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

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

#711
post #364

I haven't seen anyone mention this, but Firefox is my "daily driver" for almost all browsing, and is also locked down with uMatrix, uBlock Origin, DecentralEyes and Ghostery (though I could probably drop Ghostery without missing it). Chrome has uBlock Origin and a few other things but interferes with pages less. I keep a set of pages for some specific web apps (e.g. GMail, Google Calendar, task management, etc.) open…

I really love addons like 'Dark Background and Light Text', but they don't work with the 'New Tab', 'about:*' and addons.mozilla.org pages like most other addons in recent Firefox. For the 'New Tab' page I now use 'New Tab Tools' to set the background to black. But I am still unhappy that its not possible to set all other pages to a dark theme. Also that Vimium doesn't work with those pages is a shame as well. I hope…

there's an extreme method of doing 'light text on dark background', like my guide below

http://unexistance.blogspot.com/2014/09/of-firefox-solarize....

in which all background & foreground color are of your choice. been using it for 5 years at least

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

#712

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really depends on the websites. Firefox has long been significantly faster than it was in the Firefox-1.x days, when it was the fastest browser. It's always been perfectly snappy and efficient for hackernews, craigslist, 10,000-line colored diffs in the cgit web frontend ... but popular web sites got many times slower. Chrome enabled web developers to do atrociously inefficient things and just not care. Even today…

I think the issue is less poor coding and resource consumption and more the fact that devs seem to primarily test their website on Chrome. Whether inadvertently or not, the Chrome team hit on a genius way of gaining market share by focusing on dev tools so heavily.

I recall Firebug being one of the reasons for sticking with Firefox before Chrome had dev tools.

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

#713
post #683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

privacy.resistFingerprinting.block_mozAddonManager does not exist in my about:config. Just changing "extensions.webextensions.restrictedDomains" is apparently not enough. I also tried :fixamo in tridactyl, but it just returns: "# Error: Attempt to postMessage on disconnected port" I was using version 1.13.1pre1454 with FF 60.0.2.

Have you tried adding the setting that doesn't exist manually? There's a little + button you can click on about:config. --- That's a particularly unhelpful error, sorry about that. It usually means that Tridactyl can't access the native messenger. Did you install it with `:installnative`? What is the output of `:native`?

> That's a particularly unhelpful error, sorry about that. It usually means that Tridactyl can't access the native messenger. Did you install it with `:installnative`? What is the output of `:native`?

I did not, but now I have.

:fixamo now doesn't return any error but still doesn't work.

Adding "privacy.resistFingerprinting.block_mozAddonManager" manually and setting it to true did the job. Thanks!

So far I like Tridactyl, especially the useful commands, but since it seems to be incompatible with other addons that overwrite the NewTab page. I think I will have to disable it.

I also miss the smooth scrolling experience with j,k from VimiumFF, jumping lines like Tridactyl does makes me loose the point were I left of. I might check back how the progress is going tough.

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

#714
post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really love addons like 'Dark Background and Light Text', but they don't work with the 'New Tab', 'about:*' and addons.mozilla.org pages like most other addons in recent Firefox. For the 'New Tab' page I now use 'New Tab Tools' to set the background to black. But I am still unhappy that its not possible to set all other pages to a dark theme. Also that Vimium doesn't work with those pages is a shame as well. I hope…

there's an extreme method of doing 'light text on dark background', like my guide below http://unexistance.blogspot.com/2014/09/of-firefox-solarize.... in which all background & foreground color are of your choice. been using it for 5 years at least

Thanks, but I do like it to be easily switchable. Some pages expect certain background colors and changing them makes embedded svgs hard or impossible to see.

Maybe you can get away with using the solarized theme, but I prefer having a black background...

Thanks for this suggestions anyway

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

#716
post #713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried adding the setting that doesn't exist manually? There's a little + button you can click on about:config. --- That's a particularly unhelpful error, sorry about that. It usually means that Tridactyl can't access the native messenger. Did you install it with `:installnative`? What is the output of `:native`?

> That's a particularly unhelpful error, sorry about that. It usually means that Tridactyl can't access the native messenger. Did you install it with `:installnative`? What is the output of `:native`? I did not, but now I have. :fixamo now doesn't return any error but still doesn't work. Adding "privacy.resistFingerprinting.block_mozAddonManager" manually and setting it to true did the job. Thanks! So far I like Trid…

> :fixamo now doesn't return any error but still doesn't work.

