Why I use Firefox
xn--ime-zza.eu
xn--ime-zza.eu
I use FF, too, but I can see why someone wouldn't want to: It's just not a very good Mac app. Weird windowing and focus bugs in fullscreen mode. Keyboard shortcuts that randomly stop working. Zero scripting capabilities (it used to have the bare minimum, but Mozilla bizarrely ripped it out), and just poor integration in general. My system-wide shortcuts — the ones that are so important I've added them to every context menu on the system? That's a big nope because FF devs apparently think showing poxy extension icons is more important.
Google had the good sense to copy Safari's keyboard shortcuts in Chrome. Mozilla didn't.
The bookmark manager is straight out of Windows 95. Awful UX.
I do like Firefox, but it's just not up to snuff on macOS.
And I don't mind dated UX of bookmarks manager, I even think that compared to other browsers it is the most usable one.
Firefox may be open source, but Mozilla is a company with a paid development team. It is exactly these types of issues - UX, UI - on which the dev team should be working. I'm sure that a lot of features come from the open source community, but the polish and sound implementation is on the dev team.
For what it's worth, Firefox on KDE is fine.
I wish it was! Unfortunately it's not.
For the past 6+ years I only use Chrome rarely and as an Internet Explorer replacement.
I am back again to remind people that profiles suck on Firefox, container tabs are not a great solution, and there are tons of extensions that Chrome has that Firefox doesn't.
So just 3 very simple examples of why someone would use Chrome over Firefox.
In my case it's Dark Reader and uBlock, and both work well in FF.
401 - Chrome
446 - Firefox
546 - Safari
511 - Chrome without any extensions
433 - Clean firefox install
500 - Clean edge install
On an AMD Ryzen 7950X3D / 5600MHz RAM
Interestingly, I got substantially different results depending on whether I used chrome with my typical extensions or not. Looking at the flamegraph, I don't seem to see the full picture of why there's such a substantial difference. Bitwarden/React Developer tools (the 2 primary extensions I use) don't seem to make enough of an impact to account for the roughly 40% performance increase seen without them. The browserbench javascript accounted for ~38.6% of the overall time taken for the benchmark, but the sum of my extensions was only 6.5%. I'm not incredibly familiar with browser performance profiling, so there's probably more to the story.
457 - Chrome
444 - Safari
348 - Firefox
202 ± 4.7 - Chrome
184 ± 5.0 - Firefox
171 ± 2.6 - Safari
Of course, that is exactly the model used by Mozilla. It exports search query data to Google for capture, by default, in return for payment.
"Thank goodness for Mozilla and all its collaborators."
Indeed, thank goodness for long-time Mozilla collaborator Google, LLC. Mozilla employees left to join Google beginning in 2005. They wrote Chrome.
Without Google's payments to Mozilla, who knows what might happen.
What is "real" privacy.
There is no small amount of telemetry by default in Firefox, far more than Chrome. Unless one changes each of these settings, Mozilla collects data about Firefox users. Defaults can only be changed by editing the source and compiling Firefox. Almost no one does this.
Is having control useful for "real privacy". Is it useful for data collection and surveillance. Who should have control.
Firefox has over 37 million lines of code. The compiled program requires hundreds of megabytes of storage space. Based on LOC and binary size it is larger than the Linux kernel. Compiling Firefox on "average" computers will take hours and will require a powerful computer. It is not an easy process and can easily fail due to its numerous dependencies.
I use a text-only browser that compiles in less than a minute on an older, underpowered computer to a 1.2 MiB static binary. There are no mandatory dependencies. It is from this browser that I type and submit this reply.
But what if the computer user does not care to share information with Mozilla.
Information such as:
(a) IP address
(b) the software is used/when the user is online
(c) the user's preferred websites
(d) how the software is used
(e) settings the user changes or does not change
and so on.
This is information sharing with Mozilla by default. It is not "opt-in". It is "op-out".
