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Pulse Browser – An experimental Firefox fork

pulsebrowser.app

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Re: Pulse Browser – An experimental Firefox fork

#101

Post by TexanFeller »

chironjit wrote: post #45

Hey, just wanted to say great work. I'm excited for innovation of a non-chrome engine and am gonna give it a try. My 2 biggest beef with Firefox is website compatibility and dead tabs. For item 1, certain sites don't work with Firefox when they do with Chrome. This can happen even in sites of industries that claim to want privacy / decentralisation / anti-monopoly. Some of these are government websites. Sometimes, we…

> certain sites don't work with Firefox when they do with Chrome

Despite most web devs only really supporting and testing in Chrome, aside from Google sites which deliberately sabotage FF compatibility, I find the opposite to be true more frequently. I can't count the number of times a site had not been working for my wife in Chrome and I tell her "try it in FF", and it works. I'm a full time FF user at home and have basically zero compatibility issues. I only use Chrome at work because of a few poorly implemented mandatory tools that exclude FF.

Re: Pulse Browser – An experimental Firefox fork

#102

Post by toastal »

solarkraft wrote: post #73
toastal wrote: post #59

Reasons LibreWolf ( https://librewolf.net/ ) is more interesting: • more mature • more installation options • hosted on an open-core forge, GitLab, instead of a proprietary, closed-source one, GitHub • open-source communications preferred, Matrix/Gitter, instead of proprietary, closed-source communications, Discord • website has a lot more information

Last time I checked it was incompatible with most half-advanced JavaScript apps by default. Not what I'm looking for.

'Incompatible' is one way to put it. Privacy and security is set to the most restrictive by defaults Firefox offers (more in line with Tor) and users are supposed to opt into every feature that may compromise those ideals. Honestly it's helped me in some cases: spoofing its user agent, I can actually use Slack in a tab and if I disable it Slack will report I'm using an unsupported browser and block access to the chat.

Re: Pulse Browser – An experimental Firefox fork

#103

Post by toastal »

pluc wrote: post #79
toastal wrote: post #59

Reasons LibreWolf ( https://librewolf.net/ ) is more interesting: • more mature • more installation options • hosted on an open-core forge, GitLab, instead of a proprietary, closed-source one, GitHub • open-source communications preferred, Matrix/Gitter, instead of proprietary, closed-source communications, Discord • website has a lot more information

Plenty of obscure alternatives: LibreWolf, IceWeasel, IceCat, WaterFox, PaleMoon or just ArkenFox.

Many of these aren't trying to advertise as particularly private with uBlock built-in as a feature.

Re: Pulse Browser – An experimental Firefox fork

#104

Post by toastal »

solarkraft wrote: post #74
neodymiumphish wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be huge for me. I can't really move away from Edge for productivity/work use cases until I have vertical tabs to a comparable usability in another browser.

I don't know how you can deal with just vertical tabs. Sidebery (FF extension) offers tree tabs and it's really cool.

I thought Tree Style Tab was the preferred Fx add-on.

Re: Pulse Browser – An experimental Firefox fork

#105

Post by kitsunesoba »

GeckoEidechse wrote: post #34
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…

Currently the 3rd most requested feature on Mozilla Connect is native vertical tabs: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/native-vertical-tabs-li... Any chance we could see something like this in Pulse Browser or is that something that just requires touching too much of the underlying code base to be viable? ^^

Vertical tabs are indeed big for me, but I’ll add that it’s critical that it be possible to hide the unnecessarily huge and ugly sidebar header, which is the biggest problem plaguing vertical tab extensions on Firefox. Right now that requires userchrome edits which is ridiculous.

Re: Pulse Browser – An experimental Firefox fork

#106

Post by solarkraft »

toastal wrote: post #104
solarkraft wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how you can deal with just vertical tabs. Sidebery (FF extension) offers tree tabs and it's really cool.

I thought Tree Style Tab was the preferred Fx add-on.

I prefer Sidebery because it feels faster, more reliable (TST seems to struggle much harder with a higher number) and has a prettier default theme.

I think it also has many more config options, but I'm quite happy with the defaults.

Re: Pulse Browser – An experimental Firefox fork

#107

Post by jacooper »

jacooper wrote: post #46

I personay think that even though Google controls chromium, its simple the best web engine out there. Instead of working on an objectively worse engine, try to influence chromium without google, or maybe even create a complete fork.

Personally*

Re: Pulse Browser – An experimental Firefox fork

#108

Post by webmobdev »

trickypr wrote: post #6
account-5 wrote: post #2

I'm not sure what this is offering over normal Firefox other than not having to turn off telemetry, install ublock ( and the other mentioned add-ons), and making use of user.js myself? Also if you're making an issue of providing software with no telemetry then your website should probably not include cloud insights tech that: "collects web vitals from the actual devices your visitors are using".

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…

I appreciate your initiative on creating a fork of Firefox and trying to innovate on it. The following criticism of the project is well intentioned, even if harsh:

> We have been moving further away from privacy and towards developing/iterating on features faster

That is fine but what have you done on the Privacy aspect? I tried out your alpha and immediately on startup it tries to connect to location.services.mozilla.com . So I disabled geolocation, and it still insists on connecting to Mozilla. So I check settings to see if there is an option to disable checking for updates, but there is no such option. If you want me to create config or policy files, I don't see how your browser is making things any easier than Firefox. And hence my question - what privacy features have you actually incorporated or enabled in Pulse Browser?

(Note: I am not questioning your rationale of the default settings, which is necessary for the average user, but the lack of ease for power users to customise any feature. Please look into how Pale Moon / White Star and Orion browsers ensure that disabling phoning home features in settings actually means that the browser will not make any automatic network connections on startups - they are the only 2 browsers that do this, and thus show that they genuinely respect their users.)

Otherwise, your whole project is just a browser extension bundled with the browser. Nevertheless, a good effort. You might find this resource useful for your project - https://sammacbeth.eu/blog/2020/12/27/firefox-fork.html

Re: Pulse Browser – An experimental Firefox fork

#109

Post by chlorion »

Tade0 wrote: post #32
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…

This appears to be a case of something that I've known as "the BBBB problem" - should we optimise algorithms that will rarely be used in a way that makes computation time explode? I mean, who removes history entries by selecting thousands of them manually? Okay, this guy, but who else? I don't remember who named it like that, but the associated anecdote was about typing "BBBB" somewhere in Excel(I think it was the fu…

I do understand what you mean, and in general I agree, but in this specific example making it faster doesn't require "optimizing" anything! If I am understanding correctly the "naive" algorithm here is the fast one, so it takes more effort to make it slow than it does to make it fast.

Re: Pulse Browser – An experimental Firefox fork

#110

Post by itake »

pressjumpdev wrote: post #64
itake wrote: post #23

How fast does this get updated when Mozilla releases a 0day patch?

Hey, Pulse dev here. We try to keep up with updates regularly (1 week to 2 weeks if we are busy). In the case of an exploit or critical update we try to do it fast as possible.

How automatic are updates? Will it warn me when I am out of date and can update itself (e.g. clicking a button, not going back to the home page and needing to DL and install each version)?
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