So I wanted to drop Chrome a while ago, and looked at Chromium. Apparently using the "no sync" version you can no longer even log into Gmail (or any other Google service) on the web. That was definitely the last straw for me losing trust in Google, but there's just no good alternative.
I'm not sure where to go from here because it seems pointless to even use Chromium if I can't remove Google from it and still be able to login to Gmail.
No it doesn't! When you use GMail, you understand that Google have some potential sight of your emails and you accept that because that's how it works.
What you DIDN'T sign up for is Chrome, which can see every site you have every visited, sending all of that info to Google as well to perhaps start targetting some different ads at you. I'm sure that would work well if one of your housemates had visited a dodgy site, which then picks up some suspect ads when you are doing online shopping with your girlfriend.
Maybe switch to Firefox and use their accounts toggle feature. It lets you separate out sessions for particular sites. It’s not “chromium” but it works well for what you are asking for as far as I can tell.
>Would you mind to explain how using gmail is fine but having to log in into chrome is not?
Well, I've sort of just accepted that Google has all of my personal data at this point. I trust them with data that I want to explicitly give up for the sake of convenience. Anything I type into Gmail I can accept as becoming essentially public record.
However, that doesn't extend to passively collected browsing data. It creeps the shit out of me that my private browsing history could be associated to my real life identity and other PII by someone at Google.
I would love to do this. However the warnings signs have blared into a real crisis: Google Docs has a stranglehold on “work”, in the broadest sense of the term, the way Microsoft Office once did. Until documents are decoupled from corporate lock-in on a mass scale, I’m personally stuck & likely many others are.
I used to self-host because I could run really strict spam filtering. Unfortunately Sonic dropped their plans to offer static IPs and reverse DNS with their fiber products so I'm stuck with using their servers as a smarthost at least. Can't say I enjoy it (especially with their all-day outage this week), but it does give me a chance to at least easily run aggressive spamassasin filters.
I have a self-hosted domain too, with docker-mailserver, but only for less important email. For important communications I really worry about ending up on a spam list somewhere and landing directly in people's spam box, plus there are potential downtime concerns, so I stick to GSuite for that.
I've had a couple occasions where things have disappeared into the void. This was, of course, after moving away from a static IP (thanks Sonic). On the inbound side, I've had repeated delivery problems with Sonic blackholing mail from some financial institutions.
I use both ProtonMail and FastMail for different purposes, and am considering switching my FastMail account to the main one. It may not be as well integrated, but that's kindof a boon. GMail's new user interface is _really_ clunky. (I know I can switch to classic mode, but I'd rather just switch to something else entirely.)
If you're really set on a Chrome-like browser, there's ungoogled chromium. Otherwise, I guess Firefox is the only truly free choice at this point, and even that includes DRM to be able to cope with sites like Netflix.
Edit: actually, there should be more browsers that I don't know about because I haven't really looked around anymore since choosing Firefox a decade ago. Is anything as well-supported (in terms of proper rendering and security, as well as being FOSS / privacy-conscious) that I should look at other than ungoogled chromium?
Well, with Firefox I have a separate issue which is that I never know when an update will include default-enabled integration with Pocket, a phone service, or some other startup that's scratched Mozilla's back in the past six months. So Firefox isn't a replacement. Also I was badly burned by Firefox removing support for XUL extensions, and refuse to depend on that browser again. I have serious misgivings with how Firefox is managed. You're not being helpful since you know I know about Firefox, and my question is about Chrome.
They ditched proprietary extensions in favor of an open spec than any other browser can use... I mean WebExtensions are here to stay and for the greater good. I can't understand blind hatred towards a move towards an open source alternative.
As for Firefox including Pocket, they own Pocket for starters, and it's less annoying than Edge or Chrome pushing their analytics filled services. There's a lot less cruft on Firefox than in other browsers. If I really wanted I could use one of the GNU forks of Firefox, though I'm not sure how much more privacy conscious they may be aside from a bunch of brand rework.
And blocked site list, right? I forgot the name but there is this anti-phishing and -malware list with 40% false-positives that Firefox uses and is maintained by Google.
From what I've read, Mozilla had some agreement with Google to keep all the data from their tracking stuff silo'ed so it wasn't aggregated with other data and wasn't used for anything besides showing back to Mozilla people.
and
They're now (and have been for more than a year) respecting DNT, removing the GA code so that you don't make any requests to google if you have that enabled.
Firefox currently downloads the (Google Widevine) DRM blob automatically. Firefox will prompt you before using the DRM blob to play video, but you have two options if you don't want it on your computer:
* Or you can install one of Mozilla's "EME-free" builds of Firefox. The only difference between regular and "EME-free" builds is the default value of the "Play DRM-controlled content" option.
Brave and Vivaldi are both based on Chromium and have packaged, non-Google distributions.
I'm posting this comment on Brave, having switched over last week for most of my personal browsing. Generally like it a lot; there are a couple warts (it won't open S3 URLs from the AWS web interface, for example), but it does most of what I need in a browser.
Vivaldi still has Google features like search and safebrowsing which report everything you type into the URL bar and every site you visit to Google by default. Simply "not packaged by Google" doesn't guarantee non-Google.
You can interact with SafeSearch in one of two ways: by sending a URL hash to Google, or by downloading the list of URLs and performing your checks locally.
As a replacement for Chrome on your PC, Brave takes the second approach, and performs the evaluation locally (pulling down a fresh list every so often for up-to-date comparisons). You'll have to check with Vivaldi on which approach they take.
Brave has all of the phone-home-to-Google logic removed. If you ever spot anything at all that gives you concern, do feel free to let us know.
I just spotted something after updating Brave this evening. Included in the update was the version bump to Chromium 69 - and when I re-launched Brave, there was a popup saying "Here are the new features in Chrome 69", and clicking on it took me to a Google-hosted page listing all the ways in which Chrome 69 phones home for a safer, faster, more convenient browsing experience.
After having just posted here, it was...disconcerting. I'd like to give you guys the benefit of the doubt, but you may want to check a fresh update & relaunch from 0.23 to 0.24. I doubt I could reproduce (I've already clicked past it, and it was only on the first re-launch), but for a moment I was pretty confused about what browser was open (in fact, the only reason I'm certain it's Brave is because I just double-checked my Chrome and it's still on 0.68). Brave 0.24, V8 6.9.427.23, rev f657f15, macOS x64 (10.11.6 El Capitan), OS Release 15.6.0, Brave Sync v1.4.2, libchromiumcontent 69.0.3497.100.
Are you referring to the chromium space options, or the browser market as a whole? I’ve never left Firefox and still find it to be a pleasant browser, one with which I’ve never felt really left out barring a few annoying bugs from time to time that are typically short lived.
I love Firefox in theory, it's just that in practice I've never been able to stick with it. One thing or another always leaves me running back to Chrome. It's possible that it's just my own bias and familiarity, but I'm not principled enough to endure an inferior experience in any way. Plus working in chrome dev tools all day long, you really miss it when you want to pop something open and look under the hood real quick, and I don't think Firefox is quite up to par there.
Container tabs just makes up for lack of easy profile switching (at least on macOS, not sure about Windows or Linux), which was in Chrome for years. Even after it came, I gave it a try and found it pretty cumbersome.
(Before I get you-can-do-this-and-that replies, I know Profile Manager exists, and that's an ugly hack: macOS users should not need to run multiple copies of the same app bundle.)
If you think different profiles is comprable to container tabs, you haven't really understood how to use container tabs, or possibly even what container tabs are for.
No, container tabs are fundamentally different than just supporting different profiles, in that how it extends that concept allows for a whole new mode of use. Container tabs allows for domains to be tagged to always (or sometimes, with a prompt) open in a specific container, so after you've correctly configured it, you don't ever have to switch profiles. If I click a link to Amazon, it opens in my Amazon/shopping container. If I open a link to Goodreads, it does the same. If I open a link to any of the banking sites I need to use for different car/house/card payments, that automatically goes in it's own container.
The big thing that's different with container tabs is that after you set it up (which is done little by little as you decide to open something in a specific tab and then mark it to always open there), it's not something you actively manage, it passively does what you want. That's why it's so different.
Having every site be it's own container (which is also a mode Firefox supports, to my knowledge) would be slightly more passive, but also likely cause problems with some sites that use multiple domains, so I think container tabs is a good compromise (for now) that allows good compartmentalization while also allowing escape hatches for sires that require it.
> Plus working in chrome dev tools all day long, you really miss it when you want to pop something open and look under the hood real quick, and I don't think Firefox is quite up to par there
Based on what? What did you try to do and couldn't? Or is your complaint - like the rest of your comment says - that you weren't immediately familiar with the UI, you didn't bother learning, and then decided it was the browser's fault?
How long did it take originally for you to learn the Chrome tools and how long have you given Firefox?
Protip: when you want to sell someone on something, a response of "you're doing it wrong, you're the problem" generally doesn't work.
It's a pretty widely held thing that FF's dev tools don't feel as smooth or well thought out as Chrome's, which is frustrating because FF (really, FireBug, unless you count the weird IE stuff) pretty much _made_ the concept of browser tools great.
I'd love to use FF again too, but for me the blocker is the UI and battery drain. 's why I just use Safari.
> Protip: when you want to sell someone on something, a response of "you're doing it wrong, you're the problem" generally doesn't work.
I agree, but how is this relevant to my comment? I didn't say the GP did anything wrong - I asked them what they did. Not nearly the same thing.
> It's a pretty widely held thing that FF's dev tools don't feel as smooth or well thought out as Chrome's
There are a large number of groups with widely held beliefs where said beliefs don't stand up to scrutiny. "It doesn't feel like Chrome" is not a belief that doubles as valid criticism because it's not actionable. Its sole purpose is to complain about things while making sure nobody can ever act on them because it's so vague.
> for me the blocker is the UI and battery drain
While "the UI" fits in to the category above, battery drain is an actual, specific, measurable and actionable complaint. So please, more of the latter, less of the former.
Stack rewinding, code editing/saving, breakpoints on DOM subtree and attribute modifications, the ability to search for requests via response text (very useful when reverse-engineering APIs), breakpoints on XHR requests, event listener breakpoints.
These are not things that Firefox just does differently, they're features that Firefox just doesn't have.
Firefox's dev tools aren't bad in and of themselves. The UX is fine, and getting better. I don't know if other people have opinions about memory tools or profiling -- I don't all that much.
I guess Firefox's dev tools look prettier, and they do have some features that Chrome doesn't. But Firefox features tend to trend more towards, "here's a cool thing like the ability to debug shaders". Chrome's trend more towards, "here's a useful thing like the ability to debug Javascript."
Firefox's developer tools are quite powerful, I'd recommend trying them for a bit and getting used to working with them.
If you ultimately do want to keep using chrome for the dev tools, you can switch your primary browser to ff and use Chromium (without signing in at all) just for that purpose. There's no reason you have to use your primary browser for your web development work.
I use Firefox exclusively to browse, I use Chromium for local development.
It is true the Firefox's dev tools are a lot better now than they used to be - I use them regularly when I test sites cross browser. But they lack critical features like source editing and stack rewinding, and the tiny visual/layout improvements they've made are not enough to get over that. In Chromium, if I pause a script, I can edit a line code earlier in the function, resume, and Chromium will rewind the stack to that point and replay it forward with my changes.
It is insanely useful, hands down the single tool that I use most often. Stuff like that blows Firefox's dev tools out of the water, because it turns out that I debug Javascript more often than I debug Grid layouts.
A while back I looked into whether or not anyone at Mozilla was working on something comparable, and there was somebody. But then everything went silent and I don't know the status anymore. I've been wondering for multiple years now why this kind of stuff isn't higher priority than new Grid tools or color selectors or whatever.
Firefox's dev tools are way behind Chrome's in basic functionality, even if the user experience is otherwise excellent. You can't even set breakpoints on DOM elements. I would disagree with anyone who claims that they're even remotely comparable tools at this point.
For me it was early on during the time where Chrome was new. First they didn't support plugins so adblockers were not working so I'd see ads and pop ups everywhere. Next they did support adblockers but they sucked due to API limitations. I realized then that they were primarily an ad company, I know the adblockers have somewhat improved for Chrome but I went back to Firefox and never bothered again. I only use Chrome / Chromium for web development.
I engaged with the folks pushing this feature internally when my own browser started enforcing omnidirectional login. One of my specific complaints was that it was an end-run around the user-provided sync passphrase, which nominally prevents Google from hoovering up my logged-out history.
They didn't grok my privacy issue. Maybe they were deliberately misunderstanding me. Doesn't matter either way. Now I use Firefox.
Google's culture breeds internal arrogance and blindness to outside concerns. Arguing with Google people about issues with their products is approximately as effective as arguing with a brick wall.
I stopped using Chrome when I wanted to have downloads automatically save to the desktop (no dialog).
Turned out, there was a 2 year old open bug on the missing feature, in which Google UX engineers repeatedly argued allowing the save location to be changed was counter to the desired user experience.
I switched to Firefox the next day and haven't touched Chrome since.
Was that a long time ago? Chrome has supported the option of a fixed download location for many years. I don't remember it ever not having that option, in all the time I've used it.
Correction: I think it was the ability to turn off the in-window "downloaded file bar" pop-up, which could(?) only be dismissed by manually closing it.
There are a lot of different bug reports out there asking for a flag, and apparently the Chrome team added one, then disabled it a few patches latter.
I forget what I was doing at the time (downloading PDFs for a uni course?). But it was a pain in the ass, of dubious utility anyway, and the cavalier UX attitude of "father knows best" left a really bad taste.
This may be true, but it's definitely not unique to Google. I know some well-meaning leftists who work for the leading Social Network and don't see any contradiction in that.
I could imagine a high-flying company having entitled employees, I just don't see the qualitative difference between this or that company. Please enlighten me if I'm missing the point.
And lest I sound arrogant myself: I once worked in Pharma and made my peace with the price vs R&D logic.
Well, every day there is more and more evidence ahoyt how
R&D excuses in relation to the price later are that, excuses to win more money and they do not share the real investments numbers
Ummm, leftism has a long history of invasive mass surveillance and questionable social engineering practices, so I don’t really see the contradiction here...