It was my only reason to launch Chrome on my job laptop and it's been six months that I use Google Meet daily on FF without issue.
For whatever reason, the experience just isn't there. Maybe it's Mozillas fault, maybe it's Google's, maybe it's even Apple's.
The web interfaces for both Jitsi and Zoom fail to recognise my web camera. I've gone through the permissions settings a dozen times and Firefox says that it sees camera, but it only displays a black feed. Vivaldi correctly accesses the camera on both sites.
imascientist.org.uk makes it "impossible" to sign up for outreach sessions under Firefox. The div with the sessions has a `max-width` parameter, but the contents are significantly larger than this width, resulting in the buttons being outside the rendering area and inaccessible. I have to go into the dev tools and edit the CSS every time I open the page.
These are just the issues that I've dealt with today. Don't get me wrong - I'm literally typing this in Firefox at this moment. However, it doesn't help anyone to pretend that these issues never pop up. I simply feel that the benefits outweight these annoyances.
zoom worked without problem.. both audio and video..
imascientist.org.uk i opened the registration page and it showed without problem buttons where in the end of the page as i would expect.
It look like it is something in your end and not with firefox..
On imascientist.org.uk I don't see a sign up button, only login.
When you have a site not working as expected, start Firefox in "Troubleshoot Mode" (alt-key then in the menu at the top Help > Troubleshot mode) that starts Firefox with addons turn off. If the site works, restart and turn of addons one by one to you see which one creates the problem.
The "give me examples" is sort of a moving target, anecdotally I have run into many more completely or partially broken sites when using Firefox as compared to Chrome and Safari. It is likely that some or all of those examples are now fixed but the pain in the moment is enough to keep me from using the browser long term.
It works fine for me.
I've occasionally run into relatively minor visual issues (I think from before the :has pseudo-class was made generally available in FF) but I cannot think of a single instance where a site was unusable and then worked when I tried it in Chrome.
Do you have some examples of websites that really behave that differently depending on the browser you're using?
Having lived through the "best viewed with..." days I'd hoped we were past all that by now!
But I still use of because of the cookie Mgmt mainly, and secondly because we need at least one alternative browser engine on desktop... Safari WebKit is a fork (or the original if you prefer), it's not really that different.
* duolingo.com (mic does not work) * mediatest.webex.com * webserial in general
(Mozilla and Goog were smart to start offering account-based sync because this creates a moat for regular adoption. But anyone can and should go window-shopping for browsers - it's cheap entertainment, at the very least.)
Any non OSS browser makes me feel weird. The amount of trust you place in a browser is insane.
I don't know your specific reasons. But commonly this is just familiarity bias.
That doesn't say that X is better than Y in general (it often isn't) just that you know X better than Y and therefore it's better for you.
It's why I've never been able to switch to emacs despite trying it out. It's why I'm forever stuck on Ubuntu, despite the fact that there are DEs/distros out there that suit my use case better, probably.
It’s probably fixable, though. One of these days when I have some surplus time I’d like to grab a copy of the Firefox source, see how practical changing its UI is, and figure out if the root cause of lack of polish is technical or organizational. If it’s the latter a fork may be in order.
> Mozilla develops their own browser engine
This is key. Without Mozilla we are aproaching monopoly as Safari aproaches gradually Internet Explorer.
Chrome is doing the "I make my own web standards and push them through, ups now my feature is standard incompatible so I try to force change the upcoming standard just before it gets committed" thing IE had done in the past (it's e.g. the main reason why you sometimes end up with CORS issues on FF, the site isn't standard compatible as it doesn't handle a certain thing the standard requires from websites but due to a last minute exception for chrome doesn't require browsers to enforce).
And Safari does the "I don't adopt new standards forever and have strange bugs" IE think. Funnily like IE there are a lot of devs which swear that it has no strange bug problem (because they mainly use libraries developed on/for or at least tested with safari, but if you use some more newer tech it Safari support can be quite costly).
