Really tired of this Firefox spam. If you think ad blocking is so important then let usage share % speak by itself when Chrome removes ad blocking, if they actually do it.
1. Safari is only available for macOS and iOS. There's no widely available, up to date browser based on non-Blink WebKit, and it's unlikely there will be, as it's rather tied to Apple OS APIs.
2. Aside from Firefox, all browsers that are available for all major operating systems are based on Chromium/Blink, and consequently will inherit Google's architectural decisions, and on a sociopolitical level, enhance Google's domination of the Web.
I get why someone might want Safari, what I'm asking is why the download link is on the front page of HN when there's no opinion nor perspective. I keep hearing "it's not an ad" but then...what is it?
What??? What does this even mean?? We're meant to just sit and watch as more and more control of the internet is taken away from us, in hope that maybe something nice happens?
All this "spam" is meant to raise that usage %!
We need to claw back what little hope remains, or die trying, damn it.
To be fair, that seems to be precisely what this post proposes. If you are unhappy with Google, you can switch "easily."
That said, I would at least agree that this post is has a lack of any real substance and is low effort. Generally speaking, most people are familiar with Firefox, which holds even more accurate here on _Hacker News_. I would speculate many are also familiar with the initial "import" process offered by Firefox and competing browsers alike. So I am unsure of the goal of this post. I wouldn't go so far as to call it outright _spam_, but I do not think it warrants frontpage presence either.
It just feels like an ad. No mention of that other article, and it's a REAL stretch to say that these are related. No more ad spam on Hacker News, it's one of the few good sites left.
These aren't related whatsoever, but the timing of this submission is.
I personally don't think it belongs on the front page just because of news regarding a competitor, the only discussion this link sparks is the same discussion that's already been had twice this week (20044430, 20050173).
In Firefox you can find the search field on a page, right click, and 'add a keyword for this search'. Then you can just type that keyword in the address bar, for instance 'wp searchtermhere' for wikipedia.
In Firefox, go to Preferences -> Search and click on "Add search bar in toolbar". Also uncheck "Show search suggestions in address bar results".
Then ctrl-l will only autocomplete URLs and ctrl-k will search. Once you're in the search box, press TAB to cycle through your search providers. You can add additional search providers easily.
Slightly better still not there. If I have 15 search providers I have to press TAB 15 times to get to the last one, that is tiresome. I can search amazon/ebay/npm/rubygems/mdn/etc without looking at the screen or keyboard with chrome. I have probably >10 search engines I use daily.
I didn't think about adding sites like rubygems and mdn, but that's a good idea.
Edit: I just tried it and it works. Example: create a bookmark in Firefox and change the URL to the one below. Set the keyword to "r" in the bookmarks editor. Then you can type `r devise` in the address bar to search rubygems.
One of the points brought up about the changes being made to content blocking in Chrome is that it was an engine change. So no, switching to Edge or Opera or whatever might not do anything to help. I'm guessing Brave is the one Blink-powered browser that is likely to become an exception.
It would be nice if there was also something in place which allowed Firefox to detect when an addon like uBlock Origin is also available on Firefox, then suggest installing the Firefox version during the upgrade.
> eyeo GmbH (owner of Adblock Plus) is a business partner of Google (through its "Acceptable Ads" business plan), and its business share some the same key characteristics as the Google's ones above:
> It gets revenues from the displaying of ads with those with which it has a contract (Google, Taboola, etc.)
> It expressly names uBlock Origin as a risk factor to its business
uMatrix and uBlock Origin are complementary. Specifically uBlock Origin has cosmetic filters which uMatrix doesn't have. Using both is quite handy in my experience.
Anything "Adblock" should be avoided. Borderline malware imo, and there is no reason to use them when you've got uBO/uMatrix.
My understanding is that Adblock's blocking is purely visual? So the ads themselves actually load and get their tracking data like normal, just silently now.
Generally, yes. A little less so if you have spare but still important.
The main reason is, as you said, cache. The more unused RAM you have, the longer caches will be kept. It includes disk cache, browser cache, etc... But it can also make the CPU cache more efficient. L2 cache is about 10 times faster than RAM, and the less RAM you are using, the more cache will be used. L1 cache is even faster but here, access patterns matters as much as raw size, if not more.
Agreed. My mainstay for some time has been Pi-hole coupled with browser running uBO, Privacy badger, Decentraleyes, Webmail Adblock, Tracking Token Stripper, Neat URL, Referer Control, and No Coin. I see nothing but pure content. I also like how uBO blocks WebRTC from leaking local IP addresses and blocks CSP reports.
Editing to say I've been reading on the fallout of the Chrome adblocking issue and many seem to think that DNS blocking is the way forward, but how long until it isn't? I've mentioned this before, but there has to be some way to do this without using browser-based solutions. I use them as well as a Pi-hole, but I dislike the browser-based solutions as a whole. What I'd like to see is a proxy, preferably web-based (cloud) that I can point my router and mobile devices to take advantage wherever I happen to be. Imagine a proxy that acts like /dev/null. It fools the sites into believing they are sending down ad data, but the proxy strips out that garbage. I know this does nothing for the bandwidth used, but I'm just thinking as I type. I understand HOW to do this, but my coding skills are not at that level. And I doubt this should be written in Python, although it likely could be. 20 years ago, I would be doing it in Perl, although those skills have fallen by the wayside since I have no real use case for Perl these days.
Presumably because an adblocker, like virus detection, consumes potentially non-trivial CPU, and may introduce race conditions of extensions applying deltas to a DOM which results in rendering and behavior bugs.
I strongly recommend uBlock Origin in favor of AdBlock. AdBlock is a commercial endevour that makes deals with advertising companies to let their ads through.
The fact that you have to turn it off is a clear signal of a piece of software which works in its interests, not yours. Can you justify using AdBlock Plus over an extension which doens't even need the switch in the first place?
Google will keep locking down Chrome and using corporate talk to hand wave it away, only recourse is to leave.
First it’s “sign in” with obtuse ways to turn it off. Then block Adblocking, once again with obtuse ways to disable... the end goal is pretty obvious, get the majority of Chrome users to turn on ads and tie their real names to their Chrome browser.
Of course let “power users” (who’ll turn that crap off anyways) have their switches to do so. It gives Google plausible deniability.
——
To those who say just fork Chrome adfm had a good article explaining why that doesn’t work:
> And while you can use or adapt Chromium to your heart's content, your new browser won't work with most internet video unless you license a proprietary DRM component called Widevine from Google. The API that connects to Widevine was standardized in 2017 by the World Wide Web Consortium, whose members narrowly voted down a proposal to change the membership rules for the W3C to require members not to abuse the DMCA to prevent DRM from becoming a tool to undermine competition.
Apparently someone has, because I was using Chromium on Linux to watch Netflix several years ago without any trouble (this was before Firefox got it working).
That's only if you are making a browser and want to distribute it. There's no way that Google is going to mail howlers to end-users who use widevine with chromium forks.
Widevine works with chromium just fine - by which I mean that like with everything chromium it gets broken without apparent reason every now and then, but after some time they fix it.
Because you would need to get a widevine license from google. Mozilla was able to do that, but I know at least one chromium fork had it's application for a license rejected. It technically is possible to copy the widevine library from a chrome install to use with chromium, but non technical people won't know how to do that.
I’ve quit chrome for a while now but... I’m pretty sure they have your real name as long as you signed in once from the same hw and browser footprint. Is real name that important for them? I think everyone’s digital signature is already out there
I remember of projects that failed because Widevine explicitly didn't work in their Chromium. I assume that Widevine builds nicely but requires a Google-issued key to work.
This is fine for power users who care enough to do it. But for the general public, as well as companies which would need to do this if they wanted to support DRM in their own kind of browser, it is not going to fly with Google and probably isn't legal.
You don't "build" Widevine. Google distributes a binary (libwidevinecdm.so) which implements a standard API that works with both Chrome and Chromium. The "master" DRM secret key is obfuscated and distributed in libwidevinecdm.so itself.
It's usually going to be around any studio produced content Broadcast or Movie. YouTube TV uses it for live broadcasts. The Studios require DRM as part of their content licensing. PlayReady is the other primary DRM competitor.
I used to have Firefox and Vivaldi ...but honestly I used Vivaldi mainly...when I heard that even Microsoft was going to use chromium I realized...Firefox is literally the last front ! I installed Firefox and started using it as my main browser! What I miss the most is Vivaldi speed dial and bookmarks. Add-ons aren't always a solution ! I miss Netscape days...internet wasn't a megacorp business playground :( !
> I miss Netscape days...internet wasn't a megacorp business playground :( !
You mean "this website is optimized for Internet Explorer 6" days? Or the earlier "this website is optimized for Netscape 2.0" days?
I think the nearest the web ever came to not being any megacorp's playground was when Firefox was at around 30% market share, and IE6 which had 60%+ market share had stopped moving. IOW, when MS still had the playground mostly to themselves, but chose to ignore it. And even then, the web / Firefox couldn't really innovate without breaking IE6 compatibility, so everyone was stuck.
I looked up Vivaldi Speed Dial. It looks like the same sort of thing Firefox, Chrome, and Safari have where a new tab has a pinned list of favorite or most visited sites. What does Vivaldi do that I'm not seeing?
Having switched from Vivaldi back to Firefox about a year ago, the Vivaldi speed dial is similar to the pinned lists of favorites, but it's much more user friendly. You can customize how many sites you see, how many are in each column, number of columns, etc. You can also change the icon to be anything you like. It certainly wasn't a dealbreaker for me personally, and as you said, pinned favorites serve the same purpose, but it does feel more restrictive on FF.
Sounds kinda similar to what you are looking. It does No. of sites, custom columns, custom pictures, and custom backgrounds. It really gives you a lot of control compared to all the other extensions I tried.
they don't let you run in browser contexts normally but they definitely let you set your own new tab page(with webextension privileges) as part of the extension which lets an extension do whatever they want.
It used to be more customisable but FF wanted to dictate what users saw, for some reason, partially advertising ("recommended by pocket"). They really like to imitate the worst of commercial enterprise sometimes.
It has become a little more customisable now, thankfully.
It's way more than just pinning ! I organize my YouTube subscription in folders with themes like tutorials recipes and subfolders...you can do that on Firefox with the bookmark toolbar but in a less user friendly way and less visually pleasing way toi. what makes it worse is that it used to be possible on Firefox! It's not a deal breaker or anything ! But I miss that XD ! I had a hundreds of bookmarks organized on Vivaldi ! I still don't know how to "transition" that to firefox :/
Electron apps' Chrome stores its cookies separately from the user's installation of it, correct? That, plus the lack of a logged-in account within Electron's Chrome might help to mitigate user cookie correlation and the like, right?
I wish someone with a lot more knowledge than me on this replies. You raise a very valid, practical and useful question, would love to hear the answer :-)
But Electron app has full access to your system unlike normal web page. So it makes sense to run Electron apps from separate user account so that they cannot read your browser history, cookies, install you an extension etc.
If we're saying fire up Chrome just to watch Netflix, I'm suggesting saving some effort and/or isolate the rest of your browser by wrapping it in a very basic Electron app.
At the very least, you wouldn't get auto-logged into your "browser" or anything like that.
I wonder if that might backfire. I've been using Chromium for a while now, but whenever I need to see video, I copy paste the url over to Firefox. At some point, I'm going to be bothered enough to just switch permanently to Firefox.
"Most internet videos" probably is overstatement. I'm watching youtube, pornhub and twitch and I don't think that it requires any DRM. The only service with DRM I'm aware of is Netflix and it's terrible anyway.
> The only service with DRM I'm aware of is Netflix and it's terrible anyway.
Ha! Tell that to their 150 million subscribers. :)
More seriously, using a browser without DRM would be a deal-breaker to many users like myself solely because of Netflix, unfortunately. That said, if you're serious about using a DRM-free browser, there are other ways to watch Netflix (iOS/Android, smart TVs, etc).
> > The only service with DRM I'm aware of is Netflix and it's terrible anyway.
> Ha! Tell that to their 150 million subscribers. :)
I'm not sure that a large number of subscribers is a convincing argument of the non-terribleness of a service. A quick Google search suggests that Comcast, excuse me, Xfinity, has somewhere in the neighbourhood of 30 million subscribers. I don't think that you will find any argument telling them how terrible Xfinity is.
