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Waterfox Browser

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Re: Waterfox Browser

#51

Post by tuesdayrain »

bscphil wrote: post #38
godelski wrote: post #32

> Waterfox does not collect ANY telemetry, meaning you don't have to worry about any tracking or usage information about what you do inside YOUR browser. This is woefully uninformed or malicious. There's a lot of tracking that is out of your hands. Such as canvas fingerprinting. Even sending back 0's (like tor does) doesn't prevent fingerprinting. In either case I lost confidence for the browser just by reading what…

It's not worded precisely, but I believe what they have in mind is tracking performed without prior consent by the browser author. Obviously if you don't block tracking scripts that doesn't protect you from websites that want to track you, but that's not the point of the statement.

> It's not worded precisely, but I believe what they have in mind is tracking performed without prior consent by the browser author.

That was my interpretation. If I tell someone "I'm not collecting any data on you, so you don't have to worry about being tracked", it would be odd for them to accuse me of lying or being incompetent since obviously the government is tracking them.

Re: Waterfox Browser

#52

Post by bscphil »

drilldrive wrote: post #28
ravenstine wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess if someone really needs to use a legacy extension, it's a good thing that it's around, but I'm personally glad that XUL is dead both from a developer standpoint and as a user.

I am glad Mozilla made the much needed change and don't have long-term problems with Mozilla other than perhaps lack of trust. I did not like how Mozilla made the swift change with little announcement for long-term add-ons though, particularly making the change right after allowing for multi-processing.

My recollection of the change is that they did announce it well in advance, but left many of the needed replacement APIs missing or broken until it was far too late for many developers to make the switch before XUL got deprecated. (We're still feeling the effects of the lacking WebExtenions APIs, actually.)

Re: Waterfox Browser

#53

Post by ronjouch »

bscphil wrote: post #48
ronjouch wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "I'm still waiting for a way to hide the tab bar which is a privileged UI feature now" userChrome.css to the rescue: - Tree Style Tab's wiki offers tips to do exactly that: https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-fo... . - Or you can combine the address and tab bar: https://github.com/rstacruz/firefox-stealthfox If none is to your exact taste, https://www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/ may help.

That's the correct solution for now, but we can only hope Mozilla won't disable the ability to use these files. They're disabled by default in FF 69: https://www.ghacks.net/2019/05/24/firefox-69-userchrome-css-... And the key to reenable them has legacy in the name: toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets

Thanks for pointing that out. I'm worried too:

- At first, the discussion on bugzilla [1] is reasonable: user stylesheets off by default for performance, and there's even backward compat code enabling the pref during Firefox 68 if you are using them. All good...

- ... but then comes this legacy in the pref name :-| :-| :-|

I hope Mozilla keeps the feature alive, it's appreciated by many "power" users.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1541233

EDIT good news: re-reading recent comments, in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1541233#c61 , Florian Quèze (mozilla dev) affirms: "the word 'legacy' was used in the preference name to avoid giving the impression that with this new preference we are adding a new customization feature. I'm not aware of any plan to drop support for these files".

Re: Waterfox Browser

#54

Post by flukus »

ravenstine wrote: post #7
gruez wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK the main selling point is xul (legacy) extension support.

I guess if someone really needs to use a legacy extension, it's a good thing that it's around, but I'm personally glad that XUL is dead both from a developer standpoint and as a user.

I'm still waiting for a working vertical tabs extension that doesn't leave the tab bar across the top wasting space. Dumping XUL is why it's hard to see firefox as a viable browser.

Re: Waterfox Browser

#55

Post by bscphil »

ronjouch wrote: post #53
bscphil wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the correct solution for now, but we can only hope Mozilla won't disable the ability to use these files. They're disabled by default in FF 69: https://www.ghacks.net/2019/05/24/firefox-69-userchrome-css-... And the key to reenable them has legacy in the name: toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets

Thanks for pointing that out. I'm worried too: - At first, the discussion on bugzilla [1] is reasonable: user stylesheets off by default for performance, and there's even backward compat code enabling the pref during Firefox 68 if you are using them. All good... - ... but then comes this legacy in the pref name :-| :-| :-| I hope Mozilla keeps the feature alive, it's appreciated by many "power" users. [1] https://bug…

That is good news, thanks.

