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How to Firefox

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Re: How to Firefox

#441

Post by bornfreddy »

psionides wrote: post #206
bool3max wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the long run Alphabet will find a way to bar non-vetted browsers from accessing the Internet.

How would they do that?

Now we are talking! Let's see the required steps, not necessarily in this order:

1) create a dominant browser 2) create a dominant mobile OS 3) create a dominant e-mail service 4) create a dominant search engine 5) leverage each of these to make other solutions, especially open ones, difficult to use 6) make other browsers perform badly when interacting with your services 7) lock other browsers from accessing your services, effectively crippling them

There are some more minor steps, like making your main browser competitor dependent on your funding, but we can leave out the details. So we are now at... step 6?

Re: How to Firefox

#442

Post by bornfreddy »

beeflet wrote: post #358
hbn wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is reason for Apple to implement Google-mandated standards.

Re: How to Firefox

#443

Post by yellowapple »

doph wrote: post #265
moffkalast wrote: post #207

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 didn't believe it and after trying those samples, I still don't. All of them run flawlessly for me on FF 104.0.4 on an up-to-date Arch install on my laptop.

Also not seeing any issues, on Firefox 140.0.1 (via Flatpak) on Aeon (GNOME, Wayland). Everything's at my screen's native 165fps (except for the very first aquarium demo, which bottoms out at around 45fps with the maximum number of fish).

Re: How to Firefox

#444

Post by cassepipe »

Everyone is going to talk about UBlock origin (a must) but I have a different take on what makes firefox great:

A thing you can do on firefox with some tweaks is no-search browsing (tm).

1. Remove search suggestions in (about:preferences#search) 2. Use the [History AutoDelete](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/history-autod...) addon to remove your searches from your History since they would clutter the result and it's unlikely you care about them 3. Go to (about:config) and set `browser.urlbar.resultMenu.keyboardAccessible` to `false` so you can tab through the results with just one tab press

Now when you Ctrl + L into the current tab, you will get results from your history, bookmarks and even open tabs. And the results are only a few Tab presses away, no need to move your hands off the keyboard. You can browse without the useless round trip to a search engine.

If you don't like the results and want to launch a search anyways, well just press Enter instead and it will launch a search with the default search engine.

Searchless browsing right there for you.

P.S : Cool trick is to type % + space in the awesome bar to move around opened tabs, awesome You can also specifically look into bookmarks with * and history with ^

P.P.S : Ctrl + L, Ctrl + T, Ctrl + W and Ctrl + Alt + T are your best friends.

Firefox is amazing, you just have to tweak it a tiny bit

Now you can also learn more about custom search engines :

https://askubuntu.com/a/1534489

They let you do things like "maps New York" directly from the navigation bar and get the result directly in Google maps

Re: How to Firefox

#445

Post by ripe »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #404
kjkjadksj wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dabbled in the cli browser space but a lot was left to be desired due to the state of the modern web. I was having trouble with HN threads even. They would lose indentation structure for the comments and appear all one after another. Mostly dabbled in links and w3

I actually dislike the indented structure. I disable tables in links. Non-hyperlinked HN can also be retrieved and read without using a browser, e.g., using the Firebase JSON endpoint. I can filter the JSON into formatted text the way I like it. For anything other than reading, I can use the command line: short shell scripts I wrote for retrieving, submitting, replying and editing. I also filter HTML to SQL and have…

Your browsing infrastructure seems intriguing. Do you have it written up somewhere, so others could try reproducing?

Re: How to Firefox

#446

Post by yellowapple »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #308
mattlutze wrote: post #89

I am surprised how many people have so many problems with Firefox. I've never felt impeded by loading speeds, and my ADHD regularly has me forgetting to restart it, to the tune of 100+ tabs open across multiple desktops. My wimply little MacBook Pro doesn't seem to mind. The only downside I've found is that, because so many people just default to "Chrome or nothing," there's occasionally sites that have bugs because,…

> 100+ tabs open across multiple desktops. My wimply little MacBook Pro doesn't seem to mind. There's a bug on Linux where background windows continue rendering, even if they're in an inactive workspace or not visible in any other way. This really hits performance, but it doesn't seem to be fixable due to some limitation on GTK3. If I hide/resize my system status-bar, every single window gets resized to match the new…

I can't seem to reproduce any CPU spikes on my end when repeatedly hiding/unhiding various GNOME toolbars (top or bottom).