Sure but those 150 million people choose to subscribe to Netflix. Presumably they like it, otherwise why would they spend money on it every month? The people who use Comcast have no choice, because for nearly all of them, the alternative is no Internet access at home other than via cellular.
The original statement was like saying, "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded."
Sure, but many of those Xfinity customers don't have any reasonable alternatives, whereas there are now a handful of players in the video streaming space. If someone doesn't like Netflix, they can easily cancel their subscription and switch to another service. So even though you're partially right, the subscriber count in this case is a pretty good proxy of how good the service is.
The services used to have more or less the same catalog, but it’s become more and more broken up.
To get everything you need to subscribe to 4+ services, and if you drop Netflix, you lose a hefty part of their catalog because it’s on none of the others.
I guess when someone says "it's terrible", I assume that includes the catalog and we're not just talking about the UI or something like that. You can't say Netflix is terrible, and then in the same breath praise their selection. The catalog is part of the product, especially with each service making originals now.
While Comcast the company is evil, I loved their internet service. It was blazing fast and to this day was the most rock-solid ISP I've had for uptime. YMMV of course but for people in my area Comcast was the best (tho sometimes only) choice. (I did get really tired of playing the stupid intro/promo rate game with them tho).
Once they turned on their 250GB data cap tho it became far less useful since my wife/kids would stream several gigs a day or more of TV.
Don't they have a desktop client that works just fine? Also, Chrome's "advantage" may be having built-in DRM, but it's not much of one: Netflix limits Chrome users to 720p video. So for all practical purposes you need a different browser or client for Netflix anyway if your main browser is Chromium based.
> I'm watching youtube, pornhub and twitch and I don't think that it requires any DRM.
Depends on the content, If you are watching paid for content on YT it is most likely DRM'ed. [0] An "stats for nerds" example from such a piece of content (Notice the protected line, this line isn't present on DRM free YT Content.). But the vast majority of content on YT is DRM free.
Twitch has some DRM'ed content, things like when they streamed Thursday Night Football. But that was played via the Amazon Video player not twitches normal video player. I remember because the player threw a fit if you didn't have HDCP configured correctly, which most streamers don't. Not that they were trying to re-stream the game, but have it playing on another one of their monitors to see how it was doing. Personally I liked the idea of having a chat alongside the game :-)
| Can we define "most internet video" as Amazon Video, BBC, Hulu, Netflix and Spotify?
Maybe you could in terms of unique videos, but in terms of the volume of watched video, not at all. Netflix itself is responsible for something in the range of 15% of the worlds bandwidth usage.
Either way, it not going to win an end users to have something like that.
The day the Web sold its soul. Such a disappointment when TBL came out in support of that. People who knew better tried to warn us, but they all got shouted down and told there "was no other choice" b/c content creators were going to try an lock down with extensions and it would somehow be worse.
Not with extensions, with plug-ins, and they were already doing it. Flash and Silverlight came with DRM for any publisher that wanted to use it. Many did.
Plugins would be fine; you could always point out, that they are non-standard. Now, if you fail to support the right EME plugin, it is the browsers fault.
I know, but that's not the point. The point is, that the pain for the non-standard support had to be taken by the proponents of DRM. Now, it is up to the foss crowd.
IOW, it was not about tech issue, but about social issue / blame-shifting.
TBL? Can you extrapolate? I google it and its "The Basketball League". I just think your comment had the opportunity to continue to educate me on something I have never heard of or about and to throw in an acronym without having used the the 3 words before is confusing.
I can't tell if there is humor tied to this response, but either way it's a brilliantly written reply to my comment. Gave me a chuckle, and got my upvote.
>your new browser won't work with most internet video
"most internet video"... by what metric? Hours watched? Catalog size? I find it unlikely that DRM videos outnumber non-DRM videos by any reasonable metric.
You know what's horrifying about the idea of "just fork Chrome"? Google can still hurt you by blocking your browser's access to their prime properties (YouTube, Gmail, Maps, etc). Just look at YouTube denying Chromium-based Edge the new redesigned experience for absolutely zero reason.
Meh, he lost me when he tried to say Microsoft success in cloud is due to Office. Microsoft's success in cloud is due to having a good enough cloud platform and being better at selling to enterprises than Amazon or Google. IBM and Oracle can sell to enterprises but lost because their cloud platforms suck.
The referenced comment rehashes the evils of Ballmer's Microsoft which Nadella has mostly corrected. Satya Nadella has embraced (but not extended!) Open Source. Their Azure strategy puts all platforms on a level playing field - yet has also made Azure an incredible place to make Windows/Microsoft technologies shine. It's a great place for all apps.
Yes, they control Office and are the defacto office document standard. What they do with Office now is affordable and ubiquitous. No other office document suite can do this. They are a for-profit company, and Office serves their customers very well. Yes, in Ballmer's days this wan't the case, but today you can run Office (365/Cloud) on a Chromebook and on Android and iPhone as supported apps.
Linux and Open Source tech is a huge part of Azure now. They profit from people using Linux on Azure. They don't have a reason to chase customers away when they are making money from them.
Yeah, sure, the government spent millions to break up AT&T and the Baby Bells, then let AT&T get back into the local phone and Internet business by buying up companies left and right. Now AT&T is part of a nationwide duopoly with cable companies, and most US consumers have exactly 2 choices: either AT&T for non-cable or some other company for cable.
It's government's responsibility to foster competition to push back against companies wanting to limit it. Govt is doing a shitty job and gets an F.
Every large player has been wilfully degrading user experience in any browser they don't approve of for a few years now. This is a ship that has sailed - from the lack of antitrust suits we can deduce that there are in fact very few legal ramifications, if any.
It seems like Google just treats fines due to antitrust lawsuits as the cost of doing business, and they're potentially making more money with such behavior than they are losing due to legal costs.
> Just look at YouTube denying Chromium-based Edge the new redesigned experience for absolutely zero reason.
The reason is almost certainly a new user agent (compared to non-Chromium Edge) that YouTube didn't expect. Chromium-based Edge is still not stable, and therefore, not properly supported by YouTube.
I don't have time to test this, but I'm willing to bet that you'd get the same result by using any indie browser that happens to send a user agent that YouTube doesn't recognize.
> The reason is almost certainly a new user agent (compared to non-Chromium Edge) that YouTube didn't expect. Chromium-based Edge is still not stable, and therefore, not properly supported by YouTube
Why almost certainly? We're seeing antagonistic, self-preserving and dare I say abusive monopolistic behavior from Google with Chrome's anti-adblocking. Why the benefit of doubt when blocking a competitor's browser?
More pointedly, would an independent YouTube have behaved similarly for as long?
Do you remember when almost all sites worked fine without internet explorer but refused to work without it unless you faked the user agent? Why are you defending round 2 of best with IE?
The web is a standard. Auto failing based on user agent is a sign of developer incompetence.
I wouldn't be defending them if YouTube refused to work with a "strange" user agent, but that's not what happened. Judging by the screenshots, YouTube still worked, it just refused to use a new design. The old design is still perfectly functional.
Chromium-based Edge is not stable. It's a new thing that I don't expect website owners to test against. The error message showed that the new design is tested against the latest version of Edge. Complete rewrite of Edge still hasn't replaced the old Edge.
Also, no, the web is not a standard. There's no fixed set of things that a browser should implement and call it a day. It's constantly-evolving depending on the needs of the owners of the website. It's why nobody dares to create a browser from scratch nowadays.
It depends on what you choose as your choice of technology, if you choose web components then you really can only really offer that same experience to users that have a browser that supports that API natively (without polyfills) which old Edge did not do.
My understanding of this situation with yt was that our server side detection code was wrong based on an update in edge (or our UA management), and we don't do feature detection in the client because it is too slow... So we send people to the older version.
You appear to have somehow missed the extremely loud chorus of "we hate it, change it back" that happen every time any web app gets a new design. See also the saga of Instagram on Android.
Interpreting user agent strings is what amateur programmers do. I don't generally expect high standards from Google engineers (a whole other argument I won't entertain here) but that's still pretty tragic for a top-five website.
And besides, your claim is doubtful at best since Chromium Edge doesn't share any User Agent string elements with previous EdgeHTML versions. Your YT developers would have needed to be intentionally malicious to match "Edg/" as a trigger to downgrade the user experience.
yeah but blacklisting or at least conscious degradation is necessary. hit that with a game I built, had to degrade the experience on chrome/iOS because of the non-accelerated canvas element
Your company's customers aren't going to care when you tell them this. They're going to complain to your support department that your app doesn't work.
First of all, we have no evidence that your Edge example was intentional. In fact, we have evidence to the contrary as they fixed it within hours of it being reported [1]
Now as far as your hypothetical, sure they can, but I use all of those services, YouTube, Gmail, Maps, ... on Chromium every day and they do not block nor have they ever blocked any of them.
> And it may even be a quick ‘n dirty deliberate hack to exclude Chredge this way, just so it doesn’t pollute their telemetry / testing of new website features.
That test proves nothing without seeing the Google's code. Feature detection is incredibly slow, requiring JS and multiple round trips. Whereas user agent strings are instantaneous.
>How's this polluting their telemetry? Also, how is some random UA NOT polluting their telemetry? It's a horrible excuse, that's all it is. It was fine and then suddenly it became "an issue". It's singling out them, SPECIFICALLY. Nice try.
Chredge worked for many weeks, then it didn't for a day or so, then it worked again.
Turning the block on was intentional, and turning it off was intentional.
We can only guess at their motivation, and I can guarantee you it was not benevolent given what Mozilla said recently about their interactions with Google.
Yes. And on top of the video codec issue, there is also the issue of getting Chrome to build, and integrating code changes from every upstream Chromium release, which is quite frequent. The build setup process is very manual for an outsider, and changes often.
As a developer and power user, it's difficult for me to switch to Firefox.
However for most average Joe's it's fine and won't make a difference, so I always install and recommend Firefox when I play IT guy for family/friends. Time to start doing this again like we did in 2005!! It worked then and it can now!
What is the equivalent for one tab? It is technically simple enough that I could develop one one my own, except I remember firefox extensions to be an unbelievable pain to install back in the day.
I've had a terrible time using Firefox since Tab Mix Plus was killed. Dev is working on a replacement but many of the necessary APIs were also killed in the great add-on death of 2017 (Firefox 57), and have yet to be rewritten (and may never be).
What many others have already said - it's slower and many popular sites don't work properly on it. I don't feel like randomly having websites break when I am trying to get things done.
Even on a newer computer Firefox feels jagged and hangs. Memory leaks still happening years later. It is so frustrating to see Firefox using 1.5GB of RAM when only 2 tabs remain.
Quantum helped a lot, but it's still not enough for me and many others.
Really? Do you have examples? I haven’t faced this issue. Some websites breaks somehow if you block 3rd party tracking (by breaking I mean that some pictures or video embedded into the page won’t load), but that’s an opt-in feature so I don’t think that’s what you mean.
I consider myself the same. I quit using Chrome & started using Brave about a year ago. I haven't looked back or missed Chrome. What would you be missing?
Edge & Firefox have also been useful in the same way I once used Opera (special tasks where their features really shine). I really liked Edge's reading mode & for just browsing websites it was great.
As a power user, I prefer Firefox to Chrome, due to its configurability and to the power of certain add-ons. One simple example: multi-row tab bar, thanks to custom CSS for the UI. It used to be even better before the mass murder of the now-called "legacy" extensions, but today we must settle for the less restricted offer.
As a developer, I don't typically use browsers as debuggers or programming environments, so I never experienced game-breaking differences.
> It used to be even better before the mass murder of the now-called "legacy" extensions,
I can't even switch because one of the vital extensions for my workflow do not exist any more and the author of the Chrome equivalent doesn't want to port it. (I even offered a little money, I probably can't pay enough for an experienced developer to do the full port.)
No, I am running Chrome for a long time now. I use an extension there which doesn't exist for Firefox. An equivalent existed in the old Firefox. I made an attempt at porting it but my JS skills are super meagre.
Luckily for us, there's antitrust law. This isn't really possible:
Reproduction steps:
1. Check that Google search is working by opening Chrome, navigating to www.google.com, and searching for any term (such as the name of a newspaper and clicking the link to verify that search works as expected.)
