Firefox and Flux: A New, Beautiful Browser is Coming
donotlick.com
donotlick.com
Rule #0 of business is: Listen to your users. For browsers, one straightforward way to do this is to look at what extensions and addons users install. By far, the winner is adblock. Almost everyone who knows how to block ads does so. Therefore, if you are making a browser and you care about user experience above everything else, you will have ad blocking by default. That no major browser does tells us what their priorities really are.
Again, apologies for the negativity. This has frustrated me for some time.
Edit: I realize that if everyone suddenly started blocking ads, there would be darkness and chaos. But the current situation is only tenable because a small fraction of users have the know-how to get what they want. You can avoid ads if you are technically proficient or know someone who is. Everyone else has to put up with ads. Advertisers annoy millions if not billions of people, effectively subsidizing the usage of those with ad blockers. That doesn't seem fair to me.
1. Such as the old new tab page in Chrome: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=326788
Just because adblock is popular doesn't mean everyone is using it, and as much as I don't like it, advertisers rely on that... it could seriously damage the web if they did that.
The French have an expression for this, they would say you can see no farther than the end of your own nose.
I understand this. I gave the advertisers a fair shot. I didn't install any adblocking on my phone. I gave them a significant chunk of my limited mobile browsing bandwidth. I understand it's a compromise; I waste my page space and bandwidth, and the websites I like continue to exist.
Then my phone started talking to me about some TV show or some shit in the middle of the office last week. Firefox installed, adblock installed, scorched earth policy. I will never view another ad on mobile.
I'm willing to be reasonable and compromise here, but if they're not holding up their end of the bargain, I'm not going to carry that burden either. If this is the way the web is going to be, then the web needs a new business model and I'm happy to bring it about.
The sites that suffer the most from adblocking are those that provide very little benefit for the user anyway: splogs, linkfarms, and other very contentless things built solely to lure users in for adverts. While I don't use adblock myself (I use a filtering proxy instead), seeing that part of the internet die off, and possibly a return to something closer to the noncommercialised web of the 90s where the signal-to-noise ratio was much higher, IMHO is a very good thing. Although there are some good ad-supported sites that may die off, in my experience the sites that contain lots of very good, detailed information are unlikely to contain ads too. It's a bit like chemotherapy...
I frequently visit The Verge and The Guardian. I also happen to follow their journalists on twitter because they're often interesting to listen and talk to. On more than one occasion I've seen them express their frustration at ad blocking software and the problems it causes. As such, and because I love the sites, I've turned off adblock for them. (not trying to sound magnanimous here, it's not like I disabled adblock for every site.)
I'd rather have websites sell advertising space next to their content then gate their communities behind paywalls frankly.
For me the annoyance factor is less of a problem than the privacy concern.
I personally don't mind a certain level of information about my browsing being a bit leaky. I feel like it's a reasonable compromise to make for serving up content I want. Flagrant invasions of privacy are not ok, but I am more concerned with third parties serving malicious content through ads; Something I've seen enough to make me use an ad blocker by default.
Those are not the only two choices. Many of the sites I like are personal ones either hosted on the author's own server+connection, or ones hosted by large institutions that would likely be able to afford the hosting anyway.
absolutely, and I'm grateful to see people experimenting with different models for making money, but as it stands the most reasonable way for websites to make money is, probably in order of effectiveness:
1) advertising
2) charging for content
3) freemium, ie free content with paid extas
4) sponsorship
5) ???
generally when I talk about websites serving advertising, I'm speaking specifically about news/media websites. The cost of producing news is substantial, so earnings have to be commensurate. Either you charge people for it, or you give it away for free with advertising, and perhaps have added value services.
People who say "I turned off AdBlock to help support the sites I visit" but never click on any ad are not making a bit of difference.
I personally don't use ad blockers for this reason. I like supporting sites I visit, even if I hate the ads showing there.
Doesn't adblock normally block all ads? Last time I used it was years ago, so maybe things have changed.
Oh God No! I do not use adblock. I use noscript and im happy with it. I also do not use "Video DownloadHelper" which is the second most used addon. And neither do I use Firebug which is #3. Please do not put all this stuff into my browser! And not everybody uses noscript which I use and which is #4. Im completely fine with installing it.
How about improving on the basic stuff? For example make FF use all cores of my machine and not just one?
I was a very happy Opera user for years under the exact assumption that there is little need to install addons if your browser has all the features you need – and I didn’t use all of Opera’s features either, but somehow even with the included mail and bittorrent clients, it ended up being smaller than, say, Firefox.
They are working on it: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis
This is already in the nightly version for some months: "File > New e10s Window" will open a new window in its own process.