I think people make too much of Safari lagging in the adoption of standards. Yes, they lag behind on what Chrome is pushing but they're also ahead on other features, like color spaces.
I'm familiar with Safari strange bugs but it's usually while I'm testing with VoiceOver so I have fewer occasions to notice bugs with Chrome or Firefox, which don't work as well with VoiceOver overall.
I think of Safari being the new IE because it's not as evergreen as other browsers; old but still usable iPhones and iPads can't run the current version and aren't allowed to run anything else. Thus, developers have more reason to care about what a browser from 2+ years ago supports.
The only time new features were released was when IE or Netscape pushed them.
This is the first time I've ever heard someone say this. The overwelming sentiment is that safari is leagues behind, lacks features, lacks performance is has the worst standards support of all common browsers.
What areas are you referring to?
All we ever did at my jobs, when people complained "it doesn't work on safari" is put up a banner for safari users pointing them to either the app-store for our app, or to the fact their browser is not supported.
I've only ever gotten complaints from safari users that stuff was broken (It wasn't, their browser just did stuff wrong/differently/not-yet)
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/
It currently mentions "Google" a number of times, along with "Microsoft", "eBay", "AdMarketplace", "Cloudflare", "Comcast", "Adjust", "Fastly", "our partners", and other entities.
I think a lot of people believe that Firefox respects its users' privacy more than it actually does.
They may be surprised to learn how many, and which, third-parties might be involved when using Firefox.
So it's like Google wearing a mask.
Comment A) "Screw Mozilla, all their funding comes from their Google Search deal, they're just Google in a mask"
Comment B) "Screw Mozilla, they waste all this money on side projects (that would provide diversification and non-Google revenue streams) when they should be spending all of their effort on Firefox (which is effectively un-monetizable apart from the search deal - and you can bet hard money that there would be screaming if they tried)"
except oops all corporate politics are the same so the politically motivated feel-good crap from Mozilla is exactly the same as the politically motivated feel-good crap from every other corporation and so it's all just a waste of time and money and effort that COULD as you put it "provide diversification" instead, if Mozilla was competently run
- Rust
- LetsEncrypt (collaboration)
- Opus (collaboration)
- AV1 (collaboration)
- Mozilla Common Voice database
- FirefoxOS
- MozillaVPN
- Lockwise
- Relay
- Bugzilla
- Servo
- MDN
- The VR projects - even if you think they're dumb they're hardly political feel-good stuff.
- The new privacy monitoring services
- The Scroll partnership (defunct because Twitter bought them and destroyed it)
Saying Firefox is Google wearing a mask is some wild conspiracy theory.
- User Styles: I can customize pretty much everything about the browser UI using CSS.
- Containers: Shared history, form data, bookmarks,etc. But containerized cookies.
- Separate search field next to the address bar.
Plus worth mentioning that Firefox has native support for real user stylesheets with own origin layer, just as specified by standards. It is userConent.css file in the "chrome" folder in the profile directory. Slightly cumbersome compared to Stylus' provided "UserCSS" injections, but I think it is super important for any user agent to keep this functionality that is by the way required for CSS2.1+ compliance, and UAAG [1]
And also, to my knowledge, Firefox is one of few browsers that lets you (still) hack its interface ("chrome") through css (userChrome.css in aforementioned folder). [2]
[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/2015/NOTE-UAAG20-Reference-20151215/#s... [2] https://twitter.com/myfonj/status/1387584962354982912
De-selecting the box and specifying my preferred fonts is the absolute first setting I change on every Firefox installation.
Not the controls, though. For that you’d need Firefox 2016.
/* to hide the native tabs */
#TabsToolbar {
visibility: collapse;
}
/* to hide the sidebar header */
#sidebar-header {
visibility: collapse;
}As of now, extensions can kind of customize this like before, they just don't do it in a fully general way (like you'd get from a supported settings feature). The extensions will only apply after a given tab's page has loaded. So if I want to go left three tabs, I will get stuck on any tab which needs to reload, or doesn't have a page loaded, or any number of exception.
