TST is literally the killer feature for FF. It's actually the only reason I went to FF, it was getting out of hand to have all my tabs across the top, and it makes little sense with modern screens being so wide that giving up a little horizontal space to get legible titles is absolutely worth it.
Someone in Chrome/Edge/Safari must be thinking about doing this, I don't know why it hasn't been cloned. Can't be too hard to do.
Which raises the question: why would FF sabotage it? Why isn't it easy to hide the default tabs, and why does the sidebar have the name of the extension providing it stuck at the top?
They had all of the warning in the world about how important this extension was to people years before finally removing XUL, half a decade later you still can only repair the display problems through CSS that isn't kept consistent from version to version, and feature requests/bug reports on the issue are filled with antagonism from the project.
TST might be niche but the concept of a tab in general is not something only understood by technically savvy people. We’re not in the era of IE6 anymore.
I never got to leverage TST, something about the UX bothers me. I have better flow with Tab Stash. Also TST suffers with my hoarding habits and the subtree features have bare naked UI.
From the extension description, Tab Stash seems to save all open tabs as bookmarks. But this feature is already built into Firefox. Am I missing something? I’ve never used either of these extensions (will be trying out TST) so forgive my ignorance if I’m missing something obvious!
Me too. I was a long time TST user but I found I am more productive if I use stashes instead, pin the ones I use daily, and try to only keep what needs to be open in a native tab.
A "killer feature" is a phrase with its own meaning so we can treat it as an atom and apply modifiers to it. The order of operations matters, and I posit that the OP placed their imaginary parentheses as I did in my first example.
No. There is no such thing as a "literally killer feature" unless it is some feature that can cause death. A killer feature in this case is exclusively figurative and adding "literally" is wrong to do.
> Someone in Chrome/Edge/Safari must be thinking about doing this, I don't know why it hasn't been cloned.
Easy, most people never use more than five or six tabs because it’s annoying to have more. TST is a solution to a marginal use case so no one invests the time into developing it.
When I saw the title of this article, I assumed it had to be about Tree Style Tags. No other browser feature has so immediately become a feature I must have so quickly.
Privacy and ad-blocking are great, but I could see myself being lazy and switching to a browser with a better UX, if one existed. But you'll have to take Tree Style Tabs from my cold, dead hands
It's pretty much the only reason I'm staying with Firefox. Mozilla has pissed me off often enough for me to attempt to jump ship, but there's just nowhere to go.
(I'm aware of Orion, but when I last used it I found it to still have performance and polish issues)
You need to use userChrome.css (that's what I do and it works great). it's a bit of a hidden feature, I hope they expose it to extensions eventually, maybe with a different API
You can hide the tab bar through userstyles css. It can't be done from Firefox itself unfortunately, but once you set it up you never have to do it again.
And Tree Tabs felt like a better Tree Style Tabs (but there were no bugfixes in past 4 years).
Though very rarely Sideberry looses/forgets the tree structure of tabs, and I have to restore it from one of the recent snapshots (which it creates every day automatically).
I've tried to switch from TST to Sidebery twice and both times hit small but bad bugs (restore not working on browser restart) and went back to TST. It's simultaneously slicker but buggier. It looks like Sidebery is still under development though: https://github.com/mbnuqw/sidebery/issues
Am I doing something wrong? Every time I try to move something into a group, it just gets deselected and I have to select them again and then sometimes it works to move into a group.
People hate the UI. It was clean before the transition to webextensions, now it's messy and can only be fixed through futzing with userChrome.css (with no help from mozilla.)
If you like my garish and ugly theme, it is TST friendly (it will theme the TST tabs as long as you pick the "Photon" TST theme in the TST settings): https://alan.norbauer.com/projects/alanglow
> I'm looking for a way to have the tab bar hidden.
That's possible by editing userChrome.css. I don't remember the exact incantations, but I'm pretty sure it's mentioned in TST's docs and/or settings page.
I find multi-account-containers* incredibly useful re: tab groups. Coupled with a few pinned tabs (email), I generally always know where to look for what when I have the browser open.
This fixes most of the links on HN for me - I'm one of those people who doesn't like the browser to save anything, so every time I visit a site it's for the first time - so anyway reader mode just cuts right through all the shit in one click, no cookie banners, no subscribe banners, no interruption banners, it gets straight to the content if it's there (sometimes even cuts through shallow front end paywalls) - honestly if the site looks horrible and reader mode doesn't work, close tab - can't be arsed.
It also makes far better use of screen space than most site designs, e.g those common yet horrible headers with css position: sticky. Pretty much every big news site is made better by pulling any content into reader mode.
I wish they also had a way to search tabs without the address bar. I insist that address bars act solely as address bars so I've disabled all other features from it including search.
Even a CLI shouldn't be making internet connections automatically or unpredictably. If my terminal had the option to send my keystrokes to some sever for autocomplete suggestions (and market research) or did things like automatically append parts of URLs to what I type by guessing at what I wanted I'd disable that too.
Simple Tab Groups is how tab groups should have been done in Firefox from the start. I think if they would be like that they would not have to rip them out. Tab search or rather filtering is included and is such a splendid addition. Also automatic backup of groups is a fine feature, but so far I only needed to use it for migration.
I'd like to add that it combines very nicely with Gesturefy, defining a couple of mouse gestures to switch between tab groups (either through a small popup or switching moving back/forth) is what got me to actually use the tab groups meaningfully.
I should be clear. What I was referring to when I said `keybindings` is browser/developer keybindings that are not yet made configurable.
There's been an open issue for 7 years asking for a shortcut key for the eyedropper[0]. The navigation between developer panels is also a bit tedious. The page focus key, F6, is not configurable.
These are some instances I was thinking when I said I wanted good keybinding support. I'll be really willing to try an extension that achieves these but it's really the browser's job.
With that said, I've tried a bunch of these extensions in the past! I'm not a vim guy so I settled with Link Hints[1] for in-page navigation. I cannot recommend it enough for non-vim guys. It's really underrated.
Thanks for the mention of F6, I had been looking for a page focus key for a while to restore focus after switching to the address bar.
I've discovered that "ctrl-f esc" also works; focus goes back to the page when the search bar closes. Convenient if you have capslock remapped to escape.
For what it's worth, Chrome has a reader mode, just hidden behind an experimental flag, and a native PiP mode for videos, accessible with the media controls icon that appear when a video is playing.
I use Panorama Tab Groups. It lets me create groups of tabs (obviously) for each project. Each project has 10-20 tabs and I can quickly switch between them. It means that most times, I only have 10-20 tabs visible. Makes things much easier to navigate and keep track of.
There is tab search (and history, and bookmarks for that matter) from the address bar (i.e. typing `% foo` will search all tabs for `foo`). I don't know if it's turned on by default, but you can set it up from “Search shortcuts” settings section.
What do you dislike about tab groups? Or is Chrome's implementation on mobile not good?
I think the current design is ugly. The way Edge handles them in the vertical tabs sidebar looks a lot better than the way other Chromium derivatives handle them in the tab strip, but still not the best. I like Vivaldi's implementation better, but the UI is relatively laggy. I miss old Opera.
I find them unpredictable. I don't know when something will open in a new group, I don't know how I can move a tab out of/into a group. I find it to be kind of a mess. And of course it was shoved at me without even asking whether I want it.
(Thanks in advance for the solution. I mostly use Firefox anyway)
> Yes, you can get extensions for this in Chrom(e/ium) but having these as a native feature is really nice.
I've been using Brave for a while and I'm considering going back to FF, partly to get out of Chromium.
However, this is a point I don't get. What do I care if these features are native or plug-ins? My Brave plugins are synced, so whenever I install Brave and set it up I immediately. If the plugin is well done, there is no difference, and for people who don't care about that particular feature it could be less bloat to have it on a feature.
Specifically for the Reader mode, the Chromium Addon I use comes from the Firefox code for the same functionality, so it's just as good. Kudos to FF, OSS is awesome.
Really wondering why this is so neglected in all browsers. I know quite a few users that like to accidentally press CTRL + T when trying to write a capital T after sitting 2h on a site to put in some info.
It is good that browsers grow more sceptical of sites capturing hotkeys, but some sites really benefit from the question if you really want to leave that page. As far as I know this is the only long-term supported solution. Restoring tab might work but not on all sites.
two leading spaces changes text to code formatting
perhaps lines are closer together here.
It definitely does with me. I used Edge when I was using Windows and I liked it!
I went back to Windows after almost 2 years for work and MS has managed to bloat it too. Don't understand why I need a Math solver. Edge bar is annoying. Favorites and bookmarks are 2 separate things?
I turned them all off obviously but defaults matter.
I went from disliking Edge, to liking it, and then slowly disliking it again as they added bloat to it.
What turned me off from it was when I lost a year's worth of (unimportant) bookmarks and history. One day I opened it up and it decided to kindly sign me in automatically (probably detected I was signed into an MS site in-browser), and it wanted to automatically sync all my history, auto-fill info and passwords to Microsoft's sync servers. I immediately disconnected my account to stop this, and then it deleted my Edge profile afterwards as a further courtesy.
I understand that these two behaviors are probably Features, but I don't like the feeling of losing control of my software. And now these features like MSFT Rewards, coupon services, credit card services, and the "Bing Bar" (or whatever you call it) are just too much for me. Not to mention every PC I use Edge on tends to assault my eyes with political propaganda since Edge's New Tab page defaults to biased news outlets.
If you mean a basic calculator in the URL bar, Firefox has that too (also a simple units converter) but off by default. They do that because people use search engines for that kind of stuff. The implementation (at least the Firefox one) is quite simple.
One irritation I have with FF is its confoundingly difficult way to add arbitrary "search engines" with a keyword. eg: I want to just type `r subreddit` and have it expande to `https://reddit.com/r/subreddit`. You can DO it, but natively if FF doesn't "see" the URL as a search (so it doesn't provide the 'add search engine' option in the search bar right-click) it's overly hard to accomplish. Had to install a plugin, and/or hope project Mycroft has it.
I want to see extensions which change how the user interacts with the browser (eg. Vimium or gesturify) work on browser internal pages such as settings, extensions or reader view. I know its not going to happen because "security".
Regarding tab groups, there's two things that I've found that seems to have solved my requirements:
- Workona (this is an extension for chrome)
- Arc (https://thebrowser.company/)
Both essentially have the idea of "spaces" for web browsers.
Native reader mode is fantastic! The underlying parser (readability) works great. Shameless plug: I use Readability to parse web articles and send it directly to Kindle: https://ktool.io
I'm typing this from a desktop Firefox on PostmarketOS in Poco F1 smartphone, I love it.
Especially since I have to rely upon the browser for most 3rd party services due to the lack of a proper Linux client.
But running Firefox on Linux mobile has largely been a community effort, I wish Mozilla realizes the need-gap and invests in official Linux smartphone version.
But I'm actively moving away from 3rd party extensions in FF as I found a recommended extension promoting anti-vaccine agenda[1], The only extensions I use now are ub & Multi-account containers. I would prefer if FF integrated them by default and thorough reviews for recommended extensions.
No. Tab groups are great, they allow you to bundle context but persist it front and center. On a given day I might be working on five different things, I context switch between tab groups, make some progress within a group, and move along. Bookmarks absolutely do not solve this issue. Bookmarks are not ephemeral, and take considerably more time to organize than simply using tabs naturally.
I don't use groups (I liked them when tab groups were a feature of Firefox). I search for tabs by typing stuff in the awesome bar, that works.
I always have a lot of tabs and kill everything from times to times. But it's nice to reach a tab that's already loaded when you need it, instead of reloading the page every time, making a network access, using resources and having to wait. A page being already open is also a hint that it's something I accessed recently and that it's most likely the thing I need.
I don't want to waste my time managing bookmarks (actually the sibling comment from lamacase captures my view very well on this). That's not how I use a browser. But it's good they are there for people like you who find a use for it.
The former don't preserve login state (and site state in general) or scroll position, navigating between them requires an internet connection and often uses significant data (important when working from a metered and/or unreliable connection like on a train or plane), just to name a few differences.
Ok, great idea. Now we just need an extension that auto-bookmarks every newly opened page until I unbookmark it, and a category of "super-bookmarks" to curate the pages I would manually bookmark now.
I've never understood how people get into a workflow where they expect to have lots of persistent tabs. I rely on the fact that I can reset my browser by quitting it - everything goes away and I can start fresh, ahhh! The idea of browser state as something valuable is foreign, and it kind of makes me feel uncomfortable.
I usually work on about 5 projects at a time. During a given day I will switch between those projects at least once an hour. With Panorama Tab Groups, I only see about 10-20 tabs at a time and they are all specific to the current project. when i switch, it does it all at once and the pages don’t reload. They retain their state. I can be editing something in one tab group, switch to another tab group to check on a dependency, and then switch back to the firs group to finish editing.
I do use bookmarks for longer term organization but my workspace is all handled in tab groups.
Wow, I should have read this before cadence-per-cadence making the exact same comment!
I have no idea why nobody uses bookmarks and everybody keeps hundreds of tabs open. When did that start? Who even has the RAM for that? How do you even click on them when they’re that tiny? So many things just don’t make sense.
> Coworkers look at me like I’m a freak because I usually keep fewer than 10 tabs open :)
Haha! That's me. My maximum is 15 and then my cleanliness ghost kicks in. I said tab groups because I like organization even if it's just 10 tabs. I honestly don't know why I said tab search.