2. Open firefox.com and navigate to www.google.com
You will receive a message:
"It looks like you have Chrome installed! For the most secure experience, please visit this page using the Chrome browser or wait and try again later.."
If you have not used Chrome in the past 1 hour from your same IP address, you receive the page as expected.
The above repro steps should be pretty much impossible under antitrust law. (Due to search monopoly.) Which is a very good thing.
It's a shame Microsoft didn't want to use Firefox's codebase instead of Chromium for its new Edge browser. I don't know what Microsoft thinks it gained by doing this, but I'm almost certain they'll regret it in the long run, because it's a trap by Google.
Google, Microsoft new "bestie" in this collaboration, will screw them over once it's clear that Microsoft "can't turn back" from using Chromium or even fork it.
That would be declaring a full on browser war with Google. I expect MS don't want to do that yet. It remains an option in the future I suppose.
As I understand it Chromium is a lot easier to wrap your own GUI around than Gecko. XUL is still not completely decoupled, separating them completely is an ongoing effort I think.
Maybe when the embedded Gecko/Servo engine is production ready would be the time for MS to reconsider.
First, you are being overly critical. Automatic (forced) sign-in is actually useful. Second, why do you call leaving the "only" recourse? As if it's something completely horrid that you would never ever do freely. Leaving is a completely fine path to take.
With webRequest, Google is "just" testing the waters. Just like with the forced sign-in, they will back down when they see the backlash.
Based only on Google's description, they seem to have a valid reason to remove (even though they say "deprecate", they mean remove) the offending API. However, there's zero chance they can get away with this. For what reason I'm not sure, market share of Chrome is very important to them. So they'll have to keep it or implement some new, acceptable method.
Too bad it takes a lot more than "a few minutes" to get used to Firefox and all of its quirks. Like the fact that I can have like 20 tabs open at the same time before they start hiding themselves from me.
I try to mostly use firefox, but there are some legit sites that do not work in firefox, youtube is probably the biggest offender with the seek very often not working properly.
I can't help but wonder if it is because firefox is actually behind or if google is sabotaging them.
> Like the fact that I can have like 20 tabs open at the same time before they start hiding themselves from me.
I didn't like it either at first, but then I realized it was just because it was different than Chrome. In time, I liked how Firefox did it better. You're always guaranteed to see the favicon and 3 or 4 letters of the tab's title no matter how many tabs you have. In Chrome, you're eventually looking at triangles or lines with no way to differentiate them.
>You're always guaranteed to see the favicon and 3 or 4 letters of the tab's title no matter how many tabs you have.
But I can't see the tab's favicon or letters because they're 100% hidden from me.
I currently have 49 tabs open in Chrome. If I set Firefox to be the same exact width as Chrome, I can open 27 tabs at the same time. If I open up the 28th, it starts hiding tabs.
I actually have no issue with how Chrome does it. Just seeing the favicon is enough when dealing with a large number of tabs.
EDIT: Just tested opening 49 tabs. None of the tabs show anything more than just the favicon and about 90% of the first letter. Not really sure how this is better than what Chrome does, which is show 49 favicons without scrolling.
Favicons alone aren't really enough though. I routinely have multiple tabs open for Wikipedia, Youtube, Arxiv.org, Jira, Reddit, and even HN.
With Firefox, you get the Favicon and at least the first few characters of the page title. And if you use the tab drop-down, you see all, or most, of the title (depending on how long it is).
I don't know what to tell you then. I'm typing this comment right now using Firefox, with a tab-bar full of tabs, and every visible tab has the favicon and a portion of the title visible. The rest can be found in the drop-down, with nearly the entire title displayed.
Maybe there's some setting that controls this behavior, but my Firefox is pretty much completely stock. shrug
Interesting. Maybe we're running different versions, or maybe it's somehow dependent on screen resolution or something. Weird. For me, Firefox has always displayed at least the first few characters of the title.
I was going to say that the favicons on Chrome probably disappear at some point too, but you're right. Chrome guarantees at least half a favicon on display, but to do so, new tabs are not put on the tab-bar. They're completely hidden with no way to access them via the tab-bar.
Yeah, that is not really optimal. However, that is luckily only a problem on a very high number of tabs. Firefox's tab UI starts having usability issues at a much higher number. At my tested width.
There's nothing inherently wrong with it, but it doesn't work well once you get beyond a certain number of tabs (the number will vary depending on your screen size, etc., blah). At some point, all the tabs are scrunched down to being indistinguishable blobs. Firefox, at least, doesn't have that issue, thanks to the scrolling tab bar. And the drop-down that shows all your tabs is, to me, a sufficient answer to the "my tabs are hidden from me" concern.
I understand that some people will feel differently of course. And it's less of an issue in the first place if you don't keep ludicrous numbers of tabs open.
>At some point, all the tabs are scrunched down to being indistinguishable blobs.
I don't know what you're on about. I opened the maximum number of tabs that my browser window can have visible (~90) and at no point were they indistinguishable blobs. Every single one still had a favicon.
To me, nothing but a favicon is exactly "an indistinguishable blog" since it does nothing to help me distinguish between the 10 arxiv.org tabs, or 7 or 8 Youtube tabs that I have open. shrug
This is something that bothers me when pair programming or working with co-workers who use a lot of tabs. I have to watch them fiddle between 10 jira tabs until they find the ticket. God forbid they misclick a few times (every time!) and then you get to see them hit a few other websites while all in the search of that only holy jira ticket tab.
You also have a list of all open tabs available from the dropdown arrow at the far right, but the tab width can be changed in about:config with browser.tabs.tabMinWidth.
If you're looking for information on this preference, it went away between FF4 and FF57(?) but should be back and working now so you'll see a lot of old information about it being removed.
Tree Style Tabs is a common Firefox add-on people use to manage large number of tabs. Or you can click on the down caret on the right side of the tabs bar to get the full list of your tabs.
Huh. Tree Style Tabs has millions of happy users. And if you type in the address bar FF will match against open tab names and urls, and let you switch to them.
Much like my physical desktop full of papers you can't see which is which just glancing from above, and my overall laptop desktop full of dozens of different windows... it's cluttered, but I know what's what enough to find it, usually!
Sure, I could put all those papers on my desk into a drawer, or even file them, but who's got time for that? (Answer: those who are succesfully less cluttered than the cluttered among us).
Chrome tabs get absolutely useless when they get to that razor thin mode. You can hover your mouse and scroll through firefox tabs if you have more than what fits in your window size.
Chromium is not Chrome. Switching from Chrome to Chromium is still leaving Chrome.
Whether or not Chromium or Firefox are more to your liking is another matter, and whether or not switching to Chromium accomplishes what you want to accomplish by leaving Chrome is another matter.
Not really, think of Chromium as a developer version of chrome. It may be open source but it still maintained by Google. Only alternative shift to Firefox.
You can change Chromium but you cannot change Chrome. The majority of Chrome is Chromium, but there are parts of Chrome that are not Chromium. Particularly the branding. Furthermore if you're actually forking Chromium like suggested and taking it in another direction to assuage any grievances you might have with Chrome, then you have certainly "left Chrome".
I was not recommending that anybody switch from Chrome to Chromium. Personally I do not find that Chromium fixes what I consider broken about Chrome, which is what I was alluding to when I said "whether or not switching to Chromium accomplishes what you want to accomplish by leaving Chrome is another matter." The negative reaction I received for that post makes me think people believe I was recommending Chromium. I do not; I recommend Firefox.
That's true, but I personally don't have the time to create, or even work on, a Chromium fork. Is there one with any momentum?
My preference would be to use https://github.com/atlas-engineer/next, because I'm a huge Common Lisp fan, but without uMatrix and uBlock Origin (or something equivalent) it's not a viable alternative yet.
I've been trying to switch to Firefox lately. I still prefer Chromium's UI, but I won't tolerate Google's new anti-adblock stance.
Some other thread yesterday linked to ungoogled chromium [1] which sounded like a good idea to me but in practise I'd have to build it myself which Im not really comfortable with.
I'd probably get it to run but it would need more time than I'm willing to invest in this. Plus would I have to build it new everytime there's an update‽
Browsers have become so complicated that it's essentially a miniature OS inside our OS, and even building it from source as an experienced developer is hard. On top of that, there is a sort of inherent monopoly with browsers, and all browser vendors have some agenda or another. This is a weird age for software developers and users.
If you're using Archlinux, there's an AUR package. That means you can build it like any other package with makepkg or a helper program like pacaur. If hardware resources are an issue, it's probably not too hard to rent a powerful linode server for an hour or 2 to build the package and then transfer it to your local machine. I imagine it would only cost a couple of bucks max.
When a browser removes your ability to block ads and trackers, it is creating a giant security hole. Even Google's own ads trick users into clicking on them while believing that they are going to legitimate sites.
Without denying or confirming that Chrome's security is better than any other browser, how often have you heard of someone with an up-to-date Firefox, Edge, Safari, Chrome, or some other major browser, being hacked this way? If you do an honest risk analysis, how big is the extra risk of using a less secure browser (assuming your statement is true)? And is a single 0day (which Chrome has just as well) enough to compromise your entire life, like, you would probably have defense in depth (running the browser in a VM, for example) if you're that worried in the first place?
For those who think I'm just jabbing and that a VM would be too unpactical: at work (we're a security firm) we have a fresh VM for each new project for compartmentalization. Our browser, tools, everything runs in there and nothing should ever reach the host --- unless, of course, you have a VM escape, but then you need two zero-days instead of one. For more sensitive projects, even more measures are taken, but that's rare: you have to draw the line somewhere.
Just saying "Chrome is the only secure option" is a little too short-sighted I think.
The problem with all these browser forks is that, while they are certainly well intentioned, they're a dime a dozen and eventually die hard.
Over the years, I've seen countless forks of browsers that make these big promises but don't have the developer resources and funding behind them that make the main browsers possible. I can't imagine it's easy to just backport every feature and bugfix from upstream while also making your own changes.
Unless one plans on building a business or a foundation around a browser, the best that an OSS browser fork can hope for is to be a valiant effort that will quickly be superseded by another fork that promises to be even more private and ub3r l33t than the others.
Firefox is in great shape right now, and if it's not working well for some people(I'm honestly not having issues with it at this point), then we need to find ways to make Firefox more viable, whether it's getting people to donate to the Mozilla Foundation or better promotion or what.
I switched a couple of months ago because Chrome is just a bloated piece of garbage. One of my favorite features in Firefox is containers, which I used to have different users for in Chrome. Maybe Chrome has something similar now but it's one of the things I liked when I switched over. Haven't had any issues so far, glad I did
> One of my favorite features in Firefox is containers
Container tabs are great. Combined with Tree Style Tabs and Containerise addons, you have something unbeatable in both terms of security, privacy and user friendliness.
I don't understand how it's better than multiple profiles. I use multiple accounts for the same services (Asana, AWS, email, etc.) how can I manage that with containers?
In my opinion, profiles are useful for separating "who I am." Whether that's my personal life and my professional life, or if it's me or my spouse using the same computer.
Containers are useful for separating "who I am to my providers." As far as Facebook is concerned, I am a Facebook user, but I don't use Amazon or Google. But Amazon thinks I'm an Amazon user that doesn't use Facebook or Google. You can accomplish this with profiles, but in Chrome (last I checked) that meant multiple windows, rather than just sites being displayed in tabs that indicate the container in use. So for that purpose, I believe containers are more useful.
(I also think Firefox should step up their profile game, because when my spouse and I alternate using a computer we share, it's inconvenient for me to close all her Firefox windows so I can open my profile!)
You can definitely have two profiles open simultaneously - on MacOS, this is achieved with “open -n Firefox.app --args -P [profile name]”; on Windows, “firefox -no-remote -P [profile name]”. Admittedly, that should _really_ be exposed in the UI somehow, but at least it means you can wrap up the command in a handy desktop shortcut (e.g. one that says “my Firefox” and one that says “her Firefox”).
OK - I hadn't come across that. I actually have the shortcut on my desktop that prompts you to pick a profile if you don't have any windows open already. I'll have to see if I can tweak the shortcuts to open each one! Thanks!!
> Admittedly, that should _really_ be exposed in the UI somehow
Go to about:profiles, click the "Launch profile in new browser" button under the profile you want.
