Live data from Hacker News

The Firefox Dilemma

blog.tawhidhannan.co.uk

201–208 of 208 posts

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#201
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. I really dislike the firefox omnibar and that I can't set it to just be an address bar. I sometimes visit washingtonpost.com but not often enough that I have a bookmark, and every time firefox insists it should be wasingtonpost.com.co, which I must have visited at some point but it is not bookmarked and the suggestion never goes away (I have firefox set to clear history when exiting, but I tried to do a "clear now…

regarding your first point, I believe you can make the address bar behave like you want simply by Edit->Preferences->Uncheck 'Provide Search Suggestions' and removing a result from your address bar results with shift-delete might also be what you're missing

Thanks for the suggestions. Unchecking 'Provide Search Suggestions' didn't help and I already had 'Show search suggestions in address bar results' unchecked. Shift-delete didn't help either. I made a somewhat longer reply to the sibbling comment of your comment but it turned out I did have a sub-page of washingtonpost.com.co bookmarked and for some reason it was just completing to the domain name and not showing the star. Deleting that fixed the problem. I also found browser.urlbar.autoFill to make it stop changing what I type. So yay firefox configurability.

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#202
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might be because the browser history is limited by default: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1039372 Details on the ranking algorithm: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Tech/Places...

Thanks! That might be it. For future notice though, the answer in the first link is wrong; you want "places.history.expiration.current_max_pages", not "places.history.expiration.transient_current_max_pages". Apparently the max "pages" are automatically calculated by default- mine was around 160k, so my history only went back about 2.5 years. I've set it to the maximum value for a 32 bit integer, which I guess should…

They do it for performance reasons, but I've not noticed any slowdowns yet at least. Still - would be better if they had a limit on how long back they searched instead of actually deleting data. That would most likely be more work ofc.

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#203

1. I like firefox's omnibar/awesomebar more than chrome's. It seems to read my mind better [1]. It also have some features [2] I think most people are unaware of. 2. Firefox have bookmark tags. 3. Firefox scroll the tabs instead of compressing the width until they're unusable. (It's also possible to set the minimum tab-width) 4. It's much simpler to get ctrl-tab MRU behavior [3] in Firefox last time I checked. 5. Fir…

1. I really dislike the firefox omnibar and that I can't set it to just be an address bar. I sometimes visit washingtonpost.com but not often enough that I have a bookmark, and every time firefox insists it should be wasingtonpost.com.co, which I must have visited at some point but it is not bookmarked and the suggestion never goes away (I have firefox set to clear history when exiting, but I tried to do a "clear now…

"I really dislike the firefox omnibar and that I can't set it to just be an address bar."

Me too. I've hated that thing since it was first introduced.

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#204
post #197

1. I like firefox's omnibar/awesomebar more than chrome's. It seems to read my mind better [1]. It also have some features [2] I think most people are unaware of. 2. Firefox have bookmark tags. 3. Firefox scroll the tabs instead of compressing the width until they're unusable. (It's also possible to set the minimum tab-width) 4. It's much simpler to get ctrl-tab MRU behavior [3] in Firefox last time I checked. 5. Fir…

i wish i could prioritize the search suggestions in the search/addressbar: tabs first, then bookmarks, and only then history. or make three groups, and give me the top 3 tabs, top 3 bookmarks and top 3 history matches.

Not quite what you described and maybe you already know this, but you can prefix (or postfix) your query with %, *, or ^. This will restrict the results to tabs, bookmarks, or history, respectively.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-search-fire...

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#205
post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i wish i could prioritize the search suggestions in the search/addressbar: tabs first, then bookmarks, and only then history. or make three groups, and give me the top 3 tabs, top 3 bookmarks and top 3 history matches.

Not quite what you described and maybe you already know this, but you can prefix (or postfix) your query with %, *, or ^. This will restrict the results to tabs, bookmarks, or history, respectively. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-search-fire...

i didn't know that. thank you! that's going to be a huge help, because like some others here, i have hundreds of tabs open and am often searching for one that i knew i had already opened.

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#206
post #193
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not actually a terrible idea if it can be done without tracking. Thank you for disclosing. I'd quite like an RSS+reader view browser. At a guess, RSS+reader view+AMP could cover pretty substantial amounts of existing content.

It could be done entirely without external requests: the browser would be an amp interpreter, no need for the amp js as all. The hardest part is that amp probably isn't restrictive enough: you can still use a very large subset of HTML and CSS.

Very interesting thought. Probably enough HTML for tracking though right?

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#207
post #206
post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be done entirely without external requests: the browser would be an amp interpreter, no need for the amp js as all. The hardest part is that amp probably isn't restrictive enough: you can still use a very large subset of HTML and CSS.

Very interesting thought. Probably enough HTML for tracking though right?

> Probably enough HTML for tracking though right?

I'm not sure what you mean?

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox is never going to lose me as a user as long as the awesome Tree-style tabs extension - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta... is supported on it. It completely changed my browsing experience, and I cannot use any other browser except for quick, temporary browsing (like how one might use Notepad on Windows in a bind). I'd highly, highly recommend this extension to anyone who has never…

Looks like a ton of similar extensions exist for Chrome as well. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-outliner/eggk...

As @slavak mentions, Chrome APIs are far more hobbled and every tree-style implementation I've seen has been glaringly deficient in comparison to Tree-style-tabs on Firefox. TST should be the way all browsers handle tabs, especially considering that vertical screen real-estate is far more expensive. I've been using it for 6+ years and can't imagine browsing any other way.
Post reply on HN