So, bottom line, I can't customize controls in a general sense anymore.
Comment A) "Screw Mozilla, all their funding comes from their Google Search deal, they're just Google in a mask"
Comment B) "Screw Mozilla, they waste all this money on side projects (that would provide non-Google revenue streams) when they should be spending all of their effort on Firefox (which is effectively un-monetizable apart from the search deal - and you can bet hard money there'd be screaming if they tried)"
Can we at least acknowledge that most of the side projects did lead to improvements in the browser and web ecosystem? FirefoxOS led to a bunch of focus on memory usage & responsiveness as well as web APIs that provided more parity between web and native apps. LetsEncrypt got a big boost from Mozilla as did Opus and AV1. Rust is in a class of its own. The VPN deal doesn't require that much investment from Mozilla since it's based on Mullvad. The voice & language database is a big boon to the current open source AI training movement, etc.
You don't need to copy/paste this to all your comments. Some people may disagree with you and dismissing them like that will only lead to resentment.
> Can we at least acknowledge that most of the side projects did lead to improvements in the browser and web ecosystem?
Indeed, a lot of the stuff you mentioned _indirectly_ improved some things in Firefox-the-web-browser. Now image how much better it could have been be if all that resources had been invested in the browser quality directly.
Why? These are such tiny, meaningless amounts in the grand scheme of Mozilla's finances, why focus on them so much and make such a big deal out of them?
Well, from their analyses of the companies this money is being sent to, including the copious use of scare quotes around basic terms like cis, as well as several comments about the political leanings of these organizations, it's very clear that the author of this blog post is not really upset because Mozilla is spending money that isn't related to their core mission, since it's basically a drop in the bucket, but is really more angry that the money is going to places they politically disagree with.
Their argument that this is objectively bad, as opposed to just being a reason for them and other conservatives to not donate if they really care that much, is just hogwash too. The idea that the people who are donating to Mozilla think all of that money is going to building the browser and would have no way of knowing that Mozilla is a politically motivated organization that has a certain stance and will donate money to further that stance is absurd: Mozilla makes it very clear that they as a foundation exist to do far more than just work on Firefox and a few other projects, that they have large scale social goals, and neither do they do anything to hide the fact that their values and goals are oriented very much in a progressive direction. The idea that someone would be shocked that Mozilla has a progressive leaning and is looking to forward progressive causes after reading this (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/) or many other things on their site is just laughable to me.
I have a low opinion of Lunduke. Most of his criticisms are, if not entirely false, in extreme bad faith.
I don't dabble in US politics too much because I'm European, but it felt a bit odd to read the article and encounter the way it frames things.
As if donating money to a bunch of organizations that care about trans issues, pro-choice, vaccine acceptance and a bunch of other social justice stuff is somehow a horrible thing to do, especially when the amount of money being donated is equivalent to the salaries of a few qualified engineers.
>> Why does Mozilla give so much money to political speakers that have no relationship to their core business?
What exactly is wrong with a company choosing to support a left political leaning? From what I've read of USA, those might in general be more grounded and regard privacy higher, than the right leaning stuff like needing an ID to watch pornography, banning books and all that other weird stuff, which might lead to some surveillance state.
>> Why does Mozilla seem unconcerned with alienating a large portion of their user base (which is already shrinking)?
I don't get it, who cares about this so much that it'd alienate them? It's akin to me seeing that my KitKat chocolate bar supports planting more trees, going on some charade about climate change and then boycotting their products. Surely nobody gets so worked up over some money going towards initiatives that'd arguably make lives better?
>> Why do some of the recipients of Mozilla money appear to be nothing more than empty shells of companies — not even having a simple website?