File > New e10s Window
> Each update contains more "Sign in to your browser" stuff plastered everywhere. Eye candy is added. Useful configuration options are removed.
- First of all, each update cannot possibly contain more "sign in to your browser". Are you talking about Firefox Sync, of which similar-yet-poorer functionality used to be in an incredibly popular extension (by your own rules, that should go in the browser!)?
- Eye candy is nice. Not everyone lives in the 90s and wants a clickable version of Lynx.
- Configuration options are as useful as the users make it. There was a massive outrage on here when Firefox removed the javascript switch, yet that is one of the best decision they made for their userbase. Google sure did remove a lot of options over time, some of it has infuriated me as well (the removal of http: was a big one for me). But most of the time, users do not actually know what they want which is why they just want a bazillion options to be able to change their mind all the time, as if they're not using a browser but playing Wedding Tie Choice Simulator 2015. As Randall Munroe put it: https://xkcd.com/1172/
Then why are Mozilla removing everything? I like eye candy too. A metro-ified, totally bare browser without even a status bar is the complete opposite.
Oh, and links has mouse support via GPM.
>- Configuration options are as useful as the users make it. There was a massive outrage on here when Firefox removed the javascript switch, yet that is one of the best decision they made for their userbase.
Because everyone switched to NoScript instead.
*Their preferred term even though everyone just installs Status4Evar and still has a status bar.
This is possible with the new version, but it's not (yet) as simple as it was with the previous one:
https://docs.services.mozilla.com/howtos/run-fxa.html
https://docs.services.mozilla.com/howtos/run-sync-1.5.html
I presume AdBlock's logic is that because promo ads often have the dimensions in the filename, that's good enough reason to block EVERY image on the web that has dimensions in the filename. Pathetic logic!
While you might be happy browsing away on the internet with Ad-Block, it could very well be blocking non-ad content, which is not something you want as core browser functionality.
I've never noticed that with EasyList.
Edit: Quick optical grep confirms it, nothing to match image dimensions I could see in the filter rules.
Many are very specific and look like useful filters, but here are just a small sample of rules that are problematic: -300x250- -300x250_ .300x250. .300x250_ /300x250- /300x250. /300x250/
looks like the culprit.
I wasn't up to speed on the lists business. I will look into using a different list. I was just using adblock now and then at the default settings, I installed it and haven't touched settings.
I don't use it all the time because I don't want it interfering with testing and dev, messing with the document.
When it backfires and hides stuff you've just published, suddenly I'm cursing adblock because I know other default adblock users won't see the image.
This is actually frustrating, I had thought until now that easylist blocked only third party ads; this means they block self-hosted as well.
Describing the image is the alt tag's job. Otherwise, consider the nightmare...
Britney_Spears_Red_Carpet_MTV_Awards_2012_834pm_Headshot.jpg
Which isn't great file naming for the web. Or am I too oldschool and this is how all the kool kids do it now?
Do search engines expect meta data in image names? I don't think they're counting on it, even if they are picking it up.
Why?
In the Britney example, there's no naming convention, only a vague approximation of the image contents.
This may work for you personal blog, but in large production environments, you don't want editors just "making up" image names without consistent naming convention.
Remember that the original digital camera image has no mention of Britney! At best, when the RAW image is converted, the general image name might be appended with "mtv_awards", but nothing further.
Same for video file naming. You can't fit all the subject matter of the video into its file name, you would instead maybe put the reverse date in the name and an abbreviated title. But to expect that to be used for SEO is not a good strategy.
Status quo bias is a powerful thing.
Apple is the only major browser vendor that can afford to ship an ad blocker without strangling its own throat. If Jobs where still around, he might have actually done that, if only to stick a big middle finger at Google. Now I'm not so sure. Maybe MSFT will do it first with IE, if Bing's market share gets any lower than it already is (or if Yahoo finally folds).
This is IMHO a most disturbing trend; instead of leaving configuration options available (and possibly adding more), many "UX experts" seem to have the notion that all users are exactly the same and should therefore never need anything more or less than what these "experts" think they should need. Removing options also reduces the amount of learning-by-experimentation that is possible, but experimentation is one of the best ways of learning about things. The point is often made that this is so "users don't break things", but at the same time it denies them a valuable learning experience and takes away freedom.
Meanwhile the focus is on adding eye candy and using plenty of doublespeak (some of my favourite examples of this are "decreased clutter", "simplification", "streamlining", "user-oriented") to make the users think that they're being offered an improvement. The goal of designing a browser for a novice user, which may be initially simple to use, but is "layered" so that it grows with the user's knowledge, is slowly eroding away. Instead, the expectation seems to be that the average user is one who knows little more than how to turn on a computer, and one who intends to remain ignorant --- the model of the "perfect consumer". The customisation features are gradually relegated to extensions, and advanced configuration is not a gradual learning curve, but a big jump, creating a gap that users have to cross - a gap that is widening. Maybe this is a reflection of a general societal trend, but I have no doubt that it is also contributing to it.
