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Pulse Browser – An experimental Firefox fork

pulsebrowser.app

81–90 of 114 posts

Re: Pulse Browser – An experimental Firefox fork

#81
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, I am a dev on Pulse Browser. I want to clarify our current development direction (I haven't significant updated the website recently). We have been moving further away from privacy and towards developing/iterating on features faster than Firefox is willing to, along with providing sane defaults. For example, we have been experimenting with a opera/vivaldi-like method of accessing Firefox's sidebar. Whilst you cou…

> Sorry about Vercel's insight stuff, not sure how that got enabled, How do you "accidentally" enable such user-hostile tracking? This gives quite a bad image of the site and the associated project. Will you "accidentally" enable telemetry as well on some future versions of Pulse?

It's actually an easy and understandable development mistake to make. It's usually an opt out situation, not opt in.

Development teams build and test with debug mode builds, send out these builds to internal teams to beta test. These telemetry tools are used to collect data, errors etc.

When it was time to ship, they forget to turn it off for the stable builds. I've seen it happen a lot.

Re: Pulse Browser – An experimental Firefox fork

#82

Hey, just wanted to say great work. I'm excited for innovation of a non-chrome engine and am gonna give it a try. My 2 biggest beef with Firefox is website compatibility and dead tabs. For item 1, certain sites don't work with Firefox when they do with Chrome. This can happen even in sites of industries that claim to want privacy / decentralisation / anti-monopoly. Some of these are government websites. Sometimes, we…

Don't ask a browser vendor to fix websites in 2022. We know that it's rarely a problem with the browser, and mostly devs that decided (or been told) to do a chrome only website. We did it once with IE, don't fall in that trap again.

Haha, I don't necessarily disagree with you on this..

My only view on this is it would be nice to have a general chrome compatibility switch. I've not accounted for the feasibility of this from a technical or commercial perspective, so I can't advocate for it beyond a nice to have feature.

Re: Pulse Browser – An experimental Firefox fork

#83
post #59

Reasons LibreWolf ( https://librewolf.net/ ) is more interesting: • more mature • more installation options • hosted on an open-core forge, GitLab, instead of a proprietary, closed-source one, GitHub • open-source communications preferred, Matrix/Gitter, instead of proprietary, closed-source communications, Discord • website has a lot more information

Last time I checked it was incompatible with most half-advanced JavaScript apps by default. Not what I'm looking for.

So what is your preferred browser?

Re: Pulse Browser – An experimental Firefox fork

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't ask a browser vendor to fix websites in 2022. We know that it's rarely a problem with the browser, and mostly devs that decided (or been told) to do a chrome only website. We did it once with IE, don't fall in that trap again.

Haha, I don't necessarily disagree with you on this.. My only view on this is it would be nice to have a general chrome compatibility switch. I've not accounted for the feasibility of this from a technical or commercial perspective, so I can't advocate for it beyond a nice to have feature.

There used to be “Open this page in IE” browser extensions. It shouldn’t be too difficult to have a similar “Open this page in Chrome/Edge”.

Re: Pulse Browser – An experimental Firefox fork

#85
post #62

Hey, just wanted to say great work. I'm excited for innovation of a non-chrome engine and am gonna give it a try. My 2 biggest beef with Firefox is website compatibility and dead tabs. For item 1, certain sites don't work with Firefox when they do with Chrome. This can happen even in sites of industries that claim to want privacy / decentralisation / anti-monopoly. Some of these are government websites. Sometimes, we…

>For item 1, certain sites don't work with Firefox when they do with Chrome. This can happen even in sites of industries that claim to want privacy / decentralisation / anti-monopoly. Some of these are government websites. People often say this but rarely give examples, do you have some? Explicitly listing the sites would be much better feedback that might actually lead the problems being solved.

I've learnt to sorta live it and workaround it but one egregious example was a passport renewal site for a (non US) country whose image uploading function failed silently on image upload.

Repeated the process multiple times for an hour until it occurred to me to just try a chrome-based browser. Worked fine after that.

I've run into quite a few crypto-related sites that break in weird ways when interacting with wallets / etc. The relative frequency of these issues on crypto sites are really the most disappointing - so much for decentralisation, anti-monopoly, etc, etc

Not keen to name and shame in this thread but my primary worry is that it will drive away more people from Firefox.

Re: Pulse Browser – An experimental Firefox fork

#86
On the github page (https://github.com/pulse-browser/browser) under "Features", it cites "QR Code Generator". I'm puzzled by this feature - both for bare curiosity, but also for a browser that is intended to be somewhat minimalist. Does someone know what the use-case would be for this feature? (Not knocking this feature, just curious.)

Re: Pulse Browser – An experimental Firefox fork

#87
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>For item 1, certain sites don't work with Firefox when they do with Chrome. This can happen even in sites of industries that claim to want privacy / decentralisation / anti-monopoly. Some of these are government websites. People often say this but rarely give examples, do you have some? Explicitly listing the sites would be much better feedback that might actually lead the problems being solved.

Just go to about:compat in Firefox and you can see them. Most of them are simple UA locks but some require more advanced logic.

Interesting, will have a look at this

Re: Pulse Browser – An experimental Firefox fork

#88
post #86

On the github page ( https://github.com/pulse-browser/browser ) under "Features", it cites "QR Code Generator". I'm puzzled by this feature - both for bare curiosity, but also for a browser that is intended to be somewhat minimalist. Does someone know what the use-case would be for this feature? (Not knocking this feature, just curious.)

I would guess its to replace or augment the "Send Tab to Device" functionality of stock Firefox so that the user can easily get the same page onto their phone or other device without a Mozilla account.

Re: Pulse Browser – An experimental Firefox fork

#89
post #86

On the github page ( https://github.com/pulse-browser/browser ) under "Features", it cites "QR Code Generator". I'm puzzled by this feature - both for bare curiosity, but also for a browser that is intended to be somewhat minimalist. Does someone know what the use-case would be for this feature? (Not knocking this feature, just curious.)

Probably to share URLs quickly with a mobile device without needing to sync things?
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