Yes, it's not obvious, and the UI has a lot to be desired if you want to explain the feature to some non-techie, but you no longer need to close the other Firefox instances in order to launch a different profile. I think this was added a couple releases ago.
Be aware that running multiple profiles at once can cause issues with updates. One instance can end up updating, which means that the other instance can no longer create new processes, because it is still on the old version, and it gets updated in place.
LOL, I'll sometimes just use different channel versions of browsers for different accounts when I have to access them regularly. The worst imho is when you have a google personal account and a google business (apps) account for work.
It's definitely something I'd like to see worked out better as a power user feature.
Yes. As pointed out in another thread, containers share history. But they don't share cookies or session status so you can have multiple gmail sessions going.
Having a container is nice compared to opening a private window because you don't have to do 2FA every time.
Containers helps keep things sandboxed and lets you use the same window with different tabs representing different sessions.
So in your case you could have say a "work" container and a "home" container. Each of these could persist logins for all of the services you are using without having to switch between users and have different windows open you just have the 2 tabs.
What I think people find more useful is the ability to make a container for say "facebook". Anytime you open facebook it puts it in a new tab with a sandboxed browser session. It's similar to having a separate profile but it's just for facebook use and you don't have to think about it so much. If you click a link to facebook it opens it in your new container already logged in meanwhile facebook does not see you as authed in any of your other tabs.
Firefox developers even make a specific Facebook Container add on that I recommend and use.
Instead of you needing to know all the tricks and tweaks needed to make it work well, they're in the box.
I don't even know it's there until it does something unexpected but necessary. For example the Facebook Container has no idea I pay YouTube not to show adverts. So inside Facebook any inlined YouTube video has adverts. If I follow a link to YouTube, I appear outside the Container and have no adverts but don't get followed by Facebook (they'd need YouTube to co-operate)
>I switched a couple of months ago because Chrome is just a bloated piece of garbage
I switched to Chrome a few years ago (and even to a Chromebox as my daily driver, on my second now because I wanted Android app support) because Firefox was a bloated piece of garbage, if I left 5-10 tabs open for a few weeks in Windows they'd be using several gigabytes of memory from a leak, memory use growing hourly.
Edit: I don't know why I'm being downvoted, this is even on Mozilla's own site showing it hasn't been fixed:
"Firefox's memory usage may increase if it's left open for long periods of time. A workaround for this is to periodically restart Firefox"
Same, but I was hesitant to switch. All I heard were comments like yours about containers and such. Finally after hearing about it so much, combined with all the talk about Quantum making things faster I gave FF a go. Haven't looked back.
I still use Chrome for some tasks such as watching/listening to Youtube. (edit: not bc of performance, but bc I hate OSXs Cmd-Tab ordering)
> One of my favorite features in Firefox is containers
I switched a couple months ago from Chrome to Firefox as well but to tell you the truth, I just heard about containers and what you could do with it. I guess I must've been living under a rock, this is amazing!
I was already glad I made the switch for the less resources being used on my aging Macbook Pro and better privacy features, but containers just took this experience to the next level for me!
EDIT: What actually triggered my switch was at one point, a few tabs on Chrome(regular things like Youtube) started causing my CPU/fan to go crazy on my MBP 2015(the last decent MBP). Instead of trying to figure out what extension or what setting was causing the problem, I thought I'd give FF a try and just couldn't look back after.
I love FF and use it daily. But honestly, the "some random tab has runaway javascript" is as much of a problem on FF as it is on Chrome. If you leave a JS-heavy site open long enough, sooner or later you'll have some runaway JS come and bite you in the battery. The only complete solution I've got is... to turn it off and back on again. The entire browser, not just the offending tab.
Does anyone know an extension or option in containers to preserve your browsing trajectory between containers?
I had a google container for a while, but opening links opens a new tab and closes the google container, so therefore you cant it back or forward without reopening that container tab. Same thing if I click a container link or something and it pushes it into a new tab, I loose that ability to go backward.
It's just a minor gripe but I'm so into the habit of hitting the back button on my mouse while browsing rather than cmd shift tab.
On the other hand Firefox actually lets you move your profile folder from one computer to another without throwing up a panic flag and resetting everything.
"Currently, add-on sync leaves setting synchronization to the individual add-on. If an add-on has support for syncing settings, they will be synced. If not, they won't. For now, if an add-on doesn't preserve settings during Sync, you should contact the add-on's author and request Sync support."
If you don't take more than a few hours to get used to a completely different browser, editor, desktop/mobile OS, etc., you probably just didn't use all its features. I know that I still had Firefox reflexes after I had been using Chrome for a few weeks (this was a few years ago when Mozilla made some poor decisions, I tried voting with my feet).
There's a long sliding scale from "knows how to use most features of the new software" to "uses every single feature maximally and never, ever presses the wrong hotkey because an old muscle memory happened to fire". I don't think the latter is a reasonable bar to set for "get used to the new software".
Then again maybe I'm being unfair here because if I'm really honest about it, the reason I didn't switch over to Chrome was that you couldn't start an in-page text search by hitting the / key like I was used to doing in Firefox. (I've since found many other reasons to keep using Firefox but at one stage that was the sticking point...)
It took me a fortnight to move beyond other people's examples and get my first bit of nicely working verilog code written to my own spec and running on an FPGA, having never touched a hardware description language before. If it is taking you weeks to get up to speed with Firefox, what on earth are you attempting to do with it?
Regarding shortcuts, this is where using Vim emulator extensions help a lot. I just install such an extension on any new browser, then the shorcuts are more or less the same (vim keybingdings).
Google is an ad company that profits off of users' personal information. Mozilla has demonstrated itself to be privacy oriented. HN users are generally privacy oriented. It's not surprising there is a big push to use Firefox, especially with the increasing Chromium usage.
I starting switching away from Google over the last year. The biggest step was moving off my Gmail account, and the trigger for that was the UI terribleness of Gmail. That took a few hours of updating every account I have with my new address. Password manager really helped with this.
I've never been much of a Chrome user. A few years ago, Chrome was unusable for me on my 2GB work machine, and was a battery-killer on my own laptop. So I stuck with Firefox at work, Safari at home.
DDG is a great search engine. I can't remember the last time I used the "!g" operator, and got any results better than the DDG ones.
The one product I still use Google for is maps, and only when I want to see a good street view or areal photo. For mobile, Apple Maps does just fine. For simple directions on the desktop, OSM works great.
I'm totally happy. 10 years ago, Google was putting things out there that weren't possible with other services. Their mapping was tremendously better than MapQuest, their email was so much nicer than Hotmail, etc.
But now they're bloated and slow. Everything seems to lag as you watch the UI components slowly appear on the screen. And the alternatives today for each product (search, maps, email, browser) are all very much competent.
Try !sp if you want to see Google results, no need to use !g directly even if you did prefer the results. Google Maps and Youtube are very difficult to replace, if you live in a big city using varied modes of transit (walking, bus/train, driving), Google Maps is really tough to beat. I reduced my Google-coverage, but I don't intend to eliminate it altogether.
What did you move to for email? Fastmail with a custom domain? I've long considered ProtonMail but unlikely to go that route.
I'm between paying for iCloud storage and using that, or Outlook.com The additional phone backup space with iCloud would be very nice anyway, so as a monthly payment, it's a one-stop shop. At this point it's extremely unlikely I'll ever go back to Android so that works for me.
Or, just moving to Outlook.com. I'm leaning towards Outlook simply because of the better calendar system. Both Gmail and Outlook support email reminders for calendar items. I could get used to iOS-only notifications, but I really prefer notifications to come through email since I often include explicit instructions.
I went with Fastmail, with their domain. If I were to do it again, I probably would use my own domain (and I may do that in the future). I can't say enough good things about Fastmail's UI. It's just as snappy as a native app, and is both consistent and intuitive. Outlook.com is also really nice. I use it for work email, and have no complaints at all.
Thanks for the StartPage tip! I'm going to start doing that whenever I want a second opinion on my search results.
Can someone remind me what will happen to all the chromium derivatives that support ad block? Will Google restrict their functionality? If Firefox and Safari are the last browsers to support ad block, then they totally stand a chance.
The changes which impede ad blocking are in Chromium, not in the commercial Chrome fork. And Google will continue to force anti-ad-blocking, pro-tracking changes into Chromium until they reach their ultimate Shrodinger's Privacy-Friendly Browser which exists in a superposition of "showing few ads" and "allowing all tracking."
At least Brave and Vivaldi both use the Chrome Web Store, which presumably will no longer allow such extensions. So either they'll have to build their own alternative, or change the browser to allow out-of-store installation, and the extension author(s) will have to support that.
Chrome didn't remove ad-block entirely, they deprecated an API that allows direct control; extensions now have to load filters into the browser itself, which will do the blocking.
Safari actually did the same recently[1], so it's not an alternative if you dislike this move by Chrome. The only difference seems to be the limit of rules (30k for Chrome vs 50k for Safari, whereas some lists used by uBO have over 75k).
I've been using Safari on Mac for months, I only open Google Chrome when React Native debugger launches it.
I'm not sure how hard it would be for the RN team to switch to another browser such as Firefox or the new Edge so I can uninstall Google Chrome from my computer.
I want to use Firefox on my Mac but it just feels so out of place. Are you using any extensions to get a more true macOS feel? While Chrome isn't perfect it doesn't feel anywhere near as "multi-platform" as Firefox does.
But what about things like pinch zoom, elastic scrolling and such? I know there are some extensions but all that ones I have tried (the top 5 that come up in search) are all janky.
While not a deal breaker it would be nice to have a more native macOS feeling version of Firefox but I guess Mozilla have other things to work on.
Firefox is back where it was back in like 2005, but instead of fighting IE/Microsoft, it's fighting Chrome/Google. Although now it has a bit more of a checkered record than it once did. Everything old is new again.
I really wish Microsoft would open source the Edge/Titan engine. There can't possibly be any NSCA code in there they don't own the rights too anymore.
At least Microsoft managed to open source the guts of Chakra before they shutdown Edge. V8 hegemony might be worse for the internet given Node and Electron than Chrome alone.
There was a port of node that used Chakra instead of v8, but I don't think it's maintained. And this is only one piece of the puzzle.. Electron also relies Chromium itself for rendering so this would probably be a pretty sizable effort.
For Christ's sake, it's not like Microsoft-written code is just irreversibly cursed.
It's corporations in a monopolistic position that let EEE happen - you know, like what Google is doing with Chrome right now.
If Internet Explorer's engine released under GPL or MIT can break Google's monopoly without simply handing it over to Microsoft, then all the power to it.
Jeez not this trope(|tripe) again. It's boring and it's tedious. It's in the past. Under different management. Sure MS are no angels, but they seem to be doing far less harm these days than Google/Facebook et al.
Do you think that Microsoft is just doing it out of the goodness of their hearts?
And that Open Source, but especially Libre Software, is going to be compatible with whatever they have in mind ?
What have they done to GitHub that's been an act of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish? Pretty sure I'd hear it here on HN first if it was a thing. Honestly I need some evidence.
Not one thing in that article, is terrible. El Reg is a tabloid and they love to stir up the muck with evocative language, I don't treat them as a serious new source these days (and I've been reading The Register since 1998 when there was some semblance of respectability - such as upsetting Apple :) ).
Right...so they dropped in Nat Friedman....a Mr Opensource... as CEO. I don't think you can get a bigger statement of their commitment to F/OSS than that.
And um ok MS need to make some cash from their acquisition maybe by pushing Azure as a platform for open source projects - hell what did you expect? If Google or Amazon Acquired Github I'd expect the same, and they'd do the same.
And you know, you as a project maintainer still have a choice. You can still deploy anywhere you like.
Microsoft aren't stupid, they've for the past ten years and more promoted the open sourcing of some of their key web dev tech (initiated by Scott Guthrie, Hanselman, Rob [thingy], and another few folks I can't remember off of the top of my head). And it's a different company now.
I hate to do the "appeal to authority" thing, but I'm 52 and lived through the "knife the baby" times. Microsoft for developers and open source are a hugely different company under Satya Nadella compared to the days of Ballmer and Gates.
I'm no MS fan but in this case it's Google that's doing the 3 Es. First they bundled their own adblocker in Chrome (embrace), then they're making their own standards to dictate what 3rd party ad blockers can do, under the guise of improving performance (extend) and now they're making it harder to make efficient 3rd party adblockers (extinguish).
