating on their issue because it's not as simple as Firefox in a Snap package on any Ubuntu installation.
If you want to report this issue I suggest first trying a fresh install of another OS on the same device just to ensure it's not hw. And of course the standard troubleshooting is to start Firefox in troubleshooting mode, that runs it without any plugins enabled.
I never had time to investigate this but this was obviously a system problem, Firefox and Thunderbird are fast on all the other machines I use.
o_O
If you can install a Flatpak or .deb package of Firefox, you should regain that performance. Found a post recommending a "Mozilla Team" PPA at https://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2022/04/install-firefox..., but I last used Ubuntu 15 years ago, so I can't speak to the specific recommendations therein.
Try creating a new blank profile in Firefox.
i also highly rely on restoring the previous session but it never took 4 mins to load
(I boot from SSD but have spinning rust for /home - so I can hear when Firefox is hammering the drive. It seems that any time it updates or fails to quit cleanly it thrashes the HD for maybe 10 to 20 seconds the first time I visit something like facebook or youtube.)
It's just a bad habit at this point x)
3000 seems excessive, but tabs are better than bookmarks since they save page state like scroll position, so many people use tabs instead of bookmarks. That's more a lack of useful functionality in existing bookmarks than an inherent advantage of tabs IMO.
As do I, and it doesn't take as long on my machine. Perhaps your hardware is unusually slow or you're using extensions that do something on every tab after startup, even the lazy-loaded ones. Firefox restarts in seconds for me.
Something is definitely not working right on your end. I'm on Debian and it takes seconds to restore 4 Firefox windows with 60 or 70 tabs.
For me, after restart, some websites hang for about 5 min and then load.
The recommended solution is to "refresh firefox" or use "troubleshoot mode" which disables all extensions.
If it's a whole-browser issue then use the firefox profiler and configure it to profile from startup: https://profiler.firefox.com/docs/#/./guide-startup-shutdown
Maybe something obvious pops out.
A roughly five min timeout is not indicative to me but someone with more intimate knowledge of IP and FF may recall one or more.
"Some" websites might help - examples please.
OS and FF versions etc
Get the dev tools out. You should be able to narrow it down somewhat.
That's not my experience. (edit) and why disconnect from the internet anyway and how do you actually do that? I think you are confused about internet and ethernet.
Ended up being a Qualcomm ath11k bug reportedly fixed in kernel 6.4: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=217528
JetStream performance is still miserable though; 50% slower than Chrome.
Worst of all Firefox doesn't support PWAs, so I'll be using Brave until it does.
-
[0] https://arewefastyet.com/win10/benchmarks/overview
[1] https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perfherder/graphs?series=auto...
~455 on Chrome, ~452 on Firefox (fully patched windows 10, 7950X3D).
3 runs including a cold start for both, variance on FF was +/-9.6, Chrome was +/- 6.0.
I'd say they are there (on that specific benchmark).
Or...hear me out: Firefox gets into the adblocker business and lets the big boys paya fortune to be exempted by default. This includes using ML to block ads (i have ideas on how to implement unblockable ads using traditional means).
I really wish they would invest more in servo. Imagine a memory safe browser!
But beyond all that, EU and US govs mandating it as the only default browser would be huge for mozilla.
They're catching up now in some areas like GPOs but mozilla has nothing on chrome enterprise.
They don't realize that corporate types are eager to spend money or random shit so long as b2b marketing is done right (makes the buyer look good internally). And I cna sort of see the conflict because they are pro-privacy and chrome enterprise is very much about giving security/system admins control. For example, if a user clicks through a failing https warning or downloads a file despite safe browing (phishing/malware) warning you would know. So long as you make sure it is only sold to enterprise and gov customers, giving them such insights (and much more, even browsing history) can be a good money maker, help dominate the market share and maintain moral leadership (don't do personal stuff at work or shit where you eat).
That will make Firefox a very attractive browser to people who want to block as many ads as possible, and they will then install an add-on which also blocks the ads that Firefox whitelists, perhaps using Firefox's own whitelist as a source if it's easily available. Then if Firefox tries to pull a Google and be evil and lock down their add-on API so that ad blocker add-ons can no longer be made, these people will just switch to a fork with no such limitations. And in the first place I don't think Firefox has enough usage for them to be able to charge a "fortune" for such an ad blocking exemption in the first place.
