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How to Firefox

kau.sh

311–320 of 505 posts

Re: How to Firefox

#311
Having tested uMatrix and uBlock Origin for years, and having tried many other Firefox extensions, IMO the best Firefox advantage is neither of those nor any other extension. It is a rarely discussed about:config option called

network.dns.forceResolve

Chrome desktop also has something like this, but it's a command-line option. Firefox OTOH allows one to select a global domain-to-IP mapping while the browser is running.

uMatrix and uBlock are IMHO designed for graphical browsers and the graphical www. For me, graphics are secondary, not a priority. I can get better (easier) control over HTTP requests and real-time transparency into TLS traffic through a forward proxy.

Firefox is still massive overkill for me. Ridiculously large and complicated. No doubt there are people who are comfortable and pleased with this sort of complexity. Glad they like it, but I am not one of those people.

Unlike Chromium or Firefox the relatively small and simple software I use to extract information from the web can be compiled in seconds on inexpensive hardware. The speeds of "no-browser" (HTTP generator plus TCP client) or the text-only browser I use easily beat any graphical, Javascript-running browser. Better control over HTTP headers, cookies and real-time, configurable logging. Not only that but I can process large, catenated HTML files that make the complex, popular browsers stall and choke.

If the goal is to achieve some customised graphical representation of a complex website, I think uBlock Origin and uMatrix are unmatched. But if the goal is "blocking", i.e., only making the HTTP requests that the user intends, and controlling the content of those requests, without regard for graphics, then I think I do better with the foward proxy.

Re: How to Firefox

#312

'Reader view'! I use it on a daily basis. Don't know if this is standard for any browser now, FF is my main browser since I left Opera... https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clu...

Chrome has it, but it's hidden in menus. Android has it as an OS feature with a really unintuitive interface. It also fails the first time you try to read any page, but works the second time... It's clearly not something they want you to use.

Re: How to Firefox

#313

'Reader view'! I use it on a daily basis. Don't know if this is standard for any browser now, FF is my main browser since I left Opera... https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clu...

[deleted]

Re: How to Firefox

#314

'Reader view'! I use it on a daily basis. Don't know if this is standard for any browser now, FF is my main browser since I left Opera... https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clu...

Chrome has it, but it's hidden in menus. Android has it as an OS feature with a really unintuitive interface. It also fails the first time you try to read any page, but works the second time... It's clearly not something they want you to use.

True. Firefox's reader view is a one-click button in the address bar, whereas Chrome's is buried in the application menu > More tools > Reading mode. And even then, Chrome only shows the reader view in a narrow sidebar, leaving the messy page open.

Re: How to Firefox

#315
To this day Firefox refuses to let me use credit card autofill on Android. I know this feature exists and I suspect it's locked to some geographical regions. It pisses me off to be a second class citizen on the same software as my American counsins. The feature is present on desktop, just not mobile.

Re: How to Firefox

#316
post #293

I tried Multi-Account Containers to try isolate my work from my personal but it just wasn't good enough. History, bookmarks, passwords and plugins were all shared. Do I really need twitch emotes and every personal password on my work environment? No. What I found as a solution was `about:profiles` and creating a separate profile with a distinct theme to tell the envs apart, and to sync I had to add a different Firefo…

Mozilla shipped an easier-to-use profile manager in Firefox 138. Here are instructions for enabling it:

https://allthings.how/use-the-new-updated-profile-manager-in...

Re: How to Firefox

#318
I wish Firefox wasn't so insecure.

On Android, although a built-in isolatedProcess API [1] is available for them to use, there is no sandboxing. No sandboxing on the web in 2025 (!!!). This has been an issue for so many years, yet Mozilla refuses to address it [2]. Chromium does do proper sandboxing on Android, and additionally restricts what syscalls a process can access. Other alternatives, such as Vanadium have even stronger sandbox implementations [3]

On desktop, it's a similar story. Site isolation has had numerous bad issues that haven't been fixed for many years [4][5][6], and especially the Linux builds have had bad sandbox escape vulnerabilities that Chromium is not susceptible to. This is mostly due to architectural differences, like [7] and [8].

The idea of someone being able to take over your computer by just visiting a site is scary. It's beyond me why Mozilla does not prioritise security over yet another sidequest that will slowly bankrupt them.

[1] https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/manifest/service-...

[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1565196

[3] https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing

[4] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1505832

[5] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1484019

[6] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1707955

[7] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1653444

[8] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1322426

Re: How to Firefox

#319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox's "answer" to profiles is to run essentially two (or more) copies of the browser rather than only copying the profile-specific parts of each profile. This leads to a lot of wasted CPU cycles and RAM and is a very suboptimal solution compared to what Chromium and Safari do these days, not to mention that the ability to create and switch profiles is not included in the UI by default and requires an extension to…

The new profile manager has already been enabled for most users. If you don't see it in the main menu yet, type `about:config` into the address bar and toggle `browser.profiles.enabled`.

I just did this and it doesn't see the multiple profiles I've been using for years through about:profile. Strange.

Re: How to Firefox

#320
post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it just doesn’t feel as smooth as Chrome Because it isn't. https://arewefastyet.com/win11/benchmarks/overview?numDays=6...

Which of those tests do you feel best measures smoothness?

All of them, I guess. I don't/won't use FF anyway, so...
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