[HN Gopher] Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox
___________________________________________________________________
Reasons to ditch Chrome and use Firefox
Author : ddtaylor
Score : 510 points
Date : 2022-05-28 08:00 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.pcworld.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.pcworld.com)
| frankzander wrote:
| Using Firefox all the time ... Brave seems also to be a
| reasonable alternative. But I just don't like the Dev tools in
| Chrome ... The FF ones are way better (IMHO). At the end it seems
| so that FF isn't blocking a lot of tracking by default while
| Brave do so. But FF with uBlockOrigin is a good match for
| privacy.
| toastal wrote:
| uBlock Origin can do a lot more than people think too... easy
| opt-in to JavaScript, cleaning tracking tokens from the URL,
| and allowing me to block features from websites trying to be a
| bit too 'social' or 'recommendy'. Fx will be skipping the part
| of the latest WebManifest that cripples uBlock's ability to
| block as well.
| Cyder wrote:
| I was using Firefox for a kiosk project and netstat/wireshark
| kept showing connections to Google. I tried to de-Google firefox
| and it wouldn't run. I was amazed Firefox is so tied to Google.
| It was disheartening. Ive left Firefox for Brave after being a
| Firefox evangelist for 15 years. Brave isn't perfect, but it
| doesn't hide what it really is.
| Vladimof wrote:
| The worst part about Firefox for me is that they removed most
| add-ons on Firefox Mobile (unless you use cumbersome
| collections).
| arun6582 wrote:
| I have tried doing the several times in past because of chromes
| arrogant and monopoly like attitude on forcing feature addition
| or removal But browsing works better and faster in chrome and
| most consumer base blindly use chrome If you want to build a
| extension with a user base you will have to use chrome If you
| want your website to work properly it must satisfy chrome first
| shaman1 wrote:
| I tried using Firefox on Android for a while but had to switch
| back to Chrome mainly because Firefox reloads the page if you put
| it in the background even for a few seconds. This caused real
| issues when I had to approve a payment on a banking app I'm using
| - after aproval going back to Firefox the page got refreshed and
| I had to do it again. Chrome somehow manages to keep the page
| loaded even with tens of open tabs.
|
| Another thing missing in the Android version is the Print
| function. Such a basic feature!
|
| I've been using it on the desktop too and there it works ok, no
| major issues - just the print dialog was much poorer then
| Chrome's and I had to print from Chrome.
|
| Firefox has a many people rooting for it but not enough people
| contributing.
|
| Brave strangely decided to go with Chromium rather than Firefox
| as a base even though Brendan knew Firefox much better. And many
| other browsers have decided the same Vivaldi, Edge, etc. At this
| stage I'm afraid Firefox has too many unpolished edges,
| especially on mobile to match the competition.
| brokenkebab2 wrote:
| "Lighter on system resources" contradicts to my experience: at
| least on js-heavy websites FF made my laptop notably hotter than
| Chrome, so on CPU side it didn't feel light at all
| debacle wrote:
| The timing on this article is interesting. My Firefox just
| "refreshed" itself, turned Pocket back on, turned DNS over HTTPS
| back on, removed all of my plugins, and then somehow leaked
| itself up to 10gb of RAM (I'll blame Discord for that I guess).
|
| The browser ecosystem under Google's benevolent dictatorship is
| languishing.
| jrootabega wrote:
| I had two similar experiences recently. DOH turned itself on a
| few weeks ago for everyone, I think, out of band from a new
| release.
|
| And when they released v100, the Ubuntu snap just updated
| itself automatically and killed a firefox process that I was
| actively using. (Not sure exactly whose fault that was, but I
| think we can give Mozilla some of it.) After restarting, I was
| greeted with that bullshit-purple-neon-themed "100 Thank You's"
| modal dialog, with no useful information, that had to be
| acknowledged before continuing.
| fuckcensorship wrote:
| I recommend checking out LibreWolf as a possible alternative:
| https://librewolf.net/.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| Thanks for the link! I have been using Safari on macOS and it
| is not so bad on privacy (please correct me on this if I am
| wrong) but I will try LibreWolf on my System76 Linux laptop.
| SMAAART wrote:
| Google Workspace user here, and Firefox and Google Docs/Sheets
| don't play well together, I've tried.
|
| Of course I'd like to find a Google Workspace replacement but I
| can't seem to find any so, I am married to Google.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| Well, Google Workspace is the best for work environments. Every
| company I have worked for in the last decade uses GSuite, then
| Workspace. I am happy running Google's stuff on my
| corporate/job laptops, and more privacy preserving options on
| my own systems.
| computerfriend wrote:
| Also a Google Workspace user, using Firefox for everything with
| no issues.
| sph wrote:
| I honestly want to ditch Firefox and try a Chromium browser for a
| minute [1], but I'm stuck on Firefox because it's the only one
| with a killer feature: send a tab to/from iOS and my Linux
| desktop.
|
| I skip Chrome and Edge for privacy reasons, Brave have a crappy
| and buggy sync feature that I don't know what OSes it supports,
| but not my combination. Can't send tabs with them. Vivaldi
| doesn't have an iOS port. Impossible to do with Chromium.
|
| Firefox can send tabs to all my machines, and I use that feature
| multiple times daily, such as finding a cool article while I'm
| sitting on the couch and sending it to my desktop so I can read
| it later. Mr. Eich, if you're around here, please please fix
| syncing tabs in your browser, it's the only thing stopping me
| from switching honestly.
|
| --
|
| 1: I quite like Firefox, but it's in a dying spiral, and I'm
| starting to see broken sites. The Web is such a complicated
| nightmare "protesting" won't change anything, and forking
| neither, because it's too bloody complex. Chromium has won. Our
| only hope is Mozilla takes their head out of their arse and start
| working on their browser instead of faffing about and making
| small, meaningless changes every release, but I don't see that
| happening any time soon.
| kristiandupont wrote:
| > I'm starting to see broken sites
|
| What are some examples of this? I keep seeing this complaint
| and I keep asking for examples but I always get "just various
| sites"-like answers. FF is my primary browser and I am not
| seeing it. I am genuinely curious as to whether it is starting
| to fall behind but I can recall maybe two or three instances
| the past couple of years where I opened a site in Brave to see
| if it worked there.
| jahnu wrote:
| I use both edge and Firefox daily and have also rarely seen
| broken sites and even then I've experienced them in both
| browsers at about the same rate.
| 323 wrote:
| Firefox is my main browser for many years now, but there are
| two categories of sites that I only open in Chrome:
|
| Video heavy sites, especially YouTube. It loads extremely
| slowly compared to Chrome. And has much more video
| stuttering. Probably Google is sabotaging YouTube in Firefox.
|
| Complex interactive sites, like crypto exchanges. They are
| slow and with many rendering artefacts in Firefox. Probably
| because they don't even bother testing in Firefox.
| cassepipe wrote:
| I was wondering if it was still possible to stream a
| youtube video out in VLC of if it has been made impossible
| freebuju wrote:
| It has always been possible to open YouTube links on VLC.
| If you want to do so with even less clicks from your
| browser, there's a _open with mpv_ extension. Can 't link
| it now as am on mobile.
| nemetroid wrote:
| > Video heavy sites, especially YouTube. It loads extremely
| slowly compared to Chrome. And has much more video
| stuttering.
|
| I recently had similar issues, and it turned out that
| Firefox's cache was constantly nearly-full. Clearing the
| cache returned YouTube to normal.
| whoisthemachine wrote:
| Ah yes, cache eviction, one of two hard problems in
| computer science...
| robonerd wrote:
| > _Video heavy sites, especially YouTube._
|
| _Right-click - > Open With mpv_
|
| It's a pain in the ass, but the performance gap is immense.
| On a desktop I wouldn't bother, but on my laptop this has a
| real impact on battery life.
| guerrilla wrote:
| > Video heavy sites, especially YouTube. It loads extremely
| slowly compared to Chrome. And has much more video
| stuttering. Probably Google is sabotaging YouTube in
| Firefox.
|
| Hmmm... I've never had this problem and I use YouTube
| heavily. You sure your video acceleration and codecs and
| all that are set up right?
| ris58h wrote:
| It's a known issue
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1658392 I
| have a laptop with Intel HD graphics and Firefox can't
| play fullhd video on x2 speed. It freezes every second.
| Chrome on the same machine plays the same video
| flawlessly.
| wildrhythms wrote:
| How does one 'set up' video acceleration and codecs?
| guerrilla wrote:
| I don't remember but I had to enable something in FF for
| acceleration at one point and I assume you'd have to have
| the right codecs installed. This is on Arch Linux.
| mmwelt wrote:
| I'm not the person you were replying to, but a few broken
| sites I've noticed are: web.skype.com
| Jitsi Meet (https://meet.jit.si/) -- apparently no support
| for insertable streams stuff.co.nz from outside NZ
| aembleton wrote:
| I don't have a Microsoft account so couldn't try
| web.skype..com. Not sure what insertable streams are.
|
| I tried stuff.co.nz from the UK and it looked like this:
| https://imgur.com/a/tibMwHE
|
| Articles loaded fine; I'm not sure what is broken about it.
| zonotope wrote:
| I use firefox and don't see broken sites per se, but there
| are many sites where performance, especially js performance,
| suffers. Gmail and other Google sites are sluggish for
| example, as well as Amazon. It sometimes takes a _minute_
| after visiting amazon.com for their js to initialize and I
| can begin to interact with the site. This is not the case for
| chromium. I stick with firefox because of multi-account
| containers, a mobile app that I can add adblockers to, and
| multi-device sync that works well with linux and android, but
| performance lags and it 's getting worse.
| [deleted]
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Google sites have long been suspected to do things
| intentionally in a way that is only optimizing for
| Chrom(e/ium), maybe even intentionally slow on other
| browsers, which is mostly Firefox. No surprise there at
| all.
|
| However I do not see this stuff about JS init to take that
| long on amazon. It might be a special thing in your case.
| Did you try things like a new profile, to test, whether it
| still happens?
| shadowgovt wrote:
| It's not so much "intentionally broken on Firefox" as it
| is "between adding features and debugging Firefox
| performance issues, one gets you promoted and one
| doesn't." Because the former benefits all users and the
| latter benefits about 5% of users at most.
|
| The banal evil of neglect vs. intentional maliciousness.
| beebeepka wrote:
| That may be a small part of the truth but even a 12 year
| old me wouldn't believe such a fairy tale to be the whole
| reason.
|
| MS also used to optimize DOS in ways that clearly hurt
| their competitors. We've seen Intel aggressively optimize
| their compiler to slow down AMD... I am sure people have
| been "optimizing" in such ways for as long as there have
| been people.
| mattarm wrote:
| I can agree that Google simply neglects Firefox
| performance and features. I think this alone is enough to
| explain why Google products work better on Chrome.
|
| Are you saying that there are people at Google whose job
| description is to tweak Google web products to perform
| worse on Firefox, just so Chrome appears better in
| comparison?
| _dark_matter_ wrote:
| It is not just suspected, all Firefox Android users are
| served a different Google search experience than Chrome.
| One that is much worse.
| cpeterso wrote:
| Firefox Android's can install the "Google Search Fixer"
| add-on to request the full Google Search UI (by sending a
| Chrome User-Agent string to google.com):
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/google-
| search...
| dralley wrote:
| It shouldn't be necessary.
| lloeki wrote:
| > a minute
|
| Shot in the dark: sounds like a timeout in TCP, DNS, or
| something like that.
| enragedcacti wrote:
| I most commonly find it during payment processing and other
| spots where devs are trying to do fancy input validation or
| styling in forms, especially on mobile. The most common issue
| is that the the cursor isn't moved correctly when accounting
| for automatically inserted spaces or hyphens and it can be
| pretty much impossible to enter the correct numbers without
| overwriting previous numbers. Autofill also generally fails
| in these scenarios.
| beej71 wrote:
| I've seen a couple pages on CNBC where it would render the
| content, then delete it all. (Like, the containing DOM
| element was made empty.)
|
| Disabling JS kept the content from vanishing.
|
| Of course, this is almost certainly bad coding on the
| website's side, and not the fault of Firefox. But it seems
| like it's but getting the QA attention it needs from the site
| owners.
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| asos.com did not work properly on FF until recently. Opening
| some categories would yield an "oops" error. Seems it's fixed
| in the latest release, but it goes to show how fucked up is
| webdev if nobody from asos.com tested it with Firefox.
| guerrilla wrote:
| What... I've used it for years. Never seen this. Maybe it
| was temporary.