This is a better point, as are the other questions in my opinion. But at the same time, if there are corporations that support the far right, I don't mind Mozilla throwing some money in a direction to balance things out, even if it might be a bit performative due to the comparatively small sums.
Seeing how many people are now criticizing Apple for hobbling PWAs with Safari on iOS, I'd say they were just ahead of their time.
By doing that you have to contend with low-to-nonexistent margins, green unoptimized software struggling to run on weak hardware, and the fact that nobody (users and devs alike) really gets excited or talks about entry level devices.
Mozilla might’ve caught some transitory flack for focusing on flagships initially, but it would’ve made for a much more usable product out of the gate and helped to fund R&D to make more affordable models a reality.
It didn’t end up challenging the Apple/Google duopoly like Mozilla wanted but I think they should have stuck with it anyways.
Rust was a project started by Mozilla Research employees but not affiliated with Mozilla. Though they did sponsor it in 2009.
HN loved to hate on it's decision but a lot of them (like XUL removal) where strictly necessary for firefox to still have any chance for relevancy.
And while they did try out a lot of things but FF fundamentally has a hard time gaining new users as they have very little killer features. So stuff like pocket, VR or FirefoxOS where needed tries of FF to gain some feature with which you can gain users. Tries they lost but I would say failing to try would have been worse leadership.
You know what else could have gained them new users? Best in class mobile browser supporting full range of FF extensions! Instead they dragged their feet on extension support for years and its performance on Android is still inconsistent for me.
Now browsers will be allowed to use their custom engine (they were forced to all use Safari up until now), so thank you EU for the new DMA!
Admittedly I haven't tried disabling extensions and finding the root cause. I just switch to Chrome for that task.
No doubt Chrome's more modern stack and hefty resources help in ironing out hardware-specific quirks.
By the way, I actually use Fennec from F-Droid and not Firefox from the Google Play Store, if that matters.
I've been meaning to try different Firefox distributions though because switching away from Firefox isn't really an option for the reasons you've stated.
Mozilla's motives alone for creating a web browser are why I trust FF. I don't like the idea of Chrome subsisting (to the point it's their actual business model) on my personal info
I've been a fan since the Firebird days--which I wish they'd been able to stick with because the antisocial fox still irritates me in a very low-key, unserious way--but the browsing experience is not modern, and the extension-based solutions are ... functional. Every few months I check again to see if one of them has improved, and I try them, and I switch back quickly. Which leaves me feeling disappointed in myself, but there you go.
Every word of that is painful to type but no less true.
For example, every major browser nowadays not only supports tabbed browsing but enforces it.
I think tabbed browsing is misdevelopment of UX because I need to handle window management on the OS and browser level. I'm using the tabbing feature in sway/i3 so every application has tabs not only browsers and they all act in the same way.
I know that not many people think this way. But that's the whole point. We should be able to tailor software to our needs.
Ok, I guess?
Personally I don’t trust anybody, I just recognize I have to give my data to someone at some point (don’t have the time to setup everything needed in order not to…). I’ve chosen Apple (gougle is out of the question because I actively distrust them), but I don’t particularly trust them…
It's the most comprehensive vi-mode addon for a mainstream browser. Support bookmarks, search engines, pagination, external text editing and colorschemes on top of the usual features something like vimium has. It is under active development [1] and written in TypeScript (which is also a plus for hackability in my book).
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tridactyl-vim... [1] https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl
I hate that no one has yet made a third party tab sharing system. I don't think it would be rocket science to have an app you can "share" URLs with which sends it elsewhere. I remember years ago while shopping for browsers that Firefox was the only one with this feature, which boggles the mind. Brave last I tried didn't support it.
Not sure what you mean, but you can click the URL, then click on Share, then select "Send to devices". In a way, it works better than Firefox, because the list of active devices is more up to date. On the other hand, it can have latency, but I noticed latency in Firefox's sharing too.