In consideration of this, Mozilla also has a rather curious description: "Mozilla is a global non-profit dedicated to putting the user in control of their online experience..."
Although I disgaree with making adblock a default; I think the concept of what constitutes an advert is too ill-defined to add this complexity to a browser. Personally I don't mind anything that is not intrusive or too distracting.
The title of the article is pretty indicative too: "A New, Beautiful Browser is Coming". The first thing that comes to mind is "Beauty is only skin deep."
I don't mind seeing ads on free services that have some marginal value for me.
Don't force your intolerance for ads upon me.
The point isn't that either side is necessarily wrong, just that "listen to your users" is not the #0 rule of business. Users can provide good feedback, but it must be tempered, because there are always going to be detractors, and detractors will always be louder than supporters.
That's fair enough. Chrome users sow what they reap. If they want a web which develops under the control of an ad company, or several ad companies (Microsoft too), then that's what they'll get.
The trouble is, it affects the rest of us who don't want a web to evolve according to the profit interests of ad companies; Mozilla got scared by the sudden migration of people from Firefox to Chrome, so they've now started copying Chrome in many ways that probably aren't as good as they think they are for the future of the web.
That's your mog & pog blog.
Currently online ads are one of the few standard business models that finance the internet ecosystem.
It would be a step back to remove them without a replacement.
I am not trying to be snarky, but to me a lot of the new UI is "oh, they made it look more like Chrome". I am kind of surprised to hear the word "brave" to describe that.
These statements seem at odds. I'm all for change when there's a clear need for it, but when it's done just to keep up with Chrome's aesthetic, it can alienate an existing userbase. If I wanted Chrome, I'd be using Chrome. The reason I stuck with Firefox for so long was the configurability. However, now when a settings is removed or dumbed down the default stance on BugZilla is "just install an addon".
Sadly, this will become the fourth extension I run to restore features Firefox has removed.
1: http://people.mozilla.org/~shorlander/ux-presentation/ux-pre...
http://mikemacd.wordpress.com/2008/09/02/google-chrome-scree...
The design was just fine, so leave it the fuck alone!
http://www.donotlick.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/tab-shap...
1. The curves of the 'aerodynamic' tabs sacrifice pixels in the horizontal ramp-off / -on whereas old 'ugly' rectangular tabs can abutt.
2. A vertical void above the tabs, too shallow into which to put icons.
I'll have no choice but to become accustomed to it but I fear my little 12" screen will become even less efficient.
(2) is the same as Chrome and older Firefox versions - to ensure that there is still some draggable area in the window when it is filled with tabs, and it disappears when the window is maximised.
Please note that I normally use tree style tabs (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...) to put the tabs in a sidebar. It may have messed up the layout a bit. (also, the non-standard colour comes from ColourfulTabs)
To me it's just more visually intuitive to have the tab right above the content window, not over all the toolbars. I really can't fathom why the reverse has become the default.
Windows and Ubuntu versions look much better; the Mac version should be fixed.
I've moved back from Chrome to Firefox and I'm a big fan of the changes that they've made. A lot of clunky interface elements have been eliminated. I really like the customisable menu - it's a much better place to put semi-frequently-used add-ons than has been available in the past. The same paradigm works nicely on mobile, too.
The next things to tackle are probably the bookmarks and options dialogs, both of which are a bit of a pain. Chrome's searchable options were a game changer, and Firefox needs something equally easy-to-navigate.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/classicthemer...
Actually more precisely it lets you completely customize the look.
Want to have square tabs? Can do, can even have the round tabs.
Want to have the url bar at the top? no problem
The fun part now is wondering how long Classic Theme Restorer will be maintained. I give it 2 versions before it falls by the wayside.
Fully rendered cache with images.
Firefox has had their comparable hack (Electrolysis?) in some prototype stage for a long time but the thing is Chrome actually delivered it... years ago. This turned the roles into a catch-up game where Firefox tries to match Chrome instead of other browsers trying to match Firefox, and the setting has remained as such since then.
The difference is still astronomical and I'm not at all convinced that a new user interface could have much effect there. The browser UI has pretty much standardized 15 years ago.
I spend a lot of time profiling browsers and I don't see a lot of multicore usage when browsing in current engines. Usually layout and painting is happening for one page at the time—the tab you're looking on—and multicore performance for them is really poor in current engines.