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| It persisted for a few months. Probably it had to do with
| PL locale, as they did not strip diacritics in category
| names from URLs
|
| Oh, and I did turn off uBlock Origin, for that matter.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Okay, I can see that being a thing. I've only used it in
| Swedish and English.
| supernovae wrote:
| Fidelity's website is busted in firefox a lot of the time
| twangist wrote:
| time.com, pages simply didn't appear -- at least this was the
| case in recent versions of FF, can't swear it's so in latest.
| Other sites can lack "Search" buttons that appear in Chrome &
| Safari, or their forms don't work in FF but do in other
| browsers. It's a real problem.
| almog wrote:
| Gmail, other than being sluggish on FF, its browser history
| (back button) is broken on Firefox (though gmail's keyboard
| shortcuts still work).
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| I use this feature to stick it to them and never use logged
| in Google properties from my main Firefox. I can discard
| their cookies at will. I have a Chromium sandbox they can
| track me in for Gmail.
| TheLML wrote:
| I've had problems when organizing online tournaments using
| Challonge. I've had to switch to Chrome a few times to do
| something, since it would regularly break in FF. Also their
| support page requires you to enter a combination of keys to
| reveal the email address: sadly this didn't work in FF, too.
| I've had a few other problems over time, but none that I
| remember off the top of my head. I've used FF for the past
| 15+ years and don't usually mind small problems, though.
| guerrilla wrote:
| I still haven't found any except a local dating site that can
| detect my ad blocker in Firefox but not Chrome. Every other
| site that doesn't work in FF so far also doesn't work in
| Chrome.
| neogodless wrote:
| HomeDepot.com often won't let me add things to cart. The past
| couple months it has been working again, but there were a few
| months where I couldn't.
|
| This morning, I couldn't buy a key off cdkeys.com - tried two
| totally different methods, email addresses, credit cards.
| Didn't try a second browser yet but I'm not sure I am that
| persistent...
|
| A news site, I think the New Yorker, would only show the
| first two paragraphs of an article but in other browsers,
| would show the full article.
|
| I don't log which sites break - if it's important I tend to
| cave and open Edge for that site, do my business, and then go
| back to Firefox for everything else. If it's less important,
| I'll opt to just not to business with them. But I'm a grain
| of sand so it doesn't make much difference.
|
| Most sites just have really obnoxious CAPTCHA, often
| requiring more than one "pick the things" but I don't know if
| my experience is specific to Firefox.
| lol768 wrote:
| > HomeDepot.com often won't let me add things to cart. The
| past couple months it has been working again, but there
| were a few months where I couldn't.
|
| I checked for webcompat issues matching this description
| and couldn't find anyone reporting that adding items to the
| cart didn't work.
|
| I attempted to reproduce the issue myself, but HomeDepot
| block visitors from my location.
|
| > This morning, I couldn't buy a key off cdkeys.com - tried
| two totally different methods, email addresses, credit
| cards. Didn't try a second browser yet but I'm not sure I
| am that persistent...
|
| Can't reproduce, I was able to buy a CD Key ("Garfield Kart
| - Furious Racing PC") at 28 May 2022, 16:51:52 BST using
| Firefox 100.0.2 and a debit card.
|
| > A news site, I think the New Yorker, would only show the
| first two paragraphs of an article but in other browsers,
| would show the full article.
|
| Can't reproduce. Visiting
| https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-baby-
| formul... in Firefox shows me the exact same content as
| when I use Chromium.
|
| I'm not saying you've _not_ experienced these issues, but
| they 're definitely not widespread and your post doesn't
| give enough information to go on to diagnose if there's an
| issue with Firefox or not.
|
| The best thing you can do is report issues to the webcompat
| project as and when you come across compatibility issues.
| It takes about 20 seconds, less time than you probably
| spent writing this comment.
| CJefferson wrote:
| What is the "webcompat project"? I just tried googling
| for it and there were some articles about it, but no page
| I could submit.
|
| I can say I recently found I couldn't make a new account
| at 'wise.com' in firefox (had to switch to chrome), and
| an internal university website doesn't work in Firefox --
| but of course, I can't share that page publicly, so
| there's not a lot useful I can do with that.
| lol768 wrote:
| https://webcompat.com/
|
| > but no page I could submit
|
| Click the large "Report bug" button and you'll get to
| https://webcompat.com/issues/new
| IshKebab wrote:
| > I'm not saying you've _not_ experienced these issues
|
| It really sounds like you are. I hate these "Well did you
| report it? I can't reproduce it. Did you rebuild in debug
| mode and check the logs? Did you learn C++ and fix it?"
| responses.
|
| It's open source victim blaming.
| saghm wrote:
| > A news site, I think the New Yorker, would only show the
| first two paragraphs of an article but in other browsers,
| would show the full article.
|
| Sorry if this is a silly question, but is this maybe just
| the paywall? I'm not sure if you've been reading more
| articles on Firefox and then only opened on Chrome or
| something after this started happening, but it sounds like
| that could be what's going on.
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| Fidelity won't let me log in on Firefox. I've tried
| everything anyone has to suggest, and I don't care anymore
| because I moved to Vanguard instead.
| splatcollision wrote:
| I just discovered the "share" item in the tab contextual menu
| includes AirDrop (on mac naturally) and while this doesn't help
| you, I was always copying and pasting a site between firefox
| and safari in order to send it to my iPhone, and was previously
| frustrated that I couldn't hit the airdrop function from
| firefox directly Thanks, your comment made me look for it!
| hollerith wrote:
| Google Chrome for iOS (well, iPadOS to be precise) will send a
| web page (not a tab) to desktop Chrome. I know because I do it
| regularly. The disadvantage of that app is that it lets through
| most ads blocked by the combination of Safari and the ad
| blocker Wipr (and I have not bothered to look for an ad blocker
| that works better with Chrome on iPadOS) with the result that I
| do most of my iOS browsing in Safari, which means that before I
| can send a page to my desktop, I usually need to "send" it to
| the Chrome app, which requires 3 taps, the first of which is a
| tap on the "share" button near the top right corner of the
| Safari app. But even with those 3 taps, it ends up being an
| easier method than the method that begins with my using the
| same "share" button to mail the page's URL to myself.
|
| I also send pages in the opposite direction.
| rusk wrote:
| > send a tab to/from iOS and my Linux desktop
|
| This was actually the killer feature for me on chrome about 5
| years ago and then Google did what Google did, and killed it.
| TekMol wrote:
| finding a cool article while I'm sitting on the couch
| and sending it to my desktop so I can read it later
|
| Isn't that just a link?
|
| I solve this by having a list of links on the web that I can
| access from everywhere.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Or you know, just drag the url to the desktop.
|
| I'm more concerned with Firefox's lack of per-tab screenshare
| in meet/jitsi/etc.
| sph wrote:
| Please show me how to drag a url from my phone to my Linux
| desktop.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Wait, and how is Firefox capable of doing that?
| alpaca128 wrote:
| With an online account that syncs the Firefox profile
| across all devices. And part of that is the ability to
| send a link to a specific device, which will then
| automatically load that URL in a new tab.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Sounds a bit counterproductive if privacy is your goal
| isn't it? Why would you be signed into your browser.
| sph wrote:
| It's that curlftpfs Dropbox comment again.
|
| It takes 20x as much time and work to copy a link, context
| switch to another app, paste, then, when you're on the
| desktop, _remember_ to check that shared document, and open
| the link, than to just press option menu, send tab, choose
| linux desktop and bam!, it's there as soon as you open your
| browser the next day.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Firefox can share history and bookmarks with other instances
| running on other machines even if the other is not running at
| the time and you don't need to do anything to make it happen
| once you have set it up.
| alduin32 wrote:
| > Our only hope is Mozilla takes their head out of their arse
| and start working on their browser instead of faffing about and
| making small, meaningless changes every release, but I don't
| see that happening any time soon.
|
| Tab syncing is a small meaningless change to me, but not to
| you. Some of these things you find small and meaningless could
| be important to some other people (for example, multilingual
| spell-checking is very important to some people, X11 isolation
| is very important to some others).
|
| What do you actually expect from Mozilla by "taking their head
| out of their arse" ?
| sph wrote:
| > What do you actually expect from Mozilla by "taking their
| head out of their arse" ?
|
| Investing in their browser. Investing in an alternative
| ecosystem.
|
| Brave have added in-browser Torrent, TOR, IPFS support.
| That's what I would expect from Mozilla, trying to
| differentiate itself. Now we've lost the compact UI, got
| coloured themes for one release. What's cooking that's really
| exciting? What's the plan to retake some of the lost market
| share? I can't see any thirst to improve over there.
| robonerd wrote:
| > _Brave have added in-browser Torrent_
|
| Useless bloat. Dedicated torrent clients are made better
| and work better.
|
| > _TOR_
|
| Interesting, but the popular advice is to only use the Tor
| Browser. I don't know if that's good advice or not, but it
| certainly dampens my enthusiasm for Brave supporting Tor.
|
| > _IPFS support._
|
| When I actually find a real use for IPFS, then I'll be able
| to form an opinion on it. Until then, it's just an obscure
| novelty to me. What can I actually do with it? Torrents and
| traditional websites together work for
| downloading/hosting/sharing anything I can think of.
| pvinis wrote:
| Hard disagree. I don't want Tor and torrents and email and
| other crapware on my browser. And not on my Firefox. It
| already has too much of that with pocket. They can focus on
| the engine and the UI. Leave useless stuff as separate
| applications.
| stragies wrote:
| The super-annoying thing about that, is that you need a Sync-
| Server, and an "Identity" server to run this all without having
| sign in to "Firefox Sync".
|
| The sync-server is trivial to run via docker, but (last time i
| checked) running the other essential part yourself is
| (intentionally?) not easy at all.
| robin_reala wrote:
| Mozilla really can't win can they? They're the only browser
| company that even attempts to provide the ability to run your
| own syncing service, and yet the insinuation is that they're
| going out of their way to make it difficult.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Turns out the sum of something's value isn't just what it
| can do but how easy it is to make it do the thing is claims
| to do.
| stragies wrote:
| I'm not sure, that can be stated as fact, but for this
| subtopic (How to run all FXA and syncserver selfhosted)
| the docs make it sound easy to deploy/run. As expected,
| after all, the featureset needed isn't huge for "Maintain
| a list of tabs per browsers per User, authenticated via
| some backend plugin for the syncserver". But then you
| read, that you need to run half a dozen "fxa-something"
| servers, in addition to the SyncServer. And a clear
| writeup of those is what I briefly check for every few
| months, but haven't found yet.
| stragies wrote:
| to be clear, by "intentionally" I meant, that I could
| understand, if it were a business decision to allocate
| less/no developer time to making the "100% self-
| hosted"-option very attractive/documented/easy. I did not
| mean to insinuate intentional hurdle-introductions via
| code, or some-such.
| andrepd wrote:
| Is this serious? Your criciticism is that... they offer their
| service _and_ the possibility to self-host?
| stragies wrote:
| No, I meant, they make it look like you could do this all
| easily without external clouds, but then the Identity-
| server, which I cannot imagine to be much more complicated
| w.r.t. functionality that e.g. a Samba4 AD-DC, is/was(last
| time i checked) basically undocumented and looked
| intentionally overbuilt (again, comparing with e.g.
| Samba4-AD). And not open-source (iirc). Also, why can't I
| use a standard Directory Server, instead of their home-
| built one-off-solution?
| commoner wrote:
| The Firefox Sync Storage source code, licensed under
| MPL-2.0 and fully documented, is right here:
|
| https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncstorage-rs
|
| It includes a Docker Compose setup.
|
| Standard directory servers aren't specifically built for
| end-to-end encryption, while data in Firefox Sync is end-
| to-end encrypted by default. Firefox Sync must also scale
| to support the millions of Firefox users who use
| Mozilla's instance.
| stragies wrote:
| Hi, thanks for replying with information. You seem to
| more than me about the current situation, i'm happy to
| learn more.
|
| So the above (synstorage-rs_in_container) is now the only
| required software needed, and now includes the identity-
| server portion?
|
| I would really like to use the "beam-a-tab-to-some-other-
| firefox", been a FF user since before it got that name.
| But i wanted to self-host all parts, and then found some
| info, that suggested, that 2 parts are needed: the
| SyncServer, the above open-source thing, and the
| Identity-server, on which i did not find much info at the
| time.
|
| Do you have a link to recent-ish write-up of the current
| situation, that you can validate to be correct-ish?