Well, most of the fighting against "invasive mass surveillance and questionable social engineering practices" has also been done by leftists, so there's that...
Centrist average Joes usually don't care about such things, and right wingers applaud them to help the police and such.
As for libertarians they are against them when it's by the government, but fine with them when a private company (even one the size of a small nation) does it as part of a "voluntary" employment contract.
To me spectrum implies a single dimension, i.e. the spectrum of light is just based on wavelength. But this metaphor doesn't really fit with politics, which at best can be reduced to two dimensions (in my opinion), and realistically is a lot more.
Realistically the left/right spectrum is orthogonal to the authoritarian/libertarian spectrum. Classic liberalism is, I think, more aligned with the right but also profoundly anti-authoritarian. Similarly, the left has a proud tradition of supporting individual liberty but also a strong tradition of suppressing it in favour of collective power.
Corporations of all stripes tend towards authoritarianism though, in my view. It is a natural structure when you have agents using someone else's capital.
It's not a matter of arrogance but of money. You have to understand when it comes to google, you are the product, not the customer. Google's real customers are big ad buyers. They listen to large ad buyers. Look how quickly they "cleaned" up search results and youtube videos when ad buyers complained.
Us complaining to google about poor treatment is like sheep complaining to shepherds or vegetables complaining to the farmer about poor treatment. Nobody would care. But if the shepherd or farmer's customers complained, they would listen very closely because it affects their bottom line.
Especially now that google has a monopoly position on search and online videos, they have even less reason to care about what the products ( you and me ) say.
This is the culture of having hundreds of millions of users. One user asking for something is just a data point and you have to rely on user research and surveys to know what users really want on average. But surveys have their blind spots as well.
The thing is, as a developer without having access to user research, all I know is what I want, and as a developer I assume I'm atypical. Whether it corresponds to what anyone else wants is questionable.
The opposite of this is people who assume that whatever they personally want is Obviously the Right Thing For All Users. You will find that attitude everywhere on the Internet. And that has its own flaws.
Wouldn't it make Google people to think when opened HN they found top 3 as it is for now - "1. Modifications to Google Chromium for removing Google integration", "2. Why I’m done with Chrome", "3. News Site to Investigate Big Tech, Helped by Craigslist Founder"?
This feature doesn’t enable sync. That’s something that members of the Chrome team have been patiently trying to explain to Matthew Green on Twitter for several days now.
It shows a big blue banner (or is it a button? I don't dare click it) announcing the current state as "Sync as <username>". If the developers need to explain this repeatedly over twitter to a professional, what impression do you think normal users who don't follow a niche twitter discussion get?
Yes, but that's because they are uninformed about the humongous amount of data they're voluntarily handing out and how much can be deducted about their day-to-day lives using that data. If they'd know, like - really properly understand, I suspect that they might not be so eager to hand it over.
I’m sure people at FaceBook said the same smug things until they crossed a line they never saw coming, and now it’s all congressional hearings and “heartfelt” apologies. It’s true, you can dick a lot of people over for a long time, but you’re just breeding backlash. It will come, in waves, and if your history is defined by a kind of arrogant dismissal of their concerns you’ll be screwed.
Every single person I've explained how much data Google et al's regularly collect has cared a lot. My mother's first comment after hearing what Android and Chrome collect was, "Why aren't the in jail?"
Unfortunately, most of these people continue to use Google's services because they often don't have a choice or are not aware of alternatives. Please, actually talk to people outside your bubble and get their actual opinion (which might require educating them about the specifics of what the tech is doing).
My father is a retired biochemist, inventor, and small-business owner. He does not use Twitter.
If he came across this, I expect that he would definitely notice that something seemed unusual. Once it became clear what was happening, I expect he would switch away from Chrome.
I received a call from a client complaining about no longer being able to switch between their gmail accounts (which you normally do by clicking on your avatar in the top right corner of the gmail app on desktop).
After a bit of back and forth, I asked for a screenshot. They sent me a photo of the screen and it became apparent that they were clicking on this new avatar embedded in the browser chrome rather than the gmail app avatar below it.
Sync and log in are two unrelated settings. They were never related
I know what I saw. I was logged in, then I wasn't after I turned off Sync. They may not be related technically, but in the UI they are part and parcel.
It doesn't for _now_. Which is no small part of his point. The next step is to automatically turn on sync etc, which is an easier step now people will start to be used to the idea they're automatically signed in to stuff in Chrome.
The main thrust though, is that this doesn't actually solve anything for end users that the Google Chrome team says it does. There appears to be absolutely no benefit in turning this on.
The main thrust though, is that this doesn't actually solve anything for end users that the Google Chrome team says it does. There appears to be absolutely no benefit in turning this on.
Over the last year or so, it feels more and more like Google, as a company, is getting desperate. Like it feels the external tide of popular opinion turning against it. But rather than mend its ways, a decision has been made somewhere to slurp up as much information as possible as quickly and quietly as possible, before it all comes tumbling down around it.
I wonder if GDPR was the turning point. Even my boss, who on a computer literacy scale of Linda Lovelace to Ada Lovelace ranks near the bottom of the scale, asked me to explain GDPR to her.
I think it was also more advertisers switching to facebook and new ones giving fb ads a try first and not even considering Google ads (btw the rebranding from Google adworfs is another sign that Google is losing new advertisers to FB and yet another thing pointing to that desperation).
This ultimately affects Google's future growth and it's why you'll see Google do more such "desperate" moves like trying to become a military contractor, building its own iPhone-like phones, tracking users more aggressively, and I imagine android users will soon see os-wide ads, too.
It's not GDPR. If anything, GDPR will help undo some of this as test cases in the EU are litigated.
I think the change happened shortly after Ruth Porat was brought on and the Alphabet reorganization was announced (Larry Page wanted to retire without having that be the headline). There was clearly a change in mandate to start monetizing more aggressively and you started seeing the ad load increase across all their properties. That all happened during a lull in Google's stock price. It started trending upwards after Porat signaled to investors that all the money pits would be cut back.
"We had to enable the sync by default because it was causing confusion with people that are already signed in and are expecting to have all their info in sync".
It's not hard to imagine that this could be their reasoning around the change in the future.
> The main thrust though, is that this doesn't actually solve anything for end users that the Google Chrome team says it does.
Yes it does, it solves the exact problem described right in the article. Before this change, there would be a seperate log-in process for Chrome versus every other google service (which normally all share your current login status). Now, your login status is shared between every google service including Chrome, as a layperson would expect. Previously people who wanted to be logged into Chrome AND other google services would have to complete the login process twice which could be confusing for novice users.
If I’m not mistaken, this also ensures that when you sign out of Gmail, you are signed out of Chrome (no?). That seems like a win for user privacy, insofar as it addresses the likely failure mode of mistakenly leaving the browser signed in after signing out of the website.
No. Pauses sync but doesn't sign out Chrome. So a person could still see your history/bookmarks/passwords in the logged-in browser. They just can't wipe your cloud data (which I think was the same before this update).
Yes I was thinking about chrome profiles. My mistake. But from what I remember, when you choose to log out, Chrome prompts you if you want to wipe your local data. So logging out locally allows you to protect some data. I think there was a way to log out remotely (tricky/weird way), though again without the local-wipe prompt.
I also just tried signing in to chrome (69.0.3497.100), and it tried to sync immediately again, so I'm not sure where the "sync is optional" idea comes from?
> there would be a seperate log-in process for Chrome versus every other google service (which normally all share your current login status).
Sorry, not much of a Chrome user here. Why would I want to “sign in” to a web browser? I’ve been browsing the web successfully for decades without doing so. I don’t sign in to my text editor either.
I understand the privacy concerns, but I find it very useful as I go between desktop and laptop often. It syncs bookmarks, history, tabs, settings, autofill, extensions, etc.. There have been plugins for this stuff for decades as well, so it is something that people find useful.
We could apply the principle of least astonishment to get a feel for correct behaviour without resorting to sterile arguments about what proportion of users understand the difference between a web site and a web browser.
If they looked at a slightly risque URL on their phone, would the average user expect Chrome on their laptop to autocomplete that URL?
The current behavior does not activate syncing by default in spite of the slippery slope arguments being made here. Furthermore i think most users would in fact expect syncing like that to work with minimal configuration in this day and age.
Please be civil with people who have a different perspective. The implication that the opposing position is outmoded is not a logical argument, it's an insulting one. "In this day and age," I'd think we could learn to be less dismissive of people.
Well he was replying to me and I didn't read him as uncivil at all.
His response ("syncing is expected") is completely on-point when talking about the PoLS. I disagree, obviously, and think syncing is scary voodoo magic. I don't see how you can say "users are unsophisticated and don't understand the difference between web sites and web browsers" and also say "users are sophisticated and expected config syncing".
Unfortunately, to get any further we have to test users.
(Side note sort of related from another related article - apparently you can opt-out of the unified login, but the flag that lets you opt-out is broken as of chrome canary 71)
Did you even read the article? He stated several times that the problem isn’t that sync is or isn’t enabled after the change; it’s the silent push of an update that directly violates user consent, and it widens the mouth of the user funnel-trap by quite a lot.
Also, the fact that they've gone from "The user decides when to log in, and when to sync" to "We decide when to log in but the user decides when to sync" doesn't inspire trust that they won't soon move to "We decide when to log in or sync".
For now. The next step in the dark pattern is to note the "User confusion that arises when chrome is logged in to the account, but the data is not synced", and automatically turn on sync.
I’m wondering where the source of truth for the sync setting is stored. If I enable sync on one chrome browser — then in another chrome browser on another device log into gmail (triggering chrome login) — will browser history sync be enabled on that second device?
Firefox is a truly fantastic browser now. I've been using it again for about 2 years and haven't regretted it at all. There have been a couple of weird feature hiccups but generally Mozilla seems to get things right.
Same, I always loved FF but had switched to Chrome maybe 2-3 years ago.
After this incident, I switched to FF Quantum permanently. It has come a long way and honestly I feel more at home in FF after a day than I did in Chrome after everything they've tacked on the browser.
Having read these threads, and personally knowing people in the Chrome team that read these threads, I am almost certain that Google will backtrack this. I know more than a dozen developers that switched from Chrome to FF Quantum this week.
I wish I could use it but it has serious performance problems on macOS. I tried and it was just terrible. (thought not all Mac users have problems, quite a number do, and Mozilla has an open issue asking for debugging logs from Macs to find the reasons).
Strange. I almost exclusively use OSX (El Cap) and haven't had performance issues asides from needing to restart the browser once a month or so. Hopefully they get those problems resolved soon, the browser is super quick when it's working right.
I find that I cannot watch a YouTube video on my MacBook in Firefox for more than 10 seconds without the fans coming on at full throttle. This is one of the few reasons that I start up chrome, as strangely I can watch the same video in chrome without performance issues. I haven't had this issue on Firefox on PC
Google Sheets and Google Docs have been horrible on anything than Chrome for a while as well, and I guess they have no incentive to make that situation change. Firefox is dealing with it better than before I think, but I won’t hold my breath for parity to ever come.
GP claims that FF performance is terrible, which I cannot endorse (I guess GP might be having an actual issue), but I'll make a different claim: performance is not as good as Chrome (or maybe even Safari), despite all the accolades of FF Quantum, and my myriad attempts to switch to FF. The (at least perceived) inferiority of performance in addition to general UI ugliness makes it a no switch for me.
Sorry, if that was your thought, I’m afraid all design is probably lost on you. Which might be a blessing, since you can use whatever and can’t tell the difference anyway.
There is a significant (maybe 0.4-0.5 seconds?) lag between the cursor hovering over something and it's hover action (highlight, whatever) taking place.
Running my mouse down the list in about:config feels like I'm drunk.
As a follow-up, I did a complete reinstall of Firefox with a new profile, removed as much cruft as I could (pocket, etc.), upped the content process limit... and I feel like Firefox is much more usable. There's still some lag, but it's more on the order of 0.05 - 0.1 seconds.
Now if I could just get it to be reasonable about search engines...
Also, on my 2-year old MacBook Pro, the thing heats up pretty bad and the fans go on quite loud. It's terrible. I've actually never run any application on my laptop that performs as bad as Firefox, and that's saying something.
Are you using a "scaled" resolution? If so, there's a bug in redrawing that pegs a core, and kills battery life.
It can be mitigated by setting
gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque = true
in about:config, but the fix is invasive, and has taken years to get prioritized and worked on. I've seen reports that it should finally be done in FF64 or 65.
I gave up on Firefox on OS X for performance reasons and switched to Safari a while ago and it’s a decent browser. It has support for extensions that I use (ublock origin and 1Password), uses less battery than any other browser, and is fast
I switched back to Chrome recently because the ublock origin port on Safari has been pretty broken recently. Setting third party domain blocking options in advanced mode doesn't seem to work any more (can't save the settings) and the extension doesn't seem to be maintained any more, judging by the github repo.
The one major thing that keeps me from Safari is keyword searching. It's a major part of my browsing workflow and makes me so much more productive. Last I knew, you could assign hotkeys to bookmarks, but I don't think you could assign keywords and you couldn't use %s as a placeholder.
At first, I was confused, because I've been using this feature in Safari for years. But then I remembered that years ago I installed an extension called "Omnikey" that provides this: http://marioestrada.github.io/safari-omnikey/, https://safari-extensions.apple.com/details/?id=ec.mario.omn.... If this is the only thing holding you back from using Safari, install the extension and switch. It's been working so well for years that I forgot it wasn't built in.
I love how Safari sips battery on OS X, but its performance is glacial in my experience. With Chrome I can, for example, type “was” and hit return at normal typing speed and expect the browser to have autopopulated “washingtonpost.com” from my history and take me there. With Safari on the same newer high end macbook pro, autopopulate takes up to a few seconds, so hitting return takes me to the page half of the time and searches for “was” the other half of the time. Pages seem to take longer until the first meaningful content loads, too.
It does, if you enable it again (or reinstall it from the Safari Extensions directory). However, I get the feeling it will only last for this version, since they seem to be closing down on JavaScript extensions in general.
I hear about "FF performance issues on Mac" and I just don't get it.
