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The Firefox Dilemma

blog.tawhidhannan.co.uk

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Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#191

Post by kebert »

joveian wrote: post #188
olejorgenb wrote: post #45

1. I like firefox's omnibar/awesomebar more than chrome's. It seems to read my mind better [1]. It also have some features [2] I think most people are unaware of. 2. Firefox have bookmark tags. 3. Firefox scroll the tabs instead of compressing the width until they're unusable. (It's also possible to set the minimum tab-width) 4. It's much simpler to get ctrl-tab MRU behavior [3] in Firefox last time I checked. 5. Fir…

1. I really dislike the firefox omnibar and that I can't set it to just be an address bar. I sometimes visit washingtonpost.com but not often enough that I have a bookmark, and every time firefox insists it should be wasingtonpost.com.co, which I must have visited at some point but it is not bookmarked and the suggestion never goes away (I have firefox set to clear history when exiting, but I tried to do a "clear now…

regarding your first point, I believe you can make the address bar behave like you want simply by Edit->Preferences->Uncheck 'Provide Search Suggestions' and removing a result from your address bar results with shift-delete might also be what you're missing

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#192

Post by desi_ninja »

politelemon wrote: post #64
olejorgenb wrote: post #45

1. I like firefox's omnibar/awesomebar more than chrome's. It seems to read my mind better [1]. It also have some features [2] I think most people are unaware of. 2. Firefox have bookmark tags. 3. Firefox scroll the tabs instead of compressing the width until they're unusable. (It's also possible to set the minimum tab-width) 4. It's much simpler to get ctrl-tab MRU behavior [3] in Firefox last time I checked. 5. Fir…

I like that Firefox Test Pilots often produce interesting, visible experiments. I'm a fan of Firefox Color: https://color.firefox.com - which allows you to express the UI color scheme in a shareable/saveable URL. There's also Side View: https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/side-view - which allows a persistent column to the side regardless of which tab you're in. Useful on widescreens.

SideView just changed my life, this very moment.

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#193

Post by jefftk »

hkt wrote: post #121
jefftk wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building a browser that supported only AMP would be one way to do this and have a significant number of pages you could handle. (Disclosure: I work for Google on AMP ads. I also know how much people here dislike AMP, so this is not entirely serious.)

Not actually a terrible idea if it can be done without tracking. Thank you for disclosing. I'd quite like an RSS+reader view browser. At a guess, RSS+reader view+AMP could cover pretty substantial amounts of existing content.

It could be done entirely without external requests: the browser would be an amp interpreter, no need for the amp js as all.

The hardest part is that amp probably isn't restrictive enough: you can still use a very large subset of HTML and CSS.

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#194

Post by olejorgenb »

joveian wrote: post #188
olejorgenb wrote: post #45

1. I like firefox's omnibar/awesomebar more than chrome's. It seems to read my mind better [1]. It also have some features [2] I think most people are unaware of. 2. Firefox have bookmark tags. 3. Firefox scroll the tabs instead of compressing the width until they're unusable. (It's also possible to set the minimum tab-width) 4. It's much simpler to get ctrl-tab MRU behavior [3] in Firefox last time I checked. 5. Fir…

1. I really dislike the firefox omnibar and that I can't set it to just be an address bar. I sometimes visit washingtonpost.com but not often enough that I have a bookmark, and every time firefox insists it should be wasingtonpost.com.co, which I must have visited at some point but it is not bookmarked and the suggestion never goes away (I have firefox set to clear history when exiting, but I tried to do a "clear now…

1. Try to type wasingtonpost.com.co and press delete (more generally - hover the mouse over a url-suggestion and pressing the "delete" button will remove it from history.

Very strange that clearing the history doesn't resolve it though..

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#195

Post by Felz »

olejorgenb wrote: post #144
Felz wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About the omnibar: does anyone know what its limitations are? It seems to lose sites I only use somewhat infrequently. It's frustrating when I know I've been there plenty of times, but nothing pops up.

Might be because the browser history is limited by default: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1039372 Details on the ranking algorithm: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Tech/Places...

Thanks! That might be it.

For future notice though, the answer in the first link is wrong; you want "places.history.expiration.current_max_pages", not "places.history.expiration.transient_current_max_pages". Apparently the max "pages" are automatically calculated by default- mine was around 160k, so my history only went back about 2.5 years. I've set it to the maximum value for a 32 bit integer, which I guess should fix the problem for the next 20 or so years.

Kind of annoying that Firefox's default is to delete things when you told it not to delete things.

