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Firefox Browser: best for a free web

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Re: Firefox Browser: best for a free web

#141

Post by dralley »

raven108 wrote: post #129
trts wrote: post #2

It makes me sad that FF browser share has continued to decline steadily. The past couple years of releases have been some its the best in terms of my own UX, since perhaps the Phoenix era. It's pretty fast these days, the UI is good, has a lot of great extensions and privacy features. I use Brave at work to have a better chrome-based experience with gsuite. It's also a fast, excellent browser with good privacy featur…

The problem is not the browser, but a lazy mgmt. Selling user privacy to Google for easy money instead of asking users to either pay for ensuring their privacy. But that will take real work instead of easy “royalty” payments from Google. Between telemetry, safe browsing, sqlite database with all sites you visited & gvfs they siphon off some serious data. So bad for privacy but snappy otherwise, particularly the new v…

I can think of few worse business plans than a paid browser, in 2021.

I would bet money that even the majority of HN readers wouldn't pay money for something so heavily commoditized.

Re: Firefox Browser: best for a free web

#142

Post by dralley »

ipaddr wrote: post #108
trts wrote: post #2

It makes me sad that FF browser share has continued to decline steadily. The past couple years of releases have been some its the best in terms of my own UX, since perhaps the Phoenix era. It's pretty fast these days, the UI is good, has a lot of great extensions and privacy features. I use Brave at work to have a better chrome-based experience with gsuite. It's also a fast, excellent browser with good privacy featur…

After 15+ years of use it has become so slow I had to move away for day to day browsing. I'm on windows 7 on that machine. My copy on windows 10 works almost on par with chrome in terms of speed. After the rewrite things were super fast but it has gotten slower each release.

Have you tried refreshing your profile?

Re: Firefox Browser: best for a free web

#143

Post by timClicks »

stereoradonc wrote: post #65

Too many distractions from Mozilla (Firefox OS, VPN etc and a complete dissonance from the core- browser. It doesn't help when senior management takes fat bonuses and fires away employees during the pandemic. That doesn't make for pleasant optics and also distanced me away from their product.

The distractions are actually fine if they're revenue-positive.

There might still be a small window of opportunity for Mozilla to be the champion of the web platform. It has an excellent operations team. Its CDN still delivers updates to hundreds of millions of devices. I would have loved to see Moz Inc create a Netlify service for developers and a Shopify service for small businesses.

Re: Firefox Browser: best for a free web

#144

Post by cinquemb »

fabrice_d wrote: post #138
cinquemb wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think people are forking Chrome because it’s better code, but I might be wrong. I'm going to go with the latter, but at best this is debatable and highly subjective depending on what matters to you. > I have only seen the code of Chrome and it’s very Google-like C++, with truly enormous codebase. I don't know where you are going with this; FF is a large code base too, uses servo (rust) and c++. > Even Chrome did…

One of the reason Brave finally forked Chrome (they went from gecko based, to electron based, to chrome fork) was to not suffer from the Web Compatibility issues that Firefox has.

Not too familiar with the "Web Compatibility" issues firefox has, but that would have been from when they moved off gecko at least, i doubt that was the case from using electrons chromium fork to upstream chromium. I wonder if they'd consider servo or would be too much work for them at this point?

This[0] says they started off with electron pre dec-2018, nothing about gecko.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#History

Re: Firefox Browser: best for a free web

#145

Post by commoner »

fhaldridge7 wrote: post #116
indymike wrote: post #26

Are the three headline features important to you? They are: - Picture in Picture - Expanded Dark Mode - DNS over HTTPs I really like Firefox, but features like this are not going to cause people to switch browsers. I'm pretty sure most end users would never even notice them. DNS over HTTPs is actually a bit of a pain if you want to host your own DNS.

Is DoH really that that important right now? Your ISP can still see the domain you're connecting to via SNI. Until encrypted SNI (eSNI) arrives it doesn't seem like a big win for privacy. But it seems like Cloudflare is working on it https://blog.cloudflare.com/encrypt-that-sni-firefox-edition...

Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 currently supports ESNI, but Firefox has replaced ESNI in favor of ECH (Encrypted Client Hello) starting from version 85 due to vulnerabilities in the former. Unfortunately, no public DNS resolvers support ECH yet.

- https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2021/01/07/encrypted-clien...