It's pretty clear what the plan is here, Google naturally sees ad blocking as a threat and they know that they can't outright disable ad blockers so they take the long route to take it over. Make it functional enough that most users won't bother looking for an alternative but make sure that it can't threaten your business model.
I'm aware of some Rust in the Azure IoT gateway, but that's more due to the desires of the specific team lead than to any organizational drive toward Rust. (he's the author of Actix, among other things)
There are experiments incorporating it into the OS and build system, but they've barely begun. Some teams use it for internal tooling. To make Rust work in Windows there would need to be a lot of work put into incorporating it into the build system, as well as writing libraries for RPC, COM, and other Windows specific technology.
What benefit does Microsoft have by using Mozilla instead? Earnest question.
Electron, the software framework VSCode uses, runs on Chromium. Github maintained and developed the framework and they are currently owned by Microsoft. If Microsoft contributes to Chromium and improves performance they benefit in a lot of places: their new browser is improved(Edge Chromium), their own framework(Electron), and their own product (VSCode).
They aren't really dependent on Google with Blink, though. They have developer resources that can maintain a fork of it. If Google does something Microsoft doesn't like they can just remove it form their tree or implement an alternative of their own design.
They can diverge from Chromium around the edges but they are dependent on Google for long-term Blink evolution. That includes not just the internals but also APIs. E.g. if/when Google removes powerful content-blocking APIs from Chromium, Microsoft is would struggle to maintain their own different API. Especially for APIs that have architectural implications ... converting something from sync to async or vice versa. Significant architectural divergence would get expensive pretty fast.
Then again, they would face the same issues had they adopted Gecko. Maybe less so because Mozilla could be more easily influenced than Google (in some ways). The main argument for adopting Gecko would have been that giving Google complete control over Web evolution is a threat to Microsoft and that adopting Gecko would reduce that threat. I'm a big Mozilla fan but I think it would have been a weak argument.
Huawei depended on the proprietary bits of Android ("Google Play Services"?). In contrast, Microsoft is knowledgeable enough to use only the permissively-licensed parts of Chrome as the point of departure for their fork.
Also, if Huawei were to fork Android they'd be responsible keeping their fork of a huge code base secure by push security updates, and Microsoft is much more likely to be able to do that competently than Huawei is.
They really can't, though. There's a pile of corpses of people who tried to embed Gecko, because it turns out Netscape/Mozilla is really bad at keeping a stable ABI. I doubt anybody remembers K-meleon anymore, for example. As far as I know Servo was supposed to be the new, embeddable engine, but that's mostly cancelled now and the Rust bits are just being rolled into Gecko (via Project Quantum).
I believe that's why Webkit was based on KHTML… the Mozilla developers Apple hired realized that had a better chance of working.
Maybe Mozilla has changed since all that happened and they're more friendly to embedders now? I've been out of the loop for a few years at this point. I don't think I've heard anything though, and they've built up a reputation…
Yes. GeckoView is Android-only. GeckoView is currently used in Firefox Focus, Firefox Reality VR, the upcoming "Fenix" browser, some Mozilla test apps, and a couple third-party apps.
Well, they are not embedding Blink to build a new browser either - they just fork Chrome. They could have forked Firefox the same way and customize it to their liking.
But that would not have solve their web compatibility issue in such an easy way.
For Apple users (MacOS, iOS), I would suggest Safari over Firefox as FF is the most hacked browser and very unsafe. On the other hand, Safari syncs bookmarks, tabs on all your Apple devices very seamlessly.
What the heck bugs are you running into that surface as a result of chrome being chrome? I’m no google fan but I find chrome to be far and away the most stable and enjoyable browser to debug with.
One that's particularly annoying to me a while ago was you cannot drag and drop elements from an iframe to another iframe from another domain. IIRC it was only an issue in Chrome.
Imagine permitting cross-origin drag-n-drop and a page is clickjacked: the user may end up dragging a sensitive item in the clickjacked page into an invisible iframe with a drop point layered on top of whatever target the user thinks they're dropping data into, and the end result would be that data intended for one endpoint, in this case the endpoint that was clickjacked, is sent to another.
It'd be a nontrivial attack to mount, but as you posed the challenge, I can see it done as part of e.g. a phish where a site like dropbox is iframed in a clickjacking attack (assuming they haven't mitigated it).
I can sketch (literally) what the dom might physically look like if it helps convey the attack I have in mind more effectively.
I think GP means that Chrome deviates from some HTML/CSS/JS/etc official standards, and that they don't intend to fix a lot of these discrepancies. So when you write code how it's supposed to work according to the standards, and it works well in Firefox, it might not work right in Chrome. (And GP suggests this is common.)
So in my case I go to work and get reports that X is no longer working, lucky for me in JS is easy to patch third party code and fix this issue but I could not find a ticket that explains why Chrome did this.
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=158753 meant PhotoStructure had to do user agent sniffing. If it's Firefox, I can stream the original image directly, and the correct thing happens. With Chrome, I have to do the rotation server-side before I send it to the browser (or I'd have to send metadata about the image to rotate it client-side with CSS, either is irritating).
There are several more #ifdefs I've had to add due to weird chrome glitches (like around the html5 video player, which just works seamlessly with Firefox).
Don't get me wrong-- on the Firefox side of things, it's been the user experience of the browser itself which has been suffering.
Every single update since Quantum has made things worse. Three days ago I opened up Firefox to find out all of my settings had been nuked, 200+ tabs, themes and extensions lost, about:config reset, search settings reset (hello again Google) etc. I'm still fuming mad about this.
I don't feel like drudging up old history but my most recent bug was that Chrome doesn't properly bubble mouse click events when some UI elements fire.
WONTFIX of course, apparently I should just use event.preventDefault() even though every other browser handled this particular mouse event correctly. Chrome was the only outlier. So now I am writing code specifically for Chrome.
Two years ago I had an SVG rendering bug that turned out to be so deep that I had to spend two weeks debugging and come up with an incredibly convoluted scheme for loading dynamic SVG icons because `<use/>` is broken hot garbage on Chrome. Bug report dead in the water. More code just for Chrome.
You get the picture. I now have to develop on Chrome as much as I hate it, even though FF has better debug messages and stability, just because it saves time testing every little thing out.
I upvoted you (because your suggestion is a good solution) but let’s be real, most people don’t have backups, even developers.
In my experience as a developer companies don’t even issue me a USB backup drive to run time machine on my work issued MacBook Pro unless I specifically request it.
Please don't normalize that behavior. Not having regular backups is dumb, like not wearing seatbelts. On a Mac it's so easy -- just plug a drive in once a week or so and Time Machine does its thing. A 1 TB hard drive is cheap, far less than the value of a lost day.
macOS will create local backups (space permitting) and then dump them all at once when connected to the Time Machine drive. Though of course you won't have the backups from between the last time you connected the drive to the time your computer was hosed.
I don't backup my computer anymore because everything I have is in the cloud anyways. I have a git repository with all of my scripts, a command I run to set up my system from scratch, and all of my files in Google Drive/Github. Any Steam games I play either automatically store my information online, or aren't important enough for me to worry about. The only think I would loose if my computer broke was my downloads folder, pretty much.
The only thing I customize in my browser is the color scheme, and my script updates that manually. I mean I have some bookmarks and extensions, but those don't take more than 10 minutes to restore.
I agree, I use time machine on both work and home machines , and I also keep an additional offline drive for my home machine that I sync regularly and then move to a different area of my home and leave unplugged (providing security against a ransomware or other malicious attack).
But most people just don’t and a response of “restore from your backup” is unhelpful to them :(
Why? The comment that sparked this conversation is such a niche and unlikely problem that I really don't see backups as a good cost/benefit decision just to defend against things like that. All of the data I care about is backed up. I really don't see the point of full OS backups.
Because if firefox hadn't nuked the user's config we wouldn't be talking about how to recover that config. Any time the advice is "restore from backups" then the product has exhibited a poor user experience. And this isn't because of some hardware failure, this is just the software bungling an update flow, with no special notice to the user or any obvious way to recover.
I do. I've learned over the years that any MS update could nuke my computer. And what I'm saying is on subject, you have no proof that Mozilla nuked the configuration. It could have been caused by circumstances outside their control. I've been using FF for years and years and never lost anything, presumably including after this so-called failed update.
Really replying to @tlb here (reply depth is maxed), but what's the Time Machine equivalent for ? Most of the pre-rolled backup solutions I've used either have you point to a specific set of content folders (like Photos, Music, Videos, etc.), and do a terrible job at handling profile data, system files, and everything that's "in use" when using my box is handling some kind of state.
I'm in a weird position where this particular Firefox on this particular machine didn't have a backup.
Of course, Firefox should not be pushing rushed, unfinished releases as they have been, they should never destroy data even one update every 10 years, because it is supposed to be stable software.
It might just be the nature of computers. A similar thing happened to me on Chrome during a recent update. I was using it as a backup browser and lost everything there when Chrome stopped working. I deleted it from my laptop and haven't missed it at all. I now use multiple Firefox profiles to work as alternate browsers.
If you go into your profiles directory is the old profile still there? It might have just created a new profile for you.
Chrome did it to me too. I had many links saved in onetab that are now lost. No software is completely stable on all computers in all situations.
Did you double-check your profile folder? Firefox might have created a new profile for you while leaving the old profile there. If you're on Linux or Mac, try typing this in a terminal:
firefox -ProfileManager -no-remote &
Then, if there is more than one profile listed there, try each one to see if it's the old profile.
(I'm not sure how to find the profile folder on Windows.)
Firefox 67 tried to switch to creating a new profile folder by default. It seems that the process might have gone wrong. It's likely that your settings still exist, but in a separate profile folder.
I also lost everything during an update and as for themes and extensions I do backup those from time to time since then. But losing tabs is a lot worse. At least there's a way to get them back though -
e.g. on windows it's %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\your_profile\sessionstore-backups. After you close FF you can copy over the .jsonlz4 backup to your_profile and replace the sessionstore.jsonlz4 file.
My profile disappeared, replaced wholesale. I use Tab Session Manager to automatically backup profiles and Mozilla figured out a way to delete those, too.
For years I have been working with my mom to get her to be suspicious of any pop-ups in her browser. Many times she has texted me a photo asking if some pop-up update box was legit (almost always a shady ad). When she got her new computer, I set up Firefox in a fairly locked down state: uBlock Origin, third-party cookies disabled, and clear all cookies and history when firefox closes.
It's been amazing. With the ad-blocker she almost never texts me now with suspicious stuff. Also, it was super easy to teach her that if she ever gets into a situation that feels shady, just close the browser and open it up again. Starting from a clean slate every time in a well protected browser makes her feel a lot safer because she knows that if things get scary, she can just close the window and start over.
Having to log in every time hasn't turned out to be that much of an inconvenience either. See actually feels safer because of it. It makes perfect logical sense to her that the website ask her to login every time. "My bank asks me for my ID every time I go in to deposit a check, so of course it makes sense to ask for my password every time I open my browser and visit the website."
Anyway, my takeaway is that Firefox + uBlock Origin for parents is really a wonderful thing.
I saw a comment on a previous thread say that WebRender will fix the unacceptable performance on retina MBPs. FF 67 released webrender to stable, but only for Windows 10 per the release notes.
Will WebRender fix the CPU taxing problem, and will that be released for macOS in a subsequent release?
Fix for that is scheduled for june 2019 https://github.com/orgs/FirefoxGraphics/projects/1 (I'm just waiting for this too, I don't know anything more about it, I hope they will really ship this on time)
I was surprised to see your comment, in Safari, directly below the uBlock Origin icon. It seems to be working fine for me. Do you have more details on what you mean?
Safari is the new IE when it comes to bugs and standards compliance.
Here's an example that broke many many sites that use OAuth2 Auth Code Flow for login (including the main UI portal my company provides clients):
https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=194906
This was also an issue in iOS, and since Apple doesn't let any other browsers actually use their own rendering engine on that platform (they're just wrappers around Safari's guts) this was broken for all iPhone users no matter the browser.
Chrome MacOS used to store passwords in the MacOS keychain, but stopped. (Not sure if they are stored securely now, but they do not seem to be stored using OS functionality).
