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Using Firefox for a faster, calmer and distraction-free internet

marko.fyi

251–260 of 374 posts

Re: Using Firefox for a faster, calmer and distraction-free internet

#251
post #18

I recently ditched both Chrome and Firefox. Now super happy with Safari.

How do you get by without extensions? The extension "store" (now part of the App Store) isn't searchable, and among the available extensions, which are very few, most are junkware.

The only extensions I need are an adblocker (Wipr, 1Blocker) and 1Password.

Re: Using Firefox for a faster, calmer and distraction-free internet

#252

Stop sending my data to Google ( https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/11658588961766604... ) and make Firefox fast on Linux (minimum as Chrome) - reason't why I'm not use Fox anymore.

off topic, is it common to twitter this way? Wouldn't a blog post be more efficient than multiple tweets ( that are meant to be read independently? )

Re: Using Firefox for a faster, calmer and distraction-free internet

#253
post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also had the same desire as you to keep my firefox history for as long as possible. It's especially great for auto-completion of previously visited websites. My places.sqlite file is several years old and has moved across several machines, it is 47MB. I can't say I've experienced the same lag you're describing. At least using the firefox url bar ( where auto-completions show up ) I found it to be pretty quick. The…

Make a copy of your profile (to preserve your history) then in Firefox's Show All History window, search for a site that has thousands of visits, select them all, then press delete. Firefox will start burning a few CPU cores and lock up for a long time, every time.

That might very well be performing poorly. But I interpreted the OP to talk about usability of viewing all the previous history. My goal is to never delete my firefox "sites visited" history so I can refer to it back later. So naturally I've never experienced the problem you're describing.

Re: Using Firefox for a faster, calmer and distraction-free internet

#255
Echoing the sentiment for Brave Browser as well. It's been great as a faster alternative to Chrome so far. Haven't actually used Brave Rewards, but it's nice that it at least offers some remuneration for personalized ads.

Despite years of trying to use Firefox as my default browser, as a direct alternative to Chrome, it's never been as performant and almost always somehow clunky and reminiscent of 2000's browser bloat. I did reinstall Firefox very recently and was surprised that it was even faster than Brave Browser for non-cached page loads.

However, for some benign reason I cannot resize browser windows at all using Firefox, and it seems I'm far from alone after searching for solutions online. At least there's more browser parity now in 2019/2020 onwards.

Re: Using Firefox for a faster, calmer and distraction-free internet

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet these days facebook will be using IP tracking anyway, it won’t matter whether you’re logged in or not, in the other containers, if you’re just logged in once, they will know what sites you’re visiting, your browser fingerprint easily identify as you, even if you’re not logged into Facebook in those containers.

Ip tracking is worthless. Most people have half a dozen devices. I was actually shocked recently that I have 22 devices on my network. Then think about a relatively small business. There could be hundreds of devices. All from the same ip

You can combine IP address with fingerprint built from WebGL video card information, fonts list and rendering details, OS name, CPU type, memory size (yes, browser provides this) and screen resolution.

Re: Using Firefox for a faster, calmer and distraction-free internet

#257

No, you make it function properly before I consider “[giving] it a chance”. Firefox is ridden with decade-old compliance bugs, and is generally a pain to write applications and documents for. That's just part of why web applications and documents work worse in Firefox than they do in Chromium. Mozilla should derive from Chromium, if they want to actually deliver a web browser worth choosing. They can even fight their…

Create a browser monoculture just to satisfy webdevs who are too lazy or shitty at their job to support two(2)! whole browsers? Yeah no. If Mozilla made Firefox another chromium-derivative, it would become pointless to me. If you want to use a chromium browser, you have plenty of other options. Firefox is an option for the rest of us.

> Create a browser monoculture just to satisfy webdevs who are too lazy or shitty at their job to support two(2)!

I don't see why you have to be so nasty. I'm not lazy, nor bad at my job. Firefox has unique failures in standard compliance and the function of APIs. It's not just a matter of "supporting two browsers", it's a matter of working around the unique deficiencies of Firefox, for which there rarely exist equivalents in Chromium. For example, for the longest time, getBoundingClientRect and getBBox do not work properly for elements inside an SVG.

Still today Firefox misuses 1/60 unit fixpoint numbers for SVG geometry, which means that if you scale a element larger than the geometry in the , it will be positioned incorrectly and/or misshapen; they could keep their fixpoints and still implement SVG correctly, but they instead just leave the bugs. There is little evidence that this follows any performance necessity, as Chromium and IE manage to render SVGs on the CPU considerably faster than Firefox does, while using floats in this role; Firefox barely runs properly on no-FPU computers anyway.

So shame on you for casting aspersions on web developers for not supporting this unpopular, IE-quality Netscape fork as easily as they support Chromium.

Re: Using Firefox for a faster, calmer and distraction-free internet

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem of Brave is that at heart it's still from an advertising company, no matter how nice they come across. Advertising is inherently at odds with productivity (ads waste your time) and potentially privacy (for better ad targeting), so I wouldn't recommend it. Under the hood it's just a reskinned Chromium so the battery life & performance concerns remain.

This and other accusations against Brave came up in the last Firefox thread too. Can you provide a link?

If you check out Brave’s own website or Wikipedia page their whole model is to block ads and replace them with their own advertising network based on a crypto currency which allows you to earn it while you browse and see their ads.

They are an advertising company at heart.

Re: Using Firefox for a faster, calmer and distraction-free internet

#259
post #223

The only drawback I have with FF nowadays is history management. I have enabled 'infinite history' (do not delete old history, ever) so I can keep a journal of what I've visited when. The history, as large as it might turn out, is just a few MB of an sqlite3 database (places.sql) -- problematic is the management of it using the Firefox UI. Searching is laggy and deletion of swaths of entries is impossible as it makes…

At least Firefox gives proper suggestions from history when typing in addresses. Chrome is way off, as if it wants you to search in google instead.

Yes, I also notice that I often don't have to go to Google because the page I need is in the dropdown. Suggestions in FF work awesome.

Re: Using Firefox for a faster, calmer and distraction-free internet

#260
post #102

I am as happy as I could get with Firefox except for the native tab-switching Among opened tabs. Tab search is done by typing % in the address bar followed by a keyword to search among opened tabs. - Ctr+L to get in the address bar - Shift+6 to type % - space, - type your keywords. My fingers, especially the pinky just cannot do this, particularly switching between Ctrl and Shift. Also, you have to release Shift othe…

A solution that works for me in all application is remapping keyboard, there are no major keyboard shortcuts I use that use Alt so what I did is this

- remap Left Alt to Ctrl

- remap Windows/Meta btn to Alt

- I also set CapsLock as Esc

So all my shortcuts, in apps, DE and IDE are suiper comfortable for me though this could suck if you have to work on a different person computer.

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