By "EU and US govs mandating it as the only default browser" I assume you mean for government employees and not for the entire populace (which would be straight up despotic), but either way it would probably be unenforceable.
A healthy IT organization shouldn't allow the average user to install their own browser of choice. But government orgs tend to be underfunded to the point that Firefox mandates are nowhere near their top tech priority.
Yes, for their own gov pcs not the people in general.
> and they will then install an add-on which also blocks the ads that Firefox whitelists
You are the third commenter I had to explain this to, so maybe my fault in not making this clear but there is no need for that, the whitelist is just a default "moderare" adblock setting which you can change to "aggressive" to block everything. And exisiting adblockers will continue to work if you prefer them.
This is similar to how you can set your search engine to duckduckgo but google pays a fortune to be the default.
This would completely alienate Firefox's core userbase.
> i have ideas on how to implement unblockable ads using traditional means
If a way to serve unblockable ads existed, it would already be implemented and widely used
How's that core userbase working out for them? Sub 2% very nearly. Time to shake things up and figure it out. What they've been doing don't work no more.
I don't think this is necessarily true. It's clear that any tech that literally forces users to look at something is coercive. Forcing your users to wear a Clockwork Orange style eye gadget is clearly not acceptable. Playing ads and asking your users not to switch to another channel is clearly acceptable. The game is largely about gaining or ceding ground between those extremes about what's socially acceptable rather than what's technologically possible.
Many users are okay with some level of ads. It's easier to ratchet up the ads those users are willing to watch than it is to get increasingly authoritarian with the small number of users who insist on not seeing any ads. For example, YouTube didn't attempt to fight ad blockers for years. They're only really starting now because it's trying to hit revenue targets.
> If a way to serve unblockable ads existed, it would already be implemented and widely used
It would require a change in how ads are served and bids are made in realtime. The main reason it isn't happening already is that most people are not blocking ads, especially on mobile where engagement has most value.I'd say ad blocking users are not more than firefox users even.
I just wish we all directly and willingly funded things that were good.
That wasn't what I suggested though, it was the opposite. Now i have randos downvoting every comment i make lol. People in general these days need to be more open minded I think.
This would be an abysmal decision all around. Firefox doesn't have enough market share to command any sort of price for this, and selling ad-blocker access would immediately destroy all trust in Firefox as a product.
I re-read what I said and it is in plain english, why are you and others not understanding that I didn't say selling ad blocker access? Ad blocker default exempt list is what is sold which users can change. And you can still use ad blocking extensions.
Basically a ton of people get an adblocker by default and you people have your pitchforks out because mozilla sells the default setting of an adblocker? Your emotions and open source religion aside what exactly offends you about this?
Forest and trees… who cares that you made it faster if continually less and less people use it. The extreme majority do not care about tiny improvements to speed.
If they were interested in growing market, they would be integrating ublockOrigin and other anti-ad software. They literally have nothing to lose anymore.
Then add on stupid things, so all their users, each release, have to fight to turn off dumbassery, and restore functionality.
They've literally done everything they could to destroy market share.
For example, firefox users of all sorts customized things. People loved it. Themes, plug-ins, add-ons.
Firefox devs consistently fail to realize that "configurability" is a category, not "this tiny configurable thing".
So they've removed configurable after configurable option, each option only having .1% market share usage or what not, not considering that overall... they've now alienated 20% of their user base.
Telemetry shows them a tiny percentage for each feature, but it is the collective feature set which matters.
And that has a cumulative effect. 20% upset users, all saying "Don't use firefox!", doesn't help.
Then they add useless, in your face, obtrusive and annoying features, and people scramble to diaable them.
"Oh so sorry, disable that?!". Sometimes years go by, and all the instantly closed bug reports add up, and they finally relent, fix it. Of course, everyone who cared is now gone, and will never come back, and now campaigns against firefox.
Just like the infamous tab detach issue, which took half a decade to resolve, by finally adding an about:config option to turn that off.
And who cares for telemetry, when hundreds of users complain, and bugs are ignored, or just hostile closed?
Mozilla is broken. Firefox is on the wrong path.
It is sad.
But, it’s okay for Firefox to own 2-3% market share?