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Why I use Firefox

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Re: Why I use Firefox

#261

Post by tmottabr »

rprospero wrote: post #228
jstanley wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People always say this but almost never are they able to give examples.

Concrete examples: The web interfaces for both Jitsi and Zoom fail to recognise my web camera. I've gone through the permissions settings a dozen times and Firefox says that it sees camera, but it only displays a black feed. Vivaldi correctly accesses the camera on both sites. imascientist.org.uk makes it "impossible" to sign up for outreach sessions under Firefox. The div with the sessions has a `max-width` paramete…

I just tested both sites from my default firefox profile.

zoom worked without problem.. both audio and video..

imascientist.org.uk i opened the registration page and it showed without problem buttons where in the end of the page as i would expect.

It look like it is something in your end and not with firefox..

Re: Why I use Firefox

#263

Post by crazygringo »

samatman wrote: post #258
crazygringo wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I can't read the ASCII encoding. It's gibberish. It tells me nothing about which site the article is from. It's unintelligible. You might as well not show anything at all. I can't understand why you think the underlying ASCII encoding should be used, instead of the Unicode domain that actually gets rendered in the browser's address bar. That makes as much sense as saying non-ASCII characters in the comments secti…

In the comments, UTF-8 is the encoding, so it makes sense to display it (although you'll notice that some characters are filtered out, emoji most of all). In a domain name, punycode is the encoding. The actual domain name, the one you'd need to run DNS and such, is what you see. Also, rendering it into unicode is a vector for attacks. So it's the wrong choice here, where no one wants to deal with the aggravation of k…

> The actual domain name, the one you'd need to run DNS and such, is what you see.

But it's not something we should see. It's terrible UX for the reasons I presented. I don't ever want to see the underlying gibberish in a context where I'm reading and commenting on the web.

This is a forum for discussing news articles from sites. Gibberish is not what you ever want to see.

And the idea of being a vector for attacks doesn't hold water. Yes it's true in a theoretical sense, but anything can be a vector for attacks. If the Unicode version of the domain name is safe enough for major browsers to display in the address bar, then it's safe enough to display to the even more tech-savvy HN readership.

(Also your comment seems to misunderstand the analogy between UTF-8 and Punycode. You say "UTF-8 is the encoding, so it makes sense to display it" -- but the point is HN doesn't display it. HN displays Unicode characters, not the underlying UTF-8 bytes. Which is the same way you want to display Unicode characters for a domain name, not the underlying Punycode bytes.)

Re: Why I use Firefox

#264

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

zahma wrote: post #19

I don't see why I would want to use anything else. Even if Chrome is marginally faster in an arbitrary benchmark test, I doubt I'd notice. And so far, I have no interoperability issues between Firefox on my laptop (macOS) and my iPhone (iOS), which runs Safari + Firefox Focus (because it's all the same webkit underneath). The add-on and plug-in marketplace is quite healthy, too. At the end of the day, I care about op…

"At the end of the day, I care about open-source software that doesn't model its business around capturing and manufacturing my data for export -- just the opposite."

Of course, that is exactly the model used by Mozilla. It exports search query data to Google for capture, by default, in return for payment.

"Thank goodness for Mozilla and all its collaborators."

Indeed, thank goodness for long-time Mozilla collaborator Google, LLC. Mozilla employees left to join Google beginning in 2005. They wrote Chrome.

Without Google's payments to Mozilla, who knows what might happen.

Re: Why I use Firefox

#265

Post by merecactus »

Ayesh wrote: post #18

I'm glad to see posts like this. Some of my favorite features not mentioned in the article: - User Styles: I can customize pretty much everything about the browser UI using CSS. - Containers: Shared history, form data, bookmarks,etc. But containerized cookies. - Separate search field next to the address bar.

In addition to all of the reasons so many have mentioned, my favorite reason is this setting which allows me to easily use my preferred fonts on all websites: Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above

De-selecting the box and specifying my preferred fonts is the absolute first setting I change on every Firefox installation.

Re: Why I use Firefox

#266

Post by [deleted] »

KronisLV wrote: post #239
logicprog wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That post's points about Mozilla's source of revenue and expenditure on their CEO are good, but the rest is a politically motivated hit job. They spend the first few sections establishing that Mozilla has a ton of revenue, and then the best examples of misspent money they can bring up are utter peanuts in comparison to the revenue they literally just established Mozilla has. $300,000 is nothing compared to $600,000,0…

> That post's points about Mozilla's source of revenue and expenditure on their CEO are good, but the rest is a politically motivated hit job. I don't dabble in US politics too much because I'm European, but it felt a bit odd to read the article and encounter the way it frames things. As if donating money to a bunch of organizations that care about trans issues, pro-choice, vaccine acceptance and a bunch of other soc…

[deleted]

Re: Why I use Firefox

#267

Post by stuff4ben »

bad_user wrote: post #194
stuff4ben wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brave is based on Chromium which contributes to the browser engine monopoly.

While I understand why that's a problem, at this point: 1. Firefox's marketshare is completely irrelevant for preventing Chrome's monopoly; 2. Activism doesn't work; 3. Firefox is funded almost entirely by Google's ads, Google can effectively kill it by just pulling the plug, which effectively means that they can't actually compete with Chrome if that means endangering the golden goose — wake me up when Firefox start…

> 1. Firefox's marketshare is completely irrelevant for preventing Chrome's monopoly;

That's why I use Firefox and will continue to do so.

> 2. Activism doesn't work;

Sure it does.

> 3. ...wake me up when Firefox starts blocking some ads in Google's search or on YouTube, out of the box ;-)

ublock origin is a click away. You do it once whenever you get a new machine and you pretty much forget about it.

Re: Why I use Firefox

#268

Post by jstanley »

ajorgensen wrote: post #240
jstanley wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People always say this but almost never are they able to give examples.

I unfortunately do not have a running list. The one that made me drop Firefox last time was the mermaid.js docs site. None of the sidebar navigation was clickable but only on Firefox, the same issue did not appear on Safari or Chrome. It appears they have since fixed that issue as I retested and it appears fine. The "give me examples" is sort of a moving target, anecdotally I have run into many more completely or par…

Is it this site? https://mermaid.js.org/intro/

It works fine for me.

Re: Why I use Firefox

#269

Post by samatman »

crazygringo wrote: post #263
samatman wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the comments, UTF-8 is the encoding, so it makes sense to display it (although you'll notice that some characters are filtered out, emoji most of all). In a domain name, punycode is the encoding. The actual domain name, the one you'd need to run DNS and such, is what you see. Also, rendering it into unicode is a vector for attacks. So it's the wrong choice here, where no one wants to deal with the aggravation of k…

> The actual domain name, the one you'd need to run DNS and such, is what you see. But it's not something we should see. It's terrible UX for the reasons I presented. I don't ever want to see the underlying gibberish in a context where I'm reading and commenting on the web. This is a forum for discussing news articles from sites. Gibberish is not what you ever want to see. And the idea of being a vector for attacks d…

> your comment seems to misunderstand the analogy

You're mistaking misunderstanding for disagreement.

We understand each other perfectly well, we simply disagree.

Re: Why I use Firefox

#270

Post by g9yuayon »

I don't know if it's just me or what, but even the vanilla version of FireFox feels slow in responding my mouse clicks. Occasionally FireFox stopped being responsive but didn't freeze. I'd have to kill the FireFox process. I ran into such bug often when using Netscape and the bug was never fixed, so it was quite surprising to me that I got to see exactly the same scenario on FireFox.
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