Having coworkers looking at you like you are freak while keeping your job because the company sees you as a bringer of value is the best compliment you can get from your workplace :)
Your browser has a chronological list of the previous pages you visited. It’s very easy to quickly go back to a page you had open recently and fairly easy to search for it in the history if it was some time before. It’s actually probably easier than finding a tab amongst a lot of tabs.
For persisting state, it’s simple. You don’t. History is going to send you back where you were if the url scheme is not brain dead. I will personally stop using sites which don’t do that properly because they are annoying to use.
For forms I just fill them when I need to or keep them open for a bit if I forget I would need some information which I need to check. If I realise it’s going to take some time, I just close them and fill them properly when I have all I need.
You'll have to pry Firefox from my cold, dead hands!
At the outset, yes, chromium based browsers feel snappier..
But, stuff that Chrome will not have and are absolutely essential
1. Containers... I use another unverified extension to match urls and automatically assign containers...
2. Ublock origin
3. Tree style tabs
4. Developer console... Edit and resend any request
That said, i still end up using chromium for teams and outlook 365 (pwa install feature is nice)... But that's only because i don't have any other options with those two
Manifest V3 (The browser plugin API) severely hampers uBlock Origin's abilities to block as many things as it can.
I think the first heads-up version to the public only allowed 10,000 origins to be blocked, meaning that advertisers would only need to purchase 10,001 domains and they would be able to send ads to users again.
It's been a point of sour discussion with the chrome web team for years. They've tried to adjust it to make it more palatable with the public but advertising is just too important for Google to implement the API that users want.
Google has gone so far as to use its resources to silently take control over the web to ensure that ads remain, first with AMP based web pages, and then with FLoC advertisements. Now they've replaced that with Topics but many are eyeing that very cautiously.
It cannot do CNAME uncloaking because Chrome's extension API do not provide dns resolving like on Firefox. Another example if HTML filtering where on Firefox an extension can rewrite the HTML from requests on the fly (e.g. to remove script tags, etc.). That's also not possible on Chrome and uBlock Origin will only make use of this on Firefox. There are probably more limitations, these are just two from the top of my head.
I am confused about the "I don't have any other choice" comment. I assume you mean because Firefox doesn't support whatever teams uses for meeting audio/video, or maybe it's the install feature you mentioned, but I use Firefox for both and use my phone for meetings.
There are times when I've noticed Teams to fail if I try to open it from one of my Container tabs. It complains about supported browser and stuff. But it opens perfectly on the default tab always.
On linux, just create a separate login and use Chrome there. In fact, what I do is create a separate user, start Chrome once, do any configuration I want and then create a tarball of the separate user's home directory. Then to start a fresh it's just a wipe of the whole directory and unpack the tarball again.
It's fast enough to just run Chrome in a loop, and on each exit wipe and unpack the original state again.
This loses substantial affordances Firefox containers give you (eg, right click->open in container, always open domain in container, access to bookmarks etc)
The way Firefox style containers work they need to be "built into" not "built around". It's not as much about creating a profile and running it separately (that's just standard profiles in Chrome/Firefox, or normal OS level sandboxing) as it is auto-launching webpage requests into that profile based on matches and integrating the profiles into the app UI so the tabs stand out, can co-exist in the same window, and can be managed via built in tab creation UI.
Chromium hasn't been interested in this feature but nothing would stop someone from making a Chromium derivative that does this.
Why not use the native user profile function? E.g. set up a “user profile” dedicated to access only Meta/Facebook properties (and therefore only be able to track you within that container)
"4. Developer console... Edit and resend any request" - there have been extensions for that in Chrome for a long time, though I don't know if they integrate with the developer tools/network tab itself. Agree it would be handy - I use the "replay" command in Chrome DevTools quite a bit, and if I need to modify it usually end up importing it into Postman (via the copy as cURL command, which I believe Firefox also supports).
I’m a Firefox user but I’m not sure that I can agree that it’s lighter than Google Chrome. I think Chrome is generally faster at everything.
Chrome is also more stable. For some reason my Firefox randomly freezes once or twice a month and gets stuck in a crashing loop where only a reboot will fix it.
But on principle I use Firefox whenever possible. I appreciate the effort that went into it. Still have to use Chrome daily for one or two business web apps that block FF.
Chrome is possibly faster for 10 tabs or less. When you go upwards of 100 like I do... It's not even in the competition. Its UI becomes terrible and its unresponsive. FF keeps chugging along without missing a beat.
Odd. I've been on Mac for more than a decade so no idea. Notice that this only became a thing with Quantum so if you used an older version of FF it wouldn't apply.
I'm with the GP on this: FF is unstable with lots of tabs. It's a big memory hog, and it's been like this for about 2 years in my experience so far. I'm using a Mac with 16GB RAM, and it's not enough for Firefox any more (something changed, it used to use less memory). Using current FF (103.0b9). Lot of tabs, but auto tab-unloading so there shouldn't be a large number active.
Reported memory use (in Activity Monitor) varies, 8GB-25GB, and it's often swapping. Sometimes it uses more, and then the system crashes. Often it fills my remaining 20GB of free disk space for swap space. Surprisingly, even opening HN pages and only following HN links (i.e. all text-only), the memory usage grows in this way over time.
It's not possible to scroll smoothly or type a comment like this without pauses and occasional spinning beach balls. Just scrolling through a page with two-finger drag, it will stop every 10 seconds or so, then jump forwawrd. Moving the cursor with the cursor keys in this comment window is similar.
The constant jank and pauses may be entirely due to memory swapping or some other garbage-collection like overhead, I have no way to know.
What other people write about this issue is that it's likely some combination of number of tabs, and the fact that modern pages need a lot of memory for large images, compositing and similar, and perhaps memory used by add-ons. But all of this has suggestive evidence against it: If I go to about:memory and click "Minimize memory usage", it consistently brings memory usage down to not much more than when Firefox starts up, without appearing to change any functionality or deactivate any tabs; and when it starts up it's using less than 8GB despite loading up the same session. It also does this itself spontaneously from time to time, though not reliably enough.
That said, I switched from Safari when I realised Safari was also being a memory hog and was causing everything else on the laptop to be slow. At the time I switched, Firefox was a lovely breath of fresh air in that department. Even though I copied over all my tabs from Safari (by hand), Firefox ran in very much less RAM, and life was good again on the laptop.
Something has changed since then, making Firefox much worse for memory usage, and I don't yet know what it is.
I think this is due to specific sites. I try to avoid Google Docs and have a separate instance of Chrome only for that. I updated to the M1 Max with 64gb so even if FF slowed down at some point I wouldn't know at this point. But it was OK on my previous air which was pretty weak.
"about:performance" does not show any pages or add-ons being memory hogs. The memory use per page that it shows is surprisingly small, and the total comes to < 1GB.
And I see the real memory usage grown, eventually to crashing size, even when I'm just reading around HN, clicking many article headings and comments but remaining within the HN text-only site.
I agree it's probably made worse caused by specific sites, but I haven't been able to figure out which ones, or perhaps it's wide range of them, which defeats browsing in general. However, I now avoid Telegram Web, because that does consistently crash Firefox for me eventually (I've seen reported memory use grow to 67GB when TW was open, about three times).
Whatever it is, it doesn't look like site JavaScript holding data in large JavaScript objects or DOM trees, because minimizing memory use with "about:memory" reduces the size to workable levels without any other observable effect on open pages.
So I'm inclined to think of the Firefox as having a severe reclaimable-but-not-reclaimed memory leak or cache problem of some kind, that is outside the world of JavaScript data.
Oddly, I also use FF on a 16GB Mac and experience none of those slowdowns that you mention. On my work machine, FF typically has around 100 tabs grouped into 4-6 tab groups by project and it is solid.
I do find that some websites end up using 1GB+ of memory if you leave them running for an extended period of time (looking at you MacRumors forums) but that happens on Safari and Chrome, too. HN is usually the safest one that uses the least memory. Sites with lots of ads load all kinds of crap and can use surprising amounts of memory.
An anecdote about the jank and pauses: I have... many (D:) tabs open in Chrome right now, and I discovered that setting Session Buddy to show the number of tabs in its icon causes the entire browser to pause for a fraction of a second every 1-2 seconds. Clearly this is because Session Buddy is calling the "get list of open tabs" API method, which for all I know is using a global mutex that is held for as long as it takes the browser process to get and build the tab list. Perhaps something similar is happening in Firefox. Try doing the whole nuke-profile-from-orbit thing, remove all extensions, reset all the settings, etc (after backing the profile up sufficiently to be able to put it all back). It might be some obscure option or configuration flag. Given the low number of tabs it's not likely to be that.
I vaguely remember reading a discussion about how much memory Firefox should use to optimize performance. Some ppl wanted it to just use everything while others wanted a memory footprint as small as possible. I think they went with a percentage of available memory, an idea neither side liked. (hah)
With that many tabs I can't get either to work well, tbh. OTOH, FF has an _apparent_ speed advantage for me in that it crashes pretty regularly so I'm not having to worry about memory leaks. =\
Same here, I also get frequent crashes on FF. In the past it used to crash when selecting text with the mouse, but since the latest update that seems to have been fixed. Now it tends to crash when drag&dropping things instead.
I could never figure out any consistent action to cause it; it would be there, then it would not. Often when doing nothing. Could be some confluence of extensions I have, too.
For what is worth: On my windows Chrome just freezes everything under 10-20 tab load. Firefox just works with hundreds of tabs not rebooting for months.
This is what keeps me away from Firefox. I gave it a try for 3 months a little while back but it was so much slower than Chrome for general browsing. Maybe I'm due another try.
It was after all the press about quantum that I last gave FireFox a go and was disappointed. Still, I'm willing to try again - I'd like to do what I can to prevent another browser monopoly.
I've been using firefox for the last 2-3 years, and I've had it 'crash' 2 times, both on youtube, but that might be because of all the privacy related addons I have. Ublock origin reports more than 2k blocked scripts on youtube.
Chrome also would crash occasionally and force me to reload tabs. I don't think chrome is significantly faster in practice.
I'd consider faster as a different thing than lighter. I think benchmarks show that the JS engine in Chrome is faster, but you pay a price in memory and processor to get that.
Personally, I have found FF really stable lately on both Windows and Linux and use it whenever possible as you do. And like you, I also need to fire up Chrome for the odd thing now and then.
> For some reason my Firefox randomly freezes once or twice a month and gets stuck in a crashing loop where only a reboot will fix it.
My Chrome does that every other day on Linux. It has been that way for the last year or two. I can get around a full restart and loss of tabs by killing some GPU renderer processes.
Within the past couple years I've went from Chrome to Edge, then to Firefox, and on to LibreWolf. Edge is probably my favourite of the bunch, and I think the CSS devtools are a lot nicer in it, but I just want to keep my stuff as independent as possible etc.
Is there really a killer feature of Chrome that justifies its use over FF? I've been using Firefox and have never been disappointed with it. I always just assumed that if you wanted privacy, it's better to use Firefox over Chrome, Safari, or Brave.
Its only killer feature to me is that websites are designed and tested with a Chromium-first attitude. As a regular FF user I might stumble upon a website that’s quite buggy or straight up doesn’t work, which forces me to use Chrome for that specific website. Other than that I don’t really feel like there’s anything, and Edge is currently a better Chrome than Chrome anyway.
EDIT: and for the record, I’m still upset Microsoft didn’t choose FF and willingly increased Google’s grasp
I've been an FF user and developer of many frontends for years and the amount of times I run into serious differences between browsers is somewhere near zero.
I've been on team FF since the switch from IE like 20 years ago- I agree sometimes there is additional jank, but I also want to add that it is rare enough that it's been a non-issue 99.9% of the time.
Even then, I expect some of it is the fact I use an obscene number of plug-ins to break most social media sites (to prevent overuse).
I built an extension[1] so that I could choose which sites are opened in Chrome... so that whenever I need to use Google Meet, it automatically opens it on Chrome.
> Is there really a killer feature of Chrome that justifies its use over FF?
I log into Chrome with my Gmail account and my browsing history+passwords are carried across all the devices I use in a typical week, Windows, Mac, iPhone. This is huge, as I rely on history a lot.
My last 3 jobs also had Google-based accounts, which means I'm able to maintain two browser contexts where I don't dirty up my personal history with boring work stuff.
I assume Firefox probably offers account syncing, but there's no reason to switch at this point. They lost me more than a decade ago, I loved Chrome's out-of-the-box interface. It made Firefox seem ancient and cluttered with all the unnecessary buttons, and massive borders and tabs consuming precious screen space.
edit: And I'm now reading that Firefox supports multiple browser contexts but requires some effort. No thanks.
Firefox also supports multiple browsers including the Android Password-Fill API. So you need to sign into your Sync account rather than your Google account but then you get a nearly identical feature set.
Plus it is all end-to-end encrypted unlike the Google one.
You get account support with Google One or a Google Workspace subscription. There are other support avenues as well. Account bans do happen but for the most part it appears that when it does, that the person who got banned doesn't share the full story and people are more than happy to jump on the Google hate train. Google is a successful company and it annoys a lot of people that others don't have the same hate that they do.
I had my paid GAFB account suspended years ago without explanation, could not get in touch with support, and as it took so long to get in touch with support, my data had been deleted by that point, meaning I lost many, many, many years of irreplaceable photographs from my Drive. Haven't touched cloud storage since.
Lesson learned: Drive is not a substitute for backups, nor is it a place to keep the only copy of important information. Now running Unraid.
If you use the Multi Account Containers extension [1] built by Firefox and use the built-in Firefox account sync, then you'll get that same functionality in Firefox across Windows, Mac, iPhone. That doesn't seem like a whole lot of effort and you get more functionality.