|
| Thanks again
|
| Also, w.r.t Directory-Servers/Security: Enterprise
| printers have been able to authenticate Users with
| SSL/TLS-secured connection for more than a decade. So why
| not a "syncserver for URLs of open tabs per User"?
| commoner wrote:
| I don't think Mozilla has a recent write-up (blog post)
| about the Sync Server. The most recent one I found is an
| announcement from 2020, which explains some of Mozilla's
| motivations:
|
| https://blog.mozilla.org/services/2020/09/15/the-future-
| of-s...
|
| But, as you mentioned, the current documentation is here:
|
| https://mozilla-
| services.readthedocs.io/en/latest/howtos/run...
|
| You might also find the unofficial Arch User Repository
| package, comments, and PKGBUILD file helpful:
|
| https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/firefox-syncstorage-
| git
|
| I hope it works out for you!
| stragies wrote:
| The syncserver is the trivial part. The less-well-
| documented web of 5-8 fxa-yxzablgt services (FX-Account-
| server) that you need to also run is the issue. The
| docker github readme warns against anything but "messing
| around" type usage, and the last update there was 7 years
| ago. ( fxa-content-server fxa-profile-server fxa-auth-
| server fxa-oauth-server browserid-verifier fxa-auth-db-
| mysql )
| kivlad wrote:
| I've tried this before, and you're right about it not
| being easy to follow, at least compared to previous
| incarnations. The above documentation is for a much older
| version, and the latest I found is here:
|
| https://mozilla.github.io/ecosystem-
| platform/tutorials/devel...
|
| There's a lot of components directly hooked into Google
| Cloud that also make it difficult in terms of
| configuration. At some point I think creating an actual
| user's guide for this would be good for the community
| interested in self-hosting this on their own.
| stavros wrote:
| Vivaldi is another browser I kind of like, made by the former
| CTO of Opera.
| jacooper wrote:
| You can already do this on brave, with brave sync enabled.
| sph wrote:
| No you can't. I have sync enabled everywhere, and there's no
| send tab option anywhere on iOS. Either that or I'm blind.
| Beta-7 wrote:
| >send a tab to/from iOS and my Linux desktop
|
| Have you tried KDEconnect? I use it to share/send links from
| Android to Linux and vice versa with the KDEconnect browser
| extension.
| lol768 wrote:
| > I'm starting to see broken sites
|
| > Our only hope is Mozilla takes their head out of their arse
| and start working on their browser
|
| Are you reporting these to the webcompat project? Mozilla is
| absolutely funding QA testers and engineers to check what's
| broken and triage issues that affect specific browsers and not
| others.
|
| They've handled 103k issues: https://github.com/webcompat/web-
| bugs/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is...
|
| A great number of the issues that Mozilla contractors and
| employees investigate that are reported via the webcompat
| project actually turn out to be the site owner's fault. They're
| not using standardised web technologies, not testing their work
| in multiple browsers. Mozilla employees and contractors will
| try to perform outreach to these site owners, but they're often
| not interested.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| There's no easy answer here short of governments forcing a
| browser ballot on new computers. Regular people just don't
| care enough if the web devolves into a monoculture. And
| businesses don't want to use standards when it's easier to
| just do whatever works in Blink.
| MasterYoda wrote:
| Every time something is broken for me on a site it is because
| of an addon/extension, not because of Firefox. I beleave
| Firefox get much blame for broken sites when it actually is an
| addon that the user installed which is to blame.
|
| I even have some vague recollection of Mozilla mentioning just
| this. Like 99% when something is broken it not because the
| browser but because some addon the user installed.
|
| So test a site that you dont think works with the "troubleshoot
| mode" in Firefox that inactivate addons etc to see if it works
| then. And if it works, then figure out which addon it is that
| makes the mess and to blame.
| jordemort wrote:
| This matches my experience - it's not Firefox that's getting
| worse, but I'm encountering more and more sites that don't
| function correctly when uBlock Origin is enabled. Whenever I
| run into a site seems busted, I disable uBlock, reload, and
| suddenly everything works. I'm not sure if the filters I'm
| using are getting worse or if the JS on the sites I'm
| visiting is.
|
| I used to use Decentraleyes but I ended up uninstalling that
| completely because it broke so many sites.
| pvinis wrote:
| I know it's blasphemy, but! what would a firefox with
| WebKit/blink look and feel like?
|
| would we want that? in a future that we are officially a
| monoculture, would we prefer no firefox, or a traitor firefox?
| rkk3 wrote:
| I wanted to switch to Firefox, but gave up because it kept
| hanging on me with only a couple of tabs open.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Tree style tabs is what brought me over. I have dozens of tabs I
| want to keep an eye on, without necessarily having them actually
| open and loaded. Kinda like bookmarks but quickly available.
| There's no way to arrange that many tabs across the top, so a bit
| of CSS magic removes the top tabs. With modern screens being so
| wide it makes sense to just have them vertically, in a tree.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| Firefox user for about five years and very satisfied with it.
|
| Firefox's multi account containers are very useful - when I
| started using them a few years ago I very quickly noticed that my
| Web searches stopped showing up in Amazon or as FB ads, and vice
| versa.
|
| And just generally not using a browser that is aligned with the
| interests of a global advertising company seems like a good
| thing.
| XorNot wrote:
| I've been using Firefox on all my devices for years now, and I am
| _never_ stopping. Google sells you ads: Chrome is _how_ Google
| shows you ads and gets your data.
|
| If you believe in a privacy respecting, open web where users own
| their own devices then you have choices other then Firefox - but
| nobody should be using Chrome.
| hn_user145 wrote:
| The only thing missing on Firefox for me is the ability to
| translate websites inline.
|
| Otherwise Firefox+ multi-account containers + proxy per container
| is a really nice feature
| kwanbix wrote:
| That is exactly why I no longer use Firefox. I moved to germany
| and I don't speak german, so you can imagine browsing without
| this functionality is impossible.
| lionkor wrote:
| there is an addon which integrates very cleanly, they should
| just merge that into the browser
| kevincox wrote:
| For me it is rare enough that I just paste the URL into
| Google translate manually.
| bachmeier wrote:
| I've used Firefox as my main browser since it was called Phoenix.
| Never had a reason to change. When I have to use Chrome (as right
| now on this Chromebook) I'm not a fan because of the lack of a
| built-in reader view button. That's a critical part of my web
| usage due to the small fonts used on many sites. The extensions
| providing this functionality for Chrome just aren't as good IMO.
|
| There is a recent development that might get me to switch to
| Chrome after this long. Chrome-based browsers will give apps
| access to the local filesystem. The Firefox team has said you
| can't do that safely because users don't understand the concept
| of a file. Using Chrome, I can for instance go to the Logseq
| website, click the button to give access to that directory, and
| start writing. No signing in, no need to store my data in the
| cloud. It's so nice to be able to avoid the cloud - but only
| using Chrome.
| Sloppy wrote:
| Add VPN, TOR support, private search, IPFS, etc. and maybe Brave
| is a better choice.
| d_sc wrote:
| I really like Firefox but have recently started using Edge a lot
| more because Firefox is unable to do virtual backgrounds in
| Google Meet. At first I tried to run 2 browsers, Edge for
| meetings and Firefox for everything else but that got cumbersome
| and frustrating. Clicking into a meeting invite would open in the
| wrong browser (if FF was the default browser) or constantly
| copying & pasting links to open them in FF.
|
| I was hoping Camo would eventually add in virtual backgrounds to
| their app but it hasn't happened yet. Would love to ditch
| Edge/Chromium.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| Question: how good is Edge privacy wise? Microsoft doesn't make
| their big money selling advertising targeting services, right?
| I noticed that Edge is even available on iOS.
| MacsHeadroom wrote:
| Edge is worse for privacy than Chrome. Even edge "private"
| browsing mode is significantly less private than Chrome's
| private browsing. It's one of the worst browsers for privacy.
|
| Edge makes lots of calls to Bing for advertising purposes.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| Thanks.
| dopa42365 wrote:
| Assuming you use ublock origin, does it really matter? For
| all intents and purposes, whatever data is collected is
| absolutely worthless.
| trinovantes wrote:
| Why I originally switched to Firefox: I can use dividers in my
| bookmarks
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| I'm using Mozilla Firefox, but it annoys me how it has no support
| for what is probably the least bad digital document format :
| MHTML = EML... even though Mozilla Thunderbird does support it !
| icare_1er wrote:
| Avoiding a Google monopoly is a good-enough reason.
| narag wrote:
| I've always used "Firefox", since it was called Netscape 2.4. I
| use Chrome to watch streaming and a few sites that don't work
| with Firefox.
|
| That said, I might start using Chromium because I want to make
| some improvements to the browser (to use it as a tool) that would
| need me to compile the browser myself.
|
| As far as I know, Firefox is no longer just C/C++ but it's
| migrating, at least partially, to Rust, so it's a moving target.
| blackhaz wrote:
| Here's one more: It's not Google.
| timerol wrote:
| > Ask current Firefox users why they switched, and you'll often
| hear "It's not Chrome."
|
| Pretty sure they covered that in the last reason of TFA
| mrweasel wrote:
| It was my primary reason to drop Chrome twelve years ago. Every
| so often I try Chrome again, but other than a minor speed
| boost, I see no reason to switch back.
|
| The UI isn't great, nor is resource usage. These days I don't
| bother installing an alternative browser and just use Safari.
| stackbutterflow wrote:
| Same reason for me. Firefox would have to be utterly broken for
| me to switch to chrome.
| hosteur wrote:
| I would really love to use Firefox Sync. But I don't want all my
| browsing history at Mozilla. Is it possible to run self-hosted
| Sync?
| robin_reala wrote:
| Sync is E2E encrypted, so while Mozilla host an encrypted file
| they don't have access to your data.
|
| (yes, it's also possible to run your own sync service.)
| hosteur wrote:
| Is it though? I have not been able to find any official up-
| to-date docs on it. The Github README says that it is no
| longer maintained: https://github.com/mozilla-
| services/syncserver
| slurpmaker wrote:
| Anything has more privacy than a google product. Firefox/mozilla
| at least have products adjacent to their browser so its
| believable they aren't only sustaining by selling peoples
| personal information to the nearest data broker.
| blahbon wrote:
| Firefox is lacking many major enterprise controls making it
| unsuitable for many large companies. An example of this is the
| lack of ability for administrators to apply additional
| restrictions on the domains specific extensions can access. Other
| basic enterprise features that are missing are the inability to
| force restarts when updates are available.
| lawgimenez wrote:
| Funny, I've done the opposite. Firefox has always been my default
| as far as I can remember but for the past several releases it has
| been heavy in terms of macOS memory. The author is obviously
| using Windows, but on macOS it is the opposite. Every startup,
| Firefox seems to throttle my MBP fans and will get sluggish as I
| keep on using it.
| cyber_kinetist wrote:
| Same for me too (I'm using Windows), I've moved on to Chrome
| because of annoying performance issues with Firefox. Much
| better in that area after switching , although I still miss
| Tree Style Tabs sometimes... (you can't find a replacement for
| that in Chrome)
| amazd wrote:
| This extension right here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
| US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
| nashashmi wrote:
| Or this one https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-
| sidebar-w...
| butz wrote:
| Ability to customize browser UI should not be overlooked either,
| especially in the day when application rarely allow user to
| rearrange controls in toolbar. And if you want to go deeper there
| still is "userChrome.css" file, where you can change how Firefox
| UI looks by editing simple CSS file.
| pebble wrote:
| I keep trying to switch to Firefox but I use canvas a lot in my
| work and canvas is so much slower compared to Chrome it keeps
| being a dealbreaker.
| vi2837 wrote:
| Firefox is the best
| yonrg wrote:
| Firefox plugin ftw: tridactyl
|
| I love this so much. Perfect vim key binds. I also removed menu,
| address and tab bars, which subjectively occupy 25% of vertical
| space.
|
| And the infamous ublock, but that's also available on
| Chrome(ium).
| gurjeet wrote:
| I'm a fan of Vimium [1]. Do you know of any advantages
| Tridactyl may have over Vimium?
|
| [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimium-ff/
| hnlmorg wrote:
| FireFox Containers are a killer feature for me. It allows you to
| run sandboxed sessions. So you can ostensibly make every site a
| private tab by default but have a small few sites persistent.
|
| Eg I'll have a work group with GitHub, Okta, etc in it so I only
| need to log in once a day. But random websites cannot track me
| between sites.
|
| Couple that with DNS blocking of trackers and ads, and the web is
| actually a lot more pleasant to use.
