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Pulse Browser – An experimental Firefox fork

pulsebrowser.app

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Re: Pulse Browser – An experimental Firefox fork

#21

Post by knok_off »

csande17 wrote: post #16
trickypr wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, I am a dev on Pulse Browser. I want to clarify our current development direction (I haven't significant updated the website recently). We have been moving further away from privacy and towards developing/iterating on features faster than Firefox is willing to, along with providing sane defaults. For example, we have been experimenting with a opera/vivaldi-like method of accessing Firefox's sidebar. Whilst you cou…

> We have been moving further away from privacy [...] I appreciate your honesty, but hearing this was enough for me to file your project into the "not touching with a ten-foot pole" bucket alongside the likes of Wave Browser.

I believe that they meant, changing focus. Which is not a bad thing. Once the majority of the privacy stuff is achieved what more is there to do without making it into Tor browser?

Re: Pulse Browser – An experimental Firefox fork

#22

Post by hnlmorg »

Existenceblinks wrote: post #7

Firefox is already fast in a lot of ways. For example, "Recalculate Style" is dead slow on Chrome compared to firefox. I don't know how but it's night and day (over a second difference for 10k+ nodes). Maybe something to do with https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/performance/bestprac... A better firefox would be a better Chrome that copies optimization technique from firefox. Because "better" means improving the…

> A better firefox would be a better Chrome that copies optimization technique from firefox. Because "better" means improving the one that 65% of users are already using .. if it's fixable.

I don’t want an internet dominated by only one web browser’s rendering engine. Not ever again thank you.

Re: Pulse Browser – An experimental Firefox fork

#24

Post by Zekio »

JonathanBeuys wrote: post #13

What I miss most in FireFox is better multiline script support in the dev console. The current solution to copy the whole script into the console every time you run it is pretty cumbersome. Also, when you opened the script from a file, ctrl+save should let you save it back with the same name. Not suggesting a name like "console-input-2022-11-13_9-36-47.js" every time.

i am almost positive i have used it recently when did it get removed?

Edit I am an idiot you said better not removed...

Re: Pulse Browser – An experimental Firefox fork

#25

Post by chrismonsanto »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #18
dartharva wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Hyper minimalistic UI"

I'm glad to see someone still has the courage to work on browsers - which is increasingly declared "infeasible". Well done. > We have been moving further away from privacy and towards But sorry, I literally stopped reading at that point. The only feature that people want and need from browsers, and the only reason to even glance twice at yet another Firefox fork is enhanced privacy and cast-iron control over what a b…

> The only feature that people want and need from browsers ... is enhanced privacy and cast-iron control over what a browser is doing. ... client web application firewalls, different, customisable jailing schemes, detailed easy to understand monitoring, file monitors, inviolable fine-grained per-io-device permissions, better Tor and IPFS integration

That's what you're interested in at least, I don't care about these features and if it was up to me the #1 priority for Firefox developers would be making desktop mode persistent by-site on Android

Re: Pulse Browser – An experimental Firefox fork

#26

Post by trickypr »

csande17 wrote: post #16
trickypr wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, I am a dev on Pulse Browser. I want to clarify our current development direction (I haven't significant updated the website recently). We have been moving further away from privacy and towards developing/iterating on features faster than Firefox is willing to, along with providing sane defaults. For example, we have been experimenting with a opera/vivaldi-like method of accessing Firefox's sidebar. Whilst you cou…

> We have been moving further away from privacy [...] I appreciate your honesty, but hearing this was enough for me to file your project into the "not touching with a ten-foot pole" bucket alongside the likes of Wave Browser.

I think you are miss interpreting me. I don't want to focus on privacy above all else. To do that well would compromise on the usability of the browser. For example, if I were to advertise it as "privacy focused", I would not feel comfortable unless I included strict anti-fingerprinting, which would break websites.

It is a balancing act, and I won't be collecting or selling your data, but I won't be competing with Librewolf or Tor for the "privacy" market either. However, at the bare minimum, we will be more "private" than Firefox by extent of including uBo and disabling Mozilla's non-critical telemetry by default.

Re: Pulse Browser – An experimental Firefox fork

#27

Post by trickypr »

talkingtab wrote: post #17

I would like to understand a bit more about this project. It is a fork of an open source git repository. It removes some features. There is some discussion in the comments about "exploring features". Are you presenting this as something for people to play with - download and throw away - or as something to depend on and use? "Pulse Browser" leads me to think the latter, but "experimental Firefox Fork", the former.

Currently it is in the "tech demo" phase. The only people I would recommend using this are people willing to contribute in some form. I would not recommend it as a daily driver hence the "alpha" tag on all the builds.

To be honest, the only part that I would recommend is our tooling that we use for soft-forking Firefox/Gecko, which is where we have the most outside testers and where I am focusing most of my upstream (mozilla-centeral) patches to improving.

Re: Pulse Browser – An experimental Firefox fork

#28

Post by brigandish »

Fix the terrible history page and I'll switch because it'll tell me that the dev team is prioritising the right things, existing, basic features over new, probably unwanted ones.

For a laugh, check out this bug[1] for the history page, extant since Firefox 11!, that means deletion is incredibly slow and tiresome. What makes me laugh even more is that history is stored in a SQLite database, meaning that deletion should be very easy and quick but they've decided to create some horrible extraction over the top that inevitably uses Javascript of some sort.

Just delete the stuff and refresh the page. Or don't, inform the user to close and reopen it themself, it would still be an improvement by a long way. Jesus wept, I know about Chesterton's Fence but how hard can this really be?

As this comment by a team committer shows, the direction of the product is wrongheaded and tells me all I need to know about why FF has fallen so far behind Chrome in market share:

> We understand this is still an issue, and we recognise that it is a pain point for people who do hit it. However, it likely involves a significant amount of non-trivial work to fix. At the moment our focus is on improving other areas of Firefox, and we don't have the time available to dedicate to this.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=734643

Re: Pulse Browser – An experimental Firefox fork

#29

Post by amadeuspagel »

brigandish wrote: post #28

Fix the terrible history page and I'll switch because it'll tell me that the dev team is prioritising the right things, existing, basic features over new, probably unwanted ones . For a laugh, check out this bug[1] for the history page, extant since Firefox 11!, that means deletion is incredibly slow and tiresome. What makes me laugh even more is that history is stored in a SQLite database, meaning that deletion shou…

Javascript? In my browser? It's more likely then you think.

Re: Pulse Browser – An experimental Firefox fork

#30

Post by dareiff »

brigandish wrote: post #28

Fix the terrible history page and I'll switch because it'll tell me that the dev team is prioritising the right things, existing, basic features over new, probably unwanted ones . For a laugh, check out this bug[1] for the history page, extant since Firefox 11!, that means deletion is incredibly slow and tiresome. What makes me laugh even more is that history is stored in a SQLite database, meaning that deletion shou…

Oddly enough, selective history deleting is absolutely awful in Safari (16.*?) as well.
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