I have not seen browsers saturate 12 cores. For example, go to [1] in your browser: no browser engine saturates maybe more than a core and a half as it chugs along struggling to reflow.
I think that Chrome- (and IE-)style per-domain process-based parallelism provides some benefits, but mainly in getting stuff like Gmail and Facebook notifications off the main thread, not really in improving throughput.
[1]: http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/single-page.htm...
chrome uses 5 processes and 7 threads in 2 processes, 11 threads in another, 1 in nacl helper and 27 in the main process. Guess what? the kernel scheduler also run them on all cores ;-)
Also, I think the Chrome debugger has surpassed Firefox's, especially with the experimental stack traces in asynchronous flows of control.
Letting sites run arbitrary local code on your machine whenever they want is suicidal from a security perspective.
NoScript might be worthwhile 15 years ago, as you browsed 90s porn sites. Today, you're just making your own web browsing life difficult, hoping the "security benefits" of your paranoia outweighs all the broken functionality you'll be constantly making exceptions for, or flat out missing out on because you don't know it's there.
Other than that, it means people can't mine bitcoin with my CPUs and power bill, I'm immune to ~90% of browser-only exploits (as opposed to ones in things like flash, PDFs, etc., which I am still far less likely to get hit by than a javascript(flash, etc.)-enabled-by-default user), and a few random and generally non-critical things won't work. Even dropdown menus still work as they are generally done in CSS these days.
If a site really needs javascript, I can whitelist it while leaving google tracking scripts, adverts, disqus, etc. disabled.
Me and all people doing front-end work I know of, who even care for any kind of "graceful degradation" (that's a minority of front-end-devs!), always go over "the layout breaks and some fonts are wrong for users with javascript disabled" with "but they cans still click the links and read the text, so we'll just leave it this way" (because the alternative will be putting at least 3x as much work into it, and nobody would pay us for it ...just as nobody would pay for a website without "live filtering" and "ajax loading" and all nowadays).
So you're basically choosing a stone-age-degraded-experience to be able to spare some CPU cycles.
(the security and privacy arguments are valid though, and you're 100% right on these... but as more and more sites become SPAs, you'll basically have no choice than whitelist more and more untill you'll have to whitelist everything)
NoScript will expose phishing schemes immediately, for instance, because it will recognize that the scripts being executed are not coming from the previously-whitelisted domain for Google.
Even if that is the case (which I do doubt), if it means I still have google analytics, advertisers, disqus, and random dodgy sites I've never before visited blocked (e.g. when a site gets compromised by injecting malicious javascript), I don't mind.
But there's no reliable way of knowing where you need JS.
It's not like every useful component on a site reveals its whole story with JS disabled. There could be a data viz animation that strengthens the topic of an article you're reading. The author refers to "the above visual" but doesn't mention it's an animation (because he assumed everyone would see the animation). All you see is a still image - the fallback to the animation. You aren't aware there's a useful animation showing the schematic of an engine part in motion, for example.
The animation was cool, you totally missed out!
However, if the way you use the web is more about fetching specific content or services from specific places - your favs basically, and you don't like to explore, then if it works for you then I won't judge :)
Before I actually installed it, I had the same concerns like you described, but the reality showed that it's moot, and the advantages were even higher than expected, so I sticked with NoScript :)
Chrome has some good points though - its scrolling feels much better, one tab (flash) crashing doesn't take out the entire browser and I can just switch to another tab until it recovers and (obviously) Google products have much better performance. Ultimately though, its slowness in other areas, plus its inherrently broken mouse gestures, meant that I switched back to Firefox.
I do wish Firefox was a bit faster moving. I know there are difficulties in dealing with a huge, old codebase, but I just wish features that Chrome has had for years, like chromeless app windows and multiprocess would just hurry up. Features like window-based private browsing took years to migrate from Chrome, and it's frustrating as you said to be perpetually caught in a game of catch up.
It hasn't been the case for years. Plugins are sandboxed. (plugin-container.exe)
The broken mouse gestures on Chrome are the single most important dealbreaker for me. I will never go back to a browser without good mouse support (which Chrome isn't).
tools > options > advanced > general
It's not as horrible as it was at launch; I'll give it that, but it still just feels wrong compared to Firefox's.
That's the most detrimental effect of Chrome's scroll I think: it makes designers want to look for alternatives to scrolling websites, and unfortunately for all of us, these "gorgeous" but completely user-hostile alternatives exist. And good luck if you get on such a website with js disabled if it wasn't coded in a gracefully degradable way...
No, that is just designer's dumbness. Scrolling should be a system setting and browsers should not override it but just read and use it (I am looking at you, Firefox). And websites certainly should not override it with at all.
