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Firefox Profilemaker

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11–20 of 53 posts

Re: Firefox Profilemaker

#11

I like it design wise, but like a lot of these "de-clutter" tools it defaults to disabling security features without warning and will break some sites while making most sites slower. Plus it ironically installs a bunch of browser addons. So if you hit next, next, next you'll lose: Google Safebrowsing (security), malware scan (security), DNS over HTTPS (security and sometimes functionality), Automatic Browser Updates,…

It's making trade-offs, and differently than the Mozilla defaults. Google Safebrowsing reduces privacy (not because of the content, but because it says "hi Google, I'm running Firefox at this IP address"), DNS over HTTPS happily sends all your DNS queries to Cloudflare (and since we're arguing over functionality, breaks some split-horizon DNS), Widevine is blatantly anti-user, third-party cookies are a privacy problem, referers are a privacy problem, ... oh, actually the rest of your list from there is all privacy issues.

Anyways, the people who made this would say that Mozilla's current defaults get 0/10 from them and are simply awful, and that using them means your browsing experience will be objectively worse and less private.

Re: Firefox Profilemaker

#12
post #4

So does this let me actually use the "multiple profiles" Firefox feature? I was always so confused by Firefox having "profiles" but apparently no interface for using or switching among them.

Use `firefox -ProfileManager --no-remote` to get the profile selection dialog on startup.

Re: Firefox Profilemaker

#14
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And on the other hand one of the biggest annoyances of the web - autoplaying videos - is enabled by default! Clearly shows that you cannot please everyone with your defaults, no matter how hard you try.

Afaik the way autoplay works is that if it is on, it does only autoplay videos without sound. This can be useful for looping video backgrounds, memes and such. If they want audio too, autoplay does not work (not even if you try to manually trigger it via js). In my eyes (browser-configurable) autoplay without sound is an acceptable use case. Autoplay with sound is not.

Autoplay with sound is a perfectly legitimate use case, but I agree with the status quo that it should not be allowed by default.

In general, the "not an acceptable use case" argument is almost always a harmful distraction - it angers people with legitimate use cases and that in turn gives fuel to those supporting it only for their own harmful use-cases. Call it what it is - a useful feature that happens to be commonly abused.

s/autoplay/cookies/g, etc.

Re: Firefox Profilemaker

#16
post #4

So does this let me actually use the "multiple profiles" Firefox feature? I was always so confused by Firefox having "profiles" but apparently no interface for using or switching among them.

Launch firefox with the -p flag and you'll have a profile interface.

Re: Firefox Profilemaker

#17
post #15

Nit: the preferred abbreviation is Fx or fx, instead of ff. See FAQ 8 on https://website-archive.mozilla.org/www.mozilla.org/firefox_...

No one can decide the preferred usage but the public. Through these two decades I hardly ever saw the Fx abbreviation in use.

Re: Firefox Profilemaker

#18
This is great but it's also enormously depressing that there is such a massive amount of crap you have to do to have a reasonably private/secure/frictionless web browser these days.

Re: Firefox Profilemaker

#20
post #15

Nit: the preferred abbreviation is Fx or fx, instead of ff. See FAQ 8 on https://website-archive.mozilla.org/www.mozilla.org/firefox_...

No one can decide the preferred usage but the public. Through these two decades I hardly ever saw the Fx abbreviation in use.

This is the first time I saw "Fx".
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