I believe all of the people who report this, but it's not something I experience. Here's my usage pattern:
- 50+ hours in a browser each week
- Regular use of both FF and Chrome with very occasional use of Safari (I'm a developer of web apps)
- FF has been my primary browser for 15 years or so
- Used on a variety of Macs (2006, 2008, 2011, 2013, and 2015 MBPs with 8-16GB RAM)
- Running uBlock Origin in all browsers FWIW
...so, anecdotal, but pretty extensive.
I never had major problems with FF in the pre-Quantum days. Chrome always felt snappier than FF, and Safari felt snappier than both, but the differences were not huge and FF was "fine." And now since Quantum, FF is on par with Chrome for me in general.
The one time FF feels like a pig for me is on Google-owned web apps like Gmail.
For many years, Gmail and Gsuite apps were lightning fast on FF. But in the last few years it has gotten slower and slower on everything but Chrome. Hmmm, wonder why.
- frame rate drops to 2-3 per second for 5-10 seconds when switching tabs
- causes other programs to not work properly because it is using too much CPU
I have tried uninstalling the browser and re-installing OS X but it didn't solve those issues. I read somewhere it is a bug that pops up when you have display resolution scaling on and I think it applies to me because I have two 4k monitors set at 2x scaling.
Entirely anecdotal but I have noticed huge issues with Firefox when I hook my laptop up to a 4k display. My normal display is 1080p and no issues on the same machine.
Anecdotally, I've never seen this, even when I had 1 external 4K and 1 external 2K connected. The whole OS was kind of sluggish at that point, but that was definitely asking a lot out of a puny integrated 3-year old laptop GPU so eh.
Just did a quick informal test with my current setup:
- MacOS High Sierra.
- 2015" MBP with no discrete GPU.
- Single 4K external monitor, 3008x1692 scaled resolution.
- uBlock is off.
With only a single blank tab open FF uses 0% CPU as expected. I opened three tabs: Facebook, Espn.com, and MSNBC.com. There was a brief flurry of CPU activity as the sites loaded, and FF's processes are now idling comfortably at 0-1%.
I repeated the process with Chrome and results were similar. One difference is that Chrome spawns 10x as many processes, but they seem to consume less memory each.
In both FF and Chrome, there's a palpable (500 or 750ms?) delay when switching tabs. In my experience a lot of Mac apps behave that way at scaled 4K resolutions.
I repeated this informal test in Safari and it "feels faster"; less CPU spike on initial site load and switching browser tabs feels close to instant.
Well, the last update to Adwords aka Google Ads is now a clunky piece of shit on Chrome and FF.
I don't know if Google has gone too far with the A/B split testing and are picking winners solely on a most ad revenue metric or if they abandoned UX testing altogether. I suppose it could be a bit of both. May be their decision making AI is secretly optimizing Google in a destructive direction.. who knows.
Yep. And Google Voice runs horribly on iOS.. 20 second lag time to check messages, no joke. Earlier versions would freeze at the beginning of each character you type.
Makes me wonder if companies aren't just slowing down their competitors..
Also the parent comment is about Google Voice, which is not a browser and therefore is not constrained by Apple's restrictions on 3rd-party browser engines.
It's possible, but it's much more likely that off-platform teams just don't get much love from their orgs. iTunes on Windows comes to mind, for example.
I would believe this, were it not that the google voice app continues to break in new ways version to version. The latest loads a little faster and isn't freezing as much (still a 10 second load, better than a 40 seconds of nothing). But now when I reply to messages? 19/20 messages I've tried to send through GV show "Message failed to send".
The timestamps on call and message lists don’t update properly either. Switching playback source (earpiece to speaker) often doesn’t work. Screen shuts off even when voicemail is still playing.
It’s been pretty good for me since Quantum. There is still a known issue with scaled monitor resolutions (which I do use), but it looks like fixes are in the pipeline.
It's my daily browser of choice, FWIW, but is no good for development. The React dev tool plugin, for instance, is only available on Chrome & Firefox.
I'm trying to switch to Firefox but it certainly doesn't feel as snappy as Chrome when doing dev work. I do like some of the tools though. Still undecided.
I use Safari for browsing and Chrome for development. Recent changes from Hangouts to Meet has also forced me to use Chrome for video chats.
I've never been a huge extension user (ad blockers and some development tools), so moving to Safari was easy. The big thing I missed was favicons, and those have been in the technology preview for awhile now.
I may explore FF for development, but I'm not sure there is a need since I've already relegated Chrome to a specific task.
This is it. Safari really doesn't compare to chrome/firefox in terms of good developer tools. They are there, but no where near as useful/powerful.
I have noticed a few quirks in Safari that I have to work around. Like not rendering things exactly the same way as chrome/firefox. Bit of a pain, but there is never anything that's really "broken".
One reason is that the variety and number of extensions available is far lesser on Safari compared to Firefox. If someone is dependent on several extensions, then it may be a no-go.
What performance issues have you experienced? Chrome and Firefox run the same on my machine. The only time I switch to Chrome is when some Javascript developer has for some reason disabled click functionality in browsers besides Chrome. Most recently Bank of America has prevented click functionality on their cash back merchants.
I'm puzzled as to why people seem to dismiss the "built-in" browser. It's the fastest, smoothest, best integrated, and least power-hungry browser on the platform. I regularly use all three major browsers (for testing, I write web applications) and I consistently switch back to Safari for all my non-special browsing.
I keep trying to use Safari as my main browser. I want to use it so bad.
I keep switching away from it due to lack of favicons and lack of extensions. I don't personally mind paying for a dev license to release an extension, but it definitely takes a toll on the extensions that get released.
This past weekend I tried Safari again when I saw it updated to version 12. I was surprised to see that Apple deactivated my uBlock Origin plugin, saying it would slow the browser down. So now Safari is unusable and filled with ads, and there's nothing Apple provides to replace uBlock Origin. This is a total show-stopper for me.
It’s really just a suggestion to turn off some extensions. Haven’t bothered to figure out what triggers Safari to do that, but you can still run uBlock Origin on Safari 12 and it seems to work fine.
the new extensions model is ridiculously useless...
You need to build your extension in Xcode now, and for anything other than content blocking, the APIs are non existent...
for instance, you can't even close tabs!
I made an extremely simple extension using the new model around 2months - before I try migrating an older "actually useful" extension. But theres just no way its possible to migrate.
Apple doesn't care about browser extensions now, it seems they want everyone to move to the new model, so they can collect revenue on sales on ad blockers.
> Apple doesn't care about browser extensions now, it seems they want everyone to move to the new model, so they can collect revenue on sales on ad blockers.
The web is terrible without a serious adblocker and the available alternatives (paid or not) are unable to take away the same amount of junk.
People will simply start using another browser.
You didn’t reply to or contradict anything they said. You need Xcode to build extensions and Safari has a super limited API. Executing JS and CSS don’t address either.
I just use uBlock Origin anyway (basically ignore the message). I don't see a difference in performance with the plugin when I updated to v12 on my mid-2010 MBP (it's slow anyway, so /shrug).
You can turn it back on. Go to Preferences -> Extensions and check "uBlock Origin". I've been using Safari 12 since it came out and uBlock Origin works with it just fine.
same happened with Adguard and this was using non deprecated APIs (uBlock Origin was and is clearly using deprecated APIs). It seems for blocking stuff Apple changed the whole SDK on the browser!
It has the worst UX. It doesn't show favicons on tabs. It has the worst selection of extensions: https://redditenhancementsuite.com/safari/. Everything just seems to be worse than Firefox/Chrome from the developer tools to extension development (you need Xcode).
To use Safari, you pretty much need to decide that performance / battery life are more important than anything else which only describes my needs when I need to milk my battery when it hits 10% with no electric outlet in sight.
As a counterpoint; I think the Safari UI is the lightest and gets out of my way. I am I the only one who actually likes the lack of favicons? Very minimalist and gets out of the way to let me do my surfing.
It does have some ux benefits too. The "back gesture" works much better than on other browsers. Firefox gives no feedback, and chrome gives very poor feedback.
Safari lets you peek at the previous page, and makes it very obvious that you are about to go back, without any performance hit.
It also comes with reading mode, which chrome doesn't. Even with an ad blocker, many pages are still layed out in ways that can only be summed up as reader hostile.
So for reading and moving between pages, I feel like it beats both ffx and chrome. So I disagree with your "more important than anything else" part, but agree that performance and battery is among its top features, and if you don't care for that, safari does become a hard choice.
We all care about about battery life performance. This comments section is filled with people like me who want to use Safari and give it a serious try every once in a while for that exact reason.
But it needs more than that when my battery already lasts 6+ hours under heavy use and my laptop is plugged in almost all day anyways.
Perhaps you can see how a reading mode that we already had extensions for in other browsers and sexier prev/next gestures damn it with weak praise.
Well, it does show favicons on tabs (with the recent update). I'm not sure what you mean "everything seems to be worse", I haven't found this to be the case. As for extensions, there are indeed fewer Safari extensions than for other browsers. I checked and I regularly use only: 1Password, Ghostery, AdBlock and Harvest.
As I said, it provides the best performance, experience and battery life.
Safari doesn't support WebGL2 and probably never will because of Apple's stance on OpenGL. Disqualifies it for me and I've had to tell customers that I can't support it, even if they'd pay for it.
For me the biggest reason not to use Safari was that I couldn't paste screen snippets or images from a clipboard (e.g. Web Whatsapp etc). But after your comment I tried and they seem to have implemented it. Maybe even in Safari 12.
Really? When I complained about Firefox performance on macOS, I was downvoted by a lot of people. It almost made me consider if the problem was PEBKAC (problem exists between keyboard and chair). I am glad I'm not the only one. I wanted to love Firefox, but I can't because of this.
edit: reading all the comments in this thread, geez, I finally feel like I'm not a stupid user. :) The issues are real!
I have perfomance issues on heavy JS websites. Facebook is almost unusable. But I have a bunch of extensions. If I try using a new profile (no extensions, default preferences, etc) it's nice and smooth.
I wanted to ditch Chrome, so I tried Firefox on macOS and it took 3-5 seconds to load most sites while they load in 0.5-1.0 seconds in Chrome. I tried uninstalling (including deleting all profile data) and re-installing to see if that helped. This is as far as I got in trying to install uBlock Origin: https://gyazo.com/5850d1b0955c42b857de4ab302c8149b Tried viewing source, but that page just came out blank too. I really want to like Firefox, but the release version feels like an alpha test to me...
Yeah, this is specific to macOS. I also use Firefox on my Linux machine, where it's supper snappy. Kind of strange, considering a lot of Mozilla employees seem to be on MacBooks.
Thank you for this suggestion. I truly appreciate it. I just dumped Chrome on mobile and started using Firefox. While it is a fast browser it is nothing compared to Brave. I'm completely blown away by this browser. Now I'm going to install Brave on my desktop as well.
Development tools held me back and why I don't use Mozilla. Using Chrome dev tools on a daily basis keeps me stuck. Also having different profiles for work and personal is super useful (different bookmarks, logins, history that syncs) it's really slick. Does Brave offer this along with 1Password integration?
I really want to use Brave and I've tried it over the course of more than a year, here and there, and every time it crashes when I pin tabs, I haven't checked their bug reports, granted, but how is this not solved by now?
My opinion is that the UX is no where near as polished. The history and bookmark features still look like they're from 10 years ago, and subtler things that are just given thought to because there seem to be dedicated UI/UX designer on the chrome team.
> The history and bookmark features still look like they're from 10 years ago
It's actually a selling point for me, I just can't stomach all the material design craps that Chrome forces on me where a page lost like 70% of usable space to useless whitespace.
I agree with both of you, really, both interfaces are shit. Chrome has that hideous whitespace that's wasteful even for touch interfaces, let alone for mouse+keyboard, and Firefox has a cumbersome and too basic interface. I can't even do an advanced search on my bookmarks.
I'm a huge fan too but it seems like Mozilla keeps dropping the ball on specific odd, "easy" things. The built-in screenshot tool makes it really easy to accidentally upload private information to a public inage sharing site and the Issue tracking a simple button relabeling has been open for months. They refuse to back down on Pocket integration that still leaves an awful taste in my mouth. The Library/Downloads windows have weird UX behaviors, should probably just be regular tabs, etc.
I for one am glad that it exists, I love Pocket, the only annoyance I have is that the Firefox integration is not as complete as the Chrome add-on, probably because Firefox users keep bitching and moaning about it.
And maybe if that functionality were in an optional extension it would be easier to add features to it for the users that want it. It's not as if it being an add-on has, in any way, hampered your ability to use it in Chrome.
It's great that you like Pocket. I think it's a bit rude to act like it's unreasonable to have qualms about how it was added (certainly pre-Mozilla owning them) or to be confused about it's inclusion while things like RSS reading/folders, (a not-uncommon browser feature) are removed.
This entire conversation wouldn't need to happen. There wouldn't be unhappy users. There wouldn't be "another side" calling criticism "bitching". They'd get active, enthusiastic user feedback, etc, etc.
I’m a heavy RSS consumer, but I’m absolutely in a minority. RSS features according to Mozilla’s own telemetry are used by an extreme minority of users (I can’t find the exact figures but certainly less than 0.5% of people), and are a fairly large and unmaintained part of a codebase that’s undergoing extensive modification. I’d far rather Mozilla expose some APIs and let people make RSS-based extensions than have it built in and getting in the way of performance work.
While I agree that maybe an official extension would have been better, most of the criticism I'm reading on HN is not warranted or in context, like the comment I'm replying to.
Whenever suggestions pop up for migrating from freaking Chrome, which if we are honest is the new IExplorer 6, to Firefox, somebody has to mention freaking Pocket. And it's tiresome and I don't think it is legitimate.
The presence of Pocket's integration in Firefox can't possibly be the reason for why somebody doesn't want to migrate from Chrome.
I never noticed the screenshot tool but, wow, that is some ugly piece of ui. The save button is called "Download" and the upload button is called "Save", holy crap. It sure comes off as someone at Mozilla going "I know, lets shove this new cloud enabled share-your-screenshots-with-everyone thing marketing came up with down every bodies throat via the screenshot tool!"
