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Tell HN: Firefox Is an awesome browser right now

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Re: Tell HN: Firefox Is an awesome browser right now

#561

Post by freedude »

VyseofArcadia wrote: post #216
tapoxi wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This post is over a year old. Requiring Manifest v3 has been indefinitely postponed. There are arguments for using Firefox, but if people keep crying wolf about Manifest v3 before it hits and has a negative impact, especially over such a long timespan, it loses its impact.

Yeah, there was some blowback to make the big G reconsider, but don't you worry. I'm sure they're cooking up something similarly nefarious to accomplish their goal. Google is the world's biggest ad company. Sufficiently few people use ad blocking that I don't think it's an existential threat, but as long as the shareholders demand infinite growth, getting rid of ad blocking will be seductive to Google.

I feel like they lost me when they got rid of "Don't be Evil" as their motto. I realized their slide down the slippery slope was well underway.

Re: Tell HN: Firefox Is an awesome browser right now

#562

Post by freedude »

altairprime wrote: post #372
marginalia_nu wrote: post #134

I use Firefox sort of begrudgingly. It's marginally less bad than the other options, but it's still an awful browser. I vehemently disagree with almost all of its design decisions, and with every new release they seem to stray even farther from sane UX. It has hamburger menus on desktop and a lot of weird space-saving design that makes no sense on a modern high resolution display. Buttons are small, have cryptic flat…

Telemetry is not synonymous with tracking. You can implement telemetry while not tracking users. You can track users without telemetry. There is a lot of telemetry , but there doesn’t seem to be any tracking.

"Telemetry is not synonymous with tracking. You can implement telemetry while not tracking users. You can track users without telemetry."

Yes, it is. If you have the ability to track, then tracking is done. It is the nature of risk management.

Re: Tell HN: Firefox Is an awesome browser right now

#563

Post by ohgodplsno »

rrishi wrote: post #287
ohgodplsno wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition: - SponsorBlock - Automatically tag and skip portions of youtube videos, such as sponsors, intros, recaps, and others. - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sponsorblock/ - Firefox Relay - Automatically create up to 5 (for free, more if paying for it) email addresses that redirect to your actual address, to avoid giving your private address to everyone. - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo…

Those are some really interesting extensions you've suggested. I'll be sure to keep Relay in the back of my mind, I haven't had need of it yet. Though I do have requirement for SponsorBlock avid watcher of YT that I am, I am a little hesitant to add SponsorBlock as I am not quite sure how it would work flawlessly without some really complicated algorithms potentially involving ML work. I am curious to know if in your…

Yeah, the word "automatically" does a lot of heavy lifting there. But like others said, it's crowsourced. You watch a video, tag it, done. There's some anti abuse tools, like tags done by new users being served not all the time and tested by other users before it's trusted.

I have never seen bad section tagging over the past two years.

Re: Tell HN: Firefox Is an awesome browser right now

#564

Post by r1cka »

commoner wrote: post #536
alexelcu wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but Firefox's profiles are very hard to use (apart from keeping multiple Firefox channels installed, e.g., stable, beta), I tried, and I couldn't. Starting a profile is difficult, and also switching between windows, since the OS sees profiles as different apps. It's probably not hard to fix, but Mozilla has had other priorities.

Try Profile Switcher for Firefox, which provides a Chrome-like interface for managing and switching between profiles in Firefox. Add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profile-switc... Source: https://github.com/null-dev/firefox-profile-switcher

My problem is opening links from apps. Sometimes I want a link in Slack (or other desktop apps) to open in my personal profile and sometimes I want it to use my work profile. With Brave/Chrome, the link will open in whatever profile window is active. I can't find a way to make this work with Firefox.

Re: Tell HN: Firefox Is an awesome browser right now

#565

Post by jml7c5 »

hojjat12000 wrote: post #448
SilasX wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By coincidence, just this morning I had a panic because I tried to close FF by closing the only window (which is something I need to do periodically because memory usage will build up over time), and I thought I had lost the tabs because when I opened it back up, they were gone with no way to restore. Apparently the behavior had changed so that closing the last window no longer closes FF, but just that window a la Sk…

I also suggest using Tab Session Manager. Sometimes I save a session and close everything and start working on a different project, but I know I can go back to my previous session and continue the previous project. I'm not afraid of losing any tabs because it also has an autosave.

Does it save each tab's back/forward history? AFAIK, the WebExtension API doesn't provide any robust mechanism to obtain it directly.

Re: Tell HN: Firefox Is an awesome browser right now

#566

Post by krackers »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #468

IIRC the thing that turned me away from Firefox most recently was the "Pocket" spam on the front page. I vaguely recall that you couldn't customize it, and the content that was pushed had a strong ideological bent that I just didn't want to have to deal with every time I opened my browser. I might be misremembering some of the details; it's been a few years. I tried Safari, Brave, etc as well but they all had usabili…

Firefox feels really visually noisy, almost to the point of spaminess on a fresh intall. Out of the box you have a gazillion ads everywhere on the new tab page, below that some "firefox tips" advertising sync, pocket shoved into the toolbar, when you go to the url bar it flies outward, inside the url bar there are buttons for various search engines, and there's a persitent "tab pickup" option that fools you into thinking you have a tab open when you're not. (Not to mention recently they removed tab distinction entirely).