The biggest improvement over the account-based Chrome experience is that you could even have contexts (containers) for several things if you like - a container group for social media, a different container group for banking, work, shopping, etc.
All in different tabs, color-coded / labeled by container group, each with isolated cookies, etc but shared bruiser history in the same window just like in Chrome (I'm assuming) but with better privacy.
I do the opposite. Always wipe all history whenever browser is closed, never sync anything, and never prompt to store passwords. I find it much more manageable.
Passwords go in the password manager.
Instead of history I use tagged bookmarks or a notes file (obsidian.md) with actual notes about why I wanted to save that link.
If I actually ever want to sync anything between work and home PC or to/from my phone (rare), it's an explicit choice to plug into USB and drag it over, or intentionally put it in dropbox. Not just something that just randomly implicitly happens or sometimes doesn't.
Those experienced with web dev around here will tell you Chrome is the main (or only) browser tested with most websites these days. Some things might be slow or broken in Firefox. One example situation that comes to mind is you can't scroll to the bottom of the page on some sites in Firefox due to terrible spaghetti layout design, so the submit button is not normally reachable. Or it loads under a banner and becomes unclickable.
There's also some sites that seem to actively make things worse on purpose or refuse to load even if they otherwise do work. I think YouTube was noted for doing this a few years ago.
In other areas, small company sites may claim Firefox just doesn't work on their site. Sometimes prompted because an ancient version once was broken and the browser entry list was never updated, or they simply forgot to account for it in the grouping of "Internet Explorer or Other." I see this more often than I would like.
A recent example I found: https://tools.usps.com/rcas.htm (the "Initializing Services" modal never goes away in FF, works almost immediately in Chrome and Edge)
This is just the most recent example I remember, unfortunately there have been enough at this point that if I'm doing anything important (such as filling and submitting some important form), I do it in Chrome because I don't want it to silently break in FF and cause other issues with invalid or corrupt data submitted to the service.
> A recent example I found: https://tools.usps.com/rcas.htm (the "Initializing Services" modal never goes away in FF, works almost immediately in Chrome and Edge)
You can also make a bookmarklet that loads Google Translate into the page. It isn't quite as nice as the auto-detect in Chrome but very close.
With the new offline translation support I actually prefer this setup as I can try the local translate first, then if the quality is bad or the language isn't supported I can make the decision if I want to upload the page to Google.
The profiles is what gets me. I have a personal bad professional profile on my device and whenever clicking on a link, it will open the page in the latest chrome window (re: profile) that was last accessed and it works wonderfully. Firefox profiles are a completely different process/app/structure and it just really does not work gracefully in any scenario I’ve tried.
This is also what keeps me from considering FF for a daily driver. I have the same workflow and it's very easy to keep straight.
I have hotkeys assigned to each profile via macOS shortcuts. Cmd-shift-# focuses a given profile. Or opens a new window of that profile if there wasn't one already.
Links from other apps always open in the most recent profile.
This makes it very simple to ensure links I click in Slack/iMessage/etc open where I want them to.
(Took the time to write this out in the hopes some Firefox folks see this..)
Chrome has support for casting to Chromecasts. While not enough reason to daily drive Chrome, it does come in handy for the random video player that doesn't natively support it.
There are a couple of features in Chrome that I use every day for web dev.
1) when the console is open, you can right-click on the reload page button and choose hard reload.
2) when inspecting CSS properties, you can change many of them by dragging them with the mouse left and right. That makes positioning elements so much easier than guessing and adjusting a dozen times.
There's a potentially a killer feature of Firefox that justifies its use over Chrome: it seems to be impossible to prevent youtube ads from playing on Chrome while in Firefox just having ABP installed does the trick.
(this claim is based on rather limited testing so please correct me if I'm wrong)
The killer features is the developer tools panel. It's so packed with features it might as well be an IDE. I use Firefox on all my devices for personal browsing, but I still use Chrome for webdev works.
Multiple profiles, so that I can keep personal and work related stuff separately. Firefox has containers, but it’s not really a first class support baked into the browser. For example, I use OneTab extension which lets you suspend tabs to save memory. This doesn’t work well unless you have profiles support.
Even with containers, when I suspend a tab, when I unsuspend I would want it in the same tab group
Firefox had the chance to remain relevant when it still had some significant market share and if they had gone all in on ad blocking (basically something like merge ublock origin directly into Firefox). Unfortunately, since most of their revenue is from Google, it could never happen due to conflict of interest.
At this point, probably, but in the past when FF had 30% market share? It would've at least forced a serious discussion in the industry on what are acceptable ads. Or maybe it would've been the impetus for a working microtransaction system built into the browser. Instead, they did nothing with their influence.
On the Mac, Firefox is Firefox, with Quantum and all. It's iOS where Firefox, like every other third party browser, is mostly just reskinned Safari, because third party browser engines aren't allowed due to apps being restricted from running outside code.
Really? There are extensions for that sort of thing. Your extension list can even be synchronized across devices.
Tree Style Tab, for example, allows control over how new tabs are opened in relation to existing tabs if you don't like FF defaults. Even if you don't like the tree view, you get a UI that adds settings for how your tabs should open and stay grouped.
Firefox supports multiple profiles, though the UI is not as streamlined as Chrome’s. In Firefox, open about:profiles to create and open new profile windows.
Video playback is janky for me in Firefox on Linux on some sites (like IGN), but not on Brave. Actually, now that I mention it, I bet I haven’t installed a codec or something.
Some of us find Firefox incredibly useful for this reason. When my company's intranet site is down you can't open a new tab on Edge without it crashing trying to get there.
I happen to really like the UI of Chrome over Firefox. To me the add bookmark dialog is very clunky in Firefox. Also, I prefer in the in-tab bookmark manager of Chrome over the 'Library' Window Firefox opens.
Also as far as making extensions go I like how in chrome you can use dev-tools-protocol within extensions as you can you cool things like intercept the body of a response with it.
That being said I'm really wanting a better browser but for me Firefox is not it.
I have an older Surface tablet (that I recovered from a recycle bin, TBH) and I've been using Chrome on it, but I was annoyed by some of the latency and tried Firefox the other day. It had all the problems of Chrome, plus jittery scrolling and some extra random lags thrown in, so I noped right out of it. I've got nothing against Firefox as a concept, but it's apparently too hardware intensive for that scenario.
Are you sure it isn't the hardware? Perhaps there's a reason it was in the recycling bin. Not my experience whatsoever, even with "old Surface tablets".
I use FF, but I have at times had to switch to Chrome for extended periods of time when performance of FF was bad after a particular release - maybe about 9-10 years ago? I think a lot of people experienced the same thing at the time, moved off and never moved back.
Anecdotally, I know several folks who got retina MacBooks when that was new (2012 or so?) and had to switch off of Firefox. For a while it didn't render correctly, and then once it did the performance made it unusable for daily driving.
Interesting..I can't even say I notice the update time..it happens but never stand in my way that I'd notice it..under 1 minute may be? Not sure to be honest.
What's your experience here?
Multiple profiles in parallel? Sure, you can start multiple instances of Firefox in parallel from the command line and use them with different profiles. I do that (on a Mac) regularly. Works under Windows too, IIRC.
A few months ago I tried to go back to Firefox and used containers a lot. It works fine, but sometimes I'd pick the wrong container, defeating the point of using containers (eg: using Google Search for personal stuff while logged in to a work Google Account).
Containers are useful and we can do interesting things with them (eg: temporary containers), but they don't replace profiles. With a profile I don't have to mix personal bookmarks with work bookmarks, I can use different extensions/settings, a different theme so I don't use the wrong profile by mistake, etc.
I personally dislike Firefox for its annoying "Looking for updates" pop-up whenever I open the browser. That 3 second stop generated more dislike from me for Firefox than bad privacy policies of Chrome ever could.
I've switched from Firefox to Safari for most of my browsing, and Chrome for anything that needs devtools.
Why? Battery. Efficiency. On the new M1 Macbooks I can run Safari and be unplugged all day long. The increased power consumption and battery drain is noticeable when using FF and I can't make it all the way through the day. As far as extensions go, I have 1Blocker and it works well, it does block YouTube ads. The only things I miss are Tree Style Tabs and Container Tabs.
I also find performance on FF to be a lot worse than both Chrome and Safari. Firefox gets sluggish with many tabs open. JS-heavy sites will be jittery and laggy in Firefox, but buttery smooth in Chrome. Having 100 tabs open is sluggish in Firefox, but smooth in Chrome/Safari. In FF some sites will occasionally crash their tab, but they don't crash in Chrome/Safari. Etc.
Then there's the attitude of Mozilla constantly changing the interface, shoving things like Pocket or Mozilla VPN in my face. Sorry Firefox, but I've left and not coming back.
My favorite part about Safari is how, because I don't own an Apple device, I have next to no options for testing and fixing the issues that get filed with regards to my web application not working in Safari.
Probably 2/3rds of the bugs I get are specifically related to Safari while the other 1/3rd are just general issues that affect every browser.
It's insane to me that they provide no way to possibly resolve this without going out and spending money to buy their hardware.
Actually if you check that page above, under "Download build artifacts from Buildbot", there's binaries available for download which includes MiniBrowser.exe.
What exactly do you expect? That Apple brings back Safari to Windows and Linux? There's public demand for that every now and then (eg [1]), but that has it's own set of problems ie. that Safari-on-Win/Lin won't be representative of what's rendered on Mac OS due to font handling, antialiasing, power management, and other peculiarities on Mac OS (Mac OS would typically run on much higher resolution than Win/Lin).
I'm not even using Mac OS currently, but I don't think it's Apple's job to make your web app run like on Chrome when Google is calling the shots on so-called "web standards" with tens or hundreds of new features every quarter, with necessarily surprising results. Personally, I'd find it ok if you just label your app with "Best run on Chrome" because that's the reality the web has degraded to, and the actual problem of web apps. Or deploy as Electron app on Mac OS.
Maybe Apple could provide a Mac OS + Safari VM, like MS was doing (or still is doing?) when they were producing IE. But then the question is on which machine would you be able to run those VMs given Apple is heading towards ARM-only instruction set machines. Should Apple commit to produce x64 binaries for backward-compatible emulation on historic hardware? Personally, I do like Apple's innovation where the rest of the industry is lagging behind.
I started using Firefox ages ago because of firebug. I’ve been using it as my primary browser ever since. I’ve never had an issue with it (other than the occasional web site that is designed to only work with Chrome). Maybe I don’t know what I’m missing since I haven’t given Chrome a try (other than loading the occasional website that only works on Chrome). Maybe Chrome is better than Firefox, but I don’t have any complaints about Firefox (though I do have complaints about bad website developers).
I ran into an interesting situation where I was building a Conway implementation and getting 60fps in Firefox / 10fps in Chrome. Turned out that Chrome had absolutely horrible performance with attempts to access out-of-bounds array indexes, where Firefox had some early fail fasts in place.
So anecdata, but I wouldn’t rely on Chrome automatically working well if Firefox does.
I keep having to "forget about this site" for YouTube after watching (admittedly many) videos - every 2 months or so. The tell-tale sign is that videos stutter outrageously. It is surprisingly consistent - stutters / freezes happening, forget about site, problem solved.
I would be surprised if this is solely due to Firefox btw; I trust YT-owner Google about as far as I can toss the lot of them.
I'm a big fan of Firefox containers. I occasionally need different logins for the same sites and containers make that much easier than Google's profile feature.
Containers is the big thing imho. Having two bookmarks that go to different Gmail accounts, with each opening in a different container tab, and each container being logged into just that account. Same for AWS accounts.
Is the purpose of using two bookmarks to open the container and gmail simultaneously? I just use one bookmark, two containers, each is only logged on to one gmail account.
One bookmark opens one account, the other opens the other account. I use an extension to match URLs to containers. So it's possible to have bookmarks "gmail [work]" and "gmail [personal]" that open in the right container, already authenticated.
Are extensions and their settings shared across all containers?
One thing I love about Chrome/Edge profiles is being able to different extensions enabled/disabled and configured differently across them.
For example, I have a "private" profile that always runs windscribe vpn and other privacy-heavy extensions that I might not necessarily want running on my "base" profile.
I used Firefox in the early-mid 00s, switched to Chrome not long after launch, after my colleagues showed me how much slicker is was than a now fairly heavy Firefox (at the time.)
Then evil Google emerges, Chrome got fat, FF trimmed up and went privacy-as-a-default, and I'm back on FF again for the better part of the last decade.
Opera had a look-in around 2008 but it didn't last long, although some of the features were nicely done, it just had a clunky feeling and the rendering was ... Different.
But it increasingly got more config-involving to make FF do what I wanted and maybe I overdid some settings/plugins and websites started to show incorrectly. Also the imho (much) too high salary for the CEO annoyed me (Mozilla is supposed to be "Internet for people, not profit").
Tried Brave and it was a nice experience after some initial cost to e.g. disable crypto. Some weeks ago I uninstalled FF on all my computers...
Given that Brave is a for-profit business backed by VC money[1], sooner or later it'll become what you hate and you will find yourself wishing there was a browser ran by a strong non-profit like Mozilla.
That being said, perhaps they should just piggyback off WebKit/Blink and save themselves a ton of resources.
I'm aware that Brave is a for-profit company, this must not necessarily mean that they'll do evil things. And if they would and Mozilla is no longer around, this could also be because Google stopped funding them.