|
| Unfortunately you cannot fix everything locally though.
| rsync wrote:
| "FireFox Containers are a killer feature for me ..."
|
| They are a killer _idea_ but their implementation is
| disappointing.
|
| In no particular order ...
|
| - You can't clear history for a particular container space [1]
|
| - Containers are _only tabs_ - so you can 't, for instance,
| create a window and have all future tabs created in that window
| inherit that container
|
| - No "private" (or "burner") container that saves nothing
| outside of each individual tab
|
| No, I am not interested in solving these basic, first-order
| use-cases with some rando extension from joey75 @
| gitlabusercontent.downloads.tv.
|
| [1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1170863
| detritus wrote:
| I'm a big fan of multi-account containers.. or at least, was.
| Recently I inadvertantly added a domain to one of the ascribed
| containers on my laptop and I'll be damned if I can work out
| how to undo it, other than uninstalling and starting over,
| which'll be a pain, because I've customised it quite a bit.
|
| ...This is a plea for help, by the way, in case it wasn't
| obvious :) I'm sure there must be a json file or something,
| somewhere, I can just edit.
| sebazzz wrote:
| When visiting the domain, open the container menu by clicking
| the icon and uncheck "always open in this container".
| detritus wrote:
| Yeah, that's the most immediate thing to try, but
| unfortunately, that doesn't work for some reason.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| I do not know how to directly manipulate the container, but I
| think what you can do is, that you open a new tab of another
| container and copy paste the URL there. Then you can set it
| to always open the domain in that container, effectively
| changing the container. Not sure how to remove a domain from
| all containers though.
| stinos wrote:
| _because I 've customised it quite a bit_
|
| Can this not (at least partly) solved by copying over the
| correct files in combination with settings sync?
| andinus wrote:
| Multi-Accounts Container Version: 8.0.7
|
| You can click on "Manage Containers", choose a container and
| then remove the site with "Manage Site List".
| detritus wrote:
| Oh Gosh, I feel so stupid - that's exactly what I was
| looking for.. please tell me they just added that this
| morning? I know they didn't..!
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| There is no reason to feel stupid. Browser containers are
| tricky and relatively new, and I was bitten by some
| quirks, too. Nevertheless, they're definitely worth it.
| was_a_dev wrote:
| It also indicates the need for better UX design, which
| for a relatively new features isn't surprising
| Accacin wrote:
| Not stupid, I also accidentally added something to the
| wrong container and it took me a while and some searching
| to find the answer. The feature is great, but the UX is
| still a little lacking.
| nfbyte wrote:
| You can also set a proxy per container (and assign specific
| websites to always use it), and when you combine that with an
| ultra-cheap VPS running e.g. a Shadowsocks server you have what
| I think is the _real_ way to circumvent censorship and bypass
| regional restrictions (as opposed to using snake oil "VPN"
| providers or even the Tor Browser).
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| Are most VPN provides unreliable? I don't know - never
| researched this.
|
| I use Proton VPN because it is bundled with ProtonMail. I
| very much like preventing my national Internet service
| provider from selling my browsing history.
| toma_caliente wrote:
| Most VPN providers you typically see pushed are very
| suspect at best. Especially the ones you see commonly
| pushed by Youtubers like NordVPN, ExpressVPN etc. I think
| the only VPNs that have actually been externally audited
| are Mullvad and ProtonVPN.
| kdbg wrote:
| Funnily, both ExpressVPN and NordVPN which you call out
| have been externally audited.
|
| NordVPN had the clients audited by VerSprite last year,
| and their No-log policy audited by PwC in 2018 and 2020.
| And a bug bounty program on HackerOne. [1]
|
| ExpressVPN - Windows Client was just audited by F-Secure
| in March, and server side audits by Cure54, and PwC in
| 2021 and 2019 respectively. And a bug bounty program on
| Bug Crowd. [2]
|
| ---
|
| For comparison
|
| Mullvad has been audited (Client security and
| Infrastructure (for privacy)) by Cure53 through 2020, and
| first was in 2018. Has no bug bounty, but they do still
| have a vulnerability disclosure program. [3]
|
| ProtonVPN, audits of the no-log policy in April, and
| clients in 2020. And they run their own bug bounty
| program.[4]
|
| ---
|
| I actually find it kinda interesting that while they've
| all had audits regarding privacy on the server side, only
| ExpressVPN has had a security audit of server side
| components. (Granted I've not look that deeply at this)
|
| [1] Annoying, you can only download the audit reports if
| you Login then click Reports in the menu
|
| [2] https://www.expressvpn.com/blog/?s=audit
|
| [3] https://mullvad.net/en/blog/tag/audits/
|
| [4] https://protonvpn.com/blog/?s=audit
| robonerd wrote:
| > _Most VPN providers you typically see pushed are very
| suspect at best._
|
| Ironically (I hope?), Mullvad is by far the one I see
| pushed the most.
| stsourlidakis wrote:
| I don't think I've ever seen a Mullvad ad or paid
| promotion (eg sponsored YT videos). I mostly see happy
| customers praising them (including myself).
| robonerd wrote:
| Between sponsorblock and ublock origin, I never see ads
| or paid promotions on youtube or any other website like
| that. That mostly leaves [presumably] unpaid promotion of
| Mullvad on sites like HN.
| barbacoa wrote:
| What's is the concern about VPNs being "suspect" or
| "reliable"? I hear this a lot about VPN providers but not
| sure why. If the VPN is logging your activity/IP you'd
| have to be doing something super illegal for the police
| to want to get a search warrant for your data.
| nfbyte wrote:
| It's not just that they're suspect or unreliable. They're
| complete bullshit.
|
| The actual use of VPN technology is to create virtual
| networks that are private (hence the name). It's a system
| level technology. There are several types of network
| topologies you can set up, when I was learning about this
| I found this article which is quite nice:
| https://www.procustodibus.com/blog/2020/10/wireguard-
| topolog.... You _can_ proxy traffic through a VPN, but
| the only scenario I can think of in which it makes sense
| is if you are an OSINT researcher and you need a safe
| system on which to conduct your research.
|
| If you need to _proxy_ traffic and "hide" your IP, just
| use a flipping proxy. It's an application level
| technology (e.g. for torrenting, every torrent client
| under the sun supports a SOCKS5 proxy). If you don't have
| the patience to set up a VPS yourself, you can even use
| something like Outline (https://getoutline.org) which
| automates that (and it has a mobile client app as well).
|
| If you need privacy (and to _actually_ hide your IP),
| then use Tor.
| selectodude wrote:
| Unfortunately that doesn't fix the real reason most
| people use VPNs, which is torrenting. Nobody should be
| using NordVPN to hide from a nation state, but for
| torrenting they add one level of obfuscation.
| nfbyte wrote:
| I specifically mentioned torrenting, please re-read.
| There is no reason to have _all_ the network I /O of your
| computer go through an extra hop just for one application
| (e.g. a torrent client) when that application can be
| configured to use a proxy instead. It increases the
| network latency, complexity and attack surface of your
| system.
| barbacoa wrote:
| If the main use case is torrents,
|
| I think the reason why the method you mention isn't
| commonly used is that it is complicated to understand/set
| up and hard to verify.
|
| I've seen more advanced users encapsulate everything in a
| VM so that non-VPN traffic can be blocked globally by the
| OS.
| SnowHill9902 wrote:
| As always, the answer is it depends on your threat model.
| qwertyuiop_ wrote:
| Mulvad seems to be very reliable.
|
| https://mullvad.net/en/
| yalogin wrote:
| I don't get why random websites cannot track you across sites.
| The IP is still the same and so is the hardware/OS combination
| it's running on. They can absolutely track you.
| MacsHeadroom wrote:
| Use a different SOCKS proxy for each container.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" random websites cannot track me between sites"_
|
| Given all the ways there are to fingerprint browsers these
| days, this belief is likely to be overly optimistic.
| timvisee wrote:
| I use it for personal, company and other sessions in the same
| window, to authenticate with different credentials on the same
| sites. It's fantastic!
| eliaspro wrote:
| A crucial feature which is missing for me in containers is the
| ability to limit AddOns to specific containers.
|
| My employer's org deploys a Microsoft SSO AddOn which re-uses
| the OS-level identity to auto-login to
| Microsoft/Office365/Azure and causes me quite some headaches
| when dealing with my customers' logins, which are usually in
| separate containers.
|
| I switched to FF profiles for those use-cases for now, but it's
| far from the container experience in terms of usability and
| integration.
| thrwawy283 wrote:
| That + the Temporary Containers extension can make every new
| tab a new container by default. I also use Container Proxy so I
| can route traffic from each tab through a different proxy if
| needed (mitmproxy). I've wanted to go to Chrome but Chrome has
| nothing like per-tab sessions/isolation. I looked at first
| party isolation but it's vague and doesn't seem like what
| Firefox provides.
|
| Firefox is the only browser that can do this. Also Google's UI
| decisions are just unilateral and awful. At least with Firefox
| we can still tweak some of it.
| dools wrote:
| The ability to have separate sessions was actually the reason I
| switched to chrome many years ago, looks like it's time to give
| Firefox another look
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Although Firefox had profiles for ages and you could start
| Firefox with the profile manager and "new instance allowed"
| to choose a profile at the start of each new instance. More
| hidden then in Chromium, but definitely possible.
|
| EDIT: Just for completeness sake, here is the command to open
| Firefox with profile manager and new instances:
|
| firefox --new-instance --ProfileManager %u
| commoner wrote:
| The Firefox Profile Switcher add-on provides an easy-to-use
| interface that looks just like Chrome's:
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profile-
| switc...
|
| You'll need to install a connector for it to work. (The
| add-on gives instructions during the onboarding process.)
| Both the add-on and the connector are free and open source
| (GPLv3).
|
| I use profiles and containers together on Firefox. Each
| profile has its own set of add-ons, browser settings, and
| containers. Containers in the same profile share the same
| add-ons and browser settings. For example, you could have
| separate personal and work profiles, with containers for
| different online accounts in each profile.
|
| On Firefox, you have the option of using only profiles,
| only containers, both profiles and containers, or none of
| the above.
| cmg wrote:
| I'm going to have to give this a try. I manage multiple
| Google Workspace accounts for clients and have stuck to
| Chrome for those as I have a profile set up for each
| account. Yes, you can log in to multiple Google accounts
| in any browser, but then it defaults to the first account
| for new windows.
|
| The two final things that would get me off Chrome
| entirely:
|
| * When I'm using my external USB microphone in a web-
| based conference system (mostly Cleanfeed but I've also
| seen it with Streamyard and Jitsi) my audio gets
| extremely robotic after a few minutes and it somehow
| impacts my entire system - I have to unplug the
| microphone to fix it.
|
| * Dropbox, for some reason, hangs at 1 second left when
| uploading larger files (appx 60MB or so)
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| I've been looking for something like that. Thanks. But
| ideally, I don't want to swithswitch profiles. I want to
| have muliple instances of FF open, each with a different
| profile. Just like Chromium based browsers and users.
|
| Anything for that?
| commoner wrote:
| When you choose a different profile in the Firefox
| Profile Switcher menu, it opens a new instance of Firefox
| with the new profile. The add-on experience will be very
| familiar if you've used Chromium's profile management
| features.
|
| If you're trying to create a shortcut to Firefox that
| launches a profile other than the one you've selected as
| the default, the instructions for Linux and Windows are
| here:
|
| https://kb.mozillazine.org/Shortcut_to_a_specific_profile
|
| This is not necessary to use the profile feature, but
| some people prefer to launch profiles from shortcuts
| instead of a menu.
| fsflover wrote:
| This is how I use Firefox; you need Qubes OS for that.
| lukewiwa wrote:
| go to about:profiles in the omnibar and you'll be able to
| open multiple profiles from there. You can also do other
| general management of profiles.
| jordemort wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the profile manager stuff in Firefox goes
| all the way back to the Netscape 4 days. If I recall
| correctly, back in the way back, it used to throw you into
| Profile Manager and walk you through creating your initial
| one on first launch of fresh installs. At some point they
| tucked that under the rug and just started creating the
| default profile automatically - maybe because it made less
| sense to ask for a bunch of personal information up-front
| when the browser was broken off from the mail client? Now
| most people have forgotten that Profile Manager even
| exists, but it's been there the whole time.
| johnny22 wrote:
| my parents rely on Profile Manager. I set that up for
| them years ago, since my mom uses my dad's computer a bit
| every day. She has no need for a whole user account.
| Separating the stuff in the browser is enough.
| kevincox wrote:
| Yes, but with this UX it may as well not exist for 99% of
| users. Container tabs while still a little power-user is
| something that can be explained to the average user.
| anonymousab wrote:
| One of the major problems with container tabs is that
| they share a lot of persistent state between them, such
| as browsing history. Profiles are mostly isolated by
| comparison.
| prox wrote:
| I hope you become a full time user, lets curb the direction
| Google wants to go in.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Even if the entire HN community would switch to Firefox, it
| would still be a drop in the ocean to curbing Chrome's
| market share.
|
| Also Firefox hasn't been doing itself any favors by
| alienating both the average Joe consumers and the
| professional devs over the years.
| richardw wrote:
| HN community represents a very attractive economic
| segment. If we switched, advertisers and web designers
| would pay attention. Firefox would instantly be getting
| paid for our searches by Google.
| skinnymuch wrote:
| I don't think that's true. If the entire HN community
| which I assume includes tons of casual weekly reading
| non-logged in users, that would be massive. The number of
| people outside HN who would try out FF again would be a
| sizable multiple of the HN community.
|
| If everyone thinks negatively, then no change will
| happen. Keeping reality in perspective is important, but
| improving things is really important too.
| guerrilla wrote:
| No it wouldn't, that's just pessimism. The entire HN
| community switching would have massive second-order
| effects. People would see experts (us) using it, we'd
| promote it and install it for people, we'd speak
| positively about it, we'd develop with it, etc. (I won't
| write the whole list.)