Thing are more consistent on Mac OS, but on Windows and Linux these kinds of GUI functionality are still at the "wild west" level, so the only sensible choice is to implement what's "better looking for the user" in your application, which all browsers except Chrome seem to do, btw, and they've arrived at a convergent result while doing it...
And "designer dumbness" is real, but it's root cause is in the fact that lots of good graphic designers are "control freaks", and when they know that something is "technically possible", they don't care how much work it takes, and it takes them a lot to "grok" how detrimental the overall result is for UX.
I solved the problem for myself by staying as far away as possible from "design-driven development" or teams led by designers... but it is a fact that such teams exist at lots of small agencies and startups and that they do shape the field, unfortunately.
Smooth scrolling is nicer than jumping in my opinion, but firefox gives an option for the latter if people want it.
Like many I run both firefox and chrome all day long.
I literally cannot tell which one is faster.
Firefox does use all the cores like Chrome does btw - it's called multithreading - and both of them seem to do approximately an equal okay-ish job at it (maybe servo does a much better job but thats not useable yet).
The only times where as a user i can see chrome multiprocess model shines is:
- sec vulns where chrome sandbox is not bypassed
- stuff actually crashing or hanging
Needless to say both cases are quite rare on either browser (and when flash hangs in firefox, it does for a few seconds before firefox proposes to kill it - while in chrome it only hangs the current tab)
Note also that:
- electrolysis can be enabled right now by an about:config option
- i run firefox and chromium on linux - i guess your mileage may vary on other platforms (?)
On my system, there's a noticeable speed difference between Firefox and Chrome, especially if I disable ad-block in Firefox. (Also on Linux.)
Firefox with 200 tabs can be 1GB or so; chrome with the same load is about 4GB.
There is always a trade-off between speed and memory usage. For my use cases, I prefer this particular trade-off for a browser. I realize you might not have the same preference.
taskset -c 0 google-chrome
taskset -c 0-2 google-chrome
I have to agree, I hate it when a fscking browser decides to grab all the system resources it can, messing with anything else I'm running.
Chrome isn't for me, it's one-core-per-tab thing is not something I need or want. I hate the idea of the browser using too much system resources, I prefer how Firefox does it.
CR however is worse when it comes to multi-tab browsing with over 20 tabs!
FF 8-13 really shined in memory usage. Unfortunately even by their own internal benchmarks, it's gone downhill since since 13.
You can work around this (a) vacuuming it by hand or (b) just deleting it (losing all your visited links).
I did this and Firefox is suddenly as fast as Chromium. (Xubuntu 14.04, 4GB RAM.)
Biggest problem with Chrome I see (performance-wise) is that tabs that weren't in use for a while take quite some time to load. My guess would be their memory gets swapped out. I don't know how Opera did it, but switch to any of ~hundred opened tabs is instantaneous.
[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa36...
Most of the menu reorganizations have very little affect on me since I usually use shortcuts. But waiting for some of these animations just hurts my productiveness and I've seen other people share my dismay. When changes like this hurt the people who know how to use their browser and want to simply get things done, it's saddening.
You may find some relevant prefs at: about:config?filter=animate
Another more minor change was, prior to this version, Firefox still allowed fixed back and forward buttons. At some point, I should probably find a fix for that as well. Animations are supposed to make the experience feel smoother, but from my point of view, it's simply more clunky.
I've removed the search box myself. If DNS doesn't return anything or if what you type looks like a search query, it does a search anyway, so the only thing I'm missing is search autocomplete (there's an addon if you really want that anyway: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/instantfox/).
This seems to come up a lot, but a Mozilla dev already explained it's to protect privacy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5590988
I'd take their word for it :)
When I'm saying is that I want both autocompleted search and a private URL bar.
I prefer it as well, but I think it's fine as an option via extensions.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/
> I want a simple vertical tab, without tree features.
> Vertical Tabs (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/108862/), VertTabbar (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/8045) or Vertigo (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/1343) can do it.
Tree Style Tab has lots of bugs for me, like permanently hiding the navigation bar after I exit full-screen, and scrolling all the way to the bottom of the tab list whenever I restore a closed tab. I still use it because I love being able to organize my tabs hierarchically, but if someone only wants vertical tabs, they should choose a simpler add-on that is less likely to have bugs.
Unfortunately, I can find that page now.
I can see a reason for them on Win/Linux, but I find them completely unfit for the Mac. I guess people just maximize the window and leave it at that.
On the other hand, I'm glad there's still a distinction between the search box and the address bar. The annoyance of omnibar mistaking a url for a search query and vice-versa, even admitting it's a rare event, is not worth the trouble to me. Besides, educating the user on such difference seems important to me.