> On February 27, 2017, Pocket announced that it had been acquired by Mozilla Corporation, the commercial arm of Firefox's non-profit development group. Mozilla staff stated that Pocket would continue to operate as an independent subsidiary but that it would be leveraged as part of an ongoing "Context Graph" project.[6] There are plans to open-source the server-side code of Pocket,[11][12][13] with more than 50 repositories already available on the company's GitHub account, including their iOS app.
It is kind of a conundrum. The Mozilla situation seems clearly to be self serving and crippling the potential of the browser. The CEO's pay exemplary of that - and similar situations are there with brave. The founder was forced out of Mozilla for a reason, but setting that aside, the liberty they took with collecting crypto for businesses while those businesses were unaware put me off of them in a profound way. The niche the browser itself fills is obviously good but the methods seem... off, not malicious intent, just questionable. Changing the ad economy isn't bad for example, a great driving motivation.
The worst thing about using Firefox is that the longer you use it the more things you have done to un-fuck it and the more work it is to replicate all those things on a new system.
I used to work with Brendan and despite being trans felt he sorta got the shaft from Mozilla. I know everyone was upset with him, but for a year and a half I worked with him and he was never anything but cordial to me... an out trans queer person.
So when he launched Brave I wanted to give it the benefit if the doubt. But the early messaging about what conditions ads are replaced was hamfisted and I stopped using it relatively quickly.
That being said... all the browsers (FF, Brave, Chrome, Safari, etc.) embody the agenda of their respective organizations. The question you may want to ask is "what organization has the most motivation to address issues I care about most?"
I don't know Brendan, but I agree that from everything I've gathered he was treated very badly by Mozilla and then to make matters worse he was woke mobbed. Absolutely lost respect for Mozilla after that. The CEO issue, to a lesser degree, indicates to me that they don't really understand how to run a tech company properly.
I'm no expert, just reading web pages: Apparently Firefox market share dropped from 30% to 3.46 over the same time her income went from 500 k to 4 million.
do you have any recommended extensions for auto-hibernating tabs? or how do you approach having many tabs? having no built-in way to do it is unfortunate but I'm really liking the other tab features
I never stopped using them. I never could stop using them, it feels so clumsy to work a PC without gestures. I am currently using StrokesPlus.net for this purpose, I am sure there are others.
Long ago MyIE2 had the most sophisticated mouse gestures. For example: One could select some text, drag it and it would search. (I had search configured to open non advertisement results in background tabs) If the text contained any links it in stead opened each of them in tabs to the right. So you selected the entire menu of the blog and tossed it to the right. There were gestures to move to the tab on the left or right but also to close the current tab AND move to the left or right. This was important to dig though an enormous pile of preloaded tabs you still had to look at. Things went so fast I got tired after surfing for a few hours.
Maxthon was not that good, I lost interest in it. Lets have a look... https://forum.maxthon.com Well, it seems quite hilarious. It supports chrome add-ons [sic] and..
> ...Create and manage blockchain identities and assets.
> ...access blockchain content...
> ...Encapsulate the blockchain technology ... enabling developers to build powerful Apps.
The 2020 forum posts describes mx6 as:
> The main browser features of mx6 will be developed based on a deeply customized chromium code base and existing mx5 codebase. All bitcoin related features will be developed by Maxthon team. Mx6 also has an open API to enable other developers to integrate their code.
Same path, the late xulrunner runtime was squeaking around all corners and chrome came out at Firefox weakest moment, it spread trough my friends circles like wildlife.
I went back to Firefox just because of Chrome api change against adblockers, and found it very usable and mature, but it's a tougher sell to my friends as the difference unnoticeable
Around 2012 my 6GB Ram laptop was struggling with Chrome, I switched to FF and got much better experience there. Then with FF Quantum release I adopted it definitely.
I'd switch to Firefox in a heartbeat if I could somehow focus the URL bar with Cmd+D instead of Cmd+L (years of muscle memory with Alt+D on Linux previously).
Other browsers have a menu entry for this (File -> Open Location... in Chrome) so keyboard shortcuts can be switched in the Keyboard settings but Firefox doesn't have this. :|
I've tried various methods without success. If anyone had a working solution I'd be very grateful.
I've tried various add-ons as well as modifying omni.ja (requires re-zipping it on Linux because zip is compiled with different flags on Mac making the omni.ja not work with FF).
This issue requires action from Mozilla, there are no user solutions as far as I'm aware.
I'm on Windows 10 with FF right now and Alt+D just worked for me, along with Cmd+L and F6 as other have said. I think your muscle memory should be just fine. Time to switch!
Oh haha I assumed windows since you said you used to be on linux, and Mac doesn't have an Alt key! My mistake. Well at the very least it seems there are FF plugins that allow you to modify shortcuts, so you could probably rebind Option+D to the same control as Cmd+L/F6 and that might work.
You can do this with karabiner-elements (https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/) by remapping cmd-l to cmd-d. I believe you can even add a condition to make the mapping only active in firefox, but I haven't tested that.
You don't actually need Decentraleyes or Privacy Badger now that Firefox has total cookie protection and that uBlock Origin supports their other features (some via lists). Arkenfox has a useful write-up on this: https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/wiki/4.1-Extensions.
I only have four extensions now: uBlock Origin, I Don't Care About Cookies, one for user agent switching, and one for removing HTML elements via the context menu.
For the privacy conscious, the arkenfox user.js template provides a nice structure for setting up Firefox settings [1]. This works extra nicely if version controlled with your dotfiles and NixOS.
One of my favorite settings is setting "keyword.enabled" to false, to prevent leaking mistyped URLs to the search engine provider. It feels much cleaner to explicitly specify the search engine using e.g. "g<space>" when you want to search.
I think crypto in general is disastrous for our environment right now, and has offered none of the self-control finance benefits it promised due to ever more regulation (the EU is soon planning to ban private wallets, you can only legally host money on exchanges then, which basically means we're full circle to the old banking system). All this has been precipitated by the frantic speculators looking for a quick buck. Bitcoin wasn't invented to enable money-hoarding investors, it was designed to undermine the old banking system and give us back full control over our money. This aspect has been completely undermined by regulation now.
But BAT is a different beast as it doesn't use mining. So my concern is not the same as for general crypto schemes.
It's the BAT idea in particular that I don't like though. It's just a new, more indirect, payment scheme for advertisers. I just want the advertising industry to die and get out from between the content creators and consumers. I know this is not a realistic viewpoint but I'm not willing to contribute to it. Brave solves the privacy problem to some extent but not the ad problem. And in a way they even promote ads by paying users to view them.
Brave seems to be looking to make the current system more palatable (and of course become the gatekeeper for this new tech which would be priceless if it ever took off). I've long given up on the ad system completely. I already pay for the sites I like and use a lot (at least where they offer this option) but I don't make any exception for adblocking ever. Even when they're non-tracked.
> It's the BAT idea in particular that I don't like though. It's just a new, more indirect, payment scheme for advertisers.
The advertising monetization model can't be stopped dead in its tracks. The fact is that it's the simplest way for content providers to generate revenue, and that won't change overnight. What BAT is attempting to do is establish a market between content consumers and providers. The BAT wallet is funded either by attention, i.e. consuming ads, or by directly purchasing BAT. In that sense, the advertising middle-man could eventually be removed from the transaction.
Note that I don't use Brave, nor particularly care about the company, but BAT is the best idea that works in practice to overcome the ad business model. It should be celebrated for that, and we need more such projects. We also need them to be friendly for content providers to integrate in order to boost adoption.
> The advertising monetization model can't be stopped dead in its tracks.
I agree, but it's not like I can't wish for it :)
> Note that I don't use Brave, nor particularly care about the company, but BAT is the best idea that works in practice to overcome the ad business model. It should be celebrated for that, and we need more such projects.
I don't like being told how I should feel about something :) I don't celebrate them and I won't. For me the solution is ever more and ever more efficient adblockers, as well as bans on tracking like the EU is doing. This is something that does really work. Many sites are really seeing a drop in income from ads and are looking for alternatives now. Hurting someone in their wallet really works.
I think BAT is a dead-end, they don't have the market power to bring about this change, and the ideal outcome is only one of the possible ones around. Seeing as how you really do celebrate their solution but still don't use it illustrates the issue I see with it.
>the EU is soon planning to ban private wallets, you can only legally host money on exchanges then, which basically means we're full circle to the old banking system
They can try to "ban" whatever they want, but it's not happening.
Aside from some of the common critiques of purpose-oriented blockchain tech, I think there's a question with BAT of if creating a token-based ecosystem with this thing actually creates economic incentives that align with the overall improvement of our society, or if it merely contributes to the existing problems that have enabled intrusive ad tech in the first place.
On a small scale, paying to be able to take away ads (or getting paid to see them — ultimately, the difference is negligible, given how pervasive ads are in our lives) is a nice experience to have. But it has a lot of implications long-term on our society, given ads are the primary way we finance pretty much all information we have access to these days.
How does this affect upward mobility? If a person in poverty wants to get out of poverty by learning a difficult skill, getting access to the information and learning it will be a longer, more difficult process for them. They will be interrupted more often than wealthier people, they will have less time to dedicate to doing the task at hand than wealthier people, etc.
I personally think it's difficult to get excited about any system that wraps the way we gate access to information in our society without considering this element, because the ability for people to move up in life is really one of the great promises of the internet, and nobody should lose that.
But we have all this today. Just install an adblocker. Ads are hardly pervasive at all for me, I really rarely see them unless I go out on the street. On the internet adblocking is almost 100% effective and I don't watch live TV.
In fact I see people who are more wealthy not using adblockers and paywall bypassers because they feel like they should support the sites somehow. It's a similar thing with downloading video content, many of my better-off friends are not downloading because they are worried about content disappearing. They actually care about the overall economic model working. My friends from worse circumstances (I know many people in lesser-off countries) don't give a shit about that and download all they can get. And I agree with them.
I myself don't have this worry. Content will never disappear one way or another. We had content on the internet before ads were really a thing and it was better than it is now in many ways. And I like cutting into the big megacorps' profits.
A lot of stuff is loaded from the same host as the content. For example, a DNS blocking solution like NextDNS can't block YouTube ads without breaking the videos (same with ads on Google Search and many other sites). It also can't apply cosmetic filters to block things like cookies popups or hide empty spots where ads are supposed to be displayed.
DNS blocking is better than nothing, but it's very basic when compared to a browser extension like uBlock Origin.
Agreed, and I would add that I have been keeping my bookmarks & tags synced on all devices using Firefox Sync for several years now without any issues. It's just great. Same for passwords. There is a in-depth article about the privacy features of their design [1]. If you add containers[2], then there is really no reason to use Chrome.
Mozilla VPN missed a real trick by being an additional client and not (also) integrating it into the browser/container natively.
Was a real chance to do something better rather than just doing the minimum (rebrand an existing VPN client app) and potentially pulling in a new customer base.
Not exactly the same, but there is FoxyProxy extension which allows to use different proxies based on URI (domain). So you can point your uris to go to outside world via different proxies (say `ssh -D ...` to vps or your vpn gateway or ..)
Technically as it's possible to use multiple profiles you may even be able to configure different sets for the same URLs.
Huh, you’re the first person I’ve encountered liking that behaviour. Since Firefox switched to MRU Ctrl+Tab by default, every Firefox user I know (whether a long-time user, one migrating from another browser, or someone for whom it is their first browser by virtue of their youth, and I have at least one in each category) has successfully found and toggled that option.
I must admit, however, that I do have Tab Flip for Tree Style Tab, with Shift+F2 to switch between the current and most recently selected tabs (like Ctrl+6 in Vim to toggle between the most recent buffers), and have added similar elsewhere, with Meta+F2 to switch between most recent workspaces in the Sway or i3 window managers:
I wouldn’t want to be without at least this single-level MRU in my browser or window manager. (On more traditional window managers, you normally have Alt+Tab or ⌘⇥ and ⌘` which are all some form of more extensive MRU list, though I find macOS’s application-level treatment bizarre and extraordinarily frustrating because of how cripplingly limiting it is if you work with multiple multi-window apps and want to see a window of each. And yeah, it’s easy to see when reflecting on Alt+Tab why Firefox went the way they did with Ctrl+Tab, making it behave similarly. But I haven’t previously found anyone actually liking it.)
Huh, this is the first time I heard that FF supports MRU, and it's amazing (well except that it's only current window, see below)! I don't know why it was turned off by default.
MRU should always be the default, this is also what IDE's do, and alt+tab does with main windows.
What is even the point of ctrl+tab cycling to next tab? You got to press it dozens of times to go back to the original tab... Why would anyone use that? You can use ctrl+pgdn and pgup to go to next/previous which is more sensible for this.
So disappointingly, now I turned this feature on in FF, and I'm disappointed to see that it only cycles through most recent tab of current window. I wish it would go through any window. I have always dozens of windows with dozens of tabs each, and I find myself sometimes just opening the same URL again due to not bothering trying to find back a tab I was in just a few minutes ago due to not having a ctrl+tab that goes to most recent tab in any window.
ctrl+tab cycling to the next tab is essential for many ways of surfing the web.
For instance, research a topic and tap up many tabs. Now go through them one by one. And in the process of doing so you might want to tab up even more.
At this point cycling to the next tab becomes a way to navigate the history, but where you have the context of each step preserved. MRU in this context is a nightmare.
MRU for tabs doesn't make any sense to me, that purpose is served by switching to another window instead (which is, and should be, MRU).
