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Firefox Private Browsing mode upgrade

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Firefox Private Browsing mode upgrade

#291

Post by BenjiWiebe »

andrepd wrote: post #41
stoplying1 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it still have the cursed text with it that says "going away in (some month soon)". It's so stupid and confusing and baffling that I want to rage quit Firefox with this as the absolute last straw. Like wtf, you're gonna take back my color in a few months? Just pull the upsell for it? Why the hell am I having to wonder about any of this? Why on God's green earth was this done instead of spending any effort getting…

> instead of spending any effort getting a SINGLE bit of unity among the Bookmarks, Downloads and Add-ons panels One thing I'd actually like is a reasonably powerful history browser/manager. I want to look for websites I visited in a custom time period, how many times I visited a website last month, or in January, or whatever. It's all very poor as it stands: a very simple interface with no power-features whatsover,…

I believe the history file is a SQLite database. I suppose you could maybe do something with that directly.

Re: Firefox Private Browsing mode upgrade

#292

Post by BenjiWiebe »

dkdmso wrote: post #141
Aardwolf wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Windows 3.11 you could choose all the colors you wanted for every part of the window rendering (and it wasn't called "limited edition" or whatever there either, and naming it limited edition in FF as in the image caption in the article doesn't inspire confidence to rely on this feature long term). Nothing recent comes close to that, even Linux desktops make it hard to choose colors or how visible your scrollbars a…

KDE definitely still lets you theme like crazy, I believe including the scroll bar settings The CSS comment sounds like Gnome. I used Gnome for fifteen years and got tired of what you're complaining about and switched to KDE eight or nine months ago and haven't looked back

That's one thing I really like about KDE - endless customizability. I actually end up using a lot of the defaults anyways.

Re: Firefox Private Browsing mode upgrade

#293

Post by GekkePrutser »

stoplying1 wrote: post #29
hbn wrote: post #9

> Last year we launched Firefox Colorways, a new desktop feature that allowed our users to express their most authentic selves and bring joy while browsing the web > “‘Independent Voices’ are the voices of the past and present that create a better future,” said Keely Alexis. “I chose this [analogy] as my inspiration for the collaboration because it feels authentic to me but it also aligns with Firefox and the vision…

Does it still have the cursed text with it that says "going away in (some month soon)". It's so stupid and confusing and baffling that I want to rage quit Firefox with this as the absolute last straw. Like wtf, you're gonna take back my color in a few months? Just pull the upsell for it? Why the hell am I having to wonder about any of this? Why on God's green earth was this done instead of spending any effort getting…

Indeed, I also don't even understand why they think colorways is even worth looking at when they're going to remove it anyway.

I just don't get the point. Have a feature or not. But not this temporary stuff. I suppose they think doing a "killed by Google" will make them as popular as chrome again :)

Re: Firefox Private Browsing mode upgrade

#294

Post by GekkePrutser »

forsythe_ wrote: post #49
dylan604 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why on God's green earth was this done instead of You are not alone. I'm starting to think something is wrong with me because I don't give an iota of a damn about any of this. I have watched people just get sucked into the rabbit hole of browsing for themes for the their browser while accomplishing exactly nothing after being overwhelmed and paralyzed by the choices. (Kinda like trying to find something to watch on…

I think the entire point is that Mozilla has depended on people "like you" to stay relevant for years and knows that's not a great long-term growth strategy compared to appealing to the general populace who cares about things like customizable themes.

So alienating their last supporters and promoters will get them back in the mainstream? How will that work?

And Firefox has always had themes. Real themes. Colorways is just some coloring and it's not even staying around for these supposed mainstream users to enjoy

Re: Firefox Private Browsing mode upgrade

#295

Post by GekkePrutser »

soundnote wrote: post #247
dylan604 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why on God's green earth was this done instead of You are not alone. I'm starting to think something is wrong with me because I don't give an iota of a damn about any of this. I have watched people just get sucked into the rabbit hole of browsing for themes for the their browser while accomplishing exactly nothing after being overwhelmed and paralyzed by the choices. (Kinda like trying to find something to watch on…

The moronic thing about these new "colorways" is that the company still refuses the sane default: Mostly grayish or very, very lightly tinted UI with a decently dark, contrasting tab bar. All these new themes have a lot of color outside the tab bar, but credit to Mozilla that the "soft" ones still manage more experienced contrast than their white-on-white abomination of a light theme.