> It sure comes off as someone at Mozilla going "I know, lets shove this new cloud enabled share-your-screenshots-with-everyone thing marketing came up with down every bodies throat via the screenshot tool!"
This describes their approach to basically every new thing they come up with, and as a long time exclusive Firefox user it's the one thing I really don't like about it. I find it to be a great daily-driver browser but every now and then they'll try to cram some new garbage down your throat.
At least they don't surreptitiously start siphoning your data with without asking first, though.
Edit: As for the screenshot thing being poor, I agree that labeling the upload button 'Save' was quite a faux pas but at least the icons are pretty clear. The 'download' icon is the same as the download manager icon, and the upwards arrow pointing to a cloud is a reasonable representation of 'upload'. I might even use this thing someday.
I really want to like Firefox (or any of the alternative browsers mentioned here for that matter), but I frequently use my Surface in tablet mode and the only browsers with acceptable touch screen support on Windows are Edge and Chrome. Last I checked, this still didn't seem to be a priority for Firefox.
They've actually fixed a number of minor issues over the past year or so, but Firefox still doesn't support pinch zoom on Windows[1]. Being able to reorder tabs using the touchscreen would also be nice, but not as critical.
Reordering tabs via touch should work, it was fixed in Firefox 59 (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1362065). And yes, pinch zoom is not supported (we do text/reflowing zoom, but not mobile-style pinch zoom). It's something that's being worked on but there's a lot of dependencies in order to get it done.
Thanks -- I didn't realize that reordering tabs had been fixed. It only works on the active tab[1] and I guess I've only ever tried moving inactive tabs before. It's not perfect, but so far seems better than in Edge (which allows reordering of inactive tabs but is often rather janky) and Chrome (which has no ability to scroll the tab bar, so tabs quickly get uselessly tiny).
Ah, good point. You should still be able to reorder background tabs using the double-tap-drag gesture (touchdown, touchup, touchdown, touchmove). I haven't tried it recently though.
Yeah I don't like to change habits, I have been using chrome for as long as it has been around, but when I read that last week I made the jump to firefox. Honestly, outside of not having the option to mute sites (as opposed to muting tabs), I can barely tell the difference. Also it makes it harder than chrome to manage site specific permissions. You have to go into the settings and add some exceptions instead of just changing a setting in top left corner while on the site. But it's otherwise a smooth transition.
I wish Firefox was as sleek, fast and no-nonsense as Safari on the Mac, which is my everyday browser. I vastly prefer the idea of an open browser that is not tightly coupled to a particular industry giant. And I wish Firefox actually had a viable Safari competitor on iOS, so that I can sync my state around.
Unfortunately, while Firefox has made significant leaps the last couple of years, it's still not a viable alternative to Safari for me. It doesn't feel particularly native (neither the "chrome" nor form controls etc.), and the UX is still clunky compared to native Mac-first apps.
One particular way in which Safari absolutely beats Firefox is the address bar. Most of the autocompletions that Safari provide are exactly what I want. As an example, if I type "mapq" into Safari, it suggests mapquest.com (a site I've never visited before, so this is not based on anything from my history). For Firefox, it suggests a Googles search for "mapquest", which is just stupid. Aside from suggesting web sites, Safari is superb at showing good results (Wikipedia is often a top hit), and it is awesome at providing autocompletions from my bookmarks and history.
Firefox also seems a bit lost when it comes to innovating, and keeps coming up with weak concepts that don't get any tractions; Personas comes to mind. Container tabs are a similarly interesting idea with a weird implementation that requires you to micromanage your tabs, which I certainly don't want to, and provides a "techie" solution to something that should just be invisible and default (i.e. all web sites should be "contained").
> Container tabs are a similarly interesting idea with a weird implementation that requires you to micromanage your tabs, which I certainly don't want to, and provides a "techie" solution to something that should just be invisible and default (i.e. all web sites should be "contained").
All websites contained would be an interesting default. With ways to “re-open current tab in container [X]” and “merge current tab with container [Y],” it would involve less micromanaging. That’s still not invisible, the container process and UX warrants plenty of thought.
I think container tabs conflates several things that won't be understandable to non-techies. One is privacy — preventing sites from abusing cross-site concerns such as cookies for tracking.
The other is what could be described as "focus" or "modality". A lot of people use windows as a poor man's workspace. For example, if I'm researching where to travel, I'll have a window open with tons of tabs — Google Flights, Kayak, Tripadvisor, Booking.com, all jammed into one "workspace". If I'm comparison shopping for one specific thing, there'd be Amazon, Jet, Etsy, eBay, etc. This is how people tend to work: Windows separate modes, tabs separate units of focus within that mode. And yet there's no browser that supports such a way of working. We have to accept that people now "live" within the Internet, and need to support different modes. Rather than think of the browser as a shell, why not think of the browser as a world in which you can open up different types of interacting with that world? For example, a Google Doc tab is not something that works very well as a tab. It's a document, representing its own modality. Slack is an app, also its own modality. A "workspace" is something else again. And so on. These are all "applications" in a classical sense, yet work within the context of a user.
I'm not suggesting a ChromeOS, just that what we think of as "the web" could be rethought in terms of different variations — ways to work — with the same thing.
Also, in terms of privacy, why are we still using cookies? Why are we "logging in" and "logging out" of web sites and having password managers that automatically fill out form fields? Why can't the web site negotiate its session with the browser ("I want an identity for gmail.com, please give me one"), which can already know who I am?
> Container tabs are a similarly interesting idea with a weird implementation that requires you to micromanage your tabs, which I certainly don't want to
You might want to take a look at the Firefox Multi-Account Containers Add-on, it lets you set domains to always open in a given container, which cuts down on the micromanagement a lot once you get it "trained". [edit: This is not well-advertised, it's accessed through the context menu (right-click) on a page when you have it open in that container]
My biggest issue with containers is how to properly containerize Google itself. There are so many Google properties that are major parts of the web (many under the Google.com subdomain) that its the only major site I have left to no container by default.
Container tabs has that feature built in, you can say that google.com and youtube.com always automatically should open in the same container.
It's still too difficult and cumbersome to use. I might want to have one tab with gmail signed in but another to make anonymous searches on Google, both are on google domains so i have to manually fiddle with the containers again. Then you click a link in an email or search result and you don't really know if this tab should be in the mail-container, in the default container or in the domain-matched container.
I know that feature is there, I was thinking that there could be a maintained list of domain groups you could subscribe to like filterlists. That way you wouldn't have to wait for a Facebook Container addon and a Google Container addon &c.
It is funny how people have wildly different experiences. I mainly use firefox on MacOS, use Safari and chrome daily, but a tenth as much. I find firefox to be the best in every way, except maybe battery where safari wins. But I don't even notice that.
Well, people's experience of performance may to some extent be subjective or dependent on hardware. But the two problems I mentioned (very poor search box suggestions, and lack of native form controls) are objectively true. Maybe you just don't care about them. For me, going back to Firefox from Safari (or Chrome for that matter) is a step down in UX.
The facts might be objectively true, but not that they're a problem. I do not want domain names suggested by the browser. If I'm intending to go directly to a domain, I'll type it in.
I think you misunderstood my example. It doesn't autocomplete domain names, it shows search results. For example, type "Hacker" and the top match might be Hacker News. Type Newton and the top hit might be the Wikipedia page for Isaac Newton. And so on. Safari searches in a bunch of sources, not just Google.
Firefox, on the other hand, only shows you searches. It might offer "Isaac Newton" as a search suggestion, but that just triggers a search. It has no knowledge of other sources of information (beyond bookmarks and history).
In Firefox preferences, you can change the address bar's suggestions to list history/bookmark matches before search suggestions Or to remove search suggestions altogether.
I'm not sure I completely understand what you dislike about container tabs.
For me, I find them very useful. It's convenient, for example, to be able to have two side-by-side Gmail tabs open. e.g. one for work email, and one for personal email.
As I commented elsewhere, they don't pass the "grandma test". They're a techie's solution to a problem that shouldn't really exist in the first place, if we'd got "logins" and privacy and so on right.
How many non-expert users actually want to be logged into multiple accounts on the same website at a time? Work + home email is the only use case that comes to mind, and Gmail at least has support for that built in.
I have terrible results with mobile safari suggesting items from my bookmarks. I constantly try to go to reddit and get auto completion of a different website that starts with ‘re’, repeatedly. I’ve tried to combat this to no avail.
You probably have search suggestions in firefox turned off (they may be off by default?).
Works for me when I flip it on https://i.stack.imgur.com/0ZfvX.png . I keep it off because I don't like having my every keystroke in the address bar sent to Google.
Firefox only does search suggestions. In other words, anything you select from the suggestions just go to search results. Safari does that, too, but it also provides actual results. Very often the top hit is the right thing.
I recently moved back to Firefox from Vivaldi. It's been a good move.
I feel like Firefox is back in the same boat it was in the 90s, but this time fighting Google Chrome instead of IE. But it's a bit different since you have to explicitly download Chrome. It's a bit different since you see an ad to download it right when you hit Google.
Not on Android, and not when you install some other piece of software that surreptitiously bundles Chrome and sets it to default: https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1053973
I started using Firefox because I literally coudn't use Chrome anymore on my PC. Every time I opened Chrome it would hard lock and I needed to ctrl-alt-del, end-task. Even re-installing and clearing out cache and folders didn't help. I haven't been able to open Chrome for months. Using Firefox for 1 week was a bit of usability shock. But it's so awesome once you get used to it. Everything is indeed so much more thoughtful. Every feature.
I use Firefox every now and then just for reading articles so my main browser doesn't get bloated with tabs, but it runs far from fantastic on my computer for some reason.
whenever a page loads all the elements move around for a second or two before they settle in their right place. that would crack me up if I had to put up with that all day
It's the best browser objectively, because it has tree style tabs, it's also a bad browser because it doesn't have a native support for tabs on the side.
Except, by default their primary product was the interface by which may of their users got targeted. They've sat on their hands on privacy for years, offering features for the informed minority, not protecting the majority of their users. It's been Safari and Brave that have started to show proper leadership in protecting users.
Recent attempts I've been making to help teach web developers about the dangers of referers, before they add more tracking pixels or leak reset password links get deleted by Mozilla technical writers because
"
We don't think it's appropriate to have a red warning banner at the tops of the pages. That kind of design element is one we try to avoid on MDN unless it's highlighting the very first thing you need to know about the item, which we don't think it is in this case, although we do appreciate that it is important."
Great idea, let's leave the wet floor warning as a note at the end of the corridor.
I'm a Mozillian who worked on MDN for 5 years, and now work on Firefox Privacy & Security. Most relevantly, I wrote the patch that implements strict-origin-when-cross-origin Referrer policy in Private Browsing Mode.
I certainly trust the MDN team to understand how to arrange their content to match their audience.
I also believe web developers should be more informed about the privacy & security issues of their work. The content you tried to add was verbose without any technical detail or links, and the MDN revision history isn't a great space for content discussion.
Have you tried filing a content bug? It's much easier to converse on bugzilla than thru edit battles.
I'd like to add that the Firefox DevTools are excellent now. For a long time there was this weird stuff with built-in devtools but-you-still-kinda-needed-FireBug and it was a mess (a sufficiently big mess to keep me on a random Blink-based browser), but these days it's just great.
Firefox is a truly great browser, they really made amazing improvements on all fronts in the last years. And I say this as someone who never used Firefox as their daily driver until half a year ago or so.
It always was. When I started using Firefox it was an alternative to IE6. It was the browser you used if you were a web developer because it had things like Firebug (which Google copied and integrated into Chrome). Chrome didn't convert many Firefox users, it just did a much better job of converting IE users than Firefox ever did, but that's no surprise given that they could directly market it to users through google.com.
Chrome initially was faster than Firefox because it lacked features. This is a common pattern if you've been in this business long enough. Firefox itself was originally the fast-but-cut-down version of Mozilla. Like Firefox, Chrome quickly gained features and bloat and became just as slow as Firefox and everything before it.
Biggest drawback to me after trying Firefox are the lack of simple profiles, as in Chrome, which let me separate work from personal from school when browsing, and the fact that all web development is done for Chrome. So many sites don't work correctly in Firefox that I eventually had to give up on it and move back.
Container tabs can do that from a isolation perspective, though bookmarks will be shared. I have "banking", "google services", "facebook", and the default for other stuff.
> While the story behind the coinage of LGTM remains murky at best, the earliest known use and explanation of the acronym can be traced to a feature summary of Google Mondrian, a peer-review software application for programmers, posted by Niall Kennedy[3] on November 30th, 2006.
Google is incentivized to do this, they make good money off of it. It’s boring and true. They’ll keep doing stuff like this until it reaches some publicly unacceptable limit.
Until then use browsers like Firefox or Safari where the incentive to be creepy is far smaller.
> They’ll keep doing stuff like this until it reaches some publicly unacceptable limit
Which as we know from things like Facebook, that limit will never be reached. These things are far too opaque for the general public to understand or care about. Even we software engineers barely understand the scope of what Google is capable of. It's going to take a principled stance from within the industry to push back against the encroachment of these corporations on personal privacy.
> These things are far too opaque for the general public to understand or care about.
Or perhaps your preference is a minority opinion, and most people will trade privacy for convenience even when fully informed and aware of Google's behavior
>Or perhaps your preference is a minority opinion, and most people will trade privacy for convenience even when fully informed and aware of Google's behavior
That's kind of my whole point. Regular people don't really understand the implications of what's possible with all this data even when you tell them exactly what's happening, and so they gladly give it up in the name of convenience. They don't realize it has value, and is dangerous in the hands of bad actors when aggregated in large amounts. It's going to take people on the inside growing a spine and standing up for the rights of all users over advancing the monopoly on private data for whatever web based surveillance apparatus they're currently being paid to work on.
If Google's decision-making processes were as blatantly short-sighted as you seem to make them out to be, they would have prevented ad blockers years ago.
This + the screwup of hiding ".m." and ".www." substrings in URLs + the public threat of getting rid of URLs entirely = patience wearing very thin. Also, enabling webUSB and webMIDI by default earlier, both of which apparently unneccesarily exposed vulnerabilities makes me wonder who's in charge, marketing or security engineering?
