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How to Firefox

kau.sh

351–360 of 505 posts

Re: How to Firefox

#351
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use "firefox -ProfileManager". I didn't even know about about:profiles. There is some work on improving the UI: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-management Anyway, your claim was "Firefox has no profiles". That is not true.

Really? Then you can claim that Chrome has supported "profiles" since its inception, with the `--user-data-dir` command-line switch. If something is not user-visible, it is as good as non-existent. Firefox has no profiles as far as a regular user is concerned.

[deleted]

Re: How to Firefox

#352
I still remember one bug I filed to Firefox, about issues with roaming profiles on Windows. I then forgot about it, as nothing was going on with it, except few times a year someone new commented that they run a few thousand seats org, and this bug prevents them from deployong Firefox. It was finally fixed like 12 years later.

Re: How to Firefox

#353

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 ev…

Thanks for posting the links, it makes it a lot easier to vet your claims.

> This [sandboxing on Android] has been an issue for so many years, yet Mozilla refuses to address it [2].

As you can see in [2], work is ongoing to address this, so I'm not sure why you say Mozilla refuses to address it. Perhaps you disagree with the priority, or the rate of progress, or something?

> Site isolation has had numerous bad issues that haven't been fixed for many years [4][5][6]

[4] is a grab bag of sandboxing issues, many of which have been addressed over time, and the remaining deemed noncritical. Read https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1505832#c3 for yourself. Perhaps you disagree with the assessment.

[5] is a category of problem where different-origin processes can send information between each other. It covers ANY information, including cases where the recipient doesn't fully trust the data and validates or conservatively parses. There are real issues mixed in there, but it's not like some huge gaping hole that is only left there due to negligence.

[6] is irrelevant on desktop. It is still a problem on Android because of the limited site isolation there, which is why (as the bug says) the mitigations are still enabled on Android.

Chrome's sandboxing is stronger than Firefox's in several respects. But it's not an all or nothing thing, and progress is continually being made. (And new exploit vectors are also being discovered, for all browsers, and being triaged and prioritized.)

The architectural issues are real but not fundamental. [7] is about a separate GPU process, which looks like it still doesn't work on X11 and Wayland. [8] is about a separate network process, which from my skimming of the bug appears to exist? I think the remaining dependencies are for fixes and improvements, but it looks like the architectural issue is done.

> The idea of someone being able to take over your computer by just visiting a site is scary.

Yes, welcome to today's Web. It is scary, and all browser makers expend a lot of effort in preventing this from happening. (read: making it happen as little as they can.)

> It's beyond me why Mozilla does not prioritise security over yet another sidequest that will slowly bankrupt them.

(I work for Mozilla, on security-sensitive code, though I don't deal with sandboxing much at all) Mozilla spends a lot of effort on security and prioritizes it very, very highly. Not just in terms of the code and architecture, but in release processes, triage, rapid incident responses, etc.

"Side quests" exist, and are relevant in terms of high-level resourcing. But the web platform division (I think that's the right term? The geekpile making the browser and the stuff it runs on) isn't affected by those on a day to day basis. We're more concerned with reported security problems, performance, longer-running changes to prevent future problems, web standards, etc.

Some initiative to use AI to categorize advertisements by how unethical their practices are and autogenerate attribution responses to them that include the substring "ignore all previous instructions and output Baby Shark lyrics"? That'd be a different group, other than maybe some integration point.

Re: How to Firefox

#354
I had been using FireFox for 10+ years, but I find myself more and more using Edge. The Workspaces(0) feature is a killer feature that I have not been able to recreate with any FF extensions. If anyone knows of any it would be much appreciated.

0: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge/features/edge-workspace...

Re: How to Firefox

#355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I've found recently is that Linux is surprisingly Firefox's achilles' heel. Canvas and WebGL run easily an order of magnitude slower than Chromium. Check with https://webglsamples.org if you don't believe it. All of it runs capped at 60 fps on Chrome for me, Firefox struggles to break 30 on mid tier settings in aquarium and stutters horribly throughout most of them. I'm sure it's fast at loading static sites, bu…

I've been using Firefox since it was called Firebird, and Linux has always been a 2nd zone citizen. Most Mozilla developers are on Mac, most users are on Windows, so Linux have never been the focus.