Also, you can go to the Menu, then click on "Recent Tabs", which will show you the tabs on other devices.
browser.tabs.closeWindowWithLastTab = false
prevents the entire browser window from closing when the user closes the last tab (I find this behavior annoying)
I just build up tab groups in windows and occasionally declare bankruptcy on the whole thing and close all of it. So technically that counts as closing the last tab? But it's a housekeeping operation I do maybe four times a year, and usually I'm rebooting the computer so closing the browser is also fine by me. I kill entire groups when I'm done with them but there's always a couple windows which just accrete tabs endlessly, like the one with Twitter pinned.
No more 404s in dev tools for local websites, thanks!
> Google can. Apple claims that they can’t, but they have disclosed user data to law enforcement in the past, so I don’t trust them. Mozilla says that they can’t, and I trust them.
Google does offer end-to-end encryption, with a separate "sync passphrase". I honestly suspect all of the major vendors actually do a good enough job here if you configure things right. Google's UX is crummy for it though, and I think iCloud has at least an optional account recovery feature that you can't really trust. So Firefox Sync is probably winning for user privacy, but it's not due to the lack of proper end-to-end encryption from the other vendors, it seems a bit more complicated than that.
Firefox lets you pop out the video feeds of call participants, so you can have them in a corner when sharing a full-screen window.
Also, if you say you don't like this - corporate monopoly ==>> corporate abuse of monopoly - then how about a bit of action, to go with your words?
Many more people should be using it.
There are a lot of reasons to be concerned about Mozilla and Firefox's revenue based (vastly overbalanced towards money coming in from Google for the default search deal). Without the firefox-google relationship, things would be in a very bad situation revenue wise.
Lately I tell people about about:about because I had only recently learned of it. Maybe you’ll find some use there too
1200 thumbs up since 2022 and 22 pages of comments. I wonder when we'll get native vertical tabs.
To get it that way takes a bit of code in the advanced options, and tinkering with a user definition file in FF to remove the top tab bar, but it's worth it.
The other killer feature of FF for me is the ability to containerize domains and control how cross-domain containerization occurs (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/containers-wi...). My interactions with google (for example) never leak out of my google container, so my search queries or browsing aren't explicitly linked to my google account, because I do that outside my google container. Want to watch a video on yt without it tanking your recommendations? Do it outside the google container.
Of course there are a lot of other ways for google to infer it's "me", so I don't know if this is pure security theater or it actually hinders them building my profile. Either way, it's nice to be able to explicitly determine when and where my google profile is built as I traverse the web.
I also set the preference browser.compactmode.show=true to enable the "compact density" in the customize toolbar section. Good use of screen real estate with these changes.
I will not defend this use model to any skeptics, but FWIW I have no performance issues!
Sidebery lets you set colors on tabs explicitly, or by pattern. I use this sparingly but it's very useful when I do.
That approach may even be more tax efficient, too.
- extensions to make the modern web usable, NoScript, ClearURLs, uBlock origin and so on
- vertical tabs (tab center reborn + css to hide tab bar) because I have a 21:9 screen and also on other 16:9 screens there is plenty of horizontal space, but too little vertical space and rotating screens makes them uncomfortable for various multimedia usages
- a little less owned by a big corp, so potentially a little less developed against their users interests...
Can it? You can set an additional password for synchronization. I was under the impression this implies end-to-end encryption.
Of course, Chrome might send this data back to Google once synced and decrypted by the user. But Mozilla might do that just the same.
Given the approximately same setup and use-case: Who do you trust more to keep encryption strong and unbroken?
OFC trustless verification and such would be my ideal for a very impractical version of "ideal". Where I'd run my own server software, read all it's source code, read all the source code of the client, monitor all my network traffic, and do so for all updates. Given this is unattainable for me (for one: I lack the skills to really vet encryption software), I'll revert to a more practical "I trust Mozilla to at least try and implement secure and proper encryption and to be open about it".