At least on iOS and macOS I see no reason not to use Safari, Edge on Windows is pretty good too. Power users will stop recommending Chrome to the average user after these changes and over time market share will hopefully decline.
It’s tough to use Safari if you’re a web developer; Chrome tends to be better at rendering pages and in overall performance, as well as adopting features quicker than Apple.
I just recently visited a site (afterschool program) that silently failed for me using Mac Chrome where Safari worked fine. All other assets other than the login form loaded making me wonder what I was missing.
I almost missed a mandatory form that finally resolved by calling the number on the contact page. This is the sort of thing that used to be the other way around...
Performance may have been an issue years ago, but nowadays safari is just as fast and consistent at rendering. I use safari as my default now, including for web dev, and have chrome ready in the rare case I need it.
Web Developer here. I find Safari to be much faster than Chrome. I still use Chrome as my "work" browser due to the ecosystem of useful extensions (react, graphql, a11y, etc). But I close Chrome at 5pm, and when I need to do non-developer-y things, Safari is a much more pleasant experience (especially now that it has favicons).
Edge is not a bad browser at all, however if you are signed in Windows it will do same shit - sync everything automatically so I would avoid using it if you care about privacy.
> For all we know, the new approach has privacy implications even if sync is off. The Chrome developers claim that with “sync” off, a Chrome has no privacy implications. This might be true. But when pressed on the actual details, nobody seems quite sure.
This seems more like, I'm being told the thing I'm worried about isn't happening, but I don't believe it.
Which is fine, but not sure what's changed with what's being done, rather than a change making clearer what's possible (when signed into google, chrome has your google cookie).
> For example, if I have my browser logged out, then I log in and turn on “sync”, does all my past (logged-out) data get pushed to Google? What happens if I’m forced to be logged in, and then subsequently turn on “sync”? Nobody can quite tell me if the data uploaded in these conditions is the same. These differences could really matter.
Again, how is that possibility any different than before this change?
It seems this is mostly a well intentioned (for a subset of chrome users) but poorly thought out UI change (giant blue button).
When you're looking for escape hatches, you know the software is working against you. At that point, it's better to move to an alternative browser, it's not worth it to fight it with hacks. If too many people use the escape hatch, they'll remove it.
I know. I was just trying to help another poor soul like myself in the interim of figuring out how to switch. For me at least, it's very nontrivial work.
That was also my argument against all the "hacks" people posted online against Windows 10 tracking. Most of them were short-lived because Microsoft had an incentive to stop them from being used in the next update of Windows.
It seems as though the needed escape hatch is a browser that simply CAN'T send info about you back to home base. Firefox might qualify, but I don't know for sure, and I don't want that to be our only option. There's a lot of great engineering that goes into Chrome.
So I'm wondering: Is enough code open sourced to make it possible for an organization such as Apache, GNU, or whatever, to create a sanitized fork of each new version of Chrome? This would be a version of Chrome with no privileged party other than its user. Every other party would be limited to the same set of features (cookies, local storage, etc.) that apply to all 2nd parties.
You might want to look into the Brave browser (https://brave.com), which is a commercial browser based on the Chromium code, funded by a micropayments idea, which tries to generally be more privacy-sensitive than the Google version.
As for a fully open-source version: here's a fairly recent summary (2017) of what's in Chrome and not in Chromium (the open-sourced subset):
There are other omissions that could get in the way of general usability; chromium also omits some proprietary licensed codecs, including the mp3 support.
However, Google synch support, etc, is left in -- and if you desire to keep that out, maintaining the patch set that does it without cooperation from upstream could be a hassle. Whenever they refactor of update the integration between synch and the rest of the browser, you need to make corresponding changes in the patch set that cuts all that out -- and at a fairly rapid pace, too, lest you find yourself unable to ship an urgent security update.
So, it's doable -- but at a price in usability, and doing it right requires some kind of continual effort. Which is what Brave is, in effect, trying to arrange with their payments-based funding scheme. And even a very capable person trying to do the project solo, on a volunteer basis, would be putting themselves at risk of burnout.
Does one really want to associate themselves with Brendan Eich though? Brave is what he has been building after being ejected from Mozilla.
While Brendan has built some interesting and useful things including Javascript, he is apparently poisonous enough to cause three of Mozilla's board members to resign, including a founding executive of Yahoo, the former CEO of AVG, and the former CEO of Mozilla Corp (from 2008 to 2010).
The disagreements were about strategy and mobile experience, so not enough to call someone poisonous. Place Yahoo, AVG, and Moz Corp against Brendan's co-founder status and JavaScript.
The other toxic drama was about a 1000$ political donation. Very sad to see an unpopular view used to paint someone as a monster. If democratic political views are enough to kill someones career, it is more a sign of the toxicity of today's social media and activism than a character judgment.
> Does one really want to associate themselves with Brendan Eich though?
No, not really. Not a good political idea to align yourself with the black sheep. With all the tars and feathers he just looks weird.
Though it also works in his favor: Brave is popular amongst the alt-right and technical-minded early adopters. They see it more as character assassination and SJW corporate culture taking desperate vengeance for Trump's win.
Exactly. I'll go further in saying a system or software should be considered insecure if it connects to Internet and wasn't designed/implemented with strong security. That's most stuff.
That's a red herring. We're not discussing a security bug -- the system is working as designed. The problem is that the goal is not desirable, and the standards and code are complex to the point that an independent implementation is intractable.
> Is enough code open sourced to make it possible for an organization such as Apache, GNU, or whatever, to create a sanitized fork of each new version of Chrome?
> Qt WebEngine uses code from the Chromium project. However, it is not containing all of Chrome/Chromium: Binary files are stripped out. Auxiliary services that talk to Google platforms are stripped out. The codebase is modularized to allow use of system libraries like OpenSSL. We do update to the latest Chromium version in use before a Qt release.
This doesn't answer your question, but I thought I'd mention: A lot of great engineering goes into Firefox too. I really think you ought to try the version of Firefox that enables WebRender by default, when it comes out. I've been using it in Nightly on Mac, and it's seriously worth trying.
> When you're looking for escape hatches, you know the software is working against you.
I would say that when you're looking for escape hatches, you know the defaults don't match your personal preferences. I understand why some people don't like combined login. However, I personally prefer it, and I guess that the decision to add it was made on the basis of believing that most people would feel like I do, or at worst feel neutral.
Based on all the discussions I've had or seen with Google developers, they added it based on the basis of believing that most people should feel that you do, or at worst won't notice. It's unlikely that they considered privacy concerns, above and beyond "we can be trusted so it's fine".
I don't know who you are or whether you have had conversations with the people who are responsible for the feature. All I can say is that that does not match my perception of the typical way of doing things at Google, as someone who has been working there for a while. That said, I do not sit close to where this feature was built, so maybe they do things differently over there.
Maybe they've revised the flag, but the flag did not disable the feature as much as the text might lead you to believe. My comment from a couple weeks ago... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17943524
Thanks for letting me know! For some reason I don't see that on my toolbar, though I haven't tried creating a new profile. I'm on Chrome 68 on Windows, if that might explain anything?
Your comment is aggressively presumptive (and wrongly so) so I'm not inclined to respond directly. You can browse my last few comments if you're genuinely interested.
Granted, Mozilla's had their own issues and some apps / sites may have become as dependent on Chrome as sites were on IE way back when. But given Google's flexing their control muscles over the last few years, a clean break is probably the better long term solution.
Question: How do I sign extensions I wrote for myself so I can actually use them, without uploading a copy of the extension somewhere? That's my roadblocker right now. I don't know how to migrate make my own extensions work on my own system without uploading them to other people's servers. (Yes, I want Firefox stable. I don't want to run a buggy browser.)
You can run either Firefox ESR or the unbranded builds [1] if you want unsigned extensions, but I'm curious what your concerns are with the unlisted extensions option from Mozilla?
Then I have the exact same problem when support dies in the coming months though.
> or the unbranded builds [1]
Interesting, so does this mean that if I want stable builds, I'd have to manually update to the exact unbranded counterpart of that stable version?
> I'm curious what your concerns are with the unlisted extensions option from Mozilla?
I guess because I really don't see what business they have forcing me to upload my extensions to their servers? Same reason why people don't like uploading Chrome stuff to Google servers?
~~~~~~~~~~~
Edit:
I'm trying out the unbranded builds and running into a problem when I try to use my existing profile: disabling signature checking doesn't work. However, it works on a fresh profile. Not sure what the problem is...
I know this is exactly what you're trying to avoid, but could you upload an example unsigned extension? I'll try to figure it out, could be a bug somewhere.
Thank you for offering to help! I actually just figured out how to fix it right now myself. The solution is to delete the following lines in prefs.js, then restart unbranded-Firefox twice:
The first start takes longer, so I can tell it's resetting something internally (not sure what). However, the second restart is what makes it start working. Not sure why.
Edit:
For anyone else trying to auto-obtain the latest stable Firefox nightly, here's a hacky command (change for your OS as needed):
Glad to hear you worked it out, good luck! Looking around there are a few levels of cache around whether addons are enabled, I guess those are what you need to clear it.
It's a temporary hack, but you might also want to look at temporarily loading extensions with about:debugging, this works even in official release.
> Then I have the exact same problem when support dies in the coming months though.
Good news! Even Firefox ESR 60 always you to disable the mandatory signature checks by setting the "xpinstall.signatures.required" pref = false. The Mozilla add-on wiki was a little unclear, so I just manually verified that the "xpinstall.signatures.required" pref works correctly in Firefox ESR 60. :)
fwiw even Nightly is quite stable these days, I can't remember when it last kept me from getting work done. And the addt'l telemetry is just a pref away.
I stopped using chrome a long time ago because its user experience was horrible and it ate up all my computers memory. This would push me over the edge if I hadn't already gone there.
I use firefox and have an addon to specifically erase my google cookies when I close the browser. I don't see a problem with this new chrome feature. Ive seen users logging into eachothers browser gmail, maybe google is democratizing the info they collect so everyone can access it? :) Ill point to this again https://youbroketheinternet.org/trackedanyway
The Mozilla container plugin is really good. Just set all google domains to automatically open in their own container. Takes 30 seconds to install and 30 seconds to set that configuration.
Just watched youtube on the newest chrome it immediately brought my PC to a near-freeze status with 2GB swapped to disk, unusable. Opened firefox and it worked smoothly.
This started to occur recently, combining with the fact that each chrome tab needs about 120MB memory along, yes it is about time to be back to firefox
Related: the morning Chrome updated itself to 69, it went into spinny-beach-ball hell (I had a zillion tabs open, which hadn't been too many before). This mattered because I had a plane to catch, and info on my trip to review and save. It wasn't immediately obvious why it was suddenly unusable, the first workarounds I tried didn't help, and every step of trying things took a long time. (E.g. bookmark all tabs, close the window, and restart: now you're just back seeing the same zillion tabs, where in previous versions with my setup this would come back with an empty window.)
OK, things change and we're kind of stuck going along for the sake of security updates, but going near-unusable at an important moment without obvious warning is a problem. (I'm looking at Firefox and Brave now too.)
I switched to firefox (linux) several years ago for my main browser and I couldn't be happer. I also run chromium when some webpage isn't working in firefox (rare) or when I need to use my companies LastPass account (I avoid LastPass in firefox because that plugin sucks balls), but I never use chromium for google services. I run all google services in a "google" multi-account container in firefox.
No, I mean that I don't want the plugin operating unless I need it to be operating. And maybe the plugin is better now, but it used to agressively autofill my passwords into forms that were not password forms, and agressively ask me questions I did not want to be bothered answering.
Forcing users to sign in to their browser is simply bad taste. Ever since Sundar Pichai became CEO, Google changed for the worst. It’s very unfortunate.
I log into my personal gmail and Facebook on Firefox and everything else on Chrome. I’ve been doing this for years now and I’m perfectly comfortable. For the most part I’ve forgotten about any differences between the two browsers.
If this is your strategy, you're going to also need to avoid google documents and signing into youtube.. and there's also the fact that at some point you need to ask yourself if Chrome is really great enough to warrant using multiple browsers when Firefox containers take care of everything privacy related for you.
Using Brave for a bit will give you some perspective on what sort of things (e.g. location) are being requested whenever you hit a Google-related page.
I agree with Matthew that the supposed problem this is solving doesn't seem to be an issue for the case where no one is logged in to Chrome. In addition it seems to me as if it has a non-invasive solution:
If A is signed in to Chrome, and the user then signs into gmail as B, sign A out of Chrome, perhaps with a notification telling them what to do.
Yesterday, news broke that Google has been stealth
downloading audio listeners onto every computer that runs
Chrome, and transmits audio data back to Google. Effectively,
this means that Google had taken itself the right to listen
to every conversation in every room that runs Chrome
somewhere, without any kind of consent from the people
eavesdropped on. In official statements, Google shrugged off
the practice with what amounts to “we can do that”.
Source: Google Chrome Listening In To Your Room Shows The Importance Of Privacy Defense In Depth
"Listening in" is inaccurate. "Ok Google" was opt-in only, and did not record users without consent. Chromium downloaded but didn't run the binary blob.
I've removed all sorts of dumb stuff slowing down the build that was included by accident or unnecessarily on my project at work. Never attribute to malice ...
> A mistaken include in a build file, most likely.
Yea, "whoops we accidentally downloaded a surveillance device on your system!"... If that sort of negligence can happen, what else is the browser currently doing, or capable of doing in the future, "accidentally"?
Not to make light of the point you're making, but by far and large customers actively want this.
There's a large market opportunity right now for voice controlled systems. Controlling those systems with your voice means they have to be able to listen to you. Full stop.
While I think it's going to take a long time before we truly understand the repercussions of those systems (and I want to be clear, I say that not as an omen of fear and doom, but as a literal statement: We don't understand exactly what level of monitoring we're ok with or is appropriate as a society) I think complaining that google is acting in a solely nefarious way by attempting to incorporate voice control into the browser is disingenuous.
Windows (the literal glass ones) also allow people to see into your home. They let any random stranger on the street walk right up and view the things you own, as well as yourself and your family. But by far and large we've decided we like windows enough that the privacy loss is worth it.