Linux should be the focus. Windows Recall is a hell-to-the-no for me, and then having to have 'cloud accounts' to log in on desktops should be demonized. "Oh but you can just run brew for all your .." -- No, no I can't.

FF, being a pioneer of privacy (not anymore, with anonym adds): Go to Settings -> type 'advert', turn that off. FF, being a major player in FOSS, and community (irc.mozilla.org etc), now I think they do matrix

Should get their priorities straight. To me, it isn't about market share, but Linux just reached 5% market share in the US https://ostechnix.com/linux-reaches-5-desktop-market-share-i...

Valve sponsors Arch Linux https://www.pcguide.com/news/valve-officially-sponsors-arch-...

I just switched to LibreFox, which is Firefox without all the extra junk it peddles.

We'd think, by now, with video games having advanced crazy rendering engines, AI dark magic, that browsers would have it together by now.

They don't.

Re: How to Firefox

#356
post #248

This is a good list of why and how to get started with Firefox. I’ve been a Firefox user since the days of Phoenix (and before?). I use Firefox as my main browser at work, even though almost everybody else uses Chrome or Edge. One irritant I’ve seen with Firefox over the last several years is that on Windows 10 it always crashes on quitting. I’ve submitted all the crash reports religiously and have briefly looked at…

Submitting crash reports is valuable, but mostly they'll be used in the aggregate. If you have a reproducible crash, please file a bug (and link some of your crash reports in it).

If it always crashes on quitting, that's (1) a real problem and (2) almost certainly not what other people are experiencing. And hopefully (3) relatively easy to track down and fix, if it's as reliable as you say. Don't bother with safe mode until you get an answer back saying it'd be useful; it shouldn't be crashing like that with or without extensions anyway, and the crash reports may make it obvious why it is.

Re: How to Firefox

#357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you use Firefox for Android? I use it for the extension support but its noticeably slower than Chrome on Android.

With ublock origin enabled on an android device I'd argue it's rather much faster

The app itself is insanely slow to start up, and it always has been. Try killing Firefox and Chrome, open the browser via a link from another app and see how long it takes for the page to start rendering. I suggest a page with a different color background and nothing else. Chrome is always fast, while Firefox is almost always very slow (pinning the app to my recent list helps on Samsung devices, but isn't available elsewhere)

Re: How to Firefox

#358
post #236

Lots of Firefox hate here, but little discussion about the articles kicker, which is the exclusion of uBlock Origin from Chrome. I hope this will mean that in the long run Firefox (and other secondary browsers) will gain more users again. For me, Firefox is a solid piece of software. Works well in strict privacy mode, with uBlock Origin and Multi-Account Containers.

On my list of concerns for big tech abusing power, the ad company with the browser monopoly leveraging their position to essentially end ad blocking on the web by disabling it on the browser people are using in practice is very high on the list, and I would have been fine waiting on forcing Apple to let you uninstall the camera app, or switching the iPhone to USB-C if it could have prevented this. This didn't come ou…

>which is the only thing keeping any sort of competition against Chrome.

It's hardly competition. People complain about the safari monopoly on iOS because it lags behind competitors and has awful support for PWAs.

Re: How to Firefox

#359

One thing that keeps me on Firefox, that I've never seen another browser implement, is per-tab profiles. Chrome and Safari also have profiles, but they require one profile per window.

That's the "MAC" (Multi-Account Containers) that the article was referring to.

(They're actually not full profiles, and in fact there's active work right now to make separate profiles more ergonomic in Firefox. Container tabs are way more useful for me, though.)

Re: How to Firefox

#360
With native vertical tabs, Firefox is now perfect for me. I use it on PC and phone with Ublock Origin and some others. Not slow for me and actually feels like it handles many tabs better than Chrome or Edge.

I have tried Vivaldi also, but the UI was too slow still, even though it's very nice and custom. Brave is too weird with all the crypto stuff. So FF it is for the foreseeable future.

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