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It’s time to give Firefox another chance

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Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#391

Post by disillusioned1 »

kuzimoto wrote: post #311
tomc1985 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or VideoDownloadHelper, or DownThemAll! :-( That said my dev edition self-updated last night and... holy shit, the new Firefox flies!

Not sure what you're downloading, but have you ever given youtube-dl ( https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/ ) a try? It's got support for tons of other sites than just YouTube. It doesn't have a GUI, but it's pretty simple to use.

youtube-dl-gui (https://mrs0m30n3.github.io/youtube-dl-gui/) is a cross-platform GUI for youtube-dl. It works well for me.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#392

Post by syshum »

noncoml wrote: post #227
syshum wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you are one of those that "Open Web" == performance only and you look the other way on things like EME, Pocket, and various other things that lower Privacy and betray the very foundation of the "Open Web"

That's as a bit unfair conclusion. I just believe that if Firefox dies then for sure "Open Web" will die. But, yeah, of course I am not happy with Pocket. But it still better than using Chrome.

I believe the Open Web died as soon as they Caved to MS/Google on DRM, and choose to oppose the EFF in their battle to prevent DRM in becoming a standard.

Mozilla is now an enemy of the Open Web, the EFF is one of the last organizations left actually standing up for the Open Web. Mozilla is just another Commercial Browser with anti-user features

To be clear I am not laying all the blame at the feet of Mozilla, clearly the Open Web is not an important issue, as even in Linux circles there are countless people that have chosen Google over freedom, making endless excuses and justifications about why choosing chrome was just pragmatic but in making that "pragmatic" choice they sent a clear market signal that performance and netflix was more important the Open web, privacy, and user freedom.

They sent a clear market signal to Mozilla that principles do not matter, and Mozilla took that market signal to heart and turned its back on the Principles of the Open web and privacy to focus more on Performance and Usability to appease those users

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#393

Post by notzorbo3 »

KGIII wrote: post #233
kenhwang wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also turn off search suggestions for the address bar so it only sends things to Google when you search. It's still giving search information to Google, but that's much more preferable to sending literally everything you type in the box.

Privacy is a tricky thing and a bit of a spectrum. I will happily give up some information in exchange for a service that I like. I'll happily give Google my search history, including typos in the search bar, in exchange for them tailoring my responses. Why? The difference in results is huge. I don't need to specific that I'm looking for Linux answers, math functions, or scientific results. Google knows this, it has…

> that I'm looking for Linux answers, math functions, or scientific results. Google knows this, it has learned it

FYI, I've been using an anonymized front-end (startpage.com) to Google for the last year and I'm not noticing any degradation in the quality of the search results. Startpage doesn't even set a cookie, so I doubt it is tracking me and learning what interests me.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#394

Post by yuhong »

notzorbo3 wrote: post #389
Karunamon wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's do a quick thought experiment and imagine all the completely legitimate reasons that a browser might have to call home. Off the top of my head: * Any of the disableable features like safe browsing * Addon code update checks (chrome web store) * Certificate pinning list updates * CA certificate bundle updates * Browser code update checks * Uploading crash reports * HSTS list updates * Settings synching I also be…

Just because there are legitimate reasons for sending all that data doesn't mean it's not also usable to track you or whatever. In fact, having all that data in the first place lowers the barrier to start using it for other things. We've seen that happen countless times. What it comes down to is that Chrome sends a whole bunch of information about me to a company who's main product is serving ads. I don't know exactl…

How many times with Google though? Of course, there are different kinds of data that may be sent too. Safe Browsing is very different from telemetry for example.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#395

Post by nnethercote »

Myrmornis wrote: post #232

Can someone explain the difference between the process / thread architecture of chrome and firefox desktop apps and the implications of this difference? On MacOS Chrome appears as many processes named Chrome helper or something, whereas Firefox appears as a single process with many threads. Given that the two are trying to solve the same problem and are so superficially similar, is the difference in architecture surp…

Firefox now uses multiple processes too. By default Firefox is limited to one UI process and four web content processes. Chrome will use roughly one content process per tab (though that's an oversimplification). Firefox's choice to use fewer web content processes result in less memory usage, but if a content process crashes you'll have to reload 1/4 of your tabs.

Both browsers use threads extensively within each process as well.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#397

Post by nnethercote »

proactivesvcs wrote: post #42

Give Firefox another chance, after Mozilla recently announced opt-out telemetry? Give them another chance now that they're siding with the likes of privacy-ignorant Microsoft? The same vendor that keeps bolting on features that seem irrelevant to its user base, such as "assumed touch", app store etc? Surely one would only offer Mozilla another chance once they have extended an olive branch, rather than a closed-circu…

How is Mozilla siding with Microsoft?

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#398

Post by quesera »

richdougherty wrote: post #175
quesera wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox has has profiles since well before the first version of Chrome was released. Unfortunately the UI has always been sort of hidden. You can launch with `-P` or `-ProfileManager` to get a profile selection menu. Or nav to `about:profiles` for a slightly more convenient (but less attractive) version. Firefox profiles are great. Better than Chrome profiles, though less convenient, for now. Interested to see how Co…

I used to use those profiles on Firefox - custom launchers in Debian. I did find them less convenient that Chrome, especially on Mac, so I switched to Chrome. Firefox's new Containers aren't perfect, but I'm giving them a go and since they're in testing still I can submit feedback to influence their direction.

On Linux it's a bit simpler because a new instance is launched each time you click the launcher icon. So all you have to do is set the config to show the profile manager at each launch.

macOS (and OS X before it) is more work. The Finder will switch to the running instance if there is one, instead of launching a new one each time you click. I worked around that with an AppleScript (for the icon and double-clickability) that calls a shell script with the proper args.

It sounds sketchy when I describe it, and is clearly not an obvious option for most people, but it has worked perfectly and invisibly for years.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#399

Post by zdkl »

jrnichols wrote: post #382
Sylos wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also still considered one of the main-reasons for Chrome eating up all market share, that they now have the leading mobile OS under their control. You can invest a lot of money trying to remedy that, before it's actually a waste of money. And a lot of technologies and standards that were developed as part of Firefox OS still are very much around today. In terms of standards, they did a lot of work for camera and…

"It's also still considered one of the main-reasons for Chrome eating up all market share," I remember one reason Chrome gobbled up a lot of marketshare - it was the browser to install because it had Flash built in. Google definitely leveraged that, and then slowly roped people into the Googlesphere from there once they had the browser as your new default.

Yeah further proof for google that being sneaky Gets Shit Done.

We collectively need to factor this into our product choices and stop encouraging the sneakiest of them all.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#400

Post by geordee »

Chrome user from the early days of Chrome. I tried switching to Firefox/Safari multiple times. It was Chrome Devtools which was holding me back in the end. Now I use Safari for most of the browsing. Getting started with Firefox for everything else. I miss the floating bookmarks in Chrome though.
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