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| Not only that. Every few weeks I come across a site that
| works better in Chrome than in FF or has some quirks
| (Google's spreadsheets are a good example - they feel
| slower in FF). Although I have no hope of changing the
| mindset of HNers working at Google, the rest of us could
| make a difference.
| dhimes wrote:
| Yeah I hate that. I still have a problem seeing comments
| on youtube in firefox, even when I'm logged in. Not sure
| we're going to be able to fix if google targets their
| properties to only their browser, outside of a lawsuit or
| gov't action.
| Kelm wrote:
| I daily drive Firefox for a few years now, including
| watching youtube - never faced your issue... Maybe a
| misbehaving extension?
| dhimes wrote:
| Hmmm. I do have a few going. I'll have to check.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Can't say I've have any issues with comments in YouTube.
| Not that I spend much time in the comments section but
| when I do read the comments they always work fine.
|
| Maybe the other commenter is on to something regarding
| extensions. The only extensions I have are ones to
| simplify management of containers, plus my password
| manager.
| rvba wrote:
| What a coincidence that Google spreadsheets work better
| in a Google browser than in another browser.
| piaste wrote:
| > People would see experts (us) using it, we'd promote it
| and install it for people, we'd speak positively about
| it, we'd develop with it, etc. (I won't write the whole
| list.)
|
| I wasn't super paying attention at the time, but wasn't
| that basically how Firefox initially established itself
| at the expense of Internet Explorer?
| ByteJockey wrote:
| Pretty much. People say that tech people switching
| doesn't do anything, but when tech people switch, semi-
| technical people get it via osmosis (forum posts for FF
| the first time, presumably reddit posts today). Suddenly
| when someone asks their friend that's slightly more
| technical than them for a recommendation, they get
| recommended the new thing instead of the old one.
|
| Whole process takes a couple years or so.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Then why is FF marketshare still tanking despite all the
| techies hyping it?
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Android and to some extent iOS, are the reason.
| jordemort wrote:
| All the techies aren't hyping it. Most people that I know
| just use Chrome. My running joke whenever I see someone
| else using it in a Zoom share or something is "found the
| other Firefox user!"
| stuartd wrote:
| I remember installing Firefox (I think v0.7) for my
| mother in law and giving it the IE icon.
| swat535 wrote:
| Well, on January 2023 when Chrome Manifest V3 is finally
| deployed and Ublock Origin is killed, I bet many HNers
| will finally switch:
|
| https://developer.chrome.com/blog/mv2-transition/
|
| Firefox maker, Mozilla, is in the uneasy position of
| being financially dependent on its search deal with
| Google, which accounts for the majority of the
| organization's revenue.
|
| I wonder how Google will be able to twist its arms (and
| trust me, they will use all their power and abuse their
| position to attempt it) to either implement V3 or find
| some other way to kill ad blockers / allow ads on
| Firefox.
| prox wrote:
| I wonder why they go with Google. Other companies are a
| much better fit. Time to untangle themselves.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Because money.
| dralley wrote:
| They've implemented V3. What they're not doing is
| removing support for V2, so plugins that want the full
| access can do so.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| The Mozilla focus on privacy is the _killer feature_ for me.
| DNS encrypted "Total Cookie Protection" uBlock
| Origin multi-account containers
|
| I also like built-in screen capture
| *various other extensions, such as Copy All Tab URLs
|
| I didn't find "Pocket" compelling when it was first introduced,
| but I have since found some of the recommendations interesting.
|
| Bravo Mozilla!
| slenk wrote:
| Pocket is the only reason I use LibreWolf - I don't trust its
| integration and what parts I can actually disable
| sp332 wrote:
| What do you think Mozilla is doing with Pocket they
| couldn't do with... the rest of the browser?
| slenk wrote:
| Sending data TO pocket...I already know I am sending data
| to Mozilla
| sp332 wrote:
| Pocket was bought by the Mozilla Corporation over 5 years
| ago. It's a first-party Mozilla product.
| slenk wrote:
| I did not realize that.
|
| I still don't like the fact that it has sponsored links
| then - that is what rubs me the wrong way.
| sp332 wrote:
| Yup, it's not great. Still seems easier to just turn them
| off with the new tab settings panel than recompile the
| whole browser, but I guess everyone has their own
| preferences.
| dandellion wrote:
| There are better browsers than Firefox if you care about
| privacy. Both Brave and Tor have better results in this
| comparison that was shared here recently:
| https://privacytests.org/, same with this tool from the EFF
| https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ it gives better results for
| Brave than Firefox (even with blockers installed on my
| Firefox). Mozilla themselves give the same score in their
| very limited comparsion: https://www.mozilla.org/en-
| US/firefox/browsers/compare/
|
| Multi-account containers are really the only killer feature
| in Firefox for me, they're super convenient for my work, but
| that's about the only thing it has left going for it.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| > comparison that was shared here recently:
| https://privacytests.org/
|
| The Librewolf project appears to be the best of all! I will
| try it.
|
| edit: Statement below is incorrect, Brave is a Chromium
| fork.
|
| I do note that Brave, Tor, and Librewolf are forks of
| Firefox. This in my opinion is an additional reason to
| support Firefox. Everyone else appears to be plundering
| naive users' browser telemetry.
| palebluedot wrote:
| Brave isn't a fork of Firefox, it is a Chromium-based
| browser.
| BerislavLopac wrote:
| Uh, I believe that Brave is based on Chromium, not
| Firefox...
| skrowl wrote:
| This is incorrect. Libre Wolf is a Firefox fork.
|
| On Android, look at Mull until Libre Wolf is available
| there.
|
| On iOS, lol, you get Safari or skinned Safari due to
| Apple's app store rules.
| gs17 wrote:
| Be prepared for stuff to break. I recently tried it and
| DRM content sometimes doesn't work no matter what you
| enable (my recent example is Udemy, which the devs claim
| happens in other FF forks). Also, by default it wipes
| history/sessions when you close it, which can be a rude
| surprise.
| [deleted]
| ur-whale wrote:
| One more reason: firefox will work on older Macs.
|
| Case in point: Chrome started to misbehave on my fathers rather
| old Macbook (missing root certs, refuses to render google drive,
| etc...)
|
| When I open Google drive, after being a completely cryptic (to a
| non-tech person) set of error messages, I realized I needed to
| upgrade Chrome.
|
| I tried to upgrade Chrome and was told I'm on an unsupported
| version of OSX.
|
| I tried to upgrade OSX and was told, no such thing exists on this
| older hardware.
|
| Lo and behold, firefox has none of these issues.
|
| Ditch Google as soon as you can, and Apple as well.
| windowsrookie wrote:
| That's strange. Chrome says it requires MacOS 10.11, Firefox
| says it requires MacOS 10.12. Based on that it would appear
| that Chrome is supporting older versions of MacOS than Firefox.
|
| MacOS 10.11 supports every 2008 and newer Apple computer. There
| are also patches to get newer versions of MacOS on old
| hardware. I'm using one patch to get 10.13 running on a 2008
| MacBook Pro and it runs great.
|
| http://dosdude1.com/software.html
| wlindley wrote:
| Ditch 'em all -- Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Amazon (the
| "evil MAGA"). It's like when folks complain about CNN or Fox
| News but keep feeding the beast by paying for subscription
| television: Stop hurting yourself, folks!
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I totally agree, but I wish you had included MSNBC news with
| CNN and Fox. They all push a pro-war and corporate agenda,
| just in different flavors.
| baisq wrote:
| Mozilla? Thanks but no thanks.
| happymellon wrote:
| You sound like someone who would then suggest Brave.
| skinnymuch wrote:
| Haha usually this sort of comment is silly and random, but in
| this case this does seem most likely
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| Care to expand on your aversion to Mozilla?
| mrweasel wrote:
| While I don't share the aversion toward Mozilla, I do think
| it a strange company.
|
| For some reason their focus seems directed towards everything
| that's specifically not Firefox or browser related. Sort of
| if Microsoft forgot that they own Windows.
| MacsHeadroom wrote:
| Mozilla is a non-profit with a mission focused on
| encouraging open source and open web technology. FireFox is
| a relatively small part of that mission.
| tzs wrote:
| I switched to Chrome a while back after years on Firefox because
| of Firefox's terrible spell checking.
|
| It is quite puzzling because Firefox uses the same open source
| spell checker that Chrome uses and that is also used by
| LibreOffice and is the OS provided spell checker on Mac.
|
| Here are some examples of words that it botched that nearly
| everything else (Chrome, Edge, Safari, LibreOffice, anything on
| Apple that uses the OS provided spell check) got right:
|
| 1. all-nighter auditable automata blacksmithing bubonic cantina
| commenter conferenced epicycle ethicist fineable initializer
| lifecycle micropayments mosquitos pre-programmed preprogrammed
| prosecutable responder solvability spectrogram splitter
| subparagraphs subtractive surveil tradable transactional tunable
| verifiability verifier
|
| 2. ballistically chewable counterintuitive exonerations mistyped
| "per se" phosphine programmability recertification shapeshifting
| tradeoffs webmail
|
| 3. manticore survivorship misclassified ferrite massless rotator
| dominator untraceably synchronizer
|
| 4. "ad hominem" algorithmically another's backlight ballistically
| coaxially hatchling impaction implementer inductor intercellular
| irrevocability licensor measurer meerkats mischaracterization
| misclassification misclassified partygoers passthrough plough
| retransmission seatbelt sensationalistic trichotomy
| underspecified untyped
|
| All of those were reported to their bug tracker item for spell
| check errors. They do eventually fix those, but the lag was in
| the one to two year range. As of now they have fixed all of #1
| except for initializer, all of #2, none of #3, and none of #4
| except for algorithmically, ballistically, implementer, and
| inductor.
| below43 wrote:
| I find Edge is a nice alternative
| egberts1 wrote:
| Whoa. If you have low memory (like 2GB or 4) in your PC, then
| Edge is not your friend.
|
| Problem is Electron as the backend for Edge.
| SaulJLH wrote:
| That is completely wrong, "electron as the back-end", LOL
| WTF.
| npteljes wrote:
| It's a different skin on Chromium. So it's an alternative in
| some regards, and not in others.
| bbarnett wrote:
| I tried Edge on mobile. Before, I had thought chrome, and to a
| lesser extend firefox, phoned home a lot.
|
| But oh boy, does edge on android phone home. You'd think a
| phone home party was going on, as the tcpdump flies off your
| screen...
|
| No thanks.
| SaulJLH wrote:
| Edge is better than Chrome, & better than FF in many respects,
| too.
|
| Don't let the "M$ teh hacking my dataz!" tin-foilers
| dissuade...
|
| Performant, good mix of features, stable, solid compatibility,
| & flexible.
| boudin wrote:
| I wouldn't touch Edge because I still remember the days when
| IE was dominating the market. As much as I despise Google
| being the one now, I do not miss those days and do not trust
| Microsoft to do anything good if they were in this position
| again. So you can make fun of people concerned about privacy,
| but history proved there's a lot more concerns to have
| regarding Microsoft
| SaulJLH wrote:
| I remember those times too, completely different group of
| management, and the way they've done business in the last
| near decade, has also been very different. Some throwbacks,
| but on the whole, vastly different. I've been watching, you
| clearly haven't. And aside from that, they're never going
| to be in the "same position", the market is entirety
| different.
| boudin wrote:
| I can see you've been watching their marketing indeed...
| Now I've seen Windows 10 and Windows 11, it doesn't
| really depict a different Microsoft.
| throwaway0x7E6 wrote:
| you're absolutely right, it's great for an average consumer
| who doesn't care about privacy
| SaulJLH wrote:
| Mainly great for users who are way more technically
| literate than the avg. hand-wavey user.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Something Edge has going for it is that it's the only browser
| on Windows where hardware acceleration seems to consistently
| work.
| juki wrote:
| I haven't really tried using Edge for general use, but I do
| use it whenever I want text-to-speech. That's a lot better
| in Edge than other options I've tried.
| croes wrote:
| The browser of the OS producer works best with the OS, honi
| soit qui mal y pense
| sieabahlpark wrote:
| [deleted]
| amanzi wrote:
| I'm still using Firefox as my primary browser on desktop and
| mobile. I have minor complaints, but nothing to make me consider
| switching to something else.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| It's really nice on Android to have extensions like YouTube
| background player and uBlock origin.
| abyssin wrote:
| That's the only thing I really miss from Android (F-Droid was
| precious to me but I don't miss it as much).