But ctrl+pgdn already goes to next tab, so ctrl+tab doesn't need to do that same thing, MRU is what multi-document programs (like text editors with multiple open files, IDE's) usually do for ctrl+tab. And this for good reason: this allows to cycle through the most recent documents the easiest, following usage patterns. This usage pattern also applies to browsers (and as said, ctrl+pgup/pgdn already do prev/next tab for the other usage pattern)
finding back your tab amongst the many open ones is a nightmare without some form of easily accessed recently used list that also works across windows
ctrl+pgdn is a two-handed operation, doa. The use-case for a browser and IDEs etc. is vastly different.
>finding back your tab amongst the many open ones is a nightmare without some form of easily accessed recently used list that also works across windows
not at all, they are ordered and you already know the direction you want to go. Unlike MRU that breaks down completely after a few tabs.
They're not ordered for me, any tab could be anywhere and many tabs can exist for many contexts from different moments of time that can be relevant again at any future time. How do you get the magical ability to have the tabs in the exact order you need them and have to go in only one direction?
> Because that's how you open them. Which is the relevant context you need.
Opening multiple tabs from one place, and then going through them exactly in that order, is just not something that happens often for me.
> As soon as you have to search for anything the MRU is poisoned beyond sense and you have to start all over again.
Not at all. Imagine you were reading some document in some tab. This tab could be in any window, on any workspace.
Now you check your email in-between, which is another tab in another window.
Now after checking your email, you want to go back to the document you were reading: try finding it back amongst all windows across all desktops, possibly not anymore the front tab because you also just opened a link from the document, or instinctively opened the discord tab of the window the document was in or paused some youtube music that was playing, or whatever!
MRU solves that perfectly. We're talking about 100s of tabs across multiple windows here. With MRU you only have to go through maybe max 10 or so, which is easy to find the document back in.
Right now, I have 258 tabs open in my main window, of which I’m actively using at least a dozen, and will use another few dozen within a day or so. (Probably should go through and clean out a hundred or two.) Most of my family is some degree of tab hoarder as well (my eldest sister regularly has over a thousand tabs spread across a few windows).
Get the "tab stash" extension, you can stash your tabs instead of nuking them. That way you can go back a few months and find things that would be tougher to find through history or other means.
Yet another tab management (YATM) recommendation here. I use the OneTab extension to help me manage tabs. In a recent update, they added the ability to:
A) name tab groups;
B) lock specific groups which mimics the capability of bookmark folders (clicking a link doesn’t remove it from the group).
The extension has helped me reduce the number of open windows on my laptop, among other productivity improvements.
I used to do this too, then I got a bookmark save service (Pocket). Now whenever I see something that I have the reaction of keeping the tab around, I just save it and close it instead. Makes browsing lighter. I do still have around 20 tabs open normally, mostly things that don't fit in the "bookmark save" workflow, but definitely better than the 100+ tabs it used to be before.
Funny enough, for me it's extremely uncomfortable when tab cycling doesn't represent the tab order I see on screen. I've always disable that feature and even have code to autodisable it on new installs
The benefit of MRU order is that you can use it blindly to go to the last-nth tab without having to eye-coordinate with the contents of the tab bar. It becomes an automatic muscle-memory thing.
Usually less than a dozen, though I don’t quite see the relevance. I use MRU to switch between two to four (rarely more) related tabs.
In code editors I often have several dozens of tabs open, and MRU is a crucial usability feature when coding, so I’d say that its usefulness is independent of the number of open tabs.
I really had to go and disable that. I use a lot of tabs, I switch between them often, and a few of them stay open for a while
I have tree style tabs so my tabs are all already ordered in a vaguely meaningful way, but the recent use order of my last tabs is completely unpredictable to me!
With this feature on ^tab might as well be random for how badly it confuses me.. I'm so glad Mozilla hadn't removed the opt-out yet.
Firefox is literally the only program of any kind that I can think of that even supports MRU Ctrl+Tab. Windowed UIs, sure, MRU is conventional, but tabbed?
Chrome uses an alternative tab workflow brought up by alt/cmd+shift+a which will bring up a list of tabs in last used order. You can then navigate via keyboard or just type to search tabs.
That doesn't explain why the other method isn't at least an option in Chrome but I figured it was worth mentioning for those that missed the functionality.
I really don't want to have a "works best in Chrome" banner but until Firefox catches up I don't have much choice (don't get me started on Safari, I've already given up).
I agree, and will add that with ordinary HTML+CSS (not a game), I've occasionally seen Chrome/WebKit rendering bugs which I didn't see when testing during development with Firefox.
Testing in Firefox is a pretty good way to approximate standards compliance, and then you have to deal with bugs when running on Chrome, if you do it that way around.
The low usage is a fair point, but "all the issues this browser causes" simply isn't true. You would say the same about chrome if you developed for Firefox first.
Same for me, my app used the html5 webspeech api and the text to speech and speech to text on Ff was nothing compared to chrome. So had to put that dreaded banner myself.
I hope things have changed now and ff is just as good as chrome now with the recent progress in ML and so many good open source projects for tts and dictation.
I've closed that bug as the problem as the originally reported problem is fixed by hardware accelerating filters as part of WebRender. Do you have more details on the performance problem that you're seeing?
Looks like WebRender has been enabled by default as of Firefox 92 (September 7, 2021) so that's great news! I think most of my performance problems were due to filters so I'm eager give it a try. I saw your comment on Bugzilla and will do that if I'm still experiencing issues after testing it. Thank you!
How about adding "performance" mode and disabling advanced effects for worse performing systems? It could be done automatically, or by adding an option. So instead of "works best in Chrome", you would add short instructions how to set it. I think some players even prefer less resources demanding version of your game, especially on phones, where battery life is important.
It's a good idea but unfortunately the effect is instrumental to certain parts of the gameplay. However, as per the sibling comment it looks like it may actually have been fixed as of end of last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32129916
I do have some other problems only happening on Firefox that I don't know the cause of (so probably something I can fix) but I certainly would like to remove that banner. Mozilla fixing the filter issues is a huge leap toward that and gives me motivation to look into the other problems.
The thing is, as a solo developer, you just have to be ruthless with cost/benefit. Either I give the same experience to maybe 2% of the users, or an overall improvement to 98%. Is it ideal? No. But a lot of things are about tradeoffs and deciding where you spend your resources.
Ok, people here don't like it. They can make their own tradeoffs. But in my opinion my choice is not that crazy.
But they have been on a road of adding increasinly user hostile "features" to the browser that I just can't take.
I snapped when they implemented automatic updates. I've never been so pissed at a piece of software than I have been at firefox when I hit Ctrl-T and the damn thing refuses to work until I restart it. And for a long time, it wouldn't even restart, it just exited.
While I'd prefer to install updates manually through apt (like every other piece of software on my laptop), if they are going to be so patronizing that they won't allow that, they need to fix they update process to not require a restart. Until that happens I'll use chromium.
Firefox has always had automatic updates but only on systems that don't manage the software updates via centralized package manager. E.g. any chance you're an Ubuntu user? They just switched it over to being a snap package instead of an apt package with 21.10.
Regardless if you open settings UI there is a radiobox to toggle between auto-installing updates and just notifying you when your version is out of date. If that's not there then it's your distro's build that is forcing updates to be done that way, not Mozilla.
As mentioned by others, the recommended list of extensions in the article is a bit outdated. These days not much more than uBlock Origin is needed for a good configuration, with the addition of maybe CanvasBlocker.
True but I use some other extensions anyway. They are:
- Multi Account Containers - does exactly what it says on the tin. I load Google stuff inside a Google container for example, and banking websites all get their own container only used for that purpose.
- Auto Cookie Optout, with their config added to uBlock Origin. Basically automatically clicks "essential cookies only" everywhere it can (it helps to allow loading of these sites automatically in uBlock and uMatrix, otherwise it can't). Possibly not an issue if you're outside the EU, though.
- uMatrix so I have some level of control over what loads when I want it.
- ClearURLs - takes out tracking and unnecessary URL parameters. uMatrix tends to block and warn if you do click one and you can find the dest_url without parameters on its warning page, where ClearURLs fails.
- Decentraleyes - injects resources instead of loading them from CDNs. Quite mixed results with this but it is still on the list for the moment.
- Sideberry, basically another tree style tabs.
Nice testing sites for these extensions are basically any newspaper website or shopping website, which are all thoroughly infested with trackers and such.
Ahhh thanks! Didn't realize umatrix had been discontinued. Well, scratch that from the list, I've enabled it in uBO. Looks like the box to check is 'I am an advanced user'.
I actually find Chrome to be faster and generally appreciate the contributions that Google has made to try to keep the web competitive with the proprietary platforms, but I can't get past the auto-start video issue.
You know that Chrome tried to remove auto-start videos and advertisers just ended up writing their own battery sucking slow canvas based software decoders?
That Firefox is doing this is very much like yesterday's new Facebook URL
By default firefox only prevents content with audio from autoplaying, which I can't think of any way to circumvent and it's probably good enough for most people.
I started using a text-only browser for recreational web use (not lynx) and can never go back to a graphical one.
The popular graphical browsers keep growing in size and complexity but I am still doing the same basic tasks on the web, i.e., retrieving files and consuming them. For these basic tasks, the so-called "modern" browsers are overkill. Chrome is something like 150MB with dynamic libraries. The text-only browser I am using to submit this comment is a 1.3MB static binary.^1
1. It does not matter which one. Generally, all of them can be modified and re-compiled to suit personal tastes, a process that (compared to compiling Firefox, Chromium, etc.) is relatively quick and only requires modest computing resources. There is no shortage of people with both the skill and the time to write such text-only browsers. Whether we can we say the same for those with both the skill and time to write "modern" graphical browsers intended to compete with the likes of Chrome is left as a question for the reader. Users of "modern" web browsers have very little control over them. We never see anyone report they disliked something about Firefox, Chrome, etc., so they modified the source and re-compiled. On the contrary, we routinely see people report they switched from the browser of one "tech" company profiting from online advertising to the web browser of another. Or we see people reporting use of some browser "extension" that the "tech" company browser vendor can disable at any time.
At least one of them used to support JS. Below is from a changelog.
Honestly I wonder though why anyone would want JS for a text-only browser.
Maybe I have just been using one too long to remember what it is like to think the (text-only) web requires Javascript.
IME, if the goal is to read text/plain or text/html, then JS is never needed.
Generally, I can always retrieve the text/html of a website without ever using JS.
Many times times I do not use a browser for the retrieval step.
Sometimes websites might make gratuitous use of Javascript to make requests the www user never specified.
For example, the www user types example.com, but the content of the website is actually found at example.cdn-123.com.
The web developer may use Javascript to make HTTP requests to example.cdn-123.com.
In such cases, I will retreive the content from example.cdn-123.com, making the requests myself, without using Javascript.
Often JSON is returned instead of text/html. This is ideal.
Because there is no need to read text enclosed in HTML tags there is no need for a browser.
For example, I search YouTube by retrieving JSON not HTML.^1 I use netcat plus a localhost forward proxy instead of a browser to make HTTP requests. Then I transform the needed data from the JSON into a TSV table using a custom single purpose program. Optionally, I then load the table into a database using sqlite3.
1. The initial search returns HTML with embedded JSON that I extract. The continuation search returns only JSON.
=== RELEASE 2.1pre29 ===
Mon Apr 16 01:49:07 MET DST 2007 mikulas:
Javascript was removed. The reason is that it is very buggy, Martin
Pergel doesn't have time to develop it and code is so messy that no one
else can understand it.
If you use links for special purposes (embedded devices, etc.), you can
bring javascript back by copying javascript files from previous release,
removing "dnl javascript" lines from configure.in, adding *.c and *.h
files to Makefile.am and re-running automake and autoconf.
Javascript hooks from main code were not removed --- they just won't be
maintained.
=== RELEASE 2.1pre28 ===
Wed Apr 11 01:39:36 cet 2007 mikulas:
Fixed a bug in decompression and javascript document.write introduced in
previous release (compressed data were displayed after document.write)
(BTW. because the javascript interpreter has bugs, Martin Pergel has not
time for it and the code is so messy that it couldn't be understand by
anyone else, javascript will likely be removed in next release)
I feel like I'm in the minority here, but Edge has been consistently better than every other browser I've tried.
I have about 30 tabs open across 3 windows on my 10 yo. laptop, that I upgraded to 8GB of RAM.
If I try to open even 10 tabs in Firefox, the laptop slows down to hell.
Running a local speed test to my Linux server on MS Edge, I get ~910Mb/s download (CPU maxes out) and ~980Mb/s upload.
If I fire up Firefox and run this same test, I get ~260Mb/s download/upload, with the CPU maxed out of course.
Edge is the way to go for Windows machines,especially if you prefer the chromium engine.
MS made lots of Windows specific optimizations, with a focus on memory use. The other killer feature is 'secure mode' that disables JS JIT, which is where most if the security issues have come from in modern browsers. Plus, in this context, MS's incentives align much closer to mine than one if the largest advertising companies in the world.
I disagree. I have yet to see a browser try to enable so much telemetry and features that track everything you do on the web. There are like 30+ things unique to Edge that they push on users. Even after turning them off, I've had Edge magically turn them back on without my consent. Chrome isn't perfect, but if you know what to disable it really isn't that challenging to make it as privacy-friendly as Firefox... and Firefox isn't the perfect angel here either. Chromium is even better, especially on Linux to escape some of the "Google-ification". I really do not see any difference between Chromium and Firefox when it comes to default privacy settings. Regardless, it is always best to go in and disable them or use a policy file to do so.