To me, as I read the brower window top-down, I have the firefox menu and minimise/maximise/close buttons -> the tabs -> the address bar and back/forward buttons. That follows the logic of application -> 'threads' within application -> status of that thread and forms the more logical tree from general to detailed in my mind.
That's not to say it's better or worse than the alternative, it's just different and makes more sense to me.
1) I'm not running OSX so it's double the size for me.
2) there's a whopping great area to the right of the 3-4 tabs I generally have open at any one time. This is the aformentioned ~20px plus the height of the tab itself. Secondly, there's the area beneath the mininmise/maximise/close buttons and the new hamburger menu button, which can be dragged in a pinch to move the window if tabs go all the way across. Tabs don't overflow to this point and it's 26px in height. Note for reference the "1" in the white box for HTTPS Everywhere is pretty much the height of the cursor. [1]
3) Even if I had a comically sized mouse cursor, I can enable the menu bar at the top to pad a bit of extra space (presuming I can live with the idea of having 'File', etc. across part of it) which bumps it up to ~25px.
And you can get that. In Firefox 29, open Menu > Customize and toggle the Title Bar button at the bottom left. That will give you a normal-height title bar to drag the window with, while still keeping tabs on top to reflect that switching tabs also changes the state of the URL in the toolbar.
What are "reverse tabs"?
http://screenshots.en.sftcdn.net/en/scrn/107000/107752/safar...
It appears that "Safari-style tabs" are tabs that extend down from the address bar, not up from it.
Safari is just the only one that didn't.
I don't care where the tabs go by default, as long as we have an option to move them if we want. Unfortunately, as Mozilla are turning into google, they have decided choice is evil and bad.
because several features of those images are even similar to the first version of chrome
Opera had fully customizable UI 12 years ago? And look at us now, somehow we moved back in functionality, even Opera nowadays is nothing more than a bad non-customizable Chrome skin :(
I dread the day most of the web stops working on Opera 12.16. I wont be even able to tune Chromium to my specific needs, after all it requires 16GB of ram to compile now (and that number will probably grow).
Firefox here. As far as I can tell is just saying "ok we decided to shuffle the buttons around again"
Haven't been using firefox since they switched their patch number schema. But I still feel a little sad seeing them seal their own fate.
Anyways, I was hoping the 'zooming' and 'back/forward page swiping animation (on a trackpad)' would be improved, to be more smooth/sexy like it is in Safari on OS X. Unfortunately this hasn't been changed however..
I like Firefox and will continue to use it, but I just don't see what good this update is supposed to accomplish.
Lots of customisation options have been removed (with the justification that it prevents inexperienced users from 'breaking' the browser), like the navigation buttons being locked to the address bar, the inability ability to move the refresh button (urgh) and the addon bar. Most can be restored though the Classic Theme Restorer addon, though it broke another of my addons last time I tried it.
I like the new placement of the real menu bar (when enabled), much better than in the previous versions.
But, in terms of day-to-day usage, its location doesn't really matter much.
back in the days they didnt have 6 week releases.
I read that as F.lux being incorporated somehow, and was very confused :P
The capital F is just the style for titles in English text.
Up until a few years ago, I used an oldish single core processor and I never had any problems with the performance of a browser.
For the past few years I've had a dual core processor, and I still have never had any performance problems, despite being on the internet for hours each day.
The only times it's even remotely a problem, is when I try out some HTML5 demo that runs the Unreal Engine through my browser, or something like that.
Chrome does have preloading of certain things which make loading some things faster although there are addons that can replicate that on Firefox.
The active tab curve is feminine, not in a good way, but I can live with it.
It does feel faster though, maybe they broke some addons that were slowing it down. Time will tell.
Further, I have removed the tab-bar and use "b" exclusively for switching tabs.
It is still frustrating that a bunch of plug-ins appear to have been disrupted because of removing the add-on/status bar, though. Not everything has moved to the new location automatically, and it's not immediately obvious how to get some of them back.
(This does not address that it's crappy that icons that were in the addon bar don't, say, automatically get put into the toolbar or trigger a message notifying you how to get them back or anything, but oh well. EDIT: According to another reply this may not be the case with all addons, seems like some automagically get moved.)
I don't think Mozilla should be holding back functionality to avoid breaking extensions. If an add-on is actively maintained, then the developer will update it, and if the add-on is not actively maintained, then it's going to have to break someday.
I respectfully disagree. Extensions are the USP for Firefox, and IMHO breaking compatibility should be considered a serious issue and not something to be done lightly. (See also: all the hate when they switched to doing six-weekly updates and it kept disabling extensions every time for months afterwards.)