Are you positive (not just assuming, cause it would amke sense) FF MacOS still uses the MacOS keychain? Cause that's a plus if so.
I tried to switch just now, looks like uMatrix doesn't work in Firefox? That's a blocker for me... I've spent a lot of time creating a ruleset on uMatrix, not looking to try recreating that.
Random, only slightly-related question: has any one used suckless' surf? I've seen it recommended by the hyper-minimalist nuts, but am more looking into it so I can tweak it easily. I figure it would be a lot easier than trying to slog through webkit, gecko, servo, blink, etc. as it is so much simpler.
1,021 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 453 ms ] thread1. Safari is only available for macOS and iOS. There's no widely available, up to date browser based on non-Blink WebKit, and it's unlikely there will be, as it's rather tied to Apple OS APIs.
2. Aside from Firefox, all browsers that are available for all major operating systems are based on Chromium/Blink, and consequently will inherit Google's architectural decisions, and on a sociopolitical level, enhance Google's domination of the Web.
Firefox is the only serious alternative to Chrome.
This? This is just spam.
All this "spam" is meant to raise that usage %!
We need to claw back what little hope remains, or die trying, damn it.
That said, I would at least agree that this post is has a lack of any real substance and is low effort. Generally speaking, most people are familiar with Firefox, which holds even more accurate here on _Hacker News_. I would speculate many are also familiar with the initial "import" process offered by Firefox and competing browsers alike. So I am unsure of the goal of this post. I wouldn't go so far as to call it outright _spam_, but I do not think it warrants frontpage presence either.
I personally don't think it belongs on the front page just because of news regarding a competitor, the only discussion this link sparks is the same discussion that's already been had twice this week (20044430, 20050173).
I use Firefox exclusively because of the sidebar tab extension and will probably use it until Firefox dies a slow death.
> Switching to Firefox is fast, easy and risk-free. Firefox imports your bookmarks, autofills, passwords and preferences from Chrome.
Pretty brief article, but that's the point isn't it? Firefox makes it easy to switch, hence the article is brief.Edit: This page (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/download/) is the firefox download page. The article linked (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/switch/) is not that page, it's a page specifically explaining the [trivial] process of switching from Chrome. It also happens to have a download link.
Maybe we can get the black bar up too ;)
In Firefox, go to Preferences -> Search and click on "Add search bar in toolbar". Also uncheck "Show search suggestions in address bar results".
Then ctrl-l will only autocomplete URLs and ctrl-k will search. Once you're in the search box, press TAB to cycle through your search providers. You can add additional search providers easily.
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Using_keyword_searches
I didn't think about adding sites like rubygems and mdn, but that's a good idea.
Edit: I just tried it and it works. Example: create a bookmark in Firefox and change the URL to the one below. Set the keyword to "r" in the bookmarks editor. Then you can type `r devise` in the address bar to search rubygems.
? - default search engine
w - wikipedia
t - dictionary
y - youtube
d - duckduckgo
I've switched to DuckDuckGo, and using their ! operators (!w for Wikipedia, !map for Google Maps) picks up most of the slack.
https://www.microsoftedgeinsider.com/en-us/welcome?channel=d...
Or you could just use uBlock Origin on Firefox (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin)!
(I tend to use uMatrix.)
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338#iss...
> eyeo GmbH (owner of Adblock Plus) is a business partner of Google (through its "Acceptable Ads" business plan), and its business share some the same key characteristics as the Google's ones above:
> It gets revenues from the displaying of ads with those with which it has a contract (Google, Taboola, etc.)
> It expressly names uBlock Origin as a risk factor to its business
Anything "Adblock" should be avoided. Borderline malware imo, and there is no reason to use them when you've got uBO/uMatrix.
AdBlock plus also has the "acceptable ads" program that most people dislike but it can be easily turned off. The rest is mostly politics.
The main reason is, as you said, cache. The more unused RAM you have, the longer caches will be kept. It includes disk cache, browser cache, etc... But it can also make the CPU cache more efficient. L2 cache is about 10 times faster than RAM, and the less RAM you are using, the more cache will be used. L1 cache is even faster but here, access patterns matters as much as raw size, if not more.
Editing to say I've been reading on the fallout of the Chrome adblocking issue and many seem to think that DNS blocking is the way forward, but how long until it isn't? I've mentioned this before, but there has to be some way to do this without using browser-based solutions. I use them as well as a Pi-hole, but I dislike the browser-based solutions as a whole. What I'd like to see is a proxy, preferably web-based (cloud) that I can point my router and mobile devices to take advantage wherever I happen to be. Imagine a proxy that acts like /dev/null. It fools the sites into believing they are sending down ad data, but the proxy strips out that garbage. I know this does nothing for the bandwidth used, but I'm just thinking as I type. I understand HOW to do this, but my coding skills are not at that level. And I doubt this should be written in Python, although it likely could be. 20 years ago, I would be doing it in Perl, although those skills have fallen by the wayside since I have no real use case for Perl these days.
First it’s “sign in” with obtuse ways to turn it off. Then block Adblocking, once again with obtuse ways to disable... the end goal is pretty obvious, get the majority of Chrome users to turn on ads and tie their real names to their Chrome browser.
Of course let “power users” (who’ll turn that crap off anyways) have their switches to do so. It gives Google plausible deniability.
——
To those who say just fork Chrome adfm had a good article explaining why that doesn’t work:
> And while you can use or adapt Chromium to your heart's content, your new browser won't work with most internet video unless you license a proprietary DRM component called Widevine from Google. The API that connects to Widevine was standardized in 2017 by the World Wide Web Consortium, whose members narrowly voted down a proposal to change the membership rules for the W3C to require members not to abuse the DMCA to prevent DRM from becoming a tool to undermine competition.
https://boingboing.net/2019/05/29/hoarding-software-freedom....
Before I canceled my Netflix subscription (due to lack of use), I was using Firefox to view it.
To my knowledge Widevine DRM works with Chromium. You can watch DRM'd videos: https://forum.manjaro.org/t/how-to-install-widevine-on-chrom...
I mean if you could just build Widevine and decrypt content it wouldn't be very good DRM.
You mean "this website is optimized for Internet Explorer 6" days? Or the earlier "this website is optimized for Netscape 2.0" days?
I think the nearest the web ever came to not being any megacorp's playground was when Firefox was at around 30% market share, and IE6 which had 60%+ market share had stopped moving. IOW, when MS still had the playground mostly to themselves, but chose to ignore it. And even then, the web / Firefox couldn't really innovate without breaking IE6 compatibility, so everyone was stuck.
Sounds kinda similar to what you are looking. It does No. of sites, custom columns, custom pictures, and custom backgrounds. It really gives you a lot of control compared to all the other extensions I tried.
To get around this limitation, one could set up a personal speed-dial start page.
see: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...
they also have most requested urls as a privilege too so it could be recreated and extended with a little effort.
It has become a little more customisable now, thankfully.
And honestly, when I watch Netflix, it's usually in my Surface, in which case I'll use the app.
Isn't Electron basically just a Chrome tab as an app (to over simplify it?
I presume it would afford Google the same level of tracking that Chrome does.
Not sure about in-browser IP tracking, though...
More like a full, independent installation than just a tab.
Well, yeah, that was the whole point.
If we're saying fire up Chrome just to watch Netflix, I'm suggesting saving some effort and/or isolate the rest of your browser by wrapping it in a very basic Electron app.
At the very least, you wouldn't get auto-logged into your "browser" or anything like that.
Make the switch.
Minor annoyance, though. Still switched in desktop as I was on mobile
Ha! Tell that to their 150 million subscribers. :)
More seriously, using a browser without DRM would be a deal-breaker to many users like myself solely because of Netflix, unfortunately. That said, if you're serious about using a DRM-free browser, there are other ways to watch Netflix (iOS/Android, smart TVs, etc).
> Ha! Tell that to their 150 million subscribers. :)
I'm not sure that a large number of subscribers is a convincing argument of the non-terribleness of a service. A quick Google search suggests that Comcast, excuse me, Xfinity, has somewhere in the neighbourhood of 30 million subscribers. I don't think that you will find any argument telling them how terrible Xfinity is.
The original statement was like saying, "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded."
The services used to have more or less the same catalog, but it’s become more and more broken up.
To get everything you need to subscribe to 4+ services, and if you drop Netflix, you lose a hefty part of their catalog because it’s on none of the others.
Once they turned on their 250GB data cap tho it became far less useful since my wife/kids would stream several gigs a day or more of TV.
I'm watching 2 million flies enjoying a dog turd right now. I'm still not convinced...
Depends on the content, If you are watching paid for content on YT it is most likely DRM'ed. [0] An "stats for nerds" example from such a piece of content (Notice the protected line, this line isn't present on DRM free YT Content.). But the vast majority of content on YT is DRM free.
Twitch has some DRM'ed content, things like when they streamed Thursday Night Football. But that was played via the Amazon Video player not twitches normal video player. I remember because the player threw a fit if you didn't have HDCP configured correctly, which most streamers don't. Not that they were trying to re-stream the game, but have it playing on another one of their monitors to see how it was doing. Personally I liked the idea of having a chat alongside the game :-)
Dunno about PornHub.
[0] - https://cejack.tk/2019-05-30_19-57-03-280.png
And genuinely, most people are choosing between privacy and convenience.
And with Firefox you don't need to choose.
Seems like ffmpeg libraries, developed outside of the web browser, support nearly all video formats a user could encounter on the internet.
Also, the part of the statement that reads "your new browser won't work with most internet video" is intriguing.
Can we define "most internet video" as Amazon Video, BBC, Hulu, Netflix and Spotify? (Widevine users listed on its Wikipedia page)
Seems like there is much, much more video on the internet that does not come from those sources.
Maybe you could in terms of unique videos, but in terms of the volume of watched video, not at all. Netflix itself is responsible for something in the range of 15% of the worlds bandwidth usage.
Either way, it not going to win an end users to have something like that.
IOW, it was not about tech issue, but about social issue / blame-shifting.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19363838
"most internet video"... by what metric? Hours watched? Catalog size? I find it unlikely that DRM videos outnumber non-DRM videos by any reasonable metric.
I guess you could call it a feature at that.
Microsoft is vaccuuming it all up. Meanwhile Microsoft is making tons of great moves to get devs and users back on their side.
And I've heard that these days, Office 365 collaborative work is at least as good as Google Docs, if not better !
Wow, that's pretty damning!
Yes, they control Office and are the defacto office document standard. What they do with Office now is affordable and ubiquitous. No other office document suite can do this. They are a for-profit company, and Office serves their customers very well. Yes, in Ballmer's days this wan't the case, but today you can run Office (365/Cloud) on a Chromebook and on Android and iPhone as supported apps.
Funny how that changes. If anyone told me in 1999 that Microsoft would eventually become one of the Good Guys...
It's government's responsibility to foster competition to push back against companies wanting to limit it. Govt is doing a shitty job and gets an F.
Well, at least we have Edge on Linux now so duopoly can live on...
The reason is almost certainly a new user agent (compared to non-Chromium Edge) that YouTube didn't expect. Chromium-based Edge is still not stable, and therefore, not properly supported by YouTube.
I don't have time to test this, but I'm willing to bet that you'd get the same result by using any indie browser that happens to send a user agent that YouTube doesn't recognize.
Why almost certainly? We're seeing antagonistic, self-preserving and dare I say abusive monopolistic behavior from Google with Chrome's anti-adblocking. Why the benefit of doubt when blocking a competitor's browser?
More pointedly, would an independent YouTube have behaved similarly for as long?
The web is a standard. Auto failing based on user agent is a sign of developer incompetence.
If only that were true. The web is, at best, a series of suggestions. See also https://caniuse.com
Chromium-based Edge is not stable. It's a new thing that I don't expect website owners to test against. The error message showed that the new design is tested against the latest version of Edge. Complete rewrite of Edge still hasn't replaced the old Edge.
Also, no, the web is not a standard. There's no fixed set of things that a browser should implement and call it a day. It's constantly-evolving depending on the needs of the owners of the website. It's why nobody dares to create a browser from scratch nowadays.
I'd been using YouTube's new layout just fine on Edge Chromium for at least a week before getting the "not supported" message.
Very happy with my Edge switch so far! And I did it before the ad blocking really reared its ugly head too.