You need to restart the browser afterwards. Sorry, people usually find the command through the help page where it has all of these caveats.

We have smooth scrolling, you just need to do `set smoothscroll true`. It's a bit rubbish, though.

You can often fix the new tab page by disabling and re-enabling the new tab add-on you want. Every time Tridactyl is updated it will steal the page back, so I'd suggest that you don't use the beta releases and instead use the normal ones.

We could reasonably easily provide a build that didn't use the new tab page (we occasionally get people who feel very strongly about this) but I'm afraid it's quite low down my list of priorities. If you're feeling up to it there's an issue open: https://github.com/cmcaine/tridactyl/issues/534

But I won't hold it against you if you use Vimium. It's very well polished : )

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

#717

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They assumed that removing their last distinctions from chrome - the extensions that had become integral parts of the workflows of millions for up to a dozen years, and the lack of tab processes - would somehow get people to switch from chrome instead of to chrome in resentment. This was where the organization had fixed all of their hopes - once they got rid of extensions and got chrome's primary marked feature (on r…

> The real problem is that Firefox has 10x as many employees as it needs Do you have any idea how much work it takes to maintain a modern web engine in 2018?

The only way to make it faster at this point was to replace large parts of the engine, the old extensions are wedded to that, that's why the old extensions are going.

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

#718

I switched to Vivaldi a year or two ago after using Firefox as my main browser for the longest time. I've considered switching back, but every time I run up against several features in Vivaldi that I am just not ready to part with yet: 1) tab stacks, 2) the ability to save and reopen an entire session, 3) a page load progress indicator in the URL bar, 4) using Ctrl-F highlights the position of all matching locations…

i would have a hard time switching back as well. a lot of the features could be added with extensions but i like having it all baked into the browser.

search shortcuts is probably my favourite feature (putting "r" in front of a search term to search directly on rotten tomatoes, or "d" to search on dictionary.com), its a great timesaver

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

#719
post #713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's a particularly unhelpful error, sorry about that. It usually means that Tridactyl can't access the native messenger. Did you install it with `:installnative`? What is the output of `:native`? I did not, but now I have. :fixamo now doesn't return any error but still doesn't work. Adding "privacy.resistFingerprinting.block_mozAddonManager" manually and setting it to true did the job. Thanks! So far I like Trid…

> :fixamo now doesn't return any error but still doesn't work. You need to restart the browser afterwards. Sorry, people usually find the command through the help page where it has all of these caveats. We have smooth scrolling, you just need to do `set smoothscroll true`. It's a bit rubbish, though. You can often fix the new tab page by disabling and re-enabling the new tab add-on you want. Every time Tridactyl is u…

> You need to restart the browser afterwards. Sorry, people usually find the command through the help page where it has all of these caveats.

:help fixamo

Does not state that I need to restart firefox afterwards. [1]

I did restart firefox after I installed `native` and before I run :fixamo. :native also returned that the it was installed correctly before I run :fixamo.

[1]: fixamo

    fixamo(): Promise

        Defined in src/excmds.ts:290

    Simply sets

     "privacy.resistFingerprinting.block_mozAddonManager":true
     "extensions.webextensions.restrictedDomains":""
in about:config via user.js so that Tridactyl (and other extensions!) can be used on addons.mozilla.org and other sites.

    Requires native.
    Returns Promise

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

#720

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is pretty fundamental. While Safari lacks features, it feels so much lighter and is noticeably less memory/CPU intensive. As a developer who needs every MB of memory, this makes me resort to Safari for pretty much everything. I'll occasionally use Firefox/Chrome when I really really need their superior webdev tools.

What tools in FF do you think are better than Chrome? Honestly, my computer is beefy (and firmly attached to a power source) enough that performance is rarely an issue with any browser, and Chrome dev tools seem to be superior in most ways, with the slight exception that it's harder to see what events are bound to an element, but the software I develop usually has fairly tight couplings so that feature isn't needed o…

Well don't listen to me, my work is mainly backend. The only frontend work I do is restricted to side projects. But most frontend devs I know prefer Chrome. My personal preference to FireFox is paranoid me trying to avoid Google (but that's another topic).
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