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Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

mobile.nytimes.com

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Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#441

Post by nneonneo »

One Firefox addon single-handedly changed my browsing experience - Tree Style Tabs. With a little bit of styling & userChrome modification, you get a browsing experience that (a) handles huge numbers of tabs in a sane fashion, (b) takes up only a bit of space on the side, freeing up valuable vertical room & making all your tab names nice and readable, and (c) makes organizing and pruning tabs a snap. It's heavily customizable (but works well out of the box), and it's pretty exclusively for Firefox - similar things for Chrome rely on separate windows and can't remove the top tab bar (making them somewhat redundant).

I also use multiple profiles via Profile Manager pretty frequently - it's super handy to have the ability to launch a clean browser environment for debugging purposes, and to have separate work profiles for different jobs to avoid cross-contamination. Firefox Sync also works quite well between all of my devices, and it's properly end-to-end encrypted for improved security.

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#442

Post by PurpleRamen »

Jaepa wrote: post #99
michaelmrose wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tridactyl is quickly approaching parity with pentadactyl

Especially after installing the native message. Want a bind to open something in mpv/youtube-dl `";v": "hint -W exclaim_quiet mpv"` Want to open a text field in gvim? Hit `ctl+i` Want to remove the extra chrome: run `:guiset gui none` I stuck on the ESR of firefox for a long time because I wasn't willing to give up vimperator. Its not the same, but its pretty close. There are 2 main pain points, which I don't know it…

Can native message fix the fundamental problems in keyhandling? Meaning it can react to keys without the site fully loaded? Work on all sites and dialogs? Have a predictable behaviour instead of timing-problems which can happen now if you type to fast? For example, opening the commandline and typing something to fast can have the effect that the typed text does not end in the commandline but instead is handled outside of it.

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#443

Post by dvcrn »

The main reason why I am still with Safari is battery. Nothing else compares (or compared last time I checked) when it comes to battery life. Did this change?

(But well, after the latest privacy changes announced by Apple, I might just stay with Safari for good)

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#444

Post by bovine3dom »

PurpleRamen wrote: post #435
bovine3dom wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a better analogy is expecting a Counter-Strike: Source modification to work with Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. I was also upset by the death of most of my favourite add-ons, particularly Vimperator, so I bullied a friend into writing Tridactyl with me [1]. If you tried it around the death of keysnail it might be worth giving it another go now, as I think it is a lot less bad than it used to be (although I…

Tridactyl (and all similar addons) will only be a bad replacement as long as they are limited to inject code in loaded sites to fetch keys. The problems emerging from this are really bad.

Yeah, I see where you're coming from. cmcaine started on an extension to the WebExtension API [1] that would fix that, but progress has stalled. It got preliminary approval and was split up into loads of bugs on Bugzilla at which point we all got a bit lost. If you feel very strongly about it, perhaps you could pick up the baton?

Part of the reason I haven't done so is because I disagree with you - Tridactyl is pretty usable to me, and there's loads of things I want to fix in that that are a higher priority to me.

[1] https://github.com/cmcaine/keyboard-api

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#445

Post by chme »

Yoric wrote: post #426
chme wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same for me, but with the recent Firefox they broke the old addons and the current ones cannot do the same. I hope they fix that regression.

WebExtensions (aka new generation addons) are getting more powerful with each version :)

Thanks for the info. :) Great work so far!

High on my list is for the extensions to work on about:* and addons.mozilla.org pages.

I like to use Vimium everywhere and 'Dark Background and Light Text' to also work on the preferences.

Also I really miss DownThemAll... I tried a couple of replacements, but they didn't for instance download all books from a Humble Book Bundle.

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#446

Post by samuell »

I switched to Brave on mobile, and hasn't looked back. Works flawlessly. It is only the desktop app on Linux/Xubuntu that can have a bit of micro-lagging at times, enough to cause frustration, and also is not as well integrated in the UI as chromium. Hope to switch there as well, as soon as laggyness improves a bit.

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#447

Post by Yoric »

nothrabannosir wrote: post #316
joeblau wrote: post #172

I just ran both of the speed test benchmarks [1][2] mentioned in the article, plus two other tests [3][4]. | Firefox | Safari | Chrome ----------------|----------------|-----------------|----------------- Speedometer 2.0 | 83.0 ±0.91 | 92.1 ±2.8 | 75.7 ±3.4 JetStream | 219.40 ±8.5563 | 294.79 ±11.138 | 201.81 ±15.171 Motion Mark | 203.71 ±5.41% | 525.77 ±6.56% | 388.85 ±4.79 ARES-6 | 54.06 ±0.95ms | 16.85 ±1.19ms | 2…

Firefox’s biggest problem is rapacious battery draining. Unplug your charger and Safari feels like a dainty butterfly in a soft summer breeze, while Firefox thrashes around like a drunken Godzilla in mid-90s Tokyo. The energy usage tab on the activity monitor consistently shows Firefox at a ~40 “score” (whatever that unit is), and Safari more around 4. Anecdotally, the difference in battery time is real. This is the…

As someone who has worked a bit on energy usage: it's a really, really hard problem, and the tools used to develop/optimize for energy are really, really bad.

Also, being cross-platform complicates things a lot: I'm certain that Safari has access to a number of libraries that are energy-efficient but exist only on macOS/iOS.

I have a vague hope that maybe the Rust community can find a way to somehow develop a standard benchmarking tool that takes into account energy use. This would help considerably on the front of refactoring Firefox towards better energy efficiency.

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#448

Post by navlelo »

nneonneo wrote: post #434
manveru wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much the only time I use chromium now is when I need to debug Websockets, since the traffic is impossible to see in Firefox. Really hope they fix https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1373639 some day.

On the other hand, Chrome refuses to show binary WebSocket traffic, so I just use SSLKEYLOGFILE + Firefox + Wireshark/tshark to debug secured WS traffic. tshark can even be configured to dump out the packets basically as they come in.

I am struggling quite a bit to make this work. Do you have any good writeups on how to do this?

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#449

Post by Yoric »

Nullabillity wrote: post #341
spockz wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’d better switch to using metal because Apple deprecated OpenGL for MacOS.

That's Apple's problem, not Mozilla's.

Apple caused it, but Mozilla (and, well, everybody else) needs to pay for it.

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#450

Post by clouddrover »

teekert wrote: post #366
dmortin wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about browser fingerprinting? If you use the same browser then they know it's you from the same fingerprint, so they can still track you if they want.

Hmm, yes good point. Still waiting for the browser-finger-print-obfuscation plugin ;)

Mozilla is integrating Tor into Firefox. Anti-fingerprinting measures are part of that project:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Fusion

https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/meetings/2...

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