Google needs to faceplant hard on this one.
It depends on what you choose as your choice of technology, if you choose web components then you really can only really offer that same experience to users that have a browser that supports that API natively (without polyfills) which old Edge did not do.
My understanding of this situation with yt was that our server side detection code was wrong based on an update in edge (or our UA management), and we don't do feature detection in the client because it is too slow... So we send people to the older version.
Developers care a lot more about this ‘experience’ than users do.
Yes it’s fun to play with the new shiny, but users don’t care.
User experience is an excuse, it’s double-talk.
And besides, your claim is doubtful at best since Chromium Edge doesn't share any User Agent string elements with previous EdgeHTML versions. Your YT developers would have needed to be intentionally malicious to match "Edg/" as a trigger to downgrade the user experience.
It seems pretty clear from the fact that nonsense user agents like "TotallyNotMicrosoft" and "IE6" worked, that there is a blacklist, not a whitelist.
Now as far as your hypothetical, sure they can, but I use all of those services, YouTube, Gmail, Maps, ... on Chromium every day and they do not block nor have they ever blocked any of them.
[1]https://twitter.com/addyosmani/status/1133782407419613184
> And it may even be a quick ‘n dirty deliberate hack to exclude Chredge this way, just so it doesn’t pollute their telemetry / testing of new website features.
That test proves nothing without seeing the Google's code. Feature detection is incredibly slow, requiring JS and multiple round trips. Whereas user agent strings are instantaneous.
Read the reply too. ;)
Turning the block on was intentional, and turning it off was intentional.
We can only guess at their motivation, and I can guarantee you it was not benevolent given what Mozilla said recently about their interactions with Google.
However for most average Joe's it's fine and won't make a difference, so I always install and recommend Firefox when I play IT guy for family/friends. Time to start doing this again like we did in 2005!! It worked then and it can now!
It would probably take me a bit to figure out exactly how to work with the FireFox advanced debugging tools, but it's familiar territory.
Installing is one click - as simple as the chrome web store.
If you want the ability to unload tabs, firefox struggles with it. The best addon is https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/unload-tabs/ but it admits that it is buggy. Haven't tried it though.
Even on a newer computer Firefox feels jagged and hangs. Memory leaks still happening years later. It is so frustrating to see Firefox using 1.5GB of RAM when only 2 tabs remain.
Quantum helped a lot, but it's still not enough for me and many others.
What popular sites don't work in Firefox?
Really? Do you have examples? I haven’t faced this issue. Some websites breaks somehow if you block 3rd party tracking (by breaking I mean that some pictures or video embedded into the page won’t load), but that’s an opt-in feature so I don’t think that’s what you mean.
What developer tools available in chrome but not firefox?
https://www.browsersync.io/
Edge & Firefox have also been useful in the same way I once used Opera (special tasks where their features really shine). I really liked Edge's reading mode & for just browsing websites it was great.
As a developer, I don't typically use browsers as debuggers or programming environments, so I never experienced game-breaking differences.
I can't even switch because one of the vital extensions for my workflow do not exist any more and the author of the Chrome equivalent doesn't want to port it. (I even offered a little money, I probably can't pay enough for an experienced developer to do the full port.)
Wait, you haven't had a security update for your browser since 2017?
Reproduction steps:
1. Check that Google search is working by opening Chrome, navigating to www.google.com, and searching for any term (such as the name of a newspaper and clicking the link to verify that search works as expected.)
2. Open firefox.com and navigate to www.google.com
You will receive a message:
"It looks like you have Chrome installed! For the most secure experience, please visit this page using the Chrome browser or wait and try again later.."
If you have not used Chrome in the past 1 hour from your same IP address, you receive the page as expected.
The above repro steps should be pretty much impossible under antitrust law. (Due to search monopoly.) Which is a very good thing.
Google, Microsoft new "bestie" in this collaboration, will screw them over once it's clear that Microsoft "can't turn back" from using Chromium or even fork it.
As I understand it Chromium is a lot easier to wrap your own GUI around than Gecko. XUL is still not completely decoupled, separating them completely is an ongoing effort I think.
Maybe when the embedded Gecko/Servo engine is production ready would be the time for MS to reconsider.
With webRequest, Google is "just" testing the waters. Just like with the forced sign-in, they will back down when they see the backlash.
Based only on Google's description, they seem to have a valid reason to remove (even though they say "deprecate", they mean remove) the offending API. However, there's zero chance they can get away with this. For what reason I'm not sure, market share of Chrome is very important to them. So they'll have to keep it or implement some new, acceptable method.
I can't help but wonder if it is because firefox is actually behind or if google is sabotaging them.
- Steve Jobs
I didn't like it either at first, but then I realized it was just because it was different than Chrome. In time, I liked how Firefox did it better. You're always guaranteed to see the favicon and 3 or 4 letters of the tab's title no matter how many tabs you have. In Chrome, you're eventually looking at triangles or lines with no way to differentiate them.
But I can't see the tab's favicon or letters because they're 100% hidden from me.
I currently have 49 tabs open in Chrome. If I set Firefox to be the same exact width as Chrome, I can open 27 tabs at the same time. If I open up the 28th, it starts hiding tabs.
I actually have no issue with how Chrome does it. Just seeing the favicon is enough when dealing with a large number of tabs.
EDIT: Just tested opening 49 tabs. None of the tabs show anything more than just the favicon and about 90% of the first letter. Not really sure how this is better than what Chrome does, which is show 49 favicons without scrolling.
You can scroll on the tab bar.
With Firefox, you get the Favicon and at least the first few characters of the page title. And if you use the tab drop-down, you see all, or most, of the title (depending on how long it is).
I just tested that and it was absolutely false.
Maybe there's some setting that controls this behavior, but my Firefox is pretty much completely stock. shrug
https://0x0.st/zB86.png
https://pasteboard.co/Ih7GvRO.png
https://ibb.co/T4z2YfZ
I understand that some people will feel differently of course. And it's less of an issue in the first place if you don't keep ludicrous numbers of tabs open.
I don't know what you're on about. I opened the maximum number of tabs that my browser window can have visible (~90) and at no point were they indistinguishable blobs. Every single one still had a favicon.
If you're looking for information on this preference, it went away between FF4 and FF57(?) but should be back and working now so you'll see a lot of old information about it being removed.
Edit: FF58, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404465
Change to something smaller.
Chrome finally fixed that a couple months ago. The favicon-hiding behavior was awful though.
I don't need to know the physical location of my tab. That's what the address bar and Ctrl+Tab are for.
> if you type in the address bar FF will match against open tab names and urls, and let you switch to them.
Hence my comment:
> That's what the address bar and Ctrl+Tab are for.
Something that Chrome also has.
Sure, I could put all those papers on my desk into a drawer, or even file them, but who's got time for that? (Answer: those who are succesfully less cluttered than the cluttered among us).
Whether or not Chromium or Firefox are more to your liking is another matter, and whether or not switching to Chromium accomplishes what you want to accomplish by leaving Chrome is another matter.
I was not recommending that anybody switch from Chrome to Chromium. Personally I do not find that Chromium fixes what I consider broken about Chrome, which is what I was alluding to when I said "whether or not switching to Chromium accomplishes what you want to accomplish by leaving Chrome is another matter." The negative reaction I received for that post makes me think people believe I was recommending Chromium. I do not; I recommend Firefox.
Also, a Chromium fork could use the Widevine binary blob the same way Chrome does today; I am not sure I understand this argument.
My preference would be to use https://github.com/atlas-engineer/next, because I'm a huge Common Lisp fan, but without uMatrix and uBlock Origin (or something equivalent) it's not a viable alternative yet.
I've been trying to switch to Firefox lately. I still prefer Chromium's UI, but I won't tolerate Google's new anti-adblock stance.
I'd probably get it to run but it would need more time than I'm willing to invest in this. Plus would I have to build it new everytime there's an update‽
It's just to much hassle for me.
[1] - https://github.com/ungoogled-software
It’s almost not even a competition anymore.
https://www2.computerworld.com/article/2978984/who-can-stop-...
For those who think I'm just jabbing and that a VM would be too unpactical: at work (we're a security firm) we have a fresh VM for each new project for compartmentalization. Our browser, tools, everything runs in there and nothing should ever reach the host --- unless, of course, you have a VM escape, but then you need two zero-days instead of one. For more sensitive projects, even more measures are taken, but that's rare: you have to draw the line somewhere.
Just saying "Chrome is the only secure option" is a little too short-sighted I think.
Over the years, I've seen countless forks of browsers that make these big promises but don't have the developer resources and funding behind them that make the main browsers possible. I can't imagine it's easy to just backport every feature and bugfix from upstream while also making your own changes.
Unless one plans on building a business or a foundation around a browser, the best that an OSS browser fork can hope for is to be a valiant effort that will quickly be superseded by another fork that promises to be even more private and ub3r l33t than the others.
Firefox is in great shape right now, and if it's not working well for some people(I'm honestly not having issues with it at this point), then we need to find ways to make Firefox more viable, whether it's getting people to donate to the Mozilla Foundation or better promotion or what.
Container tabs are great. Combined with Tree Style Tabs and Containerise addons, you have something unbeatable in both terms of security, privacy and user friendliness.
Containers are useful for separating "who I am to my providers." As far as Facebook is concerned, I am a Facebook user, but I don't use Amazon or Google. But Amazon thinks I'm an Amazon user that doesn't use Facebook or Google. You can accomplish this with profiles, but in Chrome (last I checked) that meant multiple windows, rather than just sites being displayed in tabs that indicate the container in use. So for that purpose, I believe containers are more useful.
(I also think Firefox should step up their profile game, because when my spouse and I alternate using a computer we share, it's inconvenient for me to close all her Firefox windows so I can open my profile!)
Go to about:profiles, click the "Launch profile in new browser" button under the profile you want.
Yes, it's not obvious, and the UI has a lot to be desired if you want to explain the feature to some non-techie, but you no longer need to close the other Firefox instances in order to launch a different profile. I think this was added a couple releases ago.
It's definitely something I'd like to see worked out better as a power user feature.
Having a container is nice compared to opening a private window because you don't have to do 2FA every time.
So in your case you could have say a "work" container and a "home" container. Each of these could persist logins for all of the services you are using without having to switch between users and have different windows open you just have the 2 tabs.
What I think people find more useful is the ability to make a container for say "facebook". Anytime you open facebook it puts it in a new tab with a sandboxed browser session. It's similar to having a separate profile but it's just for facebook use and you don't have to think about it so much. If you click a link to facebook it opens it in your new container already logged in meanwhile facebook does not see you as authed in any of your other tabs.
Instead of you needing to know all the tricks and tweaks needed to make it work well, they're in the box.
I don't even know it's there until it does something unexpected but necessary. For example the Facebook Container has no idea I pay YouTube not to show adverts. So inside Facebook any inlined YouTube video has adverts. If I follow a link to YouTube, I appear outside the Container and have no adverts but don't get followed by Facebook (they'd need YouTube to co-operate)
I switched to Chrome a few years ago (and even to a Chromebox as my daily driver, on my second now because I wanted Android app support) because Firefox was a bloated piece of garbage, if I left 5-10 tabs open for a few weeks in Windows they'd be using several gigabytes of memory from a leak, memory use growing hourly.
Edit: I don't know why I'm being downvoted, this is even on Mozilla's own site showing it hasn't been fixed:
"Firefox's memory usage may increase if it's left open for long periods of time. A workaround for this is to periodically restart Firefox"
With an alternate solution being:
"Add RAM to your computer" ... "RAM is cheap"
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-uses-too-much-m...
I have not had this issue at all with Chrome in Windows 7, Windows 10 or ChromeOS.
https://www.ghacks.net/2019/03/01/firefox-67-automatically-u...
There's also this:
https://www.ghacks.net/2012/05/22/make-firefox-more-responsi...
I still use Chrome for some tasks such as watching/listening to Youtube. (edit: not bc of performance, but bc I hate OSXs Cmd-Tab ordering)
That's a trivial but surprisingly reasonable reason for using two browsers. OSX has some annoying quirks sometimes.
What is this?
I switched a couple months ago from Chrome to Firefox as well but to tell you the truth, I just heard about containers and what you could do with it. I guess I must've been living under a rock, this is amazing!