In any case, there was no pressing need to remove the add-on/status bar. Arbitrary rearrangement of UIs is generally bad for usability. Ditto for major things like moving tabs (for anyone who isn't using an enhanced tab plug-in anyway) and the burger menu (which is now a tiny area right underneath the close window button, and appears to be completely inaccessible by keyboard).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_selling_proposition
(for those who were as at sea as I was)
Where is all this stuff going to be displayed? http://img.nux.ro/4RJ-Selection_065.png
I'm not sure what is supposed to happen with plug-ins that actually used the status bar for more comprehensive status information, such as the system you illustrated. You could check whether your (Burger)->Customize screen gives you anything you can dump on a toolbar somewhere as 'Osmose suggested, but since it appears you can only have one row of toolbar contents, the new model just seems to be broken for your purposes. :-(
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/the-addon-bar...
https://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-29.0&os=osx&la...
(change osx with wath you ned)
I assume they will update the website very soon
My pet bug still lays untouched though. https://bugzil.la/444284
5 years after Google Chrome introduced them [rounded tabs]
1. Aping chrome 2. Not having any option to restore sensible tab styles without an addon 3. The general 'fuck the users' mentality they have developer recently 4. Hostility to undoing the damage via removing as many customisable elements as they can.
Firefox for Android also has been shipping with a similar theme for quite some time.
So I suppose they've had ample opportunity to see how people react to it.
http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/04/why-i-use-safari-instead-of-...
Meanwhile both sides will continue to use Microsoft products, despite their history of extremely un-ethical business practises; and stand by while their country (pardon my assumption that they are USians) murders people in other countries with drones every day.
It would be nice to see outrage at outrageous things.
by taking these - IMO - baseless decisions, you're only hurting the thousands of people putting their time, blood and tears without any commercial interest into firefox, not the ceo's you agree/disagree with.
remember that mozilla has no shareholders, the ceos dont get stock options, just a salary. its wholly owned by the mozilla foundation.
Also, choosing software based on political drama instead of technical merit is amusing.
Wish that Eich's vocal detractors had seen it that way, but then again, it's pretty clear that many of them didn't care the least bit about the software or open web side of things anyway. What would one have expected from people to whom Mozilla was only relevant as it touched their social agenda?
In any case, good for anyone who won't be following their example and will be supporting Mozilla in spite of what happened.
http://forums.thedailywtf.com/forums/p/30903/355158.aspx
Australis is removing configurations options for absolutely no reason. If people want chrome, they'll use it. I don't care if mozilla want to ruin the default as long as they give people who want a normal browser a way out, but instead they are removing everything they can get their hands on.
Firefox is dumbing down. That's fine if it's IE, Chrome or Safari where the majority of users think said browser is 'the internet', but Firefox is for power users. People who like their privacy, who want to customise their software to their own use case, and who are rapidly running out of options in a world filled with shitty software that assumes the user has a room temperature IQ, removes options and metro-ifies everything while primarily existing to make money off your private information. Even Mozilla are not only dumbing down, but switching to privacy invasion mode with in-browser ads, and replacing their secure sync with one that drops it all on their servers presumably unencrypted as it works with a basic username/password.
Classic theme restorer: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/classicthemer...
What we really need is a fork of Firefox.
We saw this with Windows 8 and the start menu, we saw this with Android, we see this everywhere, all the time. Things changes and I think you should try it with an impartial eye and than, if you really don't like you can express your feelings in a more constructive way.
Also, "Firefox is for power users". I don't think so, I used to install it on every machine, even for elderly people. It's not some crazy super software.
I've used chrome before. It was constant irritations, from the metro-ified right click menus to its RAM-hogging tendencies to its general inability to restore sessions after a crash. I use Firefox because I like it, and it's the best option that presently exists.
>We saw this with Windows 8 and the start menu
...and MS caved and restored it. I tried Windows 8 and found it completely horrible. As did enough other people for there to be at least 5 third party start menu implementations from Classic Shell (near perfect Windows 7 or XP menu) to a metro-ified spin on the start menu I forgot the name of.
>Also, "Firefox is for power users". I don't think so, I used to install it on every machine, even for elderly people. It's not some crazy super software.
Firefox is a platform to build the browser you want onto as much as it's a standalone browser. It has basic functionality without addons, but even random end users, in my experience, will learn to use addons and have adblock, etc, or have customised their toolbar layout.
The Pale Moon and Cyberfox browsers are forks of Firefox and they will not merge the Australis UI. I'm already using and liking Pale Moon, it's still not on par with Opera 12.17 though but is better than Firefox.
