Comment by bloopernova | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bloopernova | Hacker News Reader

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From yesterday's Firefox thread:

Firefox has multiple compelling reasons to use it:

  Sync[1] only what you allow, bookmarks/history/extensions/etc
  Containers keep sites separated nicely[2]
  Tree Style Tabs[3]
  uBlock Origin on Android[4]
  Open Source since 1998!
  Not based on Chromium

[1] Be wary of sync on a fresh Linux install, it might sync the default bookmarks and merge them with your own. Not a huge deal but definitely an annoyance.

[2] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers

[3] Tree Style Tabs requires several extra steps to remove the tabs at the top of the window. You have to set toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets to true, then create a "chrome" (lol![5]) directory in your profile and add a userChrome.css file to it. https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab

[4] uBlock Origin on mobile web makes a massive difference. You can even use the same rules that modify the style of the page you're viewing, such as setting HN to a dark mode via:

  news.ycombinator.com##html:style(filter:invert(95%) hue-rotate(200deg); background: white)

[5] I'm aware that the Mozilla UI was called Chrome at one point, not sure if it still is.

On [5]:

It's not that Mozilla named their UI "Chrome", but that "chrome" is a graphical user interface word. For a browser it refers to the stuff around the web page content, but it's more general than browser use (you could refer to Blender's chrome around the 3D viewports to refer to its toolbars, etc).

i.e. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Chrome

I still hate Google for naming their browser Chrome for that reason. They made a perfectly good and useful UI term almost unusable.

Ironically, the modern web also led to UI chrome being harder and harder to distinguish even in native applications.

Feels a bit Microsoft'y like for example "Word".

Ah, thank you I learned something today!

My apologies for editing my comment and breaking your [3] reference. I'm trying to imagine just how much work it would be to enable footnotes in comments that others can link to. It would be nice but quite the effort to get right, and I'm sure people would prefer other features first such as more formatting. (or a full implementation of Emacs in the editor window with org-mode as the markup language, with citation links. lol!)

Container tabs really is the killer app for me. At work I might need to be signed in and accessing multiple Microsoft 365 admin portals across tenants. Or at home, being able to have containers for my homelab/dev Microsoft 365 account that can run entirely separately of my main browser profile.

Like you said, you can use multiple browser profiles in chromeium based browsers, but managing multiple whole windows when I just need 1 browser page seems like such a pain in comparison.

About 2:

If you work with multiple AWS accounts, there is a web extension that automatically places each new account in its own firefox account container.

As far as I know, chrome has profiles, but I am not aware of any automated way to assign new profiles.

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/aws-sso-conta...

That is really nice! I currently use AWS Extend Switch Roles extension[1] to switch profiles, but an automated way to confine those roles to their own profiles would be very neat.

[1] https://github.com/tilfinltd/aws-extend-switch-roles

On [1], also note that Firefox's sync is end-to-end encrypted by default. Contrast that to https://palant.info/2023/08/29/chrome-sync-privacy-is-still-....

I really wish Firefox just implemented a high quality first party tab solution.

I’ve been using Arc on my MacOS devices and Edge on windows devices because I just like a nice first party vertically tabbed browser.

Oh absolutely agreed. I use Tree Style Tabs (TST) and consider it essential now, but I wish Firefox would embrace vertical tabs as a way to remain distinct from Google Chrome.

I have 15 tabs open right now. The tabs' titles are easy to read, and different sites have different colours assigned to them. My Kagi searches open in new tabs, which are automatically set as child branches/leaves of the parent tab, which helps me to organize my work. If I go over about 30 tabs, I can just scroll the TST view with the mouse wheel, it's very easy and is non-intrusive to my workflow.

I can also bookmark tab trees, which is nice when I want to switch context from Python to Terraform for instance.

> Sync[1] only what you allow, bookmarks/history/extensions/etc

Chrome also allows you to choose what to sync.

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