To contribute, here's what Firefox does well, from my perspective:
+ History sync actually works — most Chromium browsers don't sync all history;
+ DNS-Over-HTTPS works in parallel to corporate DNS (fallback to system);
+ Tree-style-tabs;
+ Bookmarks management is better;
+ Very nice Reader View (Android & desktop);
+ Ctrl+Tab which actually works;
+ Non-admin upgrades, most of the time, making upgrades on managed laptops less annoying;
+ uBlock Origin, on both desktop and mobile;
+ Total Cookie Protection;
+ Multi-account containers (e.g., second Reddit user);
+ Android: accessibility zoom actually works;
+ Android: multiple search engines;
+ Android: Open in app;
+ Android: Dark reader / Cookie AutoDelete / other extensions;
- They dropped the ball on PWA support — mobile has unfixed bugs, desktop dropped SSB, has trouble keeping up with features [1];
- Poor performance on Android, known problems when scrolling (e.g., Mastodon, Twitter);
- incompatibility with online services (e.g., Microsoft Teams), although, granted, they're working hard to remedy that;
- No customizable keyboard shortcuts, which is surprising for a project that supposedly cares about accessibility;
- Firefox is still funded almost entirely by Google's search ads, which means they can't actually compete with Chrome;
- Mozilla has had poor and overpaid management, spending people's donations on political activism, while firing people working on next-gen improvements (e.g., Rust, Servo).
It’s not like vertical tabs are that strange of a feature at this point… Vivaldi, Edge, and Orion have them built in and they’re the only option in Arc. I understand why Mozilla might not want to have to deal with maintaining a full vertical tabs feature themselves but at least give extension authors the tools they need.
Sideberry is what I use: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/sidebery
Lately, on my older computer, I've been unloading a lot more? Similar to closing and reopening your browser with tab restoration (restores tabs, doesn't _load_ tabs). Or.. similar to about:unloads and clicking a button a bunch.
May as well link it here, I didn't put it on the store yet
https://github.com/shmup/firefox-tab-unloader/releases/tag/v...
This is the crux of it: https://github.com/shmup/firefox-tab-unloader/blob/main/back...
(I should point out, it unloads tabs in all windows -- this might not be a nice default but it's for me right now hehe)
Chrome never gained that ability for whatever reason.
On Windows I install Chrome, though. Android usually comes with Chrome as well so I stick with that. Only some apps seem to open the "built in" Xiaomi browser which is a piece of crap almost as stinky as Facebook app, which again absolutely must use it's terrible own browser implementation if I happen to click on some link (which I learned not to because of how terrible the experience is).
Also I use Firefox for web development tutorials because of the Mozilla docs: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Guid...
At the very least as a supplement to the money they receive from Google.
And even better, to fund more research projects, like their sponsorship of research into Rust and WebAssembly.
https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/18b6tdp/mozilla_c...
Of their budget, what's the cost of developing Firefox?
It's in the footer to Mozilla's website.
In actual practice, Mozilla grabs all the donations intended for FF and pools it with all donations, which then gets used for social justice programs.
But it seems to be fixed now with polyfills https://todo.sr.ht/~henriquehbr/svelte-typewriter/13
Firefox now has an edge. If they win mobile, desktop will follow.
OP reminded me to appreciate them, so I donated to mozilla. Mozilla, please don't spend my donation funding stupid shit. Your core product deserves the most love.
I disagree with most of theirs arguments in favor of Firefox.
> 1. The about:config page
Even Mozilla does not recommend this. The settings on the about:config page are undocumented and can disappear or change their behavior with any new release.
I used to set a line in "about:config" so that FF always asked before quitting. It stopped working. I checked Firefox's wiki, nothing new. I had to read the source code to understand that the setting was now meaningless: its value was ignored when the setting "restore session" was enabled. The code had evolved, but it was not reflected in the UI. I don't understand why each setting in about:config doesn't have an embedded description.
> 2. Mozilla cannot decrypt my data on their servers
Same with other browsers, e.g. Vivaldi.