This principle is heuristical and as such can result in down-side when one doesn't actually resolve the uncertainty within the heuristic (read: guess) with detailed evidence.
The obvious downside here is that you can accumulate a bunch of risks which each independently satisfy the heuristic, and so don't seem like risks, but in aggregate can result in a swing towards the opposite of what it says.
Meaning, yeah, sure, stupid thing added to the codebase. But with the accumulation of all the poor decisions Google has made surrounding privacy, is Google really that fucking idiotic, or, what?
Yes, it's maybe intentional, and just using the rule "Never attribute to malice that which cane be attributed" as an indication that there isn't any malice is stupid because it's getting you to change your mind about the kind of thing going on without evidence.
It's like saying Occam's Razor always gives you the right analysis of how things are. No, it only gives you the best guess given that you've taken everything possible into account. But here it's worse, because it's not taking into account all of the other times Google has infringed a common-sense understanding of privacy.
Whether or not it's more likely that Google is intentionally crossing this line, rather than it's just merely possible that they're intentionally doing it, depends on other information. In this case because it's unlikely that Google is really that's stupid, because they're good engineers with strong QC practices, so it's more like that there is some kind of intention involved. Not to be "evil" but to deliberately do things that deny the social value of avoiding surveillance.
I’m a partially savvy user and was surprised when I went to view my recent tabs on (the new) Chrome for iOS and it has my recent desktop tabs on as well.
For those who've switched over to Firefox recently and find Youtube inexplicably slow, it's "because YouTube's Polymer redesign relies on the deprecated Shadow DOM v0 API only implemented in Chrome." [0]
It's more of an OS issue here. Google doesn't view Android as a separate line of business. It's merely a moat for the search business. There's no way for an OS to be a moat for another business without abusing the OS.
Microsoft left IE6 stagnant. They didn't "abuse their position" other than through inactivity.
Google is actively involved in the standardization process, and moved Youtube over to a new API too prematurely (v0 of a spec). Now that v1 has been standardized, they're updating to that instead.
These are opposite problems. Microsoft got complacent whereas Google moved too fast.
fwiw if you read the rest of that thread on Twitter it explains that Youtube is not using Shadow DOM v0, the slowness is likely related to polyfills for HTML Imports, and the next version of Polymer no longer uses those to resolve issues like this.
I'm on the Polymer team at Google. We've been helping the YouTube team, who's been doing a ton of work to update to the final v1 version of the webcomponent specs. So far it's a bit neck and neck between Firefox launching version 63 with native web component support (eta October) and YouTube switching the main desktop app over.
These are new standards, and there were a number of breaking changes from the v0 specs to v1. It's a lot of code to update, but we're working super hard to get all of Google onto v1.
Oddly enough I haven't had too many issues with YouTube's slowness (as a Firefox user). I mean, it's slow, but "tolerable". It's the new Gmail that's horrifically slow now. It takes a good 20 seconds to get to the point where I can interact with it, and then each interaction takes another 10 seconds.
I mean, polymer also broke most of the chromecast functionality in google's own browser to the point that I have to use ?disable_polymer=1 to really use it at all from a browser (really I mostly just use it from my phone now), so this doesn't seem terribly surprising by comparison.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 317 ms ] threadI'm not sure where to go from here because it seems pointless to even use Chromium if I can't remove Google from it and still be able to login to Gmail.
I like gmail web mail a lot, and don't have any desire to switch. It seems absurd that my web browser would be incompatible with that.
I obviously get the idea of privacy. But using gmail somewhat contradicts it.
What you DIDN'T sign up for is Chrome, which can see every site you have every visited, sending all of that info to Google as well to perhaps start targetting some different ads at you. I'm sure that would work well if one of your housemates had visited a dodgy site, which then picks up some suspect ads when you are doing online shopping with your girlfriend.
Well, I've sort of just accepted that Google has all of my personal data at this point. I trust them with data that I want to explicitly give up for the sake of convenience. Anything I type into Gmail I can accept as becoming essentially public record.
However, that doesn't extend to passively collected browsing data. It creeps the shit out of me that my private browsing history could be associated to my real life identity and other PII by someone at Google.
I'm thinking about doing that.
The single reason I started with GMail was because at the time, it had the best spam filter in the industry.
But that was years ago. Has everyone else caught up? Is there another option with equally good spam filtering?
IMO, options like ProtonMail are much better. A service that isn't free but doesn't exploit users in order to make $$ ought to be a better option.
Otherwise I've had pretty good luck.
Edit: actually, there should be more browsers that I don't know about because I haven't really looked around anymore since choosing Firefox a decade ago. Is anything as well-supported (in terms of proper rendering and security, as well as being FOSS / privacy-conscious) that I should look at other than ungoogled chromium?
As for Firefox including Pocket, they own Pocket for starters, and it's less annoying than Edge or Chrome pushing their analytics filled services. There's a lot less cruft on Firefox than in other browsers. If I really wanted I could use one of the GNU forks of Firefox, though I'm not sure how much more privacy conscious they may be aside from a bunch of brand rework.
And I also got burned by the very badly managed WebExtensions thing. I can totally see where GP is coming from.
Two things to note from that thread:
From what I've read, Mozilla had some agreement with Google to keep all the data from their tracking stuff silo'ed so it wasn't aggregated with other data and wasn't used for anything besides showing back to Mozilla people.
and
They're now (and have been for more than a year) respecting DNT, removing the GA code so that you don't make any requests to google if you have that enabled.
This is ungoogled chromium: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
* You can uncheck Firefox's "Play DRM-controlled content" option (which will delete the DRM blob from disk). https://support.mozilla.org/kb/enable-drm
* Or you can install one of Mozilla's "EME-free" builds of Firefox. The only difference between regular and "EME-free" builds is the default value of the "Play DRM-controlled content" option.
http://archive.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/62.0.2/
I'm posting this comment on Brave, having switched over last week for most of my personal browsing. Generally like it a lot; there are a couple warts (it won't open S3 URLs from the AWS web interface, for example), but it does most of what I need in a browser.
As a replacement for Chrome on your PC, Brave takes the second approach, and performs the evaluation locally (pulling down a fresh list every so often for up-to-date comparisons). You'll have to check with Vivaldi on which approach they take.
Brave has all of the phone-home-to-Google logic removed. If you ever spot anything at all that gives you concern, do feel free to let us know.
Sampson (Brave Developer Relations)
After having just posted here, it was...disconcerting. I'd like to give you guys the benefit of the doubt, but you may want to check a fresh update & relaunch from 0.23 to 0.24. I doubt I could reproduce (I've already clicked past it, and it was only on the first re-launch), but for a moment I was pretty confused about what browser was open (in fact, the only reason I'm certain it's Brave is because I just double-checked my Chrome and it's still on 0.68). Brave 0.24, V8 6.9.427.23, rev f657f15, macOS x64 (10.11.6 El Capitan), OS Release 15.6.0, Brave Sync v1.4.2, libchromiumcontent 69.0.3497.100.
Are you referring to the chromium space options, or the browser market as a whole? I’ve never left Firefox and still find it to be a pleasant browser, one with which I’ve never felt really left out barring a few annoying bugs from time to time that are typically short lived.
Firefox container tabs are game changing.
(Before I get you-can-do-this-and-that replies, I know Profile Manager exists, and that's an ugly hack: macOS users should not need to run multiple copies of the same app bundle.)
The big thing that's different with container tabs is that after you set it up (which is done little by little as you decide to open something in a specific tab and then mark it to always open there), it's not something you actively manage, it passively does what you want. That's why it's so different.
Having every site be it's own container (which is also a mode Firefox supports, to my knowledge) would be slightly more passive, but also likely cause problems with some sites that use multiple domains, so I think container tabs is a good compromise (for now) that allows good compartmentalization while also allowing escape hatches for sires that require it.
Based on what? What did you try to do and couldn't? Or is your complaint - like the rest of your comment says - that you weren't immediately familiar with the UI, you didn't bother learning, and then decided it was the browser's fault?
How long did it take originally for you to learn the Chrome tools and how long have you given Firefox?
It's a pretty widely held thing that FF's dev tools don't feel as smooth or well thought out as Chrome's, which is frustrating because FF (really, FireBug, unless you count the weird IE stuff) pretty much _made_ the concept of browser tools great.
I'd love to use FF again too, but for me the blocker is the UI and battery drain. 's why I just use Safari.
I agree, but how is this relevant to my comment? I didn't say the GP did anything wrong - I asked them what they did. Not nearly the same thing.
> It's a pretty widely held thing that FF's dev tools don't feel as smooth or well thought out as Chrome's
There are a large number of groups with widely held beliefs where said beliefs don't stand up to scrutiny. "It doesn't feel like Chrome" is not a belief that doubles as valid criticism because it's not actionable. Its sole purpose is to complain about things while making sure nobody can ever act on them because it's so vague.
> for me the blocker is the UI and battery drain
While "the UI" fits in to the category above, battery drain is an actual, specific, measurable and actionable complaint. So please, more of the latter, less of the former.
These are not things that Firefox just does differently, they're features that Firefox just doesn't have.
Firefox's dev tools aren't bad in and of themselves. The UX is fine, and getting better. I don't know if other people have opinions about memory tools or profiling -- I don't all that much.
I guess Firefox's dev tools look prettier, and they do have some features that Chrome doesn't. But Firefox features tend to trend more towards, "here's a cool thing like the ability to debug shaders". Chrome's trend more towards, "here's a useful thing like the ability to debug Javascript."
If you ultimately do want to keep using chrome for the dev tools, you can switch your primary browser to ff and use Chromium (without signing in at all) just for that purpose. There's no reason you have to use your primary browser for your web development work.
It is true the Firefox's dev tools are a lot better now than they used to be - I use them regularly when I test sites cross browser. But they lack critical features like source editing and stack rewinding, and the tiny visual/layout improvements they've made are not enough to get over that. In Chromium, if I pause a script, I can edit a line code earlier in the function, resume, and Chromium will rewind the stack to that point and replay it forward with my changes.
It is insanely useful, hands down the single tool that I use most often. Stuff like that blows Firefox's dev tools out of the water, because it turns out that I debug Javascript more often than I debug Grid layouts.
A while back I looked into whether or not anyone at Mozilla was working on something comparable, and there was somebody. But then everything went silent and I don't know the status anymore. I've been wondering for multiple years now why this kind of stuff isn't higher priority than new Grid tools or color selectors or whatever.
Firefox's dev tools are way behind Chrome's in basic functionality, even if the user experience is otherwise excellent. You can't even set breakpoints on DOM elements. I would disagree with anyone who claims that they're even remotely comparable tools at this point.
Sorry. I call BS.
They didn't grok my privacy issue. Maybe they were deliberately misunderstanding me. Doesn't matter either way. Now I use Firefox.
Turned out, there was a 2 year old open bug on the missing feature, in which Google UX engineers repeatedly argued allowing the save location to be changed was counter to the desired user experience.
I switched to Firefox the next day and haven't touched Chrome since.
There are a lot of different bug reports out there asking for a flag, and apparently the Chrome team added one, then disabled it a few patches latter.
I forget what I was doing at the time (downloading PDFs for a uni course?). But it was a pain in the ass, of dubious utility anyway, and the cavalier UX attitude of "father knows best" left a really bad taste.
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=8966
I could imagine a high-flying company having entitled employees, I just don't see the qualitative difference between this or that company. Please enlighten me if I'm missing the point.
And lest I sound arrogant myself: I once worked in Pharma and made my peace with the price vs R&D logic.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/apr/12/non-profits-...
Centrist average Joes usually don't care about such things, and right wingers applaud them to help the police and such.
As for libertarians they are against them when it's by the government, but fine with them when a private company (even one the size of a small nation) does it as part of a "voluntary" employment contract.
Corporations of all stripes tend towards authoritarianism though, in my view. It is a natural structure when you have agents using someone else's capital.
Us complaining to google about poor treatment is like sheep complaining to shepherds or vegetables complaining to the farmer about poor treatment. Nobody would care. But if the shepherd or farmer's customers complained, they would listen very closely because it affects their bottom line.
Especially now that google has a monopoly position on search and online videos, they have even less reason to care about what the products ( you and me ) say.
The thing is, as a developer without having access to user research, all I know is what I want, and as a developer I assume I'm atypical. Whether it corresponds to what anyone else wants is questionable.
The opposite of this is people who assume that whatever they personally want is Obviously the Right Thing For All Users. You will find that attitude everywhere on the Internet. And that has its own flaws.
[0] https://twitter.com/__apf__/status/1043505744144826369?s=21
I imagine they don’t care one way or the other.
Edit: To clarify, I care about whether Google knows where I've been online. That's why I don't use Chrome. I just don't think most people care.
Now that Google knows, who else can find out? Someone Google trusts? Someone that pays Google enough money?
Lets sell your browsing data to whoever wants to buy it. What kind of risks would that create for you and your family?
Every single person I've explained how much data Google et al's regularly collect has cared a lot. My mother's first comment after hearing what Android and Chrome collect was, "Why aren't the in jail?"
Unfortunately, most of these people continue to use Google's services because they often don't have a choice or are not aware of alternatives. Please, actually talk to people outside your bubble and get their actual opinion (which might require educating them about the specifics of what the tech is doing).
If he came across this, I expect that he would definitely notice that something seemed unusual. Once it became clear what was happening, I expect he would switch away from Chrome.
After a bit of back and forth, I asked for a screenshot. They sent me a photo of the screen and it became apparent that they were clicking on this new avatar embedded in the browser chrome rather than the gmail app avatar below it.
But if these things are unrelated, I guess we'll just have to chalk that up to Google's famously shitty product management and design skills.
You could always be logged in and not sync. You just had previously chosen to be logged in and synced.
By disabling syncing, you turned off a feature that you previously had to have opted in to.
> This will sign you out of your Google accounts.
And sure enough, it signs you out of gmail and the browser. So it's sign in to the browser, or no gmail for you.
I remember because it bothered me to have to wipe my passwords from some random pc I was using just because I wanted my bookmarks.
