What We're Working on in Firefox • Hacker News Board

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#271

Post by willywanker » Sun, Jun 02, 2024, 9:52 AM UTC

mrandish wrote: post #69

rurp wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of regressions Mozilla has inflicted on Firefox in recent years blows my mind. One of their few big advantages over Chrome is better user control, but they have been working continuously to destroy that. Getting rid of most extensions and removing about:config are two big wtf decisions. All that does is piss off power users, which are the main advocates for this browser. Plus so many other baffling changes…

Yes! FF PMs and designers seem to HATE user customization, add-ons and power user capabilities yet those are the main reasons I came to FF and why I still use it. While FF is still the best browser for me (barely), it's only achieved this by all the alternatives enshittifying and dumb-ifying their browsers even faster than FF. As it is I have to spend significant effort under the hood customizing UserChrome scripts j…

Firefox has enshittified itself if your reference point is the original Firefox of the early 2000s that unseated Internet Explorer's dominance. User customization has steadily eroded since version 4 when they started copying Chrome, from multi-process to removing the statusbar to introducing the hamburger menu to the insane practice of incrementing major version numbers into the triple digits.

>While FF is still the best browser for me (barely)

Give Pale Moon a try and ignore the FF fanboy propaganda of it being oLd aNd iNSeCuRe. It isn't, it's regularly updated to keep up with Google dominated web standards and security patches, and runs on an independent fork of Firefox's Gecko rendering engine. It is not a mere rebuild like Librewolf, Waterfox etc but a separate browser that retains all the full customizabiity of pre 2017 Firefox with full XUL extension and NPAPI plugin support.

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#272

Post by willywanker » Sun, Jun 02, 2024, 9:57 AM UTC

lxgr wrote: post #250

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, you can still grant permissions to web extensions, but the difference is that it's now explicit, and it is at least possible to design extensions with minimally-required privileges. The problem is the reverse. Some permissions are now considered "too dangerous" for the extension, so there is no facility to grant them even if the user wants the extension to do that and it has a good reason to. > Nothing would ha…

I agree, and that mechanism is to introduce a new, permissioned API into Firefox's Web Extension API implementation. Requiring them to maintain two completely different extension APIs (the old XUL-based one and Web Extensions) would work too but seems excessive.

If XUL were to continue as it does on Pale Moon, here is no need for Web Extensions given they are a reduced subset in terms of functionality compared to the previous XUL/XPCOM versions.

And ironically for all the talk of making it more secure, the amount of cross browser malware has only shot up since Mozilla decided to dump XUL in favor of copying Chrome's extension system.

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#273

Post by willywanker » Sun, Jun 02, 2024, 11:36 AM UTC

speckx wrote: post #67

I would like Firefox to be able to set extensions to run only on click or allow me to provide a list of domains, like Chrome does, so every extension is not running on every page. See https://support.google.com/chrome?p=enable_extensions and https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/option-to-allow-extensi... .

You're describing userscripts, which is what site focused web extensions essentially are anyway. Install the Grease/Tamper/Violet monkey extension and you can find scripts from Greasyfork.org, or author your own. Each script defines a scope listing the sites it's allowed to run on.

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#274

Post by dbg31415 » Wed, Jun 05, 2024, 2:52 PM UTC

dsego wrote: post #56

switch007 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this a comment from 2018? I thought FF on MacOS was pretty good these days. And are you suggesting Chrome is similar to Safari in terms of power usage? That would surprise me Safari will of course always be better. It's no competition

My experience as well, it used to be bad, it's okay now.

I don't actively monitor it every day, but I feel it!

Intel MacBook from 2021.

My laptop gets so hot when running Firefox -- almost instantly (certainly after 3-4 minutes). But I can do a call for an hour on Chrome and it doesn't get nearly as warm. And the battery just drops accordingly as the fans struggle to keep up.

I like to use Firefox, but I end up doing all my calls when I'm not plugged in on Chrome as a result of the power use / heating issues.