Re: Waterfox Browser

#56

Post by nieve »

smacktoward wrote: post #9
ravenstine wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess if someone really needs to use a legacy extension, it's a good thing that it's around, but I'm personally glad that XUL is dead both from a developer standpoint and as a user.

Yeah, projects like this give me the heebie-jeebies, to be honest. NPAPI and XUL were discontinued for really good reasons. Some users say they still want them, but that's because (1) people hate change, even when it's good for them and (2) they don't really appreciate all the security baggage those old APIs were lugging around with them. Projects that assure those users that they can keep on trucking with their old…

http://www.xuldev.org/scrapbook/ https://github.com/danny0838/firefox-scrapbook/wiki/Intro

There's zero hope of implementing something like the unfortunately named Scrapbook Plus & Scrapbook X research addons. In-browser editing & powerful manipulation, full text search within saved pages, direct access to the saved archives, the sidebar, the specialized capture options and quite a bit more require features (XUL-based and otherwise) that Mozilla won't implement. It's the biggest thing keeping me on Waterfox beyond Mozilla continual slide into sleaziness on privacy and afaik no browser not based on pre-quantum firefox supports anything like it.

Beyond research or archiving pages I think will disappear If I want to yank the content from posts across five sites, clean it up quickly, merge it into a single document and export it for conversion with calibre it's trivial with Scrapbook X and a pain with anything else I've tried. If I want to archive everything that I look at while digging into a topic or site I just turn on auto-save and start browsing. I'm fairly certain having no replacement for a major part of my workflow & browsing habits doesn't mean that I'm anti-security* or I'm scared, but that Mozilla no longer supports the tools I need. I'm grateful that Waterfox does.

*It's almost a hobby: Firejail, uMatrix & NoScript in paranoid mode, rejecting all cookies by default & extensive use of containers, different vpn connections and separate profiles for different kinds of browsing, etc.

Re: Waterfox Browser

#58

Post by itslennysfault »

sanxiyn wrote: post #39
cbsks wrote: post #29

Why does it need to send your OS and browser version to check for updates? Couldn't it just look up whatever the latest versions are?

Well, I guess you can check for update without disclosing OS, but since binaries differ between OS you need to disclose OS to actually download the update. Browser version is not necessary, but sending browser version allows serving smaller binary diff instead of full binary, which Firefox actually does.

No way! Just download the binary for every OS then only install the one for your OS and delete the rest (/s)

Re: Waterfox Browser

#59

Post by unicornporn »

So, here's a thing to work on... This is what I did:

I went to the landing page and though: sounds good. But version 56? When was this last updated? Firefox is long beyond 56. Went to the "releases" page and found nothing about when 56.2.10 was released. Had to go to their Twitter account to find out it's dated 2019-05-20.

I would also recommend renaming the "releases" page to "download" if you wish to reach beyond the geek pool.

EDIT: release dates are also in the blog...

Re: Waterfox Browser

#60

Post by drilldrive »

bscphil wrote: post #52
drilldrive wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am glad Mozilla made the much needed change and don't have long-term problems with Mozilla other than perhaps lack of trust. I did not like how Mozilla made the swift change with little announcement for long-term add-ons though, particularly making the change right after allowing for multi-processing.

My recollection of the change is that they did announce it well in advance, but left many of the needed replacement APIs missing or broken until it was far too late for many developers to make the switch before XUL got deprecated. (We're still feeling the effects of the lacking WebExtenions APIs, actually.)

It was a bit of both as I see it. Tab-groups developer quit soon after rewriting the add-on to fit the multi-processing update (which was announced several years in advance I believe, and was anticipated nonetheless), and then right after Mozilla announced the depreciation of XUL in favor of WebExtensions in a year's time, forcing another rewrite and wouldn't be fully functional until the replacement API's are developed.

Besides, that replacement API's haven't even now been fully developed points all the same to Mozilla forcing WebExtensions much too quick, as waiting more would have fixed this problem from occurring.

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