And to top it off it's a nightmare to even figure out how to do something basic like install your own extensions straight from a folder. Apparently if you download developer mode you can at least load unsigned packed extensions, but I don't want to do that, I just want to load it from a folder like the "load temporary development add-on" mode except permanent.

Not to mention they don't even support something basic like reconfiguring keybindings without editing some obscure omni.ja file.

Firefox forks might be better, but right now Firefox doesn't feel like it's really targeting anyone. I bet the average person would look at chrome compared to firefox and say the former feels "cleaner" and easier to use because it quite frankly is. On the flipside Firefox feels quite hostile to the power-user, and every update makes it feel like you're fighting the browser. At that point it's far less effort to use an ungogled chromium fork. At least despite their terrible decisions regarding manifest v3 they still allow you to load your own extensions with a simple checkbox.

Re: Tell HN: Firefox Is an awesome browser right now

#567

Post by WorldMaker »

runnerup wrote: post #295
OrbiterToad wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

dont know what kind of googling prodigies you are, but I googled 'first browser with tabs' and it says the InternetWorks Browser was the first

They’re not googling. Google is useful but sometimes has incorrect answers. The truth is we probably won’t know the true first browser with tabs. It could have been before the one you found. These people are saying “I personally used browser Z with tabs before your example Browser A was even released”. If enough people continue the chain, we’ll get to “the oldest tabbed browser that anyone on HN remembers using”. The…

Related to this, the first browser I experienced with tabs was a custom VB3 wrapper around shdocvw.dll (IE) somewhere around early Windows 9x that I wrote myself. I'm not suggesting I invented tabbed browsing and certainly that VB project never influenced anyone else, I just find it a fun anecdote.

Re: Tell HN: Firefox Is an awesome browser right now

#568

Post by JLCarveth »

GuB-42 wrote: post #416

I use both Chrome and Firefox daily and I must say that over the years, from personal experience, Firefox has improved to the point of being about as fast and stable as Chrome. The downside is that Firefox lost most of its identity, the big one being XUL, which made for more powerful plugins and customization. So yeah, Chrome and Firefox are more of less interchangeable now and the choice is essentially about how muc…

I disagree on the two browsers being interchangeable. Chrome supports quite a few Web APIs that Firefox doesn't. For example the lack of support for platform authenticators in WebAuthn.

Re: Tell HN: Firefox Is an awesome browser right now

#569

Post by bmn__ »

archontes wrote: post #475
bmn__ wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does begin searching mean? I just tested, the tab key cycles through the list of results for the input typed into the location bar. What should happen instead?

If I type 'goog', and the history result is google.com, then pressing tab should result in calling the search function in the tab with google as the search engine, and with the cursor in the box for the query. It should not cycle through the drop down menu.

I can offer you search engine bookmarks as an alternative way to achieve this. For example, I have bookmarked https://www.npmjs.com/search?q=%s with the keyword `n`, and https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/search?q=%s with the keyword `mdn`. In the location bar, I type `mdn font-family` and submit, and this kicks off the search.

Re: Tell HN: Firefox Is an awesome browser right now

#570

Post by WorldMaker »

space_debris wrote: post #545
Vinnl wrote: post #49

> I'd be glad to learn of any other cool features and extensions that y'all might want to share. I'm sure others will be sharing it as I type this comment as well, but for many HN readers, Multi-Account Containers [1] are bound to be a godsend. Easily log in to different accounts for any website, in different tabs. Great feature that's not available in other browsers. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/mult…

I never understood the concept of Multi-Account Containers. I would guess it makes sense when one hardly closes the browser (and clears the cache) and has dozens of tabs open? What is a standard use case (home/work)? I simply use Temporary Containers to isolate tabs (or different domains) and login to websites either by hand or via KeepassXC's browser integration. No per-container setup needed, every tab just lives b…

There are lots of different use cases.

1. Further defense in depth against common XSS attacks: if you only ever log into banking sites in a Banking container, then some random ad-sprung malware trying to access your bank in any other container will never find a logged in banking session to hijack (no matter how good your bank thinks they are at XSS protection and auto-timeouts).

2. Isolating tracking cookies from major ad companies. This reduces cross-correlation between/among them. I have separate containers at this point for all of: Google account usage, Twitter account usage, Facebook account usage, and Amazon account usage. The amount of targeted advertising I see decreases every time I sequester one of these major accounts into its own container. The trade-off is the increase in ReCaptchas needed and the increase in advertising companies complaining I must be using an "ad blocker". (I don't have any ad blocker extension installed, just this strategy of isolating major cookies to specific containers and Firefox built-in Enhanced Tracking Protection.)

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