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| I use Vanced for YouTube, but I cannot imagine barebacking
| the modern web without an ad blocker.
| andrepd wrote:
| Any YouTube I watch on android I watch on NewPipe. It's
| amazing.
| was_a_dev wrote:
| I've always stuggled with NewPipe, not because of NewPipe
| itself, but because YouTube and it's algorthim.
|
| People act as if the algorthim is some sort of evil entity,
| but my viewing habbits follow recommended videos and
| content aware search. I find sticking to subscriptions and
| trending videos to be very trapping.
| [deleted]
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| The same thing annoys me. I do hit the 'three vertical
| dots' menu and select "not interested" and I think that
| is effective but that takes a few seconds and is a slight
| nuisance.
|
| Off topic, but I have a love/hate relationship YouTube
| because of privacy issues, especially my political and
| spiritual views. Same thing with TikTok, but at least
| that material is mostly silly so if advertisers can buy
| information on which silly stuff I watch, that seems
| slightly less harmful than YouTube.
| andrepd wrote:
| Funny, for me it's the opposite. I'm very glad to have
| only default un-personalised suggestions, plus my hand-
| curated subscriptions.
|
| No more watching one chess video and being bombarded with
| chess content for a month, or watching one harmless
| satirical video about a politician and being bombarded
| with videos from the local right-populist party
| propaganda channel (yes, this has happened to me exactly
| as described).
| was_a_dev wrote:
| Fair enough, one of us may have been lucky/unlucky with
| how content is served to us.
|
| I have experience the "bombardment" of a suggestion, but
| I think my subscriptions are vaired enough that a click
| off that topic straightens it all out.
| HKH2 wrote:
| Yes, it's amazing, until the API changes and you have to
| wait for an update for it to work.
|
| Also, you only get to see top level comments. (Maybe that's
| a feature for some people.)
| lolinder wrote:
| I disable comments altogether in Newpipe, which for me is
| a _great_ feature.
| garfieldnate wrote:
| I actively tried to switch to Firefox this year, but couldn't due
| to issues with saving tabs on sudden shutdown. Due to a separate
| issue, my apple laptop was crashing and restarting a couple times
| a week. Several times Firefox was not able to restore the
| browsing session, and I lost all of my tabs :(
| glowingly wrote:
| All of the browsers (including all of the Trident based ones)
| have had this issue for me. Most of my browser hopping in the
| past was driven by losing a session, being unable to recover
| it, and moving on to the next browser hoping it is more stable
| now.
|
| Nowadays I aggressively save to bookmarks. Still a lot of tabs
| open, though.
| Heckopi wrote:
| Where's opera at
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Basically called Vivaldi now. (But not really, since both are
| Chromium based now ..)
| bbarnett wrote:
| In China?
| Heckopi wrote:
| I thought most use opera leo since Mozilla is heavy and buggy
| as frak
| ksrm wrote:
| Right here: https://imgur.com/a/COXJUwb
| k__ wrote:
| I used Firefox for some years after being a Chrome user since it
| was released.
|
| Firefox had some kind of glow up years ago, with Quantum, but
| that didn't hold for long.
|
| A few years ago I switched to Brave and am pretty happy with it.
|
| It has a Chromium base, but without Google's shenanigans. The
| integrated adblocker even makes it feel a bit more responsive.
|
| Also, it comes with IPFS, Onion, and crypto wallet out of the
| box. Which isn't for everyone, but in my case it was a pretty
| nice cherry on top.
| zahma wrote:
| Among all the other extensions that help guard my privacy and
| improve QoL, Containers is another great feature that integrates
| well with FF. I like maintaining profiles for privacy and
| security, and it helps me navigate certain sites where I have
| different accounts.
|
| I honestly don't get the lean toward Chrome -- or Safari for that
| matter. I don't detect such a big jump in performance that I'd
| ever consider sacrificing privacy to Google's or Apple's end.
| Brave is a nice browser but in the end I don't see how I'm better
| off with it. Maybe I'm too much of a layman and don't understand
| benchmarks or just don't pay attention to latency, but purely
| from a daily driver perspective, I've never been happier with
| Firefox.
| TingPing wrote:
| Safari is fairly pro privacy and blocks or deletes data more
| aggressively than others sometimes.
| MBCook wrote:
| It also integrates extremely tightly into the Apple ecosystem
| and has always had fantastic performance with very little
| resource usage. Unlike chrome (although that's gotten much
| better).
| IMSAI8080 wrote:
| Long time Firefox user. Using it now. Used it in the early days
| for features liked tabbed browsing, good performance and Linux
| support. These days I really mainly use it to be contrarian to
| avoid using Google for everything. I just want to support a
| competitor.
| aspaviento wrote:
| I wonder why there are sites in which the reader mode is not even
| available. I can't think of any right now but it happens with
| relative frequency to be annoying.
| d3nj4l wrote:
| Because Reader Mode is using heuristics to fetch the content of
| the article, and that can fail if the article is weirdly
| formatted in HTML. You can read more about this on the repo for
| Mozilla's Readability, which is what Firefox uses under the
| hood: https://github.com/mozilla/readability
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| I always use Firefox, but there is one annoying thing they do not
| seem able to fix: The debugger. It often happens to me, that I
| can step through code, but I simply cannot see the value of
| variables at all, not by hovering, not by adding them to watched
| variables. This often happens when working on JupyterLab. And
| some days it works suddenly. Maybe JupyterLab has become so
| overheady, that the debugger gives up or something. No idea. When
| it does not work, I just use GNU Guix as follows:
|
| guix shell ungoogled-chromium -- chromium
|
| (a double minus there)
|
| That runs an instance of ungoogled Chromium without me having to
| install it in the system packages or so. After the first time the
| build should be cached until you update your Guix packages and
| start up quite quickly.
| MaurizioPz wrote:
| Something similar happens to me working in angular. I can see
| the value referencing it as _this.variableName instead of
| this.variableName
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| As Mozilla loses core dev resources, just like IE, Firefox will
| go extinct.
|
| It will no longer be able to render modern pages as the web
| continues to grow increasingly complex.
|
| Hopefully someday there will be a major backed FOSS project that
| forks web kit and can compete. But there are far too many more
| important problems out there for something as complex as a modern
| browser.
| cptskippy wrote:
| The feature I use most is Firefox Sync and the ability to not
| only send browser tabs to instances of Firefox running on other
| machines but also to look at and load tabs from another machine,
| even when it is offline.
|
| Routinely I'll be reading something on my laptop in the evening
| and want to reference it from my Dev VM the next day. With Sync I
| can just pull up the list of open tabs on my laptop that's asleep
| and retrieve the URL.
| Existenceblinks wrote:
| For many years, Firefox is my development browsers because I
| thought I would run into perf issue, problematic/weird behaviour
| more often. But recently I develop on app on Firefox for many
| months, then test it on Chrome, dang! It's almost 3x slower
| (rendering lots of dom nodes). So now I've switched to Chrome for
| development because if it's fast on Chrome it's going to be very
| fast on Firefox.
| cdrini wrote:
| One unique Firefox feature I love that I don't see talked about
| often is how awesome Firefox's address bar suggestions are. I can
| type just a snippet of a URL or a web page title and it'll
| instantly show me all matching URLs I've visited, whether on my
| desktop or on my phone. It's become my primary second brain for
| finding Google docs, or articles I've read, or GitHub issues.
| It's usually only a few characters before it finds exactly what I
| want.
|
| Eg I type in "Ed"? It shows the URL to my "editions in solr"
| GitHub issues I've been working on recently. I vaguely recall an
| article I read months ago on CSS grid? I type "grid guide" and
| bam it's the first suggestion. The spreadsheet I made about user
| languages? "sheets lang". That vague API I can never remember the
| parameters to? Just type "/query.json?" And I get all my previous
| requests as examples!
|
| I find Chrome's address bar has been way less reliable and much
| more frequently just gives me Google autocomplete suggestions --
| even when I know that I visited a URL recently that should match!
| throw10920 wrote:
| To add to this, my experience has been that Chrome's address
| bar does only matching on whole "fragments" of URLs - that is,
| if I visited a URL with /foobarbaz/ in the name, Firefox will
| match that with "bar" while Chrome won't - which is pretty
| terrible behavior.
|
| And then there's the bookmarks mess, lack of tree-style tabs,
| and crippled ad-blocker API.
|
| As an _information management tool_ , Firefox is light-years
| ahead of Chrome.
| sp332 wrote:
| I've only been using Chrome for about a year, but if I want
| the find something in my history, I have to open the history
| window (ctrl-h). The address bar is very inconsistent about
| returning pages that I've been to recently or often.
| prox wrote:
| Hope you will take FF for a spin!
| robonerd wrote:
| Firefox's address bar always seems to show me example.com/xyz
| when I want example.com, but shows me example.com when I want
| example.com/xyz. Furthermore, sometimes the "switch to tab"
| suggestion is at the top, and other times it isn't.
|
| If they picked one and stuck to it, I'd get used to it either
| way and be a happy camper. But the inconsistency drives me up a
| wall. I don't know how this compares to Chrome, I haven't used
| that shit in years.
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| if you want example.com, type exam in the awesomebar and
| example.bar will show up in suggestions, if, of course, you
| visited it before or if it's bookmarked.
|
| if you want example.com/xyz, type example xyz or example x or
| just xyz.
| robonerd wrote:
| > _if you want example.com, type exam in the awesomebar and
| example.bar will show up in suggestions_
|
| I just tried it. I have example.com in my history, and
| typed "exam". Example.com is the second thing firefox
| suggests. Before it, is a duckduckgo image search result
| page for the query "botanist", with an image titled _"
| Young Botanist Examines The Plants In A Greenhouse Stock
| Photo"_. Firefox is picking up the "exam" in "Examines" and
| puts that result _before_ example.com.
|
| I don't really care which is first, I just want one or the
| other to be _consistently_ first.