I know what I saw. I was logged in, then I wasn't after I turned off Sync. They may not be related technically, but in the UI they are part and parcel.
Thanks for correcting me!
The main thrust though, is that this doesn't actually solve anything for end users that the Google Chrome team says it does. There appears to be absolutely no benefit in turning this on.
Over the last year or so, it feels more and more like Google, as a company, is getting desperate. Like it feels the external tide of popular opinion turning against it. But rather than mend its ways, a decision has been made somewhere to slurp up as much information as possible as quickly and quietly as possible, before it all comes tumbling down around it.
I wonder if GDPR was the turning point. Even my boss, who on a computer literacy scale of Linda Lovelace to Ada Lovelace ranks near the bottom of the scale, asked me to explain GDPR to her.
This ultimately affects Google's future growth and it's why you'll see Google do more such "desperate" moves like trying to become a military contractor, building its own iPhone-like phones, tracking users more aggressively, and I imagine android users will soon see os-wide ads, too.
Except they won't be OS-wide, they'll be Play Services wide and mandatory if you're an vendor including Play Services.
If you don't want Google's ads, you can go do your own thing on AOSP like Amazon and other largely-flopped attempts.
I think the change happened shortly after Ruth Porat was brought on and the Alphabet reorganization was announced (Larry Page wanted to retire without having that be the headline). There was clearly a change in mandate to start monetizing more aggressively and you started seeing the ad load increase across all their properties. That all happened during a lull in Google's stock price. It started trending upwards after Porat signaled to investors that all the money pits would be cut back.
It's not hard to imagine that this could be their reasoning around the change in the future.
Yes it does, it solves the exact problem described right in the article. Before this change, there would be a seperate log-in process for Chrome versus every other google service (which normally all share your current login status). Now, your login status is shared between every google service including Chrome, as a layperson would expect. Previously people who wanted to be logged into Chrome AND other google services would have to complete the login process twice which could be confusing for novice users.
I also just tried signing in to chrome (69.0.3497.100), and it tried to sync immediately again, so I'm not sure where the "sync is optional" idea comes from?
Sorry, not much of a Chrome user here. Why would I want to “sign in” to a web browser? I’ve been browsing the web successfully for decades without doing so. I don’t sign in to my text editor either.
Chrome is not a Google service. It is a web browser. It should act like one.
If they looked at a slightly risque URL on their phone, would the average user expect Chrome on their laptop to autocomplete that URL?
His response ("syncing is expected") is completely on-point when talking about the PoLS. I disagree, obviously, and think syncing is scary voodoo magic. I don't see how you can say "users are unsophisticated and don't understand the difference between web sites and web browsers" and also say "users are sophisticated and expected config syncing".
Unfortunately, to get any further we have to test users.
So in theory your data should remain local
That doesn't sound very reassuring to me. Especially long term.
tbf, this is followed by
> This is my paraphrase
(Side note sort of related from another related article - apparently you can opt-out of the unified login, but the flag that lets you opt-out is broken as of chrome canary 71)
-- Upton Sinclair (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upton_Sinclair)
Firefox it is, and they have done a great job with the new version.
After this incident, I switched to FF Quantum permanently. It has come a long way and honestly I feel more at home in FF after a day than I did in Chrome after everything they've tacked on the browser.
Having read these threads, and personally knowing people in the Chrome team that read these threads, I am almost certain that Google will backtrack this. I know more than a dozen developers that switched from Chrome to FF Quantum this week.
(I'm on Yosemite.)
Google Sheets and Google Docs have been horrible on anything than Chrome for a while as well, and I guess they have no incentive to make that situation change. Firefox is dealing with it better than before I think, but I won’t hold my breath for parity to ever come.
If your cpu does not have a webm decoder in hardware, it has to decode them in software which is inefficient.
P.S. macOS 10.13.6.
Go to chrome://flags, search for "UI Layout for the browser's top chrome" and pick "Normal". Restart and enjoy the old design.
Running my mouse down the list in about:config feels like I'm drunk.
This is on a brand new maxed out i7 MacBook Pro.
Now if I could just get it to be reasonable about search engines...
It's pretty bad. Firefox cuts my battery life in half doing nothing.
It can be mitigated by setting
in about:config, but the fix is invasive, and has taken years to get prioritized and worked on. I've seen reports that it should finally be done in FF64 or 65.EDIT: It seems AdBlock Plus has now come out with a new plugin that conforms to Apple's new API.
I believe all of the people who report this, but it's not something I experience. Here's my usage pattern:
- 50+ hours in a browser each week
- Regular use of both FF and Chrome with very occasional use of Safari (I'm a developer of web apps)
- FF has been my primary browser for 15 years or so
- Used on a variety of Macs (2006, 2008, 2011, 2013, and 2015 MBPs with 8-16GB RAM)
- Running uBlock Origin in all browsers FWIW
...so, anecdotal, but pretty extensive.
I never had major problems with FF in the pre-Quantum days. Chrome always felt snappier than FF, and Safari felt snappier than both, but the differences were not huge and FF was "fine." And now since Quantum, FF is on par with Chrome for me in general.
The one time FF feels like a pig for me is on Google-owned web apps like Gmail.
For many years, Gmail and Gsuite apps were lightning fast on FF. But in the last few years it has gotten slower and slower on everything but Chrome. Hmmm, wonder why.
- uses 100% CPU even when idle
- frame rate drops to 2-3 per second for 5-10 seconds when switching tabs
- causes other programs to not work properly because it is using too much CPU
I have tried uninstalling the browser and re-installing OS X but it didn't solve those issues. I read somewhere it is a bug that pops up when you have display resolution scaling on and I think it applies to me because I have two 4k monitors set at 2x scaling.
Anecdotally, I've never seen this, even when I had 1 external 4K and 1 external 2K connected. The whole OS was kind of sluggish at that point, but that was definitely asking a lot out of a puny integrated 3-year old laptop GPU so eh.
Just did a quick informal test with my current setup:
- MacOS High Sierra.
- 2015" MBP with no discrete GPU.
- Single 4K external monitor, 3008x1692 scaled resolution.
- uBlock is off.
With only a single blank tab open FF uses 0% CPU as expected. I opened three tabs: Facebook, Espn.com, and MSNBC.com. There was a brief flurry of CPU activity as the sites loaded, and FF's processes are now idling comfortably at 0-1%.
I repeated the process with Chrome and results were similar. One difference is that Chrome spawns 10x as many processes, but they seem to consume less memory each.
In both FF and Chrome, there's a palpable (500 or 750ms?) delay when switching tabs. In my experience a lot of Mac apps behave that way at scaled 4K resolutions.
I repeated this informal test in Safari and it "feels faster"; less CPU spike on initial site load and switching browser tabs feels close to instant.
I don't know if Google has gone too far with the A/B split testing and are picking winners solely on a most ad revenue metric or if they abandoned UX testing altogether. I suppose it could be a bit of both. May be their decision making AI is secretly optimizing Google in a destructive direction.. who knows.
Makes me wonder if companies aren't just slowing down their competitors..
Also the parent comment is about Google Voice, which is not a browser and therefore is not constrained by Apple's restrictions on 3rd-party browser engines.
All this unfixed for years now.
I'm trying to switch to Firefox but it certainly doesn't feel as snappy as Chrome when doing dev work. I do like some of the tools though. Still undecided.
I've never been a huge extension user (ad blockers and some development tools), so moving to Safari was easy. The big thing I missed was favicons, and those have been in the technology preview for awhile now.
I may explore FF for development, but I'm not sure there is a need since I've already relegated Chrome to a specific task.
I have noticed a few quirks in Safari that I have to work around. Like not rendering things exactly the same way as chrome/firefox. Bit of a pain, but there is never anything that's really "broken".
I'm puzzled as to why people seem to dismiss the "built-in" browser. It's the fastest, smoothest, best integrated, and least power-hungry browser on the platform. I regularly use all three major browsers (for testing, I write web applications) and I consistently switch back to Safari for all my non-special browsing.
I keep switching away from it due to lack of favicons and lack of extensions. I don't personally mind paying for a dev license to release an extension, but it definitely takes a toll on the extensions that get released.
Safari has a new extensions model and will be deprecating the legacy one in a year. Hence the push to migrate to newer extensions.
I made an extremely simple extension using the new model around 2months - before I try migrating an older "actually useful" extension. But theres just no way its possible to migrate.
Apple doesn't care about browser extensions now, it seems they want everyone to move to the new model, so they can collect revenue on sales on ad blockers.
:(
The web is terrible without a serious adblocker and the available alternatives (paid or not) are unable to take away the same amount of junk. People will simply start using another browser.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/saf...
More specifically, if you can inject scripts I don’t see why you couldn’t call window.close()
This is a tradeoff Apple made valuing privacy and performance over user freedom. The new content blocking API is safer and faster.
https://github.com/el1t/uBlock-Safari/issues/69
To use Safari, you pretty much need to decide that performance / battery life are more important than anything else which only describes my needs when I need to milk my battery when it hits 10% with no electric outlet in sight.
This is how to enable it: https://lifehacker.com/how-to-enable-safari-favicons-on-mac-...
I do use Chrome during development though.
Safari lets you peek at the previous page, and makes it very obvious that you are about to go back, without any performance hit.
It also comes with reading mode, which chrome doesn't. Even with an ad blocker, many pages are still layed out in ways that can only be summed up as reader hostile.
So for reading and moving between pages, I feel like it beats both ffx and chrome. So I disagree with your "more important than anything else" part, but agree that performance and battery is among its top features, and if you don't care for that, safari does become a hard choice.
But it needs more than that when my battery already lasts 6+ hours under heavy use and my laptop is plugged in almost all day anyways.
Perhaps you can see how a reading mode that we already had extensions for in other browsers and sexier prev/next gestures damn it with weak praise.
As I said, it provides the best performance, experience and battery life.
We have no particular stance against it, though I agree with the other poster that WebGL is more the future.
edit: reading all the comments in this thread, geez, I finally feel like I'm not a stupid user. :) The issues are real!
"Faster tab switching in the majority of cases for our macOS users"
"Improved the reactivity of Firefox on macOS"
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/63.0beta/releasenotes
Example: https://i.imgur.com/ZfHnNmX.png
I've been seeing people repeat that for the past 5 years. It turns out to be false though.
It's actually a selling point for me, I just can't stomach all the material design craps that Chrome forces on me where a page lost like 70% of usable space to useless whitespace.
At least for me, on Linux, it’s always been opt-in, and plenty of the versions of Firefox packaged by distro maintainers get rid of it all together.
I for one am glad that it exists, I love Pocket, the only annoyance I have is that the Firefox integration is not as complete as the Chrome add-on, probably because Firefox users keep bitching and moaning about it.
It's great that you like Pocket. I think it's a bit rude to act like it's unreasonable to have qualms about how it was added (certainly pre-Mozilla owning them) or to be confused about it's inclusion while things like RSS reading/folders, (a not-uncommon browser feature) are removed.
This entire conversation wouldn't need to happen. There wouldn't be unhappy users. There wouldn't be "another side" calling criticism "bitching". They'd get active, enthusiastic user feedback, etc, etc.
Whenever suggestions pop up for migrating from freaking Chrome, which if we are honest is the new IExplorer 6, to Firefox, somebody has to mention freaking Pocket. And it's tiresome and I don't think it is legitimate.
The presence of Pocket's integration in Firefox can't possibly be the reason for why somebody doesn't want to migrate from Chrome.
This describes their approach to basically every new thing they come up with, and as a long time exclusive Firefox user it's the one thing I really don't like about it. I find it to be a great daily-driver browser but every now and then they'll try to cram some new garbage down your throat.
At least they don't surreptitiously start siphoning your data with without asking first, though.
Edit: As for the screenshot thing being poor, I agree that labeling the upload button 'Save' was quite a faux pas but at least the icons are pretty clear. The 'download' icon is the same as the download manager icon, and the upwards arrow pointing to a cloud is a reasonable representation of 'upload'. I might even use this thing someday.
Exist a way to make it work? (ie: Maker a goblal zoom and a per-domain/page)
[1] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/chrome-and-fi...
[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/styl-us/
[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=688990
[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1362065#c57
Unfortunately, while Firefox has made significant leaps the last couple of years, it's still not a viable alternative to Safari for me. It doesn't feel particularly native (neither the "chrome" nor form controls etc.), and the UX is still clunky compared to native Mac-first apps.
One particular way in which Safari absolutely beats Firefox is the address bar. Most of the autocompletions that Safari provide are exactly what I want. As an example, if I type "mapq" into Safari, it suggests mapquest.com (a site I've never visited before, so this is not based on anything from my history). For Firefox, it suggests a Googles search for "mapquest", which is just stupid. Aside from suggesting web sites, Safari is superb at showing good results (Wikipedia is often a top hit), and it is awesome at providing autocompletions from my bookmarks and history.
Firefox also seems a bit lost when it comes to innovating, and keeps coming up with weak concepts that don't get any tractions; Personas comes to mind. Container tabs are a similarly interesting idea with a weird implementation that requires you to micromanage your tabs, which I certainly don't want to, and provides a "techie" solution to something that should just be invisible and default (i.e. all web sites should be "contained").
All websites contained would be an interesting default. With ways to “re-open current tab in container [X]” and “merge current tab with container [Y],” it would involve less micromanaging. That’s still not invisible, the container process and UX warrants plenty of thought.
The other is what could be described as "focus" or "modality". A lot of people use windows as a poor man's workspace. For example, if I'm researching where to travel, I'll have a window open with tons of tabs — Google Flights, Kayak, Tripadvisor, Booking.com, all jammed into one "workspace". If I'm comparison shopping for one specific thing, there'd be Amazon, Jet, Etsy, eBay, etc. This is how people tend to work: Windows separate modes, tabs separate units of focus within that mode. And yet there's no browser that supports such a way of working. We have to accept that people now "live" within the Internet, and need to support different modes. Rather than think of the browser as a shell, why not think of the browser as a world in which you can open up different types of interacting with that world? For example, a Google Doc tab is not something that works very well as a tab. It's a document, representing its own modality. Slack is an app, also its own modality. A "workspace" is something else again. And so on. These are all "applications" in a classical sense, yet work within the context of a user.