I'll see how Australis looks like on my boxes, but I'm not very hopeful: I like having a proper menu bar, tabs at the very bottom of the window, and a status bar, I couldn't care less for a touch-like interface on a desktop where I have a functioning mouse and keyboard.
Those are hardly anything more current source codes complied differently, with a few switches flipped here and there, certainly not real forks.
Also, the only reason many of these so called Fx "forks" do not ship Australis is because they are on the ESR line.
Step up to the task yourself, then?
> and replacing their secure sync with one that drops it all on their servers presumably unencrypted as it works with a basic username/password.
Firefox Sync is every bit as end-to-end encrypted as it was before. The only difference is that it now comes with a login scheme that is actually usable.
Because everyone here is an uberprogrammer, right?
>Firefox Sync is every bit as end-to-end encrypted as it was before. The only difference is that it now comes with a login scheme that is actually usable.
I might have believed that before PRISM. I wouldn't even care about it sitting on Mozilla servers if I could still encrypt it with my own key instead of trusting them. Even if it is encrypted, presumably it is then derived from the user's password. For the average user, that might be 20-30 bits of entropy. Not good. I don't use sync, but if I did, now I essentially need a 2048-bit password to get good encryption on it.
What does this have to do with anything? How is the old sync system any different, then?
> Even if it is encrypted, presumably it is then derived from the user's password. For the average user, that might be 20-30 bits of entropy. Not good.
The other alternative here is having a sync system that your average user can't even figure out to use. On the other hand, it doesn't take anything away from you.
> I don't use sync, but if I did, now I essentially need a 2048-bit password to get good encryption on it.
You are confusing key lengths from algorithms like RSA with symmetric algorithms. The keys that are used for encrypting data will be either 128 or 256 bits (haven't checked) and used with some symmetric cipher.
Therefore, if you don't trust key stretching to be sufficient with a strong passphrase, you can grab 16 or 32 bytes of randomness, encode it however you wish and use it as a password.
The old one let you run your own server. It let you encrypt it with your own key, which you could know was generated from a good entropy source, not been shared, and is store securely. As it is, it's possible the new sync has a backdoor, even one many people at Mozilla don't know. There is also no point in deliberately increasing the attack surface for no reason.
>You are confusing key lengths from algorithms like RSA with symmetric algorithms. The keys that are used for encrypting data will be either 128 or 256 bits (haven't checked) and used with some symmetric cipher.
I may be wrong, but I thought the old sync used an RSA key as it's used for authenticating the user as well as actually saving/accessing the data (probably symmetric for the actual storage, with the key encrypted using the RSA key).
This is still possible with the new system, although I'll admit the ease and usability of such a setup needs work (and IIRC there are some changes required before android devices can properly use a third-party server; it may take a few releases before this become as easy as it was with the old system).
> As it is, it's possible the new sync has a backdoor, > even one many people at Mozilla don't know.
Both the client and server are open-source, and you can verify that the client follows the protocol [1] and doesn't leak anything more than a PBKDF2-stretched password derivative to the server. It's about as backdoor-proof as any client/server system is likely to get.
But yes, it is more dependent on the strength of your password than the previous sync system.
[1] https://github.com/mozilla/fxa-auth-server/wiki/onepw-protoc...
https://docs.services.mozilla.com/howtos/run-sync-1.5.html
> It let you encrypt it with your own key
Huh? No, it didn't. The key was generated automatically by the client just like it is now.
> As it is, it's possible the new sync has a backdoor, even one many people at Mozilla don't know.
How do you know the old one didn't? You have to trust Mozilla at some point. What if the client generates bad encryption keys on purpose, or so on?
> I may be wrong, but I thought the old sync used an RSA key as it's used for authenticating the user as well as actually saving/accessing the data (probably symmetric for the actual storage, with the key encrypted using the RSA key).
RSA keys were scrapped from the system a long time ago as they provided no benefit.
>What if the client generates bad encryption keys on purpose, or so on?
Fair enough, I never used it, but I was under the impression the user could generate their own, even if just as an option.
>RSA keys were scrapped from the system a long time ago as they provided no benefit.
Exactly the problem. The benefit is invisible to (most) endusers, so in Mozilla logic, it doesn't exist for the user.
What is the benefit in using RSA with the sync protocol? What sort of experience do you have in the design of cryptographic protocols to comment on this? Or are you grasping at whatever random reasons you can find to take a shit on the Firefox developers?
If you're interested in the reasons why asymmetric crypto was dropped, they are here:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Services/Sync/SimplifiedCryptoPropo...
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Services/Sync/SimplifyCrypto
TL;DR: There simply was no reason to use RSA. A faster and simpler protocol that is just as secure could be built without it.