Live data from Hacker News

uBlock Origin Maintainer on Chrome vs. Firefox WebExtensions

discourse.mozilla.org

201–210 of 340 posts

Re: uBlock Origin Maintainer on Chrome vs. Firefox WebExtensions

#201
post #196

After being a Chrome user for several years, I've switched back to Firefox for the past two years or so and I'm really, really happy with it. Latest version does multi-processing, e10s is finally here (though it might still get disabled by usage of certain add-ons, I remember I had to force it to stay enabled). On performance, in the past it felt sluggish, but now Firefox is fast and for my usage patterns it uses les…

> On performance, in the past it felt sluggish, but now Firefox is fast and for my usage patterns it uses less memory than Chrome. /me remembers how fast FF was compared to IE 'back in the days'.

Well, bear in mind that websites was way simpler to render for a browser back then.

Re: uBlock Origin Maintainer on Chrome vs. Firefox WebExtensions

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't seem related to the topic unless I'm missing it. Also it has nothing to do with browsers or Chrome vs Firefox

It's referenced in the OP: Chromium-based browsers are being “infested” by Instart Logic tech which works around blockers and worst, around browser privacy settings (they may start “infecting” Firefox eventually, but that is not happening now). And there is a link to further elaboration: https://github.com/gorhill/uBO-Extra/wiki/Sites-on-which-uBO...

Okay, so they have cookies on a subdomain of the main site's domain. But that in itself is not a problem, since it does not enable them to track me across websites. So I don't have a problem with that, unless they use other tricks. Are they using browser profiling or something similar to correlate across websites?

Re: uBlock Origin Maintainer on Chrome vs. Firefox WebExtensions

#203
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would suspect it's sniffing for the window-size suddenly changing in certain ways, perhaps along with watching for the normal dev-tools keyboard shortcuts via keydown listeners. I can't actually remember off the top of my head if Chrome suppresses the event in that case, but it wouldn't be surprising if it didn't. The easy check for this would be to see whether opening the devtools in detached mode via the menus ma…

This is what happens when I trigged DevTools while logging key events: document.addEventListener('keydown', ({ keyCode }) => console.log(keyCode)) 91 16 73 You can see each key.

But there's different ways of opening dev tools. You can use the mouse to right click as well. In fact, when using keyboard shortcuts in the better these days, I have a habit of hitting alt+D first to get to the address bar first (Outlook likes to hijack browser shortcuts like Ctrl+n), in which case the website shouldn't know I'm pressing anything at all.

Re: uBlock Origin Maintainer on Chrome vs. Firefox WebExtensions

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm trying DuckDuckGo, but it's just not as good. It took me a while of using DDG before I realized how much I had equated "good" with "looks like Google". What finally hit me, hard, was that I switched the DDG theme to a color scheme designed to look like Google search results, and all of a sudden the results "felt better". Markedly better. So, I started regularly comparing results, every time I found something th…

My problem is not the looks, whenever I use !g I'm annoyed how bad it looks. It IS the results. Often when something doesn't have a ton of relevant results, DDG gives the wrong results while !g has what I'm looking for.

In my experience ddg is less contextual. For instance when searching for something that is trending, Google will often give the most expected results even if the search keywords are incredibly vague, while ddg will give more standard results respecting the keywords.

That’s the very reason I switched to ddg, but it bites me back everytime I try to catch up on stuff everybody already knows for days, and need to fallback to !g.

Re: uBlock Origin Maintainer on Chrome vs. Firefox WebExtensions

#205
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same for me. I fired up Firefox for the first time in years and it works great. The hardest part to get used to is their super-weird hamburger menu layout.

This menu is changing for Firefox 57. It will have a more "normal" menu soon. You can see it today by installing Nightly Firefox.

What Ankit The mobile menu? The mobile menu is a mess if you have extensions installed, because add-on developers don't put their stuff in the tools/page submenu, and there's no way to rearrange it.

Re: uBlock Origin Maintainer on Chrome vs. Firefox WebExtensions

#206
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be perfectly honest I'm not at all interested in "better permissions" for plugins when it comes with the removal of flexibility that you get for free. If I've got plugin-installing malware on my system, I've got worse problems than a rogue plugin. Give me more useful over more secure any day of the week.

As someone worried about security; I hope that is not the majority opinion.

This would help all the individuals who have inadvertently installed malware addons which do not have pwned systems as soon as there are any, if there are ever any.

Re: uBlock Origin Maintainer on Chrome vs. Firefox WebExtensions

#207
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you hit Backspace in error, you can disable the “Go Back” action associated with the backspace key using about:config like so: browser.backspace_action = 2 Read [1] for more instructions. If you explicitly used the mouse to click the Back button, I am sorry for the time you lost. 1. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.backspace_action

Allow me to introduce the Thinkpad X61 keyboard: http://i.imgur.com/JitlIPa.jpg That's a dedicated "go back" button between up arrow and right ctrl. My webmail is unusable without Lazarus. I've taken to composing in emacs and pasting the result into forms.

With the appropriate extension this can be made seemless. Hit a hotkey get an emacs buffer with the current contents of input box. Write some stuff and save and quit. Input box now contains contents of emacs buffer. Annoyingly this requires a service that sits in the background in chrome because security wont let chrome launch such a process. In chrome you can use text-aid-too. Pentadactyl/vimperator can do it with firefox and others.

Re: uBlock Origin Maintainer on Chrome vs. Firefox WebExtensions

#208
post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With respect, that doesn't really matter. I used to have a useful feature that worked. Now I don't. That was the practical result of the change we're talking about for this user, regardless of any theoretical benefits elsewhere or any theoretical ability to provide equivalent functionality within the new architecture. Other people are welcome to use other browsers, but I was using Firefox, and a big reason I was stil…

> I used to have a useful feature that worked. > Now I don't. Well, imagine for a moment that you're whoever is in charge of firefox development at mozilla: - You want to take advantage of modern hardware such as multiple cores, GPU's etc. - You want to get rid of XUL which is an evolutionary dead end. - You have an existing extension model which basically allows extensions to more or less freely poke about in the in…

I guess you would lose some of your remaining market share to chrome and wonder how much smaller your revenue is going to be when the yahoo deal expires?

Re: uBlock Origin Maintainer on Chrome vs. Firefox WebExtensions

#209
post #189

I still think Chrome has some advantages. For example you can disable a lot of things like location services in the settings. In Firefox you can decline access to location once a site asks for it but I would rather disable it once and for all if I am setting up a machine for a less tech-savvy person. Also, firefox comes with tons of built in features you cannot disable. In past they have caused security issues (e.g.…

> the pdf.js exploit

Overall having pdf.js is a benefit to internet browsing. Should we not innovate and try to improve our tools just to preserve security?

Re: uBlock Origin Maintainer on Chrome vs. Firefox WebExtensions

#210
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always hit DDG first then if the results aren't great just append the Google bang (!g) in the DDG search field to get an unbubbled goog search. The DDG bang system is one of its best features in my mind. https://duckduckgo.com/bang

How often do you end up at Google though; a few years back I tried DDG for a couple of months but ended up basically always doing !g and so went back to Google. Might be time for another go?

I don't have any figures to back this up, but I feel like I use !g about half of the time (it may be 70 or 20% as well since I have no data). I'm not free from Google then, but this reduced my dependency by about 50%, which is still good to take !
Post reply on HN