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#196

Post by dragonsngoblins »

baybal2 wrote: post #82
metildaa wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could I get some citations? What I've seen coming out of Mozilla over tthe past few years, from DeepSpeech to Rust and Servo appears to be foundational technology written by Mozilla engineers. This tech has the potential to do a lot of good, having it be a public resource is important IMO. Mozilla's intentions and fears seem to be very reasonable, driving what they do from AV1 to fighting DRM, though they have hit de…

> What I've seen coming out of Mozilla over tthe past few years, from DeepSpeech to Rust and Servo appears to be foundational technology written by Mozilla engineers. This tech has the potential to do a lot of good, having it be a public resource is important IMO. Many things been coming out of their house, but not a usable browser — a raison d'etre stated in their charter.

"Many things been coming out of their house, but not a usable browser — a raison d'etre stated in their charter. "

And yet here I am reading this on Firefox. Like, I get that someone might prefer Chrome, but how anyone could call FF unusable is baffling to me. What on Earth would make it unusable in your opinion?

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#197

Post by em-bee »

olejorgenb wrote: post #45

1. I like firefox's omnibar/awesomebar more than chrome's. It seems to read my mind better [1]. It also have some features [2] I think most people are unaware of. 2. Firefox have bookmark tags. 3. Firefox scroll the tabs instead of compressing the width until they're unusable. (It's also possible to set the minimum tab-width) 4. It's much simpler to get ctrl-tab MRU behavior [3] in Firefox last time I checked. 5. Fir…

i wish i could prioritize the search suggestions in the search/addressbar: tabs first, then bookmarks, and only then history. or make three groups, and give me the top 3 tabs, top 3 bookmarks and top 3 history matches.

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#198

Post by em-bee »

sebazzz wrote: post #172
sametmax wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also tab containers are fantastic.

Not fantastic, but necessary in any web development activity. Being logged in as different users in the same browser, while at the same time not suffering from the limitations private mode has. Makes testing and developing very easy and saved me a lot of time.

if only i could open a container without automatically loading all tabs inside it, but lazy loaded like when you restart the browser and only the active tab is loaded.

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#199

Post by ric2b »

davidgrenier wrote: post #155
mouldysammich wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefoxs omnibar history search is significantly better than chromes; although i imagine that is down to them having no stake in sending google searches which google obviously does

Recently switched to firefox and am quite happy to see it has lots of feature I didn't think it had. Chrome allows me to do use the built-in search engine of any website supporting it by pressing tab and then typing my search query. In firefox, it seems what I have to do is type my search query than use my mouse to click on the wikipedia icon (or amazon/etc). This also requires me to setup said search engine in firef…

In the search settings you can setup shortcuts, like 'y' for youtube.

Then you can just type 'y rick roll' to make a search.

Alternatively, set your default browser to duckduckgo.org and use it's bangs, no need to manually add shortcuts!

The previous example would then be '!y rick roll'.

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#200

Post by joveian »

olejorgenb wrote: post #194
joveian wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. I really dislike the firefox omnibar and that I can't set it to just be an address bar. I sometimes visit washingtonpost.com but not often enough that I have a bookmark, and every time firefox insists it should be wasingtonpost.com.co, which I must have visited at some point but it is not bookmarked and the suggestion never goes away (I have firefox set to clear history when exiting, but I tried to do a "clear now…

1. Try to type wasingtonpost.com.co and press delete (more generally - hover the mouse over a url-suggestion and pressing the "delete" button will remove it from history. Very strange that clearing the history doesn't resolve it though..

I tried that on each character where it shows that completion after seeing your initial suggestion, but it didn't help (it makes the suggestion go away that time, but it is shown again next time). I finally figured out that I had bookmarked a scam page under washingtonpost.com.co at one point and deleting that made it stop (I looked before but must have typoed the address). The confusing part is that it didn't complete to the full bookmarked page and didn't show the star like it does for everything else. And I did have the home page of the Washington Post bookmarked, just not in an accessible place to click on it, so I don't know why it didn't choose to autocomplete to that.

Also, I found browser.urlbar.autoFill that gets it to not modify what I type but still show suggestions from bookmarks. I think I had tried to disable browser.urlbar.autocomplete.enabled at some point and enabled it again since it is sometimes helpful to quickly find bookmarked pages. It still searches if the entered text doesn't look like a domain name or url and there seems to be no way to disable that. Still, I appreciate that Firefox is configurable in a lot of ways and that there is a way to get it to mostly do what I want :).

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