White on white is what chrome uses so they think that's fashionable.

They don't understand people love Firefox because it's not Chrome. Not because it's not Chrome enough.

Re: Firefox Private Browsing mode upgrade

#296

Post by GekkePrutser »

tweetle_beetle wrote: post #231
bityard wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would rather Mozilla put their time and money into actually improving on the things they _used to_ to better than Chrome and IE, like building a vibrant and diverse community, listening to their users, focusing on giving the user control over their own browsing experience, and being first to market with privacy features. It feels to me like they just ran out of either the will or the engineers to do the hard innova…

> ... listening to their users, focusing on giving the user control over their own browsing experience ... To play devil's advocate, that may well be exactly what they're doing. I've always used Firefox, but I'm aware that I'm not a typical user andmy interests likely don't align with mass adaoption. I've said it before when Firefox has released new features that the HN crowd aren't interested in - there's not enough…

> I don't have access to statistics to qualify whether or not this is the case and contribute to making it harder to evaluate by turning off telemetry and never using Google ads, so I can't exactly complain.

Yes you can complain. They should be well aware that their remaining userbase is very averse to telemetry.

If anything the companies going all-in on telemetry and A-B testing are making ever worse products. Like Microsoft with their Teams that gets slower and more confusing every month.

> And if this is a quicker way to grow adoption then it's a good thing in the long term.

What growth? I only see a decline. All they succeed at is alienating the users that were still using it. Not gaining new ones.

Re: Firefox Private Browsing mode upgrade

#297

Post by insanitybit »

hayst4ck wrote: post #225

I am extremely surprised by all the negative Firefox sentiment here. I switched from Chrome as soon as manifest v3 was announced and I have been almost completely happy with it. In all the ways I'm unhappy with it, chrome is even worse.

Because we all want to use Firefox. No one wants to use Google's browser. Firefox is incredibly important software and it has squandered billions of dollars and a massive market lead. The CEO should be removed immediately and someone who actually believes in and understands the mission should be placed there.

Re: Firefox Private Browsing mode upgrade

#298

Post by GekkePrutser »

dkdmso wrote: post #141
Aardwolf wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Windows 3.11 you could choose all the colors you wanted for every part of the window rendering (and it wasn't called "limited edition" or whatever there either, and naming it limited edition in FF as in the image caption in the article doesn't inspire confidence to rely on this feature long term). Nothing recent comes close to that, even Linux desktops make it hard to choose colors or how visible your scrollbars a…

KDE definitely still lets you theme like crazy, I believe including the scroll bar settings The CSS comment sounds like Gnome. I used Gnome for fifteen years and got tired of what you're complaining about and switched to KDE eight or nine months ago and haven't looked back

KDE can be completely transformed by themes and they've also just introduced a choice of accent color for the default Breeze theme. A bit similar to what macOS has.

I really love that about KDE, the configurability.

Re: Firefox Private Browsing mode upgrade

#299

Post by insanitybit »

standup wrote: post #7

The "privacy" provided by so-called private browsing mode is just a smokescreen considering how much device fingerprinting is going on. And widespread surveillance of the Internet backbone not just by intelligence agencies but now private organisations like Team Cymru. It would be better if we spent the resources on a next generation anonymity network to replace Tor, or some kind of alternative data transport like ra…

Brave has a TOR mode and Brave actually runs and contributes to TOR. I honestly think it's the only browser that's doing interesting, novel things to improve web browser tech anymore.

Re: Firefox Private Browsing mode upgrade

#300

Post by 93po »

NayamAmarshe wrote: post #44
marcodiego wrote: post #12

I have to repost it aagain: Firefox: the last remaining mostly independent, maintained and reasonably popular browser. Even if it were inferior in any aspect to other options, I'd still use it for the above mentioned reasons.

The truth is, people using Firefox just to 'stick it to the big bad corpo' is getting us nowhere. Firefox is losing not because of Chrome but because of its own incompetence or inability to keep the users happy. Firefox is losing userbase a lot faster than some other browsers are gaining it, is that Firefox users' fault or Firefox's? I use Firefox because I think the sync service it provides is great and that some of…

> is that Firefox users' fault or Firefox's?

Judging by the massive amount of Google Chrome advertising I see literally everywhere, including billboards and the sides of buildings, I assume it's Google's fault

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