I was already glad I made the switch for the less resources being used on my aging Macbook Pro and better privacy features, but containers just took this experience to the next level for me!
EDIT: What actually triggered my switch was at one point, a few tabs on Chrome(regular things like Youtube) started causing my CPU/fan to go crazy on my MBP 2015(the last decent MBP). Instead of trying to figure out what extension or what setting was causing the problem, I thought I'd give FF a try and just couldn't look back after.
I had a google container for a while, but opening links opens a new tab and closes the google container, so therefore you cant it back or forward without reopening that container tab. Same thing if I click a container link or something and it pushes it into a new tab, I loose that ability to go backward.
It's just a minor gripe but I'm so into the habit of hitting the back button on my mouse while browsing rather than cmd shift tab.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Services/Sync/Addon_Sync
I hope Mozilla won't deprecate those..
Step 4: Spend weeks getting used to new shortcuts, finding equivalent extensions/plugins and getting used to their dev tools.
Both follow the WebExtensions-standard, so there’s not really much to “port”, if anything.
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2018/02/22/removing-support-...
Then again maybe I'm being unfair here because if I'm really honest about it, the reason I didn't switch over to Chrome was that you couldn't start an in-page text search by hitting the / key like I was used to doing in Firefox. (I've since found many other reasons to keep using Firefox but at one stage that was the sticking point...)
I find it odd how there will be Google Hate, and unanimous Firefox support.
I guess I'm looking to hear from users who actually removed Google from their life and are happy. Chrome is only 1 of the Google products I've used.
You can choose to not pick a side on a two-candidate election. The most voted-for candidate will still be elected.
(Even when you factor in indirect systems like an electoral college, someone will be elected.)
I've never been much of a Chrome user. A few years ago, Chrome was unusable for me on my 2GB work machine, and was a battery-killer on my own laptop. So I stuck with Firefox at work, Safari at home.
DDG is a great search engine. I can't remember the last time I used the "!g" operator, and got any results better than the DDG ones.
The one product I still use Google for is maps, and only when I want to see a good street view or areal photo. For mobile, Apple Maps does just fine. For simple directions on the desktop, OSM works great.
I'm totally happy. 10 years ago, Google was putting things out there that weren't possible with other services. Their mapping was tremendously better than MapQuest, their email was so much nicer than Hotmail, etc.
But now they're bloated and slow. Everything seems to lag as you watch the UI components slowly appear on the screen. And the alternatives today for each product (search, maps, email, browser) are all very much competent.
What did you move to for email? Fastmail with a custom domain? I've long considered ProtonMail but unlikely to go that route.
I'm between paying for iCloud storage and using that, or Outlook.com The additional phone backup space with iCloud would be very nice anyway, so as a monthly payment, it's a one-stop shop. At this point it's extremely unlikely I'll ever go back to Android so that works for me. Or, just moving to Outlook.com. I'm leaning towards Outlook simply because of the better calendar system. Both Gmail and Outlook support email reminders for calendar items. I could get used to iOS-only notifications, but I really prefer notifications to come through email since I often include explicit instructions.
Thanks for the StartPage tip! I'm going to start doing that whenever I want a second opinion on my search results.
So it's possible, but not immediate.
Safari actually did the same recently[1], so it's not an alternative if you dislike this move by Chrome. The only difference seems to be the limit of rules (30k for Chrome vs 50k for Safari, whereas some lists used by uBO have over 75k).
[1] https://adguard.com/en/blog/legacy-safari-extensions.html
https://backstage.1blocker.com/say-hello-to-1blocker-x-8b55e...
Edge is also best (but on Windows).
Usually the browser designed by the authors of the platform you run it on, will be best for power consumption, sometimes significantly so.
There is still an open problem on Retina Macbooks with scaled resolution where the performance drops like 10x over non-scaled versions.
I'm not sure how hard it would be for the RN team to switch to another browser such as Firefox or the new Edge so I can uninstall Google Chrome from my computer.
While not a deal breaker it would be nice to have a more native macOS feeling version of Firefox but I guess Mozilla have other things to work on.
I really wish Microsoft would open source the Edge/Titan engine. There can't possibly be any NSCA code in there they don't own the rights too anymore.
There was a port of node that used Chakra instead of v8, but I don't think it's maintained. And this is only one piece of the puzzle.. Electron also relies Chromium itself for rendering so this would probably be a pretty sizable effort.
It's corporations in a monopolistic position that let EEE happen - you know, like what Google is doing with Chrome right now.
If Internet Explorer's engine released under GPL or MIT can break Google's monopoly without simply handing it over to Microsoft, then all the power to it.
That's just circular reasoning, you've going to have to provide some concrete argument.
But would you please explain "what has been happening to GitHub for the last year or so"?
Right...so they dropped in Nat Friedman....a Mr Opensource... as CEO. I don't think you can get a bigger statement of their commitment to F/OSS than that.
And um ok MS need to make some cash from their acquisition maybe by pushing Azure as a platform for open source projects - hell what did you expect? If Google or Amazon Acquired Github I'd expect the same, and they'd do the same.
And you know, you as a project maintainer still have a choice. You can still deploy anywhere you like.
Microsoft aren't stupid, they've for the past ten years and more promoted the open sourcing of some of their key web dev tech (initiated by Scott Guthrie, Hanselman, Rob [thingy], and another few folks I can't remember off of the top of my head). And it's a different company now.
I hate to do the "appeal to authority" thing, but I'm 52 and lived through the "knife the baby" times. Microsoft for developers and open source are a hugely different company under Satya Nadella compared to the days of Ballmer and Gates.
It's pretty clear what the plan is here, Google naturally sees ad blocking as a threat and they know that they can't outright disable ad blockers so they take the long route to take it over. Make it functional enough that most users won't bother looking for an alternative but make sure that it can't threaten your business model.
Anyone know what MSs stance on Rust is?
Electron, the software framework VSCode uses, runs on Chromium. Github maintained and developed the framework and they are currently owned by Microsoft. If Microsoft contributes to Chromium and improves performance they benefit in a lot of places: their new browser is improved(Edge Chromium), their own framework(Electron), and their own product (VSCode).
Then again, they would face the same issues had they adopted Gecko. Maybe less so because Mozilla could be more easily influenced than Google (in some ways). The main argument for adopting Gecko would have been that giving Google complete control over Web evolution is a threat to Microsoft and that adopting Gecko would reduce that threat. I'm a big Mozilla fan but I think it would have been a weak argument.
Also, if Huawei were to fork Android they'd be responsible keeping their fork of a huge code base secure by push security updates, and Microsoft is much more likely to be able to do that competently than Huawei is.
I believe that's why Webkit was based on KHTML… the Mozilla developers Apple hired realized that had a better chance of working.
Maybe Mozilla has changed since all that happened and they're more friendly to embedders now? I've been out of the loop for a few years at this point. I don't think I've heard anything though, and they've built up a reputation…
But that would not have solve their web compatibility issue in such an easy way.
You mean the plan to embed Servo, or Servo itself?
I use Firefox as my "virgin" broswser for testing or when I need to manually override proxy settings for my own MitM purposes. But that's about it.
[citation needed].
Firefox has sync to all devices too.
With the way Google tries to strongarm standards and at the same time defy them, it's the modern Internet Explorer and it's a PITA to develop for.
Imagine permitting cross-origin drag-n-drop and a page is clickjacked: the user may end up dragging a sensitive item in the clickjacked page into an invisible iframe with a drop point layered on top of whatever target the user thinks they're dropping data into, and the end result would be that data intended for one endpoint, in this case the endpoint that was clickjacked, is sent to another.
It'd be a nontrivial attack to mount, but as you posed the challenge, I can see it done as part of e.g. a phish where a site like dropbox is iframed in a clickjacking attack (assuming they haven't mitigated it).
I can sketch (literally) what the dom might physically look like if it helps convey the attack I have in mind more effectively.
https://www.contextis.com/media/downloads/Context-Clickjacki...
There have also been plenty of UXSS bugs in various browsers caused by cross-origin drag-and-drop.
So in my case I go to work and get reports that X is no longer working, lucky for me in JS is easy to patch third party code and fix this issue but I could not find a ticket that explains why Chrome did this.
There are several more #ifdefs I've had to add due to weird chrome glitches (like around the html5 video player, which just works seamlessly with Firefox).
Every single update since Quantum has made things worse. Three days ago I opened up Firefox to find out all of my settings had been nuked, 200+ tabs, themes and extensions lost, about:config reset, search settings reset (hello again Google) etc. I'm still fuming mad about this.
I don't feel like drudging up old history but my most recent bug was that Chrome doesn't properly bubble mouse click events when some UI elements fire.
WONTFIX of course, apparently I should just use event.preventDefault() even though every other browser handled this particular mouse event correctly. Chrome was the only outlier. So now I am writing code specifically for Chrome.
Two years ago I had an SVG rendering bug that turned out to be so deep that I had to spend two weeks debugging and come up with an incredibly convoluted scheme for loading dynamic SVG icons because `<use/>` is broken hot garbage on Chrome. Bug report dead in the water. More code just for Chrome.
You get the picture. I now have to develop on Chrome as much as I hate it, even though FF has better debug messages and stability, just because it saves time testing every little thing out.
In my experience as a developer companies don’t even issue me a USB backup drive to run time machine on my work issued MacBook Pro unless I specifically request it.
I'm in a weird position where this particular Firefox on this particular machine didn't have a backup.
I'm waiting on a new drive to come in the mail as we speak.
So chew me out. Sue me. I didn't have a backup for this one Firefox instance out of half a dozen.
But please don't normalize the expectation that my browser deleting everything with an automatic update is somehow a user error.
Microsoft doesn't get a free pass, neither does Mozilla.
But most people just don’t and a response of “restore from your backup” is unhelpful to them :(
Do you similarly give Microsoft a free pass when automatic Windows updates delete your grandmother's photo album?
Of course, Firefox should not be pushing rushed, unfinished releases as they have been, they should never destroy data even one update every 10 years, because it is supposed to be stable software.
If you go into your profiles directory is the old profile still there? It might have just created a new profile for you.
Did you double-check your profile folder? Firefox might have created a new profile for you while leaving the old profile there. If you're on Linux or Mac, try typing this in a terminal:
Then, if there is more than one profile listed there, try each one to see if it's the old profile.(I'm not sure how to find the profile folder on Windows.)
Computers are not conscious.
e.g. on windows it's %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\your_profile\sessionstore-backups. After you close FF you can copy over the .jsonlz4 backup to your_profile and replace the sessionstore.jsonlz4 file.
It's been amazing. With the ad-blocker she almost never texts me now with suspicious stuff. Also, it was super easy to teach her that if she ever gets into a situation that feels shady, just close the browser and open it up again. Starting from a clean slate every time in a well protected browser makes her feel a lot safer because she knows that if things get scary, she can just close the window and start over.
Having to log in every time hasn't turned out to be that much of an inconvenience either. See actually feels safer because of it. It makes perfect logical sense to her that the website ask her to login every time. "My bank asks me for my ID every time I go in to deposit a check, so of course it makes sense to ask for my password every time I open my browser and visit the website."
Anyway, my takeaway is that Firefox + uBlock Origin for parents is really a wonderful thing.
Will WebRender fix the CPU taxing problem, and will that be released for macOS in a subsequent release?
about:config
gfx.webrender.all -> true
restart browser
It's an Apple tradition — if you like what's in the box, great, but you won't be able to customize it much later.
https://webkit.org/blog/8825/release-notes-for-safari-techno...
Safari is the new IE when it comes to bugs and standards compliance.
Here's an example that broke many many sites that use OAuth2 Auth Code Flow for login (including the main UI portal my company provides clients): https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=194906
This was also an issue in iOS, and since Apple doesn't let any other browsers actually use their own rendering engine on that platform (they're just wrappers around Safari's guts) this was broken for all iPhone users no matter the browser.
I avoid using iDevices for this reason alone.
Sorry if the question is silly
(It's also possible to CSV export from Chrome's password manager. I used this to import everything into BitWarden.)
Are you positive (not just assuming, cause it would amke sense) FF MacOS still uses the MacOS keychain? Cause that's a plus if so.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/umatrix/
uMatrix could not be verified for use in Firefox and has been disabled.
Isn't surf based on WebKit?