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| Please go to: Settings(preferences) --> Search Then:
| Search Suggestions:
|
| Disable: Show search suggestions in address bar results
|
| That should be it.
|
| Below, go to Change settings for other address bar
| suggestions it will navigate to: Address Bar / When using
| the address bar, suggest Disable or enable as you see
| fit. I think the Search engines under the "Address Bar"
| is about the custom search engines one can define (i have
| a custom search for youtube, for example: y <search
| term>).
|
| A better guide here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-
| US/kb/address-bar-autocomplet...
| robonerd wrote:
| I already have "Provide search suggestions" turned off.
| It's pulling _both_ of these suggestions out of my
| browser history. The order firefox uses for suggestions
| pulled from your history is inconsistent.
|
| When searching your history from the address bar, firefox
| sometimes puts entries matched by domain name first, and
| sometimes puts entries matched by page contents first.
| ilikepi wrote:
| I'm not in front my my desk right now, but is it possible
| the results from History are weighted by frequency and/or
| recency? I know these attributes are recorded in the
| History db.
| Arnavion wrote:
| Amazing. That is the one feature of Firefox I hate so much I
| had to write an extension that uses a regex-based whitelist to
| allow entries in my browser history.
|
| Otherwise my history, and thus autocomplete suggestions, is
| full of URls from single-page applications (webmail etc) that
| differ only in the 1000-character-long hashes in the URL.
|
| Whatever logic Chromium does to filter out this chaff from
| autocomplete works much better for me.
| newscracker wrote:
| > One unique Firefox feature I love that I don't see talked
| about often is how _awesome_ Firefox 's address bar suggestions
| are.
|
| That's actually called the _"Awesome Bar"_ , which was first
| introduced in Firefox 3 (which was 14 years ago). [1] It has
| been improved over time.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_3.0
| dandanua wrote:
| You can also add tags to bookmarks and let it search only
| through bookmarks. Now I just bookmark everything, so I don't
| need to use google's search a second time and filter again all
| that SEO and other crap. Moreover, I even bookmark some of my
| local files, since adequate tagging capabilities in file
| systems are still technologies from future, apparently.
| black_puppydog wrote:
| This.
|
| Ever since version 2 or so, the Firefox autocompletion has made
| me never use bookmarks. It's simply that good.
|
| As others have said, it requires some tweaking nowadays. If
| anyone at mozilla is reading... why?! I mean, I get it,
| newbies... but... why?!
|
| Anyhow, bookmarks and keeping them, clicking through endless
| expanding nested menus of them, just the very concept... very
| much something for the hostages of a corporation that wants
| every contact with the web to start (and end) with a visit to
| google.com
| cassepipe wrote:
| It gets much better when you disable search suggestions then
| you only have results from your browsing history/bookmarks. And
| in the end if you get no results you just launch a search
| anyways.
|
| There was a way to configure the relative weight of
| boomarks/history but I can't find it anymore.
|
| Also worthy of notice, if you start with * in the search bar
| you only get bookmarks results and with ^ you get history
| results. Finally % is for tabs (on synced devices too) !
| clairity wrote:
| that's what i do too, disable suggestions so everything i
| type doesn't get sent to $searchEngine. i also make use of a
| few keywords for my most frequently visited sites (like 'hn'
| for hacker news) so that my keywords always override
| firefox's dynamic suggestions in case of any conflicts.
|
| i just learned about the ^ % * prefixes a few months ago, and
| now use them all the time.
| jotm wrote:
| That's by design, to feed Google Search (and show you ads).
| Firefox has that, too, but you can easily turn it off so it
| will only show suggestions based on your history. Not sure
| about Chrome.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| > I can type just a snippet of a URL or a web page title and
| it'll instantly show me all matching URLs I've visited
|
| I think Chrome does this too, no? Maybe Firefox does it better?
| anotherhue wrote:
| Firefox: Yes. Mozilla: No
| tjpnz wrote:
| Firefox on Android with uBlock Origin was a game changer for me.
| It makes the mobile web usable again.
| bambax wrote:
| I switched to Firefox a little over two years ago because of the
| whole Manifest V3 snafu (and wild and unfounded invocations of
| "security" to justify it), and never looked back. It works
| perfectly well for everything -- and I couldn't live without
| reader mode.
|
| (TBH, I still use Chrome for developing, as I find the dev tools
| on Chrome easier to use than on FF, and much better looking. But
| I could also let go of that if needed be.)
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Even without all great features Firefox has, it is the last
| bastion of open internet, and this reason alone makes it worth
| using instead of Chrome and its derivatives.
| impetus1 wrote:
| I have this nice toolbar I made which customizes firefox. I would
| also suggest reviewing security on firefox.
|
| https://gitlab.com/coolcoder/fractal-toolbar/-/tree/fractal
| rvz wrote:
| Mozilla is a joke when it comes to privacy and being dependent of
| Google's money and it is quite a funny sight to see that after 14
| years [0] of trying to figure a way to make money after
| 'promising' to not rely on Google, they still can't and continue
| to aid their surveillance capitalism
|
| With that, I have heard all the (very weak) reasons listed in
| this article and at this point, you might as well use Brave
| browser since everything listed here is already implemented by
| them.
|
| Firefox (really) has no killer features and the chronic decrease
| in users shows that it is only going down as Edge has already
| over taken it. [1][2][3]
|
| [0]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.compu...
|
| [1] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share
|
| [2] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-
| share/desktop/worl...
|
| [3] https://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php
| zerop wrote:
| I ditched chrome and switched to MS Edge (Not sure if many would
| have done that). Chrome would heat up my Mac a lot and slows
| eventually, it always shows up eating lots of power. MS Edge
| seems lighter so far. Main reason to choose MS Edge (and not
| firefox) was the outlook web. I don't use outlook client and I
| use outlook web. Outlook web is slow on chrome, I found it
| lighter on Edge. I also switched to Bing from Google and found
| not much difference in day to day searches. However if I need to
| search address/people/places I go to Google.
| tomComb wrote:
| These points about edge vs. chrome seem questionable to me
| given that Microsoft just takes Google's browser engine for
| edge . I guess they each do their own optimization, but it's
| not like Google is inexperienced in this area.
| pelagicAustral wrote:
| Been using FF for about a year now. Absolutely no complains.
| Before that I used Chrome for many years and really there is
| nothing I used to do con Chrome that I cannot do on FF.
|
| I did not change because of privacy concerns or whatever, I just
| wanted to try something else, and FF has been quite alright.
| haunter wrote:
| >Automatic blocking of autoplay videos
|
| And then this very site has an automatic playing video in the
| article lmao
|
| Also a lot of these claims are so-so imo.
|
| "Lighter on system resources"
|
| "Speedier website browsing"
|
| I usually have 60-70 tabs open across 5-6 windows. Firefox
| absolutely shits itself all the time but Chromium doesn't.
|
| Anyways I use ungoogled-chromium
| https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| _yawn_ I am a declared tab horder, with 500+ tabs open and
| Firefox shows no sign of any slowdown. Try that with Chromium
| derivates. In my experience Firefox outclasses Chromium based
| browsers for such a workload.
| gurjeet wrote:
| I'm way ahead of you there, and I'm _not_ proud of it.
|
| My 'Tab counter' add-on tells me: Tabs in
| this window: 3221 Tabs in all windows: 3301 (I think
| this is because of a bug) Number of windows: 6
| pivo wrote:
| I rarely have fewer than double that number of tabs open in
| Firefox and never have crashes. Maybe it's crashed on me in the
| past, but if so I don't remember it happening.
| Jalad wrote:
| > "Speedier website browsing"
|
| I use Firefox on desktop and mobile, and I'd tend to agree with
| you.
|
| Sometimes I need to open up Chrome to test something and all of
| the pages load noticeably faster (things like FB messenger,
| Google search, etc.)
|
| It's a tradeoff I guess because the extensions on Firefox
| mobile are a killer feature.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| Meanwhile I usually have 1000-2000 tabs open in Firefox and it
| doesn't slow down at all, while Chrome made the whole system
| slow down to a concerning degree with less than 100 tabs.
| perihelions wrote:
| - _" And then this very site has an automatic playing video in
| the article lmao"_
|
| Reminiscent of this classic:
|
| - _" Among all the sites I visited, news sites, including The
| New York Times and The Washington Post, had the most tracking
| resources."_
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/23/opinion/data-...
| tgv wrote:
| The video doesn't play when I open the page. Youtube doesn't
| autoplay either; the tab neatly says "auto-play blocked".
|
| Note that browsers permit playing a video upon any "user
| interaction", i.e. a key press or a click.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| > I usually have 60-70 tabs open across 5-6 windows. Firefox
| absolutely shits itself all the time but Chromium doesn't.
|
| Last time I checked I had a few thousand tabs open with Firefox
| and it doesn't do anything except use memory.
| 8organicbits wrote:
| I'm always curious about the use case of having so many open
| tabs. Is there some context you work in where so many tabs
| are needed? Are you able to find already open tabs, or do you
| just end up with 50 hacker news tabs because you just open
| new ones? Do you actually look at each tab, or do you open in
| the background and never load them? Are you using extensions
| to make tabs management easier, like tree style tabs?
|
| Once I get past 40 or so I purge old tabs because it makes it
| hard to find others I'm actively using. Besides, opening a
| tab again isn't a huge burden.
| csydas wrote:
| I questioned it also but I guess tabs have become the
| replacement for bookmarks. AFAIk both chrome and Firefox
| have a search function specifically for open tabs so for
| some it's easier to track and store sites that way,
| especially since the browser can handle it well enough.
|
| It's not my preference as I like having a clean browser
| window; too many tabs is distracting and it's harder for me
| to contextualize what work I'm focusing on (windows + tabs
| for tasks is my preference), but I can see how it works for
| some.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Tabs are just more concrete than bookmarks. Tabs aren't
| things I thought I would want to revisit in the future that
| I went out of my way to save to a list of such things that
| I will never visit again.
|
| Rather, tabs are even more useful than that: things I was
| actually doing adjacent to the thing I was doing right next
| to it. There's a spatial element to it.
|
| Nothing compares to tabs. Especially not browser history
| which is one long list of urls I once visited, who cares.
| Tabs are a list of urls I _settled on_.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Yep, by using multiple windows (one per project/topic) I
| get a nice spatial relationship between tabs and they're
| just as easy to search as bookmarks.
| pivo wrote:
| > Are you able to find already open tabs
|
| Yes https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/search-open-tabs-
| firefo...
|
| This search also returns results for tabs open in Firefox
| on other devices.
|
| Opening the tab again isn't hard if you can remember what
| that tab was to begin with.
| prox wrote:
| Yeah, using is 40 tabs is weird to me. Here is my strategy,
| just have current tabs open that are relevant for my
| computing session.
|
| When I need something else that I visited, I use the
| history shortcut, search for the word (usually its in the
| title) and I got the info I need. Same with bookmarks which
| I usually tag.
|
| So many tabs just seems redundant I feel.
| yuhojihugyiopu wrote:
| Have over 2000 tabs as well, on an old Macbook Air. Have to
| turn off Firefox Fission though.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| I have no problem in Firefox with dozens of tabs. Meanwhile
| my extensionless Chromium install will consume all memory if
| it is left open for a couple weeks with just two or three
| tabs.
| swfsql wrote:
| I use an extension called autoTabDiscard (or something close)
| that unloads webpages that I didn't access the last 10
| minutes, or that doesn't load any tab on startup, but the
| tabs keep existing in both cases. Then you can setup
| exceptions as well.
|
| That's an essential for me.
| prox wrote:
| But why open so many tabs when you can just search history
| or bookmark (in FF you can also tag by double clicking the
| star icon)
|
| Usually I find everything I needed by time, data, keyword,
| tag, or bookmark in a few seconds at most by opening
| history or bookmark by keyboard shortcut.
| swfsql wrote:
| In my case I think I got used to have specific ff windows
| for specific stuff, and having the tabs "opened" feels
| quicker for me. But I guess I could get used to and
| switch to tags and bookmarking as you said.
| barbs wrote:
| A few thousand tabs?!?! Come on mate!