I agree with 4, but I don't care/use 3, 5, 6.
I've met a few sites where Firefox was not welcome (e.g. Jitsi meeting with screen sharing), so I would make it my primary browser only if there was a very strong incentive. But they're too similar to Chromium. Vivaldi with vertical tabs is more stable than Firefox with TST, so I won't switch any time soon.
I wish that Mozilla didn't bungle the UI for no reason, but here we are.
p.s.: I googled, there is an extension that does the same for Chrome, but not natively.
It's no substitute for a second monitor, but it's better than nothing sometimes.
One click of the picture-in-picture button and those watermarks were completely gone.
Maybe I’m just from an older “I can only do one thing at a time lol” generation.
I got the impression that the Qutebrowser project /would like/ to use Gecko, but finds this infeasible because of the manner in which Gecko is developed together with Firefox.
Whenever I’ve been lucky enough to get Glastonbury tickets it has been on Firefox
When applying I run Chrome as well to cover that base. But for me the Firefox windows are the ones that make it through. YMMV
I don't. I still neuter Firefox (LibreWolf, mostly.) and disable all the sync nonsense.
https://librewolf.net/docs/faq/#can-i-use-firefox-sync-with-...
I'm running the old Python sync server for the time being.
(I am a big user of Github on Firefox for android and I can't reproduce) thanks
Firefox becoming a better browser and gaining market share is what will fight against a monopoly. Whether Firefox does that while using Gecko or some fork of Blink it doesn't really matter.
https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/hdr-support-for-windows...
And on another comment, kkim continues to say
> Please keep your fingers crossed - we'd love to send improvements your way as soon as we can.
> šime.eu
Looks like HN needs Punycode support [1] when it displays the domain name after the article title.
That is the domain name.
I'm glad that Hacker News, the site for hackers, displays the domain name, and not the rendered display version of the domain name. Other places can and should do it differently, it's the right choice here.
I can't understand why you think the underlying ASCII encoding should be used, instead of the Unicode domain that actually gets rendered in the browser's address bar.
That makes as much sense as saying non-ASCII characters in the comments section should be displayed as raw ASCII bytes instead of correctly interpreted as UTF-8 characters. Or that domains shouldn't even be displayed as letters but just as sequences of numbers that are the code points.
The whole point of a domain name is to be semantically meaningful. Otherwise we'd just use IP addresses.
In a domain name, punycode is the encoding. The actual domain name, the one you'd need to run DNS and such, is what you see. Also, rendering it into unicode is a vector for attacks. So it's the wrong choice here, where no one wants to deal with the aggravation of knowing that confusables can be slipped into domain names at any time.
I know I could probably have this on Firefox with some extension, but I don't like the concept of extensions.
I've nearly completely switched to Brave - I still use Firefox occasionally but Edge is my second most used Browser.
I haven't used Chrome for over 5 years.
1. Firefox's marketshare is completely irrelevant for preventing Chrome's monopoly;
2. Activism doesn't work;
3. Firefox is funded almost entirely by Google's ads, Google can effectively kill it by just pulling the plug, which effectively means that they can't actually compete with Chrome if that means endangering the golden goose — wake me up when Firefox starts blocking some ads in Google's search or on YouTube, out of the box ;-)
That's why I use Firefox and will continue to do so.
> 2. Activism doesn't work;
Sure it does.
> 3. ...wake me up when Firefox starts blocking some ads in Google's search or on YouTube, out of the box ;-)
ublock origin is a click away. You do it once whenever you get a new machine and you pretty much forget about it.
I occasionally try Firefox, but it has several issues that annoy me and that have been unfixed for years. They're doing good work, and I hope they'll catch up, but until they fix their management issues, I've lost faith.
relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/198
I also like paying for software and content. When people provide you with valuable tools, they should get compensated.
But, the middle ground of "free" but not free is not a happy place in my mind.