Re: How to Firefox

#447

Post by yellowapple »

prophesi wrote: post #119

A tip I would add to this article is that Firefox natively supports sidebar tabs now without needing hacky extensions. Go to about:preferences under the Browser Layout section of the General tab, and select Vertical Tabs. The tab group functionality along with Multi-Account Containers are a lot more useful under this layout IMO.

A vertical tab list with tab groups is infinitely better than anything Chrome offers (and is indeed how I have Edge configured on my work PC), but Tree Style Tab remains Firefox's killer feature for me.

Thankfully, Firefox's decision to integrate its vertical tabs into its existing "sidebar" feature, combined with the ability to shrink the sidebar to nothingness, means that I'm now able to completely "remove" Firefox's native tab list, leaving only Tree Style Tab.

Re: How to Firefox

#448

Post by roryirvine »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #288

If you’re having performance issues with firefox and thunderbird, I recommend vacuuming the sqlite files under your profile. Compacting mailbox helps TB as well.

Yeah, I think it's been done automatically for the past decade or so but I'm still in the habit of running a quick vacuum every time I restart my computer (typically for Debian point release upgrades, so every 3 months-ish).

It's probably pure cargo-culting at this point, but unlikely to be actively harmful:

  find $HOME/.mozilla/ \( -name "*.sqlite" \) -exec sqlite3  {} "vacuum" \;
My Firefox profile is at least 20 years old, and my places.sqlite is over a GB but I don't see any particular performance problems.

Re: How to Firefox

#449

Post by yellowapple »

0xpgm wrote: post #176
ahmetcadirci25 wrote: post #147

This is something that has been on my mind for years — I want to use Firefox, but for some strange reason, it just doesn’t feel as smooth as Chrome. Here are the features of Firefox that I find particularly appealing: - The Firefox Multi-Account Containers feature, in my opinion, is what puts this browser at the top. - Additionally, the privacy extensions work incredibly well. However, there are some drawbacks: - Str…

> The Firefox Multi-Account Containers feature, in my opinion, is what puts this browser at the top. For a long time this was the reason I didn't move to Brave, but eventually I realized I don't need it so much because Brave already sandboxes cookies for each site so some social media or ad network won't be able to track me across different sites. The remaining use for multi-account containers now is staying logged i…

> The remaining use for multi-account containers now is staying logged in with different accounts to the same site, which for my usecase I can do with Brave profiles.

Right-click → "Open Link in New Container Tab" is something I do too routinely for profile-switching to be a viable alternative.

Re: How to Firefox

#450

Post by lucumo »

kevincox wrote: post #431
lucumo wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bookmarks definitely sync Yeah, I meant search engines. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44647014 > Extension settings can sync, I don't know exactly if it is opt-in or opt-out but some extensions do sync on desktop. I mostly tried with uBO. Couldn't get it to work.

Yeah, search engines don't which is annoying and confusing. However on desktop you can use keyword bookmarks which offer basically the same functionality and do sync. uBlock Origin does it's own weird thing where you need to trigger the sync in the settings interface. I don't think you can blame Firefox for this UX choice.

> However on desktop you can use keyword bookmarks which offer basically the same functionality and do sync.

Search engines can have completion; keyword bookmarks can't. Most search engines don't support it, but some do.

> uBlock Origin does it's own weird thing where you need to trigger the sync in the settings interface. I don't think you can blame Firefox for this UX choice.

It made the same choice in Chrome, so I was familiar with that. It works there, it doesn't work on Firefox. I think it's fair to put that on Firefox.

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