71–80 of 101 posts
How do you make sites that are only whitelist certain browsers to work under Firefox? Is there an app, extensions etc anything? For some handful of sites I have to keep a Chrome install around
2) Report those sites to https://webcompat.com/, and/or to Mozilla (who have an evangelism team to reach out to those sites and get them to stop doing that).
This seems like it's too hard to tell friends/family. Is the go-to now just 'install firefox'?
After the XUL removal debacle a number of years ago, I can't trust Firefox to offer a suitably flexible and capable extension system over the long run. While some people will claim that those changes were necessary, the impact was still very negative for the extension developers and users who were affected at the time. The numerous other user-hostile decisions made by Firefox's developers certainly don't help repair…
First recommendation would be a pihole running anywhere you can run it, but if you don't want to or can't do that, you can use Steven Black's ad list to create a hosts file to DNS sink ad/bad networks locally: https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts
Isn't DNS-level blocking strictly less capable than even the nerfed Manifest V3 filtering API? V3 can still block at a more granular level than nuking entire hostnames AFAIK, even if it's not as granular as V2.
Also a big benefit of DNS level blocking is it can block telemetry other unwanted network traffic (unless connection by IP or some other wizardry), for instance how often my TV attempts to phone home.
Question: Is it possible to run ad blocking at the OS level rather than in the browser? Requests to ad servers just never leave your PC? traffic from ad servers just never arrives at the browser?
This approach is less flexible than the filtering you can get from a web browser. On the other hand, it can be used to filter DNS requests from all software. With something like a Pihole, you can configure the Pihole and (maybe) your router, and it will work for all devices on your network.
Question: Is it possible to run ad blocking at the OS level rather than in the browser? Requests to ad servers just never leave your PC? traffic from ad servers just never arrives at the browser?
Finally some news that makes me think the Firefox has a glimmer of hope left.
Every app there are gets worse and worse -- aka Doctorow's enshittification So people will just take the sudden deluge of ads in stride and move on. Chances of this moving people to Firefox is slim.
I mean it is trivial, but the world fights over defaults now and there are people who only use defaults and complain when they change.
So yeah, they will move. Download an app, import userdata, reinstall extensions and blog about this hacker-news-level journey.
This seems like it's too hard to tell friends/family. Is the go-to now just 'install firefox'?
After the XUL removal debacle a number of years ago, I can't trust Firefox to offer a suitably flexible and capable extension system over the long run. While some people will claim that those changes were necessary, the impact was still very negative for the extension developers and users who were affected at the time. The numerous other user-hostile decisions made by Firefox's developers certainly don't help repair…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
i do wish! firefox has web features missing that i need on a daily basis, and their developer team seems wholly uninterested on working on them at all
Which features do you mean?
- webpage splits
- search by image
- go to non- url in bg tab
- open in new tab in a virtual sub group rather than just to the right or at the end
- tabs retain width on close until mouse goes away (helps with closing series of tabs)
- bookmarks open in new tab by default
- last tab doesn’t close the browser
- gestures and toolbar customization
That’s in Vivaldi, I probably forgot a bunch of features that feel natural but may have no FF counterpart. Tbh, looking at FF settings, there’s basically none. You can’t miss features that you never had, I guess.
This seems like it's too hard to tell friends/family. Is the go-to now just 'install firefox'?
Freedom and privacy are luxuries only available to those nerdy enough to use Linux. The rest are prey/prisoners/peasants to the technofeudal overlords.