Is there any way to make Firefox use the passwords I have saved with Google (available at passwords.google.com and loaded into gnome-keyring)?
Use KeePass
Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)
121–130 of 343 posts
Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)
#122I've seen the comment here on HN and a few other sites in the past few days - are there sites out there that don't work in Firefox, but do work in Chrome?
Like, I'm aware of a few CSS properties that work in Chrome but not FF, but I don't think I've ever come across a site that doesn't look or work completely fine in FF.
The only exception to this that I can think of is Google Earth, which I'm pretty sure you can open inside of Chrome. I've always used the desktop app for that though so I'm not sure.
Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
> - Yes, Mozilla has made missteps with Pocket and Mr. Robot. These are forgivable in my opinion. At least this steps are somehow understandable. What I‘m really miffed about is their partnership with Cliqz. If Google is the devil then Cliqz is Beelzebub. I don‘t understand what they were thinking...
can you elaborate?
Mozilla has been experimenting for years with ways to lead users to what they want to read without going through a search engine. This is both an attempt to improve user experience, an attempt to workaround Google's search quasi-monopoly and an attempt to find alternate revenue sources that would guarantee Mozilla's independence from Google.
And yes, the difference between this and ads is paper-thin – just like the difference between search and ads is paper-thin – so it's easy to get things wrong.
One of these experiments was through a German start-up called Cliqz, in which Mozilla invested in early stage. For a small fraction of German users, Firefox used the Cliqz engine as an implementation of this recommendation engine: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/cliqz-recommendations-f...
For these users, lots of private data was sent to Cliqz (pretty much the data that Chrome sends to Google). Cliqz is open-source and there were contracts between Cliqz and Mozilla to legally guarantee user's privacy, but I do not know/remember the details. Also, I seem to remember that the default Cliqz settings in the experiment were set to minimal privacy, which wasn't very good.
The experiment didn't last long, in part because of privacy concerns, but some people were (understandably) unhappy about this, including most Firefox devs.
(I may be missing some details, I haven't followed this closely)
More details here: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/74yo19/cliqz_and_m...
Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was removed because - pretty much nobody was using it; - it's pretty easy to reimplement as an extension. Championing the Free Web is harder if you also need to champion the dead web. edit "nobody" => "pretty much nobody"
Pocket is also easy to implement as an extension. In fact, it is an extension. But they bundled it with the browser.
And most people seem to be very happy about it.
Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)
#125Easy path to success for Firefox is to continue to beef up security and privacy tooling for their users and have sane defaults. They've been winning a lot of users who feel abandoned by the big companies in this space. A problem and conflict of interest for them regarding this is that they are funded mainly by Google. Firefox has a conflict of interest here because they are not doing all they can here because that wo…
Just FYI, audio autoplay is being actively worked on in the current Firefox development version, precisely to solve the problem you describe. There are some issues with coming up with a UX that doesn't privilege a small set of sites out of the box over everyone else [1] and also doesn't prompt the user on every single site that tries to play video (the current Firefox Nightly behavior; it's rather annoying).
So for this specific case, the reason it hasn't happened yet is not some nefarious conflict of interest but actual hard problems that need to be solved (and are being solved), coupled with resource constraints.
As far as containers go, I agree they are great if you understand the model. I use them. Most users find them terribly confusing in their current form. Again, a UX issue. That said, the idea of having things in a private container by default is somewhat interesting. The hard part in some way would be the discoverability of the whitelisting flow and user confusion about why their customization information is not being remembered like in every other browser. I'll try to shop this around to people a bit and see if they can figure out a way to make this work sanely.
Disclaimer: I work on Firefox, but not in UX.
[1] Google's solution in Chrome; it suppresses new startups by making the experience suck there, which is good for incumbents like YouTube but maybe less good for the web as a whole in the long term.
Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)
#126Just so we can avoid rehashing the discussion whenever a post encouraging the use of Firefox is posted. - Yes, Mozilla is still the better browser when it comes to privacy. - Yes, Mozilla has made missteps with Pocket and Mr. Robot. - Yes, it is slow/resource heavy on certain Macs with non-default resolutions. Yes, Mozilla is working on a fix. - Yes, it has become really fast for most users after Quantum improvements…
- Yes, Firefox does support Containers, which are a very innovative privacy feature allowing you to maintain separate browser sessions (cookies, site preferences, ...) towards different websites inside a single browser instance.[1][2] [1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers#w_what-are-c... [2] https://www.thechiefmeat.com/guides/containers.html
Yes this is why
> Mozilla is still the better browser when it comes to privacy
Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)
#127Just so we can avoid rehashing the discussion whenever a post encouraging the use of Firefox is posted. - Yes, Mozilla is still the better browser when it comes to privacy. - Yes, Mozilla has made missteps with Pocket and Mr. Robot. - Yes, it is slow/resource heavy on certain Macs with non-default resolutions. Yes, Mozilla is working on a fix. - Yes, it has become really fast for most users after Quantum improvements…
You missed Webrender. I switched over the firefox a month ago from chrome. While I had tried doing that a few times over the past few years, i came back to chrome because honestly there was not much difference and chrome just feels like home. This time around I had switched to try out a new tech called 'webrender'. Webrender takes a completely different approach to rendering and compositing, instead of maintainting l…
Webrender is exactly what I was thinking of when I said
> [Firefox] ... likely will continue to get better.
Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)
#128Just so we can avoid rehashing the discussion whenever a post encouraging the use of Firefox is posted. - Yes, Mozilla is still the better browser when it comes to privacy. - Yes, Mozilla has made missteps with Pocket and Mr. Robot. - Yes, it is slow/resource heavy on certain Macs with non-default resolutions. Yes, Mozilla is working on a fix. - Yes, it has become really fast for most users after Quantum improvements…
You missed Webrender. I switched over the firefox a month ago from chrome. While I had tried doing that a few times over the past few years, i came back to chrome because honestly there was not much difference and chrome just feels like home. This time around I had switched to try out a new tech called 'webrender'. Webrender takes a completely different approach to rendering and compositing, instead of maintainting l…
Not yet available on Mac it seems.
Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Okay. So they sold out and the alternative is a browser from an advert company. How do you think Mozilla should fund the development of Firefox?
An alternative is an open source version of a browser from an advert company, with anti-features hopefully being kept in check by diligent maintainers. As much as I dislike that, from the advert company I know they're on the side of the advertisers. They're not presenting a "we're on the side of you, the users" face, whilst behaving more or less the same. A better alternative would be a fork of Firefox, kept up to da…
I'm afraid that this is not an alternative. What you are suggesting is a browser that just won't let you browse the web (because it will be obsolete after a few months) and that nobody will care about.
> I don't think Mozilla can change. They're too comfortably corporate. Having lost sight of their mission, I think it would be better if it disappeared and was replaced by something else.
I understand how you can see it like this. However, from Mozilla's point of view, what you call "los[ing] sight of their mission" is "caring for as many users as possible" – rather than only for the most tech-literate fringe to which HN readers tend to belong.
Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
An alternative is an open source version of a browser from an advert company, with anti-features hopefully being kept in check by diligent maintainers. As much as I dislike that, from the advert company I know they're on the side of the advertisers. They're not presenting a "we're on the side of you, the users" face, whilst behaving more or less the same. A better alternative would be a fork of Firefox, kept up to da…
> An alternative is an open source version of a browser from an advert company, with anti-features hopefully being kept in check by diligent maintainers. To which nobody will listen and who'd have zero power in the standards committees, as unfortunate as it may be.
What's the difference between having zero power and having some power but always caving when it's important for the open web with the excuse that if you hadn't you would lose users and have no say the standards committees?