I'm not suggesting a ChromeOS, just that what we think of as "the web" could be rethought in terms of different variations — ways to work — with the same thing.
Also, in terms of privacy, why are we still using cookies? Why are we "logging in" and "logging out" of web sites and having password managers that automatically fill out form fields? Why can't the web site negotiate its session with the browser ("I want an identity for gmail.com, please give me one"), which can already know who I am?
You might want to take a look at the Firefox Multi-Account Containers Add-on, it lets you set domains to always open in a given container, which cuts down on the micromanagement a lot once you get it "trained". [edit: This is not well-advertised, it's accessed through the context menu (right-click) on a page when you have it open in that container]
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/multi-account-conta...
> i.e. all web sites should be "contained"
It's possible to enable this for most intents and purposes with "1st party isolation", which came from the Tor browser. Some info here:
https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/firefox-fpi
https://decentraleyes.org/
It's still too difficult and cumbersome to use. I might want to have one tab with gmail signed in but another to make anonymous searches on Google, both are on google domains so i have to manually fiddle with the containers again. Then you click a link in an email or search result and you don't really know if this tab should be in the mail-container, in the default container or in the domain-matched container.
It's a tough problem, and I agree the grandma test is a good standard, sometimes it can't be easily done.
Firefox, on the other hand, only shows you searches. It might offer "Isaac Newton" as a search suggestion, but that just triggers a search. It has no knowledge of other sources of information (beyond bookmarks and history).
For me, I find them very useful. It's convenient, for example, to be able to have two side-by-side Gmail tabs open. e.g. one for work email, and one for personal email.
But I do see your point that they shouldn't be necessary.
Works for me when I flip it on https://i.stack.imgur.com/0ZfvX.png . I keep it off because I don't like having my every keystroke in the address bar sent to Google.
https://imgur.com/a/dY2SWKB
Firefox only does search suggestions. In other words, anything you select from the suggestions just go to search results. Safari does that, too, but it also provides actual results. Very often the top hit is the right thing.
I feel like Firefox is back in the same boat it was in the 90s, but this time fighting Google Chrome instead of IE. But it's a bit different since you have to explicitly download Chrome. It's a bit different since you see an ad to download it right when you hit Google.
Maybe one day, mozilla. Maybe one day.
whenever a page loads all the elements move around for a second or two before they settle in their right place. that would crack me up if I had to put up with that all day
Recent attempts I've been making to help teach web developers about the dangers of referers, before they add more tracking pixels or leak reset password links get deleted by Mozilla technical writers because
" We don't think it's appropriate to have a red warning banner at the tops of the pages. That kind of design element is one we try to avoid on MDN unless it's highlighting the very first thing you need to know about the item, which we don't think it is in this case, although we do appreciate that it is important."
Great idea, let's leave the wet floor warning as a note at the end of the corridor.
See here https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/im...
I certainly trust the MDN team to understand how to arrange their content to match their audience.
I also believe web developers should be more informed about the privacy & security issues of their work. The content you tried to add was verbose without any technical detail or links, and the MDN revision history isn't a great space for content discussion.
Have you tried filing a content bug? It's much easier to converse on bugzilla than thru edit battles.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/form.doc?bug_file_loc=https%3A/...
Firefox is a truly great browser, they really made amazing improvements on all fronts in the last years. And I say this as someone who never used Firefox as their daily driver until half a year ago or so.
Chrome initially was faster than Firefox because it lacked features. This is a common pattern if you've been in this business long enough. Firefox itself was originally the fast-but-cut-down version of Mozilla. Like Firefox, Chrome quickly gained features and bloat and became just as slow as Firefox and everything before it.
>So many sites don't work correctly in Firefox
I've not experienced that.
"Looks/looking good to me"
> While the story behind the coinage of LGTM remains murky at best, the earliest known use and explanation of the acronym can be traced to a feature summary of Google Mondrian, a peer-review software application for programmers, posted by Niall Kennedy[3] on November 30th, 2006.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/lgtm?full=1
Until then use browsers like Firefox or Safari where the incentive to be creepy is far smaller.
Which as we know from things like Facebook, that limit will never be reached. These things are far too opaque for the general public to understand or care about. Even we software engineers barely understand the scope of what Google is capable of. It's going to take a principled stance from within the industry to push back against the encroachment of these corporations on personal privacy.
Or perhaps your preference is a minority opinion, and most people will trade privacy for convenience even when fully informed and aware of Google's behavior
That's kind of my whole point. Regular people don't really understand the implications of what's possible with all this data even when you tell them exactly what's happening, and so they gladly give it up in the name of convenience. They don't realize it has value, and is dangerous in the hands of bad actors when aggregated in large amounts. It's going to take people on the inside growing a spine and standing up for the rights of all users over advancing the monopoly on private data for whatever web based surveillance apparatus they're currently being paid to work on.
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=882902...
Whoever was in charge of the updates to the URL bar seems to be lacking something. But at least the URL doesn't show "https://" anymore, I guess?
I almost missed a mandatory form that finally resolved by calling the number on the contact page. This is the sort of thing that used to be the other way around...
Edge is not a bad browser at all, however if you are signed in Windows it will do same shit - sync everything automatically so I would avoid using it if you care about privacy.
This seems more like, I'm being told the thing I'm worried about isn't happening, but I don't believe it.
Which is fine, but not sure what's changed with what's being done, rather than a change making clearer what's possible (when signed into google, chrome has your google cookie).
> For example, if I have my browser logged out, then I log in and turn on “sync”, does all my past (logged-out) data get pushed to Google? What happens if I’m forced to be logged in, and then subsequently turn on “sync”? Nobody can quite tell me if the data uploaded in these conditions is the same. These differences could really matter.
Again, how is that possibility any different than before this change?
It seems this is mostly a well intentioned (for a subset of chrome users) but poorly thought out UI change (giant blue button).
Edit: Some are saying this doesn't work on Chrome 69. :(
So I'm wondering: Is enough code open sourced to make it possible for an organization such as Apache, GNU, or whatever, to create a sanitized fork of each new version of Chrome? This would be a version of Chrome with no privileged party other than its user. Every other party would be limited to the same set of features (cookies, local storage, etc.) that apply to all 2nd parties.
As for a fully open-source version: here's a fairly recent summary (2017) of what's in Chrome and not in Chromium (the open-sourced subset):
https://www.howtogeek.com/202825/what%E2%80%99s-the-differen...
There are other omissions that could get in the way of general usability; chromium also omits some proprietary licensed codecs, including the mp3 support.
However, Google synch support, etc, is left in -- and if you desire to keep that out, maintaining the patch set that does it without cooperation from upstream could be a hassle. Whenever they refactor of update the integration between synch and the rest of the browser, you need to make corresponding changes in the patch set that cuts all that out -- and at a fairly rapid pace, too, lest you find yourself unable to ship an urgent security update.
So, it's doable -- but at a price in usability, and doing it right requires some kind of continual effort. Which is what Brave is, in effect, trying to arrange with their payments-based funding scheme. And even a very capable person trying to do the project solo, on a volunteer basis, would be putting themselves at risk of burnout.
While Brendan has built some interesting and useful things including Javascript, he is apparently poisonous enough to cause three of Mozilla's board members to resign, including a founding executive of Yahoo, the former CEO of AVG, and the former CEO of Mozilla Corp (from 2008 to 2010).
His wiki page is a good reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich
The other toxic drama was about a 1000$ political donation. Very sad to see an unpopular view used to paint someone as a monster. If democratic political views are enough to kill someones career, it is more a sign of the toxicity of today's social media and activism than a character judgment.
> Does one really want to associate themselves with Brendan Eich though?
No, not really. Not a good political idea to align yourself with the black sheep. With all the tars and feathers he just looks weird.
Though it also works in his favor: Brave is popular amongst the alt-right and technical-minded early adopters. They see it more as character assassination and SJW corporate culture taking desperate vengeance for Trump's win.
Brave is fantastic on android though.
It was ten years ago. When people fussed about it it was six years old.
How many years back do political actions count as relevant?
https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-under-fire-inside-the-9-da...
Unfortunatly that requires a large sacrifice: no Turing complete languages.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15708099
That ship sailed long ago for browsers -- if you care about auditability, you can't trust the web.
Yes: https://wiki.qt.io/QtWebEngine
> Qt WebEngine uses code from the Chromium project. However, it is not containing all of Chrome/Chromium: Binary files are stripped out. Auxiliary services that talk to Google platforms are stripped out. The codebase is modularized to allow use of system libraries like OpenSSL. We do update to the latest Chromium version in use before a Qt release.
Here's a browser: https://www.qutebrowser.org/ I haven't tried it yet.
[edit]
oh, it's already in the apt repos on debian testing :)
I would say that when you're looking for escape hatches, you know the defaults don't match your personal preferences. I understand why some people don't like combined login. However, I personally prefer it, and I guess that the decision to add it was made on the basis of believing that most people would feel like I do, or at worst feel neutral.
But youtube is so damn entrenched nowadays...
Granted, Mozilla's had their own issues and some apps / sites may have become as dependent on Chrome as sites were on IE way back when. But given Google's flexing their control muscles over the last few years, a clean break is probably the better long term solution.
1 - https://wiki.mozilla.org/Add-ons/Extension_Signing#Unbranded...
Then I have the exact same problem when support dies in the coming months though.
> or the unbranded builds [1]
Interesting, so does this mean that if I want stable builds, I'd have to manually update to the exact unbranded counterpart of that stable version?
> I'm curious what your concerns are with the unlisted extensions option from Mozilla?
I guess because I really don't see what business they have forcing me to upload my extensions to their servers? Same reason why people don't like uploading Chrome stuff to Google servers?
~~~~~~~~~~~
Edit:
I'm trying out the unbranded builds and running into a problem when I try to use my existing profile: disabling signature checking doesn't work. However, it works on a fresh profile. Not sure what the problem is...
Edit:
For anyone else trying to auto-obtain the latest stable Firefox nightly, here's a hacky command (change for your OS as needed):
It's a temporary hack, but you might also want to look at temporarily loading extensions with about:debugging, this works even in official release.
Good news! Even Firefox ESR 60 always you to disable the mandatory signature checks by setting the "xpinstall.signatures.required" pref = false. The Mozilla add-on wiki was a little unclear, so I just manually verified that the "xpinstall.signatures.required" pref works correctly in Firefox ESR 60. :)
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Add-ons/Extension_Signing
> Yes, I want Firefox stable. I don't want to run a buggy browser.
? Is the developer edition running the same code as stable?
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/04/simplifying-firefox-releas... (edit for better link)
I can't find anything on this, does anyone have more info?
This started to occur recently, combining with the fact that each chrome tab needs about 120MB memory along, yes it is about time to be back to firefox
OK, things change and we're kind of stuck going along for the sake of security updates, but going near-unusable at an important moment without obvious warning is a problem. (I'm looking at Firefox and Brave now too.)
Doesn't this change in behavior make things far less confusing for non-technical users?
Because I haven't noticed any difference between Chrome and FF extensions now.
If A is signed in to Chrome, and the user then signs into gmail as B, sign A out of Chrome, perhaps with a notification telling them what to do.
https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2015/06/google-ch...
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9724409
including Google's perspective: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9735795
I've removed all sorts of dumb stuff slowing down the build that was included by accident or unnecessarily on my project at work. Never attribute to malice ...
Yea, "whoops we accidentally downloaded a surveillance device on your system!"... If that sort of negligence can happen, what else is the browser currently doing, or capable of doing in the future, "accidentally"?
"Chromium does download hotword-x86-64.nexe on startup, but it has been carefully designed as an opt-in feature"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9735795
There's a large market opportunity right now for voice controlled systems. Controlling those systems with your voice means they have to be able to listen to you. Full stop.
While I think it's going to take a long time before we truly understand the repercussions of those systems (and I want to be clear, I say that not as an omen of fear and doom, but as a literal statement: We don't understand exactly what level of monitoring we're ok with or is appropriate as a society) I think complaining that google is acting in a solely nefarious way by attempting to incorporate voice control into the browser is disingenuous.
Windows (the literal glass ones) also allow people to see into your home. They let any random stranger on the street walk right up and view the things you own, as well as yourself and your family. But by far and large we've decided we like windows enough that the privacy loss is worth it.
This principle is heuristical and as such can result in down-side when one doesn't actually resolve the uncertainty within the heuristic (read: guess) with detailed evidence.
The obvious downside here is that you can accumulate a bunch of risks which each independently satisfy the heuristic, and so don't seem like risks, but in aggregate can result in a swing towards the opposite of what it says.
Meaning, yeah, sure, stupid thing added to the codebase. But with the accumulation of all the poor decisions Google has made surrounding privacy, is Google really that fucking idiotic, or, what?
It's like saying Occam's Razor always gives you the right analysis of how things are. No, it only gives you the best guess given that you've taken everything possible into account. But here it's worse, because it's not taking into account all of the other times Google has infringed a common-sense understanding of privacy.
Whether or not it's more likely that Google is intentionally crossing this line, rather than it's just merely possible that they're intentionally doing it, depends on other information. In this case because it's unlikely that Google is really that's stupid, because they're good engineers with strong QC practices, so it's more like that there is some kind of intention involved. Not to be "evil" but to deliberately do things that deny the social value of avoiding surveillance.
Unsettling.
The YouTube Classic extension will speed things up: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-class...
[0] https://twitter.com/cpeterso/status/1021626510296285185
Google is actively involved in the standardization process, and moved Youtube over to a new API too prematurely (v0 of a spec). Now that v1 has been standardized, they're updating to that instead.
These are opposite problems. Microsoft got complacent whereas Google moved too fast.
Also Chrome is actively removing the web standards that didn't end up being adopted broadly: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/m/#!topic/bli...
So YouTube will end up just as slow in other browsers unless they upgrade to a newer polymer that uses the broadly implemented standards.
These are new standards, and there were a number of breaking changes from the v0 specs to v1. It's a lot of code to update, but we're working super hard to get all of Google onto v1.
Shame about all the conspiracy theories regarding this topic. It seemed likely enough to boil down to a logical explanation.