- https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1709263

Cloudflare has another blog post with the implementation details for ECH:

- https://blog.cloudflare.com/encrypted-client-hello/

Re: Firefox Browser: best for a free web

#146

Post by cinquemb »

diskzero wrote: post #139
cinquemb wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of DAO's funding/incubating projects? shinedao does (though mostly revenue generating focus for now, although those projects can have r&d components, haven't seen pure foss dao's but i dont know everything going on in the space), probably others. Of decentralized lending protocols? aave, compound, benqi, etc.

I was wondering about pure foss dao's or even closed ones. Anything to do with software, a service or even hardware.

Ahh, yeah don't know any outside of those that make specific defi protocols that are at least GPLv3. I'm deff interested in being apart of something like it in the future with shinedao (maybe being incubated by them in the future, anyone is free to join and put forth an initiative to the community to gauge interest though, for this or any other project), I just don't know of many people are the same and can actually contribute via code and also in the defi ecosystem (there are a few software devs and even hardware engineers in the community, but many more who aren't), but I think it will be a natural progression from all the GPLv3 stuff being put out there related to web3.

Re: Firefox Browser: best for a free web

#147

Post by xnyanta »

eric__cartman wrote: post #18
trts wrote: post #2

It makes me sad that FF browser share has continued to decline steadily. The past couple years of releases have been some its the best in terms of my own UX, since perhaps the Phoenix era. It's pretty fast these days, the UI is good, has a lot of great extensions and privacy features. I use Brave at work to have a better chrome-based experience with gsuite. It's also a fast, excellent browser with good privacy featur…

I would love to continue using FF, but on my machine with an Nvidia card ( sigh ) the scrolling in Firefox gets very choppy when using two different browser windows open on the dual monitors. And for some reason this bothers me more than it should. Maybe one of these days I should try using it again. It's been over a year since I last tried it. It's odd because the Firefox on the desktop machine with the Nvidia card…

Damn, I have this exact same problem and never suspected it was NVIDIA related :/

Re: Firefox Browser: best for a free web

#148

Post by prirai »

errantmind wrote: post #46

I've used Firefox since release but I'm curious what other less popular browsers people are using these days? For example, I have tried Bromite on my phone but the adblocking is limited. I've tried ungoogled-chromium on desktop and the speed is impressive. The main things I want: 1. Speed 2. Speed 3. Native plugins that can preempt network requests 4. Configurable for privacy (referrer, first party isolation, etc) Al…

Doing some changes in about:config like enable GPU and increasing memory processes will make your browsing liquid in firefox. Also, have fpeg installed beforehand.

Re: Firefox Browser: best for a free web

#149

Post by France_is_bacon »

I have been a devoted follower of firefox for a long time.

However, recently I have run into a lot of situations where foxfire does not work with some of the apps I need, and chromium based browsers do work. These apps are vital to what I do, and while I prefer firefox for all the usual reasons, I cannot use it. Sad really.

Re: Firefox Browser: best for a free web

#150

Post by jvzr »

I'd been using Firefox ever since the Phoenix days. And somehow, sometime, I moved to Chrome like everyone did... until I had enough of Google, and came back to Firefox right at the start of the Quantum days. Haven't left since.

Firefox is a really good browser (at least on Linux, even though the lack of HW-acceleration on NVIDIA cards is a pain) made even greater with best-in-class uBlock Origin support, and of course piroor's Tree Style Tab. Containers are also a great feature (I containerize Google, Facebook, Amazon and Twitter properties in their own silo). Tab unloaders (I don't remember which I'm currently using) is also a good idea to reduce memory usage (even though with 32 GB I have NEVER run into issues)

I've been rocking it and a custom user stylesheet to hide the tabs on top, reorder and customize the address bar to be tighter, have more contrast; and the whole UI to be black (I use the dark variant of Adwaita all day on my desktop). Having an ultrawide display, I have plenty of horizontal space. Here's an screenshot if that interests you: https://imgur.com/a/8PEKED5

Edit: How could I have missed that?! Picture-in-picture is incredibly good as well! I use it daily, mainly to watch a YT video on the side while continuing to browse the web. They even added multiple PIP windows a while back, which is a god-send when I watch livestreams such as a rocket launches (eg. official livestream in one window, and EverydayAstronaut's in another)

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