I've used Edge for almost a full year, didn't notice any difference from chrome, despite being complimented for better windows optimization. Moved back to Chrome.
It wasn't disappointing, but it's just that I didn't have a reason to stay there.
The only thing I really hate about firefox is the build.
Building FF from scratch is a fucking nightmare.
It's the only shitty package that REQUIRES python 2 for building.
That information is outdated; I build FF from source a couple of times a week, and use python3.9 for mach's python. I do agree the build is special needs, made worse by all the rust, but of the things I really hate about Firefox, the build is pretty low on that list
The Chromium (and its derivatives) builds makes it clear they have a compile farm of unlimited compute and ram, so it's just "which kind of bad" I nowadays, I guess
Browsers seem to require an order of magnitude more effort to package than is typical that distros occasionally struggle to keep up. It's the only software in which I use upstream binaries out of preference. I assume it's a safer bet from a security and/or performance perspective.
Some corrections: The HTTPS Everywhere extension is no longer necessary (it's a Firefox feature now, for the most part) and Privacy Badger no longer learns from your browsing by default (as that can itself be a privacy leak).
I tried to like Firefox, I really do, I tried to use it as primary browser, but it's just noticeable less snappy and slower than anything Chromium based, so I always return back to Chromium (now Brave).
Not to mention that I always hit some glitches in sites or some things not working in Firefox because developers didn't even bother to test on Firefox or just plainly refuse to support it.
Will say as well that Brave is much, much better out of the box for privacy than Firefox. Even with uBlock Origin and other privacy-friendly extensions, Firefox doesn't offer much in the way of anti-fingerprinting.
I agree, Brave has pretty good privacy protections, anti-fingerprinting and ad-blocking out of the box. No need to install dozen of extensions and custom user.js like in Firefox. Only extension that I need is password manager and I'm good to go.
Brave on Android is also best Android browser I used.
That pretty much sums it up. The only thing I regularly miss is Firefox's Awesome bar (Omni bar) - its fuzzing engine works much better and seems to include the entire browsing history.
this has been my experience. i even prefer some parts of the firefox ui. but for the reasons you mention, the net result is that then i have to run two browsers which means twice the work, complexity and risk.
i hate this. i really want firefox to succeed and i really appreciate their stated goals with respect to privacy, and their significant contributions to the internet commons.
My biggest complaint with Firefox is the upgrade nag. I get it, I need to upgrade, why can't they just put a reminder in the corner instead of insisting I click a dismiss button every hour.
I am cognizant it may not be universally true, but often those updates come with CVEs attached to them, a bad side effect of exposing several JITed virtual machines to the wild Internet. I know such advice from random folks depends heavily upon ones threat model, but bear the security consequences in mind, and that goes double if it wouldn't just be your network that may get taken over in an incident
As a heads up though as suggested by the name "ManualAppUpdateOnly" doesn't just disable the notification it completely disables the entire auto-update system. Not only will you not get notifications about updates you will not get updates at all until you remember to check the about dialog or manually download them. This is intended for environments that have managed packages where the browser doesn't need to update itself.
> Not only will you not get notifications about updates you will not get updates at all until you remember to check the about dialog or manually download them.
What if you feel like you can handle this not particularly difficult problem?
Then activate the setting and enjoy. If what you actually want is silent manual updates not just for the update notifications to go away then it's the perfect option for you.
If you are using Nightly (which updates twice a day), you can turn on "Show fewer update notification prompts" in your settings (about:preferences#general) which removes the update nag and puts a small reminder in the top right corner like you asked.
I've always been pragmatic about my browser choice, not prioritizing performance but rather security, configurability and open source contribution. So I used Firefox since the very first Phoenix beta because I came from using the Mozilla browser.
Only for a short while in the early 00s my poor laptop couldn't runt FF with 256M RAM so I had to use Opera. I had to enter PF rules to make the stupid ads in the UI disappear. But within probably 2 years I had a new laptop and was back with FF.
The main sell in the early 00s was that afaik noscript could not function in Chrome or Opera due to the design of its web plugins, so FF pretty much had a monopoly of the paranoid like me.
And by now I just feel that any privacy enhancements can be done with a custom user.js so I see no reason for any other browser than the upstream FF.
I feel the same way about Safari. Yes, it's not perfect- and no, you don't get all the flexibility, but it's so lightweight, stable, and energy efficient, I have a hard time considering something with a few more features in the categories I've been able to do without.
Serious question: what's the best way to block ads and enable privacy features on Safari? I'm open minded about Safari but it seems like it's a lot more difficult and maybe impossible to have the same level of privacy as I do on Chrome/Firefox/Brave.
Somewhat off-topic, but perhaps the smart people on HN can help me with this.
The one thing that keeps me from switching from Safari to Firefox is that I cannot customize tab switching. In every macOS program I use, I use the same key binding to switch between tabs. Because there is no "Next tab" or "Previous tab" menu item in Firefox, I cannot assign this function to a key with the macOS keyboard shortcuts in System Preferences.
I've looked in Firefox's setting and searched online and haven't found anything that helps. Though, to be honest, I'd prefer it to be part of the system native options so that it can follow me during upgrades.
At this point, I'm willing to consider employing BetterTouchTool, if that's a solution. But again, I'd rather go native.
Yes, Firefox has quite a few issues, starting from strange UI decisions (tabs that don't look like tabs, etc.), product integration (Pocket) and promotion (Firefox VPN in private mode window), compatibility issues with video conferencing applications (MS Teams, Facetime, probably others). But compared to other browsers, you can customize browser and solve quite a few of them, unlike in other competing browsers, where what you get, that you are forced to use and cannot change. I'd only wish Firefox developers (or management team) would take customization more seriously, as it is one of main selling features, that few users know about.
I'm still missing the "share tab" option in Google and Jitsi Meet, without it work meetings get a lot less private. I've found a pretty good plugin to fix the 'tabs that don't look like tabs' design problem, though it's a real pain in the ass to install and a major problem when switching to new devices. I'm not sure why they changed that, the old design was a lot clearer. On the other hand the fact that it doesn't support Chromecast is a big plus, since that's impossible to turn off in Chrome with recent updates and can it be problematic if you're not the owner of all Chromecasts on your damn network.
As of right now Firefox stays the side browser for code testing and whatnot, but it falls short for daily use for me.
TouchID support for WebAuthn is the last thing I need to make the switch for my daily driver browser. I used Firefox for years, but being able to use TouchID for auth/MFA is just such a huge quality of life improvement for me that it keeps me on Chrome.
Fortunately it looks like there has been at least a little movement on this recently (bumped from a P4 to P2)
Afair couple of times I was using fingerprint auth (that'd touchid if I understand things right) in Firefox. Very rare, but definitely had it as it was big WOW for me.
Firefox is the best browser in many respects. But even if it wasn’t. Even if it was missing extensions, used all my RAM and chewed my CPU, I would still choose it over Chrome. Because using a browser from the world’s biggest advertiser is wrong on principle. And using an ad blocker (I don’t use one) while using a browser made by an advertiser is next level cognitive dissonance.
> using a browser from the world’s biggest advertiser is wrong on principle
Spot on. As said many many times, the browser is the new OS.
If Google wowed the world and introduced a free (beer or speech, doesn't matter) Windows-killer OS[0] that was better in every way than Windows, was Windows-compatible, tons of people would use it. You and I wouldn't.
I think most people use an adblocker to avoid seeing ads, not privacy. Most people (myself included) care more about saving time on YouTube videos and making webpages not have pop ups all over the place than privacy.
I’d be careful not to generalize your own experience here. Just the fact that we are having this conversation on HN puts us in a bubble that is not representative of “most people”.
My motivation is privacy. The motivation of many people I know is “ads are super annoying”. Privacy awareness is growing, but most people are not as aware as the people on this thread.
It would be helpful to share an argument supporting your assertion if the goal is to help people understand and/or agree with your position.
If you consider a simplified definition of cognitive dissonance that goes something like “thoughts or actions that do not match your beliefs or values”, then the behavior described by the parent comment could be cognitive dissonance, but probably only if certain things are true:
- The person understands the nature of Google’s business
- The person believes that using Chrome still benefits Google even when anti-tracking extensions are installed
That said, the people who understand enough to be categorized as such are not the average Chrome user. The average user is not experiencing cognitive dissonance, they just don’t know any better.
Been using Firefox for 80%+ of my use cases, but whenever I need to make a payment online, it is easier to just use Chrome which stores and syncs payment methods.
And I am amazed how Firefox doesn't have profiles unlike Chrome, or at least the implementation is so counterintuitive (I use "Personal" profile as a Facebook container for instance). On the other hand, Chrome profile switching and isolation are just still so good. I hope this is not some patent-protected thing which Firefox can't just copy for good.
If Mozilla team is reading, here is some direct feedback for why I couldn't completely switch over.
Tree Style Tabs alone is enough for me to always install Firefox and never consider another browser. No, merely having a vertical tab bar ain't enough (though that's itself infinitely better than boneheadedly squeezing as many tabs as possible in a single horizontal row like a fucking maniac); the actual tree is critical for staying organized while deep in some investigation.
The biggest problem I had with firefox back in the day was it would eat up so much RAM. I'm a developer and I'm constantly loading, reloading, profiling etc across multiple tabs and eventually my pretty powerful PC would become slow. I had to restart firefox every time.
When chrome launched, I was thrilled that it had firebug features "built in" and that it didn't eat up 80% of my RAM.
The article mentions Firefox being not a processor hog anymore, has that changed that drastically?
After a while, Firefox would be incredibly sluggish and when I switched to chrome, I haven't looked back at all. These days, I use brave browser for personal browsing and chrome for work
This is weird, because I thought that Chrome (at least semi-recently, perhaps not in the earliest days) was infamous for hogging RAM.
I use Firefox and can't say that I've thought much about browser resource usage, which probably means it's not catastrophically bad, at the very least.
Why not try it out and see if it's better for you now?
The HTTPS Everywhere extension has been redundant for some time[0] and I have Firefox configured to give a visible warning when connecting to a website with HTTP.
For me the containers on desktop and uBlock origin support on moble are the big features of Firefox. I was glad containers made it in considering usage must be pretty low since even just "user has an extension" is less common than "user has no extensions".
Safari user here. I often feel I'm a minority, but it's a really good browser for my Mac. Had been using Firefox after Chrome before switching to Safari.
> A huge complaint among even the most stalwart Google Chrome users is that the browser eats through your CPU like a Snorlax at a buffet. While this is an issue for any PC, having a browser that consistently takes up almost half your processing power is especially a problem for laptops or other devices with very little RAM.
> Which is why Mozilla Firefox is such a breath of fresh air, as it uses much less of your CPU while still delivering a fast browsing experience.
This.
Even for identical set of tabs, Chrome eventually slows down my entire machine, whereas Firefox does not!
In both Linux and Mac (don't know about Windows because I don't use it).
Ironically I just went the other way today, because Firefox became unusable in a 2009 laptop, and requires add-ons to control their exponential use of processes (on a dual core).
Meanwhile Chrome, with all its usual bloat, works perfectly fine.
Chrome is horrible you can't even click on a tab sound icon to mute it, you have to right click and select mute. All Google does puts in first place their interests, not users. Fuck these people.
Firefox is great. I couldn’t ever go back to a browser without multi-account containers -> container tabs + temporary containers.
I do notice that as time goes on I seem to be having more issues with sites breaking under uBlock Origin, but to be fair I think I’m using all the blocklists, not just the defaults, so I think breakage is expected. It’s easy to turn off for particular sites, so it’s not a huge issue for me.
Somewhat related - I’m really enjoying the new Thunderbird. It feels way more polished than the previous version.
Mmm... Firefox left me cold. But I have to admit I am increasingly suspicious of Chrome. My offspring just installed the latest version of Opera after a year or two with Brave.
So... not sure Firefox works for me (though... dang... it's JavaScript implementation has come a long way) but solidly support the idea of finding something other than Chrome.
Oh. Also. Most of my news browsing I now do with lynx in a terminal window. I see no ads, autostart videos or kruft. And HN doesn't look too bad in Lynx.
That's funny, I find the opposite to be true of the Dev tools. Chrome is missing features here and there to boot. They do have lighthouse or whatever they call it though, which can be useful to some.
Same here, I recently installed Firefox on a new Android device and am very much enjoying the privacy features, particularly the adblocking capability via add-ons.
The only three things I miss from Chrome are:
- swiping down to refresh page
- a Delete action on the menu of text box selections
- the option to run webpages as separate apps
For that last one, I do use Chrome for a couple of sites (Wordle and Quordle), but Firefox is excellent for everything else.
I wish I could switch to Firefox exclusively, but the commerce websites I frequent only work correctly with Chrome. No doubt it's due to laziness and lack of testing by these websites, but it is reality. The worst part is the complete lack of warning that these sites have not been tested on anything but Chrome, and are not likely to function correctly.
Incidentally, Firefox on my M1 MacBook Air suddenly got very slow. Scrolling got super laggy. I've tried refreshing it and disabling all extensions, nothing helps. It's on the latest version and the rest of the system is very smooth as always.
It's even laggy after I completely wiped it from my system and used a fresh Firefox installation.
Late update: I feel extremely stupid. I'm using an app called "App Tamer"[0] and had it configured to run Firefox on the efficiency cores only, even when it's in the foreground. Maybe I thought originally that the e-cores would be more than fast enough to handle a browser, but I guess that's not the case. This also explains why I might not have noticed this issue before: I only use Firefox for work-related tasks and I rarely work while on battery.
