It's true. I have kept giving Firefox another chance over time but haven't been convinced. Recently, I tried Firefox again on Windows. And the experience is amazing indeed - faster, smoother, and with trackers blocking, very pleasant. And with strict protection, that's sort-of a builtin ad blocker. Something still feels off on MacOS even though the last version has been a massive improvement for MBP Retina.
Anecdote: I use it everyday at work on a 2015 MBP Retina, now on Catalina. No problems! What feels off for you?
Scrolling doesn’t elastically over scroll; it just hits a hard stop at the page boundaries
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…
you can try going to your profile and running: sqlite3 places.sqlite vacuum to see if that helps speed things up a bit. might not but it's free and safe(well as safe as anything can be i guess). to your other point if you want to check this out you can likely use an artifact build to compile firefox in under a min or so if the changes are only in the javascript frontend code and not the backend c++ code. (unsure wher…
Vacuum has no substantial impact here. It only knocked about 10% off my places.sqlite and mass deletion remains pathologically slow.
I just wish they had per-container proxy support. That would make me immediately switch to Firefox.
What's the use case for this? You can already configure different proxies to apply to different domains. The UX isn't great though, you have to use https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_auto-config
Not GP, but it seems like a great idea to me. Using different proxies you can have a different IP address for each profile, making tracking more difficult.
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.
They removed GA from the startup pages, and you can go straight from those to the telemetry settings (it even prompts you to do so on first launch iirc).
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…
> "and deletion of swaths of entries is impossible as it makes the history manager UI hang for many minutes or even hours (=essentially I always kill Firefox when I do this by mistake). I suspect the GUI constructs a view of the sqlite db using single GUI objects tied to single DB entries and therefore has maximum overhead." I've not probed this deeply, but I have encountered it and can confirm it's a problem. To giv…
Firefox is deleting each entry individually. I tried to contribute a patch with a short-circuit when you select all and hit delete, but the places code was in the middle of a refactoring, and as always with browsers it was way more complicated than my patch, so it wasn't accepted.
About once a week Firefox bans me from opening new tabs until I reboot it for an update. It promises to return my existing tabs but it never has. For this reason I don't trust it when I'm doing meaningful work.
I've never had this happen personally. What OS is this? I use Firefox on OSX installed through Homebrew, so I have to manually update it with brew. Firefox has never asked me to update.
Ubuntu bionic. Latest default Firefox without any special enterprise stuff or whatnot.
It happens when you update firefox out from under itself. In other words, don't apply apt updates for firefox until you're ready to restart it.
I literally run my browser in containers to achieve this. I still trust that more than letting the browser manage it. I call it ultra-private mode :)
But modern tracking methods go far beyond whether not you’re actually logged into some site, I’m not sure how this is much of an improvement, your IP remains the same, your browser fingerprint is probably similar enough, if not identical, for them to track you regardless of whether you’re logged in. You only have to be logged in once on the machine from one container for all the other sites you visit in other contain…
> your IP remains the same
Not necessarily, e.g. you could use VPNs for some containers or randomize the ipv6 suffix.
> it really doesn't look like an Window/Linux app either) I guess this is a subjective matter because to my eye, it looks fantastic on Windows, matching the Windows 10 dark theme very well. The active tab highlight looks like the open app highlights in my top-docked Windows taskbar. And the Firefox Container color-bars look great below that. Its sharp edges are a match for the sharp look of Windows. To me, Chrome is…
The new Edge based on Chromium is full of rounded edges (heh). Microsoft has plans to make Windows' UI round (again).
Yep. Firefox doesn’t really look and play like a Fluent design app. This look worked well for Windows 8-10 but it’ll look more and more out of place as time goes on now. Would be nice to see an UI refresh for Windows using WinUI for the chrome. I was never a big fan of HTML/CSS as their chrome because this also guarantees we’ll never have a cross platform browser in a native user interface.