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| And why not? Since it works so well on Firefox, it seems
| like a valid thing to do. You can quickly jump to any
| opened tab using the % thing in the URL or, if you have
| tagged bookmarks open, you can search by tag. Basically
| opened tabs are like a huge brain cache layer of things you
| want to look at.
| nerder92 wrote:
| I tried to switch to Firefox, is almost one year that I've tried
| but it just does not work for me. I can't express what it might
| be in words, but the experience is just worse than Chrome.
| copperx wrote:
| What OS, if I may ask?
|
| I find browser choice heavily depends on the OS you're using.
|
| For instance, I can't stand anything but Safari on macOS.
| There's nothing better than Firefox on Linux. But on Windows,
| Chrome is king.
| freebuju wrote:
| Most chromium hit pieces come across as evangelical and this one
| is no exception.
|
| From my personal perspective, Firefox gets the job done but
| Chromium is undoubtedly the better browser. On desktop and
| mobile, the difference is felt even more on mobile.
|
| Every time I found an obvious bug or got an unpolished experience
| on Firefox, I hated it even more.
|
| Whatever data the author thinks they are hiding away from Google,
| they are (un)knowingly giving it to Mozilla. Even worse if they
| are using Google to search.
| elcapitan wrote:
| I've been using FF as my main browser again since (I think)
| Quantum, and kept it at version 91 to avoid the constant breaking
| UI changes. Performance since Quantum is generally good, but for
| more intense things like video or apps I am going back to Chrome
| now. FF keeps my CPU 20C higher than Chrome for some simple
| Youtube videos, which is just ridiculous (Macbook 12, 2017).
|
| For daily non-performance relevant use, I still like the
| Container feature a lot though, doesn't look like Chrome will get
| it anytime soon.
| computerfriend wrote:
| Every version bump includes patches for serious security
| vulnerabilities. You should reconsider your decision to pin to
| version 91.
| xony wrote:
| Comevius wrote:
| I have been using Firefox since 1.5 or so, and will keep using it
| because I value customizability.
|
| I keep Chromium around for web development, but it has a lot of
| issues with Wayland (not to be confused with XWayland) currently.
| kevincox wrote:
| Although with the removal of old extensions Firefox has lost
| most of its customizability. I really wish they kept those
| around. Even if they came with scary warnings and would break
| frequently because only a few APIs were kept stable.
| Comevius wrote:
| Those old XUL/XPCOM extensions weren't really safe, and the
| only big loss was UI manipulation, which was kind of stupid
| anyway, and not at all portable.
|
| When I say customizability I mean user.js.
| iggldiggl wrote:
| > the only big loss was UI manipulation
|
| Well, for a start e.g. mass downloaders have become
| relatively useless because they can't download to outside
| of the OS downloads directory without resorting to weird
| hacks, can no longer intelligently handle already existing
| files, etc.
|
| Then user scripts no longer being able to live normally on
| the file system (and therefore being editable outside of
| whatever limited UI the extension can provide, being easily
| _searchable_ ) are another victim of webextensions.
| kevincox wrote:
| Hence the "scary warnings". I don't think UI manipulation
| is stupid, I don't believe that Mozilla makes the best UI
| and extensions can definitely improve on it for many more
| specific use cases. Portability is also nice but not
| everything needs to be widely portable, I would rather have
| a nice feature in Firefox than not having it because it
| wasn't portable across browsers.
|
| To be clear I am hugely in favour of WebExtensions. I am
| glad that they were implemented and I think that they
| should be the recommended API. But I would love to still
| have the full-power backdoor for the extensions that are no
| loner possible. For example I maintained VimFx for about a
| year after they stopped officially supporting these
| extensions and it was fine. The biggest pain wasn't
| actually keeping up with the internal API changes, it was
| the fact that it wasn't allowed in addons.mozilla.org
| anymore and there is no good way to distribute self-signed
| or third-part signed extensions.
| loudthing wrote:
| How did Chrome become so popular instead of Firefox in the first
| place? Was it purely Google's advertising of their browser? Brand
| recognition is so important to typical consumers.
| gurjeet wrote:
| IMHO, performance. Chrome's V8 engine (for running JavaScript)
| was way ahead of competition when it was released. It took
| Firefox many years to come close to it.
|
| Disclosure: Happy Firefox user since v1. Sometimes I was
| jealous of Chrome's speed, sometimes I was weary of Firefox's
| memory leaks, but never enough to leave the flexibility and
| customizability the Firefox provided.
|
| EDIT: ... and now Firefox is fast enough, and isn't a memory
| hog anymore, so I continue to be a very happy Firefox user.
| loudthing wrote:
| Good point. V8 gave us Node.js, right? Also I've been out of
| the loop for a while now about Firefox. My understanding was
| Firefox had a pretty bad memory leak for a long time. Was
| that ever resolved?
|
| Edit: Saw your edit. Glad the firefox memory problem was
| resolved.
| MBCook wrote:
| This matches my memory as well. Safari was dramatically
| faster but it was limited to the Mac (let's just ignore the
| Windows version).
|
| Chrome was based on Safari and was far far faster than
| anything else available on Windows at the time. Not only that
| but they moved fast and kept improving.
|
| Firefox is great now but it took a long time to catch up.
| wussboy wrote:
| I think it was because it was widely advertised on Google.com,
| a luxury Firefox never had.
| loudthing wrote:
| Crazy thing is Mozilla was heavily funded by Google for years
| before Chrome came out.
| bananamerica wrote:
| You know, I did that. Firefox is great, but it's using 600mb of
| RAM on my meager 2012 MacBook Air.
|
| I'm regretably looking for alternatives. Probably Safari if I
| manage to get adblock.
|
| I think it's better on Linux.
| bittercynic wrote:
| I regularly use Chromium and Firefox on an older/slower laptop,
| and Firefox seems much more restrained in memory usage. Chromium
| frequently consumes all available memory and swap, and brings the
| whole system to a crawl, and I never really see that behavior
| with Firefox.
| spurgu wrote:
| Does anyone here know how to change the keyboard shortcut to
| focus the URL bar on Firefox?
|
| I'd like to map it to Cmd+D instead of Cmd+L since it's (Alt+D)
| been in my muscle memory since forever. It's the main reason that
| keeps me from switching. With Chrome I simply assign it to the
| menu entry File -> Open Location ... but Firefox doesn't have a
| menu entry for focusing the URL bar (or at least didn't have last
| time I checked[0]).
|
| [0] Checked again, v100 still doesn't have a menu entry
| 01acheru wrote:
| I don't know how long I'm using FF, a couple years of Opera ages
| ago, some time with the early Chrome when FF was a hog but now
| I'm on FF only on Mac, iOS and Linux. It is perfect for every use
| case of mine, also it is fantastic on iOS.
|
| There is only one reason why I'm using Chrome: at work we use
| Google Workshit for Business or whatever it is called now and
| every Google service has issues anywhere besides Chrome and it is
| getting worse as the time goes by. Meet is terribly unreliable
| and since some months simply won't open the calls because of some
| unknown error, Docs and Sheets cannot be edited, Drive is slow as
| fuck and sometimes doesn't finish loading the page, Gmail has low
| res icons and is significantly slower, etc...
|
| Don't be evil... go fuck yourself!
| ncann wrote:
| A very nice feature that is only available in FF and not Chrome
| is the ability to display subtitles/closed captions in Picture-
| in-picture (PIP) mode. It's a game changer for me, who uses PIP
| heavily on my ultrawide monitor to watch Youtube videos.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| One of the reasons I've been reluctant to go back to FF is the
| lack of support for users (that Chrome). I like to set up a
| Chrome user (effectively a new instance of the browser) for each
| project / client. Each gets ends up with its own password
| manager, history, bookmarks, etc.
|
| Having users helps me silo things abd stay organized. I can also
| have multiple users' browsers open at the same time.
|
| How can I replicate this with FF?
| timbit42 wrote:
| Does Firefox's Profiles do what you are describing?
| jokoon wrote:
| I recently tried to enable resist fingerprinting, I ended
| disabling it because it broke all dark themes on websites...
| Tmpod wrote:
| It is doing its job. The media query for your theme is a point
| of data for fingerprinting, so disabling it is a good thing.
| However, it would be nice to have a way to select which
| measures should be applied, so you can costumise it to your
| preference.
| Shadonototra wrote:
| Mozilla sells its users to Google, so no thanks
|
| I'll stick with Chromium
| cyber_kinetist wrote:
| Ironically the reason why Google supports Firefox financially
| (mainly with web search deals) might be to make a competitor
| float (barely) alive so they don't need to get sued by
| antitrust/monopoly issues in the future.
| Eriks wrote:
| I have only one issue with Firefox - Google Streetview is
| sluggish for GeoGuessr use. Otherwise it is my default browser on
| my Linux box. On Macbook Safari is still the best.
| dbg31415 wrote:
| Firefox is my default browser.
|
| That said... I now use Chrome for all video calls. Firefox just
| isn't battery efficient for those. Blame Google, blame Zoom,
| blame whoever. On EVERY service I've tested (check my post
| history, complained about this to nauseam)... I can call one
| browser from the other, and no matter what Firefox on Mac uses at
| minimum 50% more power according to Apple's power use tool.
|
| Also, any time I take or receive a streaming call on Firefox, my
| MBP gets very hot. Much hotter than Chrome. Wish someone at
| Mozilla would take battery usage / CPU usage on Mac more
| seriously. It's been a problem for years.
| swfsql wrote:
| I use Libre Wolf, which is a pre-configured Firefox with enhanced
| privacy. They still support the FF Sync stuff.
|
| Similarly for vscode, there is vscodium.
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| I wish LibreWolf supported Firefox Sync. I appreciate how they
| removed Firefox's sell-out advertising, promotions for Mozilla
| Corporation products, and telemetry by default. But I couldn't
| get sync to work; it's my main blocker from using it as my
| daily driver. (Some smaller annoyances as a developer are not
| having about:crashes to examine, debug, and upload coredumps on
| an opt-in basis, and Firefox Profiler not having LibreWolf's
| C++ symbols.)
| swfsql wrote:
| My sync worked normally, except for the password autofill
| (but the passwords are still saved on the Settings)
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| Running LibreWolf on Windows 7 on an older machine, with
| ublock0 set to default-deny JS for performance reasons. I
| tried enabling Firefox Sync in about:preferences#librewolf,
| visiting the settings, and logging in again. This time I
| got further, when I logged in I got asked for 2FA, but it
| logged into accounts.firefox.com but not the browser.
|
| When I restarted LibreWolf, a Tools -> Sign In option
| appeared, but https://accounts.firefox.com/signin?action=em
| ail&service=syn... asked for the password of a now-removed
| email (which is now neither a primary nor secondary email,
| why is it still in Firefox's servers?!) under the same
| account. Entering my password said that I should use my
| primary email again, and selecting "Use a different
| account", entering my email and password, and another 2FA
| did not sign into sync (Tools still says "Sign in", as did
| about:preferences#sync). Logging in a third time emailed me
| instead of asking for a 2FA code, but yet again did not
| sign into my browser.
|
| This accounts.firefox.com bug scares me; it reminds me of
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30169435. At this
| point, I think I'm going to delete and recreate my Firefox
| account to remove all traces of my old email.
|
| EDIT: I tried deleting my Firefox account, but realized it
| would remove my Fenix addon collections too. I tried
| signing into addons.mozilla.org... and _again_ saw my
| removed email on the login screen.
| toastal wrote:
| I recently switched to LibreWolf too where the privacy setting
| involve opting _in_ to keeping instead of destroying cookies,
| WebGL support, etc. I know that when upstream Fx pushes a new
| feature, the LibreWolf team will choose the strict privacy
| option as the default.
| irajdeep wrote:
| The only chrome feature that is preventing me from moving to
| firefox is the "tab grouping" feature in chrome.
| gandalfff wrote:
| I fired up Firefox and Chrome on Kubuntu on a 2008 iMac and was
| surprised to find that Firefox could play 1080p video on YouTube
| but Chrome kept dropping frames at 480p. It's definitely worth
| trying both to see which is faster.
| coayer wrote:
| Sounds like HW acceleration wasn't working on Chrome, no?
| kkfx wrote:
| I mainly use Firefox, because of vertical tabs (Tab Center
| Reborn), Reader, TPRB/NoScript etc BUT sometimes I fall back on
| Chromium simply because I want to access a webcrapplication that
| does not work and I do not want to dig how many js and co I have
| to allow to make it works...
|
| Yes, I can use still FF with different profiles, but I'm simply a
| bit too lazy for that...
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| I recently switched to vertical tabs in FF (Sidebery) and it is
| an incredibly better approach. Why the hell is this not built
| in to the browser??? It is lame that Mozilla isn't baking this
| kind of core functionality in. On top of that, they make it a
| PITA to kill the stupid horizontal tabs.
|
| Supposedly Edge has a vertical tabs option. Chrome doesn't seem
| to even have a plug in for it.
| kkfx wrote:
| Perhaps because they are still on very small monitor where
| horizontal space is precious, Mozilla is FLOSS but
| definitively not a free project, they act as a corporate one
| so maybe they have some guidelines written in the era of
| 1024x760 CRT monitor, I can't tell...
|
| However I'm glad I can have them (hiding the tab-bar also to
| avoid clutter) since with them I can have many tabs open,
| seeing a sufficient amount of text to identify any and
| sparing precious _vertical_ space on my modern normal 19:9
| monitor...
|
| I do not use Windows, thankfully, so I do not know Edge, I've
| looked for something similar for Chromium but finding nothing
| like you... Honestly I see modern WebVM improperly named
| browsers for legacy reasons as a necessary evil since
| unfortunately the modern world is web2.0-centric and I have
| not much choice for that, but I have not much expectations
| from both nor not much interests beside the minimum
| protection and ergonomic of my daily digital life...
| sidjor wrote:
| My reasons for switching to Firefox were IT related. IT security
| divisions in some orgs are so paranoid that they won't allow
| saving form data or passwords. Or even let sessions persist and
| will make work hell. They do this for corp standard browser -
| Google Chrome it is. Firefox saves the day.
| kriro wrote:
| I need exactly one reason. Mozilla Foundation > Google for my
| browsing needs.
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