Changing that option doesn't change anything in my subjective feeling. It's not only scrolling that is laggy, I think. Also I didn't change any settings between a week ago and now, still suddenly it got laggy. It works fine on my iMac (albeit an older Intel iMac) with the exact configuration. (I use Firefox as my work browser and since I usually work at the iMac, it's been a week or two since I've last used Firefox on my M1 MBA.)
I'm glad it's working for her. I unfortunately had the opposite experience... Some sites I use that are smooth enough on Google Chrome just positively chugged on Firefox. I assume there's some key differences in the rendering engines.
If that's not a problem you have, then I can't think of a reason not to use Firefox.
I don't have the impression that Firefox is so much more optimised. If anything I had the opposite impression (Chrome using less CPU than Firefox). Makes sense too because Google has a ton of money and Mozilla doesn't.
Still I mainly use firefox and on most computers it's the only browser I even have installed.
I use both browsers (mostly FF on powerful machines and Chrome if I need to use Core2Duo or older) and I have an impression that Firefox has some memory leaks. Chrome browser loaded with as much tabs as allowed by my RAM can store its tabs forever. But Firefox can not do the same, despite it has been written on Rust.
I'm back to FF as well (after some Chrome years), and love it. However, for my work I use Google Meet and online collaboration tools such as Miro. Unfortunately, I only use Chrome for those services because FF will jumpstart my Macbook fans quickly when using Google Meet / FF.
Chrome browser crashed my old laptop so I had to find an alternative, at the beginning I was sick of the Firefox's interface but quickly adjusted to it, and now I am pretty okay with it for everything.
PS: Firefox indeed has a lot of good plugins (for some reasons, only Firefox got them)
NGL: Sometimes I do worry about the overall health of the Mozilla foundation, but moreso that if Firefox gets too far behind - we may lose out on having an open web.
Maybe HN can help save it, therefore the web, and therefore the future for our children's children? :-P
I'm finally using Firefox as my daily driver now after a half dozen attempts over the years. They finally got the major perf issues and UX warts ironed out. I don't feel like I'm compromising anymore, in fact quite the opposite, especially when using privacy containers.
I don't get the extensions part. All of them apart from the containers (that's a browser or more like engine specific behavior) are available for Chrome so they are not FF-only. Most of them are "over the top" if you start with uBlock Origin too. Like you don't need multiple extensions to do the same thing > most of the time that leads to broken sites. uBlock Origin on its own is incredibly powerful. Last but not least HTTPS Everywhere is also obsolete because you can force any browsers now to open sites with HTTPS only, you don't need it that anymore. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/09/https-actually-everywh...
And no offense if TechRadar is writing articles like this... they should open their own site without any of the extensions and watch the ads, popups, autoplay videos and such. Maybe they will notice the problem doesn't start with the browser of your choice.
The article specifically talks "of Google breaking those AdBlock extensions in 2023 with a massive update, which is rather terrifying, to say the least." What is referenced here is Manifest V3. Gorhill, uBlock Origin developer, agrees that this will significantly limit uBlock Origin on Chrome.
Yeah you can bet that Google will do anything they can to stop adblockers once their FLoC replacement is online. After all, in their view they have solved the "privacy problem".
Chrome is only going downhill from now. So is Edge, Microsoft has already at the stage where they don't prioritise user experience and appeal anymore and are priorising monetisation. Like with the "buy now and pay later" scams they're including. It's IE4 all over again, once they arrive at the desired marketshare the user is just a dumb sheep to them again.
Unfortunately Mozilla is far from perfect, they're becoming too corporate and weaseling in monetisation schemes totally in conflict with their goals. But they're still a world better.
Can you elaborate on the Mozilla corporate weasel part? As far as I can tell, they are just a) poorly managed and b) desperately trying to diversify revenue away from search prioritization contracts.
True but they are looking in all the wrong places. Including pocket "featured headlines", vpn services that are just a resell, just lowhanging fruit that does nothing but annoy the users that still care about them.
Meanwhile they try to make the browser as mainstream friendly, not understanding that the mainstream has long given up on them and they only have the last remaining bastion of hardcore privacy users left. Whose user patterns they're not seeing because they focus too much on telemetry.
I think since they became Mozilla Inc they started thinking like big tech and are slowly becoming just like it. But because their foundation origins the declining marketshare is not ringing their alarm bells like they, in a real company, would.
If they really wanted to diversify and get me to pay for something, they have to do more than just resell mullvad. I'm a mullvad user but I much rather pay for that directly as it gives me a lot more features. I love mullvad but I want to use it in more than just a browser.
What I'd want to see and would pay for:
- A service like Apple's iCloud Private Relay that really makes browsing more anonymous (rather than a basic VPN which they offer now, that's too little too late).
- Paid Sync storage (with full E2E so I have no reason to self-host)
- An archiving service of webpages (also E2E). Because onenote sucks more and more
Basically things other than 'quick wins' but that need some serious vision and development. Right now they're thinking way too much like a lazy CEO, doing a quick tie-in with another service hoping for some takeup or some cheap marketing benefit.
If they want to diversify and get people to pay they really have to offer some real benefits that are a gap in the market. Those exist but they need some more work than just a quick joint marketing effort.
Every feature removed by Google will have to be maintained by the open source community instead. That's going to be a workload that I'm not sure who is going to pick up. After all Chromium right now is maintained by Google. There's some forks like degoogled chromium but they are mainly focused on removing features, not rebuilding ones that have been deprecated.
Brave is an option but I don't really like where they're heading with their crypto tokens.
They're also more frequently updated on Chrome, and smell less like malware. The Firefox addon directory is a hellhole. The only place where Chrome fails on this is on uBlock, but that's completely intentional because they're an ad company.
I've been using google chrome for years but now it works worse with every new update. constantly changing features, newly added nonsense, ram usage problems, I'm really tired of it all now. I think it is the most logical to switch to firefox or another alternative.
I use firefox because i can add things like treestyle tabs and tridactyl and also eliminate unnecessary parts ofvthe UI when i don't need them like the url, tab, and menu bar. I also don't have to worry about security and updates like I would with chrome.
I have been using Firefox + Chrome + Edge on a daily basis for years just because it helped me mentally separate my browsing areas that needed to absolutely not collide with each other. I remember a few years ago, Firefox was making my browsing experience miserable: incompatible rendering, high memory/cpu usage, and it just felt "old".
Flash-forward 2016 or 2017 (don't remember precisely), two things changed at the same time: Firefox started feeling less poorly developed, Google started making changes in Chrome that really bothered me on a more ethical / privacy level (general stance on default values in privacy/security settings, increasing hiding stuff from me such as in the address bar or the network tab, features added "for my own good", heavy use of dark UI patterns, etc.).
I felt I needed to get out of Chrome rapidly, and there was no way it was going to be Edge (trust had to build, and it takes years), so I started re-using Firefox more heavily while anticipating I'd be frustrated. That day never came: the months passed and Firefox kept getting better and faster.
I guess I had my epiphany when I discovered there was a hard profile switcher in Firefox, which makes separation of concerns both easy and efficient to implement. This is not the "containerized tabs" thing (which I could never trust, don't ask me why) but the actual hard profile switch, that makes it impossible from one Firefox instance to access what happens in another instance simply because the separation is controlled by the operating system.
Now, when I click the Firefox icon, a list of profiles is shown on the screen: (browsing, work, facebook, linkedin, banking, shopping, training-X, training-Y, etc.). I select the profile and the browser is themed in a way that I instantly know which profile is in front of me.
I also wanted to make sure than if I mistakenly open a link to a third-party website in my "work" or "banking" profiles, that link would never actually be queried. The trick is very simple: I configured a proxy that points to a non-existing service (127.0.0.1:9999) and added the list of trusted domains (work + banks) in the proxy exceptions list. Anything else gets clicked/opened in these sessions gets directed into a black hole.
If you're interested in reaching this setup, simply replace your firefox shortcut by adding: -ProfileManager at the end of the command-line. From that point on, a window with a list of profiles will be shown everytime you click the Firefox icon, and you can have truly separated browsers running.
WebKit gets small details right such as option left right arrow selects a word but not a comma after it. In Firefox if a comma is next to a word without a space, it also gets selected. Stuff like that makes Firefox less polished in my opinion.
My pecking order is Firefox on my PC, Firefox on my Mac when I need uBlock for something, Safari for everything else. (And Edge, for when I want to make sure everything I make looks as good on Chromium as it does on WebKit and Gecko)
I use all of them. Edge for work pages/corporate intranet, Chrome for spe ific testing and customer remote, and Firefox with Ublock for web surfing. Duckduck for most and google search if I do not get what I am looking for.
The fact that the XHR/network console on Chrome doesn't format JSON responses is insane. Your in the most popular browser in the world and you have to copy paste the JSON into a formatter to read it?? Really??
Mozilla actively removed the ability to conveniently disable javascript, and left deleting cookies or localStorage from specific sites hellishly difficult. Mozilla somewhat cares about press releasing about your privacy.
I only use Chrome for some of the pants-down redirect-happy stuff required by work. FF tends to break the transitions because they are inherently insecure, but Chrome happily proceeds with them.
Firefox has great privacy features today. The containers, also Relay which allows you to create email alias. We all can wait some ms more to open a web page and support an independent browser
I wish I could use FF full time. but unfortunately I need to be able to use background blur in Google hangouts, and FF doesn't support. that's the last feature I'm waiting on.
Replied with this on a different thread, but I built an extension[1] so that I could choose which sites are opened in Chrome... so that whenever I need to use Google Meet, it automatically opens it on Chrome.
Vivaldi browser https://vivaldi.com/ and Vivaldi browser snapshot (both available for desktop and mobile) have become my favorite(s). Support all Chrome(ium) extensions, highly customizable, tab groups and tab-stacking. Been using both for 5ish years and probably never going back. I like FF but its insistince that I need to sign in from another device to verify that I am me has always been a little bit...obnoxious. Google is a joke in terms of privacy, no matter what they claim. Their entire business model is selling ads, and they do that by watching us.
Firefox is amazing except when working with electron based web apps. Most of the note taking apps I use only have chrome extensions. So now, I have to use both.
I switched to FF when Safari became unusable on Mac (Apple killing off extensions). For me FF is the least worst browser. They all suck. FF just sucks less.
I went the other way after a few years on Firefox mostly for one reason. Too often when posting something here, on Reddit, in a web-based email client, on Facebook, etc., I'd end up having to spend too much time dealing with false positives in its spell check.
It's weird because they use the same spell check engine that Chrome, Apple, LibreOffice, and a bazillion other commercial and open source things use, and those almost never produce false positives on my writing.
Mozilla needs to address things like this if they want to stop losing share to other browsers.
I've been using Brave almost exclusively for the past year or two. I very rarely run into any issues that make me reach for a different browser. Basically feels like chrome with a built in add blocker.
I was made to believe(from my readings) that it's not the browser that tracks you, it's the corporations who track you by your browsers ID(signature). Therefore, the best we can do, is to use chrome for google stuff and facebook(the 2 biggest offenders) and use FF for anything else(meaningful/serious stuff). Additionally, get the container-tab addon for firefox for super secure engagements like banking and other sensitive connections.
anyone else find that only Firefox behaves properly when opening up a saved state that opens multiple windows on multiple virtual desktops.
I've had problems with both Edge and Chrome changing the current virtual desktop or behaving weird until I click at least once on every window that opens
I've been using Firefox for around a decade, maybe? I've always liked it, but recently I switched to Vivaldi and I'm impressed by the amount of useful features it has.
My first browser was Opera and I'm a huge fan, so to see that the CTO of Opera has decided to basically recreate Opera is very alluring.
Firefox has a nasty bug where after running for some days it would suddenly stop making new connections until you completely restart it. It started happening after an update a couple of years ago and keeps happening on multiple computers.
I'm curious if anybody else ran into it or it's just my setup.
Recently, I've researched browser battery consumption for laptops. Every test I've seen rates Firefox the worst out of the big 3 or 4. Are there any settings/extensions that may have been overlooked for these reviews that can be used to help Firefox be more energy efficient?
I'm assuming you are a Windows user, and also assuming you aren't on Windows 10 because it should be built-in there, but I would recommend getting a "printer" shell extension to save as PDF. That's what I always did back when I used Windows.
Reader view is great, but it seems to work on less and less sites every day. I don't know what the mechanism is by which the browser decides whether to allow reader view rendering, but it seems to not work on about half the sites I wish I could use it on these days.
I don’t intend to diminish the article itself, since yes ditching chrome and Google is a win for personal privacy.
But I can’t ignore the irony of this article loading dozens of trackers. Like, is the cognitive dissonance that bad in web publishing? Do the teams writing the content not know about the way the publisher presents the data? Is this just pure hypocrisy? I’m at a loss.
I feel this sort of black-and-white thinking about morality is responsible for a lot of problems. Short of moving into the desert and becoming some sort of Hesychastic hermit, it's difficult, near impossible to lead a life where you do no evil.
The conclusion many draw from that is not to even bother trying. I think the better conclusion is to be forgiving of the failings of others, because they too struggle with this. Maybe the point isn't to be perfect, but to reach for what's good.
I still don't understand why that's a bad argument. In context, it's generally used to oppose hard leftist ideas (Marxism, etc). It's rarely a criticism leveled at reasonable reform or change; more when it nears outright revolution. In that case, it's not an unreasonable criticism.
It's a bad argument, it's a tu quoque logical fallacy.
You can be a serial killer and admit that murdering innocents is immoral.
The identity and the actions of the person making the argument have no bearing on the validity of the argument itself, it should be judged purely on its own merits.
Is that statement that "murdering innocents is immoral" actually correct or not, regardless of who makes the statement?
I addressed this in lighter terms below, but I don't think this is a logical fallacy (in context). To carry on your example, a serial killer that believes murdering innocents is immoral should also consider themselves immoral. They have the option to not kill, and continue to do it.
This is very different from the 'holier than thou' perspective taken by those who condescendingly dismiss arguments that they are contributing to things, by their own free actions, that they claim are evil.
I mean, it is a logical fallacy, in that it is an attempt to dismiss the validity of the argument through a variation of ad hominem. Again, whether or not the person making the argument is a hypocrite, a monster, or a talking dolphin has no bearing on the validity of their argument.
The argument's validity rests purely on its own merits, regardless of who espouses or expresses it.
I can be a smoker and admit that smoking is absolutely horrible for you. Just because I am a smoker doesn't mean that the statement that smoking is horrible for you is incorrect.
I think we're just talking about two fundamentally different things.
1) Whether or not people are hypocrites (and yes, they definitely are).
2) Whether or not that hypocrisy invalidates their arguments (and no, it has no bearing on the validity of their argument).
It's a bad argument, because validity of a critique is not predicated on critic's life choice. It's like arguing that you cannot critique a movie because you have never made one.
It's not a critique of the idea alone, it's forcing it into context.
If we take a common example of how I've seen this play out:
A: iPhones and Apple are evil because they require child slavery.
B: But.. you own an iPhone?
A: Oh so I'm just supposed to go live in the woods?
I don't think B supports child slavery. B is pointing out that even people espousing this idea participate in the system because the alternative (not owning the iPhone) results in a worse outcome.
> It's not a critique of the idea alone, it's forcing it into context.
Exactly. But switching to individual context around societal question is the problematic argument here. Properly contextualizing means to use individual cases to explain impact, but that is not done here.
Society is formed by many individuals, and it doesn't necessarily matters what most of them do to address a particular problem. We have division of responsibility.
Meh, it's quite easy to set up a website without third party (or first party) trackers. Even some github.io kind of website is better than a website with loads of tracker spam on it. It is not about black and white thinking, it is about putting in minimal effort and sticking to ones principles.
Maybe it also involves greed for viewership, "wanting to make it big" with some
article, who knows. There is not much preventing people from setting up a blog by themselves or ask someone else to help them publish in an ethical way, at least in many countries.
I guess at least some positive outcome can be concluded: People, who read on those websites might learn a thing or two.
Well it's a trade-off. Let's hypothetically say you have an important message that could save the world or something, but scream as loud as you can, you can't make everyone hear about it. You realize the only way to reach people is to do compromise with your principles, like publishing it on a major website that doesn't align with your values; which is the lesser evil, not spreading your message, or spreading it using those corrupt channels?
I don't think there's an easy answer to this. It's easy to focus too much on not doing evil that you miss the opportunity cost of doing good.
OP's point is that we're all hypocrites to some degree. Expecting someone to be doing everything right before they can comment on how we can all improve leaves us waiting for deity to resolve our problems.
I don't think it's ever fair to expect someone to do everything right, but if you want to pontificate on a specific issue, you should act in congruence with that.
I don't think writing a piece about privacy and then including dozens of trackers is honest and helping the case at all; "evil publisher" isn't an excuse. Can't have your cake and eat it, too.
This assumes the author has any control over this.
On a web dominated by tracking, the harsh reality is that the avenues capable of reaching the widest audiences are going to bring with them some…baggage.
To conclude that this is dishonest is missing the forest through the trees.
Since tracking is the dominant reality, one of the best things a smart consumer can do is use tools that help counteract it.
An article like this is using the medium available to help people similarly unable to change that medium navigate it a bit more safely.
> Can't have your cake and eat it, too.
What is the cake here? What double standard does the author benefit from if his writing encourages more people to switch to a browser that is more resistant to the tracking people are accusing the author of (endorsing? It’s not clear what the accusation actually is).
Let’s examine an alternative: The author tries to convince the publisher to forego the apparatus that currently drives their business model or they’ll threaten to publish elsewhere.
The publisher calls this bluff, and the author self-publishes instead.
Fewer people read the article, fewer people switch to Firefox, and fewer people gain a modicum of protection from tracking.
What about this outcome is better?
If you gatekeep the act of publishing privacy awareness content in this way, the only thing that happens is fewer people become aware. The only thing that can weaken tracking (aside from regulation) is making it less effective.
This mindset that only the pure/virtuous/perfect implementation is acceptable, and anything else is somehow unacceptable seems like a really good way to make no progress at all.
Refusing to acknowledge the situation we’re in is just denial.
In fairness, the person writing the article doesn't really have a say in the infra that the publisher is using. I agree that doesn't make the hypocrisy magically disappear, but it shouldn't detract from the points being made about the platforms we use to access the web.
An author doesn't get to choose what the website of the publisher does. It's not like this is the author's personal website that they have decided to put all of these trackers on it. This is a voice crying from within the system about how bad the system is. Is there a lot of cognitive dissonance in understanding how web publishing works?
An author does get to choose which platform they publish on. I'm really surprised by all the apologists here, the article is clearly click bait trying to cram ads down your throat. The real irony is that while the post is bearable to look at in chrome it's near enough unreadable in Firefox.
> An author does get to choose which platform they publish on.
A climate scientist traveling to a conference to meet with policy makers with a goal to increase awareness about a particular issue might be forced to use a mode of transportation that itself contributes to the problem of climate change.
Should the scientist adopt an absolutist/idealist position and refrain from anything that contributes to the problem, up to and including not traveling at all, because of the harm that the plane will cause in transit? Should they discard the potential longer term impact of convincing policy makers to change policy?
This is a classic case of missing the forest for the trees.
> I'm really surprised by all the apologists
It think you are misinterpreting the sentiment. An apologist would defend the tracking and ads themselves. People are not defending tracking, they are defending the utility of using the available medium to raise awareness about tracking and tools that can help mitigate it.
> the article is clearly click bait trying to cram ads down your throat
I would reframe this to something like: the majority of the content publishing business has adopted a model that embraces click bait and cramming ads down readers' throats.
This is the reality we're in.
As an author, if you want to bring awareness to this problem, or offer solutions to this problem, it only makes sense to publish that content where the readers are.
At no point does the article try to reframe the problem of tracking itself as a good thing. If it did, this would be a very different conversation.
People don’t usually automatically get to write at a specific outlet just because. In this case, the writer spent nearly a year freelancing at this outlet before they became a full-time staff writer just last month, which means they had to put a lot of work in to even get their spot.
Publishing is a very competitive field, especially in the last decade as newspaper jobs have gone dry. Don’t trash on the writer because of where they work.
I was actually pretty impressed that a mainstream (read 'ad-supported') outlet would run a story that encourages you to set up uBlock etc. Contrast it to this article that ran recently[1] on 'securing' your browser, which somehow manages to avoid mentioning that adblocking would do ten times more to protect you than any of the config changes it recommends...
There are sensible game-theoretical reasons for behaving that way. Individually choosing to forgo tracking hurts your competitive edge. Advocating for ad blocking, environmental regulations, or other industry-wide taxes will not, because everyone gets hit with that.
Traditionally, at publications of repute, the advertising and journalism departments were entirely segregated from one another. This gives the appearance of independence, rather than being influenced by an advertiser. I expect that, especially since the skill sets are rather orthogonal, that kind of segregation still happens today on web publications.
It's pretty simple. The journalist/editors want to write an article about privacy and web tracking. The business people want ads on the website to keep the lights on.
And to be fair to the business people, it's not like they have much choice. There are no major privacy-focused ad networks and they need a source of revenue. What do you expect them to do?
"Finally, it is always possible that man, as the result of coercion or other circumstances, can be hindered from doing certain good actions; but he can never be hindered from not doing certain actions, especially if he is prepared to die rather than to do evil."
At some point a company may have to make a decision that results in their death if they want to continue to act morally.
But much, much more often they simply modify their morals slightly and continue on. We humans are great at that.
What good would dying do in this case? There will be no shortage of other publications that will fill in the gap and happily embrace invasive advertising. If an organization keeps the lights on with ad revenue and teaches its readers to protect themselves from trackers, they've done more good than if they never existed at all.
Don’t aim your weapons at the publishers, who are generally working as morally as they can within the parameters they’ve been given.
Aim them at the ad technology firms that set the ground rules for the industry decades ago. The publishers are generally not the ones who let it degrade like this—the ad industry, which set the expectations for advertisers and marketers, did.
Was a software developer in the ad industry. We dealt with billions of ads. A hundred hell thousand ads here or there won't make any difference.
I did use ad block though except for running tests on the code that I wrote.
Are you writing this on internet - a tech that most if not all government use to spy on their citizens? Did you buy your computer online paying by a card or cash? Is your hardware, software all opensource and audited? Did you compile it all yourself?
It's corporate politics. The amount of tracking and data collected is not decided by the engineers nor the content creators. Most entrepreneurs think that the more data the better and that it somehow can be monetized in the future - and analyzed by "AI", but don't want to to be liable so they use third parties to collect and store the data.
Well I had a look at this article on Firefox, just to see what all the fuss is about and instantly in my face are all these Ads on TechRadar's website. They weren't even disabled by default on the first install and then you have Google being set as the default search engine. I wonder who is going to tell the editor why that is?
So either way, nothing has changed from the typical user standpoint who wants to just use a browser that not only doesn't hog their computer but takes privacy very seriously and with that simple experiment I have done, it is clear users are still no better off.
They might as well use Brave instead of Firefox which actually disables ALL these ads by default on the first install by having Brave Shields ON.
I find Firefox to be a superior browser and I use it Firefox on all my devices. But I would have used it even if it wasn't better, because I have lived through IE6 era and I know what browser monoculture results in. We don't need another browser engine monopoly.
It seems strange to compare an open source engine to the IE era. IE sucked because it stagnated technically, the engine isn't the issue with Chrome, it's the business incentives of Google that are at odds with some of the things users want in the browser as a product or service.
Why wouldn't chrome stagnate technically when there is no competition? Developing it isn't exactly cheap, and manager with looming quarterly reportsb is very likely to make a sensible decision and defund the project, leaving a few developers to fix some critical bugs. No?
There are a lot of companies and a lot of managers interested in keeping Chromium/Blink+V8 developed (Google, Microsoft, any big name using Node/Electron, other Chromium based browsers like Vivaldi, Brave, and Opera) so it's pretty hard for the Chromium project to just get defunded and stagnate outright like happened with closed source single developer IE. Google is by far the most active of the group but they are also the ones paying Safari, a browser with <20% usage share, ~$15,000,000,000/year for just the Google search deal so they understand the value of keeping their browser good enough to stay the most popular of the group instead of just dropping it. I'm sure the extra browsing analytics don't hurt either.
While I agree it'd be better if we lived in a world there were 5 separate major browser engines all neck and neck using 5 separate huge sources of funding I also agree the Chromium based browser monoculture doesn't feel or function like the IE monopoly did. If anything I've almost wondered if e.g. Mozilla's resources would be better spent being another Chromium based build that insures development of functionality Google refuses to maintain (like proper blocking APIs) instead of trying to compete 1:1 on every line of code.
the difference is that with open source software there is always the implicit threat to just fork the thing or discard what you don't want as say, Brave does. The Linux kernel is largely developed and sponsored by big tech and that has never offended anyone precisely for that reason. The optionality afforded by the fact that anyone can walk away limits what a bad actor can do, that's one of the biggest selling points of open source software.
When I tried it a few years ago on iphone, it would constantly crash and I’d lose all my tabs. I wanted sync between mobile and desktop so needed to switch to Chrome. Any idea if it has gotten better?
It hasn't crashed for me in a very long time. IOS now (reluctantly) lets you set it as the default browser, although you'll need to hunt around the settings.
Crashes multiple times per day for me, but does not lose tabs. Love it on PC, so the sync makes me tolerate the inconvenience on my phone anyways.
Chrome is still faster on some sites, so I still have it installed and pull it out when I have a specific need. For example: Watching long videos in unfocused windows.
even right now we are suffering because of the chrome dominance. the webextension manifest version 3 dropped a lot of features that coincidentally benefit google by making it harder for extensions that block ads. I don't think it's been fully ratified yet but i think it's pretty close to being the standard.
Everything listed can be achieved by using uBlock Origin
There is a reason why people abandoned Firefox, Mozilla refused to fix the performance issues, they refused to do something about the toolbar bloat, the browser became a nest for adwares/malwares, a security and privacy nightmare
and later they refused to abandon the Google deal
Google came with chrome and everyone switched, safe, efficient, reliable, and it stayed with the same UX since the beginning, a win for the users
Privacy? they don't share your data with anybody, there are no 3rd party addons or 3rd party links, unlike with Firefox for example (Pocket, Google, Duckduckgo, and various Ads in your home page)
Chrome or Chromium is the way to go if you care about:
- security
- privacy
- battery usage
Concerning their position of power, i don't buy it, Apple and WebKit have a greater impact imo and now that Microsoft is working on Chromium, it no longer is a viable argument
- Native reader mode
- Native PiP mode for videos
Yes, you can get extensions for this in Chrom(e/ium) but having these as a native feature is really nice.
Things I want to see in Firefox:
- Good/extensible keybindings
- Tab groups
- Tab search
EDIT: How do I break sentences to newline in HN